There are a lot of reasons for a girl to want to leave the saloon business. The scant chances to get married or even just to become “respectable,” the skimpy wages and long hours, the knowledge that short skirts and low-cut bodices aren’t very flattering to a middle-aged body—any saloon girl can make a long list, but none of them meant much to me. No, I wanted to leave the Silver Dollar because I was tired of wondering if every shadow on the front door would turn into Adam Cartwright.

It didn’t matter how well I knew that Adam Cartwright wasn’t even in Nevada any more. It didn’t matter that, even if he did come in, I was sure I’d get nothing from him but a polite smile…or that if he were to offer something more, I had already promised myself I’d simply turn away. I’d spent a dozen years—not very much less than half my life—counting any day special if I caught so much as a glimpse of the man, and the habit wouldn’t break. Not, at any rate, as long as I continued to work in the place I’d last set eyes on him.

Nothing was helped any by the fact that the remaining Cartwrights seemed to have settled on the Silver Dollar as their favorite place in Virginia City. It was, admittedly, the nearest saloon to where they got their mail, the mercantile with the best range of candy, and their lawyer’s office; I could see why they came in for a quick drink on the days they were running errands. But in the old times the boys, at least, spread their attentions further afield when they spent their evenings on the town. Now it seemed the high-rolling glamour of the Sazerac and the Bucket of Blood’s rowdy gangs of miners no longer appealed to Hoss or the youngster fewer and fewer people were inclined to call “Little” Joe.

Of course, the Sazerac and the Bucket of Blood weren’t what they used to be any more either. The Comstock Lode had been worked over for nigh on a decade by now, and the “easy” riches were gone; mines reached deeper and deeper into the mountain, and water had become a constant problem. Engineers still insisted there was plenty more ore down there, and everyone had a scheme for getting at it, but all those schemes needed money, and no one seemed eager to lend it to the Silver Kings who patronized the Sazerac. Meanwhile, hours at all the mines had been cut back, so thrifty miners were staying at home and the Bucket of Blood was turning nastier. If you didn’t have plenty of friends around you there, you weren’t likely to stay long, or leave happy.

But the Silver Dollar—with me in it—went jogging along much as ever; we’d always catered more to the area’s cattlemen and ranch hands, not to mention the teamsters who hauled in everything Virginia City wanted and took out Virginia City’s silver in return. People still ate, the mines still produced—if less lavishly than before—and those farming or ranching the land nearby still preferred climbing up the mountain to shop, rather than settling for what you could find in Carson City. They still liked a quick drink before turning themselves around, and they still liked to come by for longer when they found the time. And Hoss and Joe Cartwright, hard-working though they were, found as much time as anyone, and spent it all here. I wouldn’t have minded—Hoss in particular was as good as any bartender at keeping the peace—except that I’d much rather they’d have been their brother.

I wasn’t alone in that. Hoss, after all, had a reputation for being shy with the ladies, although (saloon girls not being ladies) he mostly treated us like he did anyone else in the saloon, except for a touch of added politeness—a few extra tips of the hat and some “Ma’ams.” In contrast, these days it seemed Joe had given saloon girls up for Lent and forgotten to take them back after Easter. Since Adam’s departure he’d taken more to playing poker, which made me nervous as a new-broke mustang. We didn’t have a regular dealer at the Silver Dollar; people who wanted a game made it up among themselves. It was more or less my job to make sure that the games stayed friendly—or at least peaceful…or at least that any arguments were settled without gunplay. In the old days, having Joe add himself to a table pretty much guaranteed there’d be a fight sooner or later. The boy was friendly enough, but someone always decided he was too young, too good-looking, or too rich to be lucky as well. And he was lucky—or maybe even good at the game—and he never backed down from a fight. Sooner or later his big brothers would join in to rescue him, and though they never failed to pay their bills for damages, constantly having to make repairs was a nuisance. So I wasn’t very happy when Joe settled into one of our games for the first time after Adam had left.

But nothing happened. Well, nothing I had to help clean up, anyway.

After the pattern repeated itself a few times, I kept an even closer eye on him, and got the surprise of my life. The boy was managing that game, as much as any one player could do without cheating, and managing it to keep himself as close to breaking even as he could.

Suited me, even if at first I couldn’t figure out why the sudden change in his habits. Joe’d always been one who thought “having fun” involved a lot of physical action. Dancing, bronc-busting, a vigorous fistfight; not a placid card game ending with a few slapped backs. Adam, now, might have preferred the relative quiet…and that was when I suddenly saw the light, and felt stupid that I’d taken so long to work it all out. I did wonder briefly how long Joe’d insist on trying to fill his big brother’s boots, but that, of course, was none of my business.

Which was how matters stood when Hoss Cartwright began to find his way over to me every time he came in.

Once there, he still treated me like he would Mrs. Cameron at the mercantile, but having him do so from that close at hand was disconcerting, to say the least. When he started chatting away for what seemed like hours at a time, I felt even more perturbed. I could say yes—or no—easily enough to a man who wanted to go upstairs with me, but I’d never known someone to spend so long just talking. For that matter, I’d never picked Hoss as the sort to want to spend much time with a saloon girl, for any reason. And why on earth had he chosen one who’d never shown him any particular interest?

Not that I did anything to push him away, naturally. Like I’ve said, Hoss was good for business—the saloon’s business, anyway—and a girl certainly felt safer with him around. His chatter was interesting, too; the Cartwrights were involved with most of Virginia City’s business, one way or another, and what affected Virginia City affected the Silver Dollar, and so affected me. I soaked up information like a sponge. Some of it came as news even to Sam, our bartender, and until then he’d always been the one who told me things.

The biggest news of all, of course, was what Ben Cartwright decided to do about the flooding in the mines. While other people devised plans to dig tunnels or build pumps to drain the water away, Ben had heard rumors about an explosive that worked underwater. He’d written to Boston, asking Adam for more information, and Adam had replied with a lengthy dissertation—or so Hoss reported. “Pa, even, can’t make head nor tail of some of it, but he knows some men at the Gould and Curry got all excited reading what Adam writ, so he’s making plans to get ’em a passel of blasting oil. Nasty stuff, that—” his broad shoulders had quivered in distress—”but he’s bound and determined he’ll bring some here so these other men can try using this…nitroglycerine, Adam called it.” Hoss sounded out the unfamiliar word carefully, as if it were explosive in itself.

I’d been distracted by the mention of Adam, but the naked anxiety in Hoss’ voice reclaimed my attention. “And you wish he wouldn’t?”

“Took Adam a time to find a ship willing to carry some to San Francisco. If’n the shipping companies don’t like it as freight I reckon they have a reason,” he said quietly.

Made sense to me. Hoss usually did, of course. He might say less and talk slower than either of his brothers, but that didn’t make him stupid—though he was happy to leave people with that impression if they got it. Then again, Ben Cartwright was no fool either. “What’s got him so set on this?” I asked.

“‘Cause Adam went away, o’ course,” Hoss answered without hesitating.

I had to raise both eyebrows at him to get him to elaborate. Finally he shrugged and said, “They’re doing something together again. Pa misses that. You might not think so, the way they could get to arguing over things, but…reckon Pa misses Adam more than Joe ‘n I do, even. ‘N maybe he blames himself…thinks if he’d shown more trust in Adam, the last few years, Adam wouldn’t be gone. Doubt it, myself, but I’m not gonna waste my breath telling Pa that. Pa don’t need to hear ranching weren’t enough for Adam.”

Now he was the one looking at me like I knew things about Adam he didn’t, which was confusing. I’d been as shocked as anybody the day I learned Adam was gone; he’d always seemed settled and basically happy enough, if perhaps becoming a little anxious about finding himself a wife. Really, his still being unmarried had been the most mysterious thing about him to me—I couldn’t have been the only female in Virginia City who’d dreamed of catching his eye, after all. Apparently I’d missed something—everything important, maybe. Why, then, would Hoss think I had any keys to Adam’s state of mind?

* * * * *

Hoss was giving me the same sort of look the next day, on a hot afternoon  when most of the men were drenching their neckerchiefs in the horse trough on their way into the saloon. Joe had started to chatter about how nice it would be to have a machine some professor back East had invented that could make ice in the middle of summer—not something, I was sure, Joe would have found out about on his own. For some reason, Hoss—who was, yes, in the chair nearest mine—suddenly twisted around to face me directly and asked, “Supposin’ you had the chance to do whatever you wanted to make things better here in Virginia City, Miss Rose—what would you do?”

If I hadn’t already been thinking of Adam myself, maybe I wouldn’t have found much to say in reply. I had been thinking of Adam, though, and wondering what Hoss had meant by his comment that ranching wasn’t enough to satisfy his older brother. There was plenty else needing to be done right here besides ranching, and Adam had never shied away from trying to do it. He’d helped get square-set timbering adopted in every mine on the Comstock, and gone on to involve himself in a lot of other mining issues since then. Not to mention the work he’d done as a member of the school board…a train of thought which led me, straight as a corkscrew, right to an answer for Hoss.

“This town needs a proper tea room. If I had a mineful of money, I’d open one myself—no, a hotel. A quiet, comfortable hotel where a respectable woman could refresh herself or spend the night without fearing for her reputation or her safety, with a tea room as well as a restaurant.”

Hoss blinked at my suddenly indignant voice. The thought of forcing himself on a woman—even an unrespectable one—had undoubtedly never occurred to him, or for that matter to most of the hard-working men in the saloon that afternoon. All the same, his cautious, “Why is that, ma’am?” fed my anger further.

“No, you wouldn’t understand, would you? Well, let me tell you this, Hoss Cartwright—” and I launched into my story, one I’d been wanting to tell someone important for a good many months. Trouble was, I’d had no one to hear me. It wasn’t a matter for the sheriff—nobody’d actually been hurt, after all—and the only other man I’d been confident would listen was the one man I knew better than to tell; he was prone to get excited when his wife met with disrespect. Fortunately he wasn’t around that afternoon, because now I’d started talking I wasn’t going to stop. Hank Myers wasn’t the only person who sometimes got excited.

I’ll admit his wife wasn’t someone I much liked; she was prone to airs and graces, especially towards anyone as vulgar as a saloon girl. Respect her, however, I did. Abigail Jones (as she’d been until only a year or two ago) came into Nevada as a slip of a girl when the handful of miners around here were still looking for gold in their pans. She’d started teaching not in the elegant building Virginia City now boasted, or even in a one-room schoolhouse, but by making a circuit of the area’s scattered ranches. After the Comstock bonanza, she’d moved into a raw town crowded with miners and workmen to take their children on, and done a better job with them than most people ever realized. Airs and graces or no, she kept effortless order in her classroom and knew how to involve young minds in their lessons. The depth of her contribution to Virginia City only became clear as the school board struggled to find her permanent replacement. We all knew about the young lady who’d been tied to the flagpole in her first week, and the older man who simply expelled any student he couldn’t control. But even Joe Cartwright, who couldn’t have been an easy boy to teach, remained quiet and well-mannered in her presence, however much he might giggle once her back was turned. And even when he giggled he wasn’t really unkind. Trouble was, these days the Comstock’s very richest people actually lived in San Francisco, and visited only when they had to; their children didn’t go to school here now.

“Do you know what happens to Abigail Myers when she comes into town to do some shopping? In the afternoon before Hank can collect her? She waits in the International House’s dining room by herself with a bunch of ‘gentlemen’ sniggering about her, and when it’s busy the waiters don’t serve her, so she can’t even pretend to be drinking her tea!”

Hoss’ eyebrows came together in puzzlement. “Miss Abigail?” he said slowly. “They snigger at Miss Abigail?”

I could see why he was confused. Abigail Jones had always been splendidly above most people’s ridicule. It was a skill she’d polished at the expense of countless ill-mannered children, lulling them into thinking her unobservant.

But last winter I’d seen her with my own eyes, back ramrod straight and the bright flush of embarrassment on her cheeks, in that noisy dining room while the hotel’s fancy clientele made unkind comments, not very quietly, about her dowdy clothes and old-fashioned bonnet. I was staying there myself at the time, as the result of a complicated set of accidents which had given me a brief, surprising, and unexpectedly innocent celebrity among that same group of wealthy men, even though my first night at the hotel I’d had only a travel-stained dress and a battered carpetbag to sustain my reputation. My path had crossed Mrs. Myers’ once or twice earlier that day as we shopped, so I wasn’t surprised to see her and her small pile of packages. There was nowhere else in Virginia City for her to be once she’d made all her purchases.

