A GAMBLER’S MAGIC
By Alice Duncan
A Gambler’s Magic
Copyright © 2000 by Alice Duncan
All rights reserved.
Published 2000 by Dorchester Publishing Co.
A Love Spell Book
Smashwords edition September 1, 2009
Visit aliceduncan.net
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Chapter One
Alexander McMurdo first set eyes on Miss Joy Hardesty when the small band of missionaries with which she was traveling straggled into his wagon yard in Rio Hondo, New Mexico Territory, on the third day of March, 1873. He’d known she was coming—indeed, he had summoned her hither—and he watched curiously from the door of his small home. His house sat right next to his mercantile and dry-goods store at the back of his business establishment’s huge yard.
As soon as the group arrived, its leader, the Reverend Mr. Hezekiah P. Thrash, fell to his knees and thanked their blessed Heavenly Father for having delivered them out of the wilderness. The army unit assigned to protect the missionaries, and the Mescalero scouts riding with them, watched this performance with tolerant fascination. They didn’t appear the least surprised by Thrash’s behavior.
Alexander McMurdo—Mac to his friends—wasn’t surprised, either, and merriment bubbled in him. He had a feeling the reverend would have made a fine actor had not his religious zeal carried him down another road in life. McMurdo held a keen appreciation for enthusiastic people. He smiled at Thrash, nodded to the minister’s audience, and decided to add to a smallish bit of unearthly zest to everyone’s enjoyment.
In this endeavor, he made smoke from his old black briar pipe wreath ‘round his head in a manner he knew to be reminiscent of a halo, and parted the clouds riding high in the sky so that a bright beam of sunlight poured down upon him. He knew he presented an affecting picture for anyone possessed of an ardent nature.
Sure enough, the Reverend Mr. Thrash, espying Alexander McMurdo bathed in celestial light, lifted his arms unto the heavens and let out with a fevered string of Hallelujahs, Thanks be to Gods, and Praise His Holy Names. An eloquent fellow, Thrash. Mac approved.
It looked as if the good reverend’s followers, while perhaps not as rapturously moved as he, knew what to do when Thrash carried on in this vein. They got down on their knees, too, and began to add their paeans of thanks to those of their leader.
Mac watched Miss Joy Hardesty with particular interest. It was she among this group in whose welfare and future he had chosen to intervene. She looked around with displeasure, clearly decided there was no help for it, and knelt too, after first shaking out her handkerchief and settling it on the ground in front of her. In that way, Mac presumed, she hoped to keep dust from dirtying the skirt of her gown. He grinned at so futile a gesture undertaken against such formidable odds.
An interesting female, Joy. Her lips appeared set into a perpetual frown, her eyes peered out at the world guardedly, as if she didn’t trust it, and she looked as though she suffered from dyspepsia. Mac took note of her pinched features, mousy bearing, and general air of unhappiness, and decided his errand of mercy had come none too soon.
Never had a female been less aptly named. Poor thing. If there ever had been an unjoyful specimen sent to languish on the earth, Joy Hardesty was it.
It was a shame, too. McMurdo knew there was a buoyant spirit trapped inside her somewhere, but that it had been beaten down until it barely sparked any longer. She was probably ashamed of that wee remaining spark when it did manage to sputter to life, too. Mac got the feeling she’d been taught to deplore anything even remotely connected with her essential nature; to consider human instincts improper and impure. She’d been driven so far from her original humanity that she believed she needed to quash her individuality whenever it reared what she perceived to be its ugly head.
A sad and pitiful representative of the species, Joy Hardesty. Mac clucked with sympathy—not that she’d appreciate his sympathy. In fact, he was fairly certain she’d resent it like fire.
She was infatuated with Thrash. Mac watched her watch the minister. Her longing was so ill-disguised, Mac could feel it from where he stood. She didn’t know it, of course, but what she craved wasn’t Thrash himself. What Joy longed for was Thrash’s essence, his humanity, his wholehearted, expansive belief in himself and his work.
Although she’d never admit it to anyone, Joy didn’t believe in a single thing. She was as expansive as a collapsed bladder. As animated as a dead robin. As happy as a man with a noose around his neck. Mac could see the emptiness in her soul from where he stood. He fancied the desert wind whistling through it as if through a barren cavern.
He heaved a large, sympathetic sigh. She was very like a prickly pear, Joy Hardesty, all thorns and prickles on the outside. A body had to work so hard to discover the soft sweetness hidden within that few even tried. Not an easy female in any sense of the word. She’d be a tough nut to crack and was likely to fight tooth and nail to hold onto her misery. Gloom was all she’d ever known, after all, and our Joy didn’t cotton to original thinking. It frightened her. She would most assuredly cause Mac all sorts of trouble. He liked her, though. In fact, he liked her a lot.
It tickled him immensely that she hated him on sight.
# # #
Elijah Perry allowed himself only one very small drink from his canteen. The water was brackish, warm, and unpalatable, but Elijah knew he shouldn’t feel such a strong sense of indignation about it. It had been his decision to set out into the wild New Mexico Territory; nobody’d forced him. He’d lived in the west long enough to know the water here was full of alkali, the weather harsh, and the landscape bleak and often deadly. He’d headed here on purpose for those very reasons. It was, therefore, unreasonable of him to be peeved at it for possessing all the qualities he’d sought in the first place.
Perverse by nature, he was peeved anyway. His own contradictory emotions tickled his cynical side. Since Elijah’s cynical side had grown over the years until it was about all there was left of him, it made him grin now as he hooked the canteen back onto his saddle. “Criminy, Ben, you just can’t please some folks.”
Ben, Elijah’s long-suffering horse, broached no reply. From the way his head drooped, though, Elijah judged he wasn’t delighted by their circumstances, either.
