A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  He could see the sky through the gaps left by the fallen roof, most of which lay in the center of the cabin. Vermin scuttled through the wreck. One room, with a potbellied stove and a stone fireplace. The stove was rusted, the fireplace was crumbling. Like as not, there were birds and mice nesting in the chimney.

  Wyatt added mortar to the list of things he couldn’t afford to buy.

  He shoved a hand through his hair, trying to imagine Sarah there.

  The effort was a bust. Her bedroom in town was probably bigger than this whole place.

  He picked his way over to the potbellied stove, opened the door and looked inside. A snake hissed, raising its head to strike.

  He slammed the stove door shut again and straightened.

  Went back to the threshold and stood looking out over the property, gripping the door frame with his hands—a well falling in on itself, a shell of a barn that would have to be razed and cut up for firewood. And fifty acres of decent grass—not enough to call a ranch, really, but he could run a few cattle. But it would probably be a couple of years before he made a profit, and in the interim he’d have to make at least two mortgage payments.

  Where was he going to get the cattle in the first place?

  He gave a raspy chuckle. He could always rustle a few, he supposed. Tricky, though, when the curious decided to inspect the brands.

  Again, Wyatt took off his hat and raked his fingers through his sweat-dampened hair. He had less than thirty dollars to his name, and he’d inherited his ma’s fear of debt. There had been a lot of lean years when he was a kid, years when Pappy didn’t send home enough to buy a twenty-pound sack of flour. Time and again, Miranda Yarbro had put on her Sunday best, donned a bonnet, driven herself to the bank in town, and borrowed against the farm, and on three different occasions, they’d faced foreclosure. Once, they’d gone so far as to load the household goods in the back of a wagon, headed out to who-knew-where with only a worn-out pair of plow horses to pull them, and at the last possible moment, Pappy had ridden up with a pocket full of money.

  It was one of the few times Pappy had saved the day. Why had he chosen to follow Pappy’s lead, instead of his ma’s?

  Wyatt gave another sigh. He wasn’t even riding his own horse, for God’s sake. And he’d have to work for Sam O’Ballivan—if the job offer was still open, given his poor showing as deputy marshal of Stone Creek—just to survive. Hammer and saw on the Henson place in his spare time, which, given the nature of ranch work, would be nigh onto impossible.

  He imagined what Pappy would say, if he’d been standing there. Take Rowdy’s horse and go hold up a train—better yet, a stagecoach. Easy pickings, a stagecoach. Then keep on riding. Forget Sarah. Forget Stone Creek. And for sure forget that worthless hound you call Lonesome—all he’ll do is slow you down.

  Pappy’s image faded, replaced by the small but fierce figure of his mother, Miranda. He could almost hear her voice, see her shaking an index finger under his nose. Stop running, Wyatt Yarbro. Buckle down and work. That’s how you get what you want in this life.

  “It’s impossible, Ma,” Wyatt muttered.

  Things are only impossible before you do them, she would surely have replied. Do you think I had an easy time, keeping a family of hungry boys together while your pa was off gallivanting? No. I just did what was there before me to do, whether it was impossible or not. I clawed a living out of that Iowa dirt. I milked cows and kept chickens and sold eggs and butter at the store in town. I mended shirts until my fingers bled. But I kept you all under my roof and fed, long as you needed a home.

  He’d have to choose, Wyatt realized, once and for all. Choose between Pappy’s way, and his ma’s. He couldn’t go on doing one thing, wanting all the while to do another.

  He’d tried Pappy’s method. Wound up in prison, first off, then as a drifter and erstwhile rustler.

  His ma’s way was harder, there was no denying that. Claim a patch of ground and earn the deed to it. Stand up on the inside, so he could count himself a man.

  Wyatt strode through the space where the images had stood, went to peer down into the well. It was crumbling, like the rest of the place, but there was water down there. He could see the faint, muddy glimmer of it, catch the scent of it.

  Water. For an Arizona rancher, it was as good as oil to a Texan.

  Sugarfoot nickered companionably as Wyatt passed him, set on examining what remained of the barn. His first impression had been right—there was nothing to do but rebuild it, from scratch.

