December and Mae, page 1
Table of Contents
December and Mae
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One: Luke
Chapter Two: Widow Alcie
Chapter Three: Martha
Chapter Four: Hell-Fire and Mae
Chapter Five: The Dress
Chapter Six: The Warning
Chapter Seven: Fels Naptha
Chapter Eight: Not Right under Heaven
Chapter Nine: Ride the Wind
Chapter Ten: Enter the Serpent
Chapter Eleven: Invaders
Chapter Twelve: The Prairie Kiss
Chapter Thirteen: Liz Complains
Chapter Fourteen: Waterfall
Chapter Fifteen: Mae’s Marauders
Chapter Sixteen: Revelation
Chapter Seventeen: Luke Puts His Foot Down
Chapter Eighteen: The Dinner
Chapter Nineteen: Raoul
Chapter Twenty: Betrayal
Chapter Twenty-One: The Suicide
Chapter Twenty-Two: At Nate’s
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Dressmaker
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Harvest Dance
A word about the author…
Thank you for purchasing
December and Mae
by
Sharon Shipley
Copyright Notice
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
December and Mae
COPYRIGHT © 2025 by Sharon Shipley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies in accordance with Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790, The Wild Rose Press expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception. Only brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews may be allowed.
Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com
Cover Art by Teddi Black
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
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Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Edition, 2025
Trade Paperback Print ISBN 978-1-5092-6355-4
Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-6356-1
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To: Skip Shipley,
a most patient and brilliant husband…
Acknowledgments
to Nan Swanson,
a most patient and empathic editor.
Prologue
Snagged on brambles and rusted barb wire destined to saw ankles and trip feet, stumbling over icy dead stalks and victim of the odd prairie dog hole, the girl finally gasped, hands on knees, sobbing for breath that wasn’t there, when she could go no further.
They were coming.
She could hear them, their raucous, raging, drunken bawling behind her. They’d kill her this time, if feeling mean, or if liquored up enough. She shuddered, not from cold but from the memory of her oldest brother with that queer look on his face, hovering by her pallet behind the wood stove, these last three nights before she ran away. She’d mumbled about “using the jakes” and scarpered out with just the clothes she slept in, wishing now she ran better prepared.
She looked over her shoulder. Closer now! She heard the clods of earth tossed aside by their boots, thumping the ground, and their harsh winter breath and curses and promises of what they would do to her if she did not stop or when they caught up with her. She looked back. By the buttermilk light of the moon, she spied them leaping over ruts and clumps of henbit and boneberry bushes, baying like ravening hounds.
She had to put distance.
She had to.
Her breath, ragged now, sobbing, tearing up the dark with rasping like rusty saws… Her knees felt like custard. She could no longer feel her numb feet, though they bled and left a telling trail for those hounds from hell chasing after.
First of August this far north, hoar frost made the barren-scape glitter, yet the night seemed above freezing pond water. A blessing, as she’d barely enough rags and a squashed hat to clothe her slight body and those rags were all she owned at any state.
She halted to stare at the luminous disc floating in a black sea of sky, seeming to lead her on, lending her a last strength.
She pelted on. A jackrabbit skittered across her path…she sprawled flat, listening to the scurrying of an invisible night world, and her own ragged breathing; at least she couldn’t hear them anymore, nor could they spy her. Their cries faded off in another direction, like the mist from her breath. She stiffly rose; with each step on the lumpy uneven terrain, she either felt the jarring jolt clamp her teeth and jaws together or else she was falling off the edge of the earth.
The girl dropped to her knees again and wished she could sleep under that glowing moon washing her with silver. A minute of not telling herself she wasn’t sure she could rise again. Her body, prone now on the crackling frosted weeds alternately urged her to wait, rest, go back.
She could hear them again. They veered back from the thicket of treeline, which she herself was hoping to reach, as too impenetrable. Most likely, for the first time in their miserable lives, they were right. She gritted her teeth and staggered up. She wouldn’t be the doomed hare to their murderous hounds. Now they blundered in circles. She imagined them sniffing frozen clods for her scent. Baying, cursing, yelling in agony as one or another stumbled in the dark.
