Whitefeather's Woman (2 page)

John did not look back.

Out on the street again, he looked around for Hawkwing. The skewbald gelding had made his way over to a nearby water trough, and Miss Jane Harris had been powerless to stop him.

Marching over to the horse, John climbed into the saddle and held out his hand to the troublesome visitor from Boston.

Her nervous glance darted from his hand, to his face, to the horse and back again until it threatened to make John dizzy.

“Grab hold and I'll pull you up,” he snapped.

She continued to hesitate. “I thought you were going to hire a wagon for us.”

So did I.
“Briggs claims he doesn't have anything to suit.” John could hear the disdain in his own voice.

Her lower lip, still swollen from the train accident, commenced to quiver. John wanted to throw his head back and howl, like a he-wolf at the full moon.

He could read the thoughts running through her head as clear as the sign above the No Bull Meat Market across the street. She saw him as some heathen savage, just waiting for a ripe moment to ravish and slaughter her while they rode across open country with daylight waning.

“It's up to you.” John straightened in his saddle. “It'd be just as easy for me if you stay in town tonight and I send somebody from the ranch to fetch you in the morning.”

When she darted an anxious glance farther up the street to the Carlton Hotel, John almost laughed aloud. The woman wasn't only afraid of him, she was scared of everyone and everything about Whitehorn. Talk about your fish out of water!

“I—I don't have any money to pay for a room.”

John softened his tone as he leaned down and offered her his hand again. In spite of some harsh lessons from life, he believed in second chances.

“Well, that makes two of us, ma'am. Come on, now. I'm pretty near as harmless as Hawkwing, and only a bit more stubborn. We'll make better time getting to the ranch if we ride across the range, anyway. You do want to get to the Kincaids, don't you?”

That did it. Her baby mouth set in an attempt at a determined line, which John found strangely comical. And even more strangely appealing. No question, she was prepared to wade through hell itself to reach his brother-in-law's ranch.

She extended her absurdly tiny hand up to meet his.

Drawing her up off the ground, John set her on top of Hawkwing's generous hindquarters. “Hang on.”

For the first minute or two, she settled for clutching a handful of his coat. But as the horse's pace picked up, she clenched her arms around his waist. John Whitefeather had never felt so uncomfortable on the back of a horse as he did on that endless ride out to the ranch with Miss Jane Harris perched behind him, clinging like grim death.

Everything about the woman irritated him. Her small size. Her New England fussiness. Her barely controlled panic, so intense it was almost contagious.

For the last twenty of his thirty years, John had struggled to tread the thin, brittle line between two races vastly at odds and often at war. Among his late father's people, he had found a measure of acceptance, though always clouded by the necessity to prove himself and a personal sense of guilt for the crimes of the whites. Among his late mother's race, he doubted he would ever find tolerance, let alone favor.

Over and over, he had told himself he didn't care. Until he'd almost come to believe it. His meeting with Miss Harris had ripped away those comforting illusions, and he wanted to hate her for it.

“Is the ranch much farther?” she squeaked when they had been riding for a quarter of an hour.

So, she'd finally worked up the nerve to make conversation. John heard her suck a breath in through clenched teeth.

“Why? Did you hurt your…” he searched for a polite word, but found he could only think in terms of horses “… your
rump
in that train crash?”

Her whole body stiffened behind him. “How dare you ask a lady such an improper question!”

So, the quivering little rabbit had teeth, after all. For no sane reason he could think of, John found himself grinning. Luckily, she couldn't see his face.

He shrugged. “We can stop and stretch your legs if you like, but I'd just as soon not be caught out in open country when the sun disappears behind those mountains. Easy to get lost unless there's a good moon. Lot of animals come out to hunt at night—wolves, wildcats.”

He sensed her looking around, taking in the waving green grassland in one direction and the wooded foothills of the Crazy Mountains in the other.

A shiver ran through her and she tightened her arms around his middle. “By all means, let's keep riding.”

John could tell he'd spooked her. A bucketful of ice-cold shame doused the spark of gleeful satisfaction within him. Some men found fun in baiting wild creatures, but he had never been one of them. On the contrary, he had a gift for gentling such animals—deer, pronghorns and especially wild mustangs.