“And the worst of it was how much better off she’d have been trying to get some tea right here, or even in the Bucket of Blood! You know anyone who’d tried to insult her there would have gotten a poke in the nose right away. Those miners still remember how patient she was with their children, even the slow ones who didn’t have much English.”

“Well, why didn’t she go there, then?” Hoss asked reasonably.

Even some of the men around me knew enough to join in my angry laughter.

“Abigail Jones, alone in a saloon?” one of them said, not unkindly. “She’d rather have died. Only time she ever went in one was to get her Hank out that time he was singing in here.”

Several of the saloon girls took on a soft and starry-eyed expression. Well, it had been a memorable evening. Hank had silenced the whole saloon with a song he scarcely seemed to know he was singing, in a voice more suited to the Opera House than anywhere else I knew, and Abigail Jones had swept in to claim the man who loved her with more poise and confidence than the queen of England might have shown. It was worth getting called a jezebel just to have been there.

I’d remembered that moment of past triumph when I saw her last winter, too, and despite our personal history I went over and sat beside her, made sure the waiter brought us both tea, and managed some innocent talk about the weather. She recognized me right away—more than anyone else did at the time—but was grateful enough to keep the conversation going. What’s more, on our rare encounters since then, she’d taken to favoring me with a nod and a pinched smile. Doesn’t sound like much, but compared to the cut direct, believe me, from her it was.

I don’t know how much of that winter afternoon’s anger I put into the rest of my speech to Hoss. When I’m in a real temper my words come and go without leaving much of a track in my memory; but I was certainly saying things that afternoon I usually had more sense than to bother a man’s ears with. The next thing I really remember is the sight of Hoss, mouth still slightly open but eyes sharp and thoughtful, while the rest of the circle around me were applauding, with a little laughter but a lot of sincerity. Well, Abigail Jones had taught their children too.

* * * * *

I wouldn’t see much of Hoss again for almost a month. At a slack time of year I might have worried that I’d somehow offended him, but as it happened I scarcely had time to notice. First off, Sam hired a new saloon girl, so of course I had to show her the ropes and help her settle in. She was a youngster fresh off the stagecoach from Placerville, with long blonde hair, big blue eyes and a shy smile that I knew would have all the men’s tongues hanging out right quick. To top her assets off, I soon worked out that she never needed to touch up that hair of hers, the way I did mine every week. Getting her settled was just a waste of time, of course; I’d met her sort before, and knew they never last. Within six months they’ve always found their one true love, and it’s usually no more than another month or so until they’re married—or, at the least, no longer working in a saloon. With this one my money was on married, though. The fact that she’d come straight here without even trying at the Sazerac suggested she had sensible expectations to go with her pretty face and soft voice. She called herself Dolly, which suited her—though she looked back at me blankly when I called her “Mrs. Madison” for a joke. For the sake of the man who would marry her, I hoped she knew more about cooking than about our country’s history.

About a day later, Pinkie came in from her day off laden with baked goods. Not just buns and muffins, either; fancy things like the best bakeries turned out, filled with cream or jam or sprinkled with spice-scented crumbs. She set the platter down on the bar, batting away several hands, and sighed with disappointment. “I’d hoped Hoss would be here.”

“Good thing for us he isn’t,” I commented, reaching for an eclair. It tasted even better than it looked, though I had to lick chocolate off the fingers that Pinkie’s slap had pushed into it. Pinkie watched me, scowling, which gave Dolly the chance to sneak a tea-cake off the other side of the pile. After that it was a bit of a free-for-all until all the girls had snatched themselves a sample.

It all tasted even better than it looked, to judge from the comments. Most of us wanted some more, but Sam had wedged the platter in behind the bar and wouldn’t bring it back out. “You ladies need to keep your figures,” he reminded us, licking one last crumb from the corner of his own mouth.

“Well, you’ve impressed me,” I informed Pinkie. “But if you plan on catching Hoss you’d better have some meatier bait to hand. He won’t last long on puff-pastry and whipped cream!”

She shrugged her plump shoulders. “Don’t want marriage from the man, just some money. It’s one thing to talk about tea rooms for the ladies, but if you don’t have the right goods to serve them they’ll never bother to go in. Thought he might like to know someone’s up to the task.”

“He was just asking me a question.” There was a blush under my face-paint; I knew it. She was making far too much out of a casual conversation. Any other way of thinking about what had been said was foolishness, however tempting.

Her eyes met mine. They’d been blue as Dolly’s once, but now they were fading and she couldn’t hide the little wrinkles all around them. “Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t. But I can’t stay here much longer, and I don’t want to go to the Bucket…if they’d even have me now. It’s all right for you, Lilah Rose. Everyone knows you don’t have to worry any more, but it’s different for the rest of us. Couldn’t have hurt for him to sample my pastry, now could it?”

“My job’s no safer than yours,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure that was true. She was reminding me—not very subtly—that Adam Cartwright might have had a hand in my finding a place again at the Silver Dollar after a six-month absence. From the way she talked about him to me, and sometimes to others, you’d have been justified in thinking there was quite a history behind us. It wasn’t so. He and I had first spoken to each other on a stagecoach from Sacramento last November, when I was coming back after my mother’s death and he was returning from business in San Francisco. There’d been a snowstorm, and an accident, and other things which weren’t at all like Pinkie’s romantic fantasies, but still weren’t mine to share. Afterwards, Adam had been generous to me in the casual yet carefully-thought-out way common to all the Cartwrights. He’d found a way to make me accept his money—not as payment, since there’d been nothing done that called for payment, but as recompense for the clothes I’d torn up while tending to his injuries, and the anxious moments that had followed. I was willing to concede that most likely he’d spoken to Sam about taking me back, and quite probably he’d put some money alongside those words, but I doubted that there’d been enough of either that Sam considered me a permanent hire. I was almost another year older now—and I wasn’t much younger than Pinkie.

Lately I’d taken to doing more and more of the business end—not just clearing and cleaning and sweeping, but also helping out with the books and keeping an eye on supplies. Sam was even starting to show me a few of the secret things he kept behind the bar, like the girls’ carefully watered whiskey and the stash of really good brandy. It all might come in useful when I got so old no one wanted me in his lap any more. It didn’t matter how Sam found me useful ten years from now, as long as he still found me useful. If I pinched my pennies and played my cards very carefully there might even be a chance I could buy a tiny share of the bar from him someday…if I caught him in the right mood, at the right time, and had the money close at hand.

Pretty ambitious, but aiming for that was better than wondering about hiring on at the Bucket. (If they’d have me, of course, as Pinkie had pointed out. The Sazerac wasn’t even an option for either of us by now, naturally; rich men want pretty young things to play with.) Secretly I had to admit it was much likelier I’d wind up as a bookkeeper, or some kind of clerk. Back in July, there’d been an article in a magazine I liked to read, all about a new sort of type writing machine the inventor thought would be useful for lawyers and editors. I was already laying plans for how I could learn to operate one when they reached Virginia City.

Hotels and tea rooms were entirely out of the question. Even if Pinkie and I pooled our money, there wouldn’t be enough to buy all the ingredients and equipment needed to make tea cakes in quantity. Renting a room where ladies could eat her products would require ten times the cash again. She’d have done better trying to impress a baker, I told her, and, rather wistfully, she agreed.

Joe came in not long after, with a bunch of new Ponderosa hands—all the ranches were starting to hire on in preparation for the upcoming drives, and as usual the Cartwrights seemed to be getting the cream of the lot. I noticed Dolly giving the whole crowd a careful looking-over and sighed; I had hoped to keep her through the summer, but she was being even quicker off the mark than I’d feared. Fortunately, Joe wasn’t really paying attention to any of us girls. He clearly enjoyed playing host to his crew, and appeared intent on getting to know them all. Not that all of his men were equally intent on him—one in particular, a large and cheerfully noisy fellow named Cliff who seemed to be something of a leader himself, definitely saw Dolly and got her to smile back at him.

After Joe had bought the traditional signing-on round of drinks, Sam produced Pinkie’s depleted platter of baked treats and began wrapping them up in napkins, so Joe could carry a bagful back to Hoss. Of course quite a few vanished during the process. Cliff emerged in triumph with the last eclair and offered it to Dolly, getting back his share by kissing the chocolate off her lips—a process she enjoyed, to all appearances, rather more than she should have. Joe was still looking the other way, so his competitive spirit wasn’t roused to emulation, thank goodness. Things were already quite rowdy enough without encouragement from the boss.

Maybe Joe thought so too. At any rate, he extracted his charges from the saloon sufficiently early that they could reach the Ponderosa by sundown—unlike most of the other ranches’ new hands, who looked likely to start work in the morning with bad headaches, assuming they found their way to work at all. For the rest of the evening I didn’t have time to wonder or leisure to ask anyone why Hoss hadn’t been in charge of the Cartwrights’ hiring this year. Only after we closed up, while I was washing Pinkie’s platter for her, did I work out that whether or not Hoss actually tasted any of the pastries he’d be told how good they had been. It was nice seeing Pinkie’s smile when I pointed that out to her.

* * * * *

Hoss reappeared in my life quite unexpectedly three weeks or more later, on a Sunday morning—not the best time he could have chosen. Wholesome innocence is hard to stomach on three hours’ sleep after a full night of keeping drunken, noisy men happy, but not too happy. After we closed on Saturday nights I usually changed into street clothes, caught a few hours’ sleep upstairs and didn’t try to go home until sunup—not only was that safer, but it gave my feet a chance to recover—so I was groping down the back outside stairs, only half-awake, when I realized he was waiting at the bottom, brushed and scrubbed for a church service which was still an hour or more away. With some effort, I managed to suppress a sigh.

He seemed to know how I was feeling, even so. At any rate, he said apologetically, “I’m sorry, Miss Rose, but there aren’t that many times I c’n talk to you private-like, and Adam needs some sort of answer soon. It’s about this property he’s bought, you see. He’s got an idea for it, but he wants your opinion before he goes on. Won’t take us long, I promise.”

By then we were walking straight uphill into the better part of town, an area I’d not ventured into since my brief time at the International House almost a year ago. Annoyed or not, I couldn’t help being curious. Everyone knew Adam had money and investments of his own, separate from the Ponderosa’s land, cattle, timber, and other holdings. Nobody quite knew what those investments were, or how he planned to handle them now he was no longer in Nevada. (The idea that he had become a sort of remittance man was entirely out of the question; no Cartwright would ever allow himself to become a burden to their ranch, however much he might have earned a holiday from it.) From everything we heard, Adam moved in good society back East and traveled like a gentleman of leisure; there was even talk he might go to Europe. A good many people in Virginia City would have liked to know how he was managing the trick of prosperity in times like these. I hadn’t been one of them—until now.

Hoss stopped in front of a building that had seen better days quite recently. A notice in one window indicated that everything movable inside was to have been auctioned off some days earlier. Apparently this had included cabinets and counters built into the front rooms; looking in, I could see large gaps in the wallpaper exposing layers of older paint and paper. Even so, it wasn’t hard to remember the time when this had been the most elegant place in Virginia City—and the most notorious.

“Adam took it in settlement for some debts when the last owner went bankrupt,” Hoss commented. “It was being used as a gentleman’s club—a very proper one; even Roy says so. Just not very profitable, lately. But if the mines come back to full production this fall, an’ people go back and forth from San Francisco again…he thinks this could be made into a good hotel. There’d need to be a manager, though; somebody to run it. Would you be willing?”

I ought to have said “no” at once; I knew that perfectly well. I just couldn’t. The closest I could manage was a stammered, “I…I’m not sure.”

Hoss didn’t seem either disappointed or surprised. “You think it over, Miss Rose, ma’am. And you’ll be wanting to see the contract, too; that’s still at the lawyer’s.” He surveyed the building more critically, frowning at one of the largest gaps in the paperwork—had there once been a large mirror there, or just a painting? “Place needs a lot of doing up, I’m afraid. Upstairs’ll be worse…but once the kitchen and the big front rooms are right, you could open up that tea room and restaurant and start making money towards the rest. I done told Adam you knew where to find someone could bake tea-cakes.”

