“Ladeez and gentlemen, we are gathered on this solemn occasion to see justice done. This here polecat—” he placed a palm on the young criminal’s shoulder and the fellow tried to jerk away. Calvin dug his fingers in and Phoebe saw the boy grimace.
“This here polecat done stole the hoss of Silas Kenney. It was pure dumb luck that Silas didn’t roast hisself to death or die of thirst on the desert, but was found and drug back to Big Spring by Grover Potter.”
Phoebe felt another nudge from her neighbor and wondered if she would end the day not merely stuffed but tenderized as well. Perhaps this was some sort of elaborate cannibalistic rite. The thought was so bizarre and un-Phoebelike that she pressed a hand to her forehead and wondered if she were catching something.
Calvin continued, “Now we all know what happens to murderin’ hoss thieves in this here part o’ the world.”
A roar went up from the townsfolk and Phoebe stared about her in amazement. When her gaze strayed to the boy on the scaffold again, she saw him shuffle. His air of defiance appeared to have suffered a small puncture.
“You got any last words, Sonny?” Calvin barked at the young thief as though the boy were dirt under his feet.
The boy glared at Calvin for only a second before he swallowed and said, “Don’t reckon I do.” Another swallow. Then he said softly, “Got me a letter fer my ma. Mebbe somebody’d post fer me. Got no money fer ta mail it.” His voice sounded childish, a little whiny.
Silence greeted his sad little speech. Somebody in the crowd honked out a derisive snort. Somebody else spat. A man in the back of the mob said, “Hell.” Then silence settled over the scene once more.
And all at once Phoebe found herself stepping forward. As if in a dream, she discovered herself walking toward the scaffold. She had no idea what had possessed her when she stopped at the steps and held out her hand. “I’ll take it.”
The boy caught her eye, and she wished forever afterwards that he hadn’t.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Calvin cleared his throat. “Well, now, that’s all taken care of, I reckon.”
He snatched the letter from the boy’s pocket and handed it to Phoebe. She gave him a jerky nod and dreamwalked back to Carrie’s side. Nobody had filled the hole she’d left when she’d stepped away from the throng. She saw William and Sarah gaping in astonishment. Pete and Antelope stared at her solemnly.
It was Jack whose steady, calming gaze guided her back to her place in the crowd. She stepped into the hole her absence had created, turned around, and it seemed as though she’d never left except for the letter burning her fingers.
Calvin assumed control again. “All right then. Let’s get on with this here hangin’.”
Another roar from the crowd made Phoebe wince.
“John Sylvester Peterson, you been charged and found guilty o’ stealin’ Silas’s hoss, and you gotta pay fer that wicked deed now.
“Sheriff?”
Calvin stepped back and the sheriff marched forward.
Then, as Calvin began to read verses from the Bible in a booming, somber voice, the sheriff pulled a lever.
Phoebe heard a loud crash of wood upon wood and saw the boy drop through the hole created in the floor. A gasp went up from the throng, contributed to by herself. Then she heard a ghastly gurgling sound, several noises that sounded like boots kicking against the scaffolding, and then silence, followed within the space of a heartbeat by a big sigh from the assembly. Then silence settled upon them again.
Several seconds ticked past, during which Phoebe wasn’t sure she breathed. Then she heard, as if from a long way off, Carrie saying, “Well, that was pretty clean, for a hangin’.”
She heard her own huge, gasping sob, then felt large hands turning her around. Without even thinking about it, she let Jack fold her against him as she shook, the dead boy’s letter clutched in her trembling hands and her face pressed against Jack’s chest.
“It’s all right, Miss Honeycutt. You were very brave.”
Later on, she couldn’t believe those words had come from the lips of the evil Yankee, Jack Valentine, but right then she didn’t think about their oddity. She only felt profoundly grateful for his deep, soothing voice, his strong, warm arms, and his broad, comforting chest.
She didn’t know how long she stood there, quaking in horror, before Carrie’s pragmatic voice intruded into her consciousness.
“First hangin’?”
Phoebe felt Jack nod.
“Reckon I felt about the same way my first time.”
