Chapter Two
The bounty had been a waste of three weeks.
The money had worked out fine, of course.
Two hundred dollars for a horse thief named Dutton who'd made the mistake of stealing from a cattleman who had friends in the territorial marshal's office.
Sam had tracked him across two counties and found him holed up in a line shack near the Musselshell River.
He had been playing cards with two other men who were too stupid to ask why their new friend kept checking the window, and Sam had brought him in without firing a shot.
The marshal had paid in full, no argument. Two hundred dollars. Enough to replace the barn roof before the real cold set in, with maybe enough left over for new fencing along the south pasture where the posts had started rotting through.
But three weeks of sleeping on frozen ground, eating hardtack and jerky, and riding through weather that couldn't decide between rain and sleet had been tough. All to track a man who had turned out to be more pathetic than dangerous…
Three weeks of that for a horse thief. Sam had hunted men who'd killed people. Men who'd burned things. Men who deserved the effort it took to find them. Dutton had stolen a horse because he'd lost his own in a card game and needed to get home.
Two hundred dollars for a homesick idiot who couldn't play poker.
Sam shifted in the saddle and the cold leather groaned under him.
His mare, a gray mustang he'd had for four years and who tolerated him about as well as he tolerated most people, picked her way along the frozen track toward the homestead.
Snow had started falling an hour ago, light at first, but thickening now into something with intent behind it.
He should have stopped in town. Should have taken a room at Margery Hull's boardinghouse, waited out the weather, and ridden home in the morning. But that place smelled like boiled cabbage and old tobacco, and Margery asked too many questions.
—Where'd you ride in from? Who'd you bring back? Was there trouble?
Sam had learned a long time ago that he'd rather ride through bad weather than sit through lousy conversation.
Besides, Sarah would be asleep by now. He'd slip in, hang up his things, and sleep till noon. She'd find him in the morning and scold him for not writing ahead, and he'd eat whatever she'd cooked and let her fuss. Things would be normal for a while. However long before the next job came.
He'd been chewing on something, actually. About the next job and the one after that and whether there needed to be a one after that. He’d do more good staying at the homestead than chasing men like Dutton.
Sarah needed him here, even if she'd never say it straight because she had too much pride and too much of their mother in her to admit she got lonely.
He could take work closer to home. Smaller jobs, maybe.
Help the sheriff with local trouble instead of riding across half of Montana for the marshal's office.
He could try staying put for once.
Staying put meant routine, and routine meant attachment, and attachment meant… He'd watched what attachment had cost his parents, and he'd buried it at ten years old. So that line of thinking could stop right there.
But Sarah deserved better than a brother who showed up every few weeks with money and sawdust apologies. He'd figure it out after he slept. After the barn roof got fixed. After the fencing. One thing, then the next thing, then the thing after that. That's how a man got through.
The homestead appeared through the snow, dark against the tree line, and the mare picked up her pace.
Sam swung down and led the mare into the barn, pulling the saddle and saddlebags off her and hanging them over the stall rail.
He rubbed her down with a feed sack, running his hand along her legs to check for swelling or heat.
She'd carried him for three weeks through bad country without complaint.
It was the least he could do. Then he forked hay into her stall and cracked the ice on her water bucket with his fist.
After he’d pulled the Winchester from the saddle scabbard and checked the action out of habit, he crossed the yard to the house. The second porch step from the top creaked. It was the one he kept meaning to fix and never did. He tried the door.
Locked.
Sarah never locked this door. Said there weren't no point, and that if someone wanted in badly enough, a lock wouldn't stop them. Besides, who'd ride all the way out here to rob them? They'd had that argument six, maybe seven times. Good thing she’d finally come to her senses.
He fished the spare key from under the third step, let himself in, and latched the door behind him because that's what a sensible person did with a damn door.
Dark inside, but not dead-cold, the cookstove had banked coals glowing orange behind the damper, which meant Sarah had tended it before going to bed.
Good. At least she'd done that much. He leaned the Winchester against the wall by the door and struck a match off his belt buckle, touching it to the lamp wick on the table.
The kerosene caught with that familiar sharp smell and the room swam into yellow light.
Sam hung his duster on the peg by the door, set his hat on the shelf above it, unbuckled his gun belt, and laid it on the table with the Colt still holstered.
He rolled his shoulders, working three weeks of saddle stiffness out of his back, and pulled his shirt over his head because it smelled like horse, and smoke and Dutton's line shack; he'd burn the damn thing before he wore it another hour.
The cool air hit his skin and raised the hair on his arms, and he stood there for a second just breathing in the quiet of a house that didn't move under him, didn't pitch with wind, and didn't smell like a stranger's filthy card game.
A board creaked behind him. From the stairs.
Sam's hand went to the table, to the gun belt, before the rest of his brain caught up. He turned.
It wasn’t Sarah, but a woman he'd never laid eyes on in his life, standing at the bottom of his stairs. She was wearing a white nightgown, had her hair in a braid over one shoulder, and she was holding a cast-iron skillet raised in both hands like she fully intended to cave his skull in with it.
His hand closed on the Colt's grip.
For about two full seconds they just stood there, her staring at him and him staring right back. The lamp burned on the table between them, and this woman—this stranger—was holding his sister's best skillet like a club in his own house in the middle of the damn night.
"Who are you?"
She adjusted her grip on the skillet. "Who are you? This here's my house."
"Lady, this ain't nobody's house but mine, and you'd best explain yourself right quick before I stop bein' civil about it."
"I got a gun," she said.
Her hands shook on the skillet handle, both of them, and her eyes kept darting between his face and the Colt.
Sam drew the revolver and held it low at his side, but he didn’t point it at her just yet.
"No, ma'am. I got a gun. You got a fryin' pan. So I reckon we'll try this again."
