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“Oh well, I guess that’s all right. You’d better rest now, Chris. I’ll have a bath sent up.”
Once inside the room, she looked in the mirror. Not bad, she thought, a wash and a comb should make her presentable.
“If you tell people who you are,” she said aloud to the mirror, “and they feel that they know you, there’s a good chance they’ll be willing to tell you what you want to know.”
It was an hour later that Chris was washed and she hoped the desk clerk had had time to tell the people who’d just arrived. When she walked into the lobby, people stopped and looked at her and she could hear them whispering, “Is that her?”
Smiling to herself, Chris went out into the bright sunlight. She seemed to remember a ladies’ dress shop on the main street. If there was anywhere to hear gossip, that would be the place.
•••
“May I help you?” the clerk asked, but before Chris could answer, the shop door opened and in walked three ladies. The door hadn’t closed before two more walked in followed by four more. The little shop was packed with people as Chris made her way to a corner to try on a hat or two.
“You’ll never believe who came into town,” one of the women said loudly, directing her voice toward Chris. “Of course I couldn’t believe it when Jimmy told me, but he said that Nola Dallas was in town.”
“You know, the lady who got herself put into an insane asylum to report on what it was like.”
“And she wrote that it wasn’t safe for decent women to walk the streets alone at night.”
“And she almost got herself killed in Mexico for what she wrote about the government,” said a third woman.
“How very, very much I’d like to meet her,” sighed another woman.
There followed a long, expectant pause and Chris knew they were waiting for her to make the next move. As if she weren’t aware of what they’d been saying, she tried on another hat, then removed it and started for the door. She had her hand on the knob before she looked back at the women who were unabashedly staring at her. “I am Nola Dallas,” she said softly.
The flood gates burst after that. Chris was bodily hauled back into the store and asked thousands of questions.
“Did you really write that series on divorce?”
“Did you really spend three days in jail?”
“Weren’t you frightened when you got that lobbyist and all those politicians arrested?”
Chris tried to answer all of them at once. All the while she was waiting to hear what she’d come to find out.
“I’m sure that it’s none of our business but we think you should look more carefully to your traveling companions,” said one woman with her nose in the air.
There was a hush on the crowd. “Oh?” Chris said with all the innocence she could muster. “They seem like such nice men.”
“Perhaps one of them is but that Tynan…” The women looked at each other and were silent.
Chris modestly studied her hands. “I really know so little about him.”
The women began to fall all over themselves in their rush to tell her all that they knew about the man—which, unfortunately, wasn’t much. Tynan had been arrested for murder, tried the same afternoon and sentenced to hang that night.
“That seems awfully quick,” Chris said.
“It was an open and shut case. He was guilty, everyone could see that.”
“But he went to jail instead,” Chris prompted.
The women exchanged looks. “During the night, some of the men decided not to wait to hang him—not that I believe in that sort of thing—but the way they rescued him, well…”
Chris waited patiently.
One of the women leaned forward in conspiracy. “The ah, ah…”
“What Ellen’s trying to say is that the harlots of this town banded together and, carrying rifles, they protected this Mr. Tynan until the federal marshal could get here.”
