A Lawman's Christmas: A McKettricks of Texas Novel by Linda Lael Miller Page B

the assault of the wind.
    Clay opened them, led Outlaw inside and into his stall, gave him hay and made sure his water trough was full. Then he retraced his steps, latched the doors again and walked, wind-battered, toward the jailhouse.

Chapter 5
    D ara Rose rubbed the glass in the door of the mercantile with one gloved hand, clearing a circle to look through and seeing nothing but dizzying flurries of angry white. She’d come here to mail her letter to Piper and send off the coupon to the Wildflower Salve Company, and now she wished she hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave home.
    Mr. Bickham doubled as Blue River’s postmaster. Being in a position to know who wrote to whom, and who received letters from whom, he tended to mind every body’s business but his own.
    â€œYou might just as well sit down here by the stove as try to see any farther than the end of your nose in weather like this,” Philo counseled, from behind his long counter. “That’s about the tenth time you wiped off that window, and it just keeps fogging up again.”
    Dara Rose bit her lower lip, still fretful. She and Harriet were safe and warm, but what about Edrina? Suppose she tried to walk home from school in this storm? Miss Krenshaw could be depended upon to keep her students inside, of course, but Edrina was, as recent history proved, well able to get past her teacher when she chose.
    Harriet, who considered the whole thing a marvelous lark, sat on top of a pickle barrel and gazed raptly at the exquisite doll in the display window. Dara Rose, noting this, felt another pinch to the heart.
    She had the ten dollars Piper had sent; she could buy the doll for Harriet and several books for Edrina, set it all out for them after they went to bed on Christmas Eve, to find in the morning and rejoice over. But both children still needed warm coats, and sturdy shoes that fit properly, and for all the vegetables she’d stored in the root cellar and the chickens producing fresh eggs right along—until this morning, that is—there was barely enough food to see them through the winter.
    This year, with Parnell gone and even the roof over their heads a precarious blessing, there would be no store-bought presents, no brightly decorated tree, no goose or turkey for Christmas dinner.
    â€œI could let you have that doll for two dollars even,” Philo whispered, suddenly standing beside Dara Roseand startling her half out of her skin. Because of the thick layers of sawdust covering the floor, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Put a dollar down, and you can pay the rest over time, out of the egg money.”
    Dara Rose looked at him sharply, momentarily distracted from her worry over Edrina, who might at any moment take it into her head to strike out for home, blizzard or no blizzard, perhaps concerned about her mother and sister and the chickens.
    That would be like Edrina.
    â€œNo, Mr. Bickham,” Dara Rose whispered back, while Harriet paid neither one of them a whit of notice, “I will not be purchasing the doll, and that’s final.”
    â€œBut look at your little girl,” the storekeeper cajoled. “She wants that pretty thing in the worst way.”
    Dara Rose’s cheeks throbbed, and her throat thickened. It was only by the sternest exercise of self-control that she did not burst into tears. “I can barely afford to give my children what they need, ” she told him pointedly, though in a very quiet voice. “What they want is out of the question just now. Please do not press the matter further.”
    Philo gave a deep sigh and, at the same moment, the door Dara Rose had been standing next to only moments before burst open on a gust of wind.
    Snow blew in, along with a swift and bitter chill, andthen Clay McKettrick stepped over the threshold, accompanied by a medium-size dog, coated in white. Even for a strong man like he was, shutting that door again was an effort.
    Dara