The Bridegroom

by Linda Lael Miller

  Bailey smiled again, and acid roiled in Jacob’s stomach, eating away the lining. His heart bumped painfully over several hard beats.

  “Why, you’d have an alibi, wouldn’t you, Mr. Fitch?” Bailey said. “If anything happened to Yarbro, I mean. You’d be right here in Phoenix, the whole time, going on about your business for all to see. Looking after that grand new house of yours, and your dear mother.”

  The sweat on Jacob’s back instantly turned clammy. Bailey, a man of obviously low character, was letting him know he’d done some checking—not merely on Gideon Yarbro, but on him, as well.

  The message, if he wasn’t imagining it, was that, if their arrangement were to turn sour for some reason, Bailey had already decided on the most effective way to retaliate.

  Jacob considered paying the man off, sending him on his way, and forgetting the whole idea of getting back at Gideon Yarbro, but all the while he knew it was too late for that. He’d confided in Bailey, over numerous rounds of whiskey in one of the seediest saloons in the city last night, told him about the thwarted wedding, Lydia’s abduction and how she’d refused to return with him when he’d gone, in the company of two of the U.S. Marshal’s best men, to fetch her home from Stone Creek.

  They’d briefly discussed what a sad thing it would be if Yarbro happened to die young, and leave Lydia a poor, defenseless widow, but not actually agreed to set a clear plan in motion.

  From the question Bailey had just asked, however, he’d registered the underlying implication: Jacob most definitely wanted Gideon Yarbro dead.

  Even if Jacob called him off, with generous compensation for his time, Bailey might hang around, figuring he’d found himself a meal ticket, asking for favors, then demanding them. With Yarbro alive and well, after all, Bailey couldn’t be blamed for anything, but if he told the wrong person what they’d discussed and word got around, Jacob, a respected man in the community, with a great deal to lose, might be ruined.

  Folks could be self-righteous. Hearing the gossip, they might well believe it, and take their money out of his bank, find other lenders to underwrite their loans. Exclude both him and his mother from social circles that were lucrative for Jacob and of critical importance to the august Mrs. Fitch.

  With Yarbro laid out in a pine box, on the other hand, Bailey wouldn’t dare engage in loose talk, lest he wind up with a hangman’s noose around his neck. Moreover, if he had any sense at all, he’d leave Phoenix and never come back.

  Realizing he’d left Bailey’s remark dangling too long, while he’d mulled the situation over, Jacob cleared his throat. “It would have to look like an accident,” he said cautiously. “That is imperative.”

  “Young men meet with accidents all the time, don’t they?” Bailey replied, smiling. “And the widow, well, she might just be grief-stricken enough to come right back here and marry you, mightn’t she? After a decent interval, of course.”

  Jacob allowed himself to imagine that for a moment—Lydia, mourning her dashing young swain of a husband. She’d be pliable in her despair, and most likely poverty-stricken, with those two old ladies hanging around her neck like a pair of albatrosses. And there would be Jacob, waiting to forgive her, reinstall her in the Fairmont mansion, give her position, security and plenty of pin-money for hats and hair ribbons.

  Yes, he would forgive her, treat her with the utmost tenderness, despite the fact that she’d given Yarbro—willingly, it would seem—what rightfully belonged to him.

  He’d looked forward to deflowering Lydia on their wedding night, and it would gall him until the end of his days that Gideon Yarbro had gotten to her first, but upon reflection, there were compensations. Virgin brides tended to weep and whimper a great deal, and bleed. Now that Yarbro had broken her in, there would be none of that nonsense. He, Jacob, would not have to pussyfoot around—he could assuage his lust for Lydia as often and with as much vigor as he chose.

  He felt himself harden, just to think of laying Lydia down and rutting into her whenever he wanted.

  And that would be often.

  “What will it be, Mr. Fitch?” Bailey persisted. “Do I merely ‘investigate’ Gideon Yarbro, or do I solve the problem for good?”

  “How much?” Jacob asked, shifting in his chair.

  Bailey might have taken that for fidgeting, an attack of nerves. Or he might have guessed the truth, that Jacob’s only real regret about the whole affair would be that he hadn’t killed Gideon Yarbro with his own hands and watched as the light faded from those insolent eyes.

