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“What?”
“Your gate. Yesterday I accidentally knocked it down.”
“Oh. Yes, do repair it.”
“And the fence? Wood looks half-rotten, and—”
“Of course.”
“I’ll need to get lumber from the sawmill in town. You have a wagon?”
She didn’t answer.
“Then there’s the barn roof and the corral and the front porch step and the rusted door screen and...” Hell, she wasn’t even listening.
“Yes, fix it all, please. I have accounts with the merchants in town if you need...nails or...things.”
“Kin I help him, Ma?” Daniel called from the sink.
Molly splashed soapy water at her brother. “An’ me, too?”
“We’ll see,” said Mrs. Malloy quietly.
Cord picked up his hat from the hook near the back door. “Guess I’ll be going on into town, then. You want anything from the mercantile, ma’am?”
“A newspaper. And some flour and a bag of coffee beans. Maybe one of chicken mash, too.”
He studied her hands, cradling the china coffee cup. The knuckles were reddened. Daniel and Molly were making plenty of noise having a soapsuds-splashing contest, so he risked a question for her ears alone.
“Miz Malloy, how long have you been on your own out here?”
She glanced up at him, then quickly refocused on her coffee. “Seven years.”
“Uh, is there a Mr. Malloy?”
Her shoulders stiffened under the faded green calico. “There is. Or rather there was.”
“What happened to him? The War?”
“I assume so. He went off to fight and he never came home.”
Cord’s first thought blazed through his mind like a fire arrow. What a damn fool. “If it’s not being too nosy, how have you managed all these years?”
Her laugh surprised him. “Believe it or not, until six months ago I had a hired man.”
It was his turn to laugh. “Sure hope you didn’t pay him much.”
“No, I—Why do you ask?”
He stuffed back a snort. “I can’t see that your hired man did a da—Darn thing around the place.”
She set her cup down with a snick. “Most assuredly he did not,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “But I trusted him around my children.”
He stared at her. “Ma’am, you don’t know me from Adam. How come you trust me around your children?”
She met his gaze with calm gray eyes. “I don’t really know why, Mr. Winterman. I just do. Only once before have my instincts been wrong, and that had nothing to do with my children.”
Eleanor rose and moved into the kitchen. “Children, stop that!” She rescued the suds-soaked dish towel, and when they rattled past her out the back door, she wrung it out and hung it on the rack by the stove. When she turned back, Mr. Winterman’s chair was empty.
She bit her lip and watched her new hired man push carefully through the screen and walk out the front door with a slow, easy grace. She couldn’t tell him everything. She just couldn’t.
Chapter Three (#ub3a4fbdf-f875-5b82-a0cf-8c3bd12de7ef)
The two kids tumbled down the porch steps after him. “Watch out for that loose board,” he cautioned.
“What loose bo—?” Daniel’s shoe snagged on the rotted step and just as he was about to take a tumble Cord scooped him up under one arm.
“That loose board.” He set the scrawny form on the ground. “Watch where you put your feet.”
Cord headed for the barn, Molly tagging at his heels. “Where ya’ goin’, mister?”
“Town.”
“How come?”
“Need some coffee and flour and chicken mash for your mother and some lumber to repair the porch step.” And the fence and the gate and the barn and...
“Kin I come?” Daniel asked.
“Maybe. If you tell me where your ma keeps your wagon and ask her permission.” The boy danced off, leaped over the loose porch step and slammed the screen door.
Molly tugged his sleeve. “I’ll tell you where the wagon is. It’s out behind the barn. But I don’t wanna go to town,” she added.
“You don’t? Why’s that?”
“Cuz everybody there’s bigger’n me and...and Mr. Ness yells at me.”
“How come?”
The girl gazed up at him with huge blue eyes and he went down on one knee in front of her. “How come?” he repeated.
“Cuz I knocked over his candy jar once. But I didn’t mean to, honest. It just fell over when I reached in to get my lemon drop.”
Daniel came flying off the porch. “Ma says I can go!”
The wagon was behind the barn, all right. It should have been chucked onto the trash heap. Cord had never seen a more rickety pile of boards and rusted wheels. Probably wouldn’t hold even a light load of lumber.
In the barn he led out the gray gelding and lifted a saddle off the wall peg. When he blew off the dust he groaned. The leather was so dry it practically creaked.
“Got any saddle soap, son?”
Daniel sent him a blank look. “What’s that?”
“Stuff you rub on leather things like saddles to keep them soft.”
“How come?”
“Because...” Oh, the hell with it. “Come on, son, let’s go to town.”
The trip into Smoke River was one Cord wouldn’t soon forget. Daniel asked so many questions Cord’s throat got dry answering them. And one of them brought him up short.
“You ever been in jail, mister?”
Cord hesitated. “Yeah. A long time ago.”
