Man on a Mission…

Nate Bohannan won’t let anything stand in the way of his grand plans in California. Even if it means traveling there with unreliable huckster Robert Salali. But after a destructive bender in Simpson Creek, Texas, the unscrupulous Salali runs out, leaving Nate to carry the blame—and the debt. He can fix broken furniture…but can anything fix the despair in café owner Ella Justiss’s eyes?

When her café was destroyed, Ella felt sure she’d lost her dreams along with it. Yet somehow Nate’s cheerful care and optimism fill her with hope again. Painful secrets from her childhood make Ella wary of men. When danger threatens, will Nate be the hero Ella can finally trust—and love?

Brides of Simpson Creek: Small-town Texas spinsters find love with mail-order grooms!

“I caught a fish! My very first!” Ella cried.

Nate couldn’t help but grin at her excitement. “Your papa never took you fishing?” he asked.

“No.” Nate knew by the way her lips tightened that he’d strayed onto dangerous ground.

“Well, now I have to catch up to you,” he said, keeping his tone light. “My honor as an experienced fisherman is at stake.”

By the time they left, they had a stringerful of fish. Ella had laughed and enjoyed herself more than he’d imagined her capable of. Had no one ever shown her how to have fun?

“Thanks for taking me.” She reached for the stringer. “I guess I’ll see you later…”

“Tsk-tsk, Miss Ella, did you think I was going to leave you with the nasty job of cleaning the fish after I had the fun of catching them with you?” Nate told himself it was mere chivalry, and not the fact that he wanted to earn more of her brilliant smiles.

She gazed up at him. “You’d do that for me?” she breathed, eyes wide and luminous.

“Sure,” he said, feeling as if there wasn’t much he couldn’t do under the effect of her grateful smile.

LAURIE KINGERY

makes her home in central Ohio, where she is a “Texan in exile.” Formerly writing as Laurie Grant for the Mills & Boon Historical line and other publishers, she is the author of eighteen previous books and the 1994 winner of a Readers’ Choice Award in the Short Historical category. She has also been nominated for Best First Medieval and Career Achievement in Western Historical Romance by RT Book Reviews. When not writing her historicals, she loves to travel, read, participate on Facebook and Shoutlife and write her blog at www.lauriekingery.com.

A Hero in the Making

Laurie Kingery

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

—Hebrews 13:2

To Tom, my own “jack of all trades” and master of many. I’m so lucky to spend my life with you!

And to Ella Lorene (Hill) Schroeder, my mother, for whom my heroine is named.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Dear Reader,

Extract

Chapter One

Simpson Creek, Texas

September 1869

“Could I interest you in a sandwich, cowboy? Maybe a bowl of chili?”

Ella Justiss didn’t like the look of the man who leaned on the counter, studying her instead of the menu posted behind her. He had a scraggly scruff of a beard, narrow, calculating eyes and smelled of sweat, stale whiskey and the cheroots that peeked out of his shirt pocket.

“So here’s where Detwiler keeps his best gal!” the drifter crowed, staring at her with red-rimmed eyes. “I knew he had to have somethin’ better than the ones he’s got out there servin’ rotgut. What’s your name, pretty gal?”

Pretty? Me? The drifter must have drunk a powerful lot of the saloon’s whiskey before coming to her little café in the back of the building. “Whoa, cowboy, I think you misunderstood. I’m not one of the saloon girls. See the sign?” she said, pointing behind her. “I’m selling food, cold tea, lemonade and coffee, nothing else.” There was no one else in the café at the moment, and nothing between her and the drifter but a long, battered and scratched pecan-wood countertop with a narrow opening at one end so she could bring orders out to the tables. She’d have to leave its safety and go right by him to reach the saloon or out into the alley behind her café. And something in his avid gaze told her she’d never make it past him, that he might try to force his way behind the counter. Then she could be trapped between the stove and the wall.

“Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?” she prompted, keeping her voice natural, hoping to distract him.

His eyes went narrower still, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing.

“Oh, I’m hungry, all right, gal. An’ you look purdy enough to eat. C’mere.” Before she could think to back away or try to call for George Detwiler, the saloonkeeper, the stranger made a grab for her, pulling her out from behind the counter, snaking an arm around her waist and hauling her toward him.

Suddenly she was a frightened child back in the asylum at night, waking at the sound of the creaking of the floorboards in the darkness. Her eyes strained to see through the gloom, but she couldn’t make out what had roused her. Around her, she could hear snores from some of the cots, the quiet breathing of children from others. And then there was a hand over her mouth...

Ella could never remember further than that. She didn’t know why confrontations with overfriendly customers made her think of the asylum, but they always did. Her stomach clenched, as it always did when this half memory paid a visit.

“Stop it!” she screamed. “George, help me!” She boxed her assailant’s ears and clawed at his face as he succeeded in pulling her out of her sanctuary, but she might as well have pounded on a tree trunk.

The stranger guffawed, amused by her attempts to free herself, and clamped a smelly hand over her mouth, muffling her screams. “Settle down, woman, I jes’ wanna kiss... You don’ weigh any more’n a minute, you know that?”

Oh, yes, she knew folks said she was thin as a fiddle string and short as an ant’s eyebrow, and now her size was a distinct liability in the fight. The tinkly piano music in the saloon had probably drowned out her cries. Detwiler would never hear her in time to come to her aid.

Dimly she was aware of the door opening behind her, but she was too busy fending off her attacker, who had begun to paw at the neckline of her dress, to pay any attention to what the sound might mean. Then all at once she was free, and the drifter, his nose bloodied, had fallen heavily on his backside, out cold. Ella found herself looking into the clear blue eyes of yet another stranger.

This one was as well favored as the drifter had been ugly, with a lock of curly light brown hair falling over his forehead.

“You all right, ma’am?” he asked, his Southern drawl like a caress.

“Yes, I think so... Thank you,” she said fervently. “You came along at just the right time. I knew the saloonkeeper wouldn’t hear me over his piano...” Ella glanced uneasily at her unconscious attacker lying just a few feet from her, wondering if he would come around and launch himself at her again.

“Don’t worry about him,” the newcomer said, following her gaze. “He’ll be out for a while, and when he wakes up, his head will ache too much to think of bothering you. I’ll get the saloonkeeper and we’ll drag him out of here.” He left for a moment, and when he returned, he had Detwiler in tow.

“Again, Miss Ella?” Detwiler said, glancing from her unconscious attacker to Ella and back again.

She nodded. “I’m afraid so, George.”

Detwiler said nothing more to her, just grunted as he reached under the man’s shoulders, and with the newcomer hoisting the attacker’s booted feet, and Ella holding the back door open, the two men hauled the drifter into the alley. She knew they would leave him in front of the saloon, and hopefully, he wouldn’t find his way back.

When they returned, Detwiler trudged back into the saloon, leaving Ella once more alone with her rescuer. As much as Ella had wanted to scuttle back behind the counter, she had been too shaky to move, and she still stood clutching the doorknob.

“You get a lot of that sort of thing, men bothering you like that?”

Her rescuer look concerned, but what was he going to do about it? She nodded and tried to look unperturbed, despite the fact that she was still shaking inside. If this man hadn’t come along... And being alone with this man now, without the counter between them, made her nearly as uneasy as the drifter had.

“Not usually as bad as that,” she said, hoping she sounded calm. “Guess it was too much to hope that some fellows wouldn’t get the wrong idea from my little café being in the back of the saloon.” It couldn’t be helped—it wasn’t as if she had the funds to buy a lot and erect a building on it. Using the back room of George Detwiler’s saloon for her little eatery and paying him a small sum that covered rent and provisions was supposed to be a temporary measure until the profits would enable her to have her own café, but it seemed she’d be old and gray by the time that happened.

She could think of that later. Meanwhile, she owed this stranger some sort of thanks for his timely intervention.

“Can I offer you a cup of coffee, mister? And a sandwich?” Ella asked, though she couldn’t help wincing inwardly at the loss of the three bits it would cost her to give away what she was supposed to be selling.

“Thank you, but I’ll pay for two sandwiches, since I came in with money to buy food anyway,” he told her. “I’ll eat one now, but would you wrap up the other sandwich for a friend, please?” Suiting his action to his words, he sprinkled some coins onto the countertop. “You could tell me your name.”

“Ella,” she said. “Ella Justiss.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Ella. I’m Nate Bohannan.”

After making the first beef sandwich and pouring his coffee, she studied the man from under her lashes as he ate. He wasn’t one of the local ranch hands, and he wasn’t dressed like a cowboy. He wore black trousers, a clean white shirt and a silver brocade vest with a gold watch fob. All of his clothes were clean and well cared for, if a little well-worn. If it weren’t for the fancy vest, she might have thought him a doctor, or maybe a preacher. He was well-spoken and polite, but the vest revealed a showier side to his character than a man of one of those professions.

“What brings you to Simpson Creek, Mr. Bohannan, if I may ask?” she said as she fashioned the second sandwich for his unseen friend. “Are you a gambler, by any chance?” Detwiler operated a faro table at night, so maybe the man had come to try his luck.

Bohannan threw back his head and laughed. It was a hearty laugh, as if he enjoyed a good sense of humor. “No, I’m not a gambler, though you might say our business is a kind of gamble. I’m the assistant to Mr. Robert Salali. He runs the Cherokee Medicine Show, and we’re visiting your fair town to sell his amazing product.”

“‘Salali?’ Is he Indian? Or is that some kind of foreign name?” she asked.

Bohannan smiled as he answered. “As American as you and I, though he was given the Cherokee name Salali by a Cherokee chief. He considers it an honor and uses it for his medicine business. Say, Miss Ella, why don’t you come see the medicine show. The bottled medicine he sells is a wondrous potion. It’ll cure whatever ails a body—though looking at you, I’d say you’re not troubled by lumbago, catarrh or rheumatism,” he said with a wink of a twinkling blue eye.

What was it about this man that made her want to laugh and smile at everything he said, despite her unease with his charm? It was more than the gratitude inspired by his rescue.

“No, I’m not subject to those complaints,” she said, trying to sound tart but failing miserably.

“It’s good for lots of other things,” he assured her. “Things that might not be apparent on the surface. Melancholy, dyspepsia...”

“Fortunately, I’m in good health, but I have to watch my pennies too carefully to spend money on such things,” she told him. “I want to open my own restaurant someday, one not attached to a saloon.” She had no idea why she was sharing her dream with a man who was next to a stranger to her, a man who sent disquieting emotions zinging through her.

“A completely worthy ambition,” he agreed. “But come see the presentation, won’t you? It’s entertaining, if nothing else. Salali puts on a good show.” He’d finished his sandwich—wolfed it down, more like. “Our wagon’s pulled up in front of the mercantile. And you just might think of a need for our wonderful Cherokee medicine.”

Entertaining? Ella couldn’t remember when she’d last been entertained. Life was hard for an honest woman on her own. “What’s in this amazing medicine of yours?” she asked, letting her skepticism reveal itself.

“Ah, but that’d be telling,” he said with a wink. “Suffice it to say, a little of this, a little of that, and all good for what ails a person.”

“You’d better be glad our Dr. Walker and his wife are off in Austin this week,” she told him. “He doesn’t hold with quackery. Says calomel is poison, and most of the other things in patent medicines are, too.”

