A Wanted Man (4 page)

“It’s just fine,” Mr. Hoxie said, grinning, preparing to take his seat.

“Wait, wait!” Mrs. Bossidy sprang up and pushed him away before his hindquarters landed. “You’re going to get blood all over the cushion.”

“So? I practically saved the whole train. I don’t think anybody’s going to complain.”

Mrs. Bossidy dug in the huge canvas bag she took with her everywhere, pulled out a thin dishcloth, and spread it over the seat. “There. Go ahead.”

He dropped into his seat with a gusty sigh and slapped Hiram on his knee. “Hoo-wee, you missed it, bud! Haven’t had that much fun since—” He stopped, shooting a guilty glance in Laura’s direction. “Well, in quite a while.”

“Is—” Laura raised her voice as the train picked up speed, clacking along steadily, an already-familiar sound. “Is everybody all right?”

“Everybody but a couple of the robbers.” He shook his head. “There were at least ten of ’em, though a couple rode away when it was clear which way the wind was blowin’. Four came up on the engine, shootin’ at the engineers, and the rest were stationed in the passenger cars.” He chuckled. “All of ’em but these two are trussed up and stacked in a freight car.”

“And he…he’s okay?”

“Who?”

If she squeezed them any tighter Laura’s fingers were going to be permanently welded together. But if she relaxed her grip, they were undoubtedly going to shake. “You know.
Him
.”

“Oh, the dark avenger?”

“The
what
?” Mrs. Bossidy snapped. “What kind of a
stupid name is that? What kind of a man would call himself such a ridiculous thing? Sounds like something out of a penny dreadful.”

“
He
didn’t call himself that.
I
did.” Mr. Hoxie smiled, clearly unoffended. “You should have seen him, bursting in with both guns drawn, like he thought being one against four was more than fair odds, bullets flying in all directions. Never seen anythin’ like it.” He rubbed his chin. “A novel, huh? You think I could write one of those?”

“No,” Mrs. Bossidy said.

“Did anybody get shot?” Laura couldn’t imagine that one man could face four ruthless train robbers and come out unscathed.

“Oh, sure.” He shrugged. “Not bad though.”

“Who?”
Her voice quavered. Mrs. Bossidy looked at her sharply. Laura said back in her chair, affecting unconcern.

“One of the robbers. Big brute of a fella, almost as big as Hiram, here. Went down just about as hard, wailing like a girl.” He chuckled. “Shot him in the shoulder, he did, even though the guy was movin’. Then nodded like he’d aimed there all along.”

“Is that hard?”

“Hard? ’Bout as hard as pluggin’ a quail on the fly with a pistol. Didn’t anybody ever teach you to aim for the body?” He thumped himself on the chest. “Bigger target.”

“No, I can’t say anybody ever taught me that.” Or anything else about guns beyond the fact of their existence.

“Remedy that first thing tomorrow, if you want.”

“You most certainly will not!” Mrs. Bossidy had a grip on her purse like she was ready to swing for his head if he dared to try such a thing.

“Yeah, I suppose not.” He sighed in deep regret.

“Spoilsport,” Hiram mouthed at her.

Laura cleared her throat, trying to inject the proper note of casualness in her voice. “Did you find out who he is?”

“He wasn’t the sort to volunteer a whole lot of information, if you know what I mean. And we were a tad busy.”

“Oh.”

“They’re gonna be handing all the captives off to the authorities at the next station. S’pose he’ll come back to pick these up, too.”

“Do you think he’ll get off with the prisoners?”

Mr. Hoxie shrugged; the fun was over and he wasn’t much interested in what came next. “Don’t know.”

“You’re awfully interested in that man,” Mrs. Bossidy commented.

“Oh, no,” Laura hedged. “I just…it would be only polite to thank him. Perhaps offer him a reward.”

“I see.”

“You always taught me one can never be too polite. Something you’ve demonstrated for me so wisely all these years.”

Hiram choked.

“Did I? Perhaps I overemphasized the importance of that convention.”

“Oh, no,” Laura assured her. “I am certain that it would be unforgivably rude if we did not thank him properly for saving our lives.”