“What for?”
“For...” He swallowed. “For being on the wrong side.” For getting shot in the leg in the field and then captured because he couldn’t run. It wasn’t something a young boy needed to know.
And the rest of it, spending eight years in a Missouri prison, he didn’t want anyone to know, especially Eleanor Malloy. He was trying like hell to put that behind him, to stop drifting and find some purpose in life, but it was rough. Everywhere he went people wanted to know things about him. That was one reason he decided to go to California, so he could start over.
He clenched his jaw. If he had his life to live over, he wouldn’t even carry a gun.
Smoke River’s main street looked like a hundred small towns in the West except that it was clean and the stores looked spruced up and well-painted. Ness’s mercantile, between the barber shop and the feed store, stood out like a sore thumb with a shiny coat of pink paint. Pink? What next?
Inside, the proprietor lounged behind the counter, bent over a newspaper. Cord read the upside-down headline.
MONTANA GOLD RUSH!
Suddenly the man looked up and scowled at him. “Need some help, mister?”
Daniel disappeared down an aisle lined with men’s hats on one side and boots on the other. “Yeah,” Cord said. “I need coffee, flour, salt and a bag of chicken mash. And some lemon drops,” he added quietly.
“You new in town? I’m the owner here. Name’s Carl Ness.”
“Cordell Winterman. I’m working for Mrs. Malloy a couple of miles out of town.”
The man’s shaggy eyebrows shot up. “Eleanor Malloy?”
“Something surprising about that?”
“Heck yes. Miss Eleanor, she, uh, she usually has her supplies delivered by one of the young men around town. Matter of fact, they have fistfights over who gets to do it. Leastways they did ’til Sheriff Rivera put a stop to it. You puttin’ these purchases on Miss Eleanor’s account?”
Cord nodded. When Carl Ness studied him a mite too long, he couldn’t resist.
“Pretty shade of pink on your storefront.”
Ness’s face turned the same shade. “Blame my daughter Edith for that.” He gestured one aisle over, where two young women stood examining bolts of cloth. “Wants to be an artist, she says. Didn’t know what she’d done to the store ’til one morning all my customers came in laughing.”
“Women can be unpredictable, all right,” Cord allowed.
One of the young women looked up from a bolt of gingham and studied Cord for a moment. Quickly she detached herself from her companion and scooted up the aisle toward him. She was extremely pretty, with blond ringlets that bounced at every step and a yellow ruffle-encrusted dress.
“Ooh, Mr. Ness,” she cooed. “Edith’s been telling me all about...” She gave Cord a flirty look. “Um...all about... Well, aren’t y’all going to introduce me to this handsome stranger?”
The proprietor rolled his eyes. “Fanny Moreland, Cordell Winterman. There, now you’re introduced!” He went back to his newspaper.
Miss Moreland giggled and sent Cord a dazzling smile. “Well, hello there! Fanny is short for Euphemia. Ah’m so very happy to meet you!” She slid her hand into his in a handshake of sorts. “Ah find this county is woefully short of good-looking gentlemen.”
Cord resisted an impulse to roll his eyes back at the proprietor. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Moreland.” He disengaged his imprisoned hand. “Now I—”
“Oh, please, you must call me Fanny.”
“Okay.”
“And ah may call you—?”
“Like the man said, my name’s Cordell Winterman. Now, I—”
“Oh, surely you’re not leavin’ already?”
The mercantile owner made a choking sound.
“Yep,” Cord said. “I sure am.” He stuffed a bag of lemon drops and one of caramels in his shirt pocket, hoisted the flour sack onto one shoulder and called out to Daniel. “Think you can wrestle that bag of coffee out to the wagon?”
“Yessir.” The boy grinned, waved goodbye to the girl at Cord’s elbow and bolted out the door. Cord followed him.
The owner came out with the bag of chicken mash over his shoulder, plopped it into the wagon bed and gave Cord a grin. “Kinda entertaining morning, I guess.”
“Not too much, no,” Cord replied.
Carl Ness chuckled all the way back into the mercantile.
The next stop was the feed store, and then the sawmill, where once again Cord managed to raise the owner’s eyebrows. “Eleanor Malloy? Say, mister, you know I could have all this delivered.”
“Nope. I brought a wagon.”
“Miss Eleanor know about this?”
“Yeah, she does. It’s her wagon.”
On the way back to the farm, he fed Daniel caramels and plied him with questions. “How come your mama has all her deliveries made by somebody else? Didn’t your previous hired man bring the wagon into town?”
“Nah. Isaiah was too old to drive it. Besides, people like helpin’ Ma out.”
“Men, you mean?”
“Yeah. Lots of ’em, ever since I was little. Even Sandy, the sheriff’s deputy. The only one who doesn’t bring her stuff is Doc.”
