The Tender Vine (Diamond of the Rockies #3)(51)

She nodded, looking out the window as the train pulled to a stop. Though the largest and most important city in the Wyoming territory, the ramshackle town of Cheyenne looked as though it had blown in from the vast, windswept land and snagged like tumbleweeds along the tracks.

“Come on.” Quillan took her arm and angled her through the other disembarking passengers. Carina headed for the public diner while Quillan made arrangements for the horses and wagon.

As she walked toward the station, she watched the other passengers rush to transfer their baggage, take care of any other needs, and grab food in the scant time allotted. The stops, she was learning, were orchestrated to cause the most panic in the least amount of time. The crowd around the rectangular counter that surrounded the servers was a hive, people darting in between bodies to place and snatch their orders, paying before the food was transferred to their hands.

She tried twice to gain the counter, then pressed her arms to her sides in frustration. A moment later Quillan touched the small of her back. “Step away, Carina.” He shouldered his way through, then raised two plates of food over the heads of those seated. He found for her a stool at a tall side table and stood beside her with his plate in hand.

Carina examined the fare. It was boiled eggs with a strip of beefsteak and fried potatoes. There was no time to consider quality. First-class passenger or not, if she didn’t gulp it down in the remaining ten minutes, she’d go hungry. The food was not bad, but as one accustomed to savoring her meals, the experience left her giddy. Quillan had barely acquired them a cup of coffee each when the train whistle blew. It was too hot to gulp, so Carina sucked a few desperate sips from the top, then left the rest.

“I feel like I’m riding a tornado.” She hurried behind him to a larger train even more elegantly appointed with brass trim and fittings. It shrilled its whistle as they approached. Carina choked in the smoke and cinders that wafted from its smokestack on a gust of wind. She caught a glimpse of the Miss Prestons likewise switching trains. With her wrap billowing out and her skirts flapping against her legs, the elder aunt looked like a bewildered prairie fowl. No doubt Priscilla would have a reason for that, some bump on her poor aunt’s head. Another gust blasted. Carina tasted dust and felt it on her teeth. That was one thing about traveling by train. One never escaped the dust.

The Pullman coach was arranged much as the last had been, though the seat pairs were separated by curtains, and she noticed that this one had upper berths that pulled out for sleeping. The wood ceiling was polished as shiny as a mirror and ornamented with moldings, with a stained-glass design in the center. Carina took it all in at a glance as Quillan vouchsafed their seats.

Once settled, she dug into her valise for toothbrush and powder, though she’d scarcely had time to chew her meal. She headed for the curtained retiring room at the back of the car. When her teeth were scrubbed clean, she scrutinized them and mentally pronounced them strong, white, and well aligned. She meant to keep them that way. Whatever other travails she faced, losing her teeth would not be one. She was just bilious enough to make sure of it.

Carina returned to Quillan. He was watching Priscilla Preston carry on across the aisle with a new audience. As he listened to a new list of brain organs and their corresponding characteristics, his face changed from bemused to irritated. He turned. “How widely held is that phrenology, do you think?”

Carina shrugged. “I’d heard of it only.”

Quillan seemed disproportionately irked. He frowned. “If people judge so easily by the outward appearance of someone’s head or any other such nonsense . . .” He frowned and didn’t finish.

But she knew what he meant. Glancing down, she saw his mother’s locket in his palm. He was still stinging. And wondering. Did people look at him and find something undesirable? Impossible! But she herself had done so. She’d seen a rogue—a handsome, heartless blackguard. But inside he was vulnerable, caring. Why couldn’t he show it?

She said, “We all judge by what we see. Maybe not head bumps or complexion, but expression, perhaps, or comportment.”

Quillan shook his head. “It shouldn’t be that way. People shouldn’t judge without knowing.”

“But, Quillan, God gave us the capacity to discern, to intuit.” She leaned toward him. “And we choose the face we want to show.”

He looked at her. “Not you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You show it all,” he said. “Everything you think, everything you feel, everything you want is right there for all the world to see. You’re so real it . . . it hurts.”

She squeezed his hand holding the locket. “I don’t want it to hurt.”

He said nothing more. After a while he turned back to the window, which left her vulnerable when Priscilla Preston returned.

She looked toward Quillan, though she spoke to Carina. “Do you think we’ll see bandits?”

“Bandits?” Carina raised her brows. The woman certainly chose the strangest topics.

“You know, train robbers, highwaymen. Like Black Bart, the poet? Or Sam . . . Oh, what was his name? I never can remember his last name.”

“Bass. Like the fish.”

“Yes, that’s it. Anyway what are the chances someone will rob the express box, do you think?” Miss Preston’s eyes took on a queer glow.

“Not high, I think.” Carina had seen enough lawlessness to last a lifetime. The last thing she wanted was a notorious outlaw keeping her from home. Dime stories of gunfighters and robbers like Black Bart who left a poem in place of the contents of the express box might thrill someone like Priscilla Preston, but having had her own pockets pinched and nearly ending up in a noose for her involvement with Berkley Beck, a man as unscrupulous as any train robber, Carina was not intrigued with the thought.