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Montana Mail Order Bride Page 2
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Page 2
Lucy’s eyes flew open in surprise. “And you earned enough to go to Europe, all in two summers?”
“No,” he replied. “After the second summer, I took the money I’d earned and bought my own cattle. I got permission from the owner of the ranch to run my cattle along with his while I worked for him for one more summer. So I had free grazing in addition to my wages. At the end of the summer, I sold my cattle and made a big haul. That’s how I earned the money to go.”
Lucy examined him more closely. He looked so young and green. Who would believe a young cowboy would have the business sense to pull of something like that? This was the kind of business project her grandfather appreciated. He tried to accomplish that kind of thing all the time, except he wasn’t always so successful. He’d even invested her trust in some of his projects. He didn’t tell her how they turned out, and it wasn’t her place to ask.
“That was very smart dealing,” Lucy remarked. “You must have made a tidy profit, if you could afford to travel on it.”
“I did,” Adam replied. “And I’ll do the same thing again when I come back. Now that I know I can do it, and how to do it, I’ll just keep doing it. I might even take the profit and reinvest it. Before long, I might not have to work as a cowboy at all.”
“What?” Lucy asked. “Don’t you like working as a cowboy?”
“I love it,” Adam admitted. “There’s no work I’d rather be doing. It’s just that you don’t see any old cowboys. At least, none you’d want to exchange places with. They’re all broken to pieces from falling off their horses, or they’ve been crippled branding calves when their bodies become too old and brittle to handle that kind of work.”
“I never thought about it before,” Lucy murmured.
But Adam had thought about it. Lucy imagined he’d thought about it quite a bit. “If a cowboy has spent his pay on whiskey and women and gambling, he has nothing to live on when he grows old. Then he’s too weak and stiff to work at all, and he ends up in the poor house or in the street. Some cowboys have found themselves with nowhere to live. They try to live on the range and wind up frozen in some blizzard.”
“How awful!” Lucy cried.
“I don’t intend to let that happen to me,” Adam continued. “I’ll use my body to make money while I’m young. Then I’ll use the money I earned to make certain I’m comfortable when I grow old.”
Lucy tried to turn the conversation into a joke. “Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about when you get old?”
But Adam didn’t laugh or even crack a smile. “You’re never too young to think about that. None of us lives forever. That’s exactly the way a man gets trapped into not thinking about it at all. Then, all of a sudden, he’s pushing fifty with nothing to show for it.”
“Still,” Lucy replied. “You can’t be more than twenty.”
He cracked a grin then. “I am twenty.”
“Oh!” She hadn’t intended to lure him into revealing his age. She’d left herself no option but to respond in kind. “So am I.”
Chapter 4
“So,” Lucy continued. “What does your family think about you travelling to Europe?”
“I didn’t ask,” Adam admitted. “But I don’t think they understand it. None of them has ever done anything like that, or ever wants to. They’re all happy staying in Montana.”
“And will your brothers become cowboys, too?” she asked.
“Quite likely.” Adam set his jaw and looked back out the window.
A tragic silence fell over them, and Lucy forced herself to tear her eyes away from his face to look out the window. But she still saw him out there, riding around on a horse, roping cattle and sleeping on the ground, even though she’d only ever seen him in a suit.
For some reason she couldn’t understand, he made more sense to her in that environment. She just couldn’t imagine him walking the streets of London and Paris in a suit.
When she first saw him on the platform in Billings, she thought he looked like an urban dandy. Now that she knew something about him, he looked like he was wearing a disguise that didn’t quite fit him.
The countryside outside the window rolled away behind the train, but it didn’t seem to change at all. They crossed the odd bridge and viaduct, but Lucy recognized no change in the passing of the landscape. Hour after hour, the monotony of the wide Western expanse never varied. She was used to the close variation of the East.
Even in Indiana, where the forests and farmland could begin to look the same after several hours of travel, the towns and villages and copses sat close enough to one another to give the traveler with something to look at. She found herself looking out the window and seeing nothing at all. Her eyes lost the ability to focus. Was she sleeping with her eyes open?
Was Adam still watching her? Could she turn around to check without giving away her growing interest in him? And why was she interested in him? Nothing could come of their association. She was marrying Joel Bloom, and Adam would go back to Europe, maybe forever. She’d never see Adam Foley again.
Maybe that was for the best. What good could come of seeing him again? He would only remind her of what she could never have. She just wasn’t born to a life of wealth and travel. She was an orphan. Her trust was barely wealthy enough to induce someone to marry her.
Why had fate been so cruel to her? Why had she been educated just enough to know about Europe, with its glamour and its culture, but never allowed to go there to experience it for herself? She would have done better to be born like Adam Foley’s sister. She would have been better off growing up in the dust and dirt of the American West, without education or refinement, and never knowing what she was missing.
She peeked over her shoulder, but Adam wasn’t watching her at all. He was looking around the car at the other passengers and adjusting his position in the seat. He folded his jacket over his arm and bundled it up. Then he put it in the upper luggage rack above their heads.
