The Gunman's Bride

by Catherine Palmer

  “Maybe so. Maybe I’ll pay for my sins by having my neck stretched. But don’t ever think I was having a rip-roaring good time those six years without you.”

  “If it wasn’t fun, why did you do it?… No, wait!” She held up a hand. “I don’t want to hear anything about those evil men and their sinful ways.”

  “Listen here, Miss Priss, I am one of those evil men, and you might as well accept it. But you ought to know that none of those fellows is bad through and through. And neither am I.”

  “Are you trying to tell me Jesse James wasn’t wicked?”

  “Jesse was bad, but he had a good side, too. His brother, Frank, ran with us and he’s the best man I ever met. Frank set me on the right track after Bob Ford killed Jesse. Make a life for yourself like other folk, he told me. Get a home, a wife, children. Find a place to live where you don’t have to worry about getting a ball in the back when you go out for firewood. That’s the life he’s been building ever since the jury let him off last August.”

  Rosie had read in the newspaper about the long, sensational trial. The courthouse had been jammed with people, all shocked to learn that Jesse James’s brother had been found not guilty of the train robbery murder of Frank McMillan.

  “You think the James gang is evil and the law is perfect,” Bart was saying. “Did you know the Pinkerton detective agency set a bomb in the house of Jesse and Frank’s mother? That poor lady had to have her arm amputated.”

  This was news Rosie hadn’t heard, but she wasn’t going to drop the argument. “I suppose you can find something good to say about Robert Ford.”

  “Bob Ford doesn’t have a moral bone in his body,” Bart said. “But one time in Arkansas, I was trapped at a train depot fifteen yards away from my horse. The law was everywhere. Jesse called the boys to head out and leave me to my fate. But Ford pulled his six-shooter and held off the posse while I ran to my horse. Nary a bullet touched my hide. Bob Ford saved my life, Rosie.

  I reckon the good Lord is the only one who can know a person’s heart.”

  She could hardly argue with that. Yet how could she trust a man who had done so much wrong?

  “So, Rosie-girl,” Bart said. “What do you say to putting the past behind us? Might be something good up ahead.”

  With Bart Kingsley in the picture, it might be something bad, she thought.

  “Just for today,” she said finally. “Just for today we’ll let bygones be bygones.”

  Chapter Ten

  Bart spent the morning walking the streets of Springer with Rosie. She had brought four crisp one-dollar bills to buy fabric to make curtains for Mr. Kilgore’s school.

  With his cane and wicker basket in tow, Bart accompanied Rosie as she went from one dry goods store to another. It wasn’t enough to buy just any old cloth. Rosie wanted something special, something that would cheer up the small room and bring life into the summer months. It had to be a fabric that would block some of winter’s chill but also let in spring’s sunshine.

  Bart had started the morning feeling like a citified dude, but by the time he had stared at hundreds of bolts of gingham, silk, taffeta, cotton, muslin and velvet in every color of the rainbow, he was about ready to take off like a wild bronco. His stiff white collar seemed to get tighter and tighter around his neck. The fancy coat he had traded for began to have the weight of a saddle on his shoulders. Even the bullet wound in his side began to hurt.

  He was debating the urge to gallop outside for a breath of fresh air when Rosie suddenly announced, “This is just what I’ve been looking for! Don’t you agree, Bart?”

  “It’s mighty nice.” Despite his glazed eyes and itchy feet, it occurred to Bart that he was actually enjoying the straight life. Especially with Rosie at his side.

  “Just look at this pattern!” she exclaimed. “Have you ever seen such lush florals?”

  Bart wasn’t sure what florals were, but he nodded. “Those are the lushest florals I’ve ever seen.”

  “Huge pink cabbage roses,” she exclaimed. “Violets. Lilacs. Oh, it’ll be just like bringing the outdoors inside!”

  While Bart watched Rosie turn the fabric this way and that, it came to him that being with her like this had made his heart feel downright warm. Maybe he didn’t know much about cloth and curtains. Maybe he’d never met a man who actually gave a woman’s ideas much weight. Maybe shopping and chitchat were foreign to him. But one thing was clear: Bart Kingsley was enjoying the straight life.

