“You’ll have to prove yourself, Teddy,” Northrop said, breaking the weighty silence. “It ain’t usual for a woman to be responsible for the kind of shipments carried in these parts.” He wiped his brow and the slick pate of his bald head, with a rumpled square of cambric pulled from his coat pocket. The gesture was a nervous one since sweat didn’t last long enough to trickle down the skin in the dry desert air. Still Northrop mopped as if he must stop a flood. Giving Teddy Gamble a warning was a distasteful duty. He liked the girl; he’d watched her grow up. Her father had been a friend of long standing—a man whose word was as honorable as any in the good book.
“The Gamble Line hasn’t lost a shipment yet,” Teddy retorted. “Or had a delay worse than what a broken axle might have caused.” She regretted the lingering note of hostility in her voice. She ought to show gratitude, or be pouring out her thanks. But seeing Adams from the corner of her eye was enough to keep the rancor churning inside her.
Northrop folded the wilted handkerchief and stuffed it into the pocket from which it had come. A moment lapsed as he seemed to weigh her words. “Not yet,” he said, recalling the incidents that had prompted him to journey to Wishbone. Admittedly, Teddy was right. Only, he had to remember that what had happened to date was not the whole of the issue. New mines had opened north of Wishbone, and the Gamble Line had the lucrative job of hauling dust and bullion to the agency office in Yuma. Teddy was counting on the new revenue to make up the debt her company carried. His superiors at Wells Fargo were concerned about making up the huge losses, should she fail to deliver the shipments. His job was to head off problems. “But you’ve had troubles since you took over.” His voice got stronger as he thought of the charge Wells Fargo had given him. He was to assess the situation and find a way to break the Gamble contract if he felt conditions warranted it.
“A few,” Teddy agreed.
“Four attacks in a scant three weeks make for worry, Teddy. You can’t blame us for wanting to be sure a good record’s not about to change,” he said stiffly. Like her or not he had to think of the company first, where business was concerned. Teddy needed to understand that he’d cut her no slack because she was female and neither would the holdup men. He wanted her to succeed. He knew the gravity of her need to keep the Gamble Line running. He also knew that the risk he was taking for the sake of his old friend’s daughter could cost him dearly if he proved wrong.
Teddy gritted her teeth and shot Northrop a hard look. “I don’t blame you.”
The glance she gave Parrish Adams said differently. She blamed him plenty. A month after her father’s death he’d offered to buy her out so he could add the Gamble Line’s mail and express contracts to his own fledgling line. He hadn’t taken her refusal to sell with anything resembling grace. Afterwards the holdup attempts had come regularly. While her skilled drivers and shotgun messengers hadn’t lost an express box yet, one driver had been winged and everyone making the runs was nervous.
Teddy couldn’t prove Parrish Adams had any connection to the failed holdups. But she was willing to bet her boots that he, at the very least, cheered on whoever was giving her grief. She took a little comfort in knowing that Cabe Northrop was wise enough not to have been swayed by what must have been a splendid statement of Adams’s ability to do a better job with the routes out of Wishbone.
“Glad to hear you’ve got no hard feelings, Teddy,” Northrop said, pulling a pair of thick-lensed glasses from a satchel and hooking them on his nose and ears. “You keep those deliveries on schedule and the contract is yours as long as you want it. That’s fair, ain’t it?”
“It’ll do,” Teddy said. “I don’t expect any more consideration from Wells Fargo than my father did. Or any less,” she added loud and clear. “The Gamble Line will run like it always has—without a shipment lost.”
Northrop made several notations in a journal, blotted the page, then tucked it in the satchel. He turned to Adams. “Mr. Adams, Wells Fargo appreciates your offer to assume the Gamble Line’s contracts but you’ve heard Miss Gamble’s assurances that her company will continue to meet its commitments.”
