The Vigilante's Bride by Yvonne Harris

and filed out.
    “Tim, wait a minute, please.”
    Tim Gardner, small and freckle-faced, hesitated, then plopped back onto his bench. He looked up at her as Emily slid onto the bench and sat beside him.
    He blinked at her. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked.
    “No, indeed. I like to watch you draw. You’re good at it, and I thought I’d watch to see how you do it.” She laughed. And patted his hand. “My drawings are so bad. Even my sun looks dumb with all those spikes coming out of it.”
    She picked up two slates and a handful of colored chalk left on another desk. She handed one to him. She huffed out a breath and then pretended to study her slate.
    “What you want me to draw?” Tim asked.
    “Anything. I’m going to draw a . . .” Her eyes held on the table by the window with a stack of slates. Tables were in kitchens and kitchens usually had families. It was the family she was after. “I’m going to start with something easy – a table.”
    He watched her make a few boxlike lines and then began to draw lines on his own slate.
    “Tables are easy,” he said. He leaned over and smudged out an extra line in her picture, and grinned. “Four legs, not five.”
    For several minutes they drew together, Tim quiet with concentration. Emily, watching him, drew pieces of furniture she saw in the classroom.
    Tim continued to work on one picture. A big room with a curtained window and an open door.
    “Yours is better than mine.” She tapped her finger under a table he’d drawn. Remembering breakfast in the dining room that morning, Emily had peopled her picture with little stick figures sitting and holding forks.
    Tim’s table was empty. Except for one stick figure. The chairs he’d put in his picture were empty.
    “Who’s that?” She pointed to the lone stick figure.
    “Me.”
    “Where’d everybody else go?” she asked.
    He glanced at the window and pointed to the sky. “Up there. In heaven.”
    Emily’s heart squeezed tight. It was exactly as she had feared. Tim was withdrawn because he’d lost his parents. He was a hurt little boy.
    Orphanages were full of troubled children. At Aldersgate, one of the big universities sent a doctor in from time to time to teach the instructors about painting and art and how it could help ease a child’s sadness.
    With a pang she realized now how much she missed the extra instruction she had been given.
    The slate had given Tim a way to disclose and unburden what was always in his mind. She swallowed and smiled brightly at him.
    “I’ve got an idea! Let’s make this picture New Hope’s dining room and put lots of chairs with lots of people in them.”
    Laughing, she sketched a chair at the far end of the table. Then another. And another.
    Tim stared at the slate, the solemn little face curving into a smile. With the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth, he swiftly drew in more chairs, crowding them into the picture.
    “And that’s me, next to Mr. Luke,” he said, laughing and pointing to another stick figure with big ears in a chair.
    “Mr. Luke doesn’t have big elephant ears like that.”
    Tim squealed with laughter. “Next to mine they are!”
    “You’re right.” Emily leaned over and hugged him.
    It was a start.

    “Sit down, Clete.” Bart Axel squeaked back in his swivel chair and waved his cigar to his ranch foreman.
    His account books were spread out, a ledger opened to a page scrawled in his big, loose handwriting. “I don’t care what Sheriff Tucker says. Sullivan robbed that stage and took the money, and I know it.”
    Clete Wade shifted and said nothing. Bart swung the chair around again, his back to Clete. Clete shrugged and sat down. Small, steady sucking sounds came from the other side of the chair as Bart puffed his cigar. A plume of smoke wafted toward the ceiling, and a voice snarled from the chair. “Sullivan’s been out on the range poking his nose in everyone’s herds, rounding up strays. Didn’t say nothing to me