Courting Carrie in Wonderland

by Carla Kelly

  “We can go there tomorrow,” Ramsay said. He glanced at Carrie and saw the frown line deepen between her eyes. He said what he thought she was thinking. “This will shorten our trip by two days. We can have you on the train to Bozeman by the end of the week. You’ll be in the comforts of your own home soon.”

  He heard Carrie draw a deep breath and knew he didn’t want to look at her, because he knew he would see someone already resigning herself to working hard at the Wylie Camp, while he went to Texas under a dark cloud. Their time together was going to be over too soon to suit either of them.

  “It will be a relief to be home,” the lady said. She looked down at her hands. “Maybe I thought I could grasp a little glimpse of an earlier time in my life. I’ve seen Versailles. I’ve even been presented to Queen Victoria. I don’t know …”

  “Maybe Elsie Krank wanted another glimpse of Tom Moran,” Carrie said. “I’m eager to see the falls and the canyon too.”

  Only not quite so quickly, Ramsay thought. He saw how Carrie’s shoulders drooped, and how she couldn’t hide the disappointment in her eyes. He hoped he wasn’t so transparent, but she seemed to know him well enough to know something bothered him. Heaven help him if she thought it was something she had done.

  Some hero he was. She’s too young. She has her own plans for her future. They probably don’t involve following a sergeant major into a suddenly insecure future. All the reasons ran through his mind, and he writhed inside under his own cowardice.

  What else could he do? Mrs. LaMarque had made up her mind, and he had orders to see that she visited the park. Carrie had never figured in those orders and she knew it. This was a business arrangement between them. He knew he had to tell her what had happened, but he didn’t know how or when.

  “We’ll start out early,” he said, getting to his feet. “It’s been gnawing at me that we wore you out today. We’ll get to Canyon Hotel in good time and you can rest tomorrow night. We’ll see the canyon the day after, then start for Gardiner.”

  Mrs. LaMarque held out her left hand to him, the one that didn’t shake. “Thank you, Sergeant Major, for indulging this old lady. Maybe later you can see that Carrie gets to visit Old Faithful and those hot springs here and there.”

  “I’m sure it will happen,” he said vaguely, and hated himself. “On the road by eight, Carrie? Could you cajole Bonnie into packing box lunches for us? That’s a fairly empty stretch between here and Canyon.”

  “Yes, certainly,” she replied and didn’t look at him. “We’ll be ready in the morning. Good night, Ramsay.”

  She said it kindly, but she dismissed him. He walked back slowly to his tent, trying to tell himself he should be grateful he hadn’t committed himself to anything, even though a kiss was a powerful indication that a man, an honorable man, was serious enough to think of a future involving a wife and children.

  Just how honorable do you think you are? ran through his brain as Ramsay tossed and turned and finally slept.

  Heavy-eyed, he met Mrs. LaMarque and Carrie in the dining room, just finishing breakfast. Mrs. LaMarque looked rested; Carrie did not. She sees right through me, Ramsay thought in misery. She knows me.

  Other tourists were already seated and deep into flapjacks and sausage. He paid for the same and sat with his ladies, focusing his attention on the food, then drinking two cups of coffee, in the hopes it would keep him awake until they reached Canyon Hotel.

  He worked up his nerve to glance at Carrie. He had never seen her drink coffee, but here she was, holding out her mug for another cup as the server came around. Carrie looked at him and raised her cup to him in a salute remarkable for the wooden look on her face.

  “Looks like neither of us slept too well last night,” she said.

  He heard the sorrow in her voice, which pained him more than a slap across his face. She knew something was wrong and he wasn’t talking to her.

  “Do you think we can find a moment to talk about … about whatever it is that’s eating you?” she whispered to him when Mrs. LaMarque’s attention was taken by the Great Trostini himself, who sat on the lady’s other side to chat.

  “I don’t know when,” he managed to say.

  “That’s a poor answer,” she said, and got to her feet. She touched Mrs. LaMarque’s shoulder. “I have to gather my things together. You’re already packed. Jake, could you help me get Mrs. LaMarque’s luggage to the stable?”

