Gabriel's Lady

One of the cowboys was holding up a hand of cards. His face was a mottled red, and he was sputtering like a crusted-up teakettle. The other man reached down into his pants and pulled out a revolver. Amelia felt a quick rush through her midsection. “Mrs. Smith, that man has a gun!”

Mattie Smith took Amelia’s arm and drew her around the back of the stagecoach. “We’ll just stay out of the way back here,” she said as calmly as if she were discussing dress patterns.

Amelia leaned against a thick leather luggage rack. “That man pulled a gun,” she repeated in a shaky voice.

“Lordy, child. You’re pea green. We’ve got to toughen you up, I reckon. Everyone’s got guns in Deadwood. But they don’t do much harm. Most of these boys can’t hit the side of a barn with their eyes open.”

“Shouldn’t we call the police?”

“We don’t have any police. No sheriff, either. Why do you think Deadwood’s so popular with every no-account west of the Mississippi?”

Amelia gripped the edge of the stagecoach and peered cautiously around the corner. The cowboy who had pulled the gun was sprawled on the ground. The other man, cards still clutched in one hand, was sitting on top of him with his free hand pressed down on his opponent’s neck. Several feet away, the revolver lay discarded in the dusty street, sun glinting off its steely barrel.

“Come on,” Mattie urged. “Let’s get out of here. Charlie will take care of your bag until you come back for it.”

Amelia let herself be led down the street. “There’s no law in Deadwood?” she asked, her head turned back to the scene behind them. A burly redhead was trying to separate the two combatants as the sidewalk filled up with onlookers.

“There’s all kinds of law—the law of the gun, the law of the best hand, the law of the almighty dollar,” Mattie continued. “But if you mean real law…nope. Not in Deadwood.”

“I was hoping to ask the police to help me find Parker.”

Mattie gave a snort. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, child. I can take you to your brother. Come on with me to my place.”

Amelia’s eyes followed Mattie Smith’s hand as she pointed across the street and down a short distance. Nestled between two rough board saloons was a neatly painted clapboard house, looking for all the world like a little piece of New England. A trimmed row of bushes dotted with pink primroses edged the railing of a small front porch. Pink curtains showed at each of the six real glass windows.

“You live right here in the middle of town?”

Mattie didn’t answer. She waited until a buckboard had rattled past them, then took Amelia’s hand and led her across the street.

Amelia followed along, asking in some confusion, “How do you know my brother, Mrs. Smith?”

It wasn’t until they stood directly in front of the tidy yellow house that Amelia saw the discreet sign. Female Companions. Cleanliness Guaranteed. Mattie Smith, Proprietor.

Amelia pulled back with a kind of horror as Mrs. Smith said cheerfully, “Here we are.”

“I can’t go in there,” Amelia said stiffly.

A gleam of sympathy appeared in Mattie Smith’s soft gray eyes. “I don’t mean to go against your sensibilities, Miss Prescott, but you did say you wanted to locate your brother, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you’d better follow me. Because the odds are ten to one that this is where you’ll find him.”

Amelia settled into the feathery softness of the rose damask sofa and closed her eyes. In her wildest dreams she would never have imagined that she would find herself in such a place. Although, except for a cloying scent that was fast bringing on a megrim, the little parlor of Mattie Smith’s…house…was not really much different than the sitting rooms back home where she and her mother would take tea with the other ladies of middle-echelon New York society. But when she had entered the front door she had had a direct view up the stairs to a room bathed in red light. Glowing red. She didn’t even dare think about the type of activity that might take place in such a room.

“Hey, sis.” The soft voice coming from the doorway popped her eyes open.

In an instant she had jumped to her feet and was caught up in her brother’s arms. “I could kill you,” she said, laughing and hugging him as great tears rolled down her cheeks.

Parker lifted her off her feet and spun her around. “I’d deserve it,” he said, giving her a sound kiss.

Amelia put her hands on her brother’s shoulders and pushed herself out of his grasp. “I mean it,” she said through subsiding sniffles.

Parker’s grin faded. “I do, too. I deserve anything you want to do to me, my darling little sister. But it’s damn good to see you.”

Amelia’s outburst of tears ended with a final jerky breath. “Don’t swear,” she said. The admonition was automatic. Though she was a year younger than her brother, she’d been giving him orders her whole life. Their parents had so often been away from home, involved in their own special causes, that Amelia and Parker sometimes felt that they had raised each other. Amelia mothered Parker, injecting some caution into his wild schemes, and Parker provided Amelia with a father’s strength and protection. At least, he had until he had taken off without a word.

