Chapter 17

Conrad swallowed hard and kept his hands well away from the guns under his coat. His hat had fallen off when he tumbled from the horse, and a hot prairie wind stirred his hair. The same wind moved several strands of the girl’s long, fair hair in front of her face, but she didn’t move to brush them away. All her attention was focused on the stranger who lay there surrounded by the dogs.

From where he lay, Conrad couldn’t help noticing the thrust of her breasts against the thin cotton dress she wore, or the way the wind molded the fabric to the curves of her hips and thighs. She was young, but a full-grown woman or next thing to it, no doubt about that.

He licked dust off his lips. “Listen, take it easy. I mean no harm—”

“Shut up! Come out here from town to take our land away from us. I know your type of skunk when I see it.”

The scornful lash of the girl’s voice bothered Conrad almost as much as the shotgun she was pointing at him or the slavering muzzles of the dogs all around him. She had taken him for some sort of town scoundrel with his tweed suit and rented horse.

“Sara Beth!” a man’s voice called. “What you got there, Sara Beth?”

“I think it’s another fella from the bank!” the girl replied without taking her eyes off Conrad.

An elderly man limped into view. He wore gray-striped trousers with suspenders over a faded pair of red longjohns. A black cap with a stiff bill perched on his head. Conrad looked at it for a second before he realized it was the same sort of cap worn by many men who worked for the railroad. The man was short and thin, with a leathery face and a spiky white beard.

“Mr. Potter?” Conrad guessed.

The man’s pale blue eyes were deep set under shaggy brows. Those brows rose as his eyes widened in surprise. “You know me?”

“Of course he knows you,” the girl, Sara Beth, snapped. “The bank sent him out here to cause more trouble for us, didn’t it?”

“I’m not from any bank,” Conrad said, “and I’m certainly not here to cause trouble for you. My name is Conrad Browning. If you’ll call these dogs off, I’ll tell you why I came to see you.”

The old man tugged thoughtfully at his beard. “Maybe we ought to listen to him, Sara Beth—”

“No! You can’t trust anybody from the city. You told me that.”

“Yeah, but there’s somethin’ about this young fella …” The old man’s voice trailed off as he looked surprised again. “Browning, did you say your name is? Any relation to Mrs. Vivian Browning?”

“She was my mother,” Conrad said.

That made up the old-timer’s mind. He reached over, took hold of the shotgun’s barrels, and pushed them aside. “Get away from him, you blasted varmints!” he told the dogs as he advanced, kicking at them. “Let the man alone!”

“But you told me—” Sara Beth began angrily.

“I know what I told you, girl. But this fella is the son of one of the most decent ladies to ever walk the face o’ the earth. Ever’ time a train she was on stopped in Kansas City, she made a point of it to come to my office and say hello to me.”

“Then you are Ralph Potter, the former station-master?” Conrad asked.

“That’s right, young fella.” Potter held a hand down to Conrad. “Lemme help you up.”

Conrad started to say he didn’t need any help, but changed his mind and grasped the gnarled old hand. He climbed to his feet and brushed his clothes off. Potter picked up the hat and handed it to him.

Sara Beth stood off to the side, scowling darkly at Conrad in suspicion.

“I reckon Crowley told you where to find me,” Potter said.

Conrad nodded. “That’s right.”

“I heard about your mother passin’ away, God rest her soul. Was sure sorry to hear about it, too.”

“Thank you.”

“I reckon you must own her share of the railroad now.”

Conrad nodded again, not wanting to take the time to explain that he shared the Browning interests with Frank Morgan. “I’ve come to talk to you about the railroad, in fact.”

“But I’ve been retired for a couple years now,” Potter said. “I don’t have anything to do with it anymore.”

“What I want to talk to you about happened three years ago, while you were still the station-master.”

The old-timer looked confused, but he nodded. “All right. Why don’t we go inside and get out of this hot sun?”

