Daisies In The Wind Page 9

  “Oh, so that’s what you’re worried about, is it?” Caitlin seized on this statement. She patted Rebeccah’s hand. “Well, we’ll just see about that. You know, dear, I can’t see much with these old eyes, but I can still tell a whole lot more about people than some folks with two good eyes in their heads. You may be an outlaw’s daughter, Rebeccah Rawlings, but you’re no more disreputable than I am. Now, I had an idea this morning and I think it’s a good one. Want to hear it?”

  “Go on.”

  “A town meeting. Will you come? Meet everyone—talk about your qualifications. We heard you’ve taught for several years at some fancy private school back east.”

  “Miss Wright’s Academy for Young Ladies.” Rebeccah grimaced. Her voice took on a dry tone. “I possess a fine education, a teaching certificate, and a number of excellent books—which I have yet to unpack,” she added with a smile, “but I don’t think I possess the desire to stand up before a town meeting and present myself to your citizens—and their judgment. No, thank you, Mrs. Bodine. I’d rather not.”

  “What if Wolf and I can persuade the town to give you the job? Without your going on display at the meeting. Will you agree then?”

  Rebeccah doubted very much that Wolf Bodine would persuade the townsfolk to do anything but tar and feather her. But she knew Caitlin would speak earnestly on her behalf, and felt an irresistible warming toward this woman. Yet her feelings were in a tangle. Part of her wanted to accept the teaching position, because she needed the money. And part of her wanted to refuse it, because of the very real reasons she had given Caitlin before. But practicality won out. And besides, she told herself, as Mary came in from the kitchen and Caitlin thrust herself to her feet, maybe the children of Powder Creek won’t be quite as unpleasant as those spoiled girls at the Academy. Maybe I can actually do some good for them. She would see.

  “Do what you wish,” she said, her voice casual. She rose with an air of finality. “If an offer is made, I will consider it.”

  She was proud, Caitlin observed with approval. And for some reason eager to appear indifferent, but as Caitlin and Mary drove home in silence, the older woman’s thoughts clicked along as rapidly as the horses’ hooves. She may have lost most of her vision over the years, but she hadn’t lost her wits or her instincts. From Rebeccah’s smooth, pleasantly low-timbred voice Caitlin knew the girl was cultured, educated, and intelligent. From what Rebeccah didn’t say more than what she did, Caitlin realized that the girl was also vulnerable and very much alone.

  An outlaw? By no means.

  Caitlin dismissed such suspicions with a certainty born of instinct. But why had Fess Jones gone to her cabin last night?

  For no good reason.

  The girl must be in some sort of trouble. And she was too proud to ask for help.

  It’s up to Wolf to see that she’s all right, she decided. And I’m going to tell him so myself.

  She liked Rebeccah Rawlings. And, to her surprise, she had a feeling Wolf did too. He hadn’t been immune to her, that was for sure. Caitlin had heard something in his voice when he’d spoken with the girl, something she hadn’t heard in a long time.

  She smiled to herself as Mary guided the team toward home.

  * * *

  Not once during the entire conversation did Caitlin Bodine mention Wolf, his wife, or his family, Rebeccah reflected as she stood at her kitchen window and gazed out at the turquoise sky dotted with lacy clouds. The fragrance of bluebells drifted into the kitchen, but she scarcely noticed the delicate sweetness of their perfume.

  She closed her eyes, her fingertips resting on the sun-warmed window ledge. Why hadn’t she asked about Wolf?

  Then she opened her eyes and shook off the cobwebs of her own curiosity. “Why should I?” she demanded crossly, and smoothed damp tendrils of hair back from her perspiring brow.

  Because you’re dying to know, a voice inside told her. Some silly part of her still clung to the foolish dreams of her girlhood, to the romanticized fantasies she’d engaged in over a tall cowboy with keen eyes and a kind grin.

  “Foolishness!” she muttered to herself, and turned her back on the majestic, mountain-studded view. There was plenty of work yet to do in and around this cabin. And not a minute to waste daydreaming about Wolf Bodine.

