“Miss,” he called as she hurried away. “You have something in your hair. It looks like… cereal. Pig feed, perhaps.”
The humiliation was hotter than the sun. Ellie snatched a handful of soggy oats from her ear and ran away. She didn’t see the man, Cole Masterson, lingering in the street, his thumb hooked to his belt, staring at her with the piercing gaze of someone who recognizes a broken horse among thousands.
Cole Masterson had no intention of staying in Redstone Gulch. He had a herd to sell and a Texas past he was trying to escape: an arrest warrant and the ghost of his son Thomas, taken from him years before. But he had seen that stirring before. He had seen it in the eyes of the men in the field hospitals during the war, and it troubled him.
“The girl,” said Cole an hour later, leaning against the counter of the Morrow saloon. “Dark hair, slim. Who is she?”
Hank Morrow, a man with a friendly bulldog face, wiped the counter with a dirty rag. He looked at Cole with the caution of a man weighing up the amount of truth he can afford to reveal.
“Ellie Dawson,” Hank murmured, glancing towards the door. “Ida Puit’s stepdaughter. Ever since Sam Dawson died in the mine, Ida’s been treating her like a dog. Worse than a dog.”
“The bruising on his neck,” Cole said, his voice dropping a tone. “It’s not from chores.”
“No,” Hank said bitterly. “And nobody lifts a finger. Ida has legal guardianship, the reverend’s ear, and the support of the entire town. She tells the police the girl is ‘disturbed,’ and they believe her because Ida looks like a saint and Ellie looks like a frightened animal.”
Cole said nothing. With a practiced gesture, he rolled a cigarette, but inside, rage was beginning to rise. He thought of his own son, somewhere out there, and the fatherly protection he hadn’t been able to give him. He gazed at his scarred reflection in the bar mirror.
“What does his apartment look like?” Cole asked.
The confrontation at the Dawson farm was a slow-motion collision. Cole found Ellie hanging out the laundry, her movements stiff. When he approached, she begged him to leave, her voice a frantic whisper.
“Please. You’re going to get me hit.”
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