WESTERN CHRISTMAS PROPOSALS Page 8

  He came in, apology all over his face, that changed to a smile as he looked at her. “Too tired to get in bed?”

  “Yes. You would never be so indecisive.”

  “There have been times.” He left the room and came back with a grey blanket, draping it over her and tucking in the bottom to cover her feet. At least she had taken off her shoes.

  He left again and came back with a chair. He sat down hunched over, legs wide apart, arms dangling between his legs, and looked at her. “You did everything right.”

  “I was certain he was going to die,” she confessed.

  “I won’t leave you alone again.”

  “How will you ever find someone to love and marry, if you don’t get off this ranch?”

  He shrugged. “That could be the least of my troubles.” He reached in his inside vest pocket and pulled out a letter. “The sheriff gave me this. I...I almost wasn’t going to give it to you.”

  Katie didn’t want to touch the letter. When had anything good ever come from a letter?

  “Katie...”

  She knew the handwriting on the envelope. “I thought he was dead,” she said, appalled that it sounded like an accusation.

  He didn’t leave the room. She wondered for a moment if he felt more than mere concern, then told herself that he had a vested interest in a letter from Saul Coffin. The deal was thirty dollars a month, at least through the winter, and he must think this letter had the power to change that.

  She took out the single sheet of note paper, read it to herself and handed it to Ned.

  He read it. “At least he apologized for not being there.”

  “Killing a man in self-defense?” Katie said. “And in a bar? I thought I knew him better than that. Now I am to meet him in Cheyenne.” She took another look at the letter. “I’m to send a telegram in Medicine Bow to Lusk to let him know when I will be in Cheyenne.”

  “I won’t stop you,” Ned told her.

  “I made you a promise,” she replied, wishing he were not so noble, maybe someone more like Saul Coffin. “Maybe I don’t want to be ordered about.”

  “He is a bit demanding,” Ned said. He sounded cautious, as if gauging just how much he could say against Saul without angering her.

  “He always was demanding,” Katie said. “I never really noticed just how much until...” She stopped. “...until this letter.”

  “We’ll get Pa into Medicine Bow,” he said. “Can’t leave him here alone while we go to Cheyenne.”

  “No need,” Katie replied. “Your neighbor can sit with Mr. Avery until you drop me off at the depot in Medicine Bow.”

  “And let you take the train to Cheyenne on your own?” he asked, as if she had suggested somersaults in the corral.

  “I got here by myself,” she pointed out.

  The skeptical look he gave her told Katie all she ever wanted to know about Ned’s opinion of that journey.

  “I’m coming with you,” he insisted. “I won’t let a lady ride alone from here to Cheyenne.”

  He was beginning to sound as demanding as Saul Coffin, but in a better way. “I’m no lady,” she insisted. “I’m a mill girl. I’m a chore girl. You know that!”

  He leaned over and kissed her forehead, then left the room, causing her to wonder who had told her men were simple creatures.

  As tired as she was, she could not return to sleep. Katie closed her eyes and thought through the last few months, from her fear when Saul wasn’t in Cheyenne to meet her, right down to his insistence now that she do what he wanted. Her fear left, mainly because of Ned Avery’s strong presence. He was a man without doubts, and she had so many.

  Since she couldn’t sleep, she walked down the hall and shared her letter with Mr. Avery, who agreed that she wasn’t going to Cheyenne alone. He also had no objection to their plan to bundle him into the buckboard to Medicine Bow and stay with the doctor. Katie felt her own objections to Ned’s help growing weaker by the minute. No one is listening to me, she thought.

  Katie remained silent when Ned said he would go to Medicine Bow to send a telegram, telling Saul she would be in Cheyenne in four days. “That gives him time to get there,” Ned explained. “He can meet you in the lobby of the Plainsman Hotel. While I’m in Medicine Bow, Pa, I’ll tell the doctor to expect you.”

  “Why must I go to Cheyenne?” Katie burst out, surprising herself. “I promised you I would stay.”

  Ned folded his arms across his chest. “You came to Wyoming to marry Saul Coffin, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose I did,” Katie said, “but you are an aggravating man.”

  “I am a realist,” he said simply. “Let’s get these dishes to the kitchen.”

  Angry with herself, she followed him down the hall, and plunked the dishes in the sink.

  “What do you think?”

  She turned back to her boss, who held out a woman’s coat.

  “I hope I got the size right. Try it.”

  Numb, she slid her arm in one sleeve and then the other, as he held out the coat. Tears welled in her eyes and she couldn’t do a thing about it. It was too late to press the bridge of her nose, or take deep breaths; she was past those measures that had served her so well through life. She let the tears fall as he turned her around and buttoned her coat.

  “You needed a new one” was all he said, right before he took her in his arms.

  She knew better than to trust men, but all that painfully earned knowledge flew away as she hugged him back, wondering about the kindness she had found in an unlikely place.

  He pulled away first, his eyes bright with amusement. “You’re a watering can, Katie.”

  “Am not,” she declared as the tears fell faster. “Why...”

  “Christmas came early. I ordered it two months ago when we got here from Cheyenne. “You needed it then, so I know you need it now.”

