CHAPTER 3
ROWDY RARELY LOOKED at Lark Morgan during the Sunday supper of hash, deftly made by Mrs. Porter since it was Mai Lee’s night off, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of her.
He should have been thinking about his pa or about Gideon or about the meeting with Sam O’Ballivan and Major Blackstone coming up the next morning.
Instead the mysterious woman sitting directly across the table from him, intermittently pushing her food around on her plate with the tines of her fork and eating as though she was half-starved, filled his mind.
She hadn’t told him anything about herself. What Rowdy knew, he’d gleaned from Mrs. Porter’s eager chatter.
Lark was a schoolteacher, never married, popular with her students.
She’d been in Stone Creek for three months, during which time she’d never sent or received a letter or a telegram, as far as Mrs. Porter could determine. And Mrs. Porter, Rowdy reckoned, could determine plenty.
Lark Morgan’s clothes gave the lie to a part of her story—they were costly, beyond the means of any schoolmarm Rowdy had ever heard of. He wasn’t convinced, either, that she’d never been married; there was a worldliness about her, as though she’d seen the seamy side of life, but an innocence, too. She’d been a witness to sin, he would have bet, but somehow she’d managed to hold her expensive skirts aside to avoid stepping in it.
Mentally Rowdy cataloged his other observations.
She’d dyed her hair—there was a slight dusting of gold at the roots.
Her dark eyes were luminous with secrets.
She was unquestionably brave.
And she was just as surely afraid. Even terrified at times.
He’d joshed her a little earlier, claiming the devil was his pa, and she’d flinched before she caught herself.
Could be she was a preacher’s daughter, and the devil was serious business to her. Some folks, Rowdy reckoned, paid so much mind to old Scratch and his doings that they never got past a nodding acquaintance with God.
Mrs. Porter finished her meal, setting her plate on the floor so Pardner could have at the leftovers, and set about brewing up a pot of coffee. A lot of people didn’t drink the stuff at night—said it kept them awake—but Rowdy thrived on it. Could consume a pot on his own and sleep like a pure-hearted saint until the dawn light pried at his eyelids.
Lark hesitated, then took a second helping of hash. She was a small thing, with a womanly shape, but Rowdy had seen ranch hands with a lesser appetite. He wondered what kind of hole she was trying to fill up with all that food.
His own hunger appeased, he excused himself from the table, noting the look of relief that flickered briefly in Lark’s eyes, and scraped what was left of his supper onto Pardner’s plate. When he returned to his chair, the pretty schoolmarm was clearly startled, bristling a little.
“I’ll clear away the dishes,” Rowdy said to Mrs. Porter, once she’d gotten the coffee started and showed signs of lingering to fuss and fiddle.
Mrs. Porter looked uncertain.
“It was a fine supper,” Rowdy told her. “And I’m obliged for it.”
The landlady’s eyes shone with pleasure. “I am a little weary,” she confessed girlishly, sparing nary a glance for Lark, who seemed torn between tarrying and rushing headlong for the back stairs. “Perhaps I shall retire a little early, leave you and Miss Morgan to get acquainted. Mai Lee and the mister ought to be home soon. I always leave the back door unlocked for them.”
Lark rankled visibly at the prospect of being alone with him, but she didn’t rise from the table. She’d put down her fork, and her hands were out of sight. Rowdy was pretty sure, from the tense set of her shoulders, that she was gripping the sides of her chair with all ten fingers.
Rowdy stood, out of deference to the older woman. “A good night to you, Mrs. Porter,” he said, gravely polite. “I’ll wait up for Mai Lee and her man and see that the door is locked before I turn in.”
Mrs. Porter nodded, flustered, mumbled a good-evening to Lark, and departed, pausing once on the stairs to look back, naked curiosity glittering in her eyes. Like as not, she’d wait in the upper hallway for a spell, eavesdropping.
Rowdy smiled at the idea. Sat down again.
Lark stared into her plate.
“I guess I’ll take Pardner out for a walk,” Rowdy said. “Maybe you’d do me the kindness of keeping us company, Miss Morgan?”