She heard her name called. A promise of pain. An expletive on their tongues. She detected manic glee. Never a good sign.
Suddenly she was airborne, not as dandelion fluff but as a tossed boulder flung to the earth, sailing right over a deep ditch, though not manmade, landing hard, knocking breath from her lungs, skinning knees and elbows. A rock wedged under her stomach. She began sobbing with hurt and frustration, instantly clamping her mouth tight till her jaws ached.
They, the five of them, raced past, three brothers and two uncles by the sound of them, shambling, leaping, legs stretched wide in pursuit, arms flailing. She timidly raised her aching head. The night swallowed them in a dark cloak. Their baying grew fainter. It did not return.
Stiffly the girl rose. She swayed, bewildered, fighting tears. A few escaped, trickling her cheek, adding to her misery. The cold wet itch irritated worse than a blow. Wasn’t certain sure where she was, which way she ran. She turned full circle. Even their ramshackle hut was preferable to this aching cold, but even the hut was a chimera of her longings.
Thanking all the stars… In the distance loomed a square gray ghost. A lean-to of a stagecoach stop, though she did not know it.
The road she approached seemed to her a silver river of dust leading to the town of Laramie. She thought Laramie lay that way. Sanctuary. From there, hitch a train. Maybe. Was there a train? Ignorant of such luxuries, she hugged herself, dancing from cold. Had to find shelter, soon, or it would not matter if they caught her. Her brothers would find a frozen corpse. The lean-to would do for now. However, in the darkness, she tripped on a thick clump of frozen henbit, and when she clambered up, shifted slightly west.
A pinprick of light showed faint, yellow as a cat’s eye in the boundless night—there, again. As if tree branches were waving across a faraway welcoming window.
Giving a last look at the stagecoach stop, and on her last strength, the girl made for the light.
Chapter One: Luke
Lucian Devereaux Farnsworth.
By his exterior, it was as if a mountain had a rock slide, leaving craggy outcroppings, broken, reshaped by harsh winters, some brawls, the war between the gray and the blue, horse falls, brutal labor and not a few gunfights, mended and forged anew by scorching Wyoming summers, lending him now, at the age of fifty-four, unexpectedly striking features.
Luke’s nose bore a hawk-like ridge. A scar sliced a gunmetal brow. His eyes, when he squinted at a fellow, seemed more flint than rain-sky gray—even strong men found diplomatic ways to retreat when those eyes stalked them from under fierce iron brows. Taller than most men around and yet unbent, with arms corded with iron bands, his grip was that of a vise, with scarred fists punishing as anvils.
Liz, his sister, didn’t fear him at all, giving good as she got with their rare-as-hen’s-teeth squabbles. And, if they would divulge it, he resembled James Corbett, the famous pugilist, according to Liz’s twittering female friends, who watched him sideways under lashes and pursed cupid-bow simpers.
“Luke Farnsworth! Why! Mr. Farnsworth! I do declare, you look just like that handsome devil James Corbett!”
Not only would Lucian Farnsworth disavow the charge, but deny he’d ever heard of the notorious boxer that left the weaker sex swooning, or so his sister’s quilting bees never wearied of declaring. He’d perused, in the privacy of his sitting room, a month-old Laramie Sentinel with Corbett’s picture and dates of his bouts long past.
After one chance overhearing, Lucian tried to avoid the cracked mirror above the towel roller in the kitchen.
True, that Corbet fellow is a well-made handsome devil, with a full head of hair like my own, Luke conceded. He did look like him, though his own hair was admittedly on the iron-metal-rifle side.
The rest, all hogwash.
One woman had tittered, “He had eyes hard as silver bullets.”
“Silver bullets. Hunh?”
’Spose I should be flattered.
Maybe he was.
A little.
