Heads shook all around.
“Now I ask you,” the tanner went on, “who the hell ever heard of a rifle cozy? My guns ain’t cold, like a pot o’ tea. What’s a fella supposed to do with a thing like that?”
“Well,” drawled the red-haired rancher from the west side of town, crossing his arms over his tobacco-stained vest, “you can’t put it with my hand-sewed bullet carrier that Mary Jane Mayberry gave me two days ago.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause mine’s baby-blue.” He paused. Spit. “Won’t match.”
Table-thumping laughter ensued. Marcus shook his head and turned another ledger page, blowing away the sawdust that clung to the paper. Compared to the rest of the bachelors in town, the matchmaker had taken things easy on him.
Sure, having his men come to work bleary-eyed and distracted from visits and letters and surprise gifts from hopeful brides-to-be hadn’t helped his lumber mill any. In fact, it was downright dangerous having inattentive workers running the saws. But Marcus had handled those problems on an individual basis, by reassigning the affected men to less hazardous jobs. Where his personal life was concerned…well, the matchmaker’s antics had left him relatively, and curiously, untouched.
“What about this?” Another man stood, holding a necktie aloft. It dangled from his fingertips like a limp, lace-frothed rattlesnake, remarkably ugly in shades of brown and green. “The matchmaker told the preacher’s daughter to make this damn thing for me. Now, if she comes to my mercantile and I’m not wearing it, she gets all weepy on me.” He shook his head. “I can’t run a business with nonsense like that going on.”
“Awww!” The men nearest him aimed nonsympathetic jabs at his ribs. One grabbed the necktie and slung it over the merchant’s shoulders, then stepped back as though to study the effect. “I declare!” he exclaimed in a piercing falsetto voice. “You look just like a picture in Godey’s.”
They all laughed, good-naturedly slapping their friend on the back. The necktie was passed to a cowhand, who whirled it overhead like a lasso. At the sight of it, Marcus shuddered. A man had to draw the line somewhere. Ugly neckties—with lace of all things—seemed like a good place to start.
The worst he’d personally received had been a tentative invitation to a “moonlit stroll with a lady admirer” in one of the matchmaker’s personal advertisements. Printed in Adam Crabtree’s Pioneer Press at irregular intervals, the advertisements were read with groans and expressions of resignation from the beleaguered men and eager giggles from the women. Of all the marriage-minded weapons in the matchmaker’s arsenal, the advertisements were among the most powerful.
“Irene Posy wrote po-e-try about me,” a bearded railroad man in the corner said. “And put it in the newspaper!”
“Alma Avondale follows me all the way to my mine claim every blasted morning, chattering on about the dance at the Chautauqua next month,” another man complained. “She thinks I’d make a right fine partner for the quadrille, if I’d shine up my boots.”
The miner’s drinking companions huffed in indignation. Not a man among them would admit to getting gussied up for a mere female. Not in public, at least.
The shared complaints continued. Feeling increasingly fortunate, Marcus spent the next several minutes rechecking figures. Conversations swirled around him, punctuated with gulps of whiskey and streams of tobacco juice hitting—and missing—the spittoons. Growing warm in the mishmash of bodies filling the room, he peeled off his suit coat and laid it beneath his stack of ledgers. He loosened his starched collar, then went on working.
“That’s nothing.” A calm, authoritative voice broke into the melee, and Marcus glanced up to see that the saloon’s owner, Morrow Creek newcomer Jack Murphy, had spoken.
“I won’t give names, because the lady has a reputation to protect,” he went on in his faint Irishman’s brogue, spreading his hands to encourage quiet in the room. “But this morning, a lady claimed the matchmaker had sent her to find her one true love…here, inside my saloon.”
A shocked silence fell over the men. For several moments, they contemplated this unthinkable piece of information. Even Marcus put down his pencil, frowning. If a woman would invade the sanctity of the saloon, what next? Females in britches? Ladies wearing face paint and powder and French perfume? Women who would take it in their heads to kiss a man first, without being courted?
Actually, upon reflection Marcus decided he liked the sound of that last notion. Quite a bit. But the rest…clearly, something had to be done.
The mysterious Morrow Creek matchmaker, whoever she was, had to be stopped. But how?
“Inside your saloon?” Old man Jeffries mopped his brow with a suspiciously doodad-embellished handkerchief, clearly done in by this new turn of events. “Inside?”
Jack nodded, looking somber. It was true, then. No place was safe any longer.
“Now, we all know there’s no easy way out of this,” Jack went on. Several men nodded. The creak of chairs shifting beneath bulky bodies as the men strained to see, and urgent whispers for quiet, were the only sounds in the room. “But between the lot of us, we ought to be able to come up with something.”
“I already tried sayin’ I wasn’t keen on gettin’ hitched,” the sad-faced man beside Marcus said. “Leastwise, not to a woman who’s not my own choosin’. But them gals get all fired up by the matchmaker. They don’t pay no mind to reason.”
Someone at the end of the bar laughed. “What woman does?”
A hum of agreement swelled upward, reaching to the raw-timber rafters that delineated the saloon space downstairs from whatever occupied the building’s top floor. Thoughtfully, Marcus lifted his gaze, wondering if he could interest Jack Murphy in the purchase of a punched-tin ceiling from the lumber mill’s assortment of building supplies. At three cents a linear foot, the profit on the new ceiling would be….
Another voice interrupted his musings. “Now hold on. I reckon these womenfolk can be reasoned with,” said Daniel McCabe, the town blacksmith. “That’s what I did.”
He raised his burly arm, chugged down an impressive quantity of mescal, then wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his plain white shirt. Tipping his chair back on two legs, he regarded the gathering with a self-satisfied smile. “That’s all it takes.”
“You don’t say, McCabe.” The butcher squinted, appearing to consider the notion. With a suddenly skeptical twist of his lips, he turned to Daniel again. “That made the ladies the matchmaker loosed on you quit comin’ ’round and pesterin’ you?”
“Hell, no.” Daniel’s grin widened. “But now they come ’round with things I want to have. A pair of new tongs from the mercantile, a bottle of lager on a hot day, a hank of sausage from your butcher shop—” He ticked off the items on his fingers, stopping only when interrupted by increasingly loud laughter.
Shrugging, Daniel hooked his arms in the braces holding up his soot-smudged pants. “You fellas just have to know how to handle a female, is all.”
Only a few stools down from Daniel, Marcus accepted his customary evening meal—good ale, a plate of Murphy’s tinned beans with bacon, and a hunk of brown bread—and counted out the coppers to pay for it. He began to eat, automatically scanning the day’s recorded timber yield.
It was low, probably because of the slowdowns caused by the matchmaker’s giggling, gaggling feminine disciples. They’d caused his men such distraction that both yields and profits were down. For now, the problem was small. But if it grew any more troublesome, Marcus’s planned expansion of his lumber mill would be delayed.
Concerned by the realization, Marcus turned his attention to the conversation again.