Lynna Banning Page 24
“Gus was by earlier,” Cora said as she arranged the biscuits on a square tin pan. “Brought you more flowers. That man has the greenest thumb I ever did see! And,” she continued, “he ain’t the only one to come callin’.”
From the stove, Walks Dancing sent Jessamyn a mischievous grin and held up two fingers.
Jessamyn stared at her. “Two? Two what?”
The girl assumed a studiedly serious facial expression and pantomimed a man’s swaggering walk.
“Two men,” Cora interpreted, sliding the pan of biscuits into the hot oven.
“Oh, no.” Jessamyn shook her head at Walks Dancing. “You’re quite mistaken. Not two at all! Not even one!”
“More’n two, if you ask me,” Cora said with a laugh. “Jes’ look outside.” She gestured at the window over the kitchen sink. “Looks like company for supper.”
Jessamyn peered through the glass panes and caught her breath. Three horses stood in the yard.
Dan Gustafsen clutched another bouquet of roses in one meaty hand—this time creamy white blooms tinged with pink. Silas Appleby was empty-handed, but his gray hat looked brand-new and his boots gleamed like polished piano legs.
The third rider was Ben Kearney, looking bone tired and rumpled, his hat brim pulled low over his sun-bronzed face. Dust covered his dark leather boots. Jessamyn took one look at him and felt her heart contract.
“Might as well face it, child,” Cora said as she patted the remaining biscuit dough into a lozenge-shaped mound on the cutting board. “Them’s courtin’ males in full feather.”
Walks Dancing grinned and waggled three fingers in Jessamyn’s direction. The housekeeper glanced out the window, then attacked the mass of dough with a flour-coated rolling pin.
“Look out there, Jessamyn,” she commanded. “I’m gonna give you a lesson on how to judge a man as a potential husband.”
“I’m not looking for a husband, Cora,” Jessamyn said stiffly.
“Of course not,” the housekeeper agreed. “But if yer gonna save up for a rainy day, you got to learn to recognize one!”
“Cora, I’m not saving—”
“Oh, well, then come and learn how to judge a man as a schoolteacher you may want to hire, or a foreman on a cattle ranch, or your banker. No matter what, come and watch.”
Intrigued in spite of herself, Jessamyn looked out the window. Even Walks Dancing twisted to watch the activity in the yard outside.
“Watch what they do about their spurs after they get off their horses at the fence.”
Jessamyn did as she was directed. Gus flipped his reins over the top rail and strode, spurs jangling, toward a washbasin set on a bench beside a water pail and dipper. On a nearby post hung a huck towel, clean and white as lye soap could make it.
“Gus’ll likely come to call with his spurs on,” Cora said. “And he’ll dry his face on the center of the towel. Don’t marry him.”
Gus and Silas walked together to the basin. Gus carefully put down his bouquet, then one after the other, they bent to splash their faces and hands, taking turns at the towel. Gus used the center, Silas all four edges.
“Either one of them might be trained to be a decent husband and maybe a father, but it won’t come natural. Now, look at the one still at his horse. All of them loosened the cinch except him. What’s he doing now?”
“He’s leaning against his horse and talking. Now he’s doing something with the bridle.”
“Slipping the bit,” Cora said approvingly. “Makes the wait more comfortable for the horse. Where’s his spurs?”
“He’s hanging them on the saddle horn. Gus and Silas are coming up the path toward the house.”
“Silas is a handsome feller, ain’t he? Two weeks ago, Silas was practically engaged to the Harber girl. Now, he ain’t,” Cora remarked. “But look at his boots if you get a chance. If they’re good working boots, it might be worth it to smile at him, but if they’re anything fancy, hold back. That last fellow isn’t so polished up, maybe, but watch him wash.”
In spite of herself, Jessamyn’s interest rose. She watched Ben carefully empty the used water at the base of a rosebush, ladle one dipperful of water into the basin and wash his face, neck and hands. After a critical look at the towel, he pulled a folded bandanna from his pocket and dried his face. Then he again poured the water on the rosebush and stepped up to the house.
