WESTERN CHRISTMAS PROPOSALS Read online

  “Miss Peck, I’ll pay you thirty dollars a month to be my chore girl.”

  Chapter Two

  “What makes you think I need a job?” she asked, her eyes going from the rancher wearing a canvas duster, to the round little minister who had so kindly taken her in a few nights ago.

  “Well, Mr. uh, Reverend, uh. He said...” Mr. Avery stopped. “Maybe I was wrong.” He turned to go.

  Katie could tell she had embarrassed him, and she wondered again why she carried around so much resentment. Things weren’t good and she did need a job. She needed something. A man had offered her employment and she had snarled at him like a homeless pup with nothing going in its favor.

  “I do need a job, because I am not going back to Massachusetts,” she said.

  He stopped and turned around, but his eyes looked wary now. “You said Maine.”

  “I work in Massachusetts,” she said in a rush, unwilling to apologize for her sharpness, but equally unwilling to embarrass him further. “I’m a mill girl. I regulate four looms in Lowell at the Chase Millworks. I came West to get married, but I don’t think that’s happening.”

  The rancher nodded. “The preacher told me a little.”

  Katie could tell he was unwilling to ask any more, which touched her heart. Maybe people didn’t pry out here. Maybe others came West on a shoestring like she had, with their own histories to leave behind.

  She could tell he was a patient man—something in his eyes—but she could also see that he had no time to waste, the way he slapped his gloves from one hand to the other. And she needed a job.

  Katie stepped down off the box and seated herself on it. “Mr. Avery, you tell me what you need, and I’ll answer your questions.” She indicated the other corner of the box, as if they sat in the parlor at the dormitory at the millworks, and not the back wall of a half-painted church.

  He sat down, hat in hand, which he set on the ground beside him, and didn’t dillydally. “My father is, well, he’s dying of heart disease. He can’t do much except lie in bed and chafe about the hand dealt him. He won’t want you there, even though he knows he needs you.”

  “Just the two of you?” Katie asked. “You don’t have a wife?”

  “I have a little brother,” Mr. Avery said. He made a wry face. “He’s not altogether. I mean, he’s polite and kind and generally follows orders, but...”

  He looked away, and she saw the muscles work in his face. She knew she sat with a private man, one not accustomed to telling anyone much of anything, and here she was, a stranger.

  “You can’t quite trust him to take care of your father while you do the outside work,” Katie filled in.

  His expression changed and his shoulders relaxed. She could tell he was relieved that he didn’t have to say more.

  “I’ll pay you thirty dollars a month, in addition to your room and board,” he said, not looking at her. She saw the red rise in his face, and she knew there was more.

  “Will I have a room?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said finally. “Pa built the place a room at a time, as we needed it. It all connects and there’s nothing for a chore girl.”

  She couldn’t take his offer, even as she knew she wanted to. As it was now, she shared a tiny room with two other women of questionable virtue who were, as Reverend Peabody whispered in a low voice, “Trying to get out of the life.” The collection plate on Sunday yielded very little revenue in a railroad town like Cheyenne that was just starting to think about respectability, but not too hard. The meals were almost as sparse as they had been at home in Maine, and the minister had a wife and two hopeful children.

  “It doesn’t have to be a large room,” she surprised herself by saying. “A corner of the kitchen?” Try a little harder, Mr. Avery, she thought, encouraging him silently to think of something, because she couldn’t burden the Peabodys any longer.

  Silence, then, “I could partition off the sitting room. No one sits there.”

  He was quiet again. Kate could tell he had no intention of begging or pleading. He wasn’t that kind of man.

  She knew it was going to be a poor, hard job, but she was used to those. She put out her hand. “I’ll do it.”

  He shook her hand for the second time in barely ten minutes. She felt relief cover her like a blanket and made no effort to release his hand. He chuckled and hung on to her hand, too. “I get the feeling that we’re both really relieved by this turn of events,” he said.

  “Ayuh.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she translated. “I’ll try to remember that you don’t speak Maine.”

  She let go of his hand and stood up. “I... I’d better finish this window,” she said, shy now. “I promised the preacher.”

  He stood up, and put on his hat, which made him loom over her. She stepped back instinctively, teetered on the edge of the box and felt his firm hand in the small of her back to steady her.

  “Be careful!” he admonished, but kindly. “Train leaves at seven tomorrow morning. Can you meet me at the depot?”

  Katie nodded and applied herself to the window. He tipped his hat to her, and left as quietly as he had come. In another minute she was singing again, something a little livelier than the reverend’s “Rock of Ages.”

  Satchel in hand, Ned was waiting at the depot by six thirty the next morning, wondering if Katherine Peck would come, or if she had changed her mind. He had already bought her ticket to Medicine Bow, but he knew he could exchange it if she changed her mind. I need you, he thought, looking through the depot doors toward Fifteenth Street. He hoped she would see him as an ally, and not just a boss. Pop needed to be handled delicately.

