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
