Midnight Lover Read online

  "Why don't you start a sewing circle while you're at it, Sam? Of all the damned stupid ideas, this one—"

  Sam stepped in front of Jesse. "They're takin' this serious, Jesse. I wouldn't let them see you laughing at something that means a hell of a lot to 'em."

  "And what do you expect your damn fool League to get you, Sam? A cut rate from Jade? Drinks on the house from me?"

  Sam's broad face creased in a frown for a few moments then his usual smile returned. "We're gonna keep this town safe from do-gooders and Bible salesmen and spinsters, that's what. If we all hang together on this those gals will be back on a stage east by the end of the summer and this place'll be fit for men again."

  Harry Calhoun cupped his hands and hollered, "Are you with us, Jesse, or ain't you?"

  Three hundred men turned and stared as Jesse ground out his cigar beneath the heel of his hand-tooled boot. No money-hungry, dried-up, old-maid Eastern woman could rope Jesse Reardon into marrying if he didn't feel like marrying. He didn't need the protection of three hundred panic-stricken bachelors to keep him from tying that particular noose around his neck.

  But, business was business and making a show of being one with them would go a long way toward keeping Jesse's coffers filled. He vaulted onto the platform and faced the crowd. Men who had once been bankers and lawyers stood next to desert rats who had never seen the inside of a drawing room. The mines had brought them to Silver Spur but it was more than riches that kept them there. Silver Spur was a man's town, a place where a man could have whatever he wanted as long as he could pay the price.

  And Jesse Reardon was Silver Spur in the flesh. "Harry asked if I was with you or against you." His voice was deep and rich; it rang out through the smoky room as he pulled his Smith & Wesson from his holster and spun it lazily, enjoying the nervous shuffling and coughing of the men who watched him. "I should turn this on Harry for askin' such a damn fool question."

  Harry Calhoun looked as if he'd swallowed a whole bottle of Big Red's rot gut whiskey without coming up for air.

  Jesse slid the gun back into his holster. The crowd of men started breathing again. "If you think it's time to take a stand then, hell, it's time to take a stand. We'll be there in front of the Crazy Arrow this afternoon when that stage gets in and we'll show those Bible-clutching old maids that they ain't wanted in Silver Spur!"

  The crowd whistled, stomped, and yelled their approval and when Jesse said, "Follow me to the King of Hearts, men. The drinks are on the house!" Well, if the residents of Silver Spur had been law abiding enough to need one, Jesse Reardon would have been elected mayor on the spot.

  * * *

  The huge stagecoach lurched sideways as it bounced over a rut in the road near a cemetery marked Boot Hill.

  Caroline braced herself as her right shoulder hit the side of the passenger compartment and tried to ignore the sign "Murderers Row" that swung from a tree near a cluster of fresh graves. Next to her, Abby crossed herself for the hundredth time since they left St. Louis four days ago.

  "Abby, if I see you do that one more time, I shall not be held accountable for my actions. We're just a few miles out of Silver Spur and you're not accustomed to the coach yet?"

  Abby, looking decidedly bilious, glared at her employer and crossed herself once more for good measure. "No, Miss Caroline, I wouldn't be used to it yet. Four cemeteries within two miles wouldn't be somethin' a body gets used to easy." She gestured toward the other travelers with a tilt of her head. "And, if I may say so, it would be lookin' like no one else on this coach would be used to it yet, either."

  Caroline glanced around at her fellow passengers. The four spinster McGuigan sisters who had joined the trek to Silver Spur in Baltimore looked pale and slightly green. The two little red-haired Wilder girls from Dodge City had their eyes closed, hands tightly clasped in their laps. Young Reverend Nelson, the preacher bound for the one church in town, and his bride Penelope sat huddled near the door.

  Penny's high, clear voice rose over the clatter of horses' hooves and the stink of dust and booze that seemed part of the coach itself. "We should have stayed in Philadelphia, William," she was saying. "We should have listened to Father when he offered to set you up with the finest congregation west of the Delaware River."

  "They don't need me in Philadelphia, Penny," Reverend Nelson said calmly, "and I want to go where I'm truly needed."

  Penny sighed loudly and Caroline suppressed a smile. "There is sin in Philadelphia. Who needs a backwater town like Silver Spur? You are wasting your calling, William."

