Mending His Wounded Heart, page 29
Not much of anything upset Mike. He was an easy-going man who had never wanted to work his parents’ farmland anyway. They had only owned a few heads of cattle. The Edwards family had mostly grown wheat. After his father passed, John had expanded his crop options, especially with the drop-in wheat prices. He now grew and rotated wheat, alfalfa, and field corn crops.
That foresight had kept his ranch going while others throughout the territory had gone out of business. After the family ranch had passed down to him following his own parent's death, John wasn’t about to limit his options like that. Besides beef cattle, he also raised dairy cattle, pigs, and some chickens.
Farming and ranching were extremely challenging jobs, and while John had a passion for it, Mike never had. It wasn’t that Mike was lazy. It was just that he didn’t have the desire to, as he put it, ‘spend the rest of his life out in the middle of nowhere.’ But then, he showed no inclination to move, either.
At times, John felt a curiosity about what life beyond the territory might offer. After all, the average lifespan of farmers and ranchers in the area was about fifty-five years. Of course, he was determined to exceed that, just like he was determined to exceed just about every other limitation that life out here on the plains set for him.
As they walked to the livery, John gazed toward the west. He admired the rugged Black Hills, the Lakota Sioux's sacred lands, called in their language the Paha Sapa. It was a wild country, beautiful and green. He understood why the great Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had so long defended it. Their struggles had pretty much ended about ten years ago. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, bringing thousands of white settlers, miners, and outlaws into the area. By 1877, the Black Hills had become a part of the Dakota Territory. Indian troubles had increased, coming to a culmination in 1876 with the massacre of Custer and his men at the Little Big Horn.
John loved it out here; the variety of topography, the Black Hills themselves rising high above the plains in the valleys below, so given their name because the pine-covered slopes looked dark blue or blackish in the rising or setting of the sun. In contrast, the land surrounding them encompassed mile after mile of tan-colored prairie grasses.
Those prairie grass often grew knee-high and seemed to dip under even the gentlest breeze. Some people who came from back east said that the waves of prairie grass bending in rhythmic motions reminded them of the great Atlantic Ocean. Now that was a sight that John had never seen, although he had seen a painting of it once, some image of a storm-battered ship being tossed on angry waves.
He gazed up at those Black Hills, which he had explored many times, their granite and limestone outcroppings rising like sheer monoliths from the ground, the landscape dramatic, the wildlife plentiful, and the beautiful meadows and valleys, lakes, and streams that were plentiful in the area.
While Mike often complained of wanderlust and seeing places like San Francisco or New York City, John was content here. He enjoyed every season that the territory offered, from cool and pleasant springtime weather to the often-violent thunderstorms that shook the ground from late spring to summer and sometimes even late snows. Summers were hot, sticky, and often unpleasant, but wasn’t it like that everywhere in the summertime? Fall was his favorite time of year.
The hunting – antelope, elk, deer, pheasant, and the occasional buffalo - was plentiful, especially up in the Black Hills, the weather mild and the evenings cool. The first freeze generally occurred in early October, although they had had snow earlier a few times. And in the wintertime? Well, you just never knew. One day could be dry and cool, the next below freezing. In fact, during most of the winter, daytime temperatures often remained just above freezing, and the nights dipped well below zero.
Still, if one was prepared, one could deal with the weather and what it brought. A few years ago - and one of the reasons why Mike’s family decided to sell their farm - a terrific thunderstorm, accompanied with hail had devastated crops throughout the region and—
“Are you listening to me?”
John jolted himself from his thoughts and turned once more to his friend. “What?”
“I don’t see why you can’t help me write it,” he said. “Honestly, John, you know me. I don’t have much of a way with words, at least not like you do.”
Well, that much was true. Sometimes people wondered why Mike and John were friends. They were complete opposites. While John loved to learn about new things and read books, Mike preferred less… literary pursuits.
“You gonna help me or not?”
John frowned. “Mike, I don’t think I should be helping you write a letter to a potential bride. That should come completely from you. Your words. Your thoughts.”
“But they will be, John,” Mike said. “It’s just that… well, you can polish them up a bit.”
John glanced at his friend. “Don’t you think that’s like lying?”
“Well, you’re already doing it, so why can’t you just put a little extra effort in for me?”
John held back another sigh. Mike knew he’d been crafting the perfect ad for a wife to send to the newspaper in Bismarck, way up north, hundreds of miles away. He was also considering sending his ad even further to places like Chicago, Cincinnati, and maybe even south toward Atlanta. Fact was, there weren’t many eligible women out here. Most of the unmarried women in Rapid City were either too old for him or too young.
