Fervent Charity by Paulette Callen Page A

gleamed. “I expect she can take care of herself.”
    “Yup. I expect she can.” Hank took a swallow of beer.
    “Don’t know about Pruitt though.”
    “Nope, don’t expect he knows his ass from a hole in the ground or his own shit from shinola.” Hank downed the last of his beer and left the tavern in a leisurely search for Sheriff Sully.

    Gleeve Pruitt was no man’s fool. He’d been smart enough to leave Arkansas and too smart to go south where there was nothing but cotton fields—no fit work for a white man. No, he went north and hired on to a ranch in Nebraska, but the work was too hard, and he was too good to spend his time eating dust and staring up the butt holes of cows, so he went on farther north. He got to the Dakotas in time to hire on to threshing crews and made enough money to keep going and to stop for a drink when he needed one. He had decided to hang around because, while the work was harder than he’d expected and the money not as good as he deserved, the food was good on the farms where he worked, he didn’t have to work in the rain, and he could leave whenever he wanted to and move on to the next crew, which is what he’d done two days ago when the foreman caught him napping in the hayloft when he was supposed to be working and fired him. Didn’t matter. There was another crew a few miles east and he’d hire on there. When the oats were harvested there would be wheat, barley and then corn to pick. But he was too smart to work for dirt farmers any longer than he had to. Gold would be his fortune in the Black Hills. It was only August. There were three months of work left in this place, and by that time he’d have enough money to winter in Lead and get work in the mine. He’d heard that a single fella with money in his pocket could have a lot of fun out there. In the meantime, there was some fun to be had in these parts too if you were man enough to find it.

    Jordis was raking out Moon’s stall when the mare whickered from the corral outside. Then she heard hoof beats. It wasn’t Gustie returning because Moon wouldn’t sound off for Gustie, and she’d have heard the rattle of the spring wagon. She didn’t rush out to see who it was. The barn door was wide open so anyone looking would know where to find her. She finished spreading straw on the floor of the stall. The straw shone bright gold where the sun struck it in narrow shafts through the window. She turned around. A strange man was silhouetted in the opening to the barn. She waited for him to speak.
    When he did, it took her a moment to figure out what he had on his mind. She burst out laughing.
    He came closer.
    She said, through her laughter, “Go away. You’ve come to the wrong place for that.”
    “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. I’ll pay you what you’re worth. You should be glad to get it.”
    “Are you crazy?” She closed the door to the stall and brushed her hands against her split skirt.
    He took another step closer and pulled some crinkled bills out of his pocket so she could see them. Then he unbuttoned his pants.
    Jordis still looked at him in disbelief. “You are crazy.” Then she got a whiff of him. “You’re drunk, that’s for sure.”
    His pants began a slow slide down his hips. He hooked a finger through a belt loop to keep them from falling all the way down and impeding his forward progress. He came to within three feet of Jordis and then it was she who closed the distance between them. In a motion too fast for his bleary vision, she produced a long knife and he felt the point of it in his gut and her strong hand twisting his shirt tight at his throat.
    “You wouldn’t use that,” he said, his bravado now being choked out of him.
    “I would just as soon kill you as smell you, White Man.”
    It was the way she said ‘White Man,’ like it was the first cut of the knife in his belly, that chilled the whiskey right out of his blood. He snickered and tried to back up, as if it had all been a joke. She