CHAPTER 6
MAI LEE WAS ALONE in the kitchen when Lark arrived at Mrs. Porter’s and divested herself of the lunch pail and lesson books, which she’d nearly dropped when Rowdy’d kissed her—in front of God and everybody. Hanging up her cloak, she frowned, immediately sensing something out of the ordinary, an uncomfortable shift in the atmosphere.
The Chinese woman stood at the sink, peeling potatoes, her back to Lark. Her child-size shoulders were stooped, and she didn’t say a word, or turn to offer her usual smile of welcome.
Lark put aside disturbing thoughts of Rowdy Rhodes and her concern for Lydia Fairmont, renewed when she’d walked the little girl home from school, a nameless fretting that came and went.
“Mai Lee?” Lark ventured, looking toward the stairs and the inside doorways, expecting Mrs. Porter to appear. “Is something the matter?”
Mai Lee did not respond. Usually she chattered, in her oddly cobbled English, full of news.
Still frowning, Lark took the teakettle, which would already have been singing on the stove on any other afternoon, and stood beside Mai Lee to pump cold water into it. Once again she repeated the woman’s name.
A tear slipped down Mai Lee’s cheek. “He buy house,” she lamented. “He buy garden.”
“What house?” Lark asked, setting the kettle back on the stove to heat, her voice gentle. “What garden? And who is ‘he’?”
Mai Lee sniffled, but she still wouldn’t look at Lark. “I save for house,” she said. “Save for garden.” A shiver went through her. “Now, is gone.”
Tentatively Lark touched her friend’s shoulder. Mai Lee and her husband had undergone staggering hardship and privation before leaving China, by Mrs. Porter’s account. Even now, they slept under a staircase, in a bed hardly big enough for one person, let alone two. They both worked long hours, never shirking, and while they seemed to consider themselves fortunate, given their cheerful spirits and quick smiles, glad of having ample food to eat and shelter, they nevertheless lived with a bare-bones simplicity that would have been difficult for other people—Lark included—to endure.
Lark was singularly alarmed by Mai Lee’s obvious upset, and still confused by her attempt at an explanation.
“Mai Lee,” she said quietly, “please, help me to understand. What house? What garden?”
“House behind jail,” Mai Lee said, her face a mask of wretched sorrow, even in profile. “Me save to buy. Have almost enough. Now gone.”
Suddenly it was all clear to Lark. Her heart sank.
Mai Lee and her husband had hoped to purchase the tiny place where she had seen Rowdy last, replacing floorboards. The homestead, one of the first in the area, had been abandoned years ago, and stood empty since then. The town of Stone Creek had held title to it, offering it for sale to anyone who would pay the back taxes.
And Rowdy had bought it. That answered a question she’d hadn’t thought to ask. She’d been too flustered to ask what he was doing there, pulling up floorboards and driving nails.
Lark stiffened. She couldn’t assume he’d known he was destroying a dream—he hadn’t been in town long enough to be privy to things she was still garnering after three months’ residence—but he was the source of Mai Lee’s despair, nevertheless.
“Oh, Mai Lee,” she said, “I’m so sorry.” Sympathy seemed a poor offering, in the face of the other woman’s sorrow.
Mai Lee nodded once, tersely, and went on peeling potatoes, rubbery from their long tenure in a wooden barrel in Mrs. Porter’s root cellar.
Knowing nothing else to do, and certainly nothing helpful to say, Lark went about brewing her tea. Presently, a noise at the door and a sweep of chilly air brought Mrs. Porter bustling in, carrying a shopping basket.
“I saw Mr. Rhodes on my way here,” she announced.
“He’s got a young man with him, too—came by here earlier, while you were at school. The boy had a horse when he came, but they’re both on foot now.”
Mai Lee promptly flung down her paring knife. The potato she’d been skinning landed in the kettle with a splashy plunk. She turned and scurried from the room, and the door to the little nook under the main stairs closed audibly.
“Merciful heavens,” Mrs. Porter marveled. “What’s gotten into Mai Lee?”
