Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  She stiffened and pulled her hand from his. Something caught at her chest, something that tore through her and hurt and left her feeling empty. "You are ridiculing me."

  "Oh, no, never that. Not that I don't enjoy a good joke— there's too much pain and sadness in living not to crack wise about it every now and then. But when things get real bad..." He flashed a sudden smile. "Say I'm trailing cows through a blue norther and the snow is stinging my face and the wind is howling like a lost soul in hell, it's the dreams I make up in my head that see me through it. Dreams like having someone waiting at home for me, with a fire going and a pot of some good-smelling thing cooking on the stove. A gal, say, with wheat-colored hair and big green eyes..." His words trailed off as he stared at her face, and though she blushed, she could not look away.

  He shook his head, his eyes still smiling at her. "Nope, when it comes to my dreams, Miss Clementine Kennicutt, you'll always find me a dead serious man."

  "Dreams..." she echoed.

  He raised his hat. "Tomorrow, Miss Kennicutt."

  He lifted the battered ordinary out of the gutter as if it weighed no more than a stocking stuffed with feathers. She watched him walk away from her, watched the people in his path part before his wide shoulders, watched his gray western hat bobbing among black silk top hats and beaver bowlers, watched until there was nothing left of him to see.

  She climbed the broad granite steps and passed through the columned entrance of the Tremont House in a daze. A gentleman does not ask a girl he scarcely knows, knows not at all, to be his wife. A gentleman is one who has known you forever, whose parents have known your parents forever. A gentleman wears a frock coat and a top hat, and he does not ride an ordinary pell-mell through the streets. A gentleman—

  Her mother's voice, though never loud, still managed to reach her over the refined whispers and rustling silk in the hotel lobby. "Clementine, what on earth has happened to you? Your bonnet is askew and you've dirt on your face, and look, there's a rip in the sleeve of your new jersey."

  Clementine blinked and saw her mother and Aunt Etta standing beside her. "I was struck by an ordinary," she said.

  "Gracious." Julia Kennicutt expelled a sharp breath, and Aunt Etta echoed her gasp. "Those devil-driven wheels will be the death of us all," Julia said and her sister clucked her agreement. "They shouldn't be allowed on the streets. Only a hooligan would even think of driving such a... a boneshaker."

  To hear slang on her mother's lips nearly shocked a smile out of Clementine. "He's not a hooligan," she said, and then a laugh did roll up and out of her throat, a laugh that was loud and rather unseemly. And quite shocking, coming as it did from a girl who rarely laughed. "He's a cowboy."

  The clock on the square white tower of the Park Street Church showed that it lacked five minutes to eleven. Clementine pulled her cloak close around her neck. It was more seasonably cold than yesterday. The big elms cast deep shadows onto the sidewalk, and a stiff breeze blew in off the bay.

  She paced the length of the wrought-iron fence that separated the street from the tombstones of the Old Granary Burial Ground. She looked again at the clock on the tower. A long, agonizing minute had passed.

  She decided to play a little game with herself. She would walk along the fence to the Egyptian-style gateway that led into the cemetery, and when she turned around, he would be there—

  "Miss Kennicutt!"

  A black rattletrap gig pulled up beside her with a protesting creak of its wheels, and she looked up into a man's sun- browned, smiling face that was shaded by the broad brim of a big gray hat.

  "You're here," he said. "I wasn't sure you would be."

  "I wasn't sure you would be either."

  Laughing, he leaped down and helped her into the gig. "Sorry about the shabbiness of this conveyance, ma'am," he said as he climbed back onto the seat beside her. "My uncle has five sons, and there's always a shortage of vehicles in the family stables—Get up, there!" he yelled to the horse, and they pulled out into the street at such a spanking pace she instinctively gripped her hat. The motion jostled her so that she fell against him. He was solid and surprisingly warm. She stiffened, scooting away from him as far as she could, until her arm and hip were pressed into the iron railing that wrapped around the seat.

  His eyes smiled at her. "I probably don't want to know this, but just how old are you, Miss Kennicutt?"

