This Gun for Hire Read online

  “Oh, she’s right. I’m calling myself three kinds of an idiot for not seeing it, but the scales have been lifted from my eyes. My little girl is going to have her heart broken just like her father.”

  Quill cleared his throat. “I don’t think—”

  “Don’t assume you know what’s going on in here.” Ramsey tapped his chest with his forefinger. “I was—am—a damn sight more than fond of Miss Nash.”

  Quill was not certain what he could or should say to that.

  Ramsey rested an elbow on the sideboard. He tapped his tumbler lightly against the polished top. “Maybe Miss Nash could speak to her. Soften the blow. She would be sensible about it.”

  “Ann?”

  “Calico. Oh, hell, they would both be sensible. If I understand anything about how this works, they will skewer you and congratulate themselves on being too smart to be taken in by your goddamn dashing figure.”

  Quill put his hand up, extended his forefinger. “A point of clarification. How much did you have to drink before dinner?”

  * * *

  “I have newspapers for you,” said Quill, pulling a week’s worth of folded dailies out from under his arm. “Where do you want them?”

  Calico patted the space to her left. “Rocky Mountain News?”

  “Uh-huh.” He set them down, felt her forehead with the back of his hand, and looked over the tray across her lap. She had finished most of her soup. A few noodles and bits of chicken were left, but the broth was gone. Half of a roll remained beside her bowl. He pointed to it. “Is that half of the only roll you had, or did you already eat one?”

  “Ate one. With elderberry jam.”

  “Good.” He saw the teapot on the table. “Did Beatrice bring that?”

  “No, Ann. That and more sand tarts.” She looked up at him. “Ann said you were unusually quiet this evening at dinner. She thinks Beatrice is afraid of you.”

  “I was angry with Ramsey. It got away from me. I tried to be civil, but I don’t know . . . I will speak to Beatrice. Apologize. Tell her she can bring you those teas she swears by.”

  Calico grimaced. “You do not have to mention the teas.” Her eyes darted to the seat of the rocker. “I am curious about the parcel. You left it, didn’t you?”

  “I did. It’s what I went to town for. You were sleeping when I brought it in.”

  “I wish you had woken me. I was so sure you were going to return with Dr. Pitman that I made myself fall asleep out of sheer cussedness.”

  Quill took her tray and set it aside. “And I was so sure it was the bourbon.” He picked up the brown paper parcel by its string and dropped it in her lap. “Don’t expect too much. It’s something practical.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is. The fact that it’s anything at all is . . .” She shook her head and quickly looked down at the package. She tugged at the string, careful not to make a knot of it. When she was done, she drew the string out slowly and wound it around her wrist, tucking in the end so it would not unravel. When he asked her about it, she shrugged and told him she might have use for it, and then she turned the parcel over and folded back the paper.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” There was no other sound she could move past the lump in her throat. She looked up at him then, her glistening eyes an exact match for the bright green calico fabric in her lap.

  When she said nothing, he explained somewhat diffidently, “It’s to make a sling.”

  She nodded jerkily and offered a watery smile.

  “I . . . I, um, I remembered what you said about the swaddling cloth.”

  Calico nodded again, tried to speak, and . . . nothing. She knuckled her eyes before tears dripped on the fabric.

  “I never figured you for a watering can.”

  She chuckled unevenly, sniffed, and accepted the handkerchief he thrust at her.

  “Just so you’re not tempted to use the material,” he told her.

  Calico dabbed at her eyes, blew her nose, and gave him a sideways look. “As if I would.” She folded the handkerchief and tucked it under the tray on the table. “Put it on for me.”

  “Of course.” Quill thought his voice sounded slightly off, husky, even a bit rough as though he had not spoken in a long time. He did not dwell on it, helping her out of the sling she was wearing instead. He was already folding the calico when she stopped him.

  “No,” she said, putting a hand over his. “I want you to wrap my wound. You said you would later, and it is later now. If it bleeds, it will ruin this cloth. I don’t want that. Please.”

  “I can buy another length of—” Quill stopped because he could see that was not going to satisfy her. “All right.” He used his teeth to cut a tear in the towel, and then he rent it into four wide strips. He covered her wound with one, secured it, and resumed fashioning the sling. When he was done, he helped her into it, setting the angle so her hand lay just above her heart. “Is it too tight?” He had knotted it at the side of her neck.

  “No.”

  Quill chose another strip of towel, folded it several times, and inserted the pad under the knot. Satisfied, he moved to the rocker.

  Calico ran her palm over the cotton fabric from her wrist to her elbow and back again. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think I thanked you before.”

  “You did. You just didn’t know it.”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded.

  He pushed the rocker back and set his heels against the bed frame. “You should know what Ramsey and I discussed after dinner, most of it anyway.” He reviewed his conversation, treading carefully when it came to Ramsey’s feelings for her. There was nothing to be gained by repeating what was essentially the man’s declaration of love for Calico, and moreover, it would have been wrong. What was in a man’s heart should not be grist for the mill.