  I need you more, she thought.

  He helped her out of the coat, which she folded carefully and placed on the table. She wanted him to leave, because she wanted to cry. Drat the man; he sat down at the table.

  “There’s going to be a Christmas party on Christmas Eve,” he said.

  He was changing the subject, so she knew his heart wasn’t wounded beyond repair. “You can drop me in Cheyenne, and certainly make it back in plenty of time,” she said. “And your father will be there to enjoy it, too. Where?”

  “Mrs. Bradley says this one is in the Presbyterian Church. She says there’s a social hall, with a high ceiling for a tree all the way from Minnesota. There’ll be candy canes and ribbon candy and turkey. Christmas carols, too. Mrs. Bradley says the little children in town will have a Christmas play.”

  His enthusiasm touched her heart. “You’ve never seen anything like that before, have you?” she asked, setting aside her own sadness that she would miss both it and him.

  He shook his head. “There wasn’t anything in Mississippi. Yankees burned it all. And when we got here, it was just hard living. Medicine Bow is getting civilized, Katherine.”

  Why had she ever thought Katie was lovelier than Katherine? It sounded so beautiful on his lips. “Do...do...do you think Lusk is civilized?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” he replied promptly. “People over there in Niobrara still bay at the moon.”

  She smiled, because she knew he wanted her to. “We should do something here at the house,” she told him.

  He stood up and shook his head. “I don’t have the heart for it,” he said and left her there in the kitchen.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The four days shot by, to Ned’s chagrin. He wanted them to draw out and give him courage to say more to Katherine Peck, before he took her to Cheyenne and let Saul Coffin reclaim her.

  But every morning he woke to find his father
sitting up, usually with a cup of coffee in his hand, because Katherine knew how to take care of people.

  Ned asked her how she knew so much, and she gave him an answer for the ages, one that put heart into his exhausted soul. “I do what the day demands,” she told him. “That’s enough.”

  He thought about that as he rode to the Higginses, who assured him they would look after his milk cow for a few days. A ride into Medicine Bow gained him the assurance of the doctor, who saw no problem with Dan Avery “coming for a visit,” as he put it.

  “I’m honestly surprised he is still alive,” the doctor said.

  “You wouldn’t be if you saw how well my chore girl is taking care of him,” Ned said. “He told me last week he’s not going to die until she finishes reading A Tale of Two Cities.”

  He sent a telegram to Saul Coffin, General Delivery, Lusk, Wyoming, telling the man to look for Katherine Peck on the evening train, and to meet her in the Plainsman Hotel. It gave him grim satisfaction to sign Edward Avery, Eight Bar Ranch. It was a well-known name and brand in these parts.

  As he rode home, snow was blowing sideways in all directions, a feature of Wyoming winds that he took for granted. He was tired of it all, and unwilling to think how sad his life would be, once Katie left.

  “I can’t do everything,” he told the darkening sky. “I can’t even get through this winter.”

  Katie waited for him at the kitchen door, her eyes anxious. He assured her he knew how to get home, which made her go all quiet. Perhaps he could have said it in a nicer way; maybe he’d raised his voice. Angry at himself, he strode to his father’s room, feeling two inches tall and most unmanly.

  He stopped short to see the Christmas tree. No one could have done this but Katie. She must have trod out into the knee-deep snow and chopped the tree herself. He came closer and saw his mother’s old ornaments, dredged up from some dark corner. Katie had crocheted a chain that went around and around the tree. He looked at the cardboard star and swallowed. Damn his hide, but she had taken the green brocade strip, the last memory of her father, and found a way to glue it to the star.

  He couldn’t even face his father. “I snapped at her for worrying about me.”

  “The tree is taller than she is, but she dragged it in here somehow. She spent the rest of the day decorating it, and the last two hours just walking back and forth and worrying about your sorry hide. I couldn’t even get her to read me another chapter.”

  Ned lay down beside his father. He raised up on his elbow to look at him, someone with a bad heart but lots of wisdom.

  “Why do women even want to have anything to do with men?”

  “I’ve wondered that,” Pa replied. He glanced down the hall to make sure he wasn’t going to be overheard. “They do like the lovemaking, and once we get ’um with child they see the necessity of sticking around.” He sighed. “They need us when the babies are little, and then they just stay.”

  “Hoping we’ll change?”

  “I never had the nerve to ask,” his father replied, which made them both laugh.

  Ned lay there a moment longer, relishing quiet time with the man he frankly adored. Why hadn’t he seen that sooner? Why had he let all those years of unremitting labor sour him?

  He knew he owed Katherine an apology. “You already eaten, Pa?” he asked as he stood up.

  “Yep. Go down there and say something nice to the kindest person on the Eight Bar.”

  “On my own, eh?” Ned teased.

  “Time you learned something from someone besides me, son,” his father told him. “Maybe this chore girl is the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  “I’m taking her to her fiancé tomorrow,” Ned reminded him.

  “You’re going to let that stop you?”

  Ned couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound cowardly and whining. The woman had purposefully come West to marry the man. “I probably am,” he said finally.

