Western Christmas Proposals: Christmas Dance with the Rancher / Christmas in Salvation Falls / The Sheriff's Christmas Proposal

And there she was, coat too light for this climate slung over her arm, tugging a battered tin trunk after her. She shook her head when one of the other passengers offered to help her. Maybe she thought she would have to tip them, and she had no money.

He took it from her, surprised how light it was. He thought of Mrs. Higgins’s own daughter, and her two trunks full of clothing and household goods, when she married a rancher near Sheridan, plus furniture. Katherine Peck had next to nothing. Maybe she saw Wyoming as a step up from the mills.

He gave her her ticket and tipped a young boy a quarter to wrestle her trunk aboard the westbound train, which steamed and waited—just barely—acting like a horse ready to race and held in check with some effort.

She followed him down the aisle and sat where he pointed. He sat next to her, after removing his duster and stowing it overhead, along with her coat. That coat would never do, but he didn’t feel bold enough to tell her.

They had some time to wait, and he did want to know more about her.

“I was wondering if you might have second thoughts about accepting my offer,” he said, more as small talk than serious conversation.

“No second thoughts,” she said. “Nay, not one.”

Nay? He asked himself. That’s quaint, but I can understand her better. “Will you go back to Massachusetts or Maine when you accumulate some savings?” he asked her, even though it pained him. He was not a man to pry.

“Not either place,” she said firmly. “I don’t aim to backtrack.”

There was so much he wanted to ask her, and it must have shown on his face. She stifled a little sigh, then folded her hands on her lap with an air of resolution. “I am, or was, a mill girl, from Lowell, Massachusetts,” she said. “I went to the mill at twelve years.”

“You have a fellow out here?” he asked.

“One of the mill’s floor managers has a cousin who farms near Lusk.”

“Ranches,” he corrected. “No one farms anything in Lusk.”

“Saul Coffin went there four months ago. He and I had an understanding.”

“Going to marry you?”

“Ayuh. A month ago he sent me part of the train fare. He was supposed to meet me here.” She looked at the back of the seat in front of them. “The Reverend Peabody said he told you what we think happened to Saul, uh, Mr. Coffin.”

“Lots of reasons a man can miss a train,” he said, suddenly not wishing to crush her with the likelihood of her fiancé’s death, even though she had already heard the worst. “Something delayed him, that’s all.”

“The reverend told me the same thing,” she said, looking at him now. “After you left, he and I walked to the sheriff’s office and told him where I would be, if someone came to inquire.”

“Wise of you. You may hear from him yet,” Ned said.

He could tell that she didn’t believe him, which made him wonder if she’d ever had a nice thing happen to her. He didn’t think there were many.

“Boooard! Boooard!” the conductor called.

Ned thought Miss Peck might look back at Cheyenne as they pulled out, but she kept her gaze directly in front of her. The town obviously held nothing for her except disappointment, something that she seemed to possess a lot of.

“Nothing here for you,” he commented, mostly just to fill an empty space.

“No, sir,” she agreed promptly.

“Christmas is coming,” Ned told her, then felt like a complete idiot. Of course it was coming! So was the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. New Year’s, too.

His chore girl saw right through his lame attempt at conversation. “That’ll do, Mr. Avery,” she said so kindly in the accent he was finding more charming, by the minute. “I don’t require idle chat. I’ll be your chore girl. You don’t need to worry any more.”

Maybe it was the saying of it, her quiet sort of confidence that intrigued him almost as much as her accent. He sat back, inclined to think she was right.

Chapter Three

Katherine Peck was not a talkative woman. He pulled out a copy of Roughing It he had bought in Cheyenne, but she had nothing to read. He stopped the candy butcher who came swaying down the aisle as the train picked up steam, and asked about his magazines.

“What would you like to read?” Ned asked.

Miss Peck shook her head. “No money.”

“I have some. What would you like?” He leaned closer. “You can read.”

“Ayuh,” she said, a little starch in her voice.

Ned picked out a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal, paid for it and handed it to her. “This do? May I call you Katherine? Most people call me Ned. A whole winter of you calling me Mr. Avery just might give me a case of the fantods.”