The color drained straight out of her face, but she held the skillet up. He’d give her that much; she looked scared to death, and she held the damn thing up anyway, hands trembling and all.
"I'm a friend of Sarah's." The words came out fast, tumbling over each other. "Sarah Cooper. She went to my house. We exchanged, and she told me to come here. She said nobody'd be home for two weeks—"
"Hold on a minute. How d'you know my sister?"
The skillet lowered an inch. "You're Sam?"
“Yes, ma’am.”
"Sarah told me all about you."
"That's real fine. I'm askin' how you came to know her."
"We write to each other. We've been writin' since we were girls. My name's Evelyn Granger."
Evelyn Granger. The name snagged on something.
Sarah at the kitchen table, reading a letter and laughing at whatever the letter said.
Sarah mentioning a friend back east, a seamstress, someone she fretted over.
He'd half-listened the way he half-listened to most of what Sarah told him about folks he'd never meet and reckoned he'd never have to.
"She left a letter." The woman—Evelyn—pointed the skillet toward the kitchen shelf. "On the shelf there. She wrote it for you in case."
"Put that pan down."
She lowered it to her side but didn't let go.
Sam moved to the shelf, keeping her at the edge of his vision. A folded piece of paper sat propped against a jar of dried beans. He picked it up and opened it one-handed, the Colt still in his right hand.
Sarah's handwriting. He'd know it dead asleep.
Sam, if you're reading this, you came home early, which means you're probably standing in the kitchen and wondering who's in the house. Don't shoot her. Her name is Evelyn Granger, and she's my dearest friend. I told you about her plenty of times, even though you never listen.
Aunt Mabel passed, and I had to go east to sign papers and sell the property. You know we need that money. I figured you'd be gone at least two more weeks, so I asked Evelyn to come stay and look after the place while I'm away. She's doing me a favor, Sam. Be decent.
I'll be back inside two weeks. Don't make a mess of things.
— Sarah
He read it twice, folded it, and set the Colt back on the table.
So, Sarah had gone east. Left the homestead to a woman he'd never met, a pen pal from Illinois, and expected him to still be out chasing Dutton across the territory.
Which he would have been, if Dutton had possessed the basic sense God gave a fence post and hadn't been sitting in a line shack thirty miles from where he'd stolen the horse.
He looked at the woman. Really looked, now that the Colt sat on the table and the situation had settled from dangerous to merely strange.
Small thing, compared to him. Came up to maybe his chin, if that.
Chestnut-brown hair in a braid over one shoulder, the kind of brown that caught copper in the lamplight, and loose pieces of it had come free around her face, probably from sleeping on it or from coming down the stairs in a hurry to brain him with cookware.
Hazel eyes. Younger than him by a fair stretch.
No paint on her, no jewelry, nothing fancy about her at all.
Looking at her, though, as she held that skillet, his gaze lingered on her braid and the set of her jaw, which said she'd set her teeth into something and not let go if she decided it mattered.
"Your sister; she's safe. She's at my place in Springfield. She wrote to me, said she'd be there the whole time I'm here."
Sam ran a hand through his hair and his fingers came away wet with melted snow. Lord, he needed sleep. And food. And to not be standing half-dressed in front of a woman he'd just drawn a gun on.
"How long you fixin' to stay?"
"Two weeks. That's what we agreed on. I didn't, I'm terribly sorry about the…" She gestured at the room, at the whole tangled mess of the situation. "She said you wouldn't be back."
"Well, I'm back."
He could ride to Sarah. Head east, catch up with her in Springfield, leave this woman to the homestead the way Sarah had planned. But the snow outside had thickened into something mean in the last hour, the kind that closed the passes and buried roads for days on end.
She took a step forward. "I could go in the mornin', I reckon, if the weather—"
"Sarah says you're lookin' after this place. You been tendin' the animals?"
"Yes. Chickens, horses, the cow. I followed her instructions to the letter."
"Fine. Then stay." He picked up his shirt from the back of the chair. "You can earn your keep, though. I ain't runnin' no boardin' house out here."
Her chin came up. "I'll thank you to rephrase that, Mr. Cooper."
"No!” He raised his hands. “No, I meant cook! Clean! Help with chores, nothin’ like, uh—"
"Alright, then.” Her jaw set tight. "So long as we’re clear that you meant nothing… untoward."
"Promise."
And then the room went still, and Sam became aware, all at once and about a minute too late, that he stood bare from the waist up in front of a woman who was wearing nothing but a cotton nightgown and that braid of hers. Hopefully, she’d be keeping that braid tomorrow too.
Her eyes landed on his chest, dropped to the scar running along his left side—the one from Abilene, the knife fight he'd rather forget and mostly had—then cut hard to the wall past his shoulder.
And then, and this got under his skin in a way he had no use for, they came back for just a half-second, quickly and almost guilty, before fixing on the lamp.
He pulled the shirt on. It may have taken a beat longer than the situation strictly called for. He couldn't have rightly said why.
"We'll talk proper in the mornin'."
She nodded. Color had crept up her neck and into her cheeks, and she looked like she'd rather be standing in just about any other room on God's earth right about now. Huh… he’d have to make her blush more often.
She turned for the stairs and then stopped. "Mr. Cooper?"
He looked at her.
"I don't make a habit of greetin' folks with a fryin' pan. For whatever that's worth."
His mouth tried to smile, and he shut it down before it got anywhere.
"Get some sleep, Miss Granger."
She went up the stairs, and he listened to her footsteps crossing the loft floor overhead, the creak of the bed frame as she settled in. Then, there was nothing but the sound of the stove ticking and the snow tapping at the window glass.
Sam dropped into the chair at the kitchen table and unfolded Sarah's letter again, reading it a third time by the lamplight.
Don't shoot her. Hell of a thing to leave a man.