The Rustler

by Linda Lael Miller

  “You can move your gear in tonight, if you’d like, and start work tomorrow morning. There’ll be coffee and hot grub in the bunkhouse at five-thirty.”

  Wyatt nodded, figuring Sam O’Ballivan had probably said more words in the last twenty minutes than in the better part of a year, if he was right in his assessment of the man’s character. “What I rightfully own,” Wyatt told Sam, “is in my saddlebags. I’ll bring it inside and ride out for a look at the herd, if you don’t object.”

  Sam nodded, the matter settled in his mind. He might have been pleased that Wyatt meant to start work immediately, but it was hard to tell. Sam offered to advance a month’s wages if Wyatt could use it.

  Wyatt refused. He still had most of the money Rowdy had given him, and that chafed at him plenty. What with the mortgage, he owed enough.

  Sam went to the doorway, stood in a shaft of sunlight peppered with fine golden dust. “You might have a little trouble with the hands,” he said. “They’re young, like I said, and most of them are knotheads.”

  Kids, Wyatt thought. They were the least of his worries.

  Sam took his leave, saying he had paperwork to do back at the main house.

  Wyatt brought in his saddlebags and put his few belongings in likely places, and they were so few that they hardly changed the look of the place at all. He found a tin of peaches on the shelf, opened it with his pocket-knife, and drank the juice before spearing the sweet slices of fruit and devouring them.

  Thus restored, he went back outside, mounted Sugarfoot, and rode toward the herd, with his hopes high and that feeling of impending disaster still nettling the pit of his stomach.

  WHEN THOMAS RUSHED IN after meeting the morning train, as he always did, Sarah was briefly alarmed, certain he was about to tell her that Charles had returned. With her father so ill, she’d have no hope of convincing him things were fine at the bank, and worse, seeing that Owen had become attached to her and Ephriam, he might take him away immediately. Or send the boy back East alone, while he stayed to destroy Sarah’s means of livelihood.

  Of course it wasn’t the only means. She could marry Wyatt, take in boarders—or fill Kitty’s place at the Spit Bucket Saloon.

  A shiver went through her.

  “Rowdy and Sam are back,” Thomas announced, instead. He looked so profoundly relieved that Sarah forgot her worrisome prospects and stared at him. “Mother says we could have been murdered in our beds, with a criminal in charge of the town.”

  Sarah bristled immediately. “A criminal?” she repeated. “Are you referring to Wyatt Yarbro?”

  Thomas seemed taken aback by her reaction. Maybe he’d expected her to agree—and earlier, before she’d gotten to know Wyatt, she would have. “Well,” he said nervously, mopping his broad forehead with an oversize handkerchief, “he freely admits that he used to rob trains. Mother said if he’d gone forward at the altar call, when Brother Hickey was here, she’d take a more charitable view of his character.”

  Thomas’s mother, one of those who went forward for a new allotment of salvation every year and kept strict tabs of those who didn’t, had probably never taken a charitable view of anyone.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Sarah said. “People change, Thomas. Rowdy used to be a wanted man, and everyone trusts him.”

  Before Thomas could reply to that, Owen burst through the door behind him, nearly startling the poor teller right into next week. He waved two books with yellow covers over his head.

  “I earned the money to buy these!” he crowed. “Mucking out stalls!”

  Sarah eyed his manure-stained dungarees. “In your new clothes, Owen?” she asked, but she couldn’t bring herself to actually scold him.

  “They’ll wash,” Owen said, beaming, almost breathless with excitement. “Wyatt’s in these books! In one, he’s a train robber. In the other, he holds up a bank—”

  Thomas raised his eyebrows.

  Sarah blushed a little.

  “I’m going to read them to Grandfather,” Owen rushed on.

  Sarah took the books from her son’s grubby hand and surveyed the lurid covers. Sure enough, the first, entitled, Wyatt Yarbro, Terror of the Nation’s Railways, showed a rider lying in wait for an unsuspecting train, rifle in hand, bandanna covering his face. The second, Wyatt Yarbro, Robbing the Rich to Save the Poor, depicted a man with blazing six-guns in both hands, and bags of money at his feet. Behind him, a woman cowered, one hand over her mouth.

