The Horseman (2 page)

“It
does
sound adventurous,” Bethanne
commented. “I suppose an exciting life the likes you have lived
would be preferable to the simple days and nights we all of us
linger in here.”

It was then that Briney could no longer bury
her disappointment at having been so lonesome for so long. As tears
welled in her eyes, she looked to Bethanne, placed a firm hand on
her friend’s arm, and said, “No, the path that brought me here was
not a joyous one, Bethanne. It was lonely, solitary in so many
ways, and entirely void of any mirth and laughter that was my own.
I would not wish it on anyone, other than those who have had to
endure the worse existence of life in an orphanage or asylum. You
have had a wonderful, beautiful life, filled with family, love, and
joy. No sort of luxurious travel, no lingering in the shadow of the
Taj Mahal or any other edifice of history, can compare to a simple
life bursting with friends, family, and even hard work. Always
remember that. Your upbringing was a blessing…and the stuff of my
dreams.”

Briney heard Mr. Kelley clear his throat. She
and Bethanne glanced at him quickly, only to look back to one
another with grins of mild amusement at the fact they’d seen him
dabbing tears from his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.

“Well, I best get back to my business,” Mr.
Kelley mumbled. “But I will say that we’re mighty glad you landed
here with us, Briney Thress. Mighty glad. We might not be the Taj
Mahal, but we’ve got good food, comfortable rooms, and a hell of a
lot more character than the old bat who brought you here and then
up and died on ya. I hope you’ll stay on as long as you like with
us.”

Briney smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Kelley,” she
told him. “And I hope you mean that, because I don’t plan on
leaving any time soon.”

“Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that,
Briney!” Bethanne squealed, throwing her arms around her friend. “I
was afraid you might not like our simple way of life, that you
might decide you still wanted to travel.”

Returning Bethanne’s warm embrace, Briney
sighed. “Not at all,” she assured her friend. “I would be perfectly
content to never have to board another ship or even a train for
that matter…not ever again!”

“I gotta go slop the hogs,” Mr. Kelley
mumbled, again wiping the moisture of emotion from his eyes with
his shirtsleeve.

He strode away then, and when he was gone,
Bethanne giggled, whispering, “Daddy’s a tenderhearted soul, no
matter how hard he tries to convince us otherwise. He didn’t mean
to sound so…so…callous about poor Mrs. Fletcher’s passin’.”

Briney nodded her reassurance to Bethanne
that she wasn’t at all offended. “Oh, I know that.” She shrugged,
adding, “And besides, he’s correct in his observations.”

Bethanne breathed a sigh of relief in knowing
her father hadn’t offended Briney.

“Well, I think you’ve had enough chaos and
worry these past few days to last a body a lifetime,” Bethanne
began. “So why don’t you run on up to your room and rest a while?
Read a book or…or just take a little nap or somethin’. I’ll come
and get you for supper.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly just…just do nothing
at all,” Briney argued, however. She felt abruptly nervous and
unsettled. She wasn’t at all used to having time to herself.

“Of course you can!” Bethanne exclaimed.
“Why, you’ve done nothing but send telegrams, prepare Mrs.
Fletcher’s belongin’s, mourn, and worry these past three days. You
need some rest.” Bethanne grinned mischievously, lowered her voice
to a whisper, and added, “I left a couple of my favorite dime
novels up in your room for ya. Although I’m sure Mrs. Fletcher
would not have approved of you readin’ the likes of stories about
cowboys and outlaws.”

Briney’s smile broadened. “All the more
reason to read them then,” she giggled in a whisper.

Bethanne laughed. “Then it’s settled! You run
on up and rest or read or whatever you have a mind to do. I’ll see
you at supper, all right?”

“All right,” Briney agreed. All at once she’d
realized just how tired she really was. It had indeed been three
very long, very taxing, very emotional days, and she imagined a bit
of respite and time to think without Mrs. Fletcher and her passing
to worry about would be very restful.

“And by the way, Briney,” Bethanne called
after her, “a black ribbon is plenty good enough for mournin’ after
your Mrs. Fletcher, at least out here in our neck of the woods. Why
don’t you wear somethin’ bright and happy when you come down for
supper?”