Bohannon regarded her seriously, though amusement danced in those blue eyes. He held up a hand and looked straight at her. “On my mother’s grave, I swear that there’s no calomel or any other harmful thing in Salali’s Cherokee Marvelous Medicine.”

“When does the show start?”

He smiled, a smile that wrapped itself around her soul, a smile that made her regret her long-held beliefs about men, and think that this man just might be the exception. Reaching inside his vest pocket, he brought out a gold pocket watch.

“In fifteen minutes,” he said. “Thanks for the sandwiches and that fine coffee, Miss Ella Justiss.”

“You’re welcome. Come back for supper, if you like. My fried chicken is the best in San Saba County.”

“I just might do that,” he said. He picked up the wrapped sandwich and exited through the saloon.

If she wanted to take a few minutes out to watch a medicine show, she could, Ella told herself. She’d been her own boss since leaving her job at the hotel restaurant and Mrs. Powell, the tyrannical cook who’d made her life miserable. She didn’t do business in midafternoon, anyway—those looking for a bite to eat at noon had already found it, either at her café or the hotel restaurant, and no one was seeking supper yet.

Ella locked the door to the alley, just in case the drifter woke up and tried to find his way back inside, then reached into the cigar box that held the pitifully paltry revenue from the day so far and emptied it into her reticule.

She went into the empty saloon and caught sight of Detwiler sitting on a chair at the piano, picking out a tune she didn’t know, though she did recognize the fact that the piano badly needed tuning. So George had been the one playing at the time the drifter had been attacking her.

He looked up as she approached. “Sorry about what happened, Miss Ella. Guess I shoulda known that fellow was too shifty-eyed to let him go back there, what with you bein’ alone.”

She forced a bright smile to her lips. “No harm done, George. Mr. Bohannan intervened.”

“Seemed like a nice fella, even if he is one a’ them snake-oil salesmen.” Now the saloonkeeper’s eyes turned apologetic as he cleared his throat. “I’m not sure our arrangement’s gonna work out, Miss Ella, from the number of times I’ve had to step in and keep some yahoo from botherin’ ya. I don’t want anything...bad t’ happen to ya, after all.”

Desperation gripped her with icy fingers. She could not lose the use of Detwiler’s back room, not when she had nowhere else to run her café. And there was very little in the way of other work for a decent woman if one was not a wife, like some of the ex-Spinsters, or a schoolteacher, like Spinsters’ Club member Louisa Wheeler.

“Please, George,” she said, clasping her hands together. “I’ll only need the space until I can get my own place,” she said, refusing to think about how long that would take. “I can’t go back to the hotel—Mrs. Powell’s already hired Daisy Henderson to wait tables in the restaurant.” Even if her job had not already been taken, it would be too galling to submit to the cook’s bullying again. Nor did she want to move on to yet another town.

Detwiler sighed. “All right. You kin stay for the time bein’. I know ya don’t have any other good options. I’ll try to keep a better eye on your customers. Maybe we could rig up some kinda bell rope that would ring behind the bar or somethin’ if you get another bad‘un.”

Ella smothered a snort. As noisy as it got at times in the saloon, she could probably fire a cannon back there and he wouldn’t be able to hear it. But it was nice knowing Detwiler cared about her safety, at least. She knew him to be a decent man. Even the women who served the whiskey in his saloon weren’t compelled to do anything more, and if they took customers upstairs, that was entirely up to them. Detwiler took no cut of it. And Detwiler had given her a chance to go into business for herself instead of remaining under Mrs. Powell’s bullying thumb at the hotel.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m just going to go down the street for a few minutes and see the Cherokee Medicine Show. I’ll be back before anyone’s likely to mosey in looking for supper.”

“Gonna buy ya some snake oil, eh?” Detwiler asked with a chuckle.

“Hardly,” she said, and pushed through the batwing doors to the outside.

Down the street she could see a buckboard with an extralong wagon bed pulled up in front of the mercantile. The wagon bed was gaily painted in emerald-green with navy trim and an inscription along the side in fancy script lettering. As she drew closer, she saw that the inscription read The Cherokee Marvelous Medicine Show. In the middle of the wagon bed stood a narrow podium, with a box on either side stacked full of amber bottles—no doubt the famous Cherokee elixir.

Then she saw Nate emerge from the other side of the wagon, holding a stool and a banjo he’d evidently brought out from storage beneath the wagon. She watched as he placed the stool to one side of the podium, laid the banjo on one of the boxes and, using the front wheel of the wagon, climbed gracefully aboard. He settled himself on the stool and picked up the banjo. For a moment, he tried each of the strings, adjusting one or two as needed at the end of the neck, then began strumming a few chords. Then his fingers began flying over the frets and strings as he played a rollicking tune that reminded her of a minstrel show she’d once seen in New Orleans.

Why, he’s really good, she marveled. She hadn’t expected him to have such musical talent.

She was distracted then by a flash of color down the street, and made out a swarthy, strangely dressed man in some sort of outlandish striped turban and matching waist sash, pacing up and down the street, holding a speaking trumpet to his lips. He cried, “Come one, come all, and learn of the marvelous, wondrous, extraordinary medicine first discovered by Cherokee healers. Hear about the amazing cures this medicine has brought about, from dreaded diseases like consumption, dropsy and apoplexy, to the everyday ills of catarrh, melancholia and piles!”

Everywhere up and down Main Street, people turned around and heads poked out of shops to see what was going on, including a fellow at the barbershop whose face was half shaved, half covered in thick white lather. Not much happened out of the ordinary in Simpson Creek, Texas, and its inhabitants didn’t want to miss it when it did.

So this was Robert Salali, the man Nate Bohannan had said he worked for.

Salali strode to the end of Main Street, calling through his speaking trumpet, and Ella saw the postmaster emerge from the post office and Sheriff Bishop and Deputy Menendez amble out from the jail. The medicine-show man was obviously in his element, drawing the crowd with his singsong pitch and stopping to exchange remarks with individual townspeople, even chucking a baby held by a young mother under the chin.

When Salali headed back toward the wagon-bed stage, Ella heard Delbert Perry, the town’s handyman, ask him, “How much is this amazing medicine, mister? Does it cure a bad liver?”

“Yes, my friend, it’ll underange a deranged liver faster than a crow can fly from here to San Saba. As for the price, come listen to our show and we’ll sell it to you at a discount for being the first person to ask, but I promise you, it’ll be the best money you ever spent!”

Ella couldn’t help chuckling at the idea of an underanged liver. Everyone knew Delbert Perry had been the town drunk before he’d gotten right with the Lord, and he hadn’t touched a drop of liquor since then, but years of hard living had taken its toll, leaving him with a permanently veiny, reddened nose and a paunch that was at odds with his skinny arms and legs.

Bohannan spotted her then, and flashed an intimate smile and a wink that had Ella blushing and wishing she was wearing something besides her plain, serviceable dark blue skirt and waist.

Don’t be silly, she told herself sternly. Why should she give two hoots about what a charming stranger working for a medicine-show man thought of her? He’d be gone tomorrow and she’d never see him again. And she had a goal to accomplish that didn’t include falling for the wiles of a smooth talker like Bohannan, even if he had saved her from that drifter. She should be using this time to bread chicken for her supper customers, and not be out here on the street lollygagging when she had no intention of wasting her pennies on this quackery. She hoped Perry wouldn’t buy any, either; these nostrums were usually half alcohol and it might cost him his hard-won sobriety.

Despite her reservations, though, Ella joined the crowd gathering in front of the medicine wagon. She might as well see the show, since that was what she’d come out for.

Bohannan strummed faster, escalating the music to a frenzied pace. Then just as suddenly, he stopped and laid the banjo aside, then stood and faced the crowd.

The only noise was the buzzing of horseflies plaguing the rumps of the horses tied up to a nearby hitching rail.

He leaned forward, making eye contact with everyone in the crowd in turn, until Ella found herself holding her breath. Even the flies seemed to cease buzzing.

“I’m Nathan Bohannan, and it is my honor and privilege to be the one to introduce you to the purveyor of the amazing elixir of health, Cherokee Marvelous Medicine. And now, direct from a secret Cherokee fortress in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, I give you Robert Salali! Let’s have a round of applause to welcome him, shall we, folks?”

Chapter Two

Now the medicine-show man ascended to the wagon bed via a set of steps that Bohannan had apparently placed there for him. He carried himself like royalty ascending to the throne instead of a gaudily painted wagon.

The medicine-show man paused a moment, surveying the crowd before him with a lordly air, a king in front of his subjects, as if he wore ermine-trimmed robes instead of buckskin trousers and a navy blue tunic. Around his neck was a necklace strung with what looked like alternating bear and panther claws. An eagle feather stuck out of the back of his striped turban. Raven-black hair brushed his shoulders.

He certainly had a presence, Ella thought before he had spoken so much as a single word.

When he opened his mouth at last, a torrent of syllables poured out, all of them strange and foreign to her ears. “I am Robert Salali,” he proclaimed, switching to English. “What I said in the Cherokee tongue is this—I bring you greetings in the name of the Cherokee Nation.”

Ella could not place his accent. It was neither Yankee nor a Southern drawl nor quite foreign.

“How did I come by the knowledge of this astonishing medicine, you may be wondering?” Salali said. “It is quite a tale. I saved a Cherokee chief from an agonizing death at the claws of a fierce, enormous bear. In gratitude, the chief gave me this necklace, these articles of Cherokee clothing and the knowledge of the ingredients of the elixir. He said I could share the elixir with those I wished, or keep it to myself. ‘But how could I be so selfish?’ I asked him. ‘Ah, you have a great soul,’ the chief told me. ‘So I will give you a new surname, which means “Generous Heart” and you may share the elixir as you choose. It is a gesture of friendship to our white brothers.’”

“They must be more neighborly Injuns than the Comanches, then,” somebody muttered, and there were answering chuckles.

“That must mean this medicine’s free, I reckon!” hooted one of the town’s graybeards.

Salali smiled and raised his arm majestically to quiet his audience. “Not free, no, for what is free is often not valued, and the ingredients of our amazing Cherokee medicine do cost money to obtain. I must charge a pittance or I would not be able to produce it as a service to mankind.” He pulled out a rolled scroll of parchment from his pants pocket, and with a flourish, undid the red satin ribbon that bound it and handed it to Bohannan. “My assistant will read some testimonials from satisfied customers,” he said.

Ella listened as Bohannan read accounts of a woman cured of cataplectic hysteria—whatever that was—who had come back to her right mind and made her husband a hearty breakfast the very next day after starting to take Cherokee Marvelous Medicine, a boy cured of lameness, a man cured of heart seizures, a woman of insomnia. Nothing in his tone hinted at the cynicism he’d revealed earlier to her when he’d said the medicine man “put on a good show.”

Ella heard the townspeople around her speculating as to whether the medicine would heal this ailment or that. She looked around, and though several reached into pockets or reticules for money to buy, others looked as unconvinced as she was.

Then Robert Salali spoke again, his expression solemn. “Though I can see there are many doubters among you, I will still provide the medicine for the paltry sum of only fifty cents for a pint bottle. Fifty cents for the most amazing medicine of all time, folks! I would advise you to act quickly if you are interested. In other towns near here, the elixir has gone very fast, and we are only here for this one day.”

