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“Can I drive you there, then borrow your horse and buggy?” Lauralee asked, pleading up at him with her violet eyes.
“Honey, you don’t plan to try and find Clint McCloud, do you?” he said, placing a gentle hand to her cheek. “It’s obvious that he’s dangerous where you
are concerned.”
“You said yourself that he’s more than likely left town,” Lauralee said softly. “I’m sure I’ll be safe. Please allow me to use your buggy for a while tonight, Uncle Abner?”
“I’m not sure,” Abner said, kneading his chin. “I just don’t know. I imagine Nancy would jump all over me if I allowed you to go out wandering the streets, unescorted.”
“You said yourself that this city of Mattoon is for the most part genteel and trusting,” Lauralee persisted. “And you could give me the loan of your pistol while I’m gone. Please, Uncle Abner? Please?”
“Where on earth do you want to go so badly?” Abner asked, taken aback by her persistence.
“To see Paul Brown,” Lauralee blurted out without thinking.
Abner’s eyes lit up. “Well, now,” he said, smiling slowly. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? Honey, I’d not mind at all lending you my horse and buggy if you plan to travel out to become better acquainted with Paul Brown. That’d please me greatly, Lauralee. I thought you’d see much in that man that you would take a liking to.”
Lauralee felt guilty for misleading her uncle. But she felt that this little deceit was the only way to correct the larger deceit of the previous night. Her uncle would be disappointed when he discovered the full truth about her flight to the Brown farm tonight.
But he would get over it. When he saw just how exceedingly happy Dancing Cloud made her, how could he argue that?
Their short jaunt back to Dr. Kemper’s was done in an awkward silence. Lauralee was afraid to say anything that might bring to light what she truly had planned for tonight.
And she could not help but dwell on Clint McCloud having gotten away so spotlessly clean again from the law.
Oh, if only his pistol had not misfired!
The man would be lying in the morgue even now with a bullet through his back!
Lauralee pulled the buggy to a halt before Dr. Kemper’s. So afraid that her uncle would change his mind, she scarcely breathed when he departed the buggy. She smiled clumsily at him when he slipped his pistol onto her lap.
“You do know how to use a weapon, don’t you?” Abner said, nervously slipping his hands in his rear pants’ pockets. “I wouldn’t want you to come to the hospital with a blown-off toe, or anything else, for that matter.”
“Don’t worry,” Lauralee said, laying the pistol beside her on the seat. “If I’d come face to face with that damn Yankee again, you’d better believe I’d know enough about this firearm to shoot him dead.”
Abner stood there for a moment. His eyes closely scrutinized her. There was still something amiss in her behavior tonight. But he shrugged and gave her a wave.
“Get on with you and don’t you and Paul do anything too romantic,” he said, laughing.
“We won’t, I assure you,” Lauralee said, for certain her uncle had nothing to worry about in that department. When she got through telling Paul what she had on her mind, he would never see her as someone to romance again. He might even hate her.
She gave her uncle a wave, then rode down Western Avenue again. She cast her eyes heavenward, worrying about the time of night. If Paul was already on his way to the Peterson House, then she would be put in a position of doing more convincing than she had wished to do.
If she could find him still at his home she could tell him quickly why she was there, take Dancing Cloud’s horse, and put that foolish part of her life behind her.
One thing for certain. She couldn’t allow Paul to lure her down to the pond again. There was something romantic about being with a man by a body of water in the moonlight.
The only man with whom she wanted to share such a romantic interlude was Dancing Cloud.
The wheels of her buggy clattered as she rode over the tracks. Her heart pounding, she then turned left and rode down Broadway Avenue again.
* * *
Dancing Cloud slipped into his fringed breeches and his moccasins. He picked up his shirt and studied it, the bloodstains and the bullet hole having ruined it.
“I will meet up with you some day,” he said, his thoughts on Clint McCloud. “You will pay. For sure you will pay.”
Tossing the shirt aside, Dancing Cloud went to the door bare-chested and inched it open. His eyebrows lifted with surprise. The lawman was gone.
