by Carole Howey
And her heart, over the past three months, had gotten quite used to the exercise.
"Come along," she said, anxious to change the subject. "I've wired ahead; someone will be waiting to take us out to the ranch. And you do want to see Glory first, I assume."
Glory, Missy had quickly discovered, was the best way to redirect Gideon's thoughts, no matter what odd or embarrassing topic he fixed himself on. She found herself mentioning the mare frequently to deflect the boy's unnerving curiosity about everything, most especially her private affairs: Gideon could not credit that she was unmarried and he questioned her endlessly about her situation, much to her chagrin. Missy had always thought herself a patient person, but within a few days of their association she theorized, wearily, that God had put Gideon in her path to demonstrate to her that she had not previously known what the word patience meant.
Gideon raced down the platform to the livestock car to find Glory, his coattails flapping in the light spring breeze like the wings of a young bird. Missy followed at a more sedate pace. She paused to present their baggage claims to the porter and was stopped by a familiar voice.
"Miz Cannon."
Micah Watts, the C-Bar-C foreman for the past two years, approached her in his usual respectful manner, one hand on the brim of his dusty gray Stetson, the other shoved into the back pocket of his ancient jeans. He wore a tentative smile on his bristled, weathered features that put Missy on the alert at once.
"Mi!" she exclaimed, shading her eyes. "I never expected you'd come yourself to fetch us! You could have sent one of the hands."
Mi was not old, but long years of hard work outdoors made him and his clothing look that way. The lines about his eyes, however, gave him an anxious look that she suspected had little to do with either age or wear.
"No, ma'am, I couldn't." His thin smile faded like his pants.
Missy's mouth went dry.
"There’s nothing wrong at home, is there?" Her mind instantly invented every sort of catastrophe that might have befallen the C-Bar-C, its stock, and its personnel during her absence. Fire, flood, tornado, epidemic, or any combination spelled disaster. She held her breath and braced herself for the very worst.
"N-no." Micah looked around and scratched the back of his neck, making the knot of his bandanna bob at his throat. "Leastways nothin' like, uh . . ." He trailed off.
It was not like Mi to be evasive. Missy's dread swelled in her breast.
"Mi?"
"What I mean is" He broke off and made a sound she took for annoyance at his own ineptitude. Missy's worry became impatience. Was he planning to ask for a raise in pay, or might he be considering asking her to marry him? In either case, the answer would be an emphatic no.
"Micah, is there something wrong or not?" She was abrupt.
A shy man, Micah flinched under her direct scrutiny.
"Well, no, not exactly. That is, not accordin' to Mr. Muldaur. You see"
"Who?" Missy thought she might strangle on the word.
Micah grimaced as if he expected her to rain blows on him.
"Oh, damn," he muttered, shuffling his big, booted feet on the dusty planks. "I knew I shouldn’t but then when he brought the sheriff around with that paper a' his . . ."
"Flynn Muldaur?" Missy pronounced the name very carefully, although she felt such a storm of conflicting emotions she thought she might burst on the spot. "Am I to understand that a Mr. Flynn Muldaur has presented himself at the C-Bar-C, and is"
"livin' there now; yes, ma'am," Mi finished for her. He looked relieved that Missy had guessed. He'd been spared most of the onerous task of actually telling her.
Missy remained very still, not trusting her legs to support her if she tried to move. Why couldn't it have been a mere flood or a fire? she wondered miserably. There was no calamity she could envision that would have been worse than this.
"Miz Cannon?"
Micah Watts might have been prodding a dead coyote with a stick.
"Glory's just fine." Gideon came skipping up, happy as a pig in mud. "She looks a bit hollow around the eyes like as if she needs to take on water, but I think she's glad to be What’s wrong, Miss? You look spooked!"
The fact that Gideon laughed did nothing to ease Missy's peace of mind, such as it was.
"When did he arrive?" She addressed her question to Micah.
"Who?"
"Gideon, be still a moment."
Micah looked at Gideon, then back to Missy with one eyebrow a full inch higher than the other.
"I'll explain this in a minute," she said tersely, working very hard to keep her temper in check. "Tell me about Mr. Muldaur."
"Muldaur's here?" Gideon interrupted gleefully. "See, I told you"
"Gideon, go wait with the horses. Now."
Gideon only looked at her for a second before he stalked off down the platform again.
"Tell me everything," she ordered the foreman, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. She meant to ward off a headache. Screaming would have worked better, she thought, but on a busy train platform in the middle of Rapid City she did not have that luxury.
Micah's wide, wiry shoulders relaxed. Missy guessed he was glad the weight of his news was off of them.
"Well, it's sort of a long story," he warned her. "Maybe I ought to tell it on the way."
A long story? Missy's stomach sank. By how much had Muldaur beaten her back to Rapid City?
"Tell me here and tell me now," she said through clenched teeth. "I don't care if it takes until midnight."
