by Martha Hix
“Pretty much. Has been since her baby sister died while in her care and keeping. Broke her spirit.”
Grant wondered if anything good had ever happened to poor little Patience Sweet.
Merkel was saying, “I’ve offered her to you for the night, because I know in my heart that Patience will sleep in her cozy bed at the Antlers Hotel tonight. And I’ll have my thousand dollars when I reach the Rio Grande.”
“What about her father?”
“If he has my asking price, I’ll do the right thing and let him have her. I won’t even ask for the full thousand.”
“Aren’t you the gallant?” Grant sneered. “Tell me something. What makes you think she won’t have something to say about this?”
Merkel rolled his stogie from one side of his mouth to the other. He leaned his chair back, propping himself up to grin. “That’s the beauty of it. Patience can’t speak. She’s a mute. She does as she’s told. Except to stay away from me.”
He’s playing me for a fool. The issue became a case of betting five hundred dollars to save her from white slavery.
Grant hitched a thumb toward the exit door. “Forget it. Get the hell out of here.”
“Wait just a minute, sir.” Chair legs banged to the floor, sawdust swirling. “If you don’t take my offer, that means you just want to keep all the money I’ve wagered this evening.”
“This is an honest game. You played. You won for a while. You started losing.” When that didn’t seem to sink in, Grant asked, “Do you not know there are laws against selling women’s favors?”
It was then that he caught sight of the girl again. Standing now, the mending at her feet, her fingers were a steeple beneath her chin, begging his help. She mouthed the word “please.” He knew right then and there he had to win the hand.
“All right, Merkel. I accept your challenge. Show your hand.”
The oily bastard smiled. “Full house…sir. Aces over eights.”
“That’s a dead man’s hand, boy.” He laid down his winning hand. “Four kings.”
The face that had been pasty now turned the white of death. “How did this happen?”
“It’s called gambling. See you in the morning at ten.” Grant intended to have the sheriff with him. “Here at the Garter, as you mentioned.”
Merkel shoved away from the table, stumbled toward the girl, his shoulders drooping. “Forgive me, Sister.”
Sighing audibly, she lifted an elbow to wave four fingers while Merkel made a show of leaving.
On poker nights, Grant kept wrapped peppermints in his shirt pocket. He stood, walked over to her, and handed a mint to her before patting her shoulder. “Don’t worry for a moment, Miss Sweet. I won’t hurt you. You’re safe with me.”
She popped the candy past her lips. As it bulged at her jaw, she picked up a small book that was held by a string, along with a pencil, from her waist. In small, concise script, she wrote, “Thank you.”
Her soft brown eyes then looked up at him, her thick, dark lashes falling as she reached on tiptoes to plant a quick kiss on the edge of his lips. She grabbed a large canvas poke bag with one hand and his hand with the other. Swallowing her peppermint, she rushed him out the saloon door.
Once they were on the street and under the light of the full moon, Patience melted against him. She touched her tender cheek against his chest, a kittenish mewl touching his heart.
“There, there, kitten.” He brushed her hair with his fingers and patted her cheek. Unfortunately, his gaze fell… And he noticed that her bosom in no way resembled a child’s.
She wrapped her arms around him, as if he were a lifebuoy.
Hellfire! He had to push her away. “I know some nice ladies here in town. They—”
Patience tensed.
“Now, settle down. They’re from a church here. Heaven’s Gate. You can trust them.”
She shook her head, again and again.
“Not to worry. We’ll call on the ladies tomorrow. Mrs. Craig and her niece—the niece is my cousin’s wife, Mrs. Linnea Kincaid. They are both family to me. Those two will know what to do. They will find a good place for you to stay while we sort out your situation.”
Patience grabbed his shirt. Shaking her head vehemently, she mouthed, “No, no, no!”
“Shhh,” he crooned in an effort to calm her, but she would have none of it. She hugged him tightly, again stretching on her tiptoes to reach his lips, then pulled him down to her. Grant had to wonder what he’d gotten himself into. When she opened her sweet lips over his mouth, he inhaled candy and a young woman in over her head.