“And what, exactly, would you consider the appropriate ‘thank-you’ for saving your life?”

“I—” There was obviously a wrong answer, Laura decided. Mrs. Bossidy watched her with all the suspicion of a headmistress who knew her girls were plotting escape. “My heartfelt appreciation?” she ventured.

Mrs. Bossidy shook her head. “Where you and that man are concerned, there will be no heartfelt
anything
.”

O
nce they left the station in Papillon, Laura had allowed Mrs. Bossidy to nudge her back to their private car. It was perfectly obvious
he
wasn’t coming back, anyway, and at least in her own car she could stop constantly glancing at the door, drawing her companion’s sharp attention.

Looking back on it now, she didn’t know why she had been so certain he’d come back. She only knew she’d wanted him to. But it was not as if she was accustomed always to getting everything she wanted. Her parents had certainly tried, showering her with toys and dolls and pretty new dresses, but they hadn’t been able to give her the two things she had really wanted: health, and freedom. Only time and patience had given her those.

Laura had from the first wanted to plan out as little of the trip as possible. She intended to follow her interests and instincts. The painting would be better for it. They had spent two days longer in Omaha than they’d
planned, allowing her to wait for one brilliantly sunny day to capture the light on the Missouri River and the broad, shimmering expanse of the mudflats north of town. It took them the better part of a week to reach Kearney; they’d pulled off at Columbus so Laura could capture the meeting of the Platte and the Loup River, and again at a small side spur line on the great, empty stretch before Grand Island, an endless sweep of nothingness like nothing she’d ever seen.

And so she’d considered chugging right through Kearney. In those endless months that she’d waited for the cars to be completed, Laura had pored over the available photographs and paintings of the entire length of the railway. Her concept for the panorama was to record the changes that the railway had wrought in the years since the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific had met: new towns, reformed cities, civilization in the wilderness, as well as to highlight the wild and magnificent scenery that was at last accessible to thousands from the comfortable vantage point of a train.

In the photographs Kearney was raw, bustling, like an adolescent boy who’d spurted up, awkward in its own skin.

But Kearney was all grown-up now, crisp-edged and decorous, the tumble of lopsided, hasty wood buildings replaced by sturdy brick structures and whitewashed frame houses. In the three days they’d been there Laura worked her way along the street that paralleled the railroad, faithfully recording what she saw.

She chose a small park that day, pretty with clipped green hedges and a white gazebo, filled with families enjoying a warm Saturday afternoon, a full mix of ages and sexes, another change from when the town had
been populated mostly by men—railroad workers and cowboys and those who owned the businesses that catered to them.

And she was working, for the moment at least, blessedly alone. Her three traveling companions had already gotten impatient with the tedium of watching her work, and so they were off to other activities today, Mrs. Bossidy, shopping, and the two men off somewhere that they wouldn’t reveal. They’d all had to admit she was safe enough in a public square on a pleasant afternoon.

She had vastly underestimated the time that her preliminary studies would take, mostly because, having always worked undisturbed, she hadn’t budgeted for the frequent interruptions of people who wandered by and stopped to chat.

She couldn’t bring herself to mind. Even when her health had improved to the point that her parents allowed visitors, they were carefully selected and rigidly scheduled. She would not have been surprised to discover they’d been required to undergo a medical examination first. But it was such a joy to have people stop by merely to say hello, a motley, wonderful collection of young and old, fashionably dressed and intriguingly scruffy. She’d only vaguely known such a breadth of humanity existed, for in her ordered, privileged world even the servants were well kept and well dressed. To her starved eyes, variety was a heady, wonderful thing.

But this afternoon she’d had a stretch of uninterrupted time, and now she frowned over the resulting study. She’d roughed in the outlines of the square, the tall false fronts of the stores on the far side, the wedding-cake spear of the gazebo. The proportions
were good. Not perfect, but good. She would have preferred perfect, but she would have had to spend another three weeks on the square alone to achieve that.

She sighed and pulled out her palette. The greens of the grass and the trees, a deep vibrant spill of impending summer, would be the most difficult to capture. She dabbed pure green on the page, then swirled in yellow, blue, a tiny bit of white.

