Summary: After a few too many heartbreaks, Joe promises himself he’s done with serious romances. No one really believes him, and his resolve is tested when a pretty stranger’s carriage breaks down on the Ponderosa. Will a romance finally end well, or will it just mean yet another heartbreak?  Set at the end of Season 3, first in a planned AU series.

Rating: G | Word Count: 60,221

Part One

 

1.

At first, Joe Cartwright couldn’t see anyone by the broken-down carriage.  It was plain enough that it was broken-down, the way one corner was tilting, and it had been for long enough that the black horse in the traces was eating the grass at its feet.  No one was sitting in the carriage, but he could hear muttering from the side that was out of sight.

In his probably too-extensive experience with this kind of thing, lone horsemen could be trouble.  Anyone driving a carriage that had clearly come from the livery stable in Virginia City was much less likely to be a threat, and also had none of the signs of, say, a renegade bank robber.  He pulled up Cochise, swung down from the saddle, and walked around the wagon to see who was stranded on the Ponderosa this time.

He had to smile, reflecting that he had been out looking for strays.  The four-legged kind, but the two-legged type turned up a lot around here too.

“Run into trouble there?” he asked as he rounded the corner of the wagon.

He had only a brief impression of a dark-haired woman in a green dress bending over a carriage wheel before the picture changed.  She straightened up, reached for something on the seat of the carriage, and the next thing he knew he was facing the pointed-end of a closed parasol.

“Who are you and what do you want?” she demanded, blue eyes glaring at him – because Joe Cartwright wasn’t going to fail to notice the color of a pretty young woman’s eyes, even under circumstances like this.

He automatically raised his hands, though he also had to swallow a laugh looking at the parasol.  He looked at her face again and concluded from her expression that if he laughed, she would definitely jab him.  “I saw the carriage and stopped to see if anyone needed help.” He tried a smile.  “Just being friendly, not meaning any harm.”

Neither the parasol nor her expression budged.  “You say that, but how do I know you’re not an outlaw or a—a cattle rustler?”  There was a slightly triumphant note in that last phrase, as though she was pleased to have come up with it.  That, and the style of her clothes, made him think she was from some city somewhere.  He’d already guessed she wasn’t from around here.  He knew about all the pretty young women local to Virginia City.

“Well, it wouldn’t do me much good to rustle any cattle from this area,” Joe said, trying to pitch his voice reasonable.  “My family already owns all the cattle you’re likely to run into.”

The abrupt change in her demeanor was striking.  She lowered the parasol, her shoulders relaxed, and the hostile stare turned into one of thoughtful interest.  “You’re one of the Cartwrights?”

He tipped his head in acknowledgement and lowered his hands.  “I am.”

Her gaze scanned over him.  “Not big enough to be Hoss, so—Adam or Joe?”

His eyebrows rose, but he nodded, and gave his hat a quick tug.  “I’m Joe Cartwright.  How’d you know all our names?”

She shrugged, glanced away.  “Everyone knows about the Cartwrights.”

Sometimes that seemed to be true and sometimes, usually at inconvenient moments when someone wanted to more seriously accuse him of being an outlaw, it didn’t.

“Somehow I thought you’d be shorter,” she continued.  “I mean—don’t they call you Little Joe?”

“Yeah, but that makes more sense when you see my brother Hoss,” Joe said automatically.  “He’s so big, everyone seems little.”  And while this was a familiar enough conversational route, it wasn’t getting him any answers.  “But here you know all about my family, and I still don’t know your name or what you’re doing here.”

Her cheeks flushed pink.  “I’m sorry, I’m not usually this ill-mannered.”  She extended a hand.  “I’m Elizabeth Montgomery, from San Francisco.  I was just out for a drive.”

He took her hand, fingers closing briefly around hers before she let go.  “Pleased to meet you, Elizabeth Montgomery from San Francisco.  But I am duty-bound to warn you that you’re technically trespassing.”

“Oh?” she said, and arched an eyebrow.  “What’s the penalty for trespassing?”

“Well…that depends.  Were you planning on strip-mining a couple of valleys, seizing a hostage, or…”  He paused, grinned.  “…rustling a few hundred head of cattle?”

She laughed, the sound ringing out through the clear air.  “I can’t prove I wasn’t, but hopefully you’ll take my word for it that I only wanted a drive.”

“You seem trustworthy.  I think we can let it slide,” Joe said.  “After all, you’re taking my word for it that I’m not an outlaw.  Maybe I was involved in that bank robbery they had over in Placerville.”

It actually wasn’t impossible.  Law enforcement in Placerville had telegraphed Sheriff Coffee that the bank robbers might have fled this direction; Joe was mostly out looking for strays, but he was also supposed to be keeping an eye out for anyone acting suspicious, or sneaking across the Ponderosa.  Stranded with a broken-down carriage seemed like the opposite of sneaking.

She tipped her head, considering him.  “Somehow I don’t picture a Cartwright robbing a bank.”

“Well—only with the best of motives,” Joe said, remembering a certain escapade of his and Hoss’s.  More than a year, and Pa still wasn’t laughing about that yet.  “Welcome to the Ponderosa.  Need some help with that carriage wheel?”

“Desperately,” she said, stepping aside as he approached.

“What were you planning to do before I came along?” he asked, crouching down to inspect the wheel.  Looked like it had hit a bad rut in the road, judging by the mud splashed all over it – and over the hem of her dress, he noticed when he glanced over from this lower vantage point – and while the horse had managed to haul it out of the mud, one of the spokes had been damaged.

“Honestly?  I was probably about to kick the wheel, which wouldn’t help.  And then I guess I would have waited a while to see if anyone came by, and if they didn’t…”  She shrugged.  “I imagine I would have had to ride the horse back into town.”

Joe glanced at the horse as he straightened up from the wheel – the animal seemed calm enough but also didn’t have a saddle, and he wondered how that would have gone.  Probably best all around that he’d ridden this way this afternoon.  “What were you going to do if an outlaw showed up?”

“Hit him with the parasol, obviously,” she said, straight-faced.

“Obviously,” he agreed, and just for fun, he picked up the parasol she’d set down on the carriage seat.  “You know, if you really want to fight someone with this, you have to hold it properly.”

“Oh, I see.  You’re an expert on the art of parasol fighting?”

“You might be surprised,” Joe said, settling into a fencing stance.  He tried a few thrusts, a feint and a lunge.  “A little unwieldy, but well-balanced.”

She laughed again, and applauded.  “Finest fencing with a parasol I’ve ever seen.”

He offered a bow, and tossed the parasol back onto the seat.  He nudged the broken wheel with one boot.  “This doesn’t actually look too bad.  I think I can rig something together to hold it for at least a few miles.”

She sagged back against the side of the carriage.  “You, sir, are a life-saver.  Far preferable to an outlaw or a cattle-rustler.”

“A low bar, but thanks,” he joked.  “Now let me see if I can find something to brace this wheel with.”

It wouldn’t be the easiest repair job, without many tools at hand, but he thought he could do something.  As he worked on it, he asked, “So what brings you out this way anyway?  There are plenty of places to break down closer to San Francisco.”

“I’m visiting Virginia City about a job.”

“Oh?”  Joe tried to eye her surreptitiously while continuing his work on the wheel.  There weren’t that many jobs for women in Virginia City, apart from the obvious.  And there were plenty more saloons in San Francisco than around here.  “A particular job?”

“I have an appointment to meet with Bill Raleigh at The Territorial Enterprise,” was the unexpected reply.  Joe tried not to look surprised, but she must’ve seen something on his face because she raised her eyebrows and added, “Right now I work at The Morning Call in San Francisco.”

The name was familiar, and offered a welcome way to shift the conversation.  “Do you know Sam Clemens?  You know, the writer – Mark Twain.”  Sam had still been working at The Morning Call the last Joe heard.

She smiled.  “Mr. Clemens recommended I talk to Mr. Raleigh.”

Joe snapped his fingers.  “Hey, I bet that’s how you knew our names – ol’ Sam likes to tell stories about us.”  Which…was a little worrying, now that he thought about it.  “But you know, you can’t believe everything Sam says.  He loves a tall tale, Sam does.”

“Everyone knows that,” she said with a mischievous glint in her eyes.  She glanced away as she added, “And I suppose I’ve heard him mention you, now and then.”

And who knew what stories Sam was telling?  Maybe this hadn’t been the smartest direction to take the conversation after all.  Steer back another way…  “So are you a writer like Sam?”

For some reason that made her smile again.  “Not exactly.  I’d like to be, but—there’s not much opportunity, with so many newspaper writers in San Francisco.  So I do proofreading and make coffee and—that sort of thing.  That’s why I came to Virginia City.  I heard The Territorial Enterprise needed writers, so I took leave from my job and came out here.  I’m supposed to meet with the editor tomorrow morning but the stage actually ran on time and I arrived earlier today.  So…I thought I’d take a drive.”

“Well, you couldn’t have picked a prettier place to break a wheel.”  Joe stood up from the newly-secured wheel, dusting his hands off on his gray pants.  “This’ll probably hold for a while, but I don’t know if it’ll get you all the way back to town.  Better come on back to the house with me instead.  It’s closer, and we can do a better job on it there.”

“Oh—no, I couldn’t put you out like that,” she protested.  “It’s my own fault I’m here, I can take my chances getting back to town—”

“It’s no trouble.”  It was easier than going with her all the way to town – and he wasn’t about to let her go off on her own with a rigged-together wheel.  “And we have to extend hospitality to a friend of Sam Clemens.”

“We’re not—really friends, we just work together—”

“Besides, I’d never sleep at night wondering if you broke down again and a cattle rustler found you this time.  Not that I don’t think you could fend him off with your parasol, but better not test it, right?”

She laughed at that, as he had meant her to, and finally said, “Well—I suppose…”

“Good!” he said firmly, because he definitely wasn’t going to leave her alone out here.  The wheel could break, or one of those bank robbers really could show up.  He offered her a hand to step up into the carriage.  “I’d drive, but I don’t want to put more weight on that wheel.”

“I can manage it.”  She settled her skirts as she picked up the reins again.  “Thank you very much for everything, Mr. Cartwright.”

“Oh no,” he corrected, “that’s my father.  They just call me Little Joe.  Sam must’ve told you that.”

“They mostly call me Liza.”  Then her mouth curved into a smile again.  “And you seem tall to me – Joe.”  And then she was flicking the reins, the horse was beginning to move, and he had to head over to Cochise wondering just what, if anything, he ought to make of that.

Probably nothing, though it was a nice thing to have a pretty girl tell him.  But whether she meant anything much or not, that was no reason for him to start trying to build anything on top of it.  A year ago, a remark like that would have had him plotting picnics and moonlit walks, and next thing he knew he’d be building up a whole life with a woman…only it always came crashing down around him again, one way or another.

“Nothing serious anymore,” he reminded Cochise as he swung up into the saddle, to follow Liza’s carriage.  He’d had enough heartbreaks already.

 

2.

Like Liza had told Joe, everyone at The Morning Call, and probably large portions of San Francisco, knew that Sam Clemens loved to tell tall tales.  So when she went up to Virginia City, Liza hadn’t really expected Lake Tahoe and the Ponderosa to be the fairest picture the whole earth affords, or for Little Joe Cartwright to be so charming that he could coax the birds right out of the pine trees.  But the Ponderosa was stunning, and there was…something about Joe Cartwright.  Maybe she was going to find out that Hoss Cartwright really was eight feet tall and could lift a grown steer with his bare hands.

She had been too embarrassed to admit it to Joe, but when she took the carriage from the livery stable out this way, she had known very well that she was trespassing on the Ponderosa.  As big as the place was, she hadn’t imagined anyone would even notice, and after all of Mr. Clemens’ stories, it had been irresistible to come out here and see it.

She definitely hadn’t expected to encounter any Cartwrights.

The carriage wobbled slightly after its repair job, but she didn’t like to mention it to Joe – and she couldn’t seem to think of him as Little Joe now that she’d actually met him.  It seemed at once too familiar and too inaccurate.  He was slim, but not proverbially small.  She knew it had been forward, commenting on his height; it had slipped out in the moment.  She wasn’t usually so at ease talking to people, so apt to speak without thinking much too hard about it first.  Maybe it was the influence of all of Sam’s stories; she felt like she already knew him.

She didn’t actually, of course, and she wouldn’t have blamed him now as they continued on if he had ridden up ahead – or behind, or ranged around.  But instead he brought his horse in beside the carriage, matching speed and talking to her as they went.

She didn’t think he was trying to be charming, as most of the conversation covered perfectly banal details of their respective life histories, or involved pointing out the features of the landscape, something he took an evident pride in.  But the man did have something.

She knew she wasn’t the first woman to think so.  The Morning Call regularly mined other newspapers for news items in different locales, including The Territorial Enterprise.  The Virginia City newspaper reported now and then on the newsworthy doings of the family that owned the largest spread in Nevada.  That included at least three items announcing the engagement of Little Joe Cartwright, to three different women, none of which had been followed by wedding announcements.

But asking about that would be much more forward than commenting on his height.  So she changed the subject aloud, in order to change the subject in her head.  “You have a very handsome horse.”

It wasn’t a brilliant conversational gambit, but she’d encountered enough cowboys in San Francisco to know that they would always talk about their horses.  “This is Cochise,” Joe said, giving the horse’s neck a pat.  “You don’t see a lot of paints in these parts.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise her, that he’d have a horse that would stand out in a crowd – or did she mean a herd?  She tried not to watch him too obviously as he rode beside her, but he made a striking picture, on his boldly marked black and white horse, wearing his green jacket.  She hadn’t spent long in Virginia City yet, but it had mostly seemed full of blacks and browns and dusty tans, on the men and the horses.  And here was Joe Cartwright in his defiant splash of green, as though he belonged much more to the pine trees than to the dusty city streets.

None of this was anything she was going to say out loud, so it was lucky he was still focused on his horse.  “Cochise here was a gift to my father from Chief Winnemucca of the Paiute Nation.”

The resulting stories, about encounters with Paiutes and Shoshones, about militia rides and hostage situations and helping a Shoshone woman who was expecting a baby, were very entertaining and rather improbable, if less obviously embellished than Mr. Clemens’ stories.  And they lasted all the way until the road took a turn through a stand of trees and came to a big ranch house and accompanying barn.

“Here it is,” Joe said cheerfully and quite casually.

Liza hoped her expression looked as calm and casual as his.  She suspected that she might not have tried as hard to decline his invitation of hospitality if she hadn’t wanted to see the ranch house of the Ponderosa as much as she did.  After all of Mr. Clemens’ stories, after the bits of detail in the Enterprise, she was far more curious than she cared to admit.

The only person in sight was a large man splitting wood near the front porch, work he halted as they came into the yard.

She might have guessed a ranch hand would be doing that sort of job, but it didn’t fit with the familiar tone when he called, “Hey, Little Joe, somebody forget to tell me we were expecting company?”

“Nah, big brother, this was more unplanned,” Joe said, swinging down from his horse and coming over to offer her a hand down from the carriage.

It wasn’t as though she couldn’t get down herself.  But she also wasn’t going to refuse him.  She took his hand to step down, and let go once her feet were on the ground.

The big man had approached by now, offering a warm smile and saying, “Howdy, ma’am, I’m—”

“No, wait,” Joe interrupted.  “Liza likes to guess.”

Liza glanced between the two men, between Joe’s grin and his brother’s quizzical expression, and wondered how exactly it was that she apparently now had an inside joke with Joe Cartwright.  “I mean, he has to be Hoss, right?”  He wasn’t eight feet tall, but he was definitely well over six, and about twice as broad as Joe.

“Would you believe me,” Joe asked, “if I told you this is Adam, and Hoss is even bigger?”

Liza found that his grin was infectious.  “It would certainly explain your nickname, but no, I don’t think I would.”

Hoss—it really did have to be Hoss—guffawed, a laugh big enough to fit his frame.  “You probably shouldn’t believe much this two-headed brother of mine says, especially when he’s talking to a pretty gal like you.  I am Hoss, ma’am.  Pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Liza Montgomery,” she said, extending a hand.  The big man’s grip was surprisingly gentle, probably deliberately so.  “My carriage broke down a few miles from here, and your, ah, two-headed brother very kindly rescued me.”

“She knows Sam Clemens,” Joe tossed over his shoulder as he led his horse over to the small corral next to the barn, “so any stories I tell are basically Gospel truth compared to what she’s been hearing.”

Hoss’ face split in a grin.  “Yeah?  How is ol’ Sam?  Still peddling his tall tales?”

“All the time,” Liza said, and tried to not too obviously study the man’s thickly-muscled arms.  “Can you really lift a steer with your bare hands?”

“Well now, that depends on the size of the steer, ma’am.”

She would have liked to pursue that question, but Joe was already coming back, saying, “Liza’s carriage wheel broke out on the west pastures.  Think we can do something about it?”

“I expect so,” Hoss said, and crouched down to look at the damaged wheel.  “Pretty good work patching it together.”

“Yeah, I thought it would get us here, but not as far as town,” Joe said, crouching next to his brother.  “We’ll need to replace it to get any farther.  Think we’ve got any wheels the right size in the barn?”

The steer story seemed increasingly plausible when they set to work on the wheel, Hoss single-handedly holding up one corner of the carriage while Joe worked to get the old wheel off and a new one, rustled up from the barn, put in its place.

Liza sat down on a bench set against the barn wall to watch and to wonder how exactly she had ended up here.

 

Ben Cartwright knelt down to study the ashes of a campfire, and tried to decide if the itch of unease he was feeling was based on anything real, or mere paranoia.  Deputy Clem Foster had ridden out yesterday evening, asking them to keep an eye out for any strangers, or any signs that the bank robbers who’d hit Placerville the day before yesterday were trying to escape across the Ponderosa.  The Cartwrights had offered to join a posse, but the sheriff and Clem thought they’d be more help keeping a watch out on their own land.  No one had a clear enough direction on where the bank robbers might have fled, and gathering everyone together into a posse would only mean covering less territory.  Ben wasn’t certain one nearly washed-out campsite was going to provide any useful directions either.

He didn’t think the traces of the fire were more than a couple days old, but it was hard to be certain.  It had rained during the night, disturbing the area.  The way the dirt was lying, half-obscuring the burnt kindling, might indicate that someone had tried to hide the traces, or it might have only been the rain shifting loose earth.

Ben straightened up, brushing ashes off his hands, and surveyed the immediate area.  If someone had wanted to camp out of sight, this was a likely spot for it, a depression between boulders.  But it also might have been someone innocently looking for a sheltered spot.

He knew none of his boys had been out this way, and none of the ranch hands should have had any reason to be camping here either.  So some stranger had been here – but with a ranch the size of the Ponderosa, they got travelers cutting across all the time.  It wasn’t something he liked, but it happened.

There was just nothing definite to say that whoever had been here had ties to the robbers – but nothing to say that they hadn’t either.  If there was a trail to follow he would have done it, but the rain had obscured any trace of it, and the area was too rocky for easy tracking under the best of circumstances.  The only thing he could guess was that it hadn’t been more than one or two riders; a bigger group would be more likely to have left clearer signs still visible.

Ben shook his head and headed back to his horse.  He’d have to report word to Roy Coffee, and let the sheriff decide if it was anything worth exploring.  It was a nasty business, that robbery – more than a hundred-thousand dollars stolen, and a bank teller and a customer left dead.  It had been a large gang, five or six by reports, and with that many desperate men potentially riding around the countryside…well, it only made it harder to be sure if this really was something to pay attention to, or if he was only jumping to the worst conclusions.

Once he was up on Buck, Ben looked over the landscape one more time, just in case.  But he saw only rocks and pine trees.  Whoever had been here, innocent or guilty, they were long gone.  Which was better than having them lurking behind a tree and shooting at him, but they’d taken any answers with them.

Ben turned his horse towards home.  He’d see what anyone else had found, if anything, and then ride on to Virginia City to report what little they could.  And he’d keep his eyes open while he rode, just in case.

 

3.

Hoss grinned as he held up the carriage for Little Joe to work on the wheel.  Sure, he could have found something to brace it with instead, but when a pretty girl was asking if he could pick up steers, clearly he was going to take the option that showed off a bit.  It wasn’t that big a carriage anyway.

“Hold it steady, will ya?” Joe said, wrestling with the old wheel.

“It is steady.  You just ain’t tugging at the right angle,” Hoss countered.

“You’re sure there’s nothing I can do to help?” Liza asked, from where she was sitting by the barn.

“We can do it,” Hoss and Joe both said in near-unison.

Then Joe winked in her direction and said, “You can keep an eye out for cattle rustlers.”

And she made an expression of amused exasperation that Hoss would have sworn would need much longer time around Little Joe to get that perfect.  “You do think you’re funny, don’t you?”

“Hey, I am funny!” Joe protested.  “Right, big brother?”

“We-ell…” Hoss said with a broad shrug.

Little Joe glared at him, plainly wanting to swat him except his hands were full with the carriage wheel.  But then Liza laughed and that made Joe smile, and that got Hoss to thinking.

The whole family teased Joe about how quickly and enthusiastically he could fall in love, and about his remarkable ability to dust off a broken heart and try again.  For a few years, nothing much had seemed to slow him down when it came to romantic pursuits.

But something had shifted finally.  Laura White’s death had hit him hard – Joe had been so ready, with the house and everything, and losing her had been a rough time.  And things had been a little strange ever since.  Joe’d taken Caroline Partridge on one carriage ride – and then stood her up the next time they planned to go riding.  The only gal he’d kissed recently, far as Hoss knew, was that one from New Orleans who already had a fiancé; that hadn’t been much like Joe, to chase an engaged woman, or to go after one where there was definitely no future.  But now here he was riding in with a nice gal he’d gallantly rescued – well, that seemed more like the old Little Joe.

No way to know this quick how this might turn out, of course.  But at least she wasn’t twenty years older than Joe, and she hadn’t given any sign so far that she thought she was a witch who could turn herself into a fish.  That put her ahead of some of the gals Little Joe had chased after before.

“You visiting Virginia City, Miss Liza?” Hoss asked, figuring he might do some fishing himself.

“Just Liza,” she corrected.  “And I’m not—entirely sure about my plans yet.”

“Liza wants to work for The Territorial Enterprise,” Joe contributed.

“Yeah?  I didn’t know there were women in newspapers.”

He meant it innocently enough, but her resulting smile looked forced.  “There’s a few of us.  And I suppose I’ll have to see what the editor of the Enterprise thinks of the idea.”

“Well, that’d be grand,” Hoss said heartily, and tried to think what else he could ask her about.

He didn’t get the chance just then because hoofbeats interrupted the conversation, and a moment later Adam rode into the yard.

“Joe, what are you doing back already?” Adam asked even as he swung down from his horse.  “I thought you were rounding up strays.  And we told the sheriff we’d check that western area.  What are you both doing messing around with that carriage?”

“You might say I just found one stray, older brother,” Little Joe said, with a meaningful head tilt in Liza’s direction.

“What do you mean one?  What are you doing back here if—oh.”  Adam’s long stride had apparently just taken him to a point where he could see past the carriage to what Joe was getting at.

“Did you just call me a stray?” Liza asked, arms crossed.

Joe got his gut-punched look and stammered, “Oh—no, I didn’t mean—that is—”

“That’s what we always call people we bring home who needed help,” Hoss said swiftly.  “Sort of a family joke.”

“This comes up a lot?” Liza asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Adam said dryly.  He approached Liza, who stood up as he got closer.  “I apologize for how I rode in.  I didn’t see you there.  I’m—”

“No, wait!” Hoss and Joe chorused together, Hoss enjoying being in the joke this time.

Adam looked at them both like they were crazy, and Liza laughed and said, “Just by process of elimination he has to be Adam, right?”

“Yeah,” Joe agreed, “but he seems to think he’s Pa sometimes, the way he talks.”

“Someone has to keep you two in line,” Adam shot back, then turned to Liza with a smile again.  “Adam Cartwright, as you correctly guessed.”

“Elizabeth Montgomery,” she returned, and Hoss could see Adam clock the name, just before she amended, “Liza, mostly.”

“Welcome to the Ponderosa, Liza.  I hope these brothers of mine haven’t given you too poor an impression of the family so far.”

She smiled at him, but Hoss thought there was something a mite different in the smile, and he wondered how seriously she was taking the teasing.  “Not at all.  They’ve been very charming and helpful.”

“Hmm,” Adam said with a rueful look.  “I can guess who’s been charming and who’s been helpful.”

“On the contrary, I wouldn’t assign either quality exclusively.”

Hoss exchanged a glance with Joe, who shrugged.  Apparently she could talk just about as fancy as oldest brother when she wanted to.

“How unexpectedly broad-ranging of them,” Adam said, which was definitely him showing off.  “Let me take my horse into the barn and then perhaps I can be of some help as well.”

All gazes followed Adam as he led Sport through the barn doors.  Or actually—Hoss glanced over at Joe to check, and yep, little brother was watching Liza watch Adam.  He had to grin again.  Could be possibilities here.

He glanced back at the barn and thought that maybe, just in case he was the only one seeing the possibilities…  “Hey, Joe, how about finding something to brace this ol’ carriage with?  I want to talk to Adam for a minute.”

“Yeah, sure,” Joe said, still half-distracted, but hunted up a block of wood to set under the corner.

Relieved of the burden, Hoss headed into the barn, to find Adam taking Sport’s saddle off.  “Hey, Adam,” he began, then hesitated.  “Er—everything all right out in the east pasture?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.  No problem with the cattle and no sign of bank robbers,” Adam said, heaving the saddle onto the nearby stall railing, and squinted at him.  “What is it?”

So he was obvious to Adam, at least.  “I jest wanted to say—don’t knock Little Joe too much in front of Liza, alright?”

“What did I say?” Adam protested.

“Well, that bit about—”

“It was a rhetorical question,” Adam interrupted.

“I know, I know.  It’s just that I think Joe might be taking a little shine to her, and…”

“When does Joe not take a shine to every pretty woman in sight?” Adam asked, rolling his eyes.

Hoss shrugged.  “The last few months – or didn’t you notice?”

Yanking on Sport’s blanket, Adam paused for a beat before saying more quietly, “Yeah, I noticed.  But a few months isn’t very long.”

“Is for Joe.”

Adam sighed.  “I know.  All right, I’ll be polite.”

“Good,” Hoss said and beamed at him.  “Hey, maybe this’ll be a good ‘un.  Maybe the name’s a good sign, right?”  After all, Adam’s mother had been an Elizabeth too.

“It’s just a name, Hoss,” Adam said, shaking his head, but smiled.  “I guess we’ll see though.”

 

According to Sam Clemens, Adam was the educated Cartwright, intellectually brilliant – and able to throw a mean right hook as well.  It seemed he hadn’t liked an article Sam wrote.  So far, the tall tales about the Cartwrights hadn’t been nearly as tall as Liza had assumed but—well, she’d have to see a little more of the oldest brother to decide about that one.

Something about him had unsettled her, though.  He was as polite and smooth-talking as his brothers, but somehow it still—hadn’t felt as easy, as it did with Joe and Hoss.  Like there was a lot more going on behind Adam’s eyes, and she couldn’t begin to guess what.

As the barn door closed behind Hoss, she tried to put the black-clad Adam out of her mind and turned back to Joe.  “So you bring home strays often?”

He rolled the new wheel up beside the carriage axle, and remarked, “We just try to help out where we can, when someone needs it.  We’ll have the carriage right as rain by supper.”  Then, snapping his fingers as though the idea had just struck him, he added, “You know, it’s a long drive back to Virginia City.  You ought to stay for supper before you go.”

It would be so easy to agree.  He said it charmingly and she wanted to say yes (of course she wanted to say yes), but she had started thinking about what she was saying again – and she didn’t want to look too eager.  “Do you always invite strays for supper?”

“If we think they might be hungry,” Joe said without missing a beat.  “’course, it might be getting dark by the time supper’s over,” he added meditatively.

Was he rescinding the invitation?  “Oh.  Then maybe—”

“Guess I’ll just have to escort you back to Virginia City after supper,” he said, with a grin that looked as though it had won him a great many arguments.

Maybe especially with women.  All those engagement announcements swam back into her mind and made Liza hesitate.  “I could never impose on you like that—”

“No, it wouldn’t be,” Joe protested.  “Gives me an ironclad reason to convince my pa that I need to be in Virginia City on a Friday night.  If we play the cards right, we can probably convince him Hoss needs to come too.  You’d be doing us both a favor, really.”

Two men escorting her home had rather a different color on it than just one charming, oft-engaged young man doing the job.  Less exciting, perhaps, but much simpler.  Less implied expectations.

“All right,” she agreed.  “Supper it is.”

“Good!” Joe said and left the wheel leaning against the carriage to come over and take her arm.  “Come on, we’ll go let Hop Sing – that’s our cook – know to put another plate on the table.”

“What about the carriage?”

“Hoss and Adam’ll finish it,” Joe said dismissively.

“Shouldn’t you help?”

“Nah, youngest brother’s privilege,” he said easily, and winked.  “’sides, if I don’t slack off work now and then, what would they have to feel superior about?”

 

4.

Joe knew that yelling was a very probable consequence of telling Hop Sing that they had an unexpected guest.  He was never worried personally by Hop Sing yelling, but he’d only narrowly convinced Liza to stay.  He didn’t need Hop Sing to scare her off.

So he brought her inside, then very deliberately led her over to the settee.  “Why don’t you sit here while I talk to Hop Sing?”

She was looking around the room with wide eyes.  It was always a toss-up whether someone was going to be impressed by the inside of the house.  Sometimes it came down to their background, and he would have guessed that Liza, being from San Francisco, would have been more accustomed to houses much grander than this.  Though he didn’t actually know much about her background.

She sank onto the red and white settee readily enough.  “This is—quite the grand house,” she said with a smile, looking up at the high roof beams.

“Yeah, brother Adam designed it and Pa built it out of some pines he chopped down just up the hill.  All before my time, though.”  He winked.  “You wait here.  And don’t worry if you hear some yelling.  That’s just Hop Sing’s way.  As long as no pots come flying at my head, he isn’t really upset.”

“How will I know from here if he’s throwing pots?” Liza asked, a sparkle of amusement in her eyes.

“You’ll hear the thud when I fall over, of course.  Hop Sing has good aim.  But really, it’ll all be fine.  Just give me a minute.”

Joe hurried on into the kitchen, where Hop Sing was chopping an absolute mountain of carrots.

“Hey, Hop Sing,” Joe said, halting just in front of the big central island where the carrots were piled, “we’re going to have company for supper.”

And then came the expected explosion.  “Extra people for supper?  Why no notice?  Little Joe think Hop Sing have nothing else to do?”

“It was last-minute, and just one person.  I’m sure you have…plenty of food,” Joe said, eyeing the carrots.

“Not proper food for company!  Only making pot roast, carrots, potatoes!  Not company supper!”

Time for some blatant flattery.  “No, no, that sounds great!  Everyone knows you make the best pot roast, Hop Sing.”

Hop Sing grimaced, but it wasn’t a really serious grimace.  “No try sweet talk Hop Sing.  Save for pretty girls.  Hop Sing have reputation, not happy about last-minute guest.”  He waved his knife around in punctuation, which looked dramatic but also meant everything was all right.  It was when he waved a ladle that you had to watch out, because he might actually whack a person with that.  Joe knew perfectly well that Hop Sing wasn’t going to stick a knife in him, however much he might thrust it about in the air.

“Hop Sing,” Joe said with all the sincerity he could find, “your reputation couldn’t possibly suffer as a result of serving your pot roast.  Impossible.”

The cook fixed him with a glare.  “But dessert!  What about dessert?  How Hop Sing find time to bake pie now?  Answer that!”

Liza’s voice broke in.  “Can I help somehow?”

Joe and Hop Sing both swung around to look at her, standing in the passageway out to the dining room.  Hop Sing, Joe noticed out of the corner of his eye, set his knife down at once, next to the carrots.  Maybe he should have brought Liza in to begin with, if he wanted a calmer reaction.  Hop Sing always presented his own brand of charm when they had female guests.

“I know it’s all my fault for disrupting your supper plans,” Liza continued, looking far more worried by the idea than was really warranted.  “So if I can do anything…?”

“No, no, guests not asked to work,” Hop Sing said quickly, and glared at Joe.  “Hop Sing know proper manners.”

Joe knew that was directed at him.  “Oh, sorry – Hop Sing, this is Miss Elizabeth Montgomery.  Liza, this is our cook, Hop Sing.  The best cook in Nevada.”

“Not just Nevada,” Hop Sing said with a scowl.  So much for that flattery attempt.

“Right, of course.  So we should just leave him to it,” Joe said, moving across the kitchen and trying to usher Liza out.  She meant well, but nothing got Hop Sing going like someone else messing around in his kitchen.  Best not to risk it unless the cook was out of town.  Preferably at least a day’s stagecoach ride away.

Liza didn’t seem to want to be ushered.  “But I really would like to help if I can.  Joe helped me when my carriage wheel broke, and now Hoss and Adam are fixing the carriage.  Isn’t there something I could do?  Maybe chop some carrots, so you can do the more important things?”

And that, wonder of wonders, seemed to work.  Joe looked back and forth between Liza and Hop Sing, and the cook was actually softening.

“Well – only if Missy Liza very sure about wanting to,” Hop Sing said slowly.  “And must listen to Hop Sing about how to chop!”

“Of course,” Liza said, nodding.  “However you want them chopped.”

“Sliced,” Hop Sing instructed, reaching into a cupboard and handing her an apron.  “Not diced.  Sliced.”

“Sliced,” Liza agreed, and tied the apron around her waist.

Joe was so busy gawking at this unexpected turn that he almost didn’t catch the apron Hop Sing threw at him.  “Little Joe peel apples for pie, since Hop Sing making last-minute pie now.”

“Oh—sure,” Joe said, and pulled two stools over to the center island.  If he was going to get pressed into kitchen duty, he was at least going to sit next to the pretty guest while he did it.

Liza started tackling the alarmingly high pile of carrots, Joe set into the basket of apples Hop Sing presented him, and Hop Sing began the clearly more complicated business of mixing pastry.  And as Joe peeled ribbons of apple skin, he wondered how he could get Liza to say more about herself.

“Liza works in newspapers in San Francisco,” Joe informed Hop Sing.  “Like Sam Clemens.”

“Missy Liza write stories like Mr. Clemens?” Hop Sing asked.  “That one about jumping frogs – very funny.”

“I don’t publish stories,” Liza said, “but – maybe some day.  For now I work at The Morning Call, doing a little bit of everything else.  My father was in newspapers too.”

“Missy Liza live with parents?” Hop Sing asked, stirring his bowl of flour and water and – Joe didn’t know what else, pastry stuff.

“No,” Liza said, gaze on the carrot she was slicing.  “My parents died two years ago.”

“Both of them?” Joe asked.

“There was a fever that swept through the neighborhood.  We all had it.  I got better, and…”  She shook her head.  “Anyway, I’m on my own now.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said quietly, and Hop Sing reached out and lightly touched her shoulder.

“It’s all right, really,” she said, summoning up a smile.  “I didn’t mean to—bring such a tragic note to the afternoon.”

“You didn’t,” Joe said, then after a moment added, “My mother died when I was five.  She fell from her horse.”  That had been horrible enough.  He couldn’t imagine losing his father at the same time.

“That must have been terrible.  I suppose I was lucky that I was grown, at least.”

Hop Sing shook his head, spoon moving rapidly around in the bowl.  “No good time to lose parent.  Very sad, when Missy Marie die.  Very bad days.”

“Were you working for the Cartwrights already then?” Liza asked, and Joe wondered if it was an attempt to move off of their mutual sad stories.

