Printer in Petticoats

by Lynna Banning

  Cole stood without moving, weighing the situation and his options. He could fire at the man out the front window, scare him off, maybe even wing him. But that would scare the heck out of Jess, and then he’d never know who the man was.

  Or he could position himself behind the door and wait until the lock yielded, then confront whoever it was.

  No, he couldn’t. If the fellow was armed, there might be gunplay, and Jess could get hurt.

  He decided to make a noise and startle the man into leaving. Quietly he backed away from the window, reached for the rollup top on Jess’s desk and slid it up and down with a hard rattle and snap.

  Footsteps pounded down the boardwalk. Cole strained his ears listening for a horse, but he heard nothing more. So the man was on foot, not horseback. And that suggested it was someone from town.

  Quietly Cole unbolted the lock and cracked open the door.

  He could hear men’s laughter from the saloon down the street, the snip and twitter of night birds, even the lonely whistle of a train somewhere. Night sounds.

  But no horses’ hooves. No gunfire. Nothing but the ominous quiet of a dark street in the middle of the night.

  He shut the door, locked and bolted it, slid his rifle back under the cot and lay down on top of the quilt. The rhythmic thump-thump he heard was his own heartbeat, and he smiled wryly into the dark and wondered how many hours until dawn.

  First thing tomorrow he’d pay another visit to Sheriff Jericho Silver.

  *

  Jessamine bent over the proofs Eli had run off, working her teeth into her pencil. She had a bad feeling about this election. She believed Jericho Silver could win a majority of the votes, but she could not help wondering what Conway Arbuckle would do if he lost the race. She hadn’t seen the man lately, at the hotel or anywhere else, and Rosie Greywolf reported that he had not visited his “other wife” all week.

  Rosie kept her sharp eye on town happenings and she missed nothing. Usually. But the Indian woman did live in a cabin half a mile outside town, so she couldn’t see everything that went on twenty-four hours a day.

  Tomorrow the townspeople would vote, along with residents of Gillette Springs, which would fall under the new judge’s jurisdiction. No doubt Arbuckle was out this very minute canvassing votes in that community.

  She was so worked up that when she inadvertently smeared the ink on her proof copy she unexpectedly burst into tears, then went ahead and let herself have a good cry. She couldn’t imagine what was wrong with her. Nerves, probably. She hadn’t been sleeping much at night, knowing Cole lay just twelve steps away.

  She liked having him near. Liked feeling protected. But still… Oh, she felt all mixed up inside. She couldn’t just tiptoe down the stairs and crawl into his bed at night. He still had his memories of his wife, and she… Well, it wouldn’t be fair to grow too close to him, since there was really no future in it for either of them. Yes, she had fallen in love with him, and maybe he even loved her, but…it was not enough.

  Later, while Eli cranked off copies of the Sentinel’s morning edition, she tried to talk sense to herself. The election would be over soon and things would get back to normal. She would report on Mrs. Hinksley’s whist party and the latest engagement announcement and birthday celebration. And of course the news about the railroad strike in the East and where General Custer would next confront the Sioux.

  But she felt uneasy, as if something terrible was about to happen. How she wished life could be the way it was before.

  But that was before Cole had come to Smoke River, and she did not wish for that.

  She put on a determined smile for Eli’s benefit, retrieved her notebook, sharpened a fresh pencil and prepared to leave the office to check her news beats.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cole looked up to find young Teddy MacAllister bending over his shoulder, his russet eyebrows pulled down into a frown. “Mr. Sanders?”

  “Yes, what is it, son?”

  “I—I got a suggestion for you. ’Bout Miss Jessamine. An’ I brought you something to help.”

  “What about Miss Jessamine, Ted? Nothing wrong with her printing press, is there? She got enough ink?”

  “Nah, nuthin’ like that. Just now she was helping me load up the Sentinel copies to distribute, and she was sorta snuffly, like she’d been cryin’.”

  Cole surveyed the boy in silence. Jess never cried, except for the night her newspaper was firebombed. His neck prickled.

  “I’ll just mosey on over there and check on her,” he said.

