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They stopped long enough for Oat to catch up with them. For the past few miles he had been trailing farther and farther behind. Paulie had begun to wonder whether the old man might be hoping that they would leave him so far in their dust that they would forget about him entirely and he could then go back to his safe house and warm his old toes by a fire.
Right now, he just looked startled to find the three of them huddled together. “Night Bird?” he asked anxiously, trying to guess the reason for the holdup.
“No,” Trip answered. “Just ‘Oh! Susanna.”’
Will’s exasperation was bumped up another notch. “We need to be concentrating on the landscape—not some damned song. Now let’s get going.” He whirled and spurred his horse into a canter.
Paulie exchanged glances with Trip and blew out a breath impatiently as Will rode ahead of them once again.
“I wonder what’s eatin’ him,” Trip said.
As if anyone had to guess! Paulie felt angry just thinking about how torn up inside Will must be over Mary Ann’s disappearance. Frankly in her opinion, Mary Ann just wasn’t worth all this fuss. She still had her doubts about Mary Ann’s being spirited off by Night Bird. It didn’t make sense. For one thing, they said Mary Ann had always been scared of being abducted by Night Bird, and in Paulie’s experience, the thing you’re afraid of happening hardly ever does. It’s the things you didn’t expect that sneaked up and changed your life for good.
She kicked her horse into a gallop. In no time at all, she raced up alongside Will and skidded her little bay gelding, Partner, to a quick stop.
Will didn’t appear glad for the company. “Don’t you ever stay quiet?” he asked.
Paulie tried not to take the remark to heart. In better days, Will had always seemed to enjoy jawing with her. “Don’t you ever plan on acting civil again?” she shot back. “I swear, you roam around for months at a time, clear off to Kansas, then you ride back in and start barking orders at us like you’re paying us money to take them.”
Her tart response brought a sheepish shrug.
“Maybe I do stay away too long,” he said. “I know I did this time. But I’m back now, and I’ve decided to settle down.”
Paulie didn’t know if she felt like dancing or weeping. It all depended on where Will planned on setting himself up. “You thinking of staying in Possum Trot?”
“Probably not.”
“Well then, where?”
“That depends on Mary Ann.”
For a moment, all she could do was stare at him. What was he talking about? He didn’t look at her as if he’d said anything odd; he wasn’t looking at her at all, in fact. Just staring straight ahead, his expression faraway yet strangely determined.
“Mary Ann!” Paulie cried. “Have you gone crazy, Will?”
His face remained stony. “Nope.”
“She’s married, Will!”
“Oat doesn’t love Mary Ann.”
“Oat, Mary Ann’s husband, is riding just in back of us, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“He didn’t want to come,” Will insisted.
“But he did.”
“He had to talk himself into it.”
Paulie rolled her eyes. “So would anybody with any sense, Will! It’s because we’re going after a killer.”
“A killer who has Mary Ann. His wife.” He turned his dark eyes on Paulie, his expression softening. “You were more resolute than that old toothless husband of hers, Paulie.”
“That’s because—” She was about to say, because I was so worried about you. But she couldn’t. She’d already lied and told him that she was only coming along because she and Mary Ann were friends. And he’d believed her! Which just proved that something in the man’s mind had shook loose.
“Because you care about Mary Ann,” he finished for her. “You see? That proves my point. Oat doesn’t care about his wife even as much as her friends do.”
“Oh, Will, you can’t be sure of that.” Although she felt fairly certain that Oat wasn’t a head-over-heels newlywed, she hated to see Will eating his heart out over a woman who didn’t deserve him. And even more to the point, who wasn’t even available.
And, she admitted to herself shamefully, who wasn’t herself.
“You heard him talking, Paulie. He said he just lost her—the way a man would talk of misplacing his fountain pen. And it was almost as if he was hoping that she was lost.”
Paulie had sensed the same thing. But she hated to think it. Because if Oat gave up on Mary Ann... Oh, it was selfish of her to want Will for herself—not to mention hopeless—but she couldn’t help it. As long as Oat was married to Mary Ann, Paulie at least stood a tiny chance of making Will appreciate her. “He’s married to her, Will.”
“Marriages don’t always last,” he said tersely.
