Daisies In The Wind (12 page)

“Do what you wish,” she said, her voice
casual. She rose with an air of finality. “If an offer is made, I
will consider it.”

She was proud, Caitlin observed with
approval. And for some reason eager to appear indifferent, but as
Caitlin and Mary drove home in silence, the older woman’s thoughts
clicked along as rapidly as the horses’ hooves. She may have lost
most of her vision over the years, but she hadn’t lost her wits or
her instincts. From Rebeccah’s smooth, pleasantly low-timbred voice
Caitlin knew the girl was cultured, educated, and intelligent. From
what Rebeccah didn’t say more than what she did, Caitlin realized
that the girl was also vulnerable and very much alone.

An outlaw? By no means.

Caitlin dismissed such suspicions with a
certainty born of instinct. But why had Fess Jones gone to her
cabin last night?

For no good reason.

The girl must be in some sort of trouble. And
she was too proud to ask for help.

It’s up to Wolf to see that she’s all
right
, she decided.
And I’m going to tell him so
myself
.

She liked Rebeccah Rawlings. And, to her
surprise, she had a feeling Wolf did too. He hadn’t been immune to
her, that was for sure. Caitlin had heard something in his voice
when he’d spoken with the girl, something she hadn’t heard in a
long time.

She smiled to herself as Mary guided the team
toward home.

* * *

Not once during the entire conversation did
Caitlin Bodine mention Wolf, his wife, or his family, Rebeccah
reflected as she stood at her kitchen window and gazed out at the
turquoise sky dotted with lacy clouds. The fragrance of bluebells
drifted into the kitchen, but she scarcely noticed the delicate
sweetness of their perfume.

She closed her eyes, her fingertips resting
on the sun-warmed window ledge. Why hadn’t she asked about
Wolf?

Then she opened her eyes and shook off the
cobwebs of her own curiosity. “Why should I?” she demanded crossly,
and smoothed damp tendrils of hair back from her perspiring
brow.

Because you’re dying to know
, a
voice inside told her. Some silly part of her still clung to the
foolish dreams of her girlhood, to the romanticized fantasies she’d
engaged in over a tall cowboy with keen eyes and a kind grin.

“Foolishness!” she muttered to herself, and
turned her back on the majestic, mountain-studded view. There was
plenty of work yet to do in and around this cabin. And not a minute
to waste daydreaming about Wolf Bodine.

* * *

Wolf had his hands full all the rest of the
day. After bringing Jones’s body to the undertaker for burial at
Boot Hill, he was summoned to break up a fistfight in the Gold Bar
Saloon, another at Coyote Kate’s, had to ride to Helena to serve as
a witness at a trial, then back to Powder Creek to tend to the
paperwork that was the scourge of his job, and finally he had the
wearisome duty of locking up a drunken cowboy named Shorty McCall
from the Broken Tree Ranch for disturbing the peace after Shorty
pistol-whipped a gambler in the Silk Drawers Brothel and then shot
up all Molly Duke’s handsome downstairs windows and mirrors.

Just another quiet day in Powder Creek.

He was about to lock up for the night and go
home for supper when Mayor Duke barreled in, holding up a pudgy
hand as Wolf glanced up from his desk.

“Won’t take up more than a minute of your
time, Sheriff. Don’t mind me. Just wanted to tell you. Myrtle Lee
Anderson has called a town meeting. It’s set for tomorrow night at
the hotel. She’s concerned about that young lady who arrived in
town yesterday. Is it true she’s Bear Rawlings’s daughter?”

“What if it is?”

Ernest Duke shook his gray head. “Myrtle’s
been stirring folks up. Most everyone in these parts remembers that
bank holdup Bear Rawlings’s gang pulled here six, maybe seven years
ago, when the teller was killed and Ed Mason’s little girl was run
down in the street during their getaway. Folks won’t take kindly to
having the ringleader’s daughter living here—much less teaching
their kids. Oh, yes,” Duke went on, his black eyes fixed
unblinkingly on the sheriff, “Myrtle told me Caitlin had some idea
about that. But it won’t do, Wolf. We’ll be lucky if folks don’t
try to tar and feather that little missy right out of town.”

“There’ll be no tarring and feathering under
my jurisdiction.” Wolf stood to his full height. The hard glance he
sent the mayor held a quiet yet perceptible warning. “Get a hold of
yourself, Ernest. Don’t get hysterical like Myrtle Lee.”