The cook nodded vigorously.  “Hop Sing here, very long time.  Longer than this one,” he said, gesturing to Joe with a batter-smeared spoon.  “Very good day, when Mr. Cartwright bring Missy Marie home.  And many very funny days, when this one small.”

Joe’s eyebrows shot up towards his hair because now suddenly they were in other dangerous territory.  “We don’t need to talk about—”

“Like time Little Joe try to grow horse plants,” Hop Sing continued serenely on.

“Horse plants?” Liza repeated, also ignoring his protest.

“It’s not that good a story,” Joe muttered, but clearly no one was listening to him.

And he had to admit, it was pretty funny from the vantage point of almost twenty years on.  Adam and Hoss had told him that pintos-as-in-ponies grew from pintos-as-in-beans.  And that sorrels came from sorrel leaves, and bays from bay leaves.  And of course chestnuts from chestnuts.  So he, young and trusting, had naturally started his own horse garden out in a corner behind the house, and diligently watered it every day for more than a week before his mother finally caught wind of what was going on, and very carefully explained a few things about life.

“And Hop Sing catch Little Joe, many days even after that, checking on corner of garden,” Hop Sing said with a wide smile.  “Just in case any horse poke nose out of dirt!”

“What can I say, I’m an optimist,” Joe said, grinning in spite of himself while Liza giggled.  “And I really had hopes for those pinto beans!”

One story turned into others and, perhaps trying to be fair, Hop Sing told ones about Adam and Hoss too.   They got into some more recent ones, and when Joe started explaining about the time they’d all helped one of their ranch hands woo Joe’s old school teacher, Liza laughed so hard she had to stop slicing carrots to catch her breath, and Joe found out that he liked making her laugh.

Lucky thing he’d ridden out the direction he had today.

Though it didn’t feel so lucky when Pa walked into the kitchen, asking as he entered, “Joseph, I was just told by Adam and Hoss that you can explain why they’re out there fixing a carriage wheel instead of the chores they were supposed to do today.”  It wasn’t exactly a question, but—it was a question.

Joe held up a half-peeled apple defensively.  “I’m helping Hop Sing,” he said quickly, answering the unspoken question – of why he wasn’t outside instead of Hoss and Adam.  It wasn’t a totally accurate answer, but it sounded good, and he jumped quickly onto the second half of the explanation, indicating Liza.  “And this is Elizabeth Montgomery.  It’s her carriage.”

“The livery stables’, actually,” Liza said, traces of laughter still lurking in her eyes.  “You must be Mr. Cartwright.”

“Ah.  Yes,” Ben said, modifying his tone and expression as he took her in, putting on his gracious host smile.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.  I take it you’re staying for supper?”  He glanced at Hop Sing, as though checking for objections, but the cook was gathering sliced carrots into a big bowl.

“Her carriage did break down nearby, so it’s the least we can do,” Joe jumped in.

“And everyone has been very kind helping me,” Liza said.  “But of course I don’t want to impose…”

There she went again, worrying about that, but Joe knew he could rely on his father for this one.  No strays got turned away for supper at the Ponderosa, not even ones that seemed a lot more apt to cause trouble than a polite, well-dressed young woman who was a victim of nothing more complicated than a carriage accident.  “No, no,” Ben said at once, “we’re always happy to have company.  And it’ll do these bachelor sons of mine good to have a woman at the table.”

“Well—if you’re sure,” Liza said.

“Have to at least stay to eat carrots,” Hop Sing commented.  “Missy Liza good at slicing them.”

“Thank you,” she said with a smile.  “I’m not good at much in cooking, I’m afraid, but at least I can slice carrots.”

“That’s settled then,” Pa concluded, rubbing his hands together, then continued, “I’m afraid I’ll have to miss supper though – I need to ride into Virginia City to talk to the sheriff.”

Joe’s eyebrows shot up, wondering if he’d missed something exciting.  “You didn’t see any bank robbers, did you?”

“No, nothing that definite.  Just an unexplained campsite from the last day or two.  Probably nothing, but could be something.”

Unexpectedly, Hop Sing spoke up with the next question.  “Mr. Cartwright have trail to follow?”

“No,” Pa said slowly, probably wondering where this was going, “the rain last night washed out any traces.”

“Then not urgent information,” Hop Sing decreed.  “Mr. Cartwright eat supper, then go.  Not good for hungry man ride into town.  Hop Sing making pie.  Eat pot roast and pie, then go.”

Pa frowned, but it was the frown that meant he was about to give in.  Joe knew what it looked like when Pa was digging in instead, and this wasn’t that.  “Maybe I ought to—”

“All settled, everyone join for eating, now everyone out of Hop Sing kitchen so supper can be finished!”  Hop Sing picked up a dish towel to flap at all of them.  “Out, out!”

Joe got off the stool quickly enough to take Liza’s arm as she slid down from her own stool – Pa might’ve felt obliged to be polite and got in the way – and they all moved towards the dining room.

Joe was already thinking through how this new information was going to adjust his own evening plans – riding into town with Pa was not the same as riding in with Hoss – but he also had another question that had been waiting.  “How’d you know that would work?” he asked in a low voice, leaning in towards Liza.  “Offering to help Hop Sing with the unimportant stuff?”

She wrinkled her nose, looking puzzled, and shrugged.  “I wasn’t trying to make anything work.  It just seemed polite.  And I really don’t know how to do more complicated cooking than slicing carrots.”

 

5.

Liza found something extraordinary about supper at the Ponderosa – namely, how ordinary it all seemed.  How comfortable they all were, and how comfortable the supper felt, so that every few minutes she had to remind herself where she was, and how unlikely it was that she had ended up there.

Ben Cartwright himself pulled out her chair to sit down.  Somehow she ended up next to Hoss, across the table from Joe and Adam.  She was careful to compliment the food as soon as it arrived, which was not hard to do when everything tasted excellent.

“Carrots are sliced real nice too,” Joe said with a wink as he scooped some onto his plate.

“I’m sure the apples were beautifully peeled for the pie,” Liza returned, smiling.

“I don’t care what shape anything is, I just want ‘em passed over here,” Hoss said, reaching for the bowl.  “And why are we talking about apple peels?”

“Your brother Joseph assisted Hop Sing with the apple peeling this afternoon,” Ben clarified from the head of the table.

“Nice work to be doing, while we fixed a carriage wheel,” Adam said dryly.

Joe gave him a wide-eyed and innocent stare, and said, “Apples don’t peel themselves, older brother.  Someone had to do it.”

“Carriage wheels don’t fix themselves either,” Hoss remarked, “but we’ve got it nice and sorted for you now, Miss Liza.”

She still felt as though she was putting them to far too much trouble, but there were only so many times she could say that before it would start to sound rude in itself.  So she just settled for saying, “Thank you so much.  You’ve all been very kind.  And it’s just Liza.”

“Right.  Just Liza,” Hoss agreed, picking up his fork to dig into the mountain of food on his plate.

She wasn’t sure why the informality felt important, except – they were so comfortable in this place, so comfortable with each other, and if they could dispense with polite formality with her too, then she could pretend that she belonged here too.  Just for one evening.  At home, she kept to herself mostly, or had casual friendships with the people she worked with, and she had concluded that that was best.

She had had to move out of the neighborhood she had grown up in when her parents died, and she’d left everyone she knew behind in the process.  She kept meaning to go back and visit, but somehow – that felt more daunting than coming all the way to Virginia City.  And forming a new community, new connections – that was most daunting of all, so much that she had decided maybe it wasn’t strictly necessary.  Maybe it was better, to just let all that go for now, to not face the awkwardness and the rejections and the uncertainties of forming new connections, when they’d just eventually lead to loss anyway.

So it had been a long time since she had sat down at a table with a family, to eat supper.  And this, tonight – well, she had fallen into this all unintentionally.  And it wasn’t going to last, it wasn’t really real, so it wasn’t so risky.  It was only for one night, that was all.

“You know, by the time we finish that pie,” Joe said, directing his gaze at his father, “it’s going to be pretty dark out there.  I thought Hoss and me had better escort Liza back to town.”

“You did?” Hoss said, looking blank, then started just as though he’d been kicked under the table.  “Oh—yeah, that makes sense.”

“After all, there might be cattle rustlers around,” Joe said, grinning across the table at Liza.  She felt a little awkward, but—he treated it like such a delightful joke that it managed to feel more funny than embarrassing, on balance.

“Why would cattle rustlers care about her?” Adam asked.  “She doesn’t have any cattle.”

“Cattle rustlers are unpredictable,” Joe said, undaunted.

“And driving a carriage in the dark can be unpredictable also,” Ben intervened.  “Of course Liza should have an escort back to Virginia City.  But I need to go into town to talk to the sheriff anyway—”

“Yeah, I was thinking about that too, Pa,” Joe said, so swiftly that it was clear he’d been ready for the comment.  “And you know, there’s no reason Hoss and me can’t tell Roy about that campsite for you.  You told us where it was, so we can let him know.  You’ve already been riding all day.  Buck must be tired.”

“We have other horses,” Ben said dryly.

Joe looked like he was prepared with another argument, but before he could get it out, Adam spoke up.  “Don’t you have to go into town tomorrow morning too, to visit the bank, Pa?  Why not let Joe do the ride tonight, if he’s so fired-up about it?”

“Hey, I’m just trying to be helpful,” Joe said, with that wide-eyed innocent look that couldn’t be fooling anyone around the table.

“Hmm.  You make a good point, Adam,” Ben said.  “All right then.  Very thoughtful of you, Little Joe.”

And there was something so perfectly deadpan and serious about the way he said it that Liza felt sure he saw right through Joe’s efforts to get into town on Friday night after all.

It must be nice, to have people who knew you so well.

 

Hoss wasn’t a mite surprised that Little Joe volunteered right quick to be the one to drive in the carriage with Liza back to Virginia City.  Sure, Joe made some polite remark asking if Hoss’d rather drive than ride, but he had that look in his eye, the one that meant Hoss better know the right answer and then give it.  And Hoss did know, because obviously when Joe had a shot at riding in a carriage with a pretty gal, there was only one thing he wanted his big brother to do – stay out of the way.  He was half-tempted to say he’d be more than happy to drive, just to be contrary and to tease Joe, but it wouldn’t be profitable in the long run.

So they tied Cochise with a lead rope at the back of the carriage and Hoss got on Chub and they headed for Virginia City, and the only part that surprised Hoss was why he was along at all.  Though he could guess it might be to persuade Pa that this was all just a fine, generous deed for a stranger in need.  As if Pa couldn’t see through that too.

Hoss would’ve been willing to ride on up ahead and let the two of them alone, only Liza kept flinging questions his way, keeping him in the conversation.  Which seemed right considerate of her, and though it was hard to tell by moonlight, Joe didn’t seem too put out either.

Still, Hoss didn’t push his luck, carefully not getting off Chub fast enough at the livery stable to help Liza down.  He let Joe do that, with all the flourishes.  He also let Joe make a big fuss at the livery stable owner about the state of his carriages, and then take Liza’s arm to walk her across the street to the hotel.

“Thank you again for all your help,” Liza said once they were all standing on the front porch of the hotel.  “Both of you.”

“Least we could do for a new arrival in town,” Joe said, pulling his hat brim down in the way that Hoss knew he thought made him look debonair – a word he only knew because Joe talked about being it.  “Besides, it meant Hoss and me can spend Friday night in Virginia City.”

“Though we were real happy to give you an escort anyway,” Hoss put in, because he didn’t quite see what Joe was trying to do, making out like he wasn’t really trying to help her.  Obviously he was trying to help her.

“Well, I hope you enjoy your evening,” Liza said, glancing between them.  “And—I really did have a lovely time at the Ponderosa.”

“Hey, you come out and see us again after you’ve got that job with The Territorial Enterprise,” Joe said.  “Tell us all about it.”

She didn’t say she would – though she didn’t say she wouldn’t.  She just smiled and said good-night, and disappeared inside.

“Thought you would’ve tried to get in a kiss there,” Hoss remarked as they thumped down the steps from the hotel porch.

“What, with you looming over us?” Joe said, but it seemed sort of more like habit than like he was actually annoyed.  He straightened his hat, expression preoccupied.

“You were the one who said I should come,” Hoss pointed out.

“Yeah, I know.  And it’s not like that anyway.  I don’t kiss every girl who comes along, you know.”

Which was technically true but so blatantly false to this situation that Hoss snorted with laughter.  “Little Joe, when you rescue a gal and bring her back to the Ponderosa, and then spend all afternoon laughing with her, it seems pretty obvious where things are going.”

“There’s nothing happening here,” Joe protested.  “Sometimes I bring a girl home and don’t romance her.”

“Yeah?” Hoss said, and leaned on the hitching rail outside the hotel, the better to cock his hat and cast a skeptical look at his indignant little brother.  “Name one.”

“Trudy Coombs,” Joe said promptly.

Danged if he didn’t have a point there.  But that had also been in just the last couple months, when Joe had been dodging off any serious romance, and not to mention…  “Didn’t she have a fiancé before you ever met her?”

“That’s not the point!”

“Uh-huh.  All right, I’ll give you that one, but try and name a second.”

Joe glowered at him.  “This is ridiculous, and we’re supposed to be talking to the sheriff for Pa.”  He stomped off down the street, and Hoss followed along, chuckling.

They found Sheriff Coffee at his desk, which was snowed over with papers.  It didn’t take long to tell him about the campsite Pa had found, considering there wasn’t much to be said about it.

Roy shook his head.  “All right, thanks, boys.  I’ll add it to the information I’ve got.”

“Think it might mean anything, Roy?” Hoss asked, leaning forward in the chair he’d taken in front of Roy’s desk.

“Might be, and then again might not.”  Roy made a broad gesture to the spread of papers.  “I’ve got notes on a dozen things that might mean something, and nothing definite to say that those robbers are within a hundred miles of here.  The sheriff over in Placerville thought they were heading this way, but he lost the trail and no one knows where to pick it up.  All I can really do is watch out for any strangers in town, or any strange happenings.  You haven’t spotted anyone out your way who didn’t belong?”

“Nope, no strangers,” Little Joe said, leaning so far back in his chair that it was a wonder he wasn’t tipping over backwards.  “I mean, just Liza.”

The sheriff’s eyebrows rose.  “Who’s Liza?”

“Oh—just a girl whose carriage broke down on the Ponderosa,” Joe said off-handedly.  “Hoss and me escorted her back to the hotel before we came over here.”

“Huh.”  Roy looked uncommonly thoughtful.  “You know why she was on the Ponderosa?”

“She went for a drive.  It’s a pretty place, you know.”  Joe’s chair thumped back onto the floor and he stood up.  “We’ll let you know if we see any desperate characters around.”

“Yeah,” Roy said, still looking thoughtful.  “You do that, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure thing, Roy,” Hoss said, following Joe to the door.  Hoss glanced back as they stepped out, and the sheriff was making notes on one of his papers as they left.  He nudged Joe once they were out on the board sidewalk.  “Hey, Little Joe, did Roy seem sort of interested in Liza?”

“Why would he be?  He’s looking for bank robbers,” Joe said, and poked Hoss in the arm.  “And I brought Willow Hoad home and didn’t romance her.”

Hoss shook his head.  “Doesn’t count.  You shot her father and she tried to kill you with an axe.  You didn’t have any option there, and you still got all hung up on how cute she was.”

Joe gave an expressive eyeroll and just said, “So are we getting a beer or not?”

Hoss grinned.  “If you say so, little brother.”

And with that, they made straight for the Silver Dollar, Joe leading the way.  Didn’t seem to be too lively around town yet, but the night was still young.  Inside the saloon, there was music playing and a healthy-sized crowd, but still room for both of them to stand at the bar and order a couple of beers.

Once the beers arrived, Joe drank his down with barely a pause for breath.

“You that thirsty?” Hoss joked.

Joe shrugged, set his near-empty mug down with a thunk, and said, “Come on, let’s get back home.”

Hoss nearly choked on his own swallow of beer.  “What, already?  This was your big Friday night in town?  A stop at the sheriff’s and one very fast drink?”

“I’ve got a lot to do in the morning.”  He gave Hoss’ shoulder a push.  “Come on, drink your drink and let’s go.”

Hoss shook his head, but took another swallow and set the mug down.  “Why’d we even come in here if you’re in such a rush to leave?”

Little Joe looked at him like he was missing the obvious.  “I told Liza we were going to go to the saloon.  Now if she asks, we went to the saloon, we had some beers—”

“Some?”

“Roughly—and then we went home after that.”

“Uh-huh.  And why’d you tell Liza we were going to the saloon?”

“Because she was obviously going to feel she had to refuse an escort unless I could give her an excuse for it.”

“Uh-huh.  And you’re going to be so all-fired busy in the morning because…you’re real excited about that fence Pa wants us to fix?”

“Well…”  Little Joe rubbed the back of his neck as they walked back out through the swinging saloon doors.  “Pa needs to come into town for a trip to the bank tomorrow, right?  I thought maybe I could offer to save him the ride.  Again.  And then I could sort of check up on how things went with that interview Liza has tomorrow at the newspaper office.  Just to be friendly, you know.”

Just to be friendly.  Sure.  “And Pa ain’t going to agree to you riding out here again if you don’t get home at a decent hour tonight,” Hoss concluded.

“Right,” Little Joe said, swinging up into Cochise’s saddle.  “And then poor Pa’ll have to make the long, dusty ride himself.”

Hoss shook his head.  When it came to making time with pretty girls, Joe was endlessly creative and determined.  “You’re a good son, Little Joe,” he said solemnly, “saving Pa all that trouble.”

“Thanks, big brother,” Joe said with a grin.

And, Hoss reflected, he was probably a good brother too, for not knocking Little Joe’s head off for dragging him along for all this nonsense.

 

6.

Liza smoothed her skirts, glad she hadn’t worn her best dress to go riding yesterday, the way the hem had ended up in the mud.  She pushed open the door of The Territorial Enterprise office, hoping she looked more confident than she felt.  The office inside was small, and felt familiar even though she’d never been here.  The thump of the press, the desks and the papers and the trays of type, the smell of ink – she had grown up in her father’s newspaper office, when he had a newspaper, and she spent more waking time now at the office of The Morning Call than she did in her room at her boarding house.

The only man in the room was bending over a tray of type, and called without looking up, “Be right with you, ma’am.”

So she waited, a few steps in from the door, because it wouldn’t do any good to interrupt him and maybe cause trouble with his type.  She held herself carefully still even though her heart was hammering with nerves and uncertainties.

It had been so easy with the Cartwrights.  If things felt half as easy with Mr. Raleigh, then – well, she’d probably have a job at the end of this.

After what felt like an interminable length of time but was probably two minutes, the man finally moved away from his tray of type, wiping his hands as he came over to greet her.  “I’m Bill Raleigh, ma’am, what can I do for you?  A little printing project, perhaps?  Invitations for a wedding or a party?”

“Ah, no,” Liza said, valiantly holding onto her smile.  “I have an appointment with you.  About a job.”

His eyebrows drew together in a puzzled frown.  “I don’t think so, ma’am.  I certainly don’t have a job opening for—well, for a lovely young woman such as yourself.”

That was a compliment, she supposed, and yet already it was clear that this was not going to be as easy as supper on the Ponderosa.  “I sent you a telegram,” Liza said, and reached into her bag for the folded paper within.  “And I have a letter of introduction from Sam Clemens.”

“I know Sam, of course,” Raleigh said, nodding slowly.  “And I did have a recent telegram.  From an E. Montgomery.”

“Yes,” Liza said past the lump in her throat.  “That’s me.  Elizabeth Montgomery.”  What had she told the telegraph operator?  Hadn’t she said the full name?  Was it a standard practice to shorten it?  Always looking to save a few letters…

“Ma’am, I do apologize for the confusion,” Raleigh said, not unpleasantly, then continued with the damning sentence, “but I’m afraid a newspaper office is no place for a lady.
Liza gritted her teeth and strove to remain pleasant.  “As I telegraphed you, I’ve been working for The Morning Call already.  I assure you, I’m entirely comfortable within a newspaper office.”

“Well, perhaps in San Francisco where they have a larger staff, it makes sense to employ a wider variety of people,” Raleigh said, as though imparting select wisdom.  “But as you see, we have a much smaller office here.  My only opening is for a writer.”

“I am a writer,” Liza said quietly.

“Oh?  And what have you written?  A bit of poetry, perhaps?  Some light romances, maybe?  That’s not what we’re looking for here.”

That wasn’t what she had written – but she had nothing published to prove otherwise.  She thought of insisting that he read Mr. Clemens’ letter, but it was hard to believe it could matter.  She had read the letter herself, of course, and while it was professional and complimentary and said nice things about her reliability and the neatness of her typesetting, it was not such a glowing epistle as to overcome a stone wall like this.  It was not untrue, what she’d told Joe.  She wasn’t friends with Sam Clemens.  They worked together, and he had been very professionally polite to write her a polite, professional letter.  And no more than that.

“Virginia City is a mining town, you see,” Raleigh continued.  “Our journalists have to be prepared to write about the rough side of life.  I’m sorry you’ve made the trip all the way here, but I’m afraid there’s no place on my staff for one of the—more delicate sex.”

It was tempting to fling something at his head and ask how delicate that made her seem – but while it might be fleetingly satisfying, it wasn’t going to get her a job.  But then, it didn’t appear that anything was going to do that.

“I see,” she said, after a moment to gather her composure.  “Thank you very much for your time.”  And then she pushed open the door to step back outside – and to go inquire at the stage office about the next stage back to San Francisco, because there was plainly nothing more to be done in Virginia City.  The future she had hoped she might be able to have here had been wiped away, in a single conversation.

 

Ben Cartwright finished his business at the bank and stepped out onto the wooden sidewalk outside, surveying the bustling Virginia City street.  Little Joe had argued hard for the chance to handle this errand, but Ben had known his youngest son long enough to see straight through that.  The boy had his attention fixed on one thing this morning, and it wasn’t the bank business.

Besides, he wanted to stop in and see Roy Coffee too, just in case he could provide any more information about that mysterious campsite – and he wanted to hear if the sheriff had learned anything else.  He didn’t like this business of bank robbers possibly lurking behind every tree.

Roy greeted him warmly when he got to the sheriff’s office, gesturing him to a chair across from the desk.  “Glad you came in this morning, Ben, I was wanting to talk to you.”

“About the campsite I ran across?” Ben asked, settling into the chair.

“No, not that.  I think the boys told me anything there is to know there.”  Roy leaned forward across his desk, expression intent.  “But about this girl you had over for supper last night – Liza Montgomery.  How well do you know her?”

“Liza?” Ben said in surprise.  What could the sheriff possibly want to know about her?  “Not well at all, I suppose.  She just happened to have her carriage break down not too far from the house.”

“Yeah, that’s what Little Joe said.  Anything strange about that carriage breaking?”

“Not especially.  Joe tells me the wheel got caught in some mud and a spoke cracked.  With the rain we’ve had lately, there’s plenty of mud around.  You might want to have a word with Lafe over at the livery about the carriages he’s renting out, but that’s nothing to do with Liza.  What are you driving at anyway, Roy?”

Roy leaned back in his chair again, fingers tapping against the chair arm.  “It’s just this, Ben.  I’ve done a little checking this morning, and that young woman’s a stranger in town – no one knows her or can identify her.  She arrived yesterday on the east-bound stage, coming through Placerville.  Putting her in just about the right time and place for that bank robbery.”

For a moment Ben stared at Roy in blank amazement, then broke into laughter.  “You’re not seriously suggesting that she might be part of the gang that robbed the bank?  You’re that hard up for suspects?”

“I am serious, Ben,” Roy protested.  “I ain’t been spreading it too far, but it so happens the sheriff in Placerville wired that one of that gang was a woman.  And your Liza just about fits the description.”

This was enough to somber Ben up quickly.  “She’s not our Liza; we just had her to supper once.  And what kind of description?”

“Well – age, hair color.  No one got a good look – at least not anyone alive to report on it.”

“That’s not much to go on, Roy.”

“I know, Ben, but tell me this – why did a woman who’d been riding on a stage for at least a couple days arrive in town and, instead of resting at the hotel, she rents a carriage to go riding on private property?  What was so all-fired important that she had to be on the Ponderosa to do?”

“I don’t think there was anything, she wanted a drive—”

“Or maybe that gang of robbers split on their way out of Placerville, and she was going to meet whoever was camping on your land.  Her carriage breaks down, Little Joe comes along, she turns on the charm for a polite young man so no one suspects anything.”

Ben grimaced.  “It’s possible, Roy, but – she’s in Virginia City for a job interview with The Territorial Enterprise, it’s not like she’s here for no reason—”

“Yeah, I looked into that too.  Bill Raleigh was expecting someone, but he wasn’t expecting a woman.  Maybe she overheard something on the stage ride, saw an opportunity.  It’s a pretty far-fetched story as it is, don’t you think?  A woman wanting to work in the newspaper around here?”

“No,” Ben said slowly, “I don’t think there’s any particular reason a woman couldn’t want to write for the newspaper.  And she knows Sam Clemens, that shows you something—”

“She says she knows Sam Clemens, but it happens he’s a pretty well-known person around these parts, writing the way he does.  Anybody might’ve picked up his name to use for a little more color for their cover story.”

“All right,” Ben said, raising his hands, palms out.  “There’s no proof she is who she says she is.  But there’s also nothing saying that she’s a bank robber.”  He wanted to believe it was pure common sense bringing him down on this side of the argument.  The truth was, he didn’t know Liza, or anything definite about her.  But…while he’d lived enough years to lose a great many illusions, he still didn’t want to believe that a polite young woman who could trade jokes with his youngest son was also a cold-blooded bank robber and killer.

Roy slumped a little, shoulders dropping.  “I know it’s not proof, Ben.  I haven’t got proof of anything.  I’ve got all sorts of possibilities and absolutely nothing to be sure of.  What I’d really like to do is keep an eye on this Miss Montgomery for a few days, see if she tips a hand to any more indications.  But she went to the stage office not an hour ago, asking about the afternoon stage to San Francisco.  So now I’ve got to decide if I need to go have a polite word telling her I don’t want her leaving town.  And if I do that, it’ll put her on alert if she is up to something.”

Ben had been under the impression she was planning to stay in Virginia City, but – “Things must not have worked out with Raleigh at the newspaper.”  And, on seeing Roy’s look, he added, “Or she’s a bank robber trying to make a fast escape, I know.”

“But you see the dilemma I’m in, Ben?”

“Yeah, I think so.”  Ben rubbed his chin, thinking.  “What about this, Roy?  What if I invite her out to the Ponderosa, to stay with us for a while?  She’d still be in the area, we can keep an eye on her, and in the meantime, you see if anything more turns up.  Telegraph to San Francisco to check on her story.”

Roy frowned, brows furrowing.  “Well, now…I can’t ask you to take that kind of responsibility, Ben—”

“No, you let me worry about that,” Ben said, waving down the objection.  “Odds are she’s just a nice young woman and we’ll have a pleasant house guest for a few days.”

“Maybe, maybe,” Roy allowed.  “But I’d make sure your safe is locked.”

Ben shook his head, rising to his feet.  “Fine, and we’ll lock our bedroom doors too, in case she wants to murder us in our sleep.”

“You joke, Ben,” Roy said, jabbing with one finger, “but this is a serious business!”

“We’ll be careful,” Ben promised, “now let me go find the girl before she disappears on us.”

Ben set off down the street from the sheriff’s office, scanning the busy main thoroughfare.  Plenty of pedestrians, plenty of horses, plenty of carriages – it could be tricky, finding one woman in all of this, but he headed towards the stage depot as a first stop.  No sign of her there, so he crisscrossed over to the hotel, and there he had better luck.  He spotted Liza sitting on a bench, on the hotel’s front porch.  Roy would be pleased she hadn’t vanished.

He walked towards Liza, a slight frown crossing his face as he came closer.  He didn’t know the young woman well, but he thought he recognized something of her expression.  Adam and Little Joe had both been known to wear similar ones; middle son Hoss was the one less prone to brooding.

Ben still pitched his voice with hearty good cheer as he said, “Good morning, Liza,” stopping in front of her.

She looked up, and a smile replaced her troubled expression.  “Oh, good morning, Mr. Cartwright,” she said, starting to rise to her feet.

He waved her back down, sitting himself on the opposite end of the bench.  “I see my boys got you back to town all right last night.”

“Yes.  They were quite—splendid.”

“And how was your interview with the Enterprise?” he asked, even though the information he’d had from the sheriff made the answer seem clear enough.

“Bill Raleigh is hard up for writers, but he’s not that hard up,” she said, a bitter tone on the words.  If this was all just a cover story for a bank robber, she was putting a good bit of acting into it.

“Raleigh didn’t like your work?”

Liza rolled her eyes.  “He didn’t like my skirts.”

Ben sighed, brows drawing together.  He had half-expected this result when he heard about her business the previous day.  He had married three women who all had their own very definite ideas about what they could and couldn’t do, and he’d learned there was no value in making assumptions in that regard.  Not all men had had the benefit of such enlightenment.

She echoed the sigh.  “I suppose it was rather absurd to come all this way.  I just thought—I don’t know.  That sometimes you have to do an absurd thing, when you’re trying to achieve something wild and improbable.”

Like building a ranch out of a wilderness, perhaps, or a thriving town out of a rough and tumble mining settlement.  “You know, Liza, I’ve known Bill Raleigh of the Enterprise a long time,” Ben said slowly.  Because if she was what she said she was, maybe he could do her a good turn.  And if she wasn’t, maybe he could learn something.  “What if I have a word with him and—”

“No,” she interrupted.  “I thank you, I really do, but—I want him to hire me because he believes I can do the job, not because he doesn’t want to offend you.”

A perfectly reasonable answer for an independent young woman – or for a bank robber who couldn’t actually hold the job if she got it.  “Well, I can understand that,” he said diplomatically.  “What are you planning to do now?”

“Pack up and go back to San Francisco,” she said, staring meditatively out at the busy street.  “There’s not much for me to do here.”

So Roy’d been right about that much, about her intentions to leave town.  And the sheriff wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t like this plan.  Little Joe had had that look in his eye…  Ben didn’t often play matchmaker for his sons; they found their way into enough romantic entanglements without any assistance.  Trying to help Roy here might complicate that situation in certain ways, but, well, he had already told Roy he’d help.

“You have a longer vacation from your job at The Morning Call, don’t you?” he said, and then plunged into the key question.  “Why not come back to the Ponderosa with me?  There’s plenty more of the ranch we could show you.  It’s a very big place.”

She blinked, bit her lower lip.  “Oh.  That’s very kind of you, but…”

“It’s a big ranch house too, with extra guest bedrooms.  We like having company.  You’d be welcome to stay as long as you like.”

A half-smile crossed her face.  “Is that what strays usually do?”

It was his turn to be surprised.  “Strays?”

“Joe and Hoss told me that’s what you all call people you bring home who needed help.”

“Ah.  Well.”  Ben chuckled.  “I suppose we do, but not usually to their faces.  I’m sure they didn’t mean any disrespect.”

“I know.”  She still hadn’t actually given an answer to the invitation, and she still looked uncertain.  Which seemed to undercut Roy’s theory that she’d been trying to get onto the Ponderosa for sinister reasons; unless it was only that the situation had changed.  “It’s—I don’t mean to be a reluctant guest and I’m not ungrateful for everything you’ve all done and offered—it’s just the opposite, really.  I’m used to having to work much harder for a lot less.”

They hadn’t gone too deep into her history the previous night, and Ben wondered what stories were behind those words.  He gave her his warmest smile.  “On the Ponderosa, we don’t believe hospitality is something that needs to be earned.  We’ve certainly given it to a few people who didn’t particularly deserve it.”  And if that was the case here too – well, they’d navigate that if they came to it.

She smiled back, and finally nodded.  “All right.  Then I would be very glad to accept your hospitality.”

 

7.

It had been a very quiet morning since they’d started in on the fence mending, mostly because Little Joe hadn’t had two words to say together since Pa had turned him down on running the bank errand.  Hoss didn’t mind.  Nothing wrong with a little quiet on a pretty morning, punctuated by some pounding of fence posts.

He heard the hoofbeats before he could see anyone coming, and looked up in time to spot Buck’s big tan shape round a stand of trees a little in the distance.  “Pa’s coming back from town.”

Little Joe just grunted and didn’t look up from the post he was positioning.

And then a second horse came around the trees, following Buck, this one pulling a carriage.  Hoss didn’t recognize the horse or the carriage, but the woman riding in it was easy enough to identify.

“Hey, Pa brought company home,” he said, pushing his hat back with one hand and giving Joe’s arm a nudge.

“Yeah?” Joe said disinterestedly, and then finally looked.  “Oh,” he said, and the change that came over him was funny in how abrupt it was.  Suddenly he was standing an inch taller and all smiles.

“Nice work on the fence, boys,” Ben said, reining Buck in as they approached.

“Oh, we aim to please,” Joe said, grinning with all his teeth showing.

Liza drew the carriage to a halt next to Buck.  “Good morning, Hoss—Joe.”  And Hoss wasn’t blind – sure, she said his name first, but she smiled different when she got to Joe.  Hoss had to try not to smirk himself.

Joe turned his smile on her.  “Good morning.  Didn’t expect to see you today,” he said, just as though he hadn’t been angling hard for exactly that.  “How’d the interview at the newspaper go?”

Her smile slipped.  “Not well.  But—”  And she seemed to be actively drawing the smile back up now.  “Your father very graciously offered me hospitality for a few days.  So I don’t suppose I’ll head back to San Francisco just yet after all.”

“Sorry about the interview,” Hoss offered.

“Yeah, definitely,” Joe chimed in.  “And didn’t I tell you we’re always happy to have company?”

“So you did,” she said, though her smile still seemed to take too much effort.

Oh well.  Unless Hoss badly misunderstood little brother, Joe’d be spending how ever long she was here trying to get that smile back again.

 

Liza resisted her impulse to look back over her shoulder at Joe as she and Ben continued on toward the house.  Not that there was any particular reason to think he’d be watching.  Or Hoss either.  But it would be awkward if they were.  So she concentrated very carefully on the scenery Ben was pointing out, even though Joe had pointed out some of the same scenery yesterday, only she didn’t like to mention that.

At the house, Ben carried her red trunk inside, and she resisted her other impulse to protest that it was too much trouble.  She was pretty certain that suggesting he wait for Hoss to carry it in wouldn’t be well-received.

Inside, Ben took a couple of steps towards the stairs, then appeared to change his mind.  “Maybe the downstairs guest bedroom would be best,” he said, and then seemingly half to himself, “That’s more removed from the others.”  Then he glanced at her and added, “It’s quieter that way.”

“Your upstairs is loud at night?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe how Hoss can snore,” Ben said with a smile, and carried her trunk through the door just off the dining room.

She still found it a little odd that a room directly off the main living area would be quieter – but it was hardly important.  And maybe he just didn’t want to lug her trunk up the stairs after all.

Liza followed Ben, into a room nicer than the hotel had been, with a big bed and an oil painting of a sailing ship on the wall.

“I’ll let you get settled in,” Ben said, retreating, “and let Hop Sing know we have a guest.”  He closed the door behind him.

Liza sank onto the bed, feeling that the morning had been something of a whirlwind.  Was this what always happened, when the Cartwrights started getting involved?  Things just—happened?  She had thought her only options today were either securing a job with the Territorial Enterprise, or going directly back to San Francisco.  She hadn’t expected to end up a houseguest of the Cartwrights.

And she certainly hadn’t expected this to happen when she’d driven her rented carriage out onto the Ponderosa, just wanting to see the setting of so many of Sam Clemens’ stories.  She hadn’t expected the Cartwrights to be so—much.  Everything Sam said they were and more.