  “Good heavens,” Sarah said. “Wyatt ought to sue these people.”

  “Where there’s smoke,” Thomas muttered righteously, taking his normal place behind the counter, “there’s fire.”

  Sarah glared at him until he wilted.

  Owen, most of the conversation having gone right over his head, waited anxiously for the return of the dime novels. Perhaps, Sarah thought, he’d already read them, since he seemed to know so much about the stories. If so, he was bright for his age; short as the books were, they were geared toward an adult audience.

  She returned the pulp-bound volumes, though reluctantly. She was not one to discourage reading, whatever the contents of the books in question. And, because the wild yarns were supposedly about Wyatt, she secretly yearned to read them herself.

  “Are you coming home to make us lunch, Aunt Sarah?” Owen’s face changed. “What am I supposed to call you now that I know you’re—”

  “‘Sarah’ will be fine for the time being,” she broke in hastily, aware of Thomas’s renewed and very avid interest. The secret was out, but she didn’t want Thomas’s mother to be among the first to have it confirmed.

  Owen pondered that solemnly, and Sarah wished she hadn’t intervened. Did the child think she didn’t want him calling her Mother or Mama? The matter would have to be taken up in private.

  “I’ll be home in an hour,” Sarah said.

  “Can we have bread and bologna again?”

  “I made soup,” Sarah answered, smiling. “But you may have bologna if you want.”

  Owen dashed out of the bank, the two dime novels clutched tightly in his right hand.

  “Mother says books like that will destroy civilization as we know it,” Thomas pontificated, puffed up like an overfed rooster.

  “Thomas,” Sarah said crisply, “I have heard enough of your mother’s sage opinions for one day. Now, please sort today’s receipts if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Thomas said, red to the ears.

  They closed for lunch five minutes earlier than usual. Sarah had already balanced the ledgers, recorded deposits and withdrawals, and cashed Charles’s voucher, too.

  Although Sarah set a place for Wyatt, he didn’t appear for the midday meal. Kitty joined her and Owen, though, while Doc sat with Ephriam upstairs.

  Owen ate quickly and went up to ask Doc if he could read the “Wyatt books” to his grandfather. Sarah excused him, keeping her eyes on her bowl of soup. This time, she hadn’t scorched it.

  “I’m thankful to you, Sarah,” Kitty said quietly. “This is a fine chance you’re giving me, and I won’t disappoint you.”

  Sarah swallowed, nodded. “When do you suppose Davina will arrive?”

  Kitty sighed, laid down her soup spoon. “Probably tomorrow. School takes up on Monday, and she’ll need a day or two to settle in.”

  After Lark married Rowdy and stopped teaching classes, the town council had scraped up the funds to build a small house, hardly larger than Sarah’s garden shed, as an abode for future teachers. Fiona had lived there quite happily, or at least without complaint, but now she was heading East to take care of her aunt. It hurt Sarah’s feelings that she’d heard about this secondhand; she and Fiona had been friends.

  “I guess we’ll have to close down the Poker Society, now that you aren’t working at the Spit Bucket anymore,” Sarah said distractedly.

  “We could play right here,” Kitty said, with the merest flicker of mischief in her tired eyes, “in your front parlor.”

  “We could at
that,” Sarah agreed. They’d have to replace Fiona. Perhaps Davina would be willing to sit in.

  “Will you come with me tomorrow, Sarah?” Kitty asked. “To meet Davina’s train? Doc said he’d sit with your father.”

  Sarah nodded. She’d have to leave the bank to accompany Kitty to the depot the next morning, but she knew, for all her circumspection, that her friend could barely wait to lay eyes on the daughter she hadn’t seen in so many years.

  “Do you know what she looks like?”

  “I’ll know her,” Kitty said, choking up a little. “But I’ll be a stranger to her.”

  Sarah didn’t reply.

  “Sarah?”

  She looked up.

  Kitty reached across the table and squeezed Sarah’s wrist lightly. “I did something I oughtn’t to have done,” she said. “I let Wyatt know I’d welcome his attentions—”

  Sarah stiffened.

  Kitty’s smile was forlorn. “He put me right in my place,” she went on. “There’s a man who knows what he wants. And what he wants, Sarah Tamlin, is you.”