Pinkie, like me, had worked here once. It was hard not to giggle at the idea of two of the last survivors from Julia’s Palace coming back and making it respectable. I managed to reduce the impulse to a mere twitch of my lips.

It didn’t escape Hoss, and he gave me a big grin back. He remembered, of course; Joe had spent a lot of time here, especially during the epidemic when the big front gaming-room had been stacked with sick men too poor to get help anywhere else. A lot of people in Virginia City still talked about that, but had no idea what Julia Bulette had done for the rest of her short life—except give money to the fire department, of course. At the rate they were going the Palace would wind up being remembered as the city’s first opera house. There’d be no other acceptable explanation for an assembly room that big. As for all those bedrooms upstairs…this time I did giggle. Julia would have laughed aloud….

“S’long as it’s not our hotel that’s funny, Miss Rose,” Hoss said a little more cautiously, and I came back to business that quickly. Whether I would make a good manager or not, the building was perfect for Adam’s purpose. The corner location was quiet yet convenient for the stagecoach and the best shops. Its windows ran almost the height of the ground floor on both exposed walls, so the front room—the tea room, surely—got light and warmth in the winter, while in the summer Julia had used heavy blue awnings to keep the sunlight from touching the glass. That had been where her gentlemen gambled, except when the tables had been moved out and the carpet rolled up for a ball. The supper-room had been on the next floor up, and above that the rooms for which the men really came. Some of the bedroom walls would need to come down, I suspected. Gentlemen’s club or not, I doubted they’d ever been actually used for people to sleep in. Hotel guests would need dressing rooms, places to bathe, accommodations for servants….

Hoss broke into my thoughts by clearing his throat. “They’ll be expecting me at church right soon,” he said quietly. “Shall I walk you to your rooms first, Miss Rose, or was there somewhere else you was planning to go?”

Even if I were the sort of woman who wasn’t supposed to be walking alone, the way back to my boarding house was perfectly safe on a Sunday morning, but Hoss wouldn’t let me refuse his escort. I laid my hand on his arm and let him guide me home. Away from the Palace I found enough of my tongue again to let him know I thought Adam had done well in getting the building—that it should make a fine hotel…that my hesitations were about me, not it. Hoss heard me out patiently and patted my hand when I had stuttered myself into silence again. “You think it all over a bit. Make sure you’re sure what you want…our lawyer’ll be in touch too, with the contract, like I said. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to say no, Miss Rose.”

His eyes kept cutting back to the eastern sky, checking on how high the sun had risen, and I realized he needed to leave, even though it was still well before any church services were due to start. “I won’t rush,” I promised him, and then pure curiosity drove me to add, “You didn’t really come in town this early just to see me, did you?”

He grinned, and blushed. “No, ma’am. They’re christening the newest little McKaron boy today, ‘n Ginny McKaron asked me to be his godfather…’n they want me to move the font out before the service starts, besides. But seeing how Little Joe was already doing my chores this morning, well, it sure made it easier getting in to talk to you. I figured you’d like it better the fewer people saw us.”

The Cartwrights were perhaps the only people in Nevada who could go from a discussion of investments and lawyers’ contracts to how they got out of their daily chores without missing a beat, or even seeing an incongruity. A tiny corner of my mind wondered if Adam had yet admitted the necessity of hiring a valet. From everything I’d heard, he’d certainly need one to be received with any respect in Europe. The thought of that intensely self-sufficient man submitting himself to the requirements of a servant unsettled me enough I wondered what he could have found to make up for such a loss of freedom.

Hoss set off for the church, and I took myself inside to my room—just the one, despite Hoss’ assumption, and a small one at that. Of course, I seldom did much there but sleep, so I’d never bothered to make it comfortable, or pretty. I sat on the bed and wondered how long the wallpaper in the far corner had been trying to curl away from the ceiling, and what the picture had been which had left an unfaded spot on the wall where the afternoon sun hit. Suddenly this room seemed as full of mysterious secrets as anywhere I’d ever been.

Oh, let’s face it; I was scared—just as I had been when Adam first reached out to me. It was so much safer remaining what I was. I knew what was expected of me at the Silver Dollar—knew I was good at the job, even if it wasn’t always a pleasant one. Knew my place. Wasn’t that how things were supposed to be?

It seemed that Adam didn’t think so.

* * * * *

Sunday night I was back at the saloon. It was never one of our busier nights, but teamsters facing a hard and early morning didn’t care much about the Lord’s Day, and Sam thought being closed during the morning services kept the day quite sufficiently holy. (He spent the time doing his books and enjoying the quiet, he once told me.)

Pinkie wasn’t there, which was a disappointment; I’d have liked to talk things over with her. Dolly was there, which reminded me that it was probably just as well I wasn’t being tempted to gossip. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Dolly—actually, I rather liked what I’d seen of the girl. I just didn’t care to discuss Julia’s Palace and its future—or Adam Cartwright—with her. Especially not Adam Cartwright. I spent my time soaking up the buzz around me instead; the teamsters’ talk was all about Ben Cartwright’s blasting oil, which had finally reached San Francisco by being combined with an even larger shipment meant for the Central Pacific Railroad. Rumor had it Ben was going out to Sacramento in the morning to escort his share the rest of its way here, and the teamsters’ general attitude was “sooner him than us.” Much to my surprise, Dolly had her own opinion to contribute.

“What I can’t figure,” she said as she helped wipe down the tables after closing time, “is how he thinks he’ll take it over the mountains. The new sheriff back in Placerville wasn’t even happy when Tweedy’s circus came through with their elephant—said it would frighten the horses. Seems to me an elephant isn’t anything compared to a load of this exploding stuff.”

“I didn’t know they had a new sheriff in Placerville,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Sheriff Connors—he was the old one—he’s taking a job in Carson City. Or was it Gold Valley? I can’t keep them all straight. Anyway, he wanted out of Placerville on account of he’s going to marry my sister.”

That was interesting news. I hadn’t even known she had a sister. If the man she planned to marry felt he had to leave Placerville first, I could guess what the sister had done for a living, too. There’d been a strange story about a saloon girl in Placerville and a man who’d looked just like Adam Cartwright, back just before Adam went East. I’d never known the ins and outs of the whole tale, and I might have asked Dolly about it now, had I not had more important issues on my mind. Instead, I just said, “Well, I hope the new fellow lets Ben Cartwright through. People here really want that blasting oil, dangerous or not, and if he’s turned back at Placerville he’ll have a long drive to find another way across.”

“It’s not worth anyone getting killed,” Dolly pointed out. All that told me was that she didn’t come from a mining family—or, very likely, a ranching one either. People get killed; it’s a chance they have to take along with most kinds of work. A lot of people certainly thought getting our mines open again was more than worth losing a handful of lives. Not all of them were mineowners, either….

Then again, if you reckoned Placerville’s fortunes rested on being on the main road from the Comstock to San Francisco, I supposed a big hole in that road might cause them as much trouble as having the mines shut down did us.

Dolly went on with her wiping in amiable silence, apparently having taken my silence for agreement. Meantime, Sam put a nickel in the music box, set it to his favorite tune, and came over to start putting up the chairs. “Don’t forget the mule-packers,” he reminded me.

Sam certainly wasn’t going to forget them; time was he’d been one himself, at least during the winters. In the summers, he tried his hand at washing gold out of pretty much any stream he came across—this was before the silver strike, of course, and gold was all anyone was looking for. He never hit a really big strike, but he got pretty familiar with how the placer-miners lived, and he put together a pretty fair little nest-egg which he never bothered spending—until Virginia City started to grow.

Not too many of the miners who were in on the first strike here ever made much money from it; silver mining, at least on the Comstock lode, needs a lot of money poured into digging the mine before any money comes back out of it. But Sam knew enough to know where the real money was, a little like Annie O’Toole, though she’s a lot more famous now. Annie sold the miners grub; Sam sold ’em booze. His little handful of gold was enough to build the first version of the Silver Dollar, and after that he was as good as coining silver. Just listening to the tinkle of the music box now was a reminder of those bonanza days.

People used to joke that if the Silver Dollar ever caught on fire, Sam wouldn’t be running in to rescue his account books, or his cash box, or even his customers, but that music box. Soon as he made his first pile, he’d spent a fortune tracking down the most up-to-the-moment, top-of-the-line tabletop music box in Geneva—that’s Switzerland, not New York—and getting it shipped here. It had come over the Sierras on muleback—the same way he seemed to think Ben’s nitroglycerine would, and I suppose for more or less the same reasons. Once it got here, he and some friends tinkered around for a while figuring out how to arrange things so putting a coin in a slot would start the box playing for a bit—and that is how the Silver Dollar got its very own pay-music box, the first one in the known world. There’s more money tied up in that machine than the Sazerac spent for a first-class piano and a concert-trained pianist to play it, and I doubt it’ll make back its cost any time this century, but around here that’s never really the point. Sam loved the sound of a good music box and he had wanted one he could share with the rest of us—for a fair price, of course. When a Virginia City man wants something, money’s not supposed to be an object while he gets it.

It was still true that if you had something very delicate and special you wanted to bring to Virginia City, it was better to get it carried in on a mule instead of bounced through the mountains in a wagon, even now that the new roads gave the teamsters a fairly smooth route all the way from Sacramento. Trouble was, the old mule trains couldn’t move very much at a time, and you really needed to be good with the beasts, as well as know every inch of the mountains, to get a pack-train through in a reasonable time. Even the best of them—like Watson & Son, a family-owned company run by old friends of Sam—were much slower than using one of the regular freight lines. Now I came to think of it, there weren’t many pack-trains still being run nowadays except by Watson & Son, and rumor had it even they were doing more ranching than freight delivery these days.

I supposed Watson & Son would be willing to carry a shipment of blasting oil. The old-timers always prided themselves on being able to carry anything, anywhere, anytime, so they wouldn’t be willing to refuse, and perhaps for them there really wasn’t much distinction between a cargo of delicate china and a crate or two of explosives—the mules couldn’t tell the difference, surely. Even so, the very idea of it sent a chill up my back I couldn’t reason away. Maybe Dolly and that sheriff weren’t so foolish after all. I went to bed thinking more about that problem than about my own, which seemed in comparison not so much insignificant as insubstantial. Could Hoss really have been suggesting the proposal I thought I’d heard? The more I considered it, the less likely it seemed. By the time I fell asleep, instead of worrying about Julia’s Palace, I was trying to decide how I could ask Dolly about Adam’s stay in Placerville this spring without making it obvious why I wanted to know. It was a much more complicated little problem, anyway.

* * * * *

Mornings, I sleep late—it doesn’t do for a saloon girl to yawn at her clientele. On Mondays the mail usually is already lying on the downstairs table for us to sort through before I get out of my room. Normally I only look at it if I’m expecting the latest issue of my special magazine from the east—the one I like to read because I imagine Adam might be doing so as well—though some of its articles, like the one on the type writing machine, have been really useful in themselves. Today, though, there was a new Godey’s Lady’s Book—Pinkie (of course) subscribed, and left it downstairs for the rest of us to enjoy on the understanding we wouldn’t “borrow” it for private reading. I might have flipped through its pages to see the color fashion plate, but there was also a hand-delivered note on top of the magazine, clearly marked, “Miss L.R. McNair.” It was still sealed, which meant the landlady hadn’t found it first. I snatched it up, retreated into my room again, and unfolded the message carefully.

It came from a lawyer’s office—Hiram Wood’s office, one of the oldest law offices in town. That was worrisome enough; more worrisome was the message that he would “appreciate a visit from you at your earliest convenience,” on a matter of “considerable importance.” That had to mean the contract Hoss had mentioned. Hiram Wood had been the Cartwrights’ main lawyer for longer than I’d been in Virginia City. In fact, he was one of the people–fewer now than even a couple of years ago, but still more than I liked–who’d been in Julia’s Palace, who’d known the celebrated Julia Bulette intimately…not to mention the other girls available there.