“Oh, I’m not in favor of it. I just know that
folks still get pretty riled up over the mention of Bear Rawlings’s
name, and the fact that his kin is here, well ... Rumor has it over
in the hotel and at Coyote Kate’s that she’s up to her pretty white
neck in no good. Some think she’s masterminding a future bank job,
working with no-good varmints like Fess Jones. Heard you shot that
hombre yesterday up at her place. What was he doing there? Were
they in cahoots?”

“Ernest, there’s no evidence that Miss
Rawlings is up to anything other than making a go of the Peastone
place. Last I heard, Bear won it fair and square from old
Amos—maybe the only honest possession he ever came by in his life.
She has every right to live there, so long as she doesn’t bother
anybody. And by the same token, nobody has the right to bother her.
You savvy?”

Ernest Duke flinched at the ominous look in
Bodine’s cold gray eyes. Wolf wasn’t a man to tangle with, no sir,
not if you valued your hide. He was easygoing and soft-spoken most
of the time, and courteous to all the citizens of the town, but
Ernest suspected that beneath all that a deep, slow anger burned
within him, and, once ignited, it would rage like a hell-born
fire.

Ernest Duke didn’t want to be the one to fan
those flames.

“No need to worry about me, Sheriff,” he said
soothingly, and fingered the lapels of his well-cut dark suit. “I’m
just keeping you posted about what’s going on. I don’t have a thing
to do with it personally, but I thought you ought to know.”

“What time is the meeting?”

“Seven o’clock. Planning to come?”

Wolf nodded.

“Fine, then, that’s real fine. See you
there.” The mayor bobbed his head and smiled jovially, but Wolf
sensed his uneasiness.
Myrtle has already stirred folks up more
than he’s saying
, Wolf concluded.

He watched Ernest Duke leave his office and
cross Main Street, then closed the shutters. Shorty McCall was
snoring in his cell, probably passed out for the night. Wolf’s
deputy, Ace Johnson, would be in later to keep an eye on him. As
Wolf left the office and stepped out onto the boardwalk, he
pondered the mayor’s words and wondered darkly why folks always had
to think the worst of strangers. Of course he himself had been
suspicious of Rebeccah Rawlings—hell, he still was, up to a
point—but that was his job. He’d be damned if he’d let law and
order in Powder Creek deteriorate into some hysterical mob out to
drive a lone woman from the town.

Even if she was Bear Rawlings’s daughter.

The whole town was there.

Myrtle Lee Anderson had her red-faced sons
and daughters-in-law perched in the front row. Right behind them
were Doc Wilson, the mayor and his gossipy chipmunk of a wife,
Lillian, and Waylon Pritchard, along with his parents and two older
brothers. Wolf’s scanning eye noted each citizen crowded into the
hotel dining room, where the town meeting was taking place. There
was the pretty widow, Lorelie Simpson; Dan Butterick, who owned the
sawmill; every rancher whose property came within a thirty-mile
radius, prominent among them the Bradys, the Adamses, and the
Westerlys, as well as most of the storekeepers and merchants, even
some gamblers and saloon girls from Coyote Kate’s and the Gold Bar,
who had come to hear about the dangerous and undesirable Miss
Rawlings.

As thunder rumbled down from the Big Belt
Mountains and a late-summer storm hurried its way toward the
valleys, Caitlin sat with Wolf near the back of the room, holding
her temper in check with great effort. Myrtle Lee Anderson took the
podium first.

“That woman’s got no more brains than a
grouse,” Caitlin whispered to Wolf as Myrtle Lee went on and on
about the upstanding town they lived in and demanded to know what
would happen to them all if riffraff outlaws began to take up
residence in Powder Creek?

Abigail Pritchard, Waylon’s thickset,
eagle-eyed mother, came to her feet when Myrtle paused for breath.
“And how will it make poor Emily Brady feel having to see that
Rawlings woman in town every week, knowing that she’s living high
off the hog on money left her by the very man responsible for
running down Emily’s little niece? It’s a mercy the poor Masons
have moved away, that’s what it is. But we haven’t forgotten what
Bear Rawlings and his gang did to them. Why should Rebeccah
Rawlings be welcome in this town, when little Lottie Mason is
buried under six feet of earth because the Rawlings gang ran her
down without so much as a backward glance?”

At this, Emily Brady, the child’s aunt, sank
her head into her hands and wept silent tears of rage. Her husband,
Cal, stared down at the floor and patted his wife’s knee.