Conrad smiled. “That’ll be fine. Thanks.”

“Sara Beth, you fix us some lemonade,” Potter said as he ushered Conrad toward the farmhouse.

The girl snorted as if she didn’t like being ordered around, but she didn’t say anything.

The furnishings in the house were old and shabby, but the place was clean, almost spotlessly so. Potter and his granddaughter—she was too young to be his daughter—might be a little down on their luck, judging by Sara Beth’s talk about the bank, but they weren’t allowing that to make them give up. Potter motioned Conrad into an armchair next to a small, round table with a lace doily and a lamp sitting on it. The old-timer pulled up a ladderback chair and sat on it while Sara Beth disappeared into the kitchen.

“Now, Mr. Browning, what can I do for you?”

“Like I said, I want to ask you about something that would have happened about three years ago. A young woman came through Kansas City on the train, probably heading west. She was traveling with another woman—I don’t really know how old she was—and a couple of small children. Infants. Twins. A boy and a girl.”

Potter took off the black cap and gave him a dubious frown. “Lots of folks come through Kansas City, Mr. Browning.”

“Yes, that’s what people keep telling me,” Conrad said, trying not to sigh in frustration.

“I can’t hardly remember—”

“It’s possible this woman would have come to see you. She probably would have been upset about something and might have demanded some sort of special treatment.”

“Oh, you’re talkin’ about Miss Tarleton.”

Conrad sat there, thunderstruck with surprise.

“I remember her, all right,” Potter went on. “Be hard to forget a lady like Miss Tarleton, if you ever had to deal with her.”

Conrad managed to nod. “That’s putting it mildly. Go on, Mr. Potter.”

“Well, like you said, she was upset because the train she was on was a mite late, and she’d missed her connection to Denver. I don’t know what she thought I could do about it. It’s not like I could reach out and catch that westbound and make it back up all the way to Kansas City just so’s she could get on it.”

“She was going to Denver, you say?” Conrad’s heart slugged heavily in his chest, but he managed to keep his face and voice calm.

“Well, that’s where she was bound next. I seem to recall her sayin’ she was gonna stop there for a while. But the tickets she had would take her and the lady with her all the way to San Francisco. No charge for the two little ones, of course. Wee babes like that ride for free.”

Conrad felt a little dizzy. This was exactly the sort of information he’d been looking for. He had Pamela’s intinerary laid out before him.

Sara Beth came back from the kitchen carrying a tray with a couple of glasses of lemonade on it. She handed one to Potter and one to Conrad, not being very gracious about it. Conrad smiled and said, “Thank you,” anyway.

Potter took a drink of the lemonade and licked his lips. “Talkin’ is thirsty work.”

“You’re being very helpful, Mr. Potter,” Conrad assured him. “I had a feeling someone, somewhere along the way, must have remembered Pamela. You called her Miss Tarleton. Did you know her before she introduced herself?”

“Well, not really, but when she said she was Clark Tarleton’s daughter, I knew him, all right. He had an interest in the railroad at one time, too, but whenever he came through the station, he wasn’t near as nice as your mother always was. He seemed to think the world pretty much revolved around him, and I reckon Miss Tarleton inherited that same feeling from him.”

Conrad nodded. That was Pamela, all right.

“Did she tell you the two children were hers?”

Potter shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t offer any explanation for them.” He pursed his lips in disapproval. “I figured as much, though. I saw she didn’t have no wedding ring on her finger, but it’s not my place to judge.” The old-timer squinted shrewdly at Conrad. “Mr. Browning, you can tell me to go to hell if you want … but were those your kids?”

Grimly, Conrad nodded. “That’s right. Now you understand why I’m trying to find out where she went.”

“She stole your kids away?” Potter shook his head. “That’s a mighty bad thing to do to a man.”

“I didn’t even know about them until recently.”

“And now you want to find her and them?”

“Not Pamela,” Conrad said. “She’s dead.”

