Christmas Mail Order Bride - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides: Book 1) (8 page)

“How do you know their language?” she pressed him.

“My mother is part Shoshone,” he revealed. “I think you know her. She’s the cook at the West’s house. Janet, they call her, although that’s not her real name.”

Penelope gaped at him, seeing him as if for the first time. She detected no resemblance between the two faces but she understood her own mental connection between them now. In the general aspect of each and their facial expressions, one reminded her of the other. The magnitude of their personalities dominated her awareness. Everyone else, besides these two, seemed to her to be cardboard cut-outs plastered against the backdrop of life, leaving only these two in the foreground, three-dimensional, warm-blooded, and dynamic. She shook her head to clear her thoughts. She could never look at any person the same way again.

“What’s the matter?” he examined her. “Are you unwell?”

“No, I’m fine,” she shook her head again. “I’m just surprised to see you here.”

He spoke to the custodian again, then turned back to her. “We’ll stay here tonight. Then we’ll go back in the morning.”

“I’m sure Anders will be glad you found me,” Penelope remarked.

Caleb laughed. “I don’t think so. He’ll be mad. Oh, he’ll be glad to get you back, but he’ll be infuriated that I was the one to bring you back. He won’t be happy at all that we spent any time together away from him.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Penelope pondered.

Caleb continued to speculate. “He’ll be full of all sorts of crazy ideas of what you did while you were away, and what we did together on the way back. He’ll be that much more insistent that we never set eyes on each other again.”

“Do you really think he’s that unreasonable?” she wondered.

“Never mind,” Caleb turned away and began unlacing his boots. “We’ll be back soon enough, and I guess you can talk to any of these people that you want to, now that I’m here.”

He set his boots side by side next to her bed roll and wiggled his toes inside his socks, settling into the scene in the house. Everyone else around them carried on with their normal activities. Some of them smiled at him but for the most part, they accepted his presence as perfectly normal. She remarked on how much more casually he behaved here than at the West ranch, where he stiffened his shoulders every time anyone spoke to him, and where his eyes darted continually from side to side, always alert to potential danger. Here, he smiled in return to one and all, and his conversation flowed more naturally.

“Do you come here much?” she asked.

“Not much,” he confessed.
“Every now and then. My mother comes here more than I do. I used to come with her when I was younger, but since I started working for the Wests, I don’t get a chance anymore. But these people don’t care how frequently you come. When you come, you’re family. It’ll be the same for you now, too. Now that they’ve spent time with you and brought you into their homes, you’ll be welcome any time you want to come back.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever come back,” she declared.

“Why not?” Caleb demanded. “Weren’t they kind to you? Didn’t they take good care of you?”

“Yes, they did,” she admitted.

“Of course, they did!” he snorted. “Hospitality to strangers is everything to them. They take great pride in it. It’s very important to them that a helpless person found bleeding and unconscious on the side of the road, with one dead body and two screaming horses tangled up in the shafts of a carriage, be taken in and tended to and restored to their own people. You should be grateful they found you the way they did.”

“But I didn’t know!” she wailed. “I didn’t know it wasn’t the same people who attacked the carriage. I thought they took me a captive. I thought I was a prisoner here. I wouldn’t want to come back to a place where I thought I was a prisoner.”

“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” he considered. “I guess if you didn’t know the difference between the two people, you wouldn’t want to come back. To me, this place feels a lot more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever been. I can be myself here. No one expects you to be anything else. They’re the kindest, most considerate people on the planet, if you ask me. A lot more considerate than the Wests.”

“Even George?” she suggested.

“Well, George is the salt of the earth,” he conceded. “I think the sun rises and sets on George. But, like I told you the other night, he doesn’t go out of his way to help people. He helps people when he can, but he never sticks his neck out. He would never help anyone if it meant making Anders mad at him. He protects his own, and that means Anders. Anders, and only Anders.”

“You really don’t like the
Wests, do you?” she marveled.

“I like them just fine,” he argued. “I just know them a lot better than you do. You’ll see. When you get to know them better, you’ll see I’m right.”

“I certainly hope I can prove you wrong,” she contradicted. “I would hate to think of anyone that way.”

“But you think that way about these Shoshones,” he pointed out. “
and you
have
been proven wrong about them. You wouldn’t accept their hospitality, even now that you know the truth about them.”

“Okay, you’re right,” she retreated.

“Now, let’s drop the whole thing,” he proposed. “Let’s talk about something else. We have a long trip home, so let’s not argue.”

“Okay,” she agreed.

That evening, they enjoyed the company of her hosts. The greater facility of communication in Caleb’s presence greatly relaxed not only Penelope but also the other residents of the house. He explained their jokes to her, and the knowledge that they meant her no harm and in fact cared about her welfare disposed her to look more kindly on them than before. Later, Caleb curled up on a blanket near her bed, and she slept more tranquilly than ever in the security of his presence. They rose in the morning and departed after breakfast. At the door, Penelope took her leave of her custodian, who, through Caleb’s translation, insisted she return as frequently as she cared to, and to keep the Shoshone people in her thoughts. Penelope reminded herself that this woman, whom she considered something of a mother substitute, was nothing more than a heathen Indian who slept on the bare dirt in a sod shack in the middle of nowhere. Had she not held that knowledge foremost in her mind, she would have fallen on the woman’s neck in a flood of weeping at parting from her.

