by Hill, April
She craned her head around to face him, brushed her hair out of her eyes, and stuck out her tongue. “I told you already, it ain’t none of your fuckin’ business. And I still don’t believe you can read Mexican!”
There was a pause of several seconds, while Griff tightened his grip around her waist, pulled off his belt, and folded it in two. With her head down and her toes barely touching the ground, Gertie/Clarinda couldn’t see what was happening during this short “intermission,” making what did happen the second unpleasant surprise of her day. The wide leather belt cracked across the exquisitely sensitive underswell where her upper thighs met her buttocks, and even through the fabric of her brand-new muslin drawers, every blow felt like she’d sat down on a red-hot stove.
A half-dozen painfully well-placed swats later, Griff dumped her back onto her feet.
“Who the hell give you the right to wallop me like that?” she demanded, rubbing her rear-end in a futile attempt at extinguishing the fire.
“I’m your older brother, remember?”
“Yeah, well I’ll just betcha you’d never do nothin’ like that to your danged sister.”
“If she’d called me what you just did, she’d be sitting on a pillow for a day or so, that’s for sure. Now, how old are you? And if you lie to me again, we’re gonna start all over, with those pretty new drawers of yours down around your damned ankles.”
“I turned sixteen last month,” she muttered sullenly.
“What’s your name? Your real name?”
“My ma and pa named me Eileen a’Roon. It means secret pleasure of my heart, and yeah, I know it’s a stupid thing to call a little baby, but they was both from some little place in Ireland where folks go around naming babies stuff like that—stuff that nobody can spell, or understand what it means. Ireland’s somewheres over in Europe, I think. Anyway, I reckon the damn fools at that orphan place they took me hadn’t cleaned their ears so good, ‘cause when I told ’em my name, they took to callin’ me Earleen right-off. I had this little bitty locket with my name writ on it, but all that was left on it by then was the big ‘E’ and a lot of scratches. It got all beat up during the wreck.”
“Wreck?”
“Yeah. We was on this paddle-wheeler headed upriver—Ma and Pa, and me and my baby sister, Annie. After the tax people took our place in Kentucky, Pa sold off just about ever’thing we had, hopin’ to maybe find us a little farm in Oregon, so’s we could get us a new start. Even sold off my ma’s harp—the one I told you about, that she come over from Ireland with. Ma wasn’t the kind to go around cryin’ all the time, but she cried when they carried off that little gold harp. I was about to cry too, but I didn’t let on. I figured Pa already felt bad enough.
“Anyway, one mornin’ while we was all still asleep, there was a real big boom, and the whole boat just upped and blew itself all to smithereens. Nobody acted like they knew what the heck was goin’ on, but one fella kept on yellin’ about the boiler. After that, the boat just kinda went all to pieces, and the pieces started floatin’ off down the river. I reckon most of the folks there got drowned. Someone throwed me and Annie in the river with two of them float things on, and after a while, we got picked up by a fella out fishin’ for catfish. We was both about froze to death, but we wasn’t hurt much. We never seen Ma or Pa again, though.”
Griff sighed. “I’m very sorry about your parents, Clarinda. Life can be hard out here—especially for newcomers, but at least you still have your sister. Is she still at the orphanage?”
She shook her head. “She passed on a couple months after we got there.”
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, knowing that his words were woefully inadequate, no matter how often he repeated them.
“They told me she’d caught the diphtheria,” she went on. “Annie was real little for her age, and she’d always been kinda spindly, but there was never enough to eat there, and one day, it’s like she just got too weak to wake up. I pitched a fit and told the son of a bitch who run the place they starved my baby sister to death. They locked me up in this old root cellar ‘til I said I’d take it back and stop tellin’ lies about ‘em, but I told ‘em no, and that for all I cared, they could all go shit in their damned hats.”
He smiled. “Good for you.”
