A Wanted Man Read Online Free

sitting, and responded with a slight and crooked grin.
    The pit of Lark’s stomach fluttered.
    Mrs. Porter led the new boarder straight to the room at the back, with its fireplace and outside door and lovely writing desk. The dog got up and lumbered after them.
    For a moment, Lark was so stricken by jealousy that she forgot she might be in grave peril. Then, her native practicality emerged. Even presuming Mr. Rhodes was not in Autry’s employ, he was a stranger, and he carried a gun. He could murder them all in their beds.
    Mai Lee set another place at the table.
    Voices sounded from the next room. Lark discerned that Mrs. Porter had undertaken to lay a fire, and Mr. Rhodes had promptly assumed the task.
    Lark stood up, intending to dash upstairs and lock herself in her room until she had a chance to speak privately with Mrs. Porter, but Rhodes reappeared before she could make another move. She dropped back into her chair and was treated to second look of amusement from the lodger.
    Indignant color surged into Lark’s face.
    Mrs. Porter prattled like a smitten schoolgirl, offering Mr. Rhodes a tart and running on about how it was good to have a man in the house again, what with poor, dear Mr. Porter gone and all. Why, the world was going straight to Hades, if he’d pardon her language, and on a greased track, too.
    Rhodes crossed to the table, took one of the tarts and bit into it, studying Lark with his summer-blue eyes as he chewed. He’d left his coat behind in his room, and the gun belt with it, but Lark was scarcely comforted.
    He could be a paid assassin.
    He could be an outlaw, or a bank robber.
    And whatever his name was, Lark would have bet a year’s salary it wasn’t Rowdy Rhodes.

2
    P AYTON Y ARBRO —Jack Payton to anybody who asked—sat with one booted foot braced against a windowsill, in the apartment back of Ruby’s Saloon and Poker House in Flagstaff, smoking a cheroot and pondering the sorry state of the train robbing business in general and his feckless sons in particular.
    He had six of them, at least that he knew of. Wyatt was the eldest—he’d be thirty-five on his next birthday, sometime in April, though Payton was damned if he could recall the exact date. Then came Nicholas, followed in short order by Ethan and Levi, who were twins, then Robert and, like a caboose, young Gideon, who’d just turned sixteen. He’d come along late, like an afterthought, and Miranda had died giving him life.
    Payton tried not to hold it against boy—it purely wasn’t his fault—but sometimes, when a melancholy mood struck, he couldn’t help it.
    She’d driven her ducks to a poor pond marrying up with Payton Yarbro, Miranda had. Five of her sons were wanted by the law, and the sixth, Gideon, was likely to get himself into trouble first chance he got. Like as not, that opportunity wouldn’t be long in coming, for Gideon, like his brothers, was a spirited lad, half again too smart for his own good, hotheaded and reckless. By necessity the boy already lived, without knowing, under a partial alias—went by the surname of Payton.
    Robert—he’d been Miranda’s favorite, and she’d called him Rob, after some swashbuckling fellow in a book—used his nickname and a moniker meant to stick in Payton’s craw.
    There was no telling what the others had come to by now.
    Maybe Miranda’s prayers had been answered, and they’d all married and settled down to live upstanding, law-abiding lives.
    Of course, the odds were better that they’d been hanged or gotten themselves killed in a gunfight over a woman or a game of cards, out behind some whiskey palace.
    Payton sighed. At least he knew where Gideon was—sulking in the saloon, where Ruby had set him the task of raking the sawdust clean of cigar butts, peanut shells and spittle. Wyatt and the others, well, if they were alive at all, could be just about anyplace. Scattered to the winds, his boys.
    Miranda, God rest her valiant soul, was probably rolling over in