Mary McBride - Forever And A Day

“Well, don’t be,” he said just as the cook put a plate of scrambled eggs and fried peppers on the table in front of him.

“Huevos, señor,” the Mexican announced proudly.

Gideon glared at the plate, then extended the dark look to Honey. “Rattlesnake,” he muttered, shaking his head.

One corner of her mouth lifted in a grin. “I said I spoke Spanish. I didn’t say I spoke it well.” She picked up her fork and proceeded to taste the delectable, familiar food.

Gideon devoted his complete attention to his breakfast. Honey enjoyed their companionable silence until her appetite was satisfied. Her curiosity, however, remained ravenous.

“How long ago?” she asked, slanting her fork across her empty plate.

“How long ago what?”

“When you went to...you know...” Why, she wondered, was it so difficult for her to say the word? She already knew he was a criminal, for heaven’s sake. She’d met him at a bank robbery, hadn’t she?

Gideon put his fork down now like a man who’d just lost his appetite. “Prison,” he said. “That’s English, bright eyes. Not your blasted, misconstrued Spanish.”

“Prison.” She repeated it if only to prove that she could. The word, however, seemed to stick in her throat.

“Five years ago,” he added as he pulled the quill pick from his shirt pocket and settled it in the corner of his mouth.

“Why?”

“I got caught,” he answered bluntly. “Why else?”

“Robbing a bank?”

Gideon eased back in his chair, tipping it onto the two back legs. “More or less,” he replied, then worked the quill to the center of his lips, preventing further conversation.

He hadn’t been robbing the bank, he thought bleakly. Not that time anyway. For a year and for the first time in his life, he’d been on the right side of the law. He’d married Cora, more out of high hope than hot affection. He’d taken up tenant farming with something like a vengeance, planting oats and corn and wheat till his hands were blistered and his back nearly broken. When he wasn’t being a farmer, he was being a carpenter and a bricklayer, fixing up that down-and-out tenant property till it looked like a real home. All the while, he’d bowed and scraped to the local authorities till his forehead was nearly rubbed raw. Trying. Trying for once to do right.

Hell, he’d been living so clean he practically squeaked, when his cousin, Dwight Samuel, had shown up one afternoon at his little hardscrabble farm just east of Sugar Creek. Dwight had called it quits with Jesse and Frank, forming his own ragged gang of cutthroats and thieves. The trouble was he couldn’t trust a single one of them, and he needed a man to watch his back.

A fool was what Dwight had needed, Gideon thought now, and a fool was just what he’d found. Dwight had played on his sympathy. His cousin had played him like some kind of fiddle, to the tune of old times, past crimes committed in the name of the Confederate States of America and William Clarke Quantrill, old loyalties and long-lingering hates.

“Family,” Dwight had said finally. “I helped raise you, Gid. You owe me.”

A dubious debt, Gideon had thought. His cousins had raised him to ride fast, shoot straight and steal. Still, they had taken him in when there was no one else to look out for him. And dubious or not, it was a debt.

He remembered Dwight laughing as they rode into Liberty the following day. “Hell,” his cousin had said, “this bank’s been robbed so many times, I expect they’ll just hand over the money right quick and breathe a sigh of relief to see us ride out.”

But they hadn’t. The bank had been robbed so many times they were bound and determined not to let it happen again. The tellers had been armed. Half the town had been on the alert. Gideon had been holding the horses outside when Dwight had come flying empty-handed out the door, gunsmoke billowing at his back.

“They’re all dead. Shot down like dogs,” he’d yelled. “Let’s get.”

Dwight had leapt on his horse, grabbing the reins from Gideon just as hot metal had torn through Gideon’s thigh, and then a bullet in the shoulder had pitched him into the dirt of the street.

“They get you?” his cousin had yelled down at him.

Gideon only remembered raising a bloody hand. “Pull me up. I can ride.”

Dwight’s horse’s hooves had danced perilously close to Gideon’s head as the robber had peered down at him. “Hell. You’re dead, too. Sorry, cousin,” he’d said, then slashed his heels into the horse and was gone.

A feminine voice cut through Gideon’s reverie now. He looked at the woman across the table, almost surprised to find her there, startled to discover himself alive and breathing.

“Which was it?” she asked him now, her eyes brilliant with curiosity. “More or less?”

“More,” he said, thinking it had been more than he’d ever bargained for. Enough to land him in the state penitentiary when he recovered from his wounds.

Her head tilted fetchingly. She raised a hopeful eyebrow. “It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity or anything like that, was it?”

Gideon laughed in spite of himself. She was so young, so unspoiled. He appreciated her innocence and her willingness to believe in his, even though he wasn’t worthy of it. “I was guilty, Ed,” he said.

Her optimistic expression slackened a moment, hope withering in the harsh glare of fact. “Oh,” she said.

He grinned. “Disappointed?”

She shook her head vehemently.

“Yes, you are,” he said with a sigh. “You’re like most females. You want to make a man better than he is. Change his past to suit your own sweet notions. If you can’t change his past, then you set out to change his future.” He slanted back in his chair and crossed his arms, eyeing her with amusement.

But she didn’t appear to be amused, either by his views on the opposite sex or by his evasions. “Is that what Cora tried to do?” she snapped.

A bitter laugh broke from Gideon’s throat. “Hardly. Cora had enough trouble with her own past to waste her time worrying about mine.”

“Did she rob banks, too?”

“She was a whore.” The words came out more harshly than he intended, causing the little bank teller to flinch and drag in her lower lip. Gideon leaned forward. “Forget about Cora, will you? She took off five years ago, and I haven’t given her a second’s thought since then.”

“Yes, you have.” Her voice was quiet and firm. “You turned to her for warmth and for comfort last night in your sleep.”

He probably had, Gideon thought mournfully. But he wasn’t going to admit it to this little girl just to satisfy her overblown female curiosity. “What I turned to,” he growled, “was a woman in my bed. Any woman.”

“You spoke her name,” she insisted. “You said—”

Gideon shoved back his chair. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what I said. All right? Will you just stop?” He stood up and dug some bills out of his pocket, then tossed them on the table. “Come on.”

Honey rose slowly to her feet, shoulders stiff, chin tilted. “Where are we going?”

“To catch the ten o’clock train.” Gideon slung his arm around her and propelled her out of the café before she could respond.

The tracks ran north and south at the edge of the little town, and by the time Gideon had pushed, pulled and bullied Honey in that direction, the locomotive was already getting up a thundering head of steam. He clamped his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the platform of the last car, then vaulted up behind her.

Honey, who had been muttering under her breath all the way from the café, shook the red-and-black flounces of her short skirt now. “I can’t ride on a train dressed like this. What’ll people think?”