Printer in Petticoats

by Lynna Banning

  Teddy thought for a long minute. “Well, uh, how do you know when a girl likes you?”

  Cole coughed again. “Most times you don’t. You have some particular girl in mind?”

  “Um, yeah. Her name’s Manette Nicolet. She’s French. Talks foreign words all the time.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Aw, I can’t talk French. Sometimes I bring her bugs ’n’ stuff.”

  “Bugs?”

  “Yeah. She likes crawly things. Insects, you know?”

  Cole rolled his eyes. “Interesting female.”

  “Yeah, and she’s real pretty, too.”

  “Figures,” Cole said under his breath.

  “So, how do I know if she likes me?”

  Cole pulled the roan into an even slower walk and sucked in a gulp of air. “You don’t, Ted. You might never know how she feels about you. But if you’re smart, you’ll treat her real special, no matter what.”

  Teddy thought for a few minutes. “Is that what you do?”

  “Well, yeah. If I get the chance, that is.”

  “Miss Jessamine’s kinda temperamental, huh?”

  Cole barked out a laugh. “Kinda.” God, was it that obvious he was attracted to the Sentinel’s prim and proper editor?

  “My advice,” Teddy said with a conspiratorial wink, “is to bring her some bugs.”

  When Cole rode back into town with the boy, he couldn’t help glancing at the front window of the Sentinel office. Bugs, huh? He’d have to give Teddy’s suggestion some thought.

  He reined his sleek Arabian to a stop and approached the hitching rail just as Jessamine stepped out of her office and hailed him.

  “Cole, I need to talk to you.”

  “What’s up?” he asked carefully.

  “I have an idea.”

  Cole rolled his eyes. “Not another one. Eli told me about the Sheepmen’s Summit meeting last spring.”

  “Eli talks entirely too much. Get down off your horse and listen for a minute.”

  He swung down and stood with the reins in one hand. “Okay, I’m listening.”

  Jess tried not to watch his supple fingers holding the leather lines. “Your candidate and my candidate are just trading insults in your newspaper and mine. What if they met face-to-face and argued in person?”

  “A debate, you mean?”

  “Exactly. What do you think?”

  “Good idea,” he said with a nod. “When? The election’s getting close.”

  “Next Monday night? At the church meeting hall. We could—”

  “Arrange for a moderator,” he finished for her. “Someone—”

  “Like Matt Johnson, Ellie’s husband,” Jess interrupted. “He’s a federal marshal, and—”

  “He’d be armed,” Cole inserted. “Nobody would dare speak out of turn.”

  “I’ll talk it up in the Sentinel and—”

  “I’ll do the same in the Lark,” he finished. He removed his black Stetson and held it over his heart. “Great minds—”

  “Are never at a loss. Oh, Cole, it will be fun!”

  “And a challenge,” he added. “Once Arbuckle gets going, he’s hard to shut up.”

  “Jericho Silver can shut him up,” she said smugly. “Just you wait and see.”

  *

  Just before the next chorus rehearsal, winter struck with a vengeance. All afternoon rain spit against the front window of the Lark office, and by suppertime the sky had turned black and hail was bouncing off the boardwalk.

  At the restaurant, Cole downed a bowl of hot chili and a slab of apple pie, then snugged up his jacket and started off for the music school rehearsal room. Halfway down the boardwalk, he spied Jessamine trudging along ahead of him.

  “Can’t hardly sing if our teeth are chattering,” he remarked from three paces behind her.

  “‘Can’t hardly’? Heavens, such grammar!” She turned toward him and teetered on the hail-spattered planks. Just as she lost her balance, he snaked out an arm, caught her shoulder and held on while she righted herself.

  “I hate winter,” she gasped.

  “I’ve always liked it.” He slid his arm around her waist and urged her forward. “Rain makes the corn grow and flowers bloom in the spring. Anything ungrammatical in that?”

  She laughed, and he expelled a sigh of relief. Maybe she wasn’t so prickly on rehearsal nights. Or maybe she was just too cold to talk back. Whatever it was, he liked it when she was quiet.

  Actually, he liked it when she talked back, too.

