A Wanted Man: A Stone Creek Novel

“Drink this,” he ordered, holding out the squat glass. “And calm down. Otherwise, you’re likely to bust a blood vessel or something.”

Payton clutched the glass, and his hand shook a little as he raised it to his lips, closing his eyes almost reverently, like a man taking a sacrament. He swallowed, shuddered, opened his eyes again.

“You bring the rangers down on me, boy,” Payton said, when he’d recovered enough to speak, “and I’ll die in a jail cell. It’ll be on your head.”

“I came here to warn you,” Rowdy replied, hooking his thumbs under his gun belt. “That’s more than you would have done for me. From here on out, you’re on your own—Pappy.”

With that, Rowdy figured his business was concluded. He turned and made for the door. Took his hat from the fancy three-legged table, held it in one hand.

Payton hoisted himself out of his chair and turned to face Rowdy. “You don’t owe me any favors, boy. I won’t argue that you do. But if you have an honorable bone in your body, you’ll ride out of here and keep on going, without a parting word to Sam O’Ballivan or anybody else.”

Rowdy put his hat on, laid a hand on the fancy glass doorknob. “You’re right, Pa. I don’t owe you any favors. And I’m not going anyplace until I’ve heard Sam out. If you don’t want him coming after you, don’t rob any more trains.”

“I gave that up a long time ago.”

All of a sudden, the backs of Rowdy’s eyes burned, and his throat drew in tight. He didn’t know what he’d expected—it had been five years since he’d ridden with his pa’s gang—but it wasn’t this, whatever this was. “For your sake, I hope that’s the gospel truth. At the same time, your word and two cents would buy me a cheap cigar.”

“I guess we understand each other then.”

Rowdy nodded glumly. “One more thing,” he said, his voice coming out hoarse. He oughtn’t to linger, he knew that, but he did it just the same. “Is Gideon all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“You haven’t brought him into the family business, then?”

“He’s only sixteen, Rob.”

“I was fourteen, the first time I rode with you.”

“I’m a different man than I was then,” Payton said. Now that the whiskey had hit his bloodstream, he was his familiar, cocky self. “Older. Wiser. And one hell of a lot sadder.”

Rowdy didn’t reply to that. He simply nodded, opened the door and went out. He looked neither to the right nor the left as he strode through the saloon beyond. The swinging doors crashed against the outside walls when he struck them hard with the palms of both hands.

* * *

GIDEON PAYTON CROUCHED beside the small grave outside the picket fence surrounding the churchyard. The monument was white marble, the finest to be had, and there were no dates, no Bible verses or lines of mournful poetry—only two plain words, chiseled into Gideon’s heart as well as the stone.

“Our Rose.”

In the ten years since his sister had died, Gideon had visited this spot under the spreading limbs of an oak tree on all but a handful of days. He’d been a child himself when Rose was killed, only six, but the memory was as vivid as the town surrounding him now, the people coming and going in wagons and on horseback out there in the street, the bell tolling in the little steeple of yonder church.

In spring and summer he brought her flowers, usually stolen from someone’s garden. In the fall the leaves of the great oak blanketed the long-since-sunken mound in glorious shades of crimson and russet and yellow and gold. In winter he offered trinkets—a bright bottle cap, a woman’s ear bob found on a sidewalk, a colorful stone from the banks of Oak Creek. Sometimes he read to her out loud from a storybook.

Rose had loved stories, but he hadn’t known how to read yet when she was living.

He supposed he ought to have gotten over the loss of her by now, since he was sixteen and almost a man, but some wounds never heal, no matter what the preachers said.

Today Gideon laid a letter at the base of Rose’s headstone.

“It’s from a college back east,” he told her quietly. “Pa went and signed me up for it.” He paused, frowned. “I don’t even like school that much, but I guess I’m good at it. Pa and Ruby say nothing worthwhile can come of my staying here, once I finish up my lesson-work this spring.”

A flicker of motion at the edge of Gideon’s vision interrupted his speech before he could get to the part that sorrowed him most—he knew he’d have to go, and that would mean he couldn’t pay Rose any visits for a long time.

A rider sat watching him from the road. His horse was a gelded pinto, and his boots were good, probably handmade in Mexico. He wore a hat pulled down low over his brow, and a pistol, butt forward, showed where he’d pushed back one side of his long black coat, so it caught behind the holster.

Gideon took in all those things in the space of an instant, but they weren’t what caught his attention. Something in the stranger’s countenance sent a thrill through Gideon, made him rise slowly to his full height.