Stifling a definite sigh, I pulled my Sunday best out of the wardrobe again. I certainly couldn’t go see the Cartwrights’ lawyer dressed like a saloon girl, after all.

I got past Mr. Wood’s clerk without incident, but my heart sank as the lawyer himself—now frankly bald on top, but with traces of henna still maintaining the ginger streak in his beard—escorted me into his inner office, leaving the door carefully open just the proper amount for a man doing business with an unaccompanied woman.

Oh, dear. He remembered me; he certainly did. Not without reason, either. He’d been a sampler at the Palace, seldom going back a second time. I’d been one of the exceptions. Nice enough customer, but…at least he seemed to be trying as hard as I was to put old memories behind us. Certainly after he returned to his desk he was keeping his eyes firmly on the papers before him. Quite a thick stack of papers, as it happened.

“That seems a rather lengthy contract just for hiring a hotel manager,” I said cautiously. “Hoss spoke to me about that yesterday, but….”

Mr Wood smiled at me, and I tried not to feel patronized. “My clients—client, rather—does not approve of absentee landlords. Since he can not now maintain the close supervision he would prefer for a property of this magnitude, he feels it is more appropriate for him to recover a reasonable profit from his investment while passing it on to someone in a better position to use it as the basis for a successful business. This contract—”he flourished it at me again—”delineates the process.”

“My client” meant Adam. I seized on that and tried to make it make sense of the rest. Adam was giving me the opportunity to build up my own successful business, if I wanted to. If I could. “What happens if I’d prefer the property remained your client’s?”

He pursed his lips at me, looking disappointed. “In that case I would be required to find another person to take on the position described here. Perhaps you could offer a recommendation?”

I shook my head, beginning to feel like a cow under attack from a big cloud of flies. “And if I take on this…obligation, and the hotel can’t make a profit?”

“Were you to declare bankruptcy the business and its assets would have to be liquidated in order to satisfy your debt to my client. If you were merely unable to make the schedule of payments outlined in this document, my instructions are more flexible, but it would be up to my client to establish a course of action.”

That certainly sounded ominous. I tried to remind myself that Adam couldn’t have meant to put me in a more uncertain position than I already was. Hesitantly, I reached out for the papers. “Do you really think this can work?”

“I’m not able to offer you any legal advice on this, Miss, er, McNair. I am, after all, already acting on behalf of one client; it would be most improper of me to attempt to counsel you as well. If you would like another lawyer to look it over for you, I’d suggest my former clerk, Mr. Gort. He’s recently established his own legal practice, and I can safely say he’s more than capable of offering you excellent guidance at a very…at very reasonable fees.” He tapped the papers against his desk, lining them all up neatly, replaced them in their folder, and handed it all to me. “I have copies already prepared of all these documents, of course. Should you decide to accept my client’s proposition, you may come into my office and make the necessary signatures at any time; my clerk will be happy to act as witness.”

We both stood up, and he reached out to shake my free hand. Rather less pompously, he added, “If you do want to take this on, may I say that I’d strongly recommend you end your current employment as soon as possible? You do not want this endeavor to have any…taint of the saloon about it. I’d also suggest you stop dying your hair at once, for the same reason…but that’s only a personal suggestion, I’ll remind you, not legal advice.” He attempted a friendly chuckle, which sounded almost as uncomfortable as I felt. “I don’t have to charge you for it. Of course it’s up to you to make any such decisions yourself….” With an obvious effort, he recovered a more formal manner. “I certainly do wish you well, Miss McNair. Thank you so much for your time.”

I murmured some half-audible response which I hoped was appropriate and made my way out of the office. At some point I supposed I would need to consult a lawyer of my own, so I certainly appreciated having a recommendation from Mr. Wood, but at the moment there were questions I needed answered that no lawyer could possibly understand. No man could, actually…so the next place I headed was the only business in town that I knew was run—top to bottom—by a woman.

I didn’t normally venture into Sue’s Dresses, even in street clothes on my day off. In fact, I’d only been in her shop once—yes, back last winter, while I was staying at the International House and using Adam Cartwright’s money to replenish my personal wardrobe after the stagecoach accident. Once I was back at the Silver Dollar I really didn’t want Sue’s customers thinking that because she also worked to support herself, I took her for my equal. With money as tight as it had been in Virginia City lately, the last thing Sue needed was an excuse for her respectable customers to stop patronizing her store.

Today the store was empty, but Sue came out of the back room before the bells on the front door had stopped ringing. She started up to me with open arms, as if I were one of her most regular customers. “Why, Miss McNair! I’m so pleased to see you again….”

Her voice began trailing off half-way through “pleased,” at about the time she must have realized my hair was no longer mousy brown, but a rather brassy blonde. Meanwhile, I was almost as stunned as she, because I’d caught sight of the plain gold band on her left ring finger, and the discovery temporarily drove my own affairs out of my mind.

I found my tongue about the time she fell silent. With a gesture towards her hand I said, “Best wishes to you both—but I’m surprised I didn’t hear about your wedding! Hoss and Joe never breathed a word of it to anyone—I’d have thought they’d at least throw you a party after the ceremony.”

Sue’s momentary confusion about my hair was washed away in a wave of remembered happiness. “Oh, Paul and I didn’t want to wait another minute to be married. We both thought a five-year engagement was quite long enough to know our minds…I do hope the Cartwrights aren’t feeling very offended, because it would be so nice if they held a party to celebrate the first service Paul holds in his new church instead.”

“And when is that likely to be?”

“Well, that’s the wonderful part…Ben’s letting us build it on the Ponderosa, and Adam had already worked out a design for a little place that Paul could build almost by himself, so as soon as we have the full set of plans we can get right to work. It’s almost too perfect to be true—sometimes I still have to pinch myself to be sure everything’s really happening, you know….” She reached out her arms to me again and this time I went ahead and embraced her.

I suppose I should explain that Sue—and for the life of me I can’t remember her old last name—was the daughter of an ex-foreman at the Ponderosa, and after her father died during one of the drives (bad accidents happen on even the best run ranches sometimes) the Cartwrights took her practically into the family. People who talk about how lonely that houseful of men must have been after Marie Cartwright died forget that there were, in fact, more than a few women around—well, girls, to be fair—and they were by no means all tomboys. Connie McKee (whose father was a lawman too often on the road to look after his girl himself) went off to finishing school eventually, but little Mariette (the daughter of a different foreman) stayed on the ranch until she got married to Jason Blaine, and Sue could easily have done the same. When Ben Cartwright talked about the whole Ponderosa being a family, he meant it more than most ranchowners do.

Unlike Mariette, though, Sue had her own plans for herself. She learned how to operate one of the newfangled sewing machines they were using to make cheap miners’ clothing as fast as the miners could wear their old clothes out, and then she had the idea to use the machine to make women’s dresses instead of men’s shirts. Obviously the wives of the Silver Kings weren’t buying their dresses from Sue…but their maids and their housemaids also needed clothes suited to their station, and even some of the farmers’ wives began bringing cloth from the mercantile to Sue to make it up into dresses instead of trying to sew for themselves. What’s more, when Sue wasn’t sewing for other people she was sewing for herself—not dresses for her to wear, but dresses to use in her business. Dresses a hesitant prospective customer could examine to be sure they wouldn’t fall apart, to see how a particular style looked in a variety of fabrics…or to buy outright, if the fit was close enough. It wasn’t long before Sue had a collection of dresses on a rack in her store for her customers to consult, try on, and purchase. If there had been a large number of dressmakers in Virginia City, I suppose her methods might have caused more of a stir, but in fact there weren’t very many, and the ones we had weren’t particularly good. For those women who couldn’t make regular journeys to places like San Francisco and the dressmakers there, Sue was undoubtedly a godsend.

How long she’d have stayed in business had she married as young as Mariette did I won’t pretend to guess. As it happened, she didn’t marry young. She was too independent, too self-sufficient to appeal to the sort of man who likes a young wife…and then Paul Watson arrived in town, and that changed everything.

Paul first showed his face here about five years ago, looking for a way to start his life over after having given up on being a gunslinger. We get people like that often enough, but this man was luckier than most; no one around here had anything against him, and when he smiled at Sue outside her little dress shop, she fell in love with him—and brought the Cartwrights into his life as well. Naturally, the Cartwrights weren’t about to let Sue tie herself to a man who didn’t deserve her, so they looked Paul Watson over with sharp eyes, and liked what they saw in him. Oh, he was a good-looking man, but also a patient one, and intent on rebuilding his life in a very different pattern from what it had been—and he refused to take the woman he loved into that life until he believed it could be what he thought she deserved. Sue was annoyed by this, but the Cartwrights (even Joe, who’d at one time been more than a little sweet on her himself), while sympathetic, felt Paul was behaving exactly as he should, so he’d gone off to train for the ministry by himself. Several of the more spiteful old maids in Virginia City commented that even though Sue was also behaving very properly, she was taking quite a chance by agreeing to wait for a penniless man of the cloth who didn’t have even the promise of a pulpit anywhere yet. Such an unquestionably handsome young man was sure to attract ladies with far more money than Sue would ever have, and given the costs of building up a new church and congregation…well, the old maids left it at that.

Meanwhile, Sue ran her store, ignored all the gossip, and smiled fiercely at anyone who mentioned Paul’s name in her presence. Now it appeared her patience and faithfulness had paid off; I just hoped married life continued to agree with her as well as being single and self-reliant always had. To judge by her broad smile and sparkling eyes, she hadn’t found anything she objected to yet.

Except, it appeared, my hair. When her eyes finally wandered back to it, she narrowed her lips and shook her head, looking suddenly quite serious again. “Now, Miss McNair, how may I help you today?” With enviable self-control and tact she brought her gaze down to meet mine and held it there. It was enough to make me wonder if my hair had turned bright green.

I produced my folderful of legal papers (now somewhat crumpled-looking) and explained my dilemma. The financial aspects of this proposal were less worrying to me than the Cartwrights’ basic assumption—that a woman would be given the respect and cooperation necessary to run as complicated a business as a hotel in the middle of Virginia City. From what I had seen of how Sam ran the Silver Dollar, I could make a fair guess at some of what would be required: I’d need a line of credit at a bank; I’d need regular deliveries of food and other supplies; I’d need to maintain good relations with Sheriff Coffee and the Merchants’ Association. The teamsters I could handle, but a banker? And how would the owners of the International House react to competition from a mere female?

Sue, bless her, understood what I was trying to ask before I could get the words out, and her eyes went from lovestruck sparkle to a gimlet-like, and somewhat amused, glitter. She relieved me of the papers and swept us both into the back room, where she spread them all out on a table. After what seemed only a quick glance over them, she said briskly, “So instead of being charged rent, you’re buying the hotel over seven years out of its profits? And if—” she paused a moment to do some calculating—”if that’s all Adam paid for the building, he’s even better at finding a bargain than I thought.”

“Mr. Wood said something about his also getting a moderate profit,” I said rather desperately. Much too late, I’d remembered I didn’t really want anyone else to know Adam’s part in all this.

This time, Sue’s gaze came up to meet mine, and something in it reminded me she’d been like a sister to all of them, except—for a little while—Joe. “If it were anyone but the Cartwrights offering this, I’d say it was far too good to be true.”

“But since it is them?”

“I wonder why you should have cold feet,” she said quietly.

I found my hands making meaningless gestures in the air. “Oh, my past…what I am…. What I’d need to be, for this.”

Her eyes looked up past mine, then back down to my face, my dress—the one I’d bought here less than a year ago—even my shoes. With almost a shrug in her voice, she suggested mildly, “Stop dying your hair, and use a black hairnet while it grows out. That should do it.”

“That’s all?”

“I managed,” she pointed out. “And I even had to pay rent.”

We were halfway back to the store’s front door when I heard its string of bells ring again, and froze in my tracks. Sue spun me round to face a mirror on the rear wall and deposited a bonnet on my head in what seemed the same motion, then swept forward to welcome her new customers in a voice as cheerful and pleased as she’d used to greet me. I let the babble of twittery voices wash over me as I adjusted the bonnet. Once they all seemed occupied elsewhere I laid the bonnet back on the counter and slid towards the door with a mumbled, “Perhaps another day, ma’am….”