A bud of inexplicable joy bloomed within Jessamyn’s chest. Without a word, she stepped to the oven and opened the door. Folding a dish towel around the edge of the pan, she slid the golden brown biscuits off the rack, then moved to meet the sheriff. As she passed the stove where Walks Dancing stood vigil over the steaming kettle of stew, the Indian girl held up a single finger. Her fine, black eyes sparkled as they met Jessamyn’s.
Ignoring the gesture, Jessamyn flew out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the front door. At this moment nothing mattered except seeing Ben, hearing his voice, watching his face change when he looked at her.
Near the doorway Gus thrust a handful of creamy pink roses at her. “Evening, Miss Jessamyn.”
Silas Appleby snatched off his hat and slicked back his sandy hair. “Howdy, ma’am.”
Jessamyn smiled briefly at each man but did not pause. As the two strode on into the sitting room at Cora’s invitation, Jessamyn continued toward the doorway. She intercepted the sheriff just as he ducked his head under the door frame.
“You’re going back up into Copperblossom Canyon tonight, aren’t you?” she said quietly.
Ben removed his hat and nodded.
The realization that he was leaving again so soon knifed through her. A cold lump of apprehension settled in her stomach.
“I could tell by the way you walk.” She held up the pan. “You’ll want biscuits to take with you.”
She scooped four fat biscuits off the baking tin and stuffed two in each pocket of his sheepskin jacket.
He encircled her wrist with his warm fingers. “Come outside, Jess.” He pulled her gently toward the open doorway.
Jessamyn set the biscuit pan down on the oak hall rack and followed him out onto the front porch. Resettling his hat, Ben turned to face her.
“I don’t have a lot of words to give you, Jessamyn.”
She inhaled a lungful of the warm, honeysuckle-scented air, watched the sky behind him flame rose pink and crimson. “I don’t expect words, Ben. Least of all from you,” she added with a soft laugh. “When something important happens, I’ve noticed you say very little.”
His eyes, gray-blue with fatigue, widened for a split second, then flared with a hot light in their depths. “Has something important happened?”
Jessamyn let the question hang in the quiet, color-washed evening silence. Watching his face, she waited while she thought how to respond. She knew what he meant. It was clear that their night together at the cabin had been important to him in some way—she just didn’t know what way.
“Has it?” he repeated.
A mockingbird trilled from the rose arbor. Endless variations of the song floated out, altering with each passing second. Like life, Jessamyn thought. One moment things were one way; then something would change and everything would be different.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Something important has happened. Between you and me, that night at the cabin. Nothing will ever be the same.”
“Jess, I don’t know how—”
“Don’t talk, Ben,” she interrupted softly. “Just kiss me.”
He wrapped both arms around her, enfolded her in his warmth. She lifted her face, felt his warm mouth move over hers. His breath caught as she began to respond, and he deepened the kiss, his lips saying what words could not.
An ache flowered in her throat. She could not say what she felt, either, but she could show him. Her mouth under his would tell him she valued him, wished him a safe journey—her kiss, and the biscuits she’d slipped into his jacket.
He broke free with a soft groan and set her apart from him.
In the dying light she saw his face twist.
Jessamyn rose on tiptoe and pressed her lips against his one last time. “Jeremiah told me you did brave, courageous things in the field during the War of the Rebellion.”
“The War Between the States,” he corrected gently.
“Yes, the war. Don’t do anything foolishly heroic this time,” she whispered.
A low chuckle sounded in her ear. “I won’t.”
“And I hope…” She faltered. “I hope you weren’t thinking I’d miss you, Ben, because I—”
“No,” he breathed against her mouth. “I wasn’t.”
“And, Ben… Oh, Ben, you know this can’t go on. Don’t come back expecting…more.”
After a long hesitation, his words whispered against her temple. “I wouldn’t think of it.”
