The Man from Stone Creek. Linda Lael Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ she could, letting her gaze bore into Sam O’Ballivan like a pointy stick.

      When everyone was settled in their seats, Sam announced his plan. The boys would help him tend the mercantile, the girls would remain at the schoolhouse for a “hygiene” lesson.

      The boys cheered and stomped their feet, and rushed for the door at an offhand signal from Sam. The girls sat, wide-eyed, waiting for enlightenment. Maddie would have bet not a one of them could have defined the word hygiene, but they had noticed the bathtub. They were all agog at the spectacle.

      “Miss Chancelor will give the demonstration,” Sam went on, looking worriedly from face to face. “But we’ll need a volunteer to get into the tub.”

      Sure enough, Violet’s hand shot up. “I’ll do it, Mr. SOB,” she cried.

      “Mr. O’Ballivan,” Sam countered easily. “That’s good, Violet. I appreciate your willingness to take the initiative.”

      Violet beamed. “Can I go to the privy first?”

      The other girls giggled and Sam silenced them with a ponderous sweep of his eyes.

      “Yes,” he said. “You do that.”

      While Violet was gone to the privy, he brought in four buckets of hot water and emptied them into the tub. The remaining girls watched, barely able to suppress their amusement.

      When he’d set aside the last bucket, Sam turned to address them. “If even one of you makes fun of Violet,” he said, “you’ll find yourself writing ‘I will not bully smaller children’ one hundred times on the blackboard. Is that clear to everyone?”

      The girls nodded, subdued.

      Sam dusted his hands together. “Good,” he said, and turned to Maddie. “Now, Miss Chancelor, if I might have the key to the mercantile—”

      She surrendered it, slapping it down into his palm with a little more force than strictly necessary.

      “Thank you,” he said, tossing the large brass key once and catching it with an aplomb that made Maddie grit her teeth.

      And so it was that Maddie came to illustrate the finer points of taking a bath, using Violet Perkins as a model.

      * * *

      MADDIE HAD BEEN RIGHT, Sam thought as he opened the mercantile for the day’s commerce. There were eight women waiting on the sidewalk, shopping baskets in hand, tapping their toes in impatience. He greeted them with a nod and made his crew of boys wait until the ladies had swept inside.

      It was the contrary nature of folks, he reckoned, that on this particular morning, everybody in town wanted to get their marketing done. Had Maddie followed her usual routine, there most likely wouldn’t have been so much urgency.

      He set the boys to sweeping and dusting canned goods while the female population of Haven made their various selections.

      “Where,” demanded a narrow-faced old biddy with hooded, hawklike eyes and a nose to match, “is Maddie?”

      Sam opened his mouth to answer, but before he could get a word out, Terran cut him off. “She’s over to the schoolhouse, giving Violet Perkins a bath!” he crowed.

      “Teaching a hygiene lesson,” Sam corrected quietly.

      “Well,” huffed the Hawk Woman, “it’s about time somebody look that child in hand.”

      “Yes,” Sam said, opening the cash register drawer to tally the funds on hand. “It is about time.”

      The woman blinked.

      Sam silently congratulated himself on a bull’s-eye.

      By ten-thirty, he’d taken in four dollars and forty-eight cents, and made careful note of every transaction, so Maddie couldn’t say he’d fouled up her books. Then, figuring the hygiene lesson ought to be over, and Violet decent again, he dispatched Terran and young Ben Donagher to the schoolhouse to find out.

      When they came back, Maddie was with them, the front of her dress sodden and her hair moist around her face. He couldn’t rightly tell if that sparkle in her whiskey eyes was temper or satisfaction with a job well done.

      “I see my store is still standing,” she remarked.

      Sam grinned. “I trust my school has fared as well,” he parried, reaching for his hat.

      “You’ll have to empty the bathtub yourself,” Maddie said, taking her storekeeper’s apron down off a peg and donning it. “Violet fairly gleams with cleanliness. One of the other girls aired out her dress while she was soaking.”

      Sam sent the boys trooping back to the schoolhouse, lingering to take out his wallet. “Next time Violet comes in the store,” he said, laying a bill down on the counter, “you outfit her with a new one. Say there was a drawing and she won.”

      Maddie regarded him solemnly. He still couldn’t tell whether she was pleased with him or wanted to peel off a strip of his hide. “You lie very easily, Mr. O’Ballivan,” she said.

      Well, that answered one of his questions. “Kids like Violet run into more than their fair share of humiliation, it seems to me,” he replied. “If a lie can spare them embarrassment, then I’m all for it.”

      She had the good grace to blush.

      He waited until he’d reached the doorway before putting on his hat. “We’re due at the Donaghers’s supper table at seven o’clock,” he reminded her. “Best have Terran hitch up that buckboard you use for deliveries unless you want to ride two to a horse.”

      Maddie put the bill he’d left on the counter into the cash register and headed for a display of calico dresses, probably to choose one for Violet. “We’ll take the buckboard,” she said without looking at him.

      Sam smiled to himself as he closed the door behind him.

      Damn, he thought. It would have been a fine thing to share a saddle with Miss Maddie Chancelor. A fine thing indeed.

      * * *

      SCHOOL HAD LET OUT for the day and Sam was seated at his desk, going over the map Vierra had given him the night before, when a small, impossibly thin woman stepped shyly over the threshold. She wore a bonnet and a faded cotton dress, and he knew who she was before she introduced herself.

      He refolded the map, set a paper weight on top of it, and stood. “Sam O’Ballivan,” he said by way of introduction, and added a cordial nod.

      “Mrs. John Perkins,” Violet’s mother responded, lingering just inside the open door.

      “Come in,” Sam urged when she didn’t show any signs of moving.

      She hesitated another moment, then thrust herself into motion. He noticed then, as she approached, that she was carrying a basket over one arm, filled with brown eggs. She set the whole works on his desk, straightened her spine, and looked up at him.

      “I guess my Violet had a bath today at school,” she said.

      Sam СКАЧАТЬ