The Angel Of Devil's Camp

Her clothes! Wadded up in a ball and wet as rainwater.

She snatched them up and with shaking hands pulled on the dripping garments, starting with her underdrawers. Her skin shrank at the feel of the damp, clingy muslin.

That dreadful man!

Every step of the way back to the cabin she rehearsed the stinging words she would level at the colonel when she confronted him.

Tom leaned back on the plank porch, supporting his weight on one elbow. He’d sent the crew on ahead with the promise of venison steaks for dinner, and now he waited for Mary Margaret Hampton. He worked his thumbnail into the wood, outlining a curved half-moon that looked like the letter C.

C for cantankerous. C for crazy. Chuckle-headed. Calico-hungry. All that and more. His crew was an obstreperous bunch of misfits, and it had taken half the season to turn them into a team. He’d almost lost another man today when that idiot bullwhacker Sam Turner got to showing off and one of the young Claymore boys slipped under the mule team.

On top of that, he was saddled with a cotton-headed female. By damn, he was in no mood for any nonsense, especially not from a little slip of a woman whose sense of independence outweighed her brain power.

When she appeared on the trail that led up to the cabin, Tom lifted his head. She marched along the path with jerky steps, holding her wet, drooping skirt up out of the dust. Her eyes glinted an icy green.

“Evening, Miss Hampton.”

She stopped short and pressed her lips together. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you. Thought you might be along pretty soon. I see you found your dress and…things.”

“Found and donned, no thanks to you. Whatever possessed you to take them in the first place?”

“Had to,” he said quietly. “Behind me were eleven men who haven’t seen a woman in six months, let alone one standing in the woods buck naked. What do you think they’d do if they stumbled across some damn fool’s frilly underwear hangin’ on a bush?”

“Avert their eyes and walk on, of course. As any gentleman would.”

Tom rose. “My men aren’t gentlemen, Miss Hampton. They’re rough and they’re rowdy and they’re all male. I wouldn’t go poking at this particular hornet’s nest if I were you.”

“I was most certainly not poking—”

“You were taking a bath in the river. Against my orders.”

She dropped the folds of her skirt clenched in her fingers and propped her fists on her hips. “You saw me!”

“Couldn’t miss you. Hair all sudsed up with white foam, you looked like a frosted cake floating out there in the middle of the river. I gathered up your clothes so the men wouldn’t get interested in finding the owner.”

“Frosted cake! Well, I never!”

“That water’s crystal clear,” he said with a grin. “The rest of you looked like a shriveled up corn doll.”

“The rest of me?”

“Miss Hampton, don’t take another bath without telling me. Like I said before, I’ll post a guard.”

Speechless, Meggy stared into the man’s face for a full minute. A muscle under his eye jerked. “A guard,” she echoed.

“A guard.”

All at once she became aware of how cold and wet she was. Her clammy underdrawers stuck to her thighs and calves; her damp shimmy clung to her back and chest like a coating of cold syrup. Her petticoats dripped water down her ankles and into her shoes. And her dress…well, it felt for all the world like a heavy, cold shroud.

“Go inside,” he ordered. “You’re shivering. Get out of those wet things.”

“I am n-not s-shivering.” She had to work hard to keep her voice steady.

He rolled his eyes toward the treetops. “Go!”

Without thinking, Meggy snapped her heels together and saluted. “Am I dismissed, then, Colonel?”

Without waiting for a reply, she hoisted her skirt up a few inches and planted one foot on the porch. With a little lift she attempted to heave herself upward, but the weight of her wet clothes was more than she’d bargained for. She stumbled against the edge.

Tom watched her struggle for a moment, then moved behind her, placed his hands about her waist and lifted her onto the porch. The feel of her body under his hands, the whiff of roses that came from her hair sent a red-hot arrow straight to his groin.

With an exaggerated sniff, she stomped across the planks to the front door, yanked it open and banged it shut behind her.

“Headstrong and excitable,” he muttered as he clomped down off the porch. “She sure gets an arch in her back over the damnedest things.”

On the other hand, she might have been raised on prunes and proverbs, but when she closed her mouth, she was all woman.

“That being the case…” He laughed out loud as he strode down the hill toward the safety of his tent.

“The next time she flames up over something, I guess I’ll have to set a backfire.”

Chapter Five

Meggy listened to the colonel’s boots clump across the porch and fade as he tramped down the path. As fast as her chilled fingers could move, she unbuttoned her wet dress, stepped out of her petticoats and peeled off the cold, clingy underdrawers and shimmy. The late-afternoon air was still warm, but her naked skin pebbled just the same. Hurriedly she laid the wet garments out on the counter beneath the windowsill to dry.

And stopped short.

Her pie! Her beautiful apple pie had disappeared. The black iron skillet sat on the sill right where she’d left it, but it was empty.

Clutching a damp petticoat to her body, she tiptoed forward for a closer look. Gone. Not a single crumb remained in the pan. Something, or someone, had stolen her pie.