  * * *

  Wolf had his hands full all the rest of the day. After bringing Jones’s body to the undertaker for burial at Boot Hill, he was summoned to break up a fistfight in the Gold Bar Saloon, another at Coyote Kate’s, had to ride to Helena to serve as a witness at a trial, then back to Powder Creek to tend to the paperwork that was the scourge of his job, and finally he had the wearisome duty of locking up a drunken cowboy named Shorty McCall from the Broken Tree Ranch for disturbing the peace after Shorty pistol-whipped a gambler in the Silk Drawers Brothel and then shot up all Molly Duke’s handsome downstairs windows and mirrors.

  Just another quiet day in Powder Creek.

  He was about to lock up for the night and go home for supper when Mayor Duke barreled in, holding up a pudgy hand as Wolf glanced up from his desk.

  “Won’t take up more than a minute of your time, Sheriff. Don’t mind me. Just wanted to tell you. Myrtle Lee Anderson has called a town meeting. It’s set for tomorrow night at the hotel. She’s concerned about that young lady who arrived in town yesterday. Is it true she’s Bear Rawlings’s daughter?”

  “What if it is?”

  Ernest Duke shook his gray head. “Myrtle’s been stirring folks up. Most everyone in these parts remembers that bank holdup Bear Rawlings’s gang pulled here six, maybe seven years ago, when the teller was killed and Ed Mason’s little girl was run down in the street during their getaway. Folks won’t take kindly to having the ringleader’s daughter living here—much less teaching their kids. Oh, yes,” Duke went on, his black eyes fixed unblinkingly on the sheriff, “Myrtle told me Caitlin had some idea about that. But it won’t do, Wolf. We’ll be lucky if folks don’t try to tar and feather that little missy right out of town.”

  “There’ll be no tarring and feathering under my jurisdiction.” Wolf stood to his full height. The hard glance he sent the mayor held a quiet yet perceptible warning. “Get a hold of yourself, Ernest. Don’t get hysterical like Myrtle Lee.”

  “Oh, I’m not in favor of it. I just know that folks still get pretty riled up over the mention of Bear Rawlings’s name, and the fact that his kin is here, well ... Rumor has it over in the hotel and at Coyote Kate’s that she’s up to her pretty white neck in no good. Some think she’s masterminding a future bank job, working with no-good varmints like Fess Jones. Heard you shot that hombre yesterday up at her place. What was he doing there? Were they in cahoots?”

  “Ernest, there’s no evidence that Miss Rawlings is up to anything other than making a go of the Peastone place. Last I heard, Bear won it fair and square from old Amos—maybe the only honest possession he ever came by in his life. She has every right to live there, so long as she doesn’t bother anybody. And by the same token, nobody has the right to bother her. You savvy?”

  Ernest Duke flinched at the ominous look in Bodine’s cold gray eyes. Wolf wasn’t a man to tangle with, no sir, not if you valued your hide. He was easygoing and soft-spoken most of the time, and courteous to all the citizens of the town, but Ernest suspected that beneath all that a deep, slow anger burned within him, and, once ignited, it would rage like a hell-born fire.

  Ernest Duke didn’t want to be the one to fan those flames.

  “No need to worry about me, Sheriff,” he said soothingly, and fingered the lapels of his well-cut dark suit. “I’m just keeping you posted about what’s going on. I don’t have a thing to do with it personally, but I thought you ought to know.”

  “What time is the meeting?”

  “Seven o’clock. Planning to come?”

  Wolf nodded.

  “Fine, then, that’s real fine. See you there.” The mayor bobbed his head and smiled jovially, but Wolf sensed his uneasiness. Myrt
le has already stirred folks up more than he’s saying, Wolf concluded.

  He watched Ernest Duke leave his office and cross Main Street, then closed the shutters. Shorty McCall was snoring in his cell, probably passed out for the night. Wolf’s deputy, Ace Johnson, would be in later to keep an eye on him. As Wolf left the office and stepped out onto the boardwalk, he pondered the mayor’s words and wondered darkly why folks always had to think the worst of strangers. Of course he himself had been suspicious of Rebeccah Rawlings—hell, he still was, up to a point—but that was his job. He’d be damned if he’d let law and order in Powder Creek deteriorate into some hysterical mob out to drive a lone woman from the town.

  Even if she was Bear Rawlings’s daughter.

  8

  The whole town was there.