“Fantods?” she asked as she carefully placed the magazine on her lap, almost as though it were valuable beyond comprehension.

“What? No fantods in Maine?”

“Not that I know of.”

“The creeps. The heebie-jeebies. The fantods,” he explained. “When people call me Mr. Avery, I just naturally look around for my father. Call me Ned.”

“I will, if you’ll call me Katie,” she told him.

Her hand caressed the magazine. He could tell she was eager to start reading, but she was also polite, and he was her boss. “Katie? I thought you preferred...”

“I want a different name. Am I allowed?”

“Certainly. Many shady people come West and change their names.”

“I am not shady,” she told him. He thought he saw amusement in her eyes for the first time.

“Didn’t think you were, Katie.”

She turned her attention immediately to the treasure in her lap. He couldn’t help watching her from the corner of his eye, how she caressed the magazine, then turned the pages so slowly. Her satisfied sigh touched his heart.

He couldn’t help smiling through the first few chapters of Roughing It. He gave himself over to the story and had just finished the fifth chapter when the conductor shouted, “Laramie!”

He put down the book and stood up. “I’ll be right back,” he told Katie. To his amusement, she barely glanced up from the magazine.

He dashed into a hardware store on the block next to the depot and bought a doorknob with a key and two hinges. A quick lunge for a bag of lemon drops completed his stampede through Laramie. He made it back to the train just as the conductor was calling, “This train is ready to depart!”

He handed her the parcel. Without a word, she untied the twine that bound it and spread out the hardware.

“I can knock together a wall and a door,” he said. “Until your room is done, my brother and I will sleep in the barn. Shouldn’t be more than a day.”

Katie ducked her head, staring hard at the parcel in her lap. “When I was ten, my stepfather started to beat me,” she whispered. “When he thought to do other things more grievous, I ran away. I was twelve.”

God forgive me when I whine, Ned thought, appalled. “Won’t happen here,” he told her. “Have a lemon drop. Things are going to get better.”

Eyes still lowered, she took a lemon drop from the proffered bag. “You still want me to work for you?”

“Yes. Girls of ten or twelve don’t have much say in things, do they?”

She shook her head. “I walked to Massachusetts, sleeping in barns and doing odd jobs, and became a mill girl. I’ll be a good chore girl and I won’t run away.”

Kate put aside the magazine, and looked out the soot-grimed window, as if searching for scenery.

“You’re looking in the wrong direction, if you’re after scenery,” Ned told her, impressed with her bravery. He pointed across the aisle. “That seat’s empty. Take a look.”

Intrigued, she did, and was rewarded with an eye-filling view of a mountain rising out of all that empty space.

“Elk Mountain,” he said, coming across the aisle to sit beside her. “It’s the northernmost mountain in the Snowy Range. My ranch is by that river over there. We’re seven miles from Medicine Bow.”

“Practically next door to a town,” she added.

He liked her smile and her handsome high cheekbones. He liked even more that she thought to tease him. “Out West, that’s the truth,” he replied. “Pa was here early, so we have river acreage. He came with a railroad crew, laying this track that we’re riding on. He liked what he saw, and stayed.”

“How many acres?” she asked.

“Better question is, how many cattle do we run?”

“Well, then...”

“One thousand, all behind bob wire, because we learned our lesson sooner’n three years ago, when we had a bitch of a winter and the cattle all drifted and died. Pardon my language.”

She made a little gesture with her hand, and he continued. It still wasn’t a good memory. “Some of the ranchers twitted us earlier about fencing our property. Sure we lost cattle in ’87, but not as many as the stockmen whose beeves drifted.”

“What happened?”

“They’re mostly gone.”

“The tough survived?”

Just like you, he thought, impressed. “Guess so. You should do fine, Katie Peck.”

Chapter Four

To Katie’s eyes, Medicine Bow looked no better and no worse than Laramie, only smaller. She let Ned Avery take her tin trunk and followed him from the train. She waited on a bench by the stable while he and the liveryman hitched one horse to a small wagon, such as she had never seen back East.

“It’s a buckboard,” he said, as he helped her in. “One stop and we’ll head home.”

