Montana Mail Order Bride Read online

  LILY WILSPUR

  Montana Mail Order Bride

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Lucy Palmer stepped off the train and tossed her long red hair behind her. She sniffed the hard clear air and grimaced. “Excuse me,” she said to a gentleman next to her. “Could you tell me if this is Great Falls?”

  “This?” The man smiled under his waxed moustache. “This is Billings. You still have a long way to go before you reach Great Falls.” He cocked his head and examined Lucy. “The conductor should have announced which station you were coming to.”

  Lucy tossed her head again. She’s acquired the habit from her friend, Priscilla, back home in Muncie. She used it to express her annoyance when circumstances made any other expression of it socially unadvisable.

  “Oh, I’m sure he announced it,” she shot back. “But I didn’t hear him. I was asleep. I didn’t know we were coming into a station until people started getting out of their seats and slamming their luggage around. That’s what woke me up.”

  Lucy shot the man a glance, just long enough to see him watching and listening to her. He looked too young to be wearing a suit like that, with the waist coat buttoned up underneath the jacket. His hat looked like something he’d stolen from his father’s closet. He kept shifting his arms inside the suit as though he wasn’t used to wearing fine clothes.

  She smoothed down her dress and wrinkled her nose at the surrounding train station. “And these stations all look the same to me,” she continued. “They all have the same dirty, lifeless appearance, the same layer of dust covering everything.”

  She didn’t see the man’s lips twitching with a secret smile under his moustache. “Are you heading to Great Falls?”

  “No,” she replied. “I’m going on to Kalispell.”

  The man’s eyes flew open. “Well, then, you have a very long way to go, haven’t you?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Lucy muttered.

  “We’re a couple hundred miles from Great Falls now,” the man told her. “Beyond that, Kalispell is another—-oh, I don’t know. Three or four hundred more miles, I’d say.”

  “What?” Lucy gasped.

  “And the trip from Great Falls to Kalispell is getting up into the mountains, so it takes much longer.” The man nodded toward the mountains rising dark and distant to the West. “I guess you came up from Denver. Did you?”

  “Of course,” Lucy replied.

  “Well,” the man continued. “That trip is pretty flat, all in all. Great Falls to Kalispell is steep and curvy. The train goes much slower.”

  Lucy groaned. “And Kalispell isn’t even the end of my journey! I have to travel by coach to my final destination from there.”

  “Really?” the man asked. “And where is your final destination?”

  Lucy waved her hand toward the same mountains. “I don’t really know. I only know I’m getting off the train in Kalispell. Then I’m going by coach from there. The arrangements are all made.”

  The man narrowed his eyes. “I don’t understand you, Miss.”

  Lucy didn’t like the direction this conversation was going. She didn’t like telling strangers her circumstances. But the tedious train journey left her starved for someone to talk to. She would never see this man again. She might as well talk to him. He could take her secret with him when he got off the train.

  “I’m a mail-order bride,” she told him. “I’m meeting my groom in Kalispell, and he’s taking me the rest of the way to his home up in the mountains.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of that.” The man tipped his hat. “Well, you’re the first mail-order bride I’ve met. Congratulations—or, pleased to meet you—or whatever a person is supposed to say to someone like you.”

  Lucy stiffened. “Someone like me?”

  “A mail-order bride,” the man explained.

  His manner irritated her. She turned away. “Well, thank you anyway.” The blood rushed to her cheeks. She wasn’t ending this impromptu interview very gracefully, but she had to get out of it.

  Luckily, the train whistle sounded at that moment, and she strode back over to the car. She stepped across the threshold of the door into the car. Someone stepped into the car behind her. She glanced back and saw the same man following her.

  He smirked at her and tipped his hat. “Howdy, Miss.”

  Lucy scowled at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m getting on the train,” he replied. “Is that all right with you?”

  “You’re not following me, are you?” she asked.

  “I’m traveling up to Great Falls.” He laughed at her. “What did you think I was standing on the platform for? My health?”

  Lucy whirled away. “I didn’t give you or your travel plans the slightest thought.”

  She pushed her way through the bustle of passengers and found her same seat by the window. She gazed out at the bleak landscape. The train lurched forward, and the other passengers rustled into seats of their own.

  The sun-scorched ground outside the train slipped away under the wheels, but the mountains in the distance didn’t move. They anchored the rest of the world. People and trains and rivers might move and travel around, but those inscrutable peaks held their fixed position and let everything else revolve around them. Lucy didn’t like them. She liked butterflies and goldfinches and bumble bees.

  She felt a movement next to her and glanced around. Here was the same man, taking the seat next to her. “I think that seat is taken,” she told him.

  He looked around. “By who? It looks to me like everyone’s already sitting somewhere.”

  Lucy looked over the back of her seat. “There was a lady sitting here.”

  The man settled himself into the seat. “Well, she isn’t here now. If she comes back, I’ll move.”

