A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [3]
Clay spared her a sidelong glance and a nod. Why wasn’t this child in school? Did her mother know she was running loose like a wild Indian and leaping onto the backs of other people’s horses when they weren’t looking?
And where the heck had a kid her age learned to ride like that?
“Good,” Edrina said, with a relieved sigh, her little arms still folded. “Because Papa couldn’t be trusted with a firearm. Once, when he was cleaning a pistol, meaning to go out and hunt rabbits for stew, it went off by accident and made a big hole in the floor. Mama put a chair over it—she said it was so my sister, Harriet, and I wouldn’t fall in and wind up under the house, with all the cobwebs and the mice, but I know it was really because she was embarrassed for anybody to see what Papa had done. Even Harriet has more sense than to fall in a hole, for heaven’s sake, and she’s only five.”
Clay suppressed a smile, tugged at the saddle to make sure it would hold his weight, put a foot into the stirrup and swung up. Adjusted his hat in a gesture of farewell. “I’ll be seeing you, chatterbox,” he said kindly.
“What about your trunk?” Edrina wanted to know. “Are you just going to leave it behind, on the platform?”
“I mean to come back for it later in the day,” Clay explained, wondering why he felt compelled to clarify the matter at all. “This horse and I, we’ve been on that train for a goodly while, and right now, we need to stretch our muscles a bit.”
“I could show you where our house is,” Edrina persisted, scampering along beside Outlaw when Clay urged the horse into a walk. “Well, I guess it’s your house now.”
“Maybe you ought to run along home,” Clay said. “Your mama’s probably worried about you.”
“No,” Edrina said. “Mama has no call to worry. She thinks I’m in school.”
Clay bit back another grin.
They’d climbed the grassy embankment leading to the street curving past the depot and on into Blue River by then. The members of the town’s governing body waddled just ahead, single file, along a plank sidewalk like a trio of black ducks wearing top hats.
“And why aren’t you in school?” Clay inquired affably, adjusting his hat again, and squaring his shoulders against the nippy breeze and the swirling specks of snow, each one sharp-edged as a razor.
She shivered slightly, but that was the only sign that she’d paid any notice at all to the state of the weather. While Miss Edrina Nolan pondered her reply, Clay maneuvered the horse to her other side, hoping to block the bitter wind at least a little.
“I already know everything they have to teach at that school,” Edrina said at last, in a tone of unshakable conviction. “And then some.”
Clay chuckled under his breath, though he refrained from comment. It wasn’t as if anybody were asking his opinion.
The first ragtag shreds of Blue River were no more impressive than he recalled them to be—a livery on one side of the road, and an abandoned saloon on the other. Waist-high grass, most of it dead, surrounded the latter; craggy shards of filthy glass edged its one narrow window, and the sign above the door dangled by a lone, rusty nail.
Last Hope: Saloon and Games of Chance, it read in painted letters nearly worn away by time and weather.
“You shouldn’t be out in this weather,” Clay told Edrina, who was still hiking along beside him and Outlaw, eschewing the broken plank sidewalk for the road. “Too cold.”
“I like it,” she said. “The cold is very bracing, don’t you think? Makes a body feel wide-awake.”
The town’s buildings, though unpainted, began to look a little better as they progressed. Smoke curled from twisted chimneys and doors were closed up tight.
There were few people on the streets, Clay noticed, though he glimpsed curious faces at various windows as they went by.
He raised his collar against the rising wind, figuring he’d had all the “bracing” he needed, thank you very much, and he was sure enough “wide-awake” now that he was off the train and back in the saddle.
He was hungry, too, and he wanted a bath and barbering.
And ten to twelve hours of sleep, lying