Beautiful Bad Man (13 page)

When she first mentioned partners, all he could think of was sharecropping, feeling like an indentured servant again, Jake Kepler and “next year.” Marriage would be different. A husband owned everything, including the woman. She was crazy to propose it. He was crazy to consider it.

He could keep her safe, which was all he’d started out to do, but how miserable would he make her? How miserable would she turn around and make him? Would it kill all the peace he’d found out there, walking over the land, making plans, and daring to dream of a different life?

They walked back out in the cold, and he knew that if they parted and she went back to sitting by the store or to the boarding house, the decision would be made by default, and it would be no.

“All right,” he said. “How do we get married?”

She crossed her arms and tipped her head at him, “Are you sure? If you marry me you can’t have someone else later, you know.”

“I know.”

“Are you sure you don’t want someone younger? Some beautiful young blonde?”

“Now who has cold feet? If you’ve come to your senses, say so.”

“I haven’t.... We are a sorry pair, aren’t we? We need to find Reverend Densmore, and on a day like this he’s probably home close to his fire.”

Getting married was all too easy. In Cal’s opinion something that life-changing ought to take longer and present a lot more difficulty.

Instead, Densmore rounded up a couple of wide-eyed neighbors as witnesses, stood them all at the front of the church and, sounding all too much like Henry Sutton, read biblical words out of some other book. The man intoned rather than spoke, as if the words required emphasis. Which they didn’t. Those words could be whispered and make a man’s blood run cold. If he meant them.

Cal had never considered promises — his own or anyone else’s — much of a burden. No one had ever kept a promise to him, and he kept only those that were easier to keep than break. These promises had a disturbing weight to them. He told himself once outside the church the feeling would pass.

Till death. The only thing that kept him from walking out before the final amen was the look of her in the rose dress. A partnership. A real marriage. Norah.

He had no ring. Why hadn’t she mentioned a ring? Hawkins probably gave her some shiny thing, and where was it? She’d have a collection soon.

The female stranger who had agreed to be a witness, looking all misty-eyed, pulled the ring off her own finger and gave it to him so he could put it on Norah for those few minutes.

By the time it was done, he was impatient with it, ready to forget the strange feelings and start the long list of things he had gone over and over in his mind these last weeks.

“It’s late to start home today,” Norah said tentatively. “There are no married couples at the boarding house, but maybe Mrs. Pollard will let us stay there just for tonight. When she finds out we’re married, she’s going to feel bad about not admitting I was there when you asked.”

“We’re only going to the boarding house long enough to make that woman give you back most of your money. There are better places to spend the night, and we’ve got a lot to do before then.”

“I’m not spending the night in a saloon.”

“Didn’t you just promise to obey?”

She gave him the first of what he knew would be many unhappy looks.

“
I
T IS A BOARDING
house, not a hotel,” Norah said, as she hurried down the street after Caleb. “I couldn’t stay at the hotel by myself, and everyone says it’s terrible anyway. I couldn’t stay at the saloon like you.”

“For what she charged, you could. You’d need a gun to discourage any customers who mistook you for one of the regular women is all.”

“Are you telling me I look like one of those women?” She remembered about his mother after the words were out and flinched inside, but he didn’t take offense.

“Not to a sober man.”

“Oh.” She didn’t care whether he meant she looked better or worse to a sober man, specifically to his sober self. She really didn’t.

“Well, I don’t like her, but I don’t think Mrs. Pollard did anything wrong. I needed a safe place to stay, and I agreed to her terms.”

In the end. After all but swallowing her pride and begging to pay for only one week instead. Still, did the woman deserve whatever Caleb had in mind?

“She took advantage of you, and she lied to me.”

Norah half-wanted to ask why he took offense at someone lying to him when he admitted he was a liar himself. Her other half was smarter than that.

He stopped, and for a moment she dared hope he’d changed his mind. He hadn’t. “I suppose you have things in your room at that place you need to get out.”

“No, Mr. Lawson let me have my trunk brought to his store and put in his storeroom before I knew where I was staying yesterday, and I brought the box with my other things with me this morning, hoping I’d get a ride home today.”

