A Wanted Man

by Linda Lael Miller

  Filled with sudden urgency, she looked frantically about for her clothes, but they were missing. Everything was gone—the dress stained with Gideon's blood when she'd knelt beside him after the shooting, and when she'd held him in her arms in the bed of a wagon as he was being transported to Rowdy's house. The drawers and camisole had vanished, too. Everything had been taken away except her shoes, which still lay oddly askew where Rowdy had tossed them when he took them off her feet.

  Lark snatched the quilt off the bed, wrapped it around herself like a coronation robe, and opened the bedroom door just a crack. Peered out.

  Gideon lay sleeping on his cot. Lark squinted, examining him from a distance. His shoulder was bandaged, seeping a little, but his color was good, and he seemed to be breathing normally, and with relative ease, considering what he'd been through.

  There was no sign of Mai Lee or of Hon Sing, but Rowdy sat near the stove, reading a book, fully clad, one booted foot braced against the chrome rail, and Pardner was stretched out on the floor, midway between him and Gideon, keeping his canine vigil.

  "Where are my clothes?" Lark whispered anxiously, and with a peevish note in her voice.

  Rowdy grinned, closed the book. "I burned them," he said, as though it were a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "They were pretty well ruined."

  "You burned—What am I supposed to wear? I can't leave this house in a quilt!"

  He smiled a private little smile, as though relishing the thought of Lark parading through Stone Creek clad only in the covering from his bed, then nodded toward the table, where a bundle waited, wrapped in brown paper and neatly tied up with twine. "Mai Lee fetched some things for you from the rooming house. Shall I bring them to you?"

  "No!" Lark replied quickly, and rushed out to snatch the package off the table, nearly losing her grasp on the quilt in the process.

  Rowdy smiled. "Bathing room's that way," he said, nodding toward a nearby door. "I lit a fire under the boiler a while ago, so the water ought to be hot."

  The very thought of a real bath restored Lark considerably. She took her fresh clothes, the edge of the quilt dragging behind her with a homespun kind of elegance, and scurried in the direction Rowdy indicated.

  The tub was a thing of gleaming splendor, the likes of which Lark had not seen since before she'd fled Denver. There was a flush commode, too, and a pedestal sink made of real porcelain, though it only had one spigot. Even at Mrs. Porter's, surely the best-appointed house in Stone Creek, she had used chamber pots and the privy, and taken shivering baths in her room, with only a basin, a cloth and a towel.

  After closing the bathing room door carefully behind her, Lark set the clean clothes Mai Lee had brought her on the lid of the commode, still in their parcel, put the plug in place in the bathtub and turned on the spigots.

  Gloriously plentiful, steaming water poured out of the faucet, thundering into the tub, and Lark was so overcome with gratitude and joy that she nearly wept.

  She let go of the quilt, letting it fall into a pool of faded color at her feet, stuck a toe in to test the water. It was perfect—hot, but not scalding—and best of all, it soon filled the tub nearly to the brim.

  Settling in, Lark soaked awhile, then used the soap and washcloth Rowdy must have set out for her, scrubbing herself squeaky-clean from head to foot. The feeling was so heavenly that she almost forgot that Autry was bound to come to Stone Creek, if he hadn't already, and discover her there. Even if she hid out, which she fully intended to do, she couldn't remain entirely invisible. She still had to teach school, after all, and she would need to look in on Gideon often, while he recovered.

  She slipped down into the water until it reached her chin, frowning.

  Common sense argued for leaving. She could enlist someone, surely, to escort her as far as Phoenix in a wagon or a buggy—she couldn't risk getting aboard the stagecoach, because its arrival and departure were events in Stone Creek, and her going would arouse considerable notice. Once she'd reached Phoenix, which seemed an impossible feat in itself, even if Autry didn't send riders after her, she could...what?

  Board a train? Autry could have agents on all of them, looking for her.

  Buy a stagecoach ticket? Where would she go, and what would she do when she got there—wherever "there" was? She had no friends, no family and no money.

  All these things compounded the problem, of course, but they weren't the real reasons she couldn't leave Stone Creek.

  She was bound to the place by ties of caring—for Gideon, for Lydia and all her students. The school term wouldn't be over until early June, and honor required her to complete her contract, informal though it was.

