Her heart thudded as she worked up her courage and asked, "What else did you hear?"
"Nothing. Only his remark about the shoes."
She concealed a sigh but was greatly relieved.
David looked at her entreatingly and said, "He's gone now and we can both forget him."
"Yes," she agreed. But there was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and she could not meet David's eyes, knowing that for as long as she lived she would never forget Jesse DuFrayne. She attempted to lighten the atmosphere by suggesting, "Let's talk of more pleasant things. Tell me what it's like in the East."
"Have you never been there?"
"No. I've never been farther than Denver, and I was there only twice, both times as a child."
"The East…"He stopped momentarily and ruminated. "Well, the East has absolutely everything one could want to buy. Factories everywhere producing everything, especially since the war is over. The newest innovations and the grandest inventions. Did you know that a man named Lyman Blake in Massachusetts invented a machine for sewing soles onto shoes?"
"No, no I didn't, but I guess I must thank him for his glorious invention." Miss Abigail realized she was bored to death by this conversation.
"The East has all the up-and-coming modern advancements, including women's suffragettes voicing their absurd ideas and encouraging such outlandish activities as the game of tennis for females. Not everything in the East is proper," he finished, making it clear what he thought of women playing tennis.
"I've heard of Mrs. Stanton's Suffrage Association, of course, but what is tennis?"
"Nothing at all for you, Miss Abigail, I assure you," he said distastefully. "Why, it's the most… the most unladylike romp that France ever invented! Women actually running and… and sweating and swatting at balls with these gut-string rackets."
"It sounds like the Indian game of lacrosse."
"One might expect such behavior out of an uncivilized savage, but the women of the East should know better than to wear shortened hems and shortened sleeves and carry on like… well, it's disgraceful! They have lost their sense of decency. Some of them even drink spirits! I much prefer you women out West, who still conform to the old social graces, and for my money I want to see it left that way. Leave the upstart ideas out East where they belong."
He had scarcely stammered at all during that long diatribe.
She realized he was very incensed about the subject. Miss Abigail sat on the porch swing, rocking quietly, and suddenly found herself comparing David Melcher's opinions to those of Jesse DuFrayne on the many occasions he'd encouraged her to set aside her prim and proper ways. She remembered that day up in the hills when he'd taken her hat off for her and teased her about not unbuttoning her wet cuffs.
She pictured his dark hand pouring champagne and recalled the loose, easy feeling as it ran through her blood. And then there was that untidy scrap they'd had on that kitchen chair and somehow in the middle of it he'd said he liked her in that old faded shirt…
"… don't you agree, Miss Abigail?"
She came out of her reverie to realize David had been expounding upon the virtues of a western woman while she'd been wool-gathering about Jesse, comparing him—and unfavorably yet!—to David.
"Oh, yes," she sat up straight. "I quite agree, I'm sure." But she wasn't even sure what she was agreeing with. Would Jesse's memory always distract her so?
Apparently she had agreed that one o'clock would be a good time for them to meet tomorrow, for he was rising from the swing and making his way across the porch while she followed.
He went down one step, turned, cleared his throat volubly, came back up the same step, fumbled for her hand, and kissed it quickly, then retreated down the step hurriedly.
"Good night, Miss Abigail."
"Thank you for dinner, Mr. Melcher."
For some reason, watching him disappear up the street, she found herself wishing he had not cleared his throat that way or fumbled as he reached for her hand or even kissed
it
! She wished that he might have kissed her mouth instead, and that when he had, she'd have found it preferable to the kisses of Jesse DuFrayne.
Inside, the house was beastly quiet.
She wandered in without even lighting a lamp, listless and dissatisfied. She raised the back of the kissed hand to her lips, trying to draw some feeling from the memory. David Melcher approved of her wholeheartedly, she was sure. She willed that to be enough for now, but the memory of Jesse DuFrayne contraposed every action and mannerism that David had displayed tonight. Why should it be that even though he was gone Jesse had the power to impose himself on her this way? And at the most inopportune times possible? Instead of reveling in David's seeming attraction for her, her joy was blighted by her endless contrasting of the two men in which Jesse invariably came out the winner. With these couple of days so precious, while David remained, she wanted to find him perfect, flawless, incontestable. But Jesse wouldn't let hen Jesse dominated in every way.
