The Man from Stone Creek (19 page)

Without looking at Sam and Miss Blackstone again, without worrying about the mail or the possibility of missing a customer, Maddie turned on her heel and headed for the Rattlesnake Saloon.

 

A
BIGAIL STARED
mutely at the stagecoach ticket Sam had placed in her gloved hand. It wounded him, seeing its meaning dawn in her whole countenance, but there was nothing for it. She was a proud woman, and when she met his eyes, he felt her injured confusion like a spear thrust.

“You're sending me away?”

The stage driver, having unloaded the mail bags and left them just inside the door of the mercantile for Maddie to see to, climbed the side of the coach to fetch down Abigail's belongings.

Sam signaled him with one hand and the man paused, puzzled, shook his head and stepped back to the ground.

“Sam?” Abigail prompted.

“You shouldn't have come here,” Sam told her. He took her arm and led her a little way apart. “I'm
working,
Abigail, and besides, there's no fitting place for you to stay. You've got to turn right around and head back home. Now. Today.”

Abigail, resilient as tempered steel, recovered her normal unassailable dignity. She lengthened her spine and tugged at the tops of her dusty traveling gloves. “You,” she said, “are
always
working. And you've never minded before when I paid an unexpected visit. What, exactly, is different now?”

Sam had been aware of Maddie's presence, seen her walk away out of the corner of his eye, and wondered where she was headed. Not that Maddie Chancelor had anything to do with the subject at hand.

“There's been a killing, for one thing,” Sam replied, forcing himself to concentrate. “A man named Mungo Donagher shot his eldest son to death.”

Abigail blinked. “That's terrible,” she said. Then, after a deep, measured breath, she added, “There's something more, Sam. Something you're not telling me. What is it?”

He thought of the map Vierra had given him that night in the graveyard in Refugio. Even then, as he andAbigail stood yammering on the sidewalk, there was a train rolling north, loaded with Mexican gold and unsuspecting passengers. If Vierra's information was sound, the outlaw gang would probably be waiting in ambush at the railroad trestle, and that was two days south of where he was, all of it hard riding.

“There's a
lot
I'm not telling you,” Sam rasped, “because I
can't
tell you.”

She pondered him, her wide-set eyes wise and watchful, her cheekbones flushed with color beneath a layer of trail grime. “You know you can trust me, Sam O'Ballivan,” she said.

He sighed. “It's not a matter of trusting you. I have to leave town, right away, and I don't know when I'll be back. You'd be on your own.”

“What about the children? Your students?”

“I'll just have to shut the school down until I get back.” The stagecoach driver was checking his team, making sure the harnesses didn't rub anywhere. He must have seen the ticket, now crumpled in Abigail's right hand, because there was an air of lingering about him. Sam sensed the man's growing impatience and understood it. He had a route to cover and a station to reach before sundown.

Abigail smiled. “Or you could let me take over,” she suggested, showing no signs of boarding that stagecoach. She'd gone to normal school, unlike Sam, who'd gotten the bulk his education from borrowed books, so it wasn't an empty threat. With Abigail, no threat was
ever
empty.

“How would I explain that? And where would you stay?”

“We'll simply make up some story,” she said with growing eagerness. There were faint blue shadows under her eyes, and that worried Sam. For all her adventurous spirit, Abigail was delicate. “And I can stay wherever you're staying now. Surely you have a room somewhere.”

A flush pulsed in Sam's neck. “It wouldn't be proper.”

“Since when do you worry about what's proper?” Abigail countered, still smiling. Sam decided he'd liked it better when she was indignant.

“Since everything depends on my being the schoolmaster,” he said.

“All aboard for Tucson!” the driver called hopefully. There were no other takers, so that meant Abigail, and she wasn't paying a lick of attention.

“You just said you were leaving,” Abigail reasoned, “so it's not as if we'd be sharing your quarters.”

Sam suppressed an urge to yank off his hat, fling it down on the board sidewalk and stomp on it in pure frustration. “Abigail,” he said,
“get on the stage.”

Abigail folded her arms, but not before she tore the stagecoach ticket into tiny little pieces and flung it into the slowly settling dust. “No,” she said flatly.

“Abigail—”

“You are not my husband, and therefore you have no authority over me. I choose to stay, and that's what I'm going to do!”

The driver shrugged, unloaded Abigail's trunk and valise, climbed into the box and took up the reins. Sam winced as the man wrenched at the brake lever.

He was desperate. “
Damn
it, Abigail—”

Abigail waved a cheerful farewell to the driver.

The stagecoach lurched into noisy motion.

She reached for a valise, and Sam took it from her, none too politely. He grabbed up the trunk with his other hand and stormed off toward the schoolhouse, leaving Abigail to follow if she chose. Which, of course, she damn well did.

 

M
ADDIE STOOD OUT
in front of the Rattlesnake Saloon, petting Charlie Wilcox's horse and trying to summon up the courage to march through those swinging doors and find out what Oralee Pringle had to say.

There were few secrets in Haven, and folks were out and about. They'd know the minute she stepped over Oralee's threshold, and they'd have plenty to say about it over their supper tables that night. She could go around back, but that would only intrigue them more.

The stagecoach passed, with a clatter of horses' hooves, a squeak of ungreased wheels and the inevitable cloud of choking dust. Maddie didn't turn around to see if Abigail Blackstone was inside it, but she hoped, with an unflattering intensity, that she was.

She took a deep breath and a step toward the saloon entrance. What did she have to lose? Undine meant to sell the mercantile, and once that happened, Maddie wouldn't have to worry about her reputation, because she and Terran would be packing up and leaving.