“Another day,” she agreed brightly—not mumbling at all. “Good morning, Miss McNair.” And the twittering voices echoed her; they’d just been waiting to be reminded of my name, I realized. I said, “Good morning,” to them all and escaped onto the street.

* * * * *

Sue would probably have marched right back to Hiram Wood’s office and signed the contracts at once, but I still lacked her courage. Instead I went down to the Silver Dollar—going in the back way in case any of Sue’s other customers might see me and be shocked—changed for the afternoon shift, and carried on with the life I’d been living.

Next morning, though, I made my way to Sam Gort’s office. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t in as good a part of town as his former employer’s place of occupation, and was neither as spacious nor as elegantly furnished as Hiram Wood’s office. His “very reasonable fees” were still high enough that I couldn’t help wondering just how expensive Mr. Wood’s counsel was. Still, I’d been around enough businessmen to know that signing a contract without having a lawyer look it over for you was about as foolish as trying to dig ore out of an unshored mine. I didn’t trust anybody’s word—not even all the Cartwrights together—enough to take that sort of risk.

It wasn’t wasted money, either. Gort skimmed over most of it looking more curious than concerned, but there was a place or two where I could see he backed up to study things more carefully, and when he had tidied up the stack of papers again he said, “There’s something I think I should bring to your attention, Miss McNair. This is a very generous arrangement—” the way in which he said ‘generous’ made it almost into an insult—”but in the case of the sudden death of any of the parties involved—especially that of Adam Cartwright, or of Hoss since he’s acting as his brother’s local agent—your interests would not be, in my opinion, fully protected. You might be required to repay immediately any money you used from the funds set aside for refurbishing the building were Hoss to die suddenly, for example. Or, in the case of the untimely death of Mr. Adam Cartwright, an unscrupulous heir might require you to either make the balance of payments owing on the purchase of the hotel at once or forfeit the money already paid. If you wish, I can bring these matters to Mr. Wood’s attention before you sign anything.”

I blinked at him in surprise. “You’re not suggesting this was deliberate, surely?”

“No, no, quite the contrary,” Gort said hastily. “I’m sure Mr. Wood was only formalizing the guidelines set down by Mr. Adam Cartwright, and knowledgeable as he is—as all the Cartwrights are—their experience mainly comes from short-term contracts where questions such as these do not normally arise. I’m sure this was nothing but an ordinary oversight, but given Mr. Adam Cartwright’s situation could change at any moment without our knowledge—”

My expression must have clouded somehow; he broke off in mid-oration and said, simply and much more kindly, “He could get married, Miss McNair. And in that case his wife would become his principal heir.”

Somehow I’d never thought of all of that. I supposed it was why people were willing to pay lawyers such high fees; it was a lawyer’s job to anticipate such things. All the same, I didn’t want it to seem that I was quibbling over some “what-if’s” and “might-have-beens.” Gort himself had called Adam’s proposition generous. Maybe accepting a degree of personal risk was part of what Adam was looking for when he had made it.

To my surprise, when I said as much to Gort he shrugged and agreed. “Not that I’m well acquainted with the youngest brother, and of course there’s no knowing how Mr. Adam’s situation might change, but it would certainly be most unlike any of the older Cartwrights to take advantage of such a legalistic quibble. I can hardly advise you to ignore the situation, but….”

Which, of course, left me no closer to a decision than before. I paid Gort with a sizeable chunk of my personal savings and went back to work again.

Midway through that afternoon Hoss came in waving a piece of paper and almost bouncing with enthusiasm. “Miss Rose, you’ve just got to read this! See, Adam wrote to some people in San Francisco—I guess he knew we’d have to be doing the building over proper—and asked ’em to keep an eye out for anything useful that came along. So this feller’s done writ me about a passel of wallpaper a man had shipped all the way from France. Seems as a boy he worked in a house had this fancy wallpaper showing lots of trees ‘n fields ‘n a river ‘n even a waterfall…and now he’s got his own big fancy house he wanted wallpaper like that in it too. So he sent for it from France, like I said…only then his wife found out, ‘n she don’t want nothing so old-fashioned as that in her house. See, someone wrote a book saying that walls are flat, so that means what goes on a wall should look flat…not trying to look like it’s real, ya know? So she don’t want the paper, and it’s sitting in a warehouse now, but we can get it at a good price if we want it. Look, here’s the letter….”

I waved Pinkie over and explained to her that Hoss wanted advice on redecorating the old Palace. She was the one who really read her Godey’s Lady’s Book, after all, and no doubt she knew more about how the fashionable home (or business) was decorated than anyone else in the room. (Sam had no more interest in running a fashionable saloon than he did in being a fashionable dresser. No, less—on the rare occasions he was seen in either the church or the courthouse, he was as smartly dressed as anyone. But the Silver Dollar looked essentially the same as it had the day it opened, and that was how our customers liked it.)

She peered over my shoulder, squinting a little to make out the words. “Sounds pretty, but where would you put it?”

“What about the side wall of the front room—over where the piano used to be? People could look at it while they had their tea. Paint the rest of the room verdigris to match, with darker green on the woodwork….”

“No, no, you can’t use green where people are eating. It puts ’em off ordering the food.”

I frowned at her; my sudden vision of a cool green room with a waterfall in one corner seemed awfully appealing to me, particularly in the heat and noise of a summer’s afternoon in Virginia City. “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure,” Pinkie said firmly. “The light would reflect onto the ladies’ faces. They’d all look queasy.”

“Gotta think that would put me off my vittels,” Hoss chimed in, and I sighed. Anything that could impair Hoss’ legendary appetite would downright destroy that of the ladies I wanted as customers. Well, if the tea room was out, and the restaurant, that left…well, the front lobby. There hadn’t really been one at the Palace, but a hotel would need a lobby. Making that cool and refreshing would surely be a good idea? Rather tenatively, I suggested so to my advisors.

Hoss brightened up at once—it was obvious he wanted to find a place for this paper. Something about the story must have touched him—he’d had his share of trouble with elegant ladies from San Francisco himself, after all. I suspected he could sympathize with a homesick husband cursed with a status-obsessed wife. Then again, maybe he just wanted to feel cool and refreshed himself.

Pinkie was a little more hesitant, probably because, like me, she knew there was no lobby at the moment. She didn’t raise any real objections, though. Hoss gave her a long, assessing glance and turned back to me. “Just let me know what you decide, ma’am. Less’n Pa needs my help to move his blasting oil, I should be in and out of town most every day, what with all the building we’ll be doing.” His furrowed brow deepened into a definite frown. “No, that won’t do…Pa might need me in a hurry, and there’s no saying how long that wallpaper will sit around without somebody else wanting it. I’d best let the man know Adam put this in your hands, so you don’t have to waste time tryin’ t’get hold of me first. Unless you want I should go telegraph him now so’s he can send it straight on to you?”

Now that was moving too quickly for my taste. “I haven’t even agreed to…to have anything to do with what Adam’s planning! You didn’t exactly tell me just what he was asking me to do. It’s a lot of risk to take at a time like this…I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

Being Hoss, he didn’t pretend not to understand me. “It is a lot of risk, Miss Rose. But you’re a lot of person, too.” Without waiting to see how I took that, he folded up his letter, pressed it into my hand, and left.

* * * * *

I took off work early that night, hoping that catching up on my rest might help me think more clearly. Of course, things didn’t work out that way—do they ever?

First of all, I had a dream. Not a nightmare, or even a bad dream—as Adam Cartwright once said himself, I know the difference between them—but one of those complicated visions that leave you less rested than you were before you lay down.

It started with me in the stagecoach that brought me home over the Sierras after my mother had died in Sacramento. Adam Cartwright sat on the opposite seat, as he’d done in real life, paying as little attention to me as was polite. That, also, was how it had been in real life; we hadn’t exchanged more than the briefest of greetings until after the sharp snap and violent jolt that began the accident. He might never have known me for anything but a young lady travelling to Virginia City for reasons that were none of his concern—and I wouldn’t have minded. I’d felt happy enough just being allowed a day in his company. I was easily satisfied back then….

The snapping sound came, more clearly in this dream than it had been at the time, when I’d been half asleep. Now I recognized it for a gunshot, and I guessed the coach was shaking and swaying because the driver had been hit, and couldn’t control his team any longer. I glanced around wildly for Adam. He should have been leaning out the window, maybe trying to see if he could climb up and onto the driver’s perch while there was still a chance to prevent a runaway. He should have been, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t anywhere.

The dream shifted, as dreams do, and we weren’t careening through snow-clad mountains any more; I was standing in a barren desert outside the coach watching it try to move forward. There was only a two-horse hitch now, with a dead mule on the side towards me, blocking my view of whatever was in the other side’s harness. The driver was cursing and cracking his whip—not in the air, but against something. I could hear the lash’s impact, with an echoing groan every time. I couldn’t imagine what the driver was thinking; nothing small enough to be hidden behind the mule’s carcass could possibly pull a coach of this size, laden as it was. At the least the driver should have unhitched the dead animal and shoved it out of the way before settling in to flog the poor beast that survived. I started closer, planning to give the driver a piece of my mind—and realized it was Adam straining against the breaststrap on the far side of the harness, his shirt hanging off him in crimsoned tatters. And still the whip came down, again and again.

I wanted to strangle that slave-driver right then, and maybe I did, for the dream took another shift and I found myself with the whip lying around my feet like a broken-backed snake. The mule and the driver were gone, while the stagecoach had shrunk down to a tiny covered wagon, the sort miners often use. Adam was still hitched to it, but he was strong and whole again, and it moved quite easily when he leaned into the harness. He flashed me a smile and an informal salute as he headed off for the distant mountains.

For a moment I had the urge to run after him, though I knew that was foolishness. Adam had taken on enough obligation without having to look after me as well, and I couldn’t be any help when I didn’t have any idea what he was after. While I hesitated, someone came up beside me and laid a firm hand gently on my shoulder. I didn’t need to turn to recognize the newcomer; his voice was distinctive enough.

“Let be, Miss Rose. He thinks he’s doing what should be done, and he’s grateful for all your help, but you’ve got business of your own you need to tend to now. Don’t worrit yourself about him…it’s too late for that, Miss Rose. He’s gone.”

I might have tried to argue, but there was another shift before I could start. Now I was busy painting a room a soft, pale green. I might have been in mother’s house, trying to get it ready for her wake…or I might have been somewhere else entirely. I liked the shade of green, anyway, and I said so aloud.

Hoss was somewhere behind me, doing something that involved a lot of hammering. “Makes me think of cabbages,” he retorted. Before I could protest, he went on in a thoughtful voice, “Right pretty things, cabbages can be, just like they was carved out ‘a jade sometimes. No one ever really looks at them much, you know? Makes me feel cooler, restin’ my eyeballs on that wall of yours.”

About then I realized that the hammering, unlike Hoss’ voice, wasn’t just in my dream. I dragged myself out of bed, shrugged on a bedjacket, and stumbled over to the door before whatever was on the other side could knock it down. A moment later, when I recollected that Hoss was nowhere near me, I could have kicked myself for being so trusting, but it was only Dolly. Tears had made a mess of the facepaint she didn’t even need to wear, but her dress was still in one piece, and her stockings weren’t torn, so I figured her trouble was nothing I couldn’t handle. “Come on in,” I snapped, and shut the door behind her before I turned up the gas.

It took quite a while for me to get her story clear, though it was simple enough at heart. She’d taken a liking to young Cliff Rexford (why that lummox?, I wondered, as if it were any of my concern), but she hadn’t seen him for a few days and when he’d come in tonight he hadn’t looked at her once, even when she went up as close as she dared to the poker table where he was playing. No, it hadn’t been an unfriendly game, and no, he hadn’t lost—or won—very much. He had been pretty annoyed about something, and he’d been angry when some of the men he was with tried to tease him about—well, whatever it was. Dolly hadn’t been close enough to hear the start of the conversation, and by the time she was they’d stopped saying anything that could help her figure it all out.