The man resettled his hat, briefly revealing a head of straw-colored hair. Then he nudged the horse into motion with the heels of his boots and rode along the length of the picket fence.

“Strange place for a grave,” he said, drawing up close to where Gideon stood. His eyes were almost the same shade of blue as Pa’s were, Gideon noted, and his mouth was like his ma’s had been—still, but ready to smile. Not that Gideon rightly recollected his mother; she’d died when he was born, and he’d only seen one likeness of her, a faded old picture tucked between the pages of a Bible.

Gideon stiffened, gestured toward the cemetery flanking the small church. “Nobody in there’s got a better marker than my sister, Rose,” he told the rider. His heart was beating fast and, cold as it was, sweat tickled the skin between his shoulder blades.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” the stranger said quietly.

Gideon straightened his spine. He wasn’t afraid of the man. Standing on the ground, not sitting a horse, he’d be no taller than Gideon, but he was older, and seasoned, if the easy way he wore his gun was any indication. “I reckon there’s a lot you don’t know about me, mister,” he said, intrigued.

The rider grinned. “I know a little more than you probably think I do,” he said, shifting in the saddle, standing briefly in the stirrups as if to stretch his legs. “Your name is Gideon...Payton. You’re sixteen years old. Ponder it a bit, and you’ll realize that you’ve seen me before.”

That little hesitation before he said “Payton”—what did that mean?

And Gideon did recall a previous encounter, a shadowy glimpse that teased at the edges of his memory but wouldn’t show itself.

“Who are you?” he asked bluntly.

“I call myself Rowdy Rhodes,” the man answered. “And I’m your brother.”

Gideon had known he had brothers, but he hadn’t been able to get much more than that out of his pa. They were all older than he was, but he couldn’t have said how many of them there were, or recited their names with any certainty. Now one of them was sitting right in front of him.

“You call yourself Rowdy Rhodes? If you’re my brother, you ought to be a Payton, not a Rhodes. And what the hell kind of name is Rowdy, anyhow?”

Rhodes chuckled and leaned forward in the saddle, resting one forearm on the pommel. “One that suits me just fine,” he said. “Are you still in school, Gideon?”

Gideon glanced at the letter lying in front of Rose’s gravestone, and wished he hadn’t. Rhodes made him uneasy, with his watchful, knowing eyes, and yet Gideon wanted to know all about him. “I’ll be going away to college, come autumn.” He swallowed. “I mean to be an engineer. Maybe work for the railroad.”

“Now, that’s ironic,” Rhodes said wryly.

Gideon was affronted, though he didn’t know why. Felt like a rooster with its feathers ruffled. “I’m smart,” he said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Rhodes replied. He looked down at Rose’s grave, maybe noticed the letter, and the bottle caps, some of them rusting now, and the ear bobs and bits of frayed ribbon, with all the color weathered out of them. “How come they buried your sister out here, instead of in the churchyard, with the others?”

An old rage, all the worse for being helpless, surged up inside Gideon, stung the back of his throat like gall. “Because Ruby Hollister is her mother,” he said.

Again, Rhodes adjusted his hat. “But not yours.”

Gideon shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. And he waited. If Rhodes was his brother, like he claimed, let him prove it. Let him say Ma’s name.

He did, just as surely as if Gideon had demanded it of him aloud. “Your mother was Miranda Wyatt...Payton.”

There it was again, that little hitch between words, subtle but sharp as a tug on reins already drawn tight.

Gideon wanted to ask about it, but his audacity didn’t stretch quite that far. Rhodes’s manner was kindly enough, yet there was an invisible fence line behind it, enclosing places where it wouldn’t be wise to tread.

“You ever need any help,” Rhodes went on, when Gideon didn’t speak, “you’ll find me boarding at Mrs. Porter’s, over in Stone Creek.”

Gideon nodded. Stone Creek was a fair distance from Flagstaff, and he didn’t own a horse. Still, it was good knowing he could go there and expect some kind of welcome when he arrived.

Rhodes moved to rein his horse away, toward the road.

“Wait!” Gideon heard himself say.

The familiar stranger turned in the saddle, looked down at him.

“How many of you are there? Brothers, I mean?” Gideon blurted.

Rhodes smiled. “Five,” he answered. “Wyatt, Nick, Ethan, Levi and me.”

Gideon drew a step closer. “Are they Paytons?”