More yellow, she judged. She picked up the tube and squirted, rewarded only by a tiny bubble.

Darn
. If she didn’t have enough paint with her, the light would be gone by the time she fetched some and returned to the square. Still squinting at the paper, trying to decide whether a smidge more blue would help, she groped for her canvas bag. She could have sworn she’d left it in reach, right there…there…she finally gave up and glanced to her right.

Her bag was a good three feet away, two scuffed black boots planted beside it. She looked up, and up, the full length of two very long legs. Past narrow hips encased in faded denim, a broad chest, truly impressive shoulders, and here she had to clamp her hand on her crown to stop the slippage of her straw bonnet.

My goodness
. She’d conjured him up a dozen times since that day on the train. She’d battled the urge to stop scribbling the landscape outside her window and draw him instead, even though she knew that would be a terrible mistake and she could never do him justice.

But she discovered she hadn’t been doing him justice, anyway, because he was ten times more arresting in person than he’d been in her memory.

He’d shaved. And yet she’d recognized him immediately, as if she’d known all along what he’d look like without the beard.

He wasn’t skilled with a razor. A day’s growth shadowed his very fine jaw, marred by a couple of nasty nicks from the blade.

“You’re getting it all over your hands,” he said.

“What?”

He pointed at her hand. “The paint.”

“Oh.
Oh!
” Bright yellow smeared her fingers. She scrabbled for her bag, dug through brushes and pots in search of a cloth.

“Here.” He handed her a thin, rumpled square of linen.

“I couldn’t. It won’t wash out, it’s—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll consider it my contribution to the art world. Lord knows it’ll never happen any other way.”

She shook out the handkerchief, hoping for a monogram, any hint at his identity. No luck. The yellow stained the white and smeared over her skin, and she finally gave up.

“It’s only making it worse,” she said with a laugh. “It’s a losing battle, anyway.” To prove it, she held up her hand. There was blue beneath her nails and a wide patch of red on her left thumb. “I’m sorry about your handkerchief. I could have it washed. If you want me to return it…” She trailed off, hoping he’d supply a name, an address.

“Keep it,” Sam Duncan told her. He’d pondered how to approach her for days, what would be the best way to attach himself to her party. Try to get hired? Play the suitor and get himself invited along? Finally, he’d concluded he’d simply have to get to know her a bit to judge the right approach.

Laura let her hand drop to her lap, the cloth crumpled within, conscious all the time that he watched her
with minute care. Did he suspect that she’d do just that? That she would hide it in a drawer, a keepsake like a young girl saving her first dance card? It seemed a terribly adolescent thing to do, embarrassingly so, but her illness had caused her to miss out on such things at the appropriate time.

She couldn’t bring herself to discard the handkerchief. But she could hardly fold it up and tuck it safely away while he stood there, could she?

“You’re healing.” The bruise around his left eye had slid from purple to yellow-green. The scrape on his cheek was fading, and the shape of his mouth—what she’d been able to see beneath his beard when they’d first met—had changed, his lips thinner, as if they’d been slightly swollen before.

“Healing?” he asked. And then “oh!” He pressed two fingers beneath his damaged eye, remembering his wounds. They were minor compared to many he’d had, hardly worth thinking about. “It happens. Not as fast as it used to, though.”

Laura couldn’t imagine what had happened to cause him so much injury. He’d handled the dangerous situation on the train so competently. Surely it had taken more than a simple bar brawl. A riding accident, perhaps. Or maybe he was a prizefighter…he looked too lean for the ring, but he moved with such confidence and controlled strength.

She hoped he might volunteer the information but said nothing. It was too forward a thing to ask, but oh, she wanted to know.

A bird chattered in a nearby elm, making the silence all the more obvious when it flew off.

And here was another thing she’d missed at the appropriate time. She’d never learned how to make light
conversation with a man. The rituals of flirtation were a mystery to her, imagined from novels, glimpsed through carriage windows.

“You were…I saw you on the train.”

“I remember,” Sam said, injecting some warmth in his voice, testing for her response.

She flushed, immediate and bright. Her skin, flawless, overly pale, hid nothing.

He’d expected her to be sophisticated, perhaps a bit jaded. She was the famous daughter of an even more famous father.