  Teddy shoved a small cardboard box onto Cole’s desk. “This is for you, to take to Miss Jessamine. Like I told ya, before, ’member?”

  Inside the box was a collection of dried grasshoppers. “Bugs,” Teddy explained. “It’s what I give to Manette, an’ I thought it’d help with Miss Jessamine.”

  Cole couldn’t laugh in front of the boy, but he bit the inside of his lower lip so hard he tasted blood. “Mighty thoughtful of you, Ted. I’ll see it gets delivered, for sure.”

  The boy grinned and raced out to mount his mare, his saddlebags laden with newspapers. Smiling, Cole watched him go larruping down the street, and then he sobered.

  Jessamine was crying? Why?

  He was across the street in twenty seconds. “Eli, where’s Jess?”

  The old man looked up from the sandwiches spread out on his workbench. “Dunno. At the restaurant, mebbe. It’s past lunchtime.”

  When Cole entered the restaurant, Rita glanced up, tipped her head toward the table in the far corner and headed for the coffeepot. He moved forward and turned the chair that was next to Jessamine backward then straddled it. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, Cole. Why? My goodness, you look awful. Are you getting enough sleep at night?”

  “Nope. But let’s discuss that later. Teddy said you’ve been crying.”

  Her red-rimmed eyes widened. “Teddy? Well, yes, I have, but how would he know that?”

  “He said you were ‘snuffly’ when you were loading up the newspapers. What’s wrong, Jess?”

  “Oh, I— It’s nothing, really.”

  Rita marched over and stood at his elbow, notepad poised. “You eatin’ or just jawin’?”

  “Coffee,” he said.

  “Got a nice chicken-fried steak on the menu.”

  “Just coffee.”

  “Fresh apple pie, too,” the waitress persisted.

  “Just one cup of coffee, Rita,” he said, his voice tightening. “Please.”

  Rita went back to the kitchen, muttering under her breath. “Stubborn? Never seen two such stubborn…”

  Cole hitched his chair closer. “Jess, has something happened? Somebody threaten you?”

  She shook her head.

  He leaned in closer. “Are you… Oh, my God, are you pregnant?”

  She clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle a shocked laugh, then shook her head again. “No, I am not.” Then her eyes filled with tears.

  “Jess?”

  “It’s this dratted election. The waiting. The rumors. The—”

  “You’re not pregnant,” Cole breathed. Hell’s bells, he was halfway disappointed. “Teddy MacAllister was worried about you. He brought over a special gift for me to give you.”

  She smiled. “Oh, that’s nice. What is it?”

  “A box of bugs.”

  “Bugs!”

  “Grasshoppers. Seems they’re a love offering he takes to Jeanne and Wash Halliday’s daughter, Manette.”

  “Bugs,” she repeated. “Oh, how sweet.”

  “You’d like a box of grasshoppers?”

  She laughed. Thank God. Her eyes looked dry and so green and clear he wanted to swim around in them.

  “The election is tomorrow,” he reminded her. “Voting box will be at Ness’s Mercantile. Sit with me?”

  “I suppose we should. Marshal Johnson is the official ballot monitor, but he’ll need two witnesses.”

  “I’m composing a piece about Arbuckle
for when he concedes,” he said dryly.

  “I’m writing a story based on Jericho’s acceptance speech.”

  “Should boost both our subscriptions,” Cole ventured.

  “Again,” she added. “After this we’ll need a new controversy to keep sales booming.”

  Cole laughed. “Think maybe we can find something new to argue about?”

  But she isn’t pregnant. He guessed maybe they would disagree about whether that was a relief or a disappointment.

  “For pity’s sake, Cole, why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I have strawberries growing out of my ears.”

  He started to laugh and then choked it off. “I guess because in a lot of ways you’re beginning to scare me, Jess.”

  Her teacup jiggled, and she carefully disengaged her finger from the delicate curved handle. “I cannot imagine why I should scare you. You’re the one sleeping with a rifle under your bed. Oh, yes, I know it’s there. Eli told me.”

  “Damn that old man!”