After another hour or so, Elijah squinted into the distance, wondering if he’d contracted a brain fever, or if he truly beheld signs of humanity up ahead. His eyes were no longer infallible, as they’d been in his youth. Not for the first time, Elijah considered the prospect of purchasing some spectacles if he ever saw civilization again. He already owned a pair for reading, but he didn’t put them on except in private because he still clung to a remnant of his vanity. He shook his head and grinned in a self-mocking manner. “Whoever heard of a gambling man wearing specs, Ben?”
Ben returned no answer to this query, either. Undismayed, Elijah shaded his eyes and squinted harder at what might or might not signify a community of man in the distance. He was pretty sure he saw a couple of windmills, although their wooden frameworks were so much the same color as the surrounding countryside, he couldn’t be certain.
“Rio Hondo should be around here somewhere, boy,” he said kindly, hoping in that way to perk poor Ben up. The horse didn’t seem to be impressed, but Elijah felt a little perkier.
Not that Rio Hondo was a hotbed of civilization. In truth, it was a hiccup. A speck. A dot. Or, amended Elijah with his customary dark humor, more likely a blot, on the otherwise empty high planes of southeastern New Mexico Territory that the few folks who knew about it had begun calling the Pecos Valley. He’d also heard some people call this region the Seven Rivers Country.
He eyed the barren landscape and wondered where those seven rivers were and, if they existed, why there wasn’t so much as a speck of greenery to be seen. Strange country, this.
So was Rio Hondo. It was, in fact, a nothing of a place, established as a stopover for cattlemen driving herds to forts in the territory or north to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, or even up into Colorado and on to Kansas and Missouri. It was nothing in the middle of a vaster nothing. It was a place to which nobody ever came and few knew was there. It was, in short, exactly what Elijah had been seeking.
He didn’t know why. All he knew was that during his last night in San Antonio, when he’d won the biggest stake of his gambling life, and bedded the most beautiful whore in town, been fawned over by the largest group of the most worthy fellows, and had regaled all of them with the most amusing stories, the emptiness in his soul had finally swallowed up the rest of him. Nothing in the whole of his life mattered, and Elijah felt sick as the enormity of his own nothingness struck him.
That wasn’t entirely true. One thing mattered. He patted his vest pocket now, even though he knew his letter to Virginia still resided there. He’d wait until the day before he left Rio Hondo and post it from there, presuming the village had some kind of postal service.
Virginia was the only thing in his life that mattered, however. And, since he was in a brutal truth-telling mood, he reminded himself that he wasn’t even sure about her. For all he knew, she’d grown up to be a faithless jade just like all the other females in the world.
And men. Elijah, who knew himself to be as faithless and jaded as any woman, didn’t hold Virginia’s sex against her. His antipathy was expansive. It included everyone without prejudice.
If she’d changed, he didn’t want to know about it. Sometimes he feared that if he discovered Virginia had become like all the rest of the people in the world, the last tiny spark of virtue remaining in him would die, and he’d be left bankrupt—black and shriveled and dried up. He shivered and told himself to stop thinking about it.
At any rate, the echoing hollowness of his life had ultimately driven Elijah out of San Antonio. He’d felt almost compelled to find an emptiness bigger than himself, as if in that way his own nothingness might be absorbed once and for all, and he might either find peace or disappear altogether.
He snorted—cynically, of course—and grumbled, “Peace. Ha! Damn-fool thing for a man to crave.”
Hell, the only time he’d ever felt alive had been in the middle of the war when his life might have been blasted from his body at any second—and by so small a thing as a bullet. The disparity in size between men and bullets and the relative effectiveness of each amused Elijah, if such a black-edged sense of the ridiculous as he possessed could be counted as humor.
Well, it didn’t matter now. He was here, and so was Rio Hondo. He was glad for Ben’s sake. The poor horse was tired.
Elijah rode Ben down Second Street. He wondered where First Street was and, if such an avenue existed, why it, and not Second, hadn’t been accorded the honor of being Rio Hondo’s main street. He didn’t think hard about it because he didn’t care—but he did wonder.
“There’s a wagon yard, Ben.”
The territory was too new and too raw to have sprouted amenities such as hotels except in the largest of its cities. Elijah figured that this place, McMurdo’s Wagon Yard, was where he’d be putting up.
He could probably have found overnight accommodations at the Pecos Saloon. He saw it across the street from the wagon yard, looking shabby and windblown. Around here, everything looked shabby and windblown. But he didn’t like trying to sleep in saloons. They were noisy and often violent, and Elijah didn’t care to have his sleep, which came to him rarely and never deeply, interrupted by gunfire. Such interruptions had happened before, and they invariably set his heart to racing and him to gasping for breath. He was too old for that sort of nonsense.
No, Elijah thought the wagon yard would suit him down to the ground. He guided Ben through the huge double gates, and prepared himself to smile at the proprietor.
# # #
Alexander McMurdo looked up and grinned when a horseman entered his wagon yard.
“Howdy, stranger.”
Mac enjoyed speaking the vernacular of the area. It made him feel as one with the community. Besides, it irritated Joy Hardesty, and he took satisfaction from that. He shot a glimpse at her now. She’d been sweeping off the front porch of his mercantile establishment and looked as sour as a pickle. It was a familiar expression for her, and it struck Mac as funny.
She’d glanced up from her sweeping when she heard the sound of a horse’s hooves and seemed intrigued, in glum sort of way, by the mounted stranger. When she heard Mac chuckle, she peeked over at him, and her face pinched up even more.
“Ye’ll get wrinkles if ye keep scowlin’ like that, lass,” Mac said kindly. He needled her every now and then because he figured she could use it. Of course she was offended by his levity and renewed her attack on the floor as if it, rather than Mac, had dared mention her gloomy demeanor.
“How-do,” said the man in response to Mac’s greeting. He grinned, tugged the brim of his dusty black hat politely, drew his horse to a halt, and swung down from the saddle. He let out with a huge groan as soon as his boots hit the earth.
Mac grinned back. “Long trip?”
“Very long.” The weary traveler put a hand to the small of his back, stretched, and groaned again. “Not as young as I used to be.”
“Reckon none of us are.”
