“Your Translator is Lying!” — Widow’s Daughter Warns Millionaire Cowboy in Fluent German Before Deal

Chapter 6

Vincent Pryce left the way a beaten dog leaves — backward, head low, expecting a kick that never came.

Duncan Hale gave him exactly enough time to gather his hat. He gave him the road, such as it was, and he gave him one sentence, spoken so quietly that only the girl and the German heard it clearly: “If I ever see you in this territory again, I will not trouble myself to ask questions.”

Pryce did not ask what that meant. He did not want the answer. The polished translator who had walked into the Territorial Hotel that morning with a swagger and a suitcase of lies went out of it at a dead run, scattering a doorman and a barrel of nails and two spooked hounds, and the heavy front doors swung shut behind him like a verdict.

The parlor emptied of its poison.

The clock ticked. The flies buzzed against the window glass. And Duncan Hale sat down at the head of the table and looked at the coffee-stained contract as if it were a snake still moving in the grass.

“Child,” he said, “pull up a chair.”

Hazel Hart did not move. Her hands, resting on her silver tray, were trembling again — not with fear this time but with the after-burn of the thing she had done, the way a body shakes after a man leaps across a chasm and stands, wobbling, on the other side. Her whole life had been a quiet cup of coffee with feet. She had just set that cup down and stepped off the table, and she had no idea how to be the thing she had become.

“I—I should return to the kitchen, sir. Mrs. Pemberton is expecting—”

“Mrs. Pemberton,” Duncan said, “can wait.”

As if summoned by the words, the parlor doors flew open.

Mrs. Aldercote — the hotel manager, a woman built of starch and suspicion — swept into the room with her face the color of brick. She had seen the translator sprint through her lobby. She had heard the commotion through the wall. She had come to do what she had been doing for twenty years: smooth things over, apologize on behalf of whoever had caused trouble, and make sure the servants were kept where servants belonged.

Her eyes found Hazel by the table, and her face went from brick to scarlet.

“There you are, you terrible child! What on earth are you doing at the gentlemen’s table? I told you — I told you — you are not a person in this room! You are to pour and step back, and instead you—” She lunged forward and seized Hazel by the elbow, her fingers biting into the bone. “You are finished. Get back to the laundry, and we will speak about your wages—”

“Release her.”

The words were soft. The silence they carved was not.

Mrs. Aldercote froze. She turned her head, slowly, and found the cattle baron watching her across the room. He had not raised his voice. He had not stood. But his eyes were the color of winter river ice, and the woman who had bossed a hundred hired girls felt suddenly, completely small.

“I said,” said Duncan Hale, “release her arm.”

Mrs. Aldercote’s fingers sprang open as if the child’s elbow had gone white-hot. She stepped back, smoothing her skirts, babbling apologies in a voice that kept climbing and cracking: Mr. Hale, I do not know what came over me, I did not mean — of course, sir, of course —

Duncan reached into his coat. He pulled out a gold coin — a heavy eagle, twenty dollars’ worth of frontier promise — and laid it on the oak table where it caught the light like a fallen sun.

“This young lady,” he said, “is no longer serving coffee today. She is conducting my business. I am buying out her shift — and the rest of the week while we’re at it.” He looked at Mrs. Aldercote, and his voice did not rise a single note. “If anyone in this hotel gives her or her mother a hard time, I will buy this hotel and fire every soul in it. Do we understand one another?”

Mrs. Aldercote swallowed.

“Y-yes, Mr. Hale. Completely understood.” She curtsied — actually curtsied, the starch going out of her spine as she backed toward the door — and closed the heavy doors behind her with a click softer than a mouse’s footfall.

The room was quiet again.

Hazel stared at the gold coin. It was more money than she had seen in her entire life. It was a doctor’s visit for her mother. It was real food. It was, possibly, a train ticket back east — an escape from the lye and the steam and the grief. She reached out a shaky hand, and then stopped, because she did not know if she was allowed to touch it, because she did not know what it meant, because the world had tilted sideways and she was standing on the wall.

Werner Brandt had been watching her. The stern German, whose broadcloth suit was dark with sweat, reached across the table and took a clean porcelain plate. He set two sugar biscuits on it — the kind the hotel served with the afternoon coffee, the kind Hazel had never once been offered, only permitted to carry — and slid it gently across the oak toward her.

“Eat, child,” he said in German. His voice had lost all its iron. “A good citizen needs her strength.”

Hazel looked from the biscuits to the coin to the two titans of the frontier, who were both, impossibly, watching a twelve-year-old girl as if she were the only person in the room worth waiting on.

She took a biscuit.

It tasted like victory, and like home, and like the first sweet thing she had eaten in a very long year.