For all her show of Boston prudery, Jane Harris reminded him of a wounded doe. Beneath a tiny scrap of a hat that would be useless against the beating sun, she had hair of a sorrel shade, like a yearling just losing its protective spots. Her features were as delicate as a fawn's, too, and she had the same enormous, liquid brown eyes. Those eyes held a restless wariness like a deer's, as if ever alert for predators, yet powerless against them. He had never met a woman so vulnerable and so completely unfit for Big Sky Country.

She provoked his pity as well as his resentment, and they were like twin burrs beneath his saddle. Truth be told, pity was the more nettlesome of the two.

Little Miss Harris had landed in Whitehorn alone, injured
and without a single belonging she didn't wear or carry on her. What would she do, John wondered, when she found out Ruth and Caleb
didn't
want her to work for them?

S
omething was wrong. Jane sensed it from the moment John Whitefeather ushered her into the big, two-story house with a wide porch that wrapped around it like a protective embrace. Standing in the generously proportioned kitchen, dominated by a big cast-iron stove, she wondered why her new employers didn't appear happy to see her.

“Ruth, Caleb, this is Miss Jane Harris, from Boston.” John Whitefeather hung his long coat and leather hat on a peg by the kitchen door. “She just got into Whitehorn this afternoon. She's come about the job looking after Barton and Zeke.”

A slender woman with warm bronzed skin dropped her washing cloth into the dish tub in the far corner of the kitchen. Wiping her hands on her apron, she approached Jane. Her dark hair was plaited in a thick braid that coiled far down her back. She wore a long skirt that looked to be made of very fine leather, and a bright red shirtwaist embroidered with tiny colored beads in an intricate design.

Beside the area where his wife had been working, Caleb
Kincaid sat in a big wooden armchair upholstered with leather. A rugged-faced man with shaggy blond hair, he slowly lit a pipe without speaking a word.

Mrs. Kincaid shot her husband an odd, searching look, then she caught sight of Jane's face. “What happened to you,
kâse'ee'he?
Did you fall off the horse on your ride out here? No, these bruises have begun to heal.”

Jane took a deep breath, ready to launch into the contrived explanation for her injuries. At the last moment, she faltered. What if she got confused and told Mrs. Kincaid a slightly different story than she'd told the foreman? Might he trip her up in the lie?

To her surprise, John Whitefeather came to her rescue. “Some cars on her train got derailed back in Chicago. She lost all her bags in the accident, too.”

Ruth Kincaid shook her head and made a crooning noise of sympathy. “You must be hungry and tired, dear. Sit down and eat, then we'll talk. Before you go to bed, I'll put a poultice on your cheek. It might draw that bruise. And you need some salve for the scrape on your chin.”

Gratefully Jane sank down onto one of the plain, solid chairs ranged around the big kitchen table, and took off her hat and gloves. Eking out her last few crackers on the train, she thought she'd grown accustomed to the vague biliousness of constant hunger. It had gnawed at her stomach like a toothless old dog worrying a bone. Now, as she inhaled a savory blend of meat and onions, her appetite suddenly grew the fangs of a wolf.

Mrs. Kincaid set a plate of stew in front of Jane and another in front of John Whitefeather, who had taken a seat opposite her. Years of strictly minding her manners, and the consciousness of her new employers' eyes upon her, kept Jane from falling on her supper like a starving beast.

Nothing could stifle her groan of pleasure upon sinking her teeth into a tender morsel of richly flavored meat.

Mrs. Kincaid smiled as she set a plate of biscuits and a crock of butter on the table between Jane and the foreman. “Is this the first time you've tasted venison, Miss Harris?”

Jane abruptly stopped chewing. She swallowed hard to work that mouthful down. “Deer meat?”

She reached for a biscuit at the same moment as John Whitefeather. His large, brown knuckles swiped across hers, making them look smaller, softer and paler. She suddenly had a vivid flash of memory—Emery's sallow, bony fist flying toward her eye. With a gasp and a start, she jerked her hand back, as though she'd touched a red-hot stove.

“Don't worry, Miss Harris.” The foreman glanced at Mrs. Kincaid, his dark brows raised. “There's plenty of biscuits here for both of us.”

Jane caught the rancher's wife returning John Whitefeather's dubious look. A sense of impending trouble ambushed her again.

Caleb Kincaid smoked in watchful silence as Jane and John Whitefeather finished their meal. Only when his wife had removed the plates from the table did he speak.