Briney paused in ascending the stairs and
looked back to Bethanne in astonishment. “Oh, surely you can’t be
in earnest, Bethanne!” she exclaimed. “Why, I’m sure I’m meant to
wear all black crape for at least six months! I can’t just—”

“You certainly can, Briney,” Bethanne said,
placing her hands on her hips to emphasize her firmness of opinion.
“Out here, folks don’t stand so hard on black crape for mourning,
even for widows. Why, the longest I’ve ever seen a widow in black
here in Oakmont was when ol’ Mrs. Ada Rose Josephson lost her
husband, Mr. Josiah Josephson. Mrs. Josephson wore black crape and
a veil for all of two months and then nearly passed out from the
heat one day while walkin’ through town. She took to wearing just a
black hat after that.” Bethanne shook her head. “You’re a bright
young woman, Briney, and your life is your own now. No one ‘round
here will give a second thought to you not bein’ shrouded in black
like the grim reaper.” Bethanne folded her arms across her chest,
adding, “And besides, Mrs. Fletcher…she wasn’t even your kin in
truth now, was she?”

Briney couldn’t help but smile at Bethanne.
She was standing at the foot of the stairs looking so determined
that she quite convinced Briney.

“Well, things out here do seem to differ very
broadly from back east,” Briney admitted.

“Yep! And that’s how we like it,” Bethanne
confirmed. “So no black crape at supper, okay? It’ll ruin
everybody’s meal anyhow.”

Briney allowed a quiet giggle to escape her
throat—a giggle Mrs. Fletcher would have entirely disapproved
of.

“Very well. No more black crape,” Briney
agreed.

Bethanne nodded with approval.

Briney was still smiling when she reached her
small but comfortable room. Bethanne Kelley was a very
strong-minded young woman—a confident young woman who seemed never
to doubt herself, her abilities, or her decisions. Briney hoped to
one day have the strength of character and self-belief Bethanne
had.

Briney exhaled a heavy sigh as she stripped
off the uncomfortable black crape dress she’d been wearing for the
past three days. It was the most uncomfortable dress she owned, and
she was glad to free her body of its dismal black. Though she knew
she would struggle in changing her ways from the proper, polite
practice of perfect etiquette demanded by Mrs. Fletcher, Briney was
inwardly exuberant at the anticipation of a more informal way of
life the likes lived in small western towns like Oakmont.

She’d thought she’d be wearing the gloomy
black crape for six months, in the least. And the sudden knowledge
that she could cast it aside and wear whatever she chose lifted her
spirits to a height she’d not known since she was a child.

Briney rather plopped down on her comfortable
bed, closing her eyes as the breeze from the open window next to it
breathed over her. The lace of the curtains tickled her nose as
they wafted to and fro as the fragrant breeze manipulated them, and
she giggled, thinking how utterly mortified Mrs. Fletcher would be
to know that Briney was lying on her bed in nothing but her
undergarments—and doing nothing at all.

Still, her respite was short-lived, for there
was one task that needed tending before Briney could relax
altogether. The money must be hidden!

Oh, it wasn’t that Briney hadn’t already
hidden the money. She’d hidden it the moment Mrs. Fletcher had
given it to her, only hours before the poor old woman had passed.
But with all the preparations Briney had found herself making in
order to have Mrs. Fletcher’s earthly remains transported back to
New York to her family, Briney hadn’t really had the time to
consider a truly safe hiding place for the money.

Sitting upright on her bed, Briney went to
the traveling trunk at the foot of it—the trunk that kept safe all
of her sentimental possessions and a few necessities as well.
Opening the trunk, Briney carefully removed items, setting them
aside, until she uncovered the two old biscuit tins Mrs. Fletcher
had presented to her.

As Briney removed the tins from the trunk,
she was once more struck by the weight of them. Yet what had she
expected? One thousand silver dollars should be heavy! Setting
aside the biscuit tins full of coins, Briney removed a tobacco tin
from inside the trunk. This was the tin that Briney worried most
about losing—the tobacco tin filled with $1,500 worth of banknotes
of various denominations. To Briney, the silver coins in the
biscuit tins simply seemed more durable than the paper money in the
tobacco tin. Regardless of which form of the money was to be
worried over the most, she knew that both the coins and the
banknotes needed to be hidden, for it was all she had in the world
with which to provide for herself the necessities of life.