  He paced off some of the land, close in to the house, and found the spring Ephriam had mentioned, a grassy oasis of pure water, feeding into the well from underground. Until he got the latter mucked out, he could hike back and forth with buckets.

  He began to feel cautiously hopeful. Sure, the house was small—but so was the one Rowdy and Lark lived in, and they certainly seemed happy enough, and he could always build on more rooms when he’d had time to acquire a bank account.

  He smiled. Not that he’d put a cent of his money into the Stockman’s Bank. The establishment was the proverbial sitting duck, and it was only a matter of time before some band of yahoos rode in and robbed it bare.

  Yahoos, he had to allow, who had not reckoned on Rowdy Yarbro, Sam O’Ballivan, or himself.

  All he asked of a benevolent fate, if there was such a thing, was that Sarah wouldn’t be in the bank when it happened.

  Memories of the stampede down south, when both he and Reb should have been killed, flashed in his mind. He wasn’t prepared to call whatever had saved their hides “God,” but something had kept them out of harm’s way that night.

  Maybe there was a reason.

  Thoughtful, Wyatt mounted up and rode back to town. Headed straight for the bank.

  Ephriam was there, with the teller, introduced as Thomas, though whether it was his first name or his last, Wyatt didn’t know. Or care.

  There was no sign of Sarah. Most likely, she and Owen were still out buying the boy’s school gear. Wyatt felt a pang, picturing that. He was gone on Sarah, had been from the first sight of her, but now he was starting to get attached to the kid, too. Owen was another man’s son, he reminded himself, and the kid was only visiting in Stone Creek.

  “I reckon if you have those mortgage papers drawn up,” Wyatt said to Ephriam, belatedly remembering to remove his hat, “I’m ready to sign them.”

  Ephriam smiled, and it seemed to Wyatt that there was a lot behind the expression. Cordiality, surely, but a certain sad resignation, too. Nobody knew better than he did, after all, that the clear-minded state he was enjoying now was most likely temporary. “Come into my office,” Tamlin said. “Thomas, you’ll be all right out here alone?”

  Thomas reddened, affronted by the question. Wyatt felt little sympathy for the youth, given that he’d warned Sarah of plans to hold up the bank, then left her to face twenty men alone. “I’ll be fine,” the teller said.

  Wyatt spared Thomas a glance as he passed him.

  The young man bristled.

  Ephriam’s office was small and cluttered, like Doc’s, but here, as at Venable’s place, there was a sense of underlying order.

  “Sit down, please,” Ephriam said, taking the chair behind his desk, sort of sinking into it, as though he suddenly found his own weight too great to carry.

  Wyatt drew up a chair. Set his hat aside on the floor.

  “You’ve been out to the Henson place?” Ephriam asked, tenting plump fingers beneath a series of chins.

  “Yes, sir,” Wyatt said. “I believe I can make something out of it.”

  It was only by giving voice to the statement that it became true for Wyatt.

  The spread would never be fancy, but it would pay a modest living—someday, that was, and with a hell of a lot of elbow grease.

  Ephriam regarded him i
n somber, measuring silence for a long time. Then he asked, “What are your intentions toward my daughter, Mr. Yarbro?”

  Wyatt was caught off guard by the question, though he supposed he should have anticipated it. “I want to marry her,” he heard himself say. “But right now, I don’t have much to offer in the way of support, so it’ll be a while.” He paused, cleared his throat, sat up a little straighter in the chair. “I do mean to court her, though, and I know I ought to ask your permission, but the plain truth is, I’ll be making a case for myself with her, whether you approve or not.”

  The banker chuckled at that. “I’m willing to overlook that formality,” he said. “You have my permission, for what it’s worth. The one thing I would ask is that you take good care of Sarah.” He spread his hands, apparently drawing Wyatt’s attention to their surroundings. “I started with a few hundred dollars in a cash box. Got it mining, in various places. I lived over at Mrs. Porter’s, in a room under the stairs, and lent money at interest, five, ten, twenty dollars at a time. Mrs. Porter’s husband ran Stone Creek Bank—he was my only competitor. It’s closed now, of course.”

