Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (3 page)

      
‘That's all past us now. You're here and I am ever so glad,” Alexa said, tightening her feeble grip on Roxanna's hand. “How long can you stay—oh, please say it will be over the winter. Ever since Mama died I've been so alone in this big empty house.”

      
“You're more than kind. You know Papa's bank failed after he was murdered and then I lost my brother in the war... Truth to tell, Alexa, until I can find work, I'm quite broke.”

      
“Then it's all settled. You shall stay with me. We shall have such grand times, just as we did in school, as soon as I'm up and about.”

      
But Alexa was not up and about as fall stretched into winter. The terrible cough grew steadily worse and she had an increasingly difficult time holding down food. Roxanna became a combination of nurse and companion, caring for her friend, who the doctor now admitted was dying from consumption.

* * * *

      
The winter had been unusually wet. Now, however, outside the bedroom window a pair of robins chirped joyously and the heavenly perfume from the lilacs wafted up on a warm spring breeze. But the beauty of the day was lost on Roxanna as she looked at Alexa's wasted body. Each day she seemed to shrink more, as if the bed were slowly swallowing her.

      
“You must write your grandfather, Alexa. He's your only living relative. Jubal MacKenzie owes it to you to come to St. Louis,” Roxanna insisted.

      
“I don't want to disturb Grandfather, Roxanna. He's one of the most important men building the transcontinental railroad. The Union Pacific is all the way into Wyoming Territory now. I doubt if a letter could even reach him.”

      
“You still haven't told him you're ill, have you?”

      
Alexa did not meet Roxanna's level gaze but plucked nervously at the bedclothes. “No, I...I have not. I'm afraid of him, Roxanna. All I remember from when I was a little girl is a big tall man with a bristling red beard and a booming voice. He even made Papa quake, and he was ever so much braver than Mama or me. How disappointed he'll be to find out I'm going to die and leave him without an heir.”

      
“Don't talk rubbish! You are not going to die,” Roxanna insisted for what must have been the thousandth time.

      
But Alexa only shook her head sadly. “You know it's true.”

      
Before Roxanna could remonstrate, a soft tap on the door interrupted them and Gretchen entered with an envelope clutched in her hand. “A letter just arrived by special courier for you, Miss Hunt.” The maid approached the sickbed fearfully, not wanting to risk contamination. Gingerly she held out the envelope. Roxanna snatched it and dismissed the girl, then opened the heavy vellum envelope and handed its contents to Alexa. The postmark was Denver.
Speak of the devil and up he pops,
she thought sourly.

      
If Alexa wouldn't write Jubal MacKenzie, she would. Then, hearing the papers in Alexa's hands rustle, she looked over at her friend. If it was possible, Alexa looked even paler than usual. “What is it—what's wrong?”

      
The expression on Alexa's face was one of incredulous terror as she handed Roxanna the letter. Her hand trembled violently.

      
Roxanna quickly scanned the letter, then resisted the urge to crumple it into a ball and toss it out the open window. “This is positively medieval! He can't just announce to you that he's picked a husband for you and expect you to meekly travel to some godforsaken place in the wilderness to marry a total stranger!”

      
Alexa smiled weakly at Roxanna’s vehemence. “The marriage would take place in Denver, hardly a wilderness. Grandfather wants me to join him at his rail camp in Wyoming so we can have some time together...” Her face crumpled. “If only I could go. He has asked me to come west repeatedly—to visit with him, but I was always afraid. I guess I've always been afraid of life and now I wish I'd done so many things—”

      
“Don't—don't do this to yourself, Alexa,” Roxanna replied, putting her arms around Alexa's shoulders.
Like bird bones, so delicate and brittle
. Alexa began to cough again and Roxanna could see the bright crimson stain of blood soaking through the cloth her friend held to her mouth. Life was so damn unfair! Quickly exchanging the soaked cloth for a fresh one, she rang for the maid and summoned the doctor.

