“Something’s wrong, Mr. Boswell. I’d appreciate it if you would tell me what it is.”
Boswell’s gaze met hers for the first time. He shrugged and shook his head. “Ain’t nothing, really. Bring him in.”
Relieved, Samantha motioned Steve and Silas into the shop. They carried Lars through to a small examining room in the back and lifted him onto the table. Samantha patted Lars’s warm hand. “I’ll get Nicholas settled at the hotel and be right back.”
“Nah, I’ll be fine,” Lars said, waving her away. “You take care of the lad.”
“Thank you, Mr. Boswell,” Samantha said, stopping deliberately in front of him.
“Welcome,” he said, without looking up at her.
Samantha opened her reticule, fumbled through her bills a moment, then took out a twenty. “I’ll pay the rest of his bill before I leave town.”
At that Boswell looked up at her, his eyes miserable with shame or embarrassment, she couldn’t tell which.
“That won’t be necessary. The railroad will pay,” he said gruffly.
“Well, that may take awhile. I don’t want you to be out anything on my behalf.”
He sighed heavily and took the money. “Thanks.”
She sent Silas to the telegraph office to wire the Texas and Pacific that there was a crippled train on the tracks, then walked to the door and stepped outside. Sheridan followed her.
Smiling, Chila Elaine Dart walked to the window of her suite at the Rawson Hotel. She pulled aside the sun-streaked maroon velvet drapery and looked down at the wide rutted road baking under the hot sun.
She felt good today. She and her son, Joe, had come into town to make the last payment on her ranch. Twenty years of paying off the bank and she finally owned the land she’d bought so long ago. If Chila were still speaking to her mother, which she wasn’t, she’d enjoy letting her know that she had succeeded, against all her dire predictions.
Chila sneezed. Just touching the fabric had freed enough dust to irritate her nostrils. “I wouldn’t give two shakes for the hotel’s housekeeper.”
Joe grunted to let her know he’d heard her, but he didn’t look up from the newspaper he was reading.
“Must be a bear and bull fight, darlin’. That would account for all the commotion coming from behind Owen Parker’s hotel. Ah wonder if he keeps his draperies any cleaner?”
“Unnnnnn.”
A few people not at the bear and bull fight appeared to be looking out the doors and windows of the stores across the street. What had attracted them was not immediately apparent. Then Samantha Forrester stepped out of Seth Boswell’s barber shop and paused on the sidewalk.
The sight of Samantha made Chila want to lean out of the window and wave and yell hello. But then she remembered about the article Claire Colson, Picket Post’s official busybody, was showing around town, and that stopped Chila cold. She hadn’t meant anything ugly by reading the article Claire had shown her, but she felt guilty nevertheless. And of course Claire had gotten on her high horse and told everyone in town who’d listen that Samantha Forrester was trying to give all of ’em the consumption, which apparently, if the article could be believed, was as contagious as typhoid.
Chila considered Samantha Forrester a friend. Yet she had to admit that the article, written by a real doctor, proved almost without a doubt that consumption was contagious. For years Chila had been reading articles that hinted at it. This was the first time she’d ever read something that actually convinced her. Unfortunately it had convinced others as well.
Samantha might be angry at her for reading it, but according to Claire Colson, it was the townspeople who had a right to be angry at Samantha, who exposed them all to the danger of contagion every time she brought that boy into town. Horrid disease and an absolutely horrid fate for a small child. Chila shuddered to think of it. She couldn’t think about children dying, especially Nicholas, with his big solemn eyes and his earnest way of saying whatever was on his sweet little mind.
Consumption was such a touchy issue with Samantha. She wouldn’t be pleased. Unfortunately Samantha was the only truly interesting woman in Picket Post. Chila enjoyed Samantha’s friendship. The other women in town were mostly European peasants who cared only about their menfolk and their young’uns—and their endless chores. Wherever you looked you could see them waddling on their swollen stump legs, their faces grim with the struggle to survive. They lived in rude shacks with only the crudest tools, cooking utensils, and farm implements. Some lived worse than the poor white trash who used to share-crop on her father’s cotton plantation after the war and before her family disowned her. Her father was one of the few men in Georgia who had survived the Civil War without going broke, which just proved the devil looked out for his own.