Maybe Ben knew what he was saying about this room being quiet, because she couldn’t hear anything from the kitchen.  She half-expected a lot of yelling and carrying-on, similar to what she’d heard the previous day when Joe announced she was coming to supper.  But perhaps Ben rated more politeness, or maybe chopping a mountain of carrots bought some tolerance.

She took a deep breath, and got up off of the bed.  She supposed she ought to unpack her bag.  Comb her hair.  She peeked into the mirror on one wall and thought that at least there was no need to change her dress.  She’d worn her best one for her interview on purpose.  Not that it had helped.

She shuffled through her things, ran a comb through her hair and twisted it up again with pins, and then she wasn’t altogether sure what to do next.

She ventured out of the guest room, looked around but didn’t see Ben anywhere.  Maybe still in the kitchen, or tending whatever other business he had needed to do today before he’d taken it upon himself to rescue her from her gloom back in Virginia City.  He probably assumed she’d be resting, but she didn’t feel any desire to take a nap, or to lie down on the bed and stare at the ceiling.

There were bookshelves in Ben’s office, so she wandered that way.  She wouldn’t go poking about in his desk, of course, but surely a bookcase was considered open – even if it was literally closed in a glass cabinet.  She didn’t see a lock, though.

Liza had one hand on the cabinet door when she heard Ben’s voice behind her.  “Looking for something?”

She looked back, startled, and said, “Oh, just a book to read.  If that’s all right?”

Standing near the big grandfather clock, he was looking at her with an oddly intent expression, which quickly smoothed away into a smile.  “Of course.  Feel free to read whatever you’d like.”  He crossed over into the office portion of the room, and closed a lower-level cabinet she hadn’t even noticed was partially open.  Just before it swung shut, she glimpsed what looked like a strongbox inside.

Well, it wasn’t like she’d been planning to rob the Cartwrights, so it didn’t really matter where they were keeping their money.  She turned her attention back to the bookcase, and looked over the thick volumes within.

“Adam’s the scholar in the family,” Ben remarked, leaning on the edge of his desk, “so he has far more books upstairs.  Anything in particular you like?”

“A bit of everything.”  There hadn’t been a lot of spare money for books in the past several years, so she’d grown accustomed to reading whatever came her way.  She spotted a copy of Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens on a middle shelf and seized that with some relief.  She would have looked longer, but she had the awkward feeling that Ben wanted to get to his desk and she was in his way.  “This is fine,” she said quickly, raising the volume in illustration.

“One of my favorites,” he said with a smile.  “If there’s anything else you need…”

“Oh no, I’ll just go sit out on the porch.  I’m sure you’re very busy already.”

“Not at all,” he responded, but she guessed that was just being polite, and took herself and the Dickens volume out the front door.

There was a rocker on the front porch, so she sat down there to read – and to see what the whirlwind did next.

 

Liza was still sitting on the front porch with Pickwick Papers when Joe and Hoss walked into the yard an hour or so later, back from their fence work.  She was almost sure she saw Joe’s gaze flick her way for an instant then away again as the two brothers walked over to the water pump near the barn.  She was not too far away to observe that Joe had his shirt open, except for the last button.

Hoss pumped a stream of water, drank from the ladle, then handed it over to his brother.  Joe had a drink—then dumped another ladleful of water right over his head, splashing down onto his shirt and chest.

Liza felt her cheeks warm, and very carefully looked down at her book again.

He had to know, didn’t he?  He couldn’t not be doing it deliberately, right?

She snuck another glance, in time to see Joe shake his head, dark curls and water droplets flying.

Yes, he definitely knew.  While he didn’t seem arrogant exactly, Joe Cartwright also did not strike her as a man who was unaware of his own charms.

And what was she supposed to do now?  Fan her cheeks and go into maidenly flusters at the sight?

Maybe that’s what those other girls had done, the ones he’d been engaged to.  She wished the Enterprise, or Sam Clemens, had had the story on why exactly none of those engagements had ever got as far as a wedding.  Maybe Sam did know, but she’d never asked.

Joe and Hoss were heading towards the house now, towards the house and her.  She didn’t know how to flirt and she knew she’d feel ridiculous if she tried and—and anyway, none of this felt real.  It was too deliberate, too intentionally provoking, like a routine he’d probably done many times before.  So he needn’t think she was going to go into a swoon just because his tan shirt was clinging to his chest and arms and outlining every muscle…

She carefully closed her book and stood up, smiling as naturally as she could in response to their apparently casual greetings.  “You’re just in time for lunch,” she remarked.  “Better change your shirt if you don’t want to drip everywhere.”

Then she turned around, just catching Joe’s rather nonplussed expression and Hoss’ stifled chuckle, and walked into the house with a great show of calmness and unconcern.  And if he had been expecting something else – well, she didn’t know how to play games like this, and she wasn’t going to try.  She liked it better when he was real.  He was more charming, somehow, when he wasn’t so obviously trying to be charming.

Besides, it was safest to not let herself even go in that direction.  She couldn’t see why Joe Cartwright, Ponderosa heir and very eligible young bachelor, would be interested in her, beyond any kind of casual way he was probably interested in a very many women.

So it was all for the best—she resisted the impulse to look back over her shoulder and sneak another peek—because a man who looked like that and could be as charming as even Sam Clemens claimed—well, if she started down that path, she didn’t see how she was going to resist traveling much too far.

 

Joe stared after Liza’s retreating back, feeling a bit at sea.  It was not the reaction he had been hoping for and also, she was right, he was going to drip all over the floor and Hop Sing was going to yell at him about it which was also not going to give the impression he would want—

“You didn’t really think that would work, did you?” Hoss rumbled.

Joe glared at his brother.  “What?”

“That,” Hoss said, gesturing at Joe’s wet hair and shirt.

“I was hot,” Joe snapped.  “It’s hot work, fixing fences!”

And she could have at least giggled, or something.  Something to give a fellow a sense of being appreciated a bit.

“You really should change,” Hoss commented.

“I know, I know,” Joe muttered, wringing out the tail of his shirt onto the porch’s wood slats.  If he was quick, maybe he wouldn’t drip too much – only he probably had to go past Liza, since she’d just gone inside – it was enough to almost feel that he’d be better off climbing the trellis outside his bedroom window, only that was the sort of thing best done by moonlight when the odds of someone catching him were a lot lower.  It would be just his luck to be halfway up and have Pa or Adam walk around the corner.

Nothing for it but to go inside.  Hoss was already across the threshold, and Joe ran one hand over his wet curls and followed.  He only needed to get across the room, up the stairs—

He was just past the entryway when he saw Liza come around the corner from the kitchen.  Carrying a dish towel.

She smiled and tossed it at him, his left hand automatically coming up to catch it.  “Thought that might help keep Hop Sing from having to clean the floor.”

“Thanks,” Joe managed.  Smile like this was a joke they were in together – and then make a fast retreat.

He got upstairs without leaving too much in the way of puddles, and pulled off his wet shirt once he was safely behind his bedroom door.  He rubbed the towel over his wet hair, and glared at his own reflection in his mirror.

“No more of this nonsense, you hear?” he told himself – in a low voice, mindful of Hoss changing shirts in his bedroom next door.  “Sure, we got up to all sorts of shenanigans at sixteen.  And that’s fine, that’s being sixteen.  But if you wouldn’t go ride into hostile Indian territory to invite their princess to a dance now, don’t go doing other stupid things either.”

It had been an impulse of the moment, a lapse in his personal conviction that Liza was a very nice girl he was not romantically interested in.  Certainly not seriously.

All right, he’d never entirely believed he had no romantic interests at all, whatever he might insist to Hoss (who obviously didn’t believe it either).  But he was so tired of getting his heart broken.  His romantic history for more than three years now had been heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak.  Laura’s death had just about undone him, and he’d promised himself that was enough.  He wasn’t going to wildly fling himself into more pain, over and over and over.

It was why he’d stood up Caroline Partridge, rather than take her out riding.  She was an attractive, entirely suitable girl, a neighbor he was bound to keep on seeing – bad idea.  Not a safe one to romance.  And it was why he’d been perfectly willing to kiss Michele Dubois, who was only visiting and had a fiancé besides.  Beautiful girl, moonlit night, opportunity for a little fun but definitely nothing serious.  Safe.

He ran a comb through his damp curls, trying to decide where to categorize Liza.  Yesterday she had been planning to stay in Virginia City, was friendly and unattached and pretty.  Terrible idea, off-limits.

But…that interview she had, it had gone badly.  And he was sorry about that, but as he pulled one of his many tan shirts out of his wardrobe, it occurred to him that it also changed things.  Because she’d be going back to San Francisco soon.  Much too soon for anything really serious to happen.

Not that he’d ever needed more than a day or two in the past, but – still, putting an end date right from the start, that made everything nice and clear-cut and simple, right?  A little flirtation until she left town would mean nobody had to get too emotionally tangled up, and nobody got hurt.  He didn’t want to go breaking her heart either, but based on her recent lack of reaction, there was no sign that she was likely to get too invested either.  Or that even a flirtation was necessarily an option.  But he could still angle to see what might happen.

“You don’t look too bad at least, you have that going for you,” he remarked, studying himself in the mirror.  Then he smoothed his hair down one more time and pronounced himself fit for decent company again.

He made it downstairs after everyone else but still just in time for lunch.  Hoss, mercifully, did not comment on his still-damp hair, and when Liza smiled at him, laughter lurking in her eyes, it felt a little more like it really was some sort of shared joke.

Lunch went along fine, and most of the way through the meal he found a good opportunity to lob the very casual suggestion across the table, “Say, Liza, maybe I could give you a tour this afternoon of a few spots you missed on your last carriage ride.  Be on hand in case a wheel breaks too.”

She smiled, but before she could say anything Pa broke in from the head of the table with, “Don’t you have a fence to finish mending, young man?”

It was remarkable how Pa could throw young man at the end of a sentence and turn a simple question into a reprimand.  “Hoss and I are almost done with that anyway,” Joe said, and turned to look at Hoss, intending to convey with a gaze that now would be a great moment for Hoss to jump in and volunteer to handle the rest of it.  After all, what was a big brother for?

But Hoss was poking his roast with a guilty expression and said, “Guess I didn’t mention it, Little Joe – while you were upstairs I told Pa I needed to stay around here this afternoon.  Chub threw a shoe and I want to get him reshod before I need him.  You know.”

“Yeah,” Joe said sourly.  Sometimes it was downright unprofitable having a family.  Deep down, and not even that deep, he knew he wouldn’t really trade them for anything, but there were moments…  If Adam chimed in right now to offer to give Liza a tour himself, Joe might throw a plate at him.

But Adam kept his gaze on his own plate and his thoughts to himself, and instead Liza, predictably enough, said, “I really wouldn’t want to inconvenience any of you.  I’m sure I’ll be fine on my own.  Maybe take a walk.”

“Aw, that wouldn’t be very hospitable of us,” Hoss said, smiling in that bashful way he got.  “Why don’t you come out to the barn with me?  I’ll introduce you to the horses.  If you like horses, I mean.”

It wasn’t a given, considering she lived in San Francisco.  Not that no one rode horses, but there was a lot more walking and riding of carriages, which was different, even when there were horses involved.

But Liza’s eyes brightened and she said, “I love horses.  I had one when I was younger, and I used to ride out in the Presidio.”

“Well, we’ve got some of the nicest horses around,” Hoss said, and winked at her.  “You come out with me and meet them.”

Joe didn’t love this plan either, but…there was nothing to say that wouldn’t make him look ridiculous.  And maybe, if he was quick enough with that fence, he could get back in time to help Hoss reshod Chub.  Yeah.  Hot work, that, heating up metal and everything.  The kind of work a person might want to take their shirt off for, for instance.  Not that he was going to play any silly games, just…yeah.  Might be worth trying to get back early today.

 

8.

As everyone finished up eating, Little Joe shot off to his fence work with surprising alacrity, and Hoss took Liza out to the barn, leaving Ben and Adam the last ones at the table.  Ben could see that his oldest son was regarding him with a thoughtful expression.  There was always a lot going on behind those dark eyes.

Ben cleared his throat.  Sometimes, you had to take the direct approach.  “Something on your mind, Adam?”

Adam leaned back in his chair, expression unchanged.  “Just trying to work something out.  First I thought you were trying to play matchmaker, inviting Liza here, but then you sent Joe out to the fence work.”

Ben shifted uncomfortably, because he wasn’t certain he was being entirely fair to his youngest son.  Not about the fence, that was just making sure Little Joe behaved responsibly.  “Fences have to be built, and Hoss needs to take care of his horse.  And I don’t play matchmaker.”

“No, not usually,” Adam acknowledged.  “So why did you invite Liza out here?  She seems a nice enough young woman, but if you weren’t trying to put her in Joe’s path, why not just let her go on her way back to San Francisco?”

Ben sighed.  “That…is more complicated than I would like.”  He sketched out his conversation with Sheriff Coffee, which had led them to this result.

Adam lifted one skeptical eyebrow.  “You think the woman is a bank robber, so you invited her home?  Isn’t that taking charity a bit far?”

“I don’t think she’s a bank robber, Roy does!” Ben protested.

“Roy Coffee the sheriff, whose job it is to catch bank robbers…”

“And Roy doesn’t really think she is either,” Ben amended, “he just—thinks it’s possible.”

“And we don’t have any evidence that she isn’t.”

Ben frowned at that.  “We can’t approach it from that angle.  We have no evidence that she is, and until events unfold otherwise, she is here simply as a guest.”

“But I see you’ve locked up the guns,” Adam said, nodding towards the rifles by the stairs, chain snaking through their triggers.

“There’s no point in being reckless,” Ben admitted.

Adam lifted one finger.  “Next question – what are you going to tell Joe?”

And this was where Ben felt more conflicted.  Obviously Joe needed to know the situation.  That was clear.  And yet…  Little Joe had been devastated by Laura White’s death.  And now he had some of that old gleam and spark back in his eyes.  Whether anything came of it in the long-run was a different question, but in the short-term, Ben didn’t like to throw an obstacle into something that was doing his son good.  It wouldn’t be good if it turned out she really was a bank robber, but – somehow he still couldn’t find that a likely possibility.

“I’ll have to find the right moment,” he said finally, “to let Joe know too.”

Adam nodded slowly, as though he understood much more than had been said.  Perhaps he did.  That oldest son of his was insightful.  “Don’t wait too long, Pa.  Given a couple of days, Joe’s liable to propose to her.”

Ben wanted to deny that, but – Little Joe had certainly moved at that speed in the past.  For that matter, he himself hadn’t moved much slower, when he’d met Joe’s mother.  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said finally, and resolved to talk to Joe…soon.

 

Out in the barn, Liza didn’t admit to Hoss that his horse Chub was much bigger than the pony she had had all those years ago.  She was bigger now too, but that didn’t seem to make much difference.  Somehow it helped more that Hoss was so big – when he stood next to Chub, the black horse didn’t seem quite so large.

Or maybe it was just that it didn’t matter as much when Hoss slung an arm over the horse’s neck and said, “Ol’ Chub here’s friends with everybody.  Aren’t you, pal?”

She thought like horse, like rider but didn’t say it out loud.  Though Hoss might not have minded.  She was occupied anyway offering up the apple Hoss had suggested she bring from the bowl in the living room inside.  Chub took it with a great slobbering of lips and began crunching.

Beverley used to make a mess of her hand too, in just the same situation.  She had been devastated when the little brown pony had to be sold.  That was when she was eleven, the first big dividing line in her life, when her father’s newspaper folded.  The house was sold, her horse was sold, and life turned altogether upside down.  They had rebuilt a life, in a new neighborhood, with new people.  She hadn’t had a horse since then though.

Joe’s black and white paint stuck his head out of the stall next to Chub’s and gave a nicker that sounded downright indignant.

Hoss laughed.  “See, you can’t give Chub an apple without sharing all around.  Cochise here won’t stand for it.  That’s Joe’s horse.”

“We’ve met,” Liza said, fishing in her pocket with her dry hand for the second apple she’d brought, then offering it up to the paint.  The second big dividing line of her life, of course, was when her parents died.  A far worse turning of the world.  She wasn’t sure she had entirely rebuilt since then, even if it might not look too bad from the outside.  She was living in a new neighborhood again, but she hadn’t done as well at connecting with new people this time around.

“Oh yeah, Joe was riding Cochise yesterday when your carriage broke down.  Didn’t know he introduced you two.”

“Well, not exactly.  But he did tell me about your father buying Cochise from Chief Winnemucca.”  The horse took the apple much more delicately, nipping it lightly from her palm.

“Joe loves that story.  Thinks it makes Cochise extra special.”

“But you’re just special all on your own, aren’t you?” Liza crooned to the horse, who tossed his head in apparent agreement.

Like horse, like rider.

She had hoped that this might be the next dividing line in her life, finally a good one.  That she’d be able to make her way in a new place, with a proper job she could be proud of.  But Bill Raleigh hadn’t seen things her way.  So in a few days or a week, she’d be going back to San Francisco, back to the same life she’d had for the last two years.  And that was fine.  Really fine.

But at least she could enjoy being here while she was here.

“Pa and Adam are out on their horses,” Hoss said, nodding at two of the empty stalls, “but Sport – that’s Adam’s horse – doesn’t like apples anyway.  More particular, that one.”

Like horse, like rider, but she definitely wasn’t going to say that out loud.  Anyway, she didn’t really know Adam.  He’d been perfectly pleasant, just more aloof.  Probably there were women who found that sort of thing attractive, like a challenge to overcome.  Abigail Jones, for instance, based on the story Joe had told yesterday.  For herself, she thought that would be exhausting, if you had to always wonder what a man was thinking.

Which didn’t explain why she was spending an increasing amount of time wondering what Joe was thinking, specifically about her.  She glanced at Hoss out of the corner of her eye.  Was there any way to ask…  No.  That would be utterly ridiculous.  Joe was friendly and charming and looked very distracting in a wet shirt, but trying to get an idea from his brother about whether he liked her was as silly as blushing and fluttering because he’d dumped water over his head.  Sillier, even.

“I’d better take care of Chub’s shoe,” Hoss said, moving over to an anvil on the other side of the barn, and stirring up the coals in the brazier next to it.  “You ever seen a horse shod before?”

“Not for a long time.”

“Well, best not get too close.  Chub’s real calm, but the fire can get hot,” Hoss said, taking off his tan vest.

“I’ll be careful,” Liza promised, and sat down on a bale of hay in front of Cochise’s stall.  The horse briefly nosed her hair, breath hot, then retreated again.  At least Joe’s horse seemed to like her.

It didn’t take Hoss long to get Chub reshod.  He led the big horse out of the stall with a firm admonishment that he wasn’t going to stand for any nonsense, and apparently Chub believed him.  He didn’t cause any trouble, and Hoss was plainly very familiar with the work he was doing.

When it was all done, Hoss wiped his hands off on a rag and remarked, “I ain’t seen him that cooperative in a long while.  Must be showing off for a lady.”

“Just him, or both of you?” Liza asked impulsively.

Hoss grinned and ducked his head, which didn’t make him seem small.  “Aw, I’m just doing work here, that’s all.  Tell you what though, if you don’t mind climbing up to the hayloft, I’ve got something else I can show you.”

“I don’t mind.”  It had been a long time since she’d climbed into a hayloft too – not since the days of Beverley and watching horses be reshod.  But her boots only had low heels and she thought she could manage a ladder, even in these skirts.

If she was still planning to stay in Virginia City, she’d buy a split skirt and proper boots for riding.  Maybe, if the Enterprise had paid enough, she could have bought a horse.  Or at least rented one from the livery stable occasionally.  The Cartwrights would probably have loaned her a horse, for that matter.

But she wasn’t staying, so it was no good thinking about it.

It was a good sturdy ladder up to the loft, her boots worked fine, and she was halfway up before it occurred to her that there were some men who would have definite ideas when they invited a woman up to a hayloft.

But this was Hoss, rendering the notion ridiculous.  She’d only known him since yesterday, but she still felt quite safe going up to a hayloft with him, with no expectations that he had expectations.  Hoss would probably blush kissing a girl on the cheek.

Joe, on the other hand…  No, it was no good carrying on thinking about that either.

She glanced back and saw that Hoss was studiously standing back from the ladder and looking the other direction besides, as though getting any glimpse at all of her petticoats as she climbed would be unconscionable.  She smiled, and kept climbing.

The hayloft was high enough to stand very nearly straight, and the ladder went all the way up to the ceiling, making it easy enough to step off with dignity preserved.  She backed away across the hay-strewn boards to make space for Hoss – who couldn’t stand straight up here, but seemed comfortable enough with the hunched posture required.

“Stay quiet and walk slow along this way,” he said in a low voice, waving one hand as he led her towards the bigger mounds of hay farther from the edge.

She was intrigued now, and followed along behind him.  As they came around a big mound of hay, Hoss crouched down and pointed.  Liza became aware of a rustling in the hay just before she got into position to see what was causing it.

“Oh Hoss, they’re adorable,” she breathed, easing down to her knees to look more closely at the kittens curled up among the hay.

It appeared they had interrupted naptime, because the kittens blinked sleepily and then popped up and converged on Hoss, clearly an old friend.

“Hey there, little guys,” Hoss laughed, scratching furry heads.  “We’re lucky there’s three of them up here.  And it’s lucky you came to visit when you did.  These fellows are just about big enough to wander off soon.”

“Where’s their mother?” Liza asked, clasping her hands in her lap because she wanted to pet a kitten so much but wasn’t sure she should.  She didn’t want to scare them, and didn’t know if they liked people besides Hoss.  Surely everybody liked Hoss.

“Oh, out hunting, I expect,” Hoss said easily.  “She’s leaving ‘em alone more now.  There were six, but these are the last three that haven’t struck out on their own yet.  Here, this little one looks ready to be acquainted.”

And with that she found a ball of black fur deposited in her lap.  “Hello, you,” she said softly, and lightly touched the soft kitten fur.

The kitten was black all through, except for one white paw, and blinked up at her with vivid blue eyes.  He delicately sniffed her fingers, then began exploring the folds of her skirt.

“Only one in the bunch with black fur,” Hoss said meditatively.  “It ain’t always good for cats, being black like that.  Some people don’t like it.”

“You mean the bad luck idea?  But that’s such nonsense.”

“Sure, I know that.  But I worry about him if he wanders too far.  He’s the smallest one of all his brothers and sisters too.  Maybe that’s why he gets into the most trouble.  Got to prove something.”

“How much trouble can a kitten get into?” Liza asked, fingering the little cat’s tail until he turned around and batted at her hand.

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Hoss said, and launched into a tale about the different improbable places he kept finding the cat in the barn – including sitting on Chub’s head once.  “Chub didn’t mind, luckily, but I sure wish I’d seen how that kitten got up there.  Think he might’ve dropped down, and that must’ve been a trick.”

“All that but he doesn’t leave the barn?”

“Likes home, I guess.”

She could understand that.  If you had the right home, one you really belonged in – why would you ever leave?

The black kitten stayed with Liza, while the other two climbed all over Hoss, right up until she said, with regret, “We really should be going, shouldn’t we?  You must have other things to do.”

“Oh, this and that,” Hoss said, lifting one kitten down from his shoulder and shooing the other off his leg.  “Guess we ought to head down at that.”

“It was lovely to meet you, little one,” Liza said, picking up the furry, squirming black kitten and kissing it between the ears.  Then she set it back down on the hay, where it sat and looked up at her quizzically, ears twitching.  She got to her feet, brushing hay off of her skirt, and made her way to the ladder.

It was a little trickier climbing down in her skirts than it had been going up, but she managed it.  She was looking out towards the open barn doors, brushing yet more hay off of her sleeves, when she heard a thump and rustle of straw behind her.  She turned around, but Hoss was still halfway down the ladder – and would have made a much larger thump if he fell anyway.  There was a feed trough full of loose hay nearby, and the hay was shifting.  A second later, a little black head popped up, the kitten shook himself, and then scrambled out of the hay.  He leaped down from the trough and trotted up to rub his head against her ankle.

“My goodness,” Liza said a bit blankly.  It was a long drop down for someone this small.  “Hoss was right about you being a daredevil.”

“Guess he wasn’t done saying good-bye,” Hoss remarked, dropping off the last rung of the ladder – and it was a much louder thump.

“I promise to visit again tomorrow,” Liza said, bending down to scratch the kitten’s head.

She started for the door, and the kitten followed right along.  She expected he’d stopped at the barn door, but as she crossed into the front yard he stayed right beside her.

“Well, look at that,” Hoss said.  “I think he’s done found a reason to leave the barn.”

“This is very sweet, but shouldn’t you go back home?” Liza said, trying to scoot the kitten back towards the barn with one hand.  He twisted right around and came back to sit on her foot.

Hoss leaned against the nearby corral railing, looking pleased.  “Looks like he’s decided where he belongs.  You’d better keep him, if you want him.”

“If I want—but I—”  Liza looked down uncertainly at the kitten who was looking up at her, with an uncannily similar pleased expression.  She did want him.  She had had no ideas an hour ago about adopting a pet, but she had always liked cats and this one was looking at her with such an absolutely winsome expression…  But it couldn’t really be that simple, could it?  “How could I ever get him back to San Francisco?”

“Oh, that’s easy.  I’ll help you rig up a basket for him.  I’ve seen people carry chickens on the stagecoach.  One little kitten’ll be fine.”

“My boarding house does allow pets,” Liza said slowly.  “But – wouldn’t he be better off here?  Not in the city with, I don’t know, dogs and carts and lots of people.”

Hoss shrugged.  “We have coyotes and wildcats here.”

Also outlaws and cattle rustlers, Liza thought but didn’t say aloud.  She would have, if it had been Joe.

“It’s probably all a balance,” Hoss continued, “and he’s clearly decided who he wants to be with.  You’ll take care of him fine.”  He scooped up the kitten, who looked even smaller in his big hands, and deposited him into Liza’s arms.  “If you want him, he’s yours.”

Who could resist a furry armful of happy kitten?  “I—thank you, Hoss, that’s really—the sweetest thing…”

He got that bashful look again.  “Aw, weren’t really me.  It was mostly the kitten’s idea.”

But he had brought her to meet the kittens to begin with – because he was the kind of person who knew and cared when there were kittens in his barn – and had smoothed out every difficulty and somehow made it all seem like a quite easy while also a momentous thing to trust her to take care of this little animal…  She smiled at him as the kitten rubbed his head against her chin.  “It was you too.  Thank you.”

 

9.

Liza was still cuddling that kitten and smiling at Hoss when Little Joe came trotting around the corner of the barn.  Hoss lifted a hand in greeting, surprised – and not surprised – to see Joe back so quick.  “H’lo, little brother,” he called.  “You finish that fence already?”

“Yeah, there wasn’t that much left,” Joe said, which was somewhat true.  He must’ve worked right quick to get it done this soon though.  He came over and joined them by the corral – but didn’t reach for the water pump this time.

Liza turned to smile at Joe, and Hoss was struck that, as shiny as she’d smiled at him over that kitten, she got even shinier as soon as Joe turned up.  “Hello, Joe.  Look, Hoss gave me a kitten.”

Joe smiled back at her, but it didn’t get as far as his eyes.  “Oh.  Wasn’t that nice of him.”

Hoss shrugged.  “The kitten decided he wanted to adopt her.”

“But you introduced us,” Liza said, and glanced at Joe again.  “Hoss showed me the hayloft—”

“The hayloft, huh?”  Joe’s eyebrows scrunched together.

“—and the kittens living up there.”

“Oh.  Right.  Sure,” Joe said, and his expression smoothed out again.

Hoss shook his head.  As if he would have had any other ideas about a hayloft!  Especially with a gal who was so clearly sparking another direction entirely.  The things little brother thought sometimes.  “Anyway, it seemed to be love at first sight with this little guy,” Hoss said, reaching out to give the kitten a scritch between the ears.

“Great.  That’s great.”  Joe shoved his hands into his pockets.  “So, you take care of Chub yet?  Thought I might help with that, if you needed help.”

Joe, volunteering for chores?  He definitely had some angle going, so it was probably safest all around that Hoss could say, “No, all done with that.  Chub’s all set for the next time we need to ride off in a hurry.  Plenty of other work to be doing around here though.  Need some firewood.”

“Right, yeah,” Joe said, running a hand over his curls.

“I’m going to take this one inside,” Liza said, cradling the kitten, “and see if Hop Sing can help me figure out what he needs.  Thanks again, Hoss.  It was really sweet of you.”

“Happy to help, any time,” Hoss said, sincerely and because it would probably annoy Joe.

They both watched Liza walk away towards the kitchen, and Hoss watched Little Joe’s face change as she turned away.  He’d been smiling as long as she was looking, even if there’d been something a little off in the smile, but now his expression soured.

“Somethin’ eatin’ you, Little Joe?” Hoss asked innocently.

“No,” Joe said immediately.  He leaned back against the corral rail, kicked against the post.  “It’s nothing.”

Hoss grinned, watching Joe watch Liza until she disappeared through the kitchen door.  He leaned his elbows on the corral railing.  “Liza’s a real nice gal, ain’t she?”

“Sure,” Joe said in a low voice.

“Real pretty, too.  You do think she’s pretty, don’t you?”

“What’s it matter if I do?” Joe muttered, heel hitting the corral post hard enough to shake the whole thing.

“Seems to me it might matter a lot.”

That finally got Joe to turn, to glare fiercely at Hoss.  “I don’t see how, when you’re off giving her kittens!”

Hoss threw back his head in a roaring laugh at that.  “Aw, come on, Little Joe—”

“Don’t come on me, big brother, I don’t—”

“You really don’t see it, do you?”

“See what?” Joe snapped.

Hoss laid one big hand on Joe’s shoulder.  “Little brother, that woman lights up like a sunrise when she looks at you.  I was just being friendly-like, and the fact is, I had to give her a kitten to get her to smile anything like the way she does when you just say hello.  I think she likes me fine, but she ain’t lighting up about me.”  And for that matter, he wasn’t lighting up about her, even if she was a real nice gal.

Joe’s gaze strayed back to the closed kitchen door.  “We haven’t – you know, there isn’t anything – it wouldn’t be serious, with her going back to San Francisco and all, but – you really think so?”

“Sure do.”

“Huh.  You know, maybe I’ll go see if she needs help with that kitten.  Help talk Hop Sing around about some food…”

“Sounds like a real good idea, Little Joe,” Hoss said, his brother already heading towards the house.

Hoss shook his head, grinning, and went to pick up the ax to chop some firewood.  It wasn’t like Joe to have a lot of doubts when it came to women.  Might be a good thing for him, chasing after one he wasn’t too sure of.  And as for whatever that was about nothing being serious – yeah, he’d known Joe a lot of years, and nobody could fall into serious faster or easier than little brother.  Just give him a couple of days.

 

Joe tried very hard to keep his mind on the checker board in front of him.  He and Hoss had done this a thousand times or more – Joe sitting on the big coffee table, one knee drawn up and checkerboard on the table by his foot, Hoss sitting on the couch and bending over the board.  Adam was sitting on the other end of the couch, immersed in some big thick book, and their father was over at his desk, shuffling through paperwork and occasionally muttering something under his breath.

All perfectly normal, all a very ordinary Saturday evening at home for the family.

Every bit of his distraction, the reason he couldn’t keep his mind or his gaze on the game, was curled up in the big red armchair by the fire.  It would probably be bad enough if she was just sitting there, but she was sitting there with her new black kitten and a length of ribbon, and using the one to tease the other, and it was just about the most adorable thing he’d ever seen and he didn’t mean the kitten—

“Little Joe, you ain’t paying attention to this game,” Hoss said, bringing Joe’s gaze sharply back as his brother clinked his red checker, jumping over three black ones.

“Sorry, Hoss,” Joe said, running a hand over his curly hair and using the gesture as cover to sneak another glance towards Liza.

It wasn’t very good cover.  Liza looked up just then, her gaze meeting his.  She smiled at him, blue eyes alight, and he thought he could see what Hoss meant, that maybe she did look at him a bit differently.

Joe swallowed, dragged his attention back to Hoss and the checkers.  “Rematch?” he managed.

Hoss’ eyebrows rose.  “You sure?”

“Yeah.  Can’t let you just—walk away with a win.”

And he needed something to hold him in place, to keep him from doing anything rash.

He had been down this road too many times to have any doubts about what he was feeling.  He knew all the signs.  And every instinct was telling him to go ask Liza if she’d like to take a walk, and if that went well to try kissing her in the moonlight, and if that went well…he might find himself hurtling towards something serious after all, and he’d promised himself he wasn’t going that way again.

Checkers.  Much better if he just stayed right here and played checkers.

And maybe tomorrow, see if she’d be interested in a picnic.  Picnics weren’t serious, not like moonlight walks.  Picnics were only a bit of fun.  Not that he hadn’t ever fallen in love in the middle of the day, but still.  Just a picnic.  See what happened then.  And right now, he could deal with tonight.

Though he didn’t seem to be dealing with it very well, since Hoss won the next game of checkers too.

“You all right, little brother?” Hoss asked, frowning at him.  “You didn’t even cheat that game.”

“I don’t cheat at checkers!  You just use that as an excuse whenever you lose.”

“Methink you doth protest too much,” Adam murmured from the depths of his book, which was exactly the sort of nonsense oldest brother liked to spout.

“It doesn’t make you right just because you can quote Shakespeare,” Joe said acidly.  Any time methink came out, Shakespeare was a safe bet.  “I’ve read Shakespeare too, you know.”

Adam cocked an eyebrow at him, and remarked, “You don’t exactly capture the breadth of the Bard when you only peruse the romantic parts.”

That—was both true and a plain example of Adam wielding big words to show off.  He’d been doing that more since Liza arrived, which Joe didn’t know how to interpret—but he didn’t like it.  He glanced at Liza again now—and she was looking amused, but he wasn’t sure how to interpret that either.  Which of them was she amused by, and was it a good sort of amusement or…

“Oh, never mind,” he said, before somebody started mentioning exactly who he had been reading the romantic parts of Shakespeare with.  You never talked about the past girls you’d liked in front of the current one you liked; that was just good sense.  “Did you decide on a name for that kitten yet?” he asked, in a probably transparent effort to change the subject.

She smiled at him and, maybe as a mercy, went along with the subject change.  “I decided to call him Brontë, after my favorite author.”

Joe would have liked to say something very intelligent about that, except he had no idea who Brontë was, or what he might have written.  “Oh.  Well—seems like a nice name.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed you as an admirer of Wuthering Heights,” Adam remarked, in much the tone he’d used to comment on Shakespeare’s romantic poetry – that it was all slightly ridiculous.  And of course Adam had to know more about this subject, and Joe was about ready to knock the checkerboard over to disrupt the conversation again, when—

“I’m not,” Liza said, and there was a new, slightly false sweetness to her tone.  “Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, but I admire Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre.”

“Aren’t they essentially the same?” Adam said, tone dismissive.  “Sentimentalist Gothic novels.”

Liza’s eyebrows rose.  “I take it you are not an admirer of Gothic literature?”

Adam closed his book, so this was getting serious.  “You’re not going to claim that Jane Eyre is Shakespeare, of course.”

“No,” Liza returned cooly, “but not everything needs to be Shakespeare.  Nothing except Shakespeare, in fact.  Jane Eyre is Brontë, and that seems like quite enough.  And it is not the same as Wuthering Heights, apart from on a very superficial level.”

Joe and Hoss exchanged a glance.  Joe had lost track of the references they were making several remarks back, but he could tell that she was disagreeing with oldest brother on an intellectual topic.  That didn’t happen much.

Not that Adam gave any sign of conceding the fight.  “Aren’t they both romantic tales set on a moor, inside a large, spooky house, centered around a romance with a brooding hero?”