* * * *

      
Late that night, Roxanna sat in Alexa' s room red-eyed from weeping, staring at the empty bed where her friend had spent most of the past months of her life. The young doctor had done all he could, but Alexa's life had literally ebbed away in a slow crimson trickle. “At least her awful suffering is over,” Roxanna murmured to herself, but the words rang hollow. The undertaker was preparing her body downstairs.
Papa. Mama. Rexford. Now Alexa. There is no one left for me.

      
The wake began the next morning. But since Alexa had led a painfully reclusive life even before she fell ill, there were few callers, all old family friends—except for one. Fortunately, when Gable Hogue arrived, Roxanna was in the kitchen giving instructions to the cook. The instant she saw Isobel Darby's relentless detective, she slipped behind the heavy velvet draperies in the hallway as her heart beat a thudding tattoo.
How did he find me?

      
She listened as he discreetly explained to the maid that he was an old teacher of the deceased young lady come to pay his last respects. Dour, sullen Gretchen, thank heaven, did not mention Miss Alexa's old school chum who was currently residing in the house. For once the maid's churlish disposition endeared her to Roxanna. She watched as Hogue approached the bier and studied poor Alexa's lifeless form. Then he turned and strode silently from the house.

      
Roxanna waited in sheer terror for the next several days as she closed down the house and paid the servants their severance wages. Since she had assumed control of the household finances over the past six months, Roxanna was able to give each employee a bonus with the admonition not to disclose anything about her to Hogue should he return. By week's end she concluded that he must have heard about a reclusive young woman dying who happened to fit Roxanna Fallon's description. Apparently it never occurred to him that the heiress had a friend with the same unusual coloring.

      
But sooner or later he would find her. He always did. Roxanna was completely out of options at this point. Once Jubal MacKenzie was notified that his granddaughter was dead, the allowance would stop. Where could she go? What could she do to keep from starving to death? The past four years had taught her the utter futility of seeking further employment on the stage. That was the way Hogue always located her for Isobel. But she had no references to become a tutor or governess. Factory supervisors took one look at her pale blond hair and fine-boned aristocratic body and laughed when she applied for honest work. Of course they offered her another sort of work...

      
“Is that how I'll end up...used by hundreds of men, pawed and mauled until there's nothing left of me?” She sat alone in the empty house, listening to the soughing of the cool spring wind as her body was wracked with shudders. To let any man touch her again after Vicksburg was unbearable. To let an endless succession of them use her was enough to fix her eyes on Terrence Hunt's dueling pistols hanging on the study wall. Even death was better than life as a whore.

      
Roxanna stood up and paced resolutely over to the drapery-shrouded window. “No. I won't sell myself and I won't take my own life.”
That was his way out—a coward's way.

      
She had a decent sum of money left in Alexa's account—if old Jubal MacKenzie allowed her to keep it once he learned his granddaughter was dead. Someone would have to let him know, since the family attorney here in St. Louis had died suddenly the preceding week.

      
Thinking of MacKenzie, Roxanna walked over to the desk and picked up the sheaf of papers, his last letter to his granddaughter. An arranged marriage seemed so cold blooded. No doubt he stood to benefit from some sort of business merger. The prospective groom worked for the California side of the transcontinental, the Central Pacific. Poor timid Alexa, who was frightened to death of men, auctioned off to the highest bidder! Suddenly an idea planted itself with blinding clarity in Roxanna’s mind. No! She shook her head, dismissing it as preposterous.

      
“I couldn't...” Her eyes strayed once more to the letter. The old Scotsman had not been to St. Louis to visit his only daughter since her husband died eight years earlier. When Alexa' s mother died two years ago, he had been off in the wilds of Canada, negotiating a timber contract for his precious railroad. He had invited his orphaned granddaughter to come to Denver, but Alexa had refused. It seemed MacKenzie was a man who expected everyone to meet him on his own terms or be damned. Already Roxanna did not like the man, and she had never even laid eyes on him!

      
But he has not laid eyes on his granddaughter since she was thirteen years old either,
some relentless voice within Roxanna insisted. He had no idea what she looked like as a grown woman. She and Alexa were both slender, with light eyes and pale blond hair. Gable Hogue had thought Alexa Hunt might be Roxanna Fallon. What if Roxanna Fallon became Alexa Hunt?