While he didn’t necessarily know if that was true, he did know that he had yet to meet a woman in Rapid City that prompted the accelerated heartbeat, the desire to stare, and maybe even clammy palms like he had read in some books. Not that he expected a fairytale or anything when it came to marrying someone, but he wanted to feel something.
As they neared the livery stable, Mike continued to badger him gently. He finally turned to his friend. “Mike, again. You’re absolutely sure you want to get married?”
Mike shrugged. “Why not?”
“But do you want to get married?”
“Why do you want to get married?”
John paused, eyeing the horses in the corral, watching them from the other side of the railing, tails swishing, ears tucked forward with interest. What, did they want to know, too? “Well, as you said, we’re not getting any younger. And I’m alone out there on the ranch. It’s too big for just one person. So, I was thinking, maybe if I had a wife and eventually a family, it wouldn’t be so empty anymore.”
Mike nodded. “I know I live behind a sawmill, but I make decent enough money. Maybe I could even build a small place for a bride and myself back there.” He thought about it a moment and then shrugged. “You know, a wife could be useful to me, and I wouldn’t have to spend money eating out of a can or going to the saloon for Darby’s and paying two bits for his lousy stew. Or having old Missus Banks out at the boarding house fix me something. That costs a lot, you know.” He grew more enthusiastic. “I wouldn’t have to take my clothes to old widow Devers anymore so that I can save even more.”
John frowned. “But what about companionship? What about having someone to talk to, someone to share the things you like with?”
Mike looked at him as if he were crazy. “Aw, that’s just foolish. I need someone to help out, not someone to get all lovey-dovey with.” He winked. “Well, maybe once in a while.”
John gave up and held out his hand. “Fine. Show me what you’ve got.”
John watched as Mike dug into his trousers pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He extended it. “See, I wrote down a quick note. When you place your ad, can you place one for me, too?”
John wasn’t at all sure this was a good idea. Mike was a good man, no doubt about it, but he had some wild ways. He could overdo the drinking and the gambling, which was pretty much the reason why he lived in a shack behind a sawmill. He couldn’t afford to build or buy a house on his own. Still, when he had to work, he worked hard, and John knew that running the sawmill wasn’t easy. New orders came in almost every day, not only from the railroad but also from all the people moving into the territory.
Grumbling under his breath, John reluctantly took the note.
“Thanks, John. Maybe sometime soon we’ll both have a nice woman waiting for us at home, dinner on the table.”
John shook his head. “I sure hope you know that there’s a lot more to marriage than that, Mike.”
“Course I do.” He shrugged, then glanced toward the saloon. “I think I’ll go have a drink to celebrate my upcoming nuptials. Care to join me?”
“No,” John said. He glanced over Mike’s shoulder toward the saloon across Main Street and down a couple of buildings. “I’ve got chores to do.”
“Your loss,” Mike said, then turned and strode across the dirt street.
Shaking his head, John entered the livery, waving a greeting to Jonas Baker, presently busy mucking out stalls. “Hey, Jonas,” he called out.
Jonas muttered a grumbled reply, and John went through a doorway. He stepped to his horse, who nickered softly as he approached. He rubbed the gelding’s neck. “How you doing, Samson?” The horse tossed its head and snorted.
John mounted and then rode out of the corral, heading south out of town toward his ranch, his thoughts occupied with the kind of woman he hoped to marry. A kind and compassionate woman, one who understood the harshness of life out here in the west, and one willing to work hard with him.
At the same time, John was determined to provide any such woman with a good home, some sense of security, and kindness in return. He knew better than to expect that he would fall in love at first sight. That never happened. But maybe, given time and patience, he and his future bride would become accustomed to one another and, if he were fortunate, they would fall in love with each other.
Someday, John wanted children, someone to pass his ranch down to. He was saving up enough money to buy another hundred acres by the end of the summer, but he also knew that providing for a wife would cost money. He needed to buy a cooking stove, maybe a couple of new furniture pieces. A lovely horsehair sofa would fit his house's main room. Perhaps he could even squeeze in a small glass-fronted cabinet in the kitchen area for a nice set of dishware. Women appreciated things like that.
Though he had inherited the ranch from his parents, the house itself was still relatively new. For the first thirty-five years of their marriage, his father and mother had lived in a large, one-room shoddy house with two sleeping spaces - one for his parents and one for himself, separated by blankets hung from the ceiling. It had two fireplaces, one at each end, one primarily for heating, the other for cooking. John had helped his father build the new house a short distance from the shoddy, and it was a fine house indeed.
The house had a main room, a kitchen alcove, and two small bedrooms. It had genuine glass windows and brass knobs on the doors. Unfortunately, his mother had passed away a mere six months after the family had moved into the new house. His father had taken her death hard and had never been the same. He, too, had passed away not long ago.