“As I said,” Liza said, tone only growing more frosty, “on a superficial level.  If one wishes to confuse setting and genre with the real substance of a story.”

“You didn’t mention the similarity of the hero.  Do you have a fondness for the tall, dark and brooding sort?”

Hoss and Joe hadn’t even been pretending they weren’t sitting back and watching the show by this point, but this sudden turn had Joe newly alert.  Because that didn’t exactly sound like it was about literature anymore – and it was pretty obvious who around here was the tall, dark and brooding sort.  Not him.  Dark, kind of, and brooding now and then though it wasn’t his most natural state, and tall…well, not judging by the rest of his family.  Maybe he should intervene after all—

But Liza smiled, a rather brilliant smile that didn’t seem entirely sincere around the edges, though maybe he was kidding himself that he could read her smiles that well after this short a time, and said, “No, not really, despite the attractions of Mr. Rochester.  But I always had a preference for Mr. Tilney over Mr. Darcy.”

Joe had no idea who any of those people were and could only hope they were fictional.  It was some consolation that Adam seemed thrown too.  “I don’t quite follow…”

“Jane Austen,” Liza said, tone gone sweet again.  “Mr. Darcy is tall, dark and brooding, while Mr. Tilney is far more charming.  And admits to a weakness for Gothic novels.”

Joe nearly jumped in to mention that he personally enjoyed dime novels, but managed to catch himself in time.  It would only make him look ridiculous – but if she preferred charm to brooding, that was a good sign, right?  Speaking of styles.

“But tell me,” Liza continued, gaze still on Adam, “if you don’t enjoy Austen either, what do you read?”

Adam smiled with slightly too many teeth.  “I’ve been admiring the works of the Transcendentalists lately.”

If he thought the big word in there was going to win him a point, it didn’t.  She didn’t even blink, and just said, “Oh?  Emerson or Thoreau?”

“I’ve been venturing through Walden recently.”

Something in her face softened a fraction.  “I’ve always felt that when Thoreau is good, he’s very good, but when he’s boring, he’s very boring.”

And unexpectedly, Adam laughed.  An actual laugh, not his sardonic one.  “He is, though, isn’t he?  Discussing the changing depths of the pond…”

“Interminable,” Liza agreed, a new sparkle in her eye.  “But then he comes out with something like If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined—”

“—he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours,” Adam finished, and Joe started to get uncomfortable again.  He didn’t want them to fight, but they didn’t have to get along too well either.

He probably would have thrown himself into the conversation then, with uncertain results, but he was saved by the sudden bustling arrival of Hop Sing with a tray of coffee.  Joe guessed the cook had been waiting for an opportune moment – he was clever that way – and emerged from the kitchen when the situation was less tense.  It broke up the previous discussion, as everyone maneuvered coffee cups and lumps of sugar, and as Pa, who must have been listening for the last five minutes at least, came to join them.  Joe contrived to sit on the arm of Liza’s chair and Adam started talking to Pa and that seemed to be the end of whatever had been happening between Adam and Liza.

And mostly, as Joe thought it over, he thought it had been all right.  Adam wasn’t going to win any points with a woman by insulting her favorite book.  And Joe was rather pleased by the idea of a woman who could hold her own in an argument with Adam about intellectual topics.  That could be a lot of fun to watch, the way oldest brother always thought he knew everything.

 

10.

Liza wondered the next morning if the Cartwrights were holding council somewhere out of her sight to determine who was in charge of hospitality each day.  She really wouldn’t have blamed them if they decided they had done their duty by now and left her to her own devices for the day.  But that seemed not to be the Cartwright way, because the moment she mentioned at breakfast that she might take a walk, Joe promptly volunteered to escort her.

And it wasn’t like she minded that.

Once Joe was involved in the plan, bringing a great deal of energy and enthusiasm to the whole thing, her intended casual stroll swiftly gained a specific destination and also the addition of a picnic basket wheedled out of Hop Sing.

The weather was perfect as they walked, cool but without a chill, and the scenery was all that Sam Clemens could have promised, with the green pines and the glimpses of blue lake between them.

“Is the Ponderosa always this beautiful?” she asked, looking up at pine branches above as they ambled along the trail.

“Well, we like her,” Joe said with a grin.  “But she may be putting on her best for a special visitor.”

She thought of saying she wasn’t that special, but he’d probably feel obligated to disagree and – that would just be fishing, really.  So instead she said, “So were you assigned to look after the stray today?”

“No, I volunteered.  Even offered to arm wrestle Hoss for the privilege.”

She couldn’t imagine that contest ending in any but the one way, and not a way that would end up where they were.  “And – he threw the match?”

Joe laughed.  “Well, we didn’t actually arm wrestle, but yeah, he would have thrown it if we had.  He’s very reliable that way.  Although you could have pretended to believe I could take him.”

That was probably the flirty thing to do, the thing that the women who knew how to properly react when Joe Cartwright started dumping water over his head would have done.  But she lifted her eyebrows and pointed out, “I’ve seen him lift up a carriage, remember?”

“Fair,” Joe acknowledged.  “I’ll have you know, though, I once beat every man in the Bucket of Blood Saloon at arm-wrestling.”

“Really?” Liza said, and hoped it didn’t sound too skeptical.  It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Joe was strong – he worked on a ranch after all, that had to involve a lot of physical labor – but surely a lot of men in Virginia City were strong, and Joe was hardly the biggest of them.

“Really,” Joe said, and grinned wider.  “Hoss and Adam paid ‘em all off to let me win.  They think I don’t know, but I figured it out.”

That made her laugh, and he did too, and it was friendly enough and mutual enough that she even felt comfortable saying, “I’m surprised you admit to all that.”

He shrugged.  “We all know what we’re good at in the family.  Adam’s the smart one and Hoss is the strong one.  Me, I’m good with horses, I’m a quick draw, and most people think I’m charming.”  He said that with a grin too.

She could just imagine what people found him charming.  And she couldn’t claim any kind of immunity either.

They walked on, talking easily, until they reached an outcropping of rocks, stretching down to the shore, and on the opposite side of the trail a green, flower-dotted meadow with a stand of pine trees in the center.

“That’s a good place for thinking,” Joe said, pointing at one of the big rocks, and then swung around to point at the meadow.  “And that’s a very nice spot for a picnic.”

So they spread out the blanket and investigated the basket Joe had been carrying and even if it was a little early for lunch it seemed only natural to at least try Hop Sing’s very excellent biscuits and chicken and slices of cold apple pie.  And somewhere after they’d been through the picnic basket and Joe was sprawled out on his back on the blanket, hat over his face, and Liza was sitting braiding strands of long meadow grass together, Joe said idly, “So tell me more about this Brontë you like.  Charlotte, right?”

His tone was lazy and friendly but she still felt her cheeks going hot.  She didn’t know what had gotten into her the previous evening.  Well, she knew that Adam had irritated her.  But still, she was a guest – she should have been more circumspect.  Even if they had ended up in mutual agreement around Thoreau.  “I really – shouldn’t have said all that last night…”

Joe tipped his hat farther back to squint up at her.  “Why not?  You don’t actually like Brontë?”

“No, of course I do, but I shouldn’t have argued with Adam about it.”

Joe snorted.  “You think I mind if you tell my oldest brother he doesn’t actually know everything in the world?  Do him good to have someone argue with him sometimes.”

“I doubt he agrees with that sentiment,” she muttered.  “I don’t think he’s feeling very fond of me this morning.”

“Nah, being quiet’s just Adam’s way,” Joe said, shifting to prop up on one elbow, turned towards her.  “Gets all in his own head sometimes.  And it’s not like his opinion is the only one that counts anyway.”

“Oh?” Liza said, and was he looking at her more intently suddenly…?

“Sure,” Joe said softly, and then grinned.  “Hoss likes you plenty.”

She laughed, not expecting that direction.  “I have a feeling Hoss likes most people.”

“Sure, but do you think he gives kittens to everyone?”

“It was the kitten’s idea.”

“And you think Hoss couldn’t persuade a kitten if he wanted to?”

“Well, I like Hoss very much too.”

“Mm-hmm,” Joe said in tones of agreement, and then that intent look was back in his eyes.  “Though I must be something of an idiot, sitting in a beautiful meadow on a beautiful day with a beautiful girl, talking about my brothers.”

Liza didn’t miss the compliment in the middle of that, and it wasn’t as though she didn’t like it, but – he’d shifted into what was plainly Joe Cartwright’s famous charm, and that made it feel less real than it might have.  She liked it better when he just talked to her.  “Do you talk to all the pretty girls about your brothers?”

“Only the ones I really like,” he said swiftly, and that was unmistakably a compliment too, but he was still being charming…and he probably did say it to all the girls, after all.

Somewhere along the way she’d leaned in closer towards him, and now she straightened up again.  “Didn’t you want to hear about Charlotte Brontë?”

There was only the barest pause suggesting that Joe had had to make a shift in direction for this new topic.  He sat up, looking towards her with his expression attentive.  “Sure.  Tell me about Charlotte Brontë.  Why’s she your favorite author?”

“Well…it is Gothic literature like Adam said, but I like that about it.  It’s so different, so far away.  And the heroine, Jane Eyre, she’s all alone in the world, making her own way, and I find that—admirable.”  Comforting, actually, a story about a woman who was managing, for good or ill, on her own, even if it was only fiction.  But how could she explain that to Joe Cartwright, of the Ponderosa Cartwrights, with his ranch and his family always all around him?  It had to be entirely unrelatable for him.  “And Brontë’s writing is beautiful.  Even if it isn’t Shakespeare.”

“I heard somewhere that not everything has to be Shakespeare,” Joe remarked, glint of humor in his eyes now.

That made her laugh again, and somehow the shared laughter made her want to confess more.  “There’s a lot I like about Brontë, but it’s also – that she’s a woman.  There aren’t that many women authors, and even fewer that get any respect.”

Joe snapped his fingers.  “There’s the one who wrote that book about slavery – you know – what was the name?”

She did know – or at least, she could guess what was the book about slavery.  “Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“Right, that one,” Joe said, then his eyebrows scrunched to a more embarrassed tilt.  “Adam read it.”

Of course he did.  “So Stowe’s one, and there’s Mary Shelley and Jane Austen – and I probably ought to like Stowe best because she’s one of the few Americans but, I don’t know – I like Brontë.  And I like knowing about women authors because – I’m working in newspapers, or trying to at least, but I’d like to write books.”

To his credit, he didn’t appear to find this idea the slightest bit surprising, and he didn’t sound dismissive either when he said, “Do you want to write a Gothic novel?  Like Brontë?”

“I wouldn’t aspire to be Brontë – though I did have a phase of writing Gothic stories a few years ago.  But I think I’d rather write something more like what I actually know about.  Sort of like Sam Clemens does.  Not about the same things he does, I mean, but – from life, you know.”  And now she felt quite sure she had said entirely too much, and took a stab at changing the subject.  “What about you, have you always wanted to be a rancher?”

“It was always pretty inescapable,” Joe said, eyes going distant, as though he was thinking it through, “but I don’t mind that.  It’s probably the only life I ever really wanted to have, even as a kid.  Well – except for when I wanted to be one of King Arthur’s knights.”

She could see that.  Gallant men on horseback, dramatic fights and fair maidens.

“My favorite, though,” Joe continued, voice warming, “I had this big old book of stories, it’s probably still around my room somewhere, was Robin Hood.  Hoss and I used to play at it out in the woods.  He was Little John, of course, and I was Robin Hood, and I was convinced Adam would be a great Sheriff of Nottingham, but he was a lot older so I couldn’t really get him on board…”

The picture of Adam playing the sheriff in a child’s game was funny enough, but it was a different thought that made her suddenly giggle.

Joe scratched the back of his neck.  “It was just a kid’s game…”

“No, I wasn’t – it sounds wonderful,” she said hurriedly, because she hadn’t meant to embarrass him, “but it just occurred to me – you still wear green.”

“Huh.”  Joe looked down at the sleeves of his green jacket.  “I never thought about that, but I did have sort of a feeling about the jacket.”

“And you rescue travelers when they get lost in your forest.”

“That’s not about Sherwood Forest, though, that’s just Ponderosa hospitality.”

“Is it why you know how to fence with a parasol?  Because of Robin Hood and King Arthur?”  Swordfights were much more common in that sort of story than they were out here on the Western frontier.

“For the record, I can fence with an actual foil, not just with a parasol.  And I learned to fence because my father taught me.  But, and you’ll love this, you know how he learned?”

She shook her head.

Joe grinned, a triumphant expression.  “My mother taught him.  According to Pa, she could outfence and outride just about anyone, man or woman.  And if she could do that, I don’t figure there’s any reason you can’t write a great novel either.”

Liza ducked her head, cheeks warm, and impulsively thought that as long as she was blushing already she might as well dive all the way in.  “You know one of the things I liked about you, right from the start?”

She could see Joe’s grin out of the corner of her eye, even though she didn’t quite dare to make eye contact.  “You’re going to tell me, right?”

She drew in a breath.  “When I told you I worked with Sam Clemens, you asked if I was a writer like him.  You took it for granted that I could be.”

“You know, that’s funny,” Joe said, voice softening.  “Because I liked the way you smiled when I said that.”

Somewhere along the way she seemed to have leaned in closer towards him again, and he had certainly angled towards her, and so it wasn’t very far at all to tip just a little bit closer.  She closed her eyes and a breath later he was kissing her, warm and soft and sweet.  And if the thought crossed her mind that there was probably a reason he was very, very good at this, in the heady spell of the moment it was easy enough to dismiss.

When they broke apart, he smiled at her, green eyes alight, and it was a real smile, not one of his charming grins that seemed so much more deliberate.  He drew in a slow breath and said, “You know, I was beginning to wonder if you liked me at all.”

Her cheeks had never really stopped blushing, so why not go ahead and say, “You’re a very easy man to like.”

“That so?”  And some of the charming look was glinting in his eye now, plainly fishing for further confirmation and compliments.

Which might be why she leaned back and said, “I only met you two days ago.  How quickly do you usually find out if a girl likes you?”

He shrugged, didn’t answer the question, said instead, “You’ll be going back to San Francisco before too long, so it’s best not to waste too much time.”

Right.  Right, she was going back to San Francisco.  She knew it and he knew it and she was pretty certain that a lot of girls had liked Joe Cartwright before and he knew that too.  And all of that put a different color on things.  She reclaimed the braid of meadow grass she’d dropped into her lap some while ago, studied it as she said, “I am going back so – so it’s not like there could be anything, you know, long-term…”

“Sure, yeah,” he said slowly, “but not everything in life has to last forever.  Or be serious.  Some things can just be – all about enjoying the moment.”

Well.  As long as they understood each other.  As long as they both knew that she wasn’t going to join that list of girls he’d been engaged to – not that she thought charming, wealthy, very eligible Joe Cartwright was about to propose to her – but as long as he knew that she knew that – that was better somehow, wasn’t it?

He was still looking at her intently, a smile lurking around the corners of his mouth.  “You know, I was enjoying the moment,” Joe murmured, and tugged her closer again.

It was all too irresistible, because after all, he was very good at kissing, and it was a beautiful day in a beautiful place and Joe Cartwright really was charming enough to draw the birds out of the trees, especially when he wasn’t actually trying to be charming – and what could be the harm in a few kisses?  He was the heir to the Ponderosa and she was going back to San Francisco; they existed in separate worlds, so why not enjoy the time for as long as she was here?

 

Hoss could hear Joe whistling to the accompaniment of wood chopping as he rode into the front yard.  Grinning, he left Chub at the hitching rail and strolled over to where Joe was swinging an axe near the porch, splitting firewood.

“You seem in a good mood, little brother,” Hoss said, sitting on a planter edge and crossing his arms.  “Have a nice picnic?”

Joe grinned back, swinging the axe up to rest on his shoulder.  “Excellent picnic.  One of the all-time great picnics.”

Hoss beamed in comfortable vindication.  “What’d I tell you?  Lights up like a sunrise.  And you think you’re the only one who knows anything about women.”

Joe shrugged broadly.  “Guess you’ve learned something over the years,” which was as much concession as Hoss might have hoped for.  More, even – little brother really was in a good mood.

“So when do I need to get my blue suit dusted off for the wedding?”

“Hang on there,” Joe said, holding up a hand.  “It was just a picnic.”

“Yeah,” Hoss said, and winked.  Because he’d seen Joe move plenty fast before.  “But when it’s a real good picnic…”

Little Joe’s brow furrowed slightly, and he leaned down to reposition a chunk of wood for splitting.  “It was a nice picnic, but – it’s not like that.  We’re not serious.”

Hoss felt his own forehead wrinkling, because this was not what he’d been expecting.  “You told her that?”  He didn’t claim to know everything about women, but that didn’t seem like the most romantic of things to say.

“No, she told me that.  And that’s fine, that’s good,” Little Joe said quickly, before Hoss could get a word in.  “Seeing as how she’s going back to San Francisco and everything.  So we’re just – enjoying the moment.”

“Sure.  Sure, little brother,” Hoss said slowly.  Because he’d seen how the two of them looked at each other, and not serious was not what he was reading there.  “As long as you know what you’re doing.”

And that brought back the classic Joe Cartwright grin.  “Don’t I always?”

“No,” Hoss said at once, because no older brother could let that one go by.  “But reckon we’ll just have to see this time.”

 

11.

Ben had seen Little Joe fall for a woman many times – more times than was entirely comfortable, even – and it was obvious enough at supper that something had shifted between Joe and Liza.  It wasn’t anything they said or did, just in the way they smiled at each other.  And Ben had to sigh inwardly and acknowledge that Adam had been right – there’d really been no time to waste in explaining the situation to Joe.  He’d told himself there was no real opportunity the evening before, but he’d have to make the chance tonight.

Things did align themselves a little better at least, when Liza retired to the guest room downstairs, and Joe and Hoss thumped up the stairs together.  Ben steeled himself, and followed them up, catching a long, meaningful glance from Adam as he passed the blue armchair where his oldest son was sitting with a book.

By the time he got upstairs, Little Joe was sitting on the edge of his bed and Hoss was leaning in the doorway, the two of them having one of their endless, meaningless wrangles about nothing in particular.

Ben cleared his throat and stepped past Hoss into the room.  “Joseph, I’d like to have a word with you – and with you too, Hoss,” he added, when his middle son started to move back from the doorway.  Because while it was a more pressing issue with Joe, they both needed to know.

“Yessir,” Hoss said, and dropped into the big chair in one corner of the room.

“What’s going on, Pa?” Joe asked, eyebrows tilting into their quizzical angle.

Ben took a deep breath, leaning back against Joe’s desk.  “It’s about Liza.  There’s something I really should have mentioned yesterday.”

“She’s a nice girl, Pa,” Joe said, tone already defensive, eyes narrowing.

“Yes, of course,” he said automatically, then amended, “or at least, she certainly seems to be.”  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Adam had come upstairs too, was propping up the doorway now.  “You see, I had a conversation with Roy in town yesterday…”

When Ben got to the end of recounting that conversation, and the results of it, Joe laughed.  But he stopped fast when no one joined him.

“Pa, that’s ridiculous,” he said, gaze darting between family members.  “Hoss, tell him it’s ridiculous.  Pa, you know it’s ridiculous!  You know she’s not a bank robber!”

Ben had known this wasn’t going to go well.  Would it have gone any better yesterday?  Probably not.  “It’s not that I think she is, it’s only that we have to allow for the possibility.  Based on what Roy said—”

“It’s not possible,” Joe insisted, “she can’t be.”

“Why not?” Adam spoke up from the doorway.  “You and Hoss robbed a bank once.”

Ben winced, and Joe scowled at his older brother.  “That was different.  We had good intentions, and we brought the money back.  No one’s saying the robbery in Placerville was anything like that.”

No, all the reports were that it was a professional gang and a particularly ruthless and bloody robbery, with two left dead on the bank’s floor.

“Based on the description of the female robber,” Ben began, “and Liza’s admission that she was in Placerville—”

“That’s not proof of anything,” Joe protested.

“I agree,” Ben said, letting some sternness creep into his voice, “which is why Roy is attempting to find out more.  And until we know more, we simply need to be cautious.”  Though even as he said it, he knew that was not a virtue his youngest son tended to embrace.

“Try to look at this reasonably, Joe,” Adam said.  “How much do you actually know about this woman?”

“Enough,” Joe said, glaring at Adam.  “We all know enough to know she didn’t murder anyone.  Come on, Hoss, you tell them.”

Hoss had been sitting through the discussion without speaking, a frown on his face.  Now he shrugged.  “The kittens liked her.  And the horses too.  I don’t think she murdered anybody.”

Ben found himself oddly reassured.  He trusted his middle son’s judgement about people.  It wasn’t proof, of course.  But it was something.

Adam, though, shook his head.  “Kittens like everyone, and horses like people who give them apples.”

“That’s not true, Adam,” Hoss disagreed, “animals know things.  They’ve got a sense of people.”

Adam’s disapproving expression didn’t budge.  “That’s not proof either.”

“And we would all be better off if we had some,” Ben intervened, “which is why I intend to talk to Roy again when I go into town for supplies tomorrow.”

“I’ll go with you,” Joe said, “I want to talk to Roy.”

Ben hesitated, then said, “No, you have work to do here.  Hoss will come with me.”  While part of him wanted to keep Joe away from Liza, mostly he knew that was a futile exercise.  And it would be much better if they avoided Joe creating a scene with the sheriff – though getting locked up might be the only effective way to keep him away from Liza.

He expected Joe to argue, but maybe he was weighing his own perceived benefits in staying home.  Or maybe he just had a different question on his mind.  “So what are we telling Liza about all of this?”

Ben didn’t like this either, but there was only one answer here.  “Nothing.  She doesn’t need to know any of this.  Not right now, at least.”

Joe’s frown deepened.  “Doesn’t that mean we’re lying to her about why she’s here?”

“No – she’s here because I invited her, and she’s a guest.  That’s true, until we have some reason to feel it isn’t.”

“And in the meantime, you’re watching to see if she reveals herself as a bank robber!”

That was putting it in the worst possible way, but…  “This is a legal matter, Joseph.  Roy has asked that we not reveal his concerns to Liza, because, yes, it does seem more possible to learn something if she remains unaware.  We need to respect the sheriff’s views.”

Joe sighed, eyebrows scrunched up.  “All right, but I don’t like it.”

“Noted,” Ben said dryly, and then a worse idea occurred to him.  “Joseph…you haven’t proposed to this woman, have you?”

Joe shifted into indignation with lightning speed.  “Pa, I took her on one picnic!” he protested, just as adamantly as though he hadn’t moved with similar haste in the past.  “And it’s not like that anyway, I just like her, that’s all, and—we’re not serious.”

Ben didn’t miss Hoss’ eyeroll at that, so apparently he didn’t believe his brother either.

“I see,” was all he said out loud, and even though there were any number of other things he could say, he left it at that.

Ben had a firm policy of never commenting unfavorably on any of his sons’ romantic interests, if it could possibly be avoided.  Open disapproval had back-fired spectacularly in the case of Little Joe’s romance with Julia Bulette, and he had been following this altered policy ever since.  He still believed that Joe would have left the Ponderosa with Tirza, if he’d dared to breathe a word against the woman who believed she was a witch, capable of turning into a fish, who had bitten Joe’s hand hard enough to draw blood on her first day at the ranch.  Instead Ben had called her a fine young woman and given his approval, which had taken the rebellious winds out of Joe’s sails, and he hadn’t pursued Tirza when she left.  Thankfully.  All in all, Ben saw no reason to divert from policy now.

“Then I think we all understand everything,” he said finally, and when no one responded, he took that as agreement.  Acknowledgement, anyway.  And there didn’t seem to be much else to say.  “Good-night, boys.”

Murmured responses, and Adam moved out of the doorway so Ben could leave.  Hoss didn’t seem to be getting up from the chair, so maybe he and Joe were going to keep talking.  Maybe level-headed Hoss was going to calm his younger brother down.  Sometimes that worked.  Not always – but sometimes.

 

Liza had the uncomfortable feeling the next morning that Joe wasn’t meeting her gaze at the breakfast table.  They were sitting next to each other, not across, so maybe it was only angles and chance.  Still, while his manner seemed mostly normal – as much as she could judge – he consistently wasn’t looking her way.  Maybe he had regrets about the previous day.  He hadn’t seemed to yesterday evening, but…something could have changed.

She hadn’t been regretting anything, up until now.  It probably wasn’t the wisest or most reasonable course to be kissing Joe Cartwright, when she was a guest, when she was going back to San Francisco, when they’d both agreed nothing could really come of it.  But she’d been practical and restrained and reasonable for years.  And it had all been too much fun to be sorry about it.  Up until now, at least.

Ben and Hoss ate breakfast quickly, then departed for town.  Adam was swiftly behind them, though he didn’t mention where he was going.  So it ended up just the two of them at the table, Joe poking at his eggs, and Liza wondering what she was going to do about this.  Or with the day, for that matter.

She could excuse herself, retreat, go find Brontë because at least the kitten liked her, maybe go outside for a walk until Joe left for whatever business he needed to do today.  That was, maybe, the restrained course, and certainly the option that avoided any awkwardness.  Or any fun or excitement.

She studied Joe out of the corner of her eye, and decided that restraint was not the route she was taking.  Not while she was here, on the Ponderosa.  “Is something bothering you?” she asked into the silence that had grown up since Adam had departed.

Joe flinched, fork clattering against his plate.  “Not—really.  No,” he said, and he was turning towards her now but still not meeting her gaze directly.

So something was definitely bothering him.  She tightened her grip on her napkin, took a deep breath.  “If this is about yesterday—”

“No,” he said quickly, finally looking her in the face, and there was a clear-eyed sincerity in his expression that was unexpectedly reassuring.  “Of course not.  I just – had something on my mind.”  He set his fork down, summoned up a smile.  “So what are your plans for the day?”

She shrugged.  “I don’t really have any.  But that’s all right, I’m sure I can amuse myself.”

He rubbed the back of his neck.  “I’m just riding fence today – it’s not very exciting, but the scenery’s pretty.  If you’d like to come out for a ride…”

“You don’t have to entertain me,” Liza said, wishing she hadn’t been quite so transparent about being unengaged for the day.  He probably felt obligated now, and he had his own work to do.

“It might not be that entertaining,” he said, and then the charming grin was surfacing, the glint back in his eye.  “But it’s better if I get to have a pretty girl riding along with me.”

At least she recognized this Joe Cartwright, rather than the distracted, brooding one.  “Is riding fence more or less interesting than looking for strays?”

He shrugged.  “Probably less.  You never know who you might meet, looking for strays,” he said and winked.  Then the grin faded, a more serious look coming into his eyes.  “You know, the other day – and today too, actually – besides the ranch work – well, Sheriff Coffee over in Virginia City, he asked us all to keep an eye out for anything strange.  He thinks those bank robbers from Placerville might have broke this way.”

“You mean I might have actually run into an outlaw when I was out riding?”  She had meant it half-joking when she started the sentence, but it seemed less funny the more she thought about it.  She shook her head.  “I don’t know that the parasol would have helped much.”

“You seemed pretty serious with it,” Joe offered.  “But yeah, they seem to be a nasty group.”  He rubbed the back of his neck.  “You must’ve been passing through Placerville about the same time as the robbery, right?”

“It was earlier in the day.  Everyone was buzzing about it when the stage went through, but we weren’t there for more than a few minutes to change horses and drivers.”  It hadn’t felt unsafe in the town, but the thought now that the outlaws might have gone the same direction, might have happened across her alone with her broken-down carriage – it gave her the shivers, even though nothing had happened.  Nothing bad, anyway.

“Take any passengers on in Placerville?”

This seemed an odd question, but she shook her head.  “No, everyone rode through.  Why, did you think the bank robbers might have escaped by stage?”

“No,” Joe said slowly, and then the grin resurfaced.  “No, I don’t.”  He pushed his plate away and stood up.  “I’ve got to get to those fences, but it really is a good way to see more of the Ponderosa.  Come on and keep me company?”

This time the offer felt – less like a duty, and also less like a transparent effort to be charming.  It felt real.  “All right,” she agreed.  “I’ll help you look out for bank robbers too.”

“I was counting on it,” he said, taking her hand as she stood up too.  Then he tugged her closer and kissed her.  And he didn’t kiss like a man who had any regrets about the idea.

She studied his face after they broke apart, and whatever had been haunting his eyes seemed to have faded.  Maybe it was a mistake to bring it up again, but…  “You’re sure nothing was wrong this morning?”

“Just something on my mind,” he said easily, tugging her arm through his as they headed towards the door.  “I’ll tell you about it – some time.”

And she supposed that, and the fact that it didn’t seem to be weighing on him anymore, was enough.

 

12.

The streets of Virginia City were busy for a Monday morning when Ben and Hoss drove the wagon into town.  The way the town was growing, though, it was hardly surprising.  Ben had to smile, remembering the days when it was only a rough and tumble mining settlement, and he’d gained a lot of gray hair trying to think how to keep his boys – especially that rascal of a Little Joe – safely at home.

Maybe he should have brought Joe today after all – good opportunity for a talk, that road into town.  But no, best to keep Joe away from the sheriff for now, to avoid any unfortunate incidents.  And it had been a nice peaceful drive with Hoss.  Besides, his middle son was always a good choice when a trip to town involved a stop at the general store and the loading of heavy supplies.

The general store was as busy as anywhere else, though George behind the counter waved a harried hand in their direction as they came in.  “Be with you in a minute, Ben!” he called over the heads of several other customers.

“No rush,” Ben said, leaning up against a shelf to wait.  He spent enough money here that he could probably get waited on first if he wanted to, but that wouldn’t be right or neighborly.  They’d have time enough to stop in the sheriff’s office once they were done here.

“Hey, I’m going to go see what candy they’ve got in stock,” Hoss said, turning towards the big glass jars near the window.

“Not too much, Hoss,” Ben said, one of those hold-over things from when his boys were young.  He could remind himself all he liked that they were grown men now, but comments would slip out.

Luckily, Hoss always took that easier than Adam or Little Joe did.  He just grinned and said, “You know I’m still growing, Pa.  Got to keep up my strength.”

Ben laughed – and after all, he’d lay odds that Hoss would give away most of the candy to kids on the street before they got out of town anyway.

There were still at least four people in front of Ben, and Hoss had filled up most of a bag with various inedible-looking sugar concoctions, when the door swung open again and this time admitted Bill Raleigh of The Territorial Enterprise.

“Morning, Ben,” Bill said, tipping his hat in acknowledgement as he surveyed the crowd.  “Looks like we’re in for a wait, eh?”

“Hope you didn’t have a breaking news story to rush to,” Ben joked.

“No, no, I think I can spare the time,” Bill said.  “At least until I hear gunshots or screams outside, and then I might need to change plans.”

“You know,” Ben said slowly, “you ought to have more staff to do that sort of work for you.”  Perhaps there was an opportunity here.  Bill was the man Liza said she had come to Virginia City to see.  If she was an innocent woman looking for a job, maybe he could do her a good turn.  And if she was a bank robber – well, maybe there was something useful to be learned.

This kind of double-think was getting increasingly uncomfortable.  If they could just settle the question, he’d feel easier.

“I probably should,” Bill said with a shrug, “but it’s still an uphill battle convincing promising writers they want to be here and not San Francisco.  Or New York or Boston.”

“Mm-hmm,” Ben murmured, and very carefully, very casually, said, “You know, we have a guest out at the Ponderosa right now.  Think you met her.  Liza Montgomery, from San Francisco?”

“The lady writer?” Bill said, eyebrows rising.  “Didn’t know you knew her, but that explains why she was in town.  I thought it must’ve been one of ol’ Sam Clemens’ jokes, sending her to see me, but I couldn’t figure her coming all this way just for a joke.”

“Well, no, we met her after she came to town,” Ben clarified.  “And – you didn’t know her before either?”

“No, never met her.  I saw Sam in San Francisco not too many months ago, met a few of the staff he’s working with at The Morning Call, but not her.”  He shook his head.  “Don’t know what Sam was thinking, sending her all this way.”

“Maybe he thought she could do the job,” Ben pointed out, caught between annoyance at the man’s dismissive tone, and frustration that Bill couldn’t just identify her and resolve all this uncertainty.  But maybe Roy would know more, when they talked to him.

Bill smiled, but it was an amused smile.  “I’m sure she’s a lovely young woman, Ben.  And maybe in San Francisco or Boston there’d be a place on staff for a woman, to write about, oh, fashion and household tips and so on.  But you know the kind of newspaper I’m printing, and the kind of reporters I need.  Suppose there were gunshots and screams out on the street right now.  How could I send a delicate young woman out to cover a story like that?”

“I’ve known more than one woman who could handle a crisis,” Ben said quietly, “and many who’ve had no choice about facing them.”

But Bill Raleigh was only warming to his subject.  “Virginia City’s growing, yes, but we’re still a mining town, Ben, a frontier town.  I can’t have a woman writing about mine accidents and shootings and hangings.  You know where I’m going after this?  There was a cave-in out near the Ophir Mine.”

“Anybody hurt?” Ben asked with new concern.  The Ponderosa sold timber to Holloway, the owner of the Ophir Mine, so he felt some personal connection – and of course, any disaster was a cause for sympathy.

“They’re not sure yet.  It wasn’t the proper mine, it was those abandoned diggings nearby, but they’ve got some men hunting through the rubble.  Suppose they do pull a body out from among the rocks – I can’t send a woman to cover that, can I?”

“No, Bill, I suppose you can’t,” Ben said heavily, “if you believe you can’t.”

For a thinking man, Bill seemed to entirely miss any of the deeper philosophy in the words.  “Of course, Ben, only sensible.”  His gaze grew more thoughtful, but when he spoke it was on a new aspect of the question.  “You know, it’s funny you talking to me about Miss Montgomery.  The sheriff was around asking about her too.  That’s a lot of attention for one ordinary young woman to be getting.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d say that,” Ben said, as heartily as he could.  It wasn’t going to do anyone any good for the editor of the newspaper to latch onto the idea that Liza might be a bank robber.  “You know Roy likes to keep up with strangers in town.  And those boys of mine always have an instinct for when a pretty young woman enters the district.”

Bill chuckled, as hoped.  “I suppose that’s true enough.”  And then he looked back at the store counter and said, “You know, all I needed was some tobacco, and this line’s not even moving – maybe I’ll come back later after all.”  After that he made such a rapid exit that Ben had to wonder if he really had thrown the man off track – or if maybe he hadn’t entirely missed some of the earlier tension in the conversation.

Hoss, who Ben would have said was entirely absorbed by the candy display, came strolling up just as Bill exited.  He was grinning as he nudged Ben’s arm.  “Remind me again, Pa, what’s your thoughts on meddling in other people’s business?”

Ben scowled.  “Never mind.  And I wasn’t meddling, I was only discussing the subject.  I didn’t expect Bill to give her the job just because I made a point to him about giving women a fair opportunity.”  And he’d been hoping to learn something useful, but that hadn’t panned out.

“Sure, Pa.  Suppose it would be a good thing, though, if Mr. Raleigh did change his mind, and give her the job, and Liza decided to stay around.”

“Yes, it probably would be,” he said meditatively.  He wouldn’t say it aloud to Hoss, but – there was no telling who Little Joe might fall in love with next, if this didn’t work out with Liza.  Besides, he wanted his boys to be happy.  That was the most important thing, in the end.  And then he remembered the complication.  “If she’s not a bank robber, of course.”

Hoss’ face screwed up.  “Aw, Pa, you don’t really think she is.  Do you?”

