The Man from Stone Creek. Linda Miller Lael
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a moment Maddie was afraid Mungo’s wife might hurl the lantern at her, since she was still holding it. Instead she extinguished the flame and set it aside. “Come and see how pretty the table looks,” she said as cordially as if no hard words had passed between them.
The long trestle table at the far end of the front room did look festive, set with glistening china plates and water glasses of cut crystal gracing a pristine cloth edged with lace. Undine’s fancy tastes had been the talk of Haven when that order rolled into town on the weekly stagecoach.
Maddie felt a hunger that had nothing to do with food as she took in the sight of that table. Silver candlesticks, with beeswax tapers waiting to be lit. Elegant flatware. A bouquet of wildflowers, spilling over the sides of an exquisitely painted china vase.
“It looks wonderful,” she said, and she meant it.
Undine seemed pleased. “Mungo has promised me a spinet,” she said, well aware, it appeared, of Maddie’s secret yearning for a home of her own. “We’ll have it sent from San Francisco, if I have my way.”
You always do, Maddie thought uncharitably. Her fingers flexed, missing the smooth ivory keys of the piano she’d played at the orphanage in St. Louis and, before that, in the churches and tents where her father had preached the gospel.
Don’t remember, she told herself firmly.
She was spared further conversation with Undine when Sam, Mungo and the boy trooped in. The puppy was missing and Maddie presumed Ben had left it outside.
She saw Sam sweep the well-set table with a glance as he passed, following Mungo toward the kitchen, and knew he wasn’t impressed by the china and cut glass; he’d been counting the places.
Feeling remiss, Maddie did the same. The total was seven, which meant that unless Ben was to have his supper in the kitchen, as children often did on such occasions, two more people would be joining the festivities. If the boy had already eaten, then Garrett, Landry and Rex might make an entrance at any time.
Maddie steeled herself for that. The exchange with Undine had shaken her a little, but she quickly recovered and followed the men to wash her own hands.
Anna Deerhorn, the Donaghers’ cook and housekeeper, was in the kitchen, and sure enough, she’d put a plateful of food on the big round table by the windows. Ben took a seat.
Anna met Maddie’s gaze and gave a nod of greeting.
Maddie smiled. “That embroidery thread you wanted came in on Wednesday,” she told the other woman, and pulled a small package from the pocket of her skirt. She’d wrapped the bright floss carefully before leaving the mercantile to pick Sam up at the schoolhouse.
Anna took the package with another nod and a whispered, “Thank you,” and Maddie glanced warily at Mungo, wondering if she’d somehow betrayed a secret.
Mungo, as it happened, was too busy keeping a suspicious eye on Sam to pay any mind to anything else going on in the room, but Maddie was still troubled. If she got a chance to speak to Anna alone, she would take it.
They’d all washed up, in the basin Anna kept refilling with hot water from the reservoir on the cookstove, and taken their places at the table in the next room—Undine had seated herself squarely between Mungo and Sam, Maddie saw, with rising trepidation—when a clamor arose in the kitchen.
Nobody moved, and Mungo, who had been glowering at Sam since they’d sat down, didn’t look away.
Maddie felt a little trill of fear when the door between the two rooms swung open, and Garrett, Landry and Rex strolled through, single-file, all of them looking as though they’d just come off the trail.
Garrett, the firstborn, was tall and broad through the shoulders, with dark hair and watchful blue eyes. If he lived to old age, which wasn’t likely, given his reputation, he’d look much as Mungo did now. Any woman who didn’t know him would mark him down as handsome, Maddie supposed, but he was no stranger to her, and she kept a careful distance.
Landry, the second son, was a plain man, smaller than Garrett, with a narrow face and small eyes that flitted constantly from place to place, like a rodent on the lookout for a hungry cat.
Rex, like his eldest brother, was at least six feet in height. The resemblance ended there, though; his features were oddly blurred, as though reflected in moving water, his skin pitted by an early case of smallpox.
When their eyes fell on Sam O’Ballivan, Rex and Landry came to a standstill. Garrett, seeing that his father’s attention was focused elsewhere, winked at Undine, who blushed and lowered her gaze.
Well, Maddie thought. I should have guessed.
Sam stood, and Maddie wondered if he was still wearing his .45 under his suit coat, or if he’d left it in the wagon, as most dinner guests would.
“I’m Sam O’Ballivan,” he said heartily. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Rex and Landry didn’t look as though they agreed, but they recovered soon enough.
“Howdy,” Rex said grudgingly.
“You sure do get around,” Landry observed. “I’d swear I seen you someplace before.” The unfriendly expression on his face clearly indicated that he knew exactly where he’d seen Sam O’Ballivan before, and had hoped not to repeat the experience.
Sam smiled, unruffled. “It’s a small world,” he said, and sat down again.
Undine watched out of the corner of her eye as Garrett took the place next to Maddie, reached for a cloth napkin and flipped it open.
“Anna’s ready to serve that venison roast any time now,” she said, oblivious to the tension snapping in the air.
Maddie suppressed an urge to move her chair an inch or two farther from Garrett’s. It made her skin crawl, being that close to him, and in her agitation, she happened to snag glances with Sam, sitting directly across the table from her.
She’d have sworn he smiled at her, even though his mouth didn’t move, and she felt reassured.
Meanwhile, Rex and Landry hauled back their own chairs, with a great deal of scraping, and sat themselves down. Both of them kept casting unhappy looks in Sam’s direction.
How, Maddie wondered, had he managed to make their questionable acquaintance in the short time since he’d come to Haven? When the Donagher brothers came to town, word spread like a storm warning and, since the mercantile was the heart of the community, and thus the changing house for the smallest tidbit of gossip, she would have known they were around five minutes after they rode in.
How would a schoolmaster, new to this part of the Territory, know a pair of scoundrels like Rex and Landry?
She could hardly wait to ask him.
The venison roast proved delicious, as did the rest of the meal—a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes, freshly baked biscuits, green beans and corn and peach cobbler for dessert.
Undine spent the entire evening fawning over Sam, and Mungo glared the whole time. Landry and Rex were jumpy, and Maddie, hungry as she was, could barely get a bite down her throat. The whole place felt like one giant tinderbox ready to explode into flames at a spark.
Garrett appeared comfortable enough, filling and emptying his plate more than once and stealing the occasional telling glance at Undine. And Sam seemed impervious to the sullen hostility coming his way from Mungo, Landry and Rex. He listened to Undine’s relentless chatter as though it had been written on a sacred scroll and carried down from Mount Olympus on a platter, and by the time the peach cobbler went around the table, Maddie’s stomach was clenched tight as a fist.
Would this night never end?
It was nearly nine-thirty, by the fancy clock on the sideboard, when Sam declined a third cup of coffee from a devoted Undine, and announced that he and Miss Chancelor had better be getting back to town. After all, he said, he had work to do in the morning, and Maddie liked to open