#1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller presents the Stone Creek story that started it all…

When trouble strikes in Haven, Arizona, Ranger Sam O’Ballivan is determined to sort it out. Badge and gun hidden, he arrives posing as the new schoolteacher, and discovers his first task: bringing the ranchers’ children under control. So he starts with a call on Maddie Chancelor, the local postmistress and older sister of a boy in need of discipline.

But far from the spinster Sam expects, Maddie turns out to be a graceful woman whose prim and proper demeanor is belied by the fire in her eyes. Working undercover to capture rustlers and train robbers has always kept Sam isolated and his heart firmly in check—until now. But something about the spirited postmistress tempts him to start down a path he swore he’d never travel….

Praise for #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

“Miller is one of the finest American writers in the genre.”

—RT Book Reviews

“This is a delightful addition to Miller’s Big Sky series.This author has a way with a phrase that is nigh-on poetic, and all of the snappy little interactions between the main and secondary characters make this story especially entertaining.”

—RT Book Reviews on Big Sky Mountain

“Miller’s down-home, easy-to-read style keeps the plot moving, and she includes…likable characters, picturesque descriptions and some very sweet pets.”

—Publishers Weekly on Big Sky Country

“After reading this book your heart will be so full of Christmas cheer you’ll want to stuff a copy in the stocking of every romance fan you know!”

—USATODAY.com Happy Ever After on A Lawman’s Christmas

“A fine conclusion to Miller’s latest trilogy…Animal lovers will enjoy the creatures that make up a delightfully integral part of the story.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Creed Legacy

“Miller once again tells a memorable tale.”

—RT Book Reviews on A Creed in Stone Creek

“A passionate love too long denied drives the action in this multifaceted, emotionally rich reunion story that overflows with breathtaking sexual chemistry.”

—Library Journal on McKettricks of Texas: Tate

“Strong characterization and a vivid Western setting make for a fine historical romance.”

—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Choice

The Man from Stone Creek

Linda Lael Miller

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

It is with pleasure and pride that I take you back to Stone Creek and to Sam O’Ballivan’s world. Sam is one of my all-time favorite heroes, a man of strength, integrity, humor and honor. His lady, Maddie, is his perfect match—a partner as well as a lover, his equal in every way.

I would also like to tell you about the scholarship program that I finance—Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women, awarded to those seeking to improve their lot in life through education. You can find more information on my website, www.lindalaelmiller.com.

I also hope that you’ll be on the lookout for A Wanted Man, where we’ll revisit Stone Creek to check in on schoolteacher Lark Morgan and town marshal Rowdy Rhodes. With train robberies, gangsters and romantic sparks flying amongst it all, you won’t want to miss it! Be sure to also watch for a new trilogy in another familiar setting, Parable, Montana, beginning in June with Big Sky Summer.

Happy reading!

For Kathy and Betty,

the Bannon girls,

with love

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

Haven, Arizona Territory

Fall, 1903

THE PINT-SIZE CULPRITS, heretofore gathered around the well, scattered for the brush as soon as Sam O’Ballivan rode into the schoolyard on his nameless horse, but he’d seen enough to know they were up to no good. He caught glimpses of bowl-cut hair, denim trousers and chambray shirts as they fled. Pigtails, too, and a flash of red calico, bright as a cardinal rousted from the low branches of a white oak tree in winter. With a disgusted shake of his head, Sam reined in and dismounted, leaving the gelding to stand untethered while he strode toward the scene of recent mischief. A part of his mind stayed behind, with the animal—it was newly acquired, that horse, and the two of them had yet to form a proper acquaintance. All during the long ride south from his ranch just outside Flagstaff, he’d been too busy cogitating on the complexities of this new assignment to consider much of anything else, going over Major John Blackstone’s orders again and again in his head, sorting and sifting, weighing and measuring.

“Hold on,” he called. The bucket rope was taut and quivering, and he recalled this particular trick from his own youth.

A male voice echoed from the depths of the water hole, a shambling train of plaintive syllables rattling along a track of hopeful goodwill. Sam recognized the keynote as relief.

“I find myself in—obvious difficulties—and will—be profoundly grateful for any assistance—”

“Hold on,” Sam repeated, the words underlaid with a sigh. He was powerfully built—like a brick shithouse, the boys in the bunkhouse liked to say—and seldom moved quickly, except in a fight or when called upon to draw his .45. He secured the rope with his left hand and reached for the crank with the other, peering downward.

All he could make out, even squinting, were the soles of two small, booted feet, bound at the ankles with what looked like baling twine. Here was a dainty fellow, for sure and certain—and most likely the incompetent schoolmaster Sam had come to relieve of his duties.

“I’m all right!” the teacher called cheerfully from the pit. “Thomas P. Singleton, here!”

Sam felt chagrined that given the circumstances, he hadn’t thought to inquire after the man’s well-being right off, but kept cranking. He was a practical man, given to engaging the crisis at hand and dealing with the conversational aspects of the situation later.

“That’s good, Mr. Singleton,” he said belatedly, and when the ankles came within reach, he let go of the handle and grabbed for them with both hands. Poor Tom resembled a trussed gander, plucked and ready for the stew pot, and he didn’t weigh much more than one, either.

Sam hauled him out of the well and let him plop to the tinder-dry grass like a fresh-caught trout. He wasn’t wet, so the water must be low.

Crouching, Sam pulled out his pocketknife and commenced to cutting the twine. The teacher’s thin red hair stood straight up on his head, wild and crackling with static, as though it didn’t subscribe to the law of gravity. The face beneath it was narrow, with pointy features and blue, watery eyes. The girlish lips curled into a self-deprecating smile.

“My replacement, I presume?” he asked, feeling for what turned out to be his pocket watch, still safe at the end of its tarnished chain, and tucking it away again with a relieved pat. Singleton was certainly a resilient sort; the way he acted, anybody would have thought the pair of them had just sat themselves down to a grand and sociable supper in some fancy Eastern restaurant instead of meeting the way they had. “I must say, your arrival was timely indeed.”

Still resting on his haunches, Sam nodded in acknowledgment. “Sam O’Ballivan,” he said, though he doubted an introduction was necessary. Up at Flagstaff, he’d heard all about the schoolmaster, and he figured the reverse was probably true. With a few pertinent details excepted, of course.

Singleton rubbed his rope-chafed wrists to restore the circulation, but he showed no inclination to stand up just yet. Poor little fella must have had noodles for legs, Sam reflected, after hanging upside down in the well like that. “Call me Tom,” he said affably. “I am much obliged for your quick action on my behalf.”

Sam let one corner of his mouth quirk upward. He was sparing with a smile; like names for horses, they meant something to him, and he gave them out only when he was good and ready. He made a stalwart friend, when he had a high opinion of somebody, but he took his time deciding such matters. He knew a little about Tom Singleton, much of it hearsay, but as to whether he liked the man or not...well, the vote was still untallied.

Small feet rustled the bushes nearby and a giggle or two rode the warm afternoon breeze. Valiantly, Singleton pretended not to hear, but there was a flush pulsing on his cheekbones. It had to be hard on a small man’s dignity, being cranked up out of a schoolyard well by a big one, hired to take over his job. Sam wanted to tread lightly around what was left of Singleton’s pride.

“You hurting anywhere?” Sam asked, rising to his feet and scanning the schoolyard. Just you wait, he told the hidden miscreants silently.

“Fit as a fiddle!” Singleton insisted. He tried to get up then, but Sam saw that he was fixing to crumple and withheld his hand out of regard for the fellow’s self-respect. Sure enough, he went down.

“Best sit a spell,” Sam said.

Another bush shivered, off to his left— No time like the present, he thought, and waded in, snatching up one of the offenders by his shirt collar and dragging him out into the open. The giggles turned to gasps and there was some powerful shrub-shaking as the rest of the gang lit out for safer ground. “And your name would be?”

The lad looked to be around twelve or thirteen, with a cap of chestnut-brown hair and strange, whiskey-colored eyes peering, at once scared and defiant, out of a freckled face. His clothes were plain, but of good sturdy quality, and he wore shoes, which marked him as somebody’s pride and joy.

“Terran Chancelor,” he answered, clearly begrudging the information. His gaze darted briefly to Singleton, who was just summoning up the gumption for another attempt at gaining his feet, and the sly pleasure in the kid’s face made Sam want to shake him.

Forbearing, Sam held him suspended, so the toes of his fine mail-order shoes just barely brushed the grass. “You the leader of this bunch of outlaws?” he asked.

“No,” Chancelor snapped. “Put me down!”

Sam hoisted him an inch or two higher. “Maybe you’d like to hang upside down in the well for a while,” he mused. It was a bluff, but the kid didn’t need to know that. His eyes widened and he went a shade paler behind that constellation of freckles.

“I hope you’re not the new schoolmaster,” Terran Chancelor said with brave disdain. Sam wasn’t sure how smart the kid was, but he had to credit him with grit.

He allowed himself a slow, wicked grin. “‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’” he quoted.

Chancelor frowned, gnawed at his lower lip. “What does that mean?” he asked, peevish. “Sounds like something out of some high-falutin’ book.”

Sam released his hold on the boy’s shirt, watched as he dropped, swayed and found his balance. “It means, young Mr. Chancelor, that when you sit down at your desk bright and early tomorrow morning, here in the hallowed halls of learning, I’ll be standing in front of the blackboard.”

“Well, hell,” the kid complained.

Sam suppressed a grin. “Peculiar that you should mention Hades,” he said evenly. “That quote you just asked about is carved over the gate.”

The boy’s eyes widened again, but his color was high with fresh temper. He darted another glance at Singleton. “We were just having a little fun after school let out for the day, that’s all. No harm done.”

“I guess that depends on your viewpoint,” Sam said mildly. “Whether or not there was any harm done, I mean. You tell your friends that I’ll be happy to give any or all of them the same perspective Mr. Singleton here just enjoyed, if they’re curious about how it feels.”

Chancelor narrowed his eyes, looked as if he might be deciding whether he ought to spit in Sam’s face. Fortunately for him, he didn’t pursue that inclination. Unfortunately for him, he chose to run off at the mouth instead.

“You wouldn’t dare,” he said.

Quick as if he’d been wrestling a calf to the ground for branding, Sam hooked an arm around the boy’s middle, tipped him over the rim of the well and caught a firm hold on his ankles. “There’s where you’re wrong, young Mr. Chancelor,” he replied.

“My sister will have your hide for this!” the boy yelled, but his voice quavered as it bounced off the cold stone walls.

Sam chuckled. Singleton stared at him in horrified admiration.

“He’s right, you know,” Tom whispered earnestly. “Maddie Chancelor’s got a tongue on her. She’ll flay you to the bone.”

“That right?” Sam asked. Bracing his elbows against the edge of the well, he let the kid dangle.

“The blood is probably rushing to his head,” Singleton advised fretfully.

“Good for his brain,” Sam said companionably.

“Get me out of here!” Terran sputtered, squirming. “Right now!”

“I wouldn’t flail around like that, if I were you,” Sam counseled. “Hell of a thing if you came out of those splendid boots of yours and took a spill. Fall like that, you’d probably break your fool neck.”

The boy heeded Sam’s advice and went still. “What do you want?” he asked, sounding just shy of reasonable.

“For a start,” Sam answered, “a sincere apology.”

“What do I have to say ‘sorry’ to you for?”

Sam wondered idly about Maddie Chancelor and what kind of influence she might have in this little cowpattie of a town, plopped right along the border between Mexico and the Arizona Territory like an egg on a griddle. If she was anything like her brother, she must be a caution, as well as a shrew.

“Not a thing,” he replied at his leisure. “But a kindly word to Mr. Singleton here wouldn’t go amiss.”

Sam felt a quiver of rage rise right up the length of that boy, then along the rope, like grounded lightning coursing back through a metal rod.

“All right!” Chancelor bellowed. “I’m sorry!”

“‘I’m sorry, Mr. Singleton,’” Sam prompted.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Singleton,” the boy repeated. His tone was neither as dutiful nor as earnest as it might have been, but Sam yanked him up anyhow and set him hard on his feet. The fury in the kid’s eyes could have singed the bristles off a full-grown boar, but he held his tongue.

There might be hope for this one yet, Sam concluded silently, folding his arms as he regarded the furious youth.

“Go home and tell your sister,” Sam said, “that the new schoolmaster will be stopping by shortly to discuss the calamitous state of your character.”

The boy glowered at him in barely contained outrage, fists clenched, eyes fierce. “She’ll be expecting you.” He spat the words, simultaneously leaping backward, out of reach, ready to run. “Don’t bother to unpack your gear. You won’t be around here long.”

Sam raised an eyebrow, took a step toward the kid.

He turned and fled down the road Sam had just traveled, arms pumping at his sides, feet raising little puffs of dust.

By then, Singleton had recovered his composure. “You’re in for some trouble,” he said with friendly regret, consulting his pocket watch and starting for the schoolhouse. “Might as well show you around, though. I have an hour before the stage leaves for Tucson.”

Leaving his horse to graze on the sweet grass, Sam followed. “Where will I find the formidable Maddie Chancelor?” he asked.

Singleton mounted three plank steps and pushed open the schoolhouse door, which creaked ominously on its hinges. “She’s the postmistress, and she runs the mercantile, too,” he answered with a note of bleak resignation. “When she hears how you hung young Terran headfirst down the well, she’s not going to like it. They’re alone in the world, the pair of them, and she protects that little scoundrel like a she-bear guarding a cub.”

Sam digested the information as he crossed the threshold into a small, square room. There were long tables, rough-hewn, with benches, facing a blackboard on the east wall. A potbellied stove stood in one corner, with wood neatly stacked alongside. A few reading and ciphering primers lined a shelf next to the teacher’s desk, and the place smelled of chalk. Dust motes danced in the light coming in through the high, narrow windows.

Singleton looked around wistfully, sighed.

Sam felt a twinge of sympathy, wondering if a lone incident had spurred those little hellions to act, or if anarchy was the order of the day around here. He wasn’t about to ask, figuring the man had been through enough mortification as it was, but he’d have put his money on the latter.

“Your private quarters are back here,” Singleton said after a long and melancholy pause, making for an inside door. “It isn’t much, but the roof keeps out the rain, and there’s a decent bed and a cookstove.”

Sam was used to sleeping on the ground, wrapped up in a bedroll. The accommodations sounded downright luxurious to him.

“Not that you’ll want to stay long, even if Miss Chancelor doesn’t get you fired,” Singleton added. Two carpetbags waited at the foot of the bed and he stooped to fetch them up while Sam surveyed his new home.

“Looks like it’ll do,” he decided. The more he heard about Maddie Chancelor, the more he wanted to meet her.

Singleton stooped to pick up the satchels. Smiled gamely. “Good luck, Mr. O’Ballivan,” he said. “And thank you again for your help.”

“Good luck to you,” Sam replied, a little embarrassed by the other man’s gratitude. Anybody worth his bacon would have stepped in, in a circumstance like that.

Singleton set down one of the bags long enough to shake Sam’s hand. “May God be with you,” he added in parting. Then he crossed the room, opened the rear door and left, without looking back.