Ben sighed.  “No.  But Roy had concerns…”

“Those robbers are probably in Mexico by now,” Hoss said cheerfully, “and Roy’ll calm down, and it’ll all be just fine.  And even if Liza doesn’t wind up with a job, I don’t expect Little Joe is going to let her leave town without giving her a real good reason to stay.”

Probably true.  And probably a very fine thing – assuming she wasn’t a bank robber.

 

Once the crowd cleared at the general store, and they’d made their purchases and Hoss had heaved the lot of them into the wagon, he and Pa headed over to see the sheriff.  They barely caught Roy, as he was just putting on his coat to go out when they came in the door.

“I hope we’re not keeping you from something,” Pa said, but Roy shook his head and moved over to his desk.

“Nothing that won’t wait, Ben.  I just wanted to see what the situation was out at this cave-in near the Ophir mine,” Roy said, sitting down at his desk again.

Hoss claimed one of the chairs near the desk, while Pa stayed standing.  Didn’t surprise Hoss – Pa’d been getting more and more antsy as they got closer to this conversation.  It was really bothering him, whether Liza might be some kind of criminal.  Not Hoss.  He figured she wasn’t, and that was all there was to it.

“A mine cave-in doesn’t seem much like a legal matter,” Pa said, “unless you think it was deliberate.”

“I don’t know, Ben, lately it feels like everything could be a legal matter.  I don’t mind telling you, those Placerville robbers have got me that jumpy…”  Roy sighed, leaned back in his chair.  “I’m just checking anything unusual, and hoping some sort of answer’s going to turn up from somewhere.  And Holloway was in here complaining about trespassers in his mine just yesterday – now that there’s a cave-in nearby, well, I just don’t know.”

“How about Liza?” Hoss spoke up, because while he sympathized with Roy’s feelings, none of this had a whole lot to do with them, or with calming Pa down about their houseguest.  “Did you find any answers about her?”

Roy shuffled through his papers, produced a telegraph message.  “Well now, I telegraphed to The Morning Call – but all they would do was confirm that an Elizabeth Montgomery works for them, which doesn’t tell us whether this woman is really her, or if she ought to be in Virginia City.  I expect I could get more out of Sam Clemens, but he’s out of town on some newspaper assignment and can’t be reached.  Bill Raleigh never met her before, can’t confirm her identity either.  I talked to the stage driver who confirmed she was a passenger coming out of Placerville, but they changed drivers there and he can’t say if she was on the stage before Placerville.  Every other passenger went on past Virginia City and scattered somewhere between here and Colorado.  The driver for the previous leg is out driving, can’t get in touch with him either.”  Roy shook his head.  “I tell you, it all adds up to a whole lot of dead ends.”

“So we’ve got nothing to tell us who she is,” Pa said, slapping his hat against his thigh, like he did when he was frustrated.

“Except Liza,” Hoss interjected.  “We have Liza, and she sure don’t seem like a bank robber to me.”

“You don’t seem like a bank robber either,” Roy snapped, “but I’ve still got a wanted poster somewhere in my files—”

“Let’s try to keep to the matter at hand,” Pa interrupted, though he didn’t sound quite as upset about that particular story as he had, say, last month or the month before.  Maybe Joe’d be able to get that wanted poster out of his drawer before long.  “The Placerville bank robbers…”

“Might be here, might be hundreds of miles away,” Roy said, scowling.  “Did you ever find out who was camping on your property?”

“No,” Pa admitted, “we only confirmed it wasn’t any of our people.”

“So it could be robbers, could just be someone drifting through.  Meaning I’d better check on that cave-in, and anything else strange, and keep watching every stranger, not just your Liza.”

“Not our Liza,” Pa contradicted.

“Well, kind of,” Hoss said, and when they both looked at him, he shrugged.  “You know, since she’s staying with us.”  And because Little Joe had been looking at her a particular way.

“What can we do to help, Roy?” Pa asked, apparently dismissing the question of who belonged to who.

“Probably not much,” the sheriff said.  “It’s up to you if you want to continue to host the young woman at your house, under the circumstances—”

“We ain’t going to just pitch her out!” Hoss protested, genuinely disturbed by the idea.  It was a little bit about Liza, but also about general principles.  They couldn’t go throwing a guest out of the house just for happening to ride a stage through a town where there’d been a bank robbery.

“She is a stranger, Hoss—” Roy began.

“Seems to me a stranger’s just somebody we ain’t got to know yet, Roy,” Hoss said, frowning deeply.  “Virginia City ain’t even been here more than a handful o’ years, so we all had to come here as strangers some time.”

Roy sighed but gave a grudging nod, and Hoss felt Pa’s hand grip his shoulder, saying without words that he approved of what had been said.  So that meant that for now, Liza would be staying.  Little Joe’d be happy about that – even if he was keeping up this nonsense about not being serious.  As if Hoss couldn’t tell when little brother was falling in love; he’d sure done it enough times by now.

Part Two

13.

Liza looked out over the distant treetops and Joe watched her looking, both sitting on a blanket spread on a bluff.  The sky was a perfect crystal blue, the valley was full of green pines, and he didn’t think he’d ever seen a prettier day.  And the company made it all the better.

It had been almost two weeks since their first picnic – and a mighty fine almost two weeks it had been too.  He’d been pretty fired up at Pa about that bank robber business, but Pa and Hoss had come back from their trip to town with no new information and a renewed determination that hospitality was the only proper response in the circumstances – and the subject of the bank robbery had been quietly buried ever since.  Joe hadn’t been into Virginia City since to hear what Roy thought about it all, and he didn’t care.  It just wasn’t important.

Not as important as enjoying however long Liza was going to be here.  He hadn’t quite wanted to ask, about exactly how long a leave she’d taken from her job.  A few weeks?  A month?  Long enough that she hadn’t left yet.  Long enough that he’d taken her out on more than one picnic by now, and today they’d gone on a carriage ride, a longer trip to a bluff overlooking one of the best views on the ranch.  All part of being hospitable, after all.

“What’s it like?” Liza asked after a few quiet moments, voice soft.  She waved a hand out at the view.  “To own something like this.”

“I don’t own it.  My father does.”

She turned her head, half-smiled as though he was making meaningless distinctions.  “But it’s still yours, in a way.”

“In a way.”  He squinted out at the distance, at all that land at their feet.  “A ranch like this, we own it, sure, but it’s also a responsibility.  A kind of—trust with the land.  Pa always taught us, the most important thing is family, but after that it’s taking care of the land.”  He ran a hand through his hair.  “I’m probably not saying this right.  Adam would know the right words to use – he’s the philosopher.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, voice gentler than the words themselves.  “Just because Adam is something, that doesn’t mean you can’t be it too.”

“I guess—we all sort of fall into roles, in our family.”  Adam was the smart one.  Hoss was the strong one, and had the biggest heart.  And he—was the young, impetuous one, as much as he tried to prove he could be more than that.

She shrugged, looking back at the view.  “I don’t think Adam’s any smarter than you are.  And you said it fine.”

He tried telling himself that she was flattering him, but she hadn’t said it like flattery.  She had said it like it was true.

He was still looking for words when she continued, “I wasn’t really talking about owning the land anyway.  Your father owns it, but—you belong to it.  That’s closer to what I meant.  I don’t think I’d care about owning something like this, so big and grand and—sacred, if I could belong to it.”

That was closer to what he had meant too, that was how it was his, even if he hadn’t found the right way to say it.

And it was possible that she could belong to the Ponderosa, the same way he did.  Sometimes the best part of all this was being able to offer it to someone else.

It was on the tip of his tongue, because she was beautiful and she laughed at his jokes and she listened when he talked and she understood about the land—

But he remembered just in time that they weren’t supposed to be serious.  That she had said they weren’t serious.  Nothing long-term, because she was going back to San Francisco.  And he had promised himself that he was going to be less impulsive, not jump in too fast and too recklessly and get his heart shattered over and over…

So he swallowed the offer he could have made, but it was hard to completely change direction that fast and so he found himself still skirting around the topic.  “Pa always said, when one of us got married, Hoss or Adam or me, he’d give us a piece of the land.  Let us make our own way on it.  Hasn’t happened yet, of course.”

He’d gotten close, more times than either of his brothers.  He’d thought about marrying…well, a lot of times, but he’d gotten serious enough to talk about it with eight women.  Seemed like a big number, to still be on his own.

Liza’s glance cut over towards him, without quite turning her head.  “Is that what you’d want to do?  If you got married?”

He hadn’t got as far as making actual plans with all of those women, but he’d had some ideas a few times.  He didn’t have a clue what he would have done with Julia, and hadn’t known at the time – probably some wild idea about moving to New Orleans.  He and Amy would have taken the Truckee Strip and he’d had the house all ready for Laura.  He had wanted a piece of land when he was romancing Tirza, and Melinda surely would have wanted a big, grand house – but she also wanted Adam, so that never would have worked out.  He’d got all the way to the altar with Tessa, but somehow not figured out a lot of other plans before she, luckily, left him standing there.

Maybe one advantage of the sheer size of the Ponderosa was that he could keep picking out new places.  And he’d been pretty good at letting go and moving on to new dreams.  Until he’d finally decided that he’d had enough of dreams falling apart.

But if, just supposing, that he was going to think about it now – what did he want now…

“I don’t think I do want my own ranch anymore,” he said, surprised by his own realization.  “I did.  When I was eighteen, the only thing I wanted to do was prove I was grown-up and independent.  Which probably mostly proved how young I was.”  It was only three years ago, but it felt like a long three years.  “It’s—what I was saying, about family and the trust with the land.  That feels more important now.”

She was watching him, head tilted, that intent, listening gaze again.  “Then what would you want?  If you got married now?”

“My own house.  I wouldn’t ask a wife to move in with my father and brothers.”

“Seems reasonable, even as nice as they are,” she said with a half-smile.

“But I don’t think I’d want a piece of land of my own, not a whole ranch, anyway.  I wouldn’t want to cut up the Ponderosa, and—I’d still be neighbors to my family, but that’s not the same, is it?  I’d rather keep doing what I’m doing, working with Pa and everyone.  Building up the family ranch, instead of breaking it into pieces and trying to make some kind of point by doing it all by myself.”  He ran a hand over his face, wondering if this all sounded ridiculous.  “That probably doesn’t sound very ambitious, but—”

“No, I think it is ambitious,” she interrupted.  “But a family ambition, instead of a solitary one.  It sounds perfect.”

She smiled at him then, and he had to look away, to look very carefully at the distant trees and hills instead, and fight down the instinct telling him that she was perfect for this dream and he should tell her that.

They weren’t supposed to be serious.  And anyway – she wasn’t going anywhere yet.  He could at least…wait and see what happened.

 

Liza found herself wanting to hold onto each day, each moment as it went by, because they were all so terribly fleeting.  She wanted to clutch onto the moment when she was sitting looking out at the mountains and the trees, talking to Joe Cartwright about dreams.  A little house somewhere in the pines, just down the road from Ben Cartwright’s ranch house, nestled within the sprawling Ponderosa.  She could almost see it.  And maybe it was in his future, somewhere.

But not in hers.  And the afternoon wore on, and the moments passed, and they drove back to the ranch house for supper, and she wanted to hold onto that moment too, sitting around the table with Hop Sing’s good food and the Cartwrights’ good conversation.  Because this wouldn’t last either.

Very quickly everyone was standing up from the table, moving towards the sitting area, Hop Sing was bustling around with coffee, and Hoss was asking her if she’d like to try her hand at a game of checkers, instead of watching him and Joe play.

She hesitated.  “You know, I’ve never actually played checkers,” she admitted.

“You’ve never played checkers?” Hoss and Joe chorused together.

Ben glanced over from the red leather chair, over his coffee cup.  “Not everyone likes checkers, boys.”

“I might,” Liza said, “it’s just that my father preferred chess.”  Which, she was suddenly afraid, made her sound rather pretentious.

“Oh, well, if you can play chess, you can definitely play checkers,” Joe said, steering her over towards the settee with one hand on the small of her back.  Hoss was already laying out a checkerboard on the big low table, and plunking down on the edge.

Liza sat down in the corner of the settee, smoothing out her skirts.  “I wasn’t all that good at chess,” she said, eyeing the red and black squares of the board.  She’d never been able to think far enough ahead for the game.  She could look at the board as it was, but she couldn’t anticipate enough moves out, to properly weigh her choices.

And if that didn’t tally with her larger thoughts…  When she’d accepted the invitation to stay here, she had never anticipated staying this long.  She had a month’s leave from her work, the reward for never having taken a single day away before – and for not having a role important enough that anything would grind to a halt without her – but still, she had not expected this long sojourn on the Ponderosa.  She had thought she would have a new job with The Territorial Enterprise, give notice to The Morning Call without ever using that long stretch of time.  And when the job hadn’t worked out, she had thought she would go back home immediately.  When Ben had invited her to stay with his family, well, she had thought even Cartwright hospitality wouldn’t extend more than a few days.

But now it had been nearly two weeks, and no one had made so much as a hint that she ought to be moving on.  She didn’t dare bring the subject up herself, in case that was the trigger that brought this whole interlude to a close.

“Checkers is real simple compared to chess,” Hoss said, “you just want to jump the other person’s pieces.”

“I did gather that much,” Liza said with a smile.

“Don’t worry, I’ll help,” Joe said, sitting next to her and leaning towards the board.  “Just for your first game.”

Hoss’ amiable face scrunched into a frown.  “Better not trust him, though – he cheats.”

“I don’t,” Joe protested.  “Not at checkers, not at poker – I don’t cheat at anything, and he’s just casting dark aspersions on the family name with all of this.”

Hoss snorted.  “He cheats.”

“Then why do you keep playing?” Liza asked, even though she had a suspicion.  Mainly, that winning wasn’t the point here, that the game was just about as much fun, at least to Hoss, whether Joe won or lost.  Or maybe this back and forth was the real game, running alongside the checkers.

Hoss shrugged.  “What else are we going to do of an evening?  Especially during winter when we get snowed in for a week.”

“You could read a book,” Adam spoke up from the blue armchair, his own book already open.

“We do,” Joe countered, “you just don’t think dime novels and Robin Hood count.”

“So you line up the checker pieces,” Hoss intervened, before that got more heated.  “You want red or black?”

“Does it matter?” Liza asked.

Hoss shrugged.  “Not really.”

“Adam plays checkers too,” Joe said in a loud stage whisper, “he just pretends he spends all his time doing intellectual things.”

“Red,” Liza said firmly.

“And I like to pretend I raised my boys to have some manners,” Ben remarked to no one in particular, “especially around guests.”

Even though he said it lightly, the last word sent a little chill through Liza.  Because that’s what she was.  She wasn’t part of the family.  She was a guest, and though he surely meant it kindly, all she could feel was that it meant she didn’t actually belong here.

She tried to concentrate on the checkerboard, nodding as Hoss and Joe laid out the pieces and explained the rules – much simpler than chess, it was true.

Joe leaned in against her as the game commenced, his arm warm where it pressed against hers, and though his focus seemed to be the checkerboard, she found him very, very distracting, sitting there beside her.

In theory, she supposed, she could go back to San Francisco and then, eventually, in a year or two, come back and visit the Cartwrights again.  Write a letter, perhaps, expressing a desire to visit the area, and she felt nearly sure Ben would invite her to stay with them.  And he would still be the gracious host, and she could still talk about Thoreau or whatever they were reading then with Adam, and Hoss would still be willing to play checkers with her.

But Joe – well, whatever this precarious, fleeting thing that was happening between them was – that surely wasn’t going to come back again.  Charming Joe Cartwright would definitely be on to the next girl – and the next and the next – or maybe even have finally followed a new engagement announcement up with a wedding announcement at last, and built his house among the pines down the road.

So she wouldn’t be coming back to visit in a year or two.  This interlude, this particular magic, was only for right now.  So she ought to concentrate on enjoying it for now.

She focused on the checkerboard, and nodded to Joe’s advice, and halfway through the game Brontë came and hopped up into her lap as though the moment had needed just one more element to be cozier and complete – but she still probably wasn’t concentrating that well, since she lost the game.  Or it was only that Hoss was the more experienced player.

“That was real good for a first try,” Hoss said encouragingly, visibly more bothered by her loss than she felt.  “Figure it was a practice run, like, that’s the best way.”

“It’s really all right, Hoss,” she said with a smile.  “Of course you’re the better player.”

“You have to be more aggressive in your play,” Joe decreed.  “Hoss is cautious and methodical; he doesn’t react quick enough if you try something really unexpected.”

“You play and show me,” Liza suggested, and when his face looked like he was going to try to politely refuse, added, “I’ll play the winner.”

That seemed to satisfy honor and hospitality all around.  The way Liza and Joe were sitting they hardly had to shift the checkerboard more than a few inches to commence the next game.  Hoss was evidently on a lucky streak tonight, because whatever Joe’s theories might be, his big brother was dominating the board.  Liza stroked Brontë and watched with amusement as Joe’s explanations about how this was all fine, all part of the strategy, grew increasingly long – and then dropped off entirely as he got further cornered on the board.

“You planning to make a move, little brother?” Hoss asked at last, after Joe had been studying the pieces for a very long time.

“Don’t rush me,” Joe snapped, glaring down at his dwindling checkers.

“You could just concede,” Hoss suggested, tapping a checker already removed from play against the top of the table.

Maybe that was the signal.  Or maybe the cat had just grown bored with the humans sitting around the board for so long.  Liza felt Brontë shift, then suddenly the kitten surged up out of her lap, leaping onto the table on top of the board.  One of his back paws pushed down a corner that was extending over the edge of the table – and then everything turned into a mad scramble of kitten and checkers and board.  Hoss tried to grab for either the cat or the checkers, Brontë scrambled up right over his shoulders and leaped away, Hoss lost his balance and went tumbling off the table, hitting the ground with a thud, and checkers, of course, flew everywhere.

Liza pressed a hand over her mouth.  “I’m so sorry…”  Because it was her cat, and she should have – done something…

And then Joe leaned back on the settee and let out a high-pitched cackle she never would have predicted, dissolving into laughter that was impossibly infectious.  She tried to resist – at least, until Hoss started laughing too, and even Ben and Adam joined in, until the room fairly rang.

“Little Joe,” Hoss said, once the laughter had started to subside slightly, “you been teaching that cat tricks?”

And that set everyone off again.

It would be a lot easier, really, to think about moving on, if they’d all stop being so wonderful.

 

14.

Joe had one eye on the young horse he was leading around the corral, getting it used to a bridle, and one eye on Liza, sitting on the corral rail where it met up with the barn, holding a book.  He fancied she had one eye on her book and one on him too.  But for all that, he managed to notice when Danny Kidd rode into the yard.  Danny lifted a hand in greeting, then swung down from his horse and came over to the corral.

“Sheriff Coffee’s riding in, Joe,” Danny announced, leaning his elbows on the corral railing.

“He is?” Joe said as the horse suddenly jerked on the bridle.  Probably picking up Joe’s new unease.  “Easy there,” he said, as soothingly as he could, reached out to stroke the horse’s nose, and looked at Liza out of the corner of his eye.  She didn’t look anything more than mildly interested.

And why would she be?  She wasn’t a bank robber.  He was so sure of that, he’d put the idea almost entirely out of his mind – right up until they had the sheriff riding in.  And that could cause trouble, because who knew what Roy was going to have in his head?

“Danny, have you met Liza?” he asked, falling back on those manners Pa had always been trying to teach him.  Danny had been out riding herd in the north quarter recently, so he didn’t think their paths had crossed yet.

“I don’t think so.  Ma’am,” Danny said, giving his black hat a tug.

“Nice to meet you,” Liza said, closing her book.

“Roy hasn’t been out here for a couple weeks at least.  Is he here socially or officially?” Joe asked, trying to fish for something to tell him how much trouble might be coming.

Danny shrugged.  “I didn’t ask.  I just saw him heading this way and came in to tell you.”

Joe wasn’t all that surprised that Danny hadn’t talked to the sheriff.  He had ridden in at a pretty good trot too, if not fast enough to look like he was fleeing.  He was less uncomfortable with lawmen than he had been when he first came to the Ponderosa, fresh out of prison and on parole for a year.  There were a couple months still left on that year, though Joe hoped Danny would stay around and continue as a ranch hand even once he didn’t have to.

“Well, I guess Roy’ll tell us what he wants when he gets here,” Joe said, stroking a hand down the horse’s nose.  Maybe it would calm one of them.  “No posse or anything?”

“Nope, he was riding alone.”

“All right.”  That was a good sign, though maybe Roy just didn’t figure he needed a posse to arrest one young woman.  Joe gave the horse’s neck a pat and tugged the bridle off.  Enough of that for now, and the horse would probably be calmer left alone.  “Why don’t you go inside and let Pa know the sheriff is coming?”

“Sure, Joe.”

Danny loped off towards the house, and Joe boosted himself up to sit on the railing next to Liza.

“Man of few words?” she remarked, watching as Danny let himself into the house.

“Yeah, sometimes.  And women make him nervous.”

“Did I do something?”

“Nah, it’s just how he is.”

“We’re not a foreign species, you know,” she said, voice growing tart.

Maybe not, but women certainly could be mysterious and fascinating creatures – though it wasn’t a mystery what kind of reception he’d get if he said that right now.  “Of course not,” he agreed glibly, and then lifted a hand as Sheriff Coffee rode around the corner of the barn.  Judging by the speed of his horse, he might be here on official business, but it wasn’t particularly urgent.  That helped some.

The sheriff dismounted too, leaving his horse next to Danny’s, and walked over towards Joe and Liza.  Obeying an instinct he didn’t try to understand, Joe reached out and laced his fingers through Liza’s.  She glanced at him, curling her fingers around his.  Felt good that way.

“Afternoon, Little Joe,” Roy said as he approached, and Joe could tell the sheriff was looking at their joined hands.  He didn’t let go.  “And you must be Miss Montgomery.”

“Yes, I am,” Liza said, looking puzzled.

“Roy likes to keep track of anybody coming into town,” Joe said hurriedly.  Especially when there’d been a bank robbery, especially when that anybody had gone right through the right town on the right day – but as long as no one said that…

“I like to keep track of the Cartwrights too,” Roy said with a smile, “with the amount of trouble Ben’s boys get into.”

He didn’t sound like a man who was here to arrest anyone.  Probably best to just ask his business, but before Joe could get there, Pa came out from the house to greet the sheriff too.

“Good to see you, Roy,” Ben said heartily, clapping him on the shoulder.  If he was uneasy about this, he was hiding it well.  “Here about any trouble?”

“That right there, that’s the problem with being a sheriff,” Roy complained.  “You ride out on a nice day to see friends, and right away they ask you if you’re here about trouble.”

Pa laughed.  “You know you’re always welcome on a purely social call too.”

“Well, that’s real kind of you,” Roy acknowledged, “but it happens I am here about some trouble.  Not big trouble, mind, just something I wanted to mention.”

Could he just get on with the point?  “Is it about outlaws or cattle rustlers?” Joe asked, a desperate attempt at humor to relieve his own tension – and it did make him grin when Liza rolled her eyes at him.

“No,” Roy said slowly, eyeing him as though he wasn’t making sense, “it’s about bank robbers.”  Which only confirmed Joe’s worst fears – but then Roy’s next words sent the whole thing a new direction again.  “Specifically, about that cave-in near the Ophir mine.”

Joe’s eyebrows scrunched together.  What could that possibly have to do with anything?

“I thought that was determined to be an accident,” Pa said, brow furrowing.

“Yeah, it was,” Roy agreed.  “No sign of interference, dynamite or the like, thought to just be a natural event.  But Holloway was worried, it being so close to his mine – you know how conscientious he’s gotten about safety these last few years.”

“Of course,” Pa said, nodding.  “He buys our timber to brace his mines.  In fact, that contract’s about due to be re-signed this year.”

“Well, Holloway wanted the caved-in area properly analyzed,” Roy continued, “to make sure it wouldn’t indicate some sort of problem in his nearest tunnel.  I don’t know the details, Ben, I ain’t a mining man.  But the point is, he kept a few men digging over there, and early this morning they pulled out a body.”

Joe felt an uneasy prickle run down his spine, something just this side of a shudder.  This was mining country, and cave-ins were a fact of life, but it was a terrible way to go – under a mountain of rock, cut off from the sky and the air.  Ranching had its challenges and its risks, but at least it didn’t have that.

“Any idea who it was, Roy?” Pa asked quietly.

“That’s exactly what worries me, Ben,” Roy said.  “The man was carrying a bank draft from the bank that was robbed in Placerville.  I don’t know what he was doing in that cave, but two weeks ago he robbed a bank.  And that means at least one of those robbers did come this way like we thought they might’ve.”

Almost involuntarily, Joe looked over at Liza, looking for – he didn’t know what exactly.  She was frowning, a worried look on her face.  When she noticed him glancing her way her hand tightened around his, and she shifted over an inch so their shoulders bumped.  So she was uneasy, but anybody would be, at news there could be a gang of bank robbers in the area.  He was uneasy.  Judging by their faces, Pa and Roy were too.  That was all natural enough.

“Do you think the rest of the gang is under that cave-in too?” Joe spoke up.  That would wrap up the whole business, wouldn’t it?

Roy shook his head.  “They’ve just about got it cleared, and there’s no sign of anything but the one body.  And no sign of the money either.”

“So they could be in the area,” Pa said heavily, “or they could have fled to Mexico two weeks ago.  Just like we always thought.”

“Sure, Ben, only now we know they were out this direction,” Roy said.  “That’s why I wanted to let you and the other ranchers around know.  I think there’s a good chance that fire you found the other day was one or more of the outlaws passing through your land, on the way to where one of them ended up.  It all means we need to stay alert on this thing.”

“Is that why you’ve been keeping track of everyone coming into town?” Liza asked, and Joe had to hope that she couldn’t feel what, to him, was the very obviously increased tension in the group.

“Oh, I always keep track of strangers, ma’am,” Roy said, pushing his hat back and smiling genially.  Which just said to Joe that he still suspected Liza, if he was evading the question like that.

“Roy, why don’t you come into the house for some coffee?” Pa interjected, putting a hand on the sheriff’s arm.

“We-ell, I really ought to ride on to a few more ranches,” Roy said, but in the tone that meant he could be persuaded.

“It’s a long ride from town.  I think you’ve earned a cup of coffee,” Pa said, steering the unresisting Roy towards the house – and away from Liza and Joe.  He glanced back as he went.  “You’d better get that horse back in the barn, Joseph.”

“Yes, sir,” Joe said, left to wonder how deliberately Pa was moving Roy away from Liza.  This whole business was ridiculous; clearly she wasn’t a bank robber.  Pa and the sheriff were going in the front door now, and once it shut – Joe had never been one to resist reckless impulses, so suddenly he found himself asking, “You didn’t rob that bank, did you?”

Her expression was quizzical as she looked at him.  “What, because I went through Placerville on the right day?”

She’d worked that out fast.  “Sure.”

She smiled, and it was so clear she thought it was a joke, on her face and in the light way she asked, “If I was a bank robber, would you turn me in?”

“Well,” Joe said slowly – and wasn’t treating the whole thing as a joke a denial of its own kind?  “I’m sure Pa would say that was the right thing to do.  Go in of your own free will, get a fair trial, pay your debt to society.  All those things.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him.  “So that’s a yes?”

He was in all kinds of trouble if she really was a bank robber.  “No, that’s what Pa would say to do.”  He grinned at her.  “I’d probably offer to run away to Mexico with you.”

She laughed, sliding down from the corral rail.  “I might take you up on it.  If I was a bank robber.”

He dropped down off the railing himself before she got more than a step or two, plenty quick enough to catch her and kiss her.  She leaned into him, hands sliding up over his shoulders.  Kissing her made his head spin, in the best possible way, and he didn’t stop to think before breathing, “Want to run away to Mexico?”

She pulled back just an inch or two, far enough for him to see her smile as she said, “But I’m not a bank robber.”

Right.  Like he thought.  She didn’t think they were talking about anything real.  And they weren’t, not really, and he didn’t even want to whisk her off to Mexico anyway, he just wanted to keep her here…and he wasn’t exactly sure when he’d started thinking that.

They weren’t supposed to be anything serious – but he was having trouble at the moment remembering why.  Because…she was going back to San Francisco.  Right.  And he’d sworn off serious things, things that might get his heart broken, because…that had seemed like a good idea at the time.

For an instant he seriously considered throwing all caution to the wind, saying something real, something that wasn’t a joke about running away to Mexico – but the couple of inches between them were just enough to let him get a hold of his thoughts again.  She had said they were nothing serious.  And if things had started to change between them – well, if he was going to start changing the rules, if he was going to do something wild like, say, proposing – it wasn’t going to be in the middle of the front yard, when Pa and the sheriff might wander out at any moment.

So instead he said, “How about coming with me to the Thursday night dance tomorrow?  It’s not that grand but there’s music and, you know, dancing.”

“Probably why they call it a dance,” Liza said gravely, laughter lurking in her eyes.

It was very hard to get much of a sentence together when her eyes looked like that, so he just fell back on, “Probably.”

“Does the rest of your family go?”

He hesitated, because he hadn’t exactly meant it as a family expedition.  But they probably would go.  “Yeah, usually.”

And for some reason that made her laugh.  “Cartwrights do like moving in a pack, don’t you?”

Sometimes in ways that were profoundly irritating.  Sometimes in ways that meant the world.  “That’s not the point though, you and I should go.  It’s not like I was planning to dance with Hoss.”

She laughed again, and he liked that laugh, because he’d taken aim and successfully brought it out.  “I’d definitely come to a dance to watch that.”

Joe shook his head.  “The way he clomps around in those boots?  Any woman who dances with him has more courage than I do to attempt it.”

 

Liza couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to run away to Mexico with Joe Cartwright.  She watched him as he went back over to the corral, picking up the horse’s lead rope to bring it into the barn.

He glanced back at her.  “Want to come with me while I take the horse in?”

“Sure.”  Something in the diffidence of the request made it more appealing.  Like he didn’t expect it to be appealing, exactly, but he was offering – and that was better than if he was sure he was bestowing a grand gift.

But it was a real offer, while obviously he hadn’t been serious about Mexico.  And she knew that she didn’t actually want to go to Mexico.  If they did, it would probably be terrible.  As far as she knew, neither of them spoke Spanish, and also they’d get caught in the middle of the war that was currently raging down there, and it would be like Joe to idealistically throw in with Juarez’s beleaguered army, and it would all be terrible.

And yet.  She couldn’t altogether shake the idea that if she were to run off anywhere with Joe, whatever else happened, they’d have a lot of fun together.  There would be a lot of laughter.

There would be a lot of kissing too, and…  And she ducked her head and quickened her steps through the barn door, hoping the shadows inside would be enough to hide her flushed cheeks.

Joe was clearly never going to go anywhere, and she didn’t actually want him to.  She’d only been here a couple of weeks, and yet she’d never seen a family that held together as closely as the Cartwrights did.  They moved through the world as a pack, and who would Joe be if he was separated from that, or from this place that was so much a part of the family too?  She would never want that for him.

If she had agreed to go to Mexico, he would have laughed, and she would have laughed, and they would have both known it was only a silly idea, just a joke from a charming man who liked to laugh.  He wasn’t making any serious offer – not any offer more significant than going to a dance, and that was plenty.  That was more than enough, for an acquaintanceship of a mere two weeks, when she was going back to San Francisco, when they both knew nothing could ever be serious between them.

Dancing with Joe Cartwright would probably be a lot of fun too, with a far lower chance of heartbreak or disaster than running away to Mexico together.  So, on balance, it was best all around.

 

15.

Joe pulled the brim of his hat down against the sun, kicked his heel against the hitching post, and sighed.  Thursday afternoon, and nothing interesting going on in Virginia City.  The evening’s dance was still hours away, and right now – nothing was happening out there on the dusty street in front of him, which still made it marginally less boring than the conversation Adam was having in the bank behind him.  Joe had tried.  He’d gone in with Adam, he’d hung around for a while, even listened for a little bit while Adam and the bank manager discussed theories of investment, and finally gone back outside in disgust.

“What do you reckon?” he asked Cochise, standing at the rail next to him.  “Think Adam’ll be out before nightfall?”  He’d better be.  They needed to get back to the Ponderosa to get ready for the dance…which would then require coming all the way back to town again.

He was sure there had been a better way to manage today, but Pa and Adam had insisted on him going along for the business part of things.

Cochise nickered at him, in a sympathetic way, and nosed at his shirt.

Joe rubbed between the horse’s ears.  “Sorry, pal, no apples today.  But tell you what, if Adam’s not out in five more minutes, we’ll go over to – well, I’ll go over to the saloon for a beer, and see if I can bring you out a cup of coffee too.  Serve brother Adam right if he comes out and can’t find me.”

“As if I wouldn’t look in the saloon first anyway,” Adam’s dry voice remarked from behind him.

Joe twisted to look over his shoulder.  “You shouldn’t eavesdrop on a private conversation.”

“With your horse?”

“Cochise is a good listener,” Joe said staunchly.  “And anyway, you wouldn’t have known which saloon to check.”

“The Silver Dollar?”

Joe sighed again.  “Yeah, all right, it would have been the Silver Dollar.”  It was possible he was getting too predictable.  But the Silver Dollar had the best beer in town and Cochise’s favorite coffee, with a slightly lower likelihood of ending up in a brawl than at the Bucket of Blood.  That last one was not always a point in its favor, but today he didn’t have the time or inclination for a good, invigorating fight.

“Come on, let’s go sign off on that renewed timber contract for the Ophir Mine,” Adam said, starting down the sidewalk, just as though he wasn’t the one who’d taken far longer than strictly necessary in the bank.

“I still don’t see why you even needed me today,” Joe said, trotting to catch up.  At least Adam was moving faster finally.

“Weren’t you all afire to get into town just a couple weeks ago?”

“Yes, but things were different then,” Joe said, and if Adam couldn’t see for himself how things were different, he wasn’t going to bother explaining.  Though from the way older brother was smirking, he knew perfectly well that it had everything to do with whether Liza was in town or not.

“It’s better to put two signatures on the contract,” Adam said serenely.  “It always shows more respect, when we send at least two Cartwrights to confirm an agreement.  And this timber agreement with Mr. Holloway has been one of our best for the last few years—”

“I know, I know, ever since you and the Dutchman came up with that new bracing design for the mines.  Mr. Holloway won’t even care that I’m there – you’ve been his favorite person ever since then.”

“It still shows respect,” Adam said, and pushed open the door of the mining office.  “Come on – in here.”

“I know,” Joe muttered.

Inside the mining building, the secretary showed them in to Mr. Holloway’s office, who came around his desk to shake their hands and gesture them to the two chairs in front of the desk.  Joe sank down and tried not to stare at the clock, calculating how long they were likely to be sitting here and how soon he could get back home.

After a minute or two of general pleasantries, Adam said, “We’re here of course about renewing that timber contract you have with the Ponderosa.  Seems to be that time of year again.”

“Funny how fast it goes around,” Mr. Holloway said, but seemed slightly uneasy.  “About that contract – well, the truth is, I don’t think I can renew it right now.”

Joe saw Adam stiffen, and didn’t feel any too easy himself.  The Ponderosa always had a number of different revenue streams (it’s not like he didn’t pay any attention to financial matters), but this was a good one.  “Something you’re not satisfied with about the terms?” Adam asked.  “Or the service provided?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Mr. Holloway assured them, maybe too heartily.  “I know you’ve always given me a fair price, and your timber has always been top quality.  And on time too.”

“Then I don’t understand the problem,” Adam said, edge in his voice.

“Well—let me level with you.  Privately, you understand,” Mr. Holloway said, leaning forward.  “As a business partner I can only say that I can’t commit, but I like to think of the Cartwrights as friends.  And as a friend – the truth of the matter is that I’m selling my mine.”