And yet she seemed flustered and uncertain, maybe a bit shy. Would she be that easily led? The thought was surprisingly bitter. He had no problem using others’ weaknesses to further his own ends, and it was not as if she would be hurt by his simply attaching himself to her party until they reached the Silver Spur.

But it would have been easier to try and charm her if he thought she’d been a flirt who’d charmed a hundred men herself.

“Have you been standing there long?” she asked hesitantly.

“Maybe an hour.”

“An hour.” Oh, heavens. She knew she often got lost in her work; her mother used to say the house would tumble down around her while she was painting, and she would never notice. But she would have expected that somehow,
something
in her would have noticed his presence. For certainly she was aware of him now. Her skin tingled, her heart raced.

She tried frantically to recall if she’d done anything mortifying in the last hour. Scratched in unladylike places, perhaps. “That must have been terribly uninteresting.” She waved her brush in the direction of her
easel. “It is not an action-packed activity.”

“I wasn’t bored,” he said, in that velvet-draped voice that was the only smooth, soft thing on a hard and rough-edged man.

The silence settled again, prickly and obvious. Laura tried to study her work but the colors and shapes only swam before her, a kaleidoscopic spin.

She sneaked a glance at him. He appeared utterly at ease with the silence. So many people were uncomfortable with it, rushing in to fill it with whatever sprang to tongue. She herself was digging for words, searching for a conversation that would sparkle and intrigue. And yet he also answered effortlessly, without any trace of the stultifying shyness that often afflicted those who preferred the silence. Finally, she asked, “Did you get everyone taken care of?”

“Everyone?” He wore his hat low, a deep line of shadow across his face. She wondered if his eyes changed in the sunshine, if the light drew any color at all out of the blackness of his irises. “Ah, our inept bandits. We put them off in Papillon. I assume the authorities knew what to do with them.”

“You certainly did.”

He shrugged it off. “They weren’t all that good at it, if you want to know the truth. Your guards probably could have handled them just fine.” Perhaps she was a flirt after all, Sam decided. The fluttering and blushes and shy, shimmering smiles had their own appeal. It was flattering to a man to think he could cause that reaction.

“My guards?” she asked.

“Weren’t they? They looked like guards.”

“I suppose they are, though I guess I don’t think of them that way.”

“And how do you think of them?” he asked.

“As part of my life,” she admitted. For so many years she’d never ventured out. For months her world had been bounded by her bedroom, then the house, and, finally, for a very long time, the great iron fence that surrounded Sea Haven. But when she’d finally pushed and pleaded enough that her parents allowed her to ease her way out—just a few blocks at first, a brief carriage ride along the road and back, which had them both breathless with worry—either Mr. Hoxie or Mr. Peel or both had always been at her side.

“How did you know they were guards?” she asked.

“Makes sense that you would have guards.” In Sam’s opinion she should have had more. The ones she had were, well, not inept, exactly. More like complacent, as if they were accustomed to having the situation completely controlled. They treated her more like a sister than a job. It spoke well of her that they were so fond of her, but being overfond of your charge damaged your ability to make difficult decisions if they became necessary.

It would be a terrible shame if anything happened to Laura Hamilton. The thought caught him by surprise. It was no business of his, and if a man like Leland Hamilton could not protect his own, who could?

But she was…like sunshine. Open, happy, smiling. And the world held far too little warmth as it was. He liked the idea that it existed, even if he could never have it in his life again.

“Oh.” A hint of disappointment discolored Laura’s previous pleasure at his presence. What had she expected, really? That he had sought her out only because something about her appearance and manner intrigued him? “You know who I am,” she said flatly.

“You don’t exactly make a quiet entrance,” he said.
“From the moment they hitched those cars up to the train it was buzzin’. For sure you were rich enough to need a couple of guards, at least.”

“I suppose so.” He’d stood there an hour, patiently waiting. Her father often spoke of spending his life ever-vigilant, constantly aware that the vast majority of the people he met desperately wanted something from him. He’d been very poor, then very rich, and claimed the fact that people were always hoping to separate you from some of your money was the only drawback to being rich. It was, he considered, a small price to pay.