The man was almost as interesting a specimen as Joy, Mac decided. He was a handsome fellow, although he was right about one thing: He wasn’t as young as he used to be.
In spite of the dust covering him, he was as natty as a man could be. Clad in black trousers, black coat, black boots, and black vest and hat, the austerity of his garb was offset only by a shirt that would probably be white again if it were laundered, and a long gray duster.
The fellow didn’t go in for frills, Mac noticed with approval. Nothing as garish as a silver conch gleamed from his belt or hat brim. Even his gun was unobtrusive. A sober accessory, it was set into a black leather holster that rode high on his hip, butt forward for an easy grab by either hand should such a maneuver prove necessary. The fellow didn’t flaunt his skill, but Mac could tell he knew how to use that instrument of death.
Even if Mac didn’t already know who the man was, he would have pegged him for a gambler and a wanderer. A bored, slightly dangerous aura hovered about him. He’d probably had women fawning over him all his life because he possessed the world-weary, indifferent attitude of a satyr. Women were always fascinated by difficult men in Mac’s experience.
This fellow had dark hair, silvering around the edges, and a swarthy complexion. He’d lost the washboard belly of his youth, Mac noticed with a silent chuckle, although he sucked his gut in when he spied Joy plying her broom. When he took off his hat to swipe an arm across his sweaty forehead, Mac saw that the hair on his skull was thinning, too. Nope, nowhere near as young as he used to be.
Shoot, the poor fellow’d showed up just in time. Another year or two, and he might have been beyond even Mac’s help, and Mac was the most powerful wizard of his race. He stuck out a hand. “Alexander McMurdo, young feller. Welcome to Rio Hondo.”
The man shook Mac’s hand. “Elijah Perry, Mr. McMurdo. Pleased to be here.”
“Planning to spend some time with us folks in the territory, are you, Mr. Perry?”
“Thought I’d stay awhile, yes.”
“Don’t get too many visitors to Rio Hondo.”
“Don’t expect you do.” Elijah Perry smiled slightly, as though the fact appealed to him.
“Well, come on along, and I’ll show you where you can take care of your horse and yourself. We don’t have us any hotels in Rio Hondo yet, but you can be comfortable here if you don’t mind it a little rough.”
“I don’t mind it rough.”
And that was that. Mac led Elijah to a stall, and pointed out the horse feed and curry equipment. Mac indicated the wash house, and explained that he would gladly provide stew and cornbread and a glass of beer for a nickel, when Mr. Perry was ready to eat. Elijah nodded.
“Of course, Joy over there don’t approve of the beer,” Mac said with a deliberate twinkle.
Elijah, who hadn’t bothered looking in Joy’s direction after his first glance, eyed her now. “Yeah. She looks like it.”
Mac laughed. “Poor thing. She was with a group of missionaries headed for the Mexican jungles.”
“Looks like that, too.”
“She took sick, though, and they went on without her. She’s workin’ for me until she can earn her passage back east again.”
Elijah shook his head. “Don’t know that I don’t feel a little sorry for you, Mr. McMurdo. She doesn’t look like an easy sort of female to get on with.”
“Joy’s only feelin’ a little dejected, Mr. Perry. Life’s been a disappointment to her, you see.”
“Yeah. Life’s been a disappointment to a lot of us, Mr. McMurdo.”
Mac patted him on the back, and he appeared startled. “Call me Mac, Mr. Perry. Please call me Mac. Everybody does.” He winked at Elijah. “Except Joy, of course.”
Recovering his composure, Elijah managed a grin and said, “Of course.”
# # #
Joy listened to the two men talking about her, and wished she were anywhere else on earth but where she was, doing anything else on earth but what she was doing.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that she should have been prevented from fulfilling her God-given destiny by so paltry a thing as influenza.
“It’s your own fault,” she muttered under her breath. “You know what Mother always told you. You allowed your weakness to prevail. You should have battled the illness, fought it off, vanquished it with your own strength of spirit. And prayer.”
She plied the broom more forcefully still as her mother’s voice lectured her in her brain. You’re a gutless creature, Joy Hardesty. A leaky vessel. Joy sniffed disconsolately. “I’m just like my father, in fact. If I don’t shape up, even God won’t want me.”
Already God didn’t want her or she’d be in Mexico with Mr. Thrash instead of in Rio Hondo with Alexander McMurdo. Joy knew she was still feeble from her illness when tears sprang up in her eyes. Ruthlessly, because she knew those tears were weak and pitiful and proved her unfit to be her mother’s daughter, she swallowed them. “This is a judgment on you, Joy Hardesty. A judgment.”
A tear leaked past the armed and fortified barrier she’d erected against it, and Joy heaved a dispirited sigh. Why, oh why, couldn’t she do anything but fail in life? Every time she tried to be what her mother wanted her to be, to do what her mother wanted her to do, she failed. Miserably. She’d never been able to do anything else. Which is why she was here, all alone except for the company of a few miserable sinners, in a hostile territory, sweeping a floor for a living.
Knowing she was a failure gnawed at her. Every waking hour of the day, Joy carried the pain of her grief, like an open wound, in her chest. Every breath hurt her and restricted her breathing. The pain in her chest had been with her since her earliest days on earth, and was now as much a part of her as her skin and hair.
What hurt even more than the knowledge that she was a miserable failure—hurt so much that Joy had been crying herself to sleep every night since she’d overcome her fever and realized what had happened—was knowing that the Reverend Mr. Hezekiah P. Thrash had gone on without her. As if she were of no more significance to him than a mule which, once crippled, had to be abandoned.
According to Mr. McMurdo—and a less worthy example of the human male Joy had yet to meet—Mr. Thrash said he’d send for her if he could. If he could. Mr. Thrash hadn’t stuck around to tell Joy so himself. Nor had he left her so much as a scribbled note wishing her well and explaining his plans. He’d just consigned her to Mr. McMurdo’s care and gone on without her.