  “Five thousand dollars,” Bailey answered. “Half now, and half when there’s been a funeral in Stone Creek.”

  “How do I know you won’t abscond with my money?” Jacob asked, ever practical. He was, after all, a banker, descended from generations of savvy lenders. “I’d have no recourse if you did.”

  Bailey straightened the cuffs of his filthy shirt. “No,” he agreed. “You wouldn’t. I guess you’ll just have to take a chance, won’t you, Mr. Fitch?”

  Now that things had gone as far as they had, Jacob had no choice.

  “When can I expect results?” he asked, taking a small brass key from his vest pocket, inserting it into the lock on his top desk drawer.

  “When the time is right,” Bailey answered. “Matters like this can’t be handled hastily. Once I have answers to my telegrams, I’ll know plenty about Mr. Yarbro over and above his outlaw pedigree—which might be a problem all by itself, if he takes after his old daddy.”

  Jacob cleared his throat again. What he was about to tell Bailey might dissuade him, since he’d brought up Yarbro’s illustrious family more than once, but better if it happened before he’d handed over twenty-five hundred dollars to seal the bargain.

  “You mentioned Yarbro’s brothers,” Jacob said evenly, “the identical twins—”

  “Handsome as Lucifer himself,” Bailey broke in, “and their own guardian angels probably couldn’t tell them apart.”

  This, to Jacob, was neither here nor there. He wanted Thaddeus Bailey out of his office and this nasty business over with. He wanted to console Lydia on her terrible loss, and the sooner, the better. “Yarbro has two other brothers,” he said. “One of them, Rowdy, is the marshal up at Stone Creek. The other one, Wyatt, is a rancher.”

  “I wondered if you’d trouble yourself to mention them,” Bailey said, grinning. “It’s a point in your favor that you did, Mr. Fitch. Because Rowdy and Wyatt Yarbro are the main reason I have to have five thousand dollars to do this job. Both of them rode with Payton in their day, like I said, and they’re not the sort a prudent man tangles with. If they even suspect that their young brother died anything but an accidental death, hell’s back acre won’t be far enough to run.”

  Jacob had only met the elder Yarbro brothers once, the day before, and he’d been in too much of a state over Lydia’s steadfast refusal to see reason to pay them much mind. Still, he’d gathered enough to see the truth in Bailey’s assertion.

  And he was afraid. For a moment, he wished—again—that he’d never scoured the low-life saloons in the rougher section of Phoenix for a man willing to do some dirty work.

  But that moment soon passed.

  Jacob was used to getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was Lydia. Gideon Yarbro was very much in the way.

  He pulled open the desk drawer, took out a stack of hundred-dollar notes, every one backed by federal gold, and counted out twenty-five of them on the desk top.

  PADDY WAS REMARKABLY RECEPTIVE that evening, when the crew of dirty, sweating, thirsty and penniless miners trooped into his saloon, Gideon among them. A pair of drifters stood at the bar, nursing whiskey they’d probably paid for with cash money, but Paddy didn’t protest when Mike O’Hanlon slapped them both on the back, simultaneously, and boomed, in his usual ebullient way, “Private party, boys. And I know for a fact you wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  “I was sort of hankerin’ for more whiskey,” one of the drifters replied, looking aggrieved.

/>   The second, clearly the brighter of the pair, took his friend by the back of the shirt and ushered him out.

  “Will you stand good for a round or two, Paddy?” Mike asked, in the same spirit of good will. “For the sake of the Auld Sod, if nothin’ else?”

  The change in Paddy’s outlook was, to Gideon, remarkable. “Sure, Mike,” he said, smiling and under no apparent duress. “Sure. For the sake of the Old Sod.”

  After leaving Lydia, Gideon had gone straight back to the mine, and done the work of two men, lest Wilson should rise from the bed where he was mending from a broken nose and broken pride, as well, and tell him to collect his pay and be gone. And partly because he needed to expend a lot of energy, fast.

  Wilson hadn’t come back, though, and if someone on the crew was serving as his eyes and ears, which was unlikely but definitely not impossible, they had not told the foreman that the new man was unreliable.