In no time the citizens of Simpson Creek surged forward, surrounding him and the makeshift stage upon which Salali stood, clamoring for the medicine and holding out coins. She watched as Salali took the money and Bohannan handed out the bottles. Ella turned away in disgust after seeing Delbert Perry buy a bottle and walk away with an expression of bliss on his simple features. Would he be back at the saloon tomorrow, buying whiskey with his hard-earned money?

How could Bohannan help Salali prey on innocent folks this way? Rescuing her earlier had been a gentlemanly thing to do, but his actions now proved Nate Bohannan and his employer were no better than thieves.

When she turned, she saw her friend Kate Patterson standing on the boardwalk beside the wagon. She must have come out from behind the counter of the mercantile where she worked with her aunt, its proprietress, to watch the show. There was probably no one in the mercantile while this unusual diversion took place outside.

“Kate, how are you?” Ella said, smiling at her friend. “You’re not going to buy that stuff, are you?”

Kate giggled. “Of course not! I don’t need it for anything, but my aunt’s buying a bottle,” she said, indicating Mrs. Patterson wading through the throng toward Bohannan. “She suffers from rheumatism, you know, and what Dr. Walker’s prescribed so far hasn’t helped much.”

“Well, you’ll have to let me know if it works for her,” Ella said.

“The man helping Salali certainly is a nice-looking fellow, isn’t he?” Kate said.

Even as Ella followed her friend’s gaze, she saw Bohannan raise one empty crate triumphantly. “One box gone, Mr. Salali!” he called.

But there were still pint amber bottles in the other crate, and now those who had not bought a bottle surged forward, panicked that they might have missed their chance. Ella saw the medicine-show man could hardly keep up with the flow of coins.

“He is handsome, even if he’s helping to peddle snake oil,” Ella said. “He came to the café to buy sandwiches a little while ago. Say, I need to get started on my supper menu—why don’t you come over to the café and we can have lemonade while I cook the chicken for supper? I’ll tell you all about how he rescued me,” she said with a tantalizing wink.

It had been too long since she and Kate had had a cozy chat, now that Kate had a beau. For once she would have something interesting to talk about—she would not just be listening to Kate tell about what her beau had said and done. Ella would enjoy telling the other girl about the stranger’s saving her from the drifter, even if she no longer believed in his sincerity.

Kate’s eyes widened. “He rescued you? From what? It sounds thrilling! Oh, but I can’t. I promised my aunt I’d help her tend the store the rest of the afternoon since Gabe and I are going for a ride tonight in his buggy.”

Ella took an involuntary step backward, keeping her smile pasted on her face, even if her friend’s words had caused pain and jealousy to ping through her. Ever since the barbecue and dance the Spinsters’ Club had held this summer at Gilmore House, the mayor’s palatial home, her friend Kate had been oh-so-busy with Gabe Bryant, a lawyer who practiced in Simpson Creek. She was always stepping out with him, getting ready to step out with him or thinking about the marriage proposal she hoped would come soon.

Ella sighed inwardly. She didn’t begrudge Kate her beau, and she was happy for her, Ella told herself. She’d had a good time at the barbecue herself, and had danced nearly every dance with the gents who had attended. But after that evening, her lackluster life went on as before.

“Can you spare a few minutes to come into the mercantile and tell me about it?” Kate asked. “I’ve got to admit, you’ve got me intrigued,” she said, her gaze darting between Ella and Bohannan. The other crate was now empty also and Bohannan appeared to be consoling disappointed townsfolk.

“No, I really have to start working on supper,” Ella said. “I’m sure I’ll see you sometime,” she said, keeping her tone carefree as she turned to go. “It really wasn’t that important.”

She crossed the street diagonally to the saloon, and back to the hardscrabble reality of her existence.

* * *

“You made a good haul today,” Nate said to Salali as he parked the medicine-show wagon under a tree in the meadow across from Simpson Creek’s white-clapboard church. “Sold every bottle. You’ll have to make some more before we go to any more towns.” He unhitched the horses, hobbling them before he let the geldings loose to graze, and saw that Robert had taken a cross-legged seat under one of the live oak trees, pulled off his striped turban and thrown it onto a nearby bush.

I’d faint dead away if he ever offered to help with the unhitching, or at least thank me, Nate thought. But he reminded himself that under the terms of their “deal,” he was responsible for the horses and wagon, and assisting Salali when the latter did shows, so he supposed his employer really didn’t owe him any help. Nate’s “pay,” in return, was his meals and, eventually, a ride as far as Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he planned to take the new Transcontinental Railroad to California.

In California he could finally be somebody. He’d loved his father, who’d raised him alone after his mother died when he was only a baby. But all his life he had wanted to become something more than his father had been, a jack-of-all-trades who’d taken Nate to a series of small towns to live. Cal Bohannan had been content with that. Nate wasn’t.

His cousin on his mother’s side, Russell Blake, had gone to San Francisco and had become the proprietor of a grand hotel, and moved in influential circles in that thriving town. He said he planned to run for mayor in the next election, and he’d offered Nate the chance to become his partner in the hotel, with a further promise to introduce him to the powerful men he counted as friends. Nate could become a powerful man, too.

But would he ever get to San Francisco? So far, Salali didn’t seem to be in any hurry to even get out of Texas.

The day after Nate met Salali, they’d put on a show in some small east Texas town, and he’d been impressed with the man’s effortless showmanship and his personal magnetism—and the way coins poured into his hands in exchange for pint bottles of the elixir. Salali seemed inexhaustible.

Nate wasn’t so impressed anymore. Now that he had someone else to do the hard work of taking care of the horse and the wagon, navigating their journey from town to town and obtaining their vittles, Salali became a different person between shows. He seemed to feel his sole contribution to the success of the medicine show should be mixing up the elixir—a combination of laudanum, sassafras and ginseng roots, actual snake oil, and at least half alcohol—when the supply ran low.

“Mmm,” Salali muttered, his mouth full of the sandwich he’d given Nate the money to buy before the show.

“Good sandwich? You should have seen the pretty girl who made it for you,” Nate said. “Did you see her in the crowd? Tiny and dark-haired, with big brown eyes?”

Salali shook his head and mumbled something through a last mouthful of sandwich that might have been a disinterested “no.”

“Why don’t we go back to her café for some supper tonight? The food’s cheaper than in the hotel, and you could meet Miss Ella. I’m sure she’d be right fascinated to make your acquaintance.” And I could see her again. He didn’t know why that was so important; after all, he wasn’t about to abandon his goal of reaching San Francisco to take root in Simpson Creek. But there was something so compelling about the plucky, hardworking Ella...

“She wasn’t fascinated enough to buy any,” his employer muttered.

Nate shrugged. “She’s had to mind her pennies. She wants to build her own restaurant so she doesn’t have to use the back room of the saloon anymore. What do you care that she didn’t buy any elixir? We sold ’em all.”

He wished he could take back the words after he saw Salali’s eyes light up when he said “saloon.” Within days of their meeting, Nate had discovered his employer had two vices, gambling and whiskey. But what other choice had Nate had, on foot in the middle of nowhere after his horse had broken a leg and he’d had to put him down? Hot and sweaty from carrying his banjo, saddlebags and saddle, he’d come across the medicine-show wagon, broken down about five miles from where Nate’s horse had put his leg in a hole. Nate had repaired the broken axle for the medicine-show man, and regretted the deal he’d made with him ever since.

After Salali’s last drunken binge, he’d begged Nate to keep him from succumbing to his vices again.

Evidently he’d forgotten that now, however, for he said, “That saloon got poker? Faro? Why don’t I go make us a stake gambling while you see your sweetheart? I won’t drink, I promise. Or maybe just one whiskey, just to wet my whistle. What d’ya say, Nate-boy?”

It was a familiar wheedle, and one Nate had resolved to ignore forever more. When Salali gambled, he drank then lost every penny in his pockets. Then he’d lie around in a drunken stupor for the next day, and wake up cranky as a wet rattlesnake.

Sorrowful and repentant after his last binge, he’d agreed to let Nate hold on to their money after a show, so Nate resolved to stick to his guns and do just that. The money was safe in its secret hiding place on the wagon. Even if it meant neither he nor his employer had anything more to eat today than the last of the buffalo jerky, he wasn’t going to let Salali get close to temptation. If they went to town, Salali would have to agree to go into the café via the back entrance, not through the saloon. He figured the medicine-show man wouldn’t agree, but Nate would have liked to see Ella Justiss again, even for a brief time.

“I can’t let you do that, compadre,” Nate said firmly. “You told me not to let you gamble away the profits, or drink liquor, and I’m sticking to that.” He tried to ignore the way Salali’s eyes glared at him in thwarted anger. “If you won’t agree to only visit the café, we’ll stay right here. I’m just doing what you asked me to do, remember?”

Salali yawned widely, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “Think I’ll take me a siesta,” he muttered.

Maybe he’d change his mind about supper when he woke up, Nate thought. “Think I’ll take a nap, too,” he said, but he was talking to empty air. The medicine-show man was already snoring.

His employer had once admitted to him while drunk that his lately adopted surname, Salali, meant “Squirrel” in the Cherokee tongue, not “Generous Heart.” But there was nothing of the industrious planning-for-winter rodent or of generosity in Robert Salali, and Nate had to wonder why the chief had given it to him—and what he’d really done for the Indian. He didn’t believe for a minute that story of Salali killing a bear—the man was much too indolent. As Nate spread his blanket under the wagon to take advantage of the shade, he wondered what the Cherokee word for “lazy” was.

Someday soon, he and Salali would have to part ways, he thought, settling himself on his blanket and listening to his employer snore. Their arrangement wasn’t working. At the speed they were meandering through Texas, it would take years for Nate to reach Iowa, and the business opportunity in San Francisco that had been promised to him would have vanished.

* * *

It was evening when Nate awoke. He saw that Salali was already stirring around, his turban back in place, his clothes brushed. Hope rose in Nate that his employer had seen the sense of what he’d said, and decided to accompany him to supper—if it wasn’t already too late, he thought, wondering what time the petite pretty woman closed her establishment.

“You going to Ella’s café with me?” Nate asked. “I’ll bet it’ll be the best supper we’ve had in a long time.” He stepped up to the cabinet on the side of the wagon and used the comb and mirror that he kept there to spruce up a little. Maybe he ought to give himself a quick shave, he thought, after glancing at his beard-shadowed face, and pulled out his razor and a bowl, which he’d fill with water from the burbling creek just a few feet away.

“No,” Salali said, a challenging note in his voice. “I’m going to go play faro and drink as much whiskey as I please, and don’t think you’re going to tell me different.”

Nate shrugged, trying to tamp down the anger that boiled within him. There was no arguing with Salali when he got this way, but he didn’t have to make it easy. Surely if he remained firm, his employer would thank him one day. “I don’t know how you’re going to do that,” he said, taking the bowl and striding toward the creek. “You don’t know where the money we made today is, and I’m not about to tell you.”

He heard Salali following him, and figured he was going to try to wheedle him into changing his mind. He never saw the other man raise his arm, but a second later, he felt a crushing blow to the back of his head and felt himself falling. The fading light of dusk went black.

* * *

Ella had just dressed and was heading out the back steps of the boardinghouse the next morning with a basket full of eggs to scramble and a covered dish of bacon to fry for her café’s breakfast offering when she saw Detwiler trudging across the street toward her, looking as if he’d lost his last friend. His normally hound dog–droopy features were saggier than usual, and his eyes red-rimmed, as if he’d just been weeping.