* * *

MADDIE CHANCELOR was measuring flour into a tin canister to fill Mrs. Ezra T. Burke’s weekly grocery order, when Terran burst into the store, shirttail out, hair rumpled, face aflame.

“The new teacher’s here,” he blurted before she could ask if he’d been fighting again, “and he just tried his best to kill me!”

Instant alarm swelled within Maddie’s breast, fair cutting off her wind, and her hands trembled as she set the scoop aside on the counter. “Kill you? What on earth...?”

“He would have drowned me in the well if I hadn’t got the best of him,” Terran insisted.

“Drowned you in the—”

“Well,” Terran finished in furious triumph.

Maddie untied her apron laces as she rounded the counter to examine her younger brother for injuries. He looked sound, and for someone who had nearly been murdered by drowning, he was remarkably dry, too.

“Tell me what happened,” she said, grateful, for once, that the mercantile was empty.

Terran gulped visibly. “He got me by the feet and tried to drop me down the schoolyard well,” he burst out. “I hid out in the brush, after I got away, or he’d have finished me for sure!”

Maddie’s heart seized at the image of her brother, her only living relation, suspended from such a height. Haven was a wild town, a crossroads for rogues, scalawags and scoundrels from both sides of the border, but she hadn’t expected the new schoolmaster to number among them. Anxiously she looked Terran over again. “You’re certain you haven’t been hurt?”

Terran nodded. “He said he’d be by here, real soon, to talk to you. He’s going to tell you a whole passel of lies, Maddie. He’ll say—”

Just then, the little brass bell over the door jingled and a man entered, removing his hat as he traversed the threshold.

Terran took one look at him and bolted for the stairs at the back of the store to take refuge in their rooms.

Maddie’s face flamed. “You must be the new schoolmaster,” she said.

He smiled, nodded. “Sam O’Ballivan,” he replied. “And you must be Miss Chancelor.”

Maddie gave a curt nod. Sam O’Ballivan was clean-shaven and muscular, probably six feet in height, with brown hair and shrewd blue eyes. He looked more like an outlaw than a schoolmaster, and she was sure the distinctive bulge under his long suit coat was the butt of a pistol. What had Mr. Callaway and the other members of the school board been thinking, to hire such a man?

“How dare you assault my brother?” she asked evenly, when she could trust herself to speak at all.

Mr. O’Ballivan’s mouth tilted upward at one corner. He kept his distance, though, which meant Maddie didn’t have to go for the shotgun she kept under the counter in case of trouble. “Is that what he told you? Guess he’s got a devious side, to go along with that mean streak of his.”

Maddie felt like a kettle coming to a boil. “Terran is not a liar, nor does he have a ‘mean streak,’” she managed to say. “And it’s a fine how-do-you-do, your saying that, when you tried to drown him!”

O’Ballivan chuckled, and what looked like mischievous derision glinted briefly in his eyes. His blatant masculinity seemed to take over the whole store, like some ominous, unseen force. Maddie would have described him as rugged, rather than handsome, if she’d been thinking along such lines.

Which she most definitely wasn’t.

“The truth, Miss Chancelor, is somewhat at variance with your brother’s account of the incident in question,” O’Ballivan said. “When I rode up, he and the rest of that pack of rascals had Tom Singleton hog-tied and hanging headfirst down the well. God knows how long he’d have dangled if I hadn’t come along when I did.”

Maddie blinked. It wasn’t true, she told herself firmly. Terran would never be involved in anything like that.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“You don’t choose to believe me,” he remarked idly, examining a display of dime novels Maddie had spent much of the morning arranging. She disapproved heartily of yellow journalism, but the plain fact was, folks were willing to spend money on those little books, and she couldn’t afford not to carry the merchandise.

At long last O’Ballivan’s gaze swung back, colliding with hers. Maddie felt a peculiar niggling in the pit of her stomach.

“You’re not doing your brother any favors, you know, by taking his part when you know he’s in the wrong,” he said.

“Did you or did you not try to drown him?”

“If I’d tried to drown him,” O’Ballivan said reasonably, “I would have succeeded. All I did was demonstrate that hanging headfirst down a well, while memorable, is not a desirable experience.”

Maddie swallowed so hard it hurt. “What if you’d dropped him?”

“I wouldn’t have,” he responded, damnably self-assured.

She slipped behind the counter again, in case she needed the shotgun. “I will not tolerate that kind of rough treatment,” she insisted, making an effort to keep her voice from rising. “Terran is a child, Mr. O’Ballivan.”

He drew near enough to rest his hands between the pickle crock and a pyramid of bright red tobacco cans. “Terran,” he said, “is a spoiled, bullying brat. And I, Miss Chancelor, will not tolerate the sort of behavior I witnessed today. I was hired to restore order in that school, and I will do it—however many times I have to hold your brother over a well by his feet. Do we understand each other?”

Maddie felt heat surge up her neck to pulse along her cheekbones, and her ears burned. “If you lay a hand on him again,” she said, “I will have you dismissed.”

He smiled slightly. “Then I guess we do understand each other. You’re welcome to try to get rid of me, Miss Chancelor, but if what I saw in that schoolyard a little while ago is typical, I’d say I’m just the kind of teacher this town needs.”

“You don’t look like a schoolmaster,” Maddie said.

“And you don’t look like a storekeeper,” Mr. O’Ballivan retorted. “I guess appearances can be deceiving.”

Maddie resisted an impulse to pat her hair, which tended to be unruly and was forever coming down from its pins. “What does a storekeeper look like?” she retorted.

“What does a schoolmaster look like?” he countered.

Maddie sighed and glanced hopefully toward the door, wishing the man would leave and stop taking up all the room in her store. “If you have no further business here, Mr. O’Ballivan—”

“It happens that I do,” he said, and she knew by the light in his eyes that he enjoyed baiting her. “I’d like to collect my mail. You are the postmistress, aren’t you?”

Letters and packages came into Haven once a week, on the stagecoach, which had been and gone by four o’clock that afternoon. Busy with Mrs. Burke’s order, which she had promised to deliver personally after closing, she’d told the driver to put the mail in the back room and promptly forgotten all about it.

“Yes,” Maddie said. “I am the postmistress. But I haven’t had a chance to do any sorting.”

“There should be a parcel addressed to me,” O’Ballivan told her, and showed no sign of moving away from the counter, let alone leaving the premises.

Maddie glanced at the large, loud-ticking clock on the far wall, above the display window. “I’m about to close for the day.”

Again, that slow, thoughtful smile. “Well, then,” Sam O’Ballivan said, “if you’ll just point me to that parcel, I’ll be on my way.”

Maddie sighed. “I’ll get it for you,” she conceded, and turned away.

“It’s bound to be too heavy,” he argued, and came right around the end of the counter without so much as a by-your-leave. “Just show me where it is.”

Impatient, Maddie tossed aside the curtain covering the entrance to the back of the store and gestured toward the corner where the mail had been stowed. Sure enough, there was a very large box wrapped in brown paper and tied with heavy string.

Mr. O’Ballivan lifted it with one hand, tilted it slightly so she could see the large, slanted letters on the face of the package: S. O’Ballivan, c/o General Delivery, Haven, Arizona Territory.

He’d saved her the awkwardness of asking for proof that the parcel belonged to him before releasing it, but Maddie wasn’t grateful. She just wanted him gone, so she could close the store, tally the books and deliver Mrs. Burke’s groceries. She wanted the place to expand to its normal size, so she could breathe.

“Obliged,” he said, pausing in the front doorway to don his hat again. He tugged lightly at the brim.

“Goodbye, Mr. O’Ballivan,” Maddie said pointedly, right on his heels. She put one hand on the door lock, eager to latch it behind him.

He shifted the parcel from one hand to the other, as easily as if it were a basket of eggs. “Until next time,” he said, and touched his hat brim again.

Maddie, already moving to shut the door, frowned. “Do you receive a lot of mail?”

“No,” Mr. O’Ballivan replied, “but I expect we’ll have a few more rounds over your brother.”

Maddie gave the door a shove and latched it.

Mr. O’Ballivan smiled at her through the glass.

She wrenched down the shade.

As she turned away, she was certain she heard him laugh.

* * *

BACK IN HIS ROOM behind the schoolhouse, Sam built a fire in the stove, ladled water into the coffeepot that came with the place, along with the last of Tom Singleton’s stash of ground beans, and set the concoction on to boil.

If Miss Maddie Chancelor hadn’t run him off so quickly, he’d have had time to lay in a few staples. As things stood, he’d need to take his supper at the saloon and bring the leftovers home for breakfast.

After school let out tomorrow, he’d go back to the mercantile.

Like as not, Miss Maddie wouldn’t be all that glad to see him.

Sam smiled at the thought and turned his attention to the parcel. He’d packed the books himself, before starting the trip down from Stone Creek, and taken them to the stagecoach office for shipping. Now, he looked forward to putting up his feet when he got back from taking his meal, and reading until the lamp ran low on kerosene.

Of course, he’d have to shake Maddie’s image loose from his mind before he’d be able to concentrate worth a damn.

After what the boy and Singleton had said, he’d expected someone entirely different. An aging, mean-eyed spinster with warts, maybe. Or a rough-edged Calamity Jane sort of woman, brawny enough to do a man’s work.

The real Maddie had come as quite a surprise, with her slender figure and thick, reddish-brown hair, ready to tumble down over her back and shoulders at the slightest provocation. She couldn’t have been much past twenty-five, and while that probably qualified her as an old maid, it was a pure wonder to him that some lonely bachelor hadn’t tumbled right into those rum-colored eyes and snatched her up a long time ago. Women such as her were few and far between, this far west of the Mississippi, and generally had their choice of men.

Her temperament was on the cussed side, it was true, but there was fire in her; he’d felt the heat the moment he’d stepped into the mercantile and locked eyes with her.

He smiled again as he opened the stove door and stuck in another chunk of wood, hoping to get the coffee perking sooner and wondering how long it would be before the lady organized a campaign to send the new schoolmaster down the road.

Satisfied that the stove was doing the best it could, Sam opened the box to unpack his books. Except for his horse, Dionysus, grazing on sweet hay up in the high country while a lame leg mended, he treasured these worn and oft-read volumes more than anything else he owned. Some were warped by damp weather and creek water, having traveled miles in his saddlebags, while others had been scarred by sparks from forgotten campfires.

All of them were old friends, and Sam handled them tenderly as he silently welcomed each one to a new home. When he got time, he’d find a plank of wood somewhere and put up a shelf they could stand on. In the meantime, they made good company, sitting right there on the table.

He’d attended to the gelding earlier, staking it on a long line in the tall grass behind the schoolhouse, where a little stream made its crooked way from hither to yon, and stowed his tack in the woodshed. Now, as twilight thickened around the walls and purpled the windowpanes, he lit a lamp and used his shirttail to wipe out the blue metal mug he carried with him whenever he left the ranch.

He’d just poured coffee when a light knock sounded at the back door.

Sam arched an eyebrow and checked to make sure his .45 was within easy reach, there on the rickety table next to the bed. He wasn’t expecting anybody.

“Mr. O’Ballivan?” a female voice called, thin as a shred of frayed ribbon. “Are you to home?”

Curious, Sam opened the door.

The woman stood in a dim wash of moonlight, holding a basket and smiling up at him. Since no proper lady would have come calling on an unmarried man, especially after dark, he wasn’t surprised by her skimpy attire. She was a dance hall girl.

She laughed at his expression. “I brung you some vittles,” she said, and shoved the basket at him. “Compliments of Miss Oralee Pringle, over to the Rattlesnake Saloon. She said to tell you welcome to Haven, and be sure to pay us a visit first chance you get. I don’t reckon I ought to come in?”

Sam cleared his throat, accepted the basket. It felt warm in his hands and smelled deliciously of fresh-baked bread and fried chicken. His stomach growled. “I don’t suppose you ought to,” he agreed, at a loss. “But thank you, Miss—?”

The response was a coy smile. “My name is Bird of Paradise,” she said, “but you can call me Bird.”

Sam frowned. Behind that mask of powder and kohl was the face of a schoolgirl. “How old are you?”

“Old enough,” Bird replied lightly, waggling her fingers at him over one bare shoulder as she turned to go.

Sam opened his mouth, closed it again.

Bird disappeared into the darkness.

He stood in the doorway, staring after her for a long time. He’d pay a call on Oralee Pringle first chance he got, he decided, but he had more in mind than returning the basket.

CHAPTER TWO

ESTEBAN VIERRA waited until well after nightfall before crossing the river from the Mexican side; he prided himself on his ability to move freely in the darkness, like a cat. Leaving his horse to graze on the bank, he made his way through the cottonwoods and thistly underbrush to the schoolhouse, pausing to admire the Ranger’s mount. The click of a pistol cylinder, somewhere behind him, made him freeze.

It stung him, this chink in his prowess, and he felt more irritation than fear.

“Hold your hands out from your sides,” a voice instructed.

Vierra obeyed calmly. “O’Ballivan?” he asked.

He heard the revolver slide back into the holster with a deftness that spoke volumes about the man at his back. “Yes.”

He turned. “That’s a fine horse,” he said cordially. “I hope it’s fast.”

O’Ballivan’s expression was grim, his craggy features defined by the play of light and shadow. “What are you doing here? My instructions were to meet you tomorrow night, on the other side of the river.”

Vierra smiled. “I got curious,” he said.

The Ranger parted with the briefest of grins, his teeth flashing white in the gloom. “You could have got dead,” he replied. “And if you’ve no better sense than to come prowling around another man’s horse in the night, this whole plan might need some review.”

“Don’t you trust me?” Vierra asked, his aggrieved tone at some variance with his easy smile.

“I don’t know you from Adam’s Aunt Bessie,” O’Ballivan responded, one hand still resting lightly on the butt of his revolver. “Of course I don’t trust you.”

“That could be a problem. Maybe we ought to get better acquainted.”

O’Ballivan looked him over. “Maybe,” he said cautiously. “You’re Mexican. How is it that you don’t have an accent?”

Vierra shrugged. “I think in Spanish,” he said. “And I do have an accent. I borrowed yours.”

“What do you know about these outlaws we’re after?” O’Ballivan asked after a long and pensive silence.

“Ah,” Vierra said, folding his arms. “You just said you don’t trust me. Why should I trust you?”

“I don’t reckon you do,” O’Ballivan observed dryly.

Vierra was pleased. Here was a worthy opponent, a rare phenomenon in his experience, one he could spar with. “I have been offered a very large reward, in gold, if I bring these banditos back to certain anxious rancheros in my country,” he said. Often, he’d discovered, a superficial truth was the most effective means of deception. It made most people complacent.

Of course, O’Ballivan clearly wasn’t most people.

“They’ve done plenty on this side of the border,” the Ranger said. “My orders are to turn them in to a certain federal judge in Tucson.”

“Two men, working toward the same end, but with very different objectives,” Vierra allowed, still smiling. “Tell me—are the Americanos offering a bounty? Is that why you are doing this?”

