The Bridegroom. Linda Miller Lael

from the bar, walked to the swinging doors, stopped their wild swaying with both hands. Watched over the top as old Horace’s sons flung him into the back of a buckboard by his suspenders, like a bale of hay by the twine. One of them scrambled up to take the reins, while the other climbed into the wagon-bed to hold the old man down with both hands.

      And that took some doing, all by itself.

      “Are they gone?” Monty asked tentatively, from somewhere behind Gideon.

      Gideon turned, saw the bartender back at his post, but poised to hit the floor or make another dash for safety if Dad and the boys chanced to return.

      “On their way home to supper,” Gideon said. “Looks like Ma will be right on time for the pie social.”

      With that, he plucked a coin from the pocket of his tailored vest, walked over to the bar and laid it down.

      “I don’t believe I caught your name,” Monty said, after swiping the coin off the bar with one paw.

      “I don’t believe I gave it,” Gideon replied.

      Monty narrowed his eyes, and recognition dawned, though Gideon had hoped it wouldn’t. His kinfolk were well-known in Phoenix, since it was only about a day’s ride from Stone Creek, and Rowdy, along with his best friend, Sam O’Ballivan, often had business there. As a boy, Gideon had accompanied them once or twice.

      “You’re that Yarbro kid, aren’t you? The marshal’s little brother. I used to work in one of the saloons up there in Stone Creek, and I recollect that you took a bullet at a dance one night, trying to catch hold of some fool that rode a horse right into the Cattlemen’s Meeting Hall.”

      As always, the word kid made Gideon bristle, way down deep where it didn’t show, and being over six feet tall, he didn’t consider himself anybody’s “little” anything, but he was feeling charitable after the beer, and somewhat resigned, so he let the comment pass.

      “Yep,” he said simply, turning to leave.

      “That Chink sawbones fixed you up,” Monty prattled on. Maybe it was nerves, considering the scuffle just past, but he’d sure turned talkative. “Wouldn’t have given spit for your chances, but he pulled you through with his needles and poultices.”

      That Chink. The term stuck under Gideon’s hide like a cactus needle.

      “He saved my life,” Gideon said stiffly, “and the life of somebody I cared about.” Lydia Fairmont had been the other patient, he recalled, eight years old and one of Lark’s students. Rowdy’s wife had been the schoolmarm up at Stone Creek back then, and had taken the neglected child under her wing. Where was Lydia now? Maybe Lark would know. “And his name was Hon Sing.”

      Monty hastened after him, came all the way to the sidewalk. “I didn’t mean no disrespect, Mr. Yarbro,” he prattled. “I truly did not set out to offend.”

      Hon Sing, along with his wife, Mai Lei, had gone back to China, after inheriting the old Porter house and eventually selling it at a high profit, once copper was discovered in the foothills rimming the still-small town.

      And that copper mine was the reason Gideon had been sent to Stone Creek. There was a strike brewing, and his job was to see that it didn’t happen.

      He made no response to the bartender’s apology, beyond a cursory nod. Turning his mind to other things, he crossed the street, wending his way between horses and buggies and slow-moving wagons headed in opposite directions. The Desert Oasis Hotel offered some attractive amenities, including hot and cold running water, a decent restaurant and its own barbershop.

      The lobby was opulent by Western standards, with carpets on the floors, leather sofas and copious potted palms.

      Gideon registered for a room on the second floor and sent the hotel’s sweep-up man—a boy, really—back to the depot for his suitcase. Climbing the broad staircase, intending to put the tub in his room to immediate use, he wondered again, now that she’d staked out a place in his thoughts, how little Lydia Fairmont was faring. She’d be an adult now, since ten years had passed, and maybe not so little anymore, either, he reflected with a smile. She was probably married—even at eight, with her silvery-fair hair and violet-blue eyes, she’d shown the promise of growing into a very fetching woman one day.

      Gideon’s smile slipped a little as he took out his key and let himself into the room. Lydia, grown up, with a husband and children? For some reason, the idea didn’t set well with him.

      It was because she was delicate, he told himself. Too fragile, surely, to be bearing some man’s babies, or chopping wood, or any of the thousand other hard tasks a wife was called upon to do.

      He pushed the recollection of Lydia Fairmont to the back of his mind.

      In Stone Creek, he’d have plenty to occupy his thoughts, between Rowdy and Wyatt and their families and the work he’d be doing at the Copper Crown Mine. He’d told plenty of lies as it was, and he’d have to tell more before it was over. Keeping track of them, so his story stayed straight and his brothers didn’t figure out his real reason for coming back home, would be as much as he could manage.

      Anyhow, there was no place in his plans for a woman—at least, not the kind Lydia had surely turned out to be.

      LYDIA’S TWO GREAT-AUNTS, Mittie and Millie, spinsters the pair of them and both in their late sixties, twittered like schoolgirls as they peered through the tall, narrow windows on either side of the front door.

      A loud chugging sound came from the street, along with an ominous bang that caused Lydia, lurking unnoticed in the doorway to the main parlor, to start slightly.

      “Here he comes now,” Mittie enthused, under her breath.

      “Too bad he’s so fat and old and homely,” Millie lamented. “Our Lydia requires a handsome husband, one who’ll give her lots of children.”

      “Hush,” Mittie scolded, in a whisper. “Lydia will hear you! And for the life of me, I can’t think why she would turn up her nose at a man like Jacob Fitch. He might be portly and of a certain age, and I’ll even concede that he’s not much to look at. But he’s rich and he owns an automobile.”

      Lydia, carefully trained, since she’d been brought to this imposing house as an eight-year-old orphan, in many things, not the least of which was the wholesale impropriety of eavesdropping, cleared her throat delicately in order to make her presence known.

      Both aunts blushed prettily when they turned to face her.

      “Mr. Fitch has arrived,” Millie announced, recovering first. Like Mittie, she was small, almost doll-like, with the near-purple eyes that were the pride of the Fairmont line. As young women, the sisters had been breathtakingly beautiful, as their portraits attested. According to Helga, the housekeeper, Millie had loved a Confederate major, Mittie, a Union captain. Both men had been killed in the line of duty.

      Word of the deaths had arrived on the same day, the legend went, and the aunts had worn mourning gowns ever since. Now, they contented themselves with the ups and downs of other people’s romances, especially their only niece’s.

      If indeed the arrangement between Lydia and Mr. Fitch could be called a romance. It certainly didn’t feel like one to her.

      “Let’s go and make tea,” Mittie said, snatching Millie by the puffed sleeve of her sad black dress and dragging her past Lydia, in the direction of the kitchen.

      Lydia suppressed an urge to flee, or beg her aunts to tell Mr. Fitch she was indisposed—anything to avoid receiving the man and passing an interminable hour of “courting” in the parlor.

      But, like eavesdropping, lying to evade one’s social obligations was not considered proper—and Lydia placed a great deal of importance on propriety.

      As always, Fitch pounded at the front door, foregoing the bell, with its pleasant, jingly little ring.

      Lydia smoothed her lavender dress, laid out for her that