Unease gripped her. While not of an overly cheerful nature, he was normally an even-tempered man. She hurried forward, alarm clenching her insides. “George, what’s wrong?”

“They wrecked the place, Miss Ella, that d— ’scuse me, Miss Ella, them awful snake-oil salesmen.”

Ella froze. “W-wrecked it? What are you saying?”

“Tore it up. Ever’thing inside is all smashed, ’cludin’ your café. Sheriff noticed a broken front window, and found it all smashed up inside. He came out to the house and notified me, and I just came from seein’ the damage. I’m ruined, Miss Ella. We’re both ruined.”

Ella felt a coldness wash over her despite the early warmth of the morning. She set the covered dish down on the doorstep, afraid her trembling hands would drop it in the next second. What Detwiler was saying didn’t make sense.

“You’re saying they wrecked it, but the sheriff didn’t find it till this morning? How do you know both of those men did it?” And why am I already trying to protect them? she wondered, even as she began to run down the alley past the hotel toward the saloon. No, this couldn’t have happened. Not my café!

Detwiler followed her. “That medicine-show man, the one in the outlandish clothes, came into the saloon last night, set down at the faro table and proceeded to get booze-blind drunk. He got mad when he lost his money an’ I told him he had to leave. He told me he was gonna lay a Cherokee curse on me, mumbled some a’ that foreign gibberish an’ left.”

“He left? So why do you think he and the other man did the damage? Was the other man with him when he was gambling?” She looked behind her, and saw Detwiler shake his head.

“Nope, I didn’t see that other fella, but it had to have been both of ’em. Wait’ll you see it, Miss Ella. That Salali character couldn’t’ve done that much by hisself.”

They’d emerged onto Main Street, and Ella picked up her skirt hem and ran the rest of the way.

From outside the batwing doors, nothing looked amiss, but inside it was another story.

Everything had been destroyed. Chairs and tables were splintered and lay on their sides at odd angles. The huge mirror behind the bar bore a crazy quilt of cracks radiating out from a hole in the middle. The painting of a scantily clad reclining woman that hung above it had been gashed so that the canvas now hung in pathetic strips from the gilt frame. The once-magnificent mahogany bar had deep scrapes furrowing it, as if someone had gouged it with a Bowie knife. The two girls who served whiskey in the saloon huddled along the side of the bar, their faces a study in misery, their garish-colored costumes pathetic in this scene of destruction. In the middle of the floor lay the feather of a golden eagle—just like the one that had been stuck in Robert Salali’s turban.

All this Ella took in at a horrified glance as she dashed to the back door of the saloon and into her café. She hoped desperately that George had been exaggerating about her café, at least. Maybe the drunken medicine-show man had only broken into the pie safe and found the half loaf of bread and the cookies she’d had left from yesterday.

But George hadn’t overstated the situation at all. The pecan countertop was cracked in half, and the three tables and half a dozen chairs lay in splintered pieces, as if a mad bull had been let loose in this small room. Her crockery lay in shards. The empty pie safe gaped open, its decorative tinwork door hanging by one hinge.

“Why?” It was a cry ripped from her heart. How could the Lord have allowed this to happen, knowing how hard she’d worked to achieve this much, all on her own, and how much more she wanted to accomplish? How could she go on now? Her pitiful savings couldn’t replace what she had lost.

“I’m sorry about this, Miss Ella,” Detwiler said behind her.

She whirled around, even as stinging tears began to cascade down her cheeks. “What about those women out there?” she demanded, pointing an accusatory arm at the saloon behind Detwiler. “Wouldn’t they have heard something going on from upstairs and gone to get the sheriff?”

“They weren’t here,” he told her. “They’ve got a room over on Lee Street,” he said. “They don’t always sleep here, unless...”

Ella knew what he wasn’t saying, and appreciated his discretion. But now she couldn’t think of what to do. She felt frozen in place.

“Sheriff Bishop’s gone to get his deputy,” he told her. “Somebody saw them two swindlers campin’ t’other side a’ the creek yesterday. Bishop’s going out there with the deputy to see if they’re still there.”

“Well, I’m going with them,” she said as fury swamped the grief and fear within her. “And when I see that—that scoundrel Bohannan, I’m gonna punch him right in the nose. The medicine man, too.”

Chapter Three

A horsefly buzzing around Nate Bohannan’s left ear woke him. Instantly he regretted returning to awareness, for it felt like an anvil had been dropped on his head and was still bouncing on it. Opening a cautious eye, he saw that it was early morning, and he was lying in the open meadow. Strange. He usually slept under the wagon. The ground at his fingertips dropped away, and he heard a gurgling splash below. Gingerly, he raised himself up on his elbows, and was rewarded with rocketing pain that left him retching onto the grass beside him.

Once the spasm passed, he felt a tad better and was able to cast a bleary look around him. Had Salali been attacked, too? Was his partner lying somewhere nearby, beaten insensible or worse?

He was alone in the meadow. The horses and the medicine wagon were gone. There was no sign of Salali. Where was he?

Then he caught sight of the tin bowl that he used for shaving, lying in the grass a few feet to his right, next to the skillet. It all came back to him then. He’d been about to fill the bowl with water and shave before walking into town to eat at the café, and the two of them had been arguing about Salali’s intention to drink and gamble. And then...blackness.

He felt a wave of dizziness as realization hit him. Salali had hit him over the head—probably with the skillet—and taken everything, including the contents of his back pockets, his banjo, the horses and the wagon. And the money concealed in the wagon. He had vanished, leaving Nate Bohannan with only the clothes on his back and a tin bowl.

He let a curse fly then. What in the name of blazes was he going to do now?

Had Salali fled in the direction of his hideout, where he kept the ingredients to make the elixir? If so, he must be counting on Nate not having the wherewithal to follow in time to catch up with him there, for Nate knew where it was—just two or three days’ ride to the southeast, a makeshift hut hidden atop a limestone hill. Nate guessed he’d probably left right after he’d knocked Nate unconscious, and if that was so, maybe someone in Simpson Creek had seen him, and the direction he was heading.

The one thing Salali hadn’t remembered to do was to relieve Nate of his gold pocket watch—probably because when he fell, he’d sprawled face-first on the ground, on top of it. The weight of it still rested reassuringly in his breast pocket. It was all he had to purchase a horse and saddle, but perhaps there was a way to avoid selling it. It was worth way more than the price of a horse and saddle, after all, and it was his only inheritance from his father. He might not want to be like him, but the old man had loved him.

Maybe he could arrange to borrow a horse and revenge himself against that thieving charlatan. Just how he’d pay Salali back when he caught up with him, he hadn’t yet decided, but he’d have plenty of time to cogitate on it while he pursued him.

Now that he’d made his decision, time was of the essence. He levered himself to his feet, swaying slightly, feeling the earth beneath his feet tilt as if he was on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. Nausea still churned his stomach, and he blinked to clear his vision. He turned toward the bridge that lay across the creek.

And saw four very angry-looking people heading straight for him.

He blinked again, sure his headache was making him hallucinate, for one of them was Miss Ella, the proprietress of that café. Why was she making a beeline for him, her hands doubled into fists and thunder in her dark eyes?

The other three were men, and the only one he recognized was the stocky saloonkeeper he’d met yesterday. Judging by the tin stars on their shirts, the remaining men were lawmen. Sweet mercy, what had Salali done?

“I’m Sheriff Bishop, and this is my deputy, Luis Menendez. You Nate Bohannan?” asked the older of the two lawmen, his tone hard as granite.

Nate nodded, the motion sending waves of vertigo surging over him again. “What’s this about, Sheriff?” he asked, keeping his gaze averted from Ella.

“Did you and that partner of yours willfully destroy the inside of the Simpson Creek Saloon, along with Miss Ella’s café in the back of it?”

Nate closed his eyes, feeling his desire for revenge against the medicine-show man multiply tenfold. Not only had Salali robbed him blind, but by the sound of things, he’d gone on a tear in town, too.

Bishop must have taken his closed eyes as an admission of guilt, for the next thing Nate knew, the deputy had taken advantage of it to swoop behind him, grab his forearms and clamp a set of come-alongs around his wrists. His eyes flew open. “No,” he breathed. “I didn’t... And he’s n-not my partner. We had a deal—”

“You’re under arrest,” Bishop said, his eyes as cold as if he’d just condemned Nate to hang. “Come with us peaceably now, or I’ll let Miss Ella slug you in the nose as she’s been threatening to do. Destroying the saloon’s bad enough, but what kind of man wrecks a lady’s business?”

Nate let himself look at Ella then—anything to escape the implacable, hawk-eyed stare of the sheriff, and the equally accusing gaze of his deputy. But looking into the wrath-mixed-with-hurt eyes of Ella Justiss was worse, for tears flooded down her cheeks. Even though he hadn’t done what he was charged with, he felt lower than a snake’s belly just for having been associated with the scoundrel that had done the damage.

“I didn’t do it, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ve been robbed, too. Salali laid me out with a frying pan last evening and took everything I had—the wagon, the horses, the profits—and skedaddled. I only just came to, as a matter of fact.” He felt guilty not mentioning the pocket watch, but if he was able to talk his way out of the charges, he was going to need it.

“You expect us to believe that?” Bishop demanded.

Dizzy again, Nate closed his eyes. “It’s the truth. The last thing I remember before being hit over the head was arguing with Salali about going into town. I wanted to go have some supper at Miss Ella’s café, since I’d had a sandwich there before the show and it was mighty tasty.” He darted a glance at Miss Ella then, hoping to find some softening in her eyes, but there was none. “Salali wanted to go drink and gamble at the saloon. I didn’t want him to because whiskey and my employer don’t mix well—”

Without warning, the deputy’s fingers roughly probed the back of Nate’s head, sending fresh waves of sickening pain piercing through his skull.

“There is a lump back here, Sheriff,” the deputy confirmed in a Spanish-accented voice.

“Let me see...”

That was the last thing Nate heard before he passed out again.

* * *

When Nate woke, he was lying on a straw-tick mattress facing the bars of a jail cell. From inside. He groaned. Surely locking up a man when he was insensible was against the law somehow.

“You gonna live?” a woman’s scorn-laced voice inquired.

A dark skirt and small, laced-up boots hovered into his line of sight. When his gaze traveled upward, he recognized Miss Ella staring down at him through the bars.

“I’m not sure,” he said honestly, still feeling the pounding in his head, but it had diminished, somehow, as if the hammer pounding the anvil was only hitting the end of the anvil, rather than right in the middle.

“Humph. Mighty convenient, I’d say, passing out like that.”

He stared at her, his headache and her disbelief making him even testier than he might otherwise be under the circumstances. “For the sheriff, maybe. Why would you care? I’m behind bars anyway, aren’t I?”

She ignored that. “Dr. Walker says as long as you woke up, you aren’t gonna die. Oh, yes, Sheriff Bishop had the doctor check your noggin all right and proper. You’re awake, so I guess you’ll survive.”

Having to put up with the lash of Ella Justiss’s tongue, along with the pain in his head, was surely more than any man ought to have to bear. “Where’s the sheriff? I want to talk to him,” he said.

“You’ll just have to wait. The sheriff and his deputy went to see if they could catch up with that snake-oil-selling fraud and I agreed to sit with you—since I don’t have a café to run, thanks to your friend.”

