Montana Bride (14 page)

“What’s going on? What have I missed?”

Hetty turned and felt her heart career in her chest at the sight of Karl’s rumpled brown hair and warm brown eyes. He smiled at her, and she felt herself smiling back.

Before Hetty could register her feelings, the front door burst open. A huge man with a hooked nose, small black eyes, and black hair sprouting from beneath a wool cap, stood in the doorway. “Better come quick, Boss. Trouble in the bunkhouse.”

Karl’s heart was pounding by the time he arrived at the bunkhouse, which was situated at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains on the western side of the valley. It was separated from the house by a wide, snow-covered meadow. The loggers had been hired by Dennis in Butte while Karl stayed behind in the valley to work on finishing up the house, barn, and bunkhouse. So he had no idea what to expect.

He found two men wrestling on the floor of the bunkhouse while the rest of the lumberjacks stood watching. Karl didn’t hear the expected cheering for the man of their choice to win. It took only a moment to determine that Dennis was one of the two men in the fight, and that he was mercilessly beating the man beneath him.

That was why the logger had come running. None of them had felt he could interfere with the man who’d hired him.

Karl shoved his way through the crowd, put a hand on Dennis’s shoulder, and had it knocked off with such power that it hit one of the men behind him in the face. Karl turned to apologize and was met with a fist in the nose that made him see stars. He tasted blood and realized his pummeled nose was bleeding.

The fellow next to the one who’d hit Karl muttered, “That’s the boss,” causing the man who’d hit Karl to make a disgusted face and say, “Well, I’ll be a goat! There goes my job.”

Karl didn’t have time to spare for the logger’s remorse. He turned back to Dennis, who was still whaling on the man he straddled, who was no longer capable of resisting. Karl didn’t make the mistake of touching Dennis again, just got close enough to his ear to say, “That’s enough, Dennis. Your man’s down.”

As though Karl’s soft-spoken voice broke a spell, Dennis’s bloodied knuckles fell to his thighs. He gave a huffing sigh and clambered to his feet, stepping across the downed logger.

Karl turned to the nearest man and said, “Put that fellow on his bunk. I’ll send Bao out to tend him.” Then he turned to Dennis and said, “Come with me.”

As Dennis left the bunkhouse with Karl, he stared down the men around him, who shuffled off to find something to do.

They were outside before Karl spoke again. “What was that all about?”

“I told him to get out of my way, and he didn’t,” Dennis replied.

“So you hit him?”

“Of course.”

“You couldn’t have asked a second time?” Karl said. “Maybe he didn’t hear you.”

“Then he doesn’t belong on a logging gang,” Dennis replied. “The boss’s word is law. When you’re not on the mountain, I’ll be in charge. When I say ‘Jump,’ those men need to answer ‘How high?’ or they’re no good to me.”

Karl planned to be on the mountain himself whenever his loggers were working, which meant there would never be a need for Dennis to take his place. “I’m the one they’ll need to answer to, Dennis,” he said quietly.

Dennis looked startled. “Are you planning to cut wood?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Dennis laughed. “You don’t have the shoulders for it.”

Karl flushed. He wasn’t particularly muscular, but he’d carried plenty of heavy packs across the Territory during his years of study. He was certainly fit enough to use an ax, though he would likely be sore and tired at the end of the day.

“Best leave the work on the mountain to me,” Dennis said.

“This is my operation,” Karl replied. “I’ll handle it.”

“You’ve got enough on your plate finding a site for that mill,” Dennis said. “I can supervise the cutting.”

And if he did, Karl was sure Dennis would tell Jonas he had. Which meant Karl’s efforts to prove himself to his brother would come to naught. Karl had never been in charge of a dozen men before, certainly not men the likes of those he’d seen in the bunkhouse. He would never have considered using his fists to establish dominance over them, but Dennis seemed to think there was no other way.

Karl hoped he was wrong, because he planned to do things a different way. His own way. All he said was, “I appreciate the offer to help, Dennis, but I’m going to give it a go on my own.”

Dennis snickered, making it clear what he thought of Karl’s chances of succeeding. “Sure, Karl. Whatever you say.”

Karl had forgotten about his bloody nose, which he’d swiped once or twice with the tip of his shirtsleeve where it hung out beneath his coat, so when he opened the door to the cabin he was startled by Hetty’s, “Oh, no! What happened, Karl?”

