subsided, but he didn’t look too happy about it. Rowdy reckoned he’d have shot Pardner just for being there, if he’d had his druthers. Fortunately for him, his sidekick had interceded before it would have been necessary to put a bullet through his heart.
Pardner, who looked a sight with his fur all ruffled up and standing upright on his hide like quills on a porcupine, from the rubdown with a burlap sack, growled low and in earnest.
Yes, sir, Rowdy thought, looking down at him, he did want barbering.
“That dog bite?” Willie asked. A muscle twitched in the beard stubble along his right cheek. He carried himself like a man of little consequence determined to give another kind of impression.
“Only if provoked,” Rowdy answered mildly, slipping the .44 back into its holster. He was hungry, but he tarried, for it was his habit to take careful note of everyone he encountered, be they friend or foe. Pappy had taught him that, and it had proved a useful skill.
Just then Jolene trundled in with the littlest Chinaman Rowdy had ever seen trotting behind her. The sight put him in mind of a loaded barge cutting through the muddy Mississippi with a rowboat bobbing in its wake.
“Ten cents if you want clean water,” Jolene told the new arrivals, clearly relishing the prospect of ready commerce. “A nickel if you don’t mind secondhand.”
Willie and the sidekick didn’t look as though they were in a position to be too picky.
“A dime for a tub of hot water?” Willie demanded, aggrieved. “It’s plain robbery.”
The tall man took a tobacco sack from the inside pocket of his coat and dumped a pile of change into a palm. After counting out the coins carefully, he handed them over to Jolene.
“We’ll have the best of your services,” he said formally.
The Chinaman, strong for his size, nodded at a go-ahead from Jolene and turned Pardner’s tub over onto its side, so the water poured down through the gaps between the floorboards.
“I ain’t bathin’ in the same tub as no dog, Harlan,” Willie told his friend stoutly.
Harlan sighed. “Willie, sometimes you are a trial to my spirit,” he said. “That mutt was probably cleaner than you are before he even set foot in this place.”
“Them steaks are about ready,” Jolene informed Rowdy, giving Pardner a dark assessment. “I don’t reckon the dog could eat out back, instead of in my dining room?”
“You ‘don’t reckon’ right,” Rowdy said pleasantly. With cordial nods to Harlan and Willie, he made for the bathhouse door, Pardner right on his heels.
* * *
LARK MORGAN WATCHED slantwise from an upstairs window of Mrs. Porter’s Rooming House as the stranger strode across the road from Jolene Bell’s establishment to the barbershop, the dog walking close by his side.
The man wore a trail coat that could have used a good shaking out, and his hair, long enough to curl at the back of his collar, gleamed pale gold in the afternoon sunlight. His hat was battered, but of good quality, and the same could be said of his boots. While not necessarily a person of means, he was no ordinary saddle bum, either.
And that worried Lark more than anything else—except maybe the bulge low on his left hip, indicating that he was wearing a sidearm.
She frowned. Drew back from the window when the stranger suddenly turned, his gaze slicing to the very window she was peering out of, as surely as if he’d felt her watching him. Her heart rose into her throat and fluttered there.
A hand coming to rest on her arm made her start.
Ellie Lou Porter, her landlady, stepped back, her eyes wide. Mrs. Porter was a doelike creature, tiny and frail and painfully plain. Behind that unremarkable face, however, lurked a shrewd and very busy brain.
“I’m so sorry, Lark,” Mrs. Porter said, watching through the window as the stranger finally turned away and stepped into the barbershop, taking the dog with him. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Lark willed her heart to settle back into its ordinary place and beat properly. “You didn’t,” she lied. “I was just—distracted, and you caught me off guard.”
Mrs. Porter smiled knowingly. There wasn’t much that went on in or around Stone Creek, Lark had quickly learned, that escaped the woman’s scrutiny. “His name is Rowdy Rhodes,” she said, evidently speaking of the stranger who had just entered the barbershop. “As you may know, my cook, Mai Lee, is married to Jolene’s houseboy, and she carries a tale readily enough.” She paused, shuddering, though whether over Jolene or the houseboy, Lark had no way of knowing. “It’s got to be an alias, of course,” Mrs. Porter finished.
Lark was not reassured. If it hadn’t been against her better judgment, she’d have gone right down to the barbershop, a place where women were no more welcome than in her former husband’s gentleman’s club in Denver, and demanded that the stranger explain himself and his presence in her hiding place.
“Do you think he’s a gunslinger?” she asked, trying to sound merely interested. In her mind she was already packing her things, preparing to catch the first stagecoach out of Stone Creek, heading anywhere. Fast.
“Could be,” Mrs. Porter said thoughtfully. “Or he might be a lawman.”
“He’s probably just passing through.”
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Porter replied, her face draped in the patterned shadow of the lace curtains covering the hallway window.
“What makes you say that?” Lark wanted to know.
Mrs. Porter smiled. “It’s just a feeling I have,” she said. “Whoever he is, he’s got business around here. He moves like a man with a purpose he means to accomplish.”
Lark was further discomforted. She barely knew her landlady, but she’d ascertained at their first meeting that Mrs. Porter was alarmingly perceptive. Although the other woman hadn’t actually contradicted Lark’s well-rehearsed story that she was a maiden schoolteacher, she’d taken pointed notice of her new boarder’s velvet traveling suit, Parisian hat, costly trunk and matching reticules.
Stupid, Lark thought, remembering the day, a little over three months before, when she’d presented herself at Mrs. Porter’s door and inquired after a room. I should have worn calico, or bombazine.
Now, in light of the stranger’s arrival, she had more to worry about than her wardrobe, plainly more suited to the wife of a rich and powerful man than an underpaid schoolmarm. What if Autry had found her, at long last? What if he’d sent Rowdy Rhodes, or whoever he was, to drag her back to Denver or, worse yet, simply kill her?
Lark suppressed a shudder. Autry’s reach was long, and so was his memory. He was a man of savage pride, and he wouldn’t soon forget the humiliation she’d dealt him by the almost-unheard-of act of filing for a divorce. Denver society was probably still twittering over the scandal.
“Come downstairs, dear,” Mrs. Porter said, with unexpected gentleness. “I’ll brew us a nice pot of tea, and we’ll chat.”
Lark wanted to refuse