Luke sucked in the tiny softness above his gun belt. But a man who boxed for money? Foppish. A good bar brawl, wrestling calves to the ground, that’s what men did.
Risking a glance for Liz, Luke turned sideways, lifting his rather massive chest and shoulders. Still, his summers approached fall now. Luke grunted, took a slug of Liz’s day-old tar, and gazed out the kitchen at nothing in particular.
Luke Farnsworth, broken-nosed but Lord and Master of over forty thousand acres, give or take, of good Wyoming prairie, some acres of pine forest, a few lakes and streams, a foothill onto a mountain range, and an untold thousand head of cattle, part interest in a thriving copper mine, silent partner in a Red Butte ironmongery, and a varying number of roustabouts, escalating from ten to twenty-five during drives or harvest season, when Liz set the long table groaning with hearty fare under the oak… He dashed the dregs in the new zinc sink, crammed on his battered Stetson and headed for work now the sun had decided to creep out from covers of darkness.
****
Besides, something caught his attention.
A scrawny scrap of a thing garbed in rags, or some conglomeration thereof, with an undefinable hat jammed low on the head, lugged a bucket, slopping half the water, from trough to stable, on some mysterious errand.
Luke leaned closer, squinting. Who in hades was that?
Wouldn’t call Liz.
She’d accuse him of needing specs again. He squinted. Spindly legs, narrow shoulders. He didn’t have short roustabouts thin as grasshoppers! Luke stalked to the door where he didn’t need to see through the uneven panes, but the mysterious unkenned boy had disappeared.
Luke nibbled his mustache. “Hunh!” Talk to Liz about hiring help without my say-so. “’Less it’s kitchen house help,” he amended. Speak of the devil.
Liz strode in, flustered as usual, tying her apron, checking the wood crate with a jaundiced eye, rattling the poker in the fire box like killing snakes, all the while snatching the coffeepot to refill, and gave her brother a distracted look he kenned well—Do not be a-bothering me whilst work’s to be done.
Hell with that.
“What the Sam Hill you about now, Lizzie?” Luke shot an accusing thumb at the stable. The figure reappeared, single-mindedly heading to the well. “Since when do you hire the hands? That one,” he jabbed his thumb again, “looks fit to die on me. Couldn’t lasso a dead dog.”
He chuckled to remove the barb.
Liz threw him a sisterly what are you pothering about whilst I’m busy fetching you a breakfast? look, but proceeded to grind more beans and tossed grounds in the battered pot to boil before bending to peer outside.
Liz, seeing no one, resolutely turned from the window, raised a questioning brow, shrugged and went back to stir oatmeal destined to be laced with blackstrap, and dragged down the flour tin. “Hands be gathering like starving coyotes yodeling away if hot biscuits aren’t meltin’ butter by seven, so don’t be pestering me with nonsense.” Later, brushing the tops with butter, Liz deftly plopped dough rounds on the bacon-greased sheet, popped open the blackened oven and stuck more kindling in the fire box.
A little smile played across her lips.
“Ah there’s that now,” she muttered, eyeing with satisfaction the glass dome of fresh churned butter already on the table, ham frying and eggs in the big iron skillet ready to douse with bacon fat for her and Luke, and the huge enamel coffeepot she’d already tossed eggshells into, to make the brew stronger, boiling away and already thick as tar. All was right under Heaven.
****
Luke headed out, clapping on an old battered Stetson after sweeping back a lion’s mane of silvery gray. He wore scuffed boots, a threadbare pair of five-button denim jeans skimming his long muscular legs, and a worn gray plaid shirt with patches on the elbows. Laggards straggling from the bunkhouse trailing squabbles, tomfoolery, and braggadocio, bee-lined to the long-benched table outside the kitchen, where Liz plunked down a clatter of tin plates, a cauldron of steaming oats, bacon and blackstrap, along with cream so thick a spoon could stand up.
Steam rose from the barn roof. A rising sun heated the dried wood shakes.
