A Western Christmas Homecoming: Christmas Day Wedding Bells ; Snowbound in Big Springs ; Christmas with the Outlaw

by Lynna Banning

  They followed the slow-moving river bordered by cottonwoods and gray-green willows, and when the river split, they followed the branch flowing north and headed for the hazy purple mountains looming in the distance. The sun overhead was hot, even for October.

  Alice hadn’t said a single word since leaving town, and Rand was starting to wonder why. He slowed his bay until she caught up.

  “Alice, are you all right?”

  “Yes. At least I think so. I had to leave the key to the library with Sarah. This is the first time since the library was built six years ago that I won’t be there in the morning to open it up. It feels strange.”

  Rand did a quick calculation. If her sister Dorothy was the “little” sister at twenty, that meant Alice was probably around twenty-two. Had she been in Smoke River all her life?

  “You been a librarian a long time?”

  “Ever since I turned eighteen. It’s all I ever wanted to do, be around books.”

  Aha. That would make her maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Before he could ask, she volunteered a piece of information about herself he hadn’t expected.

  “I am a spinster, Marshal. I have nothing in my life but my library, so I have nothing to lose by going with you to a mining camp in Idaho to find my sister’s killer.”

  “Forgive me for saying so, but that’s not smart thinking. I’m a lot older than you, and I figure I’ve got a helluva lot to lose.”

  “How much older?”

  “I’m thirty-four.”

  “What will you lose if you don’t live through this trip?”

  Rand blinked. She sure kept surprising him with her questions.

  “You mean besides my life?” he said drily. “Well...” He waved an arm at the field of white clover and dogbane they were riding through. “I’d miss seeing meadows like this one. And I’d miss the smell of woodsmoke and mint. And roses. By the way, what kind of scent did you buy at the mercantile?”

  She gave a soft laugh. “Why, I don’t even know! I didn’t smell it. I just picked out a pretty-shaped bottle.”

  “Not very ‘saloon girlie’ of you, Miss Montgomery.”

  “No, I suppose it isn’t. I’m going to need some practice in the ‘saloon girl’ area.”

  Rand kept his face impassive. Was it possible she was unaware of how attractive she was? Nah. No girl as pretty as Alice would be blind to her effect on the male population. But her remark made him wonder.

  Something else puzzled him, too. She hadn’t asked one question about the journey to Silver City, how many miles away it was. How many days of travel it would take. And nights.

  Maybe she didn’t care. But if that was true, he wondered why didn’t she care?

  “Alice, do you know anything about Idaho?”

  “Oh, yes. When Dottie first married Jim, her husband, and went away to Silver City, I read all about Idaho. I learned about mining camps and silver assaying. The library has lots of information on such subjects.”

  He chuckled. “Then you probably know more than I do. I’ve never set foot in Idaho Territory.”

  She turned toward him, a surprised look on her face. He couldn’t see her eyes under that black Stetson she wore, but her lips rounded into a soft, raspberry-tinted O. “You mean you’ve never been where we are going?”

  “Nope. Does that make you uneasy?”

  “Nope,” she shot back.

  Rand laughed. He liked her quick humor. He liked a lot of things about Alice Montgomery.

  But he didn’t plan to pay much attention to them. This was a damned dangerous mission, so he’d best keep his mind on the problem at hand.

  Chapter Five

  The campsite Rand chose for their first night was nestled in a grove of pine trees and protected by a half circle of large gray boulders. A shallow, gurgling stream meandered nearby.

  After more than eight hours in the saddle, Alice’s derriere was numb and her thigh muscles felt hot and jumpy. Never in her life had she ridden a horse for more than an hour at a time; she never dreamed she could be this tired. She slid off the chestnut mare and had to grab on to the saddle to keep her legs from collapsing.

  The marshal surveyed her from the fire pit he was digging. “You’ve had a long ride,” he remarked. “Want some of my liniment?”