Karl reached toward his tender nose and said, “It’s nothing.”

“Your nose is bleeding!” Hetty retorted. “Come with me.”

She grabbed his hand as though he were a child and led him toward the kitchen table. Dennis followed along, winking at Karl and grinning as Hetty pulled off his coat and pushed her husband into a kitchen chair.

“Dennis’s hands need attention,” Karl said as he set his wool cap on the table.

“Bao can take care of Dennis,” she replied, arranging Karl’s coat on the back of his chair, never even glancing in Dennis’s direction. Karl found it disconcerting to have her staring at his nose from four inches away. It was hard to focus with his one good eye.

“Bao needs to take a look at one of the loggers,” he countered. “Bao!” he called.

Bao appeared in the doorway to the children’s bedroom and said, “You call, Boss?”

“There’s a man needs doctoring in the bunkhouse.”

“On my way, Boss.” Bao retrieved his coat and box of medicines from the children’s bedroom and left the cabin.

Meanwhile, Hetty pointed at Dennis, who was hovering by Karl’s chair. “You sit, too.”

Dennis set his coat on the chair back and sat down across from Karl, still grinning.

Hetty hustled around the kitchen, gathering hot water and dishcloths and scolding, “I just got through treating frostbite on your hands and feet, you’ve got an eye that’s almost swollen closed, and now you’ve gotten yourself a bloody nose. You need to take better care of yourself, Karl.”

“My feelings exactly,” Dennis said.

She plopped a ceramic bowl of cold water in front of Dennis, forcing him to lean back to avoid getting splashed, and ordered, “Put your hands in there.”

Dennis swore as the broken skin on his bruised knuckles sank into the icy water.

Hetty snapped, “Don’t be a baby.”

Karl smiled smugly. “Yeah, Dennis. Don’t be a baby.” Then he yelped as Hetty plopped a cold washcloth on his nose and snapped, “Tilt your head back.”

“Hey! Be careful.” He leaned away from her, holding the cloth more gently in place.

Her fists landed on her hips. “Why on earth did you get into a fight, Karl?”

“I didn’t!” he protested. “Dennis swatted at me and I—”

She turned on Dennis, her mouth agape. “Dennis! How could you!”

“Karl snuck up on me, and I struck out to protect myself,” Dennis retorted. “Besides, I didn’t hit him in the nose. One of the loggers did that.”

“Are your loggers so undisciplined that you need to use your fists to control them?” she demanded of both men.

“Better to let them know who the big dog is from the start,” Dennis replied, pointing at his chest with a thumb.

“I thought Karl was the big dog,” she said pointedly.

Dennis smirked. “Karl’s a pussycat.”

Karl felt the flush of humiliation stain his cheeks. It was bad enough to have Dennis make that sort of comment to him. It was a thousand times worse to have him say something so demeaning in front of his brand-new wife.

He’d thought that was the worst of it. But unlike on the trail, where Hetty had jumped to his defense, her lips pressed flat and she said nothing. He searched her face, wondering what she was thinking. But she kept her gaze focused on a sticking plaster she was manipulating in her hands.

He kept his one good eye focused on her face as she took the damp cloth away and gently dabbed at his bloodied nose with a dry cloth. Then she carefully placed the sticking plaster across the broken skin on the bridge and said, “Keep your head back until your nose stops dripping blood.”

He wanted to say,
I’m as good a man as any other.
But Hetty would either believe the best of him, or she wouldn’t. He wondered why she hadn’t jumped to his defense this time. Why had she left that denigrating description of him as a
pussycat
unanswered? Unless she believed it.

Bao appeared at the door and said, “Need you, Boss.”

Karl rose. “Be right there.”

“Your nose is still bleeding,” Hetty pointed out.

Karl swiped at his nose with his shirtsleeve and saw a red smear on the plaid wool. “It’s fine.” He grabbed his coat and cap and headed out the door without looking back.

Grace had vowed more than once that she was going to change her habit of eavesdropping. It just wasn’t nice. But when the front door opened with a slam and a gust of frigid wind blew through, she came to the bedroom door—just to find out what was going on—and heard aggravated voices. Annoyed voices. Anxious voices.

She’d stayed hidden and listened, something she’d learned in the saloon growing up—where knowing which way the wind was blowing was literally a matter of life and death—until she could determine whether the situation required action on her part.