Paulie couldn’t believe her ears. “Will, you’re talking crazy!” She’d thought all along that he looked half-crazy, but even so she’d had no idea that thoughts like these had been running through his head. And as he spoke, it didn’t even seem as if he wanted to wed Mary Ann; instead, it was almost as if it were something he had to do.
He shot her a look that had a hint of desperation in it. “You can’t imagine what I feel, Paulie.”
If only he knew! Maybe she would never work up the nerve to tell him about her own experience with unrequited love, but she could keep him from hatching these unrealistic plans.
“You know what your trouble is?” she asked him.
“No, but I’m sure you’d love to tell me.”
She ignored the barb. “You’ve got an overworked sense of responsibility. When you’re sheriff, you feel responsible for the whole town. I bet when you’re out on the trail, you feel like you personally have to account for the fate of every one of those beeves. But I’m telling you, Will, Mary Ann is not your problem.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. When Gerald was dying I told him I’d look after his daughter.”
“Things are different now. Gerald couldn’t know that Mary Ann would one day up and marry Oat and you don’t know that the two of you would be any better off together than Oat and her are,” Paulie pointed out.
“What do you think I should do—leave her with a toothless old man who obviously makes her unhappy?”
“How do you know they’re unhappy?”
“Oat himself said they fought all the time,” he insisted, his jaw set stubbornly.
“So do all married people. I think if you respected Mary Ann at all, you’d trust her to make her own decisions.”
Will shot her a keen glance. “You’re Mary Ann’s friend. Has she ever spoken to you about me?”
Paulie hesitated. “No, she hasn’t.”
“Not even before she ran off with Oat?”
Paulie couldn’t help feeling a sharp stab of guilt. “She doesn’t tell me everything, Will,” she admitted, though even that was a pale reflection of the truth. Mary Ann could be thinking about Will twenty-four hours a day, and she wouldn’t know about it.
He let out a ragged sigh, then looked at her, his brown eyes full of kindness. “I guess it’s good you came along after all. You always did know how to put me in my place, Sprout.”
She revelled in the pet name almost as much as she resented it. Why couldn’t Will think of her like he did Mary Ann, not just as a kid?
He shook his head. “I suppose I’m still a little confused over why Mary Ann would marry Oat to begin with.”
Paulie remained silent. The whole world was confused on that paint.
He shot her a patient glance. “I guess it’s a little silly to be discussing all this with you,” he said. “I doubt you’ve ever fallen in or out of love.”
The words rubbed Paulie’s fur the wrong way. Why was Will blind to the fact that she’d been crazy about him for years?
Probably because he was so stuck on Mary Ann he couldn’t see anything else!
Or maybe because he just didn’t have the slightest interest in her. That was an annoying—though highly likely—possibility. Paulie knew she could never even be a substitute for Mary Ann. She didn’t know the first thing about batting her eyelashes at a man, or flirting. Heck, the only time she’d ever worn a real grown-up long dress in front of Will, he’d said she looked like she’d been sick.
Sick! At the mere thought, she felt her dander rising all over again. Never been in love? How could he just assume such a thing?
“That just shows how smart you are!” she said tartly. “You don’t know the first thing about me, Will!”
He turned to her, his eyes wide with surprise. “Well, have you?”
Now that she’d started, she wasn’t going to back down. “If you must know, I have,” she said, tossing her head back defiantly. “Deeply in love.”
“Who?” he asked.
She blinked. “Who what?”
“Who is the object of all this love you claim to have stored up?”
This wasn’t something she was prepared to confess. Especially not to Will. Especially not when he asked her using that sarcastic tone. “None of your business.”
He looked at her skeptically. “Is it somebody I know?”
Clearly he didn’t believe her—a fact that made Paulie spitting mad. Men had so little imagination! Just because she owned a bar and wore men’s clothes, was it impossible to comprehend that she had feelings just like every other woman in the world?
“I’d say you know him pretty well, Will Brockett,” she said. “In fact, sometimes I think it’s the person you care most about in the world!”
She tapped her horse’s flanks and wheeled around. Will attempted to stop her. “Paulie, wait—”
She kept going, though, hesitating only long enough to holler one parting shot over her shoulder. “And for your information, I’ll whistle whenever I want to!”