  Jake stood up and gave Mrs. LaMarque an elaborate salaam that made the lady laugh. “Your wish is my command, Scheherazade,” he said. “Lead on.”

  They left together. Ramsay’s misery deepened when he heard Carrie laughing at something Wonder Boy was saying. Great gobs of monkey meat, but were all University of Washington engineer majors so insufferable?

  “You look like the very last rose of summer,” Mrs. LaMarque said.

  Somehow, it was easier to talk to this woman he knew would be out of his sight and mind in a few days. “I received a dispatch last night from Major Pitcher. It’s bad news for me.”

  “Is it something Carrie might want to know about?” she asked, and he heard all the sarcasm in her voice.

  “I can’t tell her,” he said. He stood up and helped her to her feet.

  “Will it make her unhappy?”

  “Probably.”

  She waited for him to speak, but he knew he could out wait her. Finally, she narrowed her eyes and glared at him. “You are a coward,” she snapped and flounced ahead.

  “I am, indeed,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. From the startled looks he saw, they had both spoken loud enough for others to hear too.

  Furious with himself, he saddled Xerxes. He was rougher than he should have been, cinching up the old gentleman, who gave him a wounded look. “Sorry, sir,” he muttered. “If you only knew my troubles.”

  They started out from Willow Park camp, Ramsay leading, and Dave Lassiter following with the carriage. Mrs. LaMarque and Carrie sat together in the second seat, which at least cheered his heart.

  He rode steadily without looking back, his stomach already beginning to hurt as he contemplated what lay ahead at Fort Clark. When he looked back after several miles, he realized he was alone on the road. Cursing himself, he turned Xerxes around and cantered back the way he had come, wondering if Mrs. LaMarque had suffered a relapse of some sort, and worried because he knew nothing about Parkinson’s palsy.

  But there they were in the little turn off at Roaring Mountain, guidebook in Mrs. LaMarque’s hand while Carrie took her picture with the grand dame’s Kodak. They were tourists, and not just part of army duty. He couldn’t help smiling at them.

  “That’s better, young man,” Mrs. LaMarque said as Carrie helped her into the carriage. “Carrie wanted to see this … this whistling mountain.”

  “Roaring Mountain,” he said automatically, and quoted from Captain Chittenden’s book, the one he was probably never going to modify for the use of the troopers who patrolled this Wonderland that had turned on him. “ ‘… a high hill on the left of the road, with a powerful steam vent near the summit.’ ”

  “Bravo,” Mrs. LaMarque said. “We’re ready to drive on now.”

  Dave tipped his battered hat to Ramsay and returned to the Grand Loop. Ramsay took his place at the head of this puzzling caravan. The turn off at Norris Junction to the cutoff for Canyon couldn’t have come soon enough to suit him, except Dave was calling to him to stop. He dismounted and walked back to the carriage, happy enough to be off his horse. For the last mile or so, he had been wondering why he had thought drinking so much coffee was a good idea. He could send them on their way and catch up, after he found a convenient clump of trees, an easy task in Yellowstone.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  To his surprise, Carrie leaned out of the carriage. “I absolutely refuse to pass up Emerald Spring at the geyser basin here,” she said, sounding uncannily like Mrs. LaMarque. She held out the Haynes Guidebook and pointed to the page. “ ‘The sulphur-lined basin with
coral walls, most beautifully shaped, can be seen to an appalling depth.’ ”

  “Twenty-seven feet down,” he said, and felt the beginning of a relief so overpowering that he wanted to sink to his knees in gratitude. What a woman! She wasn’t going to let him get away with melancholy pouting.

  “Mrs. LaMarque is going to sit here and you are going to take me to Emerald Pool,” Carrie said, her voice serene now because she sensed she had won.

  He knew she wouldn’t care for what he had to tell her. “You’re not going to like it,” he said, in his last feeble attempt to spare her. “I suppose you’re not going to take no for an answer.”