As Briney glanced around her room, she knew
that it would be wise to divide the money and hide it in several
different locations, rather than hiding it all together for one
burglar to stumble across. But she was tired from the demands of
the past few days and therefore chose a hiding place nearby that
would serve better than the obvious trunk of valuables.

She began in the wardrobe, searching the back
paneling for any loose boards that might prove a secure place to
keep at least some of the money. When the wardrobe proved to be no
help, Briney investigated the chest of drawers but decided a drawer
would be as obvious a place as a trunk to look if one were robbing
someone.

At last, Briney determined there was no good
place to hide Mrs. Fletcher’s gift—not in her boardinghouse room
anyway. She would need to find another place to keep it, perhaps
out away from town somewhere—maybe buried under a tree or bush. But
in order to cache the money away from town, Briney knew she would
need some sort of conveyance or at least a horse.

Pure exhilaration welled in Briney at once
then, and she whispered, “A horse! A horse of my very own!”

Opening the tobacco tin, she gazed at the
banknotes with in. A twenty-dollar note lay on top of the pile of
notes. “I’ll buy my own horse!” she giggled to herself.

Oh, all her life Briney had dreamt of owning
a horse—a horse she could ride at her leisure, ride whenever and
wherever she wanted to go. And now, as she stood in her lovely
little boardinghouse room, staring down at the wealth of money in
the tobacco tin, she knew that she had the ability to make her
dream come true for herself.

“Yes!” she said, still smiling as she tucked
the two biscuit tins and one tobacco tin back into the deepest part
of her trunk. “Tomorrow I’ll buy a horse! And I’ll ride it out to
wherever I want!”

Plopping down on her bed once more, she
sighed. “And I’ll ride my horse astride instead of sidesaddle. For
I’m a woman of the west now, and I mean to avoid black dresses,
ride astride on my magnificent horse, and feel the wind in my hair
and the sun on my face completely careless of whether or not I turn
freckled for it!”

And then, for the first time in a decade—as
the late summer breeze blew the lace curtains of the window out
over her bed and body to soothe and lull her—Briney Thress fell
asleep in the very middle of the day, without one concern of
whether she would be scolded for it.

*

“In my day, mourning was simply miserable!”
Mrs. Abbot said. “A widow was required to wear black crape head to
toe for the entire first year. I remember my poor mother being so
miserable in that crape after Daddy passed. It wasn’t bad enough
that she was left alone with us eight children and a broken heart;
society demanded that she be in physical misery as well.” Mrs.
Abbot shook her white-haired head, adding, “I’m glad things out
west here are different where mourning rituals are concerned.”

“I certainly concur,” Mr. Davenport agreed.
“Women had the worst of it, of course. And it seemed like every
woman and child in every town was draped in black during the war.
And I don’t think that did one bit of good toward raising folks’
spirits none then either.”

“Goodness no,” Mrs. Abbot replied.

He nodded his own white-haired head at Mrs.
Abbot and smiled at her. Briney knew, by the look of understanding
that passed between the two eldest boarders at the boardinghouse,
that they had both lived war-torn lives and thus had a knowledge of
how truly painful life could be—a knowledge the others at the table
did not own.

“Well, I think that even though Mrs.
Fletcher, God rest her soul, was your guardian, Miss Thress…I think
a black ribbon round your arm there is plenty of mourning garb for
a young girl like you,” Mrs. Kelley offered. “She wasn’t a blood
relative, after all…God rest her soul.”

“See?” Bethanne said, smiling at Briney. “I
told you no one would think anything at all of your not wearing
full mourning dress. Things are different in Oakmont.”

Briney nodded, feeling more relieved than
ever. She didn’t want to show any disrespect toward Mrs. Fletcher,
but neither did she want to dress all in stiff, itchy black crape
for a woman who had treated her more like a slave than a ward.

“And now that that’s settled,” Mr. Kelley
began, “have you had any ideas of what you’d like to do with your
life now, Briney?”

“Walt, don’t press the girl!” Mrs. Kelley
quietly scolded her husband. “For Pete’s sake! She’s only just put
the woman on a train this very day.”