The Prairie Thief

by Melissa Wiley

  Not just petty theft, either—a low-down, sneaky, systematic kind of thievery the like of which Judge Callahan had never seen in all his years on the bench. It appeared that Jack Brody had been snatching goods from right under the nose of his closest neighbor and purported friend. The robberies must have been going on for months—if the facts were indeed as Sheriff Morgan had laid out for the judge, and though Judge Callahan held it as a matter of honor never to jump to a verdict before a fair trial, he had to admit that things looked black for Jack Brody. Stolen valuables found stashed in Brody’s old dugout; no other neighbors within miles. No reports of strangers in the area, either.

  “I’d never have believed it of him,” said Judge Calla­han, shaking his head, as Mrs. Mack replaced his stew plate with a generous piece of dried-apple pie. He was in the habit of thinking aloud as he pondered his cases. This had been his practice for many years—the long, lean years of solitude during which he had subsisted primarily on cold beans on toast, until Mrs. Mack had appeared and taken him in hand. He had not seen fit to change his habits after her arrival, and indeed he had found her to be quite a shrewd judge of character.

  She had listened with gratifying interest to the sorry tale of Jack Brody’s arrest.

  “Where is the child?” she demanded in a tone so fierce it startled a crow sitting on a branch of the wild plum tree outside the open window. The bird answered with an indignant squawk. “Who’s looking after the girl?”

  The judge swallowed his bite of pie. “Sheriff Morgan left her in the care of the Smirch couple,” he replied. “Wasn’t much else he could do, under the circumstances.”

  “Poppycock! I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in all my considerable years! Leaving the poor mite in the care of the very folks who’ve accused her father. It’s preposterous.”

  Judge Callahan frowned. He couldn’t say he disagreed. There was something about the whole business that left him with a deep uneasiness in the pit of his stomach—a pit that was rapidly being filled with Mrs. Mack’s fine pie.

  “By jingo, I can’t seem to make out what all you’ve flavored it with this time, ma’am. Brown sugar . . . a wee bit of molasses, if I’m not mistaken . . . and nutmeg, that’s indisputable. But there’s something else, am I right? You can’t have gotten your hands on any cinnamon, can you?”

  The housekeeper snorted, her eyes—half-moons seamed with wrinkles—crinkling with mirth. Ah, she did love to stump him with her cookery secrets, reflected the judge.

  “You needn’t waste your wits trying to guess,” she replied in her usual tart, high tone. “I reckon you’ll need every one of them to put two and two together and come up with four.”

  Judge Callahan’s eyebrows rose. “It’s like that, is it?” he retorted. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve got it all figured out? You know the truth of the case?”

  “It was as plain as pie to me the moment I heard,” said the housekeeper archly, her arms crossed over her plump midsection.

  “The moment you heard!” the judge sputtered. “Well, let’s have it, then. Is Brody guilty or not?”

  But Mrs. Mack was sniffing her offended sniff again and refused to enlighten him.

  “Far be it from me,” she humphed, “to interfere with matters of the law. Me being just a humble cook and all.”

  She collected his empty plate and fork and headed for the kitchen, muttering under her breath. Confounded female, thought the judge. Touchier than a porcupine with poison ivy.

  Her shrill voice rang out from the kitchen above the clatter of dishes, eliciting another startled squawk from the eavesdropping crow. “As if any fool couldn’t see the man is innocent as a May morn!”

  “Ah,” replied Judge Callahan, “but I’m not any fool.” His housekeeper’s opinion, no matter how emphatically stated, was not something to base a verdict on. No, this case wanted facts, and answers. If Jack Brody hadn’t stolen those goods, then who in tarnation had?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  No More Spiders in Our Stew

  “YOUR PA’S GONNA HANG,” SAID WINTHROP SMIRCH. He was a round-cheeked, lanky-haired boy, with two missing teeth and extremely dirty toenails. He was supposed to be gathering buffalo chips for his mother, but instead he and Charlie were pestering Louisa as she gathered the morning’s eggs. It was her third day with the Smirches, and each one of them had felt like a month of Sundays. “My ma says so. She says he’s a dirty robber and he deserves what he’s got comin’.”

  Louisa’s blood was boiling, but she tried to speak calmly. Pa wouldn’t like her cussing out a little boy, which was what she felt like doing.

