Lynna Banning (15 page)

Behind the sandy-haired rancher, Jeremiah shrugged his broad shoulders, his palms turned up.

Ben shook his head. “It’s not Indians, Si. I’ve been in their camp the past two days. Not one of them’s been rustling any cows from around here.”

Jeremiah grinned. “That railroad fella’s in town again,” he said after a moment. “Larsen, remember? He’s talkin’ posse, too.”

Ben lifted his hat, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve and raked a hand through his hair. “Larsen’s worried about his investment.”

“Well, hell, Ben,” Silas retorted. “So’m I! All tallied up, that makes near a hundred head taken right under my nose!” He rolled a cigarette with shaking hands, offered it to Ben and started on another. “I’m not stupid, Ben. And I’m not blind. How the devil—”

“Don’t know how, Si,” Ben interjected. “Might have an idea as to
who,
though.” He watched the rancher’s eyes come alive with interest.

“Yeah?” Silas exhaled a puff of blue smoke into the dusty air.

Ben studied Silas’s freckled face. “Yeah. Could be somebody right here in the valley.”

The rancher’s eyes widened. “What? Why, that’s crazy. Why would—”

He stopped short as Jessamyn rode up on her mare. He touched his hat. “Ma’am.”

Ben didn’t like the light that flared in Silas’s eyes as he took in the tumbled mass of wavy hair sheathing Jessamyn’s shoulders. The rancher gazed at her like a moonstruck puppy.

Jeremiah moved over to make room for her mare. “Miss Jessamyn. You’re ridin’ pretty good now.” His dark eyes twinkled. “I expect Ben kept you pretty saddle-weary.”

“Yes, he did, Jeremiah. But I did learn to ride, didn’t I?”

The deputy chuckled. “You surely did, Miss Jessamyn. Look mighty fine on a horse now. Just like a fine-trained Carolina lady.” He shot a quick look at Ben, engaged in a heated exchange with Silas Appleby. “Yessir, mighty fine.”

“Jeremiah, the truth is, I learned a lot more on this trip than how to ride.” She smiled at the deputy. “And
none
of it was easy.”

“Yes, ma’am. Seems like nothin’ worthwhile in life ever comes for free.” A somber look passed over his face, then he chuckled again. “Come on. Miz Boult’s got a hot supper waitin’ for you. We been expectin’ you for the last day and a half.”

The deputy pulled his horse abreast of Ben’s gelding. “Ben, didja see Walks Dancing?”

“Yeah. Didn’t talk to her much, though. Black Eagle keeps a close watch on her.”

“She married yet?”

“Not yet. Soon, though. The chief’s getting on in years. He needs sons, grandsons to follow him.”

Suddenly serious, Jeremiah shook his head. “Yeah. Like I figured. Thanks, Ben.” He turned his mount toward town.

Jessamyn fell in beside him, only half listening to the continuing dialogue between Ben and Silas Appleby. She couldn’t wait to get home, breathe in the wonderful scents in Cora’s kitchen, run her hands over the polished mahogany banister, the cool, smooth sheets she knew Cora would have put on the bed in her yellow-papered bedroom. Her own bedroom. In her own house. Pride and gratitude for the gift Papa had left her bubbled in her breast.

And her newspaper. After a bath and some supper, she’d walk over to the
Wildwood Times
office and start composing her first story. Provided, she admitted to herself, she could concentrate on the words long enough to make coherent paragraphs. The story was already sketched out in
her notebook; all she had to do was refresh her memory and follow the outline she’d written down.

She sucked in a shaky breath and kicked the mare into a canter. All she had to do was stop thinking about Ben Kearney, stop remembering the low, rumbly sound of his voice, the unsettling male scent of his body, heavy with horse sweat and pine soap.

She rode out ahead of the three men. If Ben disturbed her, well, then, she’d have to find something to take her mind off him. Publishing her first edition of the
Wildwood Times
should do just that. No matter how compelling his presence, Ben was merely an attractive but transitory interest.

Her newspaper was her whole life.

“C
hild, child!” Cora Boult pulled Jessamyn into a bosomy hug. “If you don’t look a sight!”

“Oh, Cora, it’s so good to be home. And I’m so hungry!”

“’Course you are. I’ve got a nice stewed…” The housekeeper hesitated at Jessamyn’s quick intake of breath.

