A Place Called Harmony (2 page)

Dear Readers,

I’ve been wanting to write this book since the day a place called Harmony came into my mind. Many of you have traveled this journey with me and grown to know and love the people of Harmony.

Now we’re going all the way back to the beginning, to the start of the town. For those of you who read the series, you’ll love knowing how it all started. For those who haven’t visited Harmony yet, you’ll be stepping into a community at the birth of not only a town, but of friendships that will last for lifetimes. If you enjoy this tale, you might just stay awhile and read the rest of my stories.

I’ve always loved historicals. For me, early heroes in Texas always walk off the pages and into my heart.

I think you’ll feel that way about Clint Truman, who believes he doesn’t have enough heart left to break; and Gillian Matheson, who has loved one woman since he first saw her; and, of course, Patrick McAllen, who is young enough to believe that love comes easy.

Many books I write take on a life of their own. In this one I felt like I was meeting these men and their wives, not making them up. Truman stepped onto the pages with a stubbornness that his descendants had in later books: Matheson’s strong need to protect and help others is deeply rooted, and Patrick’s laughter shows through in every scene in which he appears.

So climb into the covered wagon and come along with me to Texas. I promise, this story will keep you reading long into the night.

With love,

Jodi Thomas

D
EAD
OF
W
INTER

Harmon Ely limped out of the trading post he’d built where two streams crossed in the panhandle of Texas. He’d suffered through a fire that burned his first building to the ground, two robberies, and a dozen winter storms that almost froze him out.

“It’s been a good ten years, Davy.” He grinned at the hairy yellow dog a few feet away.

The hound looked up at Harmon with sad eyes that called the old man a liar.

Harmon laughed. “I know you’re gonna be surprised, but I figure it’s about time we had a little company, and I don’t mean the beef herders and saddle tramps I usually see. I want families, kids playing around the place, and a town growing up on all this land I bought after the war.”

The old mutt named after Davy Crockett still didn’t look interested.

Harmon lifted a board as high as he could and hammered it up on the front of his store like it was a picture. “I’ve been thinking. We’ll need a lawman, and someone who knows a thing or two about building a town, and a carpenter to carry it all out. I wouldn’t mind having a few cooks and kids and throw in a schoolmarm to teach them what’s right and a preacher to make them feel guilty if they don’t follow along.”

Davy spread out like a rug on the slice of sun-warmed porch.

Harmon lifted a can of paint. Slowly, he wrote
Population
across the top of the sign. “I don’t care how long it takes, I’m gonna have me a town.”

In the middle of the sign, he painted a big number 1. Then down at the bottom he added in smaller letters,
and one dog
.

“A town,” he said to himself, since Davy was snoring, “that even my family would want to come to. A nice place where folks will pass by and say, ‘There’s old Harmon Ely’s town.’”

F
EBRUA
RY
H
UNTSVILLE
, T
EXAS

Clint Truman hit the floor so hard his teeth rattled, but, as always, he didn’t have the sense to stay down. He came up swinging, ready for another round.

The next hard blow from the miner he’d decided to fight sent him flying through the saloon’s swinging doors and into the muddy street. He slid several feet, picking up horse shit along with the mud as he dug up the road. Then he just lay still, letting the rain beat on him for a while.

When he tried to straighten, a heavy boot landed on his chest, holding him down like a boulder. Clint stared up, but the rain and clouds offered him only a shadow of the man above him. A wide shadow.

“Evening, Truman.” Sheriff Lightstone’s voice matched his three hundred pound body: big and frightening. “You drunk enough to listen to me now?”

“Soon as I finish the fight, Sheriff,” Clint promised.

“The fight’s over.” Lightstone lifted the gun belt that circled his ample waist. “We need to talk, Truman, before you kill someone and I have to arrest you. Now, we can do it here with you in the mud, or we can do it with you behind bars, but we’re going to have a talk.”

“Hell,” Clint said, hating both choices. “How about you buy me a cup of coffee before you get into telling me how to live my life?”