  “I am not,” she replied. “Help me down. We have an Emerald Pool to visit.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  He helped her from the carriage. “That’s Porcelain Geyser Basin to the north. We’re going to the Back Basin. It’s not far.”

  Silent, he led her to Emerald Pool. He watched her face as she stared in delight at the astonishing color created when the deep blue met the yellow and created a green seldom seen in nature.

  He was already going to make a fool of himself in the next few minutes, but staring at all that water was only exacerbating his other problem, the temporary one.

  “Just watch the water, if you please,” he told her. “I drank way much coffee for breakfast. I’ll be back.”

  She chuckled, but didn’t turn around. He found an obliging clump of trees and took care of business. He stood there a long moment after he buttoned up, wondering how to tell her.

  She had walked a little way on the boardwalk, the better to admire the pool so serene, colorful, and deadly hot. When he joined her again, he took a deep breath, and pulled the dispatch from an inside pocket on his uniform. He handed it to her.

  She hesitated before opening it and then took her own deep breath. She read Major Pitcher’s note first, as he had done, then the dispatch. He watched her face and saw the confusion. She closed her eyes for a moment, then she faced him and touched his chest.

  “I knew I had done something wrong and couldn’t figure out what it was,” she said and leaned her forehead against his chest.

  If she had punched the air out of him with a battering ram he could not have felt more startled. He stared at the top of her head against his chest, then put his arms around her. He closed his eyes in pleasure as she encircled him with her arms.

  “Promise me that whatever happens in the rest of your life, you won’t ever automatically think you did something wrong,” he ordered. “Don’t let any man anywhere ever make you feel that way.”

  “I believe it’s how women think,” she said.

  “I wish they wouldn’t, Caroline,” he said into her hair. “I took a wrong turn this winter. I am going to be court-martialed and thrown in the stockade for it.”

  She gasped and pulled away as he knew she would, but only to give him that clear-eyed look he was already familiar with. She took his hand and tugged him to a wooden bench just off the trail. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “Tell it all. Don’t leave out one single thing.”

  He still tried to weasel out of an explanation, but Carrie stopped him with a fierce look. “Mrs. LaMarque told me not to move until you tell me everything.”

  “Mrs. LaMarque?” he asked, dismayed.

  “Yes! Do you think we didn’t notice how glum you were last night, and how pathetic you looked in the dining room?”

  He winced at pathetic, but she was right. After years of keeping his own counsel through every wave that washed over him, he decided to obey another set of orders: Carrie McKay’s.

  “Remember my little red book, and how you turned by chance to that page about wolves?”

  “Yes.”

  She was quick, but he already knew that. She tightened her grip on his hand that she hadn’t let go of when they sat down. She scowled at some tourists who stopped to gape at something. Maybe they had never seen a sergeant major holding hands with a pretty girl. How did he know? They hurried on.

  “You’re fierce,” he said.

  “You’re stalling. Did you tell your men not to poison or otherwise kill wolves?”

  “And coyotes and mountain lions,” he said. “It had been a long winter. When I returned from Washington, D.C., with that … that blamed medal, I was tasked with taking an additional bottle of strychnine to each soldier station because everyone was running low. I delivered it, but I told them it was folly to be killing predators, because in a few years, the park will be overrun with elk and deer the wolves should have eaten.”

  “We talked about survival of the fittest in one of my classes,” Carrie said.

  “There’s more to it than that. I strongly suspect that when the ungulates—elk and deer for you less informed—”

  She chuckled at that, as he hoped she would.

  “The ungulates will start stripping the bark from the trees. I’ve seen it happen in bad winters. Trouble is, too much of that and the trees die. Maybe I’m out in left field here, but it’s only logical that killing the predators is going to change things.” He couldn’t help a self-conscious chuckle of his own. “I’ve been studying the wolves and making field notes.”

  “That hardly surprises me,” Carrie said. “What happened with the—oh, I can’t even say the word.”