  “Eli cares about me, Cole. He tries his best to watch over me.”

  “Eli can’t protect you. I doubt he can see two yards in front of his nose.”

  She bit her lip and he suppressed a groan. He knew she wasn’t teasing him this time; she was worried about something. He just didn’t know what. Her fond but feeble typesetter? Her newspaper circulation? His newspaper circulation?

  Or was it him she was worried about?

  He didn’t like it when a woman worried over him. It distracted her, made her careless about things that could harm her.

  He reached for the coffee mug in front of him and closed his fingers around it until his knuckles whitened. Maryann had worried about him. She hadn’t liked him working late at the newspaper office, and she hadn’t wanted him to continue publishing articles denouncing slavery and accusing Quantrill of the mayhem and violence he had brought to an already divided Kansas.

  Cole hadn’t listened to her fears, and he would regret it until the day he died. One night, while his attention had been focused on his press run, someone set fire to his house. He had been two blocks away when he saw the flickering glow in the sky.

  He’d started to run.

  The house had been an inferno. He’d seen Maryann in the window on the second floor, and he’d shouted for her to jump. Just as she’d climbed out onto the sill, the blazing roof had caved in on her.

  He could hear her screaming, and then there had been nothing but the roar of the flames.

  Even now he could hear her screaming. He shuddered at the memory and jerked himself back to the present. Sweat beaded on his face. God in heaven, he hated remembering.

  He hated the fear that pooled in his belly, cold and sour; and he knew he would be a coward all his life because he couldn’t let it go, couldn’t move forward. His wife had been snatched from him, and he didn’t want another.

  He didn’t like what that said about him, but he knew he was no good for Jess. She deserved better. She deserved a man who was willing to risk everything for her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Election day dawned cold and crisp, the sky blue as forget-me-nots and so clear and cloudless it looked as if it had been painted. At the mercantile, Jess perched on a stool next to Cole and huddled close to the fire in the potbellied stove.

  Federal Marshal Matt Johnson strode up and down between the aisles of men’s shirts and canning supplies, rubbing his hands together and flexing his fingers. He stopped at the counter and purchased a box of cartridges for the revolver strapped around his hips.

  Jess shivered. The marshal was here to oversee the election proceedings and make sure everything stayed peaceful. Cole tipped his hat back and settled himself next to the oversize molasses tin serving as the ballot box. A slit had been cut in the top for the paper ballots, printed up that morning on Cole’s Ramage press. The ink was barely dry.

  All day long they sat there, watching as people folded and dropped their ballots in the box, then hung around the warm stove exchanging news. The mercantile owner supplied sandwiches and coffee, but the hours dragged. Toward the end of the day, Jess could barely stop yawning.

  Late that night they helped to tally the ballots. Jericho Silver won, garnering nine hundred and ninety-six votes to Conway Arbuckle’s one hundred and eight, but even so, Jessamine could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. Whether it was the unusually still night or the absence of a moon or the decisive way mercantile owner Carl Ness had packed up his molasses tin ballot box and shooed the marshal and Cole and herself out of his store, she couldn’t say.

  What she could say without a flicker of doubt was that her nose for news hadn’t stopped twitching since yesterday afternoon.

  At midnight, Cole walked her back to the Sentinel office.

  “Long day,” he said, his voice noncommittal.

  “I know you’ve already been working a story about Arbuckle’s defeat.”

  “Yeah, I have my story half-written. I’ll just step over to my office, finish it up and make sure it’s sitting where Noralee can find it in the morning. Lock your door, Jess. I’ll use the extra key Eli gave me when I come back over.”

  “It’s a good thing that girl worships you, Cole. You work her to death.”

  “No, I don’t. She likes setting type. Wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she ended up running her own newspaper someday.”

  Jessamine sighed. “Funny how the bug bites you, isn’t it? Until Miles was killed, I never thought I’d run a newspaper, either.”

  Cole touched her shoulder briefly and stepped out onto the boardwalk. He waited to hear her lock click, then went across the street to the Lark office.

