The Lawman Takes A Wife. Anne Avery
worth seeing except the desk and the man behind it.
He looked up at their entrance, but she couldn’t make out much more of his features than she had outside.
“Yes?” His voice was deep, pleasant to the ear.
“Are you—” The words stuck on her tongue like molasses.
All of a sudden, she was even less certain of the wisdom of this visit than she’d been when she’d given in to Dickie’s pleading. What if he laughed at them? Or gave them a tongue lashing for wasting his time like old Mr. Garver was always doing? Or worse, told their mother?
Bonnie blenched at the thought of what her mother would say if she found out.
Dickie had no such reservations. “You the new sheriff?” he demanded, boldly stepping forward.
“I am.”
Dickie threw her a look that clearly said, told you so! and edged a little farther into the room. “You really a gunfighter, like Freddy Christian said you was?”
The man’s mouth abruptly thinned to an intimidating straight line. “No.”
The single word rumbled in the dusty air like distant thunder. He deliberately set aside the papers he’d been reading, then shoved back his chair and came around the desk toward them.
Seated behind the battered old desk, the man had looked impressively large. On his feet and up close, he was downright intimidating—more like a mountain on legs than a man. The floor jumped with every step he took.
Bonnie backed up a foot.
Her brother didn’t budge, but he hunched his shoulders and stuck out his chin so he could swallow. If his eyes opened any wider, his eyeballs would pop out.
The sheriff loomed over them. Bonnie had to tilt her head back to meet his gaze. Her throat tightened. There was an awful lot of jaw on that sharply carved face of his.
He stared down at her unblinkingly.
Bonnie backed up another step and clasped her hands behind her, where he wouldn’t see their trembling.
The sheriff turned to Dickie. “Who is Freddy Christian?” His voice seemed to shake the walls around them, despite its mild tone.
“A friend,” said Dickie in a very small voice. He gulped and added, a little louder this time, “He’s a year younger’n me, but he knows ’most everything ’cause his dad, see, he’s the editor of the paper.”
The sheriff considered that a moment, then, “How old are you?”
Dickie rubbed his hands on the sides of his overalls. “Me?”
The sheriff nodded.
“Eight. Nine come October.” Dickie hesitated, then cocked a thumb in Bonnie’s direction. “This here’s my big sister, Bonnie. She’s eleven.”
Those coal-black eyes turned back to her. After a moment’s sober study, the sheriff politely ducked his head by way of acknowledgment. “Miss Bonnie.”
Bonnie flushed. She’d never had a grown-up gentleman call her Miss Bonnie before. And now that she’d had the chance to study him a bit more, the new sheriff didn’t seem nearly as hard as he had a minute earlier.
On the other hand, he didn’t seem any smaller, either.
“I’m Dickie,” her brother announced, drawing the sheriff’s attention back to him. “Richard James Calhan. Named after my dad and granddad. My mother—”
“Our mother,” Bonnie snapped. She was happy to leave the talking to Dickie, but she didn’t care to be left out altogether.
“Our mother, then,” Dickie conceded, annoyed. He wasn’t willing to interrupt his recital to argue with her about it, though. “She runs Calhan’s General Store. Guaranteed best store in town! If we don’t have it, we’ll get it, no extra charge.”
The sheriff mulled over that bit of information, too. “If your ma runs the store,” he asked at last, “what’s your pa do?”
Dickie’s face fell. Over four years had passed since their father had died in a coal mine cave-in and he still had nightmares at times. For that matter, so did Bonnie, though she would never admit it. Mother already had enough to worry her.
“Da’s dead,” Dickie admitted reluctantly.
That admission was usually enough to launch a dozen questions about how he’d died and when, and how they were getting along without him. At the very least it got an “I’m sorry to hear that” kind of response, regardless if the person was sorry or not. But this man mountain neither asked rude questions nor offered false sympathy. He accepted the statement with the quiet composure that seemed as much a part of him as his broad shoulders or big feet. Bonnie found his calmness strangely reassuring.
With one smooth motion, he squatted on his heels in front of them. The change in position brought him to eye level with her.
“So,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
Bonnie looked at him, then she looked at Dickie. This was all Dickie’s idea, not hers. She’d only agreed to come with him because, if he was right, she didn’t want to be left out of the excitement. But that didn’t mean she wanted to take the blame if he got into trouble, instead.
“Dickie’ll tell you. This was his idea, not mine.”
Dickie, ever the showman, swelled with importance. “It’s this,” he said, pulling a rolled-up newspaper out of his back pocket and holding it out to the sheriff. “We wanna report a bank robbery.”
Calhan’s General Store was filled near to bursting with ladies who had gathered to inspect the new collection of winter dress goods. Since it was unthinkable that any self-respecting woman in Elk City would let the other ladies get a jump on her in the matter of selection, each of them had made a point of arriving early, only to find that everyone else had been possessed of the exact same thought. By the time Molly opened the door at 9:00 a.m. precisely, the boardwalk in front was jammed. It was eleven now, and while the lengths of cloth and ribbon and lace had shrunk, the crowd appeared to have grown.
As she always did, Molly had gotten up early so she could arrange the new bolts of cloth and boxes of buttons and trim in an attractive display on top of the broad oak counter that ran the length of the store.
It took her hours to set up the display, and hours more to straighten up after, but the ladies only needed a couple of minutes to create chaos out of her carefully constructed order. Molly suspected that was part of the attraction of this novel method of selling and the main reason she always sold three times more sewing notions and more yards of cloth than any other dry goods store this side of Denver.
Dealing with the ladies was never easy, however. Not only did she have to cope with their often heated competition for the more popular fabrics and notions, she had to sort their questions and requests out of the confusing babble of conversation and gossip that always reigned at these events. At the end of the day, she inevitably emerged with a headache and a satisfyingly well-stuffed till.
As long as the till was full, she never begrudged the headache. The store was Bonnie’s and Dickie’s future, after all.
And hers, of course. She tried not to forget that.
At the moment, though, she didn’t have time to think about the future. It was all she could do to deal with the present—measuring and cutting and tallying orders while answering the dozens of questions being flung at her from all sides. The gossip and chatter she ignored, as much out of habit as out of necessity. No merchant could afford the luxury of gossip or of choosing sides, and her position as a widow and Elk City’s only female store proprietor made her more careful than most.
That didn’t stop the ladies, however—the latest rumors had been flying thick and fast all morning. At the moment, a recent arrival held undisputed center stage.
“The