Before Lark could reply, the door swung open again, and Pardner pranced in, closely followed by Rowdy and a handsome lad of sixteen or seventeen years. The resemblance between man and boy was so strong that Lark blinked once, certain she was seeing things.
Rowdy was taller than the youth, more muscled, graceful where his companion was awkward. The newcomer had yet to grow into his strength, and his hair was a few shades darker than Rowdy’s, a butternut color, but Lark knew that in high summer, it would be fair as corn silk.
Despite these differences, they had the same blue eyes. The same expressive mouths, on the verge of a wicked grin, though the boy’s was set in a wary line at the moment.
The youth stood shyly just inside the door. At a nudge from Rowdy, he removed his ancient brown hat, held it with a diffidence that was not reflected in his taut jaw or watchful eyes.
Pardner lay down heavily, to one side of the cookstove.
Rowdy, meanwhile, made the introductions. “Mrs. Porter,” he said, “Miss Morgan, this is my brother Gideon.”
Gideon nodded politely, first to Mrs. Porter, then to Lark, though he didn’t smile. “Pleased,” he said, and blushed crimson.
Mrs. Porter, evidently over that morning’s chagrin at not being included in Maddie O’Ballivan’s invitation to Friday-night supper, fussed happily. “Come on in, Gideon,” she said. “Let me take your hat and coat. I’m sure Mai Lee—” She paused, realizing her cook was not present. “Where is Mai Lee?”
Lark pinned Rowdy with a brief but sharp glance. “Mai Lee,” she replied, “has retired to her quarters. She’s suffered a keen blow to her hopes.”
Rowdy frowned as he took off his coat and hat and hung them in their places.
In the interim, Mrs. Porter fairly tore the hat from Gideon’s hand. “I can’t imagine what would be troubling Mai Lee,” she chattered giddily. “The girl is the very soul of good cheer most of the time.”
Lark fixed her gaze on Rowdy. “It seems,” she said carefully, “that Mai Lee and her husband were hoping to purchase the property behind the jailhouse.”
Rowdy sighed, clearly registering the gravity of the situation.
Mrs. Porter, however, made to peel Gideon’s short wool coat off his shoulders, and he shrugged out of the garment with some haste, probably to avoid her fussing. “What a ridiculous idea,” the landlady prattled, with a wave of one hand. “Why, that house is barely fit to serve as a woodshed, and the well’s fallen in, too. There isn’t enough land there to do anything with, either. Mr. Porter always favored burning it clear and letting the weeds take it.” She tugged at Gideon’s arm. “Do sit down, Mr. Rhodes,” she urged.
“Payton,” Gideon said, casting a glance at his brother that was both beleaguered and stubbornly defiant. “My name is Payton, not Rhodes.”
Lark’s attention quickened at this. She watched Rowdy even more closely than before.
“Sit down, Gideon,” Rowdy told his brother.
Gideon sat, somewhat grudgingly.
“I’d like to speak with Mai Lee,” Rowdy said, neatly sidestepping Mrs. Porter, who appeared ready to herd him toward the table where young Gideon waited, looking uneasy, as though he might spring up and dash for the back door at any moment, not even stopping to retrieve his hat and coat from the pegs.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Lark told him, and her stiff countenance had more to do with the kiss they’d exchanged earlier than any personal judgments regarding his buying the property Mai Lee had wanted so much. “She has taken refuge in her private quarters.”
Rowdy leaned in, spoke gruffly, as though they were alone in the room, he and Lark. “Then perhaps you will be so kind, Miss Morgan,” he said, “as to roust her?”
“I’ll do it,” Mrs. Porter chimed, ever-helpful. Her lack of sympathy for Mai Lee’s position chafed at something in Lark, like sandpaper against raw flesh.
She glared at Rowdy as Mrs. Porter rushed out of the kitchen, so anxious to do the man’s bidding that she was breathless just calling Mai Lee’s name. “You might have given the poor woman a little time to get over the shock,” she said coolly.