Samantha was different. She read Eastern magazines and could speak interestingly about any number of subjects. She left the housework to her hired help and didn’t apologize to anyone for doing so. Chila admired a woman who didn’t let others decide how she would live.
Samantha always stayed in Owen Parker’s hotel. She said she liked Mary Francis’s cooking better, but Chila suspected it was because she didn’t want to frequent the Rawson like Chila and be seen as a copycat. A leader herself, Chila respected that.
Chila’s eyes strayed back to the street below. On the road in front of the barber shop, Nicholas Forrester straddled a pinto pony in front of a red-haired girl, probably a new employee to help Juana with the endless job of dusting that impossible house. Thinking of Samantha Forrester’s misbegotten house caused Chila to smile. Her own house wasn’t beautiful, but at least it suited the climate.
Samantha stepped out of the barber shop, followed by a man. He spoke to her, leaning a little closer than was absolutely necessary and touching her arm.
“Well, Ah’ll be!” Chila grinned. “Samantha has a beau! And a good-looking one at that!”
Chila glanced over at the mirror to reassure herself. She was fifty-two years old to Samantha’s twenty-seven, but she didn’t look her age. Most women out here were dead by forty-three. Chila was proud of the fact she didn’t have to do anything special to stay young-looking. She was just lucky, even though she occasionally caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that startled her. But usually she looked good. Her skin had dried up a little, but her body was slim and strong. Her gowns had to be made bigger now. She had no idea why. Usually the scale would testify that she hadn’t gained an ounce, unless she got on Seth Boswell’s contraption when it was acting up, which it did almost every time.
She turned back to the window in time to see Samantha Forrester look up at the man, who was a good head taller than she with stocky shoulders and a strong neck. Suddenly Chila caught sight of his face. Although she couldn’t see it in any detail, the shape of it sent a jolt through her body. The feeling quivered within her for a moment, and her lips tingled with sudden dryness. She licked them, but even her tongue had gone dry.
By now the man had turned and was walking to a calico horse standing in the street. The way he moved, even the way he carried his arms and shoulders, seemed to increase the feeling of anxiety growing in her.
Chila got a tickle in her throat and started to cough. The man turned his horse to follow Samantha toward Owen Parker’s hotel, which was across the street and west of the Rawson. As Samantha walked toward a store, people inside stepped away from the windows and turned their backs on her, pretending not to see her. Compassion for Samantha twisted Chila’s insides and made her forget her coughing spell.
Chila’s attention came back to the man. And suddenly she knew why he was so upsetting to her. It was Denny. She could never mistake that profile. No man had the same shaped head and shoulders.
A red veil misted the scene down on the street. At first Chila couldn’t see through it. Part of her felt strangely blinded, as if her real eyes were no longer working and other eyes were seeing things they usually couldn’t. Then, poking through the redness she saw the face of a devil—a
horrible ravaged face with two terrible red eyes glowing with madness.
Chila thought he was about the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. As if he could read her mind, the devil glared at her for a moment, and something writhed within her, something that felt like a snake deep down in her belly. Heat loosened by the writhing inflamed her loins. Then the devil faded back into the redness and Chila couldn’t see him any longer, couldn’t see anything but the scarlet veil. But the memory of having seen him frightened her so badly that her hands started to shake.
Ah cain’t go through this again, a voice within her whispered. Her body flushed with despair; her legs almost buckled. She sat down in the straight-backed chair beside the bureau and tried not to pant out loud, though she had no idea on Earth why she was being so considerate. She had been to hell and back, and Joe’s towhead was still bent over his newspaper.
