The Man from Stone Creek (9 page)

Maddie felt regret. She liked Anna, and rarely got to see her.

“Sure thing, Pa,” Garrett said, and waited until his father had risen and turned his back before dragging his eyes slowly over Undine.

Sam and Maddie took their leave. They had gone a mile up the river road before Sam stopped the team, got down and inspected the rigging. Up until then, he and Maddie hadn't spoken.

“What are you doing?” Maddie asked. She was fitful, anxious to get home to Terran, lock the doors behind her and forget she'd ever gone to supper at the Donagher ranch.

Sam didn't answer. He just tightened everything and climbed back up to take the reins. Maddie figured he hadn't trusted the Donaghers' hitching job, and didn't pursue the subject.

“You know them,” she said when they'd been rolling again for several minutes. “Rex and Landry, I mean.”

Sam chuckled. “Not as well as I plan to,” he replied, and left Maddie to go right on wondering who Sam O'Ballivan really was, and what he wanted with Mungo Donagher's outlaw sons.

A
LOW
,
MEWLING SOUND
caught Sam's ear as he rounded the back of the buckboard, out behind the mercantile, hoping to help Maddie down before she went ahead and made the leap herself. He paused and peered into the wagon bed, waiting for a cloud to pass over the skinny moon so he could see more than a shadowy shape huddled in the corner behind the seat.

Just as the moon was unveiled—the side lanterns had winked out, one and then the other, halfway back to town—Maddie turned from her perch to look down. “Land sakes,” she said, “it's Ben's puppy.”

Sam sighed, resettled his hat, and reached over the side of the wagon to hoist the little critter out. He'd been nestled on a pile of empty burlap bags the whole way, without making a sound until now.

“Sure enough,” he agreed, setting the mutt on the ground and watching dubiously as it sniffed the rear wheel and then lifted a hind leg.

Maddie gathered her skirts and clambered deftly over the board backrest to stand on the floorboards, her hands resting on her hips. “Somebody must have put him in the wagon. He couldn't have gotten there on his own.”

“Ben, I reckon,” Sam said. The dog had finished his business and was now smelling his pant leg. He hoped the lop-eared little creature hadn't mistaken him for a wagon wheel.

“Looks like you've been gifted with a dog,” Maddie said with a degree of satisfaction that was wholly unbecoming.

Sam rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Now what would I do with a dog?” he countered.

She sat on the side-rail and swung her legs over with a swish of skirts. Sam caught her around the waist just before she would have made the jump, and stumbled a bit at the unexpected solidity of that deceptively slender frame. The contact between their two torsos roused something inside him that made him set her away from him abruptly.

Remember Abigail,
he told himself. Damned if he could bring her face to mind, though, right at that moment.

“You're heavier than I would have guessed,” he said, and then wished he could suck the words back in and swallow them.

Maddie seemed flustered. She straightened her skirts and patted her hair and took her time looking up into his face. “I can think of a thousand things you could have said,” she told him peevishly, “that would have been better than
that.
”

Sam felt the fool, and that always made him testy. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I didn't mean—”

Maddie put up a hand to silence him. In the sparse moonlight, he saw that she was amused, not insulted, and his relief was profound. She stooped, all of a sudden, and swept the little yellow dog up into her arms. Smiled, instead of making a face, when the pup gave her cheek a tentative lap.

Something shifted inside Sam, watching her. Made him wonder what she'd look like holding a baby. He took an unconscious step backward. “I'd best unhitch this team for you,” he said. He didn't see a barn, but there was plenty of grass for the horses, and a trough.

“No need,” she answered, still cuddling the pup. “Terran can do it.”

With that, she gave a shrill whistle through her teeth.

Sam grinned, in spite of himself. He'd always admired people who could whistle like that, and he'd never run across the talent in a woman before. There were lots of things about Maddie Chancelor, he suspected, that he'd never come across before.

Before he could ask how she'd acquired the skill, the back door of the mercantile slammed open and Terran bounded out. Catching sight of the pup in his sister's arms, he stopped short.

“That's Neptune,” he said. “What's he doing here?”

