A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  Kitty chuckled, shaking her head. “That would be giving you too much credit. You don’t have the good sense to be scared, I’m guessing.”

  “Sarah knows you found your daughters,” Wyatt heard himself say. He hadn’t planned on bringing the subject up, since it was none of his business. “I told her about Kansas City. How you wanted me to marry you, so you could get the little girls back.”

  Kitty paled, but quickly recovered. Said nothing.

  “Why did you lie about it, Kitty? To Sarah, I mean.”

  “Sarah’s a lot more comfortable with lies than the truth,” Kitty said. The remark was calculated to get under Wyatt’s hide, and it did. In fact, it burrowed in and commenced to festering.

  “Don’t you want to see them? You were so all-fired determined to get them back, out in Kansas City—”

  “My girls are young women now,” Kitty answered. “Leona was married last year, to a man who built her a house and wears a suit to work every day. Davina is about to graduate from normal school. I’d like to see them, sure, but I don’t kid myself that the feeling is mutual. What would two fine ladies want with a whoring mother?”

  Wyatt set his hands on the back of the chair he’d been sitting in. “If you’re so friendly with Sarah,” he began, “then why did you say what you did a few minutes ago, about hoping I’d choose you over Nola?”

  Kitty smiled, sat back, and lit a long brown cigar. Drew on it and blew a smoke ring that floated up over Wyatt’s head, like a passing halo. “When it comes to plying my trade,” she said, in a crooning drawl, “friendship has its limits.”

  Wyatt turned to leave. He was still hoping to find his hat, lost when he’d gone to investigate the gunshots that left Carl Justice and two other men dead, and then he’d saddle up Sugarfoot and go find the Henson place. They’d tied one on for sure, the night before, Paudeen and his crew. The chances were good they’d still be passed out from celebrating the destruction they’d wrought in Stone Creek. Even if they were up and around, they’d be hungover, and that might make it one hell of a lot easier to get the drop on them.

  “Wyatt?” Kitty called after him, when he was almost to the swinging doors.

  He stopped, turned his head, waited.

  “The Henson place is three miles east of town, in a little valley. If you stick to the trail, they’ll see you. Go overland, and leave your horse in the stand of cottonwoods on the ridge.”

  He nodded, and then left.

  He found his hat at the base of a streetlamp, near Doc’s place. It was some the worse for wear, but the sun was blazing hot in a clear blue sky, and he’d need to cover his noggin if he didn’t want a temple-pounder of a headache.

  When he got to the livery stable, a few of the cowboys from local ranches were hanging around, like they had nothing better to do, chewing the fat.

  One of them, a young fella with curly brown hair and greenish eyes full of affable goodwill, came forward as Wyatt approached.

  “You goin’ out to look for the men who blew up the jail and shot those poor bastards laid out over at Doc’s, Deputy?”

  Wyatt nodded. Went inside to saddle Sugarfoot. Reb and Lark’s mare were in stalls on either side of Rowdy’s gelding, munching grass-hay.

  The kid followed him. “Me and the boys, we thought we’d go along to help, if you don’t mind.” He grinned, cocky and confident, probably a great favorite with the girls. “Name’s Jody Wexler,” he said, putting out a hand. “My pa owns the Starcross Ranch.”

  The ranch name was familiar—Doc had mentioned it the day before. “Your ma just give birth to twins?” Wyatt asked, leading Sugarfoot out of his stall.

  “My stepmother,” Jody said. “Pa wears out his women—put three in the ground so far, from having babies. There are seven of us, counting the new ones. The last wife died having my three-year-old brother, Harry.”

  “You don’t look old enough to track outlaws,” Wyatt said, throwing a blanket and then a saddle, also Rowdy’s, onto Sugarfoot’s back. Buckling and tightening the cinch.

  “I’m twenty-two,” Jody replied, unruffled. “Do you want company, or not?”

  Wyatt paused, patted Sugarfoot’s golden neck before putting the bridle on. Jody Wexler was wearing a six-gun, low on his left hip, and he was probably just a shade too fast for his own good. Not entirely sure Wexler and his pals weren’t up to something, maybe planning to jump him outside of town, Wyatt figured he had to take the chance, nonetheless. Kitty had been right—he didn’t have the common sense to be scared—but the odds of rounding up Paudeen and the rest would be better if he had a posse.