  “Would you please hold this up to the window for me, Bart?” Rosie was asking. “I’d like to see how the light comes through it.”

  “Happy to oblige,” he said, and he carried the bolt of flowery cloth to the front of the store. He made a sort of curtain rod out of his arm, and draped the fabric over it so that a sunbeam shot straight through the weave.

  “Oh, it looks so much thinner now.” Disappointment tinged her voice. “I probably should line every curtain, but I don’t have enough money to buy twice the fabric.”

  Bart would have given Rosie every dime he owned to buy lining for her curtains. The only trouble was, he had churned most of his money into his homestead, having bought a team of horses, a wagon, a plow and a collection of tools that already seemed too few and inadequate for the job that lay ahead.

  “Didn’t you say you were going to ruffle up the cloth?” he asked, searching for something that might bring the smile back to her lips. With his arm still outstretched, he began to a gather the rose-strewn fabric along it. “How’s this, darlin’? See, the sun won’t come through near so well now.”

  Rosie studied the fabric for a moment before giving a big sigh. “Oh, Bart.”

  “Don’t fret so, Rosie-girl. Now, you just go ahead and buy this cloth you’ve set your sights on. The minute I get my paycheck next Friday, I’ll give you enough money to buy all the linings you need. Tell Mr. Puckett how many yards you want, and I’ll put it right in this basket I brought. Then we’ll go get us some lunch. How does that sound?”

  Rosie’s face broke into a brilliant smile. “Thank you, Bart,” she said softly. “That sounds just fine.”

  Leaving the mercantile with Rosie and an armful of fabric, Bart stopped at the depot livery stable to rent a wagon pulled by an old mare. At the nearest restaurant, he bought a canteen of fresh lemonade, a block of ice and some vanilla ice cream.

  “Mrs. Jensen would have kittens if she knew we didn’t have a chaperone,” Rosie remarked as they headed toward the mountains.

  “We’re married folk,” Bart pointed out as he took her hand. “Don’t be scared, Rosie-girl. I’m not going to take advantage of you. A gentleman would never do such a thing.”

  “Even with his own wife?” she asked.

  “A gentleman wouldn’t treat any woman roughly,” he said. “Especially his wife.”

  Before he could get the words out of his mouth, she was clearing her throat. “Oh, did I mention that yellow clapboard house on Second Street?” she asked quickly. “It’s small. Just the right size for a single lady.”

  Bart kept his focus on the blue-gray mountains and the sapphire sky behind them. Resting his elbows on his knees, he let the mare set her own pace along the rutted track.

  “The fence needs a coat of whitewash,” Rosie was saying. “I’ll plant flowers along it. In the back, I want to dig a vegetable garden. With school lessons to prepare, I won’t have much time to tend a garden, but I can manage carrots and peas. The dining room has a small cut-glass chandelier. I know it sounds like a costly place, but I checked the price with the brokers. Osfield and Adams are offering it, and with what Mr. Osfield told me, I do believe I can afford to buy it once I’ve settled into my job.”

  Rosie paused again. “Don’t you think it sounds like a good house, Bart?”

  He gave a small shrug. “Sounds dandy. For a town house.”

  “The parlor is lovely. You should see the wallpaper.”

  “Floral, I’d guess.” Bart settled his hat down low on his brow.

>   He didn’t much like the trend of Rosie’s talk, but he wasn’t sure what to say. He’d been pondering the state of the small soddy he had built on his homestead—and how very far that damp hole in the ground was from a yellow clapboard house with a white picket fence. The wood plank walls were layered against bare dirt. There would be no wallpaper, no parlor, no roses and tulips. This was a half-buried one-room shelter, and no woman who had her heart set on a town home could ever be happy in it.

  “I’d love lace curtains in the bedroom windows,” she sighed as Bart steered the wagon toward a clearing beside a stream.

  In a soddy, he thought, lace curtains wouldn’t last a week. His heart weighed like a millstone when he set the wagon’s brake and jumped down into the ankle-high green grass. His palms nearly spanned Rosie’s waist as he lifted her up and set her feet in the grass.