His blue gaze moved over her face, came to rest, with exquisite focus, on her mouth. Her flesh tingled; she relived the kiss as surely as if he’d hauled off and done it again, right there in Mrs. Porter’s kitchen.
“I like to deal with situations directly,” Rowdy told her. He seemed to be implying that seducing her was one of those “situations,” but of course Lark couldn’t be certain. When she was around Rowdy, she seemed incapable of rational thought.
She colored up, incensed that it should be so.
He merely grinned.
Mai Lee appeared in the kitchen, following puffy-eyed and sullen in the wide, invisible path Mrs. Porter cut for her.
Rowdy studied Mai Lee, his gaze pensive, and then dismissed Mrs. Porter, Gideon and Lark from the room as grandly as if he were the owner of that house, and not merely a temporary boarder.
They all adjourned, at Mrs. Porter’s behest, to Mr. Porter’s study.
There, Gideon stood in the center of the room, looking as uncomfortable and anxious as he had in the kitchen.
Mrs. Porter straightened Mr. Porter’s desk, but did not, of course, throw away the cigar stub resting in the ashtray.
Lark paced, wondering what Rowdy was saying to Mai Lee.
She had her answer when Mai Lee suddenly sprang up in the study doorway, beaming.
“I quitting cook!” she cried triumphantly.
* * *
IN HIS THOUGHTS Rowdy reviewed the events leading up to the present prickly situation.
He’d offered to rent the ramshackle place behind his own temporary residence to Mai Lee and her husband, and she’d accepted immediately.
In her enthusiasm she’d flown the coop, dashed right out of the house, no doubt to find her husband and bend his ear with the news.
Mrs. Porter had promptly developed a sick headache and repaired to her bed.
He and Gideon and Lark had eaten, after Rowdy patched together a half-made supper from Mai Lee’s beginnings.
“What is Mrs. Porter supposed to do without a housekeeper and cook?” Lark demanded the moment Gideon had finished his meal, dutifully carried his plate and utensils to the sink and taken Pardner outside so he could attend to the customary dog business.
Rowdy sighed. Lark was clearing the table, doing a lot of bustling as she went about the task, while he ladled hot water from the stove reservoir into a pair of dented dishpans. “I don’t think Mai Lee meant she was quitting tonight,” he said, hoping he was right. “She and her man can’t plant anything for a couple of months, anyway, and the shack isn’t fit to live in. She just got a little excited when I told her I’d rent her the property for a dollar down and a dollar a month, that’s all.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Rowdy noted with some satisfaction that Lark had softened a mite. She’d been huffy before. Had about glared a hole through him when Mrs. Porter practically swooned at the news of her servant’s imminent departure and had to be escorted upstairs to her room.
Lark had undertaken that duty, because the situation was delicately female, and when she returned, she’d been narrow-eyed and tight around the mouth.
She sank into a chair at the table, evidently accustomed to letting other people do the dishes without offering to help.
Rowdy added the observation to the list he kept in his head.
It didn’t mean she was selfish or lazy, he reflected. Lark was neither of those things. She simply wasn’t used to housework, a fact that tallied with her too-fine clothes and a certain elegance in her manners.
She could kiss, though.
Damnation, she could kiss.
“Some people,” he said easily, “would think it was a kindly gesture, my offering the use of that place to Mai Lee on terms I knew she could manage.”
Looking back at Lark, he saw that she’d propped an elbow on the tabletop and rested her chin in her palm. “Why is Gideon’s last name Payton, when yours is Rhodes?” she asked. That was another thing he’d noticed about her—that she had a way of switching horses in the middle of the stream, conversationally speaking. “Did you have different fathers?”
It was a tricky question.
The honest answer was no—Payton Yarbro had sired both Gideon and him. Still, with the fourteen-year gap between their ages, and the disparate ways they’d grown up—Rowdy on the home place in Iowa, Gideon in the back of Ruby’s Saloon and Poker House in Flagstaff—it would be just as true to say they’d come from separate families.
