by Tess LeSue
Her bank account. Matt thoughtfully tossed a stone. “You Leavington Fairchild Bees are worth some money, huh?”
“Were worth some money,” Phin said, grabbing the biggest stone he could find. “Before Leonard spent it all.”
“You call him Leonard?”
“Phin does.” Flip rolled his eyes again. “Ever since he left without us.”
“He promised he’d take us!” Phin snapped.
“Since when did he ever keep his promises?”
When his next shot missed, Phin looked about ready to throw his entire slingshot at the boulder. Matt figured it was about time to step in.
“Here,” he said, reaching over and plucking the slingshot from the boy’s hand. “Try it this way.” He encouraged Flip to keep talking as he showed them how to maintain the same position for each shot, so they could gauge the temperament of their weapons and adjust for their slingshot’s idiosyncrasies.
“They had a huge fight last time he was back. It must have lasted four or five days. He called her every name under the sun, really filthy ones, but she wasn’t going to budge.”
Matt winced. He couldn’t believe anyone could yell at Georgiana, and in front of her children. How had she not dissolved in tears? She must have been pretty angry.
“When that didn’t work, he tried to charm her,” Phin sneered. “He brought her flowers and acted like a total fool.”
Which might explain Wilby’s conception, Matt thought dryly. He felt a stab in his gut at the thought.
“She didn’t give in though,” Flip said. “She said it would take more than a bunch of flowers to mend a broken bridge.”
Good for her. But he imagined finding herself pregnant with Wilby had built a bridge pretty quick.
“And when the flowers didn’t work, that’s when he said he’d take us all west with him,” Phin growled.
Matt helped him adjust his aim. The boy fired and the shot grazed the edge of the boulder.
“Nice work!” Matt grinned at him. The kid looked brighter and grabbed another rock. “But why didn’t he take you all with him?”
“He said it was too dangerous.” That bitterness was back in Flip’s voice. “He said he’d just need an advance and that he’d go ahead to buy us some land. That he’d be back for us in a couple of years, once he’d set us up in California.”
“And your ma didn’t like that, I bet.”
Flip had been watching Matt help Phin, and he copied the instructions. His next shot grazed the boulder too. “No, she most certainly didn’t.”
“But he talked her around? And he and Leo went to get you all set up?”
“Not exactly.”
The twins exchanged another cagey look. Matt’s instincts told him there was something they were trying to hold back. He would have to approach this carefully.
“Listen,” he said, putting a hand on each of their shoulders, “we’re all men here.”
They liked that. He could see them straightening up.
“It’s important for men to talk straight amongst themselves,” he said, as he met their gazes in turn. “Whatever you tell me stays between us. Shake on it?” He took his hand off Phin’s shoulder and spat in his palm for good measure before offering it to the boys.
They liked that even more. Both hurriedly spat in their palms and shook his hand.
“I won’t tell your ma. I won’t tell anyone,” Matt promised, “but you’ve just committed to always talking straight to me. You tell me the truth, and I’ll be straight with you in return.”
They exchanged another look and then took a deep breath.
“The thing is,” Flip confessed, “it’s our fault.”
“What’s your fault?”
“We gave him the key to the safe.” They hung their heads.
“Go on.”
They looked up. They’d clearly been expecting Matt to tear a strip off them, but he did no such thing. “Go on,” he urged.
“He said he’d take us with him,” Flip said glumly, “but that we couldn’t go without money.”
“He said we’d come back in two years to get Ma and the others, and we’d be heroes.”
“We were going to help him build her a big white house in California.”
“And give her a gold nugget the size of her head to repay the money we borrowed.”
Matt nodded thoughtfully, careful to keep his expression neutral. “So you helped him get the money?”
They nodded, looking miserable.
“Not just the money,” Flip admitted. “He took most of her jewels too. They were the thing she cried about the most.”
“Especially the things Grandma Bee had left her.” Phin’s voice was tight. He looked on the verge of tears. “She cried a lot about those.”
“Especially the diamond bee pin.”
“And Leo helped you?”
They gave him a disdainful look. “Of course not. Leo’s too much of a goody-goody. He would have told on us in a heartbeat if he knew what we were up to.”
So Leo was more like his sister than like the twins. That was good to know. He didn’t know that he could handle more boys like the twins. They were a good handful or two on their own, and Wilby looked set to follow in their footsteps; three wild boys was enough for a man to take on. Especially when he had no previous experience with little ’uns.
“Leo was no part of it,” Phin said angrily. “He had no right to take our place like he did.”
“I don’t think he had a choice in it,” Flip disagreed. “I can’t imagine he would have left Mother willingly. They were close,” he told Matt.
“He was a total mommy’s boy,” Phin said, rolling his eyes at Matt.
Judging from what he’d heard about Leo from Susannah, Matt didn’t imagine Leo was a mommy’s boy so much as a boy who was trying to look out for his mother; Leo seemed to have spent his life trying to fill the role of man of the family, even though he was only a child.
Just like Matt’s brother Luke.