“Fair enough, but clean up first. Between the blood and the mud, there ain’t an inch of you left unaffected. I’m tired of standing in this drizzle anyway. You’ve got ten minutes to meet me at Maggie’s. If you don’t pass her inspection to get in, I’m putting you in jail and letting you dry out until the mud flakes off and the bleeding scabs over.”

Clint stood and watched the sheriff head toward the only café willing to serve drunks in Huntsville, Texas. He hated being bossed around, and he wasn’t trying to kill himself by fighting. He just had a ton of anger built up in him and needed to get it out. In a town like Huntsville someone was always looking for a good fight.

Walking over to the horse trough, he dunked his head in and shook, guessing the horses wouldn’t appreciate him bloodying the water. He pulled the plug at the bottom of the trough and let water run out into the river already flowing in the street.

Thunder rumbled and the sky dumped buckets down on him. Clint turned his head up and took the full blast. “Give it your best shot!” he yelled, waiting for the lightning. Life couldn’t get any more painful. He probably wouldn’t feel a direct hit.

A kid of about ten ran past him, bumping into his outstretched arm. “Sorry, mister,” he shouted over the storm. “Didn’t you notice it’s raining?”

“Hell,” Clint answered. “It’s been raining all my life.”

He replaced the plug in the trough, then walked to a bench outside the saloon and lifted his saddlebags from where he’d left them three hours and several drinks ago. He might not have the sense to come out of the rain, but at least he’d left his horse in the barn.

Reluctantly, Clint headed to the back door of Maggie’s place. Once inside the mudroom, he stripped off his shirt and dried with a towel the owner tossed him.

Maggie watched from the doorway of the kitchen as he cleaned up. “You’re one hunk of a man, Clint Truman. If you ever gave up fighting and turned to loving, you’d make some woman very happy.” Her inspection wasn’t shy. “That scar running across your hand, or the one on your jaw, don’t take nothing away from that perfect body. Broad shoulders, slim waist and . . .” She grinned. “Wouldn’t mind if you turned around so I could finish my description.”

He growled at her.

Maggie held up her hands and tried her best to look innocent. “Just making notes to pass along to some woman looking for a new lover.”

“There’s no more loving left in me, Maggie.” He said the words as if he were swearing. “You mind turning around while I change my pants?”

“Not a chance. An old widow like me don’t get to see a full-grown man strip but a few times, and I’m not missing this opportunity. My first husband used to wash in the creek and come back to the house naked, but he was so hairy I thought he was a bear heading my way half the time.”

“You got anything to drink, Maggie?”

“Sure.” She stepped away and he exchanged soaked trousers for damp ones from his bag.

When she returned she handed him a cup of coffee, and he frowned.

“Trust me, honey, you need this. That bull of a sheriff is out front waiting and he don’t look happy.”

Clint downed half of the hot liquid that tasted more like the mud outside than coffee. He’d known this talk with the sheriff was coming, so he might as well get it over with.

Thanking Maggie for the towel and the coffee, Clint stepped through the kitchen door to the café. Sure enough, Lightstone sat by the window staring out at his town.

Clint took the seat across from him without saying a word.

“You eat today?” the sheriff asked.

“I’m not a kid. I don’t need mothering,” Clint snapped. At thirty he’d about decided he didn’t need anything from anyone.

“You ever wear anything but black?”

“No. Why the hell do you care?” Clint needed a drink. He had a feeling this wasn’t going to go well.

The sheriff ignored his comment. “I heard you fought with Terry’s Texas Rangers during the war. Some say you were a crack shot. Maybe even the best in the South.”

“Some talk too much. Most of what I shot was game for dinner. I don’t want to talk about the war. Wasted years. We lost, you know. The whole damn country lost.”

“I know how you feel. I thought I was fighting for Texas. For rights, then found out later it was all about slavery. By then, it was too late and I was mostly just fighting to stay alive.” He stared down at his cup as if looking for the answer. “What’d you do when you got home?”