He caught her hard against him, kissed her roughly and spun on his heel. He paused briefly to reattach his spurs, then mounted and turned the black gelding into the road. His rowels chinged musically as he rode away from her.
Long after the hoofbeats faded, Jessamyn fancied she could still hear the jingling sounds over the hammering of her heart.
“I told you, Jeremiah, I don’t have a choice.” Ben’s throat was parched from filling in his deputy during the past hour at the Red Fox. He signaled the bartender.
“Another round, Charlie.”
Jeremiah frowned at him across the scarred corner table of the noisy saloon.
Ben regarded his deputy in silence. Jeremiah seemed edgy. He guessed it was Walks Dancing’s presence in town. Jeremiah probably worried that some young buck was going to sneak into town and steal her away the minute they saddled up. It was the only time Ben could ever remember his deputy’s being skittish about a capture. Neither of them knew precisely the identity of their quarry, but that had never bothered Jeremiah before. Whatever the situation, his . deputy was always steady under fire, quick to adapt to surprises.
“You’re sure about all this, are you?”
Ben grinned at his deputy. “Not positive. Just sure. Only a fool believes everything his gut feel tells him.”
“Only a fool’d try to smoke a man out the way you plan to, Ben. And you never been a fool.”
“I’m not wrong very often, either,” Ben responded in a matter-of-fact voice. “That’s why we’re so unpopular with the jailbird set.”
Jeremiah studied the sheriffs sun-weathered face. “One big mistake is enough,” he said softly. “I got a bad feeling about this, that’s all. Wish I could talk you out of it.”
“You’d rather not ride straight into Copperblossom, is that it?”
“Hell, Ben, I got to go!” Jeremiah swallowed. “Just not at night, maybe. Trail’s faint, weather’s changeable as a woman’s heart, and…”
Ben grinned. “And Walks Dancing is at Widow Boult’s. I know. For God’s sakes, man, go tell her goodbye. We saddle up in an hour.” He rose, slapped six silver coins onto the table and strode through the saloon’s swinging doors.
Shaking his head, Jeremiah watched the tall man stride away. “Troublous,” he muttered under his breath. “Just plain troublous.”
Jessamyn laid her pencil aside, stretched her arms up over her head and massaged the tight muscles at the back of her neck. She’d been working since dawn, alternately writing stories out in longhand on pads of scratch paper and then, when her index finger cramped, moving to the high stool before the slanted worktable under the window, composing type in the stick and locking it into the frame.
The measured tick-tick of the wall clock sounded overloud in the quiet room. Almost midnight. She would not admit to Ben that she had again worked, alone, into the late evening hours. The sheriff had enough on his mind as it was.
Her nerves on edge, she rose and paced back and forth in front of her desk. Every creak in the plank floor beneath her leather shoes made her start. Her pacing took her into the back room, where she stretched out full-length on the cot.
With a sigh, she let her lids drift closed. A newspaper editor carried a heavy responsibility, she reminded herself. “A newspaper,” her father had always said, “should be society’s mirror and a force for moral improvement.”
A tall order, Papa. Feelings among the ranchers and townsfolk ran high on most issues, and she knew in her heart that one editor could not go to war alone. That’s what had gotten her father shot in the back.
Still, she couldn’t give up. The philosophy of one century was the common sense of the next, she remembered Papa saying. Jessamyn believed every word. Tired as she was, and uneasy ever since that rock had crashed through her front window, she mustered up her reserve of courage. She’d just have to do the best she could under the circumstances.
Opening her eyes, she gazed at the ceiling. What do I myself value most?
The first image that floated into her mind was the two-story white frame house she shared with Cora Boult. Her own home. That represented security, the opportunity to be safe in this topsy-turvy world.
But after security, then what? She thought hard for a moment. She needed to work at something that mattered, something that made a difference in people’s lives—not just today and tomorrow, but generations from now, when she would be dead and gone.
And then her thoughts settled on Ben Kearney, and a silent finger touched her heart. Tall and capable, blunt spoken, hurting on the inside yet oddly gentle, Ben Kearney was a man for all the challenges life offered. A man she.”
