A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  “I don’t seem to have much credibility with Miss Oralee Pringle, either,” Sam said sadly, repressing a grin. The bathwater was just plain cold now, and goose bumps swept over his flesh in nubby little legions.

  Maddie’s wonderful eyes widened. “Jupiter and Zeus,” she spouted, “if you’ve so much as set foot inside the Rattlesnake Saloon, the school board will see that you’re on the outbound stage with Bird!”

  “Would that bother you, Miss Chancelor?” Sam asked, settling back just as if the water was warm and deep, fit for soaking in. “My being shown the road, I mean?”

  “Bother me?” she countered, but she took a moment too long in doing it. “I’d get up a marching band and hold a parade!”

  Like as not, Sam reflected, he’d be dead of pneumonia before that happened, and miss the spectacle. “Miss Pringle paid me a visit tonight,” he allowed. “Fortunately, I was fully clad at the time, and chopping wood out back, like the gentleman I am.”

  “What did she want?” The words were measured out carefully, like scoops of something precious, sold by the ounce.

  “Bird,” Sam replied with a slight but involuntary shiver that had nothing to do with the fate the girl would meet if she fell into Garrett Donagher’s hands, and everything to do with the fact that the fire was dying down and a night chill was rising through the cracks between the floorboards. “The telegraph operator took my bribe and sent the wire to her folks up in Denver—I watched him do it—but he must have gone straight to Oralee after that.”

  “Tarnation,” Maddie said.

  “Did Bird teach you that awful word?” Sam teased.

  She bristled again. God, he loved it when she bristled. It was almost worth freezing to death in a copper bathtub. “I’m leaving,” she told him, as if she expected an argument.

  “It’s past time,” Sam said.

  Maddie disappeared in a twirl of skirts and he heard the schoolhouse door slam in the distance.

  Neptune whined.

  “Sorry dog,” Sam said, hoisting himself out of the tub and tucking the towel around his middle like a loincloth so he could open the stove door and chuck in some more wood. After that, he pulled on his pants and shirt. He’d brew some coffee, he decided, take the chill off his bones.

  Half an hour later there came a light rap at the back door.

  Neptune managed a halfhearted growl, probably trying to make up for his earlier shortcoming.

  Sam swore. He was in no mood for company, or somebody who needed rescuing. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  “Me,” a small voice answered.

  Grumbling, Sam opened the door.

  Terran was standing on the step, clutching a bedroll in his skinny arms. The lamplight gilded his hair, giving him a deceptively angelic aspect. “Maddie said to come and sleep over here to the schoolhouse,” he announced. “And you’re not to swear or play poker.”

  Sam stepped back so the boy could enter. “I reckon I can restrain myself from swearing,” he said seriously, “but poker is another matter.”

  A slow grin broke over Terran’s face. “Five card stud?” he asked.

  “Deuces wild,” Sam answered.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MADDIE TOLD HERSELF she ought to get upstairs and go to bed, tired as she was, and with another hard day bound to roll in with the sunrise. The store would be closed, but Maddie wasn’t a churchgoer, so Sunday was her day for housekeeping, baking and the like.

  What stopped her from turning in was knowing that once she put out the lamp and let her mind slow down, she’d have to think about Sam O’Ballivan, over there at the schoolhouse, sprawled in that copper bathtub without a stitch on.

  She flushed at the memory, and put it aside like she was sorting sales flyers from real mail after the weekly stagecoach had been and gone. She’d make tea, she decided. That would settle her a little.

  She pumped water into the teakettle and set it on the stove with a slight bang, and when she turned to get the tin canister of orange pekoe down off the shelf, Bird was standing right there, like she’d sprung up out of the floor.

  Startled, Maddie gasped and put a hand to her heart.

  “Sorry I scairt you,” Bird said contritely.

  Maddie caught her breath and worked up a smile. “I thought you’d gone to bed,” she said. She’d put up a cot in the pantry for the girl, and except for the swearing and the poker-playing, she’d proved a pleasant and unobtrusive houseguest.

  Shyly, Bird sank into a chair at the table. “I tried real hard to sleep, but I couldn’t,” she said.