  After their vocal warm-ups, the director stopped them and made a surprising announcement. “Ladies, on choir rehearsal nights, please dispense with your corsets. You cannot breathe properly when you are all trussed up in whalebone.”

  Cole had a hard time keeping his mind off Jessamine’s body with no corset.

  The director rehearsed them rigorously for an hour, let them take a break, then pushed them even harder. Halfway through the last chorus, something intangible swept through the singers, as if a single bolt of lightning had struck them all simultaneously. The sounds they made were suddenly tinged with magic, and in the middle of the chorale they were singing, they looked at each other in wonder.

  Ellie Johnson’s usually impassive expression melted into dazed surprise, and on impulse Cole turned slightly so he could see Jessamine’s face.

  Her mouth was rounded into a soft, rosy O, and her green eyes were wide-open and bright with unshed tears. A fist slammed into his chest.

  His throat closed up so tight he couldn’t sing if his life depended on it, but it didn’t matter. The swell of the music swept them all up into one of those rare moments when everything came together in perfection.

  Mercy, it was almost like an orgasm.

  His gaze met Jessamine’s, and he stopped breathing. Suddenly he wanted to hold her. Touch her. He wanted to make love to her.

  His own eyes stung. Whoa, what was happening?

  When the chorale ended, the director stood transfixed, and no one spoke for a long minute.

  “That,” Ellie said at last, “does not happen very often. We are attaining something magnificent in this music. Something important.”

  She dismissed the choir members early. People were unusually quiet as they pulled on coats and gloves and bid each other good-night. Cole was still shaken by what had hit him. He caught Jessamine at the door and waylaid her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Walk you home?” he said quietly. She nodded and wound her blue knit scarf over her ears and around her chin.

  When they stepped outside, she gave a little cry. “Look! It’s snowing!”

  Sure enough, powdery flakes were sifting down, dusting the street, the trees, even her hair with white lace. Sounds were muffled. It was magical, an enchantment of gauzy flakes.

  Even their footsteps were softened by the silence. He’d seen snow before. He’d ridden in it, walked in it, but it had never looked this beautiful before. It made him feel humble, even reverent, right down to his boot tops.

  They didn’t speak, and when her foot slipped on the slick boardwalk, he caught her around the waist and they moved on in step together. When they reached the Sentinel office, Cole withdrew his arm.

  Jessamine gestured toward the snow-dusted pines beyond the main street. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she murmured.

  “It is.” But he wasn’t looking at the trees. He was looking straight into her eyes. “Beautiful.”

  “Good night, Cole.”

  “’Night, Jessamine.”

  Jess studied his oddly strained visage a long moment, then turned toward the front door of her office. She should remind him about the candidates’ debate on Monday, but she couldn’t make herself speak such mundane words. It would only remind him, remind them both, that they were on opposite sides.

  He couldn’t know how desperate she felt about the survival of the Sentinel, how much she resented his coming here to Smoke River and threatening her livelihood. The Sentinel was her
whole reason for being.

  She was so afraid of failing, of finding out she didn’t have the intelligence or the skill or the grit to be a true journalist. Most of the time she felt like a failure, especially since Cole Sanders had arrived in Smoke River. He obviously knew what he was doing as a newspaperman. She did not.

  She had worked hard to learn things from Miles, and she had to work even harder now that she was on her own. Failure shadowed every word she put down on her yellow notepad, every article she wrote. With each issue of her newspaper she shuddered with apprehension lest someone march into her office and fire a gun into her chest, as someone had done to Miles.

  Tonight she wanted to forget, just for a moment. Forget her fears and the barrier that lay between Cole Sanders and herself.

  Suddenly she heard his voice behind her. “Jess?”

  She swung back toward him and a soft, slushy snowball landed on her cheek.

  “Leave your lamp on tonight.”

  She wanted to laugh. She wanted to heave a snowball right back at him, to forget everything but the lovely, silent night and the delicious fleeting camaraderie between them. It made her hungry for something she couldn’t put into words.

  All at once she found that her eyes were stinging.

  Chapter Nine

  The debate between Sheriff Jericho Silver and his opponent, Conway Arbuckle, drew townspeople, ranchers, sheepmen and farmers from as far north as Gillette Springs. They thronged the church meeting hall, arguing at the tops of their lungs. Even the women’s voices were raised.

