Once an Outlaw

by Jill Gregory

  “I’ll bring him what he wants tomorrow,” the gray-haired man said grimly.

  “Uncle Jake, let me.”

  “I’m not scared to face him, Emily girl.”

  “Of course not. But… you said yourself when we were traveling out here that you’ve got little use now for towns or people. And maybe it would be best if you didn’t meet up with Sheriff Barclay again—just yet.”

  “What the hell’s the point of waiting?”

  Lester spoke up. “To tell the truth, Em, I don’t see the point either. Might as well get it over with.”

  She glanced from one to the other. Maybe they were right. Uncle Jake had served his time, after all. And no good evidence had ever been found against Pete or Lester.

  Lonesome’s sheriff might be a formidable man, but he could hardly arrest them or order them out of town without just cause.

  And she’d make sure he had none of that.

  Her gaze shifted to Lester. “All right. We’ll go, but you stay here with Joey.”

  “Em! You think I’m afraid to face that no good low-down—”

  “You’re not afraid of anyone or anything, just like Pete,” she said impatiently. “Though sometimes I wish you were. But I don’t want to bring Joey into town yet. He’s just starting to get comfortable here at the cabin, and I’m not ready for people to start asking questions about him. There’ll be time enough if Lissa doesn’t get back soon and I have to send him to school. But for now,” she took a deep breath, “under no circumstances can John Armstrong find him, so I don’t want to take any unnecessary chances.”

  “I’d like to get my hands on that weasel who beat your gal friend and the boy,” Jake muttered fiercely, momentarily distracted from thoughts of Barclay.

  “Let’s hope you don’t ever get the chance—that none of us ever sees him again,” Emily said fervently. “But I do think that the best way to keep Joey safe is to keep him here at the cabin, quiet-like, for a while. I’ll figure out what to say about him in time.”

  She hooked her arm through her uncle’s and led him back to his chair. Lester followed, sinking down on the sofa once again.

  “Right now our first order of business is to get Pete released from that jail,” Emily said.

  “I still think you should be the one to stay here with the boy,” her cousin grumbled.

  She shook her head. “After what happened today, you’d best stay away from Sheriff Barclay. The less you have to do with him the better.”

  “I’m not going to lose my temper again.”

  “That’s right.” Emily planted her hands on her hips. “Because you’ll be here with Joey, repairing the corral posts and building that new shed you promised me.”

  Jake chuckled suddenly. “Give up, boy. She’s got the Spoon temper and her mother’s stubbornness. I never could talk my sis out of anything once she set her mind to it. Emily not only looks like your Aunt Tillie, she’s got the same spine of steel.”

  “I reckon.” Lester slumped back against the cushions and gazed at his cousin, frowning. “But I didn’t like the way that sheriff looked at you, Em. You watch out for him.”

  “What do you mean, how he looked at her?” Jake’s gaze sharpened.

  “Well, he knew she was a woman, that’s what I mean.”

  “Lester, you’re being stupid,” Emily heard herself say, but she felt hot color rush into her cheeks. “Clint Barclay looked at me like I was something that crawled out from under a rock—just because I’m a Spoon. But he’s going to find out that we Spoons don’t scare—or run—quite that easily. Before long, we’re going to be as much a part of this town as he is—maybe more.”

  Yet riding to town beside Uncle Jake the next day, the wagon wheels jolting over the rough trail, Emily felt her confidence slipping. She was dreading the imminent encounter with Clint Barclay and praying her uncle would manage to keep a lid on his temper no matter how much the sheriff provoked him.

  They had to get Pete out of jail and start getting accustomed to the town—and the town to them. Before Clint Barclay could turn everyone against them.

  As far as Clint Barclay looking at her like she was a woman, well—she was a woman. But Barclay hadn’t seemed particularly impressed. She’d had warmer looks from a hitching post.

  Which suited her just fine, because despite those keen blue eyes and that lean, masculine jaw, and that broad chest of his, he was the last man on the continent she’d want to be noticed by.

  The very last man.