O’Ballivan shook his head. “A man I respect asked me to track the murdering bastards down and bring them in, dead or alive. That’s payment enough for me.”

Vierra spread his hands. “Then there is no misunderstanding,” he said.

“No misunderstanding at all,” O’Ballivan agreed. “Good night, Señor Vierra.”

“You will be at the meeting place tomorrow night? The cantina in Refugio?”

O’Ballivan, turning to go, paused to look back over one brawny shoulder and nod. “Tomorrow night,” he confirmed, and moved toward the schoolhouse.

Vierra watched him out of sight, then gave a low whistle through his teeth. The Ranger’s horse came to him, and he stroked its fine neck with one hand before retreating into the darkness.

* * *

SAM ASSESSED HIS CROP of pupils as they filed obediently into the schoolroom the next morning and took their places without a word or a glance in his direction.

Terran Chancelor’s presence surprised him a little; he’d half expected Maddie to undertake the remainder of her brother’s education personally, if only to keep him safe from the fiendish new schoolteacher. But here he was, faced scrubbed, hair brushed, hands folded, sitting square in the middle at the front table.

There were four girls, of varying ages, the youngest barely larger than a china doll he’d seen once in a store window, the eldest nearly grown and already taking his measure as husband material, unless he missed his guess. The two in between, eight or nine years old by his estimate, looked enough alike to be sisters.

The boys added up to nine, and they, too, ranged from near babyhood to strapping.

When they were settled, Sam turned to the blackboard and picked up a nubbin of chalk. “My name,” he told them, “is Sam O’Ballivan.” On the board he signed his name the way he always did.

SO’B.

A few snickers rose, as expected.

Sam faced the gathering, careful to keep his expression sober.

The blond boy sitting next to Terran was still grinning.

“Your name?” Sam inquired.

“Ben Donagher,” the lad replied.

“You’re amused, Mr. Donagher?”

Donagher’s grin widened. “Well, it’s just that SOB means—”

Sam pointed the bit of chalk at him. “Yes?”

“Son of a bitch,” the boy said.

Sam nodded. “You’d do well to remember that,” he replied.

Donagher flushed and lowered his gaze.

Terran gave his seatmate a subtle jab of the elbow.

“You have something to add, Mr. Chancelor?” Sam wanted to know.

More giggles, mostly stifled.

“No, sir,” Terran said, but his eyes glittered and it was clearly all he could do not to laugh.

Sam put down the chalk and rested a hip on the edge of his desk. “When I arrived yesterday,” he began, “there was an incident under way. Mr. Chancelor had the misfortune to be caught, but I’ve got a pretty good idea who else was involved.”

The smallest girl raised her hand eagerly. “I didn’t do nothin’, Mr. SOB,” she spouted. “I went straight home, because my mama said she’d thrash my behind if the chickens didn’t get fed.”

Laughter erupted. Sam bit the inside of his lip, so he wouldn’t smile, and waited it out. “Mr. O’Ballivan,” he corrected.

Tears welled in the little girl’s eyes; she seemed to shrink, as if trying to fold in on herself until she disappeared entirely.

“Violet’s a tit-baby,” somebody said.

“She makes water in her bloomers,” added another voice.

“Her papa got hisself hanged for horse thieving.”

Sam scanned the room. “Enough,” he said quietly.

The resulting silence was profound.

He went to where Violet huddled at the far end of the back table and crouched beside her. A tear slid down her cheek and puddled on the slate resting in her lap. Up close, he noticed that her calico dress was faded and thin with wear, and she smelled pungently of urine, wood smoke and general neglect.

Sam laid a tentative hand on her small, bony back. “When you want to use the outhouse, Violet,” he said, “you don’t have to raise your hand for permission. You just get right up and go.”

Violet nodded miserably, unable to lift her head. “Mr. Singleton made me wait,” she whispered.

Sam patted her awkwardly on one small, hunched shoulder and straightened to address the rest of the class. “I will not countenance bullying,” he said. “Ask Mr. Chancelor if you don’t believe me.”

Terran flushed vividly, keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead, but no one made a sound.

“Now,” Sam said, “let’s get down to business. How many of you know how to read and write?”

* * *

IT WAS THREE FORTY-FIVE by the big clock on the mercantile wall when Sam O’Ballivan strode in. Maddie felt his presence, even before she stole a glance to confirm it. She drew a deep breath and smiled at Undine Donagher, who had come to town to order ready-made dresses from the catalog.

There were no other customers; folks tended to stay clear of the store when the Donaghers stopped by, which was often, since they owned the establishment.

“Maybe this silk would do,” Maddie suggested warmly.

Undine, the pretty and youthful wife of Mungo Donagher, a grizzled old rancher who probably tallied his land holdings in counties instead of acres, was someone Maddie dreaded rather than welcomed, even though Undine invariably spent a great deal of money when she went on a buying tangent. Because Mungo liked to keep the accounts straight, he made all his purchases like any other customer would.

Undine turned to look at Sam and her petulant expression went coquettish. Mungo, occupying himself with a display of rifles, seemed to sense the shift of his wife’s attention and turned, frowning, to watch the exchange.

Undine tugged at her white gloves, with their rows of tiny pearl buttons, and smiled, ignoring her husband. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said, and walked right over to Mr. O’Ballivan as if they’d encountered each other at a soiree. “I’d have remembered anybody as handsome as you are.”

Sam nodded with solemn cordiality, a flush darkening his neck, and took a box from the stack next to the door. “Howdy,” he said, and his gaze skittered to Maddie.

She realized that her mouth was open, and closed it again, but not quickly enough, she saw, to fool Mr. O’Ballivan. The flicker in his eyes told her he’d registered her disapproval of Undine’s bold behavior and found it amusing.

Recovering her manners, Maddie said, “Mrs. Donagher, this is Mr. O’Ballivan, the new schoolmaster.”

Before she could introduce Mungo, he stepped between Undine and Mr. O’Ballivan, extending a work-roughened, pawlike hand in greeting. His manner was one of blustery goodwill, but Maddie wasn’t fooled, and neither, apparently, was Mr. O’Ballivan. A muscle bunched in his jaw even as he shook Mungo’s hand.

Undine, her flirtation thwarted, pushed out her lower lip and retreated to the counter, where she and Maddie had been poring over the catalog.

“You look like you might just be able to handle that bunch over to the schoolhouse,” Mungo boomed, apparently determined to keep the conversation going. “One of those whelps is mine. Name’s Ben. He gives you any trouble, you just haul him off to the woodshed and tan his hide.”

A motion at the window drew Maddie’s eyes, and she saw her brother peering through the glass. When he spotted Sam O’Ballivan, he recoiled visibly and hurried off down the sidewalk.

“I don’t make much use of the woodshed,” O’Ballivan said.

Maddie’s temper heated. No, she thought. You just hang innocent children upside down in the well by their feet and scare the life out of them.

Mungo laughed, fairly rattling the canned goods on the shelves. It was not a friendly sound; Mungo Donagher was not a friendly man. In fact, most people feared him, along with his three older sons, who were, in Maddie’s opinion, little better than criminals. She stayed close to the shotgun when any of them were in the store.

“I hope you’re a better man than poor Tom Singleton,” Mungo said. “Those snot-nosed little devils stampeded right over him. Thought he might toughen up, but he didn’t.”

Maddie glanced at Undine, saw a faint blush rise in the woman’s cheeks and the slightest tightening around the mouth. She wondered about that, but only briefly, because the exchange between Sam O’Ballivan and the patriarch was building up steam.

“Yes,” O’Ballivan agreed mildly, selecting a cake of yellow soap from those on offer and dropping it into the box in the curve of his left arm, moving on, and then going back for another. This time, he chose the fancy, scented kind, French-milled and wrapped in pretty paper. It cost the earth, and Maddie’s curiosity was piqued again. “I saw the evidence of that yesterday. I’ll need two pounds of coffee, Miss Chancelor. A pound of sugar, too.” He proceeded to add tins of peaches, tomatoes and green beans to his purchases.

“A man’s got no business teaching if he can’t ride herd on a few brats.” Mungo thundered on. “’Course it’s usually a woman’s job. Teaching school, I mean. My older boys always favored a schoolmarm.”

I’ll just bet they did, Maddie thought, watching Sam O’Ballivan closely while trying to pretend she’d barely noticed him at all.

O’Ballivan didn’t answer. Occupied with his shopping, he reached down for a shaving brush, then a razor, then tooth powder. Maddie wondered, as she had from the first moment of their acquaintance, why a man like that would want to spend his days writing on a blackboard in a border town like Haven. He must have felt confined in the schoolhouse, a place hardly big enough to accommodate the width of his shoulders, and his skin was weathered, as if he’d spent much of his life outdoors.

Maddie knew the salary allotted to the teacher was paltry, since she attended school board meetings, and besides, Mungo was right. Most teachers were female. Mr. Singleton had been an exception, hired after his predecessor eloped with a medicine peddler three weeks into the school term. And now here was Sam O’Ballivan, who looked more like a hired gunslinger than anything else.

“I guess you didn’t hear me say most teachers are female,” Mungo said, sounding less jovial now as O’Ballivan set the box on the counter and proceeded to examine a large copper washtub hanging on the wall.

“Oh, I heard you, all right,” he replied, hoisting the tub down from its peg. “It just didn’t seem like the sort of remark that called for an answer.”

The air fairly crackled.

Maddie debated whether or not she ought to stipulate that she didn’t sell on credit, since the tub was one of the most expensive items she carried, but she didn’t want to be the next one to speak.

Meanwhile, Undine had recovered her aplomb. “We’d be honored to have you come to our place for supper, Mr. O’Ballivan,” she said. Mungo turned to glower at her, but she went right on ignoring him.

Sam set the tub on the counter. “I accept,” he said.

Mungo seemed taken aback, and Maddie was a little surprised herself. A mite irritated, too, though she couldn’t have said why.

Undine batted her thick lashes and posed, as if for a daguerreotypist about to take her likeness. “Would tonight be too soon?”

“Unfortunately,” Sam said, “I have a prior commitment.”

Undine was the image of sweet disappointment. “Tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow will be fine,” Sam replied.

Maddie risked a sidelong peek at Mungo, who looked as if his thick head of white hair might be about to fly upward and stick to the ceiling. Was O’Ballivan such a fool that he didn’t know where he wasn’t welcome? Or was he simply unable to resist Undine Donagher’s undeniable charms?

“Seven o’clock, then,” Undine chimed, twinkling. “The ranch house is five miles east of here, along the river trail.”

Sam nodded. “I’ll be there,” he said.

“Bring Miss Chancelor here along with you,” Mungo added. It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order, thrust into the exchange like a fist.

Maddie opened her mouth to protest.

“That’s a fine idea,” Sam replied before she could get a word out.

Undine’s face fell. Mungo took a hard grip on her elbow and ushered her toward the door. “I’ll send a ranch hand back for the goods we bought,” the rancher announced without turning his head.

“I was just being neighborly,” Undine was heard to say as Mungo fairly hurled her outside.

Maddie stared after them, confounded.

Sam O’Ballivan helped himself to a towel, four cotton shirts and a shiny new bucket.

“This tub costs eight dollars,” Maddie pointed out when she’d had a few moments to recover. “I don’t—”

Mr. O’Ballivan paused, took a wallet from the inside pocket of his coat and inspected the contents thoughtfully. Even from where she stood, Maddie could see that he had plenty of money, and that made her wonder even more.

“I think I can cover it,” he concluded, replacing the wallet.

“Who are you?” Maddie demanded. It was her nature, after all, to be forthright, and she’d held her curiosity in check as long as she could.

He added three pairs of socks to the pile. “You don’t have much of a memory,” he said. “I believe I’ve already introduced myself.”

Maddie rounded the counter and advanced, setting her hands on her hips and forcing him to stop and face her. “I guess you didn’t notice that Mungo Donagher doesn’t want you coming to his house for supper.”

Sam’s mouth quirked again, though he didn’t actually smile. “Now that hurts my feelings,” he said. “The invitation sounded sincere enough to me.”

Maddie gave an exasperated sigh. “Oh, it was sincere, all right. Undine meant every word of it. It’s Mungo I’m worried about.”

“Now why would you worry about Mungo or anything else, Miss Chancelor?”

Maddie knotted her hands in her apron, so she wouldn’t box Sam O’Ballivan’s ears. “You’re new in Haven, and you obviously have the sensibilities of a hitching post, so I’ll tell you,” she said. “Mr. Donagher is a hard man. He’s vengeful and he’s rich, and when folks get on his bad side, they tend to meet with sudden misfortune.”

“I do appreciate your concern, Miss Chancelor, but I’m not afraid of that old coot. Do you have any storybooks?”

Maddie blinked. “Storybooks?”

Sam’s eyes danced. “For kids,” he explained with the sort of patience one usually reserves for an idiot.

Maddie gestured toward a table in the far corner of the store, followed determinedly when Sam headed in that direction. She was about to pursue the subject of his identity again when she noticed the reverent way he chose and examined a volume of fairy tales. It made her throat tighten.

“My mother used to read those stories to me,” she said, and then could have bitten off her tongue at the hinge. Mr. O’Ballivan’s gaze came straight to her face, and she felt exposed, as if her memories were no more private than the goods displayed in the window at the front of the store.

“Did she?” he asked quietly.

Maddie swallowed, nodded. Looked away.

Sam caught her chin between his thumb and the curve of his forefinger. His flesh was calloused, giving the lie, yet again, to his being a schoolmaster. He turned her head so she had to meet his eyes.

His touch made her nerves spark under her skin. She wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t quite make herself do it. In fact, she couldn’t even speak, so she just stood there, like a fool, astounded by her own weakness.

“How is it that you’re not married, Maddie Chancelor?” Sam asked gravely, and let his hand fall back to his side.

Maddie moistened her lips. It was a forward question, one he had no right to ask. She was surprised when she heard herself answer. “I was engaged once,” she said softly. “He was killed.”

She waited for the pain that always came when she merely thought of Warren, let alone mentioned him out loud, but it didn’t come.

“I’m sorry,” Sam O’Ballivan said solemnly.

“It’s been five years,” Maddie answered, and was grateful when the bell jingled over the door. She’d been alone with Mr. O’Ballivan, or whoever he was, for much too long.

* * *

ONCE HE’D SETTLED UP his bill and Maddie had promised to send Terran around in a buckboard with the things he’d bought, Sam left the store. The basket Bird had brought him the night before was on the bench on the sidewalk, where he’d left it.

He’d return it to Oralee Pringle, with his thanks, and ask her about Bird while he was at it. A good part of his mind stayed behind, though, worrying at Maddie Chancelor like an old dog with a soup bone.

She’d loved a man, five years ago, enough to say she’d marry him.

Why did it open a hollow place inside him, knowing that? Maddie was a beautiful woman, and she must have had suitors right along. Had she laid her heart in the casket, with her intended, and closed the lid on it for good? And why should it matter to him, anyway, when he was all but promised to the major’s daughter?