  When Quill finished, he looked at Calico expectantly. “Well, what do you think?”

  She did not hesitate to tell him. “What I think is that you and Ramsey are lily-livered.”

  “Lily-livered?”

  “Gutless. Craven. Cowardly.”

  He put up a hand. “I know what it means. I do not know why you think it’s true.”

  “What else would you call someone who cannot face a young woman and talk frankly about her tenderhearted, but ill-advised, attachment to a man who is better than ten years her senior?”

  “Sensible?”

  Calico rolled her eyes. “Spineless. There’s a word. Shame on you for turning over that responsibility to me.”

  “I believe I felt shame. Ramsey was not feeling anything but his liquor. You hold it better than he does.”

  “Flattery will not work here.”

  “I was not trying to—” He frowned, thoughtful. “Hmm. Maybe I was.”

  Calico groped for one of the folded newspapers at her side with every intention of throwing it at him, but when she picked it up, she realized it was too flimsy to have any impact. She dropped it and pointed to her sling. “You know, I could slip my derringer in here and you would be none the wiser until I was pointing it at your heart.”

  He grinned broadly. “You are feeling better.”

  She groaned softly. “You really are impervious to threats. Ramsey was right about one thing. When I speak to Ann, I am going to skewer you, and I am going to invite her to do the same.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Over the course of the following week, and under Quill’s watchful eye, Calico’s wound closed and began to heal remarkably well. Beatrice Stonechurch credited her teas, and Calico did not have the heart to tell her that except for those occasions when Beatrice hovered while she drained her cup, she generally emptied the teapot into the sink.

  Beginning the day after Quill sutured her wound, Calico regularly left her room. She took her meals in the dining room again, sat with Ann in the front parlor
for studies and her own reading pleasure, resumed being instructed on how to handle a weapon in the rear parlor, and perched on a stool in the kitchen so she could observe Mrs. Friend making bread, pastries, stew, and soups. Mrs. Friend found her interest a curiosity, but she was happy for the company, and Calico never had to explain that what she knew about cooking was limited to chuck wagon fare and those things that could be prepared outdoors over an open fire.

  She bided her time approaching Ann, waiting for an opportunity to present itself. It finally came about because Ann walked in on her reading the romantic dime novel adventures of Felicity Ravenwood. There was no hiding it from her, so Calico owned up to her guilty pleasure.

  After that, it was surprisingly easy to talk about first loves, romantic love, love at first sight, and love everlasting. Calico listened more than she contributed, and asked many more questions than she answered, all of which had the consequence of Ann taking notice of what she said when she did speak, even taking some of it to heart. They never spoke about Quill, not directly. Ann talked about the idea of him, and sometimes about the ideal of him, and Calico heard as much curiosity as she did longing. It was when their conversation turned to reality that the skewering began.

  When Calico shared some of that conversation with Quill, she found considerable satisfaction in pointing out that it was Ann who inserted the first skewer.

  Quill shuffled the papers in his lap as he regarded Calico with a skeptical eye. “She thinks I’m a scoundrel now?”

  “Not just you. All men. And not ‘scoundrel’ in any romantic sense.”

  “Scoundrels are romantic?”

  “Only in Felicity Ravenwood’s world. Have you been listening at all? Ann has come to her senses. Her perspective is practical, thoughtful, and you no longer figure into her notions of what would make a suitable match. You should be overjoyed.”

  A small crease appeared between his eyebrows. “I am not sure I like being a scoundrel.”

  “Oh, that is the least of it.” She put up a hand. “You do not want to know.”

  Quill agreed that he probably did not. “It sounds as if you both were sensible about it. Ramsey said you would be.”

  Except to humph quietly, Calico made no comment. “What do have over there?” she said, gesturing to the papers in his lap. It was late, minutes shy of eleven, and to Calico’s eyes Quill did not look as if he had been sleeping long or restfully in quite some time. Although there was no good reason for it as far as she was concerned, he spent most of the last seven nights napping in the rocker, the armchair, or stretched out on the floor beside her. The one time he had joined her in bed, they had collided in their sleep, and her injury had gotten the worst of it. The searing pain made her bolt upright, and she barely managed to stop from crying out. There was no reasoning with Quill that it was not his fault, and he remained convinced that if she had shouted, it would have awakened everyone up and down the hall as well as the dead.

  Quill lifted his papers and squared them off. “I can do this in my room or downstairs if I am keeping you up.”

  “I didn’t say that you were. I asked what they are.”

  His lips parted around a long exhalation of air. “Something that I promised Ramsey I would review last week and never got around to it. I forgot. He forgot. Frank Fordham remembered. He came by asking for them.”

  “And yet, I still don’t know what they are. Is it a secret?”

  “No. The most important paper here is a list of the men that Frank wants to hire. Ramsey asked me to compare it to a list of known agitators.”

  Calico’s eyebrows lifted. “Agitators? You mean men who want trade unions. And where does that list come from?”

