The Rustler

by Linda Lael Miller

  “He had meetings with a lady. She wore a big hat with pink feathers on it and rode in a carriage with six white horses pulling it.”

  Sarah drew back a chair and sank into it, breathless.

  “Are you sick, Aunt Sarah?” Owen asked, clearly frightened.

  “I’m f-fine,” Sarah muttered. She wouldn’t have to write that lie in the book to remember it.

  “Let’s wash up these dishes,” Doc told the boy, his voice a little too hearty. “Since your aunt Sarah went to all the trouble to cook it and all.”

  Owen nodded, but his eyes were still on Sarah. “I’ll be quiet,” he said. “If you have a headache—”

  Sarah longed to gather the child in her arms, but she didn’t dare. She’d weep if she did, and never let go of him again. “You don’t have to be quiet,” she told him softly.

  Doc put a hand on Owen’s shoulder and steered him in the direction of the kitchen. “I’ll wash and you dry,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHILE OWEN AND DOC WERE washing dishes, Sarah went upstairs, looked in on her father, who was sleeping soundly, then opened the door to the room across from her own. It contained a brass bed, a washstand and a bureau, and soft moonlight flowed in through the lace curtains.

  The mattress was bare, since no one had used the room in months, with a faded quilt folded at its foot. Briskly, Sarah fetched sheets from the top drawer of the bureau and made up a bed for Owen.

  The process was bittersweet. Tonight, her son would sleep in this room, dreaming, she hoped, little-boy dreams. But there was a disturbing truth in Wyatt and Doc’s teasing—young as he was, Owen was more man than child. He’d lived in hotel rooms by himself, and God knew what other places.

  She yearned to keep him, raise him openly as her son. She wouldn’t mind the scandal that would surely ensue, the extra expense, the inevitable work of bringing up a child. But she must not allow herself to think such thoughts, she knew, because Charles would come back and take him away again.

  Under the law, she had no rights. On his birth certificate, Marjory Langstreet was listed as his mother.

  Some of the starch went out of Sarah’s knees.

  She sat down on the edge of the freshly made bed, fighting back tears of hopelessness.

  She’d been so young and foolish—only seventeen and far from home—when she’d given birth to Owen, in an anonymous infirmary room, a decade before. Charles, fifteen years her senior and sophisticated, a friend of her father’s, had been her “protector,” met her at the train when she arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, taken her by carriage to the women’s college in the rolling green Pennsylvania countryside.

  Homesick, regarded as a bumpkin by the other pupils in residence, most of whom had been raised in cities and not crude frontier towns, she’d quickly become besotted with Charles. She’d studied hard at school, majoring in music, but on weekends, he often came to collect her in his elegant carriage. It was all innocent at first; he escorted her to museums, to concerts, to fine restaurants.

  And then he took advantage.

  He said college was a waste for a woman, and suggested she leave school so they could spend more time together. He’d set her up in a fancy hotel, persuaded her not to tell her father that she’d dropped all her classes.

  That was when the lying had begun. She’d written weekly letters to her parents, describing books she hadn’t read, lectures she hadn’t attended, field trips she hadn’t taken. Someone Charles knew in the college office mailed the missives, and forwarded the replies. Sarah returned the funds her father sent for tuition and textbooks, claiming she’d won a scholarship. Her grades were forged, with the help of Charles’s friend, and for a long, blissful time, the deception passed as truth.

  Sitting there in Owen’s moonlit room, Sarah blushed. Charles had been right earlier when he’d taunted her about enjoying his attentions in bed. Just sixteen, her body in full flower, she’d lived for his visits, reveled like some wild creature in his caresses.

  Even when she realized, one eventful day, that she was carrying a child, she hadn’t worried. Charles would be pleased. He would surely marry her, straight away.

  She was awaiting his visit, full of her news, when a grand woman in tailored clothes presented herself at the door of Sarah’s suite. She’d been tall, imperious, exuding angry confidence.

  “So this is where Charles is keeping his current mistress,” Marjory Langstreet had said, sweeping past a startled Sarah into the sumptuously furnished suite. “And how gracious of him to support you in such style.”