Behave yourself, sanity warned the hot-blooded man. This is a child, likely no more than fifteen.
Grant had three younger sisters, each near and dear to his heart. He knew how easily girls of that age got overexcited. He extracted himself from this one’s innocent charms. “Let’s just go home. I have a comfortable bed in a guestroom. I’ll fix you a warm cup of cocoa, and in the morning we will figure out how to return you to your family.”
She wrote, “I am alone in the world.”
“Then we will chart a good and decent life for you.”
She stepped back to hug her arms.
When her tears began to fall, he said, “Will you feel better if I make that cocoa and you let me know how you’d like me to help you?”
The chin moved upward. She smiled. Hers was a beautiful smile that beamed beneath the moon and the stars. Exhaling in obvious relief, Patience put her hand in his, a gesture he took as total trust. But she suddenly stopped when they reached the second block.
She hurriedly wrote on her tablet, “Where is your horse? Your buggy? Are you afoot?”
He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Of course I’m afoot! This is town. Sheriff Alington would whistle for the lunatic’s wagon if I sent to the livery stable for my horse. Or if I wheeled my Runabout out of the carriage house and went to the trouble to crank it up, just to ride five blocks to the saloon!”
She giggled, her eyes wide in the moonlight, and covered her lips with crossed, small hands. She also lifted her shoulders in a “silly me” pose.
“Well, you didn’t know.” He winked and tickled the tip of her nose, then said, “Come along, kitten. Your cocoa awaits, not your coach.”
As Grant led her the five blocks to his home, she skipped along with the enthusiasm of a child.
It was obvious, her delight in being away from the Merkel devil.
Within minutes they were in Grant’s kitchen, where he set about making a pan of cocoa. He stirred milk and cocoa and launched into an internal war completely atypical for a man who usually made up his mind quickly and rarely looked back on a decision.
He found the sprite attractive, even though he knew better than to think it.
She drank a cup in a long gulp, as if it were cool well water on a hot afternoon.
“You don’t need to rush. It isn’t going away,” he said. “I’ll make more.”
She savored her third cup, and he assessed the young female sitting across from him at his kitchen table. In the light of this room, he could see that she wasn’t as young as he had first thought. She might be eighteen. It was her slight build that made her appear so young.
“Miss Sweet, I know it is rude to ask, but exactly how old are you?”
She brought forth her tablet, writing the numerals one and eight.
That came as a relief, but did it really make a difference, since he’d be turning her over to Jewel and Linnea forthwith? She’s above the age of consent and yours for the night, the devil within him pointed out. Grant would never call himself a saint. Especially not with his manly feelings all astir. Why should he? Plenty of men his age married girls her age. And he knew it to be a Southern truth that if a girl didn’t catch a fiancé by her eighteenth birthday, she likely never would.
His m
other had been the exception, but Margaret Elizabeth Kincaid, née Lerand, was exceptional.
A drop of cocoa running down her chin, Patience wrote on her tablet, “You haven’t had a bit. Don’t you want some of mine?”
Good God, yes! It took every bit of mustered strength not to lean in for his taste. He suggested gruffly, “Finish your cocoa.”
You sap. Why fight me? You old lecher, you like what you see in sweet little Miss Sweet.
So what if she’s young and will never overspill her camisole or out of her breeches? Have you not heard? Anything over a mouthful is wasteful! Branch out, man!
“I am going to point out the conveniences, then show you to your room. Do make yourself at home. I will see you in the morning. Don’t be surprised if I am not here when you awaken.”
He would call on Wes Alington. Whether Miss Sweet had reached eighteen or eight, no man had the right to sell a woman’s body, and Merkel would answer to the law for attempting to barter her away. “Do you understand all this?”
She nodded, mouthing, “Thank you.”
“Let’s turn in.”
She took up her tablet, scribbling faster than before. You said we would talk.
“Tomorrow,” he answered.
Wait, please. How old are you?