  Myrtle Lee Anderson had her red-faced sons and daughters-in-law perched in the front row. Right behind them were Doc Wilson, the mayor and his gossipy chipmunk of a wife, Lillian, and Waylon Pritchard, along with his parents and two older brothers. Wolf’s scanning eye noted each citizen crowded into the hotel dining room, where the town meeting was taking place. There was the pretty widow, Lorelie Simpson; Dan Butterick, who owned the sawmill; every rancher whose property came within a thirty-mile radius, prominent among them the Bradys, the Adamses, and the Westerlys, as well as most of the storekeepers and merchants, even some gamblers and saloon girls from Coyote Kate’s and the Gold Bar, who had come to hear about the dangerous and undesirable Miss Rawlings.

  As thunder rumbled down from the Big Belt Mountains and a late-summer storm hurried its way toward the valleys, Caitlin sat with Wolf near the back of the room, holding her temper in check with great effort. Myrtle Lee Anderson took the podium first.

  “That woman’s got no more brains than a grouse,” Caitlin whispered to Wolf as Myrtle Lee went on and on about the upstanding town they lived in and demanded to know what would happen to them all if riffraff outlaws began to take up residence in Powder Creek?

  Abigail Pritchard, Waylon’s thickset, eagle-eyed mother, came to her feet when Myrtle paused for breath. “And how will it make poor Emily Brady feel having to see that Rawlings woman in town every week, knowing that she’s living high off the hog on money left her by the very man responsible for running down Emily’s little niece? It’s a mercy the poor Masons have moved away, that’s what it is. But we haven’t forgotten what Bear Rawlings and his gang did to them. Why should Rebeccah Rawlings be welcome in this town, when little Lottie Mason is buried under six feet of earth because the Rawlings gang ran her down without so much as a backward glance?”

  At this, Emily Brady, the child’s aunt, sank her head into her hands and wept silent tears of rage. Her husband, Cal, stared down at the floor and patted his wife’s knee.

  Griff Westerly came to his feet. Beside him his daughter, Nel, scanned the room to see if Wolf Bodine was present. She noted Wolf in the back just as her father started to speak, and her eyes brightened.

  “Who needs trouble in Powder Creek?” Westerly demanded, facing the crowd. “We’ve built ourselves a good, decent town here and we don’t need the likes of Bear Rawlings or his kin invading it and planning hell-knows-what the first moment our backs are turned.”

  “You’re right, Griff!” Myrtle Lee nodded vigorously from the podium.

  Wolf’s mouth tightened. He stood at last, looking out over the assembled crowd, and the frown deepened between his eyes. While thunder rumbled closer and the air seemed to crackle with the violence of the approaching storm, he walked up to the podium, past all the nodding, muttering citizens, past the Bradys and Doc Wilson, past Nel Westerly, Abigail Pritchard, and Abigail’s sharp-eyed husband, Culley, the most influential rancher in Powder Creek.

  “Let’s hear what the sheriff has to say,” the whisper began. It raced around the stuffy room like a spark of heat lightning.

  “Sheriff?” Myrtle eyed him cautiously. “You want to say something about all this?”

  “Well, I don’t reckon I’m up here just to take my evening promenade,” Wolf replied lazily.

  Purple splotches popped onto Myrtle’s cheeks as the hotel dining room exploded with laughter. Some of the tension eased.

  “Maybe you think this is funny, Sheriff, but it isn’t,” she harrumphed, goaded by his infuriating air of nonchalance.

  “Let me show you how far from funny I think it is,” Wolf drawled, and in one quick motion he removed his badge from his vest and tossed it onto the table beside the podium.

  Immediately a roar went up from the crowd. “What’re you doing, Wolf?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “He’s quittin’, can’t you see?”

  “But he can’t quit!”

  “Wolf, put that thing back on where it belongs!”

  Something like panic fluttered among the more longtime residents of Powder Creek, those who remembered when Sheriff Bodine had come, nearly six years ago, with his little boy and his sprightly mother, those who remembered how efficiently he had cleaned the Saunders gang out of their town. When it was over, eight men were dead, all of them brutal murderers, rustlers, or stage robbers.

  Bodine had killed the trigger-happy Bentley brothers, too, not more than a year later. After that things had been pretty peaceful—for Montana.