Adams cleared his throat. “I’m sure Miss Gamble has every intention of doing as she has indicated,” he remarked to Northrop. His smile was smooth and easy, his manners polished and polite, his voice had the sound of gravel crunched underfoot. “Nevertheless, I want you to know my offer still stands should things change.” His quick nod to Teddy had an air of self-assurance. “Miss Gamble may feel differently once she’s been at this business a little longer and experienced more of the uncertainties and hardships in a man’s work. You remember, Mr. Northrop, that I am prepared, at a moment’s notice, to extend the routes of Adams Overland to include this area.”
“I’ll relay that information to my superiors,” Northrop said, rising. Glad to be finished with his unpleasant chore, he stuck out an arm and shook Parrish Adams’s hand. “Good day, Mr. Adams.” He cut short the hug he had for Teddy when he found her shoulders tight and resistant. “A word of advice, Teddy.” With his broad back turned to Adams he spoke softly. “Get your Uncle Zack back here to help run the line. What happens won’t be up to me the next time there are questions raised about your capabilities.”
Teddy opened her mouth to retort that Zachary Gamble’s help would just about equal that she’d received from the holdup gang. Instead she said, “I’ll think about that, Cabe.” Few people knew that her Uncle Zack’s decision to leave Wishbone hadn’t been entirely voluntary. She preferred to leave it that way.
“You do. And you tell your grandmother I’m sorry I missed one of those delightful suppers of hers,” he stated hurriedly. “I’ll be expecting an invitation next time I’m in Wishbone.”
“You’ll get it.” Teddy told Northrop good-bye but didn’t follow him out of the smoky confines of the office. She had a few things she wanted to say to Parrish Adams now that she’d been granted something of a reprieve. She wanted to let him know she wasn’t so foolish as not to be looking for whoever was behind the calamities that had befallen the Gamble Line. He must have sensed her wishes because he too delayed after Northrop was gone.
“I shoot sidewinders,” she said.
“Are you threatening me, Miss Gamble?”
Adams shifted so that the light fell on his face. A smile came slowly to his thin lips, rounding lean cheeks smooth from a recent barbershop steam and shave. Had Teddy been able to find any inkling of honesty in his dark eyes she’d have called him a handsome man. He had all else it took—thick black hair spattered just so with gray, a precisely trimmed and exquisitely waxed mustache, a firm square jaw, a form fit and trim inside a starched shirt and collar and a suit miraculously unwrinkled even in the heat of midday. But Teddy found an insidious look to the man that negated any attractiveness he had. She couldn’t see past it to find anything likable about Adams, even if she had nothing but instinct to back up her opinion.
“I am telling you how I deal with snakes,” she said matter-of-factly. “I kick over every rock and when I see a sidewinder I shoot him.”
Adams stood, casting an elongated shadow in the grid of amber light from the room’s sole window “I can see how that might work for a while, Miss Gamble. For a while. Eventually though there will be a sidewinder you don’t see. And that one will get his way.” He moved menacingly toward her. “I know I always do. Always. You keep that in mind—when running a business you’re not cut out for gets too burdensome for you.” A strange twist of his lips contorted his smile. “And you remember that I can afford to wait. Unlike you I don’t have to prove my ability to anyone. Adams Overland has never been held up.” Slowly, he looped his thumbs into the pockets of a plum silk vest, starting the heavy gold links of a watch chain swaying against the rich fabric. “So, Miss Gamble, all I have to do is sit back and wait for you to fail. And you will fail. And I will get those contracts, eventually.”
Teddy had meant to say more, to tell him she intended to find the men responsible for the holdups and who they worked for. As the damning words formed in her mind, she noted that Adams looked exactly like a hungry coyote poised and waiting for a wounded prey to give up the fight. If she guessed right, the man wanted to rattle her, and force her to say or do something she would regret. She would not give him the satisfaction—not if she had to chew her tongue off. And she would have to, if she didn’t get away from the man quickly.
Rising briskly she snatched her hat from the peg that held it, then plopped it on her head. “No, Mr. Adams, you will be a disappointed man. You see I never,” she said methodically, “turn my back on a sidewinder. Those I can’t see I can always smell.”
“Time will tell,” came his reply as she stormed out of the office and across the clean swept plank floor of the Mercantile Company without bothering to acknowledge Milt Penrod. He stood conveniently close to the office door dusting a row of canned goods with a folded corner of his white apron.
