Deborah Bedford - Blessing

“Come on, Sam,” Amos urged her pa. “It’ll be hard work in the mines tomorrow. Tonight let’s cut loose.”

Uley could tell by the way he glanced at her again that her pa wanted to go.

“You should come, too, Uley.” Amos clapped her on the back. “They’re gonna start a poker game up there at ten. It’s about time a young fella like you learned to hold his own in a gambling den.”

“No thanks, Amos.”

The raucous crowd funneled through the doorway, then fanned out onto the street, heading toward Frenchy’s, the most popular of the town’s twenty saloons. That was certainly a subject a Christian lady shouldn’t know about, she thought, somewhat grimly, as she watched her pa get swept up in the throng. Gambling dens and saloons.

Uley walked toward the little house where she and her father made their home. The cob-worked cabin on Willow Street suited them much better than the crude shanties most of the miners had pieced together in the hills. She knew her pa had purchased the pretty little place in town because he wanted to do right by her.

“Hey, Uley!” Marshal Harris Olney called out as he passed by. “Why aren’t you over at Frenchy’s with the rest of them?”

She thought before she spoke, and consciously pitched her voice lower. “That’s not a place I enjoy going.”

“Wish everybody else thought that way, too.” Harris shook his head jovially. “I’ll be up all night.”

Uley figured the marshal probably never got a decent night’s rest. People worked hard all day long in the mines, and at night, when you’d think they’d be exhausted and ready to sleep, they came out to carouse in saloons that never closed, celebrating a few nuggets of gold—which were usually gone by sunup. Oh, Father. It seems as if nothing I could ever do would change this place.

As she hurried up the street, Uley heard a slight sound to her left. The sound wasn’t much, just a pebble skipping across the dirt. She glanced up, couldn’t see into the shadows. Something about being here alone this time of night with everybody else down at Frenchy’s made her adrenaline flow.

Just suppose she’d come upon a mountain lion.

Just suppose she’d come upon somebody up to no good.

Just suppose.

Uley didn’t miss a stride. As she rounded the next corner, she spied a stranger standing at the edge of the darkness.

“Hello,” she said to him, an unreasonable fear knotting her stomach.

He nodded without answering. As she passed him, all she caught was a glimpse—a black leather vest, legs long as a stallion’s, a dark felt Stetson, a glint of moonlight reflecting in his eyes and in his hands.

A glint of metal.

Uley stopped three paces past him. The stranger was holding a gun. She turned to see him step out into the pale moonglow to take his aim.

This man, all black leather and legs, with a shadow for a face, was going to shoot the marshal in the back!

Uley didn’t take time to think. She didn’t take time to cry for help. She sprinted toward the man, mud muffling her long strides. She took a racing leap and sprang at him.

She hit him full tilt and heard his breath rush out of his lungs. The gun pinwheeled out of his hands. He grunted as he went down.

She fell on top of him and pinned him. She clamped her arms firmly about his neck, not about to let him go.

He tried to throw her off. She clung to him like the mountain lion she’d been afraid of moments before, her attention riveted to his neck, the only part of him small enough to hang on to.

For the first time in her life Uley offered thanks for her muscles, which were honed to do the same job as any man’s. She fought for breath. “He’s tryin’ to shoot Olney! Somebody get over here!”

She heard feet pounding in her direction. Thank You, Father. Oh, thank You, thank You, thank You.

The man beneath her cursed again and said, “Now I’m going to get tried for murdering Harris Olney, and I didn’t even get to kill him.”

“You hold still.” She glared down at him. “You don’t say anything.” She realized he was staring up at her now the way a man might stare at someone dead. His eyes got as big around as silver dollars.

He gasped, “You’re a lady.”

Holding him down did not frighten her, but this did. He’d found her out. Uley let go of his neck, grabbed her head and, sure enough, the cap had flown away. Her hair hung in sodden, muddy ribbons around her neck.

She looked alternately from the man beneath her to the woolen cap lying upside down in the mud.

Every fellow in Tin Cup would arrive within seconds.

Uley made a fast decision. She figured the stranger would get away, but she had to get her hat on. She leaped off of him, grabbed her hat and shoved the muddy tendrils beneath it.

The stranger lay in the precise spot he’d landed. “You’re just a girl!”

His words made her mad. Here she sat in the muck, a full-grown woman, strong enough to take him down, nineteen years old, well into marriageable age. How dare he call her just a girl?

She locked her arms around his neck again.

She couldn’t think of anything worse than this, having someone find her out after all the work she’d done in the Gold Cup Mine. Just now, the only thing more humiliating than being a woman would be having them all find out she was one. “You don’t tell anybody, you hear me?” She waggled a tiny, clenched fist at him. “You don’t tell anybody, or I’ll give you what’s coming myself.”

The horde of men from Frenchy’s flocked toward them. The stranger didn’t move his glinting eyes from her own. “Okay. Yes, ma’am.”

* * *

By early morning, it was all over the new town of Tin Cup that Uley Kirkland, one of the most spry young fellows in Tin Cup, had apprehended a man trying to murder the marshal. Everyone talked of a hanging. They couldn’t hang the scoundrel, though, until Judge J. M. Murphy came back from visiting his daughter in Denver.

All day, fellows clapped Uley on the back and talked about a trial. Others deemed the stranger should just be shot. After all, sidearms had kept the law in the valley for a long time before Harris Olney ever wore his star.

As Uley worked alongside her pa at the Gold Cup, she found herself wishing somebody would shoot the murderer and end this entire contemptible affair.

If the stranger died, her secret would die with him.

But then, she reasoned, that wasn’t quite true. She wouldn’t be dead. She would still have to live with it.

Oh, Father, wishing somebody dead is not what I should be thinking, either. What a vile sinner I am!

Around lunchtime, word filtered out that the stranger, Aaron Brown, was registered up at the Grand Central Hotel. When Uley first heard his name, she and her pa were working side by side as timbermen in shaft eleven. Uley knew this work almost as well as her father knew it, how to square off the lumber with a broadax, how to chink the fittings so that the joints stayed watertight in the shaft. “Don’t you go worrying about Aaron Brown,” Sam told her. “You did a good job last night. I’m proud of you. That criminal will be dead before we get our next paycheck.”

But what if Aaron Brown talked before then? What if he sat on the back of his horse right before they hanged him and shouted, “Uley Kirkland is a girl! Uley Kirkland, who has cut timber right alongside you and who you’ve invited to play poker in gambling dens and who you’ve talked to about all sorts of private fellow things, the one who tries to talk to you sometimes about the Lord and His ways, is a girl!”

How can you live one part of your life hanging on to the truth when the other part of your life is a lie?

They would likely hang her, too, right beside him.