The Lawman's Bride. Cheryl St.John
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it was most likely a picture of a young woman with fair hair and a beauty spot. Or of a curly-haired redhead wearing wire-rimmed glasses. None of her personas resembled the way she looked and dressed today.
Here, she couldn’t disguise herself beyond her darkened hair. Mrs. Winters did periodic checks of their faces with a damp towel. No hussies allowed in the Harvey House.
Sophie added her dishes to a pile, thanked the kitchen workers and found the lad who carried wood and kept the stoves free of ashes. “Jimmy.”
“Miss Hollis.” He was stacking wood on a canvas sling.
“Did you run my errand for me?”
“Yes’m.” He reached into the bag that hung on his hip.
She placed her hand on his arm to halt him while she took a moment to glance around. “Okay. Where are they?”
“Right here.” He produced three cigars.
Sophie gave him four coins from her tip money and closed her fingers around the cigars with a smile. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, miss.”
She hid her stash in her skirt pocket and made her way up the back stairs to change clothing. She needed to get out and get some fresh air. Speculating was getting her nowhere.
It was unlikely that the marshal would connect any of the faces on those posters to her, but she couldn’t afford to take any chances.
Willard DeWeise snored loudly from his cell at the back of the building. His dinner tray, licked clean, still sat on the corner of Clay’s desk. Clay picked up a rib bone and whistled low.
Sam, his aged hound, made his ambling way to Clay and stuck his nose under his hand. “Here, fella. Can’t ya smell it?”
Clay stuck the bone between Sam’s yellowed teeth and scratched one scarred and floppy brown ear. Sam settled himself at Clay’s feet with a grunt and licked the bone.
“Why don’t you put that damned dog out of its misery?” Hershel Vidlak, the other marshal asked. “Thing cain’t see, cain’t smell, cain’t take a piss lessen you walk him out and hold it for him.”
“Why don’t you shut your yap before I put you out of your misery?” Clay volleyed back with his usual lack of humor. It was dark, but the confined office was still sweltering. If the lawmen were cranky, he couldn’t imagine what the rowdies in the saloons would be like.
He got up and grabbed his hat. “I’m gonna make rounds.”
“I’m leavin’, too,” Hershel told him. “The missus made a strawberry pie this mornin’.”
“See you tomorrow.” Clay walked out behind Hershel and locked the door. They walked along opposite sides of the street, Clay checking the stores he passed.
Discordant music blared from the open doors of the Side-Track Saloon, yellow light spilling across the boardwalk. He pushed open the batwing doors, peanut shells and grit crunching beneath his boots.
“You workin’, Marshal?” Tubs McElroy, the burly gravel-voiced bartender, wiped beer from the polished bar with an already soggy cloth and paused with his beefy hand on a glass mug.
Clay rested his boot on the brass rail and thumbed his hat back on his head. “I’m callin’ it a night. Set one up for me.”
Tubs slanted a mug beneath the barrel spigot and foam ran over his sausagelike fingers onto the floor. He sat the brew on the bar with a whack.
Clay reached into his pocket for a quarter.
“Nope.” Tubs held up a glistening palm. “Mr. Dotson don’t let me take no payment from marshals or deputies. Havin’ a lawman sittin’ in stops a whole lot o’ trouble from ever startin’.”
Clay shrugged and sipped the lukewarm brew. He wasn’t the sociable type. His presence might raise the eyebrows of the regulars, but a stranger to town, like the one he’d come to observe, wouldn’t know this wasn’t his usual routine.
There were many establishments nicer than the Side-Track for killing an evening if one had a mind to, but this was where the fellow registered at the Strong Hotel as Monte Morgan had chosen to spend the last few evenings.
Clay glanced into the grainy mirror behind the bar and observed the other men standing on both sides of him, the haze of blue-gray smoke that hung near the low ceiling a ghostly backdrop behind their heads. He turned enough to speak to the man on his right in a friendly fashion, one elbow on the bar, both eyes casually scouring the crowd.
A few stockmen and herders sat at one of the green felt poker tables, seriously attending to their game. Cowboys, gamblers and soiled doves filled most of the other tables.
“Heard a new family from Vermont bought the Bowman place,” Clay said, just to come up with something to say.
The store owner beside him looked up in surprise. Everyone in Newton knew the marshal wasn’t one for small talk. “Bought himself a whole rig over at the livery, he did,” he replied.
From a platform at the rear of the building, a tall skinny man in faded trousers and a leather vest preached and read passages from his Bible. After several minutes he was replaced by one of the scantily-clad girls, who belted out an off-key rendition of “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder.”
“The daughter’s easy to look at,” he went on. “One of these cowboys’ll snatch her up fast.”
Clay nodded, feigning interest in the conversation. Monte Morgan sat with a bunch of well-dressed men who were taking turns listening to the singing and preaching while patting the bottoms of the girls who sat on their laps. Morgan was lean, but Clay sensed whipcord muscle beneath the dark suit, silk vest and string tie. The weapon at his hip was an ivory-handled .45, a six-shooter in an embossed holster. Pretty.
Morgan’s confident smile and grandiose mannerisms gave him the larger-than-life quality ladies liked. That was apparent by the fawning and almost laughable way they maneuvered themselves, trying to be the one who got his attention. Maybe he tipped well.
Clay couldn’t put his finger on why the man troubled him. Newton was the home of the Sante Fe roundhouse and hundreds of strangers passed through each week. It was impossible to watch or even check out each one of them. Morgan hadn’t done anything to draw attention, hadn’t so much as tossed a match off the boardwalk. But something about him made Clay wary. Morgan didn’t seem like just another rancher. Clay’s gut instincts had paid off more than once, and he figured he should go through the papers to see if there were clues to this Morgan’s past there.
Sophie strolled along Oak to Broadway where the darkened park beckoned. There were gas lamps along the street, but in the one square block between Broadway and Seventh, only the moon lit the dark brick walkways, hedges and flowers.
The park wasn’t much farther than the boardinghouse from the railroads tracks, but it was a good bit farther from the roundhouse where men worked and switched the tracks all night long. Both of Newton’s public parks were in the First Ward, nestled in housing areas and away from businesses, saloons and billiard halls. It was the closest thing to being out of the city she could find, and she loved the impression of peace and privacy, no matter how false.
Taking a tin of matches from her skirt pocket, she settled on a stone bench still warm from the day’s heat, lit a cigar and blew a smoke ring into the star-filled sky. Hours like these presented more freedom than she’d known in all of her twenty-three years. With liberating calmness, she attempted to clear her thoughts, lying back on the bench to study the night canopy overhead.
She thought of the coming weekend, of three days she could spend any way she chose. She could take a train to Wichita and shop. She could don a disguise and attend the opera right here in Newton. Her lips curled up at the idea. There was something wickedly gratifying about carrying out a pretense such as the last one she imagined. No one would be harmed