A Wanted Man: A Stone Creek Novel

Mai Lee stepped over the animal to turn the chicken with a meat fork and then poke at the potatoes boiling in a kettle. She kept stealing glances at Rhodes.

“I’ll show you your room and get a fire going in there,” Mrs. Porter said, only then closing the door against the bite of a winter evening. “Land sakes, it’s been cold lately. I do hope you haven’t traveled far in this weather.”

Lark stood up, meaning to express vigorous dissent, and sat down again when words failed her.

Mr. Rhodes, who had yet to extend the courtesy of offering his name, noted the standing and sitting, and responded with a slight and crooked grin.

The pit of Lark’s stomach fluttered.

Mrs. Porter led the new boarder straight to the room at the back, with its fireplace and outside door and lovely writing desk. The dog got up and lumbered after them.

For a moment, Lark was so stricken by jealousy that she forgot she might be in grave peril. Then, her native practicality emerged. Even presuming Mr. Rhodes was not in Autry’s employ, he was a stranger, and he carried a gun. He could murder them all in their beds.

Mai Lee set another place at the table.

Voices sounded from the next room. Lark discerned that Mrs. Porter had undertaken to lay a fire, and Mr. Rhodes had promptly assumed the task.

Lark stood up, intending to dash upstairs and lock herself in her room until she had a chance to speak privately with Mrs. Porter, but Rhodes reappeared before she could make another move. She dropped back into her chair and was treated to a second look of amusement from the lodger.

Indignant color surged into Lark’s face.

Mrs. Porter prattled like a smitten schoolgirl, offering Mr. Rhodes a tart and running on about how it was good to have a man in the house again, what with poor, dear Mr. Porter gone and all. Why, the world was going straight to Hades, if he’d pardon her language, and on a greased track, too.

Rhodes crossed to the table, took one of the tarts and bit into it, studying Lark with his summer-blue eyes as he chewed. He’d left his coat behind in his room, and the gun belt with it, but Lark was scarcely comforted.

He could be a paid assassin.

He could be an outlaw, or a bank robber.

And whatever his name was, Lark would have bet a year’s salary it wasn’t Rowdy Rhodes.

2

PAYTON YARBRO—Jack Payton to anybody who asked—sat with one booted foot braced against a windowsill, in the apartment back of Ruby’s Saloon and Poker House in Flagstaff, smoking a cheroot and pondering the sorry state of the train robbing business in general and his feckless sons in particular.

He had six of them, at least that he knew of. Wyatt was the eldest—he’d be thirty-five on his next birthday, sometime in April, though Payton was damned if he could recall the exact date. Then came Nicholas, followed in short order by Ethan and Levi, who were twins, then Robert and, like a caboose, young Gideon, who’d just turned sixteen. He’d come along late, like an afterthought, and Miranda had died giving him life.

Payton tried not to hold it against the boy—it purely wasn’t his fault—but sometimes, when a melancholy mood struck, he couldn’t help it.

She’d driven her ducks to a poor pond marrying up with Payton Yarbro, Miranda had. Five of her sons were wanted by the law, and the sixth, Gideon, was likely to get himself into trouble first chance he got. Like as not, that opportunity wouldn’t be long in coming, for Gideon, like his brothers, was a spirited lad, half again too smart for his own good, hotheaded and reckless. By necessity the boy already lived, without knowing, under a partial alias—went by the surname of Payton.

Robert—he’d been Miranda’s favorite, and she’d called him Rob, after some swashbuckling fellow in a book—used his nickname and a moniker meant to stick in Payton’s craw.

There was no telling what the others had come to by now.

Maybe Miranda’s prayers had been answered, and they’d all married and settled down to live upstanding, law-abiding lives.

Of course, the odds were better that they’d been hanged or gotten themselves killed in a gunfight over a woman or a game of cards, out behind some whiskey palace.