  Her husband looked up and reddened as he realized everyone on the coach was listening avidly to the development of their domestic drama. "My apologies," he said in the tone of solemn forbearance necessary to his profession. "I believe Mrs. Nelson is overtired. No disrespect meant to anyone from Silver Spur, I'm sure."

  "None taken," said Caroline. "Besides, I do not think there is a single citizen of Silver Spur on this coach."

  Abby gestured out the window. "Of course there isn't," she said as they passed another cemetery. "I'd be thinkin' there wouldn't be anybody left."

  Margaret McGuigan, one of the four Baltimore spinsters, looked up and spoke for the first time since they crossed the Mississippi River. "Don't you be fooled by those cemeteries, Miss Abby. There's still plenty of folks in Silver Spur." A most surprisingly girlish giggle broke through her schoolmarm facade. "And if all we've heard is true, most of them folks are men."

  Her three calico-clad sisters giggled behind their work-worn hands.

  "They better be," said Jenny Wilder, one of the Dodge City redheads. "Sarah and I sure didn't come this far to join the Baptist Sewing Circle." She glanced at the Reverend. "No offense meant."

  "None taken," he said. "I'm Presbyterian."

  "If you don't mind my asking," Caroline ventured, leaning forward toward the girls, "why have you come this far?" Aaron's letters had portrayed Silver Spur as a hard-drinking town of miners and gamblers that only came to life on Saturday night.

  "We're lookin' for men," Margaret said bluntly.

  Penelope, the preacher's wife, fell back onto the cracked leather seat in a swoon and her husband dabbed at her forehead with a limp cambric handkerchief.

  The McGuigan sisters nodded in unison. "So are we."

  "Holy Mary Mother of God!" Abby's freckled face turned red as the Wilder girls' hair "They're fancy women."

  Both Caroline and Abby stared at the plain, well-scrubbed spinsters across the aisle Caroline had seen fancy ladies once on a visit to Manhattan Island. These homespun travelers were a far cry from the bejeweled, bewigged beauties who had captured her father's eye.

  "You're...umm...err—" she struggled with the phrasing. "You'll be working in Silver Spur?"

  Jenny Wilder's laughter filled the coach. "I sure hope not," she said with a wink. "I expect to be married before the next harvest."

  Margaret McGuigan tossed her head. "I expect to wed before the Fourth of July."

  Caroline glanced at Abby, relieved to see her maid was as confused as she. "I am afraid I misunderstood. You are all betrothed to men of Silver Spur?"

  Jenny's sister Sarah looked up from her tattered copy of Godey's Ladies Book. "Not yet but we will be. You'll see."

  "But I thought Silver Spur was a rough-and-tumble mining town," Caroline said, thinking of her father's letters describing wild shenanigans that involved pistols, not petticoats. The men Aaron had written about had mayhem, not marriage, on their minds.

  Across from her, Reverend Nelson nodded. "I am under the same impression as you, Miss Bennett. My bishop told me my services in Silver Spur were desperately needed. It's a lawless, godless town."

  "Your services are needed, all right," Margaret retorted. "To perform weddings. Three of my cousins found husbands within six months of going west."

  "Rich husbands," added Jenny. "The silver mines are all over Nevada."

  A sly smile spread across Margaret's plain face. "And Silver Spur's the
richest town of all."

  Caroline and Abby listened, spellbound, as the sisters Wilder and McGuigan traded stories about Silver Spur. According to them, it was the flashiest, wealthiest town in all of the West, built around a mother lode of silver that showed no signs of being exhausted.

  Apparently neither did the miners.

  Marriageable women had first appeared in town two years ago and the rash of nuptials that followed their arrival had sparked a steady stream of spinsters bent on matrimony. Few of them had gone away disappointed.

  "How about you, Miss Bennett?" Margaret asked. "Shouldn't take a pretty girl like you more'n a week to hook a man."

  Jenny gave her a knowing look. "If you ain't betrothed by the time you reach the boarding house, then there ain't no hope for none of us. The sooner we get you taken care of, the sooner the rest of us can have our pick."

  Caroline took note of the sharp, assessing look Jenny's sister Sarah was giving both her and Abby, and the openly hostile murmurings of the McGuigan girls.