The answer was slow in coming. “No,” Rhodes said.

Gideon frowned. It was bad enough that he hadn’t known his own brothers’ Christian names. Now he wasn’t sure he knew who he was, either.

With a nod for a goodbye, Rhodes took to the road headed in the direction of Stone Creek.

Gideon watched him out of sight, half-sick with wondering. Then he bent, picked up the letter from the college in Pennsylvania, the only mail to come that day, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

Without a fare-thee-well for Rose, he headed for Ruby’s place.

* * *

THE YELLOW DOG LAY in the doorway to Mr. Rhodes’s quarters as though guarding them, looking utterly bereft.

Lark, alone in the house because Mrs. Porter had gone to an all-day meeting at church and Mai Lee was off somewhere with her husband, Hon Sing, set aside the lesson plans she’d been drawing up, in preparation for the week to come, and regarded the animal with compassionate concern.

“He hasn’t left you—your master, I mean,” she told the dog.

Pardner, muzzle resting on his forepaws, gave a tiny whimper.

“Perhaps you’re hungry,” Lark said, getting up from her chair. Mr. Rhodes had given the creature table scraps the night before, with Mrs. Porter’s blessings, and he’d had leftover pancakes and a scrambled egg for breakfast.

While she certainly didn’t have the run of her landlady’s well-stocked larder, Lark had seen the heel of a ham in the pantry earlier, while seeking the tea canister.

But perhaps Mai Lee was saving the bit of ham for her hardworking husband. For all Lark knew, it might be the only thing Hon Sing had to eat.

No, she couldn’t give such a morsel to a dog.

In the end, she cut a slice of bread and buttered it generously, then tore it into smaller pieces. She was approaching Pardner with this sustenance when the kitchen door suddenly swung open and Mr. Rhodes strode in.

Pardner gave an explosive bark of jubilance and nearly trampled Lark in his rush to greet his master.

Mr. Rhodes bent, ruffled the dog’s ears, spoke gently to him and let him out the back door, following in his wake.

Lark, recognizing a prime opportunity to make herself scarce, stood frozen in the middle of Mrs. Porter’s kitchen floor instead, one hand filled with chunks of buttered bread.

Mrs. Porter returned before Mr. Rhodes reappeared, her cheeks pink from the cold and religious conviction. Beaming, she untied the wide black ribbons of her Sunday bonnet. “You missed an excellent sermon,” she told Lark. “All about the tortures of eternal damnation.”

“Sounds delightful,” Lark said mildly and with no trace of sarcasm, depositing Pardner’s refreshments on a chipped saucer and setting it on the floor. Having lived two years under Autry’s roof, she knew the highways and byways of hell, and had no desire to revisit the subject.

Mrs. Porter removed her woolen cloak and hung it on one of several pegs beside the door. “You really should consider the fate of your immortal soul,” she said.

The door opened again, and Pardner bounded in, his master behind him.

“Wouldn’t you say we should all consider the fate of our immortal souls, Mr. Rhodes?” Mrs. Porter inquired, looking for support.

“Rowdy,” Mr. Rhodes said. He watched Lark as he took off his hat and coat and hung them next to Mrs. Porter’s bonnet and cloak, probably noting the high color that burned in Lark’s cheeks.

His perusal made her uncomfortable, and yet she could not look away.

“Yes, indeed,” he told Mrs. Porter, in belated answer to her question. “I’ve run afoul of the devil myself, a time or two.”

If Lark had said such an outrageous thing, Mrs. Porter would have taken her to task for flippancy. Because Mr. Rhodes—Rowdy—had been the one to say it, she simply twittered.

It was galling, Lark thought, the way some women pandered to men—especially attractive ones, like the new boarder.

“You’re personally acquainted with the devil, Mr. Rhodes?” Lark asked archly, when Mrs. Porter went into the pantry for the makings of supper.

“He’s my pa,” Rowdy answered.

3

ROWDY RARELY LOOKED at Lark Morgan during the Sunday supper of hash, deftly made by Mrs. Porter since it was Mai Lee’s night off, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of her.

He should have been thinking about his pa or about Gideon or about the meeting with Sam O’Ballivan and Major Blackstone coming up the next morning.

Instead the mysterious woman sitting directly across the table from him, intermittently pushing her food around on her plate with the tines of her fork and eating as though she was half-starved, filled his mind.

She hadn’t told him anything about herself. What Rowdy knew, he’d gleaned from Mrs. Porter’s eager chatter.