“Twenty-nine.”
Why do you not have a wife?
“Never met a lady quite like the one who married my father.”
She wrote intently for several moments before showing him her book again.
You could marry me. I can cook and clean and sew and mend. If I had a Brownie camera, I could take photographs of you and our children, and I could take in mending or laundry if you wished me to pull my weight with the greengrocer. What more could you want?
He couldn’t help but chuckle, which caused her chin to quiver. “Shhh, little kitten. No tears.” He took out his handkerchief, dabbing it at her eyes. “No tears,” he repeated. “This is no time to talk about produce or children. We must sleep. You are tired, and so am I.” He winked. “This is no time for proposals, either.”
At least she smiled a bit.
When he finished showing her around, Grant went to his bedroom and prepared to turn in.
Dressed in nothing, as usual, he fell asleep almost the moment his head touched the pillow. His was the most pleasant of dreams that night. A nubile girl, naked, had found where he napped under the shade of an apple tree.
She stretched out beside him, wiggling as close as humanly possible.
She hummed a song that attracted a little bird, and she smelled delicious, like apples and sunshine and the most pleasant of women. He was caressing her. She did the same to him. Then she slipped her leg between his.
And then her hand…
Chapter 2
After that gentleman from the barroom, Mr. Grant Kincaid, had tucked her in bed as tenderly as if she were a youngster, Patty Sweet had tossed and turned between the freshly scented sheets of his spare bedroom. She kept wondering what she should do next.
She thought of the two previous times she’d ended up with gamblers who wanted to get their grimy paws on her virginal flesh. She’d had to slip the powder that Chet had concocted out of the locket hidden inside her camisole into their drinks to render them harmless. There wasn’t any satisfaction to be taken from finding the money her partner had lost, then pulling it from a sleeping man’s pocket. She never took a penny more than his stake. Not one cent.
Whenever she had a guilty conscience about rolling those men, memories of Dorinda Kane came back to her. Before she got too weak to talk, the streetwalker had taught life lessons in the Tulsa jail—where Patty and Chet had been hauled, thanks to a morals charge lodged by nosy church ladies.
“No decent man touches a child,” Dorinda taught her. “If he puts his dirty, nasty sausage where it doesn’t belong, he deserves whatever bad happens to him.”
The generous streetwalker had much to say on the art of surviving the hard, cruel world. When she heard that Chet knew how to play poker, she suggested a way that he and Patty might work their way to the westernmost part of Texas. Thanks to the kindness of her dying gift, they were able to make bail, as well as to start on the long, arduous trip from Tulsa to El Paso.
They hit the road in an antiquated wagon that had once belonged to the gypsy who had taught Chet to mix potions. The wagon didn’t appear as if it would last for the long trip, but it was the wagon or walk.
Chet also had a buy-in for his first game of poker—thanks to Dorinda—and Patty lowered her apparent age to protect herself and their cash. Thus, she decided to dress younger than her years.
She and her partner had their plan. It wasn’t a scheme to be proud of, but life hadn’t dealt either of them a decent hand. They both vowed to live decent lives once they got established, Chet with his lady and their apothecary shop in Juarez, Patty with less firm plans.
She had her hopes. In a perfect world, she’d find Papa, then buy a Brownie camera and developing equipment. She’d follow him to his current dig, then set up a studio and museum to display photographs and artifacts to preserve the heritage of the Apaches and Navajos. Of course, he might have moved on to a different part of the country. What if he’d left the West?
What if she never found her father?
I can’t consider that.
She thought again about the money Chet had lost.
They should never have stopped in Plainview. That had been the ruin of everything. Her gullible partner had run into a man who knew his father, who knew a man who knew a man who knew of a crystal mountain in Mexico and needed money to dig. The gypsy friend who gave him the wagon had told him crystals had value above rubies. So off went his money and Patty’s, too. Gone. In the snap of a finger. Just like that. Poof.
All her plans now had to change.
