The Rustler

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Table scraps ought to do,” Wyatt said. “And he likes some canned milk, now and then, if you have it.”

  “Do we have canned milk?” Owen demanded of Sarah, his voice urgent.

  She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “His name is Lonesome.”

  Wyatt stood pondering on why she’d held herself back from touching the boy, when it was plain that she wanted to so badly.

  With Owen getting in the way a lot, Wyatt left the wheelbarrow on the sidewalk and carried Lonesome into the house. Sarah hurried to fetch a quilt from upstairs, and made a bed for him, right in the kitchen, precisely where Wyatt would have put him—next to the stove.

  “Well, now,” Ephriam Tamlin said, coming through the doorway to the dining room, “what do we have here?”

  “A dog!” Owen crowed. He was on his knees next to Lonesome, pouring milk from a can into a dish that was probably too pretty for the purpose.

  Ephriam laughed heartily.

  Deftly, Sarah replaced the china bowl with an old pie tin. She looked happy, with the boy and the dog and her father there. In fact, she might have been a different person from the matter-of-fact, briskly efficient woman she was at the bank.

  Wyatt was confounded by the things he felt, watching her bustle around that kitchen, making coffee, putting the laudanum and salve he gave her on a handy shelf, planning supper.

  He missed his ma and the homeplace. They’d kept a dog when he was a youngster, and Ma had let it live in the house, sleep on an old blanket near the stove. Back then, he’d been part of a real family.

  “I reckon I’d better go,” he said, thinking nobody would hear him in all the hubbub.

  But Sarah did hear, though he’d spoken softly. She paused and looked at him with wide, knowing eyes. “Won’t you stay for supper?” she asked.

  “Another time,” Wyatt said. And then, finding himself unable to bid the dog farewell, he turned and headed for the back door. Let himself out.

  He knew looking back wasn’t smart, but he did it anyway.

  Sarah was standing on the small porch off the kitchen, watching him go.

  SUPPER WAS OVER, and Sarah had assigned her father the task of heating water so Owen could take a bath. Owen had protested that he was “clean enough,” and anyhow he wanted to sleep on the quilt with Lonesome that night, so he’d just get dirty again.

  Sarah replied that he wasn’t sleeping with Lonesome, but if he agreed to the bath, she’d let him spend the night in the spare room in back of the kitchen. That way, he’d be close by if the dog needed him.

  Owen had agreed, none too graciously, and Sarah had gone out for a walk, so the bath could be endured in private.

  Sarah often walked at night, and she had an accustomed route—down to the schoolhouse, around past Doc Venable’s, then home.

  Tonight, she took Main Street. The saloons were swelling with gaslight, bawdy music and noise, as if their very walls might burst. Horses lined every hitching rail, and there were lights burning in the jailhouse, too.

  Sarah headed straight for it, lifting her skirts to keep them out of the horse manure littering the street. She’d been purposeful enough—until she reached the open doorway of Rowdy’s office. Then she hesitated on the sidewalk.

  Would Wyatt think her forward for paying an unexpected call on him, after dark?

  He’d kissed her twice that day.

  What if he got the impression that she wanted him to do it again?

  Her face burned in the warm darkness. She was about to turn and hurry away when he came to the door and caught her standing there, like a fool.

  He grinned, and all of Stone Creek went on the tilt for just a moment.

  “Evening, Sarah,” he said.

  “Owen is taking a bath,” she explained, and then felt all the more idiotic for making such an inane remark. It wasn’t as if the town deputy had to be informed of people’s personal hygiene habits, after all.

  “Come in, if you think it’s proper,” Wyatt drawled. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves, and his forearms were sun-browned and muscular.

  Sarah had never actually been inside the jailhouse. She told herself it was mere curiosity that sent her over that threshold.

  Wyatt stepped back so she could pass, but not far enough that they could avoid brushing against each other.

  “How’s Lonesome?” he asked.

  “He’s fine,” Sarah said, looking around. She saw a desk, chairs, an old potbellied stove, and a single cell with rusted bars and two cots inside, but, thankfully, no prisoner. “I gave him milk toast for supper, and more laudanum, like Doc said, and he was sleeping when I left.”