Hetty was chastising both Karl and Dennis. The two men had apparently been fighting again, only this time not with each other. It seemed Karl had gotten the worst of it. Again.

Grace’s heart jumped to her throat when Karl abruptly left the house to attend to more trouble in the bunkhouse. It was like being hit in the face with a shovel to realize that her survival, and that of her brother, hinged upon Karl’s survival. Hetty cared for them, but Hetty had nothing of her own. Having a home with a breadwinner like Karl was the main reason Grace had concocted the entire mail-order-bride scheme.

Grace had proffered a very high price to get herself and her brother to this log home in the Bitterroot Valley. She’d had a sick feeling in her stomach ever since she’d blurted to Hetty that she’d
paid
Mrs. Templeton to bring them along. Granted, her slip of the tongue had come when she’d been terrified that all was lost. But she’d been dreading the moment when Griffin recalled her words and asked,
Where did you get the kind of money it would take for the witch to bring us along?

Because Grace had no answer that would keep her brother from figuring out how she’d gotten the cash to pay Mrs. Templeton. She couldn’t bear for him to know what she’d done. He wouldn’t understand. He’d despise her if he knew the truth, as he’d despised their mother.

But she’d only had one thing to sell. So she’d sold it.

Grace shuddered. The experience had been horrible. Degrading. Painful. She’d endured it because she’d known she was trading a few moments of her life in exchange for a better life forever after for herself and her brother.

It hadn’t been easy talking herself into doing it. Grace had sworn, from the time she was old enough to know what her mother did for a living, that she would
never, ever
allow herself to become any man’s plaything. In the end, she’d had no choice. But she would
never, ever
do it again.

That was easy to say. But that proud, defiant resolution depended on her and Griffin having a stable home in which to grow up, which included food on the table and a roof over their heads. It was appalling to realize that their future depended on the fortunes of a man who’d been beaten up twice in as many days and whose best friend had just described him as a
pussycat.

“Hey! What the hell’s going on out there?” Griffin demanded, sitting up in bed.

“Shush!” Grace jumped back inside and eased the bedroom door closed. She took one look at her brother and said, “For heaven’s sake, wipe your nose!”

He swiped his long john sleeve across his runny nose and said, “Were Karl and Dennis fighting again?”

“You could use a hanky, you know.”

“Don’t have one.”

“It’s right there on the bedside table,” Grace said.

“Oh.” He started to pick it up and hissed as his blistered fingertips touched the white cloth. “I’ll stick with my sleeve.” He turned back to her and said, “I saw you listening, Grace. What did you find out?”

Grace shook her head. For a nine-year-old, her brother didn’t miss much. “It was some kind of squabble in the bunkhouse. Karl got hurt.”

“Again?” Griffin shook his head in disgust. “Karl wasn’t the only guy looking for a mail-order bride that you wrote to, Grace. Why did you pick such a namby-pamby for a father?”

“Karl’s not afraid to fight,” Grace retorted.

“Maybe not. But he always comes out on the short end of the stick. One of these days, he’s going to get his head handed to him. Why him, Grace?”

“His letters offered the most promise for a better life.”

“Based on what?”

“For one thing, he didn’t seem to care about looks.” Grace was particularly sensitive on the subject because, with her garish red curls, impossible faceful of freckles, and baby fat that had stuck long past a time when it should have gone away, she knew what it felt like to be judged for her looks and found wanting. “Karl was seeking other, more important qualities in a bride, like responsibility and kindness. And he seemed to value education and intelligence.”

Griffin snickered. “And yet, he got fooled by a thirteen-year-old girl.”

Grace flushed. She hadn’t told Griffin what she’d written in those letters. She thought maybe her notes had appealed to Karl because she’d poured out all her grown-up hopes and dreams for the future. Some of those plans—the ones that featured a loving husband and several children—would probably never come true now because of what she’d been forced to do to buy their passage to this new and better life.

But Karl had seemed willing to foster those dreams. Moreover, he’d shared several dreams of his own. Grace hadn’t yet told Hetty about the hopes and fears Karl had put down on paper, but she’d kept all the letters, so perhaps that was something she ought to do.

She’d also kept copies of her own letters to Karl, where she’d written about her dreams of one day marrying a good man.

What good man would want her now?

Besides, her plans had changed. She would
never, ever
have to face a man across a marriage bed and explain why she wasn’t a virgin, because she was
never, ever
going to let a man get that close to her again.

