Without Words (13 page)

“Her husband died without any help from me. It was one of his sons who made the mistake of pulling on me, and the two of them left Mrs. Petty in a bad way. I’m hoping you and Belle can find her a decent husband. If men are writing back East and marrying women they’ve never met, there ought to be a few around who’d rather have a pretty widow they can meet in person.”

Pretty? He thought she was pretty? No one could think that when she was covered with days of trail dust, smelling of her own sweat and Brownie’s, and dressed like a man. For a moment the compliment distracted Hassie from the fact Bret was pushing her off on his friends, wanting her to find a husband and stop being a burden to any of them.

“We’ll have to see how Belle feels about that,” Gabe said. “Let’s get these horses put up and go see her. Say what you want about living in a soddy, it will be cooler inside than out here in the sun.”

It was cooler inside, and Hassie had guessed right. Three rooms. She was also right about Belle Chapman’s negative attitude.

They no more than all sat around the kitchen table when Belle said, “I hope that male dog out there isn’t going to be getting pups on Collie.”

Hassie wondered at people who named their collie Collie but decided someone whose own dog had been named Yellow Dog until recently had no call to wonder.

Gabe smiled at his wife as if he understood her feelings, sympathized, and expected her to get over them anyway. “It’s only been a month since the last time we had to tie her in the barn. They’re just playing.”

Belle shrugged, fussed over the children, and shooed them back out in the yard. She thumped four glasses down on the table, dipped water into them, and sat, still vibrating disapproval. “You said you’d explain once Gabe was here. He’s here.”

Bret told them about Rufus. And Werver. To Hassie’s relief, he left out the purple dress and her frantic flight from the brothel. In fact he left out the brothel entirely. As he talked, Belle visibly relaxed, most of her hostility disappearing.

Hassie stared down at her hands, heat flushing across her cheeks. Belle Chapman must have thought Bret arrived for a visit in the company of the kind of woman respectable wives didn’t acknowledge existed.

By the time Hassie was paying attention to the conversation again, most of Bret’s explanation was over.

“She can’t talk?” Belle said incredulously.

Bret, bless him, didn’t correct Belle with a description of Hassie’s ruined voice, which would inevitably lead to demands for a demonstration.

“She writes,” Bret said. “Slate and pencil. She does fine, and no one can accuse her of nagging.”

“When we make a list of her virtues, I’ll put that as number one,” Belle said, the barb back in her tone. “And what do you think of all this?” she said to Hassie.

Hassie lifted one shoulder slightly and forced a smile.

Belle pointed a finger at Bret. “Go get that slate and pencil.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Bret and Gabe disappeared as fast as two big men could. Five-year-old Sarah, who didn’t want to relinquish them to an adult, delivered the slate and chalk pencil.

“You have your own,” her mother said, “and you’ve never been that fond of them. Scoot back outside now and keep an eye on your brother.”

Belle put the slate in front of Hassie. “Now, let’s talk. When did your husband die?”

“The night before Bret came. I lost track. Maybe 6 weeks ago.”

Belle blew out a big breath. “And you’re not ready to remarry.”

Hassie just shook her head, glad for once she wasn’t expected to say anything because even if her voice worked as well as Belle’s, right now it would tremble.

“You won’t be the first woman who had to do what she had to do,” Belle said. “I’m sorry, but Bret’s right, and that’s the truth of it.”

Hassie kept her head down, blinked rapidly to disperse extra moisture.
“I know.”

“You don’t have any fanciful illusions about Bret, do you?” Belle said sharply.

Hassie shook her head again, maybe too fast, or maybe too vigorously, because Belle called her on it.

“Of course you do. You wouldn’t be the first woman to waste time and emotion on Bret Sterling, and you better chase ideas like that right out of your head. If Bret ever marries, it will have to be someone that family of his approves of, and they only approve of people as grand as they are, not that that’s how they put it. The only thing a Sterling man would do with an Irish girl like you or the daughter of a small farmer like me is ruin her. One of my sisters found that out the hard way.”

At the other woman’s words, a wave of indignation ran through Hassie.
“I don’t believe that. Bret is honorable.”