Joe’s eyebrows shot up, and Adam seemed equally surprised.  “Really?  I never thought of you selling out, Mr. Holloway,” Adam said.

“Oh, I never thought so either.  But I’ve been reevaluating my priorities for a few years, and now Helene is marrying that fine young fellow she met back East.  I think it’s time we pulled up stakes and started fresh somewhere else.”

“Hey, is Helene getting married?” Joe said, genuinely pleased.  Holloway’s daughter had had her share of tragedy, and it was always nice to hear good news about someone you liked.  “That’s great!”

“I do appreciate that the whole thing leaves you in the lurch on the timber contract though,” Mr. Holloway said with a frown.  “I’ll certainly recommend continuing with Ponderosa timber, but transacting a new contract will be up to the new owners.”

“We understand how the business works,” Adam said with a smile.  “Perhaps we can talk to the incoming owners?”

“Not just yet,” Mr. Holloway said, leaning back in his chair.  “We’re still in final negotiations and want to keep everything quiet.  But it should be public in a few more days.  It’s all been moving very quickly.”

“That will be some big news for Virginia City,” Adam said.  “Let us know when everything is settled, and we’ll be glad to talk to the new owners as soon as we can.”

The general pleasantries continued a little longer, but Joe’s attention had snagged on that one phrase of Adam’s – big news.  It would be big news, the kind of news Bill Raleigh over at The Territorial Enterprise would devote a large story to.  Holloway’s mine was one of the major ones in town, employing a lot of people and impacting even more.  But right now, Raleigh didn’t know the news existed yet.

Raleigh would want this news if he knew about it, and Liza wanted to work for the Enterprise.  If Liza worked for the Enterprise, she wouldn’t go back to San Francisco, and that, Joe was realizing with sudden clarity, was something he wanted.

It didn’t mean have to mean he’d wind up with his heart broken.  It could just mean – well, it had been a good couple of weeks.  A very good couple of weeks.  And if, maybe, that could just stretch on a while longer…no one had to do anything rash like running off to Mexico or proposing marriage or anything like that.  He had to keep reminding himself that they weren’t serious.  But he could do that.  Against all previous experience, surely he could be not serious if he chose to be.

And so there had to be some way to put together all these pieces, Holloway’s mine sale and Bill Raleigh’s news story and Liza’s job, to get everyone what they wanted.  He just had to think it through.

But more pressingly, he needed to get back to the Ponderosa so he could get his hair combed and his shirt changed and pick up Liza for tonight’s dance.

 

16.

Liza sank gratefully down onto the bale of hay lining the wall of the dance hall.  Virginia City dances were – energetic, to say the least.

“You’re sure you don’t want to dance this next one?” Joe asked, still standing above her, smile at its most winning.

She waved a hand at him.  “Just let me catch my breath for a minute.”

“Oh sure, sorry,” he said, and perched on the edge of the hay bale next to her.  He leaned in closer, still smiling.  “I just enjoy dancing with you.”

She smiled but shook her head.  “I was terrible out there, and you know it.  They don’t do these dances in San Francisco.”

She had to hope that was actually true.  She didn’t go to dances in San Francisco.  It was entirely possible Joe had been to more than she had.

He didn’t contradict her though, or try to argue about her abilities, and instead just said, “I still enjoy dancing with you.  Tell you what, let me see if I can fight off the hordes at the punch bowl – I’ll be right back.”

Then he was off, weaving through the crowd, and Liza leaned back on her hands, letting out a slow breath.  She was having—fun, yes.  She liked dancing with Joe too.  But this was also all much more—difficult, somehow, than the past couple weeks at the Ponderosa had been.  There were so many people here, a great thronging crowd, and while she knew the population of Virginia City was a fraction that of San Francisco, it didn’t feel like it tonight.

Everyone knew the Cartwrights.  Ben, Adam and Hoss had all been swallowed up by the crowd – though as tall as they all were, it wasn’t that hard to spot them if she tried – while Joe had stuck by her as loyally as she could wish.  But even so, it was impossible not to see the way so many people in the room had a claim on him and the rest of his family – friendship and history and the ties of neighbors.  It was a huge web of people that she wasn’t part of.  She’d been introduced to what felt like dozens of people and she was sure she didn’t remember a single name.

Not knowing the dances was the least of it.

If she had thought any of the comfort and ease she’d been feeling recently was about her, tonight seemed to be proving definitively that it had much more to do with the Cartwrights and their skill at hospitality.

If she had stayed in Virginia City, if she had got that job at The Territorial Enterprise after all, she supposed she would have had time to learn the dances, and the names too.  She wondered if she would have been able to do it.  As big a city as San Francisco was, she’d been living in a circumscribed way within it.  It felt like she encountered a vast amount of people, passing them on the street or in connection with the newspaper, but those encounters weren’t the same as this, all these people who actually knew each other.

Her musings were interrupted by the arrival of two women in a rustle of silk dresses who emerged out of the crowd to stand arm in arm in front of her.  One had red hair and the other was blonde, but both were dressed more elegantly than most in the room, both were around Liza’s own age, and both were very pretty.

“Hello,” the redhead said, flashing a brilliant smile.  “You’re the Cartwrights’ new friend, aren’t you?”

“Oh—yes,” Liza said, not sure she would have introduced herself that way – but she supposed it was true.

She started to rise to her feet, but the blonde quickly said, “Oh, don’t get up.  That Little Joe will dance a girl off her feet if you let him.  We know.”

Then they were sitting down, one on either side of her, hardly giving Liza time to work out why the words were giving her warning bells.  Of course everyone around here knew the Cartwrights…

“I’m Jennifer,” the redhead said, smiling brightly.  “And that’s Ellie.  You are?”

“Elizabeth.  I’m—visiting from San Francisco.”  She didn’t know exactly why she provided that detail, or why it felt vaguely like reaching for some sort of defense.  Some way to claim that she had a place in the world, even if she felt decidedly out of that place at the moment.

“Oh, how delightful!” Jennifer said.  “I do love San Francisco.  So much more exciting than this dull old place.”

“It seems lively enough tonight,” Liza observed.

“Oh, this,” Jennifer said dismissively.  “It hardly compares to a proper dance in San Francisco.”

“So true,” Ellie said with a sigh.

For just a moment, Liza entertained the idea that there might be some commonality between them – that she might feel vaguely envious of the other women’s comfortable belonging here, in this place, while they envied her belonging in San Francisco.  She didn’t go to dances there, but they didn’t need to know that.

“How long are you staying in Virginia City?” Jennifer asked.

“I’m not—entirely sure yet,” Liza said.  The Cartwrights hadn’t brought the subject up in days, and these two women had brought it up immediately.  “Probably another week or so.”

“Oh, well, that might be all right then,” Jennifer said, exchanging a significant glance with Ellie.

“You see, we thought we ought to warn you,” Ellie said, putting a hand on Liza’s arm.  “Just a friendly word between girls, you know.”

“Warn me?” Liza echoed, feeling she’d missed a significant turn in the conversation.

“I mean, that Little Joe…” Ellie said, casting her gaze heavenwards, and Liza realized she hadn’t really liked the way Ellie had said that Little Joe the first time either.  “He is so charming. And handsome, obviously.  But you’ve got to watch out for that one, honey.”

“It’s true,” Jennifer chimed in.  “Every time you turn around, he’s moved onto another girl.”

“He’s very sweet, of course, when he wants to be,” Ellie continued, “but—so unsteady.  I don’t even know how many girls he’s been serious about.”

“If you can call it serious,” Jennifer said, and they both laughed.  “Lovely to dance with, but—best not to set your heart on him, you see.  He’s been chasing every girl in town for years, and he hasn’t married one of them yet.”

“You being a stranger in town, we just thought it was our duty to tell you.  Just so you know.”

“I see,” Liza said quietly.  None of this should matter.  None of this was important.  She already knew that Joe chased a lot of girls and, more importantly, that she and Joe, whatever they were, weren’t serious.

It was also possible the women were lying.  Maybe about Joe, and she did think they were lying about wanting to help her.  There was far too much overdone sweetness in the words to believe their concern was genuine.

But the substance of what they were saying—well.  She had seen more than one engagement announcement in the Enterprise, hadn’t she?  And Sam Clemens told a very similar story, about Little Joe Cartwright who charmed all the girls.  She didn’t put too much stock in Sam’s tales as a rule, but so far he had been more right than wrong about the Cartwrights in other ways.

And it was just too easy to believe that a man as handsome and charming as Joe Cartwright could chase – and catch – any girl he chose.

“But don’t let us spoil your fun, of course,” Jennifer said warmly.  “And you being from San Francisco, you’re probably used to this sort of thing.  People are so much more—open-minded in San Francisco.”

Before Liza could try to come up with a response to that, a rather pointed throat-clearing brought all their attentions to where Joe had walked up, and was now standing with two cups of punch.

“Good evening – Jennifer, Ellie.”  He smiled, but there was something strained in the smile.

“Good evening, Little Joe,” the two girls said in near-unison.

“We were just having the loveliest chat with Elizabeth here,” Jennifer said, and rose to her feet.  “But we’ll leave you two alone.  Don’t tire her out too much on the dance floor, Little Joe.”

Both women swept away, disappearing into the crowd, and Joe sat down again next to Liza, extending one cup of punch.

“Thank you,” she said automatically, taking the drink.

“Everything…all right there?” Joe asked uncertainly.

“Mm-hmm,” she said, and sipped the punch to avoid meeting his eyes.  Very sweet.  Probably good for a few sips, but not the sort of thing you’d want to drink for very long.  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Joe was looking at her with worry around his eyes.  That wasn’t reassuring.  “I was just talking with a couple of your friends.”

He grimaced.  “I don’t know if I’d call them friends exactly.”

“What would you call them?” she asked quietly.

“Well—I mean—we’ve all known each other for a long time.  Ellie, her father owns the bank, and Jennifer’s father owns a big silver mine.  So their fathers do a lot of business with my father.”

That explained how nice both their dresses were.  It also meant they were two eminently eligible young women for the youngest son of the area’s wealthiest rancher.  Much more appropriate than an orphan newspaperwoman who was just passing through town.

She wondered if he was going to leave it at the comment on doing business, but after a moment he sighed and said, “I did escort both of them—I mean, each of them, separately—to a couple of picnics and dances, that sort of thing.  But it was a long time ago, and—it was nothing serious, either one.”

Of course it wasn’t.  Though she wondered if he had kissed either of them.

He must have.  If he had escorted them to dances and picnics.

Didn’t she know what happened, when Joe Cartwright took a girl on a picnic?

It didn’t matter.  She told herself very firmly that it didn’t matter if Joe Cartwright chased every woman around, because she hadn’t been expecting anything serious anyway.  They had both been very clear on that, no one deceiving anyone else.

And if, for just a little bit there, it had started to feel serious, or like it could become serious, when they’d been sitting with what felt like the whole world at their feet and he’d talked about what he’d like to do, what kind of life he’d like to build if he was married, and if she had, only to herself, imagined sharing that life – well, it had only been for a little bit, after all.

And it all made perfect sense, really, that Joe might flirt with her because he flirted with every girl.  She hadn’t thought there was anything terribly special about her, that would interest a man like him.

When she finally looked up from her punch, it was to find Joe still looking at her intently, eyebrows still scrunched at a worried tilt.  “You’re sure everything’s all right?” he asked quietly.

“Of course,” she said, and smiled widely.  “Let’s dance again.”

“If you’re sure,” he said, but he looked relieved, glad to drop the subject and return to the dance floor.

It was much easier, just dancing.  Much easier, not letting anything be too serious, not letting anything matter very much.  Much safer, all around.

 

Jennifer Beale and Ellie McClure – of all the people Joe didn’t need talking to Liza.  Too bad Seth and Sara weren’t at the dance tonight.  They would have said nice things about him, but no, it had to be Jennifer and Ellie.  There had been a time when he’d been pretty sweet on both of them – each of them, rather, separately, at different times – but that had been almost two years ago and things had been uneasy ever since.

He might be feeling more comfortable right now if those different times had been a little farther apart.

As he led Liza back to the dance floor, his gaze was caught by Jennifer again, who smiled sweetly and waggled her fingers at him.  He managed some kind of smile back and looked hurriedly away.

Although he was clear in his own conscience that he’d always been a gentleman, to these girls and to any other girls it might be a relevant question with, he was also uncomfortably aware that Jennifer Beale and Ellie McClure didn’t appear to agree with that assessment.  They’d always been polite to his face, sometimes with an over the top politeness that felt almost like an insult in its insincerity.  And people talked to each other enough around here that he’d picked up the rumor that they weren’t so polite about him when he wasn’t around.

He still couldn’t see how any of it was his fault.  Ellie had thrown him over for Sam Bryant.  There hadn’t even been anything serious between him and Ellie, but the rumors said she hadn’t liked how quickly he’d moved on to Connie McKee.

Now, Connie – he had been very sure at the time that he was serious about her.  Looking back, though, it was hard not to wonder how much he’d been trying to prove something, after Ellie had rejected him.  If Connie hadn’t slapped him the first time he kissed her, would he have felt so determined to prove he could win her over?

Either way, it had stung when Connie went back East, enough that he’d been looking around for another romance to plunge into (it had been a bad habit for a while there).  When the carnival came to town, he’d invited Jennifer, even though he’d always thought before that she was more trouble than he wanted to tangle with.  Sure enough, she’d snuck away at the carnival, ended up held hostage, and he’d spent the rest of the night trying to find her while being accused of murder.  He’d been willing to let that go, but the very next week he took her to a dance, she’d slipped out halfway through, and it took all night to figure out she’d snuck into the saloon, where she was having a grand time.  After that, he’d just stopped inviting her places.  It wasn’t like escorting her twice was some kind of commitment – but she seemed to feel he’d broken some sort of faith with her.

Or maybe she hadn’t liked it when he’d moved straight on to courting Carrie McClane.

That had been a hectic few months, no question about that, at least…

“What are you thinking about?” Liza asked, bringing Joe abruptly back to the present.  “You looked far away.”

He’d been thinking about—the other girls he’d courted, but if he said that out loud—well, that would definitely go very badly.  “Just how lucky I am to be here with you,” he said quickly, and there was some truth in that.  Because wasn’t that the conclusion of the whole thing?  That all in all, with the perspective of hindsight, he was lucky things hadn’t gone on with Ellie or Jennifer, or maybe even with Connie or Carrie.

Liza smiled, but he wasn’t sure she believed him.  And he wished he knew what Jennifer and Ellie had been saying to her.  Just not quite enough to risk asking.

 

17.

The dance went on past midnight, very late for people who got up as early as ranchers did, if the Cartwrights were typical, at least.  Liza was tired by the end, but still didn’t entirely want the night to end.  Something about the dance – no, she knew exactly what, it was that conversation with Jennifer and Ellie – had made it starkly clear to her that the days were slipping past, that experiences were going by, and that she only had a finite quantity of them.  This was not a new life, this was an interlude, an enjoyable adventure that would end when she went back to San Francisco and her proper life.  Tonight, she found herself longing nostalgically for this moment before it had even gone by.

The Cartwrights, three out of four, had come to the dance on horseback.  Joe had driven her in the buggy, and they returned home in the same way.  The world looked different in the moonlight, with great dark shadows of fields and looming trees to either side of the pale ribbon of road.  It was beautiful and yet melancholy too, stirring up a longing for home and hearth even when she didn’t know what home would look like.  Not exactly her room back at her boarding house.  More an ideal of home than anything real.

Liza leaned back in her seat, glanced at Joe, shadowed beneath the carriage’s top.  The others had ridden up ahead – because they were faster on horseback or because the Cartwrights knew how to get out of each other’s way when one of them was courting.  Probably this had happened many times, Joe driving a girl home from a dance, and this week it just happened to be her.

They had been riding in silence for a few minutes, a peaceful silence after all the noise and crowds of the dance, but perhaps he sensed her look because he glanced her way too.  There was enough moonlight to see his smile.  “Have a nice time tonight?”

“Yes,” Liza said, because it was true, it had been a whirlwind of an evening, so different from anything she’d experienced before, but she’d liked it.  “You know how to show a girl a good time,” she said, and then tacked on a hopefully not too artificial laugh at the end, a way to say she didn’t mean anything by it – although maybe she did.

He didn’t seem to take anything from it, considering he only said, “They hold a dance just about every Thursday – weather permitting and not so much during the height of harvest time.  We can’t go every week, but we go a lot.  Probably will next week.  We could dance again.”

Liza looked out at a low, dark field on the right, stretching into the distance covered in shadow, and felt that rising melancholy again.  “I’ll probably be back in San Francisco by next week,” she said, managing to keep her voice even.

“About that,” Joe said, a more serious note entering his voice, “I had an idea.  The trouble is that Bill Raleigh didn’t believe you could be a journalist, right?”

“Because he saw that I was a woman and that was the end of it.”  Liza could hear the bitterness in her voice.  She didn’t entirely blame Bill Raleigh – she knew it was an unusual thing, for a woman to be in newspapers.  But it was exhausting to always be judged by who she was, not by what she could do – and not even by who she was inside, but only the outer form.

“Right, and that was unfair,” Joe said, nodding.  “But what if you could prove to him what you can do?”

“He didn’t wait to listen to my experience.”  Not that that would be proof exactly.  She had worked for The Morning Call for two years now, but not writing, not officially.  But she knew all the ins and outs of the newspaper business, had edited to the point of rewriting any number of stories, and she had been writing for herself for years – unpublished, though.

“What if you could bring him a big story, though?  Show up with the article all written, so he has to pay attention?”

It was a pretty enough idea, but there were a lot of gaps in it.  “Is your family about to do something newsworthy?”

Joe grinned, like a man about to flourish a handful of aces.  “No, but I’ve got a tip on something.  Andrew Holloway is planning to sell his mine.”

She wished she knew why that was meant to be important.  This was the Comstock, after all.  There were mines everywhere.  “Is that—exciting?”

“His mine’s just about the biggest one in Virginia City!  And nobody ever thought he’d sell – one of those that lives and breathes his work, you know.  But his daughter Helene is engaged to some fellow back East, and since she’s going back he’s decided to pull up stakes and go too.  Only it’s not public knowledge yet.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I saw him in town this afternoon with Adam – we sell timber to the Holloways, and Adam’s pretty good friends with Mr. Holloway.  If you and me go see him, I bet we could convince him to let you bring the story to the newspaper.  Or we convince Helene, and she’ll convince her father.  That angle works too.”

And Joe did seem like a man who knew all the angles – and all the women in Virginia City.  There was no way to comment on that without sounding petty and ridiculous though, because it was petty and ridiculous.  Jennifer and Ellie just had her wound up about this, and it wasn’t what mattered here, he was talking about a professional opportunity…

“It’s nice Helene’s getting married,” Joe continued.  “She had a fiancé who died in a mine accident a few years back – really sad thing.  But apparently she’s been writing with this fellow she knew when she was back East at school, and he came out to visit a few months ago, and now they’re making wedding plans.”

“That is nice,” Liza murmured, even more glad she hadn’t said something about Joe and Helene – because apparently there was no Joe and Helene.  Those women at the dance had gotten her paranoid.  And anyway, that wasn’t the important part in this conversation.

“Writing an article, that might work,” she said cautiously, trying to picture how it might play out, how it might end up.   It was hard to focus on that, though, when the man next to her loomed so much larger.  “Why?” she asked, and realized that didn’t make any sense even to her.  “I mean – I appreciate you’re trying to help me with this, but why?”

His eyebrows rose as though surprised – she was getting skilled at reading Joe’s eyebrows.  “Then you don’t have to go back to San Francisco.  You can stay in town, right, if you get the job?”

“That was the original plan,” she said, but it had receded when Bill Raleigh had turned her down.

She had never thought she was someone who would forget about her own goals just because she met a nice boy.  But – that wasn’t really what was happening here.  It was only that she’d thought her original plan was impossible, so she’d set it aside.  Decided to enjoy her time in Virginia City another way, and go back to looking at important things, life plan sort of things, when this interlude was over.

That, she realized, was what was disconcerting about this plan.  This was supposed to be an interlude.  Even before Jennifer and Ellie had descended on her, to give her assurances that charming Joe Cartwright really was as charming to all the girls as she had supposed he must be, to make clear that he was a casual romantic, it had been impossible for anything between them to last for long.  Every kiss, every picnic, every dance, brought with it the awareness that it was all going to end.

It didn’t really matter that they weren’t serious, that Joe wasn’t serious about her, because they couldn’t be.  Not when she was leaving.  They had said that, from the beginning.

And now – he was proposing a way for her to not leave.  Did that change anything?

“You want to stay, right?” Joe asked, eyebrows scrunching together again.  “If you get the job at the Enterprise?”

If she got the job.  And married women didn’t generally have jobs – there were exceptions, of course, but very few.  So perhaps this didn’t change things after all.  Not that anyone was thinking about marriage anyway, of course – that would be ridiculous after a mere couple of weeks.  So perhaps she was reading too many intentions into all of this.  Maybe he was just trying to help her, with no personal motives in mind at all.

“If I get the job, of course,” she said, smiling widely and making her voice light.  They still didn’t have to think of serious things.  It was still quite a longshot, that she might get the job anyway.  She could still just enjoy a casual interlude, and when it ran its course, as it surely would, one way or another – well, she could deal with that then.  “You’re very kind,” she continued, “to do so much to help a stray.”

He grinned, reached up to tug his hat down to a more dashing angle.  “It’s the Cartwright way, ma’am.”  Then he flicked the reins, driving the horses a little faster, and they continued on across the Ponderosa through the moonlight.

 

18.

Hoss scratched his head, frowning at Joe, and tried to decide if this was one of those times little brother was off on a tear and needed to be stopped for his own good.  Little Joe had had something on his mind when they got back from the dance last night, and early this morning he’d popped into Hoss’ bedroom and erupted with it.

“Explain it to me again,” Hoss said.  “Slowly.”

Joe sighed, loudly.  “I need you to come with me to the Holloways’ mine, to talk to Mr. Holloway and get him to talk to Liza about selling his mine.  Then she can write a story for the Enterprise, get a job, and stay in Virginia City.”

Yeah, that was basically what Joe had said the first time too.  Hoss shook his head, and resumed buttoning his shirt.  “Little brother, ain’t there a more direct way to keep her around?”

Joe frowned at him.  “The whole family hassles me about proposing too fast, and now you’re trying to push me into it!”

And surely if he didn’t have it somewhere in his mind, he wouldn’t have figured out what Hoss meant that quick.  “Well, ain’t you sweet on her?” Hoss asked.  “And she sure seems to like you.”

“I’m trying to take my time, all right?” Joe said, which didn’t contradict anything, as he thumped down to sit on Hoss’ big bed, arms crossed.  “And anyway – she wants this.  She wants the job.  So maybe I can help her get the job, and then she has another reason to be in town and…it just would be better that way, all right?”

“And why is it better for me to come along?” Hoss asked, tugging his vest out from under Joe.

Little Joe rolled his eyes as though this should all be perfectly evident.  “Because if you come, Liza’s a friend of the family we’re introducing to Mr. Holloway, also a friend of the family, and we get the weight of the family’s recommendation behind the whole business.  If I show up there with Liza alone, I’m obviously trying to get a favor for the girl I’m courting, and nobody takes it seriously.  You see?”

Sort of.  “Well—I guess so, Little Joe.  If you say so,” Hoss said, still doubtful, but he’d known all along he’d probably end up in this spot in the end.  Sometimes he pulled Joe out of a mess he was charging into, but most of the time Little Joe dragged him right along into the mess.  It always turned out interesting, at least.  And while he still didn’t entirely see a value in all of the strategy Joe was trying to employ here, he also didn’t see a way this was going to get them into trouble.  So that was something.

“Good!” Joe said, hopping up and clapping him on the back.  “Now you can help me explain to Pa why we need to visit Mr. Holloway this morning.”

 

Joe was very sure Mr. Holloway would take them more seriously if Hoss came along.  Holloway’d probably take them even more seriously if Adam came along, but – Adam would ask a lot of questions about why they were doing this, and then he’d want to take the whole business over, and next thing Joe knew, either the whole thing would be completely different or else it would still be his idea except Adam would somehow get the credit for it, and – no, better to rope Hoss along instead.  And then the two of them would look like serious citizens of the town, instead of him looking like the same old idea they all had of Little Joe Cartwright, always up to schemes to chase a girl.

They didn’t fool Pa, of course, but they almost never managed to fool Pa.  They explained it all at breakfast and Pa looked between Joe and Hoss and Liza, and nodded gravely and said that yes, of course, that all made perfect sense, just the way they were explaining it.  And his eyes twinkled and he exchanged a glance with Adam while Adam had one of his sardonic smiles on, and Pa obviously knew that Joe was doing all this because he was sweet on Liza.  But the exchange of glances might have gotten past Liza at least, and Pa did agree they could have the morning for the plan.  So he’d take that.

They all rode out to the Holloway mine, Liza riding one of their extra horses.  And it was a beautiful day, and a beautiful ride across the green meadows and through the pines, at least until they got closer to the mining country, and riding along with his big brother and a beautiful girl – well, Joe wouldn’t have minded if it had been a lot longer ride.  But maybe if this all went well, they could do more of this in the future too.

Liza looked nervous as they dismounted outside the mine, in front of Holloway’s building near the mine entrance.  The place was quiet today, apparently no work going on, which was surprising for a Friday.  The only people in sight were three men playing cards a little ways off.  They were dressed more like cattlemen than miners, but maybe they were waiting for Holloway or the new owners.  And those were the ones to focus on – Holloway, and the plan.

“This’ll be great,” Joe told Liza, flashing her his best grin.  “You’ll see.”

She bit her lower lip in a distinctly distracting way.  “You’re sure Mr. Holloway is going to be willing to talk to us?”

Not exactly sure, but he wasn’t about to admit doubts now.  Besides, momentum was everything with a plan like this.  Keep charging ahead, and deal with the obstacles if they came, never before.  “Of course,” he said, keeping the grin solid and sure.  “We’re old friends, remember?”

“Well, Adam is,” Hoss muttered, which was no way for an ally to be talking.

“The whole family works with Holloway,” Joe said, elbowing Hoss.  It was true too – hadn’t Joe got the timber cut for Adam’s new mining support scheme, after Hoss and Adam said it was impossible?  Everybody always forgot that part of the story.

“Well, can’t hurt to try, right?” Liza said, summoning up a smile from somewhere, and he liked that about her too.  It took some nerve, to run along with one of his unlikely schemes.

“Come on, you’ll see,” he said, taking her arm and leading the way to the front door, with Hoss stumping along behind.

 

Liza still didn’t really understand why Joe was doing all this, and that worried her more than whether it was going to work.  After all, surely any friend of the Cartwrights would at least be polite about turning them down.  Even Bill Raleigh had been polite, if dismissive and generally ignorant too.  So nothing could go too badly wrong here.  She just—wished she knew why Joe even had this idea, and was dragging his whole family along for it.

The Cartwrights helped people.  That was plainly what they did, practically a family motto, if they went in for such things.  Maybe none of this was any different than fixing a broken wagon and bringing a stray home for supper.

Just because he’d kissed her a few times, and danced with her at a party…  Well, if she could believe Ellie and Jennifer and Sam Clemens, that was what Little Joe Cartwright did.

Joe pushed the door of the ramshackle wooden building open, ushering her into the dim-lit interior.  Inside, two men and a woman in a long blue dress were standing at a heavy table, looking over some graphs.  The room was crowded with chairs and charts covering the walls, apart from the wall with the fireplace, currently unlit.  The tallest, a balding man, was the first to speak, looking up with a smile.

“Well, Little Joe, Hoss – what brings you out this way?  Like I said to Adam, it’ll be a while still before any decisions can be made about those timber contracts.”

“I know, Mr. Holloway,” Joe said, and he was smiling too, the affable, friendly Joe Cartwright smile she was getting to recognize.  “But we’re here on some other business.  I don’t think you’ve met our friend, Miss Elizabeth Montgomery?”

“How do you do, ma’am?” Holloway said, nodding, and his voice was polite, his smile was polite, but of course he had no idea at all about why they were here or why he was being introduced to her.  He nodded to the other two people in the room.  “And these are my—business associates, Mr. Smith and Miss West.”

Everyone murmured something that was also polite, but Liza was focusing on that tiny little pause before identifying the others as business associates.  Like Holloway still wasn’t sure about discussing the sale of the mine – because surely that’s who they had to be, the new owners.  Holloway hadn’t mentioned before that one was a woman, but there was no reason a woman couldn’t invest in a mine. Holloway’s reluctance couldn’t be a good sign for this unlikely scheme.

The men made various polite remarks, while Liza had the feeling the woman was watching her.  They were of a similar age, the other woman dressed in an elegant way, dark hair swept up, and Liza felt suddenly that her perfectly neat riding outfit looked dusty and unkempt.

As soon as enough formalities had been said, Joe cut to the heart of things, with a level of directness that perhaps was part of that Cartwright confidence.  “I’m guessing you two are the new owners of the mine?” he said, looking at Mr. Smith and Miss West.

Their eyes widened and their glances darted between Holloway and Joe.  “That is not exactly public knowledge yet,” Miss West said, jaw tight with tension.

“Don’t worry, the Cartwrights are good friends and business partners,” Holloway said quickly, and his gaze landed on Liza.  “Very trustworthy and discreet, and I’m sure their friends are too.”

“As it happens,” Joe jumped back in, “we did want to talk to you about when you decide to make the mine’s sale public.  You see, Liza here is a newspaperwoman.”

Holloway just looked a bit blank.  Smith and West looked at each other again, and Smith’s lip curled as he repeated, “A newspaperwoman.”

Everyone was always, endlessly surprised by her profession.  Some, like Hoss, had no rancor behind that surprise.  And then there were the ones who thought the idea was impossible, ridiculous, or even offensive somehow.  She would have thought a man who was willing to buy a mine with a female partner would be more broad-minded, but apparently not.

Liza could tell already there wasn’t much point to continuing to pursue this, but Joe had gone to all this trouble so far…  She put on her politest smile.  “I work for The Morning Call in San Francisco, but I’m considering a position with The Territorial Enterprise.  An interview with the three of you about the sale of the mine would be a very interesting subject to our readers.  And I’m sure it could only be beneficial to your business interests as well.”  A silver mine wasn’t exactly like a general store, but surely even a mine could benefit from publicity.

“We have no comment,” Smith said abruptly, “for a newspaper.”  Funny, even that got a very similar tone of disdain.  Maybe he didn’t like any reporters.

“Now, wait a minute,” Holloway intervened, “I don’t see as there’d be any harm.  This is all going to be public knowledge by tomorrow anyway.  Sooner, even, as soon as I take the bank draft over to the bank.  We were just about to do one last tour of the place, but why not share a few details after that?”

He seemed oblivious to the dark expressions on both Smith’s and West’s faces, but after all, he was a wealthy man, the owner of a prosperous mine.  He probably had to worry a lot less than most people about how everyone around him was reacting to him.

And Joe was either equally unaware or just pretending to be because this was leaning the direction he wanted.  “See, that’d be fine!  Wouldn’t that be fine, Liza?  Hoss?”

Hoss blinked like he was surprised to be drawn into this conversation at all and just said, “Uh, sure.”

“I’m sure that would be fine timing for an interview,” Liza murmured, even though she could see how Smith and West were looking at her – at all of them – and come to think of it, they were strangely averse to the whole idea.  If Holloway was right about the situation, why not talk to the newspapers now?  They didn’t know that she was here in a very unofficial capacity.

“Maybe we could come along on the tour,” Joe suggested, and it didn’t surprise her at all that he was a man who was more than happy to try for something new when he didn’t even have the first thing secure.  “That’d provide some nice background detail for the article.  A little color, you know.”

Smith’s and West’s frowns grew even deeper.  West spoke up again, voice nearly a hiss of disapproval and suspicion.  “Is that why you’re really here?  To get into the mine?”

This one finally seemed to stymie Joe, who looked at Liza and then at Hoss with an expression of confusion.  Hoss just shrugged, and Liza did her best to pick this thing up again.  “We’re here for exactly the reason we told you.  I was hoping to write an article on the sale of the mine.”

“You might at least have come up with a more likely story,” Smith spat, “than a woman reporter.”

“Here now,” Holloway said, face creased as though he’d at last picked up on his business partners’ hostility.  “There’s no call to be uncivil here.  Let’s let them see the mine.  There’s no harm in that; we’ve already suspended work for today.  And of course I’ve told you about how safe my timbering is.  We’ll do a little tour, answer a few questions, and then I’ll be on my way to the bank and the mine will be yours.”

Liza didn’t like the look on Smith’s and West’s faces as they looked at each other.  In fact, she hated it.  They were exchanging a glance, deciding something, and something was wrong here.  This wasn’t how two new mine owners should act, this was all awry somehow.  “We can just go,” she said hurriedly.  “We could talk to you later, after you go to the bank—”

“No,” Smith said, and suddenly his gun was in his hand, drawn from the holster she’d barely even noticed.  Everyone around here wore one, after all.  “I think we’re in too deep now.  You two, take those gun belts off nice and slow.”

That last was directed at Joe and Hoss, who already had their hands in the air.  Liza, heart beating painfully, realized her own hands were up too.  She didn’t remember moving.

“What the devil is going on here?” Holloway demanded.  He wasn’t wearing a gun, some detached part of Liza’s mind noted.  “These are friends!”

“But they aren’t,” Joe said, easing his gun belt off.  “What’s the real story?  Buying the mine is some kind of scam?  I don’t see how you can steal a mine, though.”

“It’s not the mine,” West snapped, drawing a small gun out of her skirt pocket, “it’s what’s in the mine!”

“A load of silver ore’s pretty hard to walk off with too,” Hoss rumbled.  He had his gun belt off, but glancing at Hoss still made Liza feel just the tiniest fraction better.  After all, a man who could lift a steer with his bare hands had to be pretty dangerous in a fight, even unarmed.

“We don’t have to explain anything to you,” Smith said, and then to West, “Go get the other boys in here.”

“Are Smith and West even your real names?” Liza asked, some kind of nervous energy spilling into words – and she really did wonder.  “They’re sort of – bland.”  The kind of names someone in the west might come up with, on the spot to come up with a name.

“What are you looking for in the mine anyway?” Joe asked.  “What would be in Holloway’s mine that anybody would be trying to find?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Liza could see Hoss edging just a little closer to Smith and his gun, sliding a foot over, an inch at a time.  Maybe that’s why Joe was talking, trying to create a distraction.

“Didn’t the sheriff say there were trespassers in the mine recently?” Liza threw in, with no idea how she’d managed to remember that in the moment.  But focusing on the puzzle, the why of it all, was less frightening than focusing on the gun Smith was still pointing in their general direction.  No one had ever pointed a gun at her before.

“Hey, that’s right,” Joe said, snapping his fingers.  “Was that you two?  And then you pretended to buy the mine to get inside?”

“Do you always talk this much?” Smith growled.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Joe said, flashing up a grin.  “Most folks find it charming.”

“But they had papers, identification,” Holloway said, looking thunder-struck by the entire turn of events.  “The bank draft!”

“Forged, obviously,” Smith said, glaring at him.  “All of it.  We just needed to get in here somehow.”

And then West – or whatever her real name was – was back, the three cardplayers from outside coming with her, and they looked bigger and more ominous than they had outside.  Especially since they’d drawn their guns too.

The room was beginning to seem very crowded.

“What’s going on, boss?” one of the men from outside asked, a hard-faced fellow with a dingy blue bandana.  “Thought we were just about done here.”

“This lot came in and started asking too many questions,” Smith said, gesturing at Liza, Joe and Hoss.  “Got a lot of suspicions.”