“Maybe,” she conceded, with a resigned shrug. “But I got the tar beat outta me a couple o’ times with this big ole black strap the preacher liked usin’ on the littler kids—said it helped ‘em to get the point, early on. I kept on spittin’ in his fat face while he done it, but none of it brought Annie back. She wasn’t but four years old when they put her in the ground.” She wiped her eyes. “You really gonna take me back there?”
“What’s the place called?” he asked, avoiding the question until he could decide if, and how he was going to arrange a good solution to what was a phenomenally bad situation—a solution that would allow him to walk away with a clear conscience, and if he was lucky, with no regrets.
“You plan on takin’ that belt to me again, if I was to say I can’t remember?”
“No,” he replied with a deep sigh. “But if you won’t tell me what I need to know, I don’t see how I can help you. The fellow-traveler bargain we agreed to goes both ways, Clarinda.”
For around thirty seconds, the girl didn’t say anything—trying to decide whether or not to trust him, Griff guessed. And then, finally, Gertie-Clarinda started talking.
“My whole name is Eileen a ‘Roon O’Malley—but my pa used to call me Elyn, for short. The name of the place I was at was Angels Unaware, like in the Bible,” she began. “Ain’t that… Isn’t that a hoot? One time, there was four young’uns died in just three weeks, so I guess they maybe did get to be angels after that. No one ever said nothin’ about what happened. One day they was there, and the next day… There was this graveyard out back, with rocks, and dead grass and a lot of little wood crosses, but most a’ the names on the crosses was all worn off. I found me an old shingle, and wrote Annie’s name on it with a piece o’ burnt wood, but the rain kept washin’ it away, ‘til I gave up and figured I’d just keep her in a little corner of my heart somewhere. Maybe I’ll get back there some day and give Annie a proper gravestone.”
When she’d finished the story, Griff could tell that she was having trouble holding back the tears, and since he was having a problem with the same thing, he continued asking for information. “How long does this place keep the children they take in?”
“The girls earn their keep sewin’ feed bags ‘til they turn eighteen. I seen some of ‘em go out when they was fourteen or so, when some dirt farmer come lookin’ for a woman he could work to death without payin’ her a red cent, and usin’ her for what he… Anyhow, after they left, we never heard nothin’ else about ‘em. No letters, or nothin.’ It was like most o’ them girls just fell down a hole and disappeared. I got hired out a lot’ o times, to work on some farm or other, but when I kept on tryin’ to run off, they quit lettin’ me out. When the boys got to around twelve, they usually got hired out during the day and come back at night. They was always plumb wore out from hard work, but none of ‘em ever seen the wages they was supposed to get.”
When Griff didn’t say anything else, Eileen found a large rock and sat down to remove a pebble from her shoe. With that done, she began braiding her hair.
“You still ponderin’ how to get shed of me?” she asked finally, with a feigned air of indifference. “I’m kinda runty, so I reckon you could just tie me up in a feed sack and toss me in a damned lake, or somethin’, or drown me in the first well we come to, like I was some old stray cat you didn’t want.”
Griff chuckled. “No lakes around here that I know of, and most people don’t like fishing stray cats out of their wells. Besides, I’m partial to cats.”
She stood up, beaming. “I’m kinda like a stray cat, so I reckon me and you are gonna have to stick together for a spell, right?”
He smiled. “It looks that way—for now.”
B
ut the truth was, Griff had something else in mind for this stray kitten. Something better—if he could arrange it.
CHAPTER SIX
After they had rested for a while, Griff turned Jack toward a small sheep ranch in Kansas that belonged to old friends Abner and Martha Goodspeed. As a young bride, Martha had insisted on calling their new home Rainbow Water, because of the way a nearby stream looked when the sun was setting. Abner and everyone else told her that it was a foolish name for a farm, but Martha wouldn’t be swayed, and Rainbow Water it had remained for all the years they’d lived there.