Lark was a schoolteacher, never married, popular with her students.

She’d been in Stone Creek for three months, during which time she’d never sent or received a letter or a telegram, as far as Mrs. Porter could determine. And Mrs. Porter, Rowdy reckoned, could determine plenty.

Lark Morgan’s clothes gave the lie to a part of her story—they were costly, beyond the means of any schoolmarm Rowdy had ever heard of. He wasn’t convinced, either, that she’d never been married; there was a worldliness about her, as though she’d seen the seamy side of life, but an innocence, too. She’d been a witness to sin, he would have bet, but somehow she’d managed to hold her expensive skirts aside to avoid stepping in it.

Mentally Rowdy cataloged his other observations.

She’d dyed her hair—there was a slight dusting of gold at the roots.

Her dark eyes were luminous with secrets.

She was unquestionably brave.

And she was just as surely afraid. Even terrified at times.

He’d joshed her a little earlier, claiming the devil was his pa, and she’d flinched before she caught herself.

Could be she was a preacher’s daughter, and the devil was serious business to her. Some folks, Rowdy reckoned, paid so much mind to old Scratch and his doings that they never got past a nodding acquaintance with God.

Mrs. Porter finished her meal, setting her plate on the floor so Pardner could have at the leftovers, and set about brewing up a pot of coffee. A lot of people didn’t drink the stuff at night—said it kept them awake—but Rowdy thrived on it. Could consume a pot on his own and sleep like a pure-hearted saint until the dawn light pried at his eyelids.

Lark hesitated, then took a second helping of hash. She was a small thing, with a womanly shape, but Rowdy had seen ranch hands with a lesser appetite. He wondered what kind of hole she was trying to fill up with all that food.

His own hunger appeased, he excused himself from the table, noting the look of relief that flickered briefly in Lark’s eyes, and scraped what was left of his supper onto Pardner’s plate. When he returned to his chair, the pretty schoolmarm was clearly startled, bristling a little.

“I’ll clear away the dishes,” Rowdy said to Mrs. Porter, once she’d gotten the coffee started and showed signs of lingering to fuss and fiddle.

Mrs. Porter looked uncertain.

“It was a fine supper,” Rowdy told her. “And I’m obliged for it.”

The landlady’s eyes shone with pleasure. “I am a little weary,” she confessed girlishly, sparing nary a glance for Lark, who seemed torn between tarrying and rushing headlong for the back stairs. “Perhaps I shall retire a little early, leave you and Miss Morgan to get acquainted. Mai Lee and the mister ought to be home soon. I always leave the back door unlocked for them.”

Lark rankled visibly at the prospect of being alone with him, but she didn’t rise from the table. She’d put down her fork, and her hands were out of sight. Rowdy was pretty sure, from the tense set of her shoulders, that she was gripping the sides of her chair with all ten fingers.

Rowdy stood, out of deference to the older woman. “A good night to you, Mrs. Porter,” he said, gravely polite. “I’ll wait up for Mai Lee and her man and see that the door is locked before I turn in.”

Mrs. Porter nodded, flustered, mumbled a good-evening to Lark, and departed, pausing once on the stairs to look back, naked curiosity glittering in her eyes. Like as not, she’d wait in the upper hallway for a spell, eavesdropping.

Rowdy smiled at the idea. Sat down again.

Lark stared into her plate.

“I guess I’ll take Pardner out for a walk,” Rowdy said. “Maybe you’d do me the kindness of keeping us company, Miss Morgan?”

Lark’s gaze flew to his face. She bit her lower lip, then nodded reluctantly and got to her feet. He’d been right to suppose there was something she was itching to find out, but it was clearly a private matter, and she knew as well as he did that Mrs. Porter had an ear bent in their direction.

Together they cleared the table, setting the dishes and silverware in the cast-iron sink. Rowdy pushed the coffeepot to the back of the stove, so it wouldn’t boil over while they were out, and watched out of the corner of his eye as Lark took a cloak from the peg by the door and draped it around her shoulders. Pardner, eager for an outing, dashed from Rowdy to Lark to the door, exuberant at his good fortune.

Lark smiled and leaned to give the dog’s head a tentative pat.

Something stirred in Rowdy at the sight.

“Does he have a leash?” Lark asked, as Rowdy crossed the room to stand as close to her as convention allowed, donning his own hat and coat.

