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He listened for a while, his arms folded behind his head, wondering exactly where the animal was. Then another cry answered, and the first one, now longer and more drawn out, grew more intense.
“Lee?” Jenna whispered beside him. “What is that sound?”
“Wolf,” he answered. “Not close, just noisy.”
“There are two of them,” she said after a moment. “They sound so forlorn.”
“Hungry, probably. And lonely.”
She was silent, but he could sense her listening in the dark. He hadn’t thought about being lonely since the War, but the howling from the hills sure as hell crawled under his skin.
“Are they going to find each other?” she asked.
The question sliced into his brain clean as a razor. “Yeah, they will. Probably going to mate.”
He heard her breath suck in. She must be pretty ladified if the word mate brought that reaction. Made him wonder even more about her.
“You said your mother was ‘proper,’” he ventured. “How come she let you join an emigrant train?”
“She didn’t have a choice, really. I mean I didn’t have a choice. Mama had to let me marry Mathias and join the train.”
“How come she let you marry a horse thief in the first place?” He held his breath, expecting an explosion of anger. No woman wanted to hear her husband called a horse thief.
She stayed quiet for a good two minutes while he waited.
“Again, Mama felt she had no choice.”
“Your father still alive?”
“No. He was killed in the War. At Antietam.”
“Too bad. It’s hard on a woman alone. She never remarried?”
“Mr. Carver, you ask far too many questions.”
“Maybe. Some might say I don’t ask nearly enough.”
“Well,” she huffed, “I would not be one of them. I thought Southern people, refined people from the state of Virginia, were too polite to probe into others’ affairs.”
“We are, usually. No law says we can’t be curious, though. And we’re out here in the West, Mrs. Borland. Not in Virginia. We’re in Yankee country, and Yankees, I’ve observed, are often ill-mannered.”
“That is insulting!” Her voice held more than a bit of frost. “Surely you, a supposedly genteel Southerner, recognize bad manners?”
Lee exhaled a long sigh. “I’m less Johnny Reb now than I was a few years back. Maybe now I’m more like your bluecoats. Your husband, for instance.”
“You are nothing like my husband,” she countered, punching out the words. “Nothing at all.”
He laughed quietly. “I’ll take that as a compliment, if you don’t mind. I didn’t like your husband.”
“I do mind,” she retorted. “You didn’t even know my husband.”
Lee chose his next words with care. “I knew him enough to see some things.”
“What things?” Her tone went from frosty to cold, stinging sleet in sixty seconds.
“For one, he had no business bringing his family on a wagon train with as little preparation as he’d made.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice rose. “Mathias prepared for this trip.”
“Then I’d have to say he didn’t have much experience. And for another thing, looks to me like you’re gonna run out of food before you get halfway to Oregon. Your man didn’t plan far enough ahead.”
Her voice turned to steel. “I’ll thank you to shut your mouth, Mr. Carver.”
Again he laughed. “You know, whenever you’re mad, it’s ‘Mr. Carver.’ And when you’re learning something, or scared, it’s ‘Lee.’”
“I cannot make up my mind about you, Mr. Carver.” She bit his name out in hard, clearly enunciated syllables.
“You might want to hurry that up a little, Mrs. Borland. We’re going to be in each other’s back pockets for another two months.”
That seemed to shut her up. He closed his eyes, listening to her uneven breathing. He knew she wasn’t asleep because she kept twitching under her quilt.
The wolves were crooning loud and long by now. Lee let himself listen and thought about Jenna, about what she’d sound like if... Ah, hell. That wasn’t any way to get to sleep.
But he couldn’t help thinking about it. He smiled up at the shadowy underside of the wagon and closed his eyes.
* * *
Odious man. He was laughing at her, and if there was one thing Jenna hated it was being laughed at. Who did he think he was, anyway? She would never last another two months in the company of this man with his outspoken ways and his subtle goading.
The South had lost the War, hadn’t it? Mathias always said the Confederate soldiers should have slunk back to their ruined plantations and done some honest work. At the moment she half agreed with him.
On the other hand, some of the things Mathias said, which he’d expressed often and crudely, were things she could not agree with. Now that he was gone, she could try to erase some of the hateful poison he’d spewed into the minds of his daughters. It hadn’t all been about her; mostly it was about how worthless other people were. How they owed him something. How he was better than they were.
“Jenna.”
“Oh, what is it?” she said sharply. She clamped her jaw shut. At least he hadn’t called her “Mrs. Borland.”
“I owe you an apology. I had no right to question you in that manner.”
“Oh.” Instantly her annoyance began to fade, but she couldn’t resist one last jab. “Tit for tat, Mr. Carver. The next time we converse it will be my turn to pry.”
He chuckled. “I will look forward to it, Jenna. Good night.”
She debated making a retort until she heard him roll over on his pallet. “Good night,” she said at last. After a long pause, she added, “Lee.”
His soft laugh made her grit her teeth. Why, why was it that he got under her skin? Tomorrow, when he least expected it, she would find some way to make him squirm. She could hardly wait.