He was about to say yes, even though it went sorely against his grain to mislead Lark—which was an odd thing in itself because she hadn’t exactly been lavish with the truth herself—when she saved him the whole conundrum.
“I shouldn’t have asked you that,” she said, appearing at his elbow and taking up a dish towel. “It was far too personal an inquiry.”
He grinned at her. “Do you always talk like that?”
She frowned, puzzled, and swabbed a plate dry after he set it in the second basin, full of clear water. “Like what?”
“Like you’re reading aloud from a page torn out of an etiquette book,” he said.
“I don’t!” she protested.
“Maybe it’s because you’re a schoolmarm,” he teased.
“I’m not—”
“A schoolmarm?”
She turned pink. “I am a schoolteacher,” she insisted.
“And what else?”
“Nothing else.”
He let his gaze drift over her face, taking care not to venture further south than her chin. Even the hollow of her throat was dangerous territory, covered, though it was, by that high-collared dress of hers. “Well,” he drawled, “there does seem to be every indication that you’re a woman, as well as a schoolm—teacher.”
Her blush deepened. “You are deliberately baiting me,” she accused.
“If I gave you that impression,” he said with exaggerated sincerity, “I certainly apologize.”
“You’re not one bit sorry!”
He chuckled. “Guess not,” he said. “It’s a pleasant thing, riling you.”
She stopped all pretense of drying dishes and stared at him. “Why?”
“Your eyes flash, and you get all warm and pink. The way you would if I laid you down and proved to your complete…satisfaction that you surely are a woman before anything else.”
She blinked. For a moment he thought she’d move to slap him, the way she’d tried to in the yard in front of the shack. This time, since he had a plate in one hand and a dishtowel in the other, she might succeed.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, given that he might have enjoyed even that kind of physical contact with Lark Morgan—Gideon chose then to open the door and come back into the house, Pardner with him.
“You can bed down in that room back there,” Rowdy told his brother, with a nod toward the doorway nearby, after a brief interval spent adjusting to the intrusion.
“I’ll sleep over at the new place.”
“I’d rather stay with you,” Gideon said. “I’ve got a bedroll. I can bunk on the floor.”
“Whatever suits you,” Rowdy told him. Gideon was still a kid, for all that he probably believed himself to be a man, and he’d ridden some distance to get to Stone Creek. It wasn’t surprising that he’d be a little skittish about staying at Mrs. Porter’s and being fussed over by a pack of women.
Lark looked from Gideon to Rowdy and back again. “How old are you, Gideon?” she asked.
“Sixteen,” Gideon said, as though that were an august age, worthy of some awe.
Lark smiled at him, laying aside the dish towel. “Well then, if you’re staying in Stone Creek a while, you’d best come to school in the morning. We start at eight.”
Gideon’s blue eyes goggled, then narrowed a little. “I’m not going to school,” he said flatly.
“Yes,” Rowdy said, “you are.”
A thick silence fell.
“Miss Morgan,” Rowdy went on, after watching Gideon try to gulp down his Adam’s apple three or four times, “is your teacher.”
Gideon’s eyes widened.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Gideon,” Lark said pleasantly.
And then she left.
Nothing about seeing him tomorrow, Rowdy thought, with a private grin.
But she would. He’d make sure of that—put himself square in her path at least once.
“I don’t want to go to school,” Gideon said stoutly.
“I thought maybe I could be your deputy or something. Both of us could go looking for Pa.”
Rowdy dried his hands, the dishwashing job finished at last. “I’m going looking for Pa,” he said. “You’re going to school.”
Gideon had the Yarbro temper, all right. It glittered in his eyes and bunched a certain muscle in his jaw. “Does it matter a whoop to you that I just said I didn’t want to?” he snapped.
Rowdy grinned. “Not even that much,” he said. Then he summoned Pardner, who was lounging by the stove again, and fetched down his hat and coat from the pegs by the door. They had a warm, comfortable place to sleep right there at Mrs. Porter’s, but Gideon’s horse was over behind the jailhouse, and so was his bedroll.
