The Gunman's Bride. Catherine Palmer

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      Along about ten o’clock, Bart felt his fever break. Bathed in sweat, his body suddenly began to cool. The hammering in his head eased. The room stopped spinning.

      He could hear the sounds of clinking glasses and chatter from a dining room somewhere. The tantalizing aromas of cinnamon, bacon and freshly brewed coffee drifted up through the floorboards and swirled around his head.

      Rosie was downstairs, he remembered suddenly, and this was her room. Her hairbrush lay on the table. Her clean, starched aprons hung by the door. He had found her!

      But as the truth set in, Bart closed his eyes. Rosie didn’t want him. She had made him promise to leave. And all he had done was bloody up her rug and sheets, smell up her room with his old leather jacket and dusty boots and put her in a position to lose her job. Rosie would be hoping he was gone by the time she returned to her room.

      No surprise there. Who would want a no-good half-breed gunman like him around anyhow?

      With a grunt he pushed himself to his feet and lifted the lace curtain at her window. The town was twice as big as it had looked the night before. From Rosie’s bedroom he could see a shoe shop, a bakery, an undertaking parlor and enough saloons to keep the whole town drunk as hillbillies at a rooster fight. There was the Five-Cent Beer Saloon, the 1883 Saloon, the Mountain Monarch, the Bank Exchange, the Progressive Saloon, the Cowboy’s Exchange Saloon, the El Dorado, the Green Light, the Lone Star, the Dobe Saloon and O’Reilly’s. And those were just the ones Bart could make out.

      A church or two had elbowed out some holy ground amid the saloons. A meeting hall, a hotel, a bank and a water tower near the bank showed that the town of Raton, New Mexico, meant business. The whole place swarmed with people—folks heading in and out of the hardware stores and mercentiles, a milkman stopping off at every house in town, men loading wagons with lumber from Hughes Brothers Carpenter and Building Supply and women carrying bundles out of D. W. Stevens, Dealers in General Merchandise. Wagons, carriages and horses filled the packed-dirt streets.

      Bart brushed a hand across his forehead. He would never be able to climb out a second-story window unnoticed. He let the curtain drop and sagged against the sill. He would have to wait until dark to try an escape.

      Before he did, he would make up for the trouble he had caused Rosie. Some of it anyhow.

      “See you at one o’clock!” Rosie called to Etta, who was chatting with the new cook.

      Heart thundering, Rosie swung into the kitchen and filled a plate with food. What if Bart had already gone? she wondered as she climbed the stairs. Worse—what if he was still there?

      She pushed open the door. The bare-chested man leaning against her window frame looked nothing like the pale invalid she had tucked away at dawn. In the sunlight, his bronze skin gleamed. A towel hung around his neck. His hair, still damp, had been washed and combed away from his face.

      For the first time Rosie fully saw what time had done to the gawky boy she once loved. From the raven eyebrows that slashed across his forehead to his burning emerald eyes, from the squared turn of his chin to the solid breadth of his chest, Bart Kingsley was all man.

      Disconcerted, she focused on a makeshift clothesline that stretched across the room. Denim trousers, a torn cotton shirt and a couple of white sheets hung dripping.

      “You washed,” she blurted out.

      “Everything but the rug.” He straightened, and she realized that he had tucked her blanket around his waist.

      “Cold water. All I had.”

      “Cold water’s the best thing there is for bloodstains.” Steadying her breath, she held out the plate. “I brought you something to eat.”

      “Thanks. I’m hungry. The fever broke a while back. I’d be much obliged if you’d allow me to stay until dark, Rosie.”

      At that moment she would have allowed him to do almost anything he wanted. If she hadn’t known his veins ran with both white and Indian blood, Rosie might have mistaken Bart for a pure Apache. With his copper skin and long, black hair, he could pass for a mighty warrior straight out of a dime novel. But he was too tall, and his eyes were too green to deny the heritage of his English mother.

      “You’d better stay put,” she said, busying herself by straightening her dressing table. “Unless you want Sheriff Bowman nabbing you first thing.”

      “You reckon I should hang for my crimes, Rosie?”

      “You’d have to answer that one.”

      “I can tell you this. It’ll be a cold day in—” He caught himself. “I’m sorry, Rosie. Cussing’s a hard habit to break.”

      “Sounds like you’ve got a lot of new habits these days.”

      “I did some things I’m not proud of, but I can’t just turn myself in. The law would just as soon shoot a man dead as let him try to make a new life for himself.”

      Rosie set her brush on the table and turned to face him. “Do you want a new life, Bart?”

      “I didn’t come all the way here to rob trains—you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

      “Why did you come?”

      Bart let out a breath. “About the time Bob Ford shot Jesse James in the back of the head, I was doing some thinking. I looked back over the years of my life and all I saw was a long tunnel. A black, cold tunnel. There was only one bright sliver. One spot of light.”

      “Is that right?” she asked. He was staring at her with a look she couldn’t read, a look that sent her pulse skimming.

      “That light was you, Rosie,” Bart said. “It was you. And that’s why I came to Raton, New Mexico. I came to find that light again, to see if I could touch it, to see if it could shine away some of that darkness in the stinking black pit I’ve made of my life.”

      Oh, Bart, she wanted to say, I forgive you. I forgive you! But the one-o’clock lunch train pulled into the depot with a whistle and a rush of steam that obliterated every sound in the tiny room. Rosie felt the floor shake and heard the window rattle. And she was thankful—so thankful—she hadn’t said anything to Bart.

      As she left her room and hurried down the stairs to the lunchroom, Rosie saw the faces of her disappointed father and her angry fiancé. She saw the wreath of rosebuds and lilacs she’d worn in her hair the night she married Bart Kingsley, the glade where she had cried her eyes out over him, the parlor where William Lowell had knelt to ask for her hand and her heart—the heart she had promised to another man.

      Rosie realized that with all these things, a blackness had crept into her own life. A blackness so intense she had fled it on a midnight train to a frontier town where no one could ever find her again. A blackness so dark she was not at all sure that even a flicker of light remained—the light that had been Laura Rose Vermillion. The light Bart had come seeking.

      Chapter Four

      Minutes after the last lunch train pulled out of Raton, Sheriff Bowman and the local pastor strolled into the lunchroom looking for a bite to eat.

      “I’ll СКАЧАТЬ