  Lucy compressed her lips. The men out West didn’t treat women the same way men did in the East. They treated women roughly. They expected women to take care of themselves rather than lending a helping hand or trying to protect them from the weather. Maybe they were just used to a different class of women.

  Well, she would show them she wasn’t that kind of woman. She expected a man to treat her like the hothouse flower she was. Lucy smoothed her dress down again. The dress was much too fine to wear on a long journey like this. But she persisted in wearing it, even if it became damaged or soiled. She had to make an example for these Frontier people. She had to show them what women were really made of.

  Chapter 2

  The man next to her didn’t seem at all impressed by her dress, or by anything else. Maybe he was just playing coy. Well, she didn’t have to talk to him if she didn’t want to. He didn’t seem like the kind of man she wanted to talk to anyway.

  So, why had she told him she was a mail-order bride? She didn’t have to do that, and she usually made it a policy not to share her personal information with strangers. Still, something about him intrigued her. He gazed past her out the window, and when he caught her looking at him, he smiled as though he expected it.

  “It’s a heck of a country out there,” he observed.

  “It sure is big,” Lucy replied. “I didn’t expect it to be so big. I can’t understand it, really.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. “What’s not to understand?”

  “I can’t explain it,” Lucy remarked. “It just seems,
sometimes, that the land out there,” She nodded toward the window. “It seems like a person sometimes. I’m not explaining it very well, but it seems like a personality to me, and not a personality that likes me very much. It seems like it knows me and doesn’t think very much of me at all.”

  Lucy found the man staring into her face. His eyes glinted. “I think I understand what you mean. I think I know the personality you’re talking about, but I think I know it a little bit better than you do. I think it might be a friend of mine, or maybe even a close relative. I think I have an understanding with it. You get that kind of understanding with the land when you’ve lived with it for a long time.”

  “Maybe that’s why I don’t like it very much,” Lucy replied. “I’m a stranger to it.”

  The man lowered his eyelids briefly instead of shrugging. “Most strangers find it welcoming. A lot of people coming out to the Frontier for the first time find their places and fit right in. They say they feel like they’ve come home at last.”

  “Is that the way it was for you?” Lucy asked.

  “I was born here,” the man replied. “I was born in Kalispell, so I’ve lived up in the mountains most of my life.”

  “I don’t think I could ever feel at home in those mountains,” Lucy remarked. “I don’t think they would have me.”

  “But you’re going to live there,” the man pointed out. “You’re going to marry a man there and live there, probably for the rest of your life.”

  Lucy groaned. “Don’t remind me.”

  The man’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “What? What are you saying? No one made you become a mail-order bride, I guess. You don’t have to go, if you feel that way about it.”

  “You’re right. No one made me,” Lucy admitted. “But I didn’t know the mountains would be so…I don’t know…so dominating. I didn’t know they would dominate a person’s life—like a tyrant.”

  “Tyrant!” the man repeated. “Hardly!”

  “But you must know what I mean,” Lucy insisted. “You must understand how they dominate a person’s life.”

  Now he really did shrug. “I certainly understand how they take a lot of your attention. People around here think about them a lot, and a lot of what people do out here depends on what’s going on with the mountains, how the weather is blowing in, and all that.”

  “It’s more than that,” Lucy replied. “It’s not just the land that has a personality. The land determines the personalities of all the people in the territory. They grow out of this land like the trees and the grass. They take all the substance of their being from it. But listen to me! I’m babbling away like an idiot!”

  The man’s eyes shot straight through her. “You’re not an idiot. You’re making a lot of sense. I’ve never talked to anyone about these things before. I shouldn’t be talking to you about them without being properly introduced.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Adam Foley.”

  She shook his hand and smiled at him. “I’m Lucy Palmer, of Muncie, Indiana.”

  “Good old Muncie,” he replied.

  “Do you know it?” she asked.

  “I’ve been there,” he told her. “But I didn’t stay. It’s like you say. When a person grows from the land and from the mountains, they belong there. They don’t grow well when they are transplanted somewhere else.”

  “I guess that doesn’t bode well for me, does it?” she remarked.

  Adam shrugged again. “You never know. You might find a home for yourself. I know a lot of women who come out to the Frontier who fall in love with the mountains. Pretty soon, they don’t want to live anywhere else.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely to happen to me,” Lucy replied.

  Adam snorted. “If you’re determined not to fit in, then you won’t. You can’t blame the land for that. Maybe you’re just not the type of person who can be at home here.” His eyes slid downward to her dress.

  So he had noticed. Maybe he wasn’t as impenetrable as he pretended to be. She began to see him in a different way. He looked less like a rogue element and more like a man with a beating heart. Still, he wasn’t like any man she’d ever met before.

  Chapter 3

  “So who’s your man?” Adam asked.