  “I’m brewing tea,” Maddie said, mostly recovered and bustling again. “Would you like some?”

  “Only if you’ve got whiskey to put with it,” Bird answered.

  “No whiskey,” Maddie told the other woman. After seeing Sam O’Ballivan bare as a harsh truth, she could have used a dose herself.

  That night, Bird looked even younger than she was, with her dark hair down and brushed, and her face scrubbed clean of powder and paint. Her eyes were liquid with sorrow. “I guess it was on account of me that you sent Terran over to the schoolhouse to stay,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  Maddie stopped, put down the tea canister and laid a hand on Bird’s shoulder. The girl had enough to fret about without the knowledge that she’d effectively put Terran out of his home. “It’s all right, Bird,” she told the girl gently.

  “I ought to be the one to go,” Bird said. “Not Terran. This here’s his rightful place.” Her face looked so forlorn that tears sprang to Maddie’s eyes. She knew what it was to be alone, to look up at lighted windows on a cold night and long for a place where she was welcome. At the orphanage, too old to be a ward, like Terran, she’d washed dishes and scrubbed floors to earn her keep, and slept on a pallet behind the kitchen stove. And she’d have done considerably more just to be allowed to stay under the same roof with her young brother. With Mama and Papa gone, he was all she had left.

  “What will you do,” Maddie asked, fair choking on the words, “if your folks up in Denver won’t take you in?”

  Bird looked forlorn, as though she’d long since resigned herself to certain disappointment. “I guess I’d do what I’ve been doing right along. I’d just be in another place, that’s all.” She gave a fragile little smile, full of grief, and a shrug to match. “If you fall in with a good outfit, it’s not so bad. Almost like a family, when the other girls are nice and the madam is good to you.”

  Maddie felt an infinite sadness, just to think of Bird or anyone else being in such straits that they’d think of a brothel as home and its inhabitants as a family. Would she have consigned herself to that sort of a life, under any circumstances?

  On her own, she’d have starved first. But she hadn’t been on her own—she’d had Terran to provide for. And the truth was, she’d have married just about any man, if necessary, to provide for the boy. Including Mungo Donagher.

  The thought made her shudder.

  That would have been a form of prostitution, selling herself for food and shelter. Which meant she wasn’t so different from Bird, and neither were the thousands of other women who’d made a similar choice. And she wasn’t out of danger, by any means. If Mungo found out she’d hidden the woman who knocked his eldest son senseless with a whorehouse lamp, she would be looking for a husband in no time at all.

  Warren’s beloved face should have come to mind then, even though he was forever gone. Instead, the face she conjured up was Sam O’Ballivan’s. Sam, with his wise, gentle eyes, his rugged and unhandsome features that somehow came together into a pleasing whole.

  Bird looked at her curiously. “You cold? You’re shiverin’.”

  “It’s a little chilly tonight, don’t you think?” Maddie responded with a brightness she most assuredly didn’t feel. “A nice cup of tea will be just the thing. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some?”

  “I guess I’d better get up a taste for the stuff,” Bird said. “Just in case my sister is in a forg
iving state of mind. She’s one for tea-drinkin’, and that’s the fact of it.”

  Before Maddie could reply, someone knocked hard at the back door.

  “Hide,” Maddie whispered frantically. It wasn’t Sam, pounding like that, and Terran wouldn’t have bothered with a knock at all. The lock was turned, but he had a key.

  Bird darted for the inside door, which was really just a curtain separating the kitchen from the main part of the mercantile.

  “Who’s there?” Maddie called, smoothing her skirts and looking around for the shotgun. Then she remembered she’d put it back in its usual place that morning, under the counter in the store.

  The door fairly rattled on its hinges. “Open up!” a man yelled. The voice was familiar.

  One of the Donaghers, Maddie thought, and a trill of dread ruffled every nerve in her body. She took a few tentative steps toward the curtain, but she knew she’d never get to the counter, grab the shotgun and get back before whichever of Mungo’s sons was out there kicked down the door and stormed inside.

  “It’s Sunday, and we’re closed,” she said with what was meant to sound like pleasant regret.

