The Rascal Read Online Free Page B

but split their ribs with laughing.
    Jack’s frown deepened. He slapped his towel on the bar.“You two are damned know-it-alls anyway. What makes you think—”
    “Handling her?” McCabe interrupted.
    “Is that what you’re calling it?” Plainly out of his head with hilarity, Copeland swabbed a tear from his eye. He smacked his hand genially on the bar, then made ready to leave. “That’s a good one, Murphy. Good luck with that tactic.”
    “Let us know how it turns out.” McCabe guffawed again.
    “I’ve practically got her subdued!” Jack protested.
    And only half exaggeratedly, too.
    But his friends merely laughed louder, then strolled from the saloon with their heads bent—doubtless to share another jest at Jack’s expense. He didn’t know exactly when, it occurred to him, he’d become such a source of amusement to the men in town.
    Whenever it had happened, Jack didn’t like it one bit. Although Copeland and McCabe’s teasing was all in good fun, it still smacked of his experiences in Boston—the same experiences that had made him leave for the west.
    It was time to put a stop to it. Once and for all.
    The next time he saw Grace Crabtree, Jack vowed, he would lay down the law in no uncertain terms. He would show her that no woman gave orders to a rough-and-ready man like himself—even a self-made rough-and-ready man like himself. Grace didn’t need to know his newly rugged persona was still progressing.
    Hell, neither did anyone else.
    Confidently, Jack grabbed a plug of tobacco from the stock for sale behind the bar. He stuffed it in his mouth, both hands propped manfully on the polished wood. Deliberately, he sucked the tobacco’s papery, strongly flavored mass against his cheek.
    Ugh . Grimacing, Jack spat it out. The sorry truth was, hejust wasn’t a tobacco-chewing man. No matter how hard he tried to cultivate the popular habit.
    But he was not a quitting man either. Narrowing his eyes, Jack considered the packets of cheroots and Mexican cigarillos stocked nearby. There was more than one way to develop a manly aura, he reasoned. With enough tobacco stuffed in his pockets, he’d smell as masculine as the heartiest western roughneck.
    Feeling assured, Jack rammed three cheroots in the pocket of his britches, then sauntered to the end of the bar with his big boots ringing, ready to greet his next adventure.
        
    As far as anyone could remember, only two women had ever been confined to the Morrow Creek town jail. One was Ruby Pemberton, an angelic-looking female who’d earned notoriety by smuggling mining camp gold in her bustle. The other was Grace Crabtree. Folks claimed it was only fitting the two of them wound up locked up together one clear January afternoon, awaiting the arrival of the beleaguered sheriff.
    But Grace knew better. “Fitting” had nothing to do with it. Serendipity did. Determined to make the most of her good fortune, Grace spent an enjoyable afternoon sharing exploits with Mrs. Pemberton. She emerged from her scandalous sojourn a little wiser than she’d been before—and vastly more entertained, too.
    Not that her two sisters, Molly and Sarah, strictly agreed.
    They launched their first salvos outside the jailhouse, while Grace was still pulling on her gloves and practical winter hat—procured through mail-order, extremely cozy and likely not the least bit stylish—in preparation for the snowy trek home.
    “Honestly, Grace.” Molly, the youngest of them all, shookher head as they trooped toward Main Street. “I don’t know what gets into you sometimes. It’s as though you want to be the subject of unending gossip in town!”
    “Posh.” Grace scoffed. “Mrs. Pemberton was fascinating. Do you know she would have succeeded flawlessly if only one blundering miner hadn’t pinched her during her getaway?”
    Neither of her sisters seemed suitably impressed.
    “Be that as it may, you ought to be more discerning,” said Sarah, the middle sister. “All of