Potter looked shocked, and so did Sara Beth, who had set the tray on a side table and withdrawn to a divan across the room. “What happened to the young’uns?” Potter asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Pamela left them somewhere, probably in the care of the servant who was traveling with her, and then”—the whole story was too complicated and sordid, and at that moment Conrad didn’t have any stomach for telling it again—“she was killed in an accident. But my son and daughter are still out there somewhere, and I’m going to find them.”

“Good Lord,” Potter muttered. “What a terrible thing.”

“I’d followed her trail to Kansas City, but I didn’t know where she went from there. Now I do.” Conrad paused. “I assume she took the next train heading for Denver?”

Potter nodded. “That’s right. Since she missed her connection because the train she came in on was late, I made arrangements for her to stay at the best hotel in town, and the railroad paid for it. I didn’t have to do that, it’s not what we usually do, but I figured for somebody like Miss Tarleton …” He shrugged his narrow shoulders.

“And it got her off your back,” Conrad said with a faint smile.

“Yeah. That, too. The next mornin’ I sent a buggy and a wagon for them, and I saw to it personal-like that her bags got loaded on the train and she and the other lady were settled in a nice compartment with the children. She was only delayed about twenty-four hours.”

“But you don’t know what happened after that?”

“After the train pulled out?” The old man shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t have any idea. Miss Tarleton and those kids rolled right on outta my life, and I ain’t seen any of them since.”

Conrad expected as much. Still, he had learned a great deal. The twins had to be somewhere between Kansas City and San Francisco. That was a vast stretch of territory … but it was better than having to search for them across the entire country.

To cover the emotions coursing through him, he took a sip of the lemonade. It was pretty sour—Potter probably couldn’t afford much sugar. The corn crop Conrad had seen on his way there had looked like a good one, but Potter might be cash-poor at the moment. A lot of farmers wound up that way, with a crop in the fields that might save them but circumstances that closed in and didn’t give them any time.

“I can’t thank you enough for your help,” Conrad said as he set the glass on the table beside him. “I’d like to give you something for your trouble.”

“Shucks, that isn’t necessary—” Potter began.

“Yes, it is,” Sara Beth snapped. “If the man wants to pay you for your help, it wouldn’t be polite to turn him down. Besides, we have a payment due on that note.”

Potter nodded wearily. “Yeah, I know, Sara Beth.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Potter,” Conrad said with a smile as he withdrew his wallet from an inner pocket of his coat. “The help you’ve given me is well worth it.”

Not to mention the hope, Conrad thought.

He took two hundred dollars from the wallet and held it out toward Potter.

Before the old-timer could take it, Sara Beth was on her feet and had come across the room to pluck the bills from Conrad’s fingers. “I handle the money around here.”

Potter didn’t challenge her. He nodded and said, “She’s got a better head for it than I do.”

It didn’t matter to Conrad who got the money. He’d gotten the information he needed. He stood up. “Thank you for your hospitality, and for your help.”

“You’re mighty welcome, Mr. Browning. Like I said, your mother was always as nice as she could be to me.”

The two men left Sara Beth counting the money and walked out of the farmhouse. As they paused on the front porch, Potter asked, “Where are you stayin’ in town, Mr. Browning? Just in case I think of anything else that might help you.”

“I’m at the Cattleman’s Hotel,” Conrad replied. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be there. Until tomorrow, anyway.”

He was going to have to do some thinking about how to proceed now that he knew what Pamela’s destination had been three years earlier. It wouldn’t do to take the train straight to San Francisco. Her letter had indicated she’d hidden the children somewhere in the West.

They could be anywhere, Conrad thought. Anywhere.

“Thanks again.” He shook the old-timer’s hand. “I’m glad your granddaughter took the money. I hope it helps you out as much as you’ve helped me.”

“Granddaughter?” Potter repeated with a puzzled frown. “Sara Beth isn’t my granddaughter. She’s my wife!”