She felt rather than heard his rumbling, “Reckon I did, too.”
“Well, I ‘spect a tiddle o’ corn likker might not be out o’ line fer the lady right now, Black Jack. I’ll go fetch her some.”
“Thanks, Carrie.”
It was when Phoebe felt herself being led away from the scaffold that she came to her senses. With a gasp, she straightened up and tried to wriggle out of Jack’s hands. They held her tight.
“Stop it, Miss Honeycutt. You’ve had a bad shock. Just sit here for a minute.”
Phoebe realized he’d led her to a wooden bench on the scruffy boardwalk in front of a mercantile establishment. She sat with a thump and he sat next to her. All of a sudden she felt ashamed of her weakness and tried to regain control of her hands. He wouldn’t release them.
“Stop it!” he said more sharply.
“Here’s the tiddle, Black Jack,” she heard Carrie say, and suddenly there was something Phoebe just had to know.
“Why do people call you Black Jack?”
Jack stared down into Phoebe’s huge, beautiful brown eyes, sweet and warm as chocolate, and didn’t want to let her go to take the liquor Carrie held. Her question made him grin. He kept one arm around her shoulder as he reached for the glass.
“You don’t want to know, Miss Honeycutt. Now, drink this.”
“I can’t drink that! I believe that glass contains distilled spirits!”
“Pure corn likker,” Carrie affirmed with a huge grin. “Straight from the Mizoo hills. Ain’t much o’ one fer likker, air she?”
Jack sighed. “No.”
Turning his care to the recalcitrant Phoebe, he said more firmly. “Drink this now, Miss Honeycutt, unless you want me to hold you down and force it down your throat.”
With a hot glare, Phoebe rebelled for another second. Then, when she felt the pressure of Jack’s hand on her shoulder and knew he was prepared to carry out his threat, she gave up, shut her eyes, and opened her mouth. She felt the rim of the glass against her lips, heard it clink against her teeth, and prepared herself by holding her breath. Then, with one enormous swallow, the stuff was down.
It felt as though somebody had shoved a burning brand down her throat. Phoebe tried to gasp but the air only burned her insides hotter. Her eyes stung and her arms flailed helplessly at her sides because—because—they just did. Then she heard Jack Valentine’s deep chuckle and felt herself being clutched to his chest again.
Lord, Lord, this woman felt good in his arms. Jack tried not to think about it while the liquor did its job. His gaze caught Carrie’s, and they smiled at one another.
“Pure little lady, ain’t she?” Carrie spoke tenderly, as though she recalled the days such might have been said about herself.
“That she is.”
“You’re a lucky feller, Jack Valentine.”
Jack felt his eyebrows arch. “You think so?” He considered regaling Carrie Potter, one of the finest, strongest women he’d ever met, with tales of the silly, flighty, ridiculous Phoebe Honeycutt. Then he suddenly realized there weren’t any.
“I surely do think so,” Carrie said.
Phoebe gasped and choked and Jack felt a tug of sympathy for her. Pulling her poor little face away from his shoulder, he saw her eyes still streaming, pressed her back again, and sighed.
“If you say so, Carrie.”
“And it was right kind o’ her to take that varmint’s letter to his ma, too. Right kind
. O’ course, she don’t know what kind o’ pig slop that boy was, but still, I kinder think it was sweet.”
“I suppose it was.”
“T’would be a shame to have that sweetness burnt out o’ her, don’t you think?”
“Now why should that happen?” Carrie’s innocent look didn’t fool Jack. He’d known Carrie Potter for a long time, ever since he and Grover Potter fought against one another in Virginia.
“Why, nothin’, Jack. Only, if’n she marries up with a feller the likes o’ which we got us around here, she’s either gonna shrivel up like a dried apple—like the rest of us done—or get plumb wore out and die. Ain’t no other ways to go on in the frontier, you know.”
“I know.” Jack didn’t like knowing it, either.
“Now San Francisco, well, I hear San Francisco is a little gentler on its womenfolk than Texas is.”
“Hmph.”
“What?”
All at once Phoebe struggled to sit up on her own. As she frantically wiped at her cheeks, she glanced hysterically from Jack to Carrie and back again. “What did you say?”