She snatched up the skillet and gasped. A shiny round coin lay underneath it. “Merciful heaven, a five-dollar gold piece! But who—”

The colonel, of course. That scoundrel! Why, he’d just lounged there on her porch, waiting for her to return from the river. Plain as buttermilk he’d helped himself to her creation, without even a by-your-leave.

Seething inside, Meggy struggled to think clearly. At least it was decent of him to pay for his prize. She could use the money to pay for the flour and sugar she’d used, and then…

Absently she hung the damp petticoat on a nail by the door and drew on clean, dry undergarments, her brain turning over the spark of an idea.

Yes! And it would serve him right, too. The very idea of eating her pie…

By suppertime she had made up her mind. Slipping the gold piece into her pocket, she snatched up the iron skillet and sped down the path to the cookhouse.

Fong glanced up from the cookstove as she entered the kitchen. “Ah, missy find fry pan. Have good luck now. Fry steaks for supper.” He lifted the pan from her hands and banged it down on the stove top.

Meggy blinked. “Don’t you want to ask me about the skillet?”

Fong grinned at her. “Nope. More better you not explain.” He turned away, dropped a teacup-size ball of suet into each of the four pans. When it sizzled, he slapped down inch-thick slabs of meat and turned to her.

“You need more flour?”

Her heart nearly stopped beating. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “But this time I can pay.” She drew out the gold piece and laid it on the warming shelf.

The cook scooped it into his palm. “Too much, missy. You take what you need for two, three days.”

“And…and a skillet?” Meggy held her breath. Without the heavy iron utensil she had nothing to bake a pie in.

“Oh, yes. Take big pan this time.” He banged a two-pronged fork against the handle of the largest skillet. “This one good. I hear about pie,” he added in an undertone.

Meggy swallowed. “Who told you?”

Fong’s black eyes sparkled. “Cannot say. But—” he beckoned her closer “—he say needs maybe more sugar.”

“Oh! The pie thief is criticizing his booty?”

“I not steal,” Fong protested. He pointed to the side pocket of his black tunic. “Someone pay. In gold. Good business, missy.”

Meggy exchanged a long, significant look with the cook. Was she dreaming, or was he encouraging her in her enterprise?

Whistling idly between his teeth, Fong surveyed his skillet-crowded stove top, jabbed one sputtering steak with the fork and expertly flipped it over. “Next time,” he said, “use big pan. Make more dollar.”

Was it possible Fong was in cahoots with the colonel? She baked a pie, the colonel stole—well, bought it—and Fong got rich when she paid him for the supplies she’d used? It made sense of a sort.

Except that she needed the money, or at least part of it. Otherwise, she would never collect enough for train fare back to…

She caught her breath as a sudden, sharp realization hit her. She could not possibly return to Chester County. By now, the parsonage would be occupied by the new minister and his family, and even though her sisters would surely take her in, she did not relish the role of maiden aunt, a spinster like Aunt Hattie, who’d grown old taking care of other people’s children instead of her own, and who’d become addled and crotchety in middle age because no man had ever touched her.

Oh, dear God, please don’t let that happen to me. I want a life for me. I want someone to love who will love me back.

Therefore, she resolved, she must go forward. She would go where she could have what she wanted. And if that meant selling another pie and saving her money, then that was exactly what she would do. She did not belong anywhere, now. But she would. She would.

Meggy pointed to the largest skillet. “That one, please.”

Fong nodded and flipped over two more steaks.

She set plates and mugs and utensils on the table, lugged out the coffeepot, brought two bowls of boiled potatoes and one of savory-smelling brown gravy, and finally carried out the huge platter of venison steaks just as Fong clanged the dinner bell.

A loud, quarreling knot of men tumbled through the cookhouse door.

“Get yer butt outta my place.”

“Anybody know who shot the deer?”

“Shut up and pass the meat!”

“Kinda takes the sting out of bustin’ that skid, don’t it, Swede?”

“Ya, sure it does, by golly.”

The men fell on the food like vultures. As the last man, the black-haired Indian, sat down at the table, Meggy spotted the colonel on the porch, his gait slow and loose jointed, his unruly dark hair curling over the collar of his red plaid shirt. Talk ceased the instant he moved into the room.

Meggy turned back toward the kitchen. Something clunked onto the table, and Tom’s voice rose behind her. “Boys, we have among us a sharpshooter of the first water.”

Meggy stopped in her tracks.

“Well, who is it?” someone shouted.

“Shut up, ya numbskull. It’s the colonel that done it.”

“You mean he won his own whiskey? ’Tain’t fair!”

“Well, hell, what do we care? We got meat, ain’t we?”

“Boys,” the colonel said. The sound of his voice brought instant quiet.

Meggy’s neck grew warm. Would he tell them who had shot the deer?

“Now, boys, when a person’s this good a shot, it pays to take note. First off, it’s food on the table. And secondly—”

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