A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  “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.”

  “Mr. James seemed to think he would be,” Maddie ventured.

  “We’ll see,” Oralee said. “Have we struck a bargain?”

  A smile welled up inside Maddie and took over her face. “I believe we have,” she said.

  Oralee stood, put out her hand. Maddie hesitated only a moment before she took it.

  She practically danced back to the general store.

  “There’s a woman moved into the schoolhouse,” Terran informed her the minute she walked in. He was sitting on the counter, bold as you please, nibbling on a peppermint stick.

  Maddie stepped around the mail bags, locked the door and turned the Closed sign to the street. “Get down off that counter,” she said. “And you know better than to help yourself to the stock.”

  “I paid for it,” Terran said.

  Maddie looked around, but the store was empty, except for the two of them. “Where’s Ben?” she asked. “And where did you get a penny?”

  “He’s over to the schoolhouse, visiting Neptune. When he gets back, I reckon he’ll have news about the lady.”

  So Abigail Blackstone hadn’t used that return stagecoach ticket after all. And she’d taken up residence at the schoolhouse. Maddie should have been pleased, since folks would be so busy with that scandal that they might even overlook her business venture with Oralee Pringle, but she wasn’t. The thought made the pit of her stomach ache.

  “That doesn’t explain the penny,” Maddie said.

  Terran finished off the candy stick. “Mr. Vierra gave it to me.”

  Maddie frowned. Looked around again. “What? When did you see him? And why would he give you money?”

  Terran grinned and jumped, belatedly, down off the counter. “I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”

  Maddie put her hands on her hips. “You’d better tell me,” she said.

  Terran thrust out a sigh that was bigger than he was. “He gave me a message,” he said. “I’m supposed to take it to Mr. O’Ballivan as soon as the sun goes down.”

  “What message?” Maddie demanded. She noticed the folded slip of paper then, jutting out of his shirt pocket. “Let me see it.”

  Terran shook his head. “I can’t. I’d have to give back the penny if I did.”

  “I might just take that penny out of your hide,” Maddie warned. She advanced a step and Terran retreated, came smack up against the counter, rounded the far end and bolted.

  “Come back here!” Maddie shouted.

  No answer.

  “Terran!” she called.

  The rear door slammed in the distance.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE NAMELESS HORSE watched curiously as Sam chopped and stacked more wood than he’d need for five winters.

  “What,” Abigail finally inquired from the back step, probably giving voice to the gelding’s bewilderment, as well as her own, “are you doing?”

  Sam surveyed the tops of the cottonwoods standing to the west. Their shimmering leaves wore a mantle of crimson and gold as the sun followed its slow, ancient path. Where, he wondered, was Vierra?

  “That should be perfectly obvious, Abigail,” he said dryly, for he knew the futility of ignoring her questions. It would have been truer to say he was keeping himself busy. “I’m laying in wood.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be leaving on some mysterious mission,” she replied. She’d swapped her traveling garb for calico, brushed the dust from her black hair and pinned it into a tidy knot at the back of her head. The dog, Neptune, who had taken an instant liking to the venerable Miss Blackstone, sat at her feet, gazing upward in plain adoration.

  “Why don’t you just shout it to the entire town?” Sam asked, testy over the situation in general.

  She bristled a little and straightened her skirts, the way she usually did when she was irritated. Sam had known her since he was sixteen years old and she was ten, and he read her expressions and mannerisms with the facility of long familiarity. “I was hardly shouting,” she said, and folded her arms. “And I must say, I expected a more gracious welcome.”

  Sam felt a twinge of guilt and summarily put it aside. “When you barge in uninvited, Abigail,” he said, “you can’t very well expect a welcome, gracious or otherwise.”

  Abigail stomped down the steps and approached, the dog trotting beside her, practically tangling itself in the swirling hem of her dress. “Do we or do we not have an understanding, Samuel O’Ballivan?” she demanded when she got within spitting distance. From the look in her eye, she was working up to a good spew.

  Sam sighed. It would have suited him better to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about, but it wouldn’t do any good. Abigail was tenacious as a sow bear after a honeycomb, and about that easy to reason with. “I reckon we do,” he allowed. He knew he sounded forlorn, and there was nothing for that, either. Maddie Chancelor had set up housekeeping in his mind, and that would have to be dealt with. Damned if he knew how to go about evicting her, though.

