“Do tell.”
She leaned on the bar again, this time so she could close in on Whiteoak. “He’s still hiding somewhere. Two of his horses are missing from the stable at his home along with one of the men he’d hired on recently.”
“Fellow by the name of Chuck Monroe?” Whiteoak asked.
Savoring her gossip like that piece of recently discovered candy, Lyssa placed her hand on the professor’s arm and said, “Yes! I’d bet he’s some sort of gunman.”
“And you’d win that bet,” Whiteoak said as he covered Lyssa’s hand with his.
“I thought you said he was a bounty hunter,” Byron said.
“Same difference,” Whiteoak replied while wearing a distasteful look on his face. He gambled that anyone with aspirations to become any sort of peace officer would share that opinion. Judging by the sour look that Lyssa wore, he was correct.
“Sheriff Willis is convinced that those two had something to do with the bank robberies,” she said. “Once they’re found, both Halstead and his hired gun will wind up in the same cage as Davis.”
“And good riddance to them,” Whiteoak said. “So that means Willis and his deputy are out searching for them right now?”
“Avery is watching things here while Sheriff Willis takes a posse out to hunt for Halstead.”
Whiteoak scratched his clean-shaven chin. “I didn’t hear anything about a posse.”
“You wouldn’t,” she replied. “On the few occasions when it was necessary to form a posse, Willis has gone one town over to Pacer Junction. Younger men around there are more than willing to sign on and collect their fee.”
Looking around at all the gray hair, silver beards and wrinkled faces gathered in the Dove Tail, Whiteoak mused, “That makes perfect sense.” He checked his pocket watch, put the timepiece away and knocked on the bar to catch Robert’s attention. “A drink for the beautiful young lady!”
“No, I shouldn’t,” Lyssa said.
“Please. I’m required by the law of this town to provide at least one free drink to everyone here.”
“I don’t like whiskey or beer.”
“Then try the tea,” Whiteoak said. “It’s my own brew!”
“She doesn’t want to drink,” Byron said. “Why don’t you have one?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” With that, Whiteoak picked up the little glass that had been set out by Robert for Lyssa and downed the whiskey in one gulp.
Byron scowled at him. “What about the tea? You’ve been going on and on about it, but haven’t tried a sip.”
“You sound like one of the skeptics at my medicinal demonstrations,” Whiteoak said through a wide smile. “I’ve had so much of that tea throughout the brewing and testing process that the taste is permanently on my tongue.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Why are you being so rude?” Lyssa scolded.
Byron propped one hand against the bar and the other on his hip. “He’s a professor of questionable integrity, specializing in making tonics that intoxicate in any number of ways and he’s intent on getting my sister to drink something he made. Pardon me for being slightly suspicious.”
“Byron!”
“It’s all right,” Whiteoak said as he patted her shoulder. “He’s only protecting you. What sort of tonic are you worried about, exactly? A love potion?”
“Well . . . ,” Byron said in a strained tone. “It’s possible.”
Lyssa hung her head and placed her fingertips against her temples. “Good Lord,” she sighed.
Wincing at being trapped between the squabbling siblings, Whiteoak took the teacup that Robert brought over and slid it away from the Keags. When he turned back around, Lyssa stood less than an inch away from him. Being so close to her soft face and bright eyes caught him off-balance, a predicament that was only compounded when she took hold of his face in her hands and planted a magnificent kiss on his lips.
Shoving past a very pleasantly surprised Henry Whiteoak, Lyssa stood up to her brother and barked, “There! See?” before snatching up the teacup and drinking from it. Slamming the delicate little cup down hard enough to spill most of the remaining tea on the bar, she said, “There doesn’t need to be any love potion, even if there was such a thing!”
“I . . . I . . . I don’t,” Byron stammered.
“Idiot.” To Whiteoak, she said, “If you’d like to see me under more pleasant circumstances, perhaps we can arrange something.”
“I’d like that very much,” Whiteoak replied.
“So would I.” Lyssa turned away from the two men standing by her, only to find a good portion of the rest of the saloon staring at her in astonished disbelief. Dreadful embarrassment soaked through her body like cold water.
“Come on,” Whiteoak said as he gently took her hand. “Let’s go somewhere quieter.”
He escorted her out of the saloon so they could stand on Wilcoe Avenue. There were a few others outside, but they were either on their way in or still tipsy from the free spirits they’d consumed. When one of the latter waved at Whiteoak, Lyssa shied away from him and hid her face from everyone in the vicinity.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she muttered.
“I know,” Whiteoak replied. “What on earth took you so long? After all the opportunities we’ve had and we still allow ourselves to be sidetracked.”
“Sidetracked?”
“Yes. From this.” Whiteoak placed one hand on her hip and used his other hand to brush some of Lyssa’s hair behind one ear. He then leaned in, lingering to feel one expectant breath escape from her lips, and touched his mouth to hers.
Even after the kiss was finished, neither one of them wanted to let more than a quarter of an inch of space grow between them. “I thought you’d lost interest,” she whispered.
“Like I said,” Whiteoak told her. “Sidetracked.”