By now she’d finally stopped crying, and looked up at me with her big eyes all the bluer for being surrounded by pink puffy eyelids and a red, swollen nose. “They’ll be so busy at the ranch he won’t be coming in much for a while…and I just don’t know what I did wrong, Miss Lilah. I really thought he liked me….”

“Well, crying your eyes bloodshot over him won’t help any,” I said bracingly, and gave her a handkerchief to blow her nose into. The young ones never do seem to have a handkerchief when they need one.

She blew her nose and mopped at her eyes—smudging her paint even worse than it had been—before asking in a very small voice, “So what should I do now?”

“Wait.” I shrugged my shoulders. “What else is there to do? See what happens when he comes back—and when he does, don’t look like you’ve been crying the whole while he was away. Be pleased to see him, but not too pleased at first. That always reels them in.”

Of course this perfectly sensible advice started her snivelling again. “But what if he never comes back?” she wailed into the handkerchief, as if no one else had ever asked that question before.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly again before I could trust myself to answer. “Then you make do the best way you can, and remember there’s never just one man who can make you happy. You’ll find another one if you’re patient and play your cards right. Don’t decide your life’s ruined because some man won’t fall for you the way you fell for him.”

It rather surprised me how convincingly I could lie through my teeth. Of course, there was no comparing Cliff Rexford to Adam Cartwright, but I’d known from the moment I saw him no one else could ever satisfy me—not even the man who’d been ready to marry me, if I’d ever dropped a hint that I expected him to. I never regretted not dropping that hint. He’d been happy enough as it was, and there wasn’t anything marriage could offer worth making myself admit that Adam Cartwright would never look twice at me. But Dolly wasn’t the sort who could live her whole life as a saloon girl, so Dolly needed to get herself some common sense. I spent the next quarter of an hour trying to provide her with it, and finally sent her up to her room dry-eyed, if not wholly in agreement with what I was saying.

As I took myself back to my own bed, I was still thinking about the “other man” in my own life, the mine foreman who’d picked me out from the crowd in the Silver Dollar on his first visit back in ’61 and never swayed from his choice. He’d been short and stocky, with an accent I found confusing and a habit of dropping in words that could never have been English; he’d spent his life underground and at forty had less schooling than Hoss Cartwright did at sixteen. He watched both Shakespeare and melodramas with wide-eyed simplicity, and didn’t seem to see much difference between them. At heart he probably found an evening of beer with his friends a better way to relax than anybody’s made-up stories. He wasn’t in any way a man who could claim my love or loyalty away from Adam Cartwright…and that was why I’d never wanted to marry him, never led him on to believe I did. It didn’t seem fair to him to pretend I was his for more than convenience’s sake. I think he understood that, and I respected him for being willing to settle for what I could give him honestly. When he’d died in that mine explosion, not long before my mother fell sick, I did really mourn him. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so willing to give up my place at the saloon and go home to nurse her if I hadn’t felt so vulnerable without him.

Adam’s absence certainly didn’t make me more vulnerable. Except for the moment when our stagecoach had been bouncing down that mountain, he’d never provided me protection, and even now his proposal to me through Hoss held as much risk as benefit. So why was it so much easier to lay away memories of a man who had been willing to offer me so much more?

It occurred to me for the very first time that a respectable mine foreman’s widow wouldn’t have had to worry about her past the way I had when Adam finally approached me. Not that I’d have treated either man any differently, even knowing how things might have turned out…but I stopped feeling quite so guilty about the advice I’d just given Dolly.

When I got back to sleep, I dreamed of cabbages and jade and mist-covered river vistas for all of the rest of the night. The next morning, on my way to Hiram Wood’s office, I paused at the telegraph office long enough to wire San Francisco that I would, indeed, like to buy those unwanted rolls of wallpaper.

* * * * *

Dolly was right; the blasting oil didn’t get through Placerville on the road.

Now, the Cartwrights’ blasting oil was packed to Adam’s specifications—I’d wager he stood over every one of those crates while they were doing it. But goodness only knows who handled the Central Pacific Railroad’s shipment, or how they packed it. What people did find out was that one of those crates was leaking, and they moved it, for caution’s sake, into the storeroom behind the Wells Fargo office in San Francisco. Then someone tried to open the crate with a crowbar….

That was a Monday afternoon. Within two days the news had reached the papers in Placerville, and was being telegraphed ever farther afield. The same night Dolly woke me out of my dream about Adam, Ben sent a desperate telegram from Placerville to the Ponderosa, and Hoss rode out to join his father the next morning, though it was two or three more days before I found that out myself. Right now the best gossip was oozing from the top of society down, spread by the men who ran the mines—and their wives, of course—not the men who worked in them. Once the story got out, though, all Virginia City was equally enthralled by it. Everyone needed the mines to get back to full production; everyone knew what Ben Cartwright had decided might help make that possible—and everyone had thought they understood the risks. Once graphic descriptions of the explosion in San Francisco were reprinted in the Territorial Observer, though, odds at the Sazerac against Ben and Hoss coming safely home rose sharply.

If this sounds vulgar, and heartless…well, it was, and I’m sorry to have to say so. But every sort of industry gambles with men’s lives; Virginia City was only more willing to admit it, in those days. Maybe it’s part of why I stayed, and stay, here. There’s an honesty to the way we live even when we’re at our most devious, and it certainly makes life a little easier for somebody like me.

Anyway, everyone was buzzing about Ben Cartwright bringing this new explosive over the mountains, and most people were nervous about it—the more so the more they knew and liked the family. The exception turned out to be Little Joe himself, who strolled into the Silver Dollar a day or two after we’d heard about the San Francisco explosion, ordered a beer, and dealt himself into a poker game looking confident as you please.

Somehow no one seemed eager to ask after Hoss, let alone Ben, but after a few moments one of the poker players ventured, “Where’s Cliff? I’ve got some money I owe him; thought he’d be with you.”

Dolly’s head came up at the sound of Cliff’s name, of course. Silly child. She’d been helping that fellow enjoy his beer a little earlier and I wondered briefly if she’d set him up with the question.

Joe wiped his lips on his sleeve—only he could make that look polite—and I saw his eyebrows draw together as he answered. “Rexford’s not with us any more. Hoss and I fired him after the scene he made at Paul Watson’s new church a few days back. There’s no place for a man like that on the Ponderosa.”

This of course required explanation, especially for those who had no idea what Joe meant about ‘Paul Watson’s church,’ meaning about half the men in the room. Even those of us who knew Paul, or at least knew of him, mostly weren’t aware of how much work he’d gotten done on that church. Up here in Virginia City, we thought of the Watsons’ church as still being planned, something for which the money was still being zealously raised. Paul, for example, had spent a lot of time in the Sazerac over the previous month, taking on all comers at arm wrestling for a dollar a try, and so far he hadn’t lost a bout. Sue was scarcely ever in her little shop lately; you were more likely to see her standing in the doorway of another shop, or on the boardwalk itself, in busy conversation with one or another of the elderly ladies who really ran Virginia City’s society. Quite a few of them had become vigorous evangelists on behalf of her husband’s church-raising efforts—and this despite his willingness to mingle with the sinners in the Sazerac. Still, while it didn’t come as a surprise that the Watsons had already scraped together the money to start building, there’d been no sign in town that they had actually begun the work.

But Paul Watson had never intended his church to be in a dusty, noisy mining city. He was a country boy himself, and he felt closer to God in open spaces, the more beautiful the better. Everyone already knew Adam had given Paul and Sue a full set of architect’s plans as a wedding present. Now as we listened to Joe we found out Paul was building by a river near the edge of the Ponderosa, on land the Cartwrights had provided, using timber they’d cut for him and seen milled to the specifications he needed. For that matter, Hoss and Joe were also hauling that timber for free, and providing their share of the labor of the church’s construction as well.

Most of the local ranches could put together a small building quickly using the materials and workmen to hand, but the Cartwright boys, by themselves, had always been better at the job than most. With Adam’s skills in engineering and design, Hoss’ strength, and Joe’s genius for organization (widely rumored to have been originally developed so he could dodge most of the hard work), they’d progressed far beyond line shacks or the occasional barn to constructing flumes, gristmills, windmill-driven pumps for wells, and houses as up-to-date as anything you’d find in San Francisco. Assuming Paul Watson knew one end of a hammer from the other, then if left to themselves he, Hoss, and Joe could probably build a small cathedral in the time remaining before the start of the cattle-driving season.

Trouble was, Cliff Rexford—at least to hear Joe tell it—had no intention of leaving the three of them alone. He’d gotten himself fired by following the Cartwrights down to the building site, insulting the preacher in front of his own employers, then practicing his quick draw and other trick-shooting practically inside the church. Hoss had apparently spent a few moments trying to calm everyone down—this had been just before he’d ridden out towards Placerville to help his father with his blasting oil—but the fancy shooting in particular annoyed Joe to the point he’d told Cliff to pick up the wages due him and get off the Ponderosa at once, and Hoss had backed his younger brother up. Since then Joe hadn’t actually seen any more of Cliff, but there were rumors the man was still in the area, keeping an eye on the half-built church and continuing to claim he was going to make Paul Watson put his gun back on. Joe made it very clear what would happen to anyone who took Cliff’s side in that quarrel, although it looked to me like nobody in the saloon had been entertaining such a notion anyway. Watson was someone these men either liked or thought harmless, and no one much approved of shooting off a pistol for fun anywhere near where people were working—or, for that matter, anywhere near grazing cattle. As for trying to impress Little Joe Cartwright with trick shooting, that lost Cliff everyone’s respect. A fool thing like that was about as downright stupid as trying to take on Hoss Cartwright at wrestling.

In the end, I suspect the most significant result of all Joe’s chatter that evening was that he unwittingly ruined my own plans for the night. You see, I’d already asked Pinkie to come back to my room after work, so we could discuss arrangements for the hotel together. Ever since signing Hiram Wood’s contract, I’d spent most of my free time jotting down every little detail I could remember about my stay at the International House. Those notes would give me a pattern on which to base my own hotel’s routine, but Pinkie had grown up helping her family run a swing station, and I suspected she knew more things I’d find useful than just how to bake a tea-cake. Unfortunately, Dolly lived in my boarding house and we always walked home together; somehow, she found her way into my room along with Pinkie, and her head was too full of what had been said about Cliff Rexford to make her useful company.

Pinkie suggested, rather mildly, that perhaps Dolly should find someone more suitable to bat her long eyelashes at. Rexford, she opined, was not much of a prospect; Dolly could do a lot better for herself.

Not to my surprise, Dolly didn’t like that idea. She swung around to me, pouting slightly. “Miss Lilah, don’t you see—”

“I’m not ‘Miss Lilah’ any more,” I interrupted her with satisfaction. “I sign my name Marianne Rose McNair now, and if you want to call me something shorter, then ‘Rose’ will do just fine.”

“All right, Miss Rose,” Dolly shrugged. Clearly the fact that I had taken to signing papers—whether with a new name or not—held no importance for her. “All I mean to say is that no one had a bad thing to say about Cliff until this Reverend Watson came to town, and I don’t see why suddenly Cliff’s a no-good scoundrel and Mr. Watson’s next thing to a saint! It’s not as if anyone is saying Cliff is lying…and if Mr. Watson did shoot Cliff’s brother I don’t see why Cliff should have to be sugar-sweet and friendly to him. I wouldn’t be, if he’d killed my sister.”

Frankly, I agreed with her, even if I knew no man would see any similarity between a fair gunfight and shooting down a woman. The problem was that Cliff’s behavior had obviously gone far beyond mere unfriendliness. Somewhat less mildly than Pinkie, I tried to point that out to the girl. Since I myself hadn’t seen any of what had happened, I wound up quoting Joe for most of my argument.

“Oh, yes, ‘Joe says,’ ” Dolly nearly shouted back at me. “Well, I don’t believe a word of it. You’ve got nothing against Cliff Rexford but Joe Cartwright’s say-so, and I wouldn’t kill a snake on the word of a spoiled little rich-man’s-baby like him. I’ve met that type before, you know….”

I didn’t hold it against her. She wasn’t the first person to size Joe Cartwright up that way on meeting him, and she wouldn’t be the last to make that mistake. Maybe the first pretty girl to do it, though, which made me wonder just why she’d left home to become a saloon girl. Who’d been flirting with her back in Placerville? Not Joe Cartwright, but someone much like him to look at, I’d bet. Well, it solved the puzzle of why she’d picked out Cliff Rexford in the first place, with a better prospect in plain view. Poor kid.

