A Lawman's Christmas: A McKettricks of Texas Novel (9 page)

As it was, Clay was half-frozen by the time he fumbled with the latch on his office door, stepped over the threshold and set the dog down to feel along the wall for the metal box that held the matches for the stove and the lanterns.

Chester gave a low growl as Clay struck the match.

There was a shuffling clatter over by the desk, followed by the sound of boot soles striking the plank floor and a grumbled curse.

“Damn it, Clay,” growled his cousin Sawyer, “you oughtn't to sneak up on a man like that, especially when he's sleeping.”

“I
thought it didn't snow in Texas,” Sawyer said, after stretching and letting go with a lusty yawn. Clay patted the dog, reassured him with a few quiet words and lit one of the two lanterns he had on hand. “What are you doing here, Sawyer?” he countered gruffly.

“I
was
catching up on my shut-eye,” Sawyer replied affably, grinning that cocky grin that sometimes made Clay want to backhand his cousin, “until you came banging through the door and disturbed me.”

Clay lit the other lantern, the one that stood on the bookcase, and then went to the stove to build up the fire. The last time he'd seen his cousin and one-time best friend, they'd had words, not just about Annabel, but about a few other things, too.

“You're a long way from home, cousin,” Clay finally remarked.

“So are you,” Sawyer answered, perching on the edge of Clay's desk now, with his arms folded. The youngest son of Clay's uncle Kade, and aunt Mandy, Sawyer had the fair hair and dark blue eyes that ran in intergenerational streaks through the McKettrick bloodline.

Clay shut the stove door with a clang and rustled up some leftovers for Chester, who seemed to have decided that the surprise visitor made acceptable company.

Which just went to show what a dog knew about anything, Clay thought glumly. Most of them liked everybody, and Chester was no exception.

“I'm going to ask you once more,” Clay said evenly, “
just once,
what you're doing here, and if I don't get a clear answer, I swear I'll toss you behind bars on a trespassing charge.”

Sawyer chuckled. “I'm just passing through,” he said. “Since I was in your neck of the woods, I decided to board my horse in San Antonio and take the train to Blue River, see how you're faring and all.”

“I'm faring just fine,” Clay responded, “so you can get on tomorrow's train, if it makes it through, and go right back to San Antonio.”

Sawyer strolled to the window, in no evident hurry to get there. He had the born horseman's rolling, easy
stride. “Good thing I didn't bring the horse,” he said, as though Clay hadn't as good as told him, straight out, that he wasn't welcome. “We'd probably be out there in the blizzard someplace, freezing to death.” A visible shudder moved through his lean, agile form, but he didn't turn around. “Like I said, nothing anybody ever told me about Texas prepared me for ass-deep snow.”

Clay ladled water into the coffeepot, a dented metal receptacle coated with blue enamel, and set it on top of the potbellied stove. Then he commenced to spoon ground coffee beans into it, along with a pinch of salt to make the grounds settle after the stuff brewed. “That's the thing about weather,” he said, at considerable length. “It's unpredictable.”

Sawyer finally turned around, but he lingered at the window, frost-coated and all but opaque behind him. “Annabel Carson got married soon after you left,” he said, gruffly and with care.

“Not to you, it appears,” Clay said, turning his back to the stove and absorbing the heat.

Sawyer made a sound that might have been a chuckle, though it contained no noticeable amusement. “Not to me,” he confirmed. “She got hitched to Whit Taggard, over near Stone Creek. You know, that banker in his fifties, with more money than one man ever ought to have? She swears it's a love match.”

“You came all the way to Blue River to tell me that?” Clay asked, strangely unmoved by news that probably would have devastated him not so long ago. Chester had finished his meal of leftovers from the hotel dining room and gone to curl up on his blanket. The wind howled and hissed under the eaves, as if it were fixing to raise the roof right off that old jailhouse and carry it next door, if not farther.

“No,” Sawyer said. “I came all the way to Blue River because your mama's been worried about you, and I love my aunt Chloe.”

Clay sighed. “I already sent Ma and Pa a wire,” he said, mildly exasperated. “They know I'm fine.”

“Your saying it and their knowing it for sure are two different things, Clay,” Sawyer went on, his tone reasonable and quiet, as if he were calming a jittery horse or a cow mired in deep mud and struggling against the ropes meant to pull it onto dry ground. “It's not every day a man picks up and leaves the place and the people he's known all his life.”