He crossed the street, weaving his way between horses and wagons, and strode along the wooden sidewalk toward the Rattlesnake. The tinny strains of an out-of-tune piano spilled over the swinging doors and he paused outside, trying to shake off his melancholy mood.

An old, swaybacked horse stood at the water trough, square in front of the saloon, a little apart from the others, reins hanging loose. He was spotted, and his ribs showed.

Sam paused to pat him. “You look about as sorrowful as I feel,” he said.

“You brought the basket back.”

Sam turned his head, saw that Bird had stepped out of the saloon to stand on the sidewalk. In the light of day, she looked even younger than she had the night before. She wore a red dress that showed her legs and too much bosom, and her face was freshly painted.

“I’m obliged,” he said, still stroking the horse. “That was the best supper I’ve had in a long time.”

Bird smiled and took the basket. “I guess you meant to thank Oralee,” she said. “She’s gone to Tucson. Won’t be back until tomorrow sometime.”

Sam nodded.

Bird lingered. “That’s Dobbin,” she said, indicating the horse. “He’s a pitiful old fella, isn’t he? Belongs to Charlie Wilcox. Stands out here, patient as the saints, all day every day, waiting for Charlie to finish swilling whiskey and ride him on home. Charlie’d never get back to that shack of his if it wasn’t for Dobbin.”

Sam felt a pang of sympathy for the horse. Wished he could put him out to pasture, with Dionysus, come summer, and let him eat his fill of good grass.

He stepped away from Dobbin, stood looking down at Bird.

“You gonna ask me how old I am again?” she asked, smiling up into his face.

“I’d like to,” he said, “but I reckon I’d be wasting my breath.”

“I’m seventeen,” she told him.

More like fifteen, he thought, sorrier for her than he was for the horse. “How did you end up working in a place like the Rattlesnake Saloon?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Just makin’ my way in the world,” she replied without a trace of self-pity. “We’ve all got to do that, don’t we?”

“I guess we do,” Sam agreed. “Don’t you have any folks?”

“Just a sister,” Bird said. “She’s married, and I was a trial to her, so she showed me the road. You comin’ inside?”

Sam shook his head, pondering. He’d never had a sister, but if he had, he wouldn’t have turned her out, whether she was a trial to him or not.

Bird looked crestfallen. “How come you don’t like me?” she blurted. “Most men take to me right away.”

“I like you fine,” Sam said. “That’s the problem.”

She went from crestfallen to confused. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t imagine you do.” On impulse, he reached out, took her hand, squeezed it lightly. “If you ever need help, Bird, you come to me.”

She smiled sadly. “It’s too late for that,” she said. Then, carrying the basket, she turned and hurried back into the saloon.

Sam stared after her for a few bleak moments, patted Dobbin again, then headed back toward the schoolhouse.

One of these days he was going to stop wanting to save worn-out horses and misguided girls and a whole lot of other things. It would be pure, blessed relief when that day came.

CHAPTER THREE

SAM WAS OUT BACK of the schoolhouse, splitting wood for the fire, when Terran rolled up at the reins of an ancient buckboard, drawn by two sorry-looking horses, one mud-brown, the other a pink-eyed pinto. Their hooves wanted trimming, he reflected, lodging the ax in the chopping block and dusting his hands together. If he’d had his hasp handy, he’d have undertaken the job right then and there.

Terran, perched on the seat, drew up the team, set the brake lever with a deft motion of one foot, and jumped to the ground. Sam’s copper tub gleamed in the bed of the wagon, catching the last fierce rays of the setting sun.

The boy rounded the buckboard, lowered the tailgate with a creak of hinges, and scrambled in to haul the boxes to the rear, where Sam was waiting to claim them.

“Too bad you ain’t a lady,” Terran remarked, admiring the tub. “You could give Violet Perkins a sudsing.”

Sam hoisted the box containing his coffee, sugar, canned goods and toiletries. “There are worse things,” he observed, “than smelling bad.”

“That depends,” Terran replied, sliding back another box, “on whether or not you’re downwind from her.”

Holding back a smile, Sam set the first crate on the ground and reached for the second. “Is it true that Violet’s father was hanged for a horse thief?”

Terran paused to meet his gaze. “Somebody lynched him, that’s for sure,” he answered solemnly. “Maddie thinks it was the Donagher brothers.”

“I take it there’s no law in this town,” Sam ventured. He’d seen a jailhouse, walking back from the store the day before, but the windows had been shuttered and except for an old yellow dog sunning himself on the wooden sidewalk in front of the door, there had been no sign of habitation.

Terran shrugged, then squared his shoulders to move the copper tub. “Not since Warren Debney was gunned down five years ago,” he said. “He was the town marshal.”

The statement snagged Sam’s attention. It’s been five years, Maddie had said back at the mercantile when he’d offered his condolences on the death of the man she’d planned to marry. He wanted to ask Terran, straight-out, if his guess was right, but he couldn’t think of a way to do it without prying into what amounted to family business.

“How did it happen?” Sam inquired, grasping the tub and lowering it to the ground.

Terran stood, tight-fisted, in the empty wagon bed, staring down at Sam. His expression was flat, giving away nothing of his thoughts. “Warren was walking Maddie home from a social at the church that night,” he recalled, his voice so quiet that Sam had to strain to hear it. “Somebody shot him from the roof of the telegraph office. Maddie had blood all over her dress when they brought her home.”

Sam closed his eyes against the image, though violence of that kind was nothing new to him, and if the boy had been standing on the ground he’d have laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Did they ever run the shootist to ground?” he asked.

Terran shook his head, kept his eyes averted. Sam caught the glint of tears despite that effort. “He’d tangled with Rex Donagher the day before, Warren had, and some folks thought Rex was the one did it, but things never went any further than that.”

“The town never replaced Debney? Got themselves a new lawman?”

Terran gave a bitter snort at that. “If there’s a prisoner—and that ain’t often—old Charlie Wilcox usually stands guard. If he’s sober enough, anyhow.”

Charlie Wilcox, Sam recalled, from his conversation with Bird out in front of the Rattlesnake Saloon that afternoon, was evidently the town drunk. Nothing much to recommend him, it seemed, save that he was the owner of a loyal horse.

Sam pulled a penny from his vest pocket—he’d left his suit coat inside the schoolhouse when he saw the need to chop wood—and extended the coin to Terran. “Thanks,” he said.

Terran blinked. “What’s that for?”

“Delivering my goods,” Sam replied.

Terran’s gaze strayed to the Colt .45 on Sam’s hip, and his eyes widened. He advanced a step to take the penny. “Obliged,” he said, but he was looking at the revolver, not the penny.

“You any good with that gun?” he ventured to ask.

Sam let one corner of his mouth tilt upward. “Just use it for shooting snakes, mostly,” he lied.

Terran closed his hand tightly around the penny. Met Sam’s eyes. “I never knew a schoolmaster to pack a .45 before,” he said. “Mr. Singleton sure didn’t.”

“Mr. Singleton,” Sam answered, “is a whole different kind of man than I am.”

“We didn’t mean to hurt him,” Terran said.

Sam nodded. “I believe that,” he allowed. “But a prank can go wrong, mighty fast, even when nobody intends for it to happen. And there are ways to do a man injury that don’t leave any marks on his hide.”

Terran’s cheeks blazed, making his freckles stand out in bold relief. He hitched up his pants and then stood with his feet spread and his hands on his hips. “You mean to mete out punishment, Mr. O’Ballivan?”

Sam shook his head. “Not unless it’s called for, Mr. Chancelor,” he replied. He gave a sparing smile. “And I don’t reckon any of you will take a notion to try putting me down the well.”

Terran tried to look solemn, but it was a lost cause. He grinned. “No, sir,” he said, “I don’t reckon we will.”

Sam put out his hand, waited.

The boy hesitated, then took it, and they shook on the bargain.

Terran was the first to speak. “Maddie says you aren’t like any schoolteacher she’s ever seen,” he confided.

Sam chuckled and shut the tailgate. “Is that right?”

Terran hesitated a moment, as if he might say something more, but then he scrambled over the back of the wagon seat to take up the reins again. Looking back at Sam over one scrawny shoulder, he gave another grin. “She don’t appreciate having to take her supper at the Donaghers’s tomorrow night, neither.”

“Why’d she agree to go, then?” Sam asked, honestly puzzled, as the boy cranked the brake lever forward.

“Said she was roped into it,” Terran answered. Then, blithely, he added, “Maddie reckons as how if you’re stupid enough to step right into a scorpions’ nest, she’d better go along and see that you don’t get stung.”

“Kind of her to look out for me,” Sam said dryly.

Terran swung the wagon around in a wide circle in the grass, and when he pulled up alongside Sam, his expression had turned somber. “She looked out for Warren, too,” he said, “and they still killed him.”

Sam didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything at all.

“See you tomorrow,” Terran told him.

Sam saluted and watched with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt as the boy drove back toward the road. Once Maddie Chancelor’s little brother was out of sight, he went back, took up his ax again and chopped the rest of the wood with more force than the job truly required.

* * *

MUNGO DONAGHER SURVEYED his bride as she dashed from one end of the ranch house kitchen to the other, grabbing down china plates from the cupboard and inspecting them for God-knew-what. She didn’t bother with cooking—they had Anna Deerhorn to do that, along with the cleaning and other household work—but ever since she’d invited the schoolmaster out for a meal, she’d been in a fine dither of preparation.

“If I didn’t know better,” Mungo said sourly, “I’d think you were taken with that O’Ballivan feller.”

Undine stopped her china-studying and turned to look at him, her eyes wide with innocent affront. “What a dreadful thing to say, Mungo Donagher,” she protested, putting one hand to her glossy black hair and pressing the other to her throat. “There’s only one man for me, and that’s you.”

Mungo knew he was being a damned fool, but he went ahead and believed her anyhow. It would have been hard not to, the way she was looking at him with those big purple eyes of hers. Lord, but she was a pretty thing, and lively in private, too.

He put out his arms, and she came to him with just the briefest hesitation and the smallest sigh. He ignored that, and held her close against him, filling his nostrils with the lemony scent of her hair.

Just then the side door swung open and his youngest, Ben, burst through from outside, clutching a speckled pup in both arms.

“Get that dog out of this house,” Mungo commanded, loosening his hold on Undine and pretending he didn’t notice how quickly she drew back.

The boy swallowed. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the way he was breathing, fast and shallow, usually signaled one of his fits. “Garrett and Landry,” he gasped, “they said they was gonna drown him in the crick!”

“It’d be a favor to me if they did,” Mungo growled. “Save me feeding him.”

Ben held the mutt closer. “Please, Pa,” he pleaded, gasping a little as he parceled out his words. “He’s a good dog, and he’s got a name, too. It’s Neptune.”

“Neptune,” Mungo muttered. “That’s a damn sissy name if I ever heard one.”

Undine shifted, so she was standing just back of Ben. “Let him have the pup, Mungo,” she said quietly. “It’s not so much to ask.”

Undine had a soft spot when it came to critters. Wanted one of those silly little dogs, small enough to ride in a reticule. She’d seen women carrying them around in the big city and been struck by the fancy ever since. Though just what “big city” that was, she’d never shared.

“Critters don’t belong in the house, Undine,” he said patiently.

She rested a light hand on Ben’s shoulder. “The child’s in a state,” she pointed out, as if Mungo didn’t have eyes in his head to see that for himself.

The boy shuddered. He was fragile, as his mother had been, God rest her soul. Elsie had died having him, and sometimes Mungo still felt a pang of grief when he recollected her. For the most part, though, he was glad to be shut of Elsie, same as he was his first wife. Hildy’d given him three strong sons, but she’d been good for nothing much besides. Tended to weeping spells and fits of sorrow. Always pining for the home folks back in Pennsylvania, that was Hildy. One day, with winter coming on, like it was now, he’d herded Garrett, Landry and Rex to town for boots. Hildy had taken his best hunting rifle, gone around behind the chicken coop, stuck the barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

Blew the whole back of her head off, and he’d found her like that.

The memory made him set his jaw. “I don’t like to encourage weakness in my boys, Undine,” he said firmly. “That dog’s small now, but he’ll be big as a yearling calf before you know it.”

Undine tilted her head to one side and gave him that look, the one she got when she meant to have her way. “Ben can keep him in his room for now. You’ll never even know he’s here.”

By that time, Ben was staring up at Undine, openmouthed, his eyes round with amazement.

“Say it’s all right, Mungo,” Undine crooned.

Ben was breathing easier. He turned his gaze slowly back to his father’s face. “I’ll take Neptune to school with me, come Monday mornin’,” he said on a rush of air. “That way, he won’t be getting underfoot around here all day.”

“A dog’s got no business in a schoolhouse,” Mungo groused, testy because he knew he’d been bested. He’d never have given in to the boy, but Undine had ways of making a man wish he’d done otherwise if he went against her grain.

“I can’t leave him here, Pa,” Ben told him. “They’ll hurt him if I do.”

Mungo cursed. “All right,” he said. “All right! But if I trip over that mutt one time—”

A smile lit Ben’s face. “You won’t, Pa. I promise you won’t.” With that he ran for the back stairs, still squeezing that infernal pup.

“He’ll grow up to be just like that Singleton fella, if this keeps on,” Mungo muttered. He shook his head just to think of one of his sons, with Donagher blood flowing in his veins, mewling over some stray bitch’s get found by the side of the road. It would have been a far better thing, to his mind, if Garrett and Landry had drowned that useless hank of hair and hide and been done with it.

Undine stepped in close, put the cool, smooth palms of her hands to either side of his face. “You’re too hard on him,” she said, breathing the words more than saying them. “He’s barely twelve years old, Mungo.”

“When I was twelve years old,” Mungo rumbled, “I was mining coal in Kentucky. Supporting my ma and two sisters.” It still plagued him sometimes, the memory of those hard and hopeless days—never saw the sunshine, it seemed, or drew in a breath of clean air. One day, he’d just had enough. Laid down his shovel for good and headed west, working as a roustabout for the Army as far as Ohio, then taking whatever job he could to patch together a living.

In time, he’d saved up a good bit of money, and then, when he was twenty-one, he’d struck it lucky in the California gold fields and bought himself the beginnings of the vast cattle ranch he owned today. Still troubled his conscience, now and then, the way he’d left Ma and the girls to look out for themselves, but he reckoned they’d managed. He’d sent them money, when he could, but never got so much as a letter back to say thanks.

It was like his mother to hold a grudge, and mostly likely she was dead by now anyway. He wondered sometimes how his sisters had fared, if they’d married and had children, but he’d long since resigned himself to not knowing.

Undine touched his top shirt button, brought him back from his somber wanderings. “Times are different now,” she said. “Folks live gentler than they used to.”

“You’re in a kindly frame of mind today,” Mungo remarked fondly, resting his forehead against Undine’s.

She smiled, pulling back to look into his eyes. “Maybe it would be a good thing,” she said, very quietly, “to send Ben away to school. There are some fine places in San Francisco. We could take him there, get him settled, and have ourselves a little honeymoon trip in the bargain.”

Mungo frowned. “That would cost a pretty penny,” he said.