“He’ll send for me if he can,” Joy murmured, sending a spray of dirt off the porch and into the yard. Not that it would stay there. The wind would blow it right back onto the porch again. She didn’t know why she bothered, except that she was a Christian woman and Mr. McMurdo, the wicked old scoundrel, was allowing her to work in his mercantile store until she’d made enough money for passage back to Auburn, Massachusetts, where she’d come from.
“I don’t want to go back to Auburn,” she whispered as she set the broom in the corner. She pressed a hand to the ache in her chest and wondered if everyone in the world hurt like this, or if there was something physically wrong with her. A cancer of the soul, perhaps. “I want to be in the Mexican jungles with Mr. Thrash, preaching to the heathens and saving men’s souls.”
“There are plenty of heathens around here you can preach to, if you’re of a mind to, lass.”
Joy jumped and whirled around. She felt her cheeks catch fire. Jerusalem! She hated it when Mr. McMurdo sneaked up behind her. He was the most silent fellow Joy had ever met. She considered it merely one more manifestation of his fallen nature that he should creep about like this. She didn’t respond, because she was near tears, and she didn’t want to feel any more like a fool than she already did.
“We have us a visitor for a while, Joy, m’dear,” the old sinner continued.
Joy saw the tall stranger who had lately ridden in to the wagon yard standing behind Mr. McMurdo. He was a handsome man, but Joy knew better than to expect his insides to match his outsides. She inclined her head slightly, feeling it was only her Christian duty to acknowledge his presence, but unsure how to greet so obviously wicked a man. Joy could tell. He was simply one more example of the revolting, depraved men who wandered around in this part of the world, and he made her want to hug herself to ward off the strange sensations his presence evoked within her.
The visitor tipped his hat.
Although Joy would never, ever, in her wildest fits of discontent, say such a thing aloud, she thought Mr. McMurdo was right about the saving of souls. She’d often wondered, since she’d been abandoned in Rio Hondo, why Mr. Thrash hadn’t chosen to spread the word out here, in this wretched territory. The awful, violent men who lived here could benefit from a taste of the Word of God as much as—perhaps more than—any heathen Indian.
“This here’s Mr. Elijah Perry, m’dear.”
Joy nodded again. She hated it when Mr. McMurdo called her “my dear” in that wretched Scottish accent of his. He sounded so sly and amused. There wasn’t a single thing about this place that amused Joy.
Both men stared at her as if waiting for her to do something. Because she was her mother’s daughter and would never do anything to which her mother might object—not even be rude to unknown sinners—she gave the stranger one more stiff nod and said, “How do you do?”
The horrid man grinned at her, as if he found her amusing, just as Mr. McMurdo did. “How-do, ma’am?”
Joy hated being the object of others’ entertainment.
Twinkling in a most unsuitable manner, Mr. McMurdo then went on to say, “Mr. Perry, please allow me to introduce you to Miss Joy Hardesty.”
“Miss Hardesty.”
Mr. Elijah Perry’s dark eyes seemed to rake her up and down. Joy felt the heat in her cheeks deepen. Why, the man was looking at her as if she were no better than those awful women at the Pecos Saloon! She felt as though she were being stripped naked by his eyes. The lecherous fiend! And Mr. McMurdo, of course, made not the slightest effort to stop him.
Well, she wouldn’t let this place or these men get to her. Joy was a proper lady, and a Christian, and she knew this was a tribulation visited upon her by a Divine Providence to test the nature of her character and moral fiber.
She dropped a curtsy as stiff as she was. “You have a fine name, Mr. Perry.”
“Thank you, Miss Hardesty.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, sir.” It wasn’t true, but Joy knew that lies in pursuit of graciousness could be forgiven. Her mother had told her so, and her mother had been a saint. Everyone said so.
“Are you really? You astonish me.”
Joy popped up from her curtsy as if she’d been goosed. She guessed the bitter twist on Elijah Perry’s mouth was supposed to be a smile. Mr. McMurdo’s grin was unmistakable. She sniffed to show them both that, while she was willing to be polite, she was above them, by virtue of morality if nothing more.
“Will you please fetch Mr. Perry some stew and cornbread, Joy? I’ll be in the back room, gettin’ him a glass of beer.”
“Certainly.” She turned to do Mr. McMurdo’s bidding.
Joy wondered if she should say something about the iniquity of drinking. Her mother would have told her this was a golden opportunity, provided by the Heavenly Father, for her to prove her worth as a crusader and a missionary.
She should offer these hardened, dissolute men a brief, kind lecture about the evils of alcoholic spirits. In truth, it was her duty to do so. Joy’s mother wouldn’t have shirked the task, no matter how unreceptive her audience was certain to be. Joy’s mother was willing to lecture anybody about anything. After all, she’d known best.
Joy’s heart was aching, though, and her eyes burned with unshed tears, and her head hurt, and her stomach churned, and the pain in her chest throbbed so hard she could barely walk, much less talk, and she didn’t say a word. Some missionary she was.
She could feel Mr. McMurdo and Mr. Perry silently mocking her behind her back. Melancholia. The word taunted her.
It’s melancholia troubling you, Joy. Melancholia is a disease of the spirit fostered by human vanity and fanned by the devil, and you must pray to rid yourself of it.
Yes, mother.
The ancient conversation followed Joy into the kitchen, and echoed in her brain until she wanted clap her hands over her ears and scream to drown it out.
There was no reason these men’s opinions should matter to her. They were sinners. Their view of her shouldn’t matter anymore than a gentle stirring borne to her upon the breeze—not that there was such a thing in this miserable place. The wind blew a gale every single day, and there wasn’t anything gentle within a thousand miles.
Oh, how she missed Auburn! How she missed the lush green of her Massachusetts home. How she missed Mr. Thrash. How she deplored her own weakness of body, mind, and soul. If only she’d remained healthy, she might be with Mr. Thrash now, in the jungles of deepest Mexico, saving the souls of those poor savages who’d never had the opportunity to hear God’s message before.
But no. Her melancholia had conquered her best intentions and made her succumb to the influenza.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Joy.