Belle made a face. “Oh, yes, he’s honorable. He’s the best of the lot of them, I’ll give you that. His brother William is the one who gave my sister false hopes, but then he went and....” Belle stopped as if realizing she needed to censor herself. “Never mind any of that. We need to concentrate on you and your problems.”

Her own problems were exactly what Hassie didn’t want to think about, much less concentrate on.
“How do you know Bret and his family when you live here, and they live in Missouri. Did you live there once? Did you have to leave after the war?”

For a moment it seemed Belle wouldn’t answer, but finally she said, “Gabe and I grew up on small farms bordering the Sterling place. We didn’t
have
to leave after the war, but we had no reason to stay in a place that’s a nest of Southern sympathizers. If Bret had any sense he’d leave too, but his loyalty to that family is beyond reason or explanation. Now enough of that. Do you have any decent female clothes out there in those packs?”

Hassie shook her head.

Belle made a disapproving sound. “Then what we need to talk about is getting you dressed proper and introduced to some of the bachelors and widowers around here.”

After not experiencing so much as a twinge for weeks, Hassie had almost forgotten the many ways her stomach could hurt. Now a familiar cramping sensation warned of misery to come. She spread a hand over her middle, knowing it wouldn’t do any good and unable not to do it anyway.

Oblivious, Belle said, “I can probably talk Gabe into a trip to town tomorrow or the next day, and Bret can just pay for a decent outfit, but right now I could use some help getting supper ready. We’ll need to stretch what I planned. A few more potatoes should do it.”

Hassie nodded, more than willing to help. Keeping busy and not thinking about introductions to marital prospects might quiet her stomach.

In spite of what Belle thought, Hassie didn’t have fanciful illusions about Bret Sterling. She knew he regarded her as an unwanted burden.

In spite of that she wished she could stay with him. She’d been a little help by recognizing Ollie Hammerill, hadn’t she?

She wanted more long days in the saddle, plain food over a campfire, luxurious stays in hotels with restaurant meals, and even frightening encounters with ferries and outlaws.

No matter where he went or what he did, her days following Bret Sterling had been the best in her life, and she wanted more of them. Which meant Belle was right. It was all a fanciful illusion.

A
FTER GIVING
G
ABE’S
young daughter, Sarah, the slate and chalk pencil to deliver to Mrs. Petty, Bret followed Gabe through the fields to where his friend was working on fence repair. Again.

“It seems like the last time I stopped by, you were fixing fence,” Bret said.

“It chronic. The horses spend half their time pushing on any weak spots, trying to get into the crops. Last time they succeeded, it was in the middle of the night, and I almost lost a couple of them. Belle and I had to walk them for hours before their guts straightened out.”

“Someday someone will come up with better fence than post and rail.”

“Yeah, or an animal smarter than a horse.”

Bret grunted, putting his back into tamping a fence post. “Maybe you want dumber, not smart enough to escape.”

“Speaking of dumb....”

“She’s not dumb,” Bret said, aggravated. “She fell across a wire when she was little more than Sarah’s age. It almost took her head off and ruined her voice. She and her mother learned some kind of sign language, but her mother’s gone now. A husband could learn it.”

“And she writes.”

“She does. We need to cross any illiterates off the list.”

“List?” Gabe stopped with a fence post in his arms. “You can’t seriously think there’s going to be enough men interested in a mute Irish papist to need a list.”

“If she’s a papist, she’s not much of one. She hasn’t crossed herself once, and she reads her Bible every chance she gets. Catholics don’t do that, do they?”

“Fine,” Gabe said, upending the fence post in one of the holes he’d already dug. “So she’s a mute Irish widow, past the first blush of youth and childless in spite of how many years of marriage?”

“You sound like a poet. When exactly does the first blush of youth end? She can’t be more than twenty-five or six.” Bret stopped tamping, chucked more dirt in the hole, and started pounding again. “Seven maybe.”

“Then the blush has faded.” Gabe returned from shooing off curious horses before they could take advantage of the gap in the fence and returned to the subject of Mrs. Petty. “I’m still not clear why you think you owe Mrs. Petty anything. Her husband died. His son tried to kill you, and you killed him. She owns that farm back there now. Why not leave her to it?”