“The boy would be making his own way in no time,” Undine reasoned. Again she smiled, and even though Mungo knew he was being handled like a hog balking at a gate, he didn’t mind. “And you’d never miss the money. You’re the richest man in this part of the Arizona Territory, if not the whole of it. And I would so enjoy being fitted for some fine dresses, instead of ordering ready-mades out of Maddie Chancelor’s silly catalogs.” She sighed and her eyes glistened, wistful and faraway. “Sometimes I get such a loneliness for the city, stuck out here the way we are, it’s like an ache inside me. Makes me just about frantic to get away.”

Her words struck a chill in the depths of Mungo’s crusty soul. Undine was like a brightly plumed bird, a spot of color in a grim landscape. Without her, the days would be a hollow round of hard work, and the nights—well, they’d be unbearable.

“You’re not thinkin’ about leavin’ me, are you?” he asked, his voice so hoarse it felt like rusty barbed wire coming out of his throat. He’d met Undine on a cattle buying trip up toward Phoenix, a year before, wooed her with what geegaws he could find in the shops, and brought her home as his wife. She’d been reluctant, until he’d shown her the size of the herd he and the boys would be driving back down to Haven.

“A lady thinks about all sorts of things,” she admitted. “Please, Mungo. If I have to pass the winter in this place, I might go mad.”

Talk of madness made Mungo profoundly uneasy, deep in his spirit. Undine didn’t know about Hildy and the way she’d given up on living; he’d told her very little about his two previous marriages, other than to say that Garrett, Landry and Rex were by his first wife and Ben by his second.

“The boys can handle the ranch for a few months,” Undine wheedled, looking up at him with imploring, luminous eyes.

Mungo huffed out an exasperated breath. “Leave them in charge,” he said, “and we’d be lucky if we came back to an inch of land and a bale of moldy hay next spring.”

“You’ve got that banker, Mr. James, to ride herd on them,” she replied. He knew by her tone that she was stepping lightly, picking her way from one idea to the next, though she’d long since mapped out the route in her mind. She bit her plump lower lip. “I might just have to go by myself if you won’t come with me.”

Mungo was no fool. He knew that if Undine wanted to go to San Francisco, or anywhere else, she’d find a way to do it, with or without him. He’d never dared to ask how she’d wound up in Phoenix, but he was pretty sure it had to do with some man. “I’ll think about it,” he said in a low voice, but it felt as if the words had been torn out of him, like a stubborn stump wrenched from the ground by a team of mules.

She brightened, pretty as a pansy after a summer rain. “Good,” she whispered. “That’s good.”

* * *

SAM SADDLED the nameless horse an hour after sunset, consulted the written instructions the major had given him before he’d left Stone Creek, even though he knew them by heart. Across the river, on the Mexican side, he was to find a certain cantina, order a drink and wait. He’d be told where to go from there, to meet up with Vierra.

The river was wide, shallow and washed with starlight. He made the crossing without getting his pant legs wet above the knee, though his boots filled to overflowing.

On the far bank, in a copse of whispering cottonwoods, he dismounted, emptied the boots and pulled them back on. He’d have to sleep in them tonight; if he took them off, he’d never get them on again. Best to let them dry to the contours of his feet, the way they had a hundred times before.

Sam swung back up into the saddle, headed slowly for the little cluster of lights where the trees gave way to open ground, and the village of Refugio. Here the buildings were mostly adobe, with a few teetering wooden shacks interspersed, and even though he probably could have hurled a stone back across the border, the two places were as different as Santa Fe and Boston.

He found the cantina easily, drawn by the sound of a guitar, and left the horse standing in the dooryard, among the burros and other mounts already there, nibbling on patches of grass. Two of the horses, he noticed, bore the distinctive Donagher brand, a D with a bar through it. Major Blackstone had sketched it for him, on the margin of his orders.

The lintel over the cantina door was low and Sam ducked his head as he entered. The clientele was mostly Mexican, as were the bartender and the girl serving drinks, but the cowboys standing at the bar were outsiders, like him. The pair of them turned their heads as Sam took a place at an empty table, their eyes narrowed with interest.

He nodded a greeting, wondering if the men were Mungo Donagher’s sons, or simply rode for his outfit. A spread that size required a lot of range help.

The girl took her time traipsing over to him through the smoky gloom. She wore a white dress, set off her smooth brown shoulders, and her dark hair was wound into a tight knot at the back of her head. She smiled, with a virgin’s shyness, and asked in Spanish what his pleasure would be.

Sam was briefly reminded of Bird, selling herself as well as liquor across the river at Oralee Pringle’s saloon. His stomach soured around the light supper he’d made for himself, but he responded to the smile as best he could. He asked for whiskey, and the girl flounced away to fetch his order.

The pair of riders had turned back to their shared bottle, though Sam suspected they were keeping an eye on him in the long, dingy mirror behind the bar. Both of them wore side arms under their dusty coats, one a right-handed gun, the other a southpaw. He unsnapped the narrow leather strap that kept his own .45 secure in the holster.

The girl came back with his whiskey. Sam paid her and left the drink to sit on the table, untouched. The barmaid lingered, her brown eyes thoughtful and unblinking, and then suddenly plopped herself onto his lap, draping her arms around his neck.

Tentatively, Sam hooked an arm around her slender waist.

She nuzzled his neck, sending shivers through him before nibbling her way up to his ear to whisper, this time in halting English, “Vierra, he will meet you behind the church, beside the grave of Carlos Tiendos, one hour from now. In the meantime—” she tasted his earlobe “—you could come up the stairs with me.”

Sam shifted uncomfortably. He’d gone a while without a woman, so the invitation had its appeal, but a particular storekeeper/postmistress had taken up squatter’s rights in the back of his mind, and that ruined everything. Besides, he needed to keep his thoughts on the task ahead of him, meet up with Vierra and work out a plan.

“They are watching you,” the girl persisted. “Those two Americanos at the bar.”

Sam traced the outward curve of one of her breasts with one finger, so they’d have something to look at. He might as well have been running a hand over a wooden Indian outside a cigar store, for all the excitement he felt. Damn that Maddie Chancelor, anyhow. “Who are they?” he whispered back.

She trembled at his caress, though Sam felt as though the blood in his veins had turned to high-country slush. “Donaghers,” she answered, confirming his suspicions. “Garrett and Landry. They don’t take to strangers, so you must be careful.”

Sam nodded almost imperceptibly. If what Terran had told him about the three eldest Donagher brothers was true, he’d have a run-in with them sooner or later, but this night, he didn’t want to be bothered.

“Come upstairs with me,” the girl reiterated. “They will guess that I am passing a message if you don’t.”

Sam forced a lusty chuckle, for the benefit of the Donaghers and anybody else who might be paying attention. “Lead the way,” he said under his breath.

She bounced to her feet, grabbed his hand and hauled him toward a set of three stone steps, around the far end of the bar. He swatted her lightly on the bottom as they passed the Donaghers and she giggled mischievously.

“My name,” she told him, closing the door of a dark room behind them, “is Rosita.”

Sam stood warily, waiting for his eyes to adjust, taking a measure of the place with all his remaining senses. He’d been led into more than one trap in his life, usually by a pretty woman full of promises, and he was absolutely still until he was sure they were alone.

Rosita raised herself onto her toes, slipped her arms around his neck again and kissed him on the mouth. “We might as well make good use of the time,” she teased in her native language.

Sam laid his hands on either side of her waist and set her gently away from him. Thin moonlight seeped into the room, through a single, narrow window, outlining a narrow cot, a washstand and a simple wooden chest with a candlestick on top.

He crossed to the chest, took a match from his shirt pocket and lit the candle. In the flickering light, he noted the crucifix on the wall above the cot, and wondered about Rosita.

“Is this your room?” he asked.

He must have spoken Spanish, because she understood him readily. She tilted her head to one side, her mouth forming a fetching little pout. “Sí,” she said.

He glanced at the crucifix again. “You bring men here?”

She nodded, took another step toward him.

He held up a hand, halting her progress.

Rosita looked as though he’d slapped her. “I am not pretty to you?” she asked softly, this time in English.

“It isn’t that,” Sam said, and thrust a hand through his hair. He’d left his hat at the table, with his glass of whiskey.

“You do not like women?”

He chuckled. “Oh, I’m right fond of women,” he said.

She tugged at one side of her ruffly bodice, about to pull her dress down.

“Stop,” Sam told her. Then, at her injured expression, he drew a five dollar gold piece from his vest pocket and extended it.

Rosita was clearly confused, and her dark eyes rounded at the gleaming coin resting in his palm, then climbed, questioning, to his face.

“That’s for keeping your clothes on,” he told her gruffly.

She darted forward, snatched the gold piece from his hand and took a couple of hasty steps back, dropping it down the front of her dress. “Nobody ever pay me to keep clothes on,” she marveled. Then, watching him closely, she blinked. “Downstairs...they think we—” Rosita flushed and fell silent.

“Let them think it,” Sam said. Then he leaned down, put one hand on the cot, with its thin, lumpy mattress, and gave it a few quick pushes, so the metal springs creaked. The sound was loud enough to raise speculation downstairs, even over the melancholy strum of the guitar.

Rosita put one hand over her mouth and giggled.

Sam pulled part of his shirttail out and rumpled his hair.

“You have folks around here?” he asked, watching her face. He’d have bet his last pound of coffee beans that she hadn’t seen her sixteenth birthday yet. “Someplace you could go?”

She shook her head.

“How about the padre, over at the church? Maybe he could help.”

“Help?” Rosita echoed, obviously puzzled.

Sam sighed. “Never mind,” he said. He consulted his watch. He was supposed to meet Vierra in twenty minutes. “This church you told me about—where is it?”

Rosita went to the window to point the place out, and Sam stood behind her. The adobe bell tower was clearly visible, even in the starlight. He could get there on foot, in plenty of time.

He was turning to go when Rosita caught hold of his arm. “Vierra,” she said in an urgent whisper. “Do not trust him too much.”

Sam cupped Rosita’s small, earnest face with one hand. “Thanks,” he told her, and headed for the door.

She followed him down the stone steps and he made a point of tucking his shirttail back in as soon as he was visible to the patrons of the cantina. He smoothed his hair, crossed to the table and reclaimed his hat. As an afterthought, he downed the whiskey, and it burned its way to his stomach.

He knew the Donaghers would follow, and as soon as he got outside, he ducked around the corner of the cantina, into the deep shadows, instead of heading for his horse.

Sure enough, Mungo’s sons came outside a moment later.

“Where’d he go?” one of them asked the other.

“Maybe the outhouse,” the other replied.

Sam waited. If they bothered his horse, he’d have to deal with them, but they were either drunk or just plain stupid, maybe both, and headed for the privy at the far side of the dooryard.

He watched as one of them slammed at the outhouse wall with the butt of his gun and bellowed, “You in there, mister?”

The second brother tried the door, pulling on the wire hook outside, and it swung open with a squeal of rusted hinges.

“Hey!” the first brother yelled, putting his head through the opening.

Sam eased out of his hiding place.

Both the Donaghers stepped into the outhouse.

Sam shut the door on them and fastened the sturdy wire hook around the twisted nail so they’d be a while getting out again.

A roar sounded from inside and the whole privy rocked on the hard-packed dirt. Sam grinned, mounted his horse and rode for the church to meet Vierra.

He could still hear the Donagher brothers yelling when he got where he was going. The graveyard was enclosed behind a high rock wall, and there was no gate in evidence, so he stood in the saddle and vaulted over, landing on his feet.

He took a moment to assess his surroundings, as he had in Rosita’s room over the cantina, and spotted the red glow of Vierra’s cheroot about a hundred yards away, beneath a towering cottonwood.

He approached, one hand resting on the handle of his Colt, just in case.

Vierra’s grin flashed white and he solidified from a shadow to a man, ground out the cheroot with the toe of one boot. “There is some trouble at the cantina?” he asked, inclining his head in that direction. The sound of splintering wood, mingled with bellowed curses, swelled in the otherwise peaceful night.

Good thing I didn’t leave my horse behind, Sam thought. They might have shot him out of pure spite.

He shrugged. “Just a couple of cowpokes breaking out of the privy,” he said. “I reckon they would either have jumped me or followed me here, if I hadn’t corralled them for a few minutes.”

Vierra laughed. “The Donaghers,” he said.

Sam nodded, took another look around. It was a typical cemetery, full of stone monuments and crude wooden crosses. He recalled the crucifix on Rosita’s wall, and it sobered him. “What do you have to tell me here that you couldn’t have said last night in Haven?” he asked.

Vierra reached into his vest and produced a thick fold of papers. “These are the places where the banditos have struck on this side of the border.” He crouched, spreading a large hand-drawn map on the ground, and Sam joined him to have a look. “Here, at Rancho Los Cruces, “ Vierra said, placing a gloved fingertip on the spot, “they stole some two hundred head of cattle and left four vaqueros dead. Here, in the canyon, they robbed a train.”

Sam listened intently, committing the map to memory, just in case Vierra wasn’t inclined to part with it.

“They used dynamite to cause an avalanche,” Vierra explained, lingering at the place marked as Reoso Canyon. “The train, of course, was forced to stop. They took a shipment of gold, and the wife and young daughter of a patron were captured, as well. The wife was found later—” Vierra stopped, and his throat worked. “She had been raped and dragged to death behind a horse. There has been no word of the girl.”

“Christ,” Sam rasped, closing his eyes for a moment.

Vierra was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was flat. “I was told that you would give me a map corresponding to this one. Showing all the places this gang has struck on your side of the border.”

Sam nodded, reached into the inside pocket of his coat and handed over a careful copy of the drawing the major had given him. “Except for the woman and the girl,” he said as Vierra unfolded the paper to examine it in a shaft of moonlight, “it’s a version of what you just showed me. Rustling. Train robberies. They cleaned out a couple of banks, too, and killed a freight wagon driver.”

“Our superiors,” Vierra observed, his gaze fixed on Sam’s map, “they believe we are dealing with the same band of men. Do you know why?”

Sam knew it wasn’t a question. It was a prompt. “Yes,” he said after a moment of hesitation. “They leave a mark.”

Vierra folded Sam’s map carefully and tucked it away inside his vest. “A stake, driven into the ground, always with a bit of blood-soaked cloth attached.”

Bile rose in the back of Sam’s throat. He’d seen the signature several times, and just the recollection of it turned his stomach. He nodded, took another moment before he spoke. “I suppose you’ve considered that it might be the Donaghers,” he said. That was Major Blackstone’s theory, and, since his conversation with Terran Chancelor that afternoon, regarding the Debney shooting, the possibility had stuck in his mind like a burr.

A muscle bunched in Vierra’s jaw. “Sí,” he said. “But there is no proof.”

Sam waited.

“The patrons who hired me, they want the right men. No mistakes,” Vierra went on. “And I do not have the option, as you do, of shooting them through the heart and bringing them in draped over their saddles. The patrons want them alive. The streets of a certain village, a day or two south of here, will run with their blood.”

