"You're not a woman, Mary Rose. You're my sister."
She laughed. The sound echoed through the pine trees. Cole picked up the reins and started the horses down the gentle slope. They had lingered long enough.
"If she's a woman, she's taken us into her embrace. I wonder if my roses are beginning to wake up yet."
"You ought to know by now the flowers you found aren't roses. They're pink fireweed."
"I know what they are," she replied. "But they're like roses."
"No, they aren't."
They were already bickering. Mary Rose sighed with contentment. She kept her attention focused on her home. Lord, she was happy to see her ranch again. The clapboard house was rather unimposing, she supposed, but it was still beautiful to her. The porch, or veranda, as Adam liked to call it, ran the length of the house on three sides. In the summer they would sit outside every evening and listen to the music of the night.
She didn't see her eldest brother working outside. "I'll bet Adam is working on his books."
"What makes you think so?"
"It's too nice a day to be cooped up inside unless there was book work to do," she reasoned. "I can't wait to see him. Do hurry, Cole."
She was anxious for the reunion with all of her brothers. She had gifts for everyone, including a box full of books Adam would treasure, drawing paper and new pens for Cole to use when he was designing a new building to add to the ranch, medicine and brushes for Douglas to use on his horses, a new journal for Travis to keep the family history in, several catalogues, seed for the garden she, under Adam's supervision, would plant behind the house, chocolates, and store-bought flannel shirts for all of them.
The reunion was every bit as wonderful as she knew it would be. The family stayed up well into the night talking. Cole didn't tell his brothers about the attorney who had visited Mary Rose's school until after she had gone up to bed. He didn't want her to worry. He was worried, however. None of them believed in coincidences, and so they discussed every possible reason the lawyer could have to want information about the Clayborne family. Douglas and Cole had both done unsavory things when they were youngsters, but time and distance from the gangsters they'd preyed upon had convinced them their crimes had been forgotten. The real concern was for Adam. If the attorney had been hired by the sons of Adam's slave master to track him down, then trouble was coming their way.
Murder, they all knew, would never be forgotten. Adam had taken one life to save two others. It had been accidental, but the circumstances wouldn't be important to the sons. A slave had struck their father.
No, the father's death would never be forgotten or forgiven. It would be avenged.
An hour passed in whispered discussion, and then Adam, as head of the household, declared it was foolish to worry or speculate. If there was indeed a threat, they would have to wait to find out what it was.
"And then?" Cole asked.
"We do whatever it takes to protect each other," Adam said.
"We aren't going to let anyone hang you, Adam. You only did what you had to do," Travis said.
"We're borrowing trouble," Adam said. "We'll keep our guard up and wait."
The discussion ended. A full month passed in peaceful solitude. It was business as usual, and Travis and Douglas were both beginning to think that perhaps nothing would ever come from the lawyer's inquiry.
The threat finally presented itself. His name was Harrison Stanford MacDonald, and he was the man who would tear all of their lives apart.
He was the enemy.
November 12, 1860
Dear Mama Rose,
Yore sun wanted me to show off my writing skil and so I am writing this her letter to you. We all work on gramer and speling afther Mary Rose goes to sleepe. Yore sun is a fine teecher. He dont lauf when we make misteaks and he always has good to say when we dun fore the nite. Since we are brothurs now I gues you belong to me to.
Yore sun,
Cole
Chapter 2
Harrison Stanford MacDonald was learning all about the Clayborne family without asking a single question. He was a stranger in town and therefore should have been met with suspicion and mistrust. He had heard all about the wild and rugged, lawless towns dotting the West and read everything he could get his hands on as well. From all of his research, he'd learned that strangers inevitably fell into one of two groups. There were those men who were ignored and left alone because they kept to themselves but looked intimidating, and those men who got themselves killed because they asked too many questions.
The code of honor that existed in the West perplexed Harrison. He thought it was the most backward set of rules he'd ever heard. The inhabitants usually protected their own against outsiders, yet took it all in stride when one neighbor went after another. Killing each other seemed to be acceptable, providing, of course, that there was a hint of a good reason.
On his journey to Blue Belle, Harrison considered the problem he would have finding out what he needed to know and finally came up with what he believed was a suitable course of action. He decided to use the town's prejudice against strangers to his own advantage by simply turning the tables on them.
He arrived in Blue Belle around ten o'clock in the morning and became the meanest son-of-a-bitch who ever hit town. He acted outrageously suspicious of everyone who dared to even look his way. He wore his new black hat down low on his brow, turned up the collar of his long, brown trail duster, kept a hard scowl on his face, and sauntered down the middle of the main road the residents called a street, but which was really just a wide dirt path, acting as if he owned the place. He gave the word "sullen" new definition. He wanted to look like a man who would kill anyone who got in his way, and he guessed he'd accomplished his goal when a woman walking with her little boy caught sight of him striding toward her and immediately grabbed hold of her son's hand and went running in the opposite direction.
He wanted to smile. He didn't dare. He'd never find out anything about the Claybornes if he turned friendly. And so he maintained his angry hate-everyone-and-everything attitude.
They loved him.
His first stop was the always popular town saloon. Every town had one, and Blue Belle wasn't any different. He found the drinking establishment at the end of the road, went inside, and ordered a bottle of whiskey and one glass. If the proprietor found the request odd for such an early hour, he didn't mention it. Harrison took the bottle and the glass to the darkest corner in the saloon, sat down at a round table with his back to the wall, and simply waited for the curious to come and talk to him.
He didn't have to wait long. The saloon had been completely empty of customers when he had entered the establishment. Word of the stranger's arrival spread as fast as a prairie fire, however, and within ten minutes, Harrison counted nine men inside. They sat in clusters around the other tables spread about the saloon, and every single one of them was staring at him.
He kept his shoulders hunched forward and his gaze on his shot glass. The thought of actually taking a drink this early in the morning made his stomach want to lurch, and he didn't have any intention of swallowing a single sip, so he swirled the murky amber liquid around and around in his glass and tried to look as if he were brooding about something.
He heard whispering, then the shuffle of footsteps coming across the wooden floor. Harrison 's hand instinctively went for his gun. He pushed his coat out of the way and rested his hand on the butt of his weapon. He stopped himself from pulling the gun free, then realized that what he'd done instinctively was actually what he should have done if he were going to continue his hostile charade.