  “Your ma is mistaken,” she said in what she hoped was a dignified tone. “There’s been a terrible mistake, but my pa’ll get it sorted out. The sheriff is probably investigating the matter right this minute.”

  “Naw,” said Winthrop. “He’s gonna hang, soon as they round up a jury.”

  “What do you mean, ‘hang’?” asked Charlie, the four-year-old. He groped in his britches pocket and pulled out a stone, cradling it in both hands like it was a precious jewel.

  It was just an ordinary creek stone—round and smooth, a creamy pale gray, almost white. Charlie was exceedingly attached to it. Last night he had fallen asleep with it clutched in his grubby fist. It was lost somewhere in the bed by sunup, and Charlie began the day with a frantic, squalling outcry over his missing stone. During the course of a single morning, Louisa had seen that stone dropped into the butter churn, flung into the fire, tucked into a hen’s nest “for safekeeping,” kicked into the straw and muck of the barn floor, and poked into Charlie’s ear. It had occurred to Louisa that if Mrs. Smirch could just free them all of the burden of keeping up with that stone, she might not be such a crosspatch. A few more days in its company, and Louisa feared the sourness might settle into her own soul as well.

  Of course, putting up with Winthrop wasn’t helping matters.

  “Hangin’s what they do to robbers,” he explained to Charlie. “They put a rope around your neck and drop you, and then you’re dead. They’re gonna hang Louisa’s pa, and I’m gonna go watch.”

  “Winthrop Smirch!” cried an outraged voice. “You take that back!”

  Jessamine came flying out of the house, her straggly braids flapping behind her. She rushed up to Winthrop and stood quivering before him, her brown eyes dark with fury.

  “You take it back,” she repeated. “That’s a mean, hateful thing to say, and I won’t stand for it.”

  Winthrop scowled up at her, his pale eyes wide. He reminded Louisa of his pa, with that half-sullen, half-trapped expression. Mr. Smirch had looked just the same way when he and the sheriff rode into the barnyard to arrest Pa.

  “Ma said so,” Winthrop said uncertainly. “I’m a-tellin’ her you hollered at me.”

  “You go right ahead,” said Jessamine, putting her bony hands on her hips. “I don’t care what you tell her, so long as you don’t say awful things to Louisa. She’s our guest, you know,” she added witheringly, but her scorn seemed lost on Winthrop.

  “She ain’t no guest,” he retorted. “She’s a bother, I heard Ma say so.”

  Louisa spun on her heel and stalked away from the little boy. He was just repeating what his mother had said, anyhow. Might as well be mad at a calf for mooing, that’s what Pa would say.

  Jessamine hurried after her.

  “Don’t you mind him,” she said earnestly, trotting up beside Louisa. “Or Aunt Mattie, neither. She’s an old crosspatch, that’s all. My ma never liked her, only she was too polite to say so. Seeing as how she was married to Pa’s brother and all.”

  “Did you know her before your parents . . . before you came to live here?” Louisa asked. She was still walking fast, not going anywhere in particular, just wanting to get far away from the Smirch house. Mrs. Smirch would probably tear into her for wandering off, but Louisa didn’t care. She had worked her tail off all day, trying to show Mrs. Smirch she was a decent person and a good housekeeper. Wh
y, she’d been keeping house for her pa since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. Her own ma had died when she was barely old enough to remember.

  Tell you one thing, Louisa thought, I keep my floor a sight cleaner than Mrs. Smirch does. Fresher straw ticks, too. Her skin still felt prickly all over from trying to sleep on that threadbare slab of sacking with bits of straw poking through every which way.

  “I never saw her till I come here,” said Jessamine. “But my ma was at their wedding. That was back east in Illinois, before Uncle Malcolm took a notion to homestead out here. My ma said Aunt Matilda ain’t never had a kind word for nobody in her life. Said if the angel Gabriel flew into her kitchen, Aunt Mattie’d complain that his halo was shining too bright and hurting her eyes.”

  Louisa chuckled. She wouldn’t have thought anyone could make her laugh while her pa was in jail, but Jessamine had a way of saying the sort of things that Louisa herself would have been embarrassed to be caught thinking.

  “Your ma sounds nice,” she said.