He pulled up in front of Bradley’s Mercantile. He must have ordered everything before he left Medicine Bow, because he came out in a few minutes with more wrapped packages, plus a paper bag, which he set in her lap.

“Pirozhki,” he said. “Some Roosians moved here from Nebraska and we can’t get enough of them. Two for each of us. Hand me one, once I get us over the tracks.”

She did as he said, enjoying her pork roll while he coaxed the horse across the railroad track. She handed him one, which he downed quickly, then the other, which disappeared about as fast. He protested when she offered him her second one, but not for long.

“Apples in the barrel behind you,” he said, and she produced two. “Barrel at home is nearly empty.” One satisfied her, but Ned needed two more apples.

“Just seven miles, so we’re practically in town,” he told her as they bumped along. She tried to brace herself so she wouldn’t nudge his shoulder, but the seat was so narrow. “I wanted to take my pa to Medicine Bow, where he could stay with the doctor and get better care, but he won’t have it.”

“Yours must be a nice place, if he won’t leave it.”

He shrugged. “Pa fought for the Confederacy, and came out here with nothing.”

“Your mother, too?”

“A little later. I was born in Mississippi. As soon as he had a holding out here, he sent for us.”

“Mr. Ave...”

“Ned.”

“No, it’s a Mr. Avery subject,” she insisted, which made him chuckle. “Mr. Avery, I can probably manage without a room of my own. I’m asking too much.”

He stopped the team. “Have you ever asked for anything before, Miss Peck?”

Embarrassed, she thought a moment. “I never dared.”

“I think maybe you’re overdue. It won’t kill Pete and me to spend a night in the barn.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it, because she wanted that room. “Very well.”

“Is the matter closed?”

“Yes.”

“Good thing, because I don’t like to argue about stuff that needs to happen.” Ned pointed to a spot where the road turned toward the river they had been paralleling. “We’ll be on Avery land soon.”

She hung on to the seat and pushed hard against the footboard as Ned guided his team into the river. She looked around, pleased with the bright yellow leaves that seemed to shiver as they passed. She thought of winter to come, and suppressed an involuntary shiver of her own.

“You need a warmer coat. Didn’t anyone ever look after you?”

“No.” She winced inside at how bleak and bald the word sounded, and she wondered just when she had gotten used to mostly nothing.

They topped a small rise, then Ned coaxed his horse down into a lovely valley. October winds may have been blowing cold, but she liked what she saw, except for what had to be Ned Avery’s home. She pointed.

“Yep. It’s a real sow’s ear. I guess we just got used to it,” he said, and she heard all the apology in his voice.

A body gets used to a lot of things, she thought, and wondered just when she had given up. Another thought struck her. For the first time since she couldn’t remember, someone was looking after her. It was a pleasant thought. She doubted Mr. Avery saw it that way, since he had made a business deal with her, but she felt herself relax, somewhere inside her body, or maybe it was her mind. She waited for the feeling to leave, but it seemed to settle in, like a cat on a hearth.

In a short time, she stood in the middle of a little kitchen, being introduced to a woman who looked as capable as Ned. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Higgins,” she said as they shook hands after Ned’s introduction.

A few whispered words to Ned, and Mrs. Higgins waved a cheery goodbye. In a few minutes, Kate heard hoofbeats.

“She watched Pa for me. This is Peter,” Ned said, and pulled a younger man closer, one with the same blond hair and build, but vacant blue eyes, with the same dark rim around lighter blue, but none of the intensity. “He does the best he can, most days.”

“Hi, Pete,” Katie said, and got a vague smile in return.

The rancher indicated the next room. “This is the sitting room.” He held his hands out, as if measuring the space. “I can build you a room right here. There won’t be a window—that would make it too cold.”

She followed him through the next connecting room. This room had a bed, and crates stacked on top of each other for clothing. “Pete and I sleep here. Wait. I’ll see how Pa is.”

She stood there, Peter beside her. He cleared his throat.

“Ned was looking for a chore girl.”

“He found one.”

“You can cook?”

“Pretty much anything you want to eat, Peter,” she told him. “You do like to eat, don’t you?”

Pete nodded, and then looked away, as if that was too much conversation.

She looked through the connecting arch to the next room, where Ned stood looking down. She went closer and saw Daniel Avery.