Carrie chuckled benevolently. “Not a thing, dearie. Just was sayin’ as to how you was right kind to take that feller’s letter like you done.”
It looked to Jack like Phoebe were having trouble focusing on the letter through the firewater drowning her eyes. Her hand still trembled, and the folded paper fluttered as though it had been caught in an erratic breeze.
“I’ll help you see that it gets off all right, Miss Honeycutt,” he told her. “Maybe you’d like to pen a note to the boy’s mother, too, and let her that her son didn’t suffer long.”
When Phoebe looked at him then, he was pretty sure the moisture in her eyes wasn’t all from the liquor.
She finally wouldn’t allow him to hold her a second longer, and he had to let her go. He watched as she tottered off with Carrie and felt a strange clutching in his heart. She was so dratted irritating. She was so dratted pretty. She was so dratted strong.
With a muffled curse, he pushed himself off the splintery bench and went in search of male companionship. That was something he understood.
# # #
Phoebe wasn’t sure she was going to survive the evening. It was bad enough watching a sixteen-year-old horse thief’s neck being wrung and being fed a vile intoxicating substance and then comforted by her nemesis Jack Valentine. But Carrie Potter and her female friends all seemed determined to feed her to death.
“You got to eat some more o’ that prairie turkey, Phoebe. It’s the best you’ll ever get. Ain’t got nothin’ like it in San Francisco, I reckon.”
“Santa Fe,” Phoebe corrected.
“Pardon me?” Little Maggie Devine looked puzzled.
“Santa Fe. The children and I are headed to Santa Fe.”
“But Carrie said you all were going to San Francisco with Mr. Valentine.”
“Oh.” Now it was Phoebe’s turn to be puzzled. “Well, I guess she was mistaken. We’re headed to Santa Fe.”
Carrie, listening nearby, only chuckled.
“You got to eat some of my strudel, too, Miss Phoebe,” Hilda Fetterman told her. “Ain’t got no apples, but it’s good cheese strudel from my own goats.”
“You’ll never taste the like again,” Carrie told her with a wink. “It’s right good.”
So Phoebe stuffed turkey and potatoes and rice and beans and strudel and cactus pie down her gullet. Then she almost wished she could find a friendly tree to hide behind and stick a finger down her throat.
“Full?”
She was just certain Jack Valentine was mocking her and turned abruptly, ready to give him a piece of her mind. It was one that sorely needed to be shared, having been stored up from the time he’d incapacitated her with liquor until now. But when she met his warm blue gaze, all at once her angry words evaporated. Lord, Lord, the man was handsome.
“Yes,” she managed to mutter.
“Me, too.”
They peered at one another for what seemed like an eternity before Carrie’s loudly cleared throat galvanized them into movement. Jack said, “Looks like the kids are having fun.”
Phoebe glanced over to where Sarah and William squealed in delight as they played tag with the Fetterman children and several other bare footed, scrape-kneed ragamuffins.
“Yes, they seem to be.”
“’Pears to me as to how Peg Walsh is a’tunin’ up his fiddle,” Carrie told them. “I reckon you’re gonna dance them shoes right off’n your feet tonight, Phoebe, gal.”
Surprised, Phoebe glanced down at the scruffy men’s shoes peeking out from under her patched skirt. “I am?”
A hoot of laughter greeted Phoebe’s incredulity. “A pretty young thing like you? Why, I should say! I’ll take a wager that you ain’t allowed to set still a minute all night long.”
Phoebe had been so used to thinking of herself as a washed-out, used-up, undesirable old-maid aunt that Carrie’s words didn’t register at first. When they did, she felt her cheeks get hot and couldn’t figure out why the woman was teasing her so hatefully. After all, it wasn’t her fault all the men she knew were dead by the time the war ended.
Not that it would have mattered. None of them would have wanted her by that time, anyway.
When she tried to summon up a thread of indignation, though, she couldn’t find one anywhere. So she just sighed, gave Carrie a somewhat forced smile, and headed over to a bench beside the other women where she planned to rest while everybody else danced. She didn’t even notice Jack tailing along behind her until she turned and sat. Then she stared at the hand he held out to her as though it were a foreign object.
