by Lily Wilspur
“That’s the spirit,” Elliot exclaimed. “I think you’ll settle in just fine. It’s not a bad life, when you get used to it. The hardest part is not having anyone to talk to, and you and I can be that for each other.”
“That’s the way I feel,” she agreed.
He glanced at her again, and when he saw her looking at him, he smiled and blushed a little.
Ellen studied him on the sly. He was kind of handsome in a round way. At least he was neat. She could live with any man as long as he wasn’t slovenly in his habits. She had to clean up after her step-father and her brothers at home. Nothing infuriated her more than a man who went around creating more work for her by messing up the house. She couldn’t stand a filthy home.
A soft whine drew her attention to the wagon box behind her. Her head spun around, and she discovered Laird standing just behind her shoulder, panting and staring at her. During their conversation and their stolen glances at each other, Ellen had completely forgotten he was there.
She cried out in fright, and she almost jumped out of the seat. Then the big dog whined again, and she realized he wasn’t looking at her at all. He was looking over her shoulder at the road ahead.
“He’s just excited about getting home,” Elliot explained. “Here, Laird. Jump down.” He swung his hand out in the direction of the horses.
Laird launched himself over the side of the wagon and landed like a cat in the grass next to the road. He bounded away, past the horses, and disappeared around a corner up ahead of them.
Elliot chuckled as he watched him go. “He’s like a little puppy every time we come home. Sometimes, he starts that whining and fidgeting more than a mile away. Then he jumps down and runs all the way home and I find him waiting on the doorstep.
Chapter 4
When they came around the corner, Ellen laid her eyes for the first time on the homestead that would be her home for the rest of her life.
The little sod house sat half buried into the hillside. Grass sprouted from its roof and from the mud chinks between the logs in those walls exposed to the elements. The stone chimney stuck out between grass and wild flowers growing on the roof. Not far away, two placid brown cows stared out at the wagon from behind a split rail fence surrounding a log barn. A motley collection of sheep grazed out in the field.
Sure enough, there was Laird on the doorstep to welcome them. He surveyed the scene as if it was his own domain and they were his invited guests. When the wagon pulled up to the barn yard fence, he left his post and sauntered over next to Elliot, who ruffled the dog behind the ears.
Ellen got down from the wagon.
“Do you know how to milk a cow?” Elliot asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Ellen confessed.
“Well, then,” Elliot replied. “Take your bag inside and then come back out. I’ll put the wagon away, and then I’ll show you how. No time like the present to get started.”
Ellen flushed to the roots of her hair. This was it, the start of a life so foreign to her, she had to learn the most basic skills from scratch. She hurried away to the house so Elliot wouldn’t see her embarrassment.
The sight that met her eyes when she opened the door to the house gave her another shock. Inside, the floor was hard-packed dirt, and it looked like it hadn’t been swept in months. Some class of animal hide covered the narrow bed against the wall. And instead of a cast iron stove Ellen was used to cooking on, an open fire burned on the hearth with nothing but an iron hook to hold the kettle above it.
Ellen took a deep breath and let it out. There was no turning back now. She was married, and this was her home. She entered the room. Sunlight flooded in through a single window in the front wall of the house, but no glass or anything else covered the opening. Only a wooden shutter hung on the outside of the wall to close the window.
Mud covered the spaces between the logs in the front half of the house. The back half was solid dirt. Crooked logs made up the bedstead and the table legs, and the table top itself was nothing but a solid slab of wood with the wood grain trailing through it.
Ellen set her handbag on the table. She had no time to change out of her travelling clothes or to settle into the house. She had to get back out to the barn for her first lesson in milking a cow. Well, at least that would get her out of here.
Elliot was just feeding and watering the horses in their stalls when Ellen came in. Laird streaked around the barn, poking his nose into everything. Ellen shivered whenever she saw him. Hopefully, she could avoid him enough to make her life here more bearable. She would probably start having nightmares about him mauling her.
Elliot finally finished tending the horses. He picked up two wooden buckets from the doorway. “Come on. Let’s get milking.”
Ellen followed him into another stall, where the first of the two cows waited for them. The cow stared at them until Elliot dumped a handful of grain into her trough. Then she fell to munching and paid no more attention to them.
Elliot knelt down in the straw and put his bucket under her udder. “Watch me now. You pinch off the teat with your forefinger. Then you roll your other fingers down, like this. Do you see what I’m doing? You create pressure with your forefinger, and shoot the milk out with the other fingers. Here, you come and have a try.”
Ellen hesitated only a fraction of a second, worried about getting her travelling clothes dirty by kneeling in the dirty barn but she saw no alternative. Elliot stood there, waiting for her to follow his orders.
She knelt down and groped around under the cow until she felt something like a large bag of warm water hanging underneath the animal. She had to press her cheek against the coarse hair on the cow’s flank just to reach it. She grasped it and squeezed, but nothing happened. The bag just swayed in her hand.
“Squeeze,” Elliot ordered. “Squeeze hard.”
Ellen squeezed with all her might. She squeezed and squeezed until her arm burned from the effort, but not a single drop of milk came out. The cow finished her grain and started kicking at Ellen’s hands.