Lark’s gaze flew to his face. She bit her lower lip, then nodded reluctantly and got to her feet. He’d been right to suppose there was something she was itching to find out, but it was clearly a private matter, and she knew as well as he did that Mrs. Porter had an ear bent in their direction.
Together they cleared the table, setting the dishes and silverware in the cast-iron sink. Rowdy pushed the coffeepot to the back of the stove, so it wouldn’t boil over while they were out, and watched out of the corner of his eye as Lark took a cloak from the peg by the door and draped it around her shoulders. Pardner, eager for an outing, dashed from Rowdy to Lark to the door, exuberant at his good fortune.
Lark smiled and leaned to give the dog’s head a tentative pat.
Something stirred in Rowdy at the sight.
“Does he have a leash?” Lark asked, as Rowdy crossed the room to stand as close to her as convention allowed, donning his own hat and coat.
He smiled. A leash? She was from a city, then, and probably a large one, where respectable folks didn’t allow their dogs to run loose. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Pardner sticks pretty close to me, wherever we go. Wouldn’t even chase a rabbit unless I gave him leave, and I never have.”
Rowdy opened the door, braced himself against the chill of the night air, and went out first, so if there was trouble, he’d be a barrier between it and Lark Morgan.
Pardner slipped past them both but waited in the yard, turning in a circle or two in his impatience to be gone, until they caught up.
“Your name isn’t Rowdy Rhodes,” Lark said, in a rush of whispered words, the moment they all reached the wooden sidewalk.
Pardner proceeded to lift his leg against a lamppost up ahead, while Rowdy adjusted his hat. “And yours isn’t Lark Morgan,” he replied easily.
Lark reddened slightly under her high cheekbones. Lord, she was a beauty. Wasted as a small-town schoolmarm. She ought to be the queen of some country, he reckoned, or appear on a stage. “Lark is my name,” she argued.
“Maybe so,” he answered. “But ‘Morgan’ isn’t. You’re running from something—or somebody—aren’t you?”
She hesitated just long enough to convince Rowdy that his hunch was correct. “Why are you here, Mr. Rhodes?” she asked. “What brings you to a place like Stone Creek?”
“Business,” he said.
She stopped, right in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Rowdy to stop, too, and look back at her. “Am I that business, Mr. Rhodes? If…if someone hired you to find me—”
“Find you?” Rowdy asked, momentarily baffled. In the next moment it all came clear. “You think I came here looking for you?”
She gazed at him, at once stricken and defiant. She had the look of a woman fixing to lift her skirts, spin on one dainty heel and run for her life. At the same time, her chin jutted out, bespeaking stubbornness and pride and a fierce desire to mark out some ground for herself and hold it against all comers. “Did you?”
Rowdy shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said quietly. “I did not.”
Lark still didn’t move. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t,” Rowdy answered, keeping a little distance between them, so she wouldn’t spook. “But consider this. If I’d come to Stone Creek to fetch you away, Miss Morgan, you and me and Pardner, we’d be a ways down the trail by now, whether you wanted to go along or not.”
Her eyes flashed with indignation, but the slackening in her shoulders and the slight lowering of her chin said she was relieved, too. “You are insufferably confident, Mr. Rhodes,” she said.
He grinned, tugged at the brim of his hat. “Call me Rowdy,” he said. “I don’t commonly answer to ‘Mr. Rhodes.’”
“I’d wager that you don’t,” Lark said. “Because it isn’t your name. I’m sure of that much, at least.”
“You’re sure of a lot of things, I reckon,” Rowdy countered. “Miss Morgan.”
“Very well,” she retorted. “I’ll address you as Rowdy. It probably suits you. You’ve fooled Mrs. Porter with your fine manners and your flattery, that’s obvious, but you do not fool me.”
“You don’t fool me, either—Lark.” He waited for her to protest his use of her given name—it was a bold familiarity, according to convention—but she didn’t.
