in a steadfast knot halfway down her scalp.
“Adversity does hold the seeds of adventure,” she announced to a crushed flower on the ground. Its remaining petal twisted in the breeze.
It would take a bit of creativity to write this adventure so that Suzie would laugh and Mother not swoon.
Gossip was bound to spread. She knew from some experience that embarrassing stories had an uncanny way of speeding across the miles.
It wouldn’t do for Edwin to hear that Missy had come trotting down the public streets of Green Island wearing nothing but a dirty shift and toting a bramble-infested, purebred Maltese.
No sooner had Muff settled into a quiet, filthy ball on her lap than he growled and scrambled to his paws, stretching to look taller than he was.
“Now what?” She glanced across the prairie, peering through an afternoon being steadily dimmed by the heavy-hung clouds.
A man appeared over the rise of a distant hill, walking. He spotted her and waved his arm.
She had wished for a bold cowboy to ride to her aid and was a good bit disappointed.
The man, breaking into a trot and shouting, “Hello,” looked like a gentleman, with his cravat neatly tied and his polished shoes winking with the last ray of sunshine. His pale cheeks jiggled with his awkward gait.
He might as well have been plucked from her mother’s drawing room.
Zane Coldridge fastened the top button of his coat against the rising wind and tugged his Stetson low on his forehead.
“We’ve nearly got him, boy,” he murmured to his horse.
The criminal, Wesley Wage, had so far been able to outrun the five-hundred-dollar price on his head, but if his behavior of the past two hundred miles held true, Zane would be able to track him to the saloon in Dry Leaf.
From a quarter mile away, Dry Leaf looked like a pass-through town. With any luck the slick bank robber would follow his usual pattern and be settled in at the saloon, belly-up to the bar, without the marshal being any the wiser.
That was often the way it went. Wesley Wage looked like an eastern dandy so folks seldom realized he was the robber who had been terrorizing innocent bank patrons over the greater part of three states.
Zane urged his horse down the main street of Dry Leaf, taking note of the location of the saloon and the marshal’s office. The two were far enough apart so that a busy or inattentive lawman might be unaware that his town harbored a criminal.
Zane tied his horse beside a trough of water outside the marshal’s office.
“Take a long drink and a short rest, Ace.” He stroked away a film of prairie dust on the horse’s neck. “We might not be here any longer than the last ten towns we’ve ridden through.”
Zane took the steps to the marshal’s office two at a time, swatting a clinging layer of dirt off his wool coat.
A feminine giggle met him when he opened the door. The rustle of a petticoat and a gasp welcomed him inside. A woman, blushing like a summer peach, leaped off the lap of a young man sitting behind a big polished desk. The marshal’s badge hung from his shirt as though it was too heavy.
He didn’t look to be more than a boy. The sudden blush of red flooding his cheeks didn’t age the image.
“Afternoon, Marshal.” Zane nodded to the couple. The woman spun away, tugging at the bodice of her dress. “Miss.”
“Mrs.,” she muttered. She turned again with her clothing restored. “Mrs. Taylor.”
“My wife just …” The young man stood up and extended his hand across the desk. Zane shook it. “… she just brought lunch.”
The couple must have been quick eaters. Zane didn’t spot a single crumb on anything that might be an eating surface.
“Mind if I have a look at your wanted posters?”
The boy marshal indicated the wall beside the door, the crimson in his cheeks fading to mottled pink.
“Not much to look at,” he said. “Don’t get a lot of criminal traffic through Dry Leaf.”
Not any that the marshal would recognize by the faded posters on the wall, at least. Wesley Wage was there, half hidden under a bright new page with the sketch of a young lady on it.
Zane stared at her likeness for a moment. She had a pretty smile. On top of her head sat a bundle of curls held up by a ribbon. She seemed to stare out at him with eyes all sparkling with humor and curiosity. He’d give up a cold beer to know whether they were blue or brown. Maybe even green?
She didn’t look like any criminal he’d ever trailed, but someone wanted her bad enough to offer a two-thousand-dollar reward.
“What’s the lady’s crime?”
“Oh, there’s no crime, mister. She’s just a runaway whose family wants her back in the worst way.” The marshal walked over to the wall of wanted posters and tapped the likeness on the nose. “If you read the small print down here on the bottom, you’ll see that the money’s only good if Lenore Devlin is returned in as chaste and unharmed a condition as she was when she fled the bosom of her family.”
“What about this one?” Zane flipped the woman’s poster up to reveal the faded image of Wesley Wage. “Have you seen him?”
“Like I said, wanted men don’t pass through Dry Leaf much.”
“I’ve lived here all my life.” A sigh shoved the curve of Mrs. Taylor’s bosom against the boy’s canvas sleeve.
“I can’t recall ever seeing anyone notorious.”
The marshal glanced down at his wife’s chest and hiccupped. Likely, a villainous horde could ride down the main street of Dry Leaf and Marshal Taylor would never see it.
“Thank you for your time.” Zane opened the door and stepped out onto the boardwalk. “I’ll leave the two of you to finish your … lunch.”
He hadn’t taken two steps toward the saloon before he heard Mrs. Taylor’s giggle cut short by the closing of the door.
He ought to feel relieved that the lawman was too occupied with wedded bliss to notice that Wage had passed his way, but instead he felt an odd sorrow tugging at his gut. Being witness to their intimacy set a yearning smack in his heart.
Zane shook himself from the inside out. He didn’t want a wife, couldn’t have one even if he did. The life of a bounty hunter was a solitary one.
He set his sights on the saloon half a block down. Wage might be able to outrun the law, but that five-hundred-dollar bounty was about to come crashing down on his head.
The only crashing inside the peaceable saloon in Dry Leaf had been Zane’s spirits. According to the patrons inside, Wage had, once again, lit out just a rope toss ahead of him.
Zane stood tall in the stirrups and stared out over the greening hills of the Nebraska countryside.