  Her gaze fell to the gloved hands she had clasped so tightly in her lap. She thought about lying, but he had said he was a man of his word and she wanted to be worthy of his regard. "I am seventeen."

  "Seventeen... Oh, Lord, help me."

  She looked behind her, into the empty space where the gig's hood would have been folded, if it'd had one. "Where is your ordinary?"

  "I left my cousin to rope and saddle it. I figure if he wants me to race, he can supply the mount."

  "You do make me smile, sir—the way you talk."

  "Uh-uh. So far I've only managed to do it twice. But I aim to keep on trying until..." He was staring at her mouth so intently she had to bite her lower lip to stop its trembling. "Until I can get you to smile at me again."

  She jerked her gaze away from his. But a moment later she was trying to look at him out the corner of her eye.

  Today he was dressed more properly for cycling, in blue knee breeches, yellow gaiters, and a seal-brown corduroy reefer jacket. The thin velvet breeches fit tight across the muscles of his thighs, which looked strong from busting broncos and trailing cattle. She thought that riding an ordinary probably seemed tame stuff to such a man.

  There were so many things she wanted to say to him; so many questions crowded her mouth. But the one that fell out made her flush with the stupidity of it. "Is it true what they say about Montana, that a person can ride from one end to the other of it without crossing a fence?"

  He laughed, as she had known he would. But she didn't mind, for she liked his laugh. "I suppose you might come upon a drift fence or two here and there," he said. "And there are some mighty big mountains that'll give you pause."

  She had read about such mountains, but she had never been able to draw a picture of them in her mind. She had known only the low bluffs and drumlins that rose above the salt marshes around Boston.

  They had reached one of the busiest thoroughfares, and he gave his attention to the traffic now, so she was able to study him. He was so large he seemed to fill all of the gig's seat. There was a joyous shine to him, like a brand-new copper penny. "What brings you all this way to Boston, Mr. McQueen?"

  He turned his head and his gaze met hers. She had forgotten that his eyes were such a deep, clear blue. The Montana sky would be that blue, she thought.

  "My mother was a long time dying," he said. "She asked to see me before she went, and so I came. I'll be leaving again, though, come the end of the week."

  "I'm sorry," she said, and then added hastily, lest he misunderstand her, "Sorry, I mean, about your mother's death."

  A shadow crossed his face, like clouds scudding across the sun. "I left her and Boston when I was seventeen, the same age as you, and I wasn't always very good about writing."

  "Did you run away?"

  He cast a glance at her, then made a clicking noise in his mouth, urging the horse around an ice wagon that had rolled into their path. "In a manner of speaking, yeah, I guess I did. I wanted to see the elephant." At her quizzical look, he laughed. "I wanted to see the marvels of the great Wild West. Indians and buffalo and grizzly bears and rivers of gold."

  How she yearned to see such marvels herself. Yet it all seemed so far beyond her reach and doomed forever to remain so. "And was he as wonderful as you thought he would be— your elephant?"

  She watched him as he took a moment to think about it; there was an excitement about him, a shining, that stirred something deep within her.

  "There's a bigness about Montana that tends to frighten a lot of people. But it's not so big you can't find what you're looking for, if you know what that som
ething is." His eyes met hers, and the stirring within her quickened. "Sometimes, Miss Kennicutt, all a body needs is a place to run to."

  She didn't know what she was looking for. The missing things, she supposed, but she couldn't have defined them, even to herself. She only knew that in this one moment she felt alive. The wind was stiff with the bite of salt in it, and late winter sunlight dappled the shop awnings and made the windows shimmer, and she was going to see a bicycle race in the company of a man, a cowboy.

  He pulled the horse to a halt in the middle of the street, ignoring the shouts that came from the carriages and wagons stalled behind them. He turned to her, and although his eyes were still wreathed with laugh lines, his mouth was set serious. "Yesterday I told you one of my dreams. Now how about sharing one of yours. What do you dream of, Miss Kennicutt?"

  She felt suddenly breathless, as if she'd just sprinted to the top of one of his big Montana mountains. "I don't know," she said, but of course she did know. She dreamed of him. She'd been dreaming of him all her life.