  “Open this goddamn door!” the visitor bellowed. “I know you’ve got Bird in there, and I mean to get her by the hair for what she done to me!”

  Garrett Donagher, then.

  Maddie murmured a silent prayer that Bird had had the good sense to escape via the front door of the mercantile, then she put on a smile and a countenance of polite confusion, and released the lock.

  Garrett loomed in the dark opening like a messenger of doom, his face contorted by rage, frustration and, from the smell of him, a good deal of alcoholic consolation.

  Maddie blinked at him, though inside she was as alert as a hawk startled in its nest by a very large, very dangerous predator. “Garrett? What in the world—?”

  Donagher pushed past her, into the small kitchen, sweeping the corners with a glare of suspicious fury. “Where is she? Where’s Bird?”

  “Bird?” Maddie echoed, and blinked again.

  “I know she’s here,” Donagher insisted. He was standing entirely too close, so close that Maddie could feel the warmth of his quick, shallow breathing on the skin of her forehead. “That meddling schoolmaster brung her.”

  Maddie peered up at Garrett. Bird had hit him a good one, that was for sure. The gash, angry but healing, was visible through the hair on the right side of his head. “What happened?” she asked with an expression of sympathetic horror. She made a move to touch the wound, but he flinched away.

  “You know damn well what happened,” Garrett accused. “Bird broke a lamp over my head. It a lucky thing she didn’t kill me!”

  Debatable, Maddie thought, but she was the picture of concerned bafflement. Had Bird bolted? And where would she go if she had? Would she have the presence of mind to go straight to Sam O’Ballivan?

  “I don’t know who told you that this woman—Bird, did you say?—was here, but she’s not.”

  “You’re a liar, Maddie Chancelor!” Donagher decreed, shaking a finger under her nose. “And you might want to remember that my pa owns this mercantile. You do as I say, or you and that brother of yours will be out on the street!”

  Because Maddie wanted with every instinct that was in her to take a step back, she took one forward instead. “I do a good job, running this store. It’s been turning a profit ever since I took over. That might have a little weight with your father, too.”

  Garrett reacted as if she’d struck him a blow to the forehead. He looked stupefied, then furious again. He shoved Maddie aside, staggered a little as he moved into the center of the room. “I’ll find her, if I have to tear this place apart to do it!” he raged. “You hear me, Bird? Come out, right now!”

  Maddie wrung her hands. “If you do any damage to the mercantile,” she said bravely, “Mungo will horsewhip you for it!”

  Garrett turned slowly, and Maddie thought she glimpsed hesitation in him, and fear. He stared at her.

  “Search the building from top to bottom if you want,” she said very quietly. “Just be peaceable about it.”

  He lingered for a few heart-stopping moments, evidently pondering the situation, then grabbed up the lamp in the middle of the table and headed for the curtain. Maddie followed, because she would have been left in the dark if she hadn’t, and because she wanted to get closer to the shotgun.

  She slipped behind the counter as quickly as she could.

  The gun was gone.

  Maddie took in a sharp breath, glanced anxiously around. Garrett, meanwhile, looked behind barrels of pickles, under display tables and behind the changing screen, where ladies tried on ready-made dresses. The front door was shut and bolted from the inside.

  She swallowed hard. Bird hadn’t escaped, then, hadn’t gone to fetch Sam. She was hiding somewhere in the store, and she probably had the shotgun. Scared and cornered, the girl was bound to shoot Donagher dead if he confronted her, and the consequences of that didn’t bear thinking about.

  “You’re making a fool of yourself, Garrett Donagher,” Maddie said, bravado being the only weapon that remained to her. “I’ll forgive you for calling me a liar, but I won’t tolerate any more of this nonsense.”

  Donagher paused again, stared at her blearily. A sudden, wicked smile twisted his mouth, and the effect of it raced through Maddie’s system like snake venom. “You know, you’re a pretty woman,” he said. “A little priggish, maybe, and not very mannerly, but with a little manly guidance—”

  Maddie’s gorge rose.

  He took a step toward her, then stopped, gazing past her shoulder. At the same time, he groped for the handle of his pistol.

  Sam.