  Jessamine’s eyes grew sorrowful. “She was, she was awful nice. My pa too, and Johnny—”

  Her words choked off. Louisa felt stupid. Why’d she go and remind a little orphan girl of her ma? I ought to know better, she thought.

  But Jessamine was already sparkling again, tugging at Louisa’s hand.

  “Come on, we’re nearly there!” she urged.

  “Nearly where?” asked Louisa.

  “At the hazel grove! I want to show you that hole. I hope we see him.”

  This again. Louisa suppressed a smile. Jessamine sure had a lively imagination.

  The hazel grove was hardly big enough to deserve its name: just seven or eight hazelnut bushes in a little hollow near the creek, ringed by sturdy, wide-branching cottonwoods—the biggest cottonwoods in the county, Pa said. The grove, which belonged to Mr. Smirch, was something of a local wonder. Every year it produced sweet, delicious hazelnuts in such abundance that Pa said it was near miraculous, considering hazel bushes didn’t usually grow in this part of the world.

  We had ’em all over County Cork, back in Ireland, where your ma and I grew up, Pa had told Louisa. Our mothers used to send us out to fill our pails. Your ma had the knack o’ shakin’ a bush just right so the ripe nuts would clatter to the ground but the green ones would hold tight.

  Mr. Smirch had always traded sacks of hazelnuts for some of Pa’s turnips and potatoes. Except for the lush grove, the Smirch land was poor; Mr. Smirch’s wheat was scant and his potatoes shriveled. Potatoes were a lot more filling than hazelnuts in a long, hungry winter.

  “Here it is,” said Jessamine, squatting beside a large gray rock between two of the hazel bushes. “See the hole there?”

  Louisa nodded. It was a good-size hole, all right, big enough for a fox or maybe a badger. She guessed that’s what Jessamine had seen, a big old badger with his white chin fur looking like whiskers and his hunched shape like a bag thrown over a shoulder. Though what on earth Jessamine had mistaken for the pointy hat, Louisa couldn’t fathom. That part must have been what Pa would call an “embellishment.” Pa was mighty fond of a good tale. He’d like Jessamine, if he ever got out of jail.

  When he gets out, Louisa corrected herself sternly. Pa’d soon set things straight, if the sheriff stood still long enough to listen to him. Though it did look bad, Louisa had to admit—Mr. Smirch finding his hatchet and all those other things stashed in the old dugout. No one had set foot in that dugout in years, to the best of Pa’s knowledge.

  If Mr. Smirch hadn’t brought the boys with him when he came to borrow Pa’s hatchet because he’d misplaced his own, nobody would have had any idea the old deserted dugout was filled with things. Winthrop and Charlie had run up the path to play while Pa and Mr. Smirch chatted. The dugout was built into the side of a hill near the creek, looking out over the expanse of Pa’s land. Its door was half-hidden by morning glories and tall grass; Louisa hardly ever noticed it at all. They had moved out of the small earthen shelter into their frame house when Louisa was little; she could barely remember living there at all.

  Nosy Winthrop had found his way into the dugout and come back to the barnyard jabbering that someone lived there and they had a china doll just like his ma’s.

  “What’s that?” Pa had asked, puzzled. “Ain’t no one been in that old place since my wife died. She used to use it for storin’ potatoes, but the critters kept gettin’ in.”

  Curious, Pa, Mr. Smirch, and Louisa had walked up the hill to see what Winthrop was going on about. Louisa would never forget the look on Mr. Smirch’s face when he saw all the things laid out in that small, dim room.

  “That there’s my hatchet,” he’d said in a low, grim voice. “And that’s my clock, and—I’ll be durned if that ain’t my pocketwatch. It’s been missin’ for months!” He turned toward Pa, his face suffused with a terrible red anger. “What in thunder are you playin’ at, Brody?”

  Pa had looked utterly bewildered. “I’m as flummoxed as you are, Malcolm. I had no idea all this was here. I can’t imagine who—” He’d turned toward Louisa then in sudden alarm. “Louisa? You know anything about this? Tell the truth now, darlin’.”

  “That there’s my hatchet,” he’d said in a low, grim voice. “And that’s my clock, and—I’ll be durned if that ain’t my pocketwatch. It’s been missin’ for months!”

  “No, Pa!” Louisa had cried. “I haven’t been in here since I was Winthrop’s age, honest!”