Oralee's plump face appeared like a painted moon above the hinged doors. “Come on in,” she said, and there was a note of challenge in her voice. She'd registered Maddie's trepidation and the dare was implicit in her shrewd little eyes.

Maddie let out the breath she'd been holding in a determined whoosh and approached.

Oralee smiled, ever so slightly, and stepped back to let her pass into that cool, shadowy space where the floor was covered with sawdust. A scattering of drifters and local no-accounts looked up at Maddie's appearance, and the piano player raised his fingers off the keys and stared. Dance hall girls wavered, faceless, in the gloom at the edges of the room, their dresses like thin washes of water-color.

Maddie wanted to bolt, but she didn't.

“We can talk in my office,” Oralee said. She paused to survey the clientele. “Back to your drinkin', you nosy bastards,” she ordered, and to a man, they all retreated into their beer mugs and whiskey glasses. The piano player spun back to the keys and resumed his bawdy repertoire, and the dancing girls came to life.

Oralee proceeded, with all the purpose of a paddle-wheeler traveling downriver, making for an open door at the back of the room. Maddie, having come this far, gulped down the last of her misgivings and sailed in the other woman's expansive wake.

To Maddie's surprise, Oralee's private enclave was no cluttered burrow, littered with the detritus of sin. It was more like a parlor, graciously appointed, with elegantly painted glass lamps and fine furniture upholstered in pale green silk. The desk was ornate, and probably French, with decorative china panels, and a quill pen stood at the ready, beside a gold-filigreed inkwell. The floor was of highly polished wood—no trace of sawdust here—and the pictures on the walls were well-executed depictions of fox hunts, sleeping dogs and pink-cheeked children in hoop skirts and velvet knee pants.

The place gave Maddie an odd, disjointed sensation, as though she'd stepped out of one world and into another, totally unexpected one.

“Sit down,” Oralee said, taking her place behind the desk.

Maddie hesitated, then took one of the silk-upholstered chairs. She folded her hands in her lap, lifted her chin. And waited circumspectly. When it finally occurred to her that Oralee might have heard about the sale of the mercantile, and was about to offer her a job at the Rattlesnake, she bristled inwardly and kept her face impassive.

“I hear Undine Donagher's itchin' to get out of the storekeepin' business,” Oralee said.

Maddie remembered that two of the girls from the Rattlesnake had been present when Banker James relayed Undine's offer. They must have carried the news straight back to Oralee. “Yes,” Maddie said stiffly, braced for whatever might come next.

“And you turned down the chance to buy the place.” Oralee paused thoughtfully, then fixed Maddie with another penetrating stare. “The store's a goin' concern. Only one between here and Tucson.”

“I'm well aware of that,” Maddie said.

“You've done a pretty good job runnin' it,” Oralee allowed, with no trace of admiration. “Couldn't have been easy, fendin' off Mungo Donagher and those rascal boys of his all that time.”

Maddie didn't answer. Her heart pounded and indignant tears burned in her throat and behind her eyes. She had herself and Terran to support, and she'd do whatever she had to do, but she hadn't reached the place where she was willing to sell her body, and it stung her pride that Oralee or anyone else thought she had.

“We're more alike, you and me, than a person might think,” Oralee observed. “Two women in business, tryin' to make their way in a man's world.”

Maddie gave a brief nod, clasping her hands so tightly that they hurt, and unable to let go.

Suddenly, Oralee smiled, genuinely this time. “By God,” she crowed, “you think I want to hire you to work upstairs!”

Maddie's chin wobbled. She wanted to say she'd starve first, and that was true, but the prospect of seeing Terran go hungry was another matter entirely. If she couldn't find an honest job, or marry a man of means, modest or otherwise, she might find herself begging at the back door of this place or another one like it. She certainly wouldn't be the first woman to find herself in such desperate straits, or the last.

Oralee gave a shout of raucous laughter and tears of mirth glistened in her eyes. Her dyed-blond curls seemed to take on a life of their own, bobbing around her head.

Maddie waited rigidly for her to go on.

Presently, Oralee's amusement subsided to coarse chuckles. She dabbed at her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief and studied Maddie for a few long moments.

“You didn't buy the store because you don't have the money,” Oralee said, “and Banker James, in his infinite wisdom, wouldn't see fit to give you a mortgage.”

Maddie's face was hot. She sat up very straight. “That's right.”

“Well,” Oralee said, “it just so happens that I
do
have the money. And I'm willing to make you a loan. We could be partners, or you could just make payments. With interest, of course.”

Maddie's mouth fell open. She closed it again.

Oralee reached for a crystal decanter and poured herself a dose of whiskey. Took a sip while she waited.

“You can't be serious,” Maddie said.

“Serious as bare feet in a thistle patch,” Oralee replied.

“Why would you do this?”

“Partly to spite Elias James,” Oralee answered bluntly, “and partly to put some of my money to honest work.”

Maddie leaned forward, then sat back. “Land sakes,” she said, stupefied.

Oralee refilled her whiskey glass, tossed back the contents and shuddered with satisfaction. “It's all right if you don't want to be partners,” she reflected presently. “I'd understand that, right enough. I wouldn't cut anybody in on the Rattlesnake if I didn't have to. I like runnin' my own show.”

The wings of Maddie's heart fluttered, preparing to spread and take flight. “What sort of interest rate did you have in mind?”

Oralee huffed out a breath. “Best one I can get away with,” she said forthrightly. “That's probably around two percent, which is a hell of a lot more than I'd get out of Banker James. I'll have the papers drawn up, if you're agreeable. Mungo'd have to sign off on the whole deal, of course. He might not be amenable to Undine's plans.”