“I didn’t want to join some make-believe family in the first place,” Griffin muttered.

“You can’t really complain. We ended up in a better home, with better parents, than we had any right to hope,” Grace replied.

Griffin made a face that conceded her point, but said, “We were damned lucky we didn’t end up spending the rest of our lives with that witch as our mother.”

“I admit I didn’t think that situation completely through. But you couldn’t ask for a better mother than Hetty.”

Griffin made another face. “She’s pretty bossy.”

“Someone needs to keep you in line,” Grace said, sitting down on the bed beside her brother. “Speaking of which, you’re going to have to try harder, Griffin.”

“To do what?”

“To behave yourself.” She saw Griffin was going to protest. “I should have done something about your behavior myself a long time ago. You’ve been running wild ever since Mom died two years ago.”

Griffin swiped at his runny nose with his sleeve again. “You’re not the boss of me.”

“I know that. But these pranks have to stop.”

Griffin dropped his chin to his chest and used his elbows to move around the muslin sheets, trying to pull them up around his waist. “You must hate me.”

Grace scooted over and put her arms around Griffin, refusing to let go when he tried to wrestle out of her embrace. “I love you, you silly goose! Even when you’re acting like an ass.”

Griffin smirked at her. “All I have to do is crow like a rooster and grunt like a pig and you’ll have a whole farmful of animals in your arms.
Cock-a-doodle-doo! Oink! Oink! Oink!
”

Grace wrinkled her nose and let him go. “You certainly smell like a barnyard full of animals.”

Griffin laughed. “So do you.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Hetty—I mean Mom—starts in on cleaning us up as soon as she gets the house the way she wants it.”

The grin disappeared from Griffin’s face. “Just let her try!”

“You’ll do as you’re told,” Grace said, ruffling her brother’s lanky black hair. “Besides, a bath wouldn’t hurt you.”

Griffin held up his blistered hands and shot a look at his wounded feet. “Don’t think I’m going to be getting into a tub anytime soon.”

Grace felt her insides twist as she surveyed her brother’s frostbitten extremities. Her gaze lingered on his little toe, which had turned nearly black. “I hope you don’t lose your toe.”

He shook his head in disgust. “I’m damned lucky I didn’t freeze to death. I’m surprised Karl risked his life looking for me.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

Griffin shot her a piercing look. “When did
anybody
ever do
anything
for us that they weren’t paid to do?”

Grace held her breath, terrified that in the next instant Griffin was going to ask her where she’d gotten the money to pay Lucille Templeton. She quickly said, “I could tell from Karl’s letters that he was a kind man. That’s partly why I chose him. Apparently he intends to be a responsible stepfather, which includes looking for some crazy kid who trekked off in a blizzard to hunt down a horse that he let go in the first place.”

Griffin flushed. “Fine. So Karl’s kind. And responsible. He’s also lily-livered.”

“He is not!” Grace shot back. “No coward would have followed you into a blizzard, risking his life—”

“Only an idiot would do something that stupid,” Griffin interrupted. “Admit it, Grace. The father you chose doesn’t have a lot of common sense.”

“Maybe not,” she conceded. “But you can’t deny he’s intelligent.”

“He’s
book
smart,” Griffin agreed. “What good is that going to do him out here in the middle of nowhere? We need a father who can use his head and not take risks that are going to get him killed. We need him alive, not dead.”

Because Grace had come to the very same conclusion herself not five minutes before, she didn’t argue. She simply said, “It’s too late to do anything about it now.”

Griffin met her gaze and said, “I suppose we better watch out for him.”

“How are we going to do that? We’ll probably both end up working around the house while he’s up on the mountain.”

Griffin’s jaw firmed. “Guess I’m gonna have to get myself up on that mountain with him.”

“Hetty will never let you go.”

“Then you better convince her otherwise,” Griffin replied.

“It’s too dangerous, Griffin.”

“No more dangerous than half the things I was into in Cheyenne. Besides,” he said with a wry smile, “you can count on Karl to keep a close eye on me.”

Grace twisted the long curl at the end of one of her childish braids around her forefinger and said, “True.” She furrowed her brow in thought. “I just don’t see how I’m going to convince Hetty to let you go.”

Griffin lay back down, using his elbows to pull the covers up around him. “You’ll think of something, Grace. You always do.”