“Awfully big gang for conmen,” Joe mused, still sounding merely interested and curious about this whole situation.  Liza didn’t quite see how Hoss was going to jump anyone with this many guns out now, but maybe Joe just couldn’t help himself when it came to talking.  “But that bank that was held up in Placerville a while back – that was a big gang, they said.  At least five, six men, and one woman too.”

“How’s he know all that?” Blue Bandana demanded.  “You told him we robbed the bank?”

Smith groaned.  “No, you idiot, but now you did!”

“Why aren’t you all the way to Mexico with the money by now?”  Joe snapped his fingers, eyes lighting up.  “Or is that it?  The money wound up in the mine somehow?  But how would money you stole end up in Holloway’s mine?”

“Our dirty double-crossing partner hid it there,” Blue Bandana growled.  “Right before getting himself caught in a cave-in!”

“Stop telling him things!” Smith ordered.

The sheriff had mentioned that too, the cave-in near the mine, the one he couldn’t explain…

“How do you know the money’s not with him in the cave-in?” Joe asked, turning his back on Smith entirely to address Blue Bandana.  “You’re never going to find it if it’s under—”

Liza barely stifled a scream as Smith smashed his gun over the back of Joe’s head.  Joe crumpled down to the ground, silent.

“You talk too much,” Smith informed the very still, very quiet Joe.

Liza wanted to fling herself after him, to check how bad this was, to make sure that he wasn’t – that he didn’t – but Hoss’ big hand was on her shoulder now and he murmured, “Easy, no sudden moves or they might get twitchy.”

So she gritted her teeth and stared at Joe and willed him to open his eyes again while Smith made his plans, while a couple of the men tied up her and Hoss and Joe too – so they thought he was alive, but had they really even checked? – and made plans for Holloway to give them one final tour of the mine.  Then she and Hoss were herded into another room and Joe was tossed in after them – that was bad, they shouldn’t be moving him if he had a head injury – and the door was locked behind them, leaving them in the darkened room to wait.

 

19.

Considering they were locked up with their hands tied and hostile forces outside, Liza’s level of relief was still profound when Joe lifted his head almost as soon as the door clanged shut.  A conscious Joe was so much better than an unconscious one, even under the circumstances.

“Not how I expected the day to go,” Joe muttered, wriggling around in an apparent effort to sit up.

“Don’t move too fast,” Liza cautioned.  “How do you feel?”

“It’s not that bad,” he said.  “I wasn’t even out for more than a second or two.  I just thought they might not tie me up if they thought I was down.”  His grimace was eloquent.  “So much for that.”

“Little Joe’s got a hard head,” Hoss contributed.  “Don’t worry.”

She liked Hoss, but at the moment Liza didn’t have patience for meaningless reassurances.  “Do you know the signs of a concussion?”

Hoss blinked at her.  “Well—no, but…”

“Joe, do you have a ringing in your ears?  Blurred vision?”

He squinted at her, but said, “No, I don’t think so.  Not great light in here – right?  That’s not me?”

“No, it’s pretty dim,” Liza acknowledged.  “Any nausea?  Headache?”

“My head hurts but, I mean, I got hit.”

“And about that,” Liza said, feeling finally that she could be a little irritated too, since he really didn’t seem to be badly hurt, “what were you thinking turning your back on him?  Don’t turn your back on hostile people!”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think he’d actually hit me,” Joe said, as though this was some kind of justification.  He even offered up a smile, if not quite as broad as his usual ones.  “So what do you think, doctor – am I going to live?”

Liza sighed.  “From this, yes.  You seem to be all right.  Certainly not confused or disoriented.”

“Hey, how’d you know all that?” Hoss spoke up.  “About the blurred vision and everything.”

Liza shrugged.  “My father worked in newspapers but my mother was a nurse before she married him.  She stopped working properly, but she still helped people sometimes – volunteering at the hospital, or neighbors liked to come to her because they knew she could help.  I picked up some things.”

“Say, that could be real useful,” Hoss said, sounding impressed.  “You gotta teach us more of that later.  Little Joe gets hit on the head a lot.”

“I don’t,” Joe protested.  “I mean, not a lot.”

“Hey, is it because you keep turning your back on people?” Hoss asked.

“Can we focus here?” Joe said through gritted teeth.  “Let’s try and get our hands free.”

“You think we can?” Liza asked doubtfully.  Her own ropes felt tight and solid.

“We’re ranchers,” Hoss said, “and our father used to be a sailor.  We’re pretty good with knots.  Hey, Joe, what do you think – we try to get Liza untied?  They might not have tied her as tight.”

“Because I’m a woman?” Liza said dryly.

“Well, they don’t seem like the most enlightened group,” Joe contributed.  “Yeah, let’s start there.”

Hoss nodded.  “You try, Little Joe, you’ve got more sensitive hands.”

“That’s what they tell me,” Joe said with a grin and then, in case she might have somehow missed the suggestive quality to the words, suddenly winced and added, “Oh, uh – sorry, Liza.  It’s the concussion talking.”

“The one you probably don’t have?” she said, but shifted to turn her back towards Joe so he could try to reach the ropes on her wrists.

“Here, lemme watch,” Hoss said, moving into position too.  “Might be able to help.”

“You two are very calm about all of this,” Liza observed, as Joe started tugging on her ropes.

“Well, it’s not our first time in a situation like this,” Hoss said.

“This has happened to you before?  Joe gets hit over the head and you both get tied up at gunpoint and locked up by people who probably want to kill you?”  She managed to get the whole sentence out without her voice wavering, though it was a near thing on those last few words.

“Dunno if it’s been that exactly, but yeah, pretty close,” Hoss acknowledged.

Behind her, Liza felt Joe’s hand curl around hers, tighten for a moment, then go back to the ropes.  “It’ll be all right, honey,” he said quietly.  “We’ve gotten out of worse than this.”

She nodded even though he couldn’t see it, but it was a moment before she trusted her voice again.  “You know,” she said finally, “Sam Clemens told a lot of stories about your family.  I should have believed more of them.”

“Ol’ Sam probably doesn’t even know the half of it,” Hoss said.  “How many times do you reckon we’ve been in a spot like this, Little Joe?”

“Who keeps count?” Joe said casually, still tugging on the ropes.  The ropes were scratching and pinching the skin on her wrists, but she didn’t say anything.  “Hey, remember that time we got captured by Vince Dagen and his boys?  You got hit over the head that time, big brother.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t because I turned my back on anybody.  Try that loop a little above your thumb—yeah, that one.  Anyway, I was fighting one of ‘em, and another one came up behind me.  That’s different.”

“I don’t know, you do get your share of hits to the head too.  Maybe there’s a pattern here.”

Liza knew what they were doing.  They were talking to try to keep her calm, and she appreciated it, although—she wasn’t sure it was the most reassuring topic they could have picked.

Or maybe it was.  After all, they were both still alive.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said aloud, careful to keep her voice even.  “You don’t have to talk to keep me from going into hysterics.”

Hoss made vague noises of protest she didn’t believe and Joe said, “What?  We’re just talking.  Hey, do you reckon Adam gets himself captured more often than we do?  Seems like there’s always somebody holding him hostage.”

“Maybe, but I’d have to add it up.”

“Count later, I think I got something,” Joe said suddenly, and Liza felt it too – the ropes weren’t untied, but they were looser.

“Let me try,” she said, and wriggled and twisted her hands.  “I think I can get—one hand…”  The rope scraped painfully over her hand, and felt like it took several layers of skin with it, but that was inconsequential compared to the result.  Once she had one hand free, the ropes slid easily off of the other.

“Here, let me get yours,” she said, turning towards Joe.

“No, try to untie Hoss,” Joe said, jerking his head towards his brother.  “Just in case we don’t have time for both of us.”

Right, because Hoss was bigger and stronger and hadn’t just been hit over the head.  She moved over to Hoss, who held his hands out behind him.  She studied the knots, trying to see the pattern, while also thinking this was part of what was special about these two, about this family.  They knew each other’s different strengths, and they weren’t reluctant to rely on them.

She wasn’t an expert on knots, but she could see what she was doing and had her hands free, and that made it comparatively easy to get the ropes loose.  She freed Hoss, and he was working on Joe’s hands, when they heard voices from the next room.

“They’re back from the mine tour,” Liza said, automatically dropping down to a whisper.

Hoss grimaced, and gave up on the knots.  Instead he got his fingers under the ropes and yanked – which, somewhat astonishingly, actually worked, the ropes coming apart in his hands.

Liza had already moved to the door, pressing her ear to the crack, trying to hear the words outside.  Joe stepped silently up to join her, leaning against the door too, standing close enough that it would have been distracting if the circumstances had been different.  But she was just beginning to be able to make out words.

“Big Jim must’ve figured we were on his tail – he didn’t waste any time hiding the saddlebags.  Once we finally got to the right part of the mine, they were just sitting there in a corner.”

So they’d found the missing money.  Was that good or bad?  They’d have no further reason to linger in the area – and what did that mean for their hostages?  For that matter, what had happened to Holloway, down in the mine with them?

“Good,” a second voice said, “now let’s get out of here.  Get the horses and go.”

“Yeah, but who carries the money?”  That was at least the third person talking – how many were out there?  All five?  “I’m not having one of you run off with it like Big Jim did.”

“We don’t have time for that right now.  We’ll divide it up outside of town.”

“What about the Cartwrights?  Somebody probably knows they came here.”

True, Ben and Adam did – but how soon would they be concerned enough to come looking?  Probably not for hours.

“So let’s dump ‘em down in the mine where we tied up Holloway.  Nobody’ll find ‘em down there.  We could make certain of it, even.  There’s plenty of dynamite around.”

Bad, bad, that was so bad – they were going to die blown up at the bottom of a silver mine, no one was ever even going to know what happened – Liza felt her breath hitch and she concentrated very carefully on looking at Joe Cartwright’s face, just a few inches away.  His eyebrows were scrunched together at a concerned angle, but he didn’t look scared or panicked.  And that helped.

“Yeah, but who takes the Cartwrights down there?” one of the voices – it was so hard to distinguish them like this – demanded.  “I ain’t going down into the mine while you sit up here with the money!”

How long were they going to argue?  Not long enough for Ben Cartwright to get worried enough to come after his sons.  Not that long.  And Joe must have thought so too, because he was looking at Hoss and holding up three fingers.  Hoss gave a nod, then politely but firmly took Liza’s arm and drew her away from the door.  If they had a plan, she wasn’t going to object.  Once she was a few steps away, Joe nodded, then folded down his fingers one at a time.

On the last one, Hoss smashed into the door with one big shoulder, the whole door crashing off its hinges in a shower of splinters.  Hoss kept the momentum going to charge straight into the room beyond, Joe right behind him, both of them whooping with enough noise for a half-dozen men.

Liza stopped in the doorway, wanting to see but not wanting to get in the way.  She didn’t know how to fight, and besides, she didn’t have even a parasol to fight with.

Hoss and Joe had the advantage of surprise and they did know how to fight, that was obvious immediately – but the bandits were armed, and had numbers on their side.

Hoss grabbed the two nearest at once, smashing them into each other, while Joe tackled a third.  All five were here, and though maybe they were reluctant to fire their guns in a room this crowded with their own allies – at least, no one did start firing immediately – this was still bad numbers.  There had to be something she could do.

The Cartwrights were flinging chairs around now and someone had knocked over the big table, papers flying everywhere.  And Liza’s gaze landed on the fireplace.  And the tools next to it.  At least it was something.

She started that way, but made only a few steps before rough hands seized her upper arms from behind – she should have got her back against the wall, especially after scolding Joe for turning his back on people – and Smith’s voice announced, “Stand down, I have your pretty friend here.”

They’d do it, too.  She knew the Cartwrights well enough to be sure of that, that Joe and Hoss were going to surrender if Smith was holding onto her, and then—they were all going to die.  They were going to be dragged down to the bottom of a mine to die.

She didn’t know how to fight.  But instinct or desperation drove her elbow back, hard.  Luck or the element of surprise was with her, because his grip on her arm was poor enough that she could get at least a little range, enough to send her elbow into the midsection of the man grabbing her.  His next words were swallowed in a choking gasp.  His fingers tightened on her arms though, so she started kicking backwards instead, grateful for the hard heels of her boots.

She connected with his legs, at least twice, and he cursed, shoving her away from him – which must have been equally untrained instinct, considering he’d been trying to take her captive.  She was off-balance, one foot already raised to keep kicking his shins, but since she wanted to get away from him she didn’t try to stop the momentum of his shove, just let herself tumble away and had to hope she wasn’t going to need Hoss or Joe to remember the signs of a concussion.

She landed in a sprawled heap in front of the fireplace, banging her hip and one elbow against the ground – definitely going to bruise, but at least she hadn’t hit her head.  And this was the direction she’d been trying to go to begin with.  She pushed up from the ground, gaze focusing on the metal stand next to the fireplace, and the collection of tools inside it.

Liza could also see Smith already coming towards her again, face twisted in rage.  She scrambled up to her knees, reaching for the tools, fingers closing around one of the handles.  She yanked, knocking the whole thing over and spilling the other tools in a clatter and crash of metal – but she had the poker in her hand, in time to make a wild swing and hit Smith in the knee.  More cursing, and this time he fell back, clutching his leg, giving her enough breathing space to stand up and look around.

Hoss was squaring off with two opponents but seemed to have the situation under control.  Joe had evidently just knocked back one man with a punch, if she could judge by positions, but that one would be coming again in a moment, and he had a friend coming with him.

“Joe!” she called, hoping she was helping and not just distracting him.

He glanced her direction, and she threw the poker across the room.

A smile lit his face as he caught it out of the air, and then—well, he might have been fooling around with her parasol, but he really did know what he was doing with something a lot more like a fencing foil.  He thrust and jabbed and she could swear he was having fun despite the peril of the situation.

Liza scanned the room, looking for other threats, and saw Miss West coming from another doorway, drawing her gun as she did.  Liza had been about to grab the long tongs from the spilled tools, but now she caught up the empty coal scuttle instead, a heavy copper vessel, and heaved it as best she could towards the other woman.

She’d been aiming for the gun but hit Miss West in the arm, which worked just as well since she dropped the gun, which skidded off into the chaos around Hoss.

Liza grabbed up the tongs, because she felt better with something in her hand, and started towards Miss West.  She’d barely made a step before the pile of men around Hoss gave a big surge and Hoss was standing up in the middle of them, assailants falling back – and in another moment Joe was jumping in to help, his own opponents down – and a moment after that it all seemed to be over.

Groaning outlaws were lying all around, Hoss had got a pistol off of one of them and had it aimed at Smith, West leaned up against the wall, holding her arm and glaring at everyone, and Joe was clapping his brother on the back as they both grinned at each other.

The Cartwright boys had, after all, been through this before.  They were good at this.

Liza thought that thought quite calmly and intelligently, just before her knees gave out and she sat down rather abruptly in front of the fireplace, still holding onto the tongs, and had to concentrate on taking some deep breaths.

She hadn’t had any time to be scared for a few minutes – or had it been even less time than that? – but it had all caught up to her suddenly.

“We’d better tie up anybody who looks conscious,” Hoss said.  “See any rope?”

“Yeah, over there,” Joe said, and she wasn’t looking at him but she could guess he was looking at her because he suddenly asked, “Hey, Liza, are you all right?”  A moment after that he was lightly touching her shoulder.

“Fine.  I’m fine,” she managed, and noticed she was still gripping the tongs very tightly.  Maybe she’d just—hang onto them for the moment.  Joe was still holding the poker, she saw when she looked at him.  “I just—need to catch my breath.  Go—tie people up.”  She waved vaguely with her free hand.

He leaned down and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.  “All right.  You were brilliant, sweetheart.”

The endearment should have meant something but somehow it—didn’t.  Not really.  It was said in the wrong tone, and it was all about the thrill and the excitement, not about affection.  Like he might have used it for any girl just then, in this moment and this mood.  It was all just part of the Joe Cartwright charm.

He’d called her ‘honey’ earlier – but that had been when he’d been trying to talk her down from the hysterics she wasn’t having.

It didn’t mean anything.  Even while she was in the middle of trying to recover herself from the terror of the fight, she was also very clear that none of this, with Joe, meant anything.

He had taken only a step away when the door to outside burst open, crashing against the adjoining wall.  Joe stepped back in front of her, lifting the poker – but he would have done that for anyone too, he was like that.  It was only an instant anyway before he was relaxing again, lowering the poker, though Liza had to shift sideways to look past his legs and see why—to see Sheriff Coffee and Ben Cartwright standing in the open doorway, guns drawn.  Adam was a dark shape just behind them.

“All right, everyone get your hands—” Ben began, then broke off as his gaze swept around the room.

“Hiya, Pa,” Joe said, lifting the poker again but this time in salute.  “Roy.  We’ve got it under control.”

“So I see,” Ben said, shoulders relaxing as he lowered his gun.

“Good to see you though, Pa,” Hoss contributed.  “And you too, Adam.”

“And here I thought we might be needed,” Adam said dryly.

 

20.

Any day that involved Pa and Adam coming to the rescue only to find him already in command of the situation was a good day in Joe Cartwright’s book.  Having it happen in front of Liza, well, that made it even better.  And the sheriff wasn’t a bad bonus either.  Nice to have the local authority see him being all competent and capable.

Imagine if they’d come in a few minutes earlier, while they were all still locked up and he had his hands tied – no, that would have been terrible.  But as it was, even factoring in the hit on the head, rope burns, and general indignities of being taken hostage, on balance he was still coming out ahead for the day.  Especially since it should now be abundantly obvious that Liza really wasn’t a bank robber – like he’d been saying all along.

Though he still had questions.  “What brought you all out here anyway?”

Pa, of course, had his own questions.  “Is everyone all right?  Hoss?”

“Yeah, no trouble, Pa,” Hoss rumbled, busy tying up Miss West’s hands, interrupting his own apologies to her for the necessity.  Which was just like Hoss.

“Joseph?”  And of course Pa had to come and grab his arm and inspect him.  “What happened to your head?”  How could Pa even see anything wrong?  Any evidence ought to be under his hair!

“I got hit, it’s fine,” Joe said, trying to shrug Pa off.

“I don’t think he has a concussion,” Liza spoke up.  She was still sitting on the hearth, but her voice sounded steady enough.  “I checked.”  She looked up at him with narrowed eyes.  “Still no blurred vision?”

“I’m fine,” Joe insisted, and appealed to the other authority figure in the room.  “Roy, why are you all here?  How’d you know there was a problem?”

“Well, we weren’t exactly sure at that,” Sheriff Coffee said, fingering the butt of his gun in its holster, and inspecting the nearest outlaw.  “But I was checking up on these two who wanted to buy Holloway’s mine – just a standard practice, you know, I like to get ahead of trouble when I can.  And I didn’t like the telegram that finally came back a couple hours ago.  Seemed no one they claimed as references had ever heard of them.  And you know how I’ve been looking for that Placerville robbery gang.  Some of the descriptions seemed to match.”

“And Pa and I happened to be visiting the sheriff’s office when the telegram came in,” Adam contributed, “and knew that you were all out here visiting Holloway.  It seemed inevitable that if something shady was going on, you would have fallen into the middle of it.”

Joe rolled his eyes, but he wasn’t really that annoyed – though clearly if they had all still been tied up when help arrived, Adam never would have let him forget it.

“All right, let’s round this lot up,” Roy said, taking on his authoritative sheriff tone.  “Going to be crowded at the jail tonight.  Ma’am, if you’ll come with me, please.”

Roy took Miss West by the arm while Pa and Adam and Hoss all started pulling outlaws to their feet and herding them out the door, and Smith tried to make some kind of defense directed at Roy, who definitely didn’t look to be believing him.

“The money from the Placerville bank is over in those saddlebags,” Joe volunteered, pointing.  “And somebody better go down in the mine and find out where they left Holloway.  They said they had him tied up down there.”

“That so?” Roy said, face creasing into a sterner expression.  “All right, Mr. Smith, once the rest are in the care of my deputy outside, you and I are taking a long walk into a dark pit.  If I don’t find Holloway safe and well at the end of it, it’s going to go very badly for you.  Ben, can you help Clem with all these ones up here?”

“Sure, Roy, we’ve got it under control,” Pa said easily, hustling another outlaw to the door.

And everything did seem under control, so that meant Joe could let his family deal with things and turn a different direction – namely, sitting down on the hearth next to Liza.  “Hey,” he said quietly, and nudged her arm.  “You sure you’re all right, honey?”

No tears or other signs of hysterics, which was more than could be said of some women he’d seen in similar situations – or men, for that matter – but she was still sitting on the hearth, still holding onto the fire tongs.  Though he had almost forgotten that he was holding the poker too.  She smiled, even if it looked a little wobbly around the edges.  “I’m good.  I didn’t get hit over the head.”

And if she could tease him, she probably was all right, or nearly.  “I know, I know,” he said, grinning.  “I shouldn’t have turned my back on him.”

 

“Well, you shouldn’t have,” Liza agreed, relieved to hear her voice come out steady and easy.  She was feeling – mostly all right, and teasing back and forth with Joe was making it better too.  She should be all right, everything was fine now.  Good had triumphed, the outlaws were under arrest, no one had even been badly hurt.

But it could have been so much worse.  “Thank you,” she found herself saying.  “For – I don’t know.  For getting us out of that.  You and Hoss seem to be – very good at this sort of thing.”

“It wasn’t all Hoss and me,” Joe said with a smile.  “You handled the situation really well too.”

Liza’s mouth twisted into a smile that was half-grimace, because she wasn’t altogether sure that was true.  She’d done something, but left by herself she would have ended up at the bottom of the mine for sure.  And also she’d heard too many half-compliments in her life to trust this one.  “Really well for a woman?  Just because I didn’t go into hysterics?”

“No, not for a woman,” Joe said in exaggerated mimicry.  “For anyone.  And I never thought you were the hysterical type anyway.”

The words were good, but even better was the way he was looking at her – and it wasn’t with the trademark charm this time, it was something softer and more real.

He was just leaning in towards her and she was tilting her head towards him and then Hoss was in the doorway again saying, “Hey, Little Joe, Liza, ain’t you coming?”

Joe sighed, and it made the corners of Liza’s mouth twitch because it was only a sigh and yet it so clearly, clearly conveyed the message that sometimes big brothers were really not worth the trouble they brought with them.

But he leaned in and kissed her anyway, quicker than she might have liked under other circumstances but still enough to take her breath away.  Then he dropped the poker next to the fireplace, stood up and extended his hand towards her.  “Yeah, we’re coming, Hoss.”

Liza finally let go of the tongs to take Joe’s hand and let him help her to her feet.

Outside, the outlaws were all up on their horses, with their hands tied, and Adam, Ben and a man with a deputy’s badge holding rifles on them just to make sure they didn’t get any ideas.  They seemed to be a pretty cowed lot, though.

More interesting, in a way, was the other new arrival – Bill Raleigh, of The Territorial Enterprise.  He was on horseback too, writing rapidly in a small notebook.

Liza felt Joe’s hand tighten around hers as he called, “Hey, Bill, what brought you out this way?”  It did seem as though the mine was a strangely busy place suddenly, for somewhere relatively out of the way.

Raleigh lifted his pencil in salute and said, “Hello, Little Joe.  I saw your father and the sheriff go tearing down the street past the Enterprise office.  I’ve covered news in this town long enough to know that if there’s a Cartwright riding fast, especially alongside the sheriff, there’s bound to be a story at the end of the ride.”  He tapped the pencil against the open notebook in his other hand.  “Sure enough, capturing the Placerville robbers’ll make a real nice headline.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, expression sour, and Liza could see him watching his plan dissipate on the breeze.

“It’s all right,” she said softly.  “Really.”  It had been a long-shot at best, and she hadn’t given it much thought anyway since events had cascaded in their new direction.  She could have been dead today, and she wasn’t; the relief of that made it harder to feel too disappointed by the collapse of a plan to earn a job she was probably never going to get anyway.

Joe’s eyebrows were scrunching again.  “Maybe he’d like an eyewitness account—”

“I don’t think so.”  A story about her time as a hostage was not going to create the kind of reputation she needed for a serious job with a man who wasn’t taking her seriously to begin with.  Especially not when he could just get a few quotes and write his own story.

Joe sighed, a different sigh than the one about Hoss.  “I’m sorry, honey, I really thought it might work.”

She squeezed his hand.  “I appreciate it anyway.”

And as they headed to the horses, she was a little disappointed about the lack of a job prospect – though mostly she’d made her peace with that days ago – and thinking more on the unexpected development that Joe was apparently still calling her honey, even when their lives weren’t in danger and she wasn’t under threat of hysterics.

She told herself that it was probably just the next stage.  She mounted up onto her horse and assured herself that it was obviously part of the Joe Cartwright romantic playbook.  Probably right before he moved on.  And she should be far more interested in her job prospects, or lack of them, and on figuring out what exactly she was going to be doing next.  Those were the important matters.  Not this.  Definitely not this.

 

On the whole, Hoss was feeling pretty well satisfied as they got the outlaws turned towards Virginia City and started off down the road.  This was the funny thing about Little Joe’s plans.  They nearly always went sideways somewhere in the middle, but came up all right by the end anyway.  Maybe not Joe’s original plan, seeing as Bill Raleigh had got himself a story all by himself without any help from Liza – but they’d come through it all right, the Placerville outlaws had been captured, and Sheriff Coffee had emerged from the mine with a dusty but otherwise unharmed Holloway.  So that was good all around.

And if Hoss was any judge of his brother’s underlying motivations, he wasn’t doing too bad on his real goal here.  Not based on the way Joe and Liza’d been sitting up close together in there when he went in to find them, or the way Joe’d wound up kissing her.

Hoss still didn’t see why Joe couldn’t just ask her to stay, instead of coming up with an excuse for it, but sometimes little brother preferred to complicate things.

“Are you sure you’re all right, son?” Pa asked as they rode on, steering Buck over towards Hoss.  He glanced over at Joe.  “Both of you?”

Hoss was used to Pa checking with him about Little Joe – just part of being an older brother, after all, and he knew good and well Pa really was worried about both of them.  Joe was just the less likely to admit anything.  “Yeah, we’re good, Pa,” he said easily.  “You know nothing much sticks to me, and Joe’s been hit harder than that before.  Anyway, there weren’t that many of them.”

Roy, riding nearby, shook his head.  “You’re incredibly lucky, with odds like they were.  But I ought to know by now not to underestimate two Cartwrights working together.

Pa chuckled and the sheriff laughed too and everyone but the outlaws was in a pretty fine mood as they rode back into town.  Even Holloway was looking happy, so relieved to be alive that he didn’t seem to mind too much needing new buyers for his mine.

When they got home again, Hop Sing did a proper rant on the foolishness of getting themselves into a situation like that, and then made fried chicken for supper.  And both of those things were Hop Sing’s way of saying he was glad that they’d come through the bad business and got home safe again.

Hop Sing’s fried chicken dinner was a reason for good cheer just in itself, and supper was a pretty cheerful affair too.  At least, at first.  Lots of talking, lots of laughter, but somehow as things went on, Hoss thought Liza got quieter, thoughts she wasn’t saying lurking somewhere behind her eyes.

He managed to give her a nudge as they moved from the table into the sitting area for pie.  “You feeling poorly or anything?” he asked in a low voice, not wanting to catch everyone’s attention.

She gave him a half-smile and said, “Just tired,” but he didn’t think it was true.  Well, it had been a long day, especially if she’d never been held hostage before.

And then Joe was perching on the arm of Liza’s chair, the big red one, and that black cat came leaping up into her lap and pie got served and the conversation kept going around and so Hoss didn’t ask her again how she was.

But he also thought that Joe was getting almost too high-spirited as the evening wound down, the kind of high spirits you put up when you’re trying not to think about something else.  Hoss watched, and made a private bet with himself that Joe’d go out to talk to Cochise tonight.  It was just something he’d noticed, even though they never talked about it.  After some sort of crisis, after somebody’d got hurt or captured or a friend got killed, Joe usually went out to the barn some time that night.

Hoss didn’t know that Little Joe was talking to Cochise out there, seeing as he’d never followed him.  But the way Joe was with that horse – yeah, it was the only thing that made sense.  Everybody needed some way to deal with it, when tough things happened.  For himself, Hoss liked long rides, breathing in the pine air and remembering all the beauty in the world.  Adam brooded and looked for answers in books.  Pa seemed to be all right as long as he could get his boys back home safe, and if he had some other way he was dealing, well, he kept it pretty tight to himself.  And Joe went out to the barn in the middle of the night.

Nobody could be sunnier than Hoss’ little brother, nobody popped back up easier and faster, but that was probably just because he’d found his way to deal with the darker things.

Hoss might go take a ride tomorrow himself.  But for tonight, fried chicken, apple pie and family seemed like a mighty good cure for any worries too.

 

21.

Joe stepped inside the shadowy great room some time after midnight, the space lit only by moonlight and the faint embers of the fire, and closed the front door behind him with barely a click.  Good so far.  But then his very first step on the wooden floor seemed almost to echo in the quiet space.  He winced, considered, then put out one hand to the sideboard to steady himself while he tried to ease his boots off.  He got the first one off, but he probably should have set it down instead of trying to hold it in the same hand he was using to get the second boot off – and next thing he knew it was slipping out of his fingers to tumble onto the floor with a thud.  He winced again.

It wasn’t that loud, probably not loud enough to carry up to the second floor – but the first-floor guest room was a lot closer, and it was only a moment before the door opened and Liza appeared in it, wrapped in a robe, with her closed parasol gripped in one hand.

“Sorry,” Joe said in a low voice, still mindful of the rest of the family upstairs, and held up his hands, boot in one.  “It’s just me.  I was trying not to wake anyone up.”

She relaxed, half-smiled.  “I wasn’t asleep.”  She glanced down at the parasol in her hand, shook her head, and set it on the chair next to the door.  “What were you doing down here?”

“I went out to the barn.  Wanted to check on Cochise,” Joe said, bending down to pick up his fallen boot, and lined both of them up by the sideboard.  It wasn’t untrue, even if he did tend to feel an especial need to check on Cochise after a day that had involved things like outlaws and hostage situations and fights that might have ended up with everyone shot or blown up at the bottom of a silver mine.

She moved a few steps closer.  “Is everything all right?  With Cochise?”

“Oh—yeah, sure, he’s fine,” Joe said, a little unsteadily because his horse hadn’t really needed checking—and because she was lovely, standing there in a purple robe, hint of a white nightgown below it, hair all tumbled around her shoulders.  Almost as lovely as she’d been this afternoon, throwing him a poker across the room in the middle of a fight.  He cleared his throat.  “What are you doing awake?”

She shrugged, and he realized the shadows in her eyes weren’t all the product of the darkness of the room.  “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Yeah,” he said softly, gaze fixed on her face, “me neither.”

If she had turned back to the bedroom, that would have been it.  But she didn’t move and neither did he and after a long moment he tipped his head towards the settee and said, “Maybe…?”

She nodded once, and they moved around to the other side of the furniture.  He sat down first, so she could decide where she wanted to be—but she sat down right next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, so he wrapped an arm around her, leaning back.  She felt good there, and he wasn’t sorry to be here, even if he was sorry about the reason for it.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” he asked, though he had a pretty good guess.  Maybe he was wrong.  Maybe she was awake thinking about him.

She sighed, rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.  “I just—keep thinking about today.”  Yeah, that was more what he’d figured.  She’d been quieter, the longer the evening went on, and all his efforts to keep things lively and light hadn’t changed that.  “It all keeps—playing over in my head, things I barely even noticed when they were happening because it was all so fast and I had other things I was concentrating on, but now—how do you do it?  How do you stay so calm in the moment, when someone wants to kill you and might really do it, and then when it’s all over just—go on like nothing happened?”

He thought about it, because he knew he needed a real answer here, not a joke or bravado or something calculated to make himself look courageous and unconcerned.  He’d said all of those things at other times, sometimes to other women, but this one was really asking.  It wouldn’t be fair to give her less than the truth – and anything that was less than the truth was only going to push her away.

“It’s not actually that simple,” Joe said slowly.  “It mattered that Hoss was there today.  I never can feel that anything really bad is going to happen when I’ve got big brother there to watch my back.  And I know, that’s no excuse for turning my back.”

He was rewarded for that with a giggle, if a faint one.

“But Hoss has been pulling me out of scrapes for as long as I can remember, so—there’s that.  I know we probably looked pretty relaxed in there, but—it wasn’t all true.  Some of it’s practice.  If you get panicky you can’t think straight or do anything, so we’ve learned to push it down.  And we probably pushed it down even more for each other, you know.  I don’t want to worry him and he doesn’t want to worry me.  But it all comes back around eventually, after everything’s over.  That’s just normal, I think.”

He drew in a breath, stroked his fingers through her hair.  He might be about to say too much, but she was quiet, listening and—she was easy to talk to.  “Cochise didn’t need me tonight, out in the barn.  I needed him.  There’s something—steadying, about horses.  I’ve ridden away from a lot of dangerous situations, and sometimes after we get home again, it helps to go out and talk to my horse.  Remind myself everything’s all right now.  That whatever threat was happening is all over, because we’re back home and we’re all right.

“There wasn’t much time to think today – it all happened pretty fast, really – but that’s what I think about, in a bad situation, if there’s time to think.  I think about getting home again.  I tell myself that the bad part’s not going to last forever.  And when it’s all over, I’m going home to put Cochise in the stable and come in here to sit at the table with Pa and Hoss and Adam, and we’ll eat one of Hop Sing’s fried chicken dinners, and sit around the fire in the evening, and—and everything’ll be the way it’s supposed to be.  Thinking about all that, remembering that – it helps.”

He almost said something else – he could say something else.  That he was realizing how much he’d like her to be in that picture too.  That when he imagined how it should be, how life was supposed to look, he wanted her there too.

But maybe that would be saying too much, especially now, when she was shook up from the day.

Though she didn’t exactly look shook up, when she lifted her head from his shoulder to smile at him.  “You’re a very lucky man, Joe Cartwright,” she whispered.

“How do you figure that?” he asked, gaze fixed on the curve of her smile.

“You have something so wonderful to think about.”

Her face was only a few inches from his and it would be the easiest thing in the world to lean in and kiss her.  He had kissed her before and he wanted to now but he knew it would mean more, here in the shadows and the intimacies of the night, than it had out among the pines and the sun, or earlier with Hoss looming from across the room.  There would be no pretending that it wasn’t serious, that it didn’t matter, that it was all just a bit of fun – and if he kissed her now, he also knew he was going to go all the way over the edge and ask her to stay, ask her to marry him, to be there at the center of the picture.

Why exactly had he ever thought he had a choice about ending up in this place eventually?  And why had he thought that it was a place he didn’t want to go?

He didn’t move, all but holding his breath, and if she leaned in even the tiniest bit—but instead she looked away, dropping her head on his shoulder again, and the moment had passed.  Not the feeling.  That, he suspected, was here to stay.  But the moment for doing anything about it had slipped away.

If he was smart, he’d go upstairs to bed, right now.  But she still felt warm and right beside him, and he tightened his arm around her, rested his cheek against the top of her head, and stayed.

 

Hoss was the first one to the stairs the next morning, automatically glancing down into the room below.  He stopped with one foot on the top step.

Adam bumped into him from behind, started to ask, “What are you—”

“Shh,” Hoss hushed him, waving at him with one hand.  “Look down there,” he whispered.  “Ain’t that just about the cutest thing you ever saw?”

Little Joe was asleep on the settee, still in his clothes, one leg dangling down to rest one socked foot on the floor.  And Liza was curled up between him and the back of the couch, wrapped in a purple robe, asleep with her head on his chest.

