CHAPTER 1
Indiana 1865
The rusted door hinges squealed as a slit of light shot across the dirt floor of the barn. Morgan closed one eye and held a hand up too late to block the light, nearly blinding his open eye. His other hand slid under the warm straw and closed on the grip of the pistol lying near his hip. He rubbed his open eye to focus. The barn door gaped and a bold glare quivered around the dark form of a man in the widening doorway. Morgan strained to see, still holding the one eye closed, saving it for the instant when he would need to shoot straight.
The farmer's low, strong voice relaxed Morgan's finger from the trigger, and he dropped the heavy weapon back in the hay.
"Mr. Lewis," the farmer said, "I see you're still with us, and we're about to have breakfast. Why don't you join my family and me?"
Morgan pulled his hand from the hay that had been his bed on the barn floor and rolled onto his knees. He'd welcomed the cool earth under the hay and his best sleep since he left Ohio. Yet, his lower back froze in that position, all fours. The pain was not the result of the hard, packed hay of the night's bed. The cause was the three years in a saddle and the many nights without a bed, either of hard earth or of packed hay.
"You can freshen up at the well. I saw your horse was still here and told Edith to set another plate. Take your time, Mr. Lewis."
"Morgan." The night before, he'd suggested that the farmer call him by his first name.
"Right, Morgan. Take your time, Morgan." The farmer backed out of the doorway, freeing the bright light again. Morgan moved to the shadows and watched the man walk toward the back door of the house. Slender, more so than Morgan was, and about the same height, two inches under six feet.
He knew he should get back on the road, ride on. The farmer could make better use of his time than in hosting a stranger for breakfast. Even in the growing dusk of arrival the night before, Morgan had seen the overgrown hillocks where weeds had replaced the vegetable and grain crops of a few years before.
He felt for the gun in the hay, found it, and put it in the saddlebags that lay nearby. The gun should stay in the saddlebags, not within his reach. The war was over, yet the waking sense of alarm and danger at times lingered. He might shoot somebody. He tucked in his shirt and hurried out into the warm sunlight. He'd turned down the offer for supper the night before, leaving Mr. Williams free to think he had eaten late on the trail—a meal that Morgan had only imagined. He didn't want to be a burden to the man, or to Mrs. Williams. "Edith," the man had called her. He'd not seen her the night before. He dipped his hands in the trough beside the well, splashed water on his face, and ran his fingers back through the dark, unruly, brown hair. He should have washed his hair at the river crossing the previous day. If he had any soap left, he would have. The wind and winter sun under the prairie skies had tanned his face below the protection of the slouch hat. He didn't feel comfortable entering a home just now. He pulled his palms down the front of his shirt, losing most of the dampness. He had no bandana. He rubbed his hands together and stepped up onto the back porch.
When he entered the kitchen, a pretty woman welcomed him and pointed to one unoccupied side of the table. She looked too young to be the mother of the two girls seated on the opposite side of the table. Mr. Williams introduced her as his wife, Edith. Morgan thanked her in advance of responding to her invitation to sit down and said he hoped he was not a bother. She said he was not and introduced him to Millie and Norma. They looked maybe six and four, and they looked clean. They seemed comfortable—safe. Their faces shone, as did their hair, clean and dark, like that of their father. Morgan had seen too many children in the last few years who hadn't been clean and who hadn't looked as if they felt safe. He noted the light, blue eyes, like their father's eyes. Their mother's eyes emphasized that he was the only person in the room with brown eyes.
Mrs. Williams asked her husband by his given name, Mark, to say grace and, with a tip of her head, bade the two girls to bow theirs. Morgan looked down at the table. Mark was brief and Morgan looked up to see Mrs. Williams rise and go first to the younger girl to cut her salted ham into small squares and then to the older, Millie, to correct how she was holding her knife as she cut the meat. Then she stopped at Mark's shoulder and leaned down to cut the ham on his plate, in squares, neat and larger than those she had cut for Norma.
Mark Williams' lower left arm rested below the level of the table. Morgan had been unable to ignore the shortened left arm the previous evening, and knew that the farmer had then picked up his stare and looked down at the place where a hand should be.
"The war," he said with a slight grin. "Shiloh. I spent the rest of the war in the quartermaster's wagon. Lucky, maybe. It probably saved my life." Mark had managed a grin. Morgan had said nothing, and didn't feel like grinning.
Morgan turned to cutting his ham in squares, noting that Mrs. Williams was doing the same. All was quiet. He found he could add nothing—no words.
The evening before, he'd stood in front of the farmer in the coming darkness. A missing hand. Morgan had lost no hand, no arm in the war. His wounds had been slight—mostly—and quick to heal. Yet, he had lost everything.
"Where are you going, Mr. Lewis?" Edith Williams asked.
Her voice was soft, polite. She smiled. She was being friendly. Morgan felt as if she had poked him in the eye with her fork.