  "I'm twenty-five years old," he said, his gaze probing hers, pulling at her, "and I've done a fair amount of wandering in my time. When a man's seen as much of the world as I have, he gets to knowing right off what he wants when he comes across it." His thumb stroked the bone of her jaw, and the smile his mouth made did something more to her breath. "Or runs over it, as the case may be. You and me, girl, we're a fit. I could take my time at courting you, showing you how we're meant to be together, but either you see it now—this rightness of us—or you don't. And no flower bouquets and serenades are going to change what is already the truth."

  She marveled at him, that he could speak of dreams in one breath and of certainties in the next. She had never been on a horse in her life, but in that moment she felt as if she were riding one of his cayuses that could run all day and turn on a nickel and was all wild.

  She turned her head away, her heart pounding so hard she wondered that he couldn't hear it. "I can't think about this yet," she said.

  His words came to her, riding on the salty wind. "You're already thinking about it, Miss Kennicutt. Shoot, you're halfway to Montana already."

  CHAPTER 2

  Gus McQueen's young bride stood on the grassy levee and looked over the straggling line of weather-rotten buildings and jerry-built shacks that passed for the town of Fort Benton, Montana. She wasn't going to let herself be disappointed. She had never seen a real elephant before, either, but she supposed that up close they all must be smelly, dirty beasts.

  No sooner had the steamboat deposited them and their baggage onto the levee than Gus informed her he would have to check immediately for a freight wagon leaving in the direction of the RainDance country, for it was not a route often traveled. "Wait for me right here, Clementine," he said to her, pointing to the ground as if he thought she was too dense to understand what "here" meant. "Don't move from this spot."

  She opened her mouth to ask if she could at least do her waiting out of the sun, but he was already striding away from her. Her gaze followed him as he crossed the road and disappeared into the yawning doors of a livery barn. Gus McQueen. Her husband. Sometimes, for no reason, looking at him made her chest ache. It was the tall, strong, splendid sight of him, she supposed.

  A departing steamboat held her interest for a while as she watched clouds of inky smoke billow from its double stacks. The giant paddles of its stern wheel churned the coffee-colored water, splashing the bank and stirring up a stink of dead fish and rotting weeds. The boat pulled out into the river with a bleat of its whistle and a hiss of steam, and she turned her attention back across the dusty road. They had been traveling six weeks to reach this nothing place.

  A few of the ramshackle buildings sported rough signs. She was able to identify a mercantile, a hotel with a sagging porch, and a saddle and harness shop. The mercantile's tall false front provided the only dab of shade on this side of the river.

  She was surprised to notice a number of women strolling up and down the boardwalk. Some walked alone, but most were in pairs, arm in arm, laughing and chatting. Many were dressed quite finely in hats trimmed with ostrich plumes and silk flowers and dresses with long pleated and ruched trains of bright rainbow colors. Clementine watched the pleasant scene with wistful longing. Her black sarcenet parasol seemed to draw the unusually warm spring sun down upon her head. Trickles of sweat rolled down her sides and between her breasts. In her cambric chemise, long flannel drawers, steel busk corset, quilted eiderdown petticoat with two flounces, nainsook camisole, and oatmeal serge traveling suit with velvet-trimmed waistcoat, she was stifling.

  She looked toward the livery for a sign of Gus. She didn't see him, nor did she see Indians or bank robbers or any other obvious perils. With so many other women about, she could hardly be in any danger. She couldn't see what harm it would do to cross over to the mercantile for a few moments of blessed relief in the shade. Especially if she was careful to keep an eye on their baggage.

  She had to lift her skirts high in order to pick her way around the horse apples and bull pies that littered the wide and wagon-rutted street. As she stepped onto the boardwalk she looked up and saw that a man lounging on the hotel porch in a willow rocker was staring rudely at her legs. She lowered her skirt, even though the warped boards were stained with dried mud and tobacco spit. At least her traveling suit had only a modest train.