  “All right,” he said. “Long as you and your friends understand that this is serious business. You could get shot, among other things.”

  “I could get shot any day of the week,” Jody answered, unfazed. “Look what happened when that gunfight broke out in front of Jolene’s yesterday.” With that, the boy sprinted out of the barn, calling to his friends to mount up, they were going after some outlaws.

  Wyatt shook his head, led Sugarfoot out into the dazzling sun, and swung up into the saddle. Jody introduced his four companions as they all rode east, out of town. Wyatt didn’t even try to remember their names; his head was full of things that could go wrong, and what he’d do if they did.

  Turning at the top of the little hill on the sunrise side of Stone Creek, Wyatt looked down at what was left of Rowdy’s jailhouse. It was pure luck and hard work on the part of the whole town that the house and barn hadn’t gone up, too.

  A pang of guilt struck Wyatt, square in his middle, strong as the blow of a fist.

  Rowdy had entrusted the town to him.

  And there, still smoldering a little, was the proof that his brother’s trust had been sorely misplaced.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ALL DURING THE LAST mile of the ride to the old Henson place, Wyatt knew he wouldn’t find Paudeen there. It was something about the silence, undisturbed and long-standing. Contrary to the dime novels, the average outlaw was neither brave nor honorable, let alone heroic, but flat-out stupid and usually vicious. Still, even the idiots among them occasionally got things right.

  Wexler and the other members of the posse, all of them still wet behind the ears, for all their bold confidence, were plainly disappointed when they drew up on the ridge Kitty had mentioned to look down on the homestead.

  The roof of the house was caving in, and the barn had fallen long ago. Old wagon wheels, rotted harnesses and broken barrels littered the ground. Wyatt had a strange feeling, looking at it. He wanted to dismount, push up his sleeves, and set the place to rights.

  He even imagined Sarah inside that tumbledown hut, walls and roof restored, and real glass in the windows, and himself chopping wood in the dooryard, Lonesome near at hand, too, playing tag with Owen.

  He shook his head, but the pictures stuck in his mind.

  “Damn,” Jody Wexler said. “They’re gone.”

  “They were never here,” Wyatt said, wondering if Kitty had sent him on a wild-goose chase, as a favor to Paudeen, or if she’d really been trying to help. With a woman like Kitty, practiced at playing situations to her best advantage, it was hard to know.

  Wyatt reined his horse around to head back to Stone Creek. The town was unguarded, and there were three men to bury. Paudeen might be long gone, but then again, he could just be lying low up in the hills somewhere.

  “You just going to give up?” Wexler asked, catching up with Wyatt and Sugarfoot on his own sure-footed pinto pony. The kid wore a blue corduroy jacket, and his hat was set at a jaunty angle. He’d been looking forward to wrangling outlaws, that was clear.

  “We’ll find them,” Wyatt said. “Maybe not today, though.”

  “Me and the boys could go looking on our own,” the boy said.

  “No,” Wyatt answered, a
little sharply. “The last thing I want is to ride out and tell all your mamas that you’re laid out on a slab at Doc’s place because you ran into something you couldn’t handle.” Paudeen and his men were no geniuses, having destroyed their own guns, as well as the jailhouse, in an effort to reclaim them. But they were hardened and bitter and probably drunked-up good, and they wouldn’t hesitate to pick off five kids on cow ponies and field horses, likely to ride right into their midst.

  Wexler sat up straighter in the saddle, clearly affronted. “I’m a fair hand with a gun,” he said. “And so are my friends.”

  “If you’re smart,” Wyatt said, feeling weary and a lot older than his thirty-five years, “you’ll hang those guns up for good and live by your wits instead.”

  Wexler’s gaze dropped to the Colt on Wyatt’s hip. “Like you did?”

  “If I had my life to live over again, I’d do things differently,” Wyatt replied, and grinned a little, though it felt more like a grimace from the inside. Now there was an understatement, if he’d ever uttered one.