“I'm afraid we have a problem, Miss Harris.” The rancher stared hard at the kitchen floor, as if suddenly finding its wood grain of absorbing interest.

Here it came. Jane's insides constricted into a tiny little lump, heavy as lead.

“Problem?” She almost gagged on the word.

Three thousand miles from home, with
nothing.
There couldn't be a problem with her only means to earn a living. There just couldn't.

The rancher was a big man. Not quite as big as his
foreman, but still tall and powerfully made. Having broached the subject, he now cast a helpless glance at his wife, who looked every bit as ill at ease.

“Did you not read the letter we sent you,
kâse'ee'he?
” Ruth Kincaid set the dishes in the washtub, then stood beside her husband's chair.

“Of course I read it,” blurted Jane, then she hesitated. What if the Kincaids asked her to quote particulars? “I mean…not with my own eyes. It…arrived on a rainy day…and the ink ran.”

Oh dear, why could she not invent a more plausible explanation for coming all the way to Montana without actually having seen the Kincaids' offer of employment? After all, she'd had years of practice lying about the injuries Emery had done her.

She toyed with the notion of telling them the humiliating truth, but firmly rejected it. Better to let the Kincaids turn her out on the empty grasslands, with wolves howling in the distance, than have to admit her fiancé had burned their letter before her eyes, then beaten her insensible for trying to escape him.

“I just assumed you must be writing to offer me the job.” Though she struggled against it, her voice rose, shrill and plaintive. “No one writes all the way from Montana to Boston to say they
don't
want you.”

Neither Caleb Kincaid nor his wife would meet her eyes, so she addressed her hopeless question across the table, to the only person in the room who did not flinch from her imploring gaze.

“Do they?”

For the first time since she'd come face-to-face with him that afternoon, John Whitefeather's sternly handsome features softened in a look of sympathy. He cleared his throat.

“We can't do anything about this tonight.” He addressed his words to the Kincaids. “Miss Harris is here and she can't go back to Whitehorn until morning. Maybe after a good night's sleep we'll all see our way clearer.”

Jane wasn't certain what to make of a hired man advising his employers with such authority. She couldn't picture herself bidding Mrs. Endicott to do anything.

After spending so many nights dozing fitfully on the upright seat of a jolting railway carriage, she yearned to lie flat on her back to sleep. As John Whitefeather had said, the situation couldn't help but look a little brighter in the morning. At the moment, her problem seemed insurmountable.

Unfortunately, nothing was going to make it disappear overnight.

“Why…?” Her lower lip began to quiver. She drew a breath to steady herself, only to exhale a humiliating sob. “Why don't you want me? You need someone to look after your baby, and I've looked after Mrs. Endicott since I was twelve years old. She's not a baby, I know, but sometimes when she won't take her pills like the doctor orders, and when she rings the bell for me half a dozen times in the night, she's every bit as much trouble. And she doesn't smell sweet like a baby or hold out her arms and smile like babies do to let you know they…”

The forlorn little words
love you
were lost as Jane shielded her face with her hands and fought to compose herself.

Suddenly she felt a pair of strong arms warm around her shoulders. Her breath caught in her throat and she jerked back from the comforting embrace. She relaxed slightly when she found it was Mrs. Kincaid, not John Whitefeather, holding her.

Ruth Kincaid crooned some words Jane could not under
stand before easing into English. “It was not
you
we turned down, Jane Harris. I asked Caleb to make that plain in his letter. There must have been a mix-up. We didn't even run our notice in any newspapers so far East.”

Jane remembered. She'd read the Kincaids' advertisement in one of the newspapers Mrs. Endicott's cousin had sent her from Saint Louis. Wanting to get as far away from Emery as possible, Jane had scoured the western papers for employment opportunities. Of several inquiries she'd sent, only the Kincaids in distant Montana had answered.

To say they didn't want her.

Ruth Kincaid patted Jane's shoulder, then took a seat beside her at the table. “I'm a healer, and when my people call on me in an emergency, I have to go. Someone needs to be here to care for the baby and for Caleb's boy, Zeke, while I am away. Women who come to Montana from back East often don't stay. Our land is too big and too hard for them. When the letters came applying for the job, we chose a widow from Bismarck. She knows this country. She'll stay for as long as we need her.”

“I w-w-would have stayed.” Jane fought the urge to give way to tears harder than she'd ever fought anything. Childish blubbering would only convince the Kincaids they'd been right to hire someone else.

