Free Mud Creek by Cheryl Holt Page B

road. So her nonsense had to end.
    He grabbed his coat and stomped outside. Though it was the middle of June, the night was cold, a nip in the air that never completely vanished. The moon was up so he could easily see his way over to his largest shed.
    Lumber was stacked next to it, the pile growing as they’d saved for the barn. It would be built after the Fourth.
    He’d put too much stock in having the barn finished, but in his mind, he viewed it as the stable center that would make the ranch a success. The barn was what they required to prosper. He was convinced of it.
    Hovered out of the wind, he leaned against the wall of the shed while he rolled a cigarette. He lit it and enjoyed a long puff, the smoke settling in his lungs. A flask was tucked in his pocket, filled with the whiskey Albert had purchased in town. Walt chugged down several gulps, liking how the liquid calmed him, how his problems seemed less insurmountable when it was coursing in his veins.
    He was distracted by motion out in the pasture, and he focused in. It was Violet wandering in the grass in the dark. She’d seen him, too, and she waved and walked toward him.
    She was another female who was slowly going crazy, another female who would need care and protection he didn’t have the will to supply.
    Albert didn’t think Violet ever slept. He’d wake in the wee hours to find her tiptoeing out the door. She’d slip back in at dawn so Helen wouldn’t realize she’d sneaked off.
    What drove a girl like her? What caused her to behave so erratically? Why couldn’t the women in his world act as they’d been taught, as was suitable and proper?
    There had been stories about her in letters from acquaintances in New York, that she was shameless, that she brazenly carried on with every traveling drifter who passed through town. Supposedly, she’d had to flee Maywood before she was tarred and feathered and run out on a rail.
    Walt suspected that most of the rumors were true. She had an insolent way of staring at a man that made him contemplate things he had no business contemplating.
    If some fellow in Maywood had gotten himself into a jam with her, Walt wouldn’t be surprised. Walt, himself, was forty-eight, bone thin from hard work, his shoulders and legs bowed, his skin lined, his once-brown hair gray and balding. Yet whenever he looked at her, he felt a stirring in his loins that worried him, that had him forgetting he was married with children to raise and responsibilities to tend.
    She was that kind of temptress. She made a man ignore what mattered.
    She kept on until she was directly in front of him, her demeanor sassy and impertinent.
    “How about if I join you in a smoke?” she asked.
    He was so shocked by her request that he offered her his cigarette, but she pushed it away.
    “I can roll my own,” she claimed. “Give me your papers and tobacco.”
    He pulled out his pouch and handed it to her, wondering if she was serious, and being stunned when she proceeded like an expert.
    They stood, puffing away and gazing out at the stars, their backs on the rough wood of the shed. She continued longer than he did, until the butt was just a little nub that she dropped on the ground and crushed under her heel.
    “Let me have a drink,” she commanded, shocking him even more.
    She pointed to the flask he had in the pocket of his shirt, but he didn’t cotton to women imbibing. It wasn’t right.
    “No.”
    “Come on,” she nagged. “Don’t be such a grump.”
    “No,” he said more sternly.
    “Albert brought a stash from Prairie City, so you have plenty. Don’t be stingy.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-two,” she lied without hesitation.
    He snorted. “You’re barely eighteen and hardly out of the schoolroom. When you’re living in my home and eating at my table, you’re not drinking alcohol. I forbid it.”
    “I forbid it.” She used a singsong voice that mocked him. “Do you realize how pompous you sound when you talk like