He was so thin, and probably not as old as he looked. She had already observed that the men out here had lots of wrinkles on their faces, sort of like sea captains from back home.

“Pa, this is our chore girl, Katie Peck,” Ned was saying. “She’ll be looking after you, after all of us, I guess.”

The older man looked at her, then carefully turned himself toward the wall. Kate sighed, wondering what it must feel like to be strong one day, then brought low by a heart ailment another day.

“Never mind, Mr. Avery,” she said. She touched his arm, then pulled the blanket a little higher. “I am here to help and that is all.”

“Don’t need...” the old man began, then stopped. His shoulders started to shake. “...help.”

Kate quietly left the room. Ned followed her, his expression more troubled than she wanted to see.

“I was afraid he might do that,” he said in apology. “He knows we need you, but his dignity...”

“Doesn’t matter,” she assured him. “You hired a chore girl and I will do my job.”

She said it quietly, as she said most things, as she had lived her own hard life that bore no signs of getting easier. She looked down at her hands, surprised to see that she still carried the doorknob and hinges. She knew other people must have epiphanies now and then—the minister said so—but she never expected one of her own. Here it came, filling her with peace. She handed the hardware to Ned Avery.

“I can do this,” she told him. “Just watch me.”

Chapter Five

Kate began her work in the morning, after a surprisingly comfortable night in the bed usually belonging to Pete and Ned Avery. Ned had insisted on changing the sheets the night before and she was glad of it, considering how dingy they seemed.

His eyes wide with surprise, Pete watched his brother make the bed. “He never tucked in anything before,” he told Katie.

Ned had turned around with a smile. “I can’t even trust a brother to watch my back,” he said. “Pete, you’re toast.”

Pete laughed out loud. Something in Ned’s eyes told Kate that no one had laughed in the Avery household in recent memory.

“No respect whatsoever,” Ned said with a shake of his head. He gathered up the nearly gray sheets, put his hand on Pete’s neck and pulled him from the room, but gently.

There wasn’t any privacy, not with the rooms connecting the way they did. As Ned tended to his father’s needs, she winced to hear Mr. Avery insisting that no chore girl would ever touch him.

“I don’t know how long it will take, but he’ll come around,” Ned had told her as he put on his coat. Katie heard the doubt in his voice. “Come on, Pete.”

I have many things to prove to Mr. Avery, Kate thought. She began in the kitchen, laying a fire in the range, a black monstrosity that, like everything in the house, needed a woman’s touch. She knew there would be Arbuckle’s and a grinder; soon the aroma of coffee spread through the house. She made a pot of oatmeal. By the time the brothers opened the door, ushering in frigid air with them, toast was out of the oven and buttered, and the oatmeal in bowls.

She stood by the table, her hands behind her back, pleased with herself, even though the meal was many degrees below ordinary.

“Don’t stand on ceremony,” Ned said as he sat down. He dumped the milk from a bucket into a deep pan and covered it, after taking out a cup of milk. “Join us.”

“I can wait until you are done,” she said.

“Maybe you could if you were the czar of Russia’s chore girl. I mean it. Get a bowl and join us.”

She did as he said. He pushed out the empty chair with his foot.

“Barn’s getting cold and Pete isn’t much fun to cuddle,” he said, as he took a sip of the coffee, nodded and raised the cup to her in salute. “Damn fine, Katie Peck. I’m going to build you a room today.”

And he did, after instructing her to move what little furniture the sitting room possessed to the other side of the doorway arch that cut the room into roughly two-thirds and a third. She did as he directed, coughing from the dust she raised.

“The only problem I have noticed with housework is that five or six months later, you have to do it all over again,” he commented, gesturing for Pete to pick up the other end of a settee.

Once the furniture was moved and the floor swept, Ned worked quickly, measuring and marking boards he had dragged from the barn with Pete’s help. When he gave her no assignment, Katie decided to tackle the stove, which hadn’t seen a good cleaning in years.

She found a metal pancake turner in the depths of a drawer of junk and scraped away on the range top until her shoulders hurt. All the time, Ned and Pete walked back and forth, bringing in more boards. After the fifth or so trip, Ned stopped to watch.