Nate doubted they’d catch Salali. If the scoundrel had taken to the road right after wrecking the saloon and café, he must have gotten a good head start. Salali wasn’t fool enough to dawdle after a spree like that, nor would he stick to the main roads.

“The sheriff’ll never catch him,” he muttered.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Ella argued. “And that tall tale your friend was spouting about saving the Indian chief from a bear—that was all made-up moondust, wasn’t it? And he was just spouting gibberish, not real Cherokee, wasn’t he?”

“Probably,” he admitted. “Woman, if you’re just going to torment me unmercifully till the sheriff gets back, get the rope and the lynch mob and put an end to my misery. I hurt too much to listen to you carp at me.”

That stopped her. She had the grace to look ashamed. “D-doctor said I was to give you this when you woke, if you were still in pain,” she said, reaching for a cup sitting on a nearby bench.

“What is it? Poison, to finish me off?” he said, eyeing it, and her, balefully.

“No, it’s not, and how dare you accuse the good doctor of such a thing? It’s willow-bark tea, and his wife brewed it herself. It’ll help your headache, though maybe you deserve to keep it.”

Despite what she’d said, she held it out to him. The bars were just wide enough to pass the cup through. He noticed she was careful not to let their fingers touch.

The remedy was bitter, but he drank it all.

“Well, since you’re awake and all, I’m going to go help Mr. Detwiler clear up the mess your friend made,” Ella said, turning to go.

“He’s not my friend,” he ground out. “I was tired of his drinking and his gambling and I was about to part company with him, though I hadn’t told him yet.” The truth was, he rued the day he’d met Salali and been in such a hurry to find a cheap way to get to the railroad, that he’d thrown in with the man. If he hadn’t taken the easy way out of his transportation problem, he would now not have to atone for what Salali had done. “Besides,” he added, standing and gripping the bars. “How can you just leave? You’re supposed to be guarding me, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “Sheriff said I could, soon as you were awake. It’s not as if you could escape, anyway.”

He didn’t know why the idea of her leaving bothered him so. Hadn’t he just been complaining about the way she had plagued him?

“But I’m hungry,” he said, hoping he looked pitiful enough that she wouldn’t laugh at him. “I haven’t eaten anything since that sandwich you sold me for lunch yesterday, and—” he glanced out of the cell’s one high window “—it’s got to be at least noon, I reckon.”

“Then it’s a pity your friend destroyed my café, isn’t it?” she retorted sweetly. “It’s not as if the hotel cook’s going to feed you. Mrs. Powell doesn’t give anything away.”

He played his last card. “Doesn’t the Bible say you’re supposed to feed the hungry? Sure it does—remember the passage where it says ‘I was in prison, and you visited me’? You did the visiting part, Miss Ella. Don’t you reckon you could take pity on a poor hungry man and do the feeding part, too?”

She studied him, chewing on her lip. “Anyone can quote scripture, Mr. Bohannan,” she said. “I could quote ‘Man does not live by bread alone,’ but I’ll just give you part of the breakfast I had planned to serve at the café this morning. It’s a wonder some stray dog didn’t find it first, but my friend Maude rescued the makings from where I left them on the back step of the boardinghouse and went ahead and cooked them. I had some, and I’ll fetch you a portion. The rest is for the sheriff and his deputy when they get back.”

Ella went over to the desk that occupied the center of the sheriff’s office part of the jail, removed the cover from a dish and scooped up a hearty helping of bacon and eggs onto a tin plate she got off a shelf. She tossed a couple of biscuits onto it and passed it under the bottom bar, along with a cup of water from the pitcher on the desk. Then, as he murmured his thanks, she went out the door without another word.

The eggs and bacon were cold, but it was food, and soon the ache in his belly had subsided. The ache in his head had faded to a dull whisper, too.

Now all he could do was wait for Sheriff Bishop and his deputy to return. He doubted they’d have Salali with them when they did. And if he was being realistic, by the time he was freed, it was unlikely he’d able to catch up with Salali, either. The wily charlatan would be gone by the time he was able to make his way to the canyon hideout.

He wasn’t sleepy, even now that his belly was full, so it seemed he would have an indefinite amount of time to contemplate what he would do after he was freed—assuming they didn’t try to hold him responsible for what his erstwhile employer had done.

He wanted to stick to his original plan and to shake the dust of Simpson Creek off his boots as soon as possible. Somehow he’d get a horse, even if he had to stay here long enough to earn the price of it. He’d head for the railroad terminus at Council Bluffs, taking jobs along the way to earn the price of a ticket to San Francisco. He’d never work in a medicine show—he didn’t want to be someone’s shill ever again.

Fortunately he had more cards in his deck. His father had passed along a number of skills to his son before he’d died. Nate hadn’t valued them then—he’d been too full of big plans and as little common sense as most wet-behind-the-ears young’uns possessed.

Something about Miss Ella’s stricken face as she spoke about the wreck of her café nagged at him. He couldn’t leave until he assured himself she would be all right. Surely she had parents who would take her in, or relatives, or friends. Maybe even someone who could afford to help her rebuild. Perhaps she had a beau who’d been pressing her to marry him, yet some stubborn independent streak had driven her to prove she could take care of herself. Perhaps this incident would force her to be practical and marry the man. A young woman should be cooking in her own kitchen, with babies crawling at her feet, and a hungry husband on the way home for supper. Serving sandwiches to rowdy cowboys and saddle tramps was for some plain old maid or a widow, not for a pretty thing like Ella Justiss.

That was it. If Bishop let him go, he’d linger just long enough to ensure himself that Miss Ella had some reasonable options. Then he was San Francisco bound.

Chapter Four

Ella parted the batwing doors of the saloon and walked inside. She’d expected that Detwiler would have made some start at cleaning up the mess, but the ruined tables and chairs, the broken glass, were still strewn everywhere. George Detwiler, Dolly and Trudy were sitting on the floor along the wall, sniffling and swollen-eyed, staring dully ahead of them.

“What’re y’all doing?” Ella demanded. “Don’t you think you should at least sweep up the broken glass?”

Detwiler studied her with doleful eyes. “Won’t make no diff’rence, Miss Ella. How’m I gonna fix all this? Those medicine-show swindlers took what was in the till an’ every whiskey bottle they didn’t drink. I don’t have anything t’sell, even if customers were willing to stand while they drink.”

Ella looked around. “You still have the piano,” she said, spotting it against the far wall. Amazingly, it had escaped the destruction. Had Robert Salali possessed some innate respect for a musical instrument that had caused him to leave the piano alone during his destructive spree?

“Ain’t no one gonna pay to come hear me play,” he said.

It was true—Detwiler could only pick out a few tunes poorly.

“Well, you can’t leave the place like this,” she said, making a sweeping gesture at the piles of splintered wood and glass. “Unless you’re planning on tearing it down and selling your lot.”

At her words, the two saloon girls set up a keening wail. If there was no saloon, they had no livelihood, any more than Detwiler did.

“Come on,” she said. “Get the brooms out and let’s start cleaning up. We could at least separate the trash and firewood from what could be repaired. Some of those tables and chairs just need new legs, looks like.”

“An’ who’s gonna repair them?” he asked, though without heat. “I’m no carpenter.”

“Hank Dayton’s got a lathe at the mill,” Dolly mumbled. “I seen it once.”

“What does that matter?” Detwiler muttered. “Hank Dayton’s a skinflint who doesn’t give anything away. I don’t know how to operate a lathe.”

“So we need someone who does,” Ella said, going behind the bar and fetching the two brooms that were propped in the corner. She handed Detwiler one of them. “Let’s get started clearing this mess, and maybe one of us will think of something.”

“You girls kin go home,” Detwiler said to Dolly and Trudy. “I’ll let you know what I’m going to do—soon’s I figure it out.”

Ella didn’t try to stop them. There were only two brooms, and the women hadn’t seemed inclined to do more than sit and blubber. She started sweeping, intending to leave the café till last, for she was too afraid Detwiler would give way to despair again if she left him on his own.

Lord, if you’re up there, we could use some help. She’d never quite believed that the Deity was interested in aiding Ella Justiss, or He would have done so years ago at the asylum, but she figured she’d offer Him the opportunity, at least.

She left Detwiler to clean his saloon while she went to do the same with her café. She had soon swept the debris into the center of her area and came back to help Detwiler with his larger one. For a time both of them plied their brooms in silence, but as the afternoon went on, the interruptions began—the saloon’s faithful customers stopping in to see if the rumor was true that there was no whiskey or poker games to be had in Simpson Creek because of the vandalism in the saloon. Ella ignored them and kept sweeping, but Detwiler stopped to tell each of his customers what had happened. Ella rather thought he was enjoying the sympathy gained with each encounter, but as these patrons began to build up inside the saloon, chattering with each other over where they would have to go to get their whiskey and card games, and doing nothing to help, even Detwiler began to get testy. Ella was past exasperated at having to ask gents to move while she swept the areas they had been standing in.

Finally, to Ella’s relief, Detwiler roared an order for all of them to leave, saying he’d put up a sign when the saloon was open again. Then he took a piece of a broken table, and a brush and bootblacking he’d dug up from who knew where and handed them to Ella.

“Your book learnin’s probably better than mine, Miss Ella,” he said. “Write on the bottom a’ this tabletop Closed Till Further Notice, an’ I’ll prop it up outside.”

If George only knew how haphazard her “book learning” had been, Ella thought as she bent to her task. The asylum orphans’ schooling had been hit-or-miss, since they couldn’t attend if they were needed to work in the laundry or the kitchens or the superintendent’s wife’s garden. But when Ella was able to go to class, she’d paid attention with a desperate intensity, for she’d known even then it was her ticket to a better life.

Detwiler had returned after placing the sign outside and Ella was sweeping piles of broken glass into a dustpan when the sound of footsteps had them both looking up. Ella recognized Faith Chadwick, the preacher’s wife, and wondered what she was doing here.

“Mr. Detwiler, the sheriff told us what happened here. I’m so sorry,” Faith said.

He’d been stacking broken table and chair legs into a pile like firewood, but now he straightened. “Thank you, ma’am. Yes, it surely is going to be a trial to replace all this.”

Faith looked troubled, but shifted her gaze to Ella. “I wonder if I might speak to you privately, Ella.”

Ella wondered what she wanted but gestured for the preacher’s wife to follow her to the café. “I’d ask you to sit down, Faith,” she said, ruefully gesturing at the splintered tables and chairs that littered the tiny area, “but as you can see, that’s impossible just now.”

Faith nodded, surveying the wreckage. “That’s what I’ve come to speak to you about.”

Ella gazed at her curiously. She and the pastor’s wife had worked together on Spinsters’ Club projects back before Faith and Reverend Gil Chadwick had married, but Ella didn’t know her very well.

And that was her own fault, Ella realized. She’d kind of had a chip on her shoulder when she’d first joined the group because she was the only one who rarely made it to meetings and Spinsters’ Club events because of having to work so much—first in the hotel restaurant and lately, in her own establishment.

“I’d like to help you get started again,” Faith said. “I have a small table in the parlor that we don’t use often, Ella, which I can loan to you, and I happened to pass the mayor’s wife on the way here, and she said she also has a couple of small tables, as well as some dishes and silverware she wants to give you outright. She had her own household before marrying the mayor, of course, so she no longer needs them.”

