A Lawman's Christmas: A McKettricks of Texas Novel Read Free

sorely vexed when she finds out,” the girl said. “Mama places great store in learning.”
    â€œMost sensible people do,” Clay observed, biting the inside of his lower lip so he wouldn’t laugh out loud. Edrina might have been little more than a baby, but she sat a horse like a Comanche brave—he’d seen that for himself back at the depot—and carried herself with a dignity out of all proportion to her size, situation and hand-me-down clothes. “Maybe from now on, you ought to pay better heed to what your mama says. She has your best interests at heart, you know.”
    Edrina gave a great, theatrical sigh, one that seemed to involve her entire small personage. “I suppose MissKrenshaw will tell Mama I’ve been absent since recess, anyway,” she said. “Even if you don’t.”
    Miss Krenshaw, Clay figured, was probably the schoolmarm.
    Outlaw’s well-shod hooves made a lonely, clompety-clip kind of sound on the hard dirt of the road. The horse turned a little, to go around a trough with a lacy green scum floating atop the water.
    â€œWord’s sure to get out,” Clay agreed reasonably, thinking of all those faces, at all those windows, “one way or another.”
    â€œThunderation and spit!” Edrina exclaimed, with the vigor of total sincerity. “I don’t know why folks can’t just tend to their own affairs and leave me to do as I please.”
    Clay made a choking sound, disguised it as a cough, as best he could, anyway. “How old are you?” he asked, genuinely interested in the answer.
    â€œSix,” Edrina replied.
    He’d have bet she was a short ten, maybe even eleven. “So you’re in the first grade at school?”
    â€œI’m in the second,” Edrina said, trudging along beside his horse. “I already knew how to read when I started in September, and I can cipher, too, so Miss Krenshaw let me skip a grade. Actually, she suggested I enter third grade, but Mama said no, that wouldn’t do at all, becauseI needed time to be a child. As if I could help being a child.”
    She sounded wholly exasperated.
    Clay hid yet another grin by tilting his head, in hopes that his hat brim would cast a shadow over his face. “You’ll be all grown up sooner than you think,” he allowed. “I reckon if asked, I’d be inclined to take your mama’s part in the matter.”
    â€œYou weren’t asked, though,” Edrina pointed out thoughtfully, and with an utter lack of guile or rancor.
    â€œTrue enough,” Clay agreed moderately.
    They were quiet, passing by the little white church, then the adjoining graveyard, where, Clay speculated, the last marshal, Parnell Nolan, must be buried. Edrina hurried ahead when they reached the corner, and Clay and Outlaw followed at an easy pace.
    Clay hadn’t bothered to visit the house that came with the marshal’s job on his previous stopover in Blue River. At the time, he’d just signed the deed for two thousand acres of raw ranch land, and his thoughts had been on the house and barn he meant to build there, the cattle and horses he would buy, the wells he would dig and the fences he would put up. He could have waited, of course, bided on the Triple M until spring, living the life he’d always lived, but he’d been too impatient and too proud to do that.
    Besides, it was his nature to be restless, and so, in order to keep himself occupied until spring, he’d accepted the town’s offer of a laughable salary and a star-shaped badge to pin on his coat until they could rustle up some damn fool to take up the occupation for good.
    â€œThere it is,” Edrina said, with a note of sadness in her voice that caught and pulled at Clay’s heart like a fishhook snagging on something underwater.
    Clay barely had time to take in the ramshackle place—the council referred to it as a “cottage,” though he