“May I have the first dance, Miss Honeycutt?”
# # #
Carrie proved to be right. Phoebe danced all night long. After the first, awkward dance with Jack, during which she wasn’t sure she wanted to be dancing at all, she wasn’t allowed to sit for more than a second at a time. And that was only one astonishing feature of the evening.
A very large fellow came up to her before Jack had seen her to her seat after the first dance ended.
“Kin I have the next dance?” he asked in a deep rumble of a voice. Then he blushed.
It was the blush that made Phoebe dance with him; it was too unexpectedly charming to resist. As it turned out, though, the blush proved the least unexpected thing about him. Not only was the fellow a buffalo hunter named Ned Foster, but he was from West Virginia, and had fought alongside her brother at Cedar Creek.
“He was a gallant feller, was Cap’n Honeycutt.”
“Thank you,” Phoebe whispered.
Then he asked her to marry him.
“I know I ain’t much to look at, ma’am,” Ned said nervously as he bumbled them around the dusty clearing, “But I’d never lift a hand agin’ ye, and I make lots o’ money with the hides.”
“But—but—but I don’t even know you!”
“That don’t matter none, ma’am. Y’see, it’s the bein’ married’ll give us plenty o’ time to get to know each other,” Ned explained gravely
The fiddle ground to a halt and Ned Foster reluctantly released her. “You think about it, ma’am. Please?”
Since it seemed so important to him, Phoebe nodded. Before she had a chance to sort out her befuddlement, she found herself swept away into the arms of yet another hairy fellow. This one was Calvin Stowe, the preaching barkeeper himself.
“We don’t often see pretty ladies like you in Big Spring, ma’am,” he told her politely.
“Thank you.” Her head reeling from Ned’s recent proposal, Phoebe felt quite distracted.
“We don’t get many females here a-tall. It’s a pure pleasure to have you to be visitin’ us, ma’am.”
Another murmured, “Thank you,” crept from Phoebe’s throat.
Very dimly, she perceived other couples whirling around the town square. She saw Jack standing at the sidelines, an enigmatic look on his face. His expression seemed caught half
way between a frown and a grimace, and Phoebe couldn’t account for it. Carrie and her Grover danced up a storm, and both looked happy as kids with candy to have the opportunity to kick up their heels. Phoebe had just begun contemplating what life must be like for a woman in Big Spring, Texas, when her attention jerked back to the man who held her.
“. . . so I was thinkin’ that if’n you don’t get no better offers, I could give ye a home and a good livin’, ma’am. I wouldn’t expect ye to work your fingers to the bone, neither, it bein’ that I’m well-fixed and all.”
Feeling as though she were going demented, Phoebe squeaked, “What?”
But before Calvin could answer her, she was swirled away in the arms of yet another man.
And so it went. By the time the last waltz was called, Phoebe wasn’t sure she’d ever walk again. Her feet throbbed fit to kill, her head ached, her hands were sore from being squeezed, and she had received five proposals of marriage before she lost track. Not only that, but she was hungry again. She couldn’t believe any of it. She staggered slightly, hoping to make it to the safety of her bench next to her friends, when she was stopped abruptly by another masculine voice.
“May I have the last dance, Miss Honeycutt.”
Phoebe turned toward that voice as though toward sanctuary. When Jack Valentine clasped her to his chest, she breathed in a huge breath of contentment and released it. A heavenly feeling of having come home flowed through her.
“Tired?”
She could hear the lazy laughter in his voice, but didn’t mind for once. She nodded and whispered a small, “Very.”
“Bet your feet hurt, too.”
“Oh, my, yes.”
“Bet I know what would cure them.”
“What?” She pulled away from him, although it cost her more energy than she wanted to give, and peered into his devil’s eyes. They looked sweet tonight. Phoebe chalked that fact up to her burgeoning dementia.
“The big spring.”
“What big spring?”
“You don’t think they just chose the name Big Spring out of the air, do you?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Come with me.”
For a moment she resisted. “What about the children?”
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