The Rustler

by Linda Lael Miller

He hauled a few beams out of the house, and worked up a good sweat, and by the time he got back to Stone Creek, it was almost sundown. He drew rein at Sarah’s gate, hoping to have a word with her.

  She must have seen him through the front windows, because she came out before he’d even dismounted. He saw both a welcome and a stand-back in her eyes.

  “You missed lunch,” she said.

  “I was out at Sam O’Ballivan’s.”

  She shaded her eyes with one hand. “You’ll be staying out there from now on?” she asked. He couldn’t tell from her voice whether that was a sorry prospect or cause for celebration.

  He decided not to get down off the new horse. “Yes,” he said. “How’s your father?” How are you?

  “He seems to be holding his own,” Sarah said.

  After that, they were stuck for conversational fodder, the both of them. Wyatt probably would have tipped his hat and ridden off if Owen hadn’t come shooting out through the front door like a live bullet out of a hot stove.

  “You’re famous, Wyatt!” he whooped. “You’re famous, just like Rowdy and Sam and Jesse James!”

  “What?” Wyatt asked, frowning.

  “It seems you’re the hero—if it can be called that—of two brand-new dime novels,” Sarah said, in a tone that could have been called friendly or cool. Or both.

  Owen vaulted over the picket fence and jumped up and down on the sidewalk, waving a couple of cheap volumes that looked more like magazines than books.

  “I especially enjoyed the part where you robbed the bank,” Sarah said mildly, but with a certain edge to her tone. “You went in with ‘two six-guns spitting hot lead’ and managed to marry the banker’s daughter by the end of the story.”

  Wyatt scowled, leaned in the saddle. “Let me see those,” he said, snatching the books from Owen’s upraised hand.

  He scanned the covers, read the print on the back.

  His stomach churned, although he’d been looking forward to supper up until a moment ago, given that all he’d had since breakfast was a tin of peaches.

  “Did you really do all that stuff?” Owen asked, still jumping around. He put Wyatt in mind of something he’d seen once in Mexico—a pod with a worm inside it, trying so mightily to get out that it hopped all over the place.

  “I can’t say,” Wyatt said grimly. After all, he hadn’t read the books, and had no way of knowing how much truth they contained, if any. He handed them back down to Owen, though his gaze shifted to Sarah. “I’ll tell you this much, though. I never robbed any bank—or married anybody.”

  “There were a lot of copies over at the mercantile,” Owen said helpfully. “You ought to go and get some, before they’re all gone. Folks were buying them up fast!”

  Wyatt winced, wishing he could find the men who’d written those books and throttle them by the neck until their eyes popped out of their heads. But they probably lived in Chicago or New York or some other Eastern place. Someplace where they’d know all about the Wild West.

  “I reckon I’ll come to call on Sunday evening,” he told Sarah. “If that’s all right by you.”

  “I’ll be looking for you,” Sarah said moderately, so he couldn’t tell if she wanted him to call or hoped he’d stay away.

  Wyatt tugged at his hat brim, reined his horse around, and headed for the mercantile.

  He got the last two copies, supposed installments in his “life story,” paid the princely sum of twenty cents for the both of them, tucked them inside his shirt, and rode back to Stone Creek Ranch, still bemused.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT WAS THADDEUS’S TURN to cook the bunkhouse supper, Wyatt discovered, after putting up the sorrel for the night and choosing another for riding guard on the herd. The rule was, if a cowpoke groused about the food, he had to man the cookstove when it came time for the next meal. Thaddeus, it seemed, had proclaimed the midday beans were too salty and the cornbread too hard.

  Wyatt, being ravenous, consumed the burned hash and stone fritters without comment. He’d speak with Sam about hiring a cook, once there were more hands to feed. As it was, each cowpuncher was bent on making up the worst vittles he could, so as to inspire complaint from one of the others and get himself relieved of mess duty.

  To Thaddeus’s disappointment, nobody else bitched, either, though the grub was nearly inedible. God only knew what he’d serve up next.

  Following the meal, Wyatt and Jimmy rode out to take over for the skeleton crew of three riding to the herd, so they could go back to the bunkhouse and eat. Thaddeus would join them after he’d cleaned up the dishes, also a part of the cook’s job.