The cow lost patience with Ellen’s attempts to wring some milk from her udder and tried to make her escape. She started backing out of the stall. Elliot slapped her hard on the rump and snapped, “Keep still!” The cow kept still for maybe half a minute. Then she tried again to get away.
Elliot stuck his head up over the partition of the stall and called out, “Laird! Come here!”
Laird trotted around the corner and entered the stall. He went straight to the front of the stall and sat down in front of the cow. He locked his eyes on her and stared at her with the ferocity of a predator mesmerizing his prey. The cow stood stock still.
Elliot knelt down again. “Now, watch me. Pinch off the top of the teat, like this. Can you see what I’m doing?”
Ellen knelt down and craned her neck to peer underneath the cow so she could see exactly what he was doing.
“Now roll your fingers down, one after the other, like this.” He demonstrated again, and a strong squirt of milk shot out of the teat. It streamed into the bucket with a resounding spray. Again and again, he shot the milk into the bucket.
“Now, you try again,” he told her.
Ellen took her place again. She grasped the teat and squeezed. This time, a few sad drops trickled from the end, but she couldn’t make it squirt the way Elliot did. After a short effort, her hands were so worn out, she had to shake them loose between attempts.
Elliot lost patience. “Well, you’ll just have to keep trying until you get it.” He knelt down again and started milking fast, with both hands pumping the cow’s udder like the pistons of a steam train. “Stand behind her so you can see what I’m doing.”
“Won’t she kick me?” Ellen asked.
“Not with Laird standing there,” Elliot replied. “She won’t move a muscle until he lets her go.”
Ellen stepped behind the cow and watched Elliot’s two hands squeezing the teats, one after the other, in rapid succession, sending streams of milk dow
n into the bucket. Her wrists ached and her forearms burned.
“You’ll have to get it, sooner or later,” Elliot told her. “I want you to take over the milking chores. This will be your job.”
Ellen gulped. “Okay.”
“It’s not as hard as you think, once you get the hang of it,” he told her. “It’s like any other skill. Once you learn how to do it, it becomes second nature.”
“You make it look so easy,” Ellen mumbled.
“That’s because I’ve been doing it, twice a day, for more than eight years.” Elliot stripped the last milk from the cow’s udder. Then he stood up. “Once you’ve had that much practice, you’ll think it’s easy, too.”
He saw her flexing her wrist.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You have special muscles that you only use for milking. You’ll develop them, and then it won’t be so hard. Trust me.”
Ellen glanced at the cow. She still stood perfectly still, staring at Laird. Elliot turned to the dog. “Let her go.”
Laird blinked and skimmed out of the stall. The cow quivered all over. Then she came to life, backed out of the stall, and walked away. Maybe she didn’t even remember that the wolf was there, keeping her entranced with his primal stare.
Elliot brought the other cow in, and this time, he milked her by himself. He finished emptying her udder even before she finished eating her grain, so he didn’t need Laird’s help. Ellen watched in wonder at his forearms flexing and clenching with every squeeze. The milk poured out of the cow effortlessly.
Elliot picked up his frothing bucket of milk and waited until the cow left the stall. “Come on. Let’s go inside. You can get supper started while I bring your trunk in.”
Chapter 5
Elliot showed Ellen where he kept his food stores. She made some biscuits and gravy with the fresh milk. Elliot brought their chairs outside to the yard and they ate in the last golden rays of daylight.
Laird lay down across the doorstep. Ellen still couldn’t get used to his eerie presence behind her, but he lay so still that she soon forgot he was there. He acted so differently than any other dog she knew. He didn’t beg while they ate. He didn’t seem even marginally interested in their food.
“It’s lovely here in the evening,” Ellen remarked.
“I like it all right,” Elliot agreed. “It sure is peaceful and quiet. But it gets lonely. Then you don’t like the silence so much.”
“It does seem strange,” Ellen remarked. “To think that the nearest people are so far away, and we’re out here all alone. You don’t think about that sort of thing when you live around people all the time. You only notice it once they’re gone.”
“There’s Clive, of course,” Elliot reminded her. “He’s not that far away.”
“Who are your other closest neighbors?” Ellen asked.
“There’s the Morgans, up the other end of the valley,” Elliot told her. “And there’s the Abbots across the river. We’re not all that alone, when you think about it.”
“So Clive could be right about the territory filling up,” Ellen observed.
“He might be,” Elliot agreed. “But it will take a while. We could be alone out here for a long time.”
“Unless we have children,” Ellen added.
Elliot grinned at her. “Right.” He stood up. “Let’s go inside. The sun’s gone, so it’s going to start getting cold.” Without waiting for her, he took his chair inside and started closing the shutters on the window. Laird followed him inside.
Ellen took their plates and washed them in the kettle of hot water hanging over the fire. By the time she dried them and set them on the shelf, Elliot had bolted the door and set his chair before the fire. Laird stretched out on the hearth.
“So what do you usually do in the evenings?” Ellen asked.