“I drifted for a while, trying to shake ghosts following me. My folks kept a little farm going during the war, so I finally settled there. I helped them out for a few years until they passed on. Then, I thought I’d marry and start a family.” Clint didn’t go on. He couldn’t. The memory of his two little girls crying still haunted his dreams.

Lightstone waited for a while then added, “I know enough to fill in the details, Truman. I heard your wife and daughters died a few years ago of the fever. Folks say you burned the house and the barns the morning after you buried them.”

Clint didn’t comment. He felt like his whole life was simply acts in a play, and some days he didn’t want to step on the stage. Sometimes he thought the ache to feel his wife, Mary, by his side would collapse his chest, or the need to run his hand over one of his daughters’ curly hair would almost take him to his knees. They were gone so fast, like his parents and all the boys he’d joined up with to go to war. Some nights, in his nightmares, he felt like a time traveler going back to them all. They’d smile at him and wave, then curl up and die like dried leaves caught in a campfire.

Clint took a long drink of his coffee and waited for the sheriff’s lecture. He’d heard it before: different people, different towns. If he had enough caring left in him to change, he would try one more time, but he no longer saw the point.

“Truman,” the sheriff began. “I need your help with a matter.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t expected the sheriff would want a favor. Lightstone was only passable nice to him on a good day, and the huge man had very few of them in a town like Huntsville.

“Now, hear me out before you decide. Promise. This is me asking for something, not me telling you what to do. You make up your own mind.”

“All right. I’ll hear you out,” Clint answered. He didn’t plan to walk back over to the saloon until the rain let up anyway. He had no other clothes to change into.

Lightstone leaned back. “I got a friend I fought with during the war who wants to build a town. He’s been running a trading post up in the wild part of Texas where the Indian Wars have been going on for ten years. He makes good money, thanks to the cattle drives coming through and crazy settlers who wanted to move that far north, but he wants more. He wants to have a community. He says his wife refused to go with him because that part of the state is too wild. Thanks to Colonel McKenzie and a new fort moving in, it may be settling down.”

“How does this affect me?”

“My friend is a good businessman, but the war left him crippled up. He’s been robbed several times, and once they shot him and left him for dead. If he’s going to do this, he’ll need someone good with a gun working for him. I’ve heard, even if you don’t usually wear a gun belt, that there is no better shot in the state.”

“I’m not a hired gun, Sheriff. Not interested.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t be that. He’s offering every man who comes to work for him forty acres and a house to live in. If you stay two years, he’ll deed the place over to you. He’ll pay a fair wage and you help him build the town. A real town where folks can walk the streets without worrying about being robbed or shot.”

Clint was low on money and knew he’d have to look for a job soon, but he never planned to settle anywhere again. He might get attached to folks if he did that, and he never, ever planned to let that happen again. Signing on to be his friend or loved one was a death warrant.

“You’d be hauling supplies and running cattle and who knows what else, but you’d also carry a gun. You’d be protecting hardworking folks and running off those who are looking for trouble. This time you’d be fighting to keep people alive. That part of Texas has very little law of any kind. Trouble will ride in at full gallop more than once over two years, I’m guessing. You’ll earn that house and land.”

Lightstone leaned halfway across the table and yelled for Maggie to bring them a couple of meals. He didn’t have to say more; she only served one choice a day.

She yelled that he needed to stop yelling at her.

The sheriff smiled. “I’d marry that woman if she’d have me, but she says four husbands were enough.”

Clint didn’t want to picture the two in bed, but the image came all the same. Both were built wide and thick. Maggie told him once that she was simply big-boned. Proof of dinosaurs, he remembered thinking at the time. If she and the sheriff ever did get together and make love, they’d shake the house.

Lightstone drew him back to the conversation. “What have you got to lose? The trip north, even if you decided not to stay, would do you good.”

“All right. I’ll go.” Clint had nothing else to do anyway. He could be packed in an hour. “But I make no promises that I’ll stay two years.”

The sheriff nodded as if they’d made a bargain. “Oh, I forgot, you have to take one thing with you.”

“What’s that?” He was thinking maybe his own horse, or rifle.

The sheriff smiled and added, “A wife.”