  “I had a premonition you weren’t going to like that.” When her eyebrows did not lower even a fraction, he continued. “The names come from all over, actually. Ramsey has more connections than the Union Pacific. It is not only the mine owners who share information. Ramsey hears from the likes of Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller. He knows who is stirring trouble—his view, not necessarily always mine—in Chicago stockyards, in the Appalachian mines, and in the shipyards on both coasts. There’s a movement and it scares him, I think. It scares all of them, so they make lists.”

  “I don’t like it. Next they will be rounding them up. Moving them to reservations.” She snorted and reached for the cup of tea on the bedside table. It was cold, but she didn’t care. She gulped it down. Almost immediately she was pressing her palm against her midriff.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I drank it too fast. I do that sometimes when I’m agitated. I should know better. It’s the chamomile, one of Beatrice’s least offensive brews, but it doesn’t always settle well in my stomach.” That said, her stomach rumbled and roiled. Her eyes widened. “Oh, dear. Here it comes.” She rapidly tapped her chest with her palm but made no effort to cover her mouth.

  The air she expelled came out in a loud, long, and most unladylike burp. It was only in the aftermath that she remembered to press her fingertips to her lips.

  Quill regarded her with interest. “Well,” he said matter-of-factly. “Everything seems to be working.”

  “Mm.” She caught her breath and swallowed. “My father would have cuffed me for that if we were out scouting. Too much noise, he’d have said. Now if that had happened while we were trading stories with the other scouts, he’d have clapped me hard on the back and congratulated me for what he would have called ‘an excellent peptic outburst.’ It tended to hurt a little either way, so I’m grateful you weren’t moved to hit me.”

  Quill said, “Did the Army command know you were out scouting with your father?”

  “No. And when I got better at it, sometimes my father didn’t know. I did not like being left behind.”

  “You’ve never told me how you found your way to bounty hunting.”

  “When I was fifteen, my father was diagnosed with consumption. He didn’t hear that from an Army doctor. A shaman told him. He was fairly adept at hiding it, although I came to believe the commander eventually figured it out. Whether he pretended not to know because it served my father’s purpose or his own, I can’t speak to that. I tried to talk some sense into him about leaving for better climes, but he was set as hard and fast in his ways as a tick on your belly. Refused to move to Arizona, where the air might have improved him. He liked the mountains. Liked the plains. He did not want anything to do with the desert. He died in my seventeenth year while he was hunting down a renegade Army deserter. I buried him, mourned him, and took up his job. In my mind it was the best way to honor him. I tracked down the deserter and escorted him to Fort Bent, where no one knew me. I had some idea about passing as a man—don’t laugh, it’s been done—but I never was too keen on it and didn’t try very hard.”

  She held up her hands in an attitude of helplessness. “The fact is I like being a woman. I just want to do mostly what interests a man.”

  “Maybe what you really want is the choice.”

  Calico thought about that. “Could be. Men have a lot of choices.”

  “So what happened at Fort Bent?”

  “Nothing. Everything happened afterward. I returned to Fort Collins. By the time I arrived, they had had word from Fort Bent. They knew about my father and that I had captured and taken in the deserter. There was some talk about me staying on with one of the families, but I didn’t want that. My father had some savings, which were turned over to me. I took his guns, some of his clothes, all of our books. They gave me his horse, which I had brought back. I bought a new saddle, a good pack animal, and I headed out for the nearest town where I could find a marshal or a sheriff and the wanted notices. It was four months before I had my first bounty, but I never wanted for anything during that time.” She paused and shook her head slightly, remembering. “That’s not true. I wanted for company. I wanted for my father.”

  Quill nodded.


  “He taught me most everything I needed to survive, but he did not teach me how to be alone. I had to learn that. I could hunt, so I ate well. It was never a problem to find water. I knew what plants I could eat. I had books, all of which I had read, but I read them again as time allowed. That helped. Bagger believed reading elevated the soul. Sometimes it seemed to me that it did. Leaves of Grass. Do you know it?”

  “I do.”

  “It was my companion. My edition was small. It fit in my pocket, and I carried it with me, not on the packhorse. Whitman should be read outdoors, Bagger said, and I think he was right. It helped.”

  Quill imagined Calico sitting hunched in front of a small fire, Whitman’s book in her hand. Her face would be illuminated by the fire, and the pages would be illuminated by her grace. Her lips would move as she read because she would want to hear the words aloud. She probably knew whole passages by rote, but she would hold the book out anyway and take care with every word, every nuance.

  He wondered if she would share that experience with him. If he invited her to lie with him in the deep grass, would she come? Would she read to him if he asked? There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. He wanted to be out of doors with her, blanketed by sunshine and nothing else, alone and together, naked in the celebration of what was right and fine between a man and a woman.

  They would sing the body electric.

  He blinked. Calico was looking at him oddly. He managed a lopsided, somewhat self-conscious, smile.

  “Where did you go?” she asked. “For a while, you were not in this room.”

  “You remember the place where I found you that night you left the house? I went there.”

  “Really?”

  “You were with me. Actually there were three of us. You. Me. Walt Whitman.”

  “You are a dangerous man, Mr. McKenna.”