Deborah Camp (21 page)

And now she was off with Romeo Rutledge.

He groaned again and buried himself deeper in self-pity. Would Rutledge be good to her? If Rutledge hurt her feelings or treated her like—The rest of the threat was lost in his harsh laugh. What was he being so defensive about? Cassie wasn’t his woman. She thought he was a two-timing husband with a litter of children tucked away somewhere on the mysterious eastern seaboard. It was good that Rutledge had taken an interest in Cassie. She needed a man in her life, someone to depend on and lean on, someone to take her father’s place. Rutledge wouldn’t have been Rook’s choice as a companion for Cassie, but at least there was someone who was concerned about her besides Jewel … and Jewel’s younger son, he tacked on.

Rook stared at the empty room and depression almost suffocated him. Without Cassie the cabin was beyond dingy: it was bleak. He sat at the kitchen table and cradled his head in his hands. It was going to be one hell of a long day.

Riding in the surrey with its fringe dancing in the breeze, Cassie was happier than she’d been in a long, long time. The day would be too short, she told herself, and she must relish each precious minute. Soon, far too soon, she’d be back on the farm and burdened once again with her uncertain future. But today she was a lady going to town in a surrey driven by a handsome man who looked upon her with unconcealed appreciation.

Oh, she felt pretty! Prettier than she’d ever felt before. The moment she’d slipped the dress over her head, she’d felt every inch the lady. From her cedar keepsake box she’d extracted a pair of white lacy gloves that had been her mother’s. She smoothed them over her hands, thankful for their camouflage. A lady didn’t have blisters and rough skin, and with the gloves on, she could forget about her working woman’s hands. From her frilly bonnet down to her high-top shoes she was fashion’s perfect picture.

“When was the last time you were in town?” Boone asked, keeping a loose rein on the roan.

“ ’Bout a month before Pa was shot,” Cassie answered,
moving one gloved hand across the pretty handrail at her side. The brass gleamed in the sun, almost blinding her at times. “This sure is a nice buggy. Is it yours?”

“My family’s,” Boone said proudly. “I thought you’d like this one.”

“You got more than one?”

“We’ve got two buggies, one buckboard, and this surrey.”

“My, my! I don’t even have a horse.”

“What about that chestnut Jewel gave you?”

The blood left her face and she looked off to one side. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about him. He’s … he’s not really mine. Jewel loaned him to me, is all.”

“Oh, I see.” He caught her gaze and smiled. “That woman … uh, Miss Townsend has been good to you, hasn’t she?”

“She’s a saint.” Cassie gave him a sharp look before she added, “No matter what anybody says about her. Jewel Townsend is a good woman.”

He ran a finger under his shirt collar and stretched his neck away from it. “It’s going to be a warm day, I believe. Eureka Springs will be full of people. The springs are more popular than ever, and a couple of bath houses have been built for those who are too delicate or too socially prominent to bathe in the public springs with commonfolk. People come from all around—even from across the ocean!—to bathe in the healing waters.”

“You think that water can really cure you?” Cassie asked, having doubts about Eureka Springs’s touted miracle water.

“It can’t hurt,” Boone said evasively. “I’ve heard people tell all kinds of tales about miracle cures. The Indians used the springs long before we learned about their powers. Indians are usually right about things that can’t be seen or proven.”

“You know any Indians?”

“Just a couple. They’re not so bad.” He flicked the reins, urging the roan into a trot. “Certainly not the savages everyone says they are.”

“Aren’t you scared of them?”

“No.” Boone laughed, a pleasing, deep-throated sound. “I’d be more scared of outlaws or those strange hill people who live in caves than I would be of Indians. Indians are more civilized than you’d think.” He sighed, and fret lines formed at the corners of his mouth. “The darkies are the biggest problem these days, if you ask me. Since the war they’re shiftless. Most of them don’t know how to make a living unless one of us shows them how to do it.” He spoke with the blind prejudice unfortunately still so common then.

“Well, what do you expect?” Cassie asked. “They were treated like beasts of burden for so long they lost all notion of what it’s like to be human. I bet if we treat ’em like people now, they’ll act like people, just like anyone else.”

“They were treated good, and I think they realize now that it’s too late.” Boone squared his shoulders with an air of defiance. “The Yankees have ruined everything. Everything, I tell you!”