For a moment she sat in dumb silence. Then, as if her mind had started to work again, she realized that devil she’d seen was Denny. The thought so startled her that her heart skipped a beat. She hiccupped. Denny is the devil.
Terrified and curious in spite of it, Chila stood and looked out the window. Down on the street Denny rode toward her on a gray-and-calico horse. Despite herself she remembered things she’d never wanted to think about again.
Chila had gone West when Joe was still in swaddling. She’d told everyone that Joe’s father had sold their original home and spent every cent on a ranch east of Picket Post. Then he’d died on the trip out, leaving her and her baby to survive as best they could in the desert.
She had never admitted the truth to anyone—that Denny had betrayed her, drowned her baby, and left her in an insane asylum in Dallas. The only way she could have survived all that was to put him out of her mind and go forward. She’d done that, but it hadn’t been easy.
Ever since her baby drowned, she’d been given to blue spells, where she had no more energy than a dishrag and cried over just about everything. There were days when she could barely lift one foot in front of the other, and yet she’d forced herself to go on, even after being cast out by her own folks because they didn’t want their neighbors to find out their daughter had spent a year in an insane asylum and come out of it with a baby of unknown parentage.
And now Denny was back. Chila had never dreamed that anyone would ever find her here in the high desert, especially not Denny, who should have been dead by now. It didn’t make a bit of sense. No more sense than her first baby being drowned by him.
She closed her eyes and saw her baby’s body, swollen and gray. His little wrinkled hand reached out to her, as if she should have done something to save him. The pain came up so hard she doubled over, panting.
“You okay, Ma?” Joe asked, still without looking up from his paper. Chila felt it was a sad commentary on their life together that she could be practically dying in front of him and he saw nothing unusual about it.
“Fine, darlin’. Just fine,” she said, opening her eyes and wiping at the tears streaming steadily down her cheeks. She tried to stop the shaking inside her, but she kept seeing the face of the man who had ridden back into her life as if he had every right in the world to be alive and breathing when her baby wasn’t.
Chila sank down onto the chenille counterpane. Oh, God! Oh, God! He’s come back. The horrible sense of panic grew worse. Denny’s come back. I told him never to make that mistake. I warned him I’d kill him. I warned him…
The pressure within became so intense she had to do something. With shaking hands, she wiped tears off her face and stepped to the window, where she saw that Denny was almost directly beneath her on the road. He was riding through town in broad daylight—as if he had every right in the world.
Rage flushed up from her newly awakened insides. With lightning speed, Chila leaned over and slipped Joe’s pistol out of his holster.
“Hey, what are you doing with my gun?”
Chila pushed aside the dusty drapery, aimed the gun at the back of the man who’d ruined her life, and fired three quick shots. To her great disappointment, Denny didn’t appear to be hit. But he was so busy fighting his animal he didn’t have time to turn or shoot back.
Joe scrambled out of his chair, grabbed the gun out of her hand, and wrestled her down to the floor. “What the hell are you doing?” he hissed from atop her.
“Give that back to me!” Chila demanded, panting at the effort to get the gun out of his hands, which were a lot stronger than hers. “Let me up from here! I’m your mother!”
“Hush! You don’t act like a mother,” he whispered. “Never have, for that matter. Now you quiet down and be still! Who the hell were you shooting at?”
“None of your business!”
“Ma, I ought a take a strap to you. Hush! Listen.”
“It’s scandalous the way you talk to your own mother thataway. You’ve been back talking me since you were knee high to a—”
“Hush, Ma! You want them to hear you?”
Down on the road men were yelling and cursing.
“Did you see where those shots came from?” yelled a man who sounded like Marshal Daley.
“No, I didn’t get to the window in time.”
Joe let out his breath in relief. “They didn’t see you,” he whispered.
“Serves ’em right. They were all busy hiding their faces from Samantha Forrester.”
“Who’d you shoot at?”
