The Gunman's Bride (19 page)

“A holdup!” someone screamed from the front of the car. “It’s a holdup! We’re being robbed!”

“Robbed!” Cries of dismay flooded the car as the passengers scrambled to the windows. The train began to squeal to a halt, and great clouds of steam billowed from beneath the engine.

As it lurched to a sudden stop, the passengers in the crowded car were tossed back and forth, jerked and shaken like rag dolls.

“A holdup! Look—gunmen!” Rosie elbowed her father aside and stuck her head out the window. Sure enough, three men on horses had surrounded the engine. The engineer was climbing down from his station, and the fireman had leaped from the box. Expecting strangers with bandanna-covered faces and armloads of weaponry, Rosie was dismayed to see men she recognized instantly.

“Bob Ford!” she gasped. “And Snort and Fancy! Oh, no—not
this
train, Bart! Not
this
train!”

But her hopes died as the door to her car banged open and Bart Kingsley climbed aboard, his six-shooter drawn. Striding past the cowering passengers, he doffed his hat.

“Morning, folks,” he said, handling the gun with an absent air. “Sorry to trouble you. Hey, there, Rosie-girl.”

“Bart!” Wide-eyed she watched him walk toward her, his towering form a startling contrast with the smaller men who hovered protectively around their wives and children. “Bart, don’t do this!”

“Don’t do what?” He stopped, a puzzled expression
on his face. “We’ve come to save you, darlin’. Don’t you want to be rescued?”

“Save me?” She glanced at her father, who was trembling like an aspen leaf in autumn, his face florid. “From what?”

“You don’t mean you went willingly with your pappy, do you?” he asked as he took off his hat in bewilderment.

“Well I…I…”

“Of course she came with me willingly,” Dr. Vermillion sputtered. “And who are you?”

“Don’t you know me, doc? I used to work for you out at your country house. I’m Bart Kingsley. I’m Rosie’s husband.”

“Her husband? You certainly are not! My daughter is unmarried, and her future husband awaits her in Kansas City.”

“Is that so?” Bart flipped back the edge of his buckskin jacket and drew a folded sheet of paper from his britches pocket. “I’ve carried this certificate every day of my life. A true and verified marriage license from the state of Missouri.”

“A marriage license?” Dr. Vermillion exploded. “Laura Rose never told me anything about a legal license.”

“You were so angry, Pappy. You wouldn’t listen to a thing I said.”

“It’s legal, all right,” Bart assured him. “Dr. Vermillion, I’m your son-in-law and have been for six years.”

Rosie glanced at her father, who had gone as white as a sheet.

“It’s true, Pappy,” she told him. “Bart and I are
married, and we have been all these years. I’ve loved him every day of every one of those years, and I love him now more than ever.”

She turned to the passengers on the train who stood gawking. “Bart and I were wrong to deceive the good people of Raton, but we didn’t do it out of malice.”

“I mean to make a good life for both of us,” Bart concurred. “And I mean to keep on loving my wife and making her happy as long as…as, well, forever.”

“Laura Rose,” her father spoke in a low voice. “You’re standing there ruining every chance I ever gave you in life.”

“No, Pappy.” She moved to stand at Bart’s side. “What God has joined together, no man should tear apart. I belong with Bart, no matter what comes our way. I trust him…” She caught herself for a moment. Then certainty flooded her. “Yes, I do—I trust Bart to protect me and keep me safe. I trust him to see to my livelihood and my happiness.”

Glancing up at the tall man whose green eyes shone, she placed her hands over the soft curve of her belly before adding, “And I trust him to provide a good home for our baby.”

“Baby?” Bart grabbed Rosie’s shoulders and swung her around. “Baby?”

She laughed. “If God’s willing, Bart Kingsley, I’ll make you a papa in January.”

“Hallelujah!” He swung her up in his arms and planted a big kiss on her lips.

“What’s going on here?” a voice said behind Bart’s shoulder. “You still holding up this train, Mr. Kingsley?”

As Bart turned, Rosie saw two of Raton’s deputy sheriffs striding down the aisle. But before the chill of fear had a chance to wash through her, the man clapped Bart on the back.

“Gonna be a papa, huh?” one of them said. “Well, good thing. You can set that kid on the right track so he don’t steer off it like you did.”

