скачать книгу бесплатно
The sheriff cleared his throat, but the way his gaze shot between her and Maggie was enough to make Mary want to giggle.
“You are right, dear sister,” Maggie said. “Until death do we part.”
“You girls—”
“We’ll accept your offer, Sheriff,” Mary interrupted. “When does the train leave?”
Chapter One (#ulink_a9d97049-3a30-5897-8762-20da275068f3)
Oak Grove, Kansas.
Steve Putnam flipped the reins of his big gray gelding over the hitching post outside of the Wet Your Whistle Saloon and stepped up on the boardwalk in order to get out of the cloud of dust being swirled up along the main street of town. A parade of wagons, buggies and people on horseback and afoot was the cause. All headed in one direction. The train station. The last place you’d find him today. In his opinion, the entire town had gone loco over this mail-order bride scheme.
Turning about, he headed toward the batwing doors of the saloon. The “Closed” sign didn’t stop him from pushing the doors apart and letting them swing shut behind him.
The sight of Chris and Danny Sanders dressed in their Sunday best had Steve pushing the brim of his hat up in order to take a second look at the cousins walking toward him.
“Sorry, Steve, we’re closed,” Danny said. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“Why?” Steve asked, not bothering to say he’d seen the sign.
“The women are arriving today,” Chris answered.
Taken aback, Steve shook his head. “You two bought into this hare-brained idea?” The cousins had opened the saloon in Oak Grove with the insurance money they’d received after the one they’d owned in Dodge City had burned down. Their business seemed to be flourishing and he couldn’t believe either Chris or Danny was looking for a mail-order bride.
Pointing a thumb at his much taller cousin, Danny said, “Chris here contributed heavily to the cause.”
“Why?” Steve directed his question toward Chris.
The cousins didn’t look much alike, not even with their blond hair oiled smooth against their heads and matching black suits complete with red vests and gold watch chains hanging from their pockets. They didn’t act much alike, either. Danny was shorter and always smiling and joking, while Chris was tall, thin and far more serious, especially when it came to money, and that was what Steve couldn’t believe. That Chris would have made a contribution to the Oak Grove Betterment Committee that had been raising money the past year “to bring suitable women of marrying age to their fine community.” He’d seen so many fliers and newspapers articles about the far-fetched idea he knew the sales pitch word for word.
“For the betterment of the community of course,” Chris answered.
Steve gave him a glare that said he knew the man was lying.
“Fine,” Chris said. “If there’s anyone we can trust with the truth, it’s you. Danny and I aren’t looking for wives, and we don’t believe every woman on that train will make a suitable one, either.”
Danny’s laughter left a sly grin on his face. “But they just might want to work in a high-end establishment such as the Whistle.”
“You’re hoping to get a couple of saloon gals out of the deal?” That was as hard to believe as the idea of getting a wife through this scheme.
“Why not?” Danny asked. “Working here would be far better than marrying a few of those men offering up their hands. Can you imagine any woman wanting to take up residence with Wayne Stevens and that creature he calls a dog? It’s dang near as big as your horse and I hear tell it sleeps in his bed every night.”
Steve had heard the same, and Wayne’s dog was big enough to saddle. Still he shook his head. “I just didn’t expect you two to participate in this idea.”
Chris withdrew his watch and clicked open the cover to check the time. As he poked it back in his pocket, he asked, “If you aren’t here to meet the train, why are you in town in the middle of the day?”
“Rex buried an ax in his knee chopping kindling last night,” Steve answered. “Doc was out and stitched him up, but said he’d be laid up for at least three weeks. I came to see if I could hire Helen Oswoski to cook for my boys for a month or so. With it being roundup time, I don’t have a man to spare.”
Danny let out a whistle. “Rex already has a hunk of wood for one leg.”
Everyone knew Rex Walton had lost a leg in the war, and Steve was worried the man would end up without both legs if he didn’t follow the doctor’s orders. “Unfortunately, it was the other leg he buried the ax in.”
“Sorry to tell you, but Helen Oswoski got married last month,” Chris said. “To Ole Hanson. She’s helping him run his stage stop between here and Dodge.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Steve admitted. He’d made a mental list of people he could hire to cook for his hands, and Helen, being a widow, had been the only viable choice.
