The Rustler (13 page)

An excuse to call on Sarah made the idea a sight more palatable.

“All right,” he said. “But don't you reckon the boy might get attached to Lonesome and find it hard to turn him loose when the time comes?”

Sadness moved in Sarah's eyes, like a shadow under sky-blue water. “Owen's only visiting,” she said. “His father will be back for him.”

Something ached inside Wyatt, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the dog. “Oh,” he said, because nothing else came to mind.

Together, Wyatt and Sarah headed for the Tamlin house, Wyatt swerving to avoid ruts in the street, so Lonesome could snooze on. While they walked, Wyatt wondered what he was going to have for supper.

He had thirty dollars in his pocket, thanks to Rowdy. He decided he'd visit the mercantile, stock up on sardines and crackers and maybe some canned peaches. While he was in prison, he'd so craved sweet fruit that he hadn't been able to get enough of it since.

Soon as they reached the front gate, Owen burst out of the house and came running down the walk.

“A dog!” he shouted, overjoyed. Then a frown crossed his face as he took in Lonesome's mode of conveyance, and the well-greased welts striping his hide. “Is he hurt?”

“He'll be all right,” Wyatt said. The boy's pleasure, like Sarah's presence, lifted his spirits. “Just needs to rest up a bit.”

“He can't chase sticks or anything?” Owen asked, disappointed.

“Not for the time being,” Sarah told the boy, moving to ruffle his hair, then drawing her hand back just short of it. “But you can feed him, and make sure he has fresh water to drink, and help him go outside when he needs to.”

Owen squared his small shoulders manfully. “I can do that stuff,” he said. “What does he eat?”

“Table scraps ought to do,” Wyatt said. “And he likes some canned milk, now and then, if you have it.”

“Do we have canned milk?” Owen demanded of Sarah, his voice urgent.

She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “His name is Lonesome.”

Wyatt stood pondering on why she'd held herself back from touching the boy, when it was plain that she wanted to so badly.

With Owen getting in the way a lot, Wyatt left the wheelbarrow on the sidewalk and carried Lonesome into the house. Sarah hurried to fetch a quilt from upstairs, and made a bed for him, right in the kitchen, precisely where Wyatt would have put him—next to the stove.

“Well, now,” Ephriam Tamlin said, coming through the doorway to the dining room, “what do we have here?”

“A dog!” Owen crowed. He was on his knees next to Lonesome, pouring milk from a can into a dish that was probably too pretty for the purpose.

Ephriam laughed heartily.

Deftly, Sarah replaced the china bowl with an old pie tin. She looked happy, with the boy and the dog and her father there. In fact, she might have been a different person from the matter-of-fact, briskly efficient woman she was at the bank.

Wyatt was confounded by the things he felt, watching her bustle around that kitchen, making coffee, putting the laudanum and salve he gave her on a handy shelf, planning supper.

He missed his ma and the homeplace. They'd kept a dog when he was a youngster, and Ma had let it live in the house, sleep on an old blanket near the stove. Back then, he'd been part of a real family.

“I reckon I'd better go,” he said, thinking nobody would hear him in all the hubbub.

But Sarah did hear, though he'd spoken softly. She paused and looked at him with wide, knowing eyes. “Won't you stay for supper?” she asked.

“Another time,” Wyatt said. And then, finding himself unable to bid the dog farewell, he turned and headed for the back door. Let himself out.

He knew looking back wasn't smart, but he did it anyway.

Sarah was standing on the small porch off the kitchen, watching him go.

 

S
UPPER WAS OVER
, and Sarah had assigned her father the task of heating water so Owen could take a bath. Owen had protested that he was “clean enough,” and anyhow he wanted to sleep on the quilt with Lonesome that night, so he'd just get dirty again.

Sarah replied that he wasn't sleeping with Lonesome, but if he agreed to the bath, she'd let him spend the night in the spare room in back of the kitchen. That way, he'd be close by if the dog needed him.

Owen had agreed, none too graciously, and Sarah had gone out for a walk, so the bath could be endured in private.

Sarah often walked at night, and she had an accustomed route—down to the schoolhouse, around past Doc Venable's, then home.

Tonight, she took Main Street. The saloons were swelling with gaslight, bawdy music and noise, as if their very walls might burst. Horses lined every hitching rail, and there were lights burning in the jailhouse, too.

Sarah headed straight for it, lifting her skirts to keep them out of the horse manure littering the street. She'd been purposeful enough—until she reached the open doorway of Rowdy's office. Then she hesitated on the sidewalk.

Would Wyatt think her forward for paying an unexpected call on him, after dark?

He'd
kissed
her twice that day.

What if he got the impression that she wanted him to do it again?

Her face burned in the warm darkness. She was about to turn and hurry away when he came to the door and caught her standing there, like a fool.

He grinned, and all of Stone Creek went on the tilt for just a moment.

“Evening, Sarah,” he said.

“Owen is taking a bath,” she explained, and then felt all the more idiotic for making such an inane remark. It wasn't as if the town deputy had to be informed of people's personal hygiene habits, after all.

“Come in, if you think it's proper,” Wyatt drawled. He'd rolled up his shirtsleeves, and his forearms were sun-browned and muscular.

Sarah had never actually been inside the jailhouse. She told herself it was mere curiosity that sent her over that threshold.

Wyatt stepped back so she could pass, but not far enough that they could avoid brushing against each other.

“How's Lonesome?” he asked.

“He's fine,” Sarah said, looking around. She saw a desk, chairs, an old potbellied stove, and a single cell with rusted bars and two cots inside, but, thankfully, no prisoner. “I gave him milk toast for supper, and more laudanum, like Doc said, and he was sleeping when I left.”