Her face reddened. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry," she said.
"I don't know," he said, finally. He felt an urge to say more. "I mean, Chicago, or maybe St. Louis. I haven't decided yet."
"Well, we don't want to get too much into your business," Mr. Williams said. "But I must say, Mr. Lewis, okay ... Morgan, that Terre Haute here is a good place to decide. Chicago is almost straight north and St. Louis is a tad south of west from here." The farmer went on to say that the name of the town meant high land and that his father had been one of the town founders.
Morgan thought to congratulate him; then thought better of it. He realized he didn't know anything to say—about anything. They finished the breakfast in near silence. Morgan was uncomfortable, despite the warm reception and his first minutes in the house.
It was not her. It was the question, so similar to the words in the question asked nearly nine years earlier by another woman—a girl.
This woman, Edith, this warm hearth, the girls, the question. It all reminded him of what he once hoped he would, might, have—and had lost.
Later, he knew he made it worse when he left the Williams home. He thanked them again, which was okay. Then he offered them money. Neither of them spoke. He wished he hadn't slept late. He wished he'd started early as he'd told Mr. Williams he would. He shouldn't have stayed for breakfast. He felt he should apologize—for something. He didn't. He wasn't sure just what he felt right at that moment.
Where are you going? It had been a simple question, a polite little question. It was too much like the questions back there—back then.
"What are you going to do, Morgan?" she had asked in that foggy past, and more recently, "Where are you going?"
At those times too, he'd said, "I don't know."
He had been rude to Mr. Williams ... or was his rudeness for Edith Williams? She was pretty in the same way. The little smile, the blue eyes, and the hair, the soft shade of sun-burnished wheat tassels.
The path he followed north was a shortcut; one that Mark Williams had said would get him most quickly on the road to Chicago, if that was where he wanted to go. Morgan hadn't replied to the half question. It didn't matter. Anywhere that was not the South or back east.
He saw the ferry raft coming slowly across the river before he was close enough to make out the sign, nailed to a large sycamore tree. An unpracticed hand had printed it. The faded letters: St. Louis and Points West.
He swung down off the horse and led the big gray toward the lean-to shelter that seemed to offer the only shade other than that of the broad sycamore with the large, multi-pointed leaves. A boy no more than twelve told him the cost of crossing and answered his questions about the time it would take, in days on horseback, to get to Chicago or to St. Louis.
Morgan leaned down and picked up a thin, flat rock.
"Wet side, it'll be St Louis," he said. He spit on the rock and tossed it into the air. It tumbled and fell, wet side up. He paid the boy for passage on the raft and walked the horse into the shade of the sycamore to wait out the "just a little while" that the boy said had to pass before the next crossing.
CHAPTER 2
St. Louis was bustling. Streets crowded and prices high—for everything. There was a shortage of all things, except people and ale and whiskey at Dugan's Tavern on Third Street. Morgan preferred the dark ale. After less than two weeks, he was nearly out of money. The livery costs for his horse, his own food, something called a sleeping house, and the dark, soothing drink at Dugan's cost more than three times what he'd expected. He sold the horse to save the monthly livery costs. The liveryman agreed to keep his saddle and bridle for him for a small fee. He needed a grubstake before he set off into the dry dust and hostile lands of the new state of Kansas, west of Missouri. He could stay in St. Louis, for a while....
Then he got lucky. He didn't see it that way at first—not that night—and wouldn't for a long time. It was in Dugan's, nearly the only place he ventured beyond the sleeping house, day or night, that he met tall, lanky Corrick McCale.
He hadn't noticed the young man because he towered over the other two men seated with him at a far table. It was the thin man's laughter that caught Morgan's attention, causing him to look toward the table where the man seemed to be using his arms to add emphasis to his words. Like most men in the tavern, he wore his shirtsleeves rolled up high in an effort to ease the heat of the August evening. His arms were not tanned and wind-dried like the arms of the other men. When the two men left his table, the lanky man stood, looked at Morgan, sitting alone in the corner, and walked over and asked if he'd mind a little company. Morgan waved toward the seat across from him. The man introduced himself as Corrick and folded into the chair.
"I hear a bit of Irish brogue in your voice, Corrick," Morgan said, taking the man's extended hand. He kept his seat and gave Corrick's hand a firm response.
"Just so. McCale, Corrick McCale, and you are?"
"Morgan. Morgan Lewis."
"Ah, and that'd be a name coming out of Wales, would it not?"
"It is. My father was Welsh."
"And your mother? Were you born in Wales too?"
"No, my mother was from Pennsylvania, English stock, born right there in Philadelphia, me too."
Morgan sat up straighter in his chair. What was he doing—all this talk, and with a total stranger.
"Well, I wasn't born in Ireland either," the tall man said. "Actually born not far from where you and your mother were born: Connecticut. I came here with my family years ago. Where do you call home?"
