Hill Country Courtship

by Laurie Kingery

  Apparently he didn’t want to resist the invitation, for he did kiss her, the descent of his lips gentle and warm, his arm going around her to hold her close as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It was a moment she wished could go on forever.

  “Maude...” he breathed. “Is it possible you’ve come to love me, too?”

  She nodded shakily, her breath coming fast. “I think I began to love you the day of the barbecue,” she admitted, gazing up at him, and then he was kissing her again, letting the horses choose their own pace, for they knew the way home.

  “I don’t know how ye could have,” he said. “I was rather full of myself that day, as I recall.”

  She chuckled. “I can’t argue with that,” she said, remembering his disparaging remarks about men coming to the party to meet prospective brides. “Insufferable as you were, though, you were the handsomest man there,” she added with a wink.

  He roared with laughter and swept her up in a tight hug. “You’re a daft lass, do ye ken? But you were the most beautiful one there, too, with your fiery red hair that looks as if it would burn my hand.” As if to demonstrate that it didn’t, he caressed the side of her head with one hand, while keeping hold of the reins with the other. After the team tried to stop and wade into the grass at the side of the road, though, he said, “I suppose I’d better pay attention to what I’m doing, or we’ll still be far from home when night falls.” But though he occupied both hands with the reins, driving the team didn’t stop him from gazing at her.

  “I want to marry you, my darling Maude, and be a father to little Hannah as well as your husband,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy, I promise. I’ll find a way to court you at the ranch and make you feel as treasured as you are to me.”

  He loved her, and he knew that she loved him. He wanted to marry her...

  Suddenly, what she had longed for was happening so fast, and yet there was still the problem of his lack of belief.

  If she agreed to marry him now, with their positions so opposite in the matter of faith, this would never change. He would never work to build his faith if she did not push him now.

  “I love you, too, Jonas, and I want to marry you. And I love living at Five Mile Hill Ranch. But—” she held up a hand when it seemed as he might pull her close and kiss her again “—I feel so isolated there, never coming into town, never attending church.”

  The town of Simpson Creek pretty much ended at the creek it was named for and gave way to ranch land, except for a few scattered cottages near the road, but they were passing a row of small houses now, and to her delight, one of them boasted a for sale or rent sign in front of it.

  “See that little house there? Why couldn’t we rent it, Jonas, or find one in Simpson Creek about that size to stay overnight in so we could attend church? I’d understand that we couldn’t attend every week... But it would come in handy when we came to town for supplies, also.” And if he was going to church with her, he’d sense the need of a relationship with the Lord. And then he’d sense the forgiveness God had for what he’d done in the past, and learn to forgive himself.

  He sighed and did not immediately answer. For the space of a few heartbeats, she thought she’d gone too far and ruined the moment. But she felt it was important to speak of the things that mattered to her now, while Jonas was in this yielding mood.

  “Ye still want your Sunday house,” he said.

  Slowly, she nodded, keeping her eyes on him, holding her breath.

  “Give me some time, sweetheart, to do some looking around the town. We’re heading into winter, and even in Texas the weather may affect whether we’re able to travel back and forth to town frequently, so the arrangements may have to wait a bit till spring. But I won’t forget—you believe me, Maude, don’t you?”

  Sweetheart. He’d called her sweetheart.

  His sudden fear that she would think he was making promises he wouldn’t keep touched her heart, and she was quick to reassure him. “I know if you say you’ll do something, Jonas, you will.”

  He gave her an appreciative smile. “That’s my lass. I’ll never lie to you.”

  It was a long journey back to Five Mile Hill Ranch, but absorbed in each other, it seemed as if they reached the gates of the ranch all too soon. They shared a rueful glance, knowing they’d have to leave this private bubble of happiness that surrounded the buckboard and resume their duties as companion and mother, son and rancher. But they’d find ways to be together, just the two of them, even at the ranch house—Maude knew this now.