Ella couldn’t believe her ears. It was a God-sent answer to her dilemma. “Thank you, Faith,” she breathed. “It’s an answer to a prayer!”

The preacher’s wife blinked as if the remark had really touched her. “We’re happy to be able to help, Ella dear. It’s what church members do for one another. Gil will be over with those things in a few minutes. He’s borrowing a horse and buckboard from the livery.”

“Can’t you read the sign? The saloon’s closed till further notice!” Detwiler’s voice boomed from the saloon.

Faith flinched and the two women exchanged a glance. Ella could guess the preacher’s wife was wishing she could help George somehow, too, but it wouldn’t be fitting for the church to help a saloon owner resume selling spirits and promoting card playing and other activities the church couldn’t approve of.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I can’t help wishing you didn’t have to conduct your business in the back of the saloon, Ella dear,” Faith said.

Ella sighed. She knew the preacher’s wife meant well, and her arranging to get Ella the furniture, dishes and silverware to resume business was certainly a blessing. But what choice did she have? She was glad Faith didn’t know about the drifter who had manhandled her only yesterday.

“Yes, I know it’s far from ideal,” Ella admitted. “And believe me, I’m trying my best to earn enough to set up my café elsewhere.”

“I know,” Faith said, surprising her with a hug before she could back away. “I’m going to pray about it, and see if God will send you a solution.”

“Thanks—for the prayer and the things you and Mrs. Gilmore are giving me.” Praying won’t hurt, Ella thought, though it’s never seemed to help me very much.

Ella went back into the saloon, feeling guilty about her good fortune. She would be back in business by tomorrow, while Detwiler was still trying to figure out how to replace his whiskey and his furniture. But when she told the saloonkeeper about Faith Chadwick’s generous offer, the man showed no envy.

“She’s a good Christian woman,” he said. “Reckon there’s nothing more I can do here. I’ll see if I can help the preacher load up those things and drive ’em over here so he don’t have to come.”

Ella watched him go. She couldn’t help wishing someday her good works would be worthy of notice. It seemed as if she spent so much time working to survive that she had no energy left for higher goals.

Well, she wasn’t perfect, but at least she didn’t consort with thieves, like that slick fellow Nate Bohannan, she thought.

As if summoned by her thoughts, Bohannan walked through the batwing doors.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, glaring at him. “There’s nothing left to ruin!” she added, making a sweeping gesture that included the pile of damaged furniture. She thought she saw Bohannan flinch at the sight. Then she saw Sheriff Bishop behind him. “Did you catch that thieving medicine-show man, Sheriff?” she asked. “Is that why you’re back?”

“No, we didn’t see a trace of him, so I came back, but Menendez stayed out to keep trying to pick up his trail. He’s also going to let the sheriffs of the nearby towns know in case he shows up there,” Bishop said. “I just thought Mr. Bohannan might like to help you clean up, but I see you’ve mostly finished that. Sorry I didn’t get back in time so he could do more.”

“Thanks for the thought, Sheriff,” Ella said, “but what the saloon needs now is a carpenter.” She nodded toward the broken tables and chairs. “Mrs. Chadwick and Mrs. Gilmore are going to give me what I need to reopen my café, but that won’t help Mr. Detwiler. You don’t happen to have anyone with carpentry skills in your other jail cell, do you?” she added. It was an attempt at a joke, but she was surprised to see Bohannan’s gaze sharpen.

He strode over to survey the pile. “Miss Ella, it just so happens I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades, and carpentry is one of my skills,” Bohannan told her over his shoulder. “I could fix everything in the saloon and your café for room and board. The only problem is, I don’t have any tools. I’d need a saw, a lathe, a hammer, nails...”

“Hank Dayton has a lathe at his mill,” Sheriff Bishop murmured.

“But he’d probably charge for the use of it,” Ella countered, remembering the conversation between Detwiler and Dolly.

“Maybe not,” Bishop mused, a half smile on his face. “As sheriff, I just happen to know Hank’s one of the saloon’s best customers. I could pay him a visit, persuade him it’s in his best interest to donate the use of his lathe so Nate, here, could make new table legs. And if I’m very persuasive, maybe he’ll even loan George some planking and sawhorses for temporary tables.”

“But Bohannan’s under arrest,” Ella reminded the sheriff. “Or are you letting him work off his sentence by fixing the damage he—that is, his employer—inflicted on this place?” she asked, allowing her voice to suggest that she still didn’t believe he was completely innocent.

“Sentence? He’s not under arrest anymore,” Bishop said blandly.

“He’s not?”

“I’m not?” Ella and Bohannan asked in unison. Ella’s voice was indignant, while Bohannan’s held notes of disbelief and gratitude.

Bishop nodded, and turned to Ella. “He’s convinced me he didn’t know anything about what Salali was planning to do, so I can’t hold him any longer. I would’ve advised him to ride on out of here and stay out of trouble, but that Salali scoundrel robbed him, too, Miss Ella. So what he’s offering is a favor to George Detwiler—and to you, since he’ll fix your café, too.”

“I wonder if he’d be offering to stay and help if he had any way to leave,” she retorted, glaring at Bohannan.

Something—she wasn’t sure if it was hurt or anger—sparked in those blue eyes as he returned her stare, but when he replied, his voice was even.

“I’m sorry you don’t trust me, Miss Ella.”

“No, I don’t,” she retorted. “You may not have wrecked the saloon, but I saw how willing you were to help fleece the townspeople of their hard-earned money to sell a bottle of worthless—maybe even dangerous—liquid. How do I know you won’t try to fleece Mr. Detwiler too?”

“I don’t believe there was anything harmful in the Cherokee Marvelous Medicine, Miss Ella,” he said.

She noticed he didn’t try to insist that it was helpful, though.

“And it’s true I might not have offered if I had a dollar in my pockets and a horse to ride out of here,” he went on. “But my carpentry skills will speak for themselves, and I hope I’ll be able to prove you have nothing to fear from me while I’m here.”

She couldn’t seem to escape that penetrating gaze of his.

Sheriff Bishop cleared his throat. “Reckon there’s no time like the present to make that visit to the lumber mill.”

She stiffened. The sheriff was going to leave her alone with Bohannan?

“Sheriff Bishop, surely you should speak to Mr. Detwiler before you do that,” she protested. “It’ll be up to him whether he decides to take Mr. Bohannan up on his very kind offer.” She was aware of Bohannan’s eyes on her, and his infuriating grin.

As if on cue, they heard a wagon pull up outside, and a moment later Detwiler came through the bat wings, carrying a small parlor table.

Bishop quickly informed the saloonkeeper about Bohannan’s being cleared of the charges, his offer to help repair the saloon and his own intended visit to the lumber mill.

First, Detwiler was incredulous, then whooped and slapped Bohannan on the back. “If you ain’t an answer to a prayer, I don’t know what is! Sure, you kin have room an’ board, can’t he, Miss Ella?”

Ella knew she was being asked because the “board” part of the offer would have to come from her. What could she say but yes? Hopefully, the fellow wouldn’t be there to eat into her profits for very long.

“’Course, the poker players won’t like it too much, bein’ so close together an’ all, but I’ll designate one table as bein’ for poker and the players in one game can sit at opposite ends of the table from the players in another. Don’t usually have more than a coupla games goin’ at a time, anyhow. The first table you repair will be for faro, Mr. Bohannan. Must admit, it’ll be good to have someone here at night to watch over the place when I leave,” Detwiler enthused, and then the two men went to help the preacher bring in the chairs and boxes of dishes and silverware for the café.

After removing the debris from the café and salvaging what could be repaired, they left Ella alone to arrange the tables and chairs as she saw fit, and to put away the dishes, silverware and cups the preacher’s and mayor’s wives had sent. By the time she had the donated things set up to her satisfaction, she found that the sheriff had indeed succeeded in convincing the lumber mill owner to loan some planking and sawhorses, and the men were already setting them up. And Dayton had also agreed to let Bohannan use his lathe to repair the saloon’s wrecked furniture. The hotel had contributed a few cast-off chairs from its storeroom, as well, so at least the poker players could sit, but the rest would have to stand until the chairs were repaired.

“There!” Detwiler said with a satisfied grin a little while later, clapping his hands together as he looked over the arrangement of the long tables and benches. “That’ll do for a spell, I reckon.” But he was speaking to Bohannan’s back, for he had wandered over to study the piano against the wall.

Curious as to what he might be up to, Ella watched him as he studied the piano, plunking a few keys here and there.

“Nice piano, ain’t it?” Detwiler said.

“It would be, but it’s out of tune,” Bohannan said.

“I used to have someone to play it at night when the saloon was crowded full of fellas playin’ poker and drinkin’ whiskey, but he moved on not long ago.” Detwiler ran his hand along the piano top. “I’ve got the tuning stuff upstairs—the guy who sold me the piano left ’em—but I dunno how to tune it.”

“Reckon I can help you with that, too. Just so happens I can tune a piano,” Bohannan murmured.

Ella ground her teeth in frustration at the sight of Detwiler’s round face all lit up. George set great store by his piano, and he was looking at Bohannan as if he’d hung the moon.

“Bohannan, this is turning into my lucky day!” Detwiler told him. “Don’t suppose you kin play, too? If you’d agree to play for a couple of hours every night when the saloon is busiest, Nate, I could see my way clear to offering you an additional three dollars a week, over and above your room and board.”

Ella watched Bohannan’s face, which revealed nothing of what he was thinking.

It took an endless minute, but at last he shook his head. “I’m not one to spend my nights in a saloon. But I’ll tune your piano, Mr. Detwiler. I can start on that right away.”

Ella hadn’t thought Bohannan would decline working in the saloon for money, and she felt her respect for him go up half a notch.

Bohannan straightened and turned from the piano. “So now that you have the problem of the furniture solved, what else do you need in order to open the saloon for business again?”

“Some glasses and whiskey. I buy the whiskey from a saloon in San Saba—the proprietor there orders extra for me.” Detwiler turned to Ella. “Miss Ella, would you please go down to the mercantile and see if Mrs. Patterson would consider putting a case of glassware on my account? If we can get the saloon back in business, tell her I could settle with her in a few days.”

Ella nodded. Anything to get away from these two men who had suddenly become allies and fast friends.

“Do you have any money saved up so you could go to San Saba and get some whiskey?” Bohannan asked Detwiler. “There’s still a lot of daylight left. If you got some whiskey, and assuming the mercantile will give Miss Ella some glasses, you could have the saloon open by tomorrow.”

Detwiler beamed as he dug through his pockets. “I reckon I got enough to buy some whiskey, all right—enough to get started, at any rate. I’ll go fetch it, by gum!” He clapped Bohannan on the back again. “How did I ever get by without you, Nate?”

How indeed? Ella wondered sourly to herself. When would Detwiler remember that before Bohannan and Salali had come to town, the saloon had been intact and he had gotten along just fine?

To add to her ire, the two men never even noticed when she left.

Chapter Five

“Why, sure, George can pay me later for the glassware,” Mrs. Patterson replied. “His mama would never speak to me again if I didn’t give him credit. How about you, Ella? Don’t you need some new plates and glasses? I heard that medicine-show man broke everything in your café, as well as the saloon.”

“Mrs. Gilmore was kind enough to give me some extra, thanks,” Ella said, and waved at her friend Kate, the proprietress’s niece, who was dusting shelves.