“Funny how this stuff built up and I continued to ignore it,” he told her, sounding more matter-of-fact than penitent, which scarcely surprised her. She was coming to know Ned Avery.

“A little attention every day—not much, really—keeps the carbon away,” she said, and surprised herself by thinking, Kind of like people.

“Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll surprise you. No peeking, now.”

She stopped long enough at noon to fix everyone jelly sandwiches and canned peaches, then continued into the afternoon until the stove was clean. The hammering continued, punctuated with laughter, which soothed her heart in strange ways.

With his own shy smile, Pete borrowed the kitchen broom.

“How does my new room in there look?” she asked, pretty certain that Pete would spill the beans, because his mind was too simple to keep a secret all the way from breakfast to supper.

Pete surprised her. “Not gonna tell. You have to wait.”

Impressed, Kate built a fire in the stove, determined to cook something better than sandwiches. Ned had already pointed out the smokehouse next door. She sliced off several steaks as her mouth watered. Even in her more enlightened place of employment in Massachusetts, meat was a rare treat administered only on holidays. Soon steaks and sliced potatoes sizzled. She opened another can of peaches and poured them into a bowl this time. She had found some pretty dishes that only needed a rinse.

She was about to call the brothers to the table when they came into the kitchen. Ned held out a key to her, just an ordinary skeleton key for a simple lock that anyone could pick, but which meant more to her than Ned Avery would ever know.

“Take a look.” He gestured her into the sitting room, or what remained of it.

She stared in surprise. “I... I thought you were going to carve a tiny space out of this side of the doorway,” she said, delighted. “Where will you sit in the evenings?”

“I already told you we use the kitchen for everything,” he reminded her, his eyes on her face.

Ned had turned the larger side of the sitting room into her bedroom, leaving only a small area on the other side of the open archway for a chair, settee and a table, the kind for books or magazines. She stared at the new wall and door, then opened the door and sighed with the pleasure of it all.

The bed was just a cot, perhaps an army cot scavenged from somewhere. Because her boss had given her the lion’s share of the former sitting room, it included the potbellied stove. He and Pete had dragged in one of the stuffed chairs and a footstool.

“I have another washbasin somewhere, and I can put up some pegs for your clothes. Sorry I don’t have a bureau.”

What could she say to such kindness? She barely knew this man, and he had given her something priceless—a room of her own, a safe one.

“Thank ye,” she managed, hoping tears wouldn’t well in her eyes. No employer wanted to hire a crybaby.

“Try it out,” her boss said.

She walked inside her room, her own room. She sat down in the chair and put her feet upon the footstool. I can sit here and reread my Ladies’ Home Journal, she thought. This might be the best winter of my life.

Chapter Six

Kate spent a peaceful night in her room, sitting for a while in the chair and reading, as she suspected wealthy people did. Her new bed was narrow and the mattress thin, but she had no complaint.

She debated whether to lock the door. Key in hand, she had the power, but the urgency was gone. She closed the door, and that was enough.

In the morning, she woke to angry voices in the back bedroom. Kate opened her door slightly and listened as Ned and his father argued about leaving him alone to the mercies of “a dratted female I can barely understand” while his sons rode fence today.

“Try a little harder, Dad,” Ned said.

“What for?” his father shot back. “You know I’m dying, I know I’m dying, and that...female with the damn fool accent knows I’m dying!”

“I guess because it’s the civilized thing to do,” Ned replied, and he sounded so weary.

“You don’t need me,” Daniel Avery argued. “You can run this ranch.”

“Did it ever occur to you that we love you?” Ned asked, sounding more exasperated than weary now, and driven to a final admission, maybe one hard for a man not used to frills, if love was a frill.

Katie dressed quickly, pleased to see that Ned or Pete—likely Ned—had laid a fire in the cookstove. While the argument about her merits and demerits continued in the back room at a lower decibel, she deftly shredded potatoes and put them in a cast-iron skillet to fry.

She silently ordered the argument down the hall to roll off her back. She was the chore girl and she was getting through a winter doing something she hadn’t planned on, because Saul Coffin, drat his hide, had a temper. Sticks and stones, she thought. That’s all it is.