  The hall echoed with accusations and recriminations until Federal Marshal Matt Johnson, seated at a long table, gaveled the crowd into quiet.

  Jessamine sat on one end of the oak table, Cole on the other, watching as the marshal rose to open the proceedings. Opponents Silver and Arbuckle sat across the room at opposite ends of another table.

  “Listen up,” Matt called. “We’re all here for a peaceable debate between the two candidates for district judge. Both the editor of the Smoke River Sentinel, Miss Jessamine Lassiter, and the Lake County Lark editor, Mr. Cole Sanders, have submitted questions for Mr. Silver and Mr. Arbuckle. I will read the question aloud, and then each candidate will have two minutes to respond.”

  The marshal ostentatiously produced an egg timer filled with sand and set it on the table before him. Jess choked back a laugh. Next, he unfolded a scrap of paper with the first question scrawled on it.

  “Mr. Arbuckle, would you tell those assembled here what you feel your qualifications are for the office of district judge?”

  Conway Arbuckle, in a natty gray pin-striped suit and an emerald bow tie, stood up, stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets and cleared his throat.

  “First, I am a legitimate, I repeat, legitimate attorney-at-law. Second, I am a college graduate. My education was obtained at, ahem, Hahvard College.”

  Jess eyed Cole and they both began scribbling furiously on their notepads. What was he writing? She’d give a cookie to peek over his shoulder, but she wasn’t close enough. Instead she studied his right hand, now flicking his pencil back and forth between his thumb and forefinger.

  Oh, good, he was nervous. She hoped he was afraid of what she might write about Arbuckle in the Wednesday edition of the Sentinel. She liked making Cole nervous. She especially liked it when she licked her lips and his breath hitched in. It made her feel powerful, but at the same time shaky inside, not calm and ice-minded as a newspaper editor should be. It made her feel vulnerable somehow, as if…as if what Cole thought of her mattered.

  But of course what Cole Sanders thought about her mattered no more than a puff of dandelion fuzz.

  Of course.

  “Thirdly,” Arbuckle droned on, his voice rising into speech-making mode, “I support law and order. As judge I intend to prosecute lawbreakers to the full extent of my God-given authority.”

  He settled back into his chair with a self-satisfied smirk.

  The marshal gaveled the buzzing crowd into silence, then turned to Jericho. “Sheriff Silver?”

  Jericho Silver shoved to his feet. His jeans were clean, his leather vest well-worn and his boots still bore spurs that chinked when he moved. He respectfully removed his well-worn black Stetson and faced the crowd.

  “I have to admit I am not an attorney. I have taken the qualifying exam, but I won’t know the results until Christmas. I also have to say that I’ve never been to college. But I have studied the set of law books my wife, Maddie, gave me when we were married.”

  Cole sent her an enigmatic smile and flipped to a new page in his notebook.

  “As for dealing with lawbreakers,” the sheriff continued, “I figure every man, or woman, is assumed innocent until proved guilty. And in my view, punishment should be fair and swift.”

  Murmurs went around the room. Good for him, Jess thought. She admired Sheriff Silver. When Miles was killed, Jericho Silver had tracked the murderer for four days and brought him back for trial. He also kept a sharp eye out for her during those first few months after she’d taken over the newspaper. Even now she knew she could count on Jericho Silver to deter harassment from an out-of-sorts subscriber.

  Cole Sanders was backing the wrong candidate, plain and simple.

  “Next question,” Matt said. “What is your family background, Mr. Arbuckle?”

  Arbuckle leaped to his feet. “My great-grandparents were among the first settlers in this great country. They established substantial tobacco plantations in Virginia. My mother was a Phelan, Irish Catholic, ya know. My daddy, well, let’s just say the Arbuckle name, and the brew you all drink every morning speaks for itself.”

  Jess heard Cole mutter something under his breath. It sounded like “Big shot.”

  When Arbuckle sat down, Jericho stood up and looked directly at the audience members.