“Well I’m not sidetracked anymore,” she said while taking his hand. “I know exactly where I want to go.”
“You do?”
Lyssa nodded. “And you’re coming with me.”
“I am?”
“Oh, yes.”
She held Whiteoak’s hand in a gentle, yet unbreakable grip. While leading him back to her home, she shared little stories with him about certain people they passed and all the gossip that was sure to flow once they arrived at their destination.
“And that doesn’t bother you?” Whiteoak asked. “The gossip?”
“People have always talked about me one way to my face and another to my back. It’s been like that ever since I dared to utter the words that I might like to do something other than bake or sew for a living.”
“Yes, but surely being a peace officer is something quite extraordinary.”
“It is,” she replied simply. “That’s why I want to do it! It started as a tribute to my late husband, but it feels right for me.”
Whiteoak removed the watch from his vest pocket, opened it and checked its face. “Well, then,” he said as he snapped the watch shut and put it away, “here we are.”
“Yes,” Lyssa replied while opening her front door. “Here we are.”
“Are you feeling all right?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you look a little weary.”
“It’s been a long couple of days,” she admitted. “But nothing would keep me from missing this.”
“And what is this, exactly?”
“You’re a worldly fellow,” she said, pulling him inside the house by the front of his jacket. “I’d think you could come up with several ways for us to pass the time.”
Following her inside and shutting the door behind him, Whiteoak said, “I sure can and I’ve been thinking about them for quite a while.”
Lyssa leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Let your imagination run wild,” she said through a slight giggle.
“You seem a bit drunk.”
“I feel like it, but I haven’t had anything to drink.”
Whiteoak moved i
n close and wrapped his arms around her. “Oh, I don’t think that’s quite true.”
Laughing harder now, Lyssa reached around to grab the professor’s wrists and move his hands onto her backside. “That’s better! For an educated man, you sure need a lot of hints.”
“You’re definitely drunk.”
“No! All I had was . . .”
Lyssa wasn’t going to finish that sentence anytime soon. She was too distracted by collapsing into an unconscious heap. Fortunately, Whiteoak already had her in his arms so he prevented her from hitting the floor.
“When I considered sweeping you off your feet,” he said to himself while doing that very thing and carrying her to her bedroom, “I admittedly had something else in mind.”
Laying her on the bed, he looked down at her and let out a frustrated sigh. Once again, he checked his watch. “Damn my impeccable timing.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Minutes later, the Dove Tail Saloon was eerily quiet. Bodies were strewn on the floor, slumped over in their chairs or propped against the bar. Outside the saloon, the scene was very similar. A few mildly confused horses milled about in the street, nudging the snoring body of a nearby local or merely plodding over to the nearest water trough.
Professor Whiteoak took one of his strolls, viewing the figures laying on the ground while taking notes on a little piece of folded paper in his hand. After surveying the saloon district, he made his way to the row of stores on Third Street. They were quiet as well.
“Hello?” Whiteoak said as a way to announce himself when he stuck his nose into a dress shop.
Something stirred within the place, causing the professor to cautiously step inside. “Is someone there?” he asked.
The sound he’d heard was a scraping against the wooden floorboards. As he spoke and stepped inside, that sound became louder and faster. By the time Whiteoak was standing next to the shop’s cash register, an old woman scurried down one of the shop’s wide aisles.
“I’m here!” she said breathlessly. When she saw who’d entered the store, she picked up her feet to move even quicker toward him. “Oh, Professor Whiteoak! I’m so glad to see you!”
“What happened, Miss Tackett?” he asked, recognizing the old woman as one of his customers.
“I surely don’t know! My husband and nephew came in to fix some loose shelves when they dropped right over! It was horrible.”
“Are they ill?”
The more she tried to think of how to answer him, the more confused Miss Tackett became. Finally, she said, “They seem to be . . . sleeping.”
“Goodness,” Whiteoak said as he approached a set of feet he’d just spotted. The feet were attached to legs protruding from the back room. Before stepping into what looked to be a private office, he turned to Miss Tackett and asked, “May I?”
“Oh, please do!”
Whiteoak knelt beside the form of a younger man with thinning black hair and a pencil-line mustache. His eyes were half closed and his breaths came in long, shuddering gulps. After feeling for a pulse, Whiteoak put the back of his hand against the man’s forehead. “He doesn’t seem to have a fever. Do you think he might have caught this ailment from someone else?”
“You know something, I think he did! I went out the back door to try and fetch someone to help, but I could only find Mister Graves and Mister Pegg in a similar state. They were in the store next door.”
“Strange. Have you seen anyone who isn’t sleeping?”
“Come to think of it, no. Of course, almost everyone in town went to partake in the little party you were throwing.”
“Let me guess,” Whiteoak said. “You didn’t partake in a thing.”
“I was too busy. Also, I don’t drink. Not with the spells I’ve been having. But you know all about those.”