“I sure can’t think of anyone who might be able to help you out,” Danny said. “Maybe you can pick one of the brides off the train.”
Frustration made Steve’s neck muscles burn. “I don’t need a bride, I need a cook.”
“Suppose you could ride down to Dodge, might find some options there,” Chris suggested.
“I might have to,” Steve admitted. “Don’t have that kind of time, but might have to make it. Walter cooked breakfast for everyone and the entire lot said they’d quit if that happened again tonight.”
Chris slapped Steve’s shoulder as the train whistle sounded. “Maybe there’re some other newcomers getting off the train in need of work. Won’t hurt to check.”
The odds were slim, but men working their way west and looking to earn a few dollars had been known to get off the train now and again. For the time it would take, it sure as heck was a better choice than the hundred-mile ride to Dodge City, which could prove just as futile. This time of year, most everyone who wanted to be working had a job.
Steve followed the cousins out of the saloon and up the boardwalk to the train station, which was already packed with people. Of course Josiah Melbourne was in the middle of the crowd, up on a platform that had been decorated with ribbons for the occasion and acting like his pompous self. This entire bride idea had been his. Short and pudgy, he probably knew this might be his only hope of ever acquiring a wife.
As far as Steve was concerned, the mayor could have every bride the town had ordered. He’d seen what this county did to women, and men. There hadn’t been a town here fifteen years ago when his family had left Georgia shortly after the war. He hadn’t known what his father had promised his mother, but he remembered all the things he’d dreamed about while walking alongside the wagon for months on end. A house far bigger than the one that had been burned down by Union soldiers, a barn full of horses, rivers full of fish to catch and woods full of deer to hunt—things ten-year-old boys dream about.
Their arrival to what everyone now knew as the Circle P Ranch, his ranch, hadn’t been what any of them had expected.
Used to growing cotton and tobacco in the fertile soil of Georgia, his father had taken one look at the treeless, dried-up ground and concluded whatever might grow here would never feed a family. But, it would feed critters, so he’d invested the last bits of money they’d had in cattle. His father’s investment had paid off—selling cattle to the army posts and later the railroad as tracks were laid west proved lucrative—but it hadn’t happened fast enough for his mother.
She hadn’t lasted two years out here. Losing an infant son to pneumonia the first winter and a three-year-old daughter to rattlesnake bite the next summer had taken its toll on her. The morning after they’d buried his sister, his mother was gone. His father had found her less than twenty miles away, but it had been too late. A band of Kansa Indians had gotten to her first.
His mother was buried next to his sister and baby brother, and to his father, who after losing his wife had slowly started to die, blaming her death on himself. He’d watched his father drink himself to death for five years. The day his father died, Steve had determined he’d never get married. He’d been seventeen, and in the past eight years he’d never once questioned that vow.
Partly because he hadn’t had time to. He’d been too busy building the Circle P Ranch to one of the largest in the state. He now had a house bigger than the one he’d been born in down in Georgia, a barn full of horses, and more cattle than he could count in a day. What he didn’t have was a cook for the men who worked for him. The men who made it possible for him to be the rancher he was today. The men who counted on him for three squares a day.
Ignoring how the mayor was welcoming the crowd and congratulating everyone on the “betterment of the community,” Steve worked his way to the front of the crowd, where he could watch the passengers depart and hopefully snag a man who knew the difference between salt and sugar to work for him for a few months.
The door of the passenger car had yet to open, and the windows were too full of soot to see through, but he kept his eyes peeled for a suitable candidate to step off the short metal stairs.
“You here to get wife, no?”
Without turning his head, Steve glanced to his right and then upwards. He was close to six feet tall, but Brett Blackwell, the local blacksmith and owner of the feed store, towered over him. With arms thicker than most men’s thighs and an equally thick Swedish accent with touches of the Midwest in it, the blacksmith looked down at him.
“You, Steve Putnam, you here for wife?”
“No,” Steve answered. “I’m here for a cook.”