  The dime novels he’d bought in town burned beneath the fabric of Wyatt’s shirt, chapping his hide and soaking up sweat, but there was work to be done, and he hadn’t had time to read up on himself. He’d be dead on his feet after guarding cattle all night, but he knew he’d crack those books as soon as he got back to the cabin. To escape whatever atrocity Thaddeus had in mind for breakfast, he’d fill up on canned goods instead.

  As nightfall came on, the herd quieted, and a full moon rose over the hills, pure silver and big as a barrel lid. Still, the hairs on the nape of Wyatt’s neck prickled, and supper wouldn’t settle in his stomach. The latter might have been the result of Thaddeus’s hash concoction—he’d sworn his ma had made it just that way and been shouted down from all sides of the table—but it didn’t explain the former.

  Sam rode out around midnight, mounted on a fine stallion, and surveyed the moon-washed herd, periodically standing in his stirrups to stretch his legs.

  “You acquainted with a kid named Jody Wexler?” Wyatt asked Sam. Thaddeus and Jimmy were on the other side of the vast sprawl of cattle.

  Sam nodded. “Runs with his own bunch,” he said. “His pa’s so busy getting married and making babies, he doesn’t pay much attention to the boy.”

  Recalling Wexler’s eagerness to be part of a posse, Wyatt figured he might be interested in punching cattle. “If I can get him and his friends to agree, will you hire them on?”

  “Surprised I didn’t think of that myself,” Sam said, with an agreeable nod.

  That was the end of the conversation.

  At sunup, the relief riders came. Wyatt gave a few orders for the day and rode back toward the main ranch house, stopping to put his horse away in the corral, and carefully avoiding the bunkhouse. From the smell coming through the open doorway as he passed, he concluded that Thaddeus was brewing up a stew of old socks and boot soles.

  Behind his own door, which he promptly closed, he built a pot of coffee and opened another tin of peaches. When that didn’t satisfy, he consumed some pears, too, smooth as alabaster and swimming in sugar syrup.

  With his boots off and a cup of fresh, stout coffee at his elbow, Wyatt settled himself at the table and began to read.

  By the time he’d finished Wyatt Yarbro, Terror of the Nation’s Railways, he was laughing out loud. But Wyatt Yarbro, Robbing the Rich to Save the Poor had him hopping mad. If it had been calculated to turn Sarah against him for all of time and eternity, it couldn’t have been more effective. Damned if the dim-witted heroine didn’t fit Sarah to a T, at least physically. Her name was Stella, a wicked coincidence, and she wasn’t smart enough by half to buttonhook her own shoes, but she ran the bank for her father and even had a fat assistant named Ted.

  He needed a few hours’ sleep, but Wyatt was too stirred up for that. He paced the cabin for a while, then went through his saddlebags for a scrap of writing paper and a pencil stub. He’d have to buy a nib pen and some ink next time he went to town, since a letter of vociferous protest written in pencil would make him look like a lunatic, but he had to get the words down somehow, or he’d explode.

  So he looked up the publisher’s address in the front of both books, and found they were one and the same. Wild West Publications, New Haven, Connecticut. Hell, if those yahoos had been working out of Cody, Wyoming, say, or someplace in Colorado, he might have been able to forgive
them.

  But New Haven, Connecticut?

  He wrote furiously, venting his spleen, and when he was finished, he kicked off his boots, stretched out on the bed he had yet to make up with the sheets and quilts provided, and fell into a shallow sleep.

  He dreamed Billy Justice was standing over him with the barrel of that shotgun of his shoved into the hollow of his throat, and awakened with a start, flailing one arm to knock the weapon aside.

  The cabin was empty, but somebody was knocking at the door.

  Still breathing hard, and a little shaken, Wyatt rolled off the bed and ambled to the door, grumbling under his breath.

  When he pulled open the door, he found Owen standing on the step.

  He blinked, thinking he was seeing things. It was a fair distance to town, half an hour on a good horse. Since there was no mode of transportation in sight—he leaned out over Owen’s head to look for one—he guessed the boy must have walked all the way, probably following the creek.