“I'm not sure,” Maddie answered, stroking the dog's back in a way that made Sam widen his stance slightly. “We just found him in the back of the wagon. Unhitch the team and see that they get a little grain, please.”

Terran nodded, but he approached and put out a hand to touch Neptune's wriggly little body. “I reckon Ben was worried one of his brothers would drown him in the creek,” he speculated. He looked up at Maddie with hope clearly visible in his eyes, even in that poor light. “Can we keep him?”

“You know we can't,” Maddie said with some regret. “Mr. James would have a fit.”

Terran looked so dejected that Sam almost reached out and ruffled his hair, the way a man does when he wants to reassure a boy. He refrained, because the truce between him and Terran was new, like a naked and fragile bird just hatched from the egg.

“I guess I could take him back to the schoolhouse,” he said with considerable reluctance. Sam was trying to break the habit of taking in lost critters; he'd left them scattered all over the Arizona Territory and half of Texas and New Mexico, as well, always in a good home, and at some point, it had to stop. “Just until we get the straight of the matter. I'll ask Ben about it Monday, before school takes up.”

Maddie smiled a little and shoved the dog into his arms. “That's a splendid idea,” she said.

Terran gazed at Neptune with a longing that made Sam feel bruised on the inside, then sighed and went to work releasing the harness fittings.

Sam stood there for a long moment, as confounded as if he were suddenly thirteen again, while the pup chewed on the collar of his one good suit coat. “What am I supposed to feed him?” he asked.

Maddie indulged in another smile. “You're a schoolmaster,” she said. “You'll reason it out.” With that, she gave a little curtsy—there was something of mockery in it—and raised her chin a notch. “Good night, Mr. O'Ballivan. And thank you for a very…interesting evening.”

Before he could shuffle the pup and tug at his hat brim, she was gone, disappearing into the mercantile through the same door Terran had just come out of.

While Sam was still standing there, oddly befuddled, Terran finished his work, hung the harnesses on a fence post and dusted his hands together. “He'd probably favor some jerked venison, being a dog,” the boy said. He ran into the store and came out again, quick as the proverbial wink, and held out two hands full of dried meat, obviously purloined from a crock or a bin in the mercantile.

Sam had to shuffle again, to take the jerky. He stuffed it into his pockets and looked up just as Maddie's shadow moved back from a second-floor window. “Obliged,” he said.

“You need something else?” Terran asked reasonably.

Sam told his feet to move, but they didn't comply right away. “No,” he said, still looking up at that lighted window, where Maddie had been standing only moments before. “I'll be going now.”

Terran waited for him to follow through. “You taken a shine to my sister?” he asked when Sam stood stock-still for another minute or so.

That broke the spell. “No,” Sam lied, and thrust himself into motion. He felt Terran's gaze on his back as he walked away.

Back at the schoolhouse, he went inside, set the pup on the floor, lit a lantern and assessed the situation while Neptune gnawed on a strip of dried meat from his pocket. Coming to no ready conclusion, he checked on the nameless horse, out there in the grass-scented darkness, found it sound, and returned to his quarters, which suddenly seemed lonely, even with Neptune curled up in front of the cold stove.

“I don't have any good reason to keep a dog,” he said solemnly.

Neptune laid his muzzle on his paws, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Sam kicked off his boots, shrugged out of his suit coat and loosened his collar. He unbuckled his gun belt, set the .45 within easy reach on the bedside stand. His eyes wandered to the stacks of books, teetering in piles and taking up most of the tabletop. He crossed to the middle of the room, selected a favorite, sat in the solitary wooden chair and flipped through the thin leaves, but his mind wouldn't settle on the familiar words. It kept straying, like a calf separated from the herd, to the mercantile on the main street of town and thence to the woman he'd glimpsed at that upstairs window.

Like as not, Maddie was getting ready to turn in right about now. Taking off her clothes, putting on a nightgown, maybe letting down her hair. He wondered if it reached to her waist, and if she plaited it before getting into bed.

Sam's throat constricted, and his groin ached.

He slammed
The Odyssey
shut, rousing the pup from its slumbers, and set the volume aside, to rest beside his .45.

Neptune let out a little whimper of concern.