He smiled. A leash? She was from a city, then, and probably a large one, where respectable folks didn’t allow their dogs to run loose. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Pardner sticks pretty close to me, wherever we go. Wouldn’t even chase a rabbit unless I gave him leave, and I never have.”

Rowdy opened the door, braced himself against the chill of the night air, and went out first, so if there was trouble, he’d be a barrier between it and Lark Morgan.

Pardner slipped past them both but waited in the yard, turning in a circle or two in his impatience to be gone, until they caught up.

“Your name isn’t Rowdy Rhodes,” Lark said, in a rush of whispered words, the moment they all reached the wooden sidewalk.

Pardner proceeded to lift his leg against a lamppost up ahead, while Rowdy adjusted his hat. “And yours isn’t Lark Morgan,” he replied easily.

Lark reddened slightly under her high cheekbones. Lord, she was a beauty. Wasted as a small-town schoolmarm. She ought to be the queen of some country, he reckoned, or appear on a stage. “Lark is my name,” she argued.

“Maybe so,” he answered. “But ‘Morgan’ isn’t. You’re running from something—or somebody—aren’t you?”

She hesitated just long enough to convince Rowdy that his hunch was correct. “Why are you here, Mr. Rhodes?” she asked. “What brings you to a place like Stone Creek?”

“Business,” he said.

She stopped, right in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Rowdy to stop, too, and look back at her. “Am I that business, Mr. Rhodes? If...if someone hired you to find me—”

“Find you?” Rowdy asked, momentarily baffled. In the next moment it all came clear. “You think I came here looking for you?”

She gazed at him, at once stricken and defiant. She had the look of a woman fixing to lift her skirts, spin on one dainty heel and run for her life. At the same time, her chin jutted out, bespeaking stubbornness and pride and a fierce desire to mark out some ground for herself and hold it against all comers. “Did you?”

Rowdy shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said quietly. “I did not.”

Lark still didn’t move. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t,” Rowdy answered, keeping a little distance between them, so she wouldn’t spook. “But consider this. If I’d come to Stone Creek to fetch you away, Miss Morgan, you and me and Pardner, we’d be a ways down the trail by now, whether you wanted to go along or not.”

Her eyes flashed with indignation, but the slackening in her shoulders and the slight lowering of her chin said she was relieved, too. “You are insufferably confident, Mr. Rhodes,” she said.

He grinned, tugged at the brim of his hat. “Call me Rowdy,” he said. “I don’t commonly answer to ‘Mr. Rhodes.’”

“I’d wager that you don’t,” Lark said. “Because it isn’t your name. I’m sure of that much, at least.”

“You’re sure of a lot of things, I reckon,” Rowdy countered. “Miss Morgan.”

“Very well,” she retorted. “I’ll address you as Rowdy. It probably suits you. You’ve fooled Mrs. Porter with your fine manners and your flattery, that’s obvious, but you do not fool me.”

“You don’t fool me, either—Lark.” He waited for her to protest his use of her given name—it was a bold familiarity, according to convention—but she didn’t.

She came to walk at his side, between him and Mrs. Porter’s next-door neighbor’s picket fence. The glow of the streetlamps fell softly over her, catching in her hair, resting in the graceful folds of her cloak, fading as they passed into the pools of darkness in between light posts.

“Did your mother call you Rowdy?” she asked casually, while Pardner sniffed at a spot on the sidewalk.

“Yes,” Rowdy said, remembering. Miranda Yarbro had always used his nickname—except when she was angry. On those rare occasions, her lips would tighten, and she’d address him as Robert. When she was proud of him, she’d call him Rob.

“Bless my boy Rob,” she’d prayed, beside his bed, every night until he left home with his pa, at fourteen. “Make a godly man of him.”

Guilt ambushed him. He reckoned the good Lord had attempted to answer that gentle woman’s prayer, but he, Rowdy, hadn’t cooperated.

“Where do you hail from, Mr.—Rowdy?”

Grateful for the reprieve from his regrets, Rowdy smiled. “A farm in Iowa,” he said. “Where do you hail from, Lark?”

She didn’t reply right away.

“Fair is fair,” Rowdy prompted. “You asked me a question and I gave you an answer.”

“St. Louis,” she said. “I grew up in St. Louis.”

And you’ve been a lot of places since, Rowdy thought, but he kept the observation to himself. After all, he’d covered considerable territory himself, in the years between here and that faraway farm.

Pardner trotted back to them. Nuzzled Rowdy’s hand, then Lark’s.