  “Strychnine. Since the winter was nearly gone, I, uh, shall we say, encouraged them to put away the strychnine until next year and not make a conscious effort to kill any more predators that season.”

  “They didn’t argue?”

  “Most didn’t. By March, the wolves had retreated to safer spots in the park, probably in Lamar Valley. It’s hard to say about mountain lions; they come, they go. No one argued until I came to the Lake soldier station,” he said, remembering the incident so well. “Sergeant Lafferty, F Company, took me aside and said he wasn’t going to disobey an order. He said he was going to continue putting strychnine in winterkill deer and elk carcasses. I told him to suit himself.”

  “He reported you,” Carrie said.

  “He certainly did.” Ramsay gave a dry half-chuckle. “He’s an ambitious man, Sergeant Lafferty, and I was in the wrong.”

  Carrie tightened her grip on his hand. “Do you spend a lot of time just watching animals?”

  “More than I probably should,” he admitted. “They fascinate me, especially the wolves, with their packs. Did you know they seem to have a pecking order? My observations indicate they typically kill the weak and the old who would probably die anyway, and the very young, but that’s nature. They are magnificent animals and they don’t deserve to die because someone in the Department of the Interior dictates otherwise.”

  Carrie let go of his hand and walked back to Emerald Spring. She stared into the water. He watched her with deep appreciation, admiring her small waist and general air of compact vitality. He knew she had plans of her own and another year of school to complete her degree. He also wanted her to be the mother of his children, because they would be the luckiest kids in Wyoming. Ramsay, you think too much, he told himself.

  He thought she might return to the carriage, but she turned around and looked at him, as though measuring him. She walked back to him and sat down. “What do you think will happen in … where is it?”

  “Fort Clark. It’s not too far from the Big Bend area of Texas. For starters, I’ll probably receive a blistering, profane scold from the regiment’s lieutenant colonel. I already got a good one from Major Pitcher, but the colonel’s will be even worse, I have no doubt.”

  “You stand there and take it?”

  “I do, Caroline,” he said. “I was wrong and I committed the worst sin a non-commissioned officer can commit, except that of striking an officer—I disobeyed an order.”

  “What happens after the scold?” she asked in that clear-voiced, realistic way of hers. Praise the Almighty that a man would never have to question where he stood with this woman. She could probably manage four or five sons with the efficiency of a drill serg
eant, and the added dollop of motherly fondness. He would never know.

  “I’ve seen what happens to soldiers who disobey orders. I can probably expect a court martial with perhaps two or three years in the stockade at hard labor, and the loss of all rank,” he said, flinching when she flinched. “And I will be commanded to relinquish my enlistment, once I serve that sentence.”

  “And then?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll be thirty-nine or so years old by then probably, unemployed and stuck in Texas. Or I’ll be thirty-nine years old, a private again if the army is lenient and I am broken by them, and earning thirteen dollars a month.”

  “Can privates marry?” she asked and blushed, because she was Carrie McKay.

  “No.”

  Better drop the hundred pound sand bag on her now. He grasped her hands. “Caroline, I want you to know there is no other way this ugly scenario I caused can end.” The thought of never seeing her again sent a wave of pain over him equal to the knife wounds he suffered in that cave. “I wish you well, and I will never forget you, but this is the end of whatever it was that we began a month ago.”

  She gave him a sharp look. “What we began a month ago was love, and you know it.”

  “We haven’t talked about it.” Sweet suffering saints, what a whiner he was.

  “We didn’t need to,” she said, and he heard all the sorrow in the world. He also heard her peculiar strength, she who should have none, not after her hard times. “I understand that you have to leave as soon as possible. Mrs. LaMarque will be too tired to see the falls today. We’ll see them tomorrow morning, and then if you feel you must ride ahead, I can get Mrs. LaMarque onto the train for Bozeman.”

  He nodded. What could he say? His intransigence and stupidity had come full circle. In any other year he wouldn’t have cared as much, but this summer he had fallen in love. He could almost see the great cosmic housekeeper sweeping up their lovely little moment into a dustpan and dumping it outside the universe.