  Sarah had stared at the woman. “M-mistress?” she’d echoed stupidly.

  “Surely you understand,” Marjory had said, “that you are a kept woman? A bird in a gilded cage?”

  Sarah’s mouth had fallen open. This was surely some kind of cruel prank. Charles wasn’t married. He loved her—hadn’t he said so, over and over again? Hadn’t he given her jewelry, bought her trinkets and clothes?

  “Who are you?” she’d managed.

  Marjory ran a gloved hand along the keyboard of Sarah’s treasured piano. The sound was discordant, and bore no resemblance to music. From there, she proceeded to examine a painted porcelain lamp, a novel bound in Moroccan leather, a delicate Chinese fan with an ivory handle—all gifts from Charles.

  “You really don’t know?” she trilled, after several long moments. Then she’d turned, hands resting on her hips, and shattered Sarah’s world with a single sentence. “I’m Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third,” she said, the words slicing through Sarah with the stinging force of a sharp sword.

  Then, as now, Sarah had been unable to stand. She’d dropped into a chair, blind with confusion, pain and fear. Unconsciously, she’d rested a hand on her abdomen.

  “Pack your things, dear,” Mrs. Langstreet had said. “As of tomorrow morning, you won’t be living here any longer. A backstreet whore belongs, you see, on a backstreet. If Charles wants to continue this dalliance, that’s his business, but I won’t be footing the bill.”

  With that, she’d gone, leaving the suite door standing open to the hall beyond.

  Sarah had been too numb to move at first. She simply sat, waiting for Charles to come and say it was all a mistake. That she, Sarah, would be the only Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third.

  All day she waited.

  But he didn’t come.

  Sarah had finally closed the door, gone to bed and lain staring up at the ceiling throughout the very long night to come.

  In the morning, a tentative knock sent a surge of hope rushing through her. She rushed to the door, opened it to find, not a smiling Charles, with a credible explanation at the ready, but one of the hotel’s porters. The fellow stood in the corridor, clearly uncomfortable.

  He’d offered an anxious smile as two maids and another porter collected themselves behind him. “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving us,” he’d said. “Mrs. Langstreet asked that we help you gather your belongings. There’ll be a carriage waiting to take you to your new residence at ten o’clock.”

  Sarah had not protested.

  She’d simply watched, stricken, as her clothes were folded into trunks and boxes, her books taken from the shelves, her jewelry stuffed into valises Marjory Langstreet had evidently provided for the purpose.

  By noon, she’d been settled in a seedy rooming house, one door of her tiny room opening onto a rat-infested alley.

  And still there had been no word, no visit, from Charles.

  Sarah waited a week, then began pawning jewelry, a piece at a time, to buy food. Twice, she wrote long letters to her unsuspecting father, telling the shattering truth, but she’d never mailed them.

  She was too ashamed.

  Too heartbroken.

  Several times, when hunger forced her out into the narrow, filthy streets, she’d considered standing on the tracks when the trolley came. It would be over, that way.

  In the end, she couldn’t do that to the baby, or to herself.

 
; She finally sent a wire to her father, reading simply, I am in trouble, and listing her address at the boardinghouse.

  Within ten days, he’d arrived, bent on taking her home to Stone Creek. She’d told him everything but the name of the man who’d sired her child, and patently refused to return to Arizona Territory. As much as she yearned for her own room, the sound of her mother’s voice, the soothing touch of her hand, Sarah simply hadn’t been able to face the inevitable gossip and speculation.

  Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.

  She hadn’t seen Charles again until a week before Owen’s birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles’s lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.

  Sarah had had no choice but to comply.

  She’d long since sold the last of her jewelry, her rich clothes and the books. Even the Chinese fan. And she’d promised her clearly disenchanted father she would finish college, no matter what.

  So when her baby boy was born, she’d handed him over to Charles’s lawyer. The loss had been keen, brutal, as though she’d torn her still-beating heart from her bosom and handed that over, too.