  “Good,” Wyatt said, watching her.

  Sarah approached the cell, saw the stockpile of guns and rifles inside. Turned to face Wyatt and found him standing directly behind her, but at a decent distance.

  “Kitty told you she’d found her children?” she asked, realizing only as she spoke the words that she’d come here to say them. She and Maddie and Lark had written letters into the wee-small hours, searching for Kitty’s daughters. Had Kitty known where they were the whole time?

  Wyatt looked blank for a moment, then remembered their exchange in Doc’s office, while he was upstairs getting the coffee. “Yes,” he said. “She had a letter from some lawyer. They were living someplace in Illinois, I think. Why?”

  Sarah sighed, looked away from his face, looked back. “I’d have to speak with Kitty before I answered that,” she said. Five years ago, in Kansas City, Kitty had been willing to marry a stranger to recover her children. She’d apparently known exactly where to find them. Yet when she’d roused Sarah and the others to such a state of righteous indignation that they’d begun to search for little Leona and Davina, through the mails and every other means they could think of, she’d called a halt to it. Had something happened to change her mind, in the years and places between Kansas City and Stone Creek? Or did Kitty’s daughters actually exist at all? Perhaps it had just been a story, a ploy for sympathy, and nothing more.

  It was all too confusing. And Sarah felt stung, even betrayed. She lived in the figurative glass house and certainly couldn’t afford to throw stones at Kitty for lying, but the discovery hurt, just the same.

  Wyatt pulled a chair into the center of the room and gently lowered Sarah into it. “Don’t they get heavy? All those secrets you’re carrying around, I mean?” he asked quietly, his face close to hers.

  “I don’t have any secrets,” Sarah said.

  Wyatt straightened, took a seat behind the desk. “Langstreet sure took off in a hurry,” he said, after a few moments had passed. “It’s almost as if he came here meaning to leave the boy with you.”

  Sarah’s throat hurt. She swallowed, but it didn’t help, and her eyes suddenly burned. Wyatt, she knew, was a hairsbreadth from guessing that Owen was her child, and she wished she could tell him he was right. It would be like laying down a heavy burden, one she’d been carrying for too long.

  “I’m sure he didn’t expect to be called away so suddenly,” she said lamely.

  “Or so he claimed,” Wyatt replied, kicking his boots up onto the desk top and crossing them at the ankles.

  Sarah didn’t answer.

  “I’ve watched you with Owen, Sarah,” Wyatt went on. “Sometimes, you reach out to touch him, then draw your hand back instead. He’s more to you than the child of a family friend.”

  Sarah thrust herself to her feet. “I shouldn’t have come here,” she said, more to herself than Wyatt. “It’s getting late, and I have to open the bank in the morning—”

  Wyatt rose, too. “I’ll walk you home,” he said.

  She shook her head, rattled. “I’ve lived in Stone Creek for most of my life,” she told him. “I can get home just fine on my own.”

  He took her arm, at the elbow. “There are some pretty rowdy strangers in town right now,” he said. “They’ve been swilling whiskey all day and, with or without guns, they’re not fit company for a lady. And do you real
ly think it’s a good idea to open the bank while they’re still around?”

  Sarah knew Wyatt was going to walk her home, whether she wanted him to or not. So she resigned herself to that much, though she did jerk her elbow out of his hand. “The Stockman’s Bank is our family business,” she said. “Of course I have to open it tomorrow morning, right on time.”

  They’d gained the sidewalk, and Wyatt walked on the outside, shortening his stride a little so she could keep up, his eyes roving up and down the street, one side and then the other, as they went.

  “Will your father be there?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “He hasn’t been well lately.”

  “He seems fine to me,” Wyatt observed. “At first, I thought he might be a little touched in the head, but he looked well enough when we brought Lonesome to your place after we left Doc’s.”

  “My father,” Sarah said sharply, “is not ‘touched in the head!’”

  Two cowboys burst suddenly through the swinging doors of Jolene Bell’s Saloon, just ahead, and Wyatt shoved Sarah behind him so quickly that she stumbled and had to catch her balance.

  She watched, her heart seizing in her chest, as he laid a hand on the butt of his pistol.