  Sarah was chagrined at the sense of primitive vindication she felt. She had no reason to mistrust Wyatt—or to trust him, either, for that matter. But she knew if he’d taken Kitty up on her offer, her own heart would have broken.

  “Do you love him, Sarah?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know.”

  “Take my advice—if he proposes, marry him, whether you love him or not.”

  Sarah wasn’t about to confide that Wyatt had already proposed, after a manner of speaking. If her father hadn’t fallen ill, she might have been planning the wedding already, though she had yet to speak with Judge Harvey about Owen. Franklin Harvey was a kindly man, a friend of her father’s, and she’d served him supper at this very table, many a time, right along with Doc and Papa. It was going to be difficult to tell him her story, especially when she thought she knew what he’d say in response.

  Charles and Marjory Langstreet were Owen’s legal parents, and her claim to be the boy’s mother would amount to nothing more than hearsay in a court of law. Marrying Wyatt wouldn’t change that.

  “Sarah?”

  She realized she hadn’t replied to Kitty’s remark.

  Kitty didn’t wait for a reply, though. “There aren’t many men like Wyatt Yarbro. And it’s a hard, cold world out there without one, whatever the fire-eaters say about women’s rights.”

  Doc appeared on the rear stairs before Sarah thought of an answer. He nodded to Kitty, who hastily got up and carried her soup bowl to the sink, smiled at Sarah.

  “Owen’s regaling Ephriam with wild tales about Wyatt,” Doc said. “I’d swear the old coot is enjoying it. From what little I heard, though, Yarbro would have to be identical quintuplets to get all that done in one lifetime.”

  Kitty started up the stairs, returning to the sickroom, and Sarah noticed that her arm brushed against Doc’s as they passed, and Doc’s neck reddened a little.

  He drew up a chair, the one Kitty had just left, and Sarah hastened to fetch a bowl and ladle out soup from the kettle on the stove. It was an old pot; she’d had to toss her good one into the rubbish bin when she couldn’t get the black globs, hard as coal and sticky as tar, out of the bottom.

  “Thank you,” Doc said. He glanced toward the stairs, then asked quietly, taking up his soup spoon, “Do you think it’s a good idea, letting Kitty board here? I know she means to make a new start, but—”

  “There’ll be talk?” Sarah finished, raising one eyebrow and smiling wanly. “Doc, there’s already so much of that that bringing a former prostitute into the household to serve as Papa’s nurse will be practically superfluous.”

  The old man chuckled. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “What have you heard, Doc? You know everything that goes on in this town. Tell me—don’t hold anything back.”

  Doc looked uncomfortable. “Well, a few people guessed outright that Owen is your boy. I’m a mite bothered that you never told me, though I had my suspicions. When Ephriam went dashing off to Philadelphia ten years back, with Nancy Anne so sick, I figured there must have been something wrong, but Ephriam never said, and I didn’t pry.” He paused, sighed. “Some say Wyatt is just cozying up to you so he can rob the bank one fine day—even that the reason he was able to turn Paddy Paudeen and those other hoodlums around was because he’s the leader of the gang.”

  It was worse than Sarah had thought, if folks were thinking such a thing. And those damnable dime novels wouldn’t help matters. She bit her lower lip, pondering, then asked, “What do you think, Doc? Does Wyatt plan to hold up the Stockman’s Bank?”

  Doc considered the question, rubbing his beard-stubbled chin with one gnarled hand. Arthritis had begun to bend his fingers, Sarah noticed, and she felt a pang of pure sorrow. “Ephriam was concerned about that, but he underwrote Wyatt’s mortgage on the old Henson place, so that would indicate to me that he’d settled the matter in his mind.”

  “I didn’t ask what Papa thought, Doc,” Sarah pointed out.

  “In my experience, outlaws are generally not the sort to lend a hand with dead bodies or bring a hurt dog to a doctor in a wheelbarrow. I could be wrong, but I’m inclined to believe Wyatt’s like Rowdy. We talked, while we were getting those men ready for their coffins, Sarah, and Wyatt told me his mother was a good woman, that she’d be right proud of how Rowdy turned out. They were young, Rowdy and Wyatt and the others, and their pa was as famous as Jesse James. I reckon they followed after him like a bunch of hounds’ pups on their first hunt. Like as not, they had prices on their heads before they figured out that they could have chosen a different way.”

