by Alice Duncan
Pecos Valley Rainbow
(Pecos Valley 3)
Alice Duncan
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
About the Author
Pecos Valley Rainbow is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 Alice Duncan (as revised)
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Wolfpack Publishing, Las Vegas.
Wolfpack Publishing
6032 Wheat Penny Avenue
Las Vegas, NV 89122
wolfpackpublishing.com
Ebook ISBN 978-1-64119-915-5
Paperback ISBN 978-1-64119-916-2
Dedication
For Phylana Bridges. Thanks, Phylana!
Pecos Valley Rainbow
Chapter One
It was a dark and stormy night. No, really. It was.
Well . . . truth to tell, while it was stormy as all get-out, the sky wasn’t dark even though it was really late, mainly because the lightning streaking it in sheets, streaks, forks and stabs kept things pretty bright. I knew the electricity, which had only come to town a couple of years earlier, had bitten the dust because I’d had to read by the light of a kerosene lantern for an hour or more.
I tried not to let the booms of thunder affect me, although they shook the house, and I could imagine canned goods falling from the shelves of my parents’ grocery and dry-goods store situated in another building in front of our house. That, of course, meant my obnoxious twelve-year-old brother Jack and I would have a lot of cleaning up to do on the morrow.
I only hoped I wouldn’t have to row the whole family to the store from the house. All the houses and businesses in Rosedale, New Mexico, had been built up from the streets because, while we lived on a desert, every darned time we had a storm like the one currently in process, the rivers flooded and all the streets turned into raging waterways. We lived close to the Spring River, and I could envision water bucketing over its banks and heading toward our house. Then there were the Hondo and the Pecos rivers, both of which were probably overflowing even as I sat propped up in my bed and wishing the thunder weren’t quite so loud.
That’s probably because I’d been reading a creepy magazine called Weird Tales I’d checked out of the Carnegie Library earlier that very day. At least I wasn’t holed up in the attic of a Gothic mansion when the torrential storm broke.
“Annabelle.” My mother’s voice preceded her knock by only a second. I know it was stupid, but my heart gave a big lurch, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Danged magazine. I laid it aside.
“Yes?”
“Are you awake?”
“Can’t sleep,” I said. “So I’ve been reading. Too much noise to sleep.”
Ma sighed. “Me too, although I haven’t been reading. I’m going to make a cup of cocoa and have a piece of Miss Libby’s pound cake. Want to join me?”
Would I? “You bet. I’ll be right there.” I loved anything cooked by Libby Powell, my aunt Minnie’s friend and companion, as long as I didn’t have to eat it in Libby’s presence. Libby Powell was a frightful, beastly old woman. She complemented Aunt Minnie, who was intense, plump, sweet, vague, liked to commune with the spirits via séances, and looked kind of like an ambulatory barrel when in motion. Miss Libby was just big. Big and mean as a rattlesnake. But boy, could she cook.
Slipping out of bed, I donned my robe and stuffed my feet into my slippers, first checking for scorpions as usual even though it was November and technically past true scorpion season. However, when it rained like this, even the insects of the field wanted to get away from it and were likely to come indoors to do so. The southeastern part of New Mexico, while confirmed in statehood more than a dozen years before, was still a pretty rugged part of the world even in the enlightened date of 1923.
I joined Ma in the kitchen just as she was pouring steaming cocoa into two mugs. Good. That meant Jack wasn’t awake—or, if he was, that he didn’t plan to join us. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, which was difficult to do most of the time, I presumed he’d turn human one of these days. At the moment, however, I’d just as soon my parents rent him out to some lonely couple who’d always longed for children and couldn’t have them. Jack would cure them of any lingering misery in that regard in no time flat.
As for me, Annabelle Blue, I was nineteen years old and an adult by anyone’s reasoning. Well, except Libby Powell’s, but as already mentioned, she was nasty and mean and hated everyone except Aunt Minnie and a few other people her age. Anyhow, my birthday was coming right up, and then I’d be twenty! My goodness, but that seemed old to me.
Ma sat heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and sighed. She’d already cut two pieces of pound cake and laid them on a napkin next to yet another kerosene lantern. No formality was expected at this time of night and in this weather. Kerosene lamps were useful in cases like this, but I hated having to clean the blasted things after they’d served their purpose.
“I suppose Second Street will be running like a river in the morning. I only hope the water doesn’t slosh over the boardwalk. Your father and I don’t need to be mopping up floodwaters from the front of the store.”
“I hope not,” I said. “Rotten floods. Are they ever going to build a dam or anything to hold the water back when it rains like this?”
Ma shrugged. “I don’t know. You’d think they’d have done it by this time if they were going to do it at all.”
“I don’t know, Ma. Rosedale, New Mexico, doesn’t seem awfully advanced in the engineering department. Instead of building that grand courthouse with government money, maybe the city fathers should have lobbied for a dam instead.”
Ma chuckled. “Maybe so.”
We had a great courthouse, with a dome and everything. It was built in 1911, right before New Mexico gained statehood in 1912, and the people who’d planned and built it spared no expense, primarily because they knew the federal government would pay for it as soon as we were admitted to the Union. Smart thinking, I guess, although I think a dam would have served the citizens of the town better than a fancy courthouse.