Clay had no answer for that, had already done all the explaining he ever intended to do, where the decision to put home behind him for good—at least as far as living there—was concerned, anyhow. Much as he loved his granddad and his pa and his uncles, he didn't want to spend the rest of his life taking orders from
them. He wanted to build and run his own outfit, marry and have sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“You hungry?” Clay asked, hoping to get the conversation going in another direction.

“I had fried chicken over at the hotel, soon as I'd checked in and stowed my gear,” Sawyer answered, with a shake of his head. He looked around at the humble quarters Clay presently called home, sighed. “Nobody can accuse you of living high on the hog, I reckon,” he finished, sounding weary now.

Clay shoved a hand through his hair, recalling the difficult trek back from Dara Rose's place. It had taken him and Chester the better part of half an hour to cover the five hundred yards or so between the jail and that snug little house.

Once he'd warmed up, had some coffee and put on long johns and an extra layer of clothes, he meant to venture out again, track down that family Dara Rose had mentioned—the O'Reillys—and see for himself that they were warm and had something to eat. He figured it was his duty, as marshal, to see that folks made it through when there was an emergency like that snowstorm, especially women and children.

“Finding your way back to the hotel in this blizzard
might be tricky,” Clay told his cousin, in his own good time. “You can bunk in the cell there if you want.”

One side of Sawyer's mouth quirked upward in a grin. “And give you a prime opportunity to lock me up, soon as I shut my eyes, and then drop the key down a deep well? Not likely, cousin.”

“You sorely overestimate my ability to tolerate your company,” Clay responded dryly. “The sooner you're on your way, the happier I'm going to be.”

Sawyer didn't reply right away, which was a telling thing, because he was usually quick to shoot off his mouth. There
was
a whole other side to Sawyer, though—one nobody, including Clay, really knew much about.

“You must know I never laid a hand on your girl, Clay,” Sawyer said, as a chunk of wood crackled and splintered to embers inside the stove. “So what exactly is it about me that sticks in your craw? We used to be as close as brothers.”

Too warm now that he'd been standing near the stove for a while, Clay moved on to his desk, reclaimed the creaky wooden chair, sat back in it with his hands cupped behind his head. Chester, lying nearby on his blanket pile, gave a single, chortling snore, and another piece of wood collapsed in the fire, with a series of sharp snaps.

“You come here,” Clay answered presently, “unin
vited, I might add, and let on that I'm a grief to the family, like some prodigal son off squandering his birthright in a far country, and then you have the gall to ask what sticks in my craw? It's the hypocrisy of it.
You're a gunslinger,
Sawyer, a hired gun. Little better than an outlaw, most likely. It might even be that if I went through all these wanted posters on my desk, I'd come across a fair likeness of your face.”

“I'm not an outlaw,” Sawyer said flatly. “You know that.”

“Do I?” Clay asked. “You blow through the Triple M every few years like a breeze—just long enough last time to turn my girl's head—and then, one fine day, a telegram comes in, and you're gone again, without a word to anybody. Like you know somebody's picked up your trail so you'd better be moving on, pronto.”

Sawyer sighed again, and it came out raspy. “I don't reckon anything I say is going to get through that inch-thick layer of bone you call a skull,” he said. “You made up your mind about me a long time ago, didn't you, cousin?”

There was no denying that. “I reckon I did,” Clay replied quietly, feeling wrung out. “You can tell Ma and the rest of the family that you've seen me and I'm fine. Seems to me that your business here is finished.”

Even as he spoke those words, Clay wondered what
the
real
reason for Sawyer's visit might be. Blue River was too far out of his cousin's way for this to be about Annabel, or a favor to Clay's ma and pa.

Sawyer crossed to the door, took his hat and canvas duster down from their pegs and put them on. Then he hesitated, one hand on the old-fashioned iron latch. “You're right,” he said, with more sadness than Clay had heard in his voice since they were ten years old and Sawyer's dog took sick and died. “I guess there's no getting back on your good side. I'll be on tomorrow's train, if it gets here, and you can get on with whatever the hell it is you think you're doing.”

