“Not yet. Fetch us some coffee, will you?”
“Colonel, I wish you’d read—”
“Coffee, Mick. Pronto.”
The sergeant gestured to the neatly made-up cot on the opposite side of the tent. “Have a seat, ma’am. Won’t be a minute.” The flap swished shut.
Meggy remained standing. “I’m sure I should not be here, sir. This is a gentleman’s private quarters.” She stared at a coal-black raven in a cage hung from the tent pole.
Tom chuckled. “Not private. And I’m not a…Anyway, sit down. This won’t take long.”
With reluctance Meggy perched on the edge of the cot. The warm air inside the tent was thick with the smell of leather and sweat. Man smells. Not unpleasant, just…different. Strong. Pungent, her sister Charlotte would have said. Charlotte wrote poetry.
Tom settled on the unmade cot opposite her, repropped his boots on the plank desk and looked her over with a penetrating gaze. “What do you plan to do, now that Peabody’s…gone?”
Meggy’s mind went blank. “Do?”
“Ma’am, you can’t marry a dead man.”
The sergeant bustled in with two chipped mugs of something that looked dark and sludgy. He handed one to Meggy and set the other near the colonel’s crossed boots. “There’s no cream. Fong churned it all into butter.”
Meggy removed her gloves and took a sip of the lukewarm brew. It tasted like the coffee she had concocted out of dried grain and sassafras root during the war. She sipped again and choked. Worse. This tasted like chopped-up walnut shells mixed with turpentine.
O’Malley sidled closer to Tom and bent over the desk. “Read that letter yet?”
Tom downed a double gulp of the coffee. “Nope.”
“If I was you, Colonel, sir, I might do that right now.” He gestured at Tom’s shirt pocket.
Meggy rose at once. “Forgive me, sir. I must not keep you from your business.”
“Tom, for the love of God, read the damn letter! Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am.”
Tom glared at his sergeant, then dug in his pocket and withdrew a folded paper. It crackled as he spread it flat. Meggy found herself watching. There was something odd about the way Mr. O’Malley danced near Tom’s shoulder, grinning at her.
Tom scanned the words, then drew his black eyebrows into a frown. “That son of a gun,” he muttered. “I wonder when he found the time?”
“Might explain why Peabody looked so peaked the last few months. Must’ve come off the peeling crew and worked half the night on his own, I’m thinkin’.”
Meggy looked from one to the other. What were they talking about?
Tom spun the paper under his thumb until the writing faced her. “This concerns you, Miss Hampton.”
“Me? Why, how could it possibly?”
“It’s Walt Peabody’s will.”
Meggy lifted the paper with shaking hands.
“…all my earthly possessions to Miss Mary Margaret Hampton, soon to be my wife.”
“Possessions? Oh, you mean his law books?”
“No, not his law books. Seems he built a cabin. For when his fiancée joined him.”
Meggy stared at him. “You mean…you mean Mr. Peabody provided for me?” The knot in her stomach melted away like so much warm molasses. Oh, the dear, blessed man. He had left her some property! She sank onto the cot.
“Oh, thank the Lord, I have a home.”
Tom shot to his feet. “Not so fast, Miss Hampton. You can’t stay here. I run a logging camp, not a boardinghouse.”
“But the cabin—my cabin—is here.”
“A logging camp is no place for a woman.”
The red-haired sergeant stepped forward. “Oh, now, Tom—”
“Shut up, O’Malley.”
Meggy stood up. “No place for a woman? Mr. Peabody seemed to think otherwise.”
“Mr. Peabody isn’t—wasn’t—the boss here. I am.”
Meggy felt her spine grow rigid. It was a sensation she’d come to recognize over the last seven years, one that signaled the onset of the stubborn streak she’d inherited from her father. “That does not signify, for it is—was—Mr. Peabody who wrote the will, not you.” She gentled her voice. “And you, sir, even if you are the boss here, are surely not above the law?”
At that instant she noticed that Mr. O’Malley stood off to one side, shaking his head at her. The Irishman was trying to warn her about something, but what? What was it she was not supposed to say?
Silence fell, during which she desperately tried to think.
A woodpecker drilled into a tree outside the tent, and Meggy started. The noise rose above the rasp of cicadas, pounding into her head until she thought she would scream.
“The law,” Tom said in a low, hard voice, “protects no one. When push comes to shove, it’s not the right that wins, but the strong. Coming from a Confederate state, I’d think you’d have a hard time forgetting that.”
She clamped her teeth together. Was that what the man had against her? That she was from the South?
“The mighty prevail, is that it?”
“That’s it. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way. I suggest you are about to do the same.”
O’Malley pivoted toward his boss. “Oh, now, Tom, couldn’t we—”
“Nope.”
Meggy drew in a long breath and used the time it took to expel it to gather her courage. She might as well risk it. She had nothing to lose and everything—a home, a sanctuary out here in this remote bit of nowhere—to gain. She needed time to absorb what had happened. Time to make new plans. Besides, she had no money, and until she could decide what to do next, she was stuck here.
“On the contrary, Colonel…I beg your pardon, what is your family name, sir? I do not wish to be improper in addressing you.”
“Randall,” he growled. “I come from Ohio.”
“Colonel Randall,” she continued. “I believe it is you who may learn the lesson here. For it is a known fact that when a suit is brought, and the issue judged by an honest jury of one’s peers…”
She left the rest unspoken. It was always best to allow the enemy a graceful exit. “Why, your own president, Mr. Grant, made that very point not long ago in a speech before the Congress of the United States.”
Tom took a good long look at the young woman standing before him. She wasn’t going to give up, he could see that. Her softly modulated voice never rose, but beneath the controlled tone he detected cold steel. And the look in her eye…Yeah, she sure did remind him of Susanna.
In that instant he knew he was beaten. Women like this one, like his sister, didn’t give up. If he pushed, she would fight back, and she would continue until she either triumphed or died trying. He closed his hands into fists. He didn’t want to be responsible for another one. She had determination written all over her.
And, he noted, she had unusual eyes, set in a perfectly oval face and framed with thick lashes. Her dark hair was parted in the center and gathered in a soft, black-netted roll at her neck. The only other part of her body he could see was her hands, which were graceful and small-boned, with long fingers and short nails. For all her fragile female appearance,