Rose's Mail Order Husband - A Historical Mail Order Bride Story (Montana Brides) (8 page)

“But how can the men have missed him if he’s on foot?” Rose asked.

“They wouldn’t have known where to look,” Iris replied. “That magnolia tree grows way up in one of the side canyons off the river. They wouldn’t have been anywhere near it.”

“So what are we going to do?” Rose studied Iris’s outline in the dark. “I thought you wanted to tell the Sheriff everything you knew to keep yourself free from suspicion. You
didn’t tell him you knew where Jake was. Why didn’t you?”

“We can wait until the men leave tomorrow morning,” Iris replied. “Then we can go find him. But I’ll only take you there on one condition.”

“What is it?” Rose asked.

“You have to promise me,” Iris continued, “that you’ll convince Jake to turn himself in peacefully.
We’ll bring him back to the house so the minister can marry you. But after that, he has to agree, and you have to agree, that he’ll go with the Sheriff without a fight. You’re my sister, and I want to do what I can to help you marry the man you want to marry, but after that, he has to face the law without offering any resistance. Do you understand?”

“Oh, Iris!”
Rose cried. “Thank you so much!”

“Keep your voice down!” Iris hissed. “You’ll wake the living dead, carrying on like that!”

“Iris, you’re a saint!” Rose breathed. “I agree to everything you ask. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for this.”

“Don’t thank me,” Iris returned. “I’m doing this as much for Mick as I am for you. I just
can’t stand the idea of these men getting into a gun fight bringing Jake in. Any of our men could get killed if that happens.”

“I promise,”
Rose declared, “I’ll do everything in my power to convince him to turn himself in. I want Jake back as much as anybody else. I can’t bear the thought of him fighting with the Sheriff.”

“All right,” Iris replied. “Stay in your room and keep quiet. When the men come in to breakfast tomorrow morning, just stay in here and pretend to be distracted with grief.
I’ll meet the men in the dining room until they leave for the day. After we’re sure they’re good and gone, we’ll leave.”

“Thank you, Iris!” Rose exclaimed. “Thank you so much! I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

Iris smiled and patted her on the leg. “You just did. I’ll come and get you after the men leave tomorrow.” She slipped out of the room as silently as she came.

The rest of the night passed in a ferment of excitement for Rose. If she dozed before Iris’s visit, she never closed her eyes once afterwards. The moment she laid down on the bed, she bounced
off of it and paced around the room. She checked the color of the sky outside her window a thousand times. When she found it still pitch black, she threw herself down on her bed and tried without success to sleep again.

The first glimmer of dawn brightened the sky only aggravated her more than ever. How long did it take three men to have breakfast?
Weren’t they supposed to be in hot pursuit of a dangerous fugitive? Why didn’t they leave already?

At long last
, the men sauntered out to the barn, got their horses saddled, and rode away. Rose watched them disappear into the horizon, only to find Iris at her side. “Let’s go.”

“Not just yet,” Iris countered. “Just wait a little longer. We don’t want them coming back and finding us gone.”

“How long do we have to wait?” Rose grumbled.

“It’s not just the men,” Iris told her. “Violet and Rita are starting the weekend laundry in a little while. We should wait just long enough to make it look like we’re disappearing to get out of work.”

Rose giggled. “You think of everything, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to get caught,” Iris argued, “and I don’t want Violet getting in trouble, either. If we
get caught, I want Violet to be able to claim in all honesty that she never knew we were gone. Violet is too good to get mixed up in this. She’s defended you and Jake against all odds. We need to make sure she doesn’t take any of the blame for helping either one of you.”

“You’re right,” Rose admitted.

“I’ll go down to the kitchen and find out what they’re doing,” Iris told her. “When they start boiling the water, I’ll make myself scarce, and we can go. Then Violet won’t see us riding away. She’ll be too busy to look out the window.”

She ducked out of the room, and Rose rested little bit easier knowing what she was waiting for. She expected Iris to come get her, so she jumped with surprise when she saw Iris crossing the yard toward the barn.

She turned around with her hand on the barn door and waved to Rose in her window, beckoning her to join her. Rose rushed down the stairs without even grabbing a shawl first. She paused on the lowest step just long enough to listen for Violet and Rita’s voices in the kitchen. Then she snuck out and raced for the barn.

In the dusty shadows of the barn, Rose found Iris saddling Jake’s horse. “Why don’t you get Paddy out?” Iris suggested.

“Can’t we ride this one together?” Rose asked. “Why do we need two?”

“You and I can ride Jake’s horse on the way out there,” Iris reminded her, “but once we find Jake, he’ll need another one to ride or he’ll be walking back. Anyway, you can ride a horse as well as I can, so you might as well.”

“True,” Rose admitted.

“When was the last time you rode?” Iris asked. “It must be years. I can’t remember the last time I saw you on the back of a horse.”

“Neither can
I, now that you mention it,” Rose remarked.

“You used to be a terror when you were younger,” Iris recalled. “You used to give Cornell grey hairs with your exploits.”

Rose chuckled. “He worried about me a lot more than he worried about you, and look how that turned out.”

Iris laughed along with her. “Now’s your chance to put all that riding to good use. Now go get Paddy out and let’s get out of here before someone starts to wonder where we are.”

Rose saddled up Paddy, the Appaloosa gelding. “It really has been a long time,” she told Iris. “I’d forgotten how relaxing and satisfying it is to work with horses.”

Iris shot her a sidelong glance. “You look happier now than I’ve seen you in a long time. I’ve been worried about you for a while now.”

“Maybe it’s just the excitement of seeing Jake again,” Rose suggested. “I’ve been beside myself ever since he took off.”