  Having figured out that much, he finally saw that the kid’s face was flushed with exertion and streaked with tears. He stepped backward with a gruff, “Come on in.”

  “He sent for me!” Owen blurted out, before Wyatt could ask what was wrong. He’d been braced for bad news about Sarah, or Ephriam. But the boy waved a half sheet of yellow paper, obviously a telegram. “He wants me to come back to Philadelphia!”

  “Take in some air, boy,” Wyatt said, indicating that Owen ought to sit down at the table.

  “I’m not going!” Owen shouted, though he did take a chair. His feet were bare and grubby with creek mud, and his overalls, probably bought new for the start of school, were ripped at one knee. “I’ll run away—I’ll—”

  “Hold on,” Wyatt interrupted, pumping some water into a tin mug and handing it to the boy. “Drink that down—slow—and talk sense.”

  “Read it for yourself!” Owen cried, but he took the mug, and he drank.

  Wyatt scanned the telegram. Sarah—Marjory gravely ill. Send Owen at once. Charles.

  “This is addressed to Sarah,” he said quietly. “How did you come to have it?”

  “She went to the train depot with Miss Steel,” Owen sniffled, a little calmer than before, but not much. “I was at home with Grandfather when a man brought it.”

  “You oughtn’t to read other people’s telegrams, Owen.”

  “It’s about me!”

  “Be that as it may, your father sent this to Sarah, not you. Has she seen it?”

  Owen shook his head. Dust flew from his fair hair, damp with sweat from covering all that ground under a hot September sun. “Can’t I be your boy, now?” he asked plaintively. “He doesn’t want me, none of them do!”

  Wyatt’s heart cracked down the middle. He sat down in the remaining chair and drew it up to face Owen’s, so their knees were touching. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’d like nothing better than to call you my son. But the fact is, your pa is Charles Langstreet. And aren’t you even a little bit worried that he said your mother is sick?”

  Owen gulped. Tears made little pale channels on his cheeks. “She’s not my mother. Sarah is.”

  “Still, Owen, she’s evidently under the weather. Don’t you want to see her?”

  “No! I hate her!”

  “Drink some more water,” Wyatt sighed, checking his watch. He might have slept another two hours or so, but with a crisis afoot, that was out the window. “I’ll go saddle a horse,” he said, as gently as he knew how. “We’ll go to town together and see what Sarah has to say about this.”

  “I won’t go back!”

  “We still need to show Sarah this telegram.”

  Owen bit his lower lip, nodded miserably.

  Wyatt ruffled the boy’s hair. “Wait here while I saddle up,” he said.

  KITTY HUDDLED CLOSE against Sarah’s side, there on the crowded platform—the new schoolmarm’s arrival was an event—watching as the train came in. She wore one of Sarah’s primmest dresses, and a bonnet, too, tied under her chin in a big, loopy bow. With her face scrubbed, she looked like any ranch wife come to town to bid welcome to an important personage.

  Davina was instantly recognizable, since she was the only unescorted woman to disembark from the passenger car. Delicately feminine, she sported a simple black bombazine traveling ensemble and carried a parasol as well as a small beaded handbag. Her hair, visible in fringes around her heart-shaped face, was golden, and her enormous eyes were a remarkable greenish-blue.

  Kitty stared at her, stricken speechless, and Sarah had to grip the other woman’s arm to keep her from backing right off the platform and falling five feet to the rocky ground.

  The young lady smiled a warm but shyly tentative smile as members of the school board and town council greeted her, though Fiona was noticeably absent from the eager throng. All the while, though, the marvelous eyes roamed, searching for a face Davina probably remembered only dimly, if at all.

  “Speak to her!” Sarah whispered, giving Kitty a little shove forward.

  Kitty stumbled ever so slightly, righted herself, and stood straight as a fence post driven deep into hard ground.

  There was nothing to do, Sarah decided, but take matters firmly in hand. She approached Davina, introduced herself, and said, “There’s someone here who’s been waiting to see you.”

  Both trepidation and relief filled the girl’s flawless face. Sarah hoped the school board wasn’t naive enough to believe she’d be teaching for long. With her looks, Davina would be snatched up for a wife before the first snowfall.