A burst of gunfire and a crash from the front office brought her upright, one hand clutching the throat of her white lace blouse.
“In here,” a gruff voice shouted. “Hurry it up!”
Jessamyn bolted off the cot and ran into the front office. Four men surrounded her printing press. With their hats pulled low, she didn’t recognize any of them.
“Just what are you doing here?” she demanded in the loudest voice she could command.
The apparent leader of the band ignored her. “Load it, boys,” he growled.
He’d been drinking, she realized. They’d all been drinking. The reek of whiskey hung in the air. One of the men could barely stand up.
“Get out of my office this instant!” Jessamyn ordered. She snatched up a type stick and took a step forward.
“Not so fast, ma’am. Me an’ the boys here have some business.”
“What business?” she snapped. She brandished the wooden stick in the face of the man closest to her. “The news office is closed. Now if you’ll kindly—”
The click of a pistol safety catch cut her words short. Horrified, she stared into the barrel of a blue steel revolver pointed straight at her chest.
Her heart hammering, she closed her mouth and lowered the type stick. “What is it you want?” she said as calmly as she could.
“Your press, ma’am, if you’d be so kind as to step aside. The Talking Paper,’ them Indians are callin’ it.”
“And what do you intend to do with it? Do any of you know how to run—”
She broke off as the gun barrel waggled.
“We’re not gonna run it, lady. We’re gonna get rid of it! Lately it’s been printin’ some stuff certain parties don’t want to hear about.”
Jessamyn jerked. “You can’t do that. I own that press. I inherited it from my father. Just tell me what you men are upset about and I’ll—”
“’Fraid you won’t have a chance, ma’am.” At the leader’s signal, one man secured a rope around the black iron press and then three of them heaved and grunted until they got the machine through the doorway and into a dilapidated freight wagon.
Desperately, Jessamyn tried to memorize their faces. None of them looked even remotely familiar. The minute they were gone, she’d sit down and sketch their features. Of one thing she was certain—they weren’t going to get away with this, not as long as she had breath in her body.
She watched the wagon rattle off down the dark street and disappear around the corner. Oh, God, they were heading for the river.
With trembling fingers she turned down the lamp wick, blew out the flame and marched out into the night air on legs that felt like rubber.
She stopped at the livery stable, where a light still shone.
“Gus,” she said in a determined voice when the stable owner answered her knock, “first thing tomorrow morning, I need a team of horses to pull my printing press out of the river.”
Chapter Twenty
Chewing one of the crumbly fresh biscuits Jessamyn had pressed on him, Ben urged his mount down the tortuous, rock-strewn trail into the upper end of the canyon, ominously quiet in the graying morning light. A niggling thought floated just at the edge of his mind.
Something didn’t fit. What would a man gain by supplying rifles to Black Eagle? What profit could a gunrunner hope to reap from an impoverished band of renegade Indians?
Something was wrong. He didn’t know what for sure, but over the years he’d learned to recognize the uneasy feeling in his gut when something didn’t add up. Under ordinary circumstances, once he knew what he had to do, he shut everything else out of his mind until he got the job done. This time his brain kept trying to make a connection that hovered tantalizingly just out of reach.
If a man stole cattle, why not just sell them and pocket the money?
He shot a glance back at Jeremiah. The deputy appeared to be half-asleep on the surefooted mare, the shapeless brown felt hat obscuring his face. Ben knew he wasn’t asleep. Underneath that battered hat ticked a brain more like a machine than a human organ. Jeremiah would be focusing his mind on the cabin layout, determining the angle of the sun when they got within hearing range, weighing the odds. He’d be figuring how many guns they might be facing, and what kind. Long ago he’d learned never to underestimate Jeremiah.
They took the cutoff, circling around on the unused Indian trail to approach the cabin from the back, unseen. Ben hoped the shack would be deserted. Then he and Jeremiah could take their time, move in and set up a trap.