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Authors: Jo Goodman

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Western, #Historical, #Fiction

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BOOK: True to the Law
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“Yes.” Tru could feel her bonnet slipping backward. She made a grab for it, exposing her tightly coiled hair to the wind’s icy teeth, and set it properly on her head before it could blow away.

Still watching her, he frowned. “Are you all right?”

Tru realized that her scarf had muffled her answer. Rather than expose her face to the cold, she nodded.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t watching where I was going,” he said.

She nodded again and pointed to herself, hoping he understood she was offering the same explanation.

“Are you certain you can walk? You didn’t twist an ankle?”

The answer to the first required another nod. The answer to the second required a shake. It would be too confusing if she did both. Tru pulled the scarf just below her bottom lip. “Really, I’m fine.” Her moist breath was made visible by the cold air. She burrowed her mouth and nose into the warm wool again. When he continued to stare at her as though gauging the truth of her words, Tru took a step sideways. The wind slipped under her petticoats and her skirt fluttered wildly against his legs as she made to pass.

“You’re Miss Morrow. The schoolteacher.”

Tru stopped. She supposed that if he had any doubt about her identity, the simple act of pausing was sufficient to confirm it.

“My name’s Bridger,” he said, touching the brim of his pearl gray Stetson with a gloved hand. “Cobb Bridger.”

She sighed and tugged on her scarf again. “I know who you are, Mr. Bridger.”

“You do?”

She felt strangely pleased that she had surprised him. “I eliminated all the faces I know. Since I don’t know yours, that makes you new to town and therefore the gambler who has taken up lodgings at the Pennyroyal.”

“I’m staying at the Pennyroyal.”

“I don’t pass any judgment about gambling, Mr. Bridger. Or drinking for that matter.” The Pennyroyal was a hotel
and
saloon. “Your affairs are your own.” She thought she sounded a bit priggish for someone who professed to pass no judgment, but it was too late to make amends for it. “Excuse me, please.”

He retreated a step and let her move out of his reach before he said, “I thought you’d be more curious.”

If he’d put out a hand to block her path, he could not have stopped her with more ease. Tru turned her head and arched a single spun-gold eyebrow.

“Don’t you wonder how I recognized you, Miss Morrow?”

Tru yanked on her scarf. “I imagine you learned something about everyone in Bitter Springs in the same manner I did. You cannot get from the train station to the hotel without the assistance of Rabbit and Finn Collins, and no personal detail is too small for them to miss about you or relate about others. As the young masters are both my pupils, I can suppose one or both pointed me out to you as you rode by or told you all of the six ways I’ve made their lives miserable by accepting the position to teach in Bitter Springs. You probably noticed my horns and cloven feet.”

Almost immediately, Tru regretted calling attention to herself in that manner. Cobb Bridger’s scrutiny was thorough, though not particularly personal. He regarded her with a certain remoteness that was almost clinical, more akin to the dispassionate observation of a scientist. She was most definitely not flattered, but then neither, she realized, was she embarrassed.

“What I noticed,” he said, returning his eyes to hers, “is that the color of your hair is as fine as Rumpelstiltskin could spin it.”

Tru felt her jaw go slack. Gaping like a fish was unattractive, and she recovered quickly. Quite against her will, though, the dimple on the left side of her mouth appeared as a short laugh changed the shape of her lips. “Pardon me, Mr. Bridger, but this is the second time today that someone has made that rather odd comparison. I do have to ask myself whether you heard it first from Finn or whether he came by it from you.”

“No doubt about it, Miss Morrow. That’s a puzzler.”

Tru smiled again, this time appreciatively. Mr. Bridger had obviously decided to give nothing away. “So you and Finn have become fast friends.”

“I don’t remember that he gave me a choice.”

“No, I don’t suppose he did.” Her smile faltered, became earnest. “You’ll have a care with him, won’t you? He doesn’t know a stranger, and I understand from his grandmother that he’s drawn most particularly to gamblers.”

“He asked me right off if I knew his father.”