Mildred Sweet may have abandoned her last living child, but she had left her with one piece of sage advice. “This is a man’s world, Patience. Find yourself a husband. Stay away from Irish dreamers and any fellow who looks at a mountain as something to tear into.” Apparently that went for husbands and business partners.
At least Chet had his mother to run to. She lived close to Lubbock, in Ropesville. Hopefully, he would read Patty’s note and would go on to his mother without causing any trouble.
With her chances for reaching El Paso and a possible rendezvous with her father slim to none, she accepted the fact that Lubbock was her fate, not El Paso.
She lay very still in her borrowed bed, thinking.
Between Tulsa and Lubbock, she’d discovered that good people were kind to younger folks.
This appeared to be the situation with Grant Kincaid. He wasn’t interested in Patty as a woman. He didn’t see her as one. He would fob her off on church ladies. Not good. Not good at all. Completely unacceptable.
When she’d seen him at the saloon, Patty had experienced something. She didn’t know quite what it was. Her daddy had taken care of her book learning, as well as everyday skills, but he’d never said a word about what it felt like to go stark-raving crazy over a fellow the first time a girl laid eyes on him.
Patty had started squirming in her chair even before Mr. Kincaid and the other gamblers had agreed to let Chet in on their game. Her heart started beating funny-like. Her woman place started throbbing.
Here in this bed, Patty recalled how she’d looked at him and how he’d looked at her in that saloon. She’d had her mending to keep her busy, yet that peculiar feeling in her gizzard never left. It was strange. Nice yet unsettling. It sure kept her all stirred up.
This feeling being new to her, she reckoned it had to do with that man and woman thing that kept her own mother in a tizzy. It was the tizzy that had turned Mildred Sweet into a scarlet woman and caused her to run off with that fast talker Lafayette Merkel.
Patty had never even had a swee
theart, much less a tizzy.
Before this night.
Even before Patty’s mother met Mr. Merkel, the Sweets never stayed put. They lived a nomadic life, never acquiring friends or possessions over and above Mama’s jewelry, as Mildred and Patty chased after the head of the Sweet household. Jethro Sweet pursued the life of a mining engineer, going from one ore mine to another, one season to the next, year after year.
“My mistake,” Mildred used to tell her daughter, “was marrying a dreamer who had Irish in his blood and wanderer in his heart. Always has to keep moving. Moving, moving, moving. You get in a tizzy for a man, Patty, you better hope he’s settled. Just look the other way if he’s footloose.”
“I will, Mama.”
Jethro Leonidas Sweet left Oklahoma to become chief engineer for a start-up copper mine near Silver City. The plan had been for his wife and daughter to follow as soon as he acquired housing, but that was the last his family had heard of him.
His wife turned furious once her money ran out. She decided he must have died, driving Mildred Sweet to desperation. When she received a Western Union telegram from the marshal in Silver City confirming a cave-in, but “no one by the name of Sweet is on the list of casualties,” that was it. She told her daughter, “He may not be on that list, but I know he’s dead in that mountain. I feel it in my bones, Patty. I have no way to support us.”
“I’ll go to work, Mama.”
“Doing what? No one would hire you.”
“Papa taught me to—”
“Get that out of your head. No one wants legal work out of a woman. This is a man’s world.” Mildred Sweet looked into the mirror of her dressing table, inspecting one side of her face, then the other. “I’ve found a man to support me, and I suggest you do the same, because Lafayette Merkel is not interested in supporting either of us. Lafayette and I have plans. We’re leaving Tulsa, forthwith.”
“You don’t need any Lafayette Merkel,” Patty pleaded. “Papa always said you could sell some of your jewelry if we got in a bind.”
Mama had a pretty mouth with full lips that she tinted with red rouge. When she got aggravated, her mouth kind of folded together like an accordion. This was one of those times. “Your papa said a lot of things. The first thing out of his mouth, whenever times got rough, was always, ‘Sell your jewelry, Mildred. Sell that jewelry!’” She started emptying the contents of her jewelry box into a snap purse. “Believe you me, I’m not selling anything.”