She came to walk at his side, between him and Mrs. Porter’s next-door neighbor’s picket fence. The glow of the streetlamps fell softly over her, catching in her hair, resting in the graceful folds of her cloak, fading as they passed into the pools of darkness in between light posts.
“Did your mother call you Rowdy?” she asked casually, while Pardner sniffed at a spot on the sidewalk.
“Yes,” Rowdy said, remembering. Miranda Yarbro had always used his nickname—except when she was angry. On those rare occasions, her lips would tighten, and she’d address him as Robert. When she was proud of him, she’d call him Rob.
“Bless my boy, Rob,” she’d prayed, beside his bed, every night until he left home with his pa, at fourteen.
“Make a godly man of him.”
Guilt ambushed him. He reckoned the good Lord had attempted to answer that gentle woman’s prayer, but he, Rowdy, hadn’t cooperated.
“Where do you hail from, Mr.—Rowdy?”
Grateful for the reprieve from his regrets, Rowdy smiled. “A farm in Iowa,” he said. “Where do you hail from, Lark?”
She didn’t reply right away.
“Fair is fair,” Rowdy prompted. “You asked me a question and I gave you an answer.”
“St. Louis,” she said. “I grew up in St. Louis.”
And you’ve been a lot of places since, Rowdy thought, but he kept the observation to himself. After all, he’d covered considerable territory himself, in the years between here and that faraway farm.
Pardner trotted back to them. Nuzzled Rowdy’s hand, then Lark’s.
To his surprise she gave a soft laugh.
“You are a dear,” she said fondly.
Rowdy was both amused and disturbed to realize he wished she’d been talking to him instead of the dog.
* * *
LARK WATCHED from the steps of the schoolhouse that Monday morning as Maddie O’Ballivan, carrying her infant son in one arm and steering his reluctant older brother, Terran, forward with the other, marched through the gate. Ben Blackstone, the major’s adopted child, followed glumly, his blond hair shining in the morning sunlight.
Behind the little procession sat a wagon with two familiar horses tied behind. It had been the sound of its approach that had caused Lark to interrupt the second-grade reading lesson and come out to investigate.
Class had begun an hour earlier, promptly at eight o’clock.
Lark had missed Ben and Terran right away, when she’d taken the daily attendance, and hoped they were merely late. It was a long ride in from the large cattle ranch Sam and Major Blackstone ran in partnership, and for all that those worthy men must have deemed the journey safe, there were perils that could befall a pair of youths along the way.
Wolves, driven down out of the hills by hunger, for one.
Outlaws and drifters for another.
“Go inside, both of you,” Maddie told the boys, when she reached the base of the steps. Samuel, the baby, had begun to fuss inside his thick blanket, and Maddie bounced him a little, smiling up at Lark when Terran and Ben had slipped past her, on either side, to take their seats in the schoolroom.
“Rascals,” Maddie said, shaking her head and smiling a little. “They were planning to spend the day riding in the hills—I guess they didn’t figure on Sam and the major heading into town for a meeting half an hour after they left, and me following behind in the buckboard, meaning to lay in supplies at the mercantile.”
Maddie was a pretty woman, probably near to Lark’s own age, with thick chestnut hair tending to unruliness and eyes almost exactly the same color as fine brandy. Until the winter before, according to Mrs. Porter, Maddie had run a general store and post office in a wild place down south called Haven. She’d married Sam O’Ballivan after the whole town burned to the ground, and borne him a son last summer. Lark’s landlady claimed the ranger’s bride could render notes from a spinet that would make an angel weep, but she’d politely refused to play on Sunday mornings at Stone Creek Congregational. Said it was too far to travel, and she had her own ways of honoring the Lord ‘s Day.
Lark liked Maddie O’Ballivan, though they were little more than acquaintances, but she also envied her—envied her home, her obviously happy marriage and her children. Once, she’d fully expected to have all those things, too.
What a naive little twit she’d been, with a head full of silly dreams and foolish hopes.
“No harm done,” Lark said quietly, smiling back at Maddie. “I’ll give them each an essay to write.”
