Apache-Colton Series

by Janis Reams Hudson

  “Seen ya go in an’ outa purt near ever’ store in town. Guess none of ‘em had what ya was wantin’.”

  “No,” she answered with a sigh. “They didn’t.”

  “Wall, ain’t that somthin’,” the woman said. She stuck out her large, work-worn hand. “Name’s Sadie. Sadie Horton.”

  Angela shook the sturdy, rough hand and introduced herself, without thinking, as Angela Colton.

  “What in the world could a body want that cain’t be bought in one of them stores?”

  Angela sighed again. “A job.”

  “Lookin’ ta git rich, are ya?”

  Angela studied Sadie Horton, the gray, frizzled hair slipping from its pins, the broad, toothy grin, the dark mole on the woman’s forehead just above her left eyebrow. It wasn’t any of those things in particular that gave off an aura of friendliness. It was the eyes. Blue, faded with age, but alert. And twinkling.

  Get rich? Ha. She knows better. “Just trying to feed myself and put a roof over my head,” Angela answered.

  “How would you feel about waitin’ tables an’ cleanin’ up a bit?”

  “Waiting tables?”

  “Course, I cain’t pay ya nothin’ but room and board at first. I’m a widow lady, an’ I had just enough money for this place here.” She indicated the door behind her, over which hung a rough board with the words “Good Food” painted on it. Next to the door was a large set of double windows, and through them Angela could see about a dozen table-and-chair combinations and one long plank table with benches on either side.

  “You mean you’re…offering me a job?” Angela asked hesitantly, hopefully.

  “I can use the help, and you can keep any tips. There’s a spare room upstairs with a bed in it, and all yer meals is free. Whad’ya say?”

  Angela blinked, then smiled. The sweet smell of steaming onions wafted out the door before her and she realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “I say, if your food tastes as good as it smells, you’ll soon have more business than the two of us can handle.”

  The woman grinned and motioned her inside. Angela followed her broad beam into the dim room, through the stifling but clean kitchen and up a back set of stairs. Sadie threw open the last door on the left.

  “‘Tain’t much, but it’s yours,” she said.

  She was right—it wasn’t much. But it was clean. Angela stepped into the room and glanced around at the bare, hardwood floor, the single threadbare blanket on the small cot, and the curtainless window, which overlooked the alley. “It will do just fine, really,” she assured Sadie as she dropped her carpetbag on the floor and her hat on the bed. “Now what do I do first?”

  “First,” Sadie said with a toothy smile, “you come downstairs and eat.”

  The meal was one of the best Angela had ever eaten. Afterward, she helped Sadie clean up the kitchen. The real work wouldn’t start until the next morning. Sadie wanted to be open for her first day of business by noon, and there were a few last-minute things to do.

  Upstairs in her room that night, Angela removed her dress and hung it on a hook behind the door. Her spirits were in good shape, compared to this afternoon. What an eventful day. She’d been the star witness in a murder trial; she’d left a husband who didn’t love her; she’d found a job with room and board. No wonder she was tired.

  She carried her candle and set it on the floor beside the bed. The room might be small and bare, but it was hers. In time, perhaps she’d be able to make it a bit more homey. Curtains would come first. Meanwhile, it would certainly do.

  Intent on finding her nightgown, Angela knelt beside her carpetbag and reached inside. The first thing she came up with was Matt’s shirt. With trembling fingers, she pulled it out and pressed it to her cheek. Matt, oh Matt, I miss you already. Why didn’t you love me? Why?

  She slipped the shirt on, crawled into bed, and cried herself to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  All the next morning Angela and Sadie were busy with last-minute cleaning and arranging. In a crate in the alley, Angela found a three-foot square blackboard. She carried it to the end of the street and propped it against the outer wall of the barber shop on the corner. With chalk she’d found in a small box, she wrote, “Good Food!” Underneath, she drew an arrow pointing down the side street toward Sadie’s. Below that she wrote, “Beans & Ham, Cornbread, 2 bits.”

