The Sons of Grady Rourke by Douglas Savage Page B

the loft with some blankets. There’s water and a wash basin in the kitchen.” Patrick gestured toward the back cranny.
    â€œThat will be fine. I ain’t been horizontal for two days.”
    Patrick nodded.
    â€œAnd there’s a jug of jack back there to warm you up, too.”
    Brewer licked his cracked lips.
    â€œThen I’ll say good night. I appreciate the hospitality.”
    Dick Brewer stood on legs still shaky. He shuffled toward the clay pot of whiskey and carried his tin cup.
    Patrick laid his hands on the arms of his chair and began rocking slowly, like an old man. He looked above the hearth toward his holstered handiron that hung from a peg on the thick wooden mantle. The fire glowed red on his hard face.
    â€œI SHOULD GO .”
    Melissa Bryant reached up and placed her hand gently upon Sean Rourke’s shoulder. As if her thin fingers were a great weight, he sat down slowly into the hard chair close to a black, pot-bellied stove. She placed a warm cup of coffee into his open palm.
    â€œMaybe another few minutes.”
    She nodded, turned, and ascended a wooden ladder toward a small loft illuminated by a single oil lamp damped low. Sean could not stop watching the white calves of her firm legs where her skirt ended as she climbed. She was barefoot in the stove’s heat that filled her small, one-room home. The loft was little more than a ledge that obscured one-third of the pitched, timber roof.
    Upstairs, Melissa had to crouch deeply to keep her head from banging into the roof’s thick beams. Unlike the sturdier adobe structures erected throughout Lincoln, her home was slapped together from old barn siding. It had been the Wortley’s storage bin until Jimmy Dolan offered her the place rent-free so long as she worked the cantina. That freed one more room at the hotel for Jesse Evans’ men to triple bunk for a dollar per week.
    The Apache raid in May 1870 had left her an orphan and pregnant. The town adopted the fifteen-year-old girl and gave her food. Lawrence Murphy had contributed one of the House’s rooms at the Wortley. But Murphy was gone and to Jimmy Dolan, business was business. To Melissa, the live-in pantry was home. The House let her have odd pieces of fabric too short to sell. She used it for curtains of happy colors.
    If Melissa gave up her voice when the painted warriors—boys mainly—took her innocence, she had carefully nursed the infant along with her fury. The eight-year-old child sleeping in the loft had never heard her mother sing her to sleep.
    Melissa stroked the sleeping girl’s forehead and blew out the lamp. When she came down the ladder backwards, Sean forced his eyes to watch the rusted old stove. Holes in its thin sides glowed like orange eyes from the burning logs within.
    â€œIs Abbey asleep?”
    Melissa nodded.
    Sean took to the dark-faced child quickly. The first time she peeked from behind her mother’s skirt to look up at him, Sean instinctively flinched. He knew what his burned faced did to the eyes of small children. But Abigail Bryant only blinked and smiled with her large black eyes. She showed no fear as if a child’s inborn revulsion at the hideous had all stayed behind in her mother’s abused body at the moment of birth.
    For two weeks, Sean walked Melissa and her daughter the short distance from the hotel to their hovel. It was an accident. They had walked ten steps behind him when he was going outside to see to his horse for the night. In the iron-cold darkness, Sean offered to walk them home before he realized that he had no idea if they had a home nor where it might be. Melissa had looked up into his weary eyes and nodded. Something in his eyes made her accept the invitation of a stranger who wore a black revolver and who had dirty fingernails. She saw a place called Shiloh, Tennessee, in his battle-dulled eyes, but she did not know it.
    The woman sat in a chair close to Sean so the stove could