Mrs. Patterson lifted a crate of glasses and placed them on the counter. “A saloon never lacks for business, even if we Christian folk wish people wouldn’t spend their money on what they buy there,” she said. “You take care, Ella. You’re a hardworking girl.”

Ella thanked her again and picked up the crate, nodding at Kate, who held the door for her. But she had walked only a few feet down the boardwalk when her way was blocked by the rotund form of Mrs. Powell, the cook from the hotel restaurant.

Ella’s former boss narrowed her already beady eyes, making her cheeks look even fleshier than before. “Humph. It’s gonna take a whole lot more than some new glasses to get that saloon runnin’ again, and your café, too, from what I hear. You’ll be back whinin’ for your job any minute now, won’t you, Ella?”

“Nope.” She wouldn’t go back to this woman’s bullying if it was the last job in Texas. Mrs. Powell had made Ella’s life miserable, and it had given Ella the impetus to start her own establishment sooner than it had probably been wise.

“Well, it’s too late if you was to come beggin’,” Mrs. Powell cackled. “That Trudy came and pleaded for a job, and I already have Daisy Henderson, too. I wouldn’t hire you back anyway, the way you left us high and dry, with the clerk having to do double duty waiting on tables and registering hotel guests.”

Ella couldn’t imagine the lazy, free-and-easy Trudy in a gray waitress uniform, putting up with the cook’s rantings. She wouldn’t last till the end of the week, especially after she saw the saloon was back in business.

She tamped down her temper with difficulty. “The saloon and my café will be back open tomorrow. Now, if you don’t mind, this crate is heavy and I have to get back there.”

She had the satisfaction of seeing the woman’s jaw drop, and knew she was wondering how reopening tomorrow would be possible.

“You’re dreamin’—”

“I’ll help you carry that crate, Miss Ella,” interrupted a voice from the street.

She looked away from her tormentor to see Bohannan crossing toward her, reaching out for the crate.

“Why, thank you,” Ella murmured, but she made sure her voice was brisk and businesslike. She hoped to get away from Mrs. Powell before the woman realized who Bohannan was. Ella wasn’t sure if the cook had been among the throng flocking to the Cherokee Marvelous Medicine Show yesterday, but if she had been, Ella didn’t want Mrs. Powell to figure out the man who had helped Salali fleece the townspeople of their money was the same one helping Detwiler now. The woman loved to gossip more than she loved to breathe, and if her tongue got going, it might slash Detwiler—and her—to ribbons.

Mrs. Powell’s eyes narrowed again as Bohannan took the crate from Ella. “Say, ain’t you the—”

Nate favored the cook with a quick, dazzling smile. “Good day, ma’am.”

Together, they crossed the street to the saloon, with Ella sensing that Mrs. Powell still stared suspiciously at their backs. She knew she should be grateful that Bohannan had rescued her just now—the man had a positive habit of coming to the rescue, didn’t he? Instead, she said, “I thought you were supposed to be tuning the piano.”

Bohannan gave her a sideways glance. “I guess you’re not going to thank me for interrupting that dragon’s tirade,” he said, “but after George left with the wagon for San Saba, I realized he hadn’t told me just where in his office he kept the tuning tools. And I didn’t feel right about rummaging in there without him or you present. After all, both of you just met me yesterday, and a lot’s happened since then.”

How did he do that? Ella wondered. How did he have a knack for bringing another person’s fears out in the open like that so that the other person felt faintly foolish for having them? He was right—if she’d arrived back at the saloon and found Bohannan rifling through Detwiler’s desk in his upper-story office, she’d have been suspicious all over again.

By now Bohannan was backing his way through the saloon’s batwing doors, carrying the crate, with Ella following.

“All right, we’ll go up to Detwiler’s office and I’ll stand there while you look for them,” she said grudgingly. “Do you know what you’re looking for?” She’d never seen a piano tuned, and had no idea what tools he needed.

Bohannan set the crate down at the foot of the stairs. “Sure. I’m hoping he has a tuning fork, a tuning hammer and mutes, at the minimum,” he said, climbing the stairs alongside her. “What I furnish is this,” he added, tapping his ear.

They reached the top of the stairs. The first room was Detwiler’s office, and the two rooms at the other end of the hall were the ones Dolly and Trudy used. The room across the hall from the office was a spare room with a cot, and here was where Bohannan would sleep. How convenient—right across from the room where George Detwiler’s safe resided. She’d have to warn the saloonkeeper to start taking his profits home with him at night, for Nate Bohannan might number safecracking among his many skills.

Bohannan paused right outside the office and was looking thoughtfully at her.

“Go ahead,” she urged, pointing at the open room, wondering what he was thinking.

“Miss Ella, I’m aware you don’t like me,” Nate Bohannan said.

She blinked, astonished that he was exposing this feeling of hers, too. She was not going to allow him to make her feel guilty for being wary of him. Only a fool wouldn’t be.

“It’s not that I don’t like you, Mr. Bohannan,” she retorted crisply. “I don’t trust you. Not any farther than I could throw you.”

“Yet George Detwiler does,” he pointed out.

She gave a mirthless laugh. “So it’s up to me to stay on my guard, since Mr. Detwiler trusts way too soon.”

“What is he to you, anyway?” he asked. “You don’t call him uncle, or Pa—he’s not your beau, is he?”

The idea of George Detwiler being anyone’s beau, let alone hers, was so laughable she almost forgot how audacious the question was, coming from this relative stranger.

“You have a lot of nerve, Mr. Bohannan. What business is that of yours?”

Speaking of nerve, she thought, the intensity in those blue eyes was decidedly unnerving. She was suddenly aware she was alone in the building with a man she’d just admitted she didn’t trust.

He shrugged. “Just wondering, Miss Ella. Since we’re going to be working in the same place, more or less, I just thought I’d ask. I like to know what’s what.”

If the circumstances had been different, she’d have reiterated that it was none of his business and flounced off, but she knew she had a responsibility to Detwiler to watch Bohannan search his office.

She extended her arm, pointing at the office. “Fetch what you need to get in there, Mr. Bohannan, and do it quickly. I have other things to do.”

* * *

By the time Ella left Bohannan tuning the piano and returned to the boardinghouse, it was already almost suppertime. She would still have to get the ingredients organized for tomorrow’s café meals after supper—but considering what had happened today, it was a miracle that she would be able to serve customers tomorrow at all.

“I’ll set the table,” she told Mrs. Meyer, the boardinghouse proprietress, as the woman stood putting final touches on the beef roast.

“And Ella and I will do the dishes afterward, so you can put your feet up,” her fellow boarder Maude added, giving Ella a wink.

“Ach, you girls are so good to me,” Mrs. Meyer said, shooting each a grateful smile.

“Nonsense, you work too hard,” Ella said, but she admitted to herself she had an ulterior motive for taking over the after-supper cleanup. She and Maude could get it done much more quickly than the older woman would, enabling Ella to do her meal preparation for the next day sooner. Normally, she could do it at her café. And while she did the slicing, mixing, seasoning and preliminary cooking, she and Maude could talk about what had happened.

There would be eight at dinner this evening; besides Mrs. Meyer, Maude and Ella, there were the other boarders—Mr. Dixon, the undertaker, a pair of drummers, a stagecoach driver and Delbert Perry—if he showed up. No one had seen him since he’d gone strolling down the street the day before with his bottle of Cherokee Marvelous Medicine, and Mrs. Meyer, Maude and Ella were beginning to worry about what had happened to him. They planned to ask Mr. Dixon to look for him after supper if he didn’t make an appearance.

But when Mr. Dixon arrived and sat himself down at his customary place at the foot of the table, he mentioned seeing Delbert shambling into the saloon.

Mrs. Meyer pursed her lips and tsk-tsked. “So he’s drinking again. He’d better not think he will keep his place in my boardinghouse if he’s going to be a drunkard again. I keep a decent establishment.”

Another thing to blame Bohannan and Salali for, Ella thought grimly. Bohannan would see firsthand how his phony elixir affected one of his customers, assuming he was still there working on the piano. Not that he would be able to do anything about it. Perry would have to start that long road back to sobriety all over again.

* * *

“You’ve had quite a busy day, from what I hear,” Maude said later, after the boardinghouse residents had left the table and Mrs. Meyer had gone out onto the porch to put her feet up.

Ella rolled her eyes. “That’s the understatement of the year.” She gave Maude a summary of the day’s events, ending with Bohannan’s being released from jail and agreeing to help repair the furniture and tune the saloon piano.

“Well, that was decent of him to stay and help like that,” Maude said. “I guess he has a conscience along with that handsome face.”

Ella stared at her friend. “Sounds like he’s got you fooled, too.” Ella knew Maude had only seen Bohannan once, when he’d been assisting with the medicine show. She hadn’t even spoken to him, and she already believed he would do as he said he would. “Well, not me. I’ve already told him I don’t trust him.”

“Ella, give the man a chance,” Maude said, her tone mild. “He sure didn’t have to offer to help. You’re always so suspicious of people. And you did admit he didn’t want to play piano in the saloon.”

Ella set her jaw and said nothing. She knew she tended to be untrusting of people’s motives, but she had reason to be. Maude hadn’t been through what she had. Maude had grown up the treasured only daughter of the town doctor, not a frightened orphan constantly in danger from the adults around her.

Maude may have had an easy childhood, but life hasn’t been so easy for her lately, Ella’s conscience reminded her. She’d seen her father cut down in the street by Comanche arrows, and she’d had to move to the boardinghouse when Dr. Walker became the doctor and moved into the attached house that went with the job, though she’d never complained.

“I’ll give the man a chance,” Ella said at last. “But I’m going to watch him like a hawk.” She was aware she sounded grudging at best, but she wasn’t about to trust someone just because he had twinkling blue eyes that did something funny to her heart.

* * *

Nate Bohannan figured it was going to be a long evening. Not only was the old piano resistant to being tuned, but his stomach kept reminding him that he’d only eaten once today, and that had been many hours ago. He wasn’t about to seek Ella Justiss out and ask her for an advance on the “board” that was part of the deal. Something told him he was going to have to do something to prove himself, like providing Detwiler with a perfectly tuned piano, before the mistrustful miss with the dark eyes would ever smile at him the way she had when he’d rescued her from the lecherous saddle tramp. No, he was just going to have to wait until morning, when he hoped she would bring over breakfast.

He was just beginning to make progress when an older man dressed in worn, threadbare clothes walked into the saloon, introduced himself as Delbert Perry and asked him if he had any more bottles of Cherokee Marvelous Medicine.

“That sure was some great med’cine,” Perry said. “Did me a world a’ good.” But his eyes told a different story, red-rimmed and anxious, and his hands trembled slightly.

“No, friend, I’m sorry, but we sold every bottle we had yesterday,” Nate told him.

“Are you gonna make some more soon?” the other man asked hopefully.

Nate shook his head. “I wasn’t the one who made the elixir—it was Mr. Salali, and he’s gone. You probably heard what he did here last night.”

Perry nodded, looking around him at the unfamiliar benches and sawhorse tables. “Yeah, I don’t rightly understand that,” he mumbled, his shoulders sagging.

Nate felt a renewed surge of guilt at being part of a shady enterprise. “You know, friend, I’m going to let you in on a little something,” he said, lowering his voice as if he were about to impart a valuable secret. “That stuff really didn’t do half of what it was supposed to do. You’re better off without it.”

