A shot rang out on Front Street. Four more popped like a string of firecrackers. Cowboy hoots and hollers made Emma long for the quiet of the prairie.
Lucy slept deeply and soundly in one of the two rooms that Matt had rented from Mrs. Conner. Emma had watched her sleep for a while before coming downstairs. The child sucked her thumb and curled her fingers about a bit of satin on her nightgown, apparently oblivious to noise outside.
If it hadn’t been for her meeting with Pendragon earlier in the afternoon, Emma would have crawled into bed beside Lucy and closed her ears to the noise as best she could. But anxiety over his comment about a man named Hawker had left her uneasy. In the end, she’d turned down the lamp and left Lucy to sleep in a beam of moonlight shining through the window and onto the bed.
Boots crunched the dirt, beginning the climb up the hill.
“You ain’t my pa.” Emma recognized Red’s voice.
“I’m the closest thing you’ve got to it, and I say you’ve got a few more years before you’re ready for the Long Branch.”
“I’m close on a man. I’ve got a job and I’m near as tall as you.”
“Sweeping up at the land office is a pastime. You get on up to your room and I’ll let you know when you’re old enough to spend time in the saloon.”
“Evening, Emma,” Red mumbled in passing. Even with the front door closed behind him, his footsteps sounded heavy on the stairs.
“The boy doesn’t know how much growing up he’s got between here and manhood.” Matt sat in the rocker beside her and stretched out his long legs with his boots crossed at the ankles. “What are you doing out here in the dark, darlin’? It must be close to midnight.”
“Half past.” Emma watched Matt through the darkness. He took off his hat and shook his hair free of the constraint.
Moonlight shadowed the weary-looking lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Her husband was a stranger to her. There was so much she wanted to know about him.
“How many children have you adopted, Matt?” From the way things were going, half the town might start to call her Ma.
“Red’s not so much adopted as taken in hand. He came to Dodge about three years ago, ready to face off with the first gunslinger he came across.” Matt sat straighter in his chair and propped his elbows on his knees. He gazed down at his hands dangling between his thighs as though the story he was about to tell lay hidden in his fists. “He was almost as wild as I was at his age. Out here in Dodge, when a boy gets off to a bad start, it usually ends in an early grave.
“The first time I saw Red he was about thirty seconds from getting a hole blown in him.”
“That’s frightful! What happened?”
“I did what needed doing.” Matt looked up from his balled-up fists. Midnight shadows couldn’t hide the regret in his eyes. “Look, Emma, since we’re going to be joining our lives for the rest of the summer, there’s some things I expect you have a right to know.”
Silence stretched long and thin while he looked out over the nightlife in Dodge, then back at her.
“Sometime or another you’ll hear someone call me Singing Trigger Suede. That’s because I used to sing while I practiced my quick draw. When I was a kid, I was wild and full of fire and my gun was faster than anything people had seen before. When I was fourteen a man heard about my gun and came to town looking for a fight.
“We faced each other, right down there on that street.” Matt grew quiet for a moment, as though he could see it happening again down the hill in the dark. “I was singing through my sweat and my shaking knees, but I knew I could take him. All of a sudden the man turned his back on me and said that he didn’t shoot babies. I’d be dead now if he hadn’t walked off. It wasn’t but an hour later that the man faced someone else at the very same spot. I watched the life blink out of his eyes while he lay there bleeding.
“I put away my gun that afternoon and took to cattle herding. It took some time, but most folks forgot about how fast I could shoot a gun.”