Even here in her house, from which he was gone, she found herself listening for his breathing, his yawning, the squeak of the bedsprings as he turned. Perhaps by taking over her old room she could exorcise him.
But wandering into it she was smitten by a sense of emptiness for her "gunslinger." The bed was dark and vacant. The pall of silence grew awesome. She dropped down onto the edge of the bed, feeling his absence keenly, knowing a bleakness more complete and sad than that which she had felt at the death of her father.
Twisting at the waist, she suddenly punched one small fist into the pillow he'd occupied so lately, demanding angrily, "Get out of my house, Jesse DuFrayne!"
Only he was out.
She punched the pillow again, her delicate fist creating a thick, muffled sound of loneliness. He's gone, she despaired. He's gone. How could she have grown so used to him that his absence assaulted her by its mere vacuity? She wanted her life back the way it had been before he'd come into it. She wanted to take a man like David Melcher into that old life and forge a relationship of genteel, sensible normalcy, instead she sank both hands into the soft feathers of Jesse's pillow, taking great fistfuls of his absence, her head slung low between her sagging shoulders as she braced there in the gloom.
"Damn you, Jesse!" she shouted at the dark ceiling. "Damn you for ever coming here!"
Then she fell lonely upon his bed, rolling onto her side and hugging his pillow to her stomach while she cried.
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Awakening the following morning, Abbie forgot she was in the house alone. She stretched and rolled over, wondering what to fix Jesse for breakfast. Realizing her mistake, she sat up abruptly and looked around. She was back in her own bedroom—alone.
She flopped back down, studied the ceiling, closed her eyes and admonished herself to be sensible. Life must go on. She could and she would get over Jesse DuFrayne. But she opened her eyes and felt empty.
The day had nothing to inspire her to get out of bed.
She spent it trying to scrub every last vestige of Jesse from her bedroom. She washed the smell of him from her sheets, polished his fingerprints from the brass headboard, and fluffed his imprint from the cushions of the window seat. But even so, she could not reclaim the room as her own. He remained present in its memory, possessing each article he'd touched, lingering in each place he'd rested, an unwanted reminder of what he'd been to her.
When her cleaning was done, she had an hour to spare before David would arrive. But the
Junction
County Courier
arrived before he did. She heard it thwack upon the porch floor and retrieved it, grateful for any diversion that would keep her mind off Jesse.
Idly, she went back inside, pausing before the umbrella stand and using the folded up newspaper to check the tautness of her chin. But even that longtime, private habit now reminded her of Jesse, standing half-naked in the doorway, teasing, "Is it firm?" Abruptly she turned away from the mirror and snapped the newspaper open, seeking to scatter his memory.
Lotta Crabtree was appearing at the famed Teller Opera House in Central City and would be followed by the great Madjeska.
Another railroad baron had chosen to build his mansion in the vastly popular Colorado Springs, playground of the rich, who flocked there to soak away their ailments in the famous mineral springs.
Some accused train robber…
Miss Abigail's eyes widened and her tongue seemed to grow thick in her throat.
ACCUSED TRAIN ROBBER PROVES TO BE
OWNER OF RAILROAD
At a meeting Tuesday afternoon in the Stuart's
Junction Depot, arbiters debated…
It was all there, including the truth about Jesse DuFrayne, which she should have guessed long ago.
Standing in the middle of her proper Victorian parlor, Miss Abigail placed the back of a lacy wrist to her throat. Jesse owns the railroad! The man I called train robber
owns
the railroad! And so he has the last laugh after all. But then, didn't he always?
With a mixture of horror and dismay she recalled the awful things she had done to him—the owner of a railroad!