“He won’t let you buy anything in his store, but he let you use the place for storage?”

“It’s only one trunk and one box. He’s a nice man really, but he has to make a living. The stores in town haven’t exactly flourished with so many people leaving these last years. He can’t give credit like he used to.”

“Norah.... You don’t need a partner. You need a keeper.” He gave her a smile she didn’t like the look of. “I guess that’s what you’ve got now, isn’t it? Let’s get this done so we can get on to more important things.”

Norah watched in awe as Mrs. Pollard, a tall, heavyset woman who had been so unyielding and intimidating two days ago, refunded twelve out of fourteen dollars without an argument.

Caleb never made a threat. Of course between pounding on the boarding house door with his fist the same way he did on the soddy door and then standing there with his coat open and tucked back, one hand on a hip and one on the handle of his pistol....

In spite of her previous defense of Mrs. Pollard’s business practices, Norah took guilty pleasure in her new husband’s performance. In fact she had to suppress a childish urge to stick her tongue out at the other woman.

“Here,” Caleb said, handing her the money. “You’re going to need this for better things.”

She had almost a hundred and twenty dollars in her pocket, and spending it on better things had an ominous sound. Pushing the money down deep, she kept her hand on top of it, liking the feel.

Ogden’s stable was in sight when Caleb ducked between two buildings and went through that digging under his clothes routine again to extract money from his hidden supply. This time Norah watched with less fascination for the process and more curiosity about the result.

“How much do you have?” she asked, expecting the same kind of hard set down her father or Joe would have given her for asking such a question.

“I haven’t counted for a while. Three thousand, give or take.”

Thousands! She gaped at him, astonished. “You really are rich.”

“Rich would laugh at this, but it’s enough for a decent start. Not having to buy the land helps.”

“You’re going to put in more, aren’t you? All I have is the land, but you’re going to put in what it’s worth and more.”

“You’re going to put in more too, partner. You just don’t know it yet.”

As they walked the rest of the way to the stable, Norah’s heart raced as she worried about what he could mean by that. He couldn’t mean.... People didn’t talk about that. Then again, maybe a man raised in a brothel would. Oh, she’d be better off if she’d never talked to Grampa Butler, but she couldn’t cut the knowledge out of her mind.

Arriving at the stable was a relief. She knew nothing about horses or wagons and would find a warm, quiet corner out of the weather and sit and wait while Caleb took care of buying both.

He had other plans. Partners did not sit in warm corners. They marched out back with the man selling the wagons and horses and examined the goods.

“I bought them before I realized what was going on.” A bandy-legged little man with weathered skin and a morose expression, Teddy Ogden sounded as discouraged as he looked. “The way things are, it’s all selling and no buying, but every one of these is a good wagon. You’ll never get a better deal.”

Norah didn’t know what to look for in a wagon. She couldn’t help, and Caleb couldn’t possibly believe she could. He just wanted her to be as cold as he was.

Except — “Oh, that’s our wagon.”

Both men swiveled their heads toward her as if they’d forgotten her presence, but while Ogden’s face stayed blank, Caleb caught her meaning.

“Are you saying this is the wagon that killed your husband?”

The very question brought a surge of old anger. “The wagon didn’t kill him,” she said. “Mr. Van Cleve killed him, at least his men did.”

Ogden didn’t like it. “You said she was your wife.”

“She is. We got married today. Until about an hour ago, she was Mrs. Joseph Hawkins.”

“You can’t just take that wagon. Maybe I didn’t buy it, but it was abandoned here one night with one side all stove in, and I fixed it good as new, and I been storing it here for months.”

Storing? The wagons all sat in the open behind the stable. Not that the wagon had ever been under cover at home either.

“We may not take it at all,” Caleb said. “Give us a minute.” He pulled Norah far enough off to be sure Ogden couldn’t hear. “How did it get here?”

“I don’t know. The neighbors who brought Joe’s body home found him crushed under the empty wagon and everything gone — the horses, the supplies, his rifle, everything. Maybe they went back and got the wagon, but why would they bring it here? Finding Joe scared them. They sold out and were gone within days.”