Maddie laughed, a rich, quiet sound born of some profound and private joy, patting the baby with a gloved hand as she looked up at Lark, her eyes kind but thoughtful. “You’re cold, standing out here. I’ll just untie Ben and Terran’s horses, so they’ll have a way home after school, and be on about my business.”
“I’ll send the boys out to do that,” Lark said, hugging herself against the chill. She hated to see Maddie go—she’d been lonely with only Mrs. Porter and Mai Lee for friends—but she had work to do, and she was shivering.
“Miss Morgan?” Maddie said, when Lark turned to summon Terran and Ben to see to their horses.
“Please,” Lark replied shyly, turning back. “Call me Lark.”
“I will,” Maddie said, pleased. “And of course you’ll call me Maddie. I was wondering if you might like to join Sam and me for supper on Friday evening. You could ride out to the ranch with the boys, after school’s out, or Sam could come and get you in the wagon.”
Lark flushed with pleasure; in Denver, as the wife of a powerful and wealthy man, she’d enjoyed an active social life. In Stone Creek, she was a spinster schoolmarm, and she probably roused plenty of speculation behind closed doors. Since she was a stranger and had all the wrong clothes for her station in life, folks seemed reticent around her. No one invited her anywhere, and she hadn’t thought it proper to attend community dances; she didn’t want the parents of her students thinking she was forward or looking for a husband.
“I’d like that,” she said. “But I don’t ride.”
Maddie smiled. “I’ll send Sam, then. Go inside now, before you freeze.”
Lark nodded and went back into the schoolhouse. She told Terran and Ben to go out and unhitch their horses, and they scrambled to obey.
“Miss Morgan?” A small hand tugged at the side of her skirt, and she looked down to see Lydia Fairmont holding up a page torn from her writing tablet. “I copied the words off the blackboard. Will you tell me if all my letters are headed whence they ought to go, please?”
* * *
AS AGREED, Rowdy met Sam and the major in the lobby of the small, rustic Territorial Hotel, the only such establishment in Stone Creek, just before nine o’clock that morning. He’d walked over with Pardner from Mrs. Porter’s, having left his horse at the livery stable the night before after returning from Flagstaff.
Both men stood when he entered, Sam looking fit and a little grim, though he had the peaceful eyes of a happily married man. Rowdy had never met the major, only seen him briefly when he’d come to Haven on sad business over a year before.
“Thanks for making the ride up here,” Sam said, sparing a slight smile for Pardner as he and Rowdy shook hands. “Good to know your sidekick is still with you.”
Rowdy nodded, then turned to the major, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a full head of white hair and a face like a Scottish banker.
“Major Blackstone,” Rowdy said respectfully.
“Call me John,” the major said, his voice deep and gruff.
“That would be an honor, sir,” Rowdy replied. Blackstone was a legend in the Arizona Territory and beyond—before signing on with the Rangers, he’d led cavalry troops at Fort Yuma. In his spare time, he’d founded one of the biggest spreads that side of Texas, fit to rival the McKettrick ranch over near Indian Rock, and served two terms in the United States Senate.
Sam had told Rowdy some of these things back in Haven. Rowdy had made a point of finding out more after receiving the telegram.
They all sat down in straight-backed leather chairs pulled up close to the crackling blaze on the hearth of a large natural rock fireplace. The lobby was otherwise empty and silent except for the ticking of a long-case clock. Pardner stuck close to Rowdy and lay down near his feet.
Rowdy saw Sam sit back, clearly taking his measure, and Pappy’s anxious words came back to him with an unexpected wallop. First, last and always, Sam O’Ballivan is an Arizona Ranger. You have truck with him, and you’re likely to find yourself dangling at the end of a rope.
“I guess you know the railroad is headed this way from Flagstaff,” the major ventured, after clearing his throat like a man preparing to make a speech.
Rowdy felt a quiver in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t fear, just a common sense warning. “So I’ve heard,” he said moderately.
Sam finally spoke. “Maybe you know there’s been some trouble. A couple of train robberies out of Flagstaff.”
With just about anyone else, Rowdy might have feigned surprise. With Sam O’Ballivan the trick probably wouldn’t work. “Heard that, too,” he said.