A chill trickled down Sam’s spine. He had no love for these murdering bastards, and would just as soon draw on them as take his next breath, but the law was the law. Unless one or more of them forced his hand, they would stand trial, in an American court, their fate decided by a judge and jury. He didn’t give a damn what happened to them after that, but by God, he’d get them that far, whether Vierra got in his way or not. “I guess it all depends on who catches up to them first,” he said moderately.

Both men rose to their feet. Vierra surrendered the map he’d brought with him. “There is a train making its way north in ten days,” he said. “I have told a few people that there will be a fortune in oro federale aboard. We will see if the rumor reaches the right ears.”

Federal gold, Sam reflected. Cheese in a mousetrap.

“And you’ve got a pretty good idea where they’ll try to intercept the train,” he ventured, recalling Vierra’s map in perfect detail. “That railroad trestle downriver from here.”

Vierra smiled. “I am impressed,” he said. “The new schoolmaster has paid attention to the lesson.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“YOU WANT ME to do what?” Maddie gaped at Sam O’Ballivan’s copper bathtub, ensconced squarely in front of the schoolhouse stove. Terran had left the store early that morning, of his own volition, and she’d barely recovered from her brother’s change of heart when back he came, breathless from running all the way.

“Mr. O’Ballivan says to come quick, if you wouldn’t mind!” he’d cried.

Maddie had frowned, concerned. Elias James, the town banker and, for all practical intents and purposes, her employer, since he oversaw Mungo’s investments, expected the mercantile door to be unlocked by nine o’clock sharp, and in the six years she’d been running the general store, she’d never failed to do that. It was now eight forty-five. “Is there some emergency?” she’d asked, already untying the apron strings she’d just tied a moment before.

“He says it’s important,” Terran had insisted.

And here she was, standing in the schoolhouse, staring in consternation at Sam O’Ballivan and the bathtub she’d sold him herself.

“I want you,” Sam repeated patiently, “to show Violet Perkins how to take a bath.”

Maddie knew Violet, of course, and had sympathy for her. The poor child hung around the store sometimes, when school was out, hoping for a hard-boiled egg from the crock next to the counter, or a piece of penny candy. She mooned over the few ready-made dresses Maddie carried—most women sewed their children’s garments at home, as well as their own—and huddled by the stove for hours when it was cold or rainy outside. Maddie often indulged her with a plate of leftovers from her own larder at the rear of the store, pretending the food would go to waste if Violet didn’t eat it.

“Here?” she asked, noting that Sam had set out the bar of French-milled soap and the towel he’d purchased with the bathtub. “In the schoolhouse?”

“What better place?” Sam reasoned. He’d been sitting behind his desk, wearing spectacles and poring over a thick volume when she burst in. At Maddie’s appearance, he’d set aside the glasses and stood. “A school is a place to learn, isn’t it? And Violet needs to know how to take a bath.”

Flummoxed, Maddie spread her hands. “What about the other students?” she asked. “You can’t expect the child to undress in front of the boys—”

Sam smiled. “Of course not. The girls can stay—I suspect some of them could do with a demonstration. I’ll take the boys down to the river for their lesson.” He held up the cake of yellow soap from yesterday’s marketing. “I’ve noticed that Violet is generally the first to raise her hand. Let her think she’s volunteering.”

Maddie glanced at the schoolhouse clock, torn. It was nine o’clock, straight-up, and the mercantile was still closed. At that very moment Mr. James was probably looking out his office window, the bank being kitty-corner from the store, wondering why the customers couldn’t get in to buy things and whipping up a temper because of it.

“Why me?” she asked.

Sam smiled again. “You’re the only woman I know in Haven besides Bird of Paradise over at the Rattlesnake Saloon. I don’t guess it would be fitting to bring her in to teach bathing, though she’d probably agree if I asked her.”

Maddie sniffed. “It certainly wouldn’t be fitting,” she said, wondering how Sam O’Ballivan had come to make the woman’s acquaintance. Damned if she’d ask him, even if her life depended on it. She approached the tub and peered inside, already unfastening her cuff buttons to roll up her sleeves. “We will need water, Mr. O’Ballivan.”

“I’ve got some heating in the back room,” he said. “No sense in lugging it in here and pouring it into the tub if you weren’t going to agree.”

She sighed. “What about the store?”

“Well, I figured, as the owner, you could—”

Maddie flushed. “I am not the owner. I manage it for someone else, and I am accountable to Mr. James, at the bank, who serves as trustee.”

Sam frowned. “Oh,” he said.

“Yes,” Maddie confirmed. “Oh. By now, there are probably people standing three-deep on the sidewalk, complaining because they can’t get in to buy salt and tobacco and kitchen matches.”

Sam brightened. “I think I have a solution,” he said. “I’ll take the boys to the river another day. In the meantime, they can learn how a mercantile operates. We’ll make a morning of it.”

“You intend to take over my store?” Maddie asked, affronted. “Do you think it’s so easy that any idiot can do it?”

The schoolmaster smiled. “I don’t regard myself as an idiot, as a general rule. How hard can it be, filling flour bags and measuring cloth off a bolt?”

Maddie came to an instant simmer, but before she could tell the man what she thought of his blithe and patently arrogant assumption that keeping a thriving mercantile was something he could do one-handed, the pupils began to straggle in. She swallowed her outrage and stood as circumspectly as she could, letting her gaze bore into Sam O’Ballivan like a pointy stick.

When everyone was settled in their seats, Sam announced his plan. The boys would help him tend the mercantile, the girls would remain at the schoolhouse for a “hygiene” lesson.

The boys cheered and stomped their feet, and rushed for the door at an offhand signal from Sam. The girls sat, wide-eyed, waiting for enlightenment. Maddie would have bet not a one of them could have defined the word hygiene, but they had noticed the bathtub. They were all agog at the spectacle.

“Miss Chancelor will give the demonstration,” Sam went on, looking worriedly from face to face. “But we’ll need a volunteer to get into the tub.”

Sure enough, Violet’s hand shot up. “I’ll do it, Mr. SOB,” she cried.

“Mr. O’Ballivan,” Sam countered easily. “That’s good, Violet. I appreciate your willingness to take the initiative.”

Violet beamed. “Can I go to the privy first?”

The other girls giggled and Sam silenced them with a ponderous sweep of his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “You do that.”

While Violet was gone to the privy, he brought in four buckets of hot water and emptied them into the tub. The remaining girls watched, barely able to suppress their amusement.

When he’d set aside the last bucket, Sam turned to address them. “If even one of you makes fun of Violet,” he said, “you’ll find yourself writing ‘I will not bully smaller children’ one hundred times on the blackboard. Is that clear to everyone?”

The girls nodded, subdued.

Sam dusted his hands together. “Good,” he said, and turned to Maddie. “Now, Miss Chancelor, if I might have the key to the mercantile—”

She surrendered it, slapping it down into his palm with a little more force than strictly necessary.

“Thank you,” he said, tossing the large brass key once and catching it with an aplomb that made Maddie grit her teeth.

And so it was that Maddie came to illustrate the finer points of taking a bath, using Violet Perkins as a model.

* * *

MADDIE HAD BEEN RIGHT, Sam thought as he opened the mercantile for the day’s commerce. There were eight women waiting on the sidewalk, shopping baskets in hand, tapping their toes in impatience. He greeted them with a nod and made his crew of boys wait until the ladies had swept inside.

It was the contrary nature of folks, he reckoned, that on this particular morning, everybody in town wanted to get their marketing done. Had Maddie followed her usual routine, there most likely wouldn’t have been so much urgency.

He set the boys to sweeping and dusting canned goods while the female population of Haven made their various selections.

“Where,” demanded a narrow-faced old biddy with hooded, hawklike eyes and a nose to match, “is Maddie?”

Sam opened his mouth to answer, but before he could get a word out, Terran cut him off. “She’s over to the schoolhouse, giving Violet Perkins a bath!” he crowed.

“Teaching a hygiene lesson,” Sam corrected quietly.

“Well,” huffed the Hawk Woman, “it’s about time somebody look that child in hand.”

“Yes,” Sam said, opening the cash register drawer to tally the funds on hand. “It is about time.”

The woman blinked.

Sam silently congratulated himself on a bull’s-eye.

By ten-thirty, he’d taken in four dollars and forty-eight cents, and made careful note of every transaction, so Maddie couldn’t say he’d fouled up her books. Then, figuring the hygiene lesson ought to be over, and Violet decent again, he dispatched Terran and young Ben Donagher to the schoolhouse to find out.

When they came back, Maddie was with them, the front of her dress sodden and her hair moist around her face. He couldn’t rightly tell if that sparkle in her whiskey eyes was temper or satisfaction with a job well done.

“I see my store is still standing,” she remarked.

Sam grinned. “I trust my school has fared as well,” he parried, reaching for his hat.

“You’ll have to empty the bathtub yourself,” Maddie said, taking her storekeeper’s apron down off a peg and donning it. “Violet fairly gleams with cleanliness. One of the other girls aired out her dress while she was soaking.”

Sam sent the boys trooping back to the schoolhouse, lingering to take out his wallet. “Next time Violet comes in the store,” he said, laying a bill down on the counter, “you outfit her with a new one. Say there was a drawing and she won.”

Maddie regarded him solemnly. He still couldn’t tell whether she was pleased with him or wanted to peel off a strip of his hide. “You lie very easily, Mr. O’Ballivan,” she said.

Well, that answered one of his questions. “Kids like Violet run into more than their fair share of humiliation, it seems to me,” he replied. “If a lie can spare them embarrassment, then I’m all for it.”

She had the good grace to blush.

He waited until he’d reached the doorway before putting on his hat. “We’re due at the Donaghers’s supper table at seven o’clock,” he reminded her. “Best have Terran hitch up that buckboard you use for deliveries unless you want to ride two to a horse.”

Maddie put the bill he’d left on the counter into the cash register and headed for a display of calico dresses, probably to choose one for Violet. “We’ll take the buckboard,” she said without looking at him.

Sam smiled to himself as he closed the door behind him.

Damn, he thought. It would have been a fine thing to share a saddle with Miss Maddie Chancelor. A fine thing indeed.

* * *

SCHOOL HAD LET OUT for the day and Sam was seated at his desk, going over the map Vierra had given him the night before, when a small, impossibly thin woman stepped shyly over the threshold. She wore a bonnet and a faded cotton dress, and he knew who she was before she introduced herself.

He refolded the map, set a paper weight on top of it, and stood. “Sam O’Ballivan,” he said by way of introduction, and added a cordial nod.

“Mrs. John Perkins,” Violet’s mother responded, lingering just inside the open door.

“Come in,” Sam urged when she didn’t show any signs of moving.

She hesitated another moment, then thrust herself into motion. He noticed then, as she approached, that she was carrying a basket over one arm, filled with brown eggs. She set the whole works on his desk, straightened her spine, and looked up at him.

“I guess my Violet had a bath today at school,” she said.

Sam waited. She’d brought him eggs, which might be construed as a peaceful gesture, but you never knew with women. They could be crafty as all get-out. Most of the time, when they said one thing, they meant another. They expected a man to learn their language and converse in it like a native.

Mrs. Perkins drew herself up to her full, unremarkable height, the top of her head barely reaching Sam’s shirt pocket. Under the brim of that bonnet, her eyes spoke eloquently of her discouragement and her fierce pride. “I came to thank you for making a lesson of it,” she said. “Violet’s real pleased that she was chosen for an example.”

“Violet,” Sam said honestly, “is a fine girl.”

Tears brimmed along the woman’s lower lashes and her pointed little chin jutted out. “It’s been so hard since John was killed. I love my Violet, I truly do, but betwixt keepin’ food on the table and a roof over our heads, I fear I’ve let some things go.”

Sam wanted to lay a hand on Mrs. Perkins’s bony shoulder, but it would be a familiar gesture, so he refrained. “Any time you want the use of my bathtub,” he said awkwardly, “you just say the word. I’ll fill it with hot water and make myself scarce.”

Mrs. Perkins blinked, sniffled, looked away for a moment. “That’s right kind,” she said. “I can do better by my girl, and I will, too. I swear I will, Mr. O’Ballivan. Short of goin’ to work for Oralee Pringle, though, I can’t think how.”

Sam took an egg from the basket and examined it as thoroughly as if he’d never seen one before. “I do favor eggs,” he said. “I’d buy a dozen from you, every other day, and pay a good price for a chicken now and then, too, if you’ve got any to spare.”

“Them eggs was meant as a present,” Mrs. Perkins said, but she looked hopeful. “I sell a few, but folks around here mostly keep their own chickens.”

“Bring me a dozen, day after tomorrow,” Sam replied. “I’ll give fifty cents for them, if you throw in a stewing hen every now and then.”

For the first time since she’d entered the schoolhouse, Mrs. Perkins smiled. It was tentative, and her eyes were wary, as if she thought he might be playing a joke on her. “That’s an awful lot of money, for twelve eggs and a chicken,” she said carefully.

“I’m a man of princely tastes,” Sam replied. His mouth watered, just looking at those eggs. He’d have fried half of them up for a feast if he wasn’t dining at the Donagher ranch that night.

It would be interesting to see if those two fools he’d locked in that Mexican outhouse showed up at the table, and more interesting still to pass an evening in Maddie Chancelor’s company.

“You want that chicken plucked and dressed out, or still flappin’ its wings?” Violet’s mother asked.

Sam took a moment to shift back to the present moment. “It would be a favor to me if it was ready for the kettle,” he said.

Mrs. Perkins beamed. “Fifty cents,” she said dreamily. “I don’t know as I’ll recall what to do with so much money.”

Sam took up the eggs. “I’ll put these by, and give you back your basket,” he told the woman. She waited while he performed the errand, and looked surprised when he came back and handed her two quarters along with the battered wicker container. “I like to pay in advance,” he said as casually as he could.

To his surprise, she stood on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek and fled with the basket, fifty cents and the better part of her dignity.

CHAPTER FIVE

MADDIE DROVE UP in front of the schoolhouse promptly at six o’clock that evening, the last of the daylight rimming her chestnut hair in fire. She managed the decrepit buckboard and pitiful team as grandly as if she’d been at the reins of a fancy surrey drawn by a matched pair of Tennessee trotters.

Sam lingered a few moments on the steps of that one-room school, savoring the sight of her, etching it into his memory. Once he left Haven for good, and married up with Abigail, as it was his destiny to do, he wanted to be able to recall Maddie Chancelor in every exquisite detail, just as she looked right then, wearing a blue woolen dress, with a matching bonnet dangling down her straight, slender back by its ribbons.

He felt a shifting, sorrowful ache of pleasure, watching her from under the brim of his hat, and the recalcitrant expression on her face did nothing to dampen the sad joy of taking her in.

“Well,” she called, after rattling to a shambly stop, “are we going to the Donaghers’ or not?”

Sam bit back a grin, tempted to reach out and give the bell rope a good wrench before he stepped down, announcing to all creation that he was having supper with the best-looking woman he’d ever laid eyes on. But some things were just too private to tell, even though nobody but him would have known the meaning of that clanging peal.

His insides reverberated, just as surely as if he’d gone ahead and pulled that rope with all his might.

