Her mother had told her that wild cowboys weren’t to be trusted, but she’d been so certain her mother had been wrong. She put a hand on her belly, testing it to see if she could feel a difference, but it still felt as firm and flat as always. If only she could change the past, she would not give those cowboys a second glance.
She looked back down at the street, saw the sheriff climbing up the steps to the gallows and quickly turned away. She was ashamed she’d ever believed herself in love with Joseph Carver, and even more ashamed she’d let him have his way with her.
“Mary!”
She jumped at the sound of her father’s voice.
“Coming,” she said, and hurried out of her room and then down the stairs to the store below.
The room was packed, mostly with people who were waiting out of the sun for the hanging. She scooted behind the counter and tied an apron around her waist before moving to her first customer, a woman she recognized as the wife of a settler named Myron Reed. The harried woman had a baby in her arms and three young children playing at her feet.
“May I help you?” Mary asked.
“I need to fill this order,” the woman said, and slid a grocery list across the counter to Mary.
“It will only take a few minutes,” she said.
“Take your time, dearie,” the woman said, then whacked her oldest child on the back of the head. “Stop puttin’ your finger up your nose.”
The child let out a bellow of dismay that only added to the underlying rumble of voices all talking about the same thing—the man who was about to be hanged.
Mary blinked back tears and hurried to fill the list, took the woman’s money, and moved to the next, then the next, and suddenly someone yelled.
“They’re coming! They’re coming!”
The store began to empty as if the building had caught on fire. Mary’s heart began to hurt and her hands began to shake. She moved to the window in time to catch a glimpse of Joseph’s face. The laughter was missing. He looked scared.
“Mary! Come away from there!” her father said.
Mary turned around. There was no one in the store but her and her father. She opened her mouth, wanting to tell him what she’d done.
Then the crowd roared and she flinched. She could hear the sheriff talking and thought he asked Joseph if he had any last words.
There was a long moment of silence. She wanted to turn around—needed to see the horror of what was happening, yet afraid she would break down. Her father wouldn’t understand why she was so upset over some thieving cowboy she shouldn’t know.
Then she heard a solid thump, followed by the faint wail of an infant and wondered if the settler’s baby was the only one who would cry for Joseph Carver this day.
A few moments later, the crowd in the street began to disperse. A few came back into the store to finish their shopping, while others loaded up in their wagons and buckboards and started the trip home. They’d seen what they had come to see—hard justice in a sparse land.
Mary lifted her chin and found herself staring blindly at the stock lining the front of the shelves, then at her father, memorizing the studious expression on his face as he posted a line of figures into his account book. Upstairs, she could hear the sounds of her little brothers and sisters playing and the intermittent creak of a floorboard above her head as her mother rocked her little sister to sleep. It was so familiar and so dear. But the innocence of her life was gone and if she told her parents what she’d done, then this would all be gone, too. She glanced at the clock. It was almost time for the stage to arrive. She took off her apron and hung it on a nail by the staircase, smoothed her hands down the front of her dress and slipped out the back door unobserved.
When Shorty topped the hill above Plum Creek, he breathed a huge sigh of relief. The preacher and his female companion would be getting off in town, and it was none too soon for him. Sister Leticia was a fine looking woman, but in his opinion, not worth the trouble she had caused. He hadn’t slept in a barn since the night his wife had kicked him out of the house and went back to