  Sudden tears shimmered in Abigail’s eyes, and that was cause for alarm. In all the years he�
��d known this contrary, cussed, fragile woman, Sam had seen her cry only twice—when her mama died after a fall from a horse, and when the coyotes got to a litter of barn kittens she’d named, dressed in doll clothes and squired around the countryside in her pony cart.

  It still chafed a raw place in Sam’s heart, that memory. Took the hide right off and scoured at the wound, the knowledge that he hadn’t been there to save Abigail that sorrow.

  “I am thirty years old,” said the present-day, grown-up Abigail. “Either we’re going to get married or we’re not.”

  Another sigh built up inside Sam, but he didn’t dare let it loose. Abigail was beautiful, she was smart and she was capable. She wasn’t afraid of hard work or much of anything else, and she’d been pursued by every unmarried man within twenty miles of home, at one time or another. She’d turned them all down flat, too. Because of him.

  He knew, with startling clarity, that he didn’t love Abigail, not the way a man ought to love a woman he took to wife. He’d have fought every wolf, outlaw and devil in the territory for her, even at that moment, but his devotion wasn’t husbandly…it was brotherly.

  Still, the major expected him to marry his daughter, and he owed that man more than he could calculate on every abacus in China. Hell, he’d expected himself to marry Abigail—someday.

  Always, someday.

  The trouble with the future, Sam reflected grimly, was that it had a bad habit of turning into now.

  “Sam?” Abigail prompted. She’d blinked back the tears, but she’d sunk her teeth into the question and she wouldn’t be letting go before she got an answer.

  “If I marry you,” he said, “will you go back where you belong?”

  Her eyes flashed and, for a moment, he thought she’d haul off and slap his face. He reckoned that was what he deserved.

  “Do you love me?” she asked, and even though she spoke the words lightly, he could see that she held her breath after saying them.

  He searched her face, the face he knew so well. Moved to caress her cheek, push a wisp of ebony hair back from her cheek, but stopped short and dropped his hand back to his side. “You know I do,” he said.

  Just then, Terran rounded the back of the schoolhouse at a dead run. Sam was at once concerned by the boy’s apparent urgency and relieved that Abigail didn’t have a chance to make him elaborate.

  He barely stopped himself from demanding to know if something had happened to Maddie.

  Terran pulled a small sheet of paper, loosely folded, from the pocket of his shirt. “I got a penny to bring you this,” he said between pants, holding it out in one grubby hand. “Maddie wanted to read it, but I wouldn’t let her.” The boy glanced curiously at Abigail. “Evening, ma’am.”

  “Abigail Blackstone,” Sam said without looking at her, “this is Terran Chancelor.”

  “Terran.” Abigail greeted him, and there was something watchful in her voice.

  “Mrs. Blackstone,” Terran responded.

  Sam’s eyes were focused on the note, but he couldn’t seem to get the words from the paper to his brain.

  “That’s Miss Blackstone,” Abigail said.

  Sam took another run at the scribbled message, and finally registered it. “Meet me at the graveyard in Refugio an hour after sunset, and be ready to ride south. The train is on schedule. E.V.”

  Abigail eased closer and Sam quickly folded the note and tucked it into his inside vest pocket.

  “Thanks,” he told Terran, who was staring at Abigail with a rapt expression, reminiscent of the dog’s. Sam cleared his throat. “Miss Blackstone will be taking over the school for a few days. Maybe a week. Tell the other kids they’d better mind her, or they’ll have me to contend with.”

  Terran’s gaze sliced to Sam’s face and widened. “Where you going?” he asked, just as if it was his business. He put Sam in mind of Maddie that way, and a few other ways, too. Could be one of their ancestors was part mule.

  “If I thought you needed to know that,” Sam said evenly, “I’d have told you.”

  The boy flushed. “You’d better come back,” he said.

  Sam waited.

  “Because you promised you’d teach me and Ben how to swim. You leave before we know that, we might drown sometime, and it would be your fault.”

  Sam checked the sun again and whistled for the horse. “I keep my word,” he said, and felt Abigail’s stare digging right into him. “Fetch my saddle and bridle from the shed, would you?”

  Terran hesitated, then went off to do Sam’s bidding.

  “Do you, Sam?” Abigail asked quietly. “Do you always keep your word?”

  He’d never actually proposed to her, never said he loved her. But he’d made a tacit promise to Abigail, just the same, and he’d honor it, whatever the cost. He looked into her eyes.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She gave a little nod, made to touch his arm, and drew back her hand just short of contact, the way he had earlier, when he’d wanted to brush the backs of his knuckles along the length of her cheek.