  When she nodded, he rummaged in his saddlebag and thrust a bottle of brown liquid into her hand. It smelled like the furniture polish Sarah used on the dining table at the boardinghouse. Maybe it was furniture polish.

  She stumbled down to the stream, dropped her skirt and her under-drawers and sloshed some of the smelly stuff onto her aching backside. When she returned he had built a campfire and was digging a frying pan and some bacon out of his saddlebag.

  “Hungry?” he asked without looking up.

  “That is a rhetorical question, Marshal. Of course I am hungry.”

  “And tired, too, I bet.”

  “And crabby,” she admitted.

  He didn’t answer, just sliced off some bacon and laid it in the pan. When the bacon was crisp he dumped in a can of chili beans, and that was supper. She wasn’t complaining. She was so tired and hungry she would eat anything, even a bear if it lumbered into camp. She shivered at the thought.

  He dished up the mess into two tin plates and handed her a spoon, and for the next half hour they ate without talking. Whatever he called this concoction, it tasted wonderful! She gobbled it down, and when her plate was empty she unrolled her blankets and sat staring into the fire while Rand tramped off to the stream to wash the plates.

  When he returned a mug of coffee appeared at her elbow.

  “You sure don’t talk much,” he said, settling himself beside her.

  “Neither do you,” she retorted.

  “I guess that’s because I usually travel alone. I do talk to my horse sometimes, though.”

  “And since I’m a librarian, I talk to my books.”

  He laughed at that, and then answered the question she hadn’t asked yet. “Three days. It’ll take three days of riding to reach Silver City.”

  “You mean I cannot bathe for three whole days? By then I will smell to high heaven!”

  He bit back a smile. “Nah, you won’t. First of all, you’ve got a bottle of fancy-smelling stuff in your saddlebag. And second...” He paused to toss the dregs of his coffee into the fire. “There are lots of streams and rivers between here and Silver City where you can take a bath. As long as you don’t mind cold water,” he added with a grin.

  “How do you know that, Marshal? About the rivers and streams, I mean?”

  “Maps,” he said with a chuckle. “Books are full of ’em. I should think you’d know that, being a librarian.”

  She studied him in the firelight. It was too dark to see his face, but his voice was full of laughter. Thank the Lord! There would be nothing worse than traveling for three days with a man who was dull in the head.

  Suddenly she remembered why she was riding into the wilderness with the marshal and she sucked in her breath. Tears stung under her eyelids at the thought of her sister. Deliberately she turned her attention to something else.

  Her traveling companion, Marshal Logan, for instance. He was a puzzle of a man in many ways. Well-mannered. Considerate. Knowledgeable. And obviously a dedicated lawman. And, she had discovered, he was a passable cook.

  And yet she sensed a streak of something hard and unyielding in him; he was like a bar of iron wrapped in something soft, like velvet. She liked the way he listened to her, as if what she said mattered. But she was constantly aware of that core of inner toughness.

  Something tu-whooed in a nearby pine tree and she jerked. “What was that?”

  “Owl.”

  She pointed at something rustling in the shrubbery behind them. “And that?”

  “Don’t know. Probably something that’s
more scared of us than we are of it.”

  “That,” she said with a shudder, “is cold comfort. Do you think it’s something big, like a...mountain lion?”

  “Nope. Probably the rabbit that owl is after. Alice, you’ve been cool and collected for the last ten hours. How come you’re so skittery all of a sudden?”

  “Maybe because I just realized how alone we are way out here in the middle of nowhere. No lights. No sheriff. No...help.”

  “Alone is good. A smart traveler is always wary of company on the trail. Besides, I’m a marshal, remember?”

  His voice sounded overpatient. Surely she wasn’t being a trial. For the last twenty-four hours she had worked hard to appear calm and rational and brave. She couldn’t lose control now. She just couldn’t.

  “Alice? Is something wrong?”

  “No. Well, yes. I am—I am a bit frightened.” A little laugh escaped her. “Actually, I am a lot frightened!”