  If. What a useless, empty word that was.

  “A man needs a gun out here,” Wexler insisted.

  Wyatt wondered how long the kid had been shaving. A few years at most, if not a few months. Wexler and the others thought they were men, because they could shoot, swill whiskey and perform well upstairs in a whorehouse. In Wyatt’s mind, being a man meant hard work, facing down trouble when it came, no matter how bad the odds were, loving one woman, protecting and providing for a family.

  Once, though, his definition would have been about the same as young Jody’s. Raise hell, chase women, and delude himself that he was safe in a dangerous world because he had a pistol on his hip and knew how to use it.

  “I reckon hard experience will bring you around to my way of thinking, eventually,” Wyatt said. “I just hope you live long enough to figure out what really matters.”

  “Rowdy wouldn’t just let those outlaws ride free,” Jody protested, reddening up a little. It was meant as a jibe, and it found its mark, just as Kitty’s remark about Sarah being more comfortable with lies than the truth had done. The thing about jibes was, they hurt, but they didn’t do any lasting damage.

  “Maybe not,” Wyatt agreed. “But he sure as hell wouldn’t let you and your friends go off beating the brush for Paudeen on your own, either. If you want to be of some real help, Doc and I could use grave diggers right at the moment.”

  Jody sighed. “We’ll help,” he said, and Wyatt silently put a mark in a mental column, under character.

  “While you’re digging,” Wyatt advised, “keep in mind that it was packing a gun that brought those men low.”

  Grudgingly, Jody nodded. He didn’t think death could happen to him—though if challenged, he would have claimed that any fool knew it could. He was too young, too full of sap and piss and vinegar to truly understand that all that could stop with one bullet.

  When they got back to Stone Creek, Wyatt led the way straight to Doc’s house. He tried not to look at the ruins of the jail as he passed them, but the smell of burned wood was acrid in his nostrils and the place itself seemed to tug at him, demanding his attention.

  The bodies were laid out in coffins, in Doc’s office, all wearing donated clothes. Doc had stitched their eyelids down, and they all had a blue-gray pallor. Wyatt would have sworn they were breathing.

  “Fast work building those caskets,” Wyatt remarked to Doc, who was signing papers at his cluttered desk, taking off his hat because he was in the presence of the dead. Wexler and the others, crowding in behind him, followed suit.

  “I keep a few on hand out in the shed,” Doc answered, turning around, his smudged spectacles barely clinging to the tip of his long nose. He took in Jody Wexler and the boys. “Somebody sick?”

  Jody and his chums gathered round the coffins, swallowing and silent, fidgeting with their hats.

  “Nobody’s sick, Doc,” Wyatt said. “I recruited them to dig graves.”

  Doc nodded, huffed out a sigh. “Good,” he said. “I’m not up to the job myself, and most of the townsfolk are probably tucked up in their beds, spent from fighting the fire.” He turned to the boys. “Grave digging will pay a dollar apiece. You’ll find shovels in my shed, and I’ll show you where the holes ought to be.”

  None of the boys spoke. They were staring at the stitched-up eyes and the hard, waxen skin of the dead men.

  “Look your fill,” Wyatt told them quietly, after exchanging a glance with Doc. “That’s what comes of living by the gun.”

  Doc’s glance slipped to Wyatt’s .45, just as Jody’s had earlier.

  “Isn’t there going to be a funeral?” one of Jody’s friends asked. He was a redheaded kid, skinny and freckled, probably no older than Carl Justice. His name, if Wyatt recalled it correctly, was Clarence.

  Doc shook his head. “If they’ve got folks, it’ll take time to find them. We have to get them in the ground—fast.” He paused, looked the boys over with a benign expression of weary resignation in his eyes. He was probably thinking the same thing Wyatt was, that it would be a shame if these young fellas ended up in pine boxes before their time. “You get shovels and go on over to the churchyard and wait for me. I’ll make arrangements at the livery stable for a wagon to haul these coffins, and then meet you.”

  The boys nodded and trooped outside.