“You don’t know him.” She’d never told her son about the bastard who had betrayed her and robbed her of the one thing she held dear in life, her baby. There was no need for Joe to know.
“Ma! You shot at a stranger!”
“Ah know him, darlin’,” she whispered fiercely.
Joe stood up, pushed the curtain aside, and looked down at the street. A crowd had gathered, and they were all facing his direction.
“Hey, Joe! See anything? A gunman took a few shots at this man,” Daley yelled, pointing at a man on a calico horse.
“No. I was reading the paper.”
Odd, thought Chila, watching him, how he could be her son and carry almost none of her good sense or her Southern accent. He had adopted the slang of the cocky cowhands who worked on their ranch.
Joe waved to the others and turned back to his mother. “You don’t know him,” he whispered. “I been everywhere you’ve been, and I never seen him before.”
“You weren’t born yet, that’s why.”
“He ain’t much older than me from what I could see. How can you be that mad at a man who was just a kid the last time you saw him?”
Chila blinked. Joe was twenty-three years old. Denny would be in his fifties by now.
Chila shuddered. Her hands would not stop shaking. The heat was trying to suffocate her in spite of the fact that she was about to shake apart.
“Help me up from here, darlin’. Ah need to lie down for a spell,” she said.
Joe gave her his hand. “You want me to get Seth Boswell?”
“No. No. Just leave me be awhile.”
“I’m not leaving here till you promise me you’ll behave yourself.”
Chila scowled. Joe had been bossy as a child, and he hadn’t changed much once he’d gotten his height. When he was twelve and one of her blue spells had gone on too long, he’d taken her to Doc Thomas at the fort against her will. The doc had asked her a lot of questions and recommended a rest at an asylum in Prescott. She hadn’t gone and she had gotten over her spell. But ever since, Joe had been leery of her, his own ma.
“Are you going to behave?” he repeated.
“You’d steal flies from a blind spider, wouldn’t you?” she asked, stalling for time to think. That devil needed killing, but not in front of Joe. Now that she’d had time to think it over, she realized it wouldn’t have worked very well if she’d killed him in broad daylight.
“Ma…”
“All right.”
“You’re not lying to me, are you, Ma?”
“Ah don’t lie.”
; Joe shook his head sadly.
“At least not much,” she rushed to reassure him. “Not about important things. Well, sometimes Ah have to lie, darlin’.”
“Ma…” Joe sighed, then stuffed his gun back into his holster. “Then get yourself a nap.”
“You tell anyone about this and Ah’ll take a whip to you, you heah me?” she called after him.
“I’m not stupid enough to turn my own mother over to the law, and that’s what I’d be doing. It’s against the law to shoot at people. In case you forgot.”
“And…we got our pride to worry about.”
“Pride,” he snorted. “That’s about all we do worry about is our damned pride.”
Joe scowled at her again, and for just a second she thought she might know who his father was, but the look passed…and so did her near revelation. He stomped out of the room and closed the door.
She might never know who his pa was, she thought sadly. She had pitched one of her fits when they’d found the baby drowned. She’d tried to kill Denny. Apparently he’d used that to get them to take her to an insane asylum. She hadn’t even known she was in one for over a year. And somehow, without her even being aware of it, she’d gotten pregnant while she was there and carried Joe to full term.
Her hands shook so hard she clasped them together and hid them in the folds of her brown skirt. She started to feel dizzy and realized she was rocking back and forth. She forced herself to stop. Her mind seemed to remember that Joe had said something important about the man, about his not being Denny because of some discrepancy. Whatever it was had slipped away.
It amazed Samantha that someone had shot at Steve Sheridan, who swore he’d never been in the small settlement before. Marshal Daley, groggy from his siesta, his hair standing up in back, asked questions and dispatched men to search the two-story buildings across the street. They looked everywhere for a lone gunman, but no one seemed to know where the shots had come from. It had all happened too fast.
“Well, stay out of trouble,” Daley said to Sheridan, as if it had somehow been his fault.
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