  Once inside, he swept up his handwritten pages. He had just turned toward Noralee’s array of type fonts when someone grabbed him from behind and pinned his arms. He drove his elbow backward into the fleshy part of a man’s belly and followed it up with a kick to his shin.

  Then someone slapped a wadded-up cloth over his nose and mouth. It smelled odd, kinda sweet, but before he could rip it away, everything went black.

  *

  Jessamine was up at dawn, hoping to catch Cole before he folded up his cot. All night she’d thought about an idea for a feature, and she hurried down the stairs to tell him.

  His cot was still there, the quilt neatly folded on top. But it looked as if his bed hadn’t been slept in, and that was odd. Even more odd was the fact that he’d left it out in plain sight. She’d have to speak to him about that before he went to breakfast.

  At ten o’clock Noralee Ness stepped into the Sentinel office, her thin arms clasped across her middle. “Have you seen Mr. Sanders this morning?”

  Jess removed the pencil between her teeth. “He’s probably at breakfast, Noralee. We were up late last night, counting the ballots.”

  “He’s not at the restaurant, Miss Jessamine. I checked. And Rita said she hasn’t seen him all morning.”

  A jolt of fear went up Jess’s spine. “Eli?” she called over her shoulder.

  “I ain’t seen him, neither, Jess. Musta got up real early, ’cause his cot—” He broke off with a glance at Noralee’s worried face.

  The girl turned puzzled brown eyes on Jess. “He was going to leave me a story to typeset this morning, about the election,” Noralee said. “But I found the pages scattered all over the floor. Should I pick them up and set the story up anyway?”

  Eli and Jessamine stared at each other for a long minute.

  “I’ll go check the Golden Partridge, Jess,” Eli said. “See if he’s celebratin’ or news-gatherin’ or…”

  “Seems awful funny,” Noralee said with a catch in her voice. “Mr. Sanders, he always does what he says he’s going to do. He said he’d have a story for me to work on this morning, and now I don’t know what to do.”

  Jessamine rose to her feet, her throat dry and her heart beginning to pound under her ruffled white shirtwaist. “I’m going over to the
livery stable, Eli. Maybe he’s out riding that Arabian of his.”

  “But Miss Jessamine,” Noralee protested, “why would he be riding around on his horse today instead of writing his news stories? The Lark’s supposed to come out tomorrow morning.”

  A shard of ice dropped into Jessamine’s stomach. She skipped the livery stable and instead went straight to the sheriff’s office. After a tense ten minutes of wrapping her shaking hands around a cup of coffee, the deputy sheriff strode in and slapped his hat on the sheriff’s paper-strewn desk.

  “His horse is there, all right, Sheriff. Hasn’t been ridden.”

  “Sandy,” the sheriff ordered. “Ride out to Wash Halliday’s place. Tell him I need him. Tell him to meet me at Marshal Johnson’s.”

  Jericho began checking his revolvers and Jess jumped to her feet. “What is it? What has happened?”

  A strained expression crossed the sheriff’s tanned face. “There’s no easy way to put this, Miss Jessamine. Looks like Cole’s been kidnapped.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Cole found himself tied belly-down on the back of a horse, his head aching as if a cannon had gone off inside his skull. He groaned and someone pulled the animal to a stop.

  “Awake, are ya?” Well, I reckon ya kin sit up. We’ll make better time that way.”

  Someone jerked him off the horse, and then the hard barrel of a gun prodded him in the back. “Mount up,” the voice ordered. A swarthy man lashed his hands to the saddle horn, and another, taller man stepped over and slapped the animal’s rump so it jolted forward.

  Three men. Cole couldn’t be sure if they were the same three he’d seen in the saloon the night of the fire, but it seemed likely. He’d thought they were all in jail.

  Guess not. Or maybe Jericho had released them for lack of concrete evidence. Or maybe they had nothing to do with Arbuckle or the fire at Jess’s newspaper office. He hated not knowing.

  He studied the countryside around him. Mostly scrub with a copse of cottonwoods here and there. Didn’t recognize it from his newspaper route or from any of his journeys around the valley on horseback. From the angle of the sun, he guessed they were heading east, into the badlands.