“Good,” Wyatt said, watching her.

Sarah approached the cell, saw the stockpile of guns and rifles inside. Turned to face Wyatt and found him standing directly behind her, but at a decent distance.

“Kitty told you she'd found her children?” she asked, realizing only as she spoke the words that she'd come here to say them. She and Maddie and Lark had written letters into the wee-small hours, searching for Kitty's daughters. Had Kitty known where they were the whole time?

Wyatt looked blank for a moment, then remembered their exchange in Doc's office, while he was upstairs getting the coffee. “Yes,” he said. “She had a letter from some lawyer. They were living someplace in Illinois, I think. Why?”

Sarah sighed, looked away from his face, looked back. “I'd have to speak with Kitty before I answered that,” she said. Five years ago, in Kansas City, Kitty had been willing to marry a stranger to recover her children. She'd apparently known exactly where to find them. Yet when she'd roused Sarah and the others to such a state of righteous indignation that they'd begun to search for little Leona and Davina, through the mails and every other means they could think of, she'd called a halt to it. Had something happened to change her mind, in the years and places between Kansas City and Stone Creek? Or did Kitty's daughters actually exist at all? Perhaps it had just been a story, a ploy for sympathy, and nothing more.

It was all too confusing. And Sarah felt stung, even betrayed. She lived in the figurative glass house and certainly couldn't afford to throw stones at Kitty for lying, but the discovery hurt, just the same.

Wyatt pulled a chair into the center of the room and gently lowered Sarah into it. “Don't they get heavy? All those secrets you're carrying around, I mean?” he asked quietly, his face close to hers.

“I don't have any secrets,” Sarah said.

Wyatt straightened, took a seat behind the desk. “Langstreet sure took off in a hurry,” he said, after a few moments had passed. “It's almost as if he came here meaning to leave the boy with you.”

Sarah's throat hurt. She swallowed, but it didn't help, and her eyes suddenly burned. Wyatt, she knew, was a hairsbreadth from guessing that Owen was her child, and she wished she could tell him he was right. It would be like laying down a heavy burden, one she'd been carrying for too long.

“I'm sure he didn't expect to be called away so suddenly,” she said lamely.

“Or so he claimed,” Wyatt replied, kicking his boots up onto the desk top and crossing them at the ankles.

Sarah didn't answer.

“I've watched you with Owen, Sarah,” Wyatt went on. “Sometimes, you reach out to touch him, then draw your hand back instead. He's more to you than the child of a family friend.”

Sarah thrust herself to her feet. “I shouldn't have come here,” she said, more to herself than Wyatt. “It's getting late, and I have to open the bank in the morning—”

Wyatt rose, too. “I'll walk you home,” he said.

She shook her head, rattled. “I've lived in Stone Creek for most of my life,” she told him. “I can get home just fine on my own.”

He took her arm, at the elbow. “There are some pretty rowdy strangers in town right now,” he said. “They've been swilling whiskey all day and, with or without guns, they're not fit company for a lady. And do you really think it's a good idea to open the bank while they're still around?”

Sarah knew Wyatt was going to walk her home, whether she wanted him to or not. So she resigned herself to that much, though she did jerk her elbow out of his hand. “The Stockman's Bank is our family business,” she said. “Of
course
I have to open it tomorrow morning, right on time.”

They'd gained the sidewalk, and Wyatt walked on the outside, shortening his stride a little so she could keep up, his eyes roving up and down the street, one side and then the other, as they went.

“Will your father be there?”

“I don't know,” Sarah said. “He hasn't been well lately.”

“He seems fine to me,” Wyatt observed. “At first, I thought he might be a little touched in the head, but he looked well enough when we brought Lonesome to your place after we left Doc's.”

“My father,” Sarah said sharply, “is not ‘touched in the head!'”

Two cowboys burst suddenly through the swinging doors of Jolene Bell's Saloon, just ahead, and Wyatt shoved Sarah behind him so quickly that she stumbled and had to catch her balance.

She watched, her heart seizing in her chest, as he laid a hand on the butt of his pistol.

One of the cowboys shoved the other into a horse trough, and there was a lot of shouting and swearing, plus some splashing.

Wyatt let go of the pistol butt. Walked on past the cowboys, with a chuckle, pulling Sarah along behind him, double-time.

“Surely,” Sarah huffed, in a whisper, still trying to breathe properly, “you don't think I've never encountered drunken cowboys before!”

“I think,” Wyatt answered calmly, “that you don't have the good sense to know when you ought to be careful.”

“I beg your pardon?” Sarah tried to pull free, but he held fast to her arm and kept walking. “I happen to have a
lot
of sense!”

“Do you?” Wyatt retorted.

Sarah knew he was thinking of the way she'd welcomed those men into the bank that morning. Well, it was just good business. “I have a college
education,
Wyatt Yarbro. I run a
bank,
single-handedly—”

He stopped so suddenly that she collided with him.

“Single-handedly?” he asked.

“Well, I mean, I help my father, of course—”

“Sarah.”

She looked around frantically, was relieved to see that there was no one nearby to overhear their conversation.

Wyatt gripped her shoulders, firmly but gently, too. “Owen told me his father came to Stone Creek to take the bank away from you. Not from your father. From you.”

“Owen is a child, he—”

“Sarah, stop. Tell me the truth, or don't talk to me at all!”

Sarah pressed her lips together. She knew by the look in Wyatt's eyes that he wanted to shake her, but he didn't. She felt delicate in his hands, like something precious and breakable.

“Sarah,” Wyatt said again.