  No one in that long, lantern-lit room lined with chairs could imagine Powder Creek without Wolf Bodine as sheriff. He had a reputation that would scare even the roughest of badmen, and more importantly he had the shrewd eye and the deadly aim with a gun that backed it up. Moreover Wolf had courage. He never balked, stalled, or hid from any fight.

  And he was honest, incorruptible. That was not always the case with lawmen. In previous years the gold strikes at Alder Gulch, Last Chance Gulch, and Silver Bow Creek had brought thousands of honest prospectors swarming to the territory, men who had built booming, prosperous towns, but they had also drawn in brutal outlaws, who sometimes worked in tandem with crooked lawmen. In Bannock, in the early sixties, Sheriff Henry Plummer’s gang of highwaymen had killed over one hundred people as they terrorized stagecoaches and men traveling between Bannock and Alder Gulch, until locally organized vigilantes began capturing and hanging the outlaws—Sheriff Plummer, the ringleader, among them. Plummer was by no means the only lawman to throw his lot in with the criminals. It was a common enough occurrence. Every person in the main dining room of the hotel knew the worth of an honest lawman, and they knew they had one in Wolf Bodine. Without ever having spoken much about it before, they all recognized that they would never find a better man to protect Powder Creek, its citizens, and its property.

  Ernest Duke knew it, too, despite his sympathies for Myrtle Lee’s point of view. “Now, now, folks, there’s no reason to get so riled up, I’m sure,” the mayor interjected into the simmering pandemonium, but the perspiration beading on his round face did nothing to reassure the townsfolk, and they quickly shouted him down.

  “Let Wolf talk,” Culley Pritchard ordered, and the babble in the room subsided.

  Outside, the wind blasted down from the mountains, smelling of rain and earth and ponderosa pine. Autumn would be coming soon. And then winter. Winter would be hard enough without having to worry about who was going to keep the law.

  Every citizen in the room knew that. So they hunkered down in their seats, clapped their gazes intently on the tall figure at the podium, and listened.

  “Seems like some people at this meeting—maybe most people—have made up their minds about our newest citizen already,” Wolf said, his cool glance sweeping the room as he spoke, resting for a moment on each sober face. “If it were up to some folks here,” he went on, with a purposeful glance at Myrtle, “we’d just take a vote about running Miss Rebeccah Rawlings out of town, and then do it. Right?”

  “Better safe than sorry, don’t you think, Wolf?” Waylon Pritchard called out, still smarting from the set-down the arrogant Miss Rawlings had delivered to him after her arrival in town.

  Wolf studied him,
his expression unreadable.

  “If you really want to be safe rather than sorry, Waylon, I reckon I have a suggestion for you. Why don’t we just string the lady up right now, tonight, and be done with it? That way we’ll be sure as sure can be that she can’t cause any trouble for us, the good, law-abiding citizens of Powder Creek.”

  Waylon swallowed, his thick Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “I didn’t say we ought to do that,” he protested.

  Across the room Coral sat beside Molly Duke, listening intently. When Waylon glanced uncertainly over to catch her eye, she threw him a look of disgust.

  “Hold on, now, Wolf,” Ernest Duke broke in again, getting laboriously to his feet. He strode up to the podium, unable to keep silent a moment longer. “No one said anything about stringing anyone up. We all know there’s no cause for that—leastways not yet—”

  “Maybe this town isn’t looking for a sheriff to uphold the law. Maybe what folks want is a vigilante leader,” Wolf interrupted. “Someone who’ll stand by whenever the good people of Powder Creek feel like taking the law into their own hands. Someone who’ll do whatever is popular. If that’s the case, you folks had better find yourself another man. I’m stepping down and moving on. Because that’s not the kind of town I want to live in, or raise my son in, or serve.”

  “Don’t be hasty, there, Wolf,” the mayor exclaimed as frantic conversation sprang up throughout the assembly. “No one said anything about vigilantes—”

  “Mayor,” Caitlin broke in from the back row, “this meeting is all about vigilante justice, and you know it. I thought the Montana Territory—and especially Powder Creek—had moved beyond those days. What do we have a sheriff for, and a jail, and a judge coming through once a month regular, if every time some nincompoop feels worried about a stranger, the whole town turns into a lynching party? Stuff and nonsense! No wonder Wolf is ready to resign.”