“Maybe they used it, left it here, and hopped a train out of town. However it got here, we might get it cheaper than buying another one outright. How much would that bother you?”

“It wouldn’t. I told you. The wagon didn’t kill him.”

“I know. Believe me, Norah, I know. They killed him. You don’t have to convince me.”

Relief flooded through her so strongly her knees wobbled a little. No one had ever believed her. At least no one ever admitted it. The sheriff said it was an accident and refused to investigate, and everyone else agreed.

“The road is straight as a ruler there,” she said. “Our horses were just big saddle horses. They could barely pull that wagon loaded. They didn’t run away, and the wagon didn’t just tip over out of the blue and greedy neighbors swarm over it like locusts and carry everything off.”

“I know, but you be sure you don’t mind seeing it every day, using it again.”

“I don’t. Really. Do what you think is best.”

In the end, Ogden swallowed his disappointment. Caleb agreed to the cost of fixing the side of the wagon bed and extra for storage, and if the total was less than half the price of a wagon, Ogden couldn’t hide his relief over getting that much instead of dealing with accusations of theft and demands for the wagon’s return free of cost.

Her husband had a strange way of doing things, Norah decided. He demanded twelve dollars back from Mrs. Pollard and got it, yet he paid Mr. Ogden what the man claimed he was owed without argument. Caleb didn’t like Mrs. Pollard of course, but he didn’t show any signs of liking Mr. Ogden either.

It had something to do with his concept of obligations owed and debts incurred and the need to repay. Someday she’d figure it out. Until death do us part. For better or for worse. She smiled a little, thinking of the look on his face at the sound of those words and the others.

They moved on to the horses, and Norah couldn’t stop a small, sad, “Oh, dear,” from escaping at the sight.

“They’re just like the wagons,” Ogden said defensively. “I shouldn’t have bought them, but I didn’t know. I should have put them on the train and sent them for auction, but it’s too late now. The dog man comes and gets one whenever he needs meat, and I feed them as much as I can afford. I got some decent saddle stock heavy enough to pull a wagon around front. That’s what you want.”

Caleb ignored the man and walked up to the corral fence. The big horses were all thin, their ribs and hips poking sharply through rough winter coats, their eyes hollow.

“Joe always said that same thing,” Norah whispered. “He said these big horses eat too much.”

“Any horse eats too much for your place. The only feed around is grass, and if you turned them out they’d be off to the V Bar C now and in the crops eating themselves to death in the summer.”

“Joe staked them out on the grass. They did all right.”

Caleb made a disbelieving sound, and Norah knew he was right. Their horses had never looked good.

“Those look like two of Mr. Fleming’s Percherons,” she said, pointing at a pair of grays nuzzling each other. “He used to brag about his horses winning prizes at fairs back where he came from. Oh, I hate this.”

“Can’t say I’m having a good time myself,” Caleb muttered.

Norah listened as Caleb sold a packhorse and bought the Percheron team and their harness. Sad and sorry as those animals looked, he and Ogden hitched them to the wagon, Caleb helped her to the seat, climbed up beside her, and drove toward the feed store.

“Can these horses even make it home?” Norah asked.

“The difference between a horse big enough to do the job and one straining at it, is yes, even half-starved like this, they can pull a loaded wagon to your place, especially after getting enough to eat tonight and tomorrow morning.”

He gave her the closest thing to a regular smile she’d ever seen and added, “Skinny can be stronger than it looks sometimes.”

The reference to his own surprising strength that night years ago, if that’s what it was, made Norah smile too.

“Mr. Flood’s arm did swell up and get red and drain for a while after you bit him. I think it almost scared him to death. He was sure he had hydrophobia and was going to die.”

“Good.”

Norah had been in the feed store a few times with her father and Joe, and it was one of the places they’d run up a considerable debt. She didn’t want to stay out in the cold, but she didn’t want to chance grumpy Mr. Huber recognizing her and dunning Caleb either. She offered to wait outside, but Caleb was having none of it.