“According to Sam here,” the major went on, “you made a pretty fair lawman, down there in Haven. Stayed on after the fire, and all that trouble with that gang of outlaws. Shows you’ve got some gumption.”
Rowdy did not respond. Blackstone and O’Ballivan had issued a summons, and he’d honored it. It was up to them to do the talking.
“We need your help,” Sam said forthrightly. “The major’s getting on in years, and I’ve got a wife and family to look after, along with a sizable herd of cattle.”
“What kind of help?” Rowdy asked.
“Rangering,” John Blackstone said.
Wait till Pappy hears this, Rowdy thought. Not that he’d get a chance to share the information in the immediate future. “Rangering,” he repeated.
“I can swear you in right now,” the major announced. “’Course, that part of things will have to be our secret. Pete Quincy, the town marshal, up and quit a month ago, and you’d be filling his job, far as the good people of Stone Creek are concerned. The job doesn’t pay worth a hill of beans, but it comes with a decent house and a lean-to barn behind the jail, and you can take your meals at Mrs. Porter’s if you aren’t disposed to cook.”
Rowdy swept the room with his gaze. The hotel seemed as empty as a carpetbagger’s heart, but if they looked around a few corners or behind the curtains, they’d probably find Mrs. Porter, or someone of her ilk, with ears sticking out like the doors of a stagecoach fixing to take on passengers.
Sam interpreted the glance correctly. “There’s nobody here,” he said.
“You seem mighty sure of that,” Rowdy replied easily.
“Cleared the place myself,” Sam answered.
Rowdy tried to imagine anybody staying when Sam O’Ballivan said “go,” and smiled. “All right, then,” he said. “If I understand this correctly, I’m to pose as the marshal, but I’ll really be working for the major, here.”
“John,” the major said firmly.
“John,” Rowdy repeated.
“You’ve got the right of it,” Sam said. “All the while, of course, you’ll be keeping your ear to the ground, same as John and I will, for anything that might lead us to this train-robbing outfit.”
Rowdy chose his words carefully. “Might not be an outfit,” he offered. “Could be random—drifters, or drunked-up cowpokes looking to get a grub stake.”
John and Sam exchanged glances, then Sam shook his head.
“No,” he said. “It’s not random. Both robberies were carefully planned, and carried out with an expertise that can only come with long experience. These men aren’t drifters—they’re too sophisticated for that. The first robbery was peaceable. They felled a couple of trees across the track, in a place where the engineer would be sure to see the obstruction soon enough to put the brakes on. But there was a railroad agent aboard the second train, and the robbers seemed to know him. Singled him out right away, and relieved him of his weapons. A passenger tried to intercede, and he was shot for his trouble. Might never regain the use of his right arm.”
“You suspect anybody in particular?” Rowdy asked lightly.
“All we’ve got is a hunch,” John said. “My gut tells me, this is Payton Yarbro and his boys.”
Rowdy did not react visibly to the name—he’d had too much practice at hiding his identity for that—but on the inside, things commenced to churning. “I haven’t heard anything about the Yarbros in a long time,” he said. “I guess I figured they’d scattered by now. Even gone out of business. The old man’s got to be getting pretty long in the tooth—might even be dead.”
Both Sam and John were silent, and the speculation in their eyes unnerved Rowdy. He realized that if he’d followed his first impulse, which was to pretend he’d never heard of the Yarbros, they’d have been suspicious. Not to know of the Yarbros would have been the same as not knowing who the James brothers were, or the Earps.
“It’s only fair to tell you,” Rowdy went on, “that I’ve got no experience tracking train robbers. I sort of stumbled into that marshaling job down in Haven, and just did what was there to do. I’ve been a ranch hand, mostly.”
Sam watched him for a long moment, and with an intensity that would have made anybody but a Yarbro squirm in his chair. On the off chance Sam knew that, Rowdy shifted slightly.
“Sam tells me you’re a good hand in a gunfight,” John said. “You could have lit out when things got rough in Haven, but you stayed on. Even helped with some of the rebuilding, along with wearing a badge. You’ve got the kind of grit we’re looking for.”
