the car, “stay here and make sure no one gets any ideas. I’m going up to the express car to see if I cain’t—” he cocked the pistol again
“—hurry up the fetchin’.”
“We’re finished,” Miss Sterling moaned, gathering the children around her. “Stranded in the middle of nowhere at the hands of bandits.”
“They’re not very smart bandits, ma’am,” Liam whispered. “I watched ’em up in the express car. We’re not so finished as you think.” He looked out the window, making Holly wonder what kind of life the orphan boy had known to stay so remarkably calm and cocky under such rough treatment. “Where are we?”
Holly looked out the window again. Evans Grove had nothing more than a sad little platform built alongside the spot in the tracks where the train occasionally stopped. She could see that sad platform just beyond the next outcropping of rocks. They were very nearly at Evans Grove. Someone small and fast could get to town and bring help.
“Liam,” Holly whispered with her eye on their enormous captor, “how fast can you run?”
* * *
“Sheriff! Sheriff Wright, did you hear what I just said?”
Mason Wright pinched the bridge of his nose and longed for patience. When he envisioned breaking up feuds and brawls in the tiny town of Evans Grove, he hadn’t pictured the combatants wearing bonnets.
“Yes, I heard you clear.” He glanced over at the door of his office, still swinging open from Beatrice Ward’s blustering entrance, and thought it might be time to make up a “Closed” sign to hang in the window. “But, Miss Ward, I don’t have to tell you times are tight all over these parts. I don’t see how requiring curtains is going to solve much of anything. People have more important places to put their time and money.”
Miss Ward puffed herself up like a fussing hen. The way that woman clucked, it wasn’t hard to draw the connection. “Ephraim always said, ‘appearance is everything.’” Beatrice was forever quoting “wisdom” Mason had never seen the spinster’s late brother display. “If we look respectable and civilized, why then we behave respectable and civilized.”
Mason didn’t see much he’d call respectable and civilized in the “basic privacy of curtains” battle Beatrice Ward had launched at this week’s town meeting. He’d seen less contentious hound fights. Honestly, the woman had been on a righteous tirade ever since the storm took the roof off her house. Always proud of her fussy little cottage on Second Street—or what she liked to call “the high side of town”—Miss Ward took her home’s destruction as a personal insult, as if no one else in town had ever lost their home or kin. Truth was, far too many had lost homes and kin when the storm burst a nearby dam last month. Most especially the Widow Evans, Beatrice’s current opponent in the room. He offered Pauline Evans a sympathetic glance before saying, “I have to agree with Mayor Evans. I can’t enforce this.”
“Acting Mayor Evans,” Beatrice corrected, casting a derisive glance at the other woman. Some days Beatrice treated Pauline Evans as if she had stolen the title off her late husband’s still-warm body instead of the sad inheritance it was.
Robert Evans had been a fine man and a huge loss to the town, and Mason had to give Pauline credit for setting aside her grief to uphold her husband’s office. If the widow never did anything else for Evans Grove, her decision to step in kept Beatrice Ward from declaring herself mayor. Beatrice always acted as if chairing the Evans Grove Ladies’ Society—which merely consisted of eight grandmothers who met weekly in the church parlor for tea and criticism—gave her supreme authority.
“We’ve sent off for funds as it is, Beatrice.” Mayor Evans—Mason refused to think of her or address her as “acting mayor” no matter what Miss Ward insisted—squared her shoulders and jutted her chin in defiance. “We need to rebuild, not redecorate.”
“One fuels the other,” Miss Ward preached. “Who’d want to invest in a drab little town?”
“The Prairie Trust Bank of Nebraska, if you both remember. Miss Sanders wired yesterday to say she’d be on this morning’s train to Greenfield and taking the stage back here this afternoon.”
“Why on earth doesn’t the train stop here regularly? We have a station,” the spinster declared with undue pride.
“We only have a platform, and you know we can always get a whistle-stop if we ask a day ahead of time,” Mason felt compelled to correct. “What matters is that Miss Sanders will be on that stage from Greenfield today with important promissory papers, and I intend to be waiting to meet her. But before then, I got a pile of paperwork to tend to, a bag of government mail left over from the flood and two complaints about Vern Hicks out yelling down by the saloon again last night. Can you see that I might have more important things to tend to at the moment?”
Mason had hoped that the mention of Vern Hicks, who spent far more time with a bottle than his wife, might throw righteous Miss Ward off her present course. It only seemed to deepen the woman’s ever-present scowl.
Truth to tell, Mason felt a little like scowling himself. Miss Sanders was a sensible sort, but he didn’t like the idea of her traveling alone on the train. He would have been much more satisfied with Miss Sanders on yesterday’s train with an Evans Grove whistle-stop, but she’d wired to say the meetings took longer than expected. Mason wasn’t much for changing plans last minute with so much at stake, but who was he to tell a banker how long it takes to get business done? No one asked him if it was wiser to wait one more day so they could request a whistle-stop right here in Evans Grove. No, that banker had gone right ahead and put her on today’s train that went on through to Greenfield. It may get her home today, but he liked the idea of a woman alone on an open stagecoach from Greenfield even less than a train.
“Do you think Miss Sanders is traveling with any funds right away?” Mayor Evans asked, evidently glad for a change of subject.
“We won’t know. The bank could send a small start-up fund, but I told her not to make any mention of it if they did. If she’s traveling with any gold at all, the fewer people who hear about it, the better. No offense, but I’d hope the Prairie Trust Bank would know better than to send even one brick of gold with a tiny little thing like Holly Sanders.”
“Well, I should hope—” Miss Ward’s declaration was cut off by the sound of yelling in the street.
“Sheriff!” Shouts and the sound of galloping horse hooves sent Mason to the door in a flash. Ned Minor was coming up the street at full speed yelling “Sheriff Wright!” as his horse kicked up a cloud of dust. The young hotel clerk was a dozen yards away when a scraggly boy lunged off the back of the horse to run full tilt at Mason.
“It’s the train,” the boy yelped, pointing back toward the tracks. “Gunmen. Miss Sanders had Miss Sterling fake the vapors so I could...sneak off and get help.”
Holly Sanders? Here? Now?
Ned pulled up his horse behind the boy. “Robbers!” Mason was already untying his horse. “The train Miss Sanders is on is stopped just down the tracks. Bandits...”
Mason had one foot in the stirrup and the safety off his gun. Turning his horse south, Mason barked to Ned, “Get every man you can and meet me at Whitson’s Rock. Get Bucky Wyler first—he’s a good shot.” He’d swallowed a bad feeling in his gut all yesterday, a twist that had been there ever since the wire from Holly Sanders. I had a hunch and I ignored it. Tamping down the chill such thoughts sent down his spine, Mason reached down to the lad and hoisted him into the saddle behind him. “Tell me everything you know while we ride.” Looking to Ned, he called, “Be fast and quiet.” The thought of tiny Holly Sanders under the gun of some lawless bandit drove Mason’s boot heels into Ace’s flanks and his gut down through the soles of his feet. If any harm came to her, he’d feel even more doomed than he already did.
Chapter Two
“Mercy!” Miss Sterling fanned herself,