  And there she was, coat too light for this climate slung over her arm, tugging a battered tin trunk after her. She shook her head when one of the other passengers offered to help her. Maybe she thought she would have to tip them, and she had no money.

  He took it from her, surprised how light it was. He thought of Mrs. Higgins’s own daughter, and her two trunks full of clothing and household goods, when she married a rancher near Sheridan, plus furniture. Katherine Peck had next to nothing. Maybe she saw Wyoming as a step up from the mills.

  He gave her her ticket and tipped a young boy a quarter to wrestle her trunk aboard the westbound train, which steamed and waited—just barely—acting like a horse ready to race and held in check with some effort.

  She followed him down the aisle and sat where he pointed. He sat next to her, after removing his duster and stowing it overhead, along with her coat. That coat would never do, but he didn’t feel bold enough to tell her.

  They had some time to wait, and he did want to know more about her.

  “I was wondering if you might have second thoughts about accepting my offer,” he said, more as small talk than serious conversation.

  “No second thoughts,” she said. “Nay, not one.”

  Nay? He asked himself. That’s quaint, but I can understand her better. “Will you go back to Massachusetts or Maine when you accumulate some savings?” he asked her, even though it pained him. He was not a man to pry.

  “Not either place,” she said firmly. “I don’t aim to backtrack.”

  There was so much he wanted to ask her, and it must have shown on his face. She stifled a little sigh, then folded her hands on her lap with an air of resolution. “I am, or was, a mill girl, from Lowell, Massachusetts,” she said. “I went to the mill at twelve years.”

  “You have a fellow out here?” he asked.

  “One of the mill’s floor managers has a cousin who farms near Lusk.”

  “Ranches,” he corrected. “No one farms anything in Lusk.”

  “Saul Coffin went there four months ago. He and I had an understanding.”

  “Going to marry you?”


  “Ayuh. A month ago he sent me part of the train fare. He was supposed to meet me here.” She looked at the back of the seat in front of them. “The Reverend Peabody said he told you what we think happened to Saul, uh, Mr. Coffin.”

  “Lots of reasons a man can miss a train,” he said, suddenly not wishing to crush her with the likelihood of her fiancé’s death, even though she had already heard the worst. “Something delayed him, that’s all.”

  “The reverend told me the same thing,” she said, looking at him now. “After you left, he and I walked to the sheriff’s office and told him where I would be, if someone came to inquire.”

  “Wise of you. You may hear from him yet,” Ned said.

  He could tell that she didn’t believe him, which made him wonder if she’d ever had a nice thing happen to her. He didn’t think there were many.

  “Boooard! Boooard!” the conductor called.

  Ned thought Miss Peck might look back at Cheyenne as they pulled out, but she kept her gaze directly in front of her. The town obviously held nothing for her except disappointment, something that she seemed to possess a lot of.

  “Nothing here for you,” he commented, mostly just to fill an empty space.

  “No, sir,” she agreed promptly.

  “Christmas is coming,” Ned told her, then felt like a complete idiot. Of course it was coming! So was the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. New Year’s, too.

  His chore girl saw right through his lame attempt at conversation. “That’ll do, Mr. Avery,” she said so kindly in the accent he was finding more charming, by the minute. “I don’t require idle chat. I’ll be your chore girl. You don’t need to worry any more.”

  Maybe it was the saying of it, her quiet sort of confidence that intrigued him almost as much as her accent. He sat back, inclined to think she was right.

  Chapter Three

  Katherine Peck was not a talkative woman. He pulled out a copy of Roughing It he had bought in Cheyenne, but she had nothing to read. He stopped the candy butcher who came swaying down the aisle as the train picked up steam, and asked about his magazines.

  “What would you like to read?” Ned asked.

  Miss Peck shook her head. “No money.”

  “I have some. What would you like?” He leaned closer. “You can read.”

  “Ayuh,” she said, a little starch in her voice.

  Ned picked out a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal, paid for it and handed it to her. “This do? May I call you Katherine? Most people call me Ned. A whole winter of you calling me Mr. Avery just might give me a case of the fantods.”

  “Fantods?” she asked as she carefully placed the magazine on her lap, almost as though it were valuable beyond comprehension.

  “What? No fantods in Maine?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “The creeps. The heebie-jeebies. The fantods,” he explained. “When people call me Mr. Avery, I just naturally look around for my father. Call me Ned.”

  “I will, if you’ll call me Katie,” she told him.

  Her hand caressed the magazine. He could tell she was eager to start reading, but she was also polite, and he was her boss. “Katie? I thought you preferred...”

  “I want a different name. Am I allowed?”

  “Certainly. Many shady people come West and change their names.”

  “I am not shady,” she told him. He thought he saw amusement in her eyes for the first time.

  “Didn’t think you were, Katie.”

  She turned her attention immediately to the treasure in her lap. He couldn’t help watching her from the corner of his eye, how she caressed the magazine, then turned the pages so slowly. Her satisfied sigh touched his heart.

  He couldn’t help smiling through the first few chapters of Roughing It. He gave himself over to the story and had just finished the fifth chapter when the conductor shouted, “Laramie!”