  And there was a still greater reason.

  It would mean leaving Rowdy.

  Before he'd made love to her, she could have gone somewhere else, given herself a new name and started over, entrusting Gideon and Lydia to others. Sam O'Ballivan, busy as he was, had worked as a schoolmaster in Haven—he could have finished out the term for her or found someone else. But from the first moment of intimacy—not in Rowdy's bed just hours before, but on the way out to Sam and Maddie's place, when he'd made her shout his name to the sky—she'd been lost to any plan that didn't include him.

  Rowdy might well vanish one of these days, she knew, because he had dangerous secrets of his own. If that happened, assuming she managed to deal with Autry and hold on to her job after the truth came out— she'd been married and divorced, and those things were considered unacceptable in a teacher—she'd stay on in Stone Creek, she decided, and live out her best years as a spinster schoolmarm. But at least she would have known passion, and the memory would sustain her through otherwise lonely nights.

  She would find a way to survive, even to thrive, with or without Rowdy.

  What she would not do was run away again.

  She meant to stand and face Autry, if it came to that. She knew Rowdy would help her, and in the event that he'd already gone, she would seek Sam O'Balli-van's assistance.

  Having come to terms with these things, Lark felt renewed, though her fears certainly hadn't diminished. She completed her bath, dried herself off with a flour-sack towel and donned her clothes, smiling when she found her hairbrush, toothbrush and powder tucked in the folds of her green woolen skirt.

  Silently she blessed Mai Lee for her thoughtfulness.

  She brushed out her hair—it wanted washing, but that was an undertaking that required several hours— plaited it into a single braid and tied it with a bit of the twine Mai Lee had used to bind the parcel closed.

  She must have looked quite presentable when she stepped out of the bathing room, because something sparked in Rowdy's eyes as he watched her. She looked away, embarrassed to remember just how completely she'd surrendered to him.

  She stood over Gideon's cot, leaned a little to touch the boy's forehead.

  He opened his eyes, looked up at her in bafflement. "Miss Morgan?" he ground out. "What are you doing here?"

  Rowdy all but overturned his chair getting to his feet, coming to stand beside Lark. While he'd seemed calm, at his reading, he'd been waiting for Gideon to wake up, and probably fearing that he never would.

  Lark watched, smiling through tears, as remembrance dawned in Gideon's face. "I was shot," he said, very slowly.

  "Yes," Lark answered. "But you're going to be all right. Hon Sing took very good care of you."

  "Did he stick a bunch of needles in me?" Gideon asked, grinning wanly.

  "He did," said Lark with a nod. "And he performed surgery on you, too. That's why you have bandages. The bullet came very close to your heart."

  He shifted on the cot, sought and found Rowdy's face, where a lecture was brewing, his expression both obstinate and chagrined. "I was only trying to be a good deputy," Gideon said.

  Rowdy's voice was hoarse when he answered. "It was a damn fool thing, what you did. But it was brave as hell, too. Do anything like it again, though, and I'll shoot you myself"

  Gideon tried to
sit up, fell back down onto the cot again. Pardner stepped up to lick his cheek, and he chuckled and reached out, shakily, to ruffle the dog's ears.

  Lark remembered the fierce way Pardner had guarded Gideon after he was shot, and smiled. When Gideon felt better, she'd tell him all about it. Tell him how she'd had to spend long minutes calming the dog before he'd allow anyone besides Lark to get close, and how Pardner had jumped into the back of the wagon, with her and Gideon, to make the ride with them.

  "Are you hurting?" Rowdy asked his brother. "Hon Sing left some stuff here—to take for pain. Powder, folded up in a piece of paper."

  Gideon shook his head. "I just feel numb, pretty much everywhere." He looked at Lark again, searched her face. "You followed me to the dance, didn't you?"

  Lark drew up a chair, took Gideon's hand in both of hers. He'd been unconscious, from the time of the shooting until just a few minutes before. If he'd awakened at any point, she would have known, because she'd been watching him so closely. "How did you know that?"