“Sure enough.” Bart laughed again and gave Rosie another hug. “Come on, girl, we’ve held this train up long enough, don’t you reckon?”

“You’re not…robbing it?” she whispered.

“Now, why would I do a thing like that? Beets selling for five cents a pound, chickens laying so fast you can’t keep up with them, cows so fat they’re practically giving buttermilk and…and a baby on the way! I’m the richest man in the world, Rosie-girl.”

As he turned to escort his wife down the aisle, Bart gave her father a backward glance. “So long, Dr. Vermillion. Don’t you worry yourself now. I’ll take care of Rosie. I always said I would, you know. And don’t be a stranger—I want my babies to know their grandpappy.”

The morning sunshine hit Rosie full in the face as she and Bart left the shelter of the passenger car.

“Hey, boys, I got me a young’un coming!” he called to Ford and the others. “How about that?”

“Yahoo!” Snort shouted and fired off two rounds as the train whistle blew and the engine began to build up steam.

Bart leaned close and whispered to Rosie on his way to his horse. “Were you ever going to tell me about the baby?”

She gave a happy shrug. “Not unless you straightened yourself up. And I guess you did.”

“I didn’t change myself, Rosie. A man can only do so much. God changed me. He’s the only way I got out of the mess I was tangled up in for so long. It took an act of God to straighten me up and help me walk straight.”

“God
and
a loving wife.” She gave him a sideways glance and then giggled. “But how did you manage to sweet-talk the deputies and get Bob Ford to help you stop the train? Bart, what’s going on?”

He set her on her feet by the stallion he had ridden into a lather all the way from the livery stable. Patting the horse on the neck, he waved and hollered his thanks as Ford, Snort, Fancy and the deputies started back down the track toward Raton.

“When I left you this morning,” he explained when they were alone at last, “I went to the boys and laid out the straight line. I told them they could do whatever they wanted, but I wasn’t going to be party to holding up any more trains. Ford was mad as a rattler on a hot skillet. He kept jawing at me while I walked back to the hotel to fetch you, but I just kept telling him he had no choice but to go straight. Before I knew it, he’d up and decided he would do just that. When we got into the lobby, the manager handed me a letter that had come in the mail a few days back. It was from Frank James.”

“Jesse’s brother?”

“Sure enough. He allowed as how after he got my letter, he talked to his pals in Missouri—and he’s got friends in high places, you know. Seems the law decided to check out what little hand I had in those train robberies, and Frank volunteered to vouch for me. It didn’t
take too long before they’d cleared my record off the books.”

“Really? Oh, Bart, that’s wonderful!”

“Only thing—they don’t particularly want me back in Missouri. Fact is, they said if I set foot in the state, they’d arrest me.”

“That’s fine with me,” Rosie said with relief.

“I reckoned you wouldn’t care too awful much. Me and the boys had started up the stairs after you, when lo and behold, the manager said you’d gone off to the depot with the man who’d marched you out of the dining room the night before. I’ll be jiggered if it wasn’t Bob Ford who came up with the notion to round up the deputies, hold up the train and haul you off.”

“But you didn’t know I left Raton on purpose,” Rosie said.

“Why did you do that, darlin’? Why’d you leave me again, after all we’ve been through?”

She sighed. “It was the baby, Bart. I want a good life for this child, and I could only think how awful it would be to bring up our little one in an outlaw’s world. But once I’d gone a short distance on the train, I knew I’d been crazy to leave. We were inside the tunnel when I made up my mind to get off at the next station and come home to you, no matter what kind of life we had to live.”

Bart softly kissed her cheek. “I promised you a good life, Rosie,” he said. “When will you trust me to give you that?”

She gazed up into his green eyes. “Now, Bart. I’ll trust you right now.”

“Then hop on this horse, girl, and let’s head for home.
Those poor milk cows are probably about to bust their britches.”

Laughing, Rosie set her foot in the stirrup. Bart cupped her waist with his hands and helped her up into the saddle.

He climbed on behind her, took the reins and spurred the horse down the hill toward Raton.

As they rode along, Rosie leaned her head back on his shoulder and shut her eyes in the warmth of the golden morning sun. “It’s a bright day, Bart Kingsley,” she whispered. “A bright day after a long, dark night.”

