“Of course! The perfect thing. Oh, I do admire a man who can think.” She headed for the door, then stopped dead in the middle of the room. She couldn’t go traipsing around town, down to the blacksmith’s shop, without an escort; it just wasn’t done. Mama would have a fit.
“Mr…. Lefty, I am so glad you came visiting this morning. I need your help.”
The old man beamed.
And when Mrs. Evangeline Tanner and Miss Letitia Price stepped through the mercantile doorway and onto the board walkway, they gasped and pointed.
“Well, did you ever see the like!”
“Queen Jane and that old one-armed freight wagon driver!”
Jane rested her fingers on Lefty’s extended good arm and was skipping—skipping!—across the street in the company of an old man who couldn’t stop grinning.
Rydell counted out ten dollar bills and handed them through the cage to the trim, gray-haired woman on the other side. “There you are, Mrs. Manning.”
The woman folded the bills into her black crocheted bag and smiled at him. “Thank you, Mr. Wilder. Now, you’ll remember to come on out and meet my granddaughter sometime, won’t you? She’s come all the way from Kansas City to visit for the summer.”
He watched the woman’s small black shoes move toward the bank entrance and shook his head. Only yesterday it seemed, Mrs. Manning’s daughter, Eula, had moved back East to be married; now Eula had a grown-up daughter looking to do the same thing. All of a sudden, he felt old.
And left out in an odd way. He’d sent Josiah, his bank clerk, home to be with his wife. The young man was so nervous at the prospect of their first child he was useless this morning, but—Rydell had to laugh—he himself wasn’t much better. All morning he’d done nothing but think about Jane Davis.
A small grimy fist appeared on the counter before him. “Kin you save this for me, mister?” The fingers unfolded to reveal a single copper penny.
Rydell leaned forward. A round freckled face peered up at him, wide blue eyes questioning.
“You want to deposit this in the bank?”
“Yessir. Else my brother’ll grab it from me. Will you save it for me?”
“Sure thing, son.” With a chuckle he slid the coin into a bank envelope. He’d not been much older than this when he’d started saving pennies, only there hadn’t been a bank then. Rydell saved all his earnings in a pickle jar secreted under his mattress.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Tommy. I helped the Queen Lady down the street set up a sawhorse ’n she done paid me.”
The Queen Lady? Did he mean Jane? He dipped the pen in the inkwell and scribbled on a piece of notepaper.
“Okay, Tommy, here’s your deposit receipt. When you want your money, just show it to the clerk.”
The boy nodded, and the round face disappeared.
A sawhorse? He’d step down the street and investigate, but he couldn’t leave the cash drawer unattended. He’d wait until noon, when he could lock up the safe.
Customers drifted in and out for the next hour, and Rydell’s curiosity grew. What the devil did Jane want with a sawhorse?
The clock on the wall tick-tick-ticked toward twelve. At one minute before noon, Tommy’s freckled visage reappeared at the counter.
“Mister, I got ’nother ’posit to make.”
Rydell reached for the envelope marked Tommy. “How much this time?”
“One big an’ one little. Here’s the little one.” He plopped another penny onto the smooth wood surface, and Rydell added it to the envelope.
“’N here’s the big one.” With both hands he lifted a tiny ball of orange fur and set it on the smooth oak surface. “It’s lost. I found it in the alley back of the livery stable, but if I take it home, my brother’ll steal it for sure.”
Rydell eyed the clock. “Okay, Tommy. I’ll take care of it.” He scooped the purring kitten into his coat pocket, where it curled up and burrowed its nose into a corner seam.
“Thanks, mister.”
Rydell sent the under-clerk to lunch, closed up the safe, and locked the front door of the bank. Then he headed up the street to see what Jane was up to.
“That’s it. A little to the left. No, too much, Lefty. Yes, right there will do nicely.” Jane cocked her head, assessing the position of her new cutting board, a discarded door plank Mose Freeman had carted from Tanner’s lumberyard. With a sawhorse propping each end, it made a perfectly level, smooth surface on which to sponge-shrink her yard goods and lay out pattern pieces. Already, a bucket of water and her sadiron were heating on the small oil stove Lefty Springer had “found” for her. It looked so new she suspected Lefty had actually purchased it from Mercer’s Mercantile.
The old man’s interest in her new business touched her heart. He’d even volunteered to watch over the shop while she’d walked up the long hill to check on Mama and boil up some eggs for her lunch. She left Mama dozing on the settee, and Jane hoped she would sleep until suppertime, when she would return to fix the evening meal.
All morning she’d worried about another teakettle incident—or worse. What if Mama fell and couldn’t get up again? What if she went out to the orchard to look for Papa and couldn’t find her way back? A hundred dangers suggested themselves as she organized her little dressmaking establishment. A hundred reasons why she felt torn in two.
She didn’t really know any of the women in town, much less the farm wives that lived out in the country and came into town only occasionally. Not only did she have to start her business, she had to befriend her clientele, women who were virtual strangers. She would have to work hard to make them think of her not as Queen Jane, but as a capable dressmaker.
And of course Mama needed her attention, too. Merciful heavens, how could she be in two places at once?
She blotted the perspiration from her face with a damp wadded-up lace-edged handkerchief and tried to think. The hot, still air smelled of dust and acrid smoke. The heat from her little stove made it stifling inside the shop. Lefty perched on an empty nail keg positioned half in, half out of the doorway, whittling on a piece of oak.
“Why’ntcha sit yerself down, Miz Jane? You’re gonna melt into a puddle if’n you don’t slow down and rest a bit.” He motioned to a second upturned keg.
“Oh, I just can’t, Lefty. I must get this muslin sponged before suppertime so I can cut out my patterns first thing tomorrow. The Fourth of July is only two days away, and I simply must be ready by then! It offers such a wonderful opportunity for my…well, my first original creation.”
With his boot, Lefty pushed his wood shavings out onto the board sidewalk. “Cain’t sew if you cain’t stand up.”
“Oh, but I can,” Jane countered. “I sew sitting up. It won’t matter a whit if my legs won’t hold me up, I can seat myself at the sewing machine. I intend to finish my—”
Through the open doorway stepped a tall figure, and Jane gave a little gasp. Her heart somersaulted at the sight of Rydell Wilder.
“Why, howdy, Dell. Come to oversee yer investment, have ya?”
That man! What right did he have to come barging in without even a by-your-leave? Jane grabbed a length of red muslin and hastily draped it around the padded bust form in the corner. Surely it wasn’t proper for a gentleman to see a lady’s…well, replica of herself, without a stitch of clothing?
All at once she was doubly grateful for Lefty’s presence in the tiny shop. Her brain seemed as sluggish and sticky as molasses, and her stomach