  She was not prepared, however, for the abrupt way the bubble burst. As soon as the buckboard pulled up in front of the house, Senora Morales threw open the door and ran shrieking up to the wagon, startling the horses and causing one of them to try to rear in the traces. It took a few moments for Jonas to regain mastery of the animals and calm them enough for either of them to make sense of what she was shouting—

  “Senor MacLaren! You must save the niña—little Hannah! He’s taken her, and Juana! And Hector is shot!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Everything seemed to happen at once then—Maude launched herself out of the buckboard to the ground, demanding details from the housekeeper, nearly startling the horses yet again. One of the vaqueros appeared and Jonas turned the wagon and horses over to him and joined Maude by the housekeeper.

  Senora Morales was near-hysterical herself, but with Maude clutching her and demanding to know what had happened, Jonas could see she was making an effort to collect herself.

  “Sì, he came an hour or so after you left, that evil hombre! It was as if he knew you’d gone, Senor MacLaren, for he came straight into the house. Hector tried to stop him from going up the stairs, but that awful man shot him.”

  “How bad is the injury?” Jonas asked grimly, bracing himself for the news that his foreman might be dead.

  The housekeeper shuddered. “Not too bad, senor, but messy—I think it will take long to heal. The shot was in the shoulder. But he will survive. After the shot, he could no longer block the staircase, and Hannah’s father went up to the nursery, his gun still drawn. He said he would shoot anyone else who tried to stop him, that he just wanted his child. And he said Juana must go with him to feed the baby...”

  “Jonas! You have to go after him!” Maude cried, grabbing his arm. “He should go to jail for what he did to Hector, and we can’t allow him to take Hannah and Juana—”

  “Of course we can’t. We won’t,” he said, smoothing her hair, and then spoke to the vaquero holding the horses. “Take the team, unhitch them and give them feed. Senora Morales, go to the bunkhouse and summon as many of the hands as possible to form a posse. We’ll ride as soon as I see Hector. And have one of them ride to town to notify the sheriff—and the doctor.”

  “But you can’t possibly ride after him now, you’ve just come all the way from Simpson Creek,” said another voice, and Jonas looked up to see his mother at the doorway. “And it’s almost dark.”

  Coira MacLaren leaned heavily on her cane. One eye was bruised and swollen shut, and Jonas spotted a scrape along her left cheek and another on the right. The hot blood coursing through his veins turned to ice.

  “Mother, what happened to you?” he shouted, and went to her side.

  The old woman leaned against him, tears coursing down her pale, wrinkled cheeks. He put an arm around her to steady her.

  “I told that caitiff he’d take Hannah and Juana over my d-dead body, and went after him with my cane,” his mother said. “He...yanked the cane out of my hand and knocked me down.” Her gaze dropped to the cane she leaned on, as if it had failed her. “He raised the cane and would have killed me, I think, if Juana hadn’t gone after him. She fought him like a wildcat until he subdued her and tied her up. He said if she gave him any more trouble he’d kill me.”

>   “He’ll die for this,” Jonas snarled, even as his heart despaired at the thought of the baby and Juana in the hands of that scoundrel, out there in the cold dark.

  “Maude, I have to see how Hector is,” he said. “Can you—”

  He was about to ask her to help his mother back into the house, but Maude was already there, placing a trembling arm across Coira’s back and under her to steady the old woman, though tears streamed down her own face.

  His foreman had been placed in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and one of the housemaids was sitting by his bedside. He was sitting up, and a blood-splotched bandage covered his left shoulder. Bruises covered his temples and face.

  At the sight of Jonas, he groaned and closed his eyes. “I am sorry I failed you, Senor MacLaren,” he said. “I would rather have died than let that malvado take the baby—and my Juana.”

  “I know,” Jonas said. “Don’t be hard on yourself, amigo. You tried to prevent him, I can see that,” he said, pointing to his foreman’s bandaged shoulder. “We’ll get them back safely, don’t you worry,” he added, wishing he could believe his own words.