She nodded. “He believes his father is riding the rails playing high-stakes poker from one end of the country to the other. He might be. No one knows, but no one but Finn holds out any hope that one day he’ll turn up in Bitter Springs with his winnings in a wheelbarrow.”

“I see.”

Tru wasn’t sure what he saw. When he tilted his head, the brim of his hat cast a shadow over his eyes. She couldn’t tell whether he was being reflective or dismissive. “So you’ll have a care,” she repeated. “It would be a kindness if you did.”

“You are certain of that?”

His question seemed to suggest that she could be wrong. She felt herself bristling and responded with rather more sharpness than she intended. “It’s no burden to show kindness.”

“What if kindness is merely a deceit? There’s a burden there, I think, and usually unfortunate consequences.”

Tru shivered inside her coat. She tried to form a response, but her teeth chattered so violently that she would have bitten her tongue.

“Perhaps we should agree to disagree,” he said. “Before you are chilled to the bone.”

“T-too l-l-late.”

“May I escort you home?”

She shook her head.

“As you wish.” He tapped his brim again. “Good day, Miss Morrow.”

Tru thought she might have seen something like humor play about his mouth, but she couldn’t be sure. He did not strike her as a man who smiled as a matter of course but as one who offered it more judiciously and to far more devastating effect.

Tru covered the lower half of her face again and turned away. She fought the temptation to glance over her shoulder to see if he was watching her. She had the sensation that he was. The most disturbing thing about that particular fancy was that she was warmed by it.

* * *

Like many Western towns built around driving cattle to market, Bitter Springs had a wide thoroughfare through the center of town. Businesses, often with living space above them for the owners, lined both sides of the street. What had once been a tent city for the worst vices of transient rail workers, barkeeps, gamblers, and whores had become a town of more or less permanent citizens with some notion of respectability and pride.

The railroad gave Bitter Springs a link east and west and south. North was still the territory of outlaw hideouts, ranches so large they were measured in square miles, not acres, and all of the Montana Territory. To hear the citizens of Bitter Springs tell it, there was no good reason to go north.

Cobb Bridger watched the schoolteacher until she turned the corner. He knew from Finn that Miss Morrow lived in a home built expressly for the purpose of attracting a qualified teacher to Bitter Springs. According to the boy, the previous teacher had been murdered, and someone—he called her the widder Berry—was to blame. With some help from Finn’s older brother, Cobb came to understand that the widder Berry was to blame for wanting the town to have a new teacher, not the murder of the former one. Rabbit also clarified that the widder Berry was now Mrs. Kellen Coltrane, but Cobb had worked that out for himself by then.

It was Mrs. Coltrane who placed the advertisement for a teacher in the Chicago paper, one of the seven positions that Gertrude Morrow had cut out, and one of five for which she was invited to interview. He had no difficulty in locating and speaking to the other potential employers, but it was experience and persistence in equal measure that led him to finding Mrs. Coltrane. As it happened, she was not a resident of Chicago but a visitor to the city, and the information she left with the paper gave her address as the Palmer House.

Andrew Mackey III had discovered the newspaper lead so late that Cobb had no expectation that Mrs. Coltrane would still be a guest at the Palmer months after placing her advertisement. At the time, he had no way of knowing if Gertrude Morrow had responded to this particular notice, but as he eliminated the other leads he was given he had to follow the one that remained. If Miss Morrow had never met with Mrs. Coltrane, then Cobb had nothing.

It hadn’t come to that. He’d verified that she was in Bitter Springs and now all that remained was to make certain she stayed and inform Andrew Mackey of her whereabouts. Keeping her close was no hardship, but he had spent his first few days in town learning about her, and what he knew about the schoolteacher made him question the wisdom of informing on her too quickly.

“Nothing adds up.”

“Pardon?” Walter Mangold cut his lumbering stride short and drew up beside Cobb. “D’you say something to me, Mr. Bridger?”