Might as well make the move, though the truth was, Rowdy didn’t much like doing it. Lark was here, under this roof, after all, and he wasn’t real keen on the idea of leaving her unprotected from whoever she was so scared of.
He wished he’d told her to wait up and lock the door behind them, but Mai Lee was still out, and she might not have a key.
Maybe he’d just come by later, in his capacity as the marshal of Stone Creek, and make sure the lock was turned.
Gideon plunked his hat on his head and jammed his arms into his coat sleeves as he came down the back steps behind Rowdy and Pardner.
“I think you’re sweet on that schoolteacher woman,” he said.
“Stop thinking,” Rowdy replied. “You might hurt yourself.”
“I reckon you meant that to be funny,” Gideon scowled, clearly not amused. “It wasn’t.”
“Does Ruby know you’re here, Gideon?” Rowdy asked, as they gained the sidewalk, “or is she out knocking on doors all over Flagstaff, looking for you?”
“I left her a note,” Gideon said. “Anyhow, I didn’t come here so I could go to school. I came because you said I ought to, if I needed help, and I need help to find Pa.”
“I’ve been thinking I might require a deputy,” Rowdy said.
Gideon looked at him with new, and slightly less hostile, interest. Rowdy wondered if the kid was always this testy, or if it was just because he was so worried about Pappy. “I could do it,” the boy said, squaring his shoulders. “Be your deputy, I mean.”
“You might want to hear me out before you agree,” Rowdy told him. “It’s night work, and it pays next to nothing. You’d have to sit in the jailhouse while I’m making my rounds. In case somebody came by, looking for help. That would leave you free to go to school in the daytime.”
“When am I supposed to sleep?” Gideon demanded.
“You can rest in the cell, as long as there aren’t any prisoners,” Rowdy answered, holding back a grin.
“Do I get a gun?”
“No,” Rowdy said. “You do not get a gun.”
“Suppose there’s trouble?”
“A gun would only complicate matters.”
“You carry one,” Gideon argued. He was Payton Yarbro’s baby boy, all right. He’d probably stand flatfooted and argue with an angel sent from Almighty God, just for the sport of it.
“I’m the marshal,” Rowdy reminded him.
“I’ve never heard of a deputy who didn’t even have a gun,” Gideon said. “It’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”
“That’s my offer,” Rowdy said. “Take it or leave it.”
“Do I at least get a badge?”
Rowdy chuckled, raised the collar of his coat against a chilly wind. “I think I can scrounge up one of those,” he said. He’d seen an old tin star, partially rusted and with the pin bent, under a stack of musty papers at the jailhouse. “It might need a little polishing and fixing, though.”
They’d reached Center Street by then.
Rowdy counted the horses in front of all three saloons, found the number to his liking and headed for the jailhouse. Opened the door, went inside, lit a lamp on the table he’d be using as a desk.
“You go on around back and see to your horse,” he told Gideon, after finding the badge and tossing it to him. “Then you’d better turn in for the night. You’ve got school in the morning and there’ll be your deputy duties to see to tomorrow evening.”
Gideon frowned, probably wondering if he was being hornswoggled, but when he looked down at the battered old badge in his palm, he finally smiled. It was the first time he’d shown the slightest inclination toward good humor.
“If you’ve got any ideas on where I might start looking for Pa,” Rowdy said, “I would appreciate your sharing them.”
Gideon’s hand closed around the tarnished star, and he looked serious again. “You meaning to saddle up and ride out, once I’m asleep?” he asked suspiciously.
“No,” Rowdy said. “Like I said before, I’ve got rounds to make.”
He intended to visit all three saloons and make sure everybody was minding their manners, and he might walk the side streets, too. After all, there were only two of them—probably not more than twenty houses in the whole town.
Once he knew the place was buttoned down tight, he’d try Mrs. Porter’s back door. If he found it locked, then he’d head on home and maybe try out that fancy copper bathtub.
Gideon tucked his badge into his coat pocket and left.