“Evening, Miss Chancelor,” he said, approaching the wagon. She’d hung kerosene lanterns on either side of the buckboard, to light their way a little after darkness rolled over the landscape like a blanket, but she’d yet to strike a match to the wicks. She was a prudent soul, Maddie was, and not inclined to waste costly fuel before there was a true need for it.

She showed no signs of letting go of the reins so he could take them. He resigned himself to being driven through the center of town by a lady, and climbed up beside her, swallowing a swell of masculine pride.

“I don’t mind telling you,” she said, “that sitting down at Mungo Donagher’s table is just about the last thing in the world I want to do this evening.”

Sam smiled. The prospect wasn’t real high on his list, either, but there was a possibility he’d meet up with Donagher’s elder sons, and that was the only reason he’d accepted the invitation. Like Vierra, he was already half convinced that Mungo’s boys were involved in the outlaw gang that had been plaguing both the Arizona Territory and the State of Sonora for several years, but he needed proof—a quantity that was most often gathered one small, seemingly unimportant fact at a time.

“Terran told me about Warren Debney,” he said quietly, just to get it out of the way. If he hadn’t spoken up, the knowledge would have remained a gulf between them, and he wanted as little distance as possible.

He felt her stiffen beside him, and she set the buckboard rolling with a hard slap of the reins and a lurch that nearly unseated him, since he hadn’t braced for it. “Terran,” she said, “sometimes talks too much.”

Sam resettled his hat, needing something to occupy his hands, for it was obvious Maddie wasn’t about to surrender the reins. “He said one of the Donagher brothers probably fired the fatal shot,” he went on, slow and quiet. “What do you think, Maddie?”

She was quiet for a long time, so long that Sam feared she didn’t intend to answer at all. Finally, though, she said, “I believe it was Rex. He’s the meanest of the three, and he and Warren had had several run-ins just prior to the shooting.”

“You were with him? Debney, I mean—when he was shot?”

She swallowed visibly, nodded, keeping her gaze fixed on the road into the main part of town. “He died in my arms,” she said, so quietly that Sam barely heard her over the hooves of those worn-out horses and the rattle of fittings.

He wanted to put his arm around her, but he knew it would cause her to pull away, so he didn’t. They rounded a bend and passed the mercantile, then the Rattlesnake Saloon. Charlie Wilcox’s old nag stood out front, patiently waiting to bear him home on its swayed back. “I’m sorry that happened to you, Maddie Chancelor,” Sam said.

“So am I,” she replied.

Sam shifted on the hard wagon seat. “It must be difficult for you—sitting down to take a meal with somebody who might have killed your man. I didn’t know about that when I roped you into coming along, and if you want to change your mind, I’ll understand.”

At long last she looked him in the eye. They were traveling east, with the setting sun at their backs, headed for the river road that led to the Donagher ranch. Sam reckoned that, after a mile or two, they’d have to stop so he could step down and light those lanterns, but for now, all he cared about was whatever Maddie was about to say.

“It makes me nervous when any of the Donagher boys come into the store,” she said frankly. “Just the same, I wouldn’t miss a chance to look them straight in the eye and let them know they’re not fooling me for one moment. They got away with shooting Warren, and stringing up poor, harmless John Perkins, too. Maybe they fooled the law, but they can’t fool God, and they can’t fool me.”

Sam sighed as they passed the row of businesses along the main street, all of them closed up and dark, like Maddie Chancelor’s broken heart probably was. He didn’t care for the idea of her drawing the Donaghers’ attention, taunting them with her suspicions. It was akin to stirring a hornet’s nest with a chunk of firewood.

“You probably ought to stay in town tonight. I’d be obliged, though, for the loan of your wagon.”

To his surprise, and cautious delight, she favored him with a soft smile and a shake of her head. The subtle scent of her lush hair teased his senses. “I guess the team and buckboard would be safe in your keeping,” she said, “and I do appreciate your kind concern. But I’ve looked after myself for a long time, and anyway, the Donaghers wouldn’t dare bother me in Mungo’s presence.” Humor flickered in her brown eyes. “Besides, there is the question of your safety, Mr. O’Ballivan.”

He straightened his spine. “I’m not afraid of any of the Donaghers, or all of them put together,” he said.

“I know that,” Maddie replied. “But there’s one Donagher you’d be wise to look out for, and that’s Undine.”

They were passing out of town, and Sam gave up on the hope that Maddie would change her mind and go back to her quarters above the mercantile, instead of venturing into the snakes’ den, with him. “Undine,” he repeated, confused. Unless the lady had a derringer tucked up the sleeve of her dress, he couldn’t imagine how she’d do him any harm.

“She’s set her sights on you,” Maddie said. “Mungo won’t take kindly to that. He’s mean jealous, and he’d as soon kill any man she takes a fancy to as look at him.”

Sam pondered that bit of information, then took a risk. “Did she ‘take a fancy’ to Warren Debney?” he asked. “Or maybe John Perkins?”

“Warren was dead and buried long before Mungo brought Undine to Haven as his bride,” Maddie said, and her eyes took on a haunted expression. “As for Mr. Perkins, she wouldn’t have given him a second look. But she has taken a liking to you. If you ignore that, it will be at your peril.”

Sam rubbed his chin with one hand, as he often did when he was thinking. He’d shaved for the occasion, and his skin still felt raw from the stroke of the new razor. His new white shirt itched, too, so he shrugged inside it, in a vain attempt to find relief. “You sound mighty certain,” he said at some length, “about Undine’s flirtations being potentially fatal for the object of her attentions, that is. Something must have happened to convince you.”

“It’s just a feeling,” Maddie said, narrowing her wondrous eyes a little upon the darkening road. “Woman’s intuition.”

“I think there’s more to it than that,” Sam persisted.

She met his eyes. “Haven is small. There are plenty of stories going around, and I hear most of them because just about everybody in this part of the territory makes their way to the mercantile on a regular basis. Mungo’s temper is legendary—they say he once beat Landry, the middle son by his first wife, nearly to death for leaving a gate open. Ben—the little one—is a friend of Terran’s, and sometimes passes the night with us if the weather is bad enough that he can’t get home. That boy is terrified of his father—and his brothers, too. I always get the feeling, whenever I’m around him, that there are things he wants to tell me—tell anybody—but he’s afraid to speak up.”

“He was in on dangling Singleton down the well,” Sam said. For the sake of the peace, he didn’t add along with your brother. “I’ve been keeping an eye on Ben, trying to size him up. He’s smart as hell, but he’s skittish, too. Yesterday in class somebody dropped the dictionary and he about jumped out of his hide.”

Maddie bit her lower lip. “I worry about Ben, out there alone with those rowdy men,” she confessed. “Undine seems fond of him, though. If it weren’t for her, I don’t think I’d close my eyes at night for fretting about it. If she were to leave—”

It was all but dark by then, and Sam laid a hand over Maddie’s, where she gripped the reins. “Better pull up,” he said, “so I can light those lamps.”

She complied ably, and he got down to attend to the lanterns. When he climbed back into the wagon box, she surprised him by handing over the reins.

“What else can you tell me about Mungo and his boys?” he asked mildly when they’d traveled a ways. The river twisted and wound alongside the narrow track, whispering stories of its own.

“They own just about everything in Haven, save Oralee Pringle’s saloon,” she said, sighing. Then, with reluctance, she reminded him, and maybe herself, “Including the general store.”

In the beginning, Sam had believed the store was Maddie’s, taken comfort in the idea that she had a way to get along, to provide for herself and Terran. Singleton had said, that first day, that they didn’t have any other family, and he’d assumed she must have inherited the mercantile from her father. Then she’d said she ran the place for somebody else and had to account to Mr. James, the banker. It hadn’t occurred to Sam that that “somebody else” might be a Donagher.

“I work for Mungo Donagher,” Maddie affirmed, sounding as if she’d just awakened from a bad dream only to find out it was real. “Mr. James, over at the bank, oversees the accounts, like I told you, but it’s Mungo who pays my wages.”

“I don’t suppose you can afford to offend him by accusing his boys of gunning down Warren Debney,” he said when he’d considered for a while.

“I’m not so sure he didn’t do it himself,” Maddie admitted softly, and when she looked up at Sam, he saw bleak resignation in her eyes. He’d have done or said just about anything, right then, to give her ease, but nothing came to mind.

“What makes you say that?” Sam asked when he’d absorbed the statement.

Maddie was silent for a long time and Sam was beginning to think he’d asked one question too many when she finally answered. “Until he brought Undine home from Phoenix,” she said, “Mungo was courting me. He told me if I went ahead and married Warren, I’d have to give up managing the mercantile.”

Something elemental and dark rose up within Sam, and he was a while putting it right. He felt as protective and as possessive of Maddie as if he’d been the one about to put a ring on her finger instead of Warren Debney. “And if you’d given in? Married Mungo instead of Debney?”

“He’d have signed the store over as a wedding gift,” Maddie recalled, frowning. “A plaything, as he put it.”

It made Sam’s gorge rise, to think of Mungo Donagher touching Maddie, let alone bedding her. “Some women,” he said in his own good time, “would have taken the old coot up on the bargain.”

Maddie pulled her shawl up around her shoulders, against the chill of the evening, and Sam thought she moved a fraction of an inch closer to him. “I’d sooner take up residence upstairs at the Rattlesnake Saloon. It amounts to the same thing.”

Sam hadn’t thought any image could be worse than Maddie throwing in with the head of the Donagher clan, but sure enough, she’d come up with one. He set his jaw and tightened his hold on the reins. At the rate these horses were traveling, they might be on time for breakfast.

* * *

THE LIGHTS of Mungo Donagher’s long, rustic house winked in the thick purplish gloom of the night. Normally, Maddie would sooner have been thrown to the lions than set foot in that place a second time, but with Sam O’Ballivan beside her, she actually enjoyed the prospect. She even hoped she would come face-to-face with Rex Donagher; she’d find a way to let him know what she thought of him and those cur brothers of his, even though she dared not insult their father. Without her job at the mercantile, she and Terran would be worse off than Violet Perkins and her mother, Hittie.

Mungo himself was waiting to greet them when they pulled up in the dooryard. The ground was unadorned by flowers and there were no curtains at the windows. Had Maddie lived in such a house, she would have planted peonies and climbing roses first thing, even if she had to carry water from the river to make them thrive. Her own plants were spindly and pitiful, and wherever she moved them, shadows followed, robbing them of light.

Mungo’s stance was stern and his countenance unwelcoming. Maddie knew it was Sam he mistrusted, not herself, but she felt a quiver of unease in the pit of her stomach just the same. She’d warned Sam, though, and that was all she could do.

He climbed down from the wagon box, extinguished the lamps to save kerosene for the ride back to town, and then extended a hand to Maddie. All that time, Mungo neither moved nor spoke. She felt his displeasure, invisible but real, roiling in the space between them.

“Evening, Mr. Donagher,” Sam said as cheerfully as if Mungo had been watching the road in eager anticipation of their arrival. “Mind if I unhitch these horses and let them graze on some of this grass?”

Before Mungo could form a reply, Undine slipped through the open doorway behind him, holding up a lantern that glowed almost as brightly as her smile.

“Supper’s ready to be served,” she called. “I cooked it myself, too.”

In the spill of light from Undine’s lantern, Mungo’s face looked hard.

Maddie shivered inwardly and wished it wouldn’t be baldly impolite to fetch her shotgun from underneath the wagon seat and bring it right inside with her. “I’m half starved,” she answered, because Sam didn’t say a word—he was busy unhitching the team—and neither did Mungo.

Undine blinked, as though she hadn’t taken notice of Maddie until that moment. “That’s fine,” she said without conviction. “You come on inside now, Maddie. Let the men tend to those horses.” She nudged Mungo with one elbow and he finally moved.

Maddie glanced in Sam’s direction, and was strangely stricken to see that he’d paused in his work to gaze thoughtfully in Undine’s direction. In that moment, she would have given her meager savings, stashed in a coffee tin under a loose floorboard in her bedroom, to know what was going through his mind.

It irritated her that she was even curious—Sam O’Ballivan was nothing to her, after all—and she swished her skirts a little as she swept up the walk toward Undine.

“Did you send off for those spring dresses I wanted?” Undine asked, addressing Maddie in an overbright, over-earnest tone, eyes sneaking past her to devour Sam. “If I can’t get Mungo to take me to San Francisco for the worst of it, they’ll be the only gaiety in the whole winter.”

Winters in that part of the Arizona Territory were mild; snow was rare and the temperatures seldom called for cloak or coat. Maddie didn’t bother to point that out, since Undine knew it well enough. “I wired the order to Chicago this afternoon,” she said, accidentally brushing against Mungo as the two of them passed on the porch steps. She paused to watch as her recalcitrant host strode toward Sam and the horses.

“That’s fine,” Undine replied, but she sounded distracted, and when Maddie looked at her, she saw that she was still fastened on Sam. Mungo might as well have been invisible.

“Are the boys home?” Maddie asked, referring to Garrett, Landry and Rex. Ben was visible in the doorway, holding a pup in both arms and taking in the scene in shy silence.

Undine gave a tinkling little laugh. “Why, Maddie Chancelor, have you gone and set your cap for one of my stepsons? Here you are, in the company of the handsomest man in the whole territory, and you’re wondering about those ruffians?”

Maddie smiled, even though her stomach rolled at the thought of “setting her cap” for the likes of the Donaghers. She’d sooner die an old maid or even throw in with Oralee Pringle, than have truck with any of them. Worried that Undine’s last remark might have reached Mungo’s ears, she slipped an arm through the other woman’s and hastily squired her into the front room, with its plank floors, beamed ceiling, and tall stone fireplace.

“Are you trying to make your husband angry?” she whispered a moment later, when Ben had gone outside to join Mungo and Sam at the wagon.

Undine blinked, her eyes wide with innocence. “Whatever do you mean, asking a question like that?” she asked, one hand fluttering to her throat.

Maddie narrowed her eyes. “I meant exactly what I said. Mungo is covetous as a rutting buck, and you damn well know it.”

Undine smiled slyly and batted her lashes. “I’m not sure Mungo’s the covetous one,” she purred. “Are you taken with Mr. O’Ballivan, Maddie?”

Maddie’s temper simmered. “No,” she said fiercely, “I am not taken with Mr. O’Ballivan. I just don’t want to see anyone get killed over your silly flirtations, that’s all!”

“Have a care, Maddie Chancelor,” Undine advised. “One word from me, and you and that brother of yours will be on the streets instead of living over the store and collecting a generous salary every month.”

After a deep breath or two, Maddie was able to speak calmly. “And one word from me, Undine, and Mungo will know all about those letters from Tucson I’ve been separating from the ranch mail so you can read them in secret.”

Undine’s cheeks pinkened and her eyes flashed. She bit down on her lower lip.

For a moment Maddie was afraid Mungo’s wife might hurl the lantern at her, since she was still holding it. Instead she extinguished the flame and set it aside. “Come and see how pretty the table looks,” she said as cordially as if no hard words had passed between them.