  Lonesome’s dusty main street was full of people bustling to and fro. Unlike yesterday, when she’d only had one thought in her mind—finding Pete—today she was far more aware of her surroundings. She noticed that the buildings lining the boardwalk boasted almost identical weathered gray facades, that the high blue sky dotted with satin-puff clouds seemed to dwarf the gritty little town, that horses neighed and buggy wheels groaned and children played beneath a tree at the far end of town.

  She saw chickens pecking in the alley behind the Wagon Wheel Saloon and a cat drowsing on the doorstep outside Hazel’s Millinery. From the second-floor balcony of Coyote Jack’s Saloon came the trill of female laughter, and she glanced up to see two women in spangled and feathered dresses, eating apples and calling out to the cowboys who emerged from the feed store with sacks of grain slung over their shoulders.

  The largest shop was Doily’s Mercantile, Emily noted, but there was also the Gold Gulch Hotel, a livery, the feed store, a bank, and a leather goods store whose front window displayed several fancy and plain saddles, a handsome pair of cowboy boots, and a shelf full of guns: Army Colts, Remington revolvers, derringers.

  She didn’t spot a single dress shop and with a small flicker of excitement guessed that the only ready-made dresses to be found in Lonesome would have to be bought from the mercantile or through a mail-order catalogue.

  That was good.

  Uncle Jake reined in the team of horses in front of the sheriff’s office, right across from the bank, and as she alighted, she saw that the feed store beside the jail had a sign in the window, as did several other establishments.

  POKER TOURNAMENT—Friday through Saturday.

  Gold Gulch Hotel

  TOWN DANCE—Saturday Night. Come one, come all.

  Beneath the words was a row of dollar signs.

  Reading over her shoulder, Jake grunted. “Pete and Lester see that, they’ll be keen to try their luck.” He squinted at the fine print. “Five dollars apiece to enter. We could buy a pile of lumber and nails for fixing the barn roof with that kind of money.” He snorted. “Bad enough we have to throw away this twenty dollars just to get Pete out of jail.”

  “Let’s just take one thing at a time, Uncle Jake,” Emily soothed him.

  “I’ve got a notion to tear down all these posters before Pete comes out here and sees them.”

  “There’s probably a law against that,” Emily murmured with a rueful smile. She gripped his arm as they started toward the jailhouse. “Now promise me, no matter what happens, you won’t lose your temper.”

  “Damn it, girl, I already promised.”

  “Promise me again.”

  He pushed open the door. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Emily’s heart thudded as she stepped inside. Clint Barclay was writing in a ledger at his desk, but he looked up as they walked in.

  His eyes flicked quickly over Emily, with no display of emotion, she noted, her shoulders tensing. Then his gaze shifted to the man beside her. Slowly, with unsettling grace, like a taut rope unfurling, he rose from the chair.

  “Something I can do for you, Spoon?” he asked in a steely tone.

  Emily’s fingers tightened warningly on her uncle’s arm. She sensed his fury at the mere sight of the lawman who had put him in jail. And knew how hard this must be for him.

  “We’re here to pay the fine for fighting,” she said quickly.

  Jake dug in his pocket, then tossed some greenbacks on the sheriff’s desk. “L
et my nephew out of that damned cell.”

  “You got the deed to the Sutter place?”

  “My niece told you I did.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t bring it,” Jake snapped, his eyes like flint.

  “Uncle Jake.” Emily glanced over at Pete. He stood gripping the bars of the cell, watching the exchange intently.

  “Please,” she whispered, “let’s just get this over with.”

  “Don’t show it to him, Uncle Jake!” Pete shouted suddenly. “He has no damn right to ask you for it. I’ll stay here till he’s sick of looking at my face, but don’t you—”

  “Pete—hush!” Emily exclaimed.

  “You’d best listen to her, Spoon.” The sheriff nodded toward the young woman in the clean, pressed blue gingham, the young woman whose midnight curls were tightly subdued by a single braid down her back. “At least she’s got some sense.”

  “Who asked you?” Emily whirled on him. “If you had an ounce of decency in you, you’d open that cell door right now. There’s no law that says we even need to show you the deed. We brought it as a courtesy.”