  By the time she finished writing, she’d attracted quite an audience.

  Sadie pressed her nose against the front window and grinned. The interest Angela had aroused was exactly what Sadie had in mind when she hired her. The girl would draw hungry men like cow chips draw flies.

  When Angela walked back down the street, more than a bit nervous about the seven men who followed, Sadie threw open the front door. The aroma of simmering beans met those men like a long, lost friend. Three of them stepped around Angela and ran through the door hollering.

  Within ten minutes of opening, Sadie’s Good Food had twelve hungry customers chowing down like they hadn’t eaten in a week.

  Angela was leery at first. All their customers were men, and she had to thread her way past them, between them, around them, in order to serve the food and clean up the tables. But as mean-looking as most of them were—guns and knives sticking out of nearly every belt and boot—they were, for the most part, polite.

  As the first week passed, she began to understand that under everyday circumstances, no matter how rough the man, he generally still respected a lady. (Abraham Miller Scott must have been the exception.) Angela wouldn’t give two cents for her safety if she ran into any of these same men in a dark alley some night, but inside Sadie’s they were friendly and polite.

  At first the work was difficult and exhausting. She climbed the stairs to her room each night worn out, asleep almost before she could put on Matt’s shirt and crawl into bed. She was glad, because she was usually too tired to lay awake and think of him.

  But as one week stretched into two, Angela grew used to the work, and it wasn’t so tiring. The results of her new-found stamina were not all good, however. True, it did give her more self-confidence and a small but growing feeling of independence, but it left her with too much energy to think.

  And when she thought, she thought of Matt. What was he doing? How was he? Did he miss her? Was he sorry she left? She thought about him so much at night, it began to seep into her days. Sometimes, when she’d step into the dining room to take an order or serve a meal, her heart would flutter in her chest. She saw Matt in every pair of broad shoulders, every blond head, heard him in someone else’s deep laugh.

  Naturally, it was never him. Matt wouldn’t come to this place to eat. When he ate in town he ate at nice places like the hotel. No, he’d never come here.

  Of course he wouldn’t come here.

  But, of course, he did.

  It happened late in the second week. Angela set two tall stacks of flapjacks down in front of a couple of breakfast customers and turned to go back to the kitchen. The light in the room suddenly dimmed. She glanced toward the front door, propped open to let in the morning breeze and let out the aroma of sizzling bacon, and froze. Her heart stopped and her throat swelled.

  Matt!

  Even without seeing his face, cast in shadows by both the light behind him and the wide brim of his hat, she recognized him. Every dear, familiar inch of him. From his height, to his broad shoulders and trim waist, to the way he stood, tall and straight, weight balanced on both feet. She’d always liked the way he stood so erect, not slouched, his weight not thrown to one hip like so many of the tinhorns she saw these days.

  Along with shock, sheer joy at seeing him surged through her. Until she remembered he hadn’t loved her enough to ask her to stay. After a brief flash of pain, she carefully schooled her expression blank.

  But when she spoke, her voice gave her nervousness away. “Ha-have a seat. I-I’ll…get you some c-coffee.” She wiped her sweaty palms on her apron and turned toward the kitchen once agai
n. And ran smack into Sadie. “Oh!”

  “Whoa, there!” Sadie said with a chuckle, putting a hand out to steady Angela. “Howdy, stranger,” she said to Matt. “Name’s Sadie, and this here’s my place. Ain’t seen you around before. Welcome!”

  Matt grinned as the robust woman pumped his hand in a firm shake. “Matt Colton,” he said.

  “Colton, huh? Any relation to our Angie here?”

  With her back to Matt, Angela stiffened. She’d never mentioned a husband to Sadie. And none of the customers had ever said they recognized Angela from the trial.

  If Matt claimed to be her husband, everyone would think she was a runaway wife. Women simply didn’t leave their husbands. It wasn’t at all the thing.

  When Matt didn’t answer immediately, Angela glanced at him over her shoulder.