As she rode away behind Caleb on his horse, she wondered at her own feelings for the people with whom she spent the last week. She experienced the same pang of regret at leaving the Indian encampment that she felt just a few days previously when she remembered the West ranch. She startled herself by dreading her return to the ranch, and to Anders’s inevitable suspicion about her absence. She knew Caleb was right, that Anders would suspect the worst about her, and that he wouldn’t be grateful to anyone, least of all Caleb, for bringing her back. The few things she looked forward to with gladness, such as a hot bath and a glass of wine in the parlor, presented something less than a balance to the disagreeable reflection of her reunion with Anders.

They rode all day in an easterly direction, past the point where the Indians hid her from the sheriff’s posse, on and on, until sundown. Caleb reined in his horse in a copse between two farms. After tethering his horse, he built a fire and warmed some food for them as darkness settled over the land.

“Here,” he pulled his bedroll from his saddle. “You take this. It’s going to get cold tonight, and those clothes won’t keep you warm.”

“What about you?” she pointed out. “How will you keep warm?”

“Oh, I’m used to it,” he maintained. “I’ve slept out lots of times in worse cold than this, and with the fire going, I’ll be fine.”

“I imagine you’ve had a hard life, haven’t you?” she ventured.

“Not as hard as some,” he returned. “I’ve been lucky, in some ways. Take you, for instance. At least I have a family. I have a mother, and I have her people to call family, too. You have no one.”

“That is true,” she conceded. “It must be nice, to have all that family living together in the same house, the way the Shoshones do. They seem very attached to each other.”

“I wish I had grown up like that,” he related. “There’s always someone around who cares about you and takes care of you. If your parents aren’t there, it’s your grandparents or your older cousins or uncles or aunts. Everyone takes care of everyone else.”

“Why didn’t your mother take you back to her people, when you were small?” she asked. “It seems like such a more sensible way to raise a child.”

“She had to work,” he informed her. “She went to work for the
Wests before I was born, and she didn’t want to lose her situation. She wanted to give me the best chance of finding a situation for myself when I grew older, and she reckoned that bringing me up at the Wests was the best way to do that. And it turns out that she was right. She took me home with her every time she could. That is, until I started working for the Wests myself. Now I can’t get away. I might go back on Christmas Day. That’s about the only day off I get anymore.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” she pondered.

He shrugged. “That’s the way it is, when you work for a living.”

“I wish I could do something about it,” she thought aloud.

“Like what?” he asked. “What could you do about it? There’s nothing to do.”

“I just want to make it easier for you,” she offered.

“You are making it easier,” he indicated. “You’re making it easier by talking to me about it. You’re the only one on the whole ranch that does that. I haven’t said any more than ‘Yes, sir’ to anyone since I started working there.”

“What about your mother?” she inquired. “Don’t you talk to her?”

“No,” he admitted. “We don’t talk to each other around the Wests at all. We haven’t discussed it, but we seem to have an unspoken agreement to keep away from each other around the ranch. If she needs to tell me something, she tells Bill, and Bill tells me. That’s just the way it is. No one needs to be reminded that I’m her son. I have enough trouble around that place keeping my lip buttoned. Opening my mouth can only get me into trouble. Kind of like getting mixed up with you. That can only get me into trouble. I don’t know why I came out here to get you. It can only cause me problems in the long run.”

“It can’t be as bad as all that,” she maintained. “You’re hardly getting mixed up with me. You’re bringing me home from that camp when no one else could find me, but it’s not as if there’s anything else going on between us.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he asserted. “Anders will act the same, either way. There may as well be something else going on between us. He’ll assume there is, anyway. He already told me if he ever caught me alone with you again, he’d run me out of the county, or hang me. You were there. You heard him. I don’t know why I stuck my neck out to bring you back at all. I should have left you there.”

She covered his hand with her own. “I’m glad you did. I’m very grateful you did.” Then, impetuously, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

His eyes flew open wide. “I should have left you there. You were perfectly safe. I could have come back to town and told the sheriff where you were, and he could’ve come and got you and taken you home. And I could have told the sheriff not to tell Anders how he found out where you were. And I could’ve gone on with my life without all this business.” He sighed heavily and shook his head.

She smiled at him in the firelight and, leaning in once more, kissed him fully on the lips. “I’m glad I’m here with you, and not the sheriff.”

He returned her kiss. Then he encircled her neck with his arm and pulled her in to kiss her more deeply, his warm breath tingling over her face. “You’re a mess of trouble for me.”

“I’m sorry for that,” she sighed, snaking her arms around his ribs. “I didn’t mean to be. You can take me back to the camp, if you want to.”

Their lips locked together, and their bodies tipped over backward, so they stretched out together on the ground by the fire. “Maybe I will,” he mumbled.

She nestled her head into the hollow of his shoulder. “Just stay here with me tonight.”

“Okay,” he hugged her to him, and they drifted off to sleep in the comfort of their embrace.

He kept the fire going all night to keep them warm, and adjusted the scanty blankets of his bedroll to keep her covered up as best he could. When the first light of dawn bestirred them to the inevitability of a new day, Penelope rubbed her smoky eyes and huddled close to the embers in the fire to keep warm as they shared the bare, hard jerky he had in his saddle bags for their breakfast. For a long time, she dared not break the silence between them, but in the end, curiosity about their plans forced her to speak.

“Do we have far to go?” she began.

“Not far,” he confirmed. “We’ll ride the rest of the day, and we’ll be there by this evening. You’ll be home in time for supper.”

“Will anyone be worried about you?” she asked.

Caleb shook his head rather dolefully. “No one will worry about me. Besides, I told Bill I had an idea about where you were, and that I was leaving to go check. But I don’t think anyone else will even notice I’m gone. Anders hasn’t left the house since you disappeared. He doesn’t come out to supervise our work anymore. He just stays indoors all the time.”