Under the best circumstances, and with good weather, it was a three-day ride to Rainbow Water, and with Jack carrying two people instead of one, it would be slow going. But Griff knew that, with a bit of luck, he might just find a loving home for Eileen a ‘Roon at the end of this particular rainbow—and a clear conscience for himself.
* * *
He and Abner had met when they served together during the war, at Appomattox Station, Abner as a surgeon’s assistant, and Griff as a badly wounded and still green cavalry lieutenant with a shattered right leg. He had dropped out of college late in the war to join the Union Army, vowing to stay until it was over, which he missed doing by one day. Severely wounded on April eighth, he was transferred to an army hospital a few miles away from where the fighting still continued. The very next day, in a brief, unpretentious ceremony in the parlor of a private home in the nearby village of Appomattox Courthouse, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant. Three days short of four bloody years, the war was finally over.
Two days after the surrender, Abner was assigned to accompany Griff and several other badly wounded men on a train north, and ended up staying on at the army hospital as a volunteer. During the long, painful months of Griff’s recovery, he and Abner became close friends, spending hours each day batting around ideas about what they wanted to do, now that the war had ended.
Griffin Harper was the son and only child of Benjamin Griffin Harper, who operated a small but successful Nebraska cattle ranch left to him by his father, and by his father before him. Griff had grown up around cattle, and around horses—the kind of kid of whom it was often said that “he’d been in the saddle before he could walk.”
The old expression was accurate. Griff had never wanted, nor ever imagined himself doing anything other than running a cattle ranch and training the remuda of working cattle horses that every working ranch needed. It was Ben who insisted that his only child go to college, not merely to study the usual academic subjects, but to learn everything they could teach him about the growing science called animal husbandry, which promised exciting modern methods of cattle ranching.
Griff lasted three years before he tired of simply learning about cattle. He wanted to do what he’d grown up doing—feeding, roping, branding, and herding cattle from the back of an intelligent, well-trained horse. When and if science came up with a truly better way of doing all that, he’d be first in line to try out the new theories. In the meantime, he needed to get back in the saddle, and maybe spend the few off-hours he had pursuing a couple of his other interests—like women.
Ben hadn’t been pleased when Griff left school, but in one way, his son’s coming home was a much needed blessing. After thriving for three generations, the ranch had just suffered through and barely survived a two-year drought. Now, facing serious financial trouble, Ben had been forced to let most of his ranch hands go. His own boy had always been the best, most reliable cowhand he’d ever had—the best hand he’d never hired, was the joke between them. Moreover, after a bad fall from a horse, Ben was still feeling stiff, and had begun to spend more and more of his time out of the saddle.
Two weeks after Griff returned home to help with the ranch, his father died—a stroke, the doctors said, but Griff knew better. The old man had simply lost interest in living after he learned that in spite of everything he’d done to save everything he owned from bankruptcy, he was still going to lose the ranch to the bank. After a lifetime of hard work, though, after burying a beloved wife on a green hill behind the house she’d loved, and after seeing all his efforts to save the place fail, Ben closed his eyes for the last time a contented man. Until the last two years, when the price of beef had suddenly plummeted, he’d had a good life, and a happy one, and he died with only one regret. He had nothing but a battered saddle and his wife’s best china dishes to leave to his only child.
* * *
With his father gone and the paperwork completed that would surrender the ranch to the bank, Griff packed a bag and rode off to join the Union Army—as a commissioned cavalry officer, thanks to a lack of trained officers and to his own three lackluster years in college. In the end, he would spend a year less in the army than he had getting an education—but learning a lot more.
It was Abner Goodspeed who had encouraged him to try settling in the Wyoming Territory area when the war was over. Griff had liked the idea, and the two friends began making plans—plans that had to be postponed until Griff was well enough to be released from the hospital. While statehood seemed unlikely in the next few years, land was cheap, Abner explained, and the Union Pacific would be reaching Cheyenne in a couple of years, making shipping cattle easier. What better place to buy a small spread of his own, settle down, and raise quality beef, the way Ben had?