With that, Sawyer opened the door and went out, letting in a blast of snow-speckled cold that reached into the deepest parts of Clay and held on.

He almost relented, almost called Sawyer back—but in the end, he figured it was best to let him go.

 

T
HE SNOW LAY LIKE A THICK,
glittering mantle over the countryside when Dara Rose went out to feed the chickens, carrying the egg basket and a jug to refill their water pan, but the sky was the purest blue, cloudless and benign. As quickly as it had arisen, the storm was over; water dripped rhythmically from the edges of the roof, and the path to the henhouse was slushy under the soles of her high-button shoes.

Hope stirred, springlike, in Dara Rose's heart, as she crossed the yard. She could hear the chickens clucking away in the coop, wanting their breakfast and their liberty from a long night of confinement.

Using the side of her foot, Dara Rose cleared a patch of ground for the birds and let them out while she ducked inside to fetch the water pan. Pleased to see that every member of her little flock had survived, she scattered their feed and then went on to collect the eggs.

There were six—a better count than the day before, though still less than she'd hoped for—and Dara Rose set each one carefully in the basket and returned to the house.

Edrina and Harriet were up and dressed, Edrina full of glee because she didn't have to go to school that day, and Harriet equally happy to have a playmate.

Dara Rose took off her bonnet and cloak, hung them up, washed her hands at the pump in the sink and put a pot of water on to boil, for oatmeal.

In the middle of the meal, a knock sounded at the front door.

Frowning, wondering who would be out and about so early, with the snow still deep enough to make traveling through it a trial, she pushed back her chair, told the children to finish eating and behave themselves and hurried through the small parlor. On some level, she
realized, she'd hoped to find Clay McKettrick standing on her tiny porch, but this only came to her when she saw Mayor Wilson Ponder there instead.

Through the glass oval in the door, the older man's face looked purposeful, and a little grim.

Dara Rose opened the door. “Mayor Ponder,” she said, not bothering to hide her surprise. He'd arrived, she saw now, looking past him to the street, in a sleigh drawn by two sturdy mules. “Come in.”

“I won't tarry,” Ponder said gravely, with a distracted tug at the brim of his bowler hat. He remained where he was, forcing Dara Rose to stand in the bright cold of the doorway and wait to hear what business he had with her. “I know this isn't a convenient time, what with the blizzard and all, but frankly, I'm not comfortable putting the task off any longer.” He reddened slightly, though that might have been because of the weather, and not any sense of chagrin, and his muttonchop whiskers wobbled as he prepared to go on. “The town purchased this house for the use of the marshal, Mrs. Nolan, and if Clay McKettrick doesn't mean to use the place, well, we—the town council, that is—would prefer to sell it.”

Dara Rose felt the floor shift under her feet, but she kept her shoulders squared and even managed not to shiver at the cold, and the news the mayor had just delivered.

“Oh,” she said, hugging herself and wishing for her cloak, wishing for summer and better times. “Do you have a prospective buyer?”

“Ezra Maddox wants the property,” Mayor Ponder said, after more whisker-wriggling. “He's offering two hundred and fifty dollars cash money and, what with bringing in electricity, the town could use the funds.”

Ezra Maddox owned a farm, Dara Rose thought, dazed and frustrated and quite cornered. What did the man want with a run-down house miles from his crops and his dairy cows?

By now, everyone knew Clay had decided to live over at the jailhouse. Could it be that Mr. Maddox was simply trying to force her hand by buying the house out from under her? Was he hoping she would give in and accept his offer of a so-called housekeeping job, possibly followed by marriage, and send her children away in the bargain?

Dara Rose seethed, even as cold terror overtook her. “How long until we have to move?” she asked, amazed at how calm she sounded.

Mayor Ponder hesitated before he answered, perhaps ashamed of that morning's mission. On the other hand, he'd gone to all the bother of hitching mules to a sleigh to get there bright and early, which did not indicate any real degree of reluctance on his part. “Ezra's mighty
anxious to take possession of the place,” he finally said. “But since Christmas is just two weeks away, well, he's—
we're
—willing to let you stay until the first of the year.”

Dara Rose gripped the door frame with one hand, thinking she might actually swoon. Behind her, in the kitchen, the girls' voices rang like chimes as they conducted some merry disagreement, laced with giggles.