Clay nodded, figuring Outlaw would be ready by now for fresh air and a chance to stretch his legs, since he’d been cooped up in a rolling box ever since Flagstaff.
Taking his leave from the welcoming committee with a touch to the brim of his hat and a promise to meet them later at the marshal’s office, he crossed the small platform, descended the rough-hewn steps and walked through cinders and lingering wisps of steam to the open door of the livestock car. He lowered the heavy ramp himself and climbed into the dim, horse-scented enclosure.
Outlaw nickered a greeting, and Clay smiled and patted the horse’s long neck before picking up his saddle and other gear and tossing the lot of it to the ground beside the tracks.
That done, he loosed the knot in Outlaw’s halter rope and led the animal toward the ramp.
Some horses balked at the unfamiliar, but not Outlaw. He and Clay had been sidekicks for more than a decade, and they trusted each other in all circumstances.
Outside, in the brisk, snow-dappled wind, having traversed the slanted iron plate with no difficulty, Outlaw blinked, adjusting his unusual blue eyes to the light of midafternoon. Clay meant to let the gelding stand un-tethered while he put the ramp back in place, but be fore he could turn around, a little girl hurried around the corner of the brick depot and took a competent hold on the lead rope.
She couldn’t have been older than seven, and she was small even for that tender age. She wore a threadbare calico dress, a brown bonnet and a coat that, although clean, had seen many a better day. A blond sausage curl tumbled from inside the bonnet to gleam against her forehead, and she smiled with the confidence of a seasoned wrangler.
“My name is Miss Edrina Nolan,” she announced importantly. “Are you the new marshal?”
Amused, Clay tugged at his hat brim to acknowledge her properly and replied, “I am. Name’s Clay McKettrick.”
Edrina put out her free hand. “How do you do, Mr. McKettrick?” she asked.
“I do just fine,” he said, with a little smile. Growing up on the Triple M, he and all his cousins had been around horses all their lives, so the child’s remarkable ease with a critter many times her size did not surprise him.
It was impressive, though.
“I’ll hold your horse,” she said. “You’d better help the railroad man with that ramp. He’s liable to hurt himself if you don’t.”
Clay looked back over one shoulder and, sure enough, there was the banty rooster of a conductor, struggling to hoist that heavy slab of rust-speckled iron off the ground so the train could get under way again. He lent his assistance, figuring he’d just spared the man a hernia, if not a heart attack, and got a glare for his trouble, rather than thanks.
Since the fellow’s opinion made no real never-mind to Clay either way, he simply turned back to the little girl, ready to reclaim his horse.
She was up on the horse’s back, her faded skirts billowing around her, and with the snow-strained sunlight framing her, she looked like one of those cherub-children gracing the pages of calendars, Valentines and boxes of ready-made cookies.
“Whoa, now,” he said, automatically taking hold of the lead rope. Given that he hadn’t saddled Outlaw yet, he was somewhat mystified as to how she’d managed to mount up the way she had. Maybe she really was a cherub, with little stubby wings hidden under that thin black coat.
Up ahead, the engineer blew the whistle to signal imminent departure, and Outlaw started at the sound, though he didn’t buck, thank the good Lord.
“Whoa,” Clay repeated, very calmly but with a note of sternness. It was then that he spotted the stump on the other side of the horse and realized that Edrina must have scrambled up on that to reach Outlaw’s back.
They all waited—man, horse and cherub—until the train pulled out and the racket subsided somewhat.
Edrina smiled serenely down at him. “Mama says we’ll all have to go to the poorhouse, now that you’re here,” she announced.
“Is that so?” Clay asked mildly, as he reached up, took the child by the waist and lifted her off the horse, setting her gently on her feet. Then he commenced to collecting Outlaw’s blanket, saddle and bridle from where they’d landed when he tossed them out of the railroad car, and tacking up. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the town-council contingent straggling off the platform.
Edrina nodded in reply to his rhetorical question, still smiling, and the curl resting on her forehead bobbed with the motion of her head. “My papa was the marshal a while back,” she informed Clay matter-of-factly, “but then he died in the arms of a misguided woman in a room above the Bitter Gulch Saloon and left us high and dry.”
Clay blinked, wondering if he’d mistaken Edrina Nolan for a child when she was actually a lot older. Say, forty.
“I see,” he said, after clearing his throat. “That’s unfortunate. That your papa passed on, I mean.” Clay had known the details of his predecessor’s death, having been regaled with the story the first time he set foot in Blue River, but it took him aback that Edrina knew it, too.
She folded her arms and watched critically as he threw on Outlaw’s beat-up saddle and put the cinch through the buckle. “Can you shoot a gun and everything?” she wanted to know.
Clay spared her a sidelong glance and a nod. Why wasn’t this child in school? Did her mother know she was running loose like a wild Indian and leaping onto the backs of other people’s horses when they weren’t looking?
And where the heck had a kid her age learned to ride like that?
“Good,” Edrina said, with a relieved sigh, her little arms still folded. “Because Papa couldn’t be trusted with a firearm. Once, when he was cleaning a pistol, meaning to go out and hunt rabbits for stew, it went off by accident and made a big hole in the floor. Mama put a chair over it—she said it was so my sister, Harriet, and I wouldn’t fall in and wind up under the house, with all the cobwebs and the mice, but I know it was really because she was embarrassed for anybody to see what Papa had done. Even Harriet has more sense than to fall in a hole, for heaven’s sake, and she’s only five.”
Clay suppressed a smile, tugged at the saddle to make sure it would hold his weight, put a foot into the stirrup and swung up. Adjusted his hat in a gesture of farewell. “I’ll be seeing you, chatterbox,” he said kindly.
“What about your trunk?” Edrina wanted to know. “Are you just going to leave it behind, on the platform?”
“I mean to come back for it later in the day,” Clay explained, wondering why he felt compelled to clarify the matter at all. “This horse and I, we’ve been on that train for a goodly while, and right now, we need to stretch our muscles a bit.”
“I could show you where our house is,” Edrina persisted, scampering along beside Outlaw when Clay urged the horse into a walk. “Well, I guess it’s your house now.”
“Maybe you ought to run along home,” Clay said. “Your mama’s probably worried about you.”
“No,” Edrina said. “Mama has no call to worry. She thinks I’m in school.”
Clay bit back another grin.
They’d climbed the grassy embankment leading to the street curving past the depot and on into Blue River by then. The members of the town’s governing body waddled just ahead, single file, along a plank sidewalk like a trio of black ducks wearing top hats.
“And why aren’t you in school?” Clay inquired affably, adjusting his hat again, and squaring his shoulders against the nippy breeze and the swirling specks of snow, each one sharp-edged as a razor.
She shivered slightly, but that was the