I had to admit, though, that the courthouse was useful. Lots of the old men in town liked to walk to Fourth and Main, sit on benches placed here and there on what passed for the courthouse lawn, and gab about the good old days, which didn’t sound all that good to me, but who was I to quibble? Still and all, fighting Indians and cattle rustlers, droughts, floods, and people like Billy the Kid, a miserable outlaw my idiot brother idolized, didn’t appeal to me one little bit. In fact, I wished I could visit a big city somewhere. Anywhere. Heck, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in this tiny little hole of a town in the middle of nowhere.
“We don’t generally get thunderstorms like this in November,” Ma observed after she’d taken a sip of cocoa.
This was true. Our “rainy” season, summer, was long gone. And summertime in Rosedale wasn’t so rainy that the town turned green and pretty or anything like that. It mainly just flooded more and left mud so slippery, you might as well have tried walking on wet i
ce. Clay soil. Doesn’t absorb water, so it floods. And people slip and fall and break bones.
In fact, although I wouldn’t say so to Ma, whose family was among the first to settle in Rosedale, there wasn’t a whole lot to recommend our town. Basically, we were built by and for cattlemen. We sat right smack in the middle of cattle country, and served as a hub for ranchers within a two-hundred-mile radius in any direction you cared to mention. That’s what we were in the good old days, and that’s what we remained. During the spring and autumn cattle drives, cowboys from all over the place drove their herds down Second Street to the railroad yard, and the rodeos that followed were the highlight of the entire year. We watched the cattle drives, not to mention the dust and mayhem caused thereby, through the front window of Blue’s Dry Goods and Mercantile Emporium, which Grandpa Blue had established in 1892. Ma’s family had ranched and farmed, but when she married Pa, she gave up the wide open spaces to help him in the family store.
That was all right with me. Personally, I was happy to live in town, even such a town as Rosedale, because ranches in these parts are even more in the middle of nowhere than the town itself. I liked being able to chat with my friends and neighbors when they came into the store, where I worked daily behind the counter. Jack was supposed to work, too, but . . . oh, never mind. He did his chores when compelled to do them by our father’s firm voice or, when that failed, by a hand strategically applied to his hind end.
My older brother George was a great guy, but he no longer lived in Rosedale. Smart fellow, George. He’d been an aeroplane pilot in the Great War, had recently left the Army Air Corps and was now married and living in Alhambra, California, with his wife and their baby son. I hoped to visit him there one day, even if only to play nanny for a week or so. I read lots of magazine articles about California, and it sounded like a great place. My two older sisters, Zilpha and Hannah, were married and out of the house, too, although they remained in Rosedale.
Zilpha’s husband is named Mayberry Zink, and he’s a very nice fellow, although I kind of wished he’d change his last name. Zilpha Zink? Personally, I’d rather die an old maid than have a name like that, not that I’d ever tell Zilpha so. Anyhow, he owns a feed and saddlery store in Rosedale, and can equip you for anything you need in the way of horses or cows, fences or barns, sheep or pigs. There’s going to be another little Zink coming along in about six months, and Zilpha and Ma are terribly excited about it. Ma really wants to get her hands on a grandchild, and George’s little boy is too far away.
Hannah is married as well, to a banker named Richard MacDougall. Richard is an okay guy for a banker, but I prefer Mayberry, who isn’t so stuffy. Richard suits Hannah, however. She’s more interested in material things than anyone else in the family.
As for my own personal love life . . . well, I didn’t have one. Mind you, I had a gentleman friend, and it was assumed by one and all, including me, that Phil Gunderson and I would marry one day. However, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Darned if I’d get married at my tender age without having had an adventure or two first. If Phil didn’t like that, too bad.
Not that I didn’t like and admire Phil, and I certainly didn’t want to lose him to some other woman. Still . . . I couldn’t help but feel that there was more to life than Rosedale, New Mexico, and I aimed to see at least a piece of it before I married and faded into the woodwork. And if I could do so in the company of Allan Quatermain or Rudolf Rassendyll, so much the better. If you know what I mean.
“Well, no matter what time of year it is, floods are always a pain in the neck,” said I after swallowing a bite of pound cake and wishing Miss Libby could be as sweet as her cooking.
Ma only sighed, and we both jumped in our chairs when a gigantic blast of thunder shook the house and rattled the windows. “Good Lord,” muttered Ma, pressing a hand to her heart. I couldn’t have said it any better.
I don’t know about Ma, but after we polished off the pound cake and cocoa and went back to bed, I didn’t get much sleep, thanks to the constant booming and crashing of the thunder. I swear it nearly knocked me out of bed a couple of times.
We were both right about the mess that met us the following morning. It was difficult even getting from our house in back of the store to the store itself. School was definitely closed for the day, even though no one had proclaimed an official holiday. However, one had to use one’s common sense in situations like these, and it was clear no kids would be able to get to school without swimming, which was flat ridiculous.
Pa grumbled the whole way from the house to the store, muttering to himself about how he was going to build a bridge so we wouldn’t have to wade through miles of water and mud the next time it rained. He’d said as much before but, like a dam for the rivers, a bridge from the house to the store remained a fond dream.
When I glanced around the store after removing my rubber boots and letting down my skirt, which I’d kilted under my waistband so as not to get it muddy, I was more relieved than not. The windows were a filthy mess, and a few tins of things had fallen from shelves, but for the most part