“Ya, me, too,” Brett answered. “My ma was da best cook. She cooked for all da men.” The man inhaled through his nose so loudly it drowned out the mayor’s speech. “I still smell her bread. So good. I want a wife like that. Good cook.”
“Good luck with that, Brett,” Steve said. “I hope you find one. I’m not here for a wife. Just a cook. Rex got hurt. I need someone to fill in for him. I’m hoping they’re on this train.”
“Ya. Dr. Graham told me. Poor little man, Rex.” For a man who could throw hundred-pound feed sacks in a wagon one in each hand, the blacksmith was a sensitive man. “You tell Brett what I can do.”
“Haul a cook out to my place,” Steve muttered while taking note of how Brett had nodded toward Nelson Graham standing on his other side. Frowning, Steve gave his head a quick, clearing shake. He hadn’t expected the doctor to be looking for a wife, either. Had every man in town gone loco? If they all thought a woman was going to make their lives easier, they needed a new line of thinking. While peering around Brett, Steve caught sight of the man standing next to the doctor and clamped his jaw tight.
“Excuse me, Brett,” Steve said, while squeezing past the man. After nodding to Dr. Graham, Steve planted himself next to the cowboy who should be rounding up spring calves. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The look in Jess Rader’s eyes said he would have run but was squeezed in too tight to move. “I told you this morning I was coming to town, Boss.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I didn’t?”
“No.”
“Well, I meant to.” Jess glanced left then right, and then must have concluded he still didn’t have an escape route. “I ponied up five bucks, Boss. I gotta be here for one of the gals to pick me or I lose my money.”
“You lose your money either way,” Steve pointed out. “And if you want one of those gals to pick you, you should have taken a bath.”
“It ain’t the first of the month yet,” Jess said. “Besides, with Rex hurt, there’s no use taking a bath. Ain’t no one to wash my clothes while I’m washing my skin.”
Steve huffed out a breath. Besides being able to cook, his new hired hand would need to know how to wash clothes.
“What are you doing here?” Jess asked. “I thought you didn’t like this idea of brides.”
“I don’t,” Steve said. “I’m here to hire a cook.”
“Good,” Jess said. “Did you know Walter put salt instead of sugar in the flapjacks this morning? They were awful.”
“Yes, I know. I tasted one.” And had tasted the eggs Walter had sprinkled with sugar. The bacon had been burned black, and the coffee had been too full of grounds to swallow.
“Aw, what? Really?” Jess stomped a foot. “If that don’t beat all.”
Steve glanced around as moans and groans filled the air from the men standing around him. “What?” he asked Jess.
“Didn’t you just hear that?”
“What?” Steve repeated.
“Someone just said there are only five. Five women instead of twelve.” Jess pointed up and down the men standing on either side of them. “Look at all these fellers; that ain’t good odds.”
Steve glanced up and down the row. Besides the blacksmith, the doctor, Jess and the saloon-owning cousins, the banker, the gunsmith, a couple of farmers, a couple of ranchers, as well as the hotel owner and few others he didn’t know were lined up next to the platform.
“All these men paid up front?” he asked Jess.
“You had to in order to be in the group the gals have to choose from.”
Lester Higgums started pounding on his drum, a signal that the train door would soon open, and suddenly Steve didn’t want to be in the front row. He didn’t want it assumed in any way he was here for one of the girls to pick from. In fact, the idea of finding a cook amongst all this hullabaloo was as far-fetched as the whole bride project.
Other instruments joined Lester’s drums; an entire band was playing. The pomp and circumstance the town was putting on for this was laughable. Or disgusting. Either way, he wasn’t impressed, and shouldered his way through the crowd.
Shouts and cheers said the conductor must be opening the door, and without a backwards glance, he headed toward the Wet Your Whistle to collect his horse.
Once mounted, he muttered a curse at how the road heading west out of town was blocked by wagons and buggies. He urged his horse eastward in order to cross the tracks behind the train and then he’d head north, back to his ranch, empty-handed.
Chapter Two (#ulink_da828de5-8843-5add-a924-19d0d8e53db6)
Mary had never been so frazzled. Her hair had never been so dirty or her clothes so dust-covered. And she’d never been so mad at her sister in her life. They were twins. They were supposed to think alike. They were supposed to have gotten off this stupid train miles ago. Days ago.