  His father just sat there, hands folded across his stomach. “You could ask her how she feels.” He shook his head. “But you’re afraid.”

  “I am,” Ned agreed. “I can at least apologize for being an ass.”

  “Son, look in the top drawer of that bureau, under my handkerchiefs.”

  Ned took out a small box.

  “Look inside.”

  Among mismatched cufflinks he saw a ring. He took it out, “This?”

  “Hand it over.”

  Pa held up the ring. “I took this off a dead Yankee at Chickamauga. Lord, you should’ve seen them run! He wasn’t fast enough and I shot him. Tried to give it to your mother, but she refused to wear it.”

  “You kept it.”

  “Your ma was always funny about this bauble. When I told her I was going to sell it to pay our taxes, she set up such a racket. I said if I couldn’t keep what little property we owned, even a nasty ring from a damn Yankee, we had no choice but to go West. Let’s do it, she said, so you can blame her for Wyoming.”

  “You never told me this.”

  “Never saw a need.” He set the ring down and reached for Ned’s hand. “I know you haven’t been happy here.”

  “Pa, I...”

  “Shut up and listen! Your ma knew there wasn’t any life in burnt-over, ransomed Mississippi. She had some money that wasn’t rebel money and we bought land here, plus homesteaded.” He picked up the ring again. “She wanted you to give this to your woman.” He laughed softly, the kind of memory laugh that Ned knew he wanted someday with a woman. “She told me, If Ned marries a damn Yankee lady, she’ll not mind this. So there you are, son.”

  The conversation had worn out Pa. Ned pocketed the ring, tucked the coverlet higher around his father and returned to the kitchen for penance.

  Katherine sat at the table, her eyes stormy, her lips tight together as she clasped her hands. Better begin at once.

  “Katherine, I was rude and I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not used to having someone worry about me, and I know the road home.”

  She glanced at him, then looked away, her stormy expression gone. “I shouldn’t have worried,” she said finally. She looked around as if she was seeing all the wide-open, wind-scoured mountains and valleys in his territory. “This place frightens me a little. You know your way around it and I don’t.”

  He had to know something, because he was curious. “Do you like it here?”

  Silent, thinking, she served him roast and those crisp potatoes of hers that he liked so well. “I believe I do,” she said. “I’d have to see it in summer to know for sure.” She hesitated. “What’s it like around Lusk?”

  He wanted to tell her it was an awful place, but it was just Wyoming, take it or leave it. “Never lived there. Couldn’t tell you.” Damn, here he was again, sounding like a fool.

  She said nothing else and he ate supper, thinking about women in ways he had never thought about them before. He wondered what it was like to have a woman around all the time, one that was his alone. He had never wanted to inflict his hard life on anyone, but now he did.

  He watched Katherine at the sink. She had such a pleasant sway to her hips as she worked. He admired the blue-and-white kitchen curtains she had sewed. All the racy calendars were long gone. The stove was blacked, the floor swept and the food was good. His chore girl had turned the godforsaken cabin into a home.

  And now like a fool he was taking her to Cheyenne to meet her fiancé. If there was a more stupid man in the territory, Ned had never met him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  On the morning of their departure for Cheyenne, Katie reluctantly accepted sixty dollars in wages for the last two months, even though she knew she had earned it. Ned seemed so certain that she wouldn’t be returning to the Eight Bar with him that he almost convinced her. She had listened to father and son talk
about finding a hired man. What about me? she wanted to ask, but it wasn’t her place.

  She knew a hired man would be more useful, but who would read A Tale of Two Cities to Mr. Avery? Could Ned even cook? She could see Mrs. Avery’s spices, tablecloths and dishes being shoved back into their cubbyholes, and it pained her.

  She packed, then looked around her room one last time, this room of her own. She had slept here peacefully with no fear. She thought about Saul Coffin and his admittedly hot temper. She had accepted his proposal because she felt some affection, and yearned to leave the mill.

  She thought about Ned Avery: his constancy, his family loyalty, his willingness to tackle everyone’s burdens, his thoughtful gift of a coat because he saw how ill-suited hers was for Wyoming. She even liked his looks, scoured as they were by wind and sun.

  Saul Coffin didn’t measure up, not now. She had been making the best of bad bargains all her life and she was tired of it. Still, the man has to ask and Saul had asked. Ned had never done more than hug her and kiss her forehead once, but she never wanted to leave his side.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes. Would you like me to sit in the buckboard bed with your father? I can keep an eye on him.”

  “Thank you. I won’t have to worry then,” he said.

  He came into her room for her battered traveling case, hefting it easily, because she had come with little. What she was leaving with far outweighed any baggage. Maybe the best life had to offer was intangible.

  Instead of following Ned outdoors, she went to Mr. Avery’s room. She was going to miss reading to him. At least he had a Christmas tree, more tree than she ever had. He had been deprived of so much by his illness, and what she was doing felt like abandonment.

  She turned around to see Ned in the doorway, watching her in that quiet way of his. “You make sure there is water in that bucket, if you want the tree to last through Christmas,” she said.