“Chicken,” she finished.

“Oh, thank God,” Jessamyn murmured.

“Say, what’s the sheriff been feedin’ you, anyway?” Cora huffed. “You look positively peaked.”

“Don’t even ask,” Jessamyn managed.

The housekeeper grinned. “If you say so. Say, lookee there, on the table.”

Jessamyn swept her gaze to the bouquet of pearly pink roses jammed into one of Cora’s glass canning jars. She bent to sniff the fragrant blooms. “Oh, they’re lovely. Bathwater must be a special elixir for your roses. They smell extra nice—spicy, like vanilla cookies.”

“Ain’t any roses I grew, honey. Gus, down at the livery stable, brung ‘em. Said they was ‘Male Mason,’ or somethin’ like that.”

“Malmaison,” Jessamyn pronounced.

“You know, I think Gus is kinda sweet on you.”

Jessamyn started. “Sweet on me! Whatever for?”

Cora propped both hands on her ample hips. “For courtin’, that’s what. You want to stay an old—a maiden lady all yer life?”

“I never thought about marrying,” Jessamyn said slowly. “All my life I’ve planned to run a newspaper.”

“Humph. ’T’ain’t natural. I never seen Gus take roses to anybody else before. Don’t make no nevermind that he runs the livery stable, he’s a fine man, Gus is. He was an officer in the Union army, you know. That’s how come he lost his eye. Don’t never mention it, though. He likes horses, is all. When he first rode into town he didn’t like how the blacksmith was treatin’ the animals, so he up an’ bought the place. Paid cash, too. You listening, child?”

Jessamyn sighed. “I’m listening, Cora.”

“Anyway, he’s been here in the valley ever since. And I never saw him take anyone roses before.”

Cora moved about the kitchen, continuing her recitation as she clattered pot lids and iron spoons, but her voice faded from Jessamyn’s consciousness. She didn’t want to think about roses or Gus or anything beyond filling her growling stomach and settling herself at Papa’s big oak desk over at the newspaper office. She especially didn’t want to think about courting.

“Yes, Cora,” she said absently. “Mmm-hmm. And roses… Yes, lovely.” One thing in particular she didn’t want to think about was Wildwood Valley’s tanned, longlimbed sheriff.

“…are you?” Cora finished on a question.

Jessamyn started. “Am I what?”

Cora drew herself up. “Are you gonna eat your supper in them duds, or are you wantin’ to get back into proper petticoats again?”

Jessamyn had to laugh. She gave the older woman a quick hug and planted a kiss on the lined cheek. “It doesn’t matter. I’m so hungry I could eat stark naked!”

At the housekeeper’s startled expression, Jessamyn unhooked her wide leather belt and pulled the rumpled red
shirt free of the waistband. The moment she began to unbutton the plaid garment, she thought of Ben. Her fingers stilled.

Ben certainly wasn’t courting her, as Cora termed it. The sheriff had barely tolerated her for most of their journey together. It took days for him to even be civil until the end, and then he’d…

She closed her eyes at the memory of his hands moving over her back, the taste of his mouth. Maybe she didn’t want a man to come calling, bringing her roses and making polite talk. All she wanted was Ben Kearney to kiss her again.

She snapped open her eyelids. She’d die before she’d admit such a thing to Cora, or anyone else. It was unsettling enough to acknowledge it to herself.

By the time Jessamyn arrived at the front door of the
Wildwood Times
office, darkness blanketed the town’s main street. Even Charlie’s Red Fox Saloon was unusually quiet. Maybe, she reasoned, because it was Friday, and the ranch owners and cowboys who caroused with boisterous abandon on Saturday night reined in their high spirits until then. Or maybe their wives—the ones who had wives—insisted their menfolk accompany them to evening prayer meeting.

The sound of singing rose from the painted clapboard church at the far end of town, floating on the soft June air. Jessamyn hummed along as she unlocked the office door, propping it ajar to enjoy both the hymns and the warm, honeysuckle-scented breeze.

“Rock of ages, cleft for me…” She lit the oil lamp, draped her blue paisley shawl over the desk chair and ducked into the back room where sectioned type cases lined the wall behind the wide, slanted worktable.