  "I'm not looking for a husband," she said. The surprise on their faces was something to behold.

  "You already married?" Margaret asked.

  Caroline shook her head.

  "A widow then?" asked Jenny.

  "I'm going to Silver Spur to claim an inheritance."

  She was spared having to go into the sordid details of Aaron's death by a sharp rap on the roof of the stagecoach.

  "Silver Spur one mile ahead," the driver called down to them. "Last stop!"

  The chatter died as quickly as it had been born. Jenny and Sarah took turns drawing a heavy tortoiseshell comb through their thick manes of shiny red hair. The McGuigan girls helped one another tighten the laces on their calico dresses and tie on matching bonnets.

  "I feel as if I should rouge my cheeks or curl my hair," Caroline whispered to Abby as the others went about their makeshift toilettes. "They're acting like brides on their wedding day."

  Even Penelope Nelson, the reverend's skittish wife, was primping in front of a tiny looking glass Margaret had lent her.

  Abby chuckled softly. "And why should you be any different? You heard what they said: the men are probably linin' the streets waitin' to claim their brides, sight unseen."

  It was Caroline's turn to laugh. "Surely you do not believe that claptrap, do you, Abby? Someone has been selling these girls a bill of goods. I seriously doubt Silver Spur to be the haven of matrimony they say it is."

  Caroline was about to relate some of her father's stories about Silver Spur when Abby pointed out the window. "Look!"

  Caroline cleaned a small circle of glass with the heel of her left hand. "Men!" she breathed as they entered the town. Men as far as the eye could see.

  Men in torn and dirty overalls lounged in the doorway of the Silver Horseshoe Eatery and Ben's Emporium and Dry Goods Store. Men in large-brimmed hats tilted down over their foreheads straddled horses larger than any Caroline had ever seen before. The men were old and whiskered; the men were young with faces smooth as a babe's. They were tall and short and fat and thin and everything in between.

  They were every spinster's prayer come true.

  The stage rattled past a cluster of men near a place called the Golden Dragon and Penelope Nelson nearly fell off her seat staring at the women in their bright red dresses who lounged on the porch, sipping cool drinks and fanning themselves while they flirted with the men.

  For the first time since she left Thomas Addison behind at the railroad station in Boston, Caroline wondered what on earth she'd gotten herself into. She hadn't figured there would be quite so many men—or that they would look quite so dangerous.

  "Will you look at them?" Sarah Wilder scrambled closer to Caroline and pointed out the window. "I bet they don't come like that in Boston, do they?"

  Two men—one, tall and clad in shamelessly tight-fitting breeches and a fringed rawhide waistcoat, the other in coveralls—leaned casually against the railing of the Golden Dragon.

  "Will you look at them?" Abby whispered to Caroline. "Just waitin' there as fine as you please, as if they were first in line at the butcher shop."

  Not even her own Crazy Arrow Saloon across the street could draw Caroline's gaze away from the man in those wicked breeches. It was a wonder he could draw a breath in them, much less walk. They were the most scandalous thing she'd ever seen in her entire life but, heaven help her, she felt as if she would rather die than turn away.

  "It would seem they're eager for brides," she managed finally, drawing in her breath as the man looked up and tipped his hat in the most arrogant of fashions. A shock of dark hair fell across his forehead and she had a fleeting glimpse of eyes bluer than the skies overhead. He seemed to be looking right at her in a way so possessive, so powerfully male, that her hands began to tremble.

  Quickly she sat back down and busied herself with pulling on her pale grey kid gloves. Her cheeks burned with some strange emotion she didn't dare identify. This wasn't why she'd come to Silver Spur. Let the McGuigans and the Wilders and even Abby go husband-hunting; she had more important things to do.

  The coach stopped and they waited while the driver clambered down from his perch in a flurry of mumbled oaths, then dragged a wooden step stool over to the passenger door, his one concession to the ladies on board.

  "Well," said Margaret McGuigan, "from here on it's every gal for herself."

  "You'll dance at my wedding," said Jenny Wilder, "or I'll know the reason why."