  One of the cowboys shoved the other into a horse trough, and there was a lot of shouting and swearing, plus some splashing.

  Wyatt let go of the pistol butt. Walked on past the cowboys, with a chuckle, pulling Sarah along behind him, double-time.

  “Surely,” Sarah huffed, in a whisper, still trying to breathe properly, “you don’t think I’ve never encountered drunken cowboys before!”

  “I think,” Wyatt answered calmly, “that you don’t have the good sense to know when you ought to be careful.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Sarah tried to pull free, but he held fast to her arm and kept walking. “I happen to have a lot of sense!”

  “Do you?” Wyatt retorted.

  Sarah knew he was thinking of the way she’d welcomed those men into the bank that morning. Well, it was just good business. “I have a college education, Wyatt Yarbro. I run a bank, single-handedly—”

  He stopped so suddenly that she collided with him.

  “Single-handedly?” he asked.

  “Well, I mean, I help my father, of course—”

  “Sarah.”

  She looked around frantically, was relieved to see that there was no one nearby to overhear their conversation.

  Wyatt gripped her shoulders, firmly but gently, too. “Owen told me his father came to Stone Creek to take the bank away from you. Not from your father. From you.”

  “Owen is a child, he—”

  “Sarah, stop. Tell me the truth, or don’t talk to me at all!”

  Sarah pressed her lips together. She knew by the look in Wyatt’s eyes that he wanted to shake her, but he didn’t. She felt delicate in his hands, like something precious and breakable.

  “Sarah,” Wyatt said again.

  “You mustn’t tell anyone,” Sarah whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “Not Rowdy, and certainly not Sam O’Ballivan.” She paused, drew a shaky breath, let it out again. “Do you promise?”

  “Depends,” Wyatt said, “on just what sort of secret this turns out to be.”

  “M-my father suffers from spells. Times when he gets mixed up, can’t remember things. So I do his work for him, whenever I can. If Charles and the other stockholders find out—well…we could lose everything—”

  Wyatt sighed again. “Sarah, Langstreet suspects something. That’s why he came to Stone Creek, though the boy plays some part in it, too. You’re on borrowed time until he gets back.”

  Sarah let her forehead rest against Wyatt’s strong chest.

  He held her, brushed a light kiss onto her temple.

  “Will you help me?” she asked softly.

  His arms tightened around her. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WILL YOU HELP ME?

  Wyatt wondered how long it had been since Sarah Tamlin had uttered those words—to anybody. That she’d said them to him was a peculiar honor, considering the extent of her pride.

  He’d said yes.

  Now, he thought, as he held her front gate open so she could pass ahead of him, all he had to do was figure out how he’d go about keeping his word.

  As they’d walked to her house she’d confessed that she’d made some bad loans and replaced the funds with her own and her father’s money. While that wasn’t illegal, at least as far as Wyatt knew, she and Ephriam could end up as paupers if Langstreet and the other stockholders caught on. The first thing they’d do, once they learned about Ephriam’s “spells,” would be to show him the road. With no salary coming in things would get tight around the Tamlin place, money-wise, and fast.

  On the front porch, Sarah looked up at Wyatt with bleak vulnerability in her eyes—blue as bruises, they were—and he thought he saw the glimmer of tears. “You won’t tell anyone?” she asked very softly. “About Papa, I mean? And me running the bank? And the loans?”

  Wyatt sighed, holding his hat in one hand. “I can’t promise you that, Sarah,” he said. She hadn’t done anything wrong, to his way of thinking, but a lot of folks had entrusted her with what savings they could scrape together and lay by against hard times. “I need to think it over.”

  She started to speak, stopped herself, nodded once.

  He touched the smooth skin of her cheek with the backs of his fingers. She felt as soft as condensed moonlight. “I meant it when I said I’d stand by you,” he told her. “For now, for tonight, that has to be good enough.”

  She sniffled, nodded again. “Good night, Wyatt.”

  He leaned down, brushed his mouth against hers. “Good night,” he replied.

  Behind them, toward the center of town, shots erupted. Six of them, rapid-fire.