Yes, mother.
Joy shook her head and frowned as she dipped out a hearty portion of the stew. There was the difference in a nut shell, she decided. Unlike the men residing in and around Rio Hondo, those poor South-American natives hadn’t been given the opportunity to better themselves. Mr. Thrash was going to give it to them.
These men—Alexander McMurdo and Elijah Perry—had heard God’s message and chosen to ignore it. That was why they seemed so much worse to Joy than those poor benighted savages in the jungle.
Feeling martyred, Joy bore Mr. Perry’s stew and cornbread to him on a tray. Mr. McMurdo had a table set up beside the pot-bellied stove in a corner of his mercantile where travelers could eat in any weather. The stove was cold today, since the weather had turned unseasonably warm. Elijah Perry lounged in front of it, looking out of place. It was the first time Joy had felt anything at all akin to him—and she didn’t feel much then. Joy was out of place, too, but not for the same reasons.
“Here you are, Mr. Perry.” She balanced the tray in one hand and picked up his bowl of stew with the other, preparing to set it down in front of him.
“Allow me, Miss Hardesty.”
Joy didn’t like it when Mr. Perry took the tray from her and held it politely so she could remove his cornbread, dining utensils, and a napkin. She said, “Thank you,” in a stifled voice because she knew she should. She didn’t want to thank him for anything.
“You’re quite welcome.” His own voice was deep and dark and rich, and hinted of southern evenings and smooth whiskey. Not that Joy would know anything about whiskey, smooth or otherwise.
Because she was uncomfortable, she lifted her chin. She found herself unable to look Mr. Perry in the eye, but directed her glance over his left shoulder. “If you need anything else, please let me know. I shall be working on Mr. McMurdo’s books at the counter.”
He inclined his head in the manner of a gentleman. “Thank you, Miss Hardesty. I’ll bear it in mind, should I need anything.”
Whatever that meant. He grinned devilishly, and his words sounded provocative, although Joy couldn’t imagine why. She snatched the tray from his hands and marched back to the counter.
She didn’t look at Elijah Perry again until she’d carried the tray to the kitchen, retrieved Mac’s big ledger book and a box full of receipts, and dragged a high stool up to the mercantile counter. She sat on business side of the counter, away from the floor of the mercantile, because she preferred having several feet of hard wood between her and the rest of this hostile territorial world. She’d rather have the continent between them but settled for what she could get.
Once she’d arranged herself on the stool she dove into her work, intending to ignore Mr. Perry. Against her will, her attention wavered, her pencil stilled, and her gaze stole over to him. Mr. McMurdo, she noted with displeasure, had brought Mr. Perry a mug of the devil’s brew.
She’d never seen anyone take over a room with less effort than Mr. Elijah Perry did. In fact, he wasn’t doing a thing except eating his stew, but his presence overwhelmed the small store. There was an almost unnatural stillness about the man; yet Joy sensed tension in him, as if he were a tightly wound spring that could explode into action any second. Mr. Hezekiah P. Thrash could take lessons from Mr. Elijah Perry when it came to capturing a congregation’s attention.
On that thought, which she knew to be scandalous, Joy frowned, tore her gaze away from Mr. Perry, and directed it at the open ledger in front of her. As if the godly Hezekiah Thrash could benefit from a single thing learned from that dreadful sinner, Elijah Perry.
Joy was tapping the end of her pencil against her nose, staring off into space, and contemplating the nature of evil when Elijah Perry looked up from his stew bowl. The movement drew her attention, and she turned to find him grinning at her.
“Lost in thought, Miss Hardesty?”
She frowned back. “Yes. Is there something I can do for you?”
He held up his bowl. Schooling his handsome face into a pleading expression that would have done credit to a scrubby schoolboy, he said, “May I please have more, ma’am? This is right good stuff.”
With a sniff to show him that she wasn’t fooled by his pleasant demeanor, that she was made of impermeable rectitude and couldn’t be beguiled by mere human fleshpots, Joy slid from her stool and went to get his bowl. “Of course, Mr. Perry.”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am.”
He sounded intolerably meek and ever so polite. It was an act; Joy knew it. It was an act designed to catch people off guard and make them think there was some good in Elijah Perry. Joy knew better. Elijah Perry was a bad man, and there was no wrapping him up in clean linen or making anything else out of him. She thought Satan himself might have sounded thus when tempting Judas Iscariot into betraying our Lord.
Then she remembered that it wasn’t her place to judge her fellow man.
Then she reminded herself that the only way a person had to ascertain the merits of his fellow beings on earth was by his actions—and Mr. Elijah Perry’s actions proclaimed him to be a sinner.
Choose your company carefully, Joy Hardesty. Don’t consort with the worldly. Your nature is too weak to withstand temptation.
Yes mother.
Bearing her mother’s admonition in mind, and determined not to allow her weak nature to succumb to worldly lures, Joy was filled with righteousness and holy virtue when she bore Elijah’s second bowl of stew out to him.
Another thought kept her visage grim. She didn’t hold with giving people food without them paying for it. She knew, because her mother had told her so, that giving people things only taught them that idleness paid. But Mr. McMurdo had laughed when she’d told him the same thing. He’d said a nickel was plenty, and no man could eat more than a nickel’s worth of his stew, no matter how many times she refilled his bowl.
She didn’t understand his reasoning—after all, he put lots of meat in his stew—but she did as he’d bidden her. Her mother would have been able to come up with an argument that would have persuaded Mr. McMurdo of the faultiness of his reasoning, but Joy, unfortunately, was nothing like her mother. It was her primary failing in a life fraught with failings.
Holding her back as straight as a stick—not a difficult proposition given the tightness of her corset stays—she set the bowl in front of Mr. Perry in a manner calculated to let him know what she thought of him. And second helpings.
“Here’s your second bowl of stew, Mr. Perry.”
“Thank you, Miss Hardesty.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Perry.”
“It’s very good stew. Did you make it, Miss Hardesty?”
“No, sir. Mr. McMurdo made it.”
