Clay chuckled under his breath, though he refrained from comment. It wasn’t as if anybody were asking his opinion.
The first ragtag shreds of Blue River were no more impressive than he recalled them to be—a livery on one side of the road, and an abandoned saloon on the other. Waist-high grass, most of it dead, surrounded the latter; craggy shards of filthy glass edged its one narrow window, and the sign above the door dangled by a lone, rusty nail.
Last Hope: Saloon and Games of Chance, it read in painted letters nearly worn away by time and weather.
“You shouldn’t be out in this weather,” Clay told Edrina, who was still hiking along beside him and Outlaw, eschewing the broken plank sidewalk for the road. “Too cold.”
“I like it,” she said. “The cold is very bracing, don’t you think? Makes a body feel wide-awake.”
The town’s buildings, though unpainted, began to look a little better as they progressed. Smoke curled from twisted chimneys and doors were closed up tight.
There were few people on the streets, Clay noticed, though he glimpsed curious faces at various windows as they went by.
He raised his collar against the rising wind, figuring he’d had all the “bracing” he needed, thank you very much, and he was sure enough “wide-awake” now that he was off the train and back in the saddle.
He was hungry, too, and he wanted a bath and barbering.
And ten to twelve hours of sleep, lying prone instead of sitting upright in a hard seat.
“I reckon maybe you ought to show me where you live, after all,” he said, at some length. At least that way, he could steer the child homeward, where she belonged, make sure she got there, and rest easy thereafter, where her welfare was concerned.
Edrina pointed past a general store, a telegraph and telephone office, the humble jailhouse where he would soon be officiating and a tiny white church surrounded by a rickety picket fence, much in need of whitewash. “It’s one street over,” she said, already veering off a little, as though she meant to duck between buildings and take off. “Our place, that is. It’s the one with an apple tree in the yard and a chicken house out back.”
Clay drew up his horse with a nearly imperceptible tug of the reins. “Hold it right there,” he said, with quiet authority, when Edrina started to turn away.
She froze. Turned slowly to look at him with huge china-blue eyes. “You’re going to tell Mama I haven’t been at school, aren’t you?” she asked, sounding sadly resigned to whatever fate awaited her.
“I reckon it’s your place to tell her that, not mine.”
Edrina blinked, and a series of emotions flashed across her face—confusion, hope and, finally, despair. “She’ll be sorely vexed when she finds out,” the girl said. “Mama places great store in learning.”
“Most sensible people do,” Clay observed, biting the inside of his lower lip so he wouldn’t laugh out loud. Edrina might have been little more than a baby, but she sat a horse like a Comanche brave—he’d seen that for himself back at the depot—and carried herself with a dignity out of all proportion to her size, situation and hand-me-down clothes. “Maybe from now on, you ought to pay better heed to what your mama says. She has your best interests at heart, you know.”
Edrina gave a great, theatrical sigh, one that seemed to involve her entire small personage. “I suppose Miss Krenshaw will tell Mama I’ve been absent since recess, anyway,” she said. “Even if you don’t.”
Miss Krenshaw, Clay figured, was probably the schoolmarm.
Outlaw’s well-shod hooves made a lonely, clompety-clip kind of sound on the hard dirt of the road. The horse turned a little, to go around a trough with a lacy green scum floating atop the water.
“Word’s sure to get out,” Clay agreed reasonably, thinking of all those faces, at all those windows, “one way or another.”
“Thunderation and spit!” Edrina exclaimed, with the vigor of total sincerity. “I don’t know why folks can’t just tend to their own affairs and leave me to do as I please.”
Clay made a choking sound, disguised it as a cough, as best he could, anyway. “How old are you?” he asked, genuinely interested in the answer.
“Six,” Edrina replied.
He’d have bet she was a short ten, maybe even eleven. “So you’re in the first grade at school?”
“I’m in the second,” Edrina said, trudging along beside his horse. “I already knew how to read when I started in September, and I can cipher, too, so Miss Krenshaw let me skip a grade. Actually, she suggested I enter third grade, but Mama said no, that wouldn’t do at all, because I needed time to be a child. As if I could help being a child.”
She sounded wholly exasperated.
Clay hid yet another grin by tilting his head, in hopes that his hat brim would cast a shadow over his face. “You’ll be all grown up sooner than you think,” he allowed. “I reckon if asked, I’d be inclined to take your mama’s part in the matter.”
“You weren’t asked, though,” Edrina pointed out thoughtfully, and with an utter lack of guile or rancor.
“True enough,” Clay agreed moderately.
They were quiet, passing by the little white church, then the adjoining graveyard, where, Clay speculated, the last marshal, Parnell Nolan, must be buried. Edrina hurried ahead when they reached the corner, and Clay and Outlaw followed at an easy pace.
Clay hadn’t bothered to visit the house that came with the marshal’s job on his previous stopover in Blue River. At the time, he’d just signed the deed for two thousand acres of raw ranch land, and his thoughts had been on the house and barn he meant to build there, the cattle and horses he would buy, the wells he would dig and the fences he would put up. He could have waited, of course, bided on the Triple M until spring, living the life he’d always lived, but he’d been too impatient and too proud to do that.
Besides, it was his nature to be restless, and so, in order to keep himself occupied until spring, he’d accepted the town’s offer of a laughable salary and a star-shaped badge to pin on his coat until they could rustle up some damn fool to take up the occupation for good.
“There it is,” Edrina said, with a note of sadness in her voice that caught and pulled at Clay’s heart like a fishhook snagging on something underwater.
Clay barely had time to take in the ramshackle place—the council referred to it as a “cottage,” though he would have called it a shack—before one of the prettiest women he’d ever laid eyes on shot out through the front door like a bullet and stormed down the path toward them.
Chickens scattered, clucking and squawking, as she passed.
Her hair was the color of pale cider, pinned up in back and fluffing out around her flushed face, as was the fashion among his sisters and female cousins back home in the Arizona Territory. Her eyes might have been blue, but they might have been green, too, and right now, they were shooting fire hot enough to brand the toughest hide.
Reaching the rusty-hinged gate in the falling-down fence, she stopped suddenly, fixed those changeable eyes on him and glared.
Clay felt a jolt inside, as though Zeus had flung a lightning bolt his way and he’d caught it with both hands instead of sidestepping it, like a wiser man would have done.
The woman’s gaze sliced to the little girl.
“Edrina Louise Nolan,” she said, through a fine set of straight white teeth, “what am I going to do with you?” Her skin was good, too, Clay observed, with that part of his brain that usually stood back and assessed things.