  “They think they’re a posse,” Wyatt said to Doc. The conversation had reminded him of the letter they’d found in Carl’s pocket; he had yet to read it, what with all that had been going on of late. Now, he handed it over, unopened.

  Doc accepted the missive, glanced at it, then set it aside before hoisting himself out his chair; Wyatt almost expected to hear his bones creak. “They’re the future of this town, those young men. Good boys, all of them. I hope they’ll pay some mind to what you said, but I don’t reckon they will.”

  “Seemed to bring them up short a little, seeing these bodies.”

  “They’ve all seen death before, and plenty of it—mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers—but as far as I know, nobody who got himself shot for nothing but too much whiskey and a hand of cards.”

  Wyatt helped Doc center the lids over the coffins, nail them down. It was solemn work, but it had to be done. Doc chalked a number on two of the boxes, probably corresponding to the ones he’d inscribe on the back of the men’s pictures, once the photographer had them developed. He wrote Justice on Carl’s.

  While the graves were being dug, under a high, hot and merciless Arizona sun, Doc sat in the shade of an oak tree, carved those same numbers into slabs of rough wood, using his pocket knife. He was determined to keep the bodies straight, in case kinfolks came to mourn.

  Wyatt helped with the digging, rode back to Doc’s place when it was finished, along with Jody and the boys. They loaded the coffins, one by one, and brought them to their final resting places. Carl’s marker at least had a name on it; the other two men had only numbers.

  It was, Wyatt thought, a sad way to wind up.

  Once the coffins had been lowered, on slings of rope, into the ground, there was more shoveling to do. Doc stood by the whole time, retreating to the oak tree again, as soon as he’d made sure the markers were right, puffing on a pipe.

  A few townspeople gathered, keeping their distance, but no words were said, so it wasn’t a funeral.

  The blisters on Wyatt’s hands had broken open, with all the shoveling, and Doc said, “Come on back to the office. I’ll put something on those sores. Hell of a thing if you got infected.”

  Wyatt nodded. The skin on his hands burned like fire, but the heaviness in his heart was worse. Doc gave Jody and the boys a dollar each, as promised, and they headed straight for the Spit Bucket Saloon.

  Doc shook his head, smiling a little.

  “Things all right over at the Tam
lins’?” the old man asked, as they walked back toward his place, Wyatt leading Sugarfoot behind him. “I noticed Ephriam opened the bank all by himself this morning.”

  “Far as I know,” Wyatt said, offering no comment on Ephriam or the bank. “I’m rooming with them now,” he added, in case Doc thought there was anything amiss. He was a sharp-eyed old coot, and he’d surely noticed the tension—or whatever it was—between Wyatt and Sarah.

  “I’d have said Sarah was too proud to take in a boarder,” Doc said. “I reckon you must be special.”

  Wyatt felt a slight rush of blood up his neck and hoped it didn’t show under all the dirt and sweat from the day’s exertions. He didn’t answer, since he couldn’t seem to find the right words.

  If he was special to Sarah, for any reason, it would be a damn fine thing. So fine, in fact, that it was too much to hope for.

  “She’s a good woman,” Doc went on. “Decent and upstanding.”

  “I’ve heard she’s prone to stretch the truth a mite,” Wyatt offered, feeling awkward. It made his voice come out sounding gruff, but that might have been a residual effect of last night’s fire.

  “That little book she carries around?” Doc confided. “She records the lies she tells in it, so she’ll remember and keep her stories straight.”

  Wyatt frowned. He’d found that book in her pocket, before he burned her dress in Rowdy’s cookstove the night before, and the temptation to open it had been nearly overwhelming, though he hadn’t given in. He was about to ask Doc why he’d said what he did, but they were interrupted by the telegraph operator, chasing them down Main Street.

  “Deputy! Mr. Yarbro!” the fella yelled. “I’ve got a wire here for you!”

  Wyatt stopped. The pit of his stomach seemed to open like a trapdoor to hell. Rowdy had received his message about the jailhouse, and this was his answer.

  He dreaded reading it.

  The operator handed him a sheet of yellow paper. Wyatt thanked him, gave him a nickel for his services, and steeled himself to catch hell.