He looked up at her, a teasing expression on his face. “Think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.”
Joy frowned at him. Although she wrinkled her brow and thought and thought, she had no idea what he’d meant by that.
Chapter Two
Elijah sat back, sighed, and only refrained from patting his belly because he was a grown man and knew the habit to be childish. McMurdo’s stew could almost reconcile a fellow to banishment in this godforsaken territory.
Perhaps not entirely godforsaken. He glanced in Joy Hardesty’s direction and decided if that was godliness, he’d just as soon skip it. She sat hunched over a big ledger book behind the counter of the mercantile, and glared at the page upon which she worked as if she bore it a personal grudge. She looked like a missionary, all right—all vinegar and prudishness and austerity. Elijah couldn’t understand what some females found so distasteful about human nature, but that one looked like she’d rather beat it off with a stick than succumb to anything human—or natural.
Not that he cared for human nature much himself, but at least he had some fairly good reasons from which he’d forged his opinion. He’d bet any amount of money that Joy Hardesty had never seen so much as a small glimpse of the horrors men could perpetrate on each other.
He wondered how old she was, and wagered with himself on the answer. Twenty-five. He’d have to ask McMurdo.
He pushed his chair back until it was balanced on its rear two legs, and propped himself against the wall while he studied Joy Hardesty some more. Taking critical stock of her features, he guessed she wasn’t really ugly—except for the expression on her face, which was ugly as sin. He grinned because the metaphor struck him as comically incongruous. A missionary lady who was as ugly as sin; ha! Sometimes Elijah was so damned clever, he amazed himself.
Her hair was brown. There was no way to tell if it was plain old brown-brown or if it had any interesting highlights, because there wasn’t enough light in the room by which to study it. Besides, she had it braided into two skinny whips that were coiled up as tight as she was. She’d wrapped them around her head and pinned them down. Elijah bet they wouldn’t dare try to get out of those pins if they knew what was good for them. From what he could see, there wasn’t anything about Joy Hardesty that wasn’t coiled up tight.
The calico dress she wore was about as unbecoming as any Elijah’d ever seen. He wondered if she’d gone out of her way to select the least flattering color and style she could find, or if the gown’s selection had been an unfortunate accident. It was brown, too, but the brown of her dress and the brown of her hair didn’t look good together. Combined, they made the brown of her eyes look like mud.
Her complexion was pale. Sallow, actually. She looked skinny and sickly and altogether unappealing. Elijah, who liked most women a shade better than he liked most men, decided that if he’d met more women like Joy before this his opinion of the two sexes would undoubtedly be different.
All that was beside the point. Although the prospect wasn’t very attractive, Elijah guessed he’d have to deal with her again. With a sigh, he lowered the chair legs to the floor, picked up his empty bowl, plate, and beer mug, and carted them to the counter. He figured he might get a lecture if he left them on the table. He was kind of surprised she hadn’t taken him to task for being free with the furniture when he’d tipped his chair back against the wall. On the other hand, it wasn’t her furniture, so maybe she didn’t care.
“Here, ma’am. Thanks for the chow.”
She looked up with a grimace. Elijah wasn’t surprised by that. Something else surprised him, however. He experienced a quick, sharp pang of pity for this unhappy woman. That surprised him. Hell, what did he care about her?
McMurdo’s explanation for Joy’s sour disposition rolled through Elijah’s mind, though, and he wondered how life could have disappointed her so badly. After all, she wasn’t that old. Not nearly as old as he was, for instance. Elijah figured he had good reasons for his own disenchantment. How could such a relatively young female have come by hers?
“Just put them down, please,” she said crisply. “I’m busy right now.”
His pity evaporated in a flash of irritation. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, drawing the words out to annoy her. He set the dishes on the counter, making as much noise about it as he could. “A pleasure doing business with you, Miss Hardesty.” He had the satisfaction of seeing his barb hit home. Two bright patches of pink appeared on her pallid cheeks. He chalked up one for himself.
Because he’d been on the trail for a long time, and because he had nothing better to do, Elijah turned away from Joy and perused the shelves of McMurdo’s mercantile establishment. He hadn’t been this far away from a big city in a long time and was curious to see how things went forward here in the territory.
It was a well-stocked store for such an out-of-the-way place. He picked up a small, prettily decorated tin containing marzipan candies. Shoot. Now where had that old man come by these? The last time Elijah’d eaten marzipan had been when he lived in Maryland, before the war, a lifetime or three ago. He picked up the tin and weighed it in his palm. He did have a formidable sweet tooth. Maybe he’d just buy this candy and gobble it down.
With a grin, he wondered if he should offer some to Joy, and decided that’s exactly what he should do. Maybe it’d sweeten her up, although he doubted it. At the very least, he expected a offer of candy from a sinner like him would disconcert her—maybe make her blush and stammer—and would be worth it for that.
When he glanced at the counter, she still had her nose in her ledger. Elijah grinned. As it was the custom to barter for prices, he cleared his throat, anticipating a spirited exchange. “How much is this candy, ma’am?”
Joy glanced up, still frowning. She looked like she didn’t appreciate Elijah interrupting her perusal of that ledger, which must be either extremely fascinating or extremely confusing.
She squinted at the tin in Elijah’s hand. It appeared to him as though she didn’t want to look him in the eye. “I don’t know. Isn’t there a price marked on it? Mr. McMurdo generally marks his unusual items.”
Blast. And here Elijah had been looking forward to a battle. He turned the tin over and peered at it from all angles. His humor returned when he saw no price. “Nope.”
She heaved an aggrieved sigh. “Oh, all right. Let me ask Mr. McMurdo.” She slid off the high stool. Elijah guessed she was going to go looking for the proprietor of this establishment, and resented having to do so, when the old fellow himself walked through the door.
“There he is. You can ask him yourself.” Joy climbed back up onto her stool.
Elijah shook his head and muttered loud enough for her to hear, “Hard to come by good help out here, I reckon.” He gave Mac a grin to let him know he was teasing, although he really was irked by Joy’s hostile attitude.