  He put down the book and stood up. “I’ll be right back,” he told Katie. To his amusement, she barely glanced up from the magazine.

  He dashed into a hardware store on the block next to the depot and bought a doorknob with a key and two hinges. A quick lunge for a bag of lemon drops completed his stampede through Laramie. He made it back to the train just as the conductor was calling, “This train is ready to depart!”

  He handed her the parcel. Without a word, she untied the twine that bound it and spread out the hardware.

  “I can knock together a wall and a door,” he said. “Until your room is done, my brother and I will sleep in the barn. Shouldn’t be more than a day.”

  Katie ducked her head, staring hard at the parcel in her lap. “When I was ten, my stepfather started to beat me,” she whispered. “When he thought to do other things more grievous, I ran away. I was twelve.”

  God forgive me when I whine, Ned thought, appalled. “Won’t happen here,” he told her. “Have a lemon drop. Things are going to get better.”

  Eyes still lowered, she took a lemon drop from the proffered bag. “You still want me to work for you?”

  “Yes. Girls of ten or twelve don’t have much say in things, do they?”

  She shook her head. “I walked to Massachusetts, sleeping in barns and doing odd jobs, and became a mill girl. I’ll be a good chore girl and I won’t run away.”

  Kate put aside the magazine, and looked out the soot-grimed window, as if searching for scenery.

  “You’re looking in the wrong direction, if you’re after scenery,” Ned told her, impressed with her bravery. He pointed across the aisle. “That seat’s empty. Take a look.”

  Intrigued, she did, and was rewarded with an eye-filling view of a mountain rising out of all that empty space.

  “Elk Mountain,” he said, coming across the aisle to sit beside her. “It’s the northernmost mountain in the Snowy Range. My ranch is by that river over there. We’re seven miles from Medicine Bow.”

  “Practically next door to a town,” she added.

  He liked her smile and her handsome high cheekbones. He liked even more that she thought to tease him. “Out West, that’s the truth,” he replied. “Pa was here early, so we have river acreage. He came with a railroad crew, laying this track that we’re riding on. He liked what he saw, and stayed.”

  “How many acres?” she asked.

  “Better question is, how many cattle do we run?”

  “Well, then...”

  “One thousand, all behind bob wire, because we learned our lesson sooner’n three years ago, when we had a bitch of a winter and the cattle all drifted and died. Pardon my language.”

  She made a little gesture with her hand, and he continued. It still wasn’t a good memory. “Some of the ranchers twitted us earlier about fencing our property. Sure we lost cattle in ’87, but not as many as the stockmen whose beeves drifted.”

  “What happened?”

  “They’re mostly gone.”

  “The tough survived?”

  Just like you, he thought, impressed. “Guess so. You should do fine, Katie Peck.”

  Chapter Four

  To Katie’s eyes, Medicine Bow looked no better and no worse than Laramie, only smaller. She let Ned Avery take her tin trunk and followed him from the train. She waited on a bench by the stable while he and the liveryman hitched one horse to a small wagon, such as she had never seen back East.

  “It’s a buckboard,” he said, as he helped her in. “One stop and we’ll head home.”

  He pulled up in front of Bradley’s Mercantile. He must have ordered everything before he left Medicine Bow, because he came out in a few minutes with more wrapped packages, plus a paper bag, which he set in her lap.

  “Pirozhki,” he said. “Some Roosians moved here from Nebraska and we can’t get enough of them. Two for each of us. Hand
me one, once I get us over the tracks.”

  She did as he said, enjoying her pork roll while he coaxed the horse across the railroad track. She handed him one, which he downed quickly, then the other, which disappeared about as fast. He protested when she offered him her second one, but not for long.

  “Apples in the barrel behind you,” he said, and she produced two. “Barrel at home is nearly empty.” One satisfied her, but Ned needed two more apples.

  “Just seven miles, so we’re practically in town,” he told her as they bumped along. She tried to brace herself so she wouldn’t nudge his shoulder, but the seat was so narrow. “I wanted to take my pa to Medicine Bow, where he could stay with the doctor and get better care, but he won’t have it.”

  “Yours must be a nice place, if he won’t leave it.”

  He shrugged. “Pa fought for the Confederacy, and came out here with nothing.”

  “Your mother, too?”

  “A little later. I was born in Mississippi. As soon as he had a holding out here, he sent for us.”

  “Mr. Ave...”

  “Ned.”

  “No, it’s a Mr. Avery subject,” she insisted, which made him chuckle. “Mr. Avery, I can probably manage without a room of my own. I’m asking too much.”

  He stopped the team. “Have you ever asked for anything before, Miss Peck?”

  Embarrassed, she thought a moment. “I never dared.”

  “I think maybe you’re overdue. It won’t kill Pete and me to spend a night in the barn.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it, because she wanted that room. “Very well.”

  “Is the matter closed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good thing, because I don’t like to argue about stuff that needs to happen.” Ned pointed to a spot where the road turned toward the river they had been paralleling. “We’ll be on Avery land soon.”