Lawman

As he left the doctor’s office, Cal was hailed by Mayor Long from the steps of the Gillespie Springs Bank.

“Devlin? Everything all right?”

Perhaps Long would know of a woman who could stay with Olivia, he thought, striding over the planking that led to the bank next door.

“Oh, everything’s fine,” he said. “I was…just checking on a friend.”

Too late, Cal saw Gillespie standing in the shadows, just inside the bank door. Hellfire, Cal thought, borrowing one of Sam’s favorite expressions. He couldn’t very well ask Long if he knew a woman who could help Livy for a few days right in front of the brother-in-law who hated her.

“We were concerned when we saw you go into the doctor’s office,” Gillespie said, his voice purring. “I trust you were not injured in the fray? I assure you, the town will pay all bills incurred in the line of duty.”

“No, I wasn’t, Mr. Gillespie.”

“Oh please, call me Bob. All my friends do,” said Gillespie, slapping Cal on the back. “And I’ll call you Cal, if that’s agreeable?”

Cal hoped the fact that he detested Gillespie’s familiarity and overhearty voice didn’t show as he nodded. “Bob, I won’t keep you from your duties,” he said. “I was just hoping the mayor would be kind enough to show me around the jail—you know, where the keys are kept and so forth?”

As he’d hoped, Gillespie either took the hint or wasn’t interested in such mundane details, and said he was sure he’d be seeing Cal around town. But Cal was aware of the bank president’s eyes boring into his back as he and Long crossed the street to the jail.

Was it only a couple of hours ago that Cal had entered this office to ask where he might find Olivia? How ironic that he was now returning as its new sheriff. He didn’t mention his previous visit to Long, though. Instead he listened and watched patiently as Long showed him around inside, pointing with pride at the two cells—fortunately empty, Cal noted.

Long tsked as he observed that the sheriffs desk still bore the remains of his dinner—a meal Cal had so recently seen the sheriff eating.

“As I said, your quarters are up above,” the mayor explained. “You reach it by a stairway out back. Come on, I’ll show you,” he said, reaching inside the desk for a ring of keys. “But I’ll warn you, Olin Watts, the old sheriff, wasn’t known for bein’ neat. Every so often he’d have this Mexican woman come and tidy up, but Watts was kinda stingy with a coin, so she only did it once in a blue moon.”

Cal followed him back outside and up the weathered steps.

The mayor hadn’t exaggerated the late sheriffs lack of tidiness, and apparently there hadn’t been a blue moon lately, for clothes lay haphazardly piled over the room’s only chair. The bed was unmade, the wrinkled sheets yellowed with age and lack of washing. Halfempty cans of beans and cups with coffee rings took up half of the table. The other half was littered with yellowed newspapers. A daguerreotype was nailed to the cracked plaster wall, and as Cal bent to study it he saw that it had been taken at a hanging, for it featured three dangling bodies with hoods over their heads, their necks bent at unnatural angles.

“The Galtry brothers, horse thieves,” read the scrawled notation on the plaster wall, “hanged March 8, 1868.”

“He certainly had an odd sense of the artistic,” Cal said, straightening and turning from the picture.

Long chuckled, then looked dismayed as he surveyed the clutter. “That Mexican woman’ll come and clean this for you. I’m really sorry, Cal. Why don’t we put you up at the hotel tonight—at the town’s expense, of course? I’ll have Jovita Mendez come and set it all to rights this evening.”

Cal had been conscious of the quickly passing minutes and had wondered how he was going to bring up the subject of the woman he needed to find for Olivia, but perhaps James Long had just supplied the opening he needed.

“Aw, don’t worry about this mess, it won’t take long to straighten up in here. But I do need to find a woman, now that you mention it—”

James Long grinned. “Right behind the saloon there’s a brothel of sorts. There’s two-three sportin’ women that live there—I imagine they can cure what ails you.”

Cal couldn’t help but smile at the way the mayor had mistaken his meaning. “No, I don’t mean that kind of female. You mentioned a woman who’d come and clean? Mrs. Daniel Gillespie just happens to be…an old acquaintance of mine, and she’s, uh…been real ill,” he said, praying Long wouldn’t press him for details. The full story would be spread soon enough, by that nosy mother in the waiting room. “The doctor said she was gonna need someone to stay with her for a few days, and I was just wonderin’ if perhaps this woman you mentioned would be willing? I’d pay her.”

He saw the mayor’s sunny expression become clouded. “Miz Gillespie’s…a friend a yours?” There was a world of insinuated meaning in the way he said friend.

“An old friend, from my growin’ up days in Bryan,” Cal said, careful to keep his voice casual. “I’m just try in’ to help her out….”

“Yes, of course,” Long said quickly, not meeting Cal’s eye. “Sure, I imagine Jovita Mendez’d be glad to earn some money takin’ care a’ Miz Gillespie. She probably doesn’t earn much takin’ in mendin’ and cleanin houses and such. Come on, I know where we can find her.”