She took a few more minutes telling me her opinion of Joe Cartwright, then flounced out, slamming the door behind her. I straightened a picture that had slid sideways on its hook and commented to Pinkie, “Well, thank goodness it’s none of our business.”

“Why not?” Pinkie snapped.

I gaped at her. Pinkie, of all people….

“You like Sue Watson, and you like Dolly—” she waved a hand in my face to keep me quiet—”else you’d never have heard her out like you did, so don’t pretend otherwise. It’s certainly theirbusiness, so why ain’t it yours?”

“We’ve got too much on our plate already,” I pointed out.

“Mebbe we do. But that’s quite a different thing, and you should know it.”

” ‘No man is an island’?” I murmured with a bit of a smile.

She gave me a mock glare. “Got a quote for everything, doncha? You and that man you turned down. He shoulda just gone ahead and grabbed you up and paid no notion to anything you said. Can’t think why he didn’t have the sense to, ‘stead of just wandering off.”

I could feel my face go rigid. Fortunately Pinkie noticed and backed down before I found my voice, or I’d have been out a pastrycook and never had the tearoom for my hotel. Even with her apologies it was hard to forgive her for that speech.

* * * * *

Just about everyone in Virginia City knows what happened the next day, of course. Mostly they heard the Watsons’ version, though, and there were some details the Watsons never chose to share. You may as well bear with me while I give you a slightly different story.

It got started in the Silver Dollar, first of all. (Everyone knows it ended here, but not so many people know about that start.) in fact, it got started right at our music box, Sam’s pride and joy. Anyone could put a coin in and play a tune, though we girls generally preferred it when someone else did the paying—perhaps because we spent more time in there than most folks, and knew all the songs by heart. That day, though, Dolly had a big enough investment in mind she wasn’t worried about spending her own nickel. What she got for that nickel…well, judge for yourself.

Even though it was just a weekday afternoon, Dolly was tricked out as if it were the first Saturday night after payday, with the men eager to spend their extra cash. When she’d caught a glimpse of Cliff Rexford on her way in, she’d scuttled up the back stairs so he wouldn’t see her dressed in plain calico and put on her best bardress, a blue satin number that was almost brighter than her eyes. After begging for a splash of Pinkie’s most expensive scent, she went back down resolved, in plain disregard of the advice I’d given her, to sail straight up to the man she wanted and cut loose with all guns. It was a pretty vulgar approach, all told, but Dolly was too innocent to know anything more sophisticated. She hadn’t seen him in far too long, and she wasn’t about to waste this opportunity.

Things went all right at first. She got him up and dancing with her while the music box played, and for a moment they seemed like the happy couple she was hoping they’d become. But somehow or other his brother got mentioned, and that got Cliff back onto how Paul Watson was a cold-blooded killer, and his preacher’s clothes were nothing but a pose—and Cliff was going to get him to pick up his gun again, and kill him. Cliff then picked up his hat and stalked out, leaving Dolly with a puzzled look on her face. If he’d never come back she might not have felt as unhappy as she would have been before their dance…but he did come back, no more than a minute or two later, and somehow he coaxed Dolly into stepping out with him so he could buy her “something nice.”

If Sam had been on duty he would have stopped things right then, but even Sam takes a day off now and again, and Cosmo was behind the bar. He didn’t know any more about Cliff’s affairs than Dolly did, and he sure wasn’t aware Cliff had been keeping an eye on Sue Watson’s little dress shop all the time he’d been sitting at the Silver Dollar that afternoon. He did know Dolly had no business leaving the saloon with other customers in it, but the place was nearly empty, and right then Cliff wasn’t just being charming to his girl. Cosmo gave them both a wink and went on with polishing the bar.

The minute Cliff got into that dress shop, though, Dolly knew she’d made a big mistake in going. Cliff set about baiting Sue so crudely neither of the women could really believe what was happening. It ended with all Sue’s pretty dresses on the floor, along with half the rest of the furnishings; not to mention Cliff knocking Sue across the room and tearing a dress half off Dolly—and Dolly giving Cliff a piece of her mind, with a temper no one had known that she possessed.

Cliff went back to the Silver Dollar alone, with a look on his face that emptied the downstairs at once. We girls bunched at the top of the stairs, wondering what had become of Dolly (we found out later she was still at the dress shop, stammering angry apologies as she put arnica on Sue’s bruises). And the next man through the doors was none other than Joe Cartwright, looking like the Archangel Michael closing the gates to Eden.

Looking back, I can see that Joe was almost as out of his depth as Dolly had been. He could play a peaceable game of poker, but he’d never tried—never wanted to try—preventing an actual fight. The one thing he had clear was that he couldn’t draw his own gun, so the best he found to do was order Cliff, loudly, to get out of town while knocking a whiskey glass, and then a whiskey bottle, out of his hands. What Joe’d forgotten was that, now Cliff wasn’t on the Ponderosa’s payroll, he had no reason to care what Joe thought of him.

When Adam made those sweeping gestures Joe was trying to copy now, they’d always had their effect. Maybe he’d learned the trick of it when he was back east at college; or maybe it had something to do with his size, and his voice, and his strength. At any rate, faced with Adam, Cliff might well have slunk away in silence. Coming from Joe, though, it all seemed…not silly, no, but—shrill, and Cliff’s sulky, half-ashamed glower was melting into open annoyance. It certainly didn’t help Joe’s cause that he barely came up to the other man’s shoulder, and must have been fifty pounds lighter, or more. Instead of being intimidated, Cliff was starting to look like a big dog being baited by a terrier. All it would take was one snap….

Not that Joe noticed, or cared. Which is why terriers are dangerous in any quarrel—until they get themselves killed, of course. There was a big sigh of relief at the top of the stairs when a new voice announced, “This is my fight, Joe.”

Paul Watson was there in his shirtsleeves, his collar open at the neck like any other hardworking man, and a gunbelt slung low around his hips. For a moment he and Cliff looked more alike than different—two big, broad-shouldered fellows with handsome, unlined faces. With Paul you reckoned the smoothness came from self-control; with Cliff, I’d assumed it was never having spent enough time thinking to wear any tracks in his forehead. I hadn’t watched Cliff’s eyes carefully enough, I realized. There was plenty of expression in them now, and a surprising amount of intelligence. The big dog was wide awake, the terrier forgotten. Thank goodness, Joe seemed content to put his back to the bar and watch matters develop without interfering further.

Quite a crowd had assembled behind the doors to the saloon, but no one else came in, for the same reason I was shooing the other girls away from the head of the stairs. In a showdown like this it felt better to have something between you and the guns being waved about—even something as fragile as a louvered swinging door, or as narrow as a doorpost. Joe, with no kind of shelter at all, should have felt as naked as a plucked chicken, but if he did it wasn’t showing.

Meantime, Paul Watson eased his way around the saloon until he had his back against the far wall, talking all the while. Cliff had finally got through the “preacher’s clothes,” that much was clear. You could hear it in Paul’s voice, which came out faster now, and sharp—taunting, even. He’d never sounded like that before, in all the time I’d known him. He was telling Cliff about his brother’s death, saying the boy’d been afraid, had died sobbing in his arms. All but saying the word “coward,” which was stirring Cliff up in return. I could see at last why Paul hadn’t wanted to talk about this before—that it was for Cliff’s sake, but also for his own.

Cliff didn’t want to believe any of it, but there was still that in Paul’s voice, despite its changes, which convinced you he wasn’t lying. There wasn’t any other way around the tale Paul told. Five years before, Cliff’s twin brother had picked a fight with a faster gun and regretted it too late—as two others had regretted it, all through those long years’ passing.

The living twin went for his gun first, but—like the dead one—wasn’t quite fast enough. Both guns fired; only one found a target. Cliff went down like everyone’s vision of the lion at bay, snarling all the way and still not surrendering, even helpless on the floor. Paul coolly leveled his pistol again.

There was silence.

It went on, unbroken by another shot.

Without really lowering his pistol, Paul walked back over to Joe. He said something I didn’t catch as he put the gun down on the bar. I heard only enough to know he had recovered the measured, calm voice he used for preaching. Then he shouldered his way through the door, presumably headed back to an anxious wife.

He wasn’t as calm as he looked, though. It was Joe had the wits to send Cosmo out after a doctor.

* * * * *

Some time after Cliff had been carried over to the doctor’s office, we heard an outburst of cheering which we found out later had announced Ben Cartwright’s safe arrival in town. Hoss came in and shouldered his way to the bar not long after the noise had died down, and Joe, catching sight of his brother, moved anxiously to join him. “Where’s Pa?”

Hoss flinched at the shout in his ear. “Ya don’t have to yell, boy! He’s over at the International House getting the Watsons settled in…here, let’s get somewheres we can talk properly.”

“Why would the Watsons be at the International House?” Joe frowned.

“Well, they didn’t want to go all the way out to the Ponderosa; said they’d be leaving tomorrow,” Hoss began, and then seemed to get confused himself. “You didn’t think I was talking ’bout Paul and Sue, did ya?”

“They’ve kind of been on my mind lately,” Joe said dryly. “I’ll catch you up later. I forgot Pa said he’d likely hire Watson & Son in his telegram from Placerville. So how are they?”

“Like you’d expect—well, Clint ‘n Ellis, anyway…’n you won’t have heard about Andy. Look, you get yourself set down first. It’s a long story….”

“But Pa’s all right.”

“Oh, Pa’s all right,” Hoss agreed. “So’ll the rest of ’em be, I guess, but it was a rough trip. Never could tell whether I was sorry you weren’t there to help or downright glad you was missing it.”

Pretty much everyone was listening in by now, but the Cartwright boys didn’t seem to care. Sam caught my eye and sent me over to them with a bottle of the good whiskey, on the house. Hoss ignored it in favor of his beer, but Joe poured himself a shot with hands that seemed less steady than usual. “So what happened?”

“Lordy, boy, what didn’t happen? Well, first of all, even afore I got there the lot of ’em–even Pa–had got brittle as old sticks. You remember how Adam used to fuss that Clint should give his younger boy, Ellis, some time away from the ranch to get a little extra schooling? Well, looks like Clint didn’t let him—and that boy still ain’t got no idea how to talk a mule out of a temper. Every time Andy tried to have Ellis handle one of the easier mules Clint was swapping things back the way he wanted it, and yelling at ’em both when things didn’t work out. Then they’d yell at each other, and all three of ’em would yell at Pa…leastways, that’s what it sounded like from what Pa done told me. It was handlin’ that blasting oil got them so wrought up. Even Andy was twitchy about it, and you know how calm he always was….”

“Was?”

“I’m getting to that.” There was a rare snap to Hoss’ voice suddenly. “See, I got to ’em the morning after they’d had to take care of a bottle that was leaking. Pa got it dealt with—did everything just like Adam had said he should, and nothing went wrong, but it had them all worried about the cold higher up. Don’t feel right having fires so near something that’s meant to blow up, but Adam said they had to keep it at the same temperature as much as possible, and you know how hard that is up in the mountains at night. So they were planning to try and get through the high country in one day, so’s not have to make camp up there. Only…well, you know how mules get when you try to rush ’em. Specially on the steep parts of the trail.”

“And Ellis wasn’t handling the mules well,” Joe said softly.

“Actually he wasn’t half bad with ’em by then, ‘cept he couldn’t rush his, so he was always falling behind. But Clint didn’t trust him no more, and Pa’d pretty much given up trying to interfere. Wasn’t doing any good anyway. Pa said later Clint was back to grumbling about Bessie dying when Ellis was born….”

“Oh, no…not that again. Poor Ellis.”

“Poor Ellis, and poor Andy, and poor Pa…it’s not like Pa enjoys hearing about that sort of thing either. At least you and Adam didn’t have to go through it this time. Remember the time Clint got Adam so riled up they was almost to fighting?”

“Clint didn’t know about how Adam’s ma died.”