  “I agree with you,” Sarah said very quietly. “But what if we’re wrong, Doc? What if Wyatt did come to Stone Creek to rob the bank?”

  Doc’s battered old face showed real sympathy. He patted Sarah’s hand. “You’ll have to trust your own heart, Sarah. That’s about all any of us can do.” At this, he glanced toward the stairs. “Sometimes, everything in the world seems to be lined up against you. All the evidence says you ought to run the other way. Make the bravest choice, not the safest. It’s not the best advice, but it’s all I have to offer.”

  Sarah stood, bent slightly beside Doc’s chair, and planted a light kiss on his forehead. Her mind was full, and so was her heart, and it didn’t occur to her until much later that Doc might have meant his advice as much for himself as for her.

  SAM’S COWPOKES WERE KIDS, all right. Some of them didn’t look old enough to shave. Beside them, Jody Wexler and his bunch seemed like seasoned men.

  Seeing Wyatt’s approach, the riders came toward him, converging from several directions. He waited for them, sitting straight in the saddle, and though he had a strong urge to resettle his hat, he didn’t. If this bunch got the idea that he was nervous about giving orders, they’d be unmanageable.

  It would be a while before he could keep their names straight, but he shook hands with each one of them, no one bothering to dismount, and it was clear that they all recognized the name Yarbro.

  “Seems we’re a mite shorthanded,” Wyatt observed. The boys looked as though they hadn’t bathed since spring, and it seemed unlikely that they used their free nights to sleep, what with town, and the attractions of whiskey, women and poker so nearby. “Does Sam post a night guard over this herd?”

  One of the cowpunchers—his name was Thaddeus if Wyatt recalled correctly—nodded, pushed his hat to the back of his head. He was blond, and put Wyatt in mind of a younger Rowdy, which might or might not be a good thing. “We take turns. Three of us ride herd from sundown to sunup, and two of us have the night off.”

  “Who’s riding tonight?”

  “Me and Jimmy and ole Robert E. Lee, here,” Thaddeus answered.

  Robert E. Lee, if that was really his name, looked to be about fifteen years old. “Bobby-Lee,” the boy said. “That’s what I like folks to call me.”

  “Well, Bobby-Lee,” Wyatt said amicably
, “you can stay in the bunkhouse tonight, after supper. I’ll ride with Jimmy and Thaddeus.”

  This offer, which Wyatt considered to be a generous one, caused some consternation in the ranks.

  “You ain’t gonna send me packin’, are you?” Bobby-Lee asked, while his four companions shifted in their saddles, probably wondering similar things about themselves. “I need this job, and I’m a good cowpoke. Just because a man falls off a horse once in a while—”

  The other four hooted at this.

  “You damn near got yourself trampled!” one of them said, slugging Bobby-Lee in the shoulder with such force that he had to grip the saddle horn with both hands to hold his seat.

  Wyatt suppressed a grin. “If you give me cause, Bobby-Lee,” he said, “I’ll send you down the road straightaway. Same goes for the rest of you. For right now, though, I’m just trying to get an idea how this setup works.” With that, he rode off, made a slow circle around the circumference of the herd.

  The cattle themselves looked to be in fine shape, well fed and well watered. The cowboys, on the other hand, couldn’t fight off half a dozen spirited old ladies on burros, should said old ladies decide to take up the rustling trade. He’d see what he could do about recruiting some real ranch hands, first thing, though he supposed if Sam O’Ballivan hadn’t been successful at it, he probably didn’t have a chance in hell.

  Because he had a few hours before he had to take up the night watch, Wyatt selected a sorrel gelding from the horses Sam had offered him his choice of, switched his saddle from Sugarfoot to the new mount, and headed back toward Stone Creek.

  First, he left Sugarfoot at the livery stable.

  Second, he rode out to his own place, to make sure his lumber had been delivered, and no outlaws had moved in in his absence.

  Everything looked on the up-and-up. He inspected the lumber, put the tools away in the ruined house, and hoped it wouldn’t rain. With luck, he could spend Sunday working on the roof.