“Pity,” Adam drawled, “I don’t think we can dump water on Joe without hitting Liza too.”

Hoss grimaced at him.  “Now don’t go down there and embarrass ‘em.”

“How do you plan to get breakfast, then?”

“Oh.  Huh.”  That was a problem.  “Well…”

Pa’s hand closed on Hoss’ shoulder, and he could see him grab Adam with the other.  He pulled them back away from the stairs.  “You boys come back around the corner and start making some noise.”

“Oh—right, Pa, good idea,” Hoss said, nodding.

There followed an unlikely amount of banging of doors and loud discussion about the prospects for breakfast, and by the time they were hitting the stairs again Little Joe was sitting up, running a hand over his face.  Liza was nowhere in sight, the guest bedroom door firmly closed.

“Morning, Little Joe,” Ben said heartily as they all descended into the great room.  “Get up early today?”

“I, um…”  Joe looked down at his wrinkled clothes, and Hoss could all but see him trying to decide if he could carry off agreeing with that.  He must have decided against it.  “I went out to check on the horses, and I must’ve…fallen asleep out here.”

“Liza up yet?” Adam asked, tone entirely too innocent.

“No…” Joe said, gaze going to the guest bedroom door.  “No, I don’t think so.”

Hoss smirked, and headed for the table.  Hop Sing, who must have been waiting in the kitchen, was already bringing out a platter of bacon.  And that made everything right in the world.

 

Liza sat in the guest bedroom, holding her head in her hands.  She should be getting dressed, she should be going out to eat breakfast and make pleasant conversation and compliment Hop Sing on his breakfast.

Instead she was sitting in here, asking herself – just what was she doing?  What could she possibly have been thinking?

There had been nothing casual, nothing light and fun and easy, about sitting on a couch with Joe Cartwright in the middle of the night, talking about fears and family.  There was nothing unimportant and meaningless about falling asleep with him.

It had been perfect.  It had felt so, so perfect.

But now it was morning, and she had to get a grip on herself.  She had to be sensible.

He wasn’t serious.  She had been telling herself that day after day, and somehow hadn’t noticed the increasing amount of desperation in the words.

But he was Little Joe Cartwright, who charmed every girl in town, and just because he was currently charming her – the only saving grace in it all was that it wasn’t serious.  Because of course this was all going to end.  And she was only going to get out alive from that ending if it wasn’t serious.

He hadn’t been serious about Ellie or Jennifer.  Two beautiful girls who were the daughters of prominent families in town, friends with his family – perfect matches, in other words.  If he wasn’t going to be serious about them, it was rank folly and egotism to imagine he could ever be serious about her.

He hadn’t married those girls he’d been engaged to, the ones who had been mentioned in the Enterprise.  She didn’t know just what had happened, but he wasn’t married.

Tomorrow, or next week, he was going to move on.  He was going to catch sight of some other pretty girl, and that would be that.  And she couldn’t even blame him because they weren’t serious.

She pressed a hand against her chest, and wondered how the idea could hurt so much, when she had always known it would turn out this way eventually.  She would deal with it, somehow, when it came.  Surely she could handle knowing that he had moved on.

She wasn’t sure she could handle watching it though.

She didn’t want to be at some future dance, watching while Joe swung some other girl around the floor.

She could have some sympathy for Ellie and Jennifer – if they hadn’t been quite so transparently malicious.

But if she didn’t want to watch Joe turn his charm towards some other girl—then she had to leave.  Quickly.  Before she fell altogether in love with him.

 

22.

Getting caught asleep on the settee wasn’t the best way to start the morning – but Joe was in too good a mood to care much about that.  He dashed upstairs to change clothes, got back down while the bacon was still hot, and was already at the table when Liza emerged from the guest bedroom.  She was dressed too, hair pinned up, looking so much the proper young woman again that he could almost believe he’d dreamed up the soft-edged familiarity of the night before.  Except her parasol was still sitting on the chair where she’d left it.

Neither of them made reference to the previous night – what were they going to say, with the whole family gathered around the breakfast table?  But Joe couldn’t even find it in him to resent that either.  Liza was sitting next to him and his family was gathered around to talk and laugh over flapjacks, and the sun was shining and the birds seemed extra loud and everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be.

And he’d been down this road enough to know that the sun probably wasn’t extra bright and the birds were probably doing their usual bird things, and everything he felt had much more to do with the girl sitting next to him than anything else – and there was nothing at all wrong with that either.

They were getting down to the last of the pancakes and Joe was angling for a way to convince Pa that he should take Liza out on a picnic today when there was a knock at the front door.  Joe jumped up to his feet to answer it before Pa could tell him to – because he was full of energy today despite the uneven sleep of the night before, and because, more importantly, he didn’t want to look like a child being reminded by his father to go do a chore.

He pulled open the front door to find Roy Coffee on the other side – and even though a visit from the sheriff didn’t often bring good news, he was feeling too good this morning to expect any trouble.  “Good morning, Roy!  You’re just in time for flapjacks, if Hoss hasn’t snagged the last few.”

“They’re still on the platter,” Hoss spoke up from the table.  “I only ate a dozen.”

“Well, thank you kindly,” Roy said, following Joe towards the dining room.  “But maybe just a cup of coffee.  I only wanted to stop by to give you the latest update on those bank robbers.”

“No troubles, are there?” Pa asked from the head of the table.

Joe dropped back into his seat next to Liza, while Roy took the empty seat at the foot, accepting a cup of coffee from the ever-efficient Hop Sing.  “No, everything’s going along just fine,” Roy said.  “I telegraphed the sheriff over in Placerville, and he’s coming personally to escort them back for trial.  So they’ll be off our hands soon enough.  But I wanted to let you know especially that the bank put up a thousand-dollar reward for that gang.  Seems to me that Hoss, Little Joe and Miss Liza here are the rightful claimants on that.”

“A thousand dollars?” Hoss said, and whistled.  “Even split three ways, that’d pay for the new saddle I was wanting – and a real fine night on the town—”

“And fill in your bank account nicely,” Pa cut in.

Hoss grinned.  “Oh sure, Pa, that too.”

Meanwhile Joe was thinking that a few hundred dollars would go a long way towards building a house somewhere down the road, supposing he wanted to do that – or to buy a wedding ring…

“I certainly didn’t expect I’d be giving you reward money for those bank robbers,” Roy remarked, looking across the table at Liza.  “Not when I half-believed you were one of them!”

Joe’s fork, aiming for a last bite of pancake, skidded across his plate with a clatter.

“You thought I was a bank robber?” Liza said confusedly.

“Well, I had word that one of that gang was a woman,” Roy explained, “and you did pass through Placerville on the right day.”

“Oh – yes, I remember, you mentioned that you keep track of any strangers coming into town,” Liza said, and Joe told himself that was fine, perfectly fine, she could understand the sheriff doing his job.

But why take chances?  “You know, why don’t we go for a walk?” he said, starting to rise from the table.

“And I do appreciate it, Ben,” Roy went blithely on, “you inviting Miss Liza to stay here to prevent her from leaving town while I was still trying to find those robbers.”

Joe sank back into his chair and put one hand over his face.  This was not going to be fine.  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that everyone else, including Liza, was looking at Pa now, who was trying and failing to look at ease.

“It wasn’t exactly like that, Roy,” Pa said, smile straining.

“You remember, Ben,” the sheriff insisted, “I told you I was going to have to ask Miss Montgomery to stay in town, and you offered to invite her out to the ranch so I wouldn’t need to reveal my suspicions – which turned out to be unfounded, of course.”

“You invited me here,” Liza said slowly, “because you thought I was a bank robber?”

“We never really thought that,” Pa said, in tones meant to be reassuring.  “We were aware of the possibility, but—”

“I thought you were being hospitable,” Liza said, voice rising, “showing me around, letting me stay on here, but you were all just – keeping watch on me for the sheriff?  I suppose if I’d tried to leave, you would have had me arrested to prevent it?”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” Joe tried.

He heartily wished he’d kept his mouth shut when she turned his way and demanded, “Did you know?  About all of this?”

He hesitated.  “Well…”

She flung her napkin down on the table.  “Of course you did.  You all did.  Of course every Cartwright knew, why would I ever think otherwise?”

“You’re making more of this than it is,” Adam spoke up.

“We really didn’t think you were a bank robber,” Hoss threw in.

“The situation was complicated,” was Pa’s offering.

None of it helped.  Liza shoved away from the table, standing up.  “Excuse me.  I suppose I can roam freely now, since you know I didn’t murder anyone in Placerville.  I won’t bother mentioning the smuggling ring I run in San Francisco!”

She didn’t wait for further replies, just slammed out the front door, leaving silence behind her.

“Well,” Pa said after a moment, “that went worse than we might have hoped.”

“I am sorry, Ben,” Roy said worriedly – now he got worried; he could have picked up on something sooner!  “I seem to have muddled things here, but I didn’t expect…”

“No, it’s all right, Roy,” Pa said, waving a hand at him.  “It’s our mess.  We – I should have known it was going to create problems, inviting a guest while you suspected her of something.  I’ll go talk to her—”

“I’ll go talk to her,” Joe said, standing up, because hadn’t everyone else said enough?  His defiance wavered, though, when Pa looked at him, so he added, “Let me do it, Pa.”

He got a nod from the head of the table, and then he was out the door too.

He caught up to her where the front yard was merging into the road, and wondered where she was planning to go.  “Liza, honey—”

“Go away,” she said without breaking stride or turning around.  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If you’d let me explain—”

Then she whirled around, glaring at him, and said, “If you give me the Joe Cartwright charm right now, I swear I’ll slap you!”

He backed up a step, hands lifted in the universal gesture of surrender.  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been slapped by a girl, but it also wouldn’t help anything.  “Right.  Sure.  We don’t have to talk.  If you’d rather brood, there’s a great rock for brooding down that way – you remember, from that first picnic we took?”

“Did you kiss me that day so that I’d reveal where I’d hidden the stolen money?”

“Of course not,” he protested.  “Pa didn’t even tell me about the whole thing until that evening.  And I didn’t need that as a reason to kiss you.”  He’d had so many better reasons.

She stared at him for a long moment, face tight and shoulders tense, until finally she let out a breath, turned, and started walking again.  In the right direction for the big rock.

He waited a beat, then followed.  She didn’t look at him, but she didn’t tell him to go away again either.

They walked in silence, and he studied the stiff set of her back, considered the pain that had been in her eyes, and tried to work out how he was going to fix this.

 

Liza wondered how much Joe had calculated on the big rock as a destination.  She hadn’t had any idea where she was going herself, so it seemed as good a place to walk to as any.  But it was a long walk, and while she started out in a fine fury, by the time they got there, walking without a word between them, the first intensity had burned off.

She halted staring at the big flat rock, then finally stepped up onto it – she could feel Joe hovering behind her but she didn’t give him so much as a glance to suggest she’d like help – and sat down.  She had intended to tell him to leave again once they got here, but now that they were actually here…  She sighed.  “Come on, then.”

He still didn’t say anything, just sat down next to her – and the rock was big enough to do that without even crowding.

She felt so stupid.  Of course there was a reason for these past couple weeks, of course the Cartwrights had some hidden motive for inviting her here, for being so warm and welcoming.  She had told herself all along that that was just how they were – and she still believed that, underneath the hurt feelings – but some part of her had believed that maybe, after all, some of it really did have to do with her.  Because they liked her.  Not because they thought she could be a criminal.

The rock was a good spot for brooding.  The clouds scudded by overhead and the blue lake stretched out towards the horizon before them and the breeze rustled through the pines in the meadow behind them, where they’d had that first picnic…when apparently Joe hadn’t known yet, that she might be a bank robber.

That did help some.

She sighed, rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead, kept her gaze firmly fixed on the expanse of water, and said, “All right.  Go ahead and explain.”

“No one actually thought you were a bank robber,” Joe said at once.  “I told Pa you weren’t, as soon as he brought the idea up.  Hoss did too.  And Pa didn’t really think you were either, he just said Roy said it was possible.  We should have told you about the whole thing, but Roy asked us not to and Pa wanted to respect that.  He’s really big on respecting the law, you know, and Roy’s a good friend too.”

“Of course.”  Obviously their loyalty was to their friend, to the sheriff, not to the stranger woman who’d landed here by accident.  She didn’t blame them for that.  “You had something on your mind, that one day at breakfast…”  He had even been talking about the bank robbery.  How had she not seen it?

“Yeah – that was the morning after Pa told me all of this.  But by the time I talked to you for a couple of minutes it was so obviously ridiculous – well, I pretty much stopped thinking about it after that.”

She nodded slowly.  That should help.  Surely all of that should help.  And yet…  She already had her hands on her knees and now she laced her fingers together, tightly.  She couldn’t look at him as she said, “It wasn’t so much the idea that any of you thought I was a bank robber that I didn’t like.  It was…I really thought your father invited me here because of me.  That you all wanted me here because of me.”

His voice softened.  “Hey – Liza, honey – of course we did.  We do.  Pa would’ve invited you to stay even if he’d never talked to Roy.  And if he didn’t, I would have.  You know that, right?”

She finally peeked at him.  His green eyes had softened too, expression intent.  “I guess so.  Yes.”  Maybe there was some truth in it, at least.  She sighed.  “I should apologize to your father, for slamming out like that.”

“He won’t hold it against you.”  He half-smiled.  “Plenty of strays have done a lot worse.”

Being one of the Cartwrights’ long parade of rescued strays was better than being a suspected bank robber.  And it was all anyone had ever promised to begin with – that they were being kind to her because they were kind people.

He was still looking at her, and she could feel herself slipping under the spell of those green eyes and that slight smile and – and she remembered with a shock as sudden as a splash of cold lake water all her resolutions of the morning, everything that had been overwhelmed by this new upset about the bank robbery.

She never should have let him follow her out to a secluded spot by the lake.  It might be a good spot for brooding, but it was undeniably romantic too.

So maybe she was a rescued stray, but she was about as rescued as she was ever going to be, and the flat fact of the matter was that if she let this go on any longer – Joe Cartwright was very much his own kind of danger, much more complicated and far more earth-shaking than a broken carriage wheel or even a vague accusation of bank robbery.  Maybe even more than the bank robbers themselves.

Joe was leaning in towards her with a particular look on his face and she knew he was about to kiss her and – she turned her head away, looked fixedly out at the lake, and said, rather abruptly for all that she tried to sound casual, “I was thinking I should really be going home soon.  Not because of all this business this morning, just – I was already thinking it.”

Out of the corner of her eye she could see him sit back, frowning.  “You mean go back to San Francisco?”

“Yes, of course.  That’s where I live.”  These words came out a bit acid, because she was picturing her little boarding house room, the back alley her window faced on.  It would seem very small and close, after these great sweeping mountains and meadows.  And lonely, too, which was funny, when the city was so much more crowded than these empty expanses.

“Listen,” Joe said, “just because it didn’t work out getting a story about Holloway’s mine, that doesn’t mean we can’t try something else.  Let me think a bit—”

“Joe, it was never going to work,” she said softly.  “I appreciate that you tried, but—Raleigh doesn’t want to hire me.  He doesn’t believe I can do the job, and no news story is going to change his mind.  I’m better off in San Francisco.  There are more newspapers, more opportunities.  And I do have a job there, one that’s still expecting me back.”

Joe didn’t respond at once, and as the silent moment stretched longer, Liza dared to look at him.  His gaze was on the lake, still frowning.

She drew in a careful breath.  “I suppose I should—”

“You wouldn’t have to go, you know,” he said, turning again to face her, eyes narrowing.  “Even if you don’t get that job.”

“That was always the plan, the reason I came here.  Without the job – I have to go home.”

“Don’t go back to San Francisco,” Joe said, voice roughened with emotion, leaning in closer again.  “Stay here.  With me.”

She had to look away again, because she already half-knew what he was saying, but he couldn’t—really mean—  She managed a laugh but it sounded forced and false.  “Surely strays don’t stay forever.”

“You could.”  He seized her hands, fingers wrapping around hers and she had to look back at him, at the sudden intensity burning in his green eyes.  “I love you.  Stay here—and marry me.”

Everything inside of her froze, suspended on a cliff’s edge and she didn’t know what to think or to feel.  She hadn’t expected—this.  She hadn’t thought this was even a possibility, but if she said yes—she could have all of it.  The Ponderosa, this family, and—Joe.

She wanted this, wanted it so much that it made her dizzy, and she knew she wasn’t on the edge of falling in love with him, she was over the cliff and plummeting down and—and surely her metaphor was wrong, it ought to be like flying, not like falling and falling and—

But what if this didn’t actually change anything?

And with that thought, she crashed to the ground.

Because—he had known her two weeks and he was proposing marriage.  How could two weeks possibly be long enough to know a person, to decide to marry them?

They had said all along that they weren’t serious.  He had half-suspected her of bank robbery for most of that time too, even if he said he didn’t believe it.

A marriage proposal didn’t suddenly make a relationship serious.  In the right moment, in the right circumstances—didn’t it just show that the man proposing didn’t take any of this seriously enough?

And that made so much more sense.  It made so much more sense to believe that Joe Cartwright, who chased all the girls and had multiple broken engagements behind him, proposed too quickly, too easily, and was sure to regret it later.  That made more sense than believing she was the one girl he really wanted to marry.

A broken engagement would be even worse than ending everything now.  Or if, somehow, they did make it to the altar, and then he regretted it farther on—that would be the worst thing of all.  That would be horrible for him, for her, for his entire family.

So that meant there was only one thing she could reasonably say, only one possible answer.  And even though it felt like tearing her own heart out, she said it.

“No.”

 

Joe was not accustomed to hearing no.  From his family, sometimes, but he could usually charm his own way with most other people, and he especially didn’t hear a lot of no’s from women.  Sure, he’d had plenty of relationships that had ended up there, but they didn’t usually start with flat no’s.

“But—I don’t understand,” he said blankly.  “I thought we…”

She pulled her hands away and he wanted to hold on but didn’t.  She looked out at the lake, and her voice didn’t sound exactly right as she said, “It’s been—lovely, but we were never serious.”

“I know – at first, but – things changed.”  For him, anyway.  It had changed for him.

And it wasn’t like he’d ever really not been serious.  Hoss hadn’t believed that for a second.

She shook her head.  “How many women have you been serious about before?”

He hadn’t been expecting that one, but maybe—Jennifer and Ellie had talked to her back at the dance, and of course—  “It isn’t like that—you’re different.”

She half-smiled.  “And how many women have you told that?”

“That’s not important, this is about you, and us—”

“How many women have you proposed to?”

He knew that number.  He didn’t need to stop and count for that number, but he also had a bad, bad feeling that eight was not a number that was going to prove his commitment to her.  “None of this matters now—”

“So it’s that many,” she said softly.

He was losing this—argument?  How had a proposal turned into an argument?  “Liza, I want to marry you.  It doesn’t matter what girls I knew before I even met you!”

She was shaking her head.  “How can you want to marry me?  It’s been a couple of weeks!”

“Right.  Two weeks.”  How often had he ever waited that long before?  “I know what I feel – when it’s right, you know.”

“But how many times have you known before, and been wrong?”

There was no answer to that.  Because the real problem here was not what he knew – clearly it was what she felt.  “What if,” he said slowly, dragging his hands through his hair, “we just wipe out the last ten minutes?  What if all I suggest is that you—stay for another week?  See what happens?”

“We’ll just drive each other mad that way,” she whispered.  “You’ll just be wondering all the time if I’ve changed my mind and I won’t be able to move without wondering what it makes you think and—”  She shook her head.  “And I have a job and a room I’m renting and – I have a life in San Francisco, one I need to get back to you.  I can’t just—drop everything.”

Wouldn’t she, though?  Drop everything, if she really wanted to?  If this actually mattered to her?

“Right,” he said, the word stiff and sharp.  “Of course.  I expect you’ll need to – make travel arrangements.  The stage runs every afternoon.”

She nodded, gaze on her hands.  “Then it’s probably best if we go back to the house.  If I pack up now, there should be time to make the stage.”

“Sure,” he said hollowly, even though he hadn’t really been suggesting she should take the stage this afternoon.  Maybe it was better though, if she was in that much of a rush to go.  “Wouldn’t want to keep you from your life any longer.”

 

23.

They walked back to the house in silence.  They hadn’t talked walking the other way either, but this was even worse.  It seemed like a mark of how badly everything had turned out that even charming Joe Cartwright no longer had anything to say.  Liza snuck glances at him, and he wasn’t looking at her.  Just looking straight ahead, jaw tight and gaze set on the path in front of them.

Maybe she was making a mistake.  After all – if he didn’t really care, then he wouldn’t care about being turned down, right?

But that didn’t really follow.  Of course he wouldn’t like to be told no.  How many women could possibly have told him no?  And – it wasn’t that she thought he didn’t care at all about her.  It was just – it couldn’t be enough for a marriage, for a commitment for a lifetime.  Not this fast.  Not this easily.

Not her.  Not when he could choose any woman he wanted – and apparently had, many times before.

He halted when they came to the front yard of the ranch house, and without looking at her he finally spoke.  “I think I’ll stop in the barn for a minute.”  His voice was cool and impersonal and distant, as distant as the expression on his face.  “I’d like to check on my horse.”

And then, at last, his gaze flicked to her face, just for an instant and away again, and something in that distant expression cracked a tiny bit.  And in what was probably going to be the last moment of shared understanding she ever had with Joe Cartwright, Liza knew that he was thinking about the previous night, about telling her that he liked to visit Cochise after some crisis was done, that it meant that everything was all right again – and he knew she was thinking of it, and he didn’t like that, her knowing.

“Of course,” she said, nodding, and made herself turn away.  She almost wavered.  Because – because if he cared enough to need to go talk to his horse – and the memory of the previous night was suddenly vivid in her mind – and if he said anything else, right now –

But no.  After a few seconds there was only the sound of his boots retreating towards the barn.  So she took a deep breath, and continued on into the house.

She had already noted that the sheriff’s horse was gone from the yard.  Inside, she saw Hoss walking across the great room, an apple from the bowl on the table in one hand.  He stopped by the settee, looked at her in surprise.

“Hello, Liza.  That was pretty quick.”

Had it been?  It didn’t feel like it.  It had been long enough to upend everything.

No.  That wasn’t true.  It had only confirmed everything, made real what she’d decided earlier in the morning.  She and Joe were always going to end eventually.  All she could do was get out as quickly as possible, before it got even worse.  And she hadn’t been early enough to get out bloodlessly anyway.

There was the scrape of a chair over the floor and she turned her head to see Ben standing up from his desk.  “About earlier,” he said, coming around to the front of the desk, “I do want to apologize—”

“No, it’s all right, really,” she said hurriedly, because all of them being kind wasn’t going to help.  “I’m sorry – I overreacted.  Joe—”  She swallowed.  “He, um, explained things.  And – it’s all right.”

Ben frowned, face still concerned.  “All the same, I don’t like the idea that we were being dishonest with a guest, or that you feel we somehow misled you—”

“Really it’s all right,” she said, a little desperately.  It would be so much easier if they’d all be terrible, lying and deceiving her.  That would make it far easier to leave.  “Joe explained it, and – and then we got to talking a little more and – I decided it’s time I went back home.”

Hoss’s face screwed up in confusion.  “You mean San Francisco?”

“Yes, San Francisco.  Where I live.”  It wasn’t fair to be irritated with Hoss about this, but – in San Francisco, they thought their city was the most important place in the world.  All the Cartwrights plainly viewed it as some distant satellite in the universe centered around the Ponderosa.

“I wouldn’t like to think,” Ben said slowly, “that the events with the sheriff this morning made you feel you had to go…”

“No, it’s not that.  I was already thinking I should be getting home.  I should try to catch the afternoon stage, so I’d better pack things up – get a basket for Brontë.”

She wondered suddenly if Hoss was going to take the kitten back.  If leaving so abruptly like this – and especially if he worked out what had happened with Joe – somehow negated her right to take anything with her.

But no, Hoss was too kind for that.  He just nodded and said, “We’ll miss you around here.”

And that made the ache she was already feeling even worse.  She’d been focusing on Joe, on how much she was going to miss him, how much worse that would get if she stayed any longer – but she’d miss Hoss too.  The whole family.  The whole ranch, even.  “Thank you,” she murmured, and fled for the guest bedroom.

She was only at the door when Hoss asked, “What became of Joe anyway?”

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob.  “He wanted to check on his horse.”  And did Hoss and Ben know, what that meant?

All Hoss said was, “Right.  Thanks,” but then he was heading towards the door, towards the barn.  So he probably did know, and surely that was good, if he was going to go talk to Joe.  Because he could still do that.

Liza squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then pushed open the bedroom door and went inside to begin packing.

 

Joe was standing in the shadowy barn, face pressed against the side of Cochise’s warm neck, when he heard the unmistakable clomp of Hoss’ big boots in the yard.  Joe straightened up quick, grabbed for the brush hanging from a hook on the wall nearby, and started running it over Cochise’s side.  The horse turned his head and nickered at him, as if to say that he wasn’t fooled.

“Little Joe?  You in here?”

“Yeah, just taking care of Cochise,” Joe said, managing a steady voice, keeping his gaze fixed on his horse’s familiar black and white pattern.  He could probably draw it from memory, if he could draw.

The clomp of boots drew closer, and Joe could tell by the creak of the wood when Hoss leaned on the stall divider.  “Liza just came in the house and said she’s going back to San Francisco.”

No easing into the subject – but at least he wouldn’t have to bring it up.  “Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, what are you gonna do about it, little brother?”

Joe squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again, and continued brushing Cochise with renewed force.  “Nothing,” he said savagely.  “I’m not doing anything about it.”

There was blank confusion in Hoss’ voice.  “But—I thought you two—”

“She turned me down, all right?” Joe all but snarled, finally turning to face Hoss, even though big brother would surely be able to see how red his eyes were.  It didn’t mean anything.  He cried easy.  “I asked her to marry me and she turned me down.  But that’s all right, it doesn’t matter.  Little Joe, he’s always falling in love, always bouncing right back and trying again.  That’s the family joke, isn’t it?”

Hoss had his worried squint on, and it didn’t make Joe feel any better.  “Hey, you know nobody ever meant—”

“But it’s true, right?  There’s been so many women.  And when they leave me or pick someone else or die, I just get right back up and keep on smiling and fall in love all over again.”  He hadn’t managed all of that with a steady voice, but what did it matter now?  He just charged on ahead.  “And this one, now, this one got a hold of the idea that I’ve chased an awful lot of women.  So when I proposed to her, when I told her that I loved her—she didn’t believe me.  Didn’t believe I could mean it.”

Hoss scratched at the back of his neck.  “Well – you did say at first that you weren’t serious, but I never thought…”

Because Hoss had understood, all along, better than he did himself.  But Liza – she didn’t understand.  “But she did think I meant it.  And she didn’t believe me today, that anything had changed.”  And the really damning thing….  “And if she doesn’t think we were anything serious, then we weren’t.”

Hoss grimaced.  “You want me to talk to her?  Try to explain—”

“No!” Joe flared up.  “If there’s one area of my life where I don’t need my big brother to shove himself in, it’s this one!”

Cochise nickered at him, a disapproving sound this time, and Joe felt a warm nose press up against his back.  His shoulders slumped, and he turned far enough to fit an arm around Cochise’s head, to scratch between the horse’s ears.  “Sorry, Cooch,” he whispered.  Then he cleared his throat and said, “Sorry, Hoss.  I shouldn’t have…”

“Nah, that’s all right,” Hoss said.  “Nobody thinks too clearly when a romance has gone sour.  I knocked you across a saloon once, remember?”

Yeah, when it came out that Helen Layton was just after the Cartwright money.  Joe was pretty sure big brother still felt bad about doing it.  “That’s all right too.”  He ran a hand over his face.  “She’s not like Helen,” he said softly, and wondered if it would be any easier if Liza was.  Or if she had turned out to be a bank robber after all.  “I mean—it’s not like it wasn’t real.  It just—wasn’t what I thought it was.”  It wasn’t what he had wanted it to be.

“I dunno, it really seemed like…”

“Yeah.”  Seemed that way to him too.  Joe shook his head, and turned to reach for the blanket folded over the side of the stall.  He flung it over Cochise’s back, so that he had his own back to Hoss again when he said, “She wants to take the afternoon stage.  Can—you drive her to Virginia City?  I’ve got—things I need to do.”

Mostly, an overpowering need to get out of here, to find a trail and just ride and ride and ride.

“Sure, little brother,” Hoss said quietly.  “I can take her to the stage.  If you’re sure.”

Joe had seen other women off before, other women he’d flirted with or liked a lot or even loved.  He’d watched them choose not him, for one reason or another, watched them ride out of his life and disappear into the distance.  He’d sat at more than his fair share of deathbeds too, and said those good-byes.

He had really tried not to put himself into that position again.  As if that was ever really going to work.

And now, he was tired.  He was so tired of all of it, so tired of losing people.  And he couldn’t bring himself to watch this one go.

“I’m sure,” he said, heaving his saddle up onto Cochise’s back, and swiped a hand across his eyes.  “Yeah.  I’m sure.”

 

When Liza was ready to leave, Hoss, Ben and Adam were all there to say good-bye and wish her well.  The farewells were gracious, appropriate to the hospitality of the Ponderosa.  Even Hop Sing emerged from his kitchen to press a bundle of food on her for the trip.  The only awkward moment was when Hoss tried to explain that Joe had somewhere else to be, something else important he had to do.  And the entire lack of reaction from Ben and Adam made it clear that someone, either Hoss or Joe, had filled them in too.

No one suggested that she come back and visit again, but that was only to be expected.  She had already known that she wouldn’t.

Hoss drove her to Virginia City, keeping up a steadily pleasant, meaningless conversation along the way.  Liza didn’t say much, just let the words wash over her.  It was lucky that Hoss was so nice.  That the whole family was.  That was lucky.  Except for the part where it gave her even more to regret leaving.

But she couldn’t marry a man after two weeks.  Especially not one who would surely be on to another woman by next week, or the week after.  He couldn’t have spent too long missing any of those other girls, the ones he’d been engaged to before.  The sheer numbers involved – he must have been moving quickly.

They arrived in Virginia City just ahead of the afternoon stage.  There was no last-minute crisis, no incident at the final moment that forced a different path.  No man on a black and white paint thundered down the street for one final word.  Liza bought her stage ticket, and Hoss very kindly helped her with her bags when the coach arrived.

Once her trunk was loaded, there didn’t seem to be anything to do but wait awkwardly by the coach with the cat basket until the driver was ready to go.  Maybe it would be better to just get in, wait inside, but somehow—Liza found herself reluctant to take that final step.

“Hoss?” she said suddenly, because this was her last chance.  “Joe didn’t really have something important to do this afternoon, did he?”

The big man shifted awkwardly.  “Well—he might’ve.”

She nodded, looked down at her hands.  “It’s all right.  I understand.”  She hesitated, then in a very small voice said, “Would you tell him—that I’ll miss him?”  She would, too, so much that it scared her.  But it had to be better to miss him when he wasn’t there than to lose him while he still was.

Hoss only looked more uncomfortable.  “I dunno if that’s a good idea.  Might sort of—make the might’ve been’s even worse, you know?”

“All right,” she said softly, because what right did she have to make any decisions at all for Joe?  His brother ought to know what was best for him.  From some unlikely place she managed to dredge up a smile.  “Well, at least I can tell you that I’ll miss you too.”  Differently, but she would miss Hoss.  It had been—so up and down and intense with Joe, while his brother had been as steady as a rock, unfailingly warm and kind and welcoming.

“Aw, you don’t have to say that,” Hoss said, smile bashful.  “It’s been real nice having you around too.  I’m sorry it didn’t—turn out better.”

“Me too,” Liza whispered, and then she had to get into the stagecoach, because she was going to start crying in another minute.

She climbed inside, stowed the cat basket with Brontë inside under the seat, alongside Hop Sing’s bundle of sandwiches.  She took the seat by the window, not because she wanted to look out but because she wanted the corner to lean against.

Two other passengers boarded, and then the driver was climbing up to his seat in the front, tugging the reins and starting the horses off.

Liza closed her eyes as the stagecoach lurched into motion, beginning its journey back towards everything she’d ever known before.  She didn’t want to watch the pine trees fade in the distance.

 

Joe didn’t dismount from Cochise as he waited, high up on the bluff overlooking the stage route out of Virginia City.  His timing was good, and it was only a few minutes before the stagecoach came into view.  From here he couldn’t see anyone inside the coach, but he hadn’t expected that.  He could see, even at this distance, Liza’s red leather trunk, in among the other baggage strapped to the stage’s roof.

So that was that.

He watched as the stage rumbled past on the road below, watched as it continued on down the trail.  Watched until it disappeared around a fold of hillside.

Joe swiped the back of his hand across his burning eyes and didn’t bother telling himself that had anything to do with the dust.

She was hardly the first woman to leave him.  Might be she wouldn’t be the last.  He knew that, but it didn’t seem to weigh much right now.

She had thought two weeks wasn’t long enough, and he could almost wish it had been shorter.  Maybe then he wouldn’t feel as badly about it.  He wouldn’t have been able to see so clearly how much she just – fit.  A pretty girl who laughed at his jokes, who liked Hoss and stood up to Adam, who appreciated the Ponderosa enough to make Pa happy and who kept her head in a crisis…  He wasn’t going to find another one like that in a hurry.  He’d done enough looking to know that.

He drew in a long, slow breath, pulled his hat down lower over his eyes.  He’d ride away from here – take a good, long ride.  Then he’d go back home.  He’d put Cochise in the stable and go inside the house.  He’d sit at the table with Pa and Hoss and Adam, and maybe they’d eat one of Hop Sing’s fried chicken dinners.  Then they’d sit around the fire in the evening, and everything would be—the way it was supposed to be.

And this feeling, it wouldn’t last forever.  It would all be all right.  Eventually.

He patted Cochise on the neck, dug his heels into the horse’s sides.  “Come on, Cooch.  Let’s ride.”

End

 

As noted at the top, this is the first in a planned AU series – nothing has really happened that’s AU yet, but the story will continue in future installments!

For those who enjoy knowing episode references, Sam Clemens/Mark Twain met the Cartwrights in the Season 1 episode, “Enter Mark Twain.”  Joe and Hoss robbed a bank (with the best of motives) in “The Bank Run.”  Adam tells a story about paying off men in the saloon to let Joe win at arm-wrestling in “The Gamble.”  The Holloways and their mine appeared in “The Philip Diedesheimer Story.” Danny Kidd befriended Joe in “The Friendship,” a title that surely makes you think he’d keep coming back into the show, but of course he didn’t.  Vince Dagen captured Hoss and Joe during “Breed of Violence.”

Re: Joe’s many past romances…Ellie McClure (“The Showdown”), Connie McKee (“Denver McKee”), Jennifer Beale (“The Abduction”) and Carrie McClane (“The Last Viking”) all appear in rapid succession near the beginning of Season 2.  Little Joe was having a hectic few months on the romance front. His more serious romances referenced include Julia Bulette (“The Julia Bulette Story”), Amy Bishop (“The Truckee Strip”) and Laura White (“The Storm”), all victims of the Curse of the Cartwrights, dying swiftly after a proposal.  Melinda Banning’s mother threw her at Joe in “The Lady from Baltimore” and Tessa’s father did the same in “Bullet for a Bride” – which is actually set later than this story, in Season 5, but I’ve moved it earlier.  Caroline Partridge appeared in “The Guilty,” and though we don’t actually see Joe stand her up to go riding at the end of the episode, we don’t see him arrive either.  Michele Dubois appeared in “The Dowry.” Part of the goal here was to explain why Joe seems to be involved in casual flirtations with Caroline and Michele soon after the really heart-wrenching loss of Laura White.