  Yet.

  For all that he’d swung that shovel like a man digging up someone buried alive, Gideon hadn’t been able to expel his need for Lydia. Truly, if Helga and the aunts had not returned when they did, he would have relieved his fetching and only too willing wife of her virginity right there in the kitchen, in the broad light of day.

  Not the most delicate way, he reflected, resigned, to breach a woman’s maidenhead. That required privacy, a lot of tenderness, and a certain amount of patience.

  But he’d snapped, with Lydia bucking against him and crying out his name the way she had. He’d lost sight of all the good reasons he had for not carrying things to their natural conclusion. When Helga and the aunts had inadvertently intervened, he’d been both furious and profoundly grateful.

  Still, though hours had gone by, he was raw with the want of Lydia.

  She’d be in bed when he got home, he thought. She was his wife, and no one on earth would refute his right to enjoy her as such. No one, that is, except himself.

  “Chin up, young Yarbro,” Mike said, whacking him halfway over the bar again, and nearly causing him to choke on the sip of whiskey he’d just taken.

  “Damn it, O’Hanlon,” Gideon said, after wheezing for a few seconds, “if you do that again, I’m going to land a haymaker in the middle of your stupid Irish face.”

  Mike laughed uproariously, not the reaction Gideon would have expected. “That’s the spirit, young Yarbro!” he shouted gleefully. “That’s the spirit! By God, there’s hope for you yet!”

  Gideon took another gulp of whiskey, still wondering at the change in Paddy. And still imagining Lydia alone in their bed at home—by God, it was their bed, not hers alone—and he’d be damned if he’d sleep away from her another night, even if it meant suffering the tortures of the damned trying to keep from taking her.

  “Still havin’ troubles at home, I see,” Mike crowed, loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear. Then, with a sweep of his arm, he made sure the others took note. “Young Yarbro, here,” he announced, “is havin’ troubles at home!”

  “Mike,” Gideon growled, flushing from the base of his throat to the roots of his hair, “will you shut up?”

  “Get a babe on her,” someone suggested. “That will give her somethin’ to look after. A woman needs to look after things.”

  Gideon sighed. He had a part to play, and he’d best play it, for all it was worth. Grinning, he turned to take all the men in. “And you’re all authorities on how to treat a woman, I suppose?”

  To a man, they all claimed expertise.

  “And how,” Mike O’Hanlon contributed, when some of the braggadocio had died down, “can you plant a babe in a woman’s womb if she won’t have you in her bed, young Yarbro?”

  “She’ll have me,” Gideon said, more annoyed than he wanted any of them to know.

  Mike raised both eyebrows and leaned into Gideon’s face. “When?” he asked. “She’s not having you now, is she, or you wouldn’t be draggin’ your chin on the ground, like you have been ever since you started work at the mine.”

  “Leave the lad be, Mike,” O’Brien said. “We’re here for a meetin’, now aren’t we?”

  “We oughtn’t to stand for it,” another man said. “Damn their eyes, the owners have already cut our pay twice this year. If they do it again, we’ll be workin’ for nothin’.”

  “We’re already workin’ for nothin’,” someone else said.

  “They let the night crew go,” O’Brien reminded everyone. “It’s down to us, and here’s Wilson raisin’ hell that we’re not sending enough ore out of the hole to suit those greedy bastards. Mark my words, the coolies will come next!”

  The remark raised grumbling agreement and this time, Gideon noticed, O’Hanlon didn’t try to quell the talk.

  “If we walk out,” Gideon reasoned, “won’t they be more likely to hire Chinamen to replace us?” He was well aware that both Mike and Paddy were watching him closely.

  “Not if we fight back,” O’Hanlon said.

  “How do we do that?” Gideon asked. At last, he seemed to be getting somewhere. Come the day after tomorrow, when he met with his contact in Flagstaff, he’d have something to report.

  “We get guns,” O’Hanlon answered. “We take over the mine, and if they try to send coolies in, we pick them off like ducks in a barrel.”

  “Jesus, Joseph and Mary, Mike,” Paddy put in, setting both hands on the bar to lean forward, his belly spilling past the spatulalike tips of his fingers. “They’ll call in the army. And those of you the riflemen don’t kill will hang from the rafters of the courthouse over in Flagstaff!”

