The Bounty Hunter's Baby. Erica Vetsch

tiny wife bustled down the steps, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Yes?” Her dark eyes darted quickly, lighting on Esther. “Why, Esther Jensen, it’s so nice to see you. It’s been weeks, child. You don’t come in nearly often enough. And who is that there with you? A baby? My lands, child. Where did you get yourself a baby?” She embraced Esther and then hugged her again.

      “He’s an orphan.” Esther’s arms tightened around the boy. “We’re looking after him until Thomas can find his people.”

      “Thomas Beaufort.” Trudy’s smile lit the store. He snatched off his hat and nodded as she advanced on him with her arms outstretched. Trudy hugged everybody, he recalled. “I remember you. It’s good to see you back in these parts. Frank told me he heard you had a big arrest not too long ago. The Burton Boys? I try to keep up on all the news, especially when it’s about someone I know.”

      “Yes, ma’am.” Not only had he captured the four-man gang of outlaws, he’d earned himself a hefty bounty in the process.

      “Trudy.” Frank held up a length of flannel. “They need to outfit the little guy, and you’d know what they need better than I would.”

      “Of course, of course. Let me see.” Trudy, though bird-like and small, tended to blow through a room like a tornado. Esther was bustled over to the dry goods counter, and Trudy exclaimed over the baby, putting her arm around Esther’s waist and talking nineteen to the dozen.

      “Isn’t he beautiful? And you need a complete layette? Of course you do, what with this little sweetheart being dropped in your lap, as it were. I remember when my first was born. I didn’t have so much as a safety pin to call my own, traveling in that bouncy wagon across the plains. I cut up my best flannel petticoat to make diapers.” She continued on, talking and whisking bolts of fabric onto the counter. Her shears snicked as quickly as her tongue, cutting lengths and folding them. “Do you need me to include a pattern for the gowns? Thread, needles, bias tape? Of course you do. I have just the thing.”

      With the women occupied, Thomas motioned for Frank to join him. He had questions he didn’t want anyone overhearing.

      “Frank, you still know everybody in town?” Thomas reached for a couple of cans of peaches and set them on the counter.

      The storekeeper picked up a feather duster and flicked it over a row of McGuffey readers. “Can’t think of anybody I don’t know.” He grinned. “Course, if I could think of them, I’d know ’em, right?”

      “Has anybody heard anything about Jase Swindell lately?” Thomas kept his voice low.

      Frank stopped dusting. “That who you’re after now? Jase Swindell?”

      Thomas nodded. “Off and on for almost a year. Since he killed a guard while busting out of Huntsville. Seems he runs to Mexico, but he doesn’t stay there. Keeps coming back north.” The liaison with the woman was most likely responsible for that. Now that she was dead, would Swindell come back to Texas ever again?

      “We heard about the escape.” Scratching his chin, Frank thought hard. “If he’s been anywhere in the county, I haven’t gotten wind of it. When him and his gang got caught the first time, the rest of his kin around here lit a shuck for the hills, cleared out. Only one left is his sister, Regina. And she isn’t right in the head, from what I hear. Does her shopping over in Spillville, so I don’t hear much about her.”

      “Nobody else who used to run with the Swindells? Nobody around here who would hide him?”

      “No, can’t think of anybody. He left a lot of victims and no friends hereabouts. Like Esther, poor thing. You could’ve pushed me over with a twig when I heard her pa shot himself.”

      “He did what?” Thomas cringed as the question came out too loudly, and Trudy and Esther turned toward him. Lowering his head and his voice, he asked, “Esther said he was dead, but she didn’t say how.”

      “Well, she wouldn’t, would she? When the rustlers wiped out Elihu’s herd, he just didn’t have the strength to go on.”

      Thomas braced his hands on the countertop. Elihu had killed himself after his cattle had been rustled.

      Elihu’s cattle had been rustled by the Swindell Gang, led by Jase Swindell.

      Thomas looked down the store to where Esther cradled the baby.

      Jase Swindell’s baby.

      How could he tell her?

      Frank flicked the duster over another shelf. “Elihu left a note, telling Esther he was sorry, and begged her to forgive him and to do everything she could to hold on to the ranch. It was the talk of the county for months. The hands all quit. Sheriff Granville suspected at least half of them had to be in on the rustling. Poor Esther’s been taking in laundry and scratching out a living out there alone for the last five years.” Frank rubbed his palm across his bald head. “How long did you ride for the Double J?”

      Thomas shrugged, his mind still reeling as he put all the pieces together. “Just the one summer five years ago. But I didn’t punch cows. Jensen hired me on to fence a pasture. I spent three months driving post holes and stringing wire.” And watching for glimpses of the boss’s daughter.

      “Esther sure took her daddy’s death hard, especially since it was by his own hand. Some folks in town weren’t too nice to her right after it happened. Always thought that was a shame, since it wasn’t her fault. But folks feel peculiar about suicide. I wondered if she could make it when she set up as a laundress. From what she spends in here, she’s barely keeping body and soul together.”

      Guilt hooked its claws into Thomas’s chest. Esther, poor and struggling, didn’t fit what he’d known about her. And he’d left her to struggle on her own.

      “Frank,” Trudy called out, hands on hips as she scanned the shelves of fabric. “Did you sell the rest of that cotton sheeting? Or am I looking at it and just can’t see it?”

      Frank went to help, and Esther edged toward Thomas. “She keeps piling things onto the counter. I can’t seem to hold her back,” Esther whispered. “Surely a baby doesn’t need so many things. It’s going to cost the earth.”

      Thomas shrugged. “She’s raised three kids. I reckon she should know what one baby needs. Don’t worry about the expense.”

      “Don’t worry? I don’t think you know how things add up.” She bit the side of her thumbnail, the crease between her brows deepening. Frank’s assessment of her financial situation hit him again.

      Which made him more determined than ever to help her.

      “Peaches?” Esther picked up one of the cans he’d put on the counter. “I remember those were your favorite.” The wistful hint to her voice tugged at Thomas, harking back to happier days when she had surprised him with a peach cobbler for his birthday.

      “Still are, though I don’t get them often, being out on the trail all the time.”

      “Don’t you have a home base?” she asked. “Are you always moving from place to place?”

      He shrugged. “No home base. I go wherever the trail leads, me and Rip.” The dog’s head came up at the sound of his name. “We stay in hotels or boardinghouses or sleep out, depending on our quarry. We’re never in one place too long. Been like that all my life.”

      “That’s sad. I might have lost a lot, but I still have my home. I don’t know what I would do if I lost that, too.” Bleakness entered her eyes, and Thomas wanted to put his arms around her and the baby and tell her everything would be all right. But he had no right to do that and no assurance that things would be all right.

      The baby began to fuss, and Trudy bustled over. “Let’s go upstairs and get him changed before you head home. And I imagine you could use a cup of tea. While we’re at it, let’s look through my storage trunk. I might still have some baby things left over from my own children.”