  "I saw you," he said. He glanced sheepishly at Rowdy, but his eyes were clear and solemn when he turned back to Lark. "I saw Rose, too." Gideon paused, swallowed. Rowdy went to get him some water. He drank from the ladle, then nodded, as if to confirm his own words to himself. "I saw Rose. You were kneeling beside me, Lark, and Rose was standing right behind you. She was wearing the dress she died in."

  "Who is Rose?" Lark asked, moved.

  "My sister," Gideon said. "She died when she was four years old."

  Lark was confounded, her emotions stirred in some deep and inexplicable way, and Rowdy remained silent.

  "You don't believe me," Gideon accused, looking from one of them to the other. "You don't think I really saw Rose. But I did.. .1 did."

  "I do believe you, Gideon," Lark said.

  "You only thought you saw her," Rowdy said. "You were shot, Gideon, and you had some kind of dream. Drink some more water."

  "Be quiet," Lark told Rowdy, holding Gideon's hand tightly now. "Did you speak with...with Rose?" she asked softly.

  Gideon shook his head. "I wanted to," he said sadly, "but there wasn't time. She was there, and she said some things I can't remember now, and I wanted to go with her when she left, but she shook her head. Then she was gone."

  Lark bit her lip. "After my mother died," she said, smoothing Gideon's blankets gently, "I was inconsolable. My grandfather was lost in his own grief, and he wouldn't have known what to say to me, anyway. But the night after her funeral—" she paused, aware that Rowdy was listening intently, and straightened her spine "—well, I would have sworn Mama came and sat on my bed. I didn't see her, though—I wish I had."

  Gideon looked somewhat mollified. Then his gaze shifted to Rowdy, standing behind Lark. He changed the course of the conversation. "Did you find Pa? Did he—?"

  Lark felt the swift tension in Rowdy's body, even though they weren't touching, perhaps because some unseen, mystical factor of their lovemaking still connected them. She looked back at him just in time to see him shake his head, not in denial, but in warning.

  The reminder was sobering. She might have shared her secrets, but Rowdy still had plenty of his own. She'd bared her soul to him; he'd told her nothing at all.

  No, he'd undressed her and put her in his bed. Later he'd returned and ravished her so completely that her body still pulsed with the aftershocks of truly cataclysmic satisfaction. But he'd made no promises, certainly. And he'd withheld the truest part of himself from her, for all the physical intimacy they'd shared.

  "I'd better go out and make my rounds," Rowdy said, suddenly uncomfortable. "If Lark—Miss Morgan—wouldn't mind staying with you for a while..."

  Lark nodded. "I'll stay," she said. For Gideon's sake, Rowdy Rhodes, not yours.

  "Obliged," Rowdy said, as though they were two polite strangers, almost colliding on a sidewalk, then cordially sidestepping each other. As though they had not been lovers only a few hours before. "I'll get back as quick as I can."

  Lark nodded, a little tersely.

  Gideon closed his eyes and drifted back into the solace of sleep, perhaps hoping to find his lost sister, Rose, waiting there.

  Bent on going out, as much to escape any questions she might ask, she suspected, as to fulfill his duties as town marshal, Rowdy crossed the room, strapped on his gun belt, reached for his hat and coat.

  In a moment of stark clarity, Lark recalled what he'd said, after she'd recounted the events leading up to Gideon's near-fatal shooting, and how, in the midst of the chaos, someone had called out the name "Willie."

  I'll kill him, Rowdy had vowed.

  Lark rushed to catch him before he went out the door.

  "You're not going looking for the man who shot Gideon, are you? Not yet—not without Sam and a posse?"

  Rowdy eyes were blank, veiled from within. He'd closed himself off to her, stepped behind some invisible barrier, through which she could not pass. "He's one man," he said grimly. "What do I need with a posse?"

  "It's almost dark, Rowdy. At least wait until tomorrow!"

  "I mean to ask some questions of the folks that were at that dance, among others." His jaw tightened. "Just the same, if I happen to run across the bastard, I might just have to invoke Rhodes Ordinance."

  When I need a law, I just make one, he'd told her the day of the blizzard.

  That was Rhodes Ordinance.

  Lark gripped Rowdy's arm. "Don't take the law into your own hands," she whispered. "Promise me you won't!"

  "I can't make that kind of promise," Rowdy said. "I've lied every day of my life since I was fourteen years old, and I won't do it anymore. If I find Willie— or meet up with Autry Whitman—well, the truth is, I don't know exactly what I'll do, but I'm sure as hell going to do something."