  When he went back downstairs, he saw that riders were assembling in front of the house and that Maude had succeeded in getting his mother inside and to a chair.

  “I’ll take her upstairs,” he said, scooping the frail old woman up into his arms. “Come with me, please, Maude.”

  His mother groaned as he carried her up the stairs and again as he set her down as gently as he could on her bed.

  “Maude, I’m going to ride out as soon as all my men are ready to go,” he said.

  “I want to go with you,” she protested. “Hannah will be frightened. She’ll—”

  Need her mother, he knew she wanted to say.

  “I know you want to come, sweetheart, but there’s no one with medical skills here but you, and to be honest, if you went, you’d only slow the posse down,” he told her, keeping his voice soft and understanding as he told her the hard truth. “I need you to stay here and take care of my mother and Hector. If there’s any laudanum left among my mother’s medicines, Hector should probably be given it,” he said.

  “But—”

  “Please, sweetheart,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “I need to know you’re safe, at least. And don’t you worry about Hannah. I’ll get her back and Renz will rue the day—”

  She sighed. “All right, I’ll stay,” she said, accepting the necessity. “But you mustn’t kill him, Jonas,” she cried. “Promise me you won’t. Leave vengeance to the law and the Lord.”

  He wouldn’t make a promise he had no intention of keeping.

  “We’re ready, Senor MacLaren!” one of the vaqueros shouted up the stairwell. He suspected they had known before he reached the ranch that they would be riding as soon as he returned home and heard the news. Hector had told him that as soon as the housekeeper had sounded the alarm, they’d ridden around the vicinity of the ranch in all directions, attempting to catch Renz before he got too far away, but they’d failed to find any trace of Renz or his captives.

  “I have to go, sweetheart,” he told Maude, holding her close for a moment. “Say a prayer for us.”

  “I will,” she promised, “the entire time you’re gone.” A silver tear streaked down her cheek. “Go with God, Jonas.”

  “I’ll bring her back, Maude. With God’s help, I’ll bring back our child.”

  He saw a spark gleam in her tear-drenched eyes at his words, and he realized what he had said. Hannah was their child, he realized. She had wrapped herself around his heart with her babyish coos and sweet smiles, not long after she had come with Maude to stay at Five Mile Hill Ranch. He was going to be her father and raise her, together with Maude, please God. And if God willed it so, not all the Felix Renzes in the world could prevent it.

  * * *

  Renz and his captives had gotten a big head start while he and Maude had enjoyed their blissful day away from the ranch, Jonas realized with regret. If only he’d listened to his gut, which had insisted that Renz had given in much too easily when he left the ranch, pretending to be discouraged by the demands of taking care of an infant and apparently content with securing permission to come back to visit. Now the madman apparently thought he’d solved all his problems by forcing Juana to go with them.

  But Felix Renz hadn’t reckoned with Jonas MacLaren, he thought.

  He mounted a fresh horse held for him by one of the vaqueros. Two or three of them held blazing torches.

  “Thank you for assembling so quickly,” he said. “Did anyone see what direction they rode off in?”

  But no one had, for they had been about their duties when Renz had stormed into the ranch house. They hadn’t known of the kidnapping till the housekeeper had come screeching into the bunkhouse while they gathered for the noon meal.

  “I figure Renz will have forced Juana to tell him where we went, so he won’t have headed west toward Simpson Creek for fear of encountering us,” he said, and prayed he was right. “So split up, a couple of you go north, a couple south, a couple west. I’ll be going east. I think the fellow might make for Lampasas and hole up there, at least overnight. If any of you meet up with Renz, be extremely careful—remember, he’s got a gun that he’s clearly willing to use. Not to mention, he’s got a woman and a baby with him and I don’t think the scoundrel would scruple to use Juana as a shield.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s likely that sidewinder’d head for Lampasas,” opined one of his few Anglo cowboys, a grizzled veteran named Abner Calloway. “He’d have the Colorado to cross.”