"Well, I doubt it'll take that long," he mumbled, looking downcast as a whipped puppy. "He showed up about three weeks ago. Came right up to the house with Sheriff Garlock; guess he knew we'd give him a hard time, else. Anyways, Eldon said the paper Muldaur had was all legal right enough. He even showed us a telegraph message from some judge or some such. We was to let him stay, at least until you came home to straighten it all out. At first we thought he was just some flimflammer, but Eldon, he made us set down with him and talk. Muldaur was real straight with us. Said we wasn't to change nothin' about what we was doin', just to keep on doin' it until you came back. The way he spoke, we kind of thought he was that he and you were" Micah broke off his explanation as if he suddenly realized he'd waded into a hidden patch of quicksand.
Missy felt her color rise.
"You thought what?" It was best she knew exactly what speculation the hired hands had put forth, because whatever theories they'd arrived at, they'd no doubt expounded on them at length on Saturday nights in the saloon. Which meant her neighbors and the whole town had surely learned of the interesting development out at the C-Bar-C by now.
Micah half turned away from her and muttered something unintelligible.
"What was that?"
"We thought he mighta married you. Sweet, holy mother of God.
Missy did not want to hear any more.
"Let's go," she said tersely, shouldering her carpetbag. "Gideon!"
"But I ain't fin"
"I'll hear the rest later." She cut Micah off without looking at him. "Gideon! We're going. Micah, see to the luggage and hitch those mares up in back. Mind you, they're in foal. I have to send a telegraph; it won't take me but a minute."
The short walk to the telegraph office was not sufficient to cool her simmering anger. Old Dick Wyman, the operator, looked up from under his visor as she entered. The little bells he kept on the jamb jingled as she slammed the door, a preposterously lighthearted accompaniment to her foul humor.
"How do, Miz Cannon," called the dried-up husk of a man, who usually called her Missy. "Welcome back. Understand congratulations is in order."
Was it her imagination, or did Dick Wyman regard her with disapproving appraisal in his hawk eyes? She felt a rush of heat seep upward from beneath the stiff, starched collar of her shirtwaist.
"Mr. Muldaur is a temporary state of off business I will very shortly take care of," she huffed, compelled, by her mortification, to look
away.
"I was talkin' about them fine mares you brung back," was the operator's amused, unruffled interruption. "Heard they was in foal."
"Oh." Missy swallowed her fresh humiliation. "Yes. They are. Three of them, anyway. Th-thank you." She placed her gloved hands on the polished counter hoping to still their trembling and found the courage to look Wyman in the face.
"I'd like to send a tele"
"'Course, since you mentioned that Muldaur feller, I guess I can tell you there's been some speculation hereabouts"
"There is no truth to any scurrilous rumor about my being involved with Mr. Muldaur in an unseemly way!" she snapped. She stared hard at him, hoping to shame him. She'd seen Allyn give people just such a look on more than one occasion, and it had never failed to make them rue their incautious words.
Dick Wyman, however, wrinkled up his mouth like an old prune and crossed his arms, with their white, gartered sleeves, in front of his chest.
"Speculation," he went on without so much as a blink, "that you might be thinkin' about sellin' the C-Bar-C."
Patience, Missy recalled Allyn saying often, had never been her chiefest virtue. Never did she more regret that flaw than under the speculative scrutiny of the calm telegraph operator in front of her. She found herself looking at the gapped seams in the plank floor.
"Oh." She managed a muffled tone. "No. I'm not. I won't. I expect to square things with Mr. Muldaur and send him on his way in short order."
She wanted to escape the office, and Mr. Wyman's stare, as quickly as possible; the telegraph to Allyn and Joshua could wait for another time. She got her hand on the door lever before Wyman spoke again.
"It's none a' my business, a' course," he remarked. "But I expect Bill Boland'll be happy to know that."
Not only did the bells jingle mockingly as she slammed the door behind her, but the four panes of glass in the door rattled as well.
Bill Boland was a neighbor and a good friend who, over time, had made no secret of the fact that he wished to be more to her than that. A widower, he'd courted Allyn years back until she married Joshua. Missy preferred to continue to treat the older man as a friend and colleague, although she knew he'd been steering their relationship in another direction since then. She had not thought of him much since she'd left Rapid City four months before. She found it unnerving that Dick Wyman had chosen that moment to remind her of him.
What had Bill made of Muldaur's arrival?
She found that his opinion of the event mattered to her. And that fact bothered her more than the event itself.
"Micah says to tell you we're ready, Miss." Gideon, quiet as a cat, had come up behind her.
Missy's stomach squirmed: Gideon's presence was another event sure to provoke speculation among her neighbors and the townspeople. She suddenly wished she could fold the boy up into her carpetbag until they reached the C-Bar-C. Both he and her neighbors in town were a little too curious for her peace of mind.