And suddenly she was laughing, raising her delicate chin high, covering her forehead with a palm. The daft, sad sound cracked pitifully into the silence. And when at last it faded away, she was left staring at the article like a glassy-eyed statue, while its significance sank in, while she absorbed what she should have guessed that day Jim Hudson had come. Maybe she had guessed but simply hadn't wanted, to admit it could be true. What she read again pounded home the facts in black and white. The article described the meeting right down to the clothing the four men had worn. It described James Hudson as the business agent-co-owner of the railroad, while Jesse DuFrayne was called the hidden partner who oversaw his enterprise from behind the hood of a photographic camera. The meeting itself was described as a "sometimes placid discussion of terms, sparked at times by fiery clashes of animosity between DuFrayne and Melcher over the seemingly alien subject of one Miss Abigail McKenzie, a longtime resident of Stuart's Junction, who had nursed both DuFrayne and Melcher during their convalescence."
As she finished, she stood mortified! By this time she was in a state of anger that would have delighted Jesse DuFrayne.
David Melcher, however, who happened to the door at that precise moment was dismayed when he stepped inside and she gave him a flat slap across his chest with the folded newspaper.
"Mi… Miss Abigail, what's wr… wrong?" he stammered.
"What's wrong?" she repeated, barely controlling the volume of her voice. "Read this and then ask me what's wrong! I am a respectable woman who must live in this town after you and Mr. DuFrayne have long left it. I do not care to have my name spewed from the lips of every gossipmonger in Stuart's Junction after the two of you saw to it that I made the front page of the newspaper in the most intriguing way possible!"
Perplexed, he glanced at the article, back at her, then silently started reading, finding more in the paper than he had told the newspaper editor.
"Whatever possessed you to argue about me in a meeting with the press present?"
"There was n… no press… pre… present. It was strictly pr… private. I… he… DuFrayne even made me pr… promise that no word would 1… leak out about you."
That surprised her. "Then how did it?" she demanded.
"I… I don't know."
"Just what brought my name into a discussion of liability settlements?"
He'd only meant the best for her yesterday and quavered now at the thought that he'd messed everything up so badly.
"I thought he sh… should apologize to you for… for all he put you through."
She turned her back on him and plucked at her blouse front. "Had it occurred to you that perhaps he might already have done so?"
"Miss Abigail! Are you defending him against me, when it is I who set out to d… defend you against him?"
"I am defending no one. I am simply chagrined at finding myself the object of two men's animosity and having it appear in newsprint. I—What will it look like to the people of this town? And why didn't you tell me last night that he is part owner of the railroad?"
He considered her question a moment, then asked, "Does that change your opinion of him now?"
Realizing that if it did she was nothing but a hypocrite, she turned to show David she was sincere.
"No, it doesn't. I simply think you would have told me that the money was coming from him, that's all."
"It's only right that he should pay me. He's the one who shot me."
"But he was
not
robbing that train when he did it. There lies the difference."
"You
are
defending him!" David Melcher accused.
"I am not! I'm defending myself!" Her voice had risen until she was shouting like a fishwife, and when she realized it she suddenly put her fingertips over her lips. She found she'd been haranguing him in the same way she'd done countless times with Jesse. Angry now at Jesse too, she'd attacked David as if he were both of them. To her horror, she found herself anticipating the exhilaration of the fight, welcoming the kind of verbiage Jesse had taught her to enjoy with him.
But David was no Jesse DuFrayne. In fact, David was stunned by her almost baiting attitude and unladylike shouting. His face grew mottled, and he stared at her as if he'd never seen her before. Indeed he hadn't—not like this. In a calm voice, he said, "We are having a fight."
His words brought her to her senses. Chagrined at what she had just caught herself doing, she felt suddenly small and completely in the wrong. She sat down properly on the edge of the settee, looking at the hands she'd clasped tightly in her lap.
"I'm sorry," she said contritely.
He sat down beside her, pleasantly surprised by her change back to the Miss Abigail he knew.