The Man from Stone Creek Read Free

remarkably dry, too.
    â€œTell me what happened,” she said, grateful, for once, that the mercantile was empty.
    Terran gulped visibly. “He got me by the feet and tried to drop me down the schoolyard well,” he burst out. “I hid out in the brush, after I got away, or he’d have finished me for sure!”
    Maddie’s heart seized at the image of her brother, her only living relation, suspended from such a height. Haven was a wild town, a crossroads for rogues, scalawags and scoundrels from both sides of the border, but she hadn’t expected the new schoolmaster to number among them. Anxiously she looked Terran over again. “You’re certain you haven’t been hurt?”
    Terran nodded. “He said he’d be by here, real soon, to talk to you. He’s going to tell you a whole passel of lies, Maddie. He’ll say—”
    Just then, the little brass bell over the door jingled and a man entered, removing his hat as he traversed the threshold.
    Terran took one look at him and bolted for the stairs at the back of the store to take refuge in their rooms.
    Maddie’s face flamed. “You must be the new schoolmaster,” she said.
    He smiled, nodded. “Sam O’Ballivan,” he replied. “And you must be Miss Chancelor.”
    Maddie gave a curt nod. Sam O’Ballivan was clean-shaven and muscular, probably six feet in height, with brown hair and shrewd blue eyes. He looked more like an outlaw than a schoolmaster, and she was sure the distinctive bulge under his long suit coat was the butt of a pistol. What had Mr. Callaway and the other members of the school board been thinking, to hire such a man?
    â€œHow dare you assault my brother?” she asked evenly, when she could trust herself to speak at all.
    Mr. O’Ballivan’s mouth tilted upward at one corner. He kept his distance, though, which meant Maddie didn’t have to go for the shotgun she kept under the counter in case of trouble. “Is that what he told you? Guess he’s got a devious side, to go along with that mean streak of his.”
    Maddie felt like a kettle coming to a boil. “Terran is not a liar, nor does he have a ‘mean streak,’” she managed to say. “And it’s a fine how-do-you-do, your saying that, when you tried to drown him!”
    O’Ballivan chuckled, and what looked like mischievous derision glinted briefly in his eyes. His blatant masculinity seemed to take over the whole store, like some ominous, unseen force. Maddie would have described him as rugged, rather than handsome, if she’d been thinking along such lines.
    Which she most definitely wasn’t.
    â€œThe truth, Miss Chancelor, is somewhat at variance with your brother’s account of the incident in question,” O’Ballivan said. “When I rode up, he and the rest of that pack of rascals had Tom Singleton hog-tied and hanging headfirst down the well. God knows how long he’d have dangled if I hadn’t come along when I did.”
    Maddie blinked. It wasn’t true, she told herself firmly. Terran would never be involved in anything like that.
    â€œI don’t believe you,” she said.
    â€œYou don’t choose to believe me,” he remarked idly, examining a display of dime novels Maddie had spent much of the morning arranging. She disapproved heartily of yellow journalism, but the plain fact was, folks were willing to spend money on those little books, and she couldn’t afford not to carry the merchandise.
    At long last O’Ballivan’s gaze swung back, colliding with hers. Maddie felt a peculiar niggling in the pit of her stomach.
    â€œYou’re not doing your brother any favors, you know, by taking his part when you know he’s in the wrong,” he said.
    â€œDid you or did you not try to drown him?”
    â€œIf I’d tried to drown him,” O’Ballivan said reasonably, “I would have succeeded.