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ruffled the dog’s ears, spoke gently to him and let him out the back door, following in his wake.
    Lark, recognizing a prime opportunity to make herself scarce, stood frozen in the middle of Mrs. Porter’s kitchen floor instead, one hand filled with chunks of buttered bread.
    Mrs. Porter returned before Mr. Rhodes reappeared, her cheeks pink from the cold and religious conviction. Beaming, she untied the wide black ribbons of her Sunday bonnet. “You missed an excellent sermon,” she told Lark. “All about the tortures of eternal damnation.”
    “Sounds delightful,” Lark said mildly and with no trace of sarcasm, depositing Pardner’s refreshments on a chipped saucer and setting it on the floor. Having lived two years under Autry’s roof, she knew the highways and byways of hell, and had no desire to revisit the subject.
    Mrs. Porter removed her woolen cloak and hung it on one of several pegs beside the door. “You really should consider the fate of your immortal soul,” she said.
    The door opened again, and Pardner bounded in, his master behind him.
    “Wouldn’t you say we should all consider the fate of our immortal souls, Mr. Rhodes?” Mrs. Porter inquired, looking for support.
    “Rowdy,” Mr. Rhodes said. He watched Lark as he took off his hat and coat and hung them next to Mrs. Porter’s bonnet and cloak, probably noting the high color that burned in Lark’s cheeks.
    His perusal made her uncomfortable, and yet she could not look away.
    “Yes, indeed,” he told Mrs. Porter, in belated answer to her question. “I’ve run afoul of the devil myself, a time or two.”
    If Lark had said such an outrageous thing, Mrs. Porter would have taken her to task for flippancy. Because Mr. Rhodes— Rowdy —had been the one to say it, she simply twittered.
    It was galling, Lark thought, the way some women pandered to men—especially attractive ones, like the new boarder.
    “You’re personally acquainted with the devil, Mr. Rhodes?” Lark asked archly, when Mrs. Porter went into the pantry for the makings of supper.
    “He’s my pa,” Rowdy answered.

3
    R OWDY RARELY LOOKED at Lark Morgan during the Sunday supper of hash, deftly made by Mrs. Porter since it was Mai Lee’s night off, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of her.
    He should have been thinking about his pa or about Gideon or about the meeting with Sam O’Ballivan and Major Blackstone coming up the next morning.
    Instead the mysterious woman sitting directly across the table from him, intermittently pushing her food around on her plate with the tines of her fork and eating as though she was half-starved, filled his mind.
    She hadn’t told him anything about herself. What Rowdy knew, he’d gleaned from Mrs. Porter’s eager chatter.
    Lark was a schoolteacher, never married, popular with her students.
    She’d been in Stone Creek for three months, during which time she’d never sent or received a letter or a telegram, as far as Mrs. Porter could determine. And Mrs. Porter, Rowdy reckoned, could determine plenty.
    Lark Morgan’s clothes gave the lie to a part of her story—they were costly, beyond the means of any schoolmarm Rowdy had ever heard of. He wasn’t convinced, either, that she’d never been married; there was a worldliness about her, as though she’d seen the seamy side of life, but an innocence, too. She’d been a witness to sin, he would have bet, but somehow she’d managed to hold her expensive skirts aside to avoid stepping in it.
    Mentally Rowdy cataloged his other observations.
    She’d dyed her hair—there was a slight dusting of gold at the roots.
    Her dark eyes were luminous with secrets.
    She was unquestionably brave.
    And she was just as surely afraid. Even terrified at times.
    He’d joshed her a little earlier, claiming the devil was his pa, and she’d flinched before she caught herself.
    Could be she was a preacher’s daughter, and the devil was serious business to her. Some folks, Rowdy reckoned, paid so