Chapter Nine (#u4a7374b9-9d6e-53f3-a3a5-8cb6860618be)
Ruthie gazed up at Lee with round blue eyes. “Mister, I heard funny noises last night.”
Lee snapped his pocketknife closed. “Noises like what?”
“Like something crying.”
“Do you know what a wolf is?”
The girl shook her head. “Tell me ’bout a woof.”
“A wolf is like a dog, honey. In fact, a long, long time ago, dogs were wolves.”
“What happened to them?”
“I guess they grew up. Some of them got to be dogs, and others stayed wild.”
“I want one,” Ruthie announced. “A big one.”
Lee swallowed a smile. “Would you like a new doll instead?” From his shirt pocket he produced the small figure he’d been carving.
Her eyes grew larger. “A dolly? For me?” She reached out her small hand and touched it with one finger. “Is it a boy doll or a girl doll?”
“A girl doll, I think. See, she has on a dress.” From the corner of his eye he saw Jenna watching them, her hands propped at her waist. But her eyes looked soft and kind of shiny.
Ruthie flung her arms around his neck and smacked a kiss onto his stubbly cheek. “Gosh, mister, you’re all scratchy.”
“Yeah. Guess I’d better shave, huh?”
“Oh, goody. Can I watch?”
Over the girl’s blond curls he saw Jenna shake her head.
“Maybe another time,” he said. “What will you name your doll?”
“I’m gonna call her Lee.”
“What? Lee is a boy’s name. My name is Lee.”
“You’re not a boy, mister. You’re a man.”
At Jenna’s burst of laughter he felt a rush of relief. From the moment she rolled out of bed at dawn, she had been glowering at him, all through their breakfast of cornmeal mush, right up to the moment Ruthie had interrupted his wood carving. Didn’t take a genius to see Jenna had something stuck in her craw.
He rose, pressed “Lee” into Ruthie’s hands and strode off to the creek to shave. As he scraped away at his chin he thought about Tess and Mary Grace and what he had planned for them this morning.
And Jenna. That is, if he could he persuade her to do it.
* * *
“Not on your life,” Jenna announced an hour later. “No. No. No. Never.”
“Listen,” he said, his voice oozing patience. “The girls will learn, and that will make your presence out here on the plains a good deal safer.”
“I understand that,” she said. “But you don’t need extra hands for firearms we don’t have. We have only your three weapons.”
He shook his head. She knew what he was thinking, that Mathias had not taken proper steps to protect his family. In that, perhaps, the Virginian was correct.
She watched him walk Tess and Mary Grace off some fifty yards away from the wagons, nail a scrap of white cloth to a tree stump for a target and direct the girls’ attention to his revolver.
With a sniff, Jenna turned back to the fire pit where the kettle of beans sat soaking.
A single gunshot cracked into the quiet, and she looked across the plain to see Tess standing with Lee’s Colt gripped in both long-fingered hands. Lee was bending to show her how to reload.
He was right about their need to protect themselves. It was foolish to depend solely on him. What if he fell ill, or was injured? Yesterday he’d risked his life getting their wagon across the Platte River. What if he had lost his footing and drowned?
Another shot sounded. This time it was Mary Grace, whose two-handed grip wobbled with the revolver’s weight. She had managed to nick the target, and Jenna felt a surge of admiration for the eleven-year-old’s accomplishment. And, she thought grudgingly, for Lee’s skill at instruction.
The rifle lesson was next, she gathered from the difference in the sound. She tried not to listen. In an hour, the target practice session drew to a close, and Jenna grew edgy. Lee had insisted on showing her how to yoke up the oxen and touch that precious horse of his. She prayed he would draw the line at handling firearms.
Probably not. Once this man made up his mind about something, he was stubborn about it. Sam said Lee had “sand.” Right now, she wished he had a good deal less of it.
“Ruthie,” she called into the wagon. “Let’s walk down to the stream and take a bath, shall we?”
“Don’t want a bath, Jenna.”
“Why not?”
“I want to do it with Mister Lee.”
Jenna stuffed down a chortle of laughter. “You can’t do that, honey. Boys and girls don’t bathe together.”
Ruthie pushed out her lower lip. “He’s not a boy, Jenna. He’s a man.”
Oh, my. How could she explain the difference? Before she could come up with anything remotely proper, Tess and Mary Grace flitted back into camp.
“Did you see us, Jenna?” Mary Grace chirped. “I hit the target twice. Tess didn’t even come close.”
“Show-off,” Tess muttered. “Who wants to hit a dumb old tree stump?”
“I do!” Mary Grace challenged. “Lee says it’s important.”
“And it is,” his low voice announced behind her. “Now, Jenna...”
She spun to face him. “No.”
His dark eyebrows rose. “No what? I haven’t asked you anything yet.”
“Whatever it is, the answer is no.”
He looked at her steadily with crinkles growing in the corners of his gray eyes. “I was going to say that I’m going to take a bath before supper. All right with you?”