Her pulse tripped. She couldn’t wait to compose her story, lay the completed type stick into the frame and lock it up. But first she had to get the words down on paper. She turned toward the desk. With deft fingers, she tied a
starched work apron over her blue striped gingham skirt, then searched her pocket for the notebook she’d filled on her journey into the mountains. Settling herself at her father’s battered desk, she flipped the pad open.

Merciful heavens! Jessamyn stared in dismay at the pages of fuzzy, water-washed writing. She’d carried the pad in her shirt pocket all during the trek with Ben. Now, after her unplanned dunking while crossing the river, she couldn’t decipher one single word.

She snapped it shut and groaned aloud. All her notes— visual impressions of Black Eagle and the Indian camp hidden high in the mountains, all Ben’s thoughtful, careful answers to her probing questions—gone. Washed away by the river’s swift current.

Dumbfounded, she stared at the ruined pages. She’d have to start from scratch, draw on her memory to re-create her story.

Close to despair, she bent her head. After a moment she slid open the top desk drawer, closed her fingers around a thick pencil. If she worked all night and through tomorrow, she might still be ready to go to press on Tuesday.

Her thoughts churned. She sat motionless for a long minute, then drew in a deep breath, smoothed a sheet of scratch paper onto the desk top and began to write.

Sheriff Kearney On Trail Of Cattle Thief Douglas County Sheriff Benning Kearney suspects the cattle thief raiding Wildwood Valley herds is in league with someone supplying illegal firearms to the Indians. Kearney concluded this following a recent trip into the Calapooya Mountain country….

She finished the paragraph and read the final sentence out loud. “It remains for Sheriff Kearney to unravel the mystery, but one thing is now clear. Identifying the thief is only a matter of time.”

Jessamyn sighed in satisfaction. Bustling toward the composing table, she reached for her type stick.

Ben lifted his niece’s small frame out of his saddle where she’d sat the past quarter mile and set her carefully on the bottom porch step of his brother’s ranch house.

“Go on in now, Alice. Tell your mama I’ll be along to supper after I feed old Blackie here and wash up at the pump.”

The child bolted up the steps, and the door slammed behind her. Ben shook his head.

A part of him—a part he barely recognized it was so rusted over from years of denial—longed to share in the easy laughter and affection between two people who loved each other.

He’d had to force himself to saddle the gelding and ride out here today. The painful contrast between his brother’s full life with the woman to whom he’d pledged his life and Ben’s own existence—that of a hardscrabbling soul trying to find itself again, as Jeremiah put it—was all too sharp.

Sunday nights after supper at the Double K Ben slept badly, tossing on the hard, narrow cot behind the sheriffs office until Jeremiah grumbled about being awakened.

“You don’ need this, Ben,” the deputy always observed. “You need a woman—a permanent kind of woman. You gave up on Miss Lorena back home, but you’d best get on with your life pretty quick now, or it’ll be too late. No sensible woman wants a burned-out ol’ soldier with a busted heart on his sleeve.”

Ben swore out loud just thinking about his deputy’s oftrepeated litany. Hell, he’d worked hard to “get on with his life” after the war. After Lorena. When his right arm had stiffened up from the wound near his shoulder, he’d taught himself to eat and write, even shoot left-handed. Over the years, he got to where he could put a bullet between a man’s eyes at twenty yards.

But let a woman get close? Never again. In the first
place, he
was
old. And tired. At thirty-six, after years surviving on battlefields in the South and then in Dakota, he was burned out. He didn’t have an interest in courting a woman.

Or the courage.

A calico queen he could tumble into bed and forget the next morning. A lady was another matter. For one thing, he’d never met one he could stand listening to more than an hour. Charlie’s calico girls didn’t talk much. They did what was needed, and that was that. The act might be pretty perfunctory, but it was safer than getting tangled up in the clutches of some clinging vine.

Like Lorena. Damned spoiled and self-centered. He hoped she was happy with the rich carpetbagger landlord of a husband she’d married after he left. He wondered if she would tie up another man’s heart, and his confidence, and make mincemeat out of them, too.

Ben gave the pump handle two vicious strokes and stuck his head under the water to cool off. Why was he dredging all this up again? He shook the water out of his hair, rubbed his wet hands over his face and blotted his cheeks against his sleeve. He had to get his mind off women.

The memory of Jessamyn Whittaker, her chestnut hair tumbled about her shoulders, her soft mouth lifted to his, would fade with a good supper and some ranch talk with Carleton and Ella.