Will sat apart, with one eye on the others and the other watching for signs of trouble. Trip and Paulie were splayed out near the glowing warmth of the fire, rattling on as usual. Oat was close to them, sitting up but half-asleep. Occasionally the old fellow would jolt awake again, especially when Trip or Paulie happened to mention something about Night Bird.
“I wonder if we’ll ever find him,” Paulie said.
Trip shook his head. He was always more sure of himself when he was on the ground, where there was nowhere to fall to. “I imagine if’n we do, it’ll be down in Mexico. They say that’s where he lives, ’cause the law won’t follow him there.”
“What about the Mexican law?” Paulie asked. “Mexicans can’t like having a renegade Comanche running loose any more than we do.”
Trip scratched his head. “They say Night Bird is part Mexican himself—the son of a captive woman from a border town.”
Oat’s eyes snapped opened and he bolted upright, his hand reaching down for his gun. “Night Bird?”
Trip chuckled. “We were just talkin’, Oat.”
“We’ve haven’t seen or heard anything,” Paulie assured him.
Oat shook his head with such force that the bulbous end of his nose quivered. “When Night Bird comes, you won’t hear him.”
The three exchanged anxious glances.
Will decided to put his two cents in. “If that were the case, then we might all just as well go to sleep.” They looked back at him quizzically. “No man is invisible. If Night Bird comes, one of us will see him.”
“Those three railroad men didn’t see him—they were all three armed and none of them looked like they had even had time to reach for their guns,” Trip said.
The story of the three men who had been ambushed by Night Bird had been through so many versions that it was hard to know exactly what had happened. Most people seemed to want to believe that Night Bird silently appeared and disposed of his victims as easily as an owl swoops down on a mouse.
“I wonder what would turn a man so mad that he’d take up thievin’ and murderin’ that way,” Trip said.
“Having your land stolen out from under you would make you a little bitter, too,” Will told him. He bore little sympathy for Night Bird, but he thought he could understand what could turn a man so wrong.
“What land did that Indian ever own here?” Trip asked.
Will nodded toward the horizon. “We fought a war to win this land from the Mexicans, but we just took it from the Indians and expected them to be happy about being nudged up to less desirable parts.”
“We wouldn’t have nudged anybody if they’d just left us be,” Trip argued.
“But we were the trespassers, and then we expected them to abide by our laws—not their own.”
Trip looked disgruntled, but said nothing more.
“I guess Will’s right,” Paulie said, turning back to the fire. “Maybe we’re lucky there’s only one Night Bird, not thousands.”
“Thousands!” Oat cried, startled by the very idea.
Will kept his eyes on Paulie. He was surprised that she would take his side after their scene earlier in the day. She had seemed so annoyed. In fact, since he’d come back, she’d been more moody than he could remember her ever being. Especially with him.
Of course, he’d been moody, too, but he knew the reason for his own odd behavior. He was perplexed and torn up over all that had happened with Mary Ann. But could what Paulie said be true? Was she really in love? And with whom?
He’d been pondering those questions all afternoon. He had to hand it to her; her little revelation had completely distracted his mind from brooding about Mary Ann.
Paulie’s being in love seemed so unlikely! Yet why not? She had to be over twenty now. But who? Who could she have fallen for?
For a while he thought perhaps Paulie might have developed a yen for Dwight Jones. That would have made sense. Though he’d been a widower for half a decade, Dwight was still fairly young, and his mercantile probably made a decent profit He and Paulie were practically the only people in Possum Trot proper, too. Dwight was the shy, anxious type, though Lord knows, in that empty town and with his booming voice, the man could sit and sing love songs all day to Paulie across the street in the saloon without even having to leave his store.
But the more he thought about it, the less likely a love relationship developing between Paulie and Dwight seemed. Dwight was completely devoted to his wife’s memory. The woman had run his store and his life; Dwight still only stocked what his dear Pearl had approved during her tragically short lifetime. And he never stepped foot in Paulie’s place, because Pearl had been a devout temperance lady. That was the clincher. Given Dwight’s devotion to Pearl’s memory, he would never take up with a woman who not only sold liquor, but was not above taking a gulp or two of the stuff herself on occasion.
So that took care of Dwight.