  “The sky is so blue,” she murmured. “Like a big bowl over the mountains. I love the territory, don’t you? Oh, look, Bart! A jackrabbit!”

  Lifting her skirts, Rosie scampered toward the stream where a large jackrabbit had frozen in surprise, its long ears upright. As the froth of blue silks swished toward it, the jackrabbit took flight, hopping along the streambed, then vanishing around a bend.

  “How silly!” She laughed, grabbing her bonnet and gasping for breath. “Did you just see those ears?”

  To tell the truth, Bart hadn’t been watching the jackrabbit or its ears. My, what a bustle could do for a woman! He could imagine his arms around that narrow waist…the scent of her neck…the brush of her hair against his cheek…

  “He went over there by that cottonwood,” Rosie was saying as she approached the wagon. “I don’t see how anyone can take jackrabbits seriously. If they were eating your crops…well, then, I suppose…Bart…Bart?”

  He started. “What?” He rubbed a palm across the back of his neck. “We ought to eat that ice cream before it melts.”

  “Hand me the tablecloth and I’ll put it under the cottonwood. Maybe we’ll get another look at our jackrabbit.”

  “Tablecloth?” He vainly searched the back of the wagon, knowing full well there wasn’t one.

  “We’ll use this old saddle blanket.” She spread it over the grass and began setting out Bart’s picnic—sandwiches made with fresh bread and roast beef, boiled eggs and a sack of Huffman’s candies. “Cream candies,” he clarified proudly.

  “Oh, I love cream candies.”

  “I know.” He hunkered down beside her on the blanket and hooked off his boots. “A man doesn’t forget things like that about his girl. Do you still like pecan pie?”

  “You didn’t!” she gasped, turning to him with sparkling eyes.

  “I sure did. Finest pecan pie you ever sank a tooth in.”

  He took out a covered plate and lifted the lid to reveal a golden crusted pie filled with molasses custard and layers of nuts.

  Rosie sighed. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Sweets to the sweet.” He couldn’t remember where that phrase came from, but he knew it was in one of the books Rosie had read to him by their stream. This gurgling New Mexico brook with its gray rocks and grassy slopes was nothing like their secluded glade in Missouri. But Bart was hoping that Rosie might begin to feel a little softer toward him in such a place.

  “You’re the sweet one, Bart Kingsley,” she said. “This is just how you used to be—full of surprises for me, thinking of kind words to say, doing such gentle things.”

  “You always brought out my good side.”

  “Sometimes I think you invented all that about being an outlaw. Here you are with your fancy duds and your cane and the pecan pie, yet I’m supposed to believe you’re a train robber?”

  He toyed with his sandwich for a moment. “Maybe you could just forget about that, Rosie-girl. Pretend I did make it up. It wouldn’t bother me if you put my past aside.”

  “But I can’t put aside the part of the past I do remember.”

  He shifted on the blanket before replying, “Did you ever think there might have been a good reason why I went off and left you with your pappy there in Kansas City?”

  She set her sandwich on the plate. “I can’t think of a single good reason for a man to run off from his bride of two weeks. Besides, you left a note that spelled out your reasons. You said we’d been playing a child’s game and you hadn’t ever loved me—”

  “Stop!” He caught her hands. “I did write that note, but not a word of it was true. Not a word, you hear?”

  “Why did you write it, then? A person doesn’t just write a letter full of lies.”

  “He does if he has to.”

  “You didn’t have to do such a cruel thing! People were never able to cow you, Bart, no matter how they taunted. Don’t sit there and tell me someone forced you to write those awful words!”

  “No one forced me,” he said more gently. “But I had to write the letter all the same. I had to do it for you.”

  “Why? You nearly killed me with that letter.”

  “I had to set you free to live a better life than the one I could give. Don’t you see that? I didn’t have a barrel of shucks. You deserved a better life and a better man than I thought I could ever be to you.”

  “A man like Dr. Lowell? You ran off and left me to marry someone like him?” Tears filled her brown eyes.

  “You were always kind to me. You believed in me and you treated me right. So you abandoned me to a father who didn’t give a hoot about who I was and what I wanted in life? You left me to my pappy, who forced me to accept the hand of a man I didn’t love, a man who expected me to act like somebody I could never be? Was that better than a barrel of shucks, Bart?”