  There was no turning back now and Caroline knew it. Boston was her past and, like it or not, she was about to meet her future head-on. Straightening the collar of her dark blue traveling suit, she winked at Abby. "I'll dance at your weddings, if you'll promise to have the wedding party at my saloon."

  There was a long, shocked silence.

  "That was a fine joke, Miss Bennett," said Reverend Nelson, patting his bride on the arm. "Your own saloon, indeed."

  "You had me goin'," said Margaret, gathering up her belongings while the stagecoach driver grumbled. "A saloon owner! You!"

  Jenny laughed out loud. "You look like a gal from a fancy finishin' school. Everyone knows saloon owners ain't women."

  Caroline reached for the Moroccan leather bag and accepted the driver's hand. "Come by the Crazy Arrow Saloon tonight, ladies—" she turned toward the Reverend and gave him a saucy smile "—and gentleman, and find out."

  Summoning up everything her father had ever taught her about pride and independence, Caroline stepped down from the coach with Abby nipping at her heels.

  Late afternoon sun blinded her and her arm instantly went up as a shield. The hot dry air that rose from the dirt road carried the smells of whiskey and tobacco, of horse and bay rum, and the combination made her stomach lurch. Abby covered her nose with a scented hanky, much to the amusement of the two men leaning against the railing.

  "This ain't nothin'," said the smaller of the two as they started across the street toward the coach. "Just you ladies wait 'til July."

  Abby groaned and the Wilder sisters made equally horrified sounds. Caroline remained impassive even though she could scarcely imagine how this godforsaken place could smell any more foul than it already did. The prospect of adding the stench of perspiration just didn't bear thinking about.

  A group of bedraggled cowboys who had been watching their arrival from the porch of a hotel appropriately named The Last Stop joined the man standing near Caroline.

  "Puny haul, ain't it?" one asked. "Usually them coaches are packed to the rafters with 'em."

  Laughter mingled with the sound of a scuffle in The Last Stop.

  "Ain't many left back there," said another. "They've all come out here to rope a man."

  Abby, who had been pointing out Caroline's trunks to the grumbling driver, whirled around. "And left because there weren't a man to be found in the whole miserable lot of you!" she spat at the growing number of men ringing the stage and its passengers.

  The McGuigan and Wilder sisters ga
sped, no doubt envisioning their dreams of wedded bliss evaporating in the harsh Nevada sunlight. The shorter of the two men who had been leaning against the railing loped toward Abby. Caroline's eyes had yet to adjust to the vicious glare but she had the impression of compact strength and steely determination. He stopped a few feet from the maid.

  "You meanin' to tell me you ain't here to find yourself a husband, little lady?" Abby had the classic Irish temper and wouldn't hesitate to use her fists, outcome be damned. Caroline stepped forward and faced her maid. "Abigail," she said, her voice quiet but stern, "don't you have other duties to occupy your time?"

  "My sainted mother would turn in her grave if I be lettin' that sorry excuse for a man insult you like that."

  "Insult me?" Caroline's voice rose in surprise. "I can fight my own battles, Abby." She motioned behind her with a toss of her head. "The day one of those unwashed ruffians can insult me, I'll—"

  "You'll what?"

  A different voice. Lower, deeper, more intimidating. She spun around. With the sun backlighting him as it was, she couldn't make out the cowboy's features but somehow she knew it was the man in the skintight breeches.

  "This is a private conversation, sir," she said brusquely. "If you don't mind..." She let her words trail gracefully away and turned back to Abby. Men in Boston had always responded instantly to her cool dismissals. "Come, Abby."

  Abby, however, had forgotten Caroline's very existence. Her maid's eyes, and the eyes of their traveling companions, were focused squarely on the arrogant, rude cowboy she'd just dismissed.

  "Abigail." Caroline raised her voice to be heard over the scuffle that had spilled from the hotel into the street beyond them, "If you would please help the driver find our trunks, we can be on our way." More than anything, she wanted a long, relaxing bath and a meal served on china plates instead of those horrid metal bowls found in most of the rail-stop outposts they'd dined in along the way.

  The fighting in the street was spreading closer to them. She reconsidered. A bath would be lovely but perhaps her first goal should be reaching the Crazy Arrow alive. The stagecoach ride through Indian Territory hadn't seemed nearly as dangerous as just standing at the depot at Silver Spur.