“Now hold on. I reckon these womenfolk can be reasoned with,” said Daniel McCabe, the town blacksmith. “That’s what I did.”
He raised his burly arm, chugged down an impressive quantity of mescal, then wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his plain white shirt. Tipping his chair back on two legs, he regarded the gathering with a self-satisfied smile. “That’s all it takes.”
“You don’t say, McCabe.” The butcher squinted, appearing to consider the notion. With a suddenly skeptical twist of his lips, he turned to Daniel again. “That made the ladies the matchmaker loosed on you quit comin’ ’round and pesterin’ you?”
“Hell, no.” Daniel’s grin widened. “But now they come ’round with things I want to have. A pair of new tongs from the mercantile, a bottle of lager on a hot day, a hank of sausage from your butcher shop—” He ticked off the items on his fingers, stopping only when interrupted by increasingly loud laughter.
Shrugging, Daniel hooked his arms in the braces holding up his soot-smudged pants. “You fellas just have to know how to handle a female, is all.”
Only a few stools down from Daniel, Marcus accepted his customary evening meal—good ale, a plate of Murphy’s tinned beans with bacon, and a hunk of brown bread—and counted out the coppers to pay for it. He began to eat, automatically scanning the day’s recorded timber yield.
It was low, probably because of the slowdowns caused by the matchmaker’s giggling, gaggling feminine disciples. They’d caused his men such distraction that both yields and profits were down. For now, the problem was small. But if it grew any more troublesome, Marcus’s planned expansion of his lumber mill would be delayed.
Concerned by the realization, Marcus turned his attention to the conversation again. This was taking much too long to resolve. Wasn’t anyone here capable of handling a passel of women?
“Why don’t we speak to the matchmaker in her own language?” Marcus suggested, setting his beans and bread aside. “We can take out a personal advertisement of our own. Tell her the men of Morrow Creek want their lives back.”
“And,” O’Neil added, “that they’ll do their courtin’ on their own terms. With the women they choose.”
Marcus nodded. Obviously, all this group needed was leadership. It was as true here as it was in his lumber mill all day long.
“Won’t work.” With a terse snap of his wrist, Jack Murphy finished wiping down the bar and flicked the wet cloth into the corner bucket. He spread his hands on the newly clean surface and leaned forward. “Adam Crabtree won’t take personal advertisements from anybody but the matchmaker’s private courier. Nobody knows who that is.”
“Lord,” the tanner groused. “She’s got us sewn up tighter than Copeland’s hold on his wallet.”
Chortles abounded as heads turned toward Marcus. He laughed, too, as agreeable to the joke as anyone else. It was true that he kept a firm grasp on his money. He’d worked hard for it. There was no crime in wanting to secure a good future.
Especially after the things he’d gone through to get there.
All the same, Marcus wasn’t so far off the mark that he couldn’t appreciate the humor in a man who accounted for every last pine shaving at the lumber mill. A man who couldn’t resist locking the door of his house when his neighbors did not. A man who’d stocked his pantry with enough tinned peaches, Arbuckle’s coffee and bags of dried beans to last until he turned gray, and who never finished a meal without tucking away a portion of it for later…just in case.
A man like him.
“I’d say we’ve got the clue we need, then,” he said, thinking back on what had been said about the matchmaker’s personal advertisements—and the Pioneer Press editor’s involvement in them. The man was known to be a radical thinker, espousing all sorts of eccentric ideas. “It sounds to me as though Adam Crabtree must be involved somehow.”
“Or his daughters!” someone piped up. “Those three are something else, again. Why, that Sarah Crabtree knows just about everyone in town, seeing as how she teaches all our children down at the schoolhouse. I’d say she’d have some definite ideas about who should be matched up.”
“Now, hold on,” interrupted Daniel McCabe, standing up so that his intimidating bulk loomed over the speaker. “I know Sarah, and there’s no way in hell she—”
“You’re right!” O’Neil said, breaking in before Daniel could finish. “There’s something ’spicious about those Crabtree sisters. All three of ’em spinsters and busybodies are privy to half the town’s secrets, between ’em. ’Specially that Grace Crabtree, with all her highfalutin ‘ladies’ clubs’ and such. She must know every old biddy in Morrow Creek.”
The men around him nodded vigorously. The buzz of conversation rose louder, enlivened by this new development. Jack Murphy weighed in with his opinion on Grace Crabtree, and Daniel McCabe rose again in defense of her sister Sarah. Talk turned to the third and youngest sister, Molly Crabtree. Amidst it all, Marcus worked on the ledgers and finished his beans and ale. Absentmindedly, he wrapped the remaining half of brown bread in his handkerchief and tucked the bundle into his coat pocket.
Suddenly, the tanner’s voice came again: “You’re a thinking kind of man, Copeland. How ’bout that for a plan?”
Marcus blinked, unable to recall the multiple directions the conversation had taken after his suggestion that Adam Crabtree might be linked to the mysterious matchmaker.
“Yeah, Copeland. You’re the one who thought up this idea,” O’Neil said. “’Tis only fair you take on Molly.”
“Molly?”
“Molly Crabtree,” O’Neil explained. Inexplicably, his face reddened, as though the mere mention of the woman’s name brought a blush to his face. Curious. “You must’ve seen her. Her little bakery shop—”
Titters erupted throughout the room, and were quickly stifled.
“—is just down the street from your place.”
Marcus squinted, trying to recall what lay on the path between his modest house and the lumber mill he’d put into operation only two short years ago. He envisioned nothing. Most days, his walk to his office was filled with thoughts of the day to come—work crews to be assigned, timber to be felled, shipments to be hauled to the railway. He wasn’t some kind of lay-about, with time to gawk at the scenery he passed.
“I don’t recall seeing her,” he said. “I don’t have time to—”
“Come on, Copeland,” someone called from near the bar. “You must’ve seen her.”
“She’s a female.” More laughter. “Remember those?”
“About so high—” one of the billiards players who frequented the newly opened saloon held his hand at chest height. “—with a fancy hat, a sweet swoosh of skirts, and a very important difference in the fit of her shirtwaist.”
Everyone laughed. Irritated, Marcus slapped the second of his ledgers closed. He knew what a woman was! Hell, he’d done his share of warming up the long nights with someone soft and biddable and more than able to fill out the ‘fit of her shirtwaist.’ Granted, he hadn’t had