Luke glanced over as Old Tom fetched tin mugs and the coffee urn. He did a double-take. He could swear he spied a pale oval face staring at the scene from the stable doorway. He blinked. No one there now. He had the impression the face—the figure, if there was one lost in the gloom—appeared hungry. He shook his head. Liz might be right. He did need specs. Probably just one of the hands inspecting his horse.
Biskits, the bunkhouse cook and bone mender, looked disdainful at the fare as something the cat sicked up, but as usual tucked in. Luke couldn’t recall when the devil’s bargain of Biskits not doing breakfast was sealed, but it was dyed in the wool now, at least while the weather was yet temperate.
Bit past it anyway. Biskits mostly mended saddles and dressed his wranglers’ cuts, bumps and breaks, and he hadn’t the heart either to pension off Corky or Old Tom, still the best smithy in the county, no matter his eighty years on God’s green earth…closest to a foreman he had.
Luke, pulling his own belt in a notch, checked his hands’ flat stomachs and low-slung gun belts, even now threatening to slide off their narrow hips from the weight.
Squinting under his battered Stetson, Luke listened, resigned, to his roustabouts, fretting between gusty chewing over the new mustang with the rough coat, one they vowed was “the devil’s own and couldn’t be broke” that awaited them.
Bone idle. Anxious to dabble in the delights of the local sin city, this being Friday. By local, Luke meant twenty miles to Laramie, or maybe even farther to Red Butte.
****
By eight o’clock the sun’s hammer beat down on the anvil of hardpan, wild horse and man alike. Luke and the feed salesman, Nate Solomon, the only Jewish fellow for fifty miles around, and his helper, Hurly, along with Old Tom and Biskits, hung elbows over the split rails of one of Luke’s multiple corrals whilst judging Gimpy Joe’s attempt to saddle the rowdy pestiferous horse bought at the Red Butte auction last week.
So far, its only talents were eating, crapping horse apples, and trying its damnedest to break bones or heads, or bite anyone with the effrontery to approach from the rear, with long yellow teeth like shovels.
Gimpy Joe, the toes of his boots dragging furrows in a whirligig pattern around the paddock, clung to a tangled mane still stuck with burrs while Luke listened with half an ear to another of Nate’s tall tales of his latest amorous conquests.
“I tell you, Luke, I had to beat her off. You recall. That Ledbetter gal? The one with freckles and the—” He cupped two rounds over his frayed tweed coat. “Well, I slipped her a box of horehound candy and a pink garter. I said she could have it if she allowed me to put it on her purty little leg, and let me tell you, she—”
Luke chuckled gamely, nodded and tried to cut him off. Heard most of them before, or some like it anyway. Even so, Nathaniel was always good for a jaw or two, better than the telegraph. But then Nate’s gossip, as a feed and sundry salesman, turned decidedly morbid, as it had lately. He looked up at Luke, with a pallbearer’s gloom. “You hear?” He shook his grizzled head. “Greiner passed on last week. Only fifty-seven. Lemuel Johnston too.”
Luke inhaled. And I’m going on fifty-five. Luke nodded in empathy, recalling missing acquaintances gone the last year to their heavenly reward—though one of them, he wasn’t too sure of the heavenly reward part.
“That a fact. Lem? Was what?”
“Fifty or thereabout, not too young to have a bad ticker, reckon,” Nate offered with the expression of an old hound dog, his gray dewlaps wobbling side to side.
Luke rubbed his chest. “No, didn’t know. Should have, only lived a mile down the pike.”
“Found him. Laid there all day, ’fore the hands thought to check.”
“’Taint right when nobody misses you,” Hurly, the assistant muttered.
Old Tom, kibbitzing, spat tobacco through any teeth left. “Makes three this month. Hope I go in mah sleep. Jes’ wake up seein’ the Pearly Gates bangin’ shut behind me, and a purty angel sayin’, ‘Welcome, Tom. We bin awaitin’ fer ye.’ ” He cackled.