  Clint Barclay met those shimmering gray eyes and felt a tug of respect. And something else, a pang of conscience. He was giving the Spoons a hard time, but that’s because he didn’t trust them. Still, Pete Spoon had served his time and the fine was paid.

  He let his gaze linger on those luminous eyes for one more moment before snagging the keys from the desk drawer.

  “Let’s see if you can stay out of trouble,” he told Pete as he unlocked the door and swung it wide.

  For one awful moment, Emily thought Pete was going to refuse to leave the cell, just to spite Barclay, but then he stalked past the lawman, came to stand alongside Emily and Jake, and planted his feet apart as the sheriff handed him back his gun.

  “Now I’d like to see that deed.” Clint spoke solely to Jake.

  His mouth tightly set, the older man yanked a paper out of his pocket, uncrumpled it, and pushed it at the sheriff.

  “No one’s lived on that property for years,” Clint commented as he scanned the document. “Last I heard, old Bill Sutter got silver fever and headed out to Leadville.” He studied Jake intently as he handed back the deed. “Mind telling me how you got this?”

  “None of your damn business.” Jake stuffed the deed back in his pocket.

  “You got anything else to say, Sheriff?” Pete’s slate-gray eyes glinted. “Much as we enjoy jawing around here with you all day, we got ourselves a ranch to run.”

  Emily wanted to poke him in the ribs but instead she stayed very still and held her breath.

  Clint Barclay looked from one to the other of them. Despite her straight back and proudly lifted chin, the girl looked pale. Yet those eyes skewered him.

  “You can go. For now. But I’m warning you, all of you—and that means Lester too—if there’s any sign of trouble, any hint of trouble, I’m coming to the Sutter place first. To find you.”

  “You mean the Spoon place,” Emily said quietly. “It’s the Spoon place now.”

  There was a moment of complete silence. Then Pete draped an arm around her shoulders and all three of them headed to the door.

  When it slammed behind them, Clint stood for a moment, lost in thought. He hoped like hell he wasn’t going to have to arrest the Spoons. The girl was too fond of them for her own good, and worse, she was loyal to the bone. When they went back to their crooked ways—if they hadn’t already—it was going to tear out her heart.

  He wondered why he should care. Just because she was beautiful, because she had more spunk and passion in her than a wild filly who’d never known a harness or lead rope? Because of the soft, sensuous glide of her hips when she walked? Or because he remembered how she’d felt when he’d held her close that night at the cabin, how she’d stood up to him with a kind of desperate courage that he’d rarely seen.

  Perhaps only once, long ago, had he heard of courage like that—when his mother had tried to protect his younger brother, Nick, from the outlaws who’d held up their stage. His mother had snatched Nick behind her, shielding her seven-year-old son with her own body, showing the same kind of frantic courage he’d seen in Emily Spoon that first night.

  Clint returned to his desk, but it was a long while before he was able to focus his thoughts on his work.

  MILY WAITED UNTIL THEY WERE across the street before she turned to Pete and threw her arms around him. “Are you all right? You look worse than Lester does!”

  “You mean this?” Her brother touched the purple bruise above his eye. “It’s nothing. Scarcely hurts atall, Sis. And before you start lecturing me, I’ll have you know that fight wasn’t my fault. I was only defending a lady and those varmints jumped me—three of ’em—”

  “If trouble were money,” Emily interrupted sternly “we’d all be as rich as Midas.”

  “Especially with a couple of hotheads like him and Lester,” Jake added. But he clapped his nephew on the back. “I’m proud of you for not taking any guff from Barclay. Damned if I didn’t want to plug him when I walked in that door.”

  “I thought about it the whole time I was in there.” Pete’s eyes glinted.

  “Oh, you two—there will be none of that!” Emily stared at them in dismay as two women in sunbonnets hurried past along the boardwalk.