“I don’t think so,” Iris argued. “You’ve been sitting in your room staring at the wall for months—years, in fact. Violet has noticed it, too. It
isn’t good for you. You need to get out and get some air once in a while.”

Rose passed the cinch belt under Paddy’s belly. “You’re right. I guess I just expected that my life would change after I got married. I put all my hopes on moving out of the Main House and up to the Bird House. I thought my life would change when that happened, and I just sat there waiting until it did.”

“No wonder you were so unhappy,” Iris replied. “Anybody would be, thinking all their happiness was in the future instead of now.”

“I never thought of myself as unhappy,” Rose told her. “I was just waiting. I
didn’t think about now at all. I only ever thought about the future.”

Iris shook her head. “Well, now is now, and you better deal with it now, otherwise it the future will never happen.”

“I never really thought about it before,” Rose repeated.

“Are you ready?” Iris asked.

“Yes,” Rose answered. “Let’s go.”

The two sisters led their horses out the back door of the barn, where they
couldn’t be seen from the house. Then they swung up into their saddles. Iris kicked her heels hard against her horse’s flanks, and he shot forward, across the pasture, toward the western ranges.

Without thinking, Rose did the same, and when Paddy rocketed after the other horse, Rose’s heart leapt into her throat.
She’d forgotten this part of horseback riding, too. The thrill of the horse’s living flesh surging underneath her, the wind whipping her hair out of her face, and the ground falling away under the horse’s pounding feet—how could she have lived all these years without this? What was life, without this exhilaration, this ecstasy?

She never envied Iris her work on the range until now. To think that Iris enjoyed this
life-giving joy, the glory of the sun and wind and rain every day, all year round. And she, Rose, sat at her dressing table, staring and seeing nothing, experiencing nothing.

All these years, she scorned Iris for her rough, dirty life. In
actual fact, it was her, Rose, who moldered away in a half-mummified death state in the back upper room of the house. Iris may have been dirty and her hands callused, but at least she was alive.

She
wouldn’t let this happen again. She would never go back to her dressing table mirror. No matter what happened with Jake, she would never settle for a life without the sun, the wind, horseflesh, work, and the company of her sisters and their families.

Iris kept her horse galloping full tilt across the open plane, but Rose caught up with her. She never restrained Paddy for an instant, but gave him
all the rein his head would take. Sensing her eagerness, he stretched his neck forward and unleashed all his great energy in running. He drew up level with Jake’s horse, and Rose urged him forward with her legs. He took her signal and pulled ahead of Iris’s horse.

Rose laughed
out loud, but the wind tore the sound out of her throat. The sound ringing up from her innermost soul combined laughing, singing, and flying. She never experienced anything like it.

Iris slowed to a walk when they reached the mouth of the canyon, and Rose fell in at her side. Her cheeks flushed bright pink, and her black hair hung free on her shoulders.

Iris glanced sideways at her. “Are you okay?”

Rose nodded and smiled. “I forgot about this.”

Iris cocked her head. “Which part?”

“I forgot what it felt like to ride so fast,” Rose explained. “It’s like flying. I forgot that.”

Iris shook her head. “It’s been way too long for you. I could understand Violet staying in the house and playing into Cornell’s hands. In a way, she had no choice, but the job of managing the house always suited her. But not you. It never made sense for you.”

“There was always Cornell,” Rose pointed out.

Iris shook her head. “You never had any reason to lock yourself away. You didn’t have to make Cornell happy. He always doted on you. You could have done whatever you wanted with him, and he would have been happy with it.”

Rose examined Iris. “It must have been hard for you, the way you stood up to him all these years and did what he didn’t want you to do. It must have been hard for you to be at odds with him for so long.”

Iris turned away. “You have no idea how hard it was.”

“I should have stood up for you against Cornell,” Rose considered. “I’m sorry now that I didn’t do more to help you.”

“And I’m sorry,” Iris replied, “that I said the things I did about you and Jake killing Cornell. Even if I believed that, I should have kept it to myself. I should have stood by you, whether you were guilty of it or not.”

“Cornell wasn’t a good man,” Rose told her. “He wasn’t the man we thought he was. He
didn’t deserve me getting along with him all these years. I shouldn’t have been so concerned with getting along with him. I should have stood up to him the way you did. I should have stood with you when you argued with him.”

Iris’s eyes flew open. “Since when did you become so down on Cornell? You never felt this way before.”

“I only came to realize what he was really made of after he died,” Rose told her. “I should have realized a long time ago that you and Violet were much more important than Cornell could ever be. I was foolish not to realize that.”

Iris colored and held out her hand to Rose between their horses. “Let’s make a pact right now that we won’t let that kind of divide come between us again.”

Rose grasped her hand, and the two sisters sealed their alliance with a smile.

They walked steadily through the canyon with the growing daylight spreading down the walls of the cliffs above them. Golden eagles screeched overhead, and scrub jays croaked in the tree branches near their heads.

Rose turned her face up to the sky and let Paddy find his own footing through the forest litter and dead branches on the ground.

“It’s awfully nice up here,” she remarked.

“Do you know,”
Iris told her, “Pete and Wade camp up here and along the river when they tend the cattle in the summer. I always wished I could join them, but I couldn’t risk Cornell finding out. Now Mick says we can come up here later in the summer and spend some time up here together. I can’t wait!”

“That sounds wonderful,” Rose exclaimed. “I envy you.”

“You could come up here, too,” Iris told her. “There’s nothing stopping you.”

Rose made a face. “Somehow I don’t think that would go over very well with being a wife and mother.”

“You’re not a wife and mother yet,” Iris pointed out. “Even if you marry Jake, you won’t be a mother for a while. You’ll have time to come out if you want to.”