The deep voice intruded on Cobb’s reverie. He glanced sideways and then up. Walt Mangold stood half a head taller than Cobb’s six feet and had shoulders broad enough to clear the sidewalks of passersby if he didn’t tread carefully. Cobb had observed that Walt
did
tread carefully. He was not merely conscious of those around him; he was conscientious. It did not escape Cobb’s notice that Walt needed more time to think about things than most people, but Cobb thought that might be a point in his favor. It would be a mistake to suppose that pondering made him slow-witted.

“Sorry, Walt. I was just thinking out loud.”

“I do that myself from time to time. Mrs. Sterling doesn’t much like it. She thinks she’s supposed to answer me, and she’s got no time for it. That’s what she tells me.”

“You stay busy at the hotel.”

“Sure do. And if I don’t, she has something to say about that.”

One corner of Cobb’s mouth turned up. Ida Mae Sterling managed the hotel and saloon in the absence of the owner, another fact he’d learned from Finn and Rabbit before they set his bags on the front porch. That’s where Walt scooped them up in his hamlike fists. Mrs. Sterling introduced herself at the registration desk and gave him a key to his room, but not before she looked him over and asked what brought him to town. It said something about Mrs. Sterling’s suffer-no-fools manner that Cobb almost told her the truth. Instead he told her that he had no particular reason for stopping in Bitter Springs. It was just a place on the way to somewhere else.

He didn’t know if she believed him, but she accepted it, and Cobb supposed it was right about then that they all conceived the idea that he was a gambling man. Finn and Rabbit had certainly been hanging on his every word.

Cobb began walking again and Walt fell in step. “Is Mrs. Sterling serving up apple pie tonight?” he asked. “I don’t know when I’ve tasted better.”

“She sure is. Funny you should ask about it. I’m on my way to pick up a couple of pies right now.”

“Pick them up? What do you mean?”

“Oh, Mrs. Sterling don’t make her own pies. When she took over managing the place from Mrs. Coltrane, well, she had to give something up, and baking pies was it. Mrs. Phillips, that’s who makes them now.” Walt raised his arm to point across the street. “That’s her place over there.”

Cobb ducked under Walt’s extended arm in time to avoid a crushed windpipe and glanced in the direction of Walt’s fingerpost. Large, neatly painted letters above the window proclaimed the shop to be exactly what it was: BAKERY. “So it is.”

Walt pulled up short. “You want to come with me, Mr. Bridger? Jenny usually gives me something for my trouble. Could be she’d have something for you, or I can share.”

“That’s a tempting offer, but I’m on my way to the station.”

“The station? You’re leaving?” Deep furrows appeared in Walt’s broad brow. “No, of course you’re not. You don’t have your bags. Then again, you don’t need them if you’re running out. Is that what you’re doing, running out? Mrs. Sterling will hunt you down herself if you didn’t pay your bill. We’ve seen that happen before, and it doesn’t set right with her. Can’t say I like it too much myself, especially since you won better than fifty dollars last night from Charlie Patterson and the Davis boys.”

Cobb held up a hand. “Walt.” When he had the other man’s attention, he went on. “I’m looking for Mr. Collins, Walt. That’s why I’m going to the station.”

“Oh.”

“And ease your mind on the matter of me leaving and not settling up. I can promise you that won’t happen. I keep my promises and pay my debts.”

Walt shifted his weight uncomfortably. “I shouldn’t have said all that. Sometimes my mouth runs ahead of my wits. You been real good for us, so I hope you know I was just blatherin’.”

Cobb regarded Walt’s ruddy cheeks and wondered how much color was embarrassment and how much was the result of the beating wind. “What do you mean that I’ve been good for you?”

“You bring in business. Folks like to take a hand with a card sharp now and again. Makes them feel real skilled if they beat you and just unlucky if they don’t. Wouldn’t do for a permanent gaming man to set up at the Pennyroyal, but a now-and-again fellow suits everyone.”

“I see.”

“It’d be real good if you stayed about a month or so.”

“I’ll be careful not to wear out my welcome.”

BOOK: True to the Law
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