  Wyatt had seen the other bank, its windows boarded up and an Out Of Business sign tacked to the door. Rowdy had mentioned some bad business concerning the Porters, sometime back, in a letter Wyatt had received in prison, but it had just been a story to him, and since he’d arrived in town, he’d been too busy falling in love with Sarah Tamlin and getting the jailhouse blown sky-high to give the tale much thought.

  Now, Wyatt nodded, as if he knew more about Stone Creek’s past than he did.

  “I hear you turned to and helped Doc get those three men buried, too,” Ephriam said, still studying Wyatt as though there were words written on his face in an illegible hand.

  Thinking back on things, Wyatt couldn’t recall Rowdy ever saying anything about Doc, but then, he hadn’t described anybody else, either, except for Lark. The pages of his few recent letters had been filled with her—how pretty she was, and how smart. How he’d never known another woman like her.

  Wyatt’s throat constricted. “I thought the only doctor in Stone Creek was Chinese,” he said, recalling something Lark had said, that first night, at the supper table.

  “Doc went through a bad patch,” Ephriam said. “Took to the drink, after his wife and daughter died of a fever. Got so bad, hardly anybody even thought of him as a doctor anymore. Made his living as an undertaker. Then, just last spring, he answered the altar call in church one Wednesday night and got himself saved. It took, I guess. He’s been stone sober ever since.”

  Wyatt had heard of stranger things—like living through a stampede. He didn’t speak, because he knew Ephriam had more to say, and he wanted to hear it, especially if it concerned Sarah.

  “Doc managed to keep his hand in, though. Tended broken bones for folks who didn’t want a Chinaman looking after them. He and Sarah spent twenty-four hours of the day upstairs at the Spit Bucket, when the women came down with some kind of grippe. Lost a few of them. Doc gave them medicine Hon Sing brewed up for him, and most pulled through.”

  Wyatt thought of Sarah, risking her own health to soothe and minister to the sick. If it came down to a choice between smoking cigars and courting maladies that could easily be fatal, he’d rather she indulged in tobacco.

  Not, he reflected with a smile, that Sarah would be swayed by his opinions if she had that mind of hers hitched up to go in a different direction from his.

  “I won’t ask if you love my daughter,” Ephriam said, making Wyatt sit up straighter again. “I reckon that’s your personal business, and hers. She’s taken with you, though, I can see that. A lot of men might think we have money of our own put by, Sarah and me. If that’s what’s on your mind, Mr. Yarbro, you’re sorely mistaken. We own the house, and not much else. Sarah made some shaky loans, and then covered them.”

  “I know about the loans, sir,” Wyatt said, feeling his neck redden up a little. “And if I’m lucky enough to marry Sarah, it won’t be for money.”

  Ephriam was a shrewd man, when his head wasn’t in a fog. It must have been a living hell for him, Wyatt thought, forgetting everything the way he seemed to do. “There’s another possibility, of course,” the old man went on. “You’re Payton Yarbro’s flesh and blood. While he was famous for robbing trains—right now, this very day, you could go over to the mercantile and buy any one of a dozen dime novels, full of his exploits—I don’t imagine he raised his sons to turn their nose up at the loot from a small-town bank, guarded only by a woman, an old man who can’t recall his own name some days, and a single teller who’s scared of his own shadow.”

  “If I’d meant to hold up the Stockman’s Bank, Mr. Tamlin,” Wyatt said, his neck feeling hotter still, “I’d have done it as soon that train pulled out of town with Rowdy and Sam on it.”

  Ephriam smiled again. “Well, I guess Payton raised Rowdy, too, and he turned out all right.”

  “Pappy didn’t raise any of us,” Wyatt said. “Our ma did that. Then, when we got old enough, we went off with our pa to learn thieving. I make no secret of that, Mr. Tamlin. I did two years in prison, and while I didn’t come forward at a revival meeting like Doc, something did happen that made me want to be a better man.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what that was?” Ephriam gave a gruff, rueful chuckle. “Hell, I’ll probably forget, anyway.”