“We have to go,” Mary hissed. “Now. It’s our last chance.”
“I want a bath,” Maggie said. “I want a decent meal. The girls say that the town is supposed to have hotel rooms for us and everything.”
“We’re not staying in this dusty cow town,” Mary insisted yet again.
“Well I want to enjoy it while I can,” Maggie spouted back. “Nothing is wrong with a little pampering.”
“Pampering!” For being twins there were times they were as different as night and day. “We need to find jobs and I need to find a place to make more tonic.”
Maggie raised her chin as if she was some high and mighty princess. “The tonic needs another week before it’s ready to bottle. What does it matter whether we are comfortable at the hotel?”
“It matters. We’ve got to show them right from the start we aren’t going to marry anyone and they can’t force us.” Mary had to draw a breath to calm her ire. “You know how it is...how it’s always been with our business. We need to be ready to leave town if necessary. That’s why you need to come with me. We have to stay together.”
“We won’t make it. That conductor has eyes like an eagle. Besides, I heard the sheriff talk to him in Bridgeport. They won’t give us a permit to sell it here anymore than they would in Ohio.”
“Then we will just have to be more careful. Anyone who tries the tonic is happy enough with the results. It will only be for a few weeks. By the time the authorities find anything out, we will be gone.”
“Where will we go after this town?”
“I don’t know,” Mary admitted. “Maybe Denver. Somewhere big enough to make a good profit. Somewhere far enough west that selling permits aren’t a problem.”
“We can talk about it at the hotel,” Maggie said before she crossed her arms and spun around.
Mary may have been angry before, now she was furious. Her entire being shook. Ever since they’d boarded the train Maggie had been too busy making friends to care about anything else. Well, maybe it was time for her to discover friends weren’t the same as sisters. It would be a rude awakening for her, but if that was what it took, so be it.
As the wheels screeched to a halt and the others, including Maggie, rushed to stare out the windows, where the music played and people shouted, Mary slid into the small latrine. Her anger continued to fester. If Maggie had kept quiet, they could have snuck out without catching the conductor’s attention more than once.
Cracking the latrine door open, Mary peered out, waiting for the chance she wouldn’t let slip by.
As a portly man stepped aboard, commanding everyone’s attention, Mary slipped out of the latrine and out the door before anyone noticed. Taking a deep breath, which caught in her throat because the air was full of smoke from the puffing smoke stack, she grabbed the railing and hoisted herself over the edge and then down the ground. Everyone else was on the other side of the train, and that was just fine with her. She traveled past another car holding animals of some sorts, and then to the one carrying their baggage. It wasn’t as if they’d brought a lot with them from Ohio—the sheriff had limited them to a bag and trunk each.
“Pampering,” she muttered. “Fairy dust.” Mary slid the door open and easily spotted her and Maggie’s things. The ruckus on the other side of the train made it so she didn’t need to be too quiet, therefore she wasn’t. “She’s been pampered most of her life, that’s what the problem is,” Mary muttered as she climbed into the car. Tossing aside various bags and bundles, she collected her tapestry bag and tossed it out the open doorway and then pushed aside other trunks until she could grasp both of the handles on the sides of hers.
They had packed carefully back in Ohio, choosing what they would bring, and she regretted that now. Her tapestry bag only held an additional change of clothing and a few other basic necessities. Everything else was in Maggie’s trunk—the one she’d leave behind after she slipped a note inside it for her sister. Her trunk held what she needed to make some money. Fast money that would get her out of town. It held several full bottles, but more important, a brewing batch of McCary’s Finest Recipe Tonic. All she required now was a place it could brew for a bit longer and then she could bottle it up.
The trunk was heavy, and the only way to maneuver it to the opening of the rail car was to walk backwards, pulling it across the rough floor. As she gave the trunk a solid tug with each step, Mary’s irritation at Maggie continued. Talking about finding a job had been useless. Maggie hadn’t worked a day in her life. She’d always had something more important to do than washing or cooking or—
Her step had found nothing but air.
Startled, she let go of the trunk handle and grabbed for it again, but it was too late.