Placing his hand over her stomach, he kissed her lips. “A bright, clear, shining day, and not a cloud in sight, Rosie-girl.”

The mesa-rimmed town of Raton, New Mexico, saw many prosperous years to come with farming, livestock, railroading and coal mining as profitable industries. According to
The Raton Comet
and other publications, the historical characters in
The Gunman’s Bride
went on to lead peaceful lives.

Mr. Thomas Kilgore’s students began attending school in a brand-new building in fall 1884. Charles Adams sold the Comet in 1886, and the newspaper was renamed
The Raton Range
. It continues to publish today. The Reverend J. A. Cullen resigned his pastorate in 1883, and his position was filled by the Reverend J. W. Sinnock. Dr. Kohlhouser’s beautiful home on Third Street was converted into St. Patrick’s Academy. His dog, Griff, no doubt joined the rest of Raton at the funeral of W. A. White’s beloved canine, Tom, who was laid to rest beneath a beautifully carved tombstone in March 1885.

Cheyenne Bill, the popular boxer, bolstered his reputation as “a hard, hard man” by winning so many bouts that he came to be called the Terror of the Wicked West. He rigged himself up in fine new clothes, got a haircut, went regularly to church and continued to be the subject of humorous but good-natured poetry published in the local newspaper.

Mathias Broyles Stockton became the new sheriff of Raton in June 1883. That same year, Charly Baker was found guilty of criminal negligence in the shooting death of eleven-year-old Manford Wade.

Robert Ford ran into trouble with Raton’s deputy sheriff, Jack Miller, and challenged him to a gunfight. Ford failed to appear, was branded a coward and was run out of town. After roaming the west in a failed attempt to capitalize on the killing of Jesse James, he was gunned down in a saloon in Creed, Colorado, in 1892.

In Missouri, Frank James succeeded in his goal of living a quiet life with a home, wife and children. The brother of Jesse James died a natural death in 1915.

It should be recorded that on the evening of January 10, 1884, Mr. and Mrs. Bart Kingsley became the proud parents of a healthy nine-pound boy whom they named Buck. And, of course, they all lived happily ever after.

To learn more about the factual basis for
The Gunman’s Bride,
the author suggests the following:

Conway, Jay T.
A Brief Community History of Raton, New Mexico: 1880–1930.
Raton: Smith’s Printing & Stationery, 1991.

New Mexico Magazine
(various articles). Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Poling-Kempes, Lesley.
The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West
. New York: Paragon House, 1989.

The Raton Comet
(all issues from 1883). Raton, New Mexico.

Stanley, F.
Raton Chronicle
. Raton Historical Society.

Dear Reader,

Worry, worry, worry!

In the past few months I’ve had plenty to worry about.

Our former apartment complex in Georgia got regular visits from the SWAT team. The police warned us that guns and drugs were everywhere. A stray bullet went through our son’s window and into his bathroom—narrowly missing him. A fellow missionary living near us was stabbed in the neck. She survived but not without a lot of shock and suffering. We bought a house that needed a total rehab. Our autistic son began to experience posttraumatic stress disorder from his six years in a Romanian orphanage.

Shall I go on?

Though I have been a servant of Jesus Christ since I was eight years old, I am a champion worrywart. Pilot Beryl Markham once said that she had no imagination, so she had no fear. I have such a vivid imagination that I’ve written more than fifty books of fiction. I’d estimate I have just about an equal amount of fear.

For many years, I’ve wondered what to do about Jesus’s commands to his followers not to worry. He said in Matthew 6: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. So do not worry.” Luke 12 records His words: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?” In Philippians 4, St. Paul reminds us: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and
supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

I confess, I still haven’t conquered my worry sin. Worry, someone said, is imagining your future and forgetting that God will be with you in it. Jesus repeatedly tried to comfort believers, saying in Matthew 11, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” In John 14, He offers, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.” But His most comforting words are in 2 Corinthians 12: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

His power is made perfect in our weakness. Now that’s something I can do very well. I’m great at weakness. God knows my many weaknesses, He knows my worries and He has sent the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to live within me and bring me a peace that surpasses all understanding.

Rosie wasn’t much good at stifling her worries, and neither am I. But thank God, He uses our weaknesses to make His own power perfect.

May God’s grace and peace be with you always!

Blessings,