The Gun Fight

Chapter Eighteen

It was dark in the room, silent. Out in the breezeless night, crickets rasped like a thousand files grating on metal. A block away, she heard the muffled trotting of a horse as someone rode home late from town. The hoofbeats faded, disappeared, and the curtain of dark silence settled once again over the street, the house, the room in which she lay, sleep-less, on her bed.

In the back bedroom, in the bed so painfully large for her, her mother dozed fitfully, mumbling and whimpering in her sleep. Her husband had been dead eight years now but Elizabeth Harper still slept in the outsize four-poster, cold, restless, and lonely. She had never been quite the same since the funeral. They had, almost literally, buried her in the cemetery with her husband.

At least her spirit was there in the ground with his resting bones. Since his death, she had never been quite up to coping with life; and this affair about Louisa and Benton and Robby Coles and everybody else had completely unhinged her. Weeping, she regarded it, attempted to deal with it, able to think of how simple it would be if her dear husband were alive.

Louisa rolled on her stomach and gazed out moodily at the great tree in the front yard which stood etched against the moonlit sky like a black paper cutout. She rested her chin on her small hands and sighed unhappily.

Now she had to stay in the house until it was all settled. She didn’t mind not going to the shop, she liked that part of it. But not being able to do anything else at all, that she didn’t like; being cooped up with her doting, moist-eyed mother. And all because of that stupid story.

Louisa rolled on her back abruptly and squirmed irritably on the sheet. She raised up her feet and kicked off the blankets, her flannel gown sliding up her legs with a sighing of cloth as she kicked.

She didn’t pull it back down again but lay there in the darkness, feeling the cool air on her flesh. She closed her eyes and tried to summon up the vision of that ride again.

She couldn’t. Her aunt had ruined it, ruined everything. Whenever Louisa thought about it now, her aunt’s gaunt, accusing face would materialize in her mind, blotting out the dream. She couldn’t envision John Benton anymore without summoning up attendant visions of Robby, of Benton’s wife, of her mother, her aunt, of the glittering-eyed Mrs. DeWitt, Mrs. Cartwright and all the women who had come to her aunt’s shop to see her and gloat and imagine things.

Louisa felt her cheeks getting warm and she turned quickly and pressed her face into the cool pillowcase. Terrible women! She wasn’t going to be like them when she grew up.

She felt the air settle like cool silk over her bare calves and thighs as she lay there. It was such an awful thing, gossip. All she’d wanted to do was make Robby a little jealous, get him to do something besides talk in monotones and be boring. Granted, she hadn’t chosen her words too wisely but she hadn’t meant any harm. And now . . . Louisa blew out a weary breath and felt the heat of it mask her face.

What was going to happen now? she wondered. Aunt Agatha had spoken about someone paying but, after all, what could Aunt Agatha do? Of course, Robby had gotten very angry and maybe he’d do something. Nothing really dangerous, though. No one would dare try to fight John Benton, that was certain.

Relieved at the acceptance of that, Louisa rolled onto her back again and stared up at the ceiling. Oh, well, so she stayed home a few days. What difference did that make? At least she wouldn’t have to work in Aunt Agatha’s shop and be stared at by those awful women.

With child. The thought came suddenly and Louisa’s throat moved and, for a moment, she could hardly breathe. She knew whose child they meant and she knew how children were begotten.

“John.” She whispered it within the shell of dreams she suddenly withdrew to.