Cassie shrugged off his blustering Confederate banter. “What’s done is done. I reckon, like in any other feud, we lost more than we gained.” She retied the bow under her chin and adjusted the bonnet, which hadn’t yet adapted to the shape of her head. “Let’s not talk about killing and poor lost people. It’s a pretty day and I want to enjoy myself.”

“Your wish is my command,” Boone said, his tone becoming lighter and less preachy. “I’m so glad you agreed to this outing.”

“I’m glad you asked me.” A thrill raced through her and eagerness followed close behind. “I had to get away from the homestead. Everybody needs a change of scenery from time to time.”

“I agree. Sometimes I think I’ll go mad if I have to spend another minute in the bank. That teller’s cage is a prison to me.”

The anguish in his voice touched Cassie’s soft heart, and she rested one hand on his sleeve. “Sounds like we both need to forget our troubles and count our blessings.”

He relaxed visibly and sent her a weak smile. “My chief blessing is having your company today, Miss Cassie.”

“Cassie,” she said, pleased when her correction made him grin from ear to ear. “No need to be so formal, Boone. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes, Cassie. I’d like to think that we’re
good
friends.”

Cassie averted her gaze from his, feeling shy now that she’d given him permission to address her in a friendly fashion. Then she chided herself; Rook had called her Cassie from the beginning. That or Cassandra Mae when he was joshing her. She should have taken him to task for his familiar use of her name, but it had seemed natural for him to do so right from the start.

Natural and wonderful, like lightning splitting open the heavens
.

Rook’s words the night of the storm came rushing back to her, along with another treasured memory of him doctoring her back with gentle fingers. Jewel had looked at the scratches during her last visit and had said that they were about healed and would leave no scars, just as Rook had promised. Soon the bear’s marks would be gone, but the skin at the nape of her neck would always remember Rook’s kiss. There were some things she couldn’t forget; the dark warmth in his eyes, the lilt of his laughter, the fit of his mouth on hers. Natural. Wonderful. Like rain falling on hard soil. Like dust devils waltzing in the wind. Wonderful … wonderful.

“Cassie?”

She blinked stupidly at Boone until her vision cleared and she saw his freckled face instead of Rook’s darkly brooding features.

“What? What were you saying?”

“I asked what you’d like to do first in town.”

“Oh.” She gathered in a head-clearing breath. “I’d like to visit the dry goods store, if you don’t mind. I need a few things.”

“Don’t mind at all.”

She glanced at the man beside her and was thankful for his comfortable manner. She’d never paid him any mind until lately. She’d never had the slightest notion that he’d ever noticed her until he’d ridden up that day to express his regrets about Shorty. Maybe pity had sent him to her
then, but it hadn’t made him come again. The second visit hadn’t been a sympathy call. He liked her. Really liked her. All she had to do was convince herself it was okay, that he had no cards up his sleeve, and that this outing was on the up-and-up. Oh,
why
did she have to be full of doubts and suspicions? Couldn’t she just accept his offer of friendship? Did she always have to look for gray clouds when the sun was shining?

Eureka Springs looked different from the buggy seat. It was more glamorous than it had been from the back of her Pa’s cantankerous mule. Boone had been right about the crowds. Saturday in Eureka Springs had become as busy as a beehive, with folks milling in and out of shops, hotels, eating places, and, of course, the baths and the sixty-odd springs.

A boy trotted down the street toward them, dodging buckboards and nervous horses. He shoved a handbill at Cassie.

“Here, ma’am. Read all about the miracles,” he shouted and then sprinted on to the next buggy.

Cassie flattened the sheet of coarsely milled paper in her lap and read the black capital letters that seemed to jump off the page:

THE CITY THAT WATER BUILT

SILOAM OF THE AFFLICTED

THE HEALING SPRINGS CITY

YES, FOLKS, THIS IS EUREKA,

AND WE’VE GOT THE CURE

FOR WHAT AILS YOU!!!!

GET WELL WHILE YOU’RE HERE.

PALACE BATHHOUSE

GUARANTEES TO CURE EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT

OF ALL CURABLE DISEASES!!!

RECOMMENDED FOR RHEUMATISM,

STOMACH TROUBLE,

NERVOUSNESS, CONSTIPATION, SKIN DISEASES,

PARALYSIS, SCROFULOUS SORE EYES,

BLINDNESS, ASTHMA, BRIGHT’S DISEASE

OF THE KIDNEYS, AND DROPSY.