  Maddie’s heart skidded and scrambled inside her chest, like a deer flailing for purchase on a patch of ice. Dear God, why had she wished for Sam to come? Now, most likely, Garrett would kill him, pick him off like a rat in the woodpile.

  She closed her eyes, but the memories rushed in, as real as if she were living the tragedy all over again. A soft, summer evening. The crack of a rifle shot. Warren, struck down in the street. The gurgling sound he made when he tried to breathe, blood spreading crimson across the front of his white shirt. He’d squeezed her hand and died.

  Dazed, Maddie gripped the edge of the counter to keep from collapsing. She couldn’t bring herself to look back.

  “I wouldn’t draw if I were you,” said the man standing just behind her.

  It wasn’t Sam.

  Maddie turned, dizzy with fear and relief and a host of other emotions.

  The man she recognized as Esteban Vierra stood with his arms folded. He spared a smile for her, but his dark eyes were fixed on Garrett and burning with challenge.

  “I’m not scared of no damn Mexican,” Garrett said.

  “That’s a pity,” Vierra said easily. “Because I can drop you like a road apple from a horse’s ass before you even clear leather.”

  Maddie laid her palm to her heart, fingers splayed. “Please,” she said. “No shooting.”

  Garrett’s neck and lower jaw went red, but he kept his hands wide from his body. Apparently he believed Vierra’s assertion, though his expression and mien were defiant. “What the hell are you doin’ here, anyway?” he demanded.

  Vierra didn’t move, but it was a dangerous sort of stillness, reminiscent of a panther poised to pounce on its prey. “I came to ask you to leave,” he replied with no inflection in his voice at all. His ebony eyes gleamed in the thin light of the lantern.

  “I have business here,” Donagher argued. “I’m lookin’ for a woman. A whore.”

  “No whores around that I can see,” Vierra said with a lethal mildness that caused Maddie to wonder if she’d be any safer with him than Garrett Donagher. She knew little about him, beyond what Warren had told her—Vierra, who appeared in Haven occasionally, always briefly, always unexpectedly, and always leaving some kind of disturbance in his wake—had been both a bandito and a federale. Accor
ding to Warren, he moved easily from one to the other, as the whim struck him. He’d come into the mercantile once or twice, to buy cheroots, and inspired Terran to ask for black vaquero boots for his twelfth birthday.

  Maddie had refused.

  Donagher glanced disconsolately around the store, perhaps hoping that Bird would show herself so he could spirit her away and throttle her in an alley. “Bad enough you have truck with that schoolmaster, Miss Maddie,” he said, sounding for all the world like a scorned suitor, once hopeful and now cruelly thwarted. “Vierra, here, he’s nothin’ but an outlaw. Only one reason he’d be on this side of the border, and that’s cause somebody’s after him on the other one.”

  “I’m sure he merely wants to purchase cheroots,” Maddie said in a businesslike manner. “As for you, Garrett Donagher, you get out of here right this instant and don’t you dare come back until you’re stone sober and ready to apologize for barging in, scaring me to death and calling me a liar.”

  Donagher’s gaze shifted from Maddie to Vierra. To her pure surprise, he sighed, strode to the front door, threw back the bolt and went out without a word or a backward glance. She watched as he moved past the display window, most likely headed for the Rattlesnake Saloon.

  “I could use some cheroots,” Vierra said.

  Maddie faced him, feeling both grateful and alarmed. She kept the cheroots on the counter nearby, but she didn’t reach for a packet and neither did he. “Thank you,” she said.

  He smiled. “I saw the light as I was passing the store. It looked as though you might be in a little difficulty—”

  Just then Bird appeared on the stairway leading up to Maddie’s and Terran’s private rooms. She was hardly more than a spindly shadow, but she cocked the missing shotgun with an unnerving deftness.

  “I ain’t too sure about this fella, Maddie,” she said. “I’ve seen him around the Rattlesnake, and I don’t think he was up to any good.”

  Maddie’s knees sagged. Mr. Vierra examined a packet of cheroots, apparently unconcerned with the shotgun and Bird’s assessment of his character. “Land’s sake, Bird,” she said, “put down that gun before you hurt somebody.”