Rowdy’s hat rested in his lap. He turned it idly by the crown. “I’m not inclined to settle down permanently,” he said.
The major nodded once, decisively. “That’s your prerogative. Run the Yarbros to ground and ride out, if that’s what you want to do. We’d be glad to have you stay on in Stone Creek, though.”
Rowdy studied John Blackstone. “You sure do seem to think highly of me,” he remarked, “given that I’m a stranger to you, and all you’ve got to go on is my reputation.”
For the first time since the palaver had begun, Blackstone smiled. “I’d stake my life and everything I own on Sam O’Ballivan’s assessment of anybody’s character. I might not know you from Adam, but I sure as hell know Sam.”
Rowdy knew Sam, too, and that was what made him wary. He was a fast gun, maybe as fast as Rowdy was, and he had a fortitude rarely seen, even in the wild Arizona Territory. Of course, it was possible, too, that Sam had already pegged Rowdy for a Yarbro, and meant for him to lead them right to Pappy’s den.
A more prudent man would have taken his pa’s advice and ridden out, put as much distance between himself and Stone Creek as he could, pronto. Rowdy was a gambler at heart; he wanted to stay and see how the cards would fall, but that wasn’t his main reason for sitting in on this particular game.
He had another, even more intriguing puzzle to solve, and that was Lark Morgan, though there was no telling when she’d strike out for parts unknown.
Sam and the major sat waiting for him to announce his decision, though they probably already knew what it would be.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
“Good,” John replied, with the air of a man completing important business. “I’ll swear you in as marshal, and Sam’s got a badge in his pocket. You just remember, the rangering part is between us.”
“I might need a posse, if I’m going after a bunch of train robbers,” Rowdy said. Whatever his private differences with his pa, he had no intention of rounding the old man up for a stretch in the prison down in Yuma, or even a hangman’s noose, but he’d put on a show until he knew what was what.
There was an off chance, of course, that Payton had been telling the truth when he claimed he’d had no part in robbing those trains. Should time and some investigation bear him out, Rowdy would find the real culprits and bring them in.
“If a posse is called for,” Sam said, handing Rowdy a star-shaped badge, “we’ll get one up.”
When the major produced a battered copy of the New Testament, Rowdy didn’t hesitate to lay a hand on it. He wasn’t a believer—at least, not the usual kind—but his mother had been, and that made the oath a solemn matter.
Fortunately, there was nothing in it about handcuffing his own pa, or any of his brothers, not specifically, anyhow. He swore to uphold the law, and he’d do that—up to a certain point.
After the swearing in, the major went off on some errand over at the Stone Creek Bank, while Sam, Rowdy and Pardner headed for the jailhouse, down at the far end of the street.
Would have made more sense to put the marshal’s office in the center of town, where the saloons were and trouble was most likely to break out. Rowdy figured folks wanted a lawman around, but at a little distance, too.
The jailhouse was about like the old one in Haven, before it burned. One cell, a potbelly stove with a coffeepot on top, somebody’s old table to serve as a desk.
It was the cabin out back that surprised Rowdy a little. It had three rooms, a good fireplace and a cookstove to rival the one in Mrs. Porter’s kitchen. The floors were hardwood and the windows were sound, with no cracks around them to let in the winter wind. The bed had a good feather mattress and plenty of blankets, and there was a sink with a working pump. An indoor toilet and a stationary bathtub with a copper hot water tank and a wood-burning boiler under it raised the place to an unexpected level of luxury.
“The last marshal had a wife,” Sam explained simply. “Come on. I’ll show you the barn.”
Rowdy grinned. “I’d probably feel more at home out there,” he said. Back in Haven he’d slept on a cell cot, when there were no prisoners, and with a certain accommodating widow when there were.
“Maybe you’ll take a wife,” Sam said, making for the back door.
“Not likely,” Rowdy replied.
Sam chuckled. “I thought the same way once,” he said. “Then I met up with Maddie Chancelor.”