Payton sighed. At least he knew where Gideon was—sulking in the saloon, where Ruby had set him the task of raking the sawdust clean of cigar butts, peanut shells and spittle. Wyatt and the others, well, if they were alive at all, could be just about anyplace. Scattered to the winds, his boys.

Miranda, God rest her valiant soul, was probably rolling over in her grave. She’d been a good, churchgoing woman, hardworking and faithful—at least, so far as Payton knew—with a Bible verse at the ready to suit just about any situation. She’d never given up hope that her sons would find the straight-and-narrow path and follow it, despite all contradictory evidence.

She’d called it faith.

Payton called it foolish sentiment.

How she’d ever fallen in love with and married the likes of him—and borne him six sons into the bargain—was a mystery to be solved by better minds than his.

She’d stayed with him, too, Miranda had, even with another man ready to offer for her, if she’d been free. She’d died wearing his narrow gold wedding band and honoring the vows they’d made in front of a circuit preacher nine months and five minutes before Wyatt had come along.

Pity he hadn’t lived up to her example.

He shifted in his chair, wished he could shut the window against the bitter chill of that Sunday afternoon, shut his mind against his thoughts, too, but Ruby was a stickler for fresh air, and the memories clung to him like stall muck to a boot heel.

Ruby didn’t countenance pipes, cigars or cheroots in her private quarters, for all that the saloon and card room were always roiling with a blue-gray cloud of tobacco smoke. She was a complex woman, Ruby—she’d joined a brothel when she was Gideon’s age, and now she was a former madam, retaining an interest in the sinful enterprises of gambling and the purveyance of strong spirits.

For all her hard history, she was still beautiful and, ironic as it seemed, as fine a woman, in her own way, as Miranda Wyatt Yarbro had ever been.

Both of them had had the remarkable misfortune of crossing paths with him. He and Ruby had never married, but she’d given him a child, too. Ten years back, she’d been delivered of a daughter. Little Rose.

Payton’s throat tightened at the recollection of the child. Redheaded, like her mother, she’d been smart and energetic and sweet, too, for all her bent to mischief. She’d been run down by a wagon when she was just four, chasing a kitten into the street out in front of the saloon, and they’d had to bury her outside the churchyard fence, in unsanctified ground.

Innocent as the flower she was named for, Rose had, after all, been a whore’s daughter.

Behind him the door creaked open. Instinctively Payton stiffened and went for his gun, though a part of him knew who was there. In the end, he didn’t draw.

“I told you not to smoke in here, Jack Payton,” Ruby said. “It makes the place smell like—”

He flipped the cheroot out through the window, stood and shoved down the sash. Turned, grinning, to face the second of the two women he’d loved in his fifty-seven years of life. “Like a saloon?” he finished for her.

She pulled a face. “Don’t go wasting your charming smiles on me,” she warned. “I see right through them. And besides, I know full well you’ll light up again, as soon as I turn my back.”

Come evening, Ruby would be resplendent in one of her trademark silk gowns, all of them some shade of crimson or scarlet. She’d paint up her face and deck herself out in jewels she’d earned the hard way. For now, though, she wore practical calico, and around her scrubbed face her dark auburn hair billowed, soft and fragrant with the lilac water she always brushed through it before pinning it up in the morning.

Looking at her, Payton felt a familiar pinch in some deep, unexplored region of his heart. She deserved a better man than he was, just as Miranda had.

“There’s a young fella out front, asking after you,” Ruby said.

Payton raised an eyebrow, instantly wary. “He didn’t offer his name?”

“Didn’t have to,” Ruby answered, with a slight sigh. “He’s one of your boys. I knew that by looking at him.”

Something quickened inside Payton, a combination of hope and alarm. “I reckon you’d better send him in,” he said.

Ruby nodded, but she looked thoughtful. “How do you suppose he knew where to find you, Jack?”

Payton spread his hands. “No idea,” he answered, wondering which one of his elder sons was about to walk through that doorway. “Did Gideon see him?”