“If you saw the place, you’d know. It’s only maybe forty acres to start with, and the fields look like the last time they were planted was before the war. The only livestock on the place was that excuse for a horse, and hard as it may be to believe, Old Brownie looks ten times better right now than she did then. I guess the husband scratched out a halfway decent living selling moonshine until his sons didn’t come back from the war and he started drinking everything he brewed himself.”

Gabe stopped fitting rails in place, a frown on his broad face. “You said you found the son who robbed the army right there.”

“The sons didn’t die in the war. They just never came home. Having seen the place, I can’t blame them. Rufus ran home for the first time in years with almost six thousand stolen dollars and who knows how long he was planning on hiding there. Or what he would have done for Mrs. Petty. Maybe he would have given her enough to get by until she could marry again. For all I know he would have plowed and planted this year or started up the still again. If nothing else, as long as he was there, he’d have seen she had enough to eat. There was hardly any food in the place, but I could smell fried meat in the kitchen. He’d been hunting.”

“He was a thief and a murderer. More likely he would have used and abused her. Killed her maybe. Definitely left her worse off than she was.”

“Maybe.” Bret finished tamping the last post, threw the iron bar aside, and grabbed the other end of a rail. “The fact is I killed him and left her with nothing. Even if I gave her some of the money, she’d have nothing before long. And then I left her in that damned hotel.”

Bret told Gabe the sordid details about the events in Werver he’d left out earlier with Belle listening and the children around.

Gabe whistled. “You hear stories of things like that, but I always figured any woman whoring was doing it because she decided to, even if what decided her was the need to eat. At least any white woman.”

“Obviously not, and who’d ever know? It’s not like she could yell for help.”

“Even so, she shouldn’t be your problem. We better keep quiet about the whorehouse, though. Just the fact she’s been riding around alone with you will raise some eyebrows. With luck we can help you offload her on somebody desperate for a woman, although I’m telling you there isn’t going to be any list. How long was she married and no children to show for it?”

“From what I heard in Werver, since the end of the war. The husband was an old man and busy pickling his liver, so you can’t blame her for the lack of children. She’ll do fine with a healthy man.”

“You should have been born a gypsy. You could travel the country selling crowbait like that horse of hers as bloodstock. Now you’re going to tell me she can’t talk but sings like a bird, and she’s not an ordinary bogtrotter but descended from Irish kings.”

Bret considered swinging the fence rail at Gabe’s skull and decided against it. The two of them had fought each other to a bloody standstill often enough over the years. No use getting an early start this time. “I’ll tell you she’s a hard worker, agreeable, and cheerful. The only thing clean and halfway kept up on the Petty place was the house, and she managed that while caring for a dying man.”

“She’s not bad looking, I’ll give you that. Not your kind of beauty, but pretty enough.”

Bret thought of the way Mrs. Petty looked when she smiled, the real one, not that too bright forced smile. And her laugh. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen or heard much of either the last few days. She must be worried about meeting strangers.

“How many eligible women are there around here? How many men looking for wives?”

“A few women. A lot more men,” Gabe conceded.

“I hear all the time about men answering advertisements in newspapers and writing to agencies that have catalogs of women and paying to get them out here without knowing a thing about them.”

“They exchange letters and photographs. They probably know as much about the catalog women as you do about Mrs. Petty. You’ve been hauling her around the country with you for almost two months and you don’t use her given name?”

“Her husband’s hardly cold in the grave. No harm keeping things a little formal.” Bret hoped Gabe would take the hint and leave the subject alone, but leaving things alone was never Gabe’s way.

“So you’ve really been riding around for weeks with the widow, and you never....” He rocked one hand suggestively.

Bret gave Gabe a glare that would shut most men up. “Of course not. She’s a widow left in a bad situation, not some painted woman.” Bret ran a forearm over his face, not to wipe away sweat but to hide a smile at the memory of Mrs. Petty flying down the street toward him in the purple dress, her face definitely painted.