Before he’d gone off to war himself, Abner had shown the good sense to marry a soft spoken, mission educated Arapaho woman named Martha Walks in Tall Grass—the “girl he’d left behind,” as the song went. It wasn’t long before they had a small ranch in the northern part of Kansas, and three growing boys. While Abner worked the ranch, Martha taught English at the mission school where she’d lived for most of her life, orphaned by the slaughter of her entire family at the hands of a detachment of U.S. Cavalry sent west to “protect the Indians’ interests.”
With no place else to go after Ben died, Griff had gone to live with Martha and Abner for a few months, working as a horse wrangler, sheep-shearer, all-round farmhand, and at whatever else needed doing on his friends’ small spread. He didn’t care much for the smell of sheep, though, and his idea of finding his own place was never far from his thoughts. So, one day, he simply walked into the kitchen where Martha was making breakfast, and told the best friends he had in the world that he was going to pack up and leave, in order to “try to go it on his own”—farther north in Wyoming.
Neither Martha nor Abner was surprised by this announcement. They’d been expecting it for quite a while, and as sad as they were to see him go, they knew it was time. Martha had her own reasons for letting him go so easily. To her way of thinking, Griff had spent far too long keeping company with women he was unlikely to marry, and her hope was that he’d finally find himself a good wife to go with the home he wanted so badly.
Griff still had his mustering-out pay in the bank, and the proceeds from the sale of his dad’s livestock and equipment—enough to buy the land he needed—if he was careful, and if he could find exactly the spread he wanted—not too big, but with plenty of grazing land and good water. He’d need a stand of timber sufficient to build a house and barn, and some sturdy fences, and he’d like the whole place to be smack-dab in the middle of a protected valley.
It was a pretty large order, of course, especially on a tight budget, but Griff knew that it was out there—somewhere. So, with a promise to write often, he rode away from Rainbow Water the next morning, not sure of where he was going, or what he wanted to do, other than look for the elusive cattle ranch he’d been talking about since he left the Cavalry—the small ranch at the end of his own rainbow.
Four months later, he was still looking—wandering through valleys farther and farther north of Rainbow Water in the search for what he wanted. The search had been harder than he’d expected, but he was in no real hurry. Jack was good company, even if he didn’t talk much, the country was beautiful, and there were no complications in his life to worry about.
And just when he was congratulating himself on how uncomplicated his life was, he passed a young woman hanging upside down in an apple tree, and his life changed.
* * *
Now, only a few short months after he’d left, he was coming back to Rainbow Water—without the ranch he’d gone looking for, and without the bride that Martha had been hinting at since he left the army. Moreover, after everything they’d already done for him, he was about to ask his friends, who’d already done so much for him, for one last favor—the biggest favor he’d ever asked. He was going to ask if Abner and Martha could see their way clear to open their hearts and take one more lamb into their already crowded fold. An Irish one this time, with a fiery temper to match her flaming red hair, and a mouth that could use a good washing out with a bar of Martha’s homemade yellow soap.
After a lot of thought, it had seemed to Griff the perfect solution—or the best one he could come up with, anyway.
And as he had more or less expected, Eileen a ‘Roon O’Malley didn’t see it that way.
“So, you’re just gonna dump me at some fuckin’ county workhouse, like I was a…”
“It’s not a workhouse,” he explained patiently. “It’s a private farm, owned by a pair of decent, God fearing people.”
She sneered. “Like them so-called Christians at that orphan place, I bet. And let me tell you somethin’, Mr. I Know What’s Right For Ever’body in the Whole Danged World. I had me just about all the Christian charity I can handle at that last shithole some righteous fool went and dropped me down.”
Griff groaned inwardly, imagining Martha’s reaction when she heard the girl swearing the way she usually did—like a drunken muleskinner. According to Abner, his brand new bride had cured him of cussing more than eighteen years ago, by kicking him out of the bridal bed—three miserable, lonely days at a time for every cuss word he uttered.