The long trestle table at the far end of the front room did look festive, set with glistening china plates and water glasses of cut crystal gracing a pristine cloth edged with lace. Undine’s fancy tastes had been the talk of Haven when that order rolled into town on the weekly stagecoach.

Maddie felt a hunger that had nothing to do with food as she took in the sight of that table. Silver candlesticks, with beeswax tapers waiting to be lit. Elegant flatware. A bouquet of wildflowers, spilling over the sides of an exquisitely painted china vase.

“It looks wonderful,” she said, and she meant it.

Undine seemed pleased. “Mungo has promised me a spinet,” she said, well aware, it appeared, of Maddie’s secret yearning for a home of her own. “We’ll have it sent from San Francisco, if I have my way.”

You always do, Maddie thought uncharitably. Her fingers flexed, missing the smooth ivory keys of the piano she’d played at the orphanage in St. Louis and, before that, in the churches and tents where her father had preached the gospel.

Don’t remember, she told herself firmly.

She was spared further conversation with Undine when Sam, Mungo and the boy trooped in. The puppy was missing and Maddie presumed Ben had left it outside.

She saw Sam sweep the well-set table with a glance as he passed, following Mungo toward the kitchen, and knew he wasn’t impressed by the china and cut glass; he’d been counting the places.

Feeling remiss, Maddie did the same. The total was seven, which meant that unless Ben was to have his supper in the kitchen, as children often did on such occasions, two more people would be joining the festivities. If the boy had already eaten, then Garrett, Landry and Rex might make an entrance at any time.

Maddie steeled herself for that. The exchange with Undine had shaken her a little, but she quickly recovered and followed the men to wash her own hands.

Anna Deerhorn, the Donaghers’ cook and housekeeper, was in the kitchen, and sure enough, she’d put a plateful of food on the big round table by the windows. Ben took a seat.

Anna met Maddie’s gaze and gave a nod of greeting.

Maddie smiled. “That embroidery thread you wanted came in on Wednesday,” she told the other woman, and pulled a small package from the pocket of her skirt. She’d wrapped the bright floss carefully before leaving the mercantile to pick Sam up at the schoolhouse.

Anna took the package with another nod and a whispered, “Thank you,” and Maddie glanced warily at Mungo, wondering if she’d somehow betrayed a secret.

Mungo, as it happened, was too busy keeping a suspicious eye on Sam to pay any mind to anything else going on in the room, but Maddie was still troubled. If she got a chance to speak to Anna alone, she would take it.

They’d all washed up, in the basin Anna kept refilling with hot water from the reservoir on the cookstove, and taken their places at the table in the next room—Undine had seated herself squarely between Mungo and Sam, Maddie saw, with rising trepidation—when a clamor arose in the kitchen.

Nobody moved, and Mungo, who had been glowering at Sam since they’d sat down, didn’t look away.

Maddie felt a little trill of fear when the door between the two rooms swung open, and Garrett, Landry and Rex strolled through, single-file, all of them looking as though they’d just come off the trail.

Garrett, the firstborn, was tall and broad through the shoulders, with dark hair and watchful blue eyes. If he lived to old age, which wasn’t likely, given his reputation, he’d look much as Mungo did now. Any woman who didn’t know him would mark him down as handsome, Maddie supposed, but he was no stranger to her, and she kept a careful distance.

Landry, the second son, was a plain man, smaller than Garrett, with a narrow face and small eyes that flitted constantly from place to place, like a rodent on the lookout for a hungry cat.

Rex, like his eldest brother, was at least six feet in height. The resemblance ended there, though; his features were oddly blurred, as though reflected in moving water, his skin pitted by an early case of smallpox.

When their eyes fell on Sam O’Ballivan, Rex and Landry came to a standstill. Garrett, seeing that his father’s attention was focused elsewhere, winked at Undine, who blushed and lowered her gaze.

Well, Maddie thought. I should have guessed.

Sam stood, and Maddie wondered if he was still wearing his .45 under his suit coat, or if he’d left it in the wagon, as most dinner guests would.

“I’m Sam O’Ballivan,” he said heartily. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Rex and Landry didn’t look as though they agreed, but they recovered soon enough.

“Howdy,” Rex said grudgingly.

“You sure do get around,” Landry observed. “I’d swear I seen you someplace before.” The unfriendly expression on his face clearly indicated that he knew exactly where he’d seen Sam O’Ballivan before, and had hoped not to repeat the experience.

Sam smiled, unruffled. “It’s a small world,” he said, and sat down again.

Undine watched out of the corner of her eye as Garrett took the place next to Maddie, reached for a cloth napkin and flipped it open.

“Anna’s ready to serve that venison roast any time now,” she said, oblivious to the tension snapping in the air.

Maddie suppressed an urge to move her chair an inch or two farther from Garrett’s. It made her skin crawl, being that close to him, and in her agitation, she happened to snag glances with Sam, sitting directly across the table from her.

She’d have sworn he smiled at her, even though his mouth didn’t move, and she felt reassured.

Meanwhile, Rex and Landry hauled back their own chairs, with a great deal of scraping, and sat themselves down. Both of them kept casting unhappy looks in Sam’s direction.

How, Maddie wondered, had he managed to make their questionable acquaintance in the short time since he’d come to Haven? When the Donagher brothers came to town, word spread like a storm warning and, since the mercantile was the heart of the community, and thus the changing house for the smallest tidbit of gossip, she would have known they were around five minutes after they rode in.

How would a schoolmaster, new to this part of the Territory, know a pair of scoundrels like Rex and Landry?

She could hardly wait to ask him.

The venison roast proved delicious, as did the rest of the meal—a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes, freshly baked biscuits, green beans and corn and peach cobbler for dessert.

Undine spent the entire evening fawning over Sam, and Mungo glared the whole time. Landry and Rex were jumpy, and Maddie, hungry as she was, could barely get a bite down her throat. The whole place felt like one giant tinderbox ready to explode into flames at a spark.

Garrett appeared comfortable enough, filling and emptying his plate more than once and stealing the occasional telling glance at Undine. And Sam seemed impervious to the sullen hostility coming his way from Mungo, Landry and Rex. He listened to Undine’s relentless chatter as though it had been written on a sacred scroll and carried down from Mount Olympus on a platter, and by the time the peach cobbler went around the table, Maddie’s stomach was clenched tight as a fist.

Would this night never end?

It was nearly nine-thirty, by the fancy clock on the sideboard, when Sam declined a third cup of coffee from a devoted Undine, and announced that he and Miss Chancelor had better be getting back to town. After all, he said, he had work to do in the morning, and Maddie liked to open the store for business right on time. She kept it open every day except Sunday.

Maddie fairly knocked her chair over backward getting to her feet.

“Landry, Rex,” Mungo said gruffly, “you go out and hitch up that team.” It was the first full sentence he’d spoken since they’d all sat at the table. “Garrett, help Undine clear the table. I’m sure Anna’s gone out to her cabin and turned in by now.”

Maddie felt regret. She liked Anna, and rarely got to see her.

“Sure thing, Pa,” Garrett said, and waited until his father had risen and turned his back before dragging his eyes slowly over Undine.

Sam and Maddie took their leave. They had gone a mile up the river road before Sam stopped the team, got down and inspected the rigging. Up until then, he and Maddie hadn’t spoken.

“What are you doing?” Maddie asked. She was fitful, anxious to get home to Terran, lock the doors behind her and forget she’d ever gone to supper at the Donagher ranch.

Sam didn’t answer. He just tightened everything and climbed back up to take the reins. Maddie figured he hadn’t trusted the Donaghers’ hitching job, and didn’t pursue the subject.

“You know them,” she said when they’d been rolling again for several minutes. “Rex and Landry, I mean.”

Sam chuckled. “Not as well as I plan to,” he replied, and left Maddie to go right on wondering who Sam O’Ballivan really was, and what he wanted with Mungo Donagher’s outlaw sons.

CHAPTER SIX

A LOW, MEWLING SOUND caught Sam’s ear as he rounded the back of the buckboard, out behind the mercantile, hoping to help Maddie down before she went ahead and made the leap herself. He paused and peered into the wagon bed, waiting for a cloud to pass over the skinny moon so he could see more than a shadowy shape huddled in the corner behind the seat.

Just as the moon was unveiled—the side lanterns had winked out, one and then the other, halfway back to town—Maddie turned from her perch to look down. “Land sakes,” she said, “it’s Ben’s puppy.”

Sam sighed, resettled his hat, and reached over the side of the wagon to hoist the little critter out. He’d been nestled on a pile of empty burlap bags the whole way, without making a sound until now.

“Sure enough,” he agreed, setting the mutt on the ground and watching dubiously as it sniffed the rear wheel and then lifted a hind leg.

Maddie gathered her skirts and clambered deftly over the board backrest to stand on the floorboards, her hands resting on her hips. “Somebody must have put him in the wagon. He couldn’t have gotten there on his own.”

“Ben, I reckon,” Sam said. The dog had finished his business and was now smelling his pant leg. He hoped the lop-eared little creature hadn’t mistaken him for a wagon wheel.

“Looks like you’ve been gifted with a dog,” Maddie said with a degree of satisfaction that was wholly unbecoming.

Sam rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Now what would I do with a dog?” he countered.

She sat on the side-rail and swung her legs over with a swish of skirts. Sam caught her around the waist just before she would have made the jump, and stumbled a bit at the unexpected solidity of that deceptively slender frame. The contact between their two torsos roused something inside him that made him set her away from him abruptly.

Remember Abigail, he told himself. Damned if he could bring her face to mind, though, right at that moment.

“You’re heavier than I would have guessed,” he said, and then wished he could suck the words back in and swallow them.

Maddie seemed flustered. She straightened her skirts and patted her hair and took her time looking up into his face. “I can think of a thousand things you could have said,” she told him peevishly, “that would have been better than that.”

Sam felt the fool, and that always made him testy. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I didn’t mean—”

Maddie put up a hand to silence him. In the sparse moonlight, he saw that she was amused, not insulted, and his relief was profound. She stooped, all of a sudden, and swept the little yellow dog up into her arms. Smiled, instead of making a face, when the pup gave her cheek a tentative lap.

Something shifted inside Sam, watching her. Made him wonder what she’d look like holding a baby. He took an unconscious step backward. “I’d best unhitch this team for you,” he said. He didn’t see a barn, but there was plenty of grass for the horses, and a trough.

“No need,” she answered, still cuddling the pup. “Terran can do it.”

With that, she gave a shrill whistle through her teeth.

Sam grinned, in spite of himself. He’d always admired people who could whistle like that, and he’d never run across the talent in a woman before. There were lots of things about Maddie Chancelor, he suspected, that he’d never come across before.

Before he could ask how she’d acquired the skill, the back door of the mercantile slammed open and Terran bounded out. Catching sight of the pup in his sister’s arms, he stopped short.

“That’s Neptune,” he said. “What’s he doing here?”

“I’m not sure,” Maddie answered, stroking the dog’s back in a way that made Sam widen his stance slightly. “We just found him in the back of the wagon. Unhitch the team and see that they get a little grain, please.”

Terran nodded, but he approached and put out a hand to touch Neptune’s wriggly little body. “I reckon Ben was worried one of his brothers would drown him in the creek,” he speculated. He looked up at Maddie with hope clearly visible in his eyes, even in that poor light. “Can we keep him?”

“You know we can’t,” Maddie said with some regret. “Mr. James would have a fit.”

Terran looked so dejected that Sam almost reached out and ruffled his hair, the way a man does when he wants to reassure a boy. He refrained, because the truce between him and Terran was new, like a naked and fragile bird just hatched from the egg.

“I guess I could take him back to the schoolhouse,” he said with considerable reluctance. Sam was trying to break the habit of taking in lost critters; he’d left them scattered all over the Arizona Territory and half of Texas and New Mexico, as well, always in a good home, and at some point, it had to stop. “Just until we get the straight of the matter. I’ll ask Ben about it Monday, before school takes up.”

Maddie smiled a little and shoved the dog into his arms. “That’s a splendid idea,” she said.

Terran gazed at Neptune with a longing that made Sam feel bruised on the inside, then sighed and went to work releasing the harness fittings.

Sam stood there for a long moment, as confounded as if he were suddenly thirteen again, while the pup chewed on the collar of his one good suit coat. “What am I supposed to feed him?” he asked.

Maddie indulged in another smile. “You’re a schoolmaster,” she said. “You’ll reason it out.” With that, she gave a little curtsy—there was something of mockery in it—and raised her chin a notch. “Good night, Mr. O’Ballivan. And thank you for a very...interesting evening.”

Before he could shuffle the pup and tug at his hat brim, she was gone, disappearing into the mercantile through the same door Terran had just come out of.

While Sam was still standing there, oddly befuddled, Terran finished his work, hung the harnesses on a fence post and dusted his hands together. “He’d probably favor some jerked venison, being a dog,” the boy said. He ran into the store and came out again, quick as the proverbial wink, and held out two hands full of dried meat, obviously purloined from a crock or a bin in the mercantile.

Sam had to shuffle again, to take the jerky. He stuffed it into his pockets and looked up just as Maddie’s shadow moved back from a second-floor window. “Obliged,” he said.

“You need something else?” Terran asked reasonably.

Sam told his feet to move, but they didn’t comply right away. “No,” he said, still looking up at that lighted window, where Maddie had been standing only moments before. “I’ll be going now.”

Terran waited for him to follow through. “You taken a shine to my sister?” he asked when Sam stood stock-still for another minute or so.

That broke the spell. “No,” Sam lied, and thrust himself into motion. He felt Terran’s gaze on his back as he walked away.

Back at the schoolhouse, he went inside, set the pup on the floor, lit a lantern and assessed the situation while Neptune gnawed on a strip of dried meat from his pocket. Coming to no ready conclusion, he checked on the nameless horse, out there in the grass-scented darkness, found it sound, and returned to his quarters, which suddenly seemed lonely, even with Neptune curled up in front of the cold stove.

“I don’t have any good reason to keep a dog,” he said solemnly.

Neptune laid his muzzle on his paws, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Sam kicked off his boots, shrugged out of his suit coat and loosened his collar. He unbuckled his gun belt, set the .45 within easy reach on the bedside stand. His eyes wandered to the stacks of books, teetering in piles and taking up most of the tabletop. He crossed to the middle of the room, selected a favorite, sat in the solitary wooden chair and flipped through the thin leaves, but his mind wouldn’t settle on the familiar words. It kept straying, like a calf separated from the herd, to the mercantile on the main street of town and thence to the woman he’d glimpsed at that upstairs window.

Like as not, Maddie was getting ready to turn in right about now. Taking off her clothes, putting on a nightgown, maybe letting down her hair. He wondered if it reached to her waist, and if she plaited it before getting into bed.

Sam’s throat constricted, and his groin ached.

He slammed The Odyssey shut, rousing the pup from its slumbers, and set the volume aside, to rest beside his .45.

Neptune let out a little whimper of concern.

“It’s all right, boy,” he told the dog. It was a pitiful thing, when a man was glad for the company of a pup that had been foisted off on him.

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