  With a groan of dismay, he drew Rosie close and wrapped his arms around her. “I didn’t know, darlin’. I didn’t know it would turn out that way. If I could live my life over again, I’d make everything better for you. Please believe me.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He kissed away the tears on her cheeks. “Aw, Rosie, after I left your little room in Raton, I missed you so much I could hardly stand it.”

  “You really thought about me?” As she relaxed against him, he loosened the pins in her hair and released the mass of chestnut waves. Toying with her hair, running his fingers through the strands, he shuddered with the ache of yearning.

  “Darlin’, you don’t know the hold you have over me,” he murmured, bending to kiss her lips. And again. “I could kiss you all day.”

  “Me, too,” she admitted as she traced his jaw line with her fingertips.

  “When we were kids,” he told her in a low voice, “I rushed through my work just to be with you. So I rode over the mountains searching for you, expecting to find my Rosie-girl with her sweet brown braids and her pretty ankles. I sure didn’t expect to find a woman with her own dreams and her own mind, a woman with twice the power over me that the little girl had.”

  “I don’t have any power over you,” Rosie protested. “The very idea! I’ve never had an ounce of power to my name.”

  “Right at this moment, honey, you could knock me over with a breath of air.”

  “Oh, really?” Laughing lightly, she blew against his cheek.

  “I’m a goner,” he cried, falling onto his back. As she giggled, he looked up—straight into the double barrel of a shotgun.

  “Don’t move,” the intruder barked.

  Eyes veiled, Bart assessed the man even as his own empty hand formed the shape of his missing six-shooter. Wearing a faded brown felt hat darkened around the crown with sweat, the fellow had a mouth full of teeth stained by chewing tobacco.

  “Sorry to spoil y’all’s little picnic,” he said, prodding Bart to his feet. “I rode my horse after your wagon all the way from Springer to get a look at your pocketbook. I reckoned anybody dressed like a city dandy oughta have a wad, huh?”

  Bart glanced over his shoulder to find Rosie watching in horror as the man edged him toward an aspen tree by the stream.

  “Then I come
upon this pretty little picture here,” the stranger continued, “and I decide I’ll get me two prizes fer the price of one. Ain’t nothing’ can stir a man’s blood like the sight of a pretty woman.”

  At his words, Rosie clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “Get yer back up against that tree, lover boy,” the man ordered. “I’m gonna tie you up so you can watch the action.”

  “Bart!” Rosie cried out.

  At her shriek, the stranger turned his head for a split second. Bart slammed his fist into the man’s jaw. The intruder staggered backward, his shotgun firing into the air.

  Rosie screamed again. Bart hammered the man with another blow to the chin. Scrambling to her feet, Rosie dashed across the clearing to the wagon. As she climbed into the back, Bart picked the man up by his coat and slammed his head against the tree. The stranger dropped the gun, and Bart kicked it away.

  “You want action?” Bart growled, throwing a thunderous punch into the man’s midsection. “I’ll teach you to talk about a woman like that.” He rammed his fist into the man’s mouth. “Talk now, you good-for-nothing thief!”

  Spitting out teeth, the stranger held up an arm to ward off the blows. “Let me go. I didn’t mean nothin’!”

  “I’ve shot men for less, you yellow-bellied little skunk.”

  “Don’t shoot me! I’ll leave! I swear it.”

  Bart lifted the man off his feet and threw him across the saddle of his horse. As the air whooshed out of his lungs, Bart grabbed the shotgun and slammed the stock into the back of his skull. Instantly limp, the man hung over his horse, blood dripping from his mouth.

  Using the rope with which the man had planned to tie him to the tree, Bart bound his assailant.

  “Get out of here now. Shee-hah!” he shouted, giving the nag a slap on the flank. As the horse skittered out of the clearing, Bart stood watching with his hands balanced lightly on his hips. Even though his chest rose and fell with the effort he had expended, he felt no pain in the hands that had battered the thief. He felt nothing but the raw male power that had been a daily part of his life for so many years.