Griff Westerly came to his feet. Beside him
his daughter, Nel, scanned the room to see if Wolf Bodine was
present. She noted Wolf in the back just as her father started to
speak, and her eyes brightened.

“Who needs trouble in Powder Creek?” Westerly
demanded, facing the crowd. “We’ve built ourselves a good, decent
town here and we don’t need the likes of Bear Rawlings or his kin
invading it and planning hell-knows-what the first moment our backs
are turned.”

“You’re right, Griff!” Myrtle Lee nodded
vigorously from the podium.

Wolf’s mouth tightened. He stood at last,
looking out over the assembled crowd, and the frown deepened
between his eyes. While thunder rumbled closer and the air seemed
to crackle with the violence of the approaching storm, he walked up
to the podium, past all the nodding, muttering citizens, past the
Bradys and Doc Wilson, past Nel Westerly, Abigail Pritchard, and
Abigail’s sharp-eyed husband, Culley, the most influential rancher
in Powder Creek.

“Let’s hear what the sheriff has to say,” the
whisper began. It raced around the stuffy room like a spark of heat
lightning.

“Sheriff?” Myrtle eyed him cautiously. “You
want to say something about all this?”

“Well, I don’t reckon I’m up here just to
take my evening promenade,” Wolf replied lazily.

Purple splotches popped onto Myrtle’s cheeks
as the hotel dining room exploded with laughter. Some of the
tension eased.

“Maybe you think this is funny, Sheriff, but
it isn’t,” she harrumphed, goaded by his infuriating air of
nonchalance.

“Let me show you how far from funny I think
it is,” Wolf drawled, and in one quick motion he removed his badge
from his vest and tossed it onto the table beside the podium.

Immediately a roar went up from the crowd.
“What’re you doing, Wolf?”

“What’s going on?”

“He’s quittin’, can’t you see?”

“But he can’t quit!”

“Wolf, put that thing back on where it
belongs!”

Something like panic fluttered among the more
longtime residents of Powder Creek, those who remembered when
Sheriff Bodine had come, nearly six years ago, with his little boy
and his sprightly mother, those who remembered how efficiently he
had cleaned the Saunders gang out of their town. When it was over,
eight men were dead, all of them brutal murderers, rustlers, or
stage robbers.

Bodine had killed the trigger-happy Bentley
brothers, too, not more than a year later. After that things had
been pretty peaceful—for Montana.

No one in that long, lantern-lit room lined
with chairs could imagine Powder Creek without Wolf Bodine as
sheriff. He had a reputation that would scare even the roughest of
badmen, and more importantly he had the shrewd eye and the deadly
aim with a gun that backed it up. Moreover Wolf had courage. He
never balked, stalled, or hid from any fight.

And he was honest, incorruptible. That was
not always the case with lawmen. In previous years the gold strikes
at Alder Gulch, Last Chance Gulch, and Silver Bow Creek had brought
thousands of honest prospectors swarming to the territory, men who
had built booming, prosperous towns, but they had also drawn in
brutal outlaws, who sometimes worked in tandem with crooked lawmen.
In Bannock, in the early sixties, Sheriff Henry Plummer’s gang of
highwaymen had killed over one hundred people as they terrorized
stagecoaches and men traveling between Bannock and Alder Gulch,
until locally organized vigilantes began capturing and hanging the
outlaws—Sheriff Plummer, the ringleader, among them. Plummer was by
no means the only lawman to throw his lot in with the criminals. It
was a common enough occurrence. Every person in the main dining
room of the hotel knew the worth of an honest lawman, and they knew
they had one in Wolf Bodine. Without ever having spoken much about
it before, they all recognized that they would never find a better
man to protect Powder Creek, its citizens, and its property.

Ernest Duke knew it, too, despite his
sympathies for Myrtle Lee’s point of view. “Now, now, folks,
there’s no reason to get so riled up, I’m sure,” the mayor
interjected into the simmering pandemonium, but the perspiration
beading on his round face did nothing to reassure the townsfolk,
and they quickly shouted him down.

“Let Wolf talk,” Culley Pritchard ordered,
and the babble in the room subsided.

Outside, the wind blasted down from the
mountains, smelling of rain and earth and ponderosa pine. Autumn
would be coming soon. And then winter. Winter would be hard enough
without having to worry about who was going to keep the law.