  She had started toward the shade of the mercantile when she noticed that next door was a saloon. Curious, she peered over the top of the slatted swinging doors. Through a haze of tobacco smoke she saw a garish oil painting of a woman who was as plump as a corn-fed chicken and quite naked. Men were lined up along a counter facing the naked woman, standing slightly bent over and hipshot, like horses at a hitching rack. The saloon was filled with a kaleidoscope of men who looked as if they could have stepped right out of a drawing in one of Shona's Wild West novels. Soldiers in blue, miners in their rough clothes, professional gamblers in black suits and ruffled white shirts. The air that wafted out the slatted doors reeked of spilled whiskey and unwashed bodies. A clink of glass against glass was followed by a roar of laughter and an explosion of pungent profanity. Clementine realized with a start that even in Montana it probably wasn't quite the proper thing for a lady to allow her eyes and ears to linger on such a sight.

  As she turned away, she felt a tug on her skirt. She looked down to discover the rowel of a spur hooked in her train. Her gaze followed the length of the man from his glossy boot up to his face. It was the man from the hotel porch.

  He must surely be an army scout, she thought, with his long blond hair and fringed buckskin shirt, and his knife sheath decorated with brass studs. But tobacco juice stained his yellow goatee, and his hands, she noticed as he raised his hat to her, were dirty. "Howdy do, ma'am," he said.

  "How do you do," she said, nodding politely. Of course they hadn't been properly introduced, but Gus had already explained to her how westerners were freer in their ways. She gave a slight pull on the train of her traveling suit. "I fear, sir, that your spur has become entangled with my skirt."

  He looked down, opening his eyes wide in exaggerated surprise. "Why, so it is. I do beg your pardon."

  He bent over and unhooked her train off the sharp rowel, lifting her skirt indecently high to do so. When he straightened up, he was grinning. "You appear to be a mite hot, ma'am, if you don't mind my sayin' so." He slipped his hand beneath her elbow. "How 'bout if I buy you something cool and wet to put out the fire in them pretty li'l cheeks—"

  "Take your hand off her!"

  Clementine swung her head around to see her husband striding down the walk so fast the rotting boards groaned beneath his weight. "I said, let her go, damn you." Gus planted himself before the man. His hands hung loose at his sides, but the rest of him had drawn up tall and taut, and his eyes glittered with a coldness she had never seen before. He was also wearing a gun she had never seen before, its holster hanging heavily from a gun belt strapped
around his waist.

  She tried to pull her arm from the man's grasp, but he tightened his grip. He hawked and shot a wad of tobacco onto the toe of Gus's boot. "You're rustling on my territory here, cowboy," he said, and his voice, which had been so friendly before, now turned mean. "I found the lady first."

  "The lady is my wife."

  The men stared at each other and the moment lengthened, grew tight, and there was the danger of impending violence in the air that could be smelled, sharp as gunpowder.

  The man's gaze flickered away from Gus's. "My mistake," he said. He released her and stepped back, his hands spread wide in an attitude of surrender.

  Gus seized her arm and hauled her down into the street so abruptly her teeth cracked together. "I told you to stay put, girl. Did you think I was talking just to exercise my tongue?"

  She dug in her heels and jerked her arm out of his grasp, forcing him to turn and face her. A spring wagon clipped past, its wheels sending a cloud of dust drifting over them. "You flung an order at my head, Mr. McQueen, and walked off. If you had exercised your tongue a little more and given me a reason—"

  He leaned over to shout at her. "You want a reason? Because it's the middle of the afternoon, when the chippies go on parade. Any woman who walks along Front Street during this time of day is likely to be taken for one of their kind. Is that what you want everyone to think, Clementine—that you're a chippy?"

  His hands had clenched into fists, and she took a deep breath. She would not fear him the way she feared her father.

  "You still haven't explained yourself adequately, sir. What is a chippy?"

  For a moment he simply stared at her, breathing heavily; then the anger collapsed within him. He reached out and pulled her to his chest, rubbing her back with his big hands. "Aw, Clementine, you're such a sweet innocent. A chippy is a soiled dove. A fancy woman who sells her body to a man for his pleasure."