Smoothing the tumbled strands of hair back from Jane's face, Ruth nodded gravely. “I think you would have. I'm sorry you came so far and through so many troubles for nothing.”

“It's my fault. I'm sorry.” By rote, the words fell from Jane's lips. This time, she meant them. “I should have taken the time to confirm what was written in your letter and not come dashing out to Montana based on a hopeful assumption.”

After her ride from Whitehorn on the back of John
Whitefeather's spotted horse, she understood what Mrs. Kincaid meant about women from the East Coast not staying long in Montana. Everything about the place was on such a vast scale. It dwarfed all her efforts and her dreams. Such country demanded strength from its daughters, and Jane sensed it would not take kindly to a foundling like her.

The dispiriting fact remained: she had nowhere to go and no means to get there if she did.

Jane took a deep breath, trying to make herself look fearless, capable and steady. She doubted either the Kincaids or John Whitefeather would be fooled. “I'll be obliged to you for letting me stay the night. I don't suppose you know anyone else hereabouts who needs help looking after their children?”

“Well now, let me think on it.” Caleb Kincaid scratched his chin in a pensive fashion.

“Think tonight and we'll talk more in the morning.” The rancher's wife beckoned to Jane. “Come along, dear. Let's find you a bed and a nightgown, then I'll bring my medicines.”

Despite her worries, or perhaps because of them, Jane longed to stretch out on any excuse for a bed and to flee from her troubles into the land of dreams.

As she rose from the table to follow her hostess out of the kitchen, John Whitefeather spoke. “I have a thought, if you want to hear it.”

Ruth Kincaid chuckled. “Was there ever a time we didn't pay you mind,
hestatanemo?
” To Jane, she added, “It was my brother who advised me to leave our people and make a life with Caleb Kincaid.”

Brother?
Jane tried to mask her surprise as she berated herself for not guessing sooner. Her stomach churned as she recalled all the subtle ways she must have offended
John Whitefeather since the first moment she'd approached him in the saloon. What wise counsel was he going to give his sister and brother-in-law concerning their unwanted houseguest?

Jane braced herself.

“When's this other lady supposed to come?” John asked, drumming his fingers on the table.

Caleb Kincaid shrugged. “Mrs. Muldoon didn't rightly give a date. Said she had to settle her affairs in Bismarck first. Another few weeks, a month, who knows?”

Nodding, as if gravely pleased with the answer, John Whitefeather cast a look at his sister. “Didn't you get called out just the other night, when Ghost Moon had trouble birthing her twins?”

“You know I did, since you rode with me.”

“Well, then, since Mrs. Muldoon won't be coming for a spell and Miss Harris is already here and could use a job, why don't you let her look after the boys? That way she could at least earn the price of a train ticket back to Boston.”

Before Jane could help herself, the words burst out. “I'm not going back to Boston—not ever!” Not as long as Emery Endicott was there, at least.

They all ignored her outburst. Ruth and Caleb Kincaid exchanged a long gaze, as though sharing each other's thoughts without words.

Jane held still, scarcely breathing as she silently willed them to give her a chance. Her eyes met John Whitefeather's, and she offered him a timid half smile for intervening on her behalf. She couldn't remember the last time anyone had spoken up for her.

At last Ruth Kincaid nodded. “My brother's plan is a good one for all of us. Would you be willing to stay, Miss Harris, until Mrs. Muldoon can come?”

“Yes.” Jane blurted out her acceptance before the Kincaids had time to think better of the idea. “Thank you.”

The matter settled, Mrs. Kincaid hustled her upstairs to a rustic but snug little room under the eaves. A narrow bed stood in one corner, while a small bureau and a washstand of matching, pale-hued wood bracketed the window. Green curtains, a round braided rug and a patchwork quilt added touches of color and warmth.

Her new employer fetched Jane a pitcher of hot water, a nightgown and an extra quilt.

“The nights can still get cold this time of year, and you don't have much meat on your bones, dear. We must try to fatten you up while you're with us.”

When Mrs. Kincaid returned later with her medicines, Jane was standing at the window, staring out at a small, sturdy cabin not far from the main house.

“I can't think why my brother insists on sleeping out in the foreman's cabin when he takes all his meals with us.” As Ruth Kincaid spoke she set several clay pots of salve on top of the bureau.