YES, FOLKS, WE’VE CURED THEM

ALL AND MORE!!!

THE PALACE. A CLEAN PLACE.

YOUR HEALING PLACE.

Cassie folded the sheet once and tucked it under her on the surrey seat. Lordy, she’d never known there were so many sicknesses! The city that water built, she mused, taking in the panorama before her of narrow, winding streets that snaked up hills at impossible angles. Houses were built on stilts that held them in place against the hillsides. Other homes were built on three, sometimes four, levels against the cliffs. It was a city of stairsteps, an Ozark city with an Alpine flavor.

Most of the people had walking canes, although none of them looked that poorly: Cassie wondered how many had real aches and pains and how many just wanted the sympathy that went along with them and a good excuse to visit the jewel of the Ozarks.

Buckboards and buggies lined the streets. Goods spilled out of the shops’ open doors. The buzz of voices filled the air, broken occasionally by bursts of laughter. One of the town’s horsedrawn tallyhos, which transported visitors from the railroad station into town, jostled past, and several of the passengers waved and shouted greetings to Cassie and Boone, The tallyho carriage was drawn by six white horses and even had a boy dressed in livery and carrying a trumpet.

It was just another weekend in Eureka Springs, but the town had a festive air. A concert band was playing at the Basin Spring Park pavilion, drawing a crowd of more than a hundred.

“It’s all like a hoedown or chautauqua. Something like that,” Cassie said, turning around on the seat to watch the tallyho pull up to one of the many hotels on Main Street. “Is it like this every Saturday?”

“Yes. Every Saturday and Sunday. We townsfolk have been meeting to discuss the future of Eureka Springs. There’s money to be made if we lay the right foundation now.”

“Money from what?”

“From all these people,” Boone said, making a sweeping motion with one arm. “Our mineral springs are gold mines. These people will spend money here if we give them something to spend it on.”

Looking around at the hustle and bustle, Cassie shook her head. “I’m glad I don’t have to be in the middle of this day in and day out like you do. All the color and movement—” She shook her head and lifted a hand to massage her left temple. “I like peace and quiet on my land.”

“I imagine you get plenty of that.”

She smiled. “Yes, sometimes too much of it.” Noticing a new building, she pointed to it. “What used to be there? A feed store?”

“Yes, but it burned down in the last big fire. That’s one of the things the townspeople have been talking about. We’re urging everyone to build with brick or limestone. We’ve had too many good buildings destroyed by fire, and we can’t be rebuilding every five years.”

Boone drove the buggy around to the back of the bank and left it there while he and Cassie shopped. At the dry goods store Cassie bought buttons and thread. Boone’s ambitious nature became apparent throughout the day of shopping and socializing, and Cassie began to admire his foresight and determination. He made her see Eureka Springs through his eyes; a city carved from a wilderness of hills, gulches, and pine forests that was becoming known all over the country and even in Canada and Europe.

“Do you realize that on any given day this town has six to eight thousand people in it?” Boone asked her as he escorted her along the sidewalk toward the Crescent gazebo. “This town is busting its seams, I tell you.”

Cassie smiled as she glanced at his determined jawline and beaklike nose. A man of vision, she thought with a sense of pride. A man of security. A man she could depend on.

“The commercial possibilities in the city are staggering,” he went on, making wide gestures with his arm, nodding to passersby, waving to people in buggies and on
horseback. “A businessman with the right ideas could make a fortune within a year or two.”

“Why don’t you do it?” Cassie asked, thinking that a fortune sounded too good to pass up. “Why not stop talking and start doing?”

He laughed and placed his hand on hers where it rested in the crook of his arm. “All it takes to make money is—” he paused and glanced down at her eager expression—“money,” he finished with a chuckle and a teasing wink. “That’s something hard to come by.”

“Boone, you’ve got a bank full of it!”

He laughed and squeezed her hand affectionately. “Dear Cassie, that money isn’t mine to spend. Besides, my father owns the bank, I merely work there.”

“But the bank belongs to your whole family.”

Boone thought on this a moment and then nodded. “Yes, but Father runs it, and Father isn’t the visionary I am. He has trouble seeing beyond his nose.”