Outside, Teddy threw her hands toward the heavens and muttered a curse. Above her a pale wafer moon hung in the daylight sky. Last night, as she stood outside the ranch house unable to sleep, that same moon had been red as blood and laced over with dark, moving shadows—a devil moon. All her life her grandmother, Felicity Gamble, had told her such an occurrence bode change for those who looked on it. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. Last night Teddy had looked hard. Today Cabe had changed his mind about putting her out of business. Now if the holdups would stop.
Distracted, she would have whisked by Horace Roper, her right-hand man in the company, had he not swiftly caught her by the arm.
“Dang, Teddy.” He let go of her then turned his head and spat tobacco juice in the dust. “I saw Cabe Northrop runnin’ for the stage like he had a war party after him. That skunk ain’t pulled our contract, has he?”
“No, Rope.” Teddy slowed her feet and forgot the foolishness about the moon. She fell in beside the broad-shouldered man as they walked down the street toward the stage stop. Horace Roper’s face was like lined leather, and his eyes had the soft glow of old copper coins. Teddy loved that weathered face, appreciated the look of worry and affection in the kind eyes. In the same way as her father had done, Rope gave her a feeling of comfort and strength. She respected the tough old codger. She would be the first to admit that as company manager he was the major asset of the Gamble Line. Still she couldn’t dredge up a smile for him as she relayed what had happened in the meeting with Northrop. “Cabe wants me to call Zack in to help run the company,” she said.
“Hell take that long polecat.” Rope shook his head then spat again. To his mind Zack Gamble had been an open wound the whole time he’d been a part of the Gamble Line. He for one wouldn’t welcome the scoundrel back. “Shows how well he knows Zack Gamble.” They walked a few paces more before Rope cocked a bristly brow and asked, “Is the contract ridin’ on Zack comin’ back?”
“No,” she said. “Wells Fargo is honoring the contract as long as we deliver safe and on time.”
“Well maybe Northrop ain’t quite a skunk,” Rope relented.
“Maybe not,” Teddy agreed. “But I’d insult a skunk if I called Parrish Adams one.”
“He was there?”
Teddy bobbed her head.
“Adams is a slick one that’s for sure.” Rope stepped up on the board sidewalk where the freight had been unloaded from the last stage. “Don’t figure that a man could come into a town and in six months just about run it.”
“It figures if you buy the sheriff.” Teddy picked up a box and hoisted it on the back of a buckboard for deliveries around town. Rope hurriedly tossed the heavier cartons in beside it.
“Watch what you say, Teddy. Len Blalock ain’t much pinned behind a badge but he’s the only law in Wishbone. We got to depend on him with these holdups we’ve been havin’.”
“The thing is, Rope, Adams could tell Len Blalock to pin that badge on his butt and Len would do it. He’s no good to us.” Teddy waved the buckboard driver off and pushed open the door of the small building that was the Gamble Line’s headquarters. “Besides, I don’t like having to watch what I say. I want a sheriff who stands for law and order, not one who clears it with Parrish Adams before he spits.”
“Adams might pull out, now that he’s seen he can’t grab all he wants in Wishbone. He thought you’d leap like a jack rabbit at his offer to buy you out. He didn’t expect a woman like...”
Rope trailed off, uncertain exactly how to proceed. Like what? The question hung uncomfortably heavy in his mind. Teddy Gamble was a woman sure as the sun came up every morning. The alluring swells and curves of her figure left no doubt of her sex. On the other hand she might as well have been a man for all the use she made of those lovely curves. He couldn’t remember Teddy ever sporting a pretty dress or ever testing a man with those soft green eyes of hers. Just for a moment he wondered if Teddy ever thought about being female.
“Like me?” Teddy supplied an answer. “A woman with something besides ruffles and lace in her head?”
“I reckon,” Rope conceded. “Anyhow he’s learned there’s at least one thing in Wishbone that ain’t his for the takin’.”
“I hope you’re right,” Teddy mumbled to herself.