"All aboard!" the conductor called out as the engine let off a hiss and a belch of steam. The train was eastbound again, back to the stability and sanity she'd left behind with Allyn and Joshua. For a wild moment, Missy considered stepping up to the car and climbing back on.
Bill Boland, besides being the nearest neighbor to the C-Bar-C, was the biggest, hardest-looking son of a bitch Flynn had ever met. And he'd met him the very first day he'd moved in. Boland was old, too. Near 50, Flynn guessed. Said he'd buried a wife ten years back. He sat a horse as if he were born to it, and it was clear to Flynn that the man took a very proprietary interest in Missy Cannon and her welfare.
Boland ''dropped by" the C-Bar-C every afternoon; it would have taken an idiot to miss the fact.
"Them six-penny nails'd do the job to last," the widower commented from atop his sorrel gelding.
The hammer came down on Flynn's thumb instead of the head of the four-penny nail he was using to secure the birch shingle. He swore.
"It's only a privy roof," he retorted. "Anyway, it only has to last the winter. I plan to put in a water closet next year."
"Oh," Boland replied, as if he meant to add, "If you're still here next year."
Flynn had hoped Boland would see he was busy and leave. He'd been unprepared for the man's regular visits at first, but as soon as it became obvious that Boland intended to come every afternoon, ostensibly to see if Missy had returned home yet, he'd tried to find something of compelling importance to do just before Boland was expected. Sometimes Boland took the hint and stayed only long enough to exchange a few terse words of courtesy, as if he were counting out every syllable against some invisible ledger of debit. More often than not, though, the widower remained, content, it appeared to Flynn, to watch him in whatever task he'd undertaken and to find fault, most politely, with his execution thereof.
It hadn't taken more than three or four visits for Flynn to come to despise him.
"Heard from Miss Cannon yet?"
Flynn placed another birch shingle without looking at the older man. That was another thing about Boland that annoyed him: Boland called her Missy until he, Flynn, referred to her by the same name. Then Boland, without fail, started calling her Miss Cannon with a chilly edge to his voice.
Who the blue hell did the man think he was?
He had half a mind not to tell Boland what he knew, but nevertheless he did so, grudgingly.
"Micah got a wire from her last night," he allowed, then plied a few steady whacks to a nail, wishing it was Boland's head beneath his hammer. "Her train's due in this afternoon. He's in town now picking her up."
Boland seemed to ponder this, adjusting the brim of his sandy white Stetson and shifting his lean, muscular form in his saddle. The leather squealed. Flynn bent to his work again.
"Guess she'll be glad to see her privy's in good repair."
Flynn looked up to try to determine if Boland meant to be insulting, but the rancher had reined off without a word of farewell.
Good riddance, he thought, biting his lower lip as he surveyed the dust cloud Boland's gelding kicked up. He tried to imagine Missy Cannon as a wife to the taciturn mountain that was Bill Boland and found himself grinning at the unlikely picture: the irresistible force that was Missy meeting with the immovable object.
Unwittingly, he remembered his encounters with the dauntless woman who ran the C-Bar-C. He recalled the determined set to her round chin, the kaleidoscopic variability of her bright eyes, and the hourglass armful of her robust figure. He remembered the bewitching gleam of her dark curls and the delicious, unfamiliar aroma of her perfume.
He pictured her standing on the train platform in Rapid City as Bill Boland rode up high, wide, and handsome to greet her.
He nearly fell off the privy roof in his haste to climb down, and he hollered for a horse.
Chapter Ten
Missy's fondest ambition was to depart Rapid City without either encountering or creating a scene, and she got as far as the center of town before her hopes were crushed.
Rapid City was hardly a booming metropolis of the stature of Annapolis or Louisville, but it was a good-sized settlement with a wide, paved main street that the railroad had put in when they'd finished the spur line the previous year. Wagons and buckboards lined the thoroughfare as Micah guided their conveyance away from the station, and Missy could not help but notice that pedestrians on the boardwalk were staring down the road in the opposite direction as if anticipating a parade.
She heard the thunder that had captured their collective attention before she saw the reason for it, and she looked up ahead even as more curious spectators peered out of shop doors and second-floor windows. The rumbling grew louder. Just as she was about to caution Micah to pull off to the side of the road, she saw two horses and riders round the bend a quarter of a mile away amid enthusiastic shouts and cheers and an impressive storm of dust.
She shook her head in disgust. "Fools," she muttered. "Racing good animals on these stones! They ought to be horsewhi"
; Astonishment and mortification took the rest of her denunciation away from her.
Bill Boland got the better of the contest by about half a length, and he doffed his hat with a big gesture.
"Howdy, Miss," he panted, a triumphant smile creasing his handsome, dusty face. "Welcome home!"
"Good afternoon, Miss Cannon." Flynn Muldaur's urbane baritone was every bit as rich as she remembered it, but there was a heated rasp to it that hinted at the exertion to which he'd just subjected himself and his horse. "I trust you had a pleasant trip."