  Pete pushed back his hat and gave her a weak grin. “Now don’t look like that, Em. I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t shoot him in cold blood or anything—what do you think I am? But if we happened to get into a situation where we needed to see which one of us could draw first—”

  “No, Pete. I won’t have it. And as for you, Uncle Jake—”

  “My shooting days are done with, girl. And my stealing days too.” He sighed, looking resigned. “Don’t get so all-fired worried. I said I wanted to plug Barclay—I didn’t say I would!”

  “Neither of us did,” Pete pointed out.

  She closed her eyes and shook her head, then fixed each of them with a stern glance. “I don’t want to hear any more talk about shooting anyone. Let’s finish up here and get back to the ranch.”

  “Finish up here?” Pete asked.

  “Uncle Jake needs lumber from the mill, and I have to make some purchases at the mercantile. Can I trust you two to go about alone for a while without getting into any trouble?”

  For the first time since yesterday, when he’d heard about Clint Barclay being Lonesome’s sheriff, her uncle grinned.

  “Reckon we’ll do our best, but we can’t make no promises, Emily girl.”

  As she watched them amble off, an ache of affection and pain pierced her heart. She walked toward the mercantile, turning her attention to the eggs and flour and beans she needed, and to thoughts of bringing home some licorice sticks for Joey.

  With a smile, she reflected that Pete and Lester would each appreciate some licorice too.

  A small bell tinkled as she entered the mercantile, where every inch of sunlit space was crammed with barrels and baskets and crates and bins. An older man with a face like a bullfrog was striding back and forth behind the counter, simultaneously trying to fill the orders of a tiny scrap of a woman with eagle-sharp dark eyes and wispy gray hair piled atop her head and a thin young matron clad in lavender muslin who was trying simultaneously to chat with the older woman, read a long shopping list, and keep an eye on two children who were giggling and darting around the pickle barrels.

  “Be right with you,” the bullfrog man called out to Emily.

  She nodded and continued to peruse the jars of penny candy on a shelf.

  “And the poor man has no idea what he’s in for after dinner tonight,” the gray-haired woman was saying to the matron. As Emily glanced at her, she gave a cackling laugh. “Berty Miller claims she’ll get Sheriff Barclay to ask her to that dance this very night or die trying.”

  “Well, I heard that another one of your boarders, Mrs. Eaves, has sent for her granddaughter all the way from Bo
ston,” the young matron replied. “The girl’s supposed to be a famous beauty and… Bobby, you get down from there right now. Mr. Doily doesn’t allow children to climb on top of his counters! And Sally, put that pickle back this instant!” She waved her shopping list in the air to fan herself and chuckled. “Well, I swear if I was still young and unmarried, I’d be tempted to throw out a lure to Clint Barclay myself!” she laughed.

  “You’d have to stand in line,” the gray-haired woman pointed out. “And watch your back. Agnes Mangley is dead set on Carla marrying him. She told me so last week.”

  “She bought three new ready-made dresses for Carla last time she came in here,” the storekeeper piped up. “And she’s paraded Carla all through town nearly every day since Clint got back from Silver Valley, just trying to run into him.”

  “Well, one or another of them will catch him soon,” the tiny gray-haired woman pronounced. She tapped her fingers against the open copy of Godey’s Lady’s Book lying on the counter. “He’s just back from his brother’s wedding, after all. That kind of thing gets a man to thinking. And now that nearly every unmarried girl in town has set her cap for him …”

  “It’s only a matter of time,” the young matron agreed. “Oh, Rufus, I nearly forgot. I’ll need five pounds of coffee as well. And half a pound of dried figs.”

  Emily had been listening to the women’s conversation in stunned silence. So—every unattached female in Lonesome—and some from far away—were out to snag Clint Barclay. The fools. Handsome he might be, but he was also stubborn and hard-hearted and impossibly arrogant.

  They’re welcome to him, she thought.

  But just then, the little boy who’d been scampering around the store with his sister stumbled into her, clutching her around the knees and nearly causing her to lose her balance.

  “Bobby!” His mother gasped in dismay.

  “I didn’t mean to, Mama, I fell!”

  “It’s all right.” Emily smiled first at the red-cheeked boy and then at the mother. “There’s no harm done.”

  “I’m so sorry. Bobby, apologize to this lady.”