“It’s very good to see you, sis,” Parker amended, tenderly pinching her cheek with a callused hand that Amelia did not recognize as belonging to her brother. His appearance was different, too. His dark brown hair was longer and had reddened in the sun. His skin was tanned and leathery, making him look years older. “But what in blazes are you doing here?” he asked. “Surely you didn’t come all this way by yourself?”

“Morgan’s with me. He’s down at the telegraph office sending a wire to Mother and Father.”

“How are they? And Matilda? I bet she misses having her pies stolen right off the cooling rack now that I’m gone. And Chops?”

Amelia smiled and motioned to Parker to slow down his questions. “Matilda says she always knew you were a scoundrel, and when you come home she’s going to give you a piece of her mind, if not a licking with her wooden spoon. And Chops wouldn’t eat for a week after you left until we finally took to mixing his food with liver paste. So now we call him Golden Chops. As to Mother and Father…” She bit her lip. “They were terribly hurt, Parker.”

Parker looked down at Mattie’s rose-patterned carpet. “I know. It was the one bad thing about this whole plan. I never wanted to hurt them.” He blinked and swallowed hard. “Or you, either, sis.”

Amelia let out a deep breath and asked the question that she had been waiting to ask for the past six months. “How could you do it, Parker? How could you leave us that way?”

Their identical brown eyes met, hers accusing, his guilty. “It seems a lifetime ago, you know. At the time I thought I was leaving because I was sick of Father trying to badger me into working at his precious bank. And I was miffed when Cindy Wellington threw me over for Jack Hastings…”

Amelia gave an incredulous huff. “Cynthia Wellington goes through men faster than she does hankies. She’s had at least a half a dozen since Jack Hastings, and besides—”

Parker stopped her with a wave of his hand. “Come on and sit down. Just listen to me for a minute,” he said, leading her to the rose sofa. “I said I thought I was leaving for those reasons. But as soon as I hit the prairie west of St. Paul, I knew that none of those things were important.”

“Then what—”

Parker put a finger on her lips. “If you can keep still long enough, I’ll try to explain, though it’s all beyond words, really.”

He shifted his gaze from her to look out beyond the pink curtains to the view of the canyon rising above the buildings across the street. “I’ve never seen anything like the West, sis,” he continued in an almost reverent tone. “It’s fresh and majestic, wild and exciting. It…” He turned back to her as he searched for the words. “It fills me up. I don’t know any other way to say it. It fills all those places in me that were so empty back in New York.”

For once Amelia had no reply. It was as if her brother, the person she had always known better than anyone else in the world, had passed a boundary into a place she couldn’t follow. She had been prepared to demand that they return to New York immediately. Their father needed them, needed Parker. But as she watched this totally unfamiliar expression on her brother’s dear, familiar face, the words wouldn’t come out.

“Listen,” Parker said in a brisk tone designed to squelch the emotion that had crept into his voice, “I can show you what I mean better than telling you. Let me take you out to my place to see the mine.”

Amelia looked around once again at Mattie Smith’s parlor. “Well, at least let’s get out of here.”

Parker followed her gaze with amusement. “What do you suppose Mother would say if she knew we were sitting in a bawdy house parlor?”

The notion did not seem so shocking to Amelia now that Parker was beside her. In fact, nothing did. Not the broken-down stagecoach nor the fight out on the street. Parker would take care of her now. And she would take care of him. She gave a happy giggle. “She’d haul us up in front of one of her crusading friends—The New York Ladies’ League for the Rehabilitation of Fallen Doves, or some such.”

Parker stood with a grin and reached for Amelia’s hands. “Mother and her colleagues would have a field day in this town.”

Amelia had to admit that the scenery as Parker led them up the trail toward his mine was breathtaking. When they had left Mattie Smith’s parlor, the little proprietor had been nowhere in sight, so without taking their leave they had made their way back to the stagecoach to find Morgan and retrieve their bags. Then they had gone to the livery where Amelia and Morgan had rented horses over Morgan’s protest that there wasn’t anywhere he couldn’t go on the two good feet that God had given him.

Amelia’s mount was a trim brown mare that had taken to her new rider immediately. The stableboy had said her name was Whiskey, which had caused Amelia and Parker to burst into one of the laughs they had shared so often through the years.

“I’ve been in Deadwood less than a day and I’ve already visited a brothel and acquired a horse named Whiskey,” Amelia said, choked with mirth. It was remarkable how just a short time in her brother’s company had restored her good humor.