The old man chuckled. He seemed to do that a lot. Offhand, Elijah couldn’t think of two less likely folks to have found each other than Alexander McMurdo and Joy Hardesty.
Joy, he noticed, had chosen not to react to his pointed comment about her rudeness. Her lips, however, looked like a couple of peaches that had been left out in the sun for too long and had wrinkled up. In fact, the whole picture Joy Hardesty resented was of something withered and lifeless. Elijah shuddered, the notion having reminded him of himself and unsettled him.
“Noticed you had some of my favorite treats on your shelves, Mac. How much for this tin of marzipan?”
The old man gave Elijah a broad smile. Now here, though he was a pleasant fellow. Nothing shrunken and tight and bitter about Alexander McMurdo. He looked like he was about a hundred and ninety years old, but he was spry for all that, and his eyes were as blue as the sky outside and as twinkly as stars. Elijah found himself liking McMurdo enormously. He liked McMurdo, in fact, about as much as he disliked Joy.
“Great stuff, that,” Mac said, pointing at the tin with the stem of his black briar pipe. “Hard to come by out here, but you can have the tin for four bits, Mr. Perry.”
“Call me Elijah, Mac,” he said, digging into his trouser’s pocket. He was about to hand the money to Mac, when he caught the look on the old man’s face, grinned, and turned to walk over to Joy. “Here, Miss Hardesty. Mr. McMurdo said four bits for the candy.”
“I heard him.” She sounded as ungracious as she looked.
Elijah held out the coin. Joy made a grab for it, but he palmed it and withdrew his hand. “You know, ma’am, pardon me for saying so, but for a Christian lady, you’re mighty rough on us poor sinners. Aren’t you afraid your meanness will turn us from the Lord’s light and prevent us from ever being saved? I can tell you here and now that if everybody who preaches God’s Word is as mean as you, I sure as good gracious don’t want anything to do with Him.”
Her face, already pale, bleached of color, and she looked stricken. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to be rude, Mr. Perry.”
Still holding the coin, Elijah propped an elbow on the counter and leaned towards her. She backed up, almost fell off her stool, grabbed the counter with both hands, and held on tight. “Sure you did, Miss Hardesty. You took one look at bad old me, and decided to teach me a lesson, ‘cause I’m such a wicked man.”
“You would, of course, know yourself much better than I.”
Elijah raised his eyebrows in appreciation. “That’s a good one, ma’am. That’s damned good.” He took note of her recoil at his language and grinned his most ironic grin. “But it won’t wash. You were as crusty as loaf of week-old bread before you even knew my name. I think you’re just mean through and through. You’re mean to the core and don’t like anything or anybody. Well, y’know what, ma’am?”
Joy’s eyes had gone as round as billiard balls. She didn’t answer him, but clutched the counter as if her life depended on it. She looked scared. Which was a distinct improvement from her usual expression, in Elijah’s opinion.
“I don’t like you, either.”
He flipped the coin insolently, and watched it wink in the dusty sunbeams. Joy didn’t reach forward to catch it, but she watched, too, as it struck the counter, bounced, and rolled off onto the floor. Elijah heard it hit the ground, but didn’t bother to watch where it went. “Better fetch it quick, ma’am. Otherwise Mac might take it out of your wages, and I’m sure he’s as eager to see your backside as you are to get out of here.”
With that, he turned and sauntered away from her, paused by the hat rack to pluck up his black hat and plop it onto his black hair, and left the store. Mac gave Joy a sympathetic smile, then he followed Elijah outside.
Joy watched the two men go. Her insides were squeezing and pitching so badly, she feared for a moment she might be physically sick. After taking several deep breaths, she decided her luncheon was safe.
She trembled all over when she braced herself with a hand on the counter and stooped to look for the coin. “Dreadful man,” she whispered into the stillness of the mercantile.
Hatred stirreth up strife, Joy Hardesty. Your own behavior brought that man’s censure down upon you. I do believe you’re incapable of learning anything I try to teach you, Joy.
Her mother’s voice, as clear as a bell, sounded the judgment, and Joy knew Elijah Perry had been right about her. She’d been rude to him—and for no better reason than that he was the sort of man her mother had cautioned her about. Yet her mother had also been very firm in her opinion that one must show sinners their way was not God’s way, and that they should cease their wickedness and follow another path.
Joy sighed heavily. Another failure to add to her long, long list. If the ghost of Jacob Marley were to visit Joy, her chain of failures would be every bit as long as Marley’s chain of miserly actions.
Her mother would have known how to deal with Elijah Perry, Joy thought dismally. Her mother had never been at a loss for anything. She’d always known what was right and what was wrong. Never had a moment’s doubt sullied her mother’s righteous thinking. She’d never shirked in her duty to her fellows, either. A powerful woman, Joy’s father had called her. And he’d been right.
Unfortunately, her mother wasn’t here to guide her. And without her mother’s hand at her back, pushing her onto the proper path at every turning and scolding her for every misstep, Joy didn’t know what to do or how to behave. She felt stuck, as if she were mired in quicksand.
Inertia. I do believe your middle name should have been inertia, Joy Hardesty.
She couldn’t find the coin. She searched and searched and searched, and it continued to elude her. It seemed typical of her life that so insignificant an item as a piece of gold should elude her in this persistent way. After searching for ten solid minutes, frustration, physical weakness, and a feeling of hopelessness overcame her determination. Joy sat on the floor behind the counter, leaned back against the wall, and cried.
She knew her mother, who didn’t have a weak bone in her body, would have looked on her with scorn and called her a pitiful specimen. She chalked up the way the dust motes in the air seemed to sparkle around her to her own imperfection of mind and spirit, and wished she could simply die now and get it over with.
# # #
Elijah stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Cooper.”
The man to whom Mac had just introduced him shook Elijah’s hand. “Likewise.”