He couldn’t wait to ride into the mountains again. Tracking always distracted him from other things weighing on his heart. If he was on the trail, he wouldn’t have to see her, wouldn’t ache to kiss her again.

With a last swipe at his hair, he clapped his hat back on and strode toward the porch.

So tired she could barely stand, Jessamyn pulled the last sheet of newsprint off the press and held it up. Jeremiah released the lever arm and moved to read over her shoulder.

“Looks mighty fine, Miss Jessamyn,” the stocky man
remarked. Nodding his head, he scanned down the page, his broad forehead creasing into a frown. “Gonna rile up some folks, though. But I expect you know that And surely does look mighty fine.”

Jessamyn’s heart swelled with pride. Despite her exhaustion, her pulse quickened as she examined the still-damp copy of her first issue. The print was sharp and clear, none of the headlines were tombstoned, and the stories beneath were broken into readable paragraphs. The articles ranged from local doings to statewide and national events reported by the wire service and delivered on horseback from Steamboat Landing.

Papa would applaud her debut effort. All during this long night, the second in as many days she had labored at the newspaper office, Jessamyn had felt her father’s spirit hovering near, guiding and encouraging her. She could almost hear his voice in her ear.
“That’s my Jess!”

Her hand shook so violently the paper rattled. “We did it, Jeremiah.” She looked up at the deputy beside her. “Just think, by breakfast time we’ll have fifty copies ready to deliver.”

“You did it, Miss Jessamyn. I jes’ helped out a bit here’n there.”

Jessamyn shook her head. Jeremiah had sneaked over from the sheriffs office last night after Ben had retired, and stayed until the sun rose, helping her lock up the frames of finished type and pulling the heavy press lever for her when her arm gave out.

“I couldn’t have done it without your help, Jeremiah. You’re a good friend.”

The deputy’s toothy grin flashed. “We’re not out of the woods yet, Miss Jessamyn. You don’t have fifty copies— only got thirty-eight. We used the last of the paper a while back.”

Jessamyn’s heart sank. “No more newsprint? But my order at Frieder’s isn’t in yet!”

Merciful heavens, what would she do now? She massaged
her temples with her fingertips.
Think!
she ordered her tired brain. She was out of newsprint and twelve copies short. She gave a little moan of despair.

“Aw, Miss Jessamyn, please don’ cry. I can’t stand it when a lady cries. Lordy, when Miss Lorena—”

Jeremiah caught himself and stopped short.

Jessamyn’s gaze locked with the sober-faced deputy’s. “Jeremiah, tell me. Who is Miss Lorena?”

Jeremiah ran a blunt forefinger around the inside of his shirt collar. “Miss Lorena was…well, uh, she was Ben’s lady, back in Carolina. And, well, seein’ as how Ben and me and Lorena, we grew up together, I sorta liked to imagine she was my lady, too.”

“You were in love with her, weren’t you?” Jessamyn remarked, her voice soft.

The deputy’s eyelids closed momentarily. “Yes’m. But I never spoke out to her. Didn’t have the right. I was just the overseer’s son, and we were mighty poor folk. I couldn’a bought her pretty dresses and fine horses like she’d expect from a man. And Ben…well, Ben was more what Miss Lorena wanted. So I never said nothin’.”

“And Ben never knew, did he?”

“No, ma’am.” The deputy tapped his well-developed chest. “It’s been locked in here for these twenty years.”

A silence dropped over the room. For a moment Jessamyn’s newspaper problems seemed insignificant compared with the lifelong ache in a man’s heart for something he couldn’t have. Lord knew she’d felt a similar longing for her father all those years he’d been gone.

“I am sorry, Jeremiah. Truly I am.”

Jeremiah started as if roused from a dream. “Oh, I’m not so heart-laden I can’t appreciate a fine-lookin’ woman. Sorta like hair of the dog, you might say—it’s good for a man.”

Jessamyn studied the solid, square-faced man before her. If she wasn’t mistaken, her sharp eyes had already identified the deputy’s choice. The look in Jeremiah’s soft brown
eyes that day Walks Dancing had ridden into town told her the deputy might be well on the road to recovery.

Jeremiah cleared his throat. “Now, then, ‘bout your paper supply. Your pappy ever smoke ceegars?” he inquired in his soft drawl.