      
Who would be hurt?
Alexa was dead and she was alive. She could become Jubal MacKenzie’s granddaughter. After all, she was an actress, wasn't she? But she would have to marry a complete stranger. Could she do it? Roxanna sat staring at MacKenzie's letter, trying to read between the lines. “What sort of a man are you, Jubal MacKenzie?” Ruthless, without a doubt. Would the man she was to wed be equally rapacious? Even if he was, he was one man. And the marriage would give her some measure of protection from Isobel. As Mrs. Lawrence Powell of San Francisco, even Gable Hogue would never find her. She would be a wife, not a whore.

      
Alexa had insisted upon giving Roxanna her power of attorney. All she needed to do was withdraw sufficient funds from Alexa's account to travel to Wyoming...to meet her bridegroom. Shivering in spite of the warm spring weather, Roxanna stiffened her spine and took a deep breath. “I'll do it!”

Chapter Two

      
“Nothin’ out there but miles 'n miles o' miles n' miles, thet's fer sure,” the old driver said as he spit a glob of noisome blackish tobacco into the dust. It landed at Roxanna's feet with a plop. The leathered skin of his face was creased by a thousand tiny wrinkles, looking as sandblasted as the desolate rolling hills that surrounded them. ‘Time ta mount up 'n skeedaddle if we want ta reach the next way station by dark.”

      
Without further ado, Jack Rabbit Sam scrambled up onto the driver's box of the battered old coach Jubal MacKenzie had chartered for “his granddaughter.”
      
Roxanna, now Miss Alexa Hunt, was left to fend for herself, which suited her just fine, since Jack Rabbit was dirty enough to sell as real estate. With a sigh, she climbed through the high narrow door. The interior was a bit shopworn and dusty but plush nonetheless, with faded maroon velvet upholstery.

      
She sank back into the lumpy cushions and gazed out the window as the coach took off with a lurch. The Nebraska panhandle was as desolate as the rest of the seemingly endless plains following the tortuous course of the Platte River. Gradually the rippling prairie short grass had begun to give way to sand hills covered with undulating coyote willow. On the distant western horizon the jagged Rockies brooded, sentinels overseeing the harsh, vast emptiness that was the High Plains. So stark and barren was the land ahead, said one newspaper account, that it could not even rise to the rank of howling wilderness. Roxanna, raised in the rich farm country of northern Missouri, agreed.

      
At least if she went through with the marriage arrangement, her groom would take her to live in San Francisco, a civilized enough city, from all reports. Would she marry this Lawrence Powell? What sort of a man agreed to wed a woman sight unseen, just to further his wealthy family's ambitions? As she mulled that over, Roxanna’s mind skittered over the incredible speed with which her life had been swept along since she had written to her “grandfather.” Within the week a wire had arrived with detailed instructions for her journey west to join him in Dakota Territory, including the charter of this stage which would take her all the way into the new rail center called Cheyenne, named for a fierce and warlike tribe of savages marauding across the region.

      
Roxanna shivered, wishing again that the cavalry escort she had been given from Fort Kearny could have continued farther west with them. But the commanding officer had ordered his men to ride down the South Platte, searching for a band of raiders who had attacked a relay station sixty miles east on the trail.

      
Forcing aside thoughts about scalping savages, she considered the new life she was beginning. Jubal MacKenzie's letter and subsequent wire indicated a certain brusque businesslike efficiency, yet there were hints of warmth, even humor in the missive. The latter qualities were unexpected from a man who would arrange a marriage beneficial for his business interests and then simply inform his granddaughter where and when she was to show up.

      
One thing was certain. Alexa's grandfather was a very rich, powerful man, used to getting his way. So, most probably, was Lawrence Powell. “Do your worst, gentlemen, I can hold my own,” Roxanna murmured grimly as the coach hit another rut in this fiction of a road, slamming her hard against the coach door. Was it her imagination or were they picking up speed? Jack Rabbit always cursed when he lashed the horses, but there seemed an extra edge in his voice now as the whip cracked viciously and the stage bounced and jerked like a child's top spinning out of control.