  Lark clung to Rowdy. She felt Pardner press between them, squirming to be noticed.

  "Stay here with us," she said to Rowdy. "Just for a little while. I'll make some coffee, find something to fix for supper..."

  Rowdy smiled almost imperceptibly and placed a light, tantalizing kiss on her mouth. He would share himself with her only when they made love, she realized, and it wasn't enough. It wasn 't enough.

  "I'll be all right," he said.

  "You won't. Autry is vicious, Rowdy, and, worse, he's a coward. And the man who shot Gideon must be an outlaw, or he wouldn't have done anything like that."

  "I can be pretty vicious myself if the situation calls for it," Rowdy said, gently removing her hand from his arm. A cold wind blew in around them, through the partially open door. "And I can handle any outlaw. I know how they think, Lark. I know the places where they hide, everything they're afraid of, how to track them." He paused, looked away for a moment, then met her gaze again. "After all, I'm one of them."

  Lark's mouth dropped open.

  Rowdy smiled again, his eyes bleak, and went out the door.

  Pardner tried to follow, and Rowdy sent him slinking back inside, dejected, with a stern word. The animal plopped down in front of the stove, with a disconsolate little whine low in his throat.

  Lark shut the door, leaned against it, pressing her forehead into the wood. Rowdy was an outlaw?

  That couldn't have been what he said—she must have misunderstood him. He was the marshal of Stone Creek—Sam O'Ballivan and Major Blackstone thought highly enough of him to give him a badge. And he was too strong, too honorable, too good to be a criminal.

  Surely she'd heard him wrong.

  Jolene's saloon was closed for business, that being Sunday, but Rowdy found a side door and went in anyway.

  All the tables were empty, but Hon Sing was standing on a chair in back of the bar, swabbing down the long mirror with water that smelled pungently of vinegar. Hearing Rowdy enter, or maybe just seeing his reflection in the glass, he turned, paused in his work.

  "Boy has fever?" the Chinaman asked.

  Rowdy shook his head. "Gideon's doing all right, thanks to you."

  Hon Sing dropped the rag
he'd been using into the bucket set among the whiskey bottles and dingy glasses under the mirror and stepped down off the chair. Came around to stand facing Rowdy.

  "You not come for whiskey," Hon Sing said solemnly.

  Again Rowdy shook his head. Took a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his trail coat and extended it to the Chinese doctor who'd been reduced, through circumstance and casual prejudice, to washing mirrors in saloons and cleaning up after whores and gamblers and drunken cowboys.

  Hon Sing just looked at the paper, puzzled.

  "It's the deed to the place behind the jailhouse," Rowdy said. "I've already signed it over to you and your wife."

  Hon Sing blinked, and his hand shook as he took the deed, examined the writing on it, which was probably incomprehensible to him, as highly educated as he undoubtedly was. "Too much," he said warily, though a light of cautious hope glinted in his eyes.

  "You saved my brother's life," Rowdy replied. "Seems to me, he and I got the better end of this trade."

  Almost reverently Hon Sing tucked the document inside his black cotton shirt. And he smiled. "Thank you," he said, and bowed his head slightly.

  Rowdy inclined his own head in response. "I'm grateful, Hon Sing. Truth is, I wouldn't have let you stick those needles in Gideon, let alone cut on him, if Lark hadn't stepped in."

  "Miss Morgan fine woman. Good to Mai Lee. Good to Hon Sing." The Chinaman paused, frowned. "Very afraid, though."

  Rowdy nodded. He knew now, at least, who Lark feared and why. From what he'd seen of Autry Whitman, not to mention the man's reputation, she'd had good reason to be scared.

  He'd deal with Whitman, that was a grim certainty. Right now, though, it was Willie he wanted to find. It was a common name, Willie, but he'd heard it in the bathhouse behind this same saloon, the first day he was in town, and he remembered the man it belonged to. He also remembered that Hon Sing had been present, summoned by Jolene to empty dirty bathwater through the floorboards.

  "Do you recall those two cowpokes, or drifters, who came in when my dog Pardner and I were here? One of them was called Harlan, and the other was Willie."