  “I’d as soon not share it, sir, at least until I’ve told Sarah.”

  A look of respect came into Ephriam’s weary old eyes. He pulled off his spectacles, wiped the lenses with part of his banker’s coat. “She knows you’ve been in prison?”

  “I let her know that right off,” Wyatt said. There wasn’t much about his life he could boast about, but living under his right name and claiming his past with no excuses was a point of pride with him. It was what his ma would have wanted, what she’d prayed for, all those nights, when she’d knelt by her sons’ beds and offered them up to the care of the God she so completely, thoroughly trusted, no matter how hard things got.

  Ephriam slid a stack of papers toward Wyatt. “Read these over, and sign them if you agree with the terms. I made the loan for four hundred and fifty dollars, instead of three hundred and fifty, figuring you’d need lumber and the like to fix up the Henson place.” He chuckled again as Wyatt picked up the papers. “Guess we ought to call it the Yarbro place, once the ink dries.”

  For the first time since he’d set foot in Ephriam’s office, Wyatt smiled. “The Yarbro place. I like the sound of that,” he said. “And I’m obliged for the extra money.” Then, because he was his mother’s son, as well as his father’s, he read every single word in those papers, made sure of his understanding, and then put his signature to the whole works.

  That one hundred dollars, given to him in cash by Mr. Tamlin, meant an extra annual payment, and that was serious business to Wyatt. Still, if he wanted a roof and a floor and clean well water, he had to accept it.

  He and Tamlin shook hands on the deal, and Wyatt left the Stockman’s Bank.

  He didn’t kid himself that he owned that fifty acres and broken house. The bank did; all he owned was the mortgage. But there was a spring in his step, just the same, as he stepped out into the sunshine, looking up and down the street as he crossed, automatically counting horses in front of saloons. Since lumber and tools were sold out of the mercantile, he made his way there.

  * * *

  SARAH PUT OWEN’S new clothes, tablets, pencils and other school equipment on her account, since she hadn’t taken time to cash Charles’s voucher at the bank. They were just leaving when Wyatt stepped up onto the sidewalk from the street.

  Seeing her, he stopped and tugged at the brim of his hat.

  Since Owen’s purchases were to be delivered at the house later in the day, there having been too much for the two of them to carry, Sarah�
�s hands were empty. Owen clutched a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, unwilling to let it out of his sight.

  Knowing Wyatt would have offered to carry things home for her, if she’d had any, Sarah almost regretted asking that the order be delivered.

  Owen shoved the package out to show Wyatt. “I’ve got long pants in here,” he said. “Just like yours. And a shirt, too. Aunt Sarah says it looks like it was cut from a flour sack, but I like it!”

  Sarah laughed, rising, once again, on a swell of fragile and very temporary joy. “Lunch is included in your room and board,” she told Wyatt. “If you’re hungry.”

  Wyatt’s white teeth flashed as he grinned. If they had a baby together, would it have Wyatt’s fine, strong teeth, his rugged yet pleasing features?

  She blushed, just to catch herself thinking such a thought, and on Main Street, too. In broad daylight.

  “I’ll be along directly,” he said. “I have some business in the mercantile, but it shouldn’t take long.”

  Hope quickened Sarah’s heart. All morning long, despite helping Owen select his new clothes and grappling with what Kitty had told her, about her daughter’s imminent arrival in Stone Creek to teach school, she’d been recalling breakfast, and the conversation her father and Wyatt had had about the Henson place.

  She wanted to ask if Wyatt had bought the property, but couldn’t quite bring herself to be that forward.

  He must have seen it in her face, the longing to know if he’d be staying or moving on, because he said, “I’ve got a mortgage now. If there’s one thing worse than a former train robber, it’s a former train robber up to his gullet in debt.”

  Sarah wanted to shout, to whirl, right there on the sidewalk, the way she used to do as a child in her mother’s parlor, when Nancy Anne Tamlin sat down at her piano and filled the house with sweet, soaring music, coaxing whole concertos from the time-yellowed keys. Suddenly, she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Wyatt didn’t say anything, either.