"Nowhere. Not now. I came originally from Virginia by way of Ohio. I suppose you mean you came here to St. Louis with your parents." Morgan thought he didn't really care where this man was born. He should get back to the sleeping house. He wasn't sleepy, but he was short of beer money.
"Yes, when I was five. This is my home. Home of the McCale family. My parents still live here. Your parents?"
"Gone. During the war." Morgan pushed his chair back from the table. Corrick seemed to him to rush to get out the next words.
"I'm sorry. What do you do for a living?" Corrick asked.
"Nothing right now. And I need to fix that real soon."
"What do you do when you are working?" Corrick asked. Morgan felt the words were moving too fast and too close. He didn't like this man's nosiness; yet, he knew, he'd posed questions too, more really, and more questions than he recalled asking anybody—except her—in a long time.
"I don't know that I have a particular work to do—or ever have. Worked at my father's side as I was growing up. That didn't pay very well."
"Doing what?"
Morgan shifted in the chair and drained his mug. It had been nearly half-full. "I really have to go," he said as he stood.
"I talk too much," Corrick said. "Everybody says I do. See you later, Morgan."
Morgan did not reply.
Two evenings later, Corrick came into Dugan's and walked directly to Morgan, sitting at his corner table.
"Morgan, I may have found a job for you," Corrick said rapidly as he strode across the room from the bar, signaling his need for a beer as he came. Julie was soon behind him with a freshly drawn pint of ale. Corrick smiled at her, which she seemed to appreciate. He thanked her and watched her walk away as if he liked her. Morgan knew why he might. Every man in the tavern liked the looks of Julie. Her hair was reddish blonde and she was trim, smiled easily, and was always friendly—or almost always. Sometimes a guest of the tavern talked in a way that didn't deserve friendship. Morgan found he was always on Julie's side of those happenings. She handled the men well. She never really needed the help of anyone else. The man behind the bar was nearly as tall as Corrick and far more muscular. The long, hewn, hickory stick leaning against the wall on the bar was the barkeep's authority reminder. Morgan thought that every man in the tavern knew that.
"How old you think she is?" Corrick asked Morgan as he sat, looking back at Julie moving to the bar.
"No idea, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, I'd guess."
"Nineteen. She's only nineteen," Corrick said.
"The corners of her green eyes, regardless of how pretty they are, make her older than that Corrick. Who said she was nineteen?"
"She did." Corrick said, and sat back in his chair, chin out, like a gentleman ready to defend the honor of a lady.
"And you believe her?"
"Yes, why shouldn't I?"
"No reason, maybe. If she's only nineteen, though, I'll eat your hat."
"I don't wear a hat," Corrick said with a smile.
"I noticed."
Corrick leaned forward, resting on one elbow, and took a short drink of ale.
"You want to know about the job?"
Morgan stopped the no somewhere before it had a chance to get out and said, "Sure, who's hiring?"
"I am." Corrick looked quite serious. He seemed to wait for Morgan to say something.
"Doing what?"
"What I've been doing for over six months. Clerking in a store and keeping some ledgers."
"Not interested. Clerking? A ledger?" Morgan took a drink from his mug. "You must have been bored with that."
"I was. I am. Now I'm taking another job."
"What's that job? Maybe I'd like that better."
"Acting," Corrick said, ignoring the quip. Morgan knew the man was inviting more, maybe wanted him to say something about acting. He didn't.
"I'm an actor, Morgan, and they're re-opening the playhouse a couple of blocks west of here. Been closed most of the war. Used as a hospital at one point."
"You'll make a lot more money at the new job?"
"No—less. It will be far more enjoyable though. I'll be expressing myself."
"Doing what to yourself?"
"Oh, come on Morgan, you're not fooling me. I can tell when I'm speaking with a college boy, even if he does have a Southern accent."
"Am I supposed to be able to tell that you're a college boy by the way you talk?"
"Of course, although I'm not in college now. Can't you tell that I was?"
"Maybe. Should I?"
"Maybe not. I wasn't really in college long and my voice is most likely all mixed up now, going from Missouri to school in Chicago and learning two foreign accents for my acting roles when I was supposed to be reading and studying to be a doctor."
"How far did you go with the doctor thing?"
"Not far enough. My father found out I was acting and not studying and quit sending me money; so, I had to come back to St. Louis. He threw me out of the house when I told him I was going to be an actor here in St. Louis."
"When was that?"
"Last night. Threw me right out. Slept last night at the livery. Old Cecil is a long-time friend of the family. Cecil runs the livery."
"I know. My horse used to be there. Sold him to the man. I was paying too much for the feed and stall."
"Well, that's the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, Morgan. I won't make enough as an actor to pay for a decent rooming house. I could make it if you took my job and paid half of the cost of a room at Maudie's Boarding House. What do you think?"
"About what?"
"The job. The room."
Morgan was about to laugh when he remembered the remaining coins and single greenback in his pocket.
