The Marriage Knot. Mary McBride

      Chapter One

      It was seven-thirty in the morning, already warm and promising pure Kansas heat, when Delaney walked the half mile out to Moccasin Creek where Ezra Dancer’s body had been discovered. A small group of men had already gathered under a big cottonwood, casting sidelong glances at the corpse, shrugging, pointing here and there before jamming their hands helplessly in their pockets and toeing the ground with their boots.

      “Mornin’, Sheriff,” several of them murmured when Delaney joined their midst. He merely nodded in reply, his gaze immediately taking in the welltrodden terrain around the deceased. These old boys had probably been out here, shrugging and scratching their heads and feeling glad to be alive, since dawn, and while they were speculating on life in general and Dancer’s death in particular, their big boots had been crushing the grass and stomping out whatever possible footprints or evidence of foul play there might have been.

      “Damned shame if you ask me,” Hub Watson said, swatting his hat against his leg. “Damned shame. What do you think, Sheriff?”

      Delaney squatted down beside Ezra Dancer’s body, his sawed-off shotgun balanced across his knees. What did he think? He thought he’d seen enough death to last him several lifetimes and enough bloodshed to color his disposition, and even his soul, a deep crimson. He thought he was getting very tired of death, particularly the notion of his own, especially now that his arm had failed him. Bone tired. And he thought Ezra Dancer must’ve been ten kinds of fool and a coward to boot to stick a pistol in his mouth and fire it.

      There was no question that it was Dancer—half his face was still intact—and not a doubt that the man had killed himself deliberately while he reclined against the rough trunk of the cottonwood. His pose seemed quite relaxed even now while his finger was stiff around the trigger. And damned if Delaney didn’t perceive half a hint of a smile on the man’s still lips.

      “Ezra’s been very sick,” somebody said. “He took a turn for the worse just yesterday.”

      Delaney glanced up to see Abel Fairfax, one of the boarders at the Dancers’ house, a man in his early fifties, about the same age as the deceased.

      “Sick? I didn’t know that,” Delaney said, but even as he spoke the words he envisioned the difference six months had made in Dancer.

      When Delaney had first come to town last December, Dancer—bushy—haired and barrel-chested—had come up to him at the Methodist lemonade social and pumped his wounded arm with such gusto that Delaney had had to grit his teeth to keep from screaming. And then there’d been that day in January when Dancer had taken a tumble on the icy street and Delaney just happened by in time to haul his bulky body out of the way of a wagon.

      He studied the corpse now and realized that Dancer had probably dropped forty or fifty pounds in the past six months. There wasn’t so much blood on him that he couldn’t discern that Ezra’s belt was buckled two notches tighter than usual. The man’s hair appeared much grayer than Delaney recalled. It was pretty obvious that Dancer had been ill. But, of course, Delaney knew he hadn’t noticed that because, all truth to tell, he’d spent the last few months going out of his way to avoid Ezra Dancer.

      No. Not Ezra.

      Ezra’s wife.

      “Somebody’ll have to tell Hannah.”

      Whoever made that somber declaration, though, obviously wasn’t volunteering.

      Delaney pried the pistol from Dancer’s cold grasp, checked to make sure the chambers were empty, then stood up.

      “I guess that’s my job,” he said. “One of you men want to tell the undertaker to come out here and retrieve the body?”

      “Sure, Sheriff.” Hub Watson spun on his heel, slapped his hat on and trotted back to town.

      Delaney stood there a moment longer, wishing he were somewhere, someone else. He didn’t much relish telling women their men were dead. He’d always thought that the day would come when he’d be the bearer of that lethal news to Mattie about Wyatt, or to Lou when Morgan’s number was up. He suspected sometime in the future he still might have to do just that.

      It was one of the reasons he’d never remarried or even gotten all that close to any woman. Not since he’d come back from the war to discover that the sweet girl he’d wed on the eve of his departure had hanged herself on hearing the news—wrong, as it turned out—that every soldier in Company H had been killed at Chickamauga. It wasn’t fair, not in the soldiering business or in the job of carrying out the law, to put a woman in that kind of jeopardy.

      Hell, maybe he’d just never loved anybody the way that Wyatt and Morgan did, he thought. Maybe to them it was worth the risk. But once he joined up with the Earps again, Delaney knew he’d still probably be bringing bad news to Mattie or Lou one of these years.

      But he never dreamed he’d be bringing such bad news to Hannah Dancer. And if he had dreamed it, he thought now, then he’d surely go to hell for merely entertaining the notion.

      “Well, what do you say, Sheriff?”

      Delaney had been so lost in his thoughts he hadn’t even realized that Abel Fairfax had spoken to him. “Pardon?”

      “I said I’ll come along to the Dancer place with you. This is gonna be awful hard on Hannah.” Fairfax shook his gray head, repeating, “awful hard on her, purely awful.”

      Delaney sighed as he stuck Ezra Dancer’s pistol into his belt, then settled his own weapon against his thigh. “I’d be much obliged for your help, Abel. Guess there’s no use in putting it off, is there?”

      The older man shrugged, turning his gaze toward town. “Nope. No use.”

      Delaney sighed again, then said, “Let’s go.”

      The Dancers’ property took up a whole square block, nearly an acre of elm trees and shady grass and sunlit gardens. Ezra, or so the story went, had made his fortune outfitting—and perhaps even outwitting—hordes of gold-seekers in California back in the fifties. The house in Newton was said to be an exact replica of his previous abode in San Francisco, complete with arched doors and windows, fancy Greek columns, and fat, hand-carved balusters on the wide wraparound porch.

      There was enough gingerbread on the building to decorate an entire village. Every outside nook and cranny was filled with some carved doodad or other. Even the trim had trimming of its own.

      It was the damnedest house Delaney had ever seen. Not that he’d spent a lot of time looking at it, though. Whenever he passed by, on foot or on horseback, he trained his gaze elsewhere. Away. He was a practical man, if nothing else. Far from a dreamer, he saw no use in looking at what—or who—he couldn’t have.

      “Well, Ezra won’t be climbing these anymore,” Abel Fairfax said as the two men made their way up the broad front steps. When one of the boards groaned beneath their feet, he added, “Hannah’s going to have to find herself a decent handyman now, I guess.”

      Delaney didn’t respond. He’d never been inside this imposing residence before, and quite suddenly he felt as if he should have soaped up some after awakening that morning or at least put on a fresh shirt instead of the one he’d been