Pardner started to follow him, stopped, looked back at Rowdy.
“Go on,” Rowdy said to the dog, feeling a strange tightening in his throat. “You go on with Gideon and rest up. You’ve already put in a good day’s work.”
Pardner stood stock-still for another few moments, then he turned and followed Gideon outside.
It was better this way, Rowdy told himself. Pardner was getting old, and though he’d been a stalwart traveler on the trip up from Haven, he wouldn’t be able to keep up on the trail, especially if a fast pace was required.
Tracking Pappy down would take some doing as it was.
No, sir, he did not need a dog to make it harder.
Despite this conclusion, a somber mood settled over Rowdy as he walked the streets of Stone Creek. When he’d done that, he checked the saloons.
Business was slow and, while Jolene and the other owners might not have agreed, he saw that as a good thing.
He tried Mrs. Porter’s kitchen door last.
It was locked, and all the lights were out.
Rowdy’s melancholy deepened a little.
He secured the jailhouse last, laying kindling and newspaper for a morning fire, emptying the coffeepot and pumping water out in front, by the horse trough, to rinse out the grounds.
His horse and Gideon’s were settled in the lean-to barn.
Rowdy went inside the house, wondering what it would be like to have a wife waiting for him. Not just any wife, either.
It was Lark Morgan he imagined greeting him with a warm smile.
He tried to shake off the images, but they stayed with him.
Gideon lay in front of the fireplace, where he’d built himself a blaze, asleep in his bedroll. Pardner had settled right up alongside him, and he lifted his head and looked closely at Rowdy, awaiting a command.
Rowdy sighed. “Good night, Pardner,” he said.
Pardner rested his muzzle on his forepaws, let out a weary breath and closed his eyes.
Damnation, Rowdy thought glumly, it was purely a hard thing to give up a dog, even if the process was gradual.
The boiler in the bathtub room was fed by a pipe leading to a tank on the roof, and it was full of fresh water. Rowdy lit a fire under it, wiped the copper tub out, and got soap and a towel from the box of supplies he’d had sent over that morning from the mercantile.
The water was a long time getting hot, but he didn’t mind that. He used the time to shake out the bedding and check the mattress for cooties.
The bath was worth waiting for.
Rowdy soaked for a while, then scrubbed. It sure beat using one of the public tubs over at Jolene’s.
As soon as the sun came up, he decided, he’d saddle his horse and ride toward Flagstaff. Follow the railroad tracks for a while, and see if he came across his pa.
He leaned back in the tub and closed his eyes.
It wasn’t much of a plan, he reckoned, but he had to start someplace. If Pappy had ridden out in the middle of the night, as Gideon said, and with some haste, he’d probably gone to meet up with his gang.
There were plenty of places in the rugged countryside for outlaws to roost.
The old man had asked about Wyatt and the others when Rowdy paid him a call in Flagstaff, acting like he didn’t know where any of them were. That didn’t mean, of course, that the Yarbro boys weren’t around, waiting to rob a train.
Rowdy swore.
What if it wasn’t just Pappy he had to find? What if Wyatt and Nick and Ethan and Levi were out there, too?
Pappy liked to conduct “peaceable” robberies, back in the old days, but he was nothing if not unpredictable. There’d been two holdups out of Flagstaff in the recent past, and one of them had ended in gunplay. A man had been shot in the arm and maimed.
There was a distinct possibility that Pappy had changed the way he did things. Age mellowed most folks, but it might not have had that effect on Payton Yarbro. The man was a law unto himself.
He had to find Pappy. That was all there was to it.
Rowdy closed his eyes, drifted off to sleep.
Woke to cold bathwater and what sounded like a hard kick to the side of the copper tub.
Cursing himself for not leaving the .44 within reach like he always did, Rowdy slammed into wakefulness, every muscle tense, ready to fight.
A pistol cocked, and the barrel pressed into the end of his nose.
“Stay right there in that water,” Pappy warned.
“Don’t you move a muscle, you little badge-wearing bastard.”