By the time John rode into the ranch yard, the sun was descending low in the sky, casting the Black Hills into a remarkable study in light and shadow. He saw twilight creating casting its soft, dark blue shadow over the sky to the east. He paused in front of the house before dismounting and taking care of Samson, trying to imagine what the house would be like, filled with laughter and maybe, someday, the patter of tiny feet.
*
Two days later, John rode to the western edge of Rapid City, heading for the post office. He had spent a lot of his spare time making several copies of Mike’s ad to send off to different newspapers. It was only after he had read Mike’s ad that he had changed his mind about writing his own. For now. Mike’s ad was just terrible. He owed it to his friend to help him out a little. And so, he had decided to replace Mike’s two-sentence ad that had simply stated: “Looking for a wife to take care of me. Will provide room and board.”
He could wait, write an ad for himself later. Besides, he owed Mike. Last winter, he’d been out riding the range, checking on the few heads of cattle and horses that he’d sheltered in the back forty acres in the northwest corner of his property, protected from the worst of the bitterly cold winds by pine-tree-studded hills.
He hadn’t been riding sure-footed Samson that day but another of his horses. John hunkered deep into his coat with the winds blowing snow, a woolen scarf tying his hat to his head. He had been on his way back to the ranch when his horse was startled by a mountain lion. The horse panicked and threw the startled John off its back.
The horse had taken off, leaving John on foot in the middle of a snowstorm, tracked by the mountain lion. He hadn’t had time to retrieve his rifle from the saddle scabbard, but he did have his Colt. The mountain lion had attacked, considering him easy prey, but two bullets had taken care of that danger. Unfortunately, that left him a good seven or eight miles from the ranch, on foot, in a snowstorm, the temperature below freezing.
He’d started back, stumbling through nearly a foot of snow. He had fallen more than once. Though he wore gloves and kept his hands tucked into his armpits, they, too, were freezing, his body temperature dropping and lethargy tugging at his senses. He tried to find shelter, but there just wasn’t any, not out here. Flat planes, snowdrifts piling up here and there. And then, out of nowhere, appeared Mike, hunkered under a buffalo robe atop his horse, holding the reins of John’s horse as well.
Yes, he owed Mike. If it hadn’t been for his friend, he would’ve died. So, if the least he could do was write an ad for a mail-order bride, he would do it. Yet, he also knew that if a woman replied to the ad, he couldn’t leave it to Mike to respond.
While it was a bit disingenuous, maybe even dishonest, John decided that he would write any replies to any woman who showed any interest whatsoever in Mike. Besides, he wanted to get to know any woman coming out west to marry his friend before Mike or the woman committed.
Once the commitment was made, there would be no changing of minds, no turning back.
Chapter 2
Twenty-two-year-old Rue Griffin stepped out of the front door of the row house, dreading yet another day of exhausting work at a restaurant owned by the Andrews family, not far from the ever-increasing area of downtown Chicago, the central business district exploding with manufacturing.
Still, she should be grateful she had a job, as menial as it was. Of course, there were the factories in town, and those hundreds of factories did employ women and children, although with abysmal working hours and even more abysmal pay. She was lucky to have gotten the job at the restaurant working with the Andrews family.
The row house had already been rather cramped before Rue moved in. The house stood barely twenty feet wide but had three floors of accommodations. The parlor floor, located on the first floor when one walked in the door, was for receiving guests and special occasions. Along the right-side wall of the house, a stairway rose to the upper floors. Farther down the hallway behind it was the small kitchen. The floor above offered a less formal place for the family to gather, while down the hallway toward the rear of that floor was the master bedroom. The upper floor, the attic really, was where Rue shared the room with Evelyn Andrews, her friend since childhood.
After her parents' death in a buggy accident on North Western Avenue a few years ago, when Rue was seventeen years old, Rue had stayed with relatives. First, she had spent some time with a spinster aunt in Gary, Indiana. Until her aunt stated, rather baldly, that her meager income could not support both of them. From there, she had been sent to live with a cousin in Joliet, but then that cousin got engaged.
Rue hadn’t known what to do. Still grieving the loss of her parents, who had died when their buggy slid on ice and overturned, throwing both her parents into the frigid waters of the canal that ran through the center of the city, she didn’t have many options. Working in a factory would not give her enough money to even rent a room in a boarding house. The cost of living everywhere in the state of Indiana seemed to keep on rising.
Rue had found herself a twenty-year-old woman with few prospects, no home, no way to earn her keep, and at her wit's end. A letter from her friend, Evelyn, whom she had grown up with in Chicago, offered a much-appreciated invitation for her to come live with them for a while until she could get on her feet.