  The thought of the fool trying to swim a horse across the chill waters of the muddy Colorado sent ice water skimming through Jonas’s veins, especially when the he thought of the risk to Juana and Hannah. “But there’s a bridge,” he said, remembering it from trips into the town for supplies that couldn’t be had in Simpson Creek.

  Calloway shook his head. “Not after t’other night’s storm, there isn’t. It washed out, I heard tell. Till they get it repaired, there’s only the old ferry.”

  It was a sudden ray of hope—a thin one. They might not have found the ferry. But what if they had, and they’d used it? What if they’d used the ferry?

  “The way I remember it, old man Wainwright operates that,” another cowhand said, “and he sure don’t like operatin’ it at night.”

  Until they reached the ferry, they couldn’t know if Renz and his captives had used it. All they could do was keep going toward the river.

  * * *

  Upstairs, after dosing Hector with laudanum, Maude watched them ride out, then returned to the distraught, weeping woman in the bed.

  “I failed them, Maude,” Coira cried. “I failed your baby and Juana. That villain took my cane from me, the cane I was going to beat his brains in with, ’cause I’m just a useless, helpless old woman.”

  “Hush now,” Maude said, smoothing back a damp tendril of faded ginger hair from the woman’s forehead. “Jonas will get them back. We have to believe that.” She considered using some laudanum to sedate the woman, but they didn’t have a very large supply and Hector might need it more for his pain.

  “But they left hours ago! How will my son even know where to look, out there in the dark? If Jonas does find him, he’ll kill him, and he’ll have another death on his conscience. And there’s nothing we can do here but wait...” She wailed as she said the last words.

  “I disagree.”

  Coira’s eyes flew open at the two calm words. “What can we do?” she cried, smacking the mattress with a clenched fist.

  “We have a very powerful weapon at our disposal,” Maude said, forcing herself to be calm, to say the words she could only half believe in her current state of fear and shock. “We can pray.”

  “Pray?” The words were a lash of scorn. “
I used to pray, girl. I prayed that my husband would stop beating me and his son, but he didn’t. ’Twasn’t until Jonas and I took matters into our own hands that the beatings ended.”

  What could she say to that? Maude wondered. She hadn’t been there, years ago in Scotland...Dear Lord, she was so out of her depth here! If only Reverend Gil was here—he’d know what to say...

  But he wasn’t here, and wasn’t likely to be anytime soon, and now was when Jonas needed their support in prayer. It was the only thing they could do to help him.

  “God says when two or three are gathered in His name,” she began carefully, “He’s right there with us, and when we who believe agree on something in prayer, and ask Him for something within His will, He will grant it,” Maude told her, infusing every bit of steadiness and faith that she could muster into her words. How could a loving God refuse to grant her the return of her baby?

  Yet tragedies happened every day. After all, Hannah had lost her mother to death just a couple of days after she was born.

  Coira stared up at her, her filmy old eyes hopeless. “How can I ask the Lord for anything? I’m a murderess. I’m not good enough to ask God for another breath.”

  “None of us are good enough,” Maude said. “Not one. Yet God has promised to hear us. He heard the thief on the cross next to Jesus, we read in the Bible, and took him to Heaven with Him, even though the man had done wrong all his life. Let’s believe that He will help us, Mrs. MacLaren,” Maude said, taking the old woman’s gnarled, shaking hand in hers. She bent her head. “Father God, we come to You in desperate need of Your help...”

  * * *

  It was like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack—with the added challenge of darkness. Where would one demented man—for Renz had to be demented to do what he had done—run with a woman and child in the middle of November? There were no better men than the three men who rode with him, and they would follow him wherever he led, he knew that—but how were they going to find the group when Renz had several hours’ head start? If only he hadn’t been thinking of himself and his selfish need to spend time with Maude, away from the ranch...