Shotgun Bride by Linda Lael Miller

there was trouble. Before there was trouble. That’s just how he said it.”
    Becky closed her eyes, swayed. John’s resolve not to coddle her wavered, but in the end it held.
    “He said we was squatters,” Sam put in. “We wasn’t. Until that fire, we had documents to prove we bought our land fair and square. I showed him. McKettrick, I mean. He said we’d been cheated, that the papers was a fraud and we had no right to the place.”
    “Rafe McKettrick,” Becky said, recovering, “would never—”
    John caught her eye. Willed her to remember the Peltons, another family who’d settled on McKettrick land. The husband had shot himself through the head, and the wife had lost their child and ended up under Concepcion’s care for a while, before taking the train back to Iowa or Ohio or some such place, where there were folks ready to take her in. Once they were both gone, Rafe had set fire to their cabin and barn and had even the rubble hauled off in wagons, and that wasn’t the only time he’d burned something down, either. On another occasion, in a fit of sorrow and rage, he’d put a torch to the first house he’d built for Emmeline.
    “I’ll go out and talk to Rafe and the rest of them,” John said, feeling gray and spent inside, and about a dozen years older than he was. “Get to the bottom of this.”
    Becky had rallied, but John couldn’t help wondering when those seemingly endless inner resources of hers were finally going to play out, like a mine that’s been scoured for its last flakes of ore. It made him hurt inside to think she might be using herself up before her time; a woman like her was a rarity, and there would not be another one along soon.
    Her smile pushed back the shadows and rivaled the stove for warmth. “Well, now,” she said, “we’d better get that baby out of jail and head on over to the hotel. Sam, there’s plenty for a man to turn his hand to at the Arizona, and, Sarah, I wonder how you’d be at changing beds, watching over the registration book, and waiting tables in the dining room. I can’t seem to keep regular help in that place to save my very life.”
    John strapped on his gun belt, checked the cylinder of his pistol to make sure it was loaded, and reached for his hat and coat. The weather was contrary; it could go one way or the other.
    Pretty much like this situation with the McKettricks.

Chapter 10
     
     
    R afe and Kade were trying to pull a lame cow out of a mud bog when John Lewis rode up, toward the middle of the afternoon. He wore an earnest expression, the marshal did, and by Kade’s reckoning, that didn’t bode well. Clearly, the lawman wasn’t just passing by—he’d come on badge business and gone to some trouble to make the journey.
    “John,” Rafe said with a nod, still hauling on his end of the rope Kade had fixed around the heifer’s neck.
    John nodded back, dismounted, and came toward them. “Give you a hand?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, he waded right into the mud, where Kade had spent the better part of the last hour, fruitlessly pushing a cow’s ass.
    “Obliged,” Rafe allowed, straining on the rope, “but I don’t reckon you came all the way out here just to help us with the chores.”
    John gave the critter a good whack on the flank, and she bawled and sucked both her front legs out of the mire, slogging toward dry ground in a few awkward leaps. “I’m here about the Fees,” he said, dusting his hands together as he made his way toward Rafe.
    Kade took the rope off the heifer and sent her on her way with a muted shout; she’d find the herd on her own. His attention was on Rafe and the marshal, and he had a real uneasy feeling in the center of his gut.
    “Nesters,” Rafe said.
    “They say they had just claim to that land,” John replied. “You burn their place, Rafe?”
    Rafe’s big shoulders shifted back a ways, and his spine straightened like a ramrod, the way it always did when he waxed indignant.