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “I was beginning to think you were more stone statue than flesh-and-blood girl.”

  “Oh.” His voice was not accusing; it was understanding, which was a relief. “I assure you, Marshal, I am quite human.”

  Rand turned toward her. “For God’s sake, Alice, could you call me Rand instead of ‘Marshal’?”

  She flinched, and Rand was instantly sorry he’d snapped at her.

  “Of course,” she said quietly.

  He strode off to the stream, and when he returned she was rolled up in her blankets like a sausage, her body curled close to the dying fire. He stood looking down at her for a long time, thinking how the firelight made everything look soft until it faded into blackness. And then he noticed the blanket was shaking.

  She was crying. He couldn’t hear her, but he knew. He dragged his own bedroll from behind the saddle, shucked his boots and stuffed his Colt under the saddle at his head. Then he crawled next to her, wrapped himself in his bedroll and pulled the shuddering bundle into his arms.

  “Alice, I’m sorry. Guess I’m tired, but I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  The blanket covered her face, but he could hear her still crying. Of all the things that he hated in life, hearing a woman cry was the worst.

  “Alice.”

  “I—I’m not crying because of anything you s-said, Mar—Rand. I’m crying b-because I’m exhausted and saddle-sore and s-scared.”

  Relief surged through him. “Alice, if you weren’t scared, you’d be crazy.”

  She gave a choked laugh. “Well, then, it would appear I am most certainly not crazy.”

  “I’ve been scared plenty of times, Alice. Once on an army patrol we ran into a bunch of outlaws holed up in a canyon. It was my first campaign, and I was plenty scared. We managed to capture all but two of them, and I was scared the whole time.”

  “What happened to the two you didn’t capture?”

  He hesitated. “I shot them.”

  “Were you frightened then?”

  “The fear was there all the time. I just tried to move through it and keep going.”

  She nodded and he heard a ragged sigh. “Thank you, Rand.”

  He lay for a long time with his arms around her blanket-wrapped form. Finally her breathing evened out and he figured she’d fallen asleep. Just as he started to ease his arm out from under her, the blanket fell away and she opened her eyes and tried to smile.

  “I have had a really terrible time since you told me about my sister. Most of the time I feel like screaming.”

  “You want to give it up? Go back to Smoke River?”

  There was a long silence. “No,” she said at last. “I want to keep on. I want to find whoever killed my sister.”

  * * *

  They rode east, toward Idaho Territory, and the landscape turned brown and dry and hot. Tiny stinging insects swarmed around Alice’s face, and no matter how much she swatted and flailed at them, they got caught in her hair. The streams grew narrower, and the shallow rivers they rode across flowed green and lazy. She desperately wanted a bath.

  To occupy her mind, she studied Rand Logan. He was interesting in a lawman sort of way, with his rifle nestled in a saddle scabbard and a worn leather gun belt strapped low on his hip. His leather boots had spurs, which chinged when he walked, but she never saw him touch his horse with the rowels. Maybe the spurs were just for show.

  Except that Marshal Logan didn’t seem to care about appearances. This morning he’d shaved hastily and sloppily, and the dark mustache over his upper lip looked a little raggedy. She liked his eyes, green as jade and always watchful. He certainly didn’t talk much, but when he did speak she paid attention. She had to pay attention, she acknowledged. This was the most frightening thing she had ever done.

  As a librarian she’d led a very circumspect life. No bumps or surprises, just nice, quiet books in a nice, quiet building in a nice, quiet town. Books were her life, her reason for living. The printed word made sense of the world around her, of things she couldn’t control, like wars and floods and hunger and suffering.

  And murder. She knew the only way she could help find Dottie’s murderer was to follow this man into God knows what, and that made her more than a little bit uneasy.

  Halfway through the afternoon they turned north, toward the mountains. Now, instead of riding straight into the sun, its rays came from her right, and she quickly learned to keep her hat tilted and the shirtsleeve on that side rolled down to avoid sunburn.