“Usually, I don’t do anything in the evenings,” Elliot replied. “Usually, I go to bed as soon as it gets dark enough to shut the window. I don’t much care for sitting up all by myself.”
“That sounds a bit melancholy,” Ellen remarked.
Elliot shrugged. “When you get up at dawn, you wind up going to sleep at dusk. It saves fuel, too.”
“Still,” Ellen persisted. “You could stay up and do something.”
“Sometimes I stay up and clean my gun,” Elliot replied. “Sometimes, I sharpen my axe. Sometimes I mend my gear, or tan hides, or grease my boots. But most of the time, I go to bed after supper.”
Ellen glanced around the room and gulped hard. “So do you want to go to bed now?”
Elliot fixed her with a piercing gaze and shook his head. “No. I want to stay up with you. Come here.”
Ellen looked around again. She caught sight of the chairs around the table and decided to bring one over, but Elliot stopped her.
“Come here.” He reached out a hand and caught her by the wrist.
He towed her over to him and pulled her down into his lap.
“I want to spend some time with you,” Elliot told her. “It’s our first night together.”
Ellen cast around in flustered confusion. “I know. I thought you might want to go to bed.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for that,” Elliot declared. “Right now, I want to concentrate on you.” He circled her waist with both arms and hugged her against his chest.
Ellen fought to breath in his embrace. Her mind flew in every direction, trying to make sense of what was happening. How ridiculous it was to fight against this now. She was married. This was her husband. They were alone, miles from their nearest neighbor. Why did she bother to resist?
Then she spotted Laird by the fire. Instead of dozing with his head on his paws, oblivious to everything around him, he lay with his head up, inspecting her with his inscrutable white-blue eyes. What was he thinking about? Was he preparing to rip her to shreds for attacking his master?
She’d intruded on his territory. She was a stranger. In all likelihood, she was the first and only person ever to visit the house. And here she was, moving in to stay. Not only that, he might take offense at the intimacy between this new intruder and his master. He might decide to fight her for possession of his master. Then what was she supposed to do?
She couldn’t concentrate on Elliot’s attentions with that beast staring at her like this. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She understood how the cow felt, transfixed by his cold, calculating stare.
Elliot, meanwhile, noticed her odd behavior. He nuzzled his bristly face into the side of her neck. “Come on. You’re awfully nice. Let me have just one evening with you before we become another boring old married couple.”
Ellen tried to put Laird out of her mind. She closed her eyes and felt Elliot’s warm breath on her neck and in her ear. The heat translated down her body, over her chest and belly. He nuzzled down to the hollow where her neck met her chest. He burrowed his face into the top of her dress.
A sizzle of tension snapped her eyes open, and the first thing she saw was Laird, staring at her. She stiffened in Elliot’s arms.
“What’s wrong?” Elliot murmured from below her chin. “Don’t you want me? I thought you were ready to get married.”
“I am,” Ellen gasped.
“Then what’s the problem?” Elliot asked.
His hands started exploring around her midsection. They squeezed her sides and crept forward to her belly. Without realizing what she was doing, she gripped his wrist to stop his hands advancing any further.
“What’s wrong?” Elliot asked again. He didn’t wait for a reply. His face came up from her neck and his lips nibbled over the side of her face in search of her mouth.
Ellen’s breath came heavier and with more difficulty. Why was she thinking of a way to get out of this? If she wasn’t ready to get married, with everything that went along with that, why did she agree to marry Elliot? What was she doing here, if not being a wife?
Elliot’s lips finally found what they were looking for and locked onto Ellen’s mouth. In one e
xplosive jerk, she yanked her head away.
“What’s the matter with you?” Elliot panted.
“It’s that wolf!” Ellen blurted out.
Elliot pulled away and stared at her. “What? Laird? What about him?” He glanced over at his dog.
“He keeps staring at me,” Ellen explained. “I can’t concentrate with him staring at me all the time.”
Elliot looked over at Laird. The dog blinked at Elliot and then at Ellen, but he never moved. He didn’t make a sound or even acknowledge their attention. “What’s he doing? He isn’t doing anything.”
“He’s just staring at me,” Ellen repeated. “I can’t do anything with him watching me.”
Elliot opened his mouth. Then he burst out laughing. “He’s a dog. He isn’t watching you.”
“Oh, yes, he is!” Ellen insisted. “Look at him! He knows exactly what we’re doing.”
“So what?” Elliot shot back. “He’s a dog. Don’t tell me you’re going all modest in front of a dog.”
“I’m not being modest,” Ellen cried. “I can’t do anything with him staring at me. He’s making me too nervous.”
“You’re acting like that cow out there.” Elliot waved his hand in the direction of the barn. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of him.”
Ellen got out of his lap and stepped away from him. “You can make fun of me all you like. I understand now why that cow wouldn’t move with him staring at her. I don’t know whether to run from him or to fight him.”
Elliot snorted. “Come on. This is crazy. Just ignore him. He’s probably curious about why you’re here. He’ll get used to you, and then he won’t stare at you anymore. In the meantime, come here and just pretend he isn’t there.” He reached out for her hand again.
“I can’t,” Ellen insisted. “Can’t you put him outside?”