Luke had assumed care of Tom and Matt when their father died on the trail up to Oregon, even though at the time Luke could barely grow the faintest wisp of a mustache. It must have been hard, Matt realized, as he looked down at the two dark-haired devils in front of him. Funny, he’d never given it much thought before. Luke had always been a bossy, domineering, disapproving presence in Matt’s life, so much so that Matt had never stopped to consider what it must have been like for him.
Hell. Imagine being saddled with two young boys when you were still a boy yourself. Imagine having to haul them along the trail, grieving for two parents lost within as many years; imagine having to find land and build a home. He remembered the three of them struggling to build that first leaky, smoky hut, not having the slightest clue what they were doing. He remembered giving Luke hell as they worked. He’d been a wildcat when he was a kid. Not unlike these two here.
It was only now that he was dealing with children on a day-to-day basis that he truly understood what his brother had done for him. How he’d sacrificed. And also cared.
Goddamn it. What was wrong with him? Now he was getting all sappy, and about Luke of all people!
“Father told us to pack our bags and that he’d come get us in the morning and we’d sneak out before the rest of them got up,” Flip was saying.
“But when we got up, they were gone.”
“And he’d left her a note, saying that if she cut him off, she’d be cutting Leo off too.”
Hell and damnation. What a piece of work. He’d kidnapped his own son.
“She cried about that more than she cried about the bee pin,” Flip said despondently.
Matt rested his hands on their shoulders again. “Thank you for telling me the truth.”
“There’s more.”
Matt almost groaned. More? That poor wom
an.
“We got letters, telling us about the big white house and the gold claim . . .”
“And they all included notes.”
“Notes?” Matt asked.
“Promissory notes. They all said, ‘Pay to the order of,’ and gave her instructions who to pay.”
“And then we ran out of money and had to start selling the furniture to pay them.”
“And when the furniture was gone, we had to sell the house,” Flip said in a small voice. “It was the house Mother grew up in.”
“She didn’t cry that time,” Phin said grimly. “She went all white and silent and didn’t talk again for a couple of weeks.”
“How did your father die?” Matt was almost afraid to ask. He had a feeling the selfish dog had met a bad end, borrowing from someone he shouldn’t have.
“Fever.”
“We found out when the debt collectors came. Someone brought a newspaper clipping with the obituary.”
The rest of the story wasn’t too much of a surprise. What else was going to happen when a twelve-year-old boy was left alone on a big gold claim? He fell prey to men like Wendell and Kipp, and whoever it was they were working with. The twins were more than happy to tell him all they knew.
“Apparently, the claim is in Mother’s name now,” Flip told Matt, “otherwise they’d just take it.”
Indeed. And they probably would have killed Leo to get it.
If they needed to get the land signed over by some soft eastern widow, what better bargaining chip than her firstborn son? She was an easy target.
But now Wendell had it in his head to marry her . . . Was he trying to swipe the claim out from under the others? Because that would be a nice, tight, legal way to do it . . . Was he offering Kipp a half claim for going along with it?
Oh, who even cared? Wendell was never going to marry her, and that was the end of it.
But what would he do if Matt married her?
Matt had no interest in a gold claim. Money had never meant jack to him, and he couldn’t see the appeal of living in one of those hellholes, sifting in streams or sinking a shaft down into the dark. He was plenty happy back in Oregon.
According to the twins, Georgiana had every intention of signing the claim over without protest and taking her children off to live a quiet life. Although the madwoman seemed to think she could stay in the same town. She had some idea about keeping the plot of land her useless husband had bought on the main street of Mokelumne Hill and building a mercantile business. Matt didn’t think she had any idea what those mining towns were like, or the kind of men she was dealing with. Or how damn pretty she was.
Not that it mattered, because if he married her, she’d be coming back to Oregon with him. Maybe he could convince Wendell that they didn’t care about the gold claim and would just quietly take the boy and go? Maybe Wendell would escort them to his cronies and they could do the deal and leave?
But that wouldn’t work if Wendell wanted the claim for himself. Or if he had feelings for Georgiana. He might just get shooting mad if Matt married her out from under him. Matt remembered the pistol pressed into his belly back at Mrs. Bulfinch’s.
Why did everything always have to be complicated? Why couldn’t he just meet a nice girl, fall in love and get married? Like his brother.
Well, maybe not like his brother. That had been plenty complicated.
Matt sighed. Ah well, it was what it was. Besides, he hadn’t decided yet whether he was marrying her or not.
23
“NO!” OF COURSE she wouldn’t marry him! What was the man thinking! Georgiana kept right on walking, aware that he was following her.
“I’ll just keep asking till you say yes.”
“You’ll die asking, then,” she said, exasperated.
Alistair Dugard had taken her by complete surprise. She wasn’t aware he’d joined Joe Sampson’s party. Apparently, he’d missed the roll out back in Independence—Georgiana didn’t bother to ask why—and he’d only caught up with them again in Laramie.
“I’ve been working my way up the line, looking for you,” he’d said when he found her. He seemed to expect her to be charmed by his attentions. She wasn’t.