  “Only distantly,” he answered. “By marriage.”

  Even as she felt relief take hold, her cheeks burned.

  One of the two men she had just served snickered. The other hooted. They know. They know I’m his wife. Yet no one had mentioned it. She blushed fiercely and left the room as fast as she could.

  Only distantly…by marriage. Well, what had she expected him to say?

  It was several moments before she felt capable of picking up the coffeepot, but then she shook so badly the scalding liquid sloshed out of the spout. Sadie, who’d followed her, stood by silently, watching, a speculative look on her lined face.

  Angela forced herself back to the dining room. Matt was seated at the far corner table. On her way with cup and coffee, she stopped at the now-disappearing stacks of flapjacks and filled the men’s cups. She dared a look from beneath her lashes, but neither man met her gaze. No hint of humor crossed their features.

  When she reached the corner table and got her first good look at Matt, she nearly gasped. His ravaged face, with sunken cheeks and darkly circled eyes, practically screamed exhaustion. She would have commented, but the hard look in those tired dark eyes stilled her tongue.

  So he was angry. Good, she thought. Serves him right for letting me leave.

  She poured his coffee and followed the steam with her eyes as it rose against the wall. “Flapjacks?” Was that her voice, sounding so calm and businesslike?

  He pulled his hat off and tossed it on the table. “Fine.”

  Like a coward, she hid in the kitchen until his breakfast was ready. What is he doing here? she wondered frantically.

  The scrape of chairs, the clump of boots followed by silence, told her the other two men had left. Matt was the only customer now. She would have left Sadie to serve him, but when Sadie stacked the flapjacks on a plate, she tossed down her spatula and headed out the front door, closing it behind her as she left.

  Angela served him his food, refilled his coffee, then retreated to the hot kitchen and began cleaning up. He hadn’t attempted to speak with her, which was just as well, for she didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to him. Conversations with one’s estranged husband had not been part of her schooling.

  If she ever lived through this episode, maybe she’d write a textbook on the subject. “How to Leave Your Husband in Three Easy Steps.”Step Number One: Be an idiot. Steps two and three will follow naturally all on their own.

  The jingling of the front bell brought her back to reality. When she stepped from the kitchen, the dining room was empty. He was gone.

  Well, so much for their first encounter.

  With hands and knees trembling, she began cleaning up the tables. When she found the silver dollar he’d left, a choked, desperate laugh escaped her throat.

  At least he’s a generous tipper.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The rest of the day stretched into an eternity for Angela. Would it never end? The lunch crowd seemed hungrier and thirstier than usual. Three times during the day she had to go out to the barber shop at the corner and repair her sign. Some prankster kept changing her arrow so it pointed in the opposite direction.

  When the dinner crowd rushed in things got rowdy. Three men got into a fight. When two of them swung and hit the third simultaneously, he crashed into the table so hard its legs broke off. Food flew everywhere.

  Angela was so tired by then, the sheer violence of the event didn’t even faze her. All she could think of was the extra energy it would take to clean up the mess. Sadie helped by hauling the broken table pieces out the back door.

  By the time Angela was finally able to climb the stairs to her room that night, she was numb.

  Matt hadn’t come back.

  In her loneliness and exhaustion, she admitted she’d rather be at the ranch, taking whatever crumbs of affection he dropped for her, than here, learning life’s lessons of independence.

  No, that wasn’t quite true, she realized. There was one thing she’d learned about herself lately, and that was that she suffered the sin of pride.

  She was too proud to humble herself that way, to live on the scraps of his goodwill. For her, it was all or nothing. He either loved her, or he didn’t.

  And he didn’t.

  Out of sheer stubbornness, she donned her white cotton nightgown and left Matt’s shirt hanging on its peg. This would be the first night—and about time!—she hadn’t slept in it since leaving him.

  She was startled out of her reverie by a high-pitched squeal that ended in a grunt coming from the alley below. She blew out her candle and crept to the window. What she saw in the dim light from a window somewhere down the street drew a gasp of outrage from her. It was a fight—a very uneven fight. A large, burly man pummeled his fists into the stomach and face of a girl.