  Pa studied her face for a long moment, then nodded.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Malcolm,” he’d said, his voice calm again. “It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t my daughter, and I’m as confounded as you are to see all these things on my property. There’s somethin’ mighty strange goin’ on here, that’s certain.”

  “What’s strange,” said Mr. Smirch, his voice as cold as a January pond, “is findin’ out that a man you thought was honest and a friend is a liar and a thief.”

  He’d stomped off then, half dragging Charlie and Winthrop by the hands. Pa called after him, but Mr. Smirch never once looked back. That had been Monday. On Wednesday, he’d shown up with the sheriff.

  Now it was Friday, and Louisa ought to be home doing her Friday housecleaning. Instead, here she was with Jessamine, staring at a badger hole.

  “I wonder,” Jessamine was saying. “I wonder if we could fit inside. See how it looks like it opens up bigger once you get past the rock? I’m of half a mind to—”

  “Jessamine!” cried Louisa in alarm. “You can’t go crawling into holes like that! A badger could tear up a little thing like you.”

  “But there ain’t no badger,” insisted Jessamine. “Else the little old thing in the hat wouldn’t go in there.”

  Louisa sighed in exasperation. “Well, then listen. You crawl in that hole, you’re going to muddy up your dress something awful. And then your aunt Matilda will have your hide.”

  Jessamine’s mouth twisted to one side. “Yeah,” she said reluctantly. “I s’pose that’s true.”

  “Tell you what. Why don’t we sit here in the shade awhile and watch for him? Maybe if we’re quiet enough, he won’t notice us. Like gopher-hunting.”

  Jessamine nodded. She pressed her lips tightly together as if she were afraid words would leap out against her will. She pointed to the foot of one of the trees, where there was a shady dimple in the ground. The girls settled themselves on the sparse grass beneath the tree, Jessamine never taking her eyes off the badger’s hole.

  After a while Louisa guessed the silence was too much for the little girl. “What really happened, Louisa?” Jessamine whispered. “If you don’t mind my asking. I’m sure your pa’s innocent if you say he is, ’cause you wouldn’t be so nice if your pa was a thief. But someone had to put all that stuff in your old dugout, right? Aunt Matilda says it was full to the rafters with stolen goods.”

  “There aren’t any rafters in a dugout,” Louisa said, but her sharpness was for Mrs. Smirch, not for Jessamine
. “I don’t reckon I know how those things got there. Nor my pa, neither. We haven’t used that dugout since I was littler than Winthrop. My pa built the cabin when I was four years old. We were only in the dugout till he saved up enough for lumber for a frame house.”

  She remembered, faintly, how excited Ma had been when they moved into the frame house. No more spiders in our stew, Louisa, she had said, whirling around in the wide new room. Pa hadn’t gotten the roof on yet, and Ma said she almost wished it could stay like that. The sky for our roof, there’s nothing grander than that, she’d declared, and Pa had laughed and spun her around the open room in a waltz. That was one of the last clear memories Louisa had of her ma. It was a good one. Her skirts billowing out like sheets on a line, her hair tumbling out of its coils, her laughing eyes looking into Pa’s.

  Louisa never felt sad, thinking of her ma. She’d been so little when ma took sick. But now there was a little gnawing thing inside her wondering if she was going to lose Pa, too, and have nothing left of him but memories.

  “It’s a mystery,” said Jessamine softly, her eyes on the hole again. “Maybe there’s a gang of outlaws hiding out somewhere and that’s where they were stashing their loot.” She snorted. “Or maybe Aunt Mattie did it herself. Maybe she was aiming to go and set up housekeeping there all by herself. She’s always saying how one day she’s just going to up and leave the pack of us ungrateful wretches, and then we’ll see how we like it.” She giggled. “I think I’d like it pretty well.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Evangeline

  NO CREATURE—EITHER WITH A HAT OR WITHOUT one—ever did make an appearance in the hazel grove, and finally the girls had to head back to the house. They knew Mrs. Smirch would be madder than a wet hen, and she was.

  “I knew you was likely to be a shirker,” she said to Louisa, waggling her ladle at Louisa, “but Jessamine Henry, you ought to know better! What would your poor ma say if she knew you’d taken to runnin’ off in the middle of the afternoon when there’s chores to be done?”