“It's all right, boy,” he told the dog. It was a pitiful thing, when a man was glad for the company of a pup that had been foisted off on him.

Usually, reading settled Sam's mind and made it easier to sleep. Tonight, the time-worn way of corralling his thoughts was not going to work, so with a sigh, he left his chair, ladled some water into a basin and washed up for the night. He used his toothbrush and powder, spitting out the back door, turned down the wick on the lamp, stripped to the skin and crawled under the covers of his narrow, lumpy schoolmaster's bed.

It didn't surprise him much when the pup jumped onto the foot of the mattress and settled himself, with a dog sigh, between Sam's feet. He cupped his hands behind his head and stared up at the dark ceiling, reviewing the events of the evening in his mind.

It took some doing to get past Maddie—the way she'd looked in her go-to-supper dress, the gleam of her hair when it caught a stray glint of moonlight, the way she'd told him about Warren Debney's death and her suspicion that one or all of the Donagher brothers had been behind it, or even Mungo himself.

Maybe, Sam thought, not for the first time, the old man had ordered the killing, out of spite. He'd wanted Maddie for a wife, and even now, when all danger of that was past, the mere idea turned Sam's stomach sour. Come to that, he didn't care much for the idea of that Debney fellow touching her, either, God rest his soul.

Deliberately he shifted his mind back to the Donaghers, where it belonged.

Garrett was a charmer, and perhaps a little too fond of his stepmother, if appearances were to be credited. Mungo's eldest might or might not be part of the gang Sam and Vierra wanted to rein in; dishonorable as it was, outlawry was rough, dirty work, requiring some hard riding and a modicum of grit. Garrett seemed the kind to take the easy route. His kind weren't usually good for much when it came to ranching, either, in Sam's experience. They always had one eye out for a lady and one ear cocked for the dinner bell.

Landry and Rex, now, they were different. Tear off those homespun, misbuttoned shirts they'd been wearing at Undine's elegant supper and you'd probably find a mean streak painted down their backs. They'd recognized Sam, sure enough, as the man they'd meant to harass the night before, over on the Mexican side of the river, and he'd kept his coat pushed back, so his .45 would be handy, all the way back to Haven.

He figured it was Maddie that had kept them from coming after him, as soon as supper was ended and he'd driven out of sight of the ranch house. If her company hadn't been so downright pleasant, he might have regretted having her along for just that reason. He wouldn't have minded a little set-to with one or both of the Donaghers, but he was a patient man.

He could wait.

Neptune gave a low growl and got to his feet.

Sam reached for the .45.

Maybe he wouldn't have to wait.

The door latch rattled.

The dog let out a sharp bark. His hackles were standing straight up.

Sam cursed under his breath, cocked the .45 and reached for his pants. Got into them one-handed and fastened the top button.

“Mr. O'Ballivan?” a familiar female voice called.

“Hush,” he told the dog.

Sam opened the door, the revolver still in his hand, and found Bird standing on the step, looking up at him. Even in the pale light of the moon, he could see that one of her eyes was blackened and her chin was wobbling.

He reached out, caught hold of her arm and pulled her inside.

Neptune growled once more, then subsided, settling himself on the mattress again, satisfied that he'd done his duty.

“What happened?” Sam demanded, setting the .45 on the nightstand again and groping to light the lantern. In the glow of the lamp, he saw that Bird's face was streaked with kohl, her dress torn, and the shiner was worse than any he'd ever seen.

“Somebody got rough,” she said, and sank into his chair as if her knees wouldn't hold her up for another moment.

Sam found a basin and emptied the water bucket into it, then reached for the one towel he owned. He and Violet Perkins had both used it, so it wasn't as clean as he'd have liked, but they'd have to make do.

“Who?” Sam asked, wetting a corner of the towel in the basin and dabbing at her upper lip with it. She'd been punched at least twice, and it would be a wonder if she still had all her teeth.

Bird shivered, and when she looked up into his eyes, it seemed like he could see the bruises on her soul. “Garrett Donagher,” she whispered. “He came in a little while ago, in a real state. I don't mind liftin' my skirt, that's my job, but—”