  “Damn!” Wyatt cursed, turning from Sarah, starting for the steps.

  She caught hold of his arm, and he was surprised by the strength of her grip. She was a small woman, delicately made, but her fingers felt steely against his flesh.

  Don’t go, her eyes said.

  Gently, Wyatt patted her hand and then removed it from his arm. He turned, sprinted down the walk, and vaulted over the gate, not wanting to spare the time to open it.

  More shots splintered the night.

  As he ran for Main Street, Wyatt told himself it was just a few of the boys, whooping it up on payday, and he wouldn’t have to shoot anybody, or get shot himself, but all the while he knew he was joshing himself.

  There’d been a gunfight, directly in front of Jolene Bell’s, and three men lay in the street, sprawled on their backs and bleeding, their arms flung out wide from their sides. The smell of gun smoke still tainted the air, though he figured the battle must have been over, because a dozen other men were riding out at top speed, and ordinary folks had begun to gather on the sidewalks.

  Keeping the .45 at the ready in his right hand, Wyatt scanned the crowd, reached the first victim, crouched to put a hand to the pulse at the base of his throat, though he could see the man had been hit square in the center of the forehead. His eyes were wide-open, staring in affronted surprise at the starry sky.

  There was no heartbeat.

  Using two fingers on his left hand, Wyatt closed the man’s eyes.

  Doc Venable elbowed his way through from the sidewalk as Wyatt squatted beside the second man. Carl Justice gazed up at him, blood gurgling, a crimson fountain, through a wound in his throat. He was going to drown in the stuff.

  “Doc!” Wyatt growled, knowing full well that there was no saving Carl.

  Venable knelt opposite Wyatt, fumbling with his medical bag. “Turn him onto his side,” he said.

  Wyatt did as he was told. How old was Carl, anyway? Seventeen? Twenty? Whatever age he was, he wasn’t going to get any older, and sorrow ambushed Wyatt, surging up from somewhere in his middle. Carl was a rustler for sure, and he was probably guilty of other crimes,
too, but he was hardly more than a kid. He might have turned around, if he’d gotten the choice.

  “That third fella is a goner,” Doc said, when Wyatt moved to rise, pumping something into a syringe and looking for a place on Carl’s blood-drenched body to stick the needle. “No need to bother with him.”

  “What is that?” Wyatt asked, momentarily light-headed. Blood didn’t bother him, but even the sight of a hypodermic needle made him woozy.

  “Pure morphine,” Doc answered, in a gruff whisper. “There’s no bringing this boy back, but it’ll take him three or four minutes to die, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Carl gave a strangled cry, and his blood wet the thighs of Doc Venable’s pants. When the kid gave a violent shudder and went still, Wyatt got to his feet, surveyed the gathering on the sidewalk.

  Folks were keeping to the shadows.

  “Who shot these men?” he asked.

  Nobody spoke, and nobody moved.

  Wyatt waited, staring into every pair of eyes he could catch.

  Finally, Kitty Steel stepped down off the sidewalk and approached.

  “They shot each other,” she said.

  “I took their guns,” Wyatt said. “How did they happen to be armed?”

  “A man can always get a gun,” Kitty sighed, looking glumly down at the dead men at her feet. “They were arguing over a hand of cards. It got out of hand. They borrowed what pistols they could from the regulars in the saloon and came out here to settle up.”

  Wyatt shoved a hand through his hair. He’d lost his hat, somewhere between Sarah’s place and here. In the morning, he’d saddle Sugarfoot and ride out after the others. Chasing after a dozen men in the dark would be futile—best he could hope for was a bullet fired from behind a rock or a Joshua tree.

  “Help me with these bodies,” Doc Venable ordered, addressing the gaping spectators on the sidewalk. “We’ll lay them out in my office, bury ’em proper tomorrow.”

  A few men shuffled forward, hesitant and shamefaced.

  Wyatt crouched beside Carl again. “Is he dead?”

  Doc nodded. “Facing his maker,” he said.

  Bile scalded the back of Wyatt’s throat. Because he’d ridden with Carl, though they certainly hadn’t been friends, he hoisted the slight, inert form off the ground, draped it over one shoulder, and started for Doc’s.