Maybe he’d already lost interest in her. How could a man who’d earned a sizeable nest egg and traveled East and to Europe be interested in her? She’d grown up sheltered in little old Muncie, Indiana, and was now going to be mummified forever more in the back reaches of deepest darkest Montana. He would go back to Paris and forget all about her in the dance halls, cafes, and operas.
She turned back to the window with the faintest trace of a tear in her eye. She had nothing to offer him or anyone else to take an interest in her. But he surprised her by speaking from behind her, “So what do you know about this Joel Bloom? You don’t know what he does. What do you know about him?”
Lucy spun around. His sharp eyes bored into her again. She just couldn’t get away from those eyes. They prevented her thinking clearly. She just couldn’t come up with a straight answer when he looked at her like that. “I don’t know.”
“Come on,” he snorted. “You must know something about him. Don’t tell me you let your grandfather agree to your marriage without finding out something.”
“All right,” Lucy replied. “I know he’s six feet tall, with brown hair and a beard, and he has brown eyes. He was married once before to a woman named Abigail, and she died five years ago, and they didn’t have any children. Oh, and he’s forty-five.”
“Forty-five!” Adam shouted.
“That’s right,” Lucy replied.
“You’re twenty, and you’re marrying a man twenty-five years older than you? You’re nuts!” Adam let out a loud gasp of astonishment and looked around the car in a pantomime of seeking agreement from the other passengers.
Lucy straightened up. “I didn’t ask for your approval.”
“What if he can’t have children?” Adam shot back. “What if he’s too old, or he has something wrong with him? Do you realize that, by the time you’re forty, he’ll be sixty-five? Even if you do have children with him, he’ll be long dead before they reach adulthood. You’ll probably be widowed before they grow up. You’ll be raising them alone. Is that what you want?�
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“You don’t know that,” Lucy retorted. “None of us knows what’s going to happen. He could live a long, healthy life, and see his children and grandchildren grow up. I could be very happy with him. In fact, I plan to be very happy with him.”
“That’s not what you said a little while ago,” Adam reminded her.
Lucy lost her temper. “Well, it’s none of your business, anyway. I’m marrying him. That’s all you need to know.”
“Fine.” Adam turned away.
Chapter 5
Lucy immediately regretted her outburst. She had to find a way to bring him back into the conversation. “What about you? Have you got a sweetheart back in Great Falls?”
“Who, me?” he asked. “No, I never had a sweetheart.”
“No sweetheart?” she gasped. “A strapping young blade like you? You’re joking.”
“No, I never did,” he maintained. “I never had time for any of that.”
“Any of what?” she asked.
“All that romantic stuff,” he told her. “Waste of time, if you ask me.”
“Have you ever tried it?” Lucy shot back. “You might find out you liked it.”
“Have you ever tried it?” Adam snapped. “It sounds to me like you’re talkin’ through your hat.”
Lucy softened. “You might be right. I guess I’ve never tried it. Not in that way, anyway.”
“What way?” he asked.
“In the sweetheart sort of way,” she explained. “I never really had a sweetheart.”
“What other kind of way is there?” Adam asked.
Lucy blushed, floundering for some way to make sense of her thoughts. “I had a suitor or two, but either I or my grandfather didn’t like them. The ones I liked, he didn’t like, and the ones he liked, I didn’t like. We just couldn’t agree.”
“Your grandfather sounds like a real peach,” Adam grumbled.
Lucy sat bolt upright in her chair. “Don’t you say a word against my grandfather. He’s all I have in the world. I won’t have you or anyone else saying anything against him.”
Adam retreated. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You’re right,” Lucy snapped. “You shouldn’t have.”
“But getting back to what you were saying,” Adam replied. “You had a few suitors, but no sweetheart.”
Lucy let him mollify her. “Right. If I had, I don’t think I ever would have left Muncie.”
“What would you have done?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucy told him. “But I would have found a way to marry him. I would have married my sweetheart, even if it meant running away.”
“Really?” Adam asked.
“Sure,” Lucy replied. “Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you marry your sweetheart, if you had one?”
Adam looked out the window and thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe and maybe not. I don’t know if I’d marry her if it meant giving up on my plan to go to Europe. That’s the reason I never had a sweetheart. I couldn’t take the time or pay the money to have a sweetheart if I wanted to go to Europe. I couldn’t do both.”
“Having a sweetheart doesn’t cost money,” Lucy pointed out.
“Only a woman could say that,” Adam retorted. “Having a sweetheart always costs money. It costs money to go visit her, and take her presents, and to impress her father. All of that costs money. And the more money the sweetheart’s family has, the more it costs. Even bargirls cost money.”
“You make it sound like a callous business arrangement,” Lucy protested.
“In a way, it is,” Adam agreed. “You should understand this yourself. Do you really think Joel Bloom would be so interested in marrying you if you didn’t have your trust?”
“He’s not marrying me for that,” Lucy insisted.
“How do you know?” Adam replied. “You didn’t communicate with him. How do you know your grandfather didn’t exaggerate your position to get this Bloom interested in you in the first place?”
