Page 7 of Follow the Lonesome Trail
She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and tugged him toward town. “Please, call me Julia.”
Saul Hansen ran a hand over his smooth chin. How many months had it been since he’d shaved? Six? Eight? Ten? He found he didn’t know. A bath of sorts, a shave, trimmed hair, and a new shirt from the mercantile made him feel ready to face down anything from a grizzly to an avalanche to a wily bartender. Even a whole roomful of womenfolk. Maybe he ought to bathe and shave more often, if it made him feel this fresh inside and out. He’d try to remember that.
While Julia had busied herself talking with people around town, he’d cleaned up with the help of Doc Masterson’s razor and washtub. He’d had a dubious audience composed of three little Masterson boys who thought surely a bath when it wasn’t even Saturday must be sacrilegious. That sounded an awful lot like something he and O’Rourke would have said as youngsters. The thought was painful, so he’d pushed it away and concentrated on soap and water, nothing more.
It was two hours past noon now, but enough women had convinced their husbands to take a little time off from work or chores that the community was well represented in the crowd converging on Carter’s Saloon. Hansen hung back a little, knowing his place as an outsider was on the fringe. Even though uniting the two halves of the town, so to speak, had started off as his idea, that didn’t mean he should ride prod on the following events. Besides, he wasn’t sure what Julia would think of him without his beard and long hair. She might not even recognize him.
Julia Masterson opened the saloon door and held it so others could file inside. Hansen wished he could see the look on Carter’s face when couple after couple walked in, most of them arm in arm like they were on their way to a dance. Quite a few had a child or two along, the sort too small to leave alone.
Dawdling behind everyone else, he watched Julia, admiring the way she greeted everyone with a smile and a word or two. Then she looked out over the crowd and noticed him at the back of it. Her eyes widened, and then her smile did too. Hansen felt himself grinning like a schoolboy in return. He could tell she’d recognized him, and he found he liked the way her eyes lingered on him. When she turned her attention to the people in front of her, he decided maybe not all stares were something he simply had to endure. Some stares, he could enjoy.
Hansen was one of the last to enter, which gave him a good view of the determined townspeople crowding the room, and of Carter’s studied calm. One couple came in behind Hansen and lingered, almost hiding behind him. He didn’t mind. If they felt in need of a shield, he’d provide it.
Carter waited, watchful but silent.
Julia stepped up and placed her hands on the bar, palms down. “We’re here for our money. We thank you for keeping it for us while things were uncertain. But now that we’re throughthe smallpox epidemic, it’s time we began building this place up again.”
People murmured in agreement.
Carter raised an eyebrow. “Why, Mrs. Masterson, are you accusing me of standing in the way of our town’s progress? Me? Really?”
“I’m asking you to return what’s ours.” Julia’s voice stayed even. “I suppose you may see yourself as a sort of, well, caretaker of Carter’s Run. You settled here first and built the sawmill, so you think you should be allowed to run the whole place. But that’s not a caretaker’s job.”
“A caretaker? No. A guardian.”
Someone in the crowd said, “Some guardian! How do we know you even still have our money?”
“You would impugn my good name?” Carter roared, his mustache bristling. “When I have given you credit at my mercantile against your deposits? At the livery and the lumber mill? And here, in the saloon? When I have paid the doctor what you owed him out of your money, and sometimes from my own if yours ran short?” He nodded. “Oh, yes. I’ve paid Doctor Masterson everything that all of you owed him. He has no grievance against me.”
The crowd muttered angrily. “He paid Doc with our money? How do we know how much?” “What if we’d already arranged to pay him with eggs, or work, or something else?” “What else has he spent our money on?”
Hansen spoke out over the noise. “Mr. Carter, a banker lets people decide what to do with their money. If they want to draw it out, he lets them. If they want to use it to pay someone, they make that choice. It’s clear that you’re no banker.”
Carter pointed a finger at Hansen. “This is your fault. You put them up to this.” His eyes blazed with fury.
A woman stepped out from behind Hansen, her husband’s hand clasped in her own. “No, he didn’t. All he did was remind us that we ought to pull our freight alongside our husbands and stop blaming them when we didn’t like how they let you buffalo them.”
Carter’s eyes widened. “You too?”
“Yes, Papa. Me too.” Her sweet voice was quiet, but not hesitant. “You didn’t lock away our money the way you did theirs, but you’ve wronged us all the same. And I’ve wronged my husband. I’ve stood aside and let you boss him around for years now, and never once supported him, and that was wrong. We own the mercantile, not you, and we’re through taking your say-so for what money people do and don’t have. That was all right when most of us were too sick to think straight. But no more.” She turned and raised her voice to address the crowd. “Once he gives everyone their money, I want you to come over to the mercantile, and we’ll make sure your tallies there are fair and square. Then we’ll start everyone over with a clean slate, cash or credit, whichever.”
Beside her, her husband said, “And we’re changing the name of our store to Dolan’s Mercantile, too. We paid back what Carter loaned us when we set it up, and the store’s ours now.”
Carter stared at his daughter. “You can’t,” he argued hoarsely.
“Why, Papa? What makes you think starting a town means you get to run the lives of every person in it?” Her voice took on a challenging edge.
“I didn’t just start this town, I saved it! Who made sure we had plenty of medicine, plenty of food? I did!”
Julia Masterson said, “Just because you save a man from a stampede or a snakebite, that doesn’t mean you get to run his life from then on.”
“Why not? Why shouldn’t I run this town? None of the rest of you people have done much for it even now that you’re wellagain. Someone has to make decisions. Someone has to be in charge.”
Doc Masterson entered from the street, as steady on his feet as a man who’d never drunk hard liquor in his life. He stopped beside his daughter-in-law and told Carter, “A man gets to make his own mistakes. That’s a principle our country was founded on. He gets to savor his own successes, too.”
Carter’s daughter asked, “The moneyisthere, in your safe, isn’t it?”
He sighed heavily. “Yes, but—”
