Читать книгу The Marriage Knot - Mary McBride - Страница 8

Prologue

Kansas, 1880

Until the morning Ezra Dancer shot himself, not much had happened in Newton. The railroad had come through in 1871, and for one wild summer the town was full of cowboys and longhorns, gamblers and quacks and whores. Newton was as sinful then as any Sodom or Gomorrah, but that honor—along with the cowboys and longhorns, the gamblers, quacks and whores—had long since passed west with the railroad to Dodge City.

Newton’s makeshift tents and rickety shacks had been replaced with painted clapboard and solid brick. Most of the saloons had given way to drier businesses—Kelleher’s Feed and Grain, the Merchant’s Bank, the First Methodist Church—and where Madam Lola’s canvas and cardboard brothel once had been, the citizens had built themselves a school.

As in most law-abiding towns, there was a jail for anyone who crossed the line, and there was a sheriff with a tough reputation to insure that nobody did.

Delaney.

His name was rarely spoken solo. Likely as not, it was mentioned in the same sentence as the Earps—Wyatt and Virgil and Morgan—and that reprobate dentist, Doc Holliday. But when the Earps and Holliday departed Kansas for the warmer clime and hotter prospects of Arizona in the autumn of ’79, Delaney stood alone.

Or, to be more exact, he lay alone on a cot in a back room of the U.S. Marshall’s office in Dodge City.

“Too bad you can’t come with us,” Morgan Earp had said in all sincerity, his eyes deliberately averted from Delaney’s wounded arm.

“He will, I expect, as soon as he mends,” Doc had said. “Isn’t that so, Delaney?”

Although he had nodded a grim yes to Doc, Delaney hadn’t followed them to Arizona after all, but had come—bad arm and a worse disposition—to Newton instead. And not a lot had happened in the six months since he’d taken the job of sheriff. There had been a brawl or two, and one domestic dispute that involved a horsewhip and a kitchen knife. But there hadn’t been a shooting until the morning Ezra Dancer put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

When his deputy awoke him with the news, Delaney’s first thought—like a searing bolt of lightning through his brain—was not about the deceased, but rather about the man’s wife.

No. Not a wife anymore.

Hannah Dancer was a widow now.

That notion shook Delaney to his core.