  * * *

  VIERRA LIT a tallow candle at the feet of the Virgin, in the little chapel at Refugio, and looked up at the statue’s placidly beautiful face. I am a sinner, he told her in silent Spanish. I do not ask your grace for myself, but for the innocent ones. Let us get there in time, please, the Americano and me.

  “I didn’t reckon you for a man of prayer,” observed a familiar voice from somewhere behind him.

  He turned, saw the Ranger framed in the arch of the doorway. O’Ballivan took off his hat, perhaps in deference to the Holy Mother, though if Vierra had had to venture a guess, he’d have said the man was not inclined toward religious devotion.

  “I am a great many things you haven’t reckoned on,” Vierra answered. He turned again to the Lady, bowed his head as he made the sign of the cross, and reclaimed his hat from the front pew. It was really only a bench, with no rail to support the weary backs of the faithful, but then, worship was not meant to be a comfortable enterprise, was it?

  “That,” O’Ballivan said, “is what worries me.”

  Vierra grinned as he approached, but his spirit was heavy. He rarely offered a prayer to the Virgin, for he was the most unworthy of men, but there were times when only the indulgence of the Mother Herself would serve, and this was one of those times. “Where is your faith?” he asked.

  The Ranger stepped aside to let him pass into the coolness of the star-scattered night. Music seeped from the nearby cantina, the plaintive thrum of guitar strings, ripe with some soft, inexpressible yearning.

  Vierra thought of Pilar and felt ambushed. Her image always came to him in the most unexpected moments.

  “I was beginning to think you’d gone to meet that train without me,” O’Ballivan said, neatly sidestepping the philosophical question. His gelding stood at the water trough across the street, reins dangling, drinking noisily.

  Vierra donned his hat. He’d left his own mount in front of the chapel, which was surely how the Ranger had known to look for him inside instead of in the cemetery, where he’d planned to wait. “And reserve all the bandito’s bullets for myself? That would have been selfish of me, not to mention foolish.”

  O’Ballivan’s horse came to him, at some silent signal, and Vierra took note of the fact, to consider later. He’d learned long ago that such things defined a man more truthfully than anything he said.

  They both took the saddle.

  “Awful quiet around this town,” the Ranger said. “Nobody’s seen the Donagher brothers since the old man killed his eldest.”

  Vierra adjusted his hat, reined his horse toward the south. “And you thought they would be here, in Refugio? Perhaps in the cantina, swilling whiskey?”

  “It crossed my mind,” O’Ballivan admitted, spurring his mount to an easy trot alongside Vierra’s.

  “That is what troubles me,” Vierra said. “Our friends, the Donaghers, are regular visitors, however unwelcome. There is one very obvious reason why th
ey might be elsewhere.”

  “They’ve gone to rob that train,” the Ranger concluded grimly.

  Vierra nodded. “Their father is in jail. Their brother was buried, and they did not come to pay their respects. Even wolves will circle a fallen member of the pack, if only to make sure he is truly dead before they devour the carcass.”

  By now they had left the town behind and urged their horses to a gallop. The Ranger shuddered, then raised his voice to be heard over the clatter of hooves on hard ground. “I’m not sure they have the guts to stop a train and steal a shipment of government gold. Or the wits.”

  Vierra stood in his stirrups, stretching his legs for the long ride ahead. “Do you have another theory?” he asked.

  “Not handy,” O’Ballivan replied. “You’ve considered the possibility, of course, that Rex and Landry Donagher might be miles from that railroad trestle and up to something else entirely?”

  “I’ve considered it,” Vierra said mildly. “But I think we’ll find something a lot worse than a stick in the ground with a bloody rag tied to it if we don’t get there before that train does.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Ranger’s hat brim dip slightly as he nodded in grim agreement.

  They rode in silence for a long time, leaving the dim and scattered lights of Refugio far behind them, following a thin, silvery trail of moonlight.

  “If you’d been at Garrett Donagher’s burying,” the Ranger said presently, “I’d have seen you.”

  “Would you?” Vierra smiled to himself. They’d covered the better part of a mile since he’d mentioned the Donagher funeral. Clearly, O’Ballivan liked to chew on a subject for a while before he discussed it, and that might mean he was slow, which could be a good thing, in some ways. Not that Vierra was fool enough to underestimate the man.

  “Yes,” O’Ballivan said implacably. “I figure you’ve got somebody in Haven, keeping an eye on things and sending word across the river. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was Oralee Pringle, or one of her girls.”