Curtis Cooper, according to Mac, was a hand on the nearby Blackworth ranch. Also according to Mac, the ranch was run by a woman, Susan Blackworth, who had built it up from ruin after her husband had met with an untimely death. From Mac’s sparkly expression and meaningful wink, Elijah got the impression Mrs. Blackworth might be able to enlighten the world about her husband’s demise should she ever care to do so. Elijah thought dryly that this territory seemed to be a magnet for unpleasant females.
Cooper had come to town with a couple of other cowboys, and had stopped by Mac’s wagon yard to purchase some rope and lumber. Mac introduced all of them to Elijah.
Later Elijah was never quite able to figure out why he and those other three men had decided to set up a poker game in Mac’s mercantile establishment, but he did know that it had seemed a perfectly logical thing to do at the time. He was pretty sure Mac had encouraged them, too, although he couldn’t figure that out, either. If he ran a nice business like Mac’s, Elijah was sure he’d not want a bunch of rough men with guns on their hips gambling in it while drinking beer.
Mac evidently didn’t mind at all. In fact, he helped set out the table and chairs, smiling like an imp the whole time. He was an interesting fellow, Mac was. Elijah couldn’t help but like him. He had a soft Scottish burr that treated the language more kindly than most of the twangs Elijah had heard since he’d left Maryland.
“And you can ask Joy here when you need refills,” Mac said merrily, gesturing to his employee, who glared at the commotion from behind the counter.
She looked as mean as a snake. “You mean she’ll condescend to serve a fellow beer if he gets dry?” Elijah scratched his head in a gesture he hoped conveyed doubt. The woman was getting to him. Whatever malevolence she radiated was starting to make his shoulder blades itch, and he wanted never to have to see her again. He couldn’t, therefore, understand the urge marching side by side with the one about never seeing her again, which was to grab and kiss her, wrestle her to a nearby mattress, and make love to her until he’d conquered her sourness forever and replaced it with—joy.
He was just nuts, was all. Joy Hardesty was a disagreeable bit of goods, and that was that.
Joy’s frown got meaner, and McMurdo laughed. “Sure she’ll serve ye beer, laddie. She’s a good girl, Joy.”
“Is she.”
Joy flounced into the back room with her ledger, ignoring Elijah so thoroughly, he knew he’d got her goat. He was surprised when a feeling of guilt overshadowed his satisfaction. When she returned, she bore paper, pen, and ink with her. She plopped these items on the counter and resumed her seat on the stool behind it, as if daring anyone to ask her to do anything. Elijah guessed she was going to write a letter or two.
She didn’t say a word, but he felt her disapproval from where he sat shuffling cards. It pulsed in the air around him and made him shift his shoulders and twitch his legs more than once. He was a little puzzled that the other men didn’t feel it. Or maybe they did. He didn’t ask.
There was no reason for it, but Elijah found himself glancing at her quite often as the poker game progressed. He didn’t care what she was doing or why she was doing it. She was nothing to him but a pain in the neck and a rude bitch.
He got the impression she used that counter for the same reason she used her spiteful tongue—to keep people away. The notion didn’t make him appreciate her to any greater degree. She was a dried-up, prune-faced old maid, was Joy Hardesty. Elijah decided he was glad she’d be waiting on them tonight. She’d hate it, and that made him happy.
Once during the evening, Elijah looked around to see where Mac was, but the proprietor of the store had evidently retired for the night. Seemed strange to Elijah. He’d want to keep an eye on things if this were his place, especially if there were four gambling gents being waited on by one single female. Not that any man would ever even think of doing anything untoward to Joy Hardesty, but still . . .
He didn’t let himself worry about it.
# # #
When Joy got back to Auburn, she’d never complain about anything again as long as she lived. She vowed it on her mother’s sainted memory. Once or twice in the several hours following the commencement of that ghastly poker game in Mr. McMurdo’s front room, she wondered if she’d last out the night, much less ever see Auburn again.
She shouldn’t be here. If God hadn’t decided to punish her for her bloodless nature, she wouldn’t be. She’d be in South America with the Reverend Mr. Hezekiah P. Thrash, saving souls. Sometimes Joy wondered why God’s lessons had to be so very hard.
God has a plan for us all, Joy, and don’t you ever forget it. It’s not up to you to question God’s intentions. It’s up to you to fulfill them.
Yes, Mother.
She guessed this was God’s test of her mettle. And, of course, she was failing again. For one thing, she should have refused to wait on those awful men while they were gambling and drinking. Her mother would, very politely, have declined the duty. Joy had been so astonished when Mr. McMurdo asked her, she hadn’t been able to think fast enough to come up with a polite objection.
Such shilly-shallying is typical of your slovenly nature, Joy Hardesty.
Yes, Mother.
Yet McMurdo had asked her to do it, and he was her employer. Besides, no matter how much she deplored his sinful character, she owed him a good deal. He’d nursed her through her dreadful illness. She’d very nearly died, according to him, and she had no reason not to believe him even though she didn’t want to. It always confused her when sinners did good deeds and behaved like Christians.
His kindness shouldn’t make any difference, however, and Joy knew it. No matter how benevolent a bad man seemed to be on the surface, iniquity was iniquity, and she should take no part in it. She knew the devil tempted people with soft words and presented quandaries as trials by which to temper the steel of their faith. Look at Job, for heaven’s sake. Her mother had taught her that the truly worthy among God’s creatures saw past surface goodness to the rotten cores underneath, and soundly rejected the lures of the world, no matter how benevolently offered.
On the other hand, Alexander McMurdo had been unrelentingly kind to her, no matter how mean she was to him.
That was neither here nor there. A sinner was a sinner, and she shouldn’t allow a sinner’s charm to beguile her.
Yet, this was her job.
That shouldn’t matter. She should refuse to serve these men the devil’s brew. She should avoid them as the transgressors they were.
But Mr. McMurdo was paying her to serve them.
But if she waited on them, serving them intoxicating liquors and knowing what they were, she was no better than Judas, who had accepted thirty pieces of silver to betray our Lord.