  But by midafternoon, the hot October sun was burning her skin right through the fabric.

  Rand rode with his gray Stetson tipped down so far she wondered how he could see the trail ahead. Occasionally she glanced over at him, but he didn’t notice. Or didn’t seem to notice. He studied the trail ahead, his right hand always resting on the butt of his revolver. Force of habit, she guessed.

  Hour after uneventful hour passed, but he still watched everything, even her. And she couldn’t help studying him when he wasn’t looking. His hair was overlong, just brushing his earlobes. And the hand holding his reins was lean and long-fingered. A surgeon’s hands. Why had he chosen to become a US Marshal rather than a doctor?

  She flicked the chestnut’s reins and drew ahead of him, then waited for him to catch up.

  “In a hurry?” he called.

  “I get restless just plodding along with nothing to do but think.”

  “If you want your horse to last in this heat, you’ll go slow.”

  “Slow is hot,” she said.

  “I figure there’s a stream a couple of miles ahead. We can stop there.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Trees.” He tipped his head. “Look yonder. Cottonwoods grow where it’s wet. Willows, too.”

  Sure enough, a fuzz of green leafy growth appeared on the horizon. She couldn’t wait for the stream; just thinking about water made her thirsty. She uncapped the canteen hanging on her cantle and shook it. Empty. Rand unhooked his own canteen and passed it to her.

  “Why am I out of water when you’re not?” she wondered aloud.

  “Maybe because you’re greedy?” He phrased it as a question, but she got the message. She shouldn’t guzzle water just because she was thirsty; she should ration it out. She took a single swallow of the warm, metal-flavored water and handed the canteen back to him.

  She was completely out of her element out here. This wilderness was so far removed from her peaceful, quiet library she might as well be on the moon.

  Another hour brought them to a little trickle of a stream, just enough to water the horses and refill the canteens. There was barely enough to splash over her sweaty face and neck.

  “Still got a couple hours of daylight left, Alice. Are you okay with going on?”

  She laughed. “You mean I could hurry up the sunset if I wanted to stop for the night? Librarians a
re smart, but they’re not that smart.”

  He turned his head to grin at her and she noticed something. One side of his face was darker than the other. He must have been riding north before he arrived in Smoke River and his sunburn had turned his skin tan.

  “Rand, where were you coming from when you reached Smoke River?”

  “How do you know I didn’t come in on the train?”

  “I just know. Librarians are—”

  “Observant,” he finished with a chuckle. “I was coming from Colorado Territory. Denver City.”

  “Colorado! That’s hundreds of miles from Oregon.”

  “Sure is. Why do you think I was so hungry at supper that first night?”

  “Why didn’t you take the train from Denver City instead of riding all that way?”

  He didn’t answer for a long while. “Because I needed the time,” he said finally.

  “Time for what?”

  “Time to work out a plan. And,” he added, “I didn’t want to load Sinbad on a freight car.” He bent to pat his horse’s neck.

  For the next hour Alice thought about his answer. So he needed to think up a plan. And he cared about his horse. Interesting.

  By the time they made camp next to a pretty, shaded river in the foothills, she had run out of questions. She watched him loosen the cinch and rub his bay down with a handful of dry grass, then do the same for her chestnut mare. Finally he dropped both saddles at her feet and strode off to the river. When he returned, his hair was dripping wet.

  “I’ll put some supper together while you take a bath if you want. There’s a little pool behind that scrubby willow, and I didn’t leave any soapsuds floating in the water.”

  Soapsuds! She didn’t have any soap that would make suds. She had forgotten to purchase soap at the mercantile, so she had only a sliver of Sarah’s yellow laundry soap.

  “Think you’re gonna be scared tonight?” he asked.

  “What an odd question. I expect I will be scared every night until...until this is over. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wanted to know how close to lay our bedrolls.”