  Elbowing her way through the greeting committee, Sarah presented Davina before Kitty.

  Kitty’s mouth moved, but no words came out.

  “Mother?” Davina asked, almost in a whisper.

  Kitty still didn’t speak, or move, though her whole body seemed to tremble with the need to embrace her daughter.

  “Yes,” Sarah said quietly. “This is your mother.”

  Onlookers began to murmur among themselves.

  Sarah swept them all up in a warning glare.

  Davina squared her small shoulders and put out a tiny, gloved hand in ladylike greeting. Clearly, her adoptive parents, or someone, had schooled her in deportment and good manners. All the social graces, probably.

  Kitty hesitated, then took it.

  For a long moment, the two women, one world-worn and the other in the first dewy flower of youth, simply stood there, hands clasped.

  Thomas’s mother, Helga, stepped forward from the little cluster of people making up the school board. “Miss Wynngate,” she said, addressing Davina, “we’ve prepared a welcome tea for you, over at the schoolhouse—”

  Sarah met Helga’s eyes. “She’ll be along in a little while,” she said.

  Helga retreated a step, swallowing, her jowls red with offense. “But we’ve brought a wagon for her trunk and—”

  “In a little while,” Sarah repeated.

  Gossiping in affronted words pitched too low to make out, Helga and her contingent of official busybodies departed. Friendlier women smiled in curious goodwill and went their own ways.

  At Sarah’s urging, Kitty linked arms with Davina, and the two of them set out for the Tamlin house, where they could talk privately.

  “Tell her the truth,” Sarah had advised, as she and Kitty approached the depot earlier.

  But Kitty had shaken her head. “I’m going to say my husband died, and I couldn’t run the ranch by myself, and I’m boarding with you to earn my keep taking care of Mr. Tamlin.”

  Now, watching them go, Sarah held out little hope that Kitty would change her mind. If she didn’t tell Davina that she’d fallen from grace, and made her home in a room above the Spit Bucket Saloon, Helga and the others would waste no time in rectifying the error.

  When Sarah reached the bank, Thomas was busy taking deposits from four men who looked as though they’d just made a long, hard ride from somewhere. One, a small man with bad skin, greeted her with a tip of the hat.r />
  The gesture reminded her of Wyatt; she wondered how he was faring at Stone Creek Ranch and whether or not he’d come to call on Sunday. She’d been quite cool to him last evening, having just read of his alleged exploits as a bank robber and seducer of stupid, simpering women.

  She knew such novels were sensationalized; the popular term for them was “yellow journalism.” As a young girl, she’d read a few, in complete secret, and thrilled to the adventures of women like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane Canary.

  No human woman could have done all the things attributed to Miss Oakley or Calamity—Sarah had known that even as a starry-eyed adolescent. It was purely logical to assume that the spectacularly implausible feats ascribed to Wyatt Yarbro were tall tales bearing no real relationship to the truth.

  Still, the bat-brained banker’s daughter had struck a little too close to the bone for Sarah’s comfort, and she’d withdrawn from Wyatt, if only slightly, in order to get some perspective.

  And he had been a train robber, a part of the infamous Yarbro gang.

  Doc’s words came back to her, for about the hundredth time, as she ducked into her father’s office, smoothed her skirts, and sat down to work.

  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.…

  Sarah straightened her spine. “Stop thinking about Wyatt and get something accomplished,” she told herself aloud.

  She’d been balancing ledgers for the better part of an hour, wondering with part of her mind how things were going with Davina and Kitty over at the house, how her father was, and what Wyatt would have to say for himself once he’d read those dime novels—for she was certain he would—when a knock sounded at the office door.

  “Come in,” she said, after patting her hair. She’d expected a farmer or a merchant looking to make a loan payment, or offer an excuse for not making one, so she was at something of a loss when Wyatt came in, steering a sunburned, sullen and filthy Owen by one shoulder.

  “Give her the telegram, boy,” Wyatt said.

  Owen jutted out his chin. He’d been crying, his new overalls were fit for the ragbag, and his lower lip trembled. “I won’t go,” he said, taking the wired message from his pocket, crossing to the desk, and laying it in front of Sarah.