“But there are mail-order brides finding husbands out West with no money of their own at all,” Lucy argued. “Some of these women don’t have a penny to their names, and the men are paying all their traveling expenses to get them to come out West. You must have read about them in the paper.”
“I can’t say I have,” Adam replied.
“Oh, right,” Lucy corrected herself. “I forgot you’ve been out of the country. But the mail-order marriage service is finding matches for people right across the economic spectrum, from the richest to the poorest. The men aren’t looking for women with money. They’re just looking for someone to share their lives and their work and hopefully have a few children.”
Lucy stopped. Adam listened to her with his head on one side. She couldn’t tell if he was fascinated with the point she was making or finding it too preposterous to believe. She’d almost given up on him answering her and was just turning away again when he burst into life again.
“But getting back to your point,” he began. “I didn’t have a sweetheart and you didn’t have a sweetheart, and here we are, on a train to Great Falls, Montana, together. What’s to become of us?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “You’re getting off the train in Great Falls, and I’m going on to Kalispell to marry Mr. Joel Bloom of parts unknown. That’s what will become of us.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked.
“Of course, it’s what I want,” she shot back. “I wouldn’t be traveling all this way if it wasn’t what I wanted. Besides, what else is there?”
“You could do something else,” Adam maintained. “You could marry someone else, if you wanted.”
“Someone else,” she repeated. “Like you, you mean?”
Adam blushed. “I wasn’t thinking of me specifically.”
“You were so!” Lucy insisted. “Why else would you have brought it up? What do you expect me to do, run off with you? We just met. We met on the train when we were both on our way somewhere else. It sounds like a torrid romance.”
“Would it have to be so torrid?” Adam asked. “Couldn’t it just be a romance?”
“Oh!” Lucy exclaimed. “You are all cheek, aren’t you? We’ve known each other all of half an hour, at the most, and already you’re suggesting I run off with you. I never heard such cheek in all my life!”
“I never suggested you run off with me,” Adam declared. “You came up with that idea all by yourself. You put those words in my mouth.”
“You liar!” she screamed. A few people in nearby seats turned around to see what the commotion was about. Lucy saw them and dropped her voice. “I never put the words in your mouth!”
“All I said was,” Adam replied. “You didn’t have to go marrying Joel Bloom of Kalispell, Montana, or thereabouts, if you feel so almighty rotten about it. Why don’t you do something else? You act like you’re going to the gallows or something. No one’s making you marry him. Do something else, if it’s so bad.”
Lucy crossed her arms over her chest and retreated into her seat. “I’m not doing anything else, you…you…scalawag!”
“Scalawag!” Adam scoffed.
“That’s right!” Lucy snapped. “You’re a scalawag, and I’m not doing anything else. What do you think I’m doing on this train, trawling for men? I’m on my way to marry him, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“I never said you were trawling for men,” Adam shot back.
“I’m not talking to you anymore.” Lucy turned her shoulder toward him and her face toward the window. “You’re rotten, Adam Foley, rotten to the core. I hope you find some chorus-line girl in Paris or Rome or wherever you’re going who will make you happy and fulfill all your expectations of women.”
She crossed her arms tighter than ever and turned her back on him as well as she could in adjoining train seats.
Adam looked the opposite direction and refused to even try to engage her in conversation again.
Chapter 6
As much as Luc
y would have liked to get away from him, there were no other available seats in the passenger car for her to move into. She was stuck riding next to Adam Foley all the way to Great Falls. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too much further.
But the sun crossed the sky and dropped behind the mountains, and still the train inched across the land, making no progress at all. When would they get there? Why did everything have to take so long out here?
Every human endeavor fell into a void of emptiness like a raindrop falling into a lake. What was the point of doing anything, when the landscape, the atmosphere, the people, even the plant life, took no notice of you at all? What was the point of living out here in the first place?
The daily struggle for existence proved a futile exercise in wasting time. The land didn’t care. The animals didn’t care. Nothing cared if one person lived or died. Each individual person relied exclusively on himself for the means and motivation to keep himself going.
What was she thinking? All these thoughts about living and dying—where did they come from and what did they mean? Lucy never entertained such thoughts before in all her life. She never had to. The means and motivation, the people who sustained her and gave her the reason and opportunity to live, surrounded her on every side. They never gave her a moment’s doubt about her purpose or her ability to live.
She didn’t speak to Adam for the rest of the day. The train rattled on over a landscape with no end in sight. The daylight drained out of the sky, the mountains and the clouds shifted from gentle pastel to charcoal grey, and the moon swam in its pool of stars. Lucy watched it all from her window. She’d seen the same transformation dozens of times since leaving Muncie, but now it was different. The passage of evening into night took on a magical mystery almost approaching religious devotion. Lucy never experienced anything like it before.
The sheer mountains to the West haunted her. They watching the train pass but never revealed their holy wisdom to the rest of the world. She couldn’t throw off the impression that they were watching her, too, and she couldn’t stand it. What did they know about her? How could she ever access them or make herself agreeable to them? Could she ever redeem herself in their eyes?