Perry nodded slowly. “I ’spose you’re right, mister. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask, though.” Without another word, he turned and trudged out of the saloon.

Never again, Nate thought. Never again would he get himself involved in something he knew to be dishonest.

Detwiler returned about an hour later, his buckboard loaded with several crates full of whiskey bottles. Nate had just finished tuning the piano, and ran his fingers over the keyboards to demonstrate.

“Sounds mighty fine,” the saloonkeeper said. “I ran into a fella on the way back who might be able to come play most nights, so that’s taken care of. Now, if you’ll just help me carry these crates in, we’ll lock up and call it a day.”

Just as they’d stashed the last crate in the storeroom behind the bar, Nate’s stomach rumbled so loudly that the other man couldn’t help hearing it.

He chuckled. “Reckon you worked right on through supper, didn’t you? Miss Ella didn’t bring you any supper over from the boardinghouse?”

Nate shook his head. “I reckon she thought my meals were supposed to start tomorrow,” he said. He didn’t want to admit he didn’t have even four bits to his name to go buy something to eat at the hotel. “Anyway, I don’t think Miss Ella likes me very much, so I didn’t want to ask.” Not liking him was one thing, but he didn’t want to tell the other man what the girl had actually said about not trusting him.

“Shucks, just give her some time. Miss Ella’s a bit...shy, let’s say, around menfolk she doesn’t know, and she had a shock today, too, with what happened. Meanwhile, I’m headed home—Ma’s got supper waitin’ for me. She always makes plenty, so you come along with me and we’ll see you get fed right enough.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he murmured. Nate could imagine how unwelcome it would be to have a stranger show up for supper, especially a stranger associated with the man who had wrecked the saloon. Detwiler’s “Ma” had to be elderly, since the man himself looked to be forty or so.

“Horsefeathers. My ma’s like the mother of this town, and she loves having folks to feed,” George said. “Come on an’ git in the wagon. Our house is just a hop an’ a skip down the road leadin’ south.”

It felt good to be welcome, to belong. It had been a long time since Nate had felt that way.

Chapter Six

Nate was just descending the stairs into the saloon, intending to make an early start at fashioning new table and chair legs using the lathe at the lumber mill, when he heard a key being turned in the door inside the batwing doors. A few seconds later Ella entered, carrying a basket of eggs and a towel-covered bowl on top of a rectangular covered dish. The makings of breakfast, unless he missed his guess. His stomach rumbled in an eager response.

“Good morning, Miss Ella. Can I help you carry those into the café?” He took in her no-nonsense navy skirt and waist, and her equally serious face framed by dark hair braided and caught up in a practical knot at the back of her neck. Inexplicably, he found himself wondering what her hair would look like spread over her shoulders.

“Morning,” she said. “No, I’ve got them, but it would help if you would open the door to the café for me.”

When he had let her into the café, she turned to him. “Give me a few minutes, and you can have your breakfast, Mr. Bohannan.”

She was back to formality, he noted. “That would be very nice, Miss Ella. I wasn’t sure if ‘board’ included breakfast or not.” He wasn’t about to tell her that George’s mother had insisted he take a half-dozen leftover biscuits with him when he’d departed from the Detwiler house last night, and that he’d already devoured a couple of them this morning.

He waited until the smells of bacon frying and biscuits baking wafted into the saloon, and returned to the café, taking a chair at one of the tables. While he waited, he watched her efficient movements as she cracked and scrambled the eggs and poured them into a waiting skillet, then set up the plates and silverware for easy serving. He noticed she had brought a towel-wrapped stack of tortillas also.

“For the travelers and cowboys who pass who want something they can take with them and eat on the road,” she explained, following his gaze. Then she dished up a generous helping of bacon, eggs and biscuits, and placed them in front of him, along with a small jar of preserves.

“Thank you, Miss Ella. It smells delicious.” He dipped his fork into the fluffy eggs, and found that his nose hadn’t deceived him. Silence descended as she stared out the window at the street behind the saloon.

“I...I hope you slept well last night, in spite of all that happened yesterday,” he said, determined to penetrate her coolness.

Her reply was crisp. “As well as could be expected, under the circumstances.”

They heard footsteps coming through the saloon and Detwiler appeared, and Ella dished out food for him, too.

“Mornin’, Miss Ella. Ma said it did her heart good to watch you eat last night, Nate,” George said with a chuckle.

Nate had been hoping George wouldn’t mention his supper at the Detwilers’ in front of Ella. It made him look as if he were going from person to person, mooching meals. He darted a quick glance at her, and sure enough, one eyebrow was raised as she poured George coffee. “It was mighty nice of her to invite me,” he told George. “Please thank her again.”

And then customers started showing up, and Ella got busy serving them, and she didn’t appear to notice when Nate left to go to the lumber mill.

He found the mill past the school, nestled on the creek bank, just as Detwiler had said it would be, and located its proprietor, Hank Dayton, as dour and paunchy a man as the saloonkeeper had predicted.

“You’ll be Bohannan from the saloon, needin’ some two-by-twos and the use of the lathe. Sheriff told me you were comin’,” Dayton said as if his customer’s presence was something distasteful to be dealt with as soon as possible so he could be alone again. “You know how many you need, and how long to cut ’em?”

“Thirty-two, thirty inches long, just like this one,” Nate said, holding out one table leg that had miraculously escaped the carnage. He was glad he’d done his figuring beforehand, for it didn’t seem the taciturn Dayton had much patience. Twelve of the table legs were for Ella’s tables, the rest for the saloon’s. “And I’ll need some planks I can trim and join into five sixty-inch round tabletops and four chair seats, but I’ll work on the legs first.”

Dayton just grunted, wiped his hands on his heavy canvas apron and motioned Bohannan to follow him. “You might as well help me saw until you’ve got enough to start with.”

Within the hour, Nate was hard at work in a little room off to the side of the main mill building, sanding lengths of wood and angling them at the end that would contact the floor so that the tables wouldn’t wobble. He was rusty at first, having used his silver tongue much more of late than he’d used his hands, but before long he discovered a remembered pleasure in turning the wood from rough two-by-twos into smooth pieces fit for table legs.

The tables in the saloon, of course, would be fairly plain and utilitarian—the customers wouldn’t care how ornate the table legs were so long as their cards and bottles stayed steady on the tabletop. He was able to fashion those fairly quickly, he discovered, as his hands rediscovered a long-unused skill with the lathe. He thought he might spend a little more time on the tables and chairs he made for the café. The ones Ella had had that day he’d come in and bought the sandwiches had been as plain as those in the saloon—in fact, they probably had been borrowed from there—but the ones on loan from the preacher’s wife were full of fancy swirls and spindles and feet like talons clutching balls. Ladies, he knew, liked fancy details.

He imagined presenting Ella with new tables and chair legs that were curved and tapered—cabriole legs, his father had called them. Did his hands still possess enough talent to make such things? And what will she say if I do? As he worked, he imagined various ways she might react, then wondered why it mattered to him. He’d be riding on as soon as he’d finished the job, after all.

Nate worked steadily through the day, forgetting to go to the café for his meal at noon and ignoring his back’s protest at the long hours bent over the lathe, until he had finished most of the table and chair legs for the saloon. He was startled, therefore, when Dayton wheeled in a low cart laden with planking for him to shape and join into tabletops, and informed him he was ready to lock up and go home for supper.

“Reckon I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Nate told him. He would have asked if he could return after supper to work some more if he thought Dayton would trust him in the mill alone, but the man didn’t seem like the trusting sort.

“Nope, you won’t. Tomorrow’s Sunday, and the mill’s closed. Reckon you might meet my missus at church, if you’re a churchgoin’ man—she’ll be there with the young’uns, but once she gets those squallin’ brats outta the house, that’s my time to get some extra shut-eye,” Dayton announced proudly, as if avoiding church was a virtue.

Tomorrow is Sunday? Nate was surprised once again. He and Salali had kept track of Sundays only to avoid staging medicine shows on that day, for conducting business on the Sabbath was apt to offend decent folks. He couldn’t think when he’d last darkened the door of a church.

But if he didn’t attend church, what would he do with himself all morning?

Nate figured the noise from the saloon would keep him awake for a while tonight. He wasn’t sure how long Detwiler kept his establishment open—it probably depended on the thirst of the clientele on any given evening. Tonight the drinkers and gamblers would no doubt be celebrating the reopening of the saloon. And since it was Saturday, there’d be cowboys in from the ranches enjoying time away from their chores.

No matter how late he went to bed, though, his lids just naturally tended to fly open at dawn. He wasn’t one to lie abed like the lumber mill owner.

Did Ella attend church? Did she ever let herself rest that much, or would she be serving breakfast, then dinner, to travelers passing through town? If she was a churchgoing woman, what would she say if he were to show up there?

It might go a long way to allay her suspicion of him, to see him warming a pew.

On the other hand, though, would the Lord think him a hypocrite, going to church after living a lie for so long?

* * *

Ella just happened to be bringing Detwiler’s supper in to him in the saloon—a favor she did so he could continue to be available to any early-evening customers—when Bohannan entered carrying a tied stack of newly turned table and chair legs with him over one shoulder as if he were a conqueror laden with booty. She noted he also carried a brown-paper–wrapped parcel as if he’d made a stop at the mercantile.

Detwiler whistled. “You’ve been busy,” he said admiringly.

Bohannan grinned. “That I have. I’ll take them back with me in the morning since I’ll need to join them to the tabletops and chair seats when those are done, but I thought I’d make sure you approve of how I’m doing them before they’re varnished.”

As if Bohannan thought there was anything to disapprove of, Ella thought waspishly, seeing the saloonkeeper run a hand over the even, sanded surfaces of a couple of chair legs.

“Whoo-ee, these are smooth as a baby’s—” Detwiler darted a hasty glance at Ella “—um, cheek. The only problem with these is they’re too good for my customers,” he added with a chuckle, keeping his voice low so it didn’t carry to a couple of cowboys lounging at one of the long tables.

Ella managed to stifle an unladylike snort at the fulsome compliments, but she could see that Bohannan had done quality work.

“Dare I hope there’s some of that for me?” Bohannan asked, with a nod toward the plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes she was still holding.

Ella set it down on the bar. “You should have had to eat the cold chicken I kept by for you at noontime,” she told him tartly. “But you never showed up. I finally ate it myself.”

He had the grace to look abashed. “I’m sorry about that, Miss Ella. I got caught up in what I was doing, once I got started at the lathe. Next time, I’ll either come back at noon, or maybe take some extra breakfast with me, all right?”

Who could stay irritated at a man who could smile like that? His smile seemed to know the path straight to her heart, unfortunately for her.

“Come on back to the café after you wash up,” she said, turning on her heel. Over her shoulder, she added, “By the way, you might want to rinse the sawdust out of your hair while you’re at it.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, freshly shaved, his damp hair curling, he entered the café and sat down at one of the tables. He was wearing a new white shirt, she noted, one that looked like the ready-made ones sold at the mercantile, along with the silver brocade vest he’d had on the first day he came to town. The shirt was what had been in the package he’d been carrying, she realized, remembering that Salali had robbed him of everything but the clothes he’d been wearing. She thought he must have sweet-talked Mrs. Patterson into advancing him the cost of it, since he’d said the medicine-show man had picked his pockets, too.

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