“I’m engaged,” she told him shortly.
“Engagements can be broken.”
She rolled her eyes. He was relentless. He was also pristine, his shirt as white as snow and his hair as shiny as oil. She had no idea how he looked so neat. She was spattered with mud and smelled like a cook fire; her hair was such a deplorable tangle that she’d taken to just bundling it up in a corkscrew ball and hoping for the best.
He followed along, trying his very best to win her attention, but she was too busy hunting for the twins. They’d taken to scavenging back along the trail for discarded belongings. Since they’d left Laramie, people were lightening their loads; the animals were tired, and the wagons kept getting bogged in when it rained; the heavier the wagons were, the deeper they sank, and the harder they were to dig out. And it rained a lot. Great storms swept through, complete with sky-splitting bolts of lightning and rolling claps of thunder. Curtains of rain shaded the horizon, and they watched sheets of it marching toward them over the grasslands. The wind blew unhampered by trees or shrubs, a vicious whipping force that hit them head-on and slowed their already slow progress. This leg of the journey, the weary middle third, was the hardest on their bodies and their spirits. Tired, the emigrants threw out anything they didn’t absolutely need; in their wake, the trail out from Laramie was littered with trunks and tools, oak furniture and iron stoves, pots and pans. The twins had a great time scavenging, returning with “treasures” Georgiana didn’t want or need.
She’d been out looking for them when she’d stumbled straight into Dugard, who now wouldn’t leave her alone. He stayed with her as she rounded the twins up. They were trying to convince her to help them carry a heavy iron stove. The whole time she was arguing with the boys, Dugard acted like they were at a garden party. As she struggled back to their camp through the sloppy mud, with the twins in tow but not the stove, Dugard peppered her with small talk. She felt like lobbing a ball of mud at him.
“Would you like to take a walk along the stream?” he asked once she’d deposited the twins back at the camp. “It looks to be a lovely evening.”
Georgiana stared at him incredulously. Who had time for a walk? She still had to set up the tent and start soaking the beans for tomorrow night’s dinner. Not to mention that she needed to pack the buffalo jerky away properly. “I have work to do,” she said tersely.
He still didn’t leave. In fact, he moved right into camp and made himself such an imposition that Mrs. Barry was forced to invite him to dinner. It was too rude not to, as he was clearly in no mind to leave. He sat himself down next to Georgiana, not seeming to notice that she didn’t want him to. Wendell was scowling at them from across the fire. Georgiana wished Matt was around to discourage Dugard, but he and Doc Barry were at another campsite, dealing with an outbreak of illness caused by bad drinking water. Without Matt around, Dugard made himself quite at home, staying until Georgiana could bear it no longer and retired to her tent.
The next day brought no relief. He was back bright and early, edging his wagon up alongside hers.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Matt growled, riding up. Georgiana had never been so happy to see him. No, that was a lie. She was always happy to see him. “You ain’t in my party,” he told Dugard.
“We’re all one party till Fort Hall,” Dugard said heartily.
“No, we ain’t.” Matt clicked his fingers and pointed at the rear of the train. “Off you go, back to Joe. We cain’t have you all mixing around or people’ll get lost.”
Dugard tried to argue, but he was no match for Matt. Georgiana relaxed as Dugard was bludgeoned into turning aside while Matt’s party rolled out. But she was wrong if she though
t Dugard would be that easily discouraged. He came ambling into the light of their cook fire that night and the next night and many nights afterward. He didn’t seem to care in the least that Matt was there. The worst thing about him was that he got Wendell all worked up again. Just when she thought Wendell might have gone off the idea of marrying her, Dugard came along and got Wendell competitive. If Dugard sat next to her, Wendell sat on the other side; if Dugard helped her haul water, Wendell got a bucket and hauled water right alongside him; if Dugard offered her a mug of coffee, Wendell got her a bigger one.
What was wrong with these men? She was engaged!
Or at least she was as far as they knew.
It got so ridiculous, people started making jokes about it. Doc Barry and Seb took to calling Dugard and Wendell “Right” and “Left.”
“Where’s Mrs. Smith’s Right-Hand Man today?”
“Chasing off after Left.”
The twins exploited the situation mercilessly, slowly outsourcing their chores to their mother’s aggressive suitors. They also convinced the two men to take them hunting. Georgiana overheard them when she was up in the wagon trying to get the flour out.
“Mother wants some meat for the stew,” Phin was ordering them, sounding officious. Well, that was a bald-faced lie, she thought sourly. “She wants you to take us out to see what we can shoot for the pot.”
Oh good Lord! They’d do anything to get at the guns.
“No guns!” she shouted, sticking her head out the back of the wagon.
The twins glowered. They hadn’t realized she was up there.
“I’ll shoot you something,” Wendell said eagerly.
“Good idea,” Dugard agreed. “You take the boys, and I’ll stay here and help Mrs. Smith.”
Oh no, no, no. Georgiana had endured quite enough of Mr. Dugard. “You should both take them,” she said quickly, “but no guns! They can use their slingshots.”