  “I don’t know who my parents were,” he said evenly. “Either my mother or father may have been Indian, but I don’t know that for sure. I guess you’d have to call me an orphan. I came to Smoke River when I ran away from the orphanage in Portland. Must have been about ten or maybe eleven years old. I’ve never really known when my birthday was.”

  “Huh!” Arbuckle scoffed. “The man’s nuthin’ but a half-breed!”

  “Very likely,” Jericho said in a quiet voice. “That doesn’t make me any less an American than anybody else.”

  At that, the onlookers cheered, and Marshal Johnson gaveled for silence. Jessamine peeked over at Cole, who sat stroking his chin. He wasn’t smiling.

  “Next question,” the marshal announced. “What does the word justice mean to you? Arbuckle?”

  Instantly Arbuckle was on his feet, his arms waving. “Justice is the great American tradition of making sure the punishment fits the…er…crime. And making sure red-blooded Americans get their fair share of everything they’re entitled to.”

  Jessamine shot another look at Cole and began a new page of notes.

  “Mr. Silver?”

  The sheriff took a minute to collect his thoughts and then rose. “Justice is what every man, rich or poor, white or Indian or Negro or Chinese or Mexican or anything else, is entitled to under the American Constitution.”

  More cheers. Cole pinned Jessamine with narrowed eyes so dark a blue they looked like muddy ink. Her stomach gave an unexpected lurch. Something in her opponent’s gaze sent her pulse skittering. Why, he looked mad enough to— “Well, shoot, folks,” Arbuckle yelled. “That definition’s pretty broad, isn’t it? That means anybody could—”

  The marshal’s gavel cut him off. With a lifted eyebrow in Jess’s direction, Cole ripped a page out of his notepad and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

  “Next question,” the marshal announced. “How would you describe your constituency, the people of Lake County? Mr. Arbuckle?”

  “Glad to, glad to.” Arbuckle rose and puffed out his chest. “I’d say my constituency consists of the good people of Lake County, and that includes the fair communities of Gillet
te Springs and Smoke River folks. We’re all upright, God-fearing, clean-living folks. Which makes our fair neck of the great state of Oregon one of the best, most industrious, most hardworking, most law-abiding places it’s my privilege to serve.”

  “Ye’re not servin’ it yet,” someone yelled. Jessamine lowered her head to hide a smile. When she looked up, Cole was staring at her. It made her so nervous she couldn’t think.

  The marshal gaveled for quiet. “Mr. Silver?”

  Jess sat with her pencil poised as the sheriff slowly stood up and turned sideways to include those seated in back of him. “I think people in Lake County are like people everywhere, no better, no worse. I would hope to serve them all equally and fairly.”

  Arbuckle grew red in the face. “Selling these good folks kinda short, aren’t you, Sheriff?”

  “Shaddup, Arbuckle!” This echoed from the far corner of the packed room. Jessamine peered in that direction, but she couldn’t identify the shouter. She exchanged another look with Cole, who shrugged and pocketed a second sheet of notepaper.

  My! He seemed to be taking lots and lots of notes. She scanned the few pages she’d filled in her own notepad, praying her memory could fill in any gaps. She couldn’t ever remember feeling so flat-footed when it came to note-taking. Was her mind wandering? Worse, was she exposing herself as a fraud in the business of journalism?

  “Last question,” the marshal announced. “Let’s say that while we’re all sitting here tonight the Smoke River Bank is robbed. What would you do? Arbuckle—?”

  The man was on his feet before Matt finished speaking.

  “First I’d alert the marshal. That’d be you, Marshal Johnson. Then I’d make sure they got up a good posse, and then I’d be the first one to join it.”

  “Bull hockey,” a man shouted.

  Arbuckle turned red. “Whaddya mean by that, mister? That’s exactly what I’d do, and don’t you forget it!”

  “Sheriff Silver?” the marshal queried in a calm voice.

  Again, Jericho took his time answering. “If the bank was robbed tonight while we’re all sitting here and I was serving as district judge, I’d keep right on sitting here. A district judge has no authority to contact a federal marshal or the sheriff or anybody else. And that goes for forming a posse, or joining one, for that matter. A judge has a duty to weigh evidence in a trial. He should consider the facts, not take sides.”