  She’d survived, somehow, doggedly arising in the morning, doing what was at hand to do, enduring more than living. She’d worked hard at her lessons, gotten her degree in music, and returned to Stone Creek just in time to attend her mother’s funeral.

  Nancy Anne Tamlin had never known she had a grandchild, nor had anyone else in town, except for Ephriam, of course, and possibly his best friend, Doc Venable.

  Now, ten years later, miraculously, impossibly, that boy was right downstairs, in her own kitchen, helping with the dishes.

  “Sarah?”

  She looked up, startled, and saw Ephriam standing in the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew by the way he’d spoken her name that he was enjoying one of his brief, lucid intervals.

  “That boy I saw tonight. Is he—?”

  Sarah felt for the book of lies, nesting, as always, in her skirt pocket, clenched it through the fabric. She swallowed, then shook her head. “No, Papa. He’s just visiting.”

  “He looks like your mother’s people,” Ephriam said. “What’s his name?”

  “Owen,” Sarah allowed, after swallowing again. “He’s Charles Langstreet’s son. You remember Mr. Langstreet, don’t you?”

  “Never liked him,” her father replied. “Pompous jackass.”

  She saw a change in Ephriam’s bearing, something too subtle to describe, but there nonetheless.

  “Great Scot,” Ephriam gasped. “It was Langstreet, wasn’t it? He was the one who led you astray!”

  “Papa—”

  “And Owen is my grandson,” the old man persisted, sounding thunderstruck. Of all the times he could have recovered his faculties, it had to be now, tonight, when keeping the secret was more important than ever before.

  Sarah simply could not summon up another lie. She felt drained, enervated, as though she’d relived her affair with Charles, her sad, scandalous pregnancy, the birth itself, which had been torturous, and, still worse, watched as Charles’s lawyer carried her newborn son out of her room in the college infirmary. She’d been permitted to give him only one thing: his first name.

  And she’d never expected to see him again.

  “Yes,” she said weakly. “You’re right, Papa. But you mustn’t let on. Owen doesn’t know who I am. He calls me Aunt Sarah.”

  Ephriam pondered a while, silent and brooding. “I’d have killed Langstreet if I’d known,” he said. “I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me.”

  Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, summoned her will, and stood. Doc and Owen had probably finished washing the dishes by then, and they’d be wondering what was keeping her.

  She stood before her father, still looming in the darkened doorway, straightening the front of his long nightshirt as though it were one of the day coats he wore to the bank.

  “Our secret, Papa?” she asked.

  “There are too damn many secrets in this house.”

  “Papa—”

  “All right,” Ephriam said. “But I don’t like it. And I’m taking that boy fishing at the creek tomorrow, with or without your say-so.”

  Sarah’s eyes stung, and she smiled. “Fair enough,” she said.

  She walked her father back to his room, tucked him in like a child. Kissed his forehead. Still under the effects of the laudanum Doc had given him earlier, he dozed off immediately.

  When she descended to the kitchen, via the rear stairway, Doc and Owen were sitting at the pedestal table in the center of the room, playing cards. The pot was a pile of wooden matches.

  Interested, Sarah stood behind Owen’s chair and assessed his hand.

  “Five card stud,” Doc said. “Care to join us?”

  “I never play poker,” Sarah said. The little book in her skirt pocket seemed to pulse in protest.

  Doc merely chuckled.

  Sarah bent low and whispered in Owen’s ear. “Bet all your matchsticks. You’ve got a straight with ace high.”

  THERE WERE ONLY THREE HORSES in front of Jolene Bell’s Saloon, two in front of the Hell-bent, six lining the hitching rail at the Spit Bucket. Wyatt passed them by, making for the jailhouse.

  All was quiet there, too, so he closed the place up for the night and went around back to the barn, where he planned to stretch out in the hayloft. The weather was clear, and he’d be able to see the stars between the wide cracks in the roof.

  He was thinking about Sarah, and those blue eyes of hers, full of tragic mysteries and an almost formidable intelligence. There was something to her attachment to the boy Owen, though he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. A sort of anxious solicitude, carefully controlled. Her gaze had constantly strayed to the child, rested on him with a certain desperate hunger.