From the very first time he’d set up his wagon in Barbrady, Whiteoak had been selling one elixir after another to cure Miss Tackett’s spells. As far as he could tell, she was simply suffering through the raised temperatures and memory lapses that many women her age so often had. She did, however, enjoy the thought that one of the professor’s many bottled miracles could bring her back to the vigor of her youth.
“Yes,” he told her soothingly. “I certainly do know all about those.”
“Can you help these men?”
“Of course I can. In fact, the reason I came along at this time was to see if there were any such cases in the area.”
“So there are others like them?”
“I saw many poor souls in the saloon, sleeping like babes on their mothers’ laps. Unfortunately, they were further along and had developed much worse symptoms.”
More than willing to believe that something terrible was headed in her direction, Miss Tackett placed her hand over her mouth and waited for more. The professor was all too happy to give it to her.
“Fever, faint pulse, and worse I’m afraid,” Whiteoak reported.
“How much worse? Has anyone died?”
“Oh, no! Not yet. Thankfully I was able to tend to them personally. Here,” he said as he reached for a flask within his jacket. “Take a drink of this and you’ll be spared.”
“What is it?”
“Something to steel your system. Since you haven’t shown any symptoms yet, this will keep you from feeling even the slightest bit of discomfort.”
Miss Tackett drank from his flask and nodded while handing it back. “I feel better already,” she told him.
“Good.”
“That’s very tasty. Is it some kind of tea?”
“Why, yes it is. The same kind of tea I was offering at the Dove Tail. A bit stronger, though.”
“Oh?” The old woman’s eyelids fluttered and she began to swoon. At the first hint of instability, Professor Whiteoak reached out to pull her toward him. That way, when she fell over, he could gently lower her to the floor.
“Actually, much stronger,” he told the sleeping old woman. “But you’ll be fine when you awake.”
Since the method of offering his tonic as a cure or protection against the strange affliction gripping the town worked so well, he used it on the next several other locals he found who had avoided drinking the mixture that had been slipped into the Dove Tail’s refreshments. Most of the folks he discovered were anxious and frightened at the predicament that had befallen Barbrady and were all too eager to grab on to any helping hand that was offered. Being the one to offer that hand at the right time was one of Whiteoak’s greatest secrets to success.
The closer he got to the saloon district, the more sleeping figures Whiteoak found. Nodding as his theory was confirmed, he strolled past the drunken sleepers and nodded to a pair of wrinkled faces staring out at him through a small glass window. Since the faces were even more shriveled than dried apple dolls, he kept moving.
Whiteoak turned the next corner and walked north up Third Street. The businesses there were mostly stables, horse traders and a few stores catering to the needs of four-legged customers. The only movement to be found in those places was the shuffling of hooves against straw-covered floors. When he heard some whispering voices coming from one of the stables, he stopped and cautiously approached the drafty structure.
“Anyone there?” he called out.
The voices fell silent for a few moments and then resumed chattering to themselves in excited, high-pitched whispers.
Whiteoak approached the stable wearing an easy smile on his face. “It’s all right. Don’t you recognize me? I’m Professor Whiteoak. I’m a doctor.”
That last statement wasn’t entirely true, but the children hiding inside the stable were too frightened to question him. The sounds of their voices and the quickness of their movements were all Whiteoak needed to assume that’s who he was dealing with. That prediction was confirmed when the pair of youths stepped from the shadows.
“You’re the medicine man,” said a boy who looked to be no more than nine years old.
“That’s right,” Whiteoak said as he squatted
down to the kid’s level. “Who else is in there with you?”
“My friend. James. He’s scared.”
“I am not,” insisted a voice that was only slightly deeper than the first boy’s.
Hooking a thumb over his shoulder, the first boy said, “He’s afraid of the dark.”
“What’s your name?” Whiteoak asked.
“Michael.”
“And have you seen any of my demonstrations?”
“You mean your medicine shows?”
“That’s right. Do you know what I do?”
Michael nodded. “My pa says you’re a salesman, but you know how to brew a few good drinks. You made his headaches go away, though.”
“That’s right,” Whiteoak told him. “I helped your father and now I can help you. Do you know what’s happening to these folks?”
Whatever bravery might have been in Michael’s small round face quickly dissipated as he looked up and down the street. Taking a step back toward the stable’s comforting shadows, he said, “No. All I saw was a bunch of men fall over like they was sick.”
“Well, they are sick, but don’t worry. You and your friend James aren’t sick yet. Do you know how to keep it that way?”
“How?”
Whiteoak reached into his jacket and withdrew his hand with a flourish. The young boy jumped back, startled, but was fascinated by what he saw. “Take this,” the professor said while handing over a small coin engraved with exotic markings, “and sit with James for a while.”
“How long?” Michael asked as he turned the coin over in his little hands.
“Until you hear familiar voices outside. That will mean that I’ve done my job and folks in town are getting up again.”
“So, they’re not dead?”
“No.”
“I told you!” James called out from the stable.
“Go on, now,” Whiteoak ordered. To hurry Michael on his way, the professor turned the boy’s head so he was facing in the other direction.
Like a little toy that had been wound up and set on its course, Michael went back to the stable and disappeared inside.
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