  Imagining the kind of shoot-out O’Hanlon had proposed, Gideon suppressed a shudder. The army wouldn’t be the first to arrive at the mine if the crew took it over, Rowdy would.

  Rowdy, with his two aging deputies. Rowdy, with a wife and five children at home, one of them barely two days old.

  Bile surged into the back of Gideon’s throat, scalding it raw, and he swilled more whiskey to wash it down. Wyatt and Owen would stand with Rowdy, and Sam O’Ballivan, too, among others. But the chances were good that one or more of them would take a bullet.

  “Worried about your big brother, the marshal, young Yarbro?” Mike drawled, close to his face again.

  “Hell, yes,” Gideon retorted, longing to shove the other man back.

  No other answer would have satisfied Mike O’Hanlon, and maybe that one didn’t, either. But though the stony suspicion in his eyes didn’t change, the Irishman turned merry again. Hail-fellow-well-met.

  “It’s all just talk, young Yarbro,” he said. “Just talk, from desperate men.”

  Gideon wasn’t convinced of that, and assignment or no assignment, he meant to warn Rowdy that the trouble brewing at the mine might be more serious than anyone—including the owners—had ever suspected.

  After that, nothing more was said about shooting coolies, but Gideon stayed until Paddy finally drove them all away from the bar, claiming he was out of whiskey and wouldn’t have more until after tomorrow’s train arrived from Phoenix.

  Cold sober, even though he’d never drunk so much at one time in his life, Gideon left with the others. Like before, the men broke off into smaller groups, even though they were all headed to the same place.

  All except Gideon, that is. And Mike O’Hanlon.

  “I’ll just see that young Yarbro gets home in one piece,” O’Hanlon announced to the departing company, though no one had asked.

  “I’ll be fine, O’Hanlon,” Gideon protested.

  But he couldn’t shake the other man.

  “’Tis a fine house,” O’Hanlon said, when they reached Gideon’s front gate. “More of your rich sister-in-law’s doing, I suppose?”

  Gideon sighed. “Something like that,” he said. O’Hanlon had already known, of course, exactly where Gideon lived. Suspicious as he was, he’d have made a point of finding out. “What are you afraid of, Mike? That I’ll slip over to my brother’s place, knock on the door, and tell Rowdy what was said tonight, over at Paddy’s?”


  “Can’t stop you from doing that,” Mike said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday—a half day. I reckon the news will keep until after the whistle blows.”

  Gideon waited.

  O’Hanlon turned to face him, straightened Gideon’s collar in a way that was at once fatherly and threatening. It took all Gideon’s forbearance not to fling the other man’s hands away. “These are hard and perilous times,” Mike said. “Have a care, young Yarbro. Have a care.”

  With that, and a sorrowful expression, the Irishman turned and walked away, whistling softly under his breath as he vanished into the shadows.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN AFTER midnight, by Lydia’s best guess, when she heard Gideon’s footsteps on the rear staircase, then moving slowly along the hallway. She waited, not even breathing, when he paused outside her door. Braced herself for the moment when he would certainly move on to the next room.

  But the green-glass doorknob turned, rattling a little, and through her eyelashes, Lydia saw the outline of Gideon’s impressive frame, rimmed in the merest hint of light, the source of which she could not determine, since there were no lamps burning in the corridor.

  “Are you asleep?” he asked, very quietly, and his words were clearly enunciated, not liquor-slurred as she might have expected. He’d been quite abrupt, telling her he’d be out late, and she’d naturally wondered if the “meeting” he’d planned to attend was being held in a saloon.

  To offer any reply at all, Lydia sensed, would upset some precarious and inexplicable balance between them, so she didn’t answer.

  Gideon sighed audibly—and came into the room.

  Lydia’s heart shimmied up into her throat and flailed there. She wondered if Gideon had guessed she was awake, perhaps by the too-rapid meter of her breathing or some other sign she’d unwittingly given, but she still did not speak, or move.

  He closed the door behind him, with a soft click, and crossed to the rocking chair. Sat down to begin pulling off his boots.