“Clint didn’t care, either. No one ever had a tragedy like his Bessie dying…sometimes that’s how it seemed Clint was.” Hoss took a long deep breath and seemed to shake those concerns away. “Anyway, my being there seemed to settle things down some, and…and you know how Andy could always smooth things over. So things was already looking better by the time they broke camp, and like I said, even Ellis was doing O. K. with the balky mule, just going a bit slow-like. But Clint was ettling to make faster time, so when we got to the top of the first pass, he had Andy go back to take Ellis’ mule through. Only Ellis wasn’t halfway down to us when something musta gone wrong, and…and then there wasn’t no mule, and no Andy, just a whole lot more space in the pass. Nothing left to bury, even.”

Joe swallowed hard a couple of times without saying anything. Hoss emptied his beer and went on solemnly, “Best you could say was it was quick. I don’t think ol’ Andy ever knew what happened.” He passed the empty glass to me for a refill—not even looking up to see which one of us girls was to hand—and went on, “Thing is, if anyone made a mistake—and I’m not saying anyone did, ‘cept for that ornery mule—but even if, it wasn’t anyone’s fault except Andy’s. Not Ellis, not Pa ‘n me, not even Clint. He was all by himself up there, and the mule wasn’t fussing or nothing. Prob’ly just one of those things. You know how it is.”

“Never feels like that at the time, though.”

“You’re right about that,” Hoss agreed. He took the refilled tankard from me and drank it half-empty again in one pass. “Clint like to tore Ellis’ head off, and Pa’s as well, come to that…well, there’s no point repeating what Clint said. He didn’t really mean it, even what he said to Ellis, or at least he didn’t mean it the way it came out. Can’t really blame him. We all loved that boy, but none of us as much as Clint did. Young Andy was his pa’s whole world, seems like.”

“He was the same age as you, right?”

“Half way between you ‘n me, I reckon. Just seemed older cause he didn’t take his time growing up the way you have.”

“Now you take that back!” Joe grinned half-seriously, and for a moment the tension eased between them. Hoss gave Joe a light cuff on the shoulder, ruffled up the boy’s hair, and gave a big sigh. “Pa took it awful hard too. He was ready to dump that stuff off the side of the mountain instead of taking another step forward. It was all I could do to persuade him that was the last thing Andy’d have wanted.”

“Surprised you got Clint to agree.”

“Don’t know that we ever did…but Ellis understood. Ellis said Andy wouldn’t have left his friends stranded. And with the three of us going on, there wasn’t much Clint could do but go with us. And that’s just about all he did do the rest of the day…set on his horse and led Andy’s. But at least he stayed out of our way…only we still had the worst part to get through.”

Joe seemed to be retracing the packroute in his mind. “Oh, yeah…there’s that big climb up to the second pass that always gives the mules fits. What’d you do, take it all up by hand?”

“Figures you’d guess. Yup, we rigged up a rope and I pulled those crates up on a cradle of pine branches, with Pa riding along to be sure nothing jostled them. Went smooth as you please, ‘cept for the last one. Don’t quite know how it happened, but Pa and that last case darn near went over the edge of a cliff. Only near, Joe. Pa’s just fine—but that’s ’cause Ellis got himself down that slope without kicking up a landslide and helped Pa carry the blame thing up between ’em.”

Joe had gone almost sheet white in the middle of that speech. “Wish Adam’d never heard of that damn stuff.”

“You and me both,” Hoss admitted. “But the fellows from the mines sure was glad to see us. They’d brought a wagon out just about as close as they could to the trail. I tell you, I was never so glad to high-tail it away from something as I was when they got them crates out of those packsaddles. But us and the Watsons, we brought ’em the blasted stuff they wanted, just like Adam said we could. No point in sticking with the blamed stuff after that, so we rode on ahead. Figured Clint and Ellis deserved some time to themselves afore they start home….”

“Can’t imagine Watson & Son without Andy,” Joe said softly. “Clint was calling it that when Andy was still in the cradle.”

“Yup, and never bothered to put another “s” to “Son,” did he?” Hoss finished his second beer and tapped on the glass to order a third. Enough other noise was starting to fill the saloon again that I lost the thread of their conversation, but when I came back with the full glass—and a pitcher more of beer courtesy of Sam—it wasn’t hard to guess where they had gotten.

“Right now I think his father’s pride’s all Ellis needs to make him happy.”

“But Adam seemed to think…” Joe began, then let his voice trail away.

Hoss shrugged. “Mebbe later he’ll change his mind—like Adam did. For now…it’s enough. Just like it was for Adam all those years. And I think, where ever ol’ Andy is, he’s right happy to see that—and so will Adam be, once he hears the news.”

Joe stared into his glass of whiskey and nodded slowly. “Yeah, well…speaking of hearing news, you aren’t the only one had a busy few days, brother. Remember I said Paul and Sue had been on my mind lately? Well, so was Cliff Rexford…you see, this morning he went out to the Ponderosa bright and early, and pretty much wrecked everything we’ve done on Paul’s church….”

I left them to Joe’s story. After all, at least no one had gotten killed in it.

* * * * *

Pinkie still keeps in touch with our old friends at the Silver Dollar, and she tells me Ellis Watson always has a drink there whenever he gets into town. He’s still too young for whiskey, but no one’s going to fine Sam for letting him have beer, given he’s bringing blasting oil from the Central Railroad’s powderworks at Donner Lake into town every time he comes. Several of the mines have extended their hours again, and hiring’s back up, so I suppose it’s worth all that risk to somebody. Just don’t tell anyone in California, where they passed a law banning anyone from transporting the stuff; it’s a good thing for us Donner Lake’s so near the Nevada border—and the old muleteer trails. The same magazine where I read about the type writing machine is now saying that Mr. Nobel, the man who invented the blasting cap that made nitroglycerine so useful, is testing something new he calls dynamite. The hope is it won’t be as dangerous to move from place to place, but will work as well as blasting oil when you want to set it off. Even if it all works out, my guess is Ellis Watson will still be the one brings any sort of explosive across the mountains for quite a while. Someone asked him once why he was willing to go on hauling blasting oil after what it did to his brother, and I’m told he answered, “It can’t do anything. If I get blown up, it’s because I made a mistake.” But when he’d drunk another glass of beer, they also say he added on, “Besides, it owes me for Andy. Owes me an awful lot, and it knows it.”

Anyway, Watson & Son is doing very nicely for itself these days, and will as long as Ellis’ luck holds up. Certainly he doesn’t seem in any hurry to get away from home any more.

Cliff Rexford’s rib healed up fairly quickly, and he made his peace with Paul Watson—and with Joe, and Hoss—after offering what I hear was a pretty comprehensive apology. He’s back at the Ponderosa again, and everyone there’s back to speaking well of him. As for Dolly, she’s working at Sue’s dress shop now—practically running the place, now that being a preacher’s wife takes up so much of Sue’s time. Cliff managed to get a waltz with her at the big dance last week, but I’m not sure she’s forgiven him yet, not entirely. Sometimes I’m not at all sure she ever will.

Hoss still worries, more than ever, maybe. If Joe’s trying to take Adam’s place taking care of Virginia City, Hoss is still trying to take care of Joe, and that’s by far the more difficult task. What’s more, there’s often a frown on his face when he talks about Adam, though the news he has to tell doesn’t sound like anything other than a man of a certain age enjoying what the wide world can offer. There must be more he isn’t sharing with us, and I do wonder what it could be…but Hoss does keep his secrets secret, especially when they’re not really his.

About a week after Hoss and Ben came home—or Cliff got his rib broke by Paul Watson’s bullet, depending on how you count the days—I did hand in my notice at the Silver Dollar, just like Mr. Wood suggested. Sam took it pretty hard. He tried bluffing at first, telling me this time he wasn’t going to let me back if I changed my mind again, and then he broke down and admitted he’d always find something for me to do at the Silver Dollar, no matter what. Then he looked at me for a right long time (as Hoss would say) and seemed about to say something else, but he finally just shook his head and sighed. Couple of days later, a wagon showed up at the old Palace with a big, heavy desk inside it. I’d seen that desk in one of the back rooms, looking down-on-its-luck but still plenty usable. Now it had a brand new glossy finish and all its brass shined up. The men who unloaded it told me Sam reckoned I’d need a good desk, with locks, if I was going to be running my own business.

Sam’s old enough to be my father, probably twice my weight, and I know for a fact every penny he has is tied up in that saloon. It’s a good thing he bought his music box back in the easy days; he couldn’t afford a luxury like that any more. But I have a feeling I know what he wanted to ask me the day I left, and I’m glad he didn’t do it. It would have hurt me almost as much as him to have to tell him no. And that desk…well, it’s not as pretty as a music box, and I couldn’t save it from a burning building even if I wanted to, but it means a lot to me, and always will.

There was still a lot of work to be done on the Palace, of course. In fact, that’s why I had to give up working at the saloon; there just weren’t enough hours in the day, with everything I had to paint, or paper, or sign. And of course I had to break my habit of calling it the Palace. That wouldn’t do, any more than it would do for people to remember that I’d been a saloon girl. Sue was right, though. As soon as my roots had grown out far enough all the blonde parts could be tucked under a hairnet, it was amazing how many more people took notice of me when I walked out in Virginia City. The tea-room was packed from the day it first opened, and half the ladies there begged me to share my recipes. It was a pleasure to tell them I had no more idea than they did how my pastry-chef created her masterpieces.

It may be true, as that fashionable lady in San Francisco insisted to her homesick husband, that scenic wallpaper is now completely out of fashion, but the people I’ve shown my lobby and grand staircase don’t seem to agree. They love the pale jade paint I used on all the walls that don’t have wallpaper, too. Maybe they don’t talk about “resting their eyeballs,” the way Hoss did in my dream, but that’s pretty much what they do there whenever there’s lots of sun. Hoss still calls it “cabbage green” when there’s no one else around to hear him, too.

I’ve had a few unofficial people staying upstairs—the most important one being Ann, now the wife of Albert Connors, Gold City’s new sheriff. Yes, Dolly’s older sister. Even after she and Bert got married and she moved down to Gold City, she’s come back almost every day to help me every way she could. When I tried to thank her she just laughed and said it was all good practice for when she had her own house to furnish, and went on to point out that she owed me for being so kind to Dolly. Even so, it didn’t feel like the hotel was really ready for guests until yesterday, when Hoss came by with the final touch to make sure everyone knew we weren’t running just a tea-room and restaurant any more.

Hoss insisted on hanging the sign up himself, and for all I know he painted it too, though it’s every bit as elegant as the ones at the International House. More elegant, really—the letters are done in the same color paint I used on all the moldings and other special woodwork. I just hope the paint won’t fade too badly; I can remember how quickly Julia’s blue awnings bleached out—though of course I suppose we can always get someone to touch up the letters. Yes, I know, I’m babbling…but it all looks so perfect, and I want it to stay that way.

I went across the street to watch while Hoss was up there on his ladder, and I got to thinking about all the people whose names weren’t on that sign. Pinkie. Jed, the colored sweeper I’d hired away from the International House—he was the only one of their employees I dared steal, since I depended on them to recommend me to potential guests they couldn’t accommodate themselves, but I’d already learned he knew everything Pinkie and I couldn’t guess about how to run a hotel. Jed’s daughter Caroline, who normally made dresses for Sue Watson’s shop but had promised to be on hand if ever one of my guests needed sewing done in a hurry. The young Irish hooligan Sheriff Coffee had picked out to be my chief bellboy, and his mother, who’d be laundering the hotel’s sheets. Hop Sing’s cousin, who’d be cooking everything Pinkie didn’t, and the Chinese laundry that would handle the table linens, and so on and so on. All those people with new jobs now, because I told a story to Hoss Cartwright one summer afternoon, or maybe because I chanced to share a stagecoach ride with Adam Cartwright the winter before that. When you were remembering the entire staff, what Hoss had set out in the dark green paint was really very incomplete.

But It looked pretty good to me, even so.

McNair’s Hotel.

And I, Marianne Rose McNair, was in charge of it all. Maybe it was just one more—one last?—contribution from Adam Cartwright to the welfare of Virginia City, but it was also, and for the first time, one from me.

I promised myself it wouldn’t be the only one.

* * * * * * * * * *