  Lucy bristled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Who’s the man you’re on your way to marry?” he asked. “I know a lot of people up in Kalispell. Maybe I know your….what do you call ‘em?”

  “My groom,” Lucy told him. “The man I’m going to marry is called my groom. But to answer your question, his name is Joel Bloom.”

  Adam shook his head. “I don’t know him.”

  “I told you, he doesn’t live in Kalispell,” Lucy reminded him. “He lives out in the mountains somewhere.”

  “What does he do out there?” Adam asked.

  Lucy waved her hand. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Adam put his head on the side. “Didn’t you bother to find out before you agreed to marry him?”

  Lucy shook her head. “My grandfather handled all the communications with him. I didn’t pay much attention to that sort of thing. I guess he does something with animals. Isn’t that what most people do out in the Wild West? Maybe he’s a cowboy or a horse wrangler. I don’t really know.”

  “Sounds like a marriage made in heaven,” Adam remarked.

  “I just wanted to get out of Muncie,” Lucy told him. “My grandfather wanted me to get married, and I didn’t want any of the men he had in mind, so we agreed to do it this way.”

  “You let your grandfather conduct your affairs for you?” he asked.

  “He’s my only living relative,” Lucy explained. “And he’s an older man. He’s the most obvious choice to handle my marriage arrangements.”

  “Still,” Adam pointed out. “Don’t you think it’s a little bit odd to marry someone when you don’t even know what they do with themselves up in the trackless mountains of Montana? You could be getting yourself into a situation where you’ll be very unhappy.”

  “I’m sure my grandfather wouldn’t get me into anything that was totally unsuitable,” Lucy insisted. “I’m sure he took all the appropriate factors into account. He has my best interests at heart.”

  Adam leaned forward and pulled off his jacket. He sat back in the seat in his shirt sleeves. “How do you know he took all the factors into account if you never checked?”

  “I trust him,” Lucy maintained.

  Adam shook his head. “You’re very trusting. He could have married you to some whiskered mountain man who lives in a bark hut on the side of a mountain. A lady like you,” His eyes slid down to her dress again. “You’d never be able to live like that.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll find out,” Lucy replied.

  Adam looked out the window again.

  “What about you?” Lucy asked. “What are you going to Great Falls for?”

  “I’m going home,” Adam replied. “I’ve been traveling in the East and in Europe. I’m going home to see my family.”

  “Do you have much family up there?” she asked.

  “My parents and my younger brothers and my sister,” Adam told her.

  “That’s nice,” Lucy remarked. “Are you the oldest?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  Lucy studied him. “I’m surprised to hear you say you’ve been to Europe. I didn’t think anyone on the Frontier cared for that sort of thing.”

  “I wanted to see it for myself,” Adam told her. “I heard all about it growing up. I made some money and I made up my mind I was going to see it. Even if I had to come back to Montana and live in a log cabin, herding cattle for the rest of my life, I was going to see Europe once in my life. I could live with everything else if I just had that to look back on.”

  Lucy sighed. “It sounds wonderful. I wish I could go to Europe.”

  Adam shot her a quick glance. “You mean your grandfather never sent you? I find that hard to believe.”

  Lucy averted her eyes. “I wanted to go before I g
ot married, but my grandfather said my trust couldn’t afford it.”

  Adam’s quick eyes picked up more than she intended him to. “Do you believe that?”

  Lucy shrugged the question away. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t go.”

  Adam stared out the window.

  Lucy hastened to fill the silence. “And now, I probably never will. I’ll get married, and I’ll live in Montana for the rest of my life.” She shook an invisible strand of hair out of her face, “Let’s not talk about that anymore. Tell me about Europe.”

  “I loved it,” Adam told her. “It was every bit as different from Montana as you’d imagine. People dressed to the nines and going to the opera. People wearing their Sunday best to eat lunch in cafes. People speaking every kind of language you can think of. It’s all there. It makes you understand just how empty Montana is.”

  Adam stole a glance at Lucy. Instead of making her happy, his description of Europe plunged her into the depths of despair. If only she could keep that hidden from him! The last thing she wanted a perfect stranger knowing was just how much she dreaded this mail-order marriage. In her mind, she was marrying those desolate mountains with their ancient, lonely heart.

  Adam still watched her. He tried to be sly about it, but she sensed his eyes on her all the time, reading her expressions. Could he tell how unhappy she was about her impending wedding? She tried to paste a contented look on her face. “It sounds wonderful.”

  “I’m going back there,” Adam told her. “I have a little bit of money left. After I visit my family, I’m going back, at least for a little while.”

  “So where did you get all this money?” she asked.

  “I worked for it,” Adam declared. “I worked two summers punchin’ cattle on a local ranch. I saved up my money, because I wanted to go to Europe. When all the other guys went to town to the whorehouses and gambling saloons, I rode out into the mountains and went hunting. I saved my money.”