  Mulling over these things as he was, Wyatt almost fell over the dog lying in the path between the jailhouse and the barn. The critter whimpered, and Wyatt righted himself.

  “What the—?”

  The dog whimpered again. It was an ugly brute of a mutt, missing a chunk of one ear and so thin he could make out its ribs even in the relative darkness. Its tail had been lopped off square, close to the hind quarters, and a scab had formed over the wound.

  “Run along home,” Wyatt said.

  The dog started to rise, dropped heavily to the ground again.

  Muttering a swear word, Wyatt crouched for a closer look. “You sick, fella?”

  The animal emitted a soft, keening whine, almost like a plea.

  Wyatt’s heart sank. He couldn’t take care of his own horse, or even himself, but he couldn’t walk away from this dog, either. And about the last thing he needed was a goddamned dog.

  He felt the mutt’s sides for obvious injuries, and found none. The legs seemed sound, too. When the brute didn’t bite him, he sighed, lifted him up in both arms, and carried him into Rowdy’s tidy little house.

  He laid him on Pardner’s rug, as gently as he could, and struck a match to light one of the kerosene lamps.

  In the glow, the miserable specimen looked even uglier than he had in the dark. And there was dried blood all over his coat, some of which had transferred itself to the front of Wyatt’s borrowed white going-to-supper shirt.

  “If you were a woman,” Wyatt told the sorry-looking critter, “you’d have to wear a flour sack over your head every time you left the house.”

  The dog whined again, its moist brown eyes imploring Wyatt, though for what he did not know. Mercy, perhaps. The simple privilege of living.

  “No telling how bad you’re hurt, looking the way you do.” Resigned, Wyatt went into Rowdy and Lark’s fancy bathroom and ran some warm water into the tub. He went back to the kitchen, gathered up the dog again, and lugged him in for a
sudsing.

  The dog endured the ordeal with the last of his dignity, and as he soaped and rinsed the critter, and soaped and rinsed him again, Wyatt’s temper, subdued by two years in prison, flared inside him, a slowly spreading heat.

  Someone—and God help them when Wyatt found out who—had beaten the dog with either a buggy whip or a tree branch of similar circumference, leaving deep, bloody stripes in his brindled hide.

  Once he’d hoisted the dog out of the tub and dried him off with a fancy monogrammed towel—the only thing at hand to serve the purpose—Wyatt rummaged through cabinets until he found a tin of salve. He applied it lavishly to the dog’s wounds, and the poor, pitiful creature didn’t even try to lick the stuff off. He just huddled there on Lark’s formerly pristine bath mat, looking forlorn and waiting for another blow.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, boy,” Wyatt said, his voice catching raw in his throat. “You’ve fallen among friends.”

  The dog licked his face, tentatively, and then cowered again.

  Wyatt patted his head, then stood. “I reckon what you need now is something to eat and a decent night’s sleep. I’ll figure out what to do with you in the morning. Meanwhile, you’ll require a name. ‘Lonesome’ ought to suit.”

  Lonesome looked pleased. Got painfully to his four feet to follow Wyatt out of the bathroom and toward the kitchen.

  After searching the pantry shelves, Wyatt opened a can of condensed milk, emptied it into a bowl, and set it on the floor. Lonesome hesitated, then made short work of the milk.

  Next, he purloined a jar of venison stew, home-preserved, and gave that to the dog, too. At this rate, he’d owe his deputy salary to Lark for the groceries he was using up.

  Lonesome lapped up the stew, burped like a dry-throated cowboy swilling beer, and laved the toe of Wyatt’s right boot with his tongue.

  He’d planned on bedding down in the barn, but Lonesome didn’t appear to be up to walking even that far. Feeling like a squatter, Wyatt found some blankets, made himself a bed on the settee in the little parlor, with one for the dog beside it on the floor.

  Lonesome settled down to sleep, after circling the blankets for a spell, and Wyatt stretched out on the settee.