By the time the sun was setting, Cal had hired the middle-aged Mexican woman, who was pathetically grateful for the job, and together they had brought Livy back to her own house in the buckboard Cal had found behind the barn, pulled by Blue.

Jovita Mendez insisted on fixing him supper after she’d tucked a sleepy Olivia into bed, and with her new employer’s permission, sent some clean sheets with him when he at last took his leave.

“That Senor Watts, he was a peeg, Dios rest his soul,” she said, crossing herself as she handed him the sheets at the door. “Don’t you worry, Señor Devleen. I weel take good care of the señora for you.”

He started to tell her that it wasn’t for him, exactly, but he guessed that this plump woman, unlike the rest of the town, was not an inveterate gossip. And that the shrewd eyes saw more than he might have wished. “Thank you, Jovita,” he said simply. He went to the barn to collect his horse, knowing he’d have to settle him at the livery stable before seeking his own rest.

He hoped his mama and Annie weren’t going to worry when he didn’t show up back at the farm tonight. In the summer, he could have ridden Blue home before it had gotten fully dark, but he wasn’t about to chance the roan breaking a leg loping over the road on this moonless autumn night. He’d get up early the next morning and ride home in time for breakfast, tell his family about his new job as sheriff and be back in Gillespie Springs before noon.

At the same time as Cal was struggling to make the room over the jail fit for human occupation—at least fit enough so he could get some sleep without worrying about roaches carrying him off—a conversation was taking place at Gillespie’s habitual table at the Last Chance Saloon.

“Thought you’d want to know I was takin’ care a’ your sister-in-law this mornin’, just about the time Olin Watts was gettin’ gunned down,” Doc Broughton said, then took a sip of his whiskey.

Robert Gillespie raised a brow at the cold-blooded way Broughton had mentioned the killing of the sheriff, then growled, “What makes you think I’d care about that murdering bitch?”

“Oh, I think you’ll care,” murmured the sawbones smugly. He puffed on his cigar until Gillespie was about ready to strangle him, but the banker would be damned if he’d ask and thereby show too much interest.

“She lost that baby. Had a fall down the stairs, she told me, an’ started bleedin. She was hemorrhagin’ by the time she was brought in t’me. If our fine new sheriff hadn’t found her, she mighta bled to death.”

“Why didn’t you just let the bitch die?” Gillespie growled.

“Aw, Bob, you know I cain’t do that,” protested Broughton. “I had a waitin’ room fulla people, and that sorta thing ain’t good for business. Ain’t it good enough that now the woman ain’t gonna give birth to no halfgreaser bastard to inherit your brother’s land?”

Gillespie was still examining his mixed emotions about his sister-in-law’s miscarriage. “Yes, I reckon that’s one good thing,” he finally said.

“And besides,” the sawbone continued, “Devlin was appearin’ t’take an interest. Seems he knew the woman…”

By then the rest of what Broughton had said earlier had sunk in. “You say Devlin found her? How’d that happen?” Gillespie demanded, chewing on the end of his own cigar.

The sawbones shrugged. “He said he was just payin’ a call. He’d been real insistent that I drop every thin’ to treat her, and he got real defensive when I, uh, kinda probed around as to how well he an’ your sister-in-law was acquainted.”

Gillespie studied the rotund physician. “Hmm. Now isn’t that interesting? This one-eyed fellow shows up just in time to stop a bank robbery, and he just happens to know Olivia. And he just happens to find her losing her baby. I call that an interesting bunch of coincidences, indeed I do.”

Chapter Five (#ulink_20e1b0b2-0c72-5b48-bec0-391b477c41ff)

Predictably, Sarah Devlin wasn’t pleased to hear that her son had taken on the hazardous profession of sheriff.

“Honest to Pete, Caleb Travis Devlin, I just get you back from the dead, and now you’ve taken up the most dangerous profession there is,” she complained as she dished up his second helping of flapjacks. “You might just as well tell me now what hymns you want played at your funeral,” she added tartly.

Cal grinned. “I expect you’d have to hold a funeral here, and you ladies’d have to sing any hymns without accompaniment, ‘cause I don’t reckon Mr. Maxwell would countenance preachin’ my funeral service,” he drawled. Of the three women present, only Mercy returned his smile.

“Cal, you stop teasin’ Mama,” snapped Annie. “You ‘bout worried her to death not showin’ up last night. She’s already imagined you murdered somewhere on the road, and now you come in and tell her you’ve hung a star on your shirt because the last sheriff was killed right in front of you?”

“I already said I was sorry for not returning last night, and why I didn’t,” Cal said evenly. “And you know there isn’t much chance of anything interesting happening in Gillespie Springs again for about another hundred years, so you can stop frettin’. I was hoping someone in this family would wish me good luck, at least.”

“I do, brother,” Sam said from across the table, extending his hand over a plate that had been piled twice as high with flapjacks as Cal’s had. “I think it’s right fine we have a lawman in the family now.”

“You haven’t said why your other arm’s in a sling,” Cal commented.