  Angela froze, her mind going back to that other time she’d seen someone beaten outside her window. She’d done nothing then, and because of her cowardice, her father was dead, and so was her baby.

  “Not this time, by heavens,” she muttered. She wouldn’t sit here cowering in the dark this time. This time she’d do something.

  But what?

  Sadie. Sadie would know what to do.

  Without even putting on her robe, Angela felt her way across the dark room and eased open the door. Down the hall, she stopped at Sadie’s door and was met with the rattle and spurt of Sadie snoring the night away. She moved on to the stairs, determined to do this on her own.

  Careful, so as not to knock anything to the floor, she felt her way around the kitchen until she came up with a cast iron skillet big enough to do some damage, but light enough for her to swing.

  Her quiet precautions were unnecessary. The man in the alley was yelling. He probably wouldn’t have heard if she’d whacked the skillet against the iron cookstove.

  “You work for me, goddammit. You don’t take off on your own ‘les I say so. And I don’t say so.” He punctuated his statements with his fists. The girl moaned and begged him to stop, but he didn’t. “I’ll teach you, you little slut.”

  They were right outside the back door. Angela, heart pounding in her throat, threw open the door and ran out screaming, “Stop it! Get away!” with the skillet held over her head in both hands.

  The man dropped his victim. The poor girl fell to a groaning heap at his feet. He swung around just as Angela rushed at him, screeching all the way. With all her might she swung the skillet toward his head. He dodged at the last second. The skillet took him in the shoulder with a dull thud.

  “Get away!” Angela shrieked. She swung the skillet again, but this time the man was ready for her and grabbed it from her hands. He flung it behind him and it crashed into the back door of the house across the alley.

  Angela was too caught up in what she was doing to panic. A dog barked nearby, then another, and another. As lights flicked on up and down the alley and people poked their heads out of doors and windows to see what was going on, Angela jumped back and grabbed one of the broken table legs Sadie had thrown out earlier. She held it in both hands like a club and dug her bare toes into the dirt to brace herself.

  The man took a step toward her and snarled
, “Mind your own business, missy, if you don’t want to get hurt.”

  With his next step, Angela swung at him. Again, he yanked her weapon from her hands and tossed it aside.

  “What’s goin’ on down there?” someone shouted.

  “Nothing!” the man before her yelled, advancing closer, not taking his eyes off Angela.

  “Then keep it down, will ya? There’s folks tryin’ to sleep around here.” The statement ended with the slamming of a window.

  Now Angela faced him, weaponless. She began to shake all over and had to fight for every breath. The enormity of what she’d done suddenly dawned on her. Now she was terrified. Now, when it was too late to do her any good. If she was going to be terrified, why couldn’t it have been before she’d rushed out into the alley? Why couldn’t she have been terrified enough to have kept her nose out of it?

  No. Not this time. This time I don’t back down.

  The girl on the ground tried to crawl away, but the effort was too much for her and she collapsed. Her new position left her lying in the man’s way. He kicked her aside, wringing another moan from her bloody lips.

  The man’s hand came out, reaching for Angela’s throat, but stopped in mid air, frozen there as if by magic. Through all the clatter and noise echoing down the alley, the metallic click of a pistol being cocked rang out as if it were the only sound.

  Matt had been hanging around on the street corner for over an hour waiting for the lights downstairs at Sadie’s to go out. A few minutes after the big double windows darkened, a light flickered in an upstairs window. Was it hers?

  His question was answered a moment later when a large bulky shadow crossed the drawn shade. Even allowing for the distortion a flickering lantern might cause, that was not Angela’s shadow.

  When no other light appeared after several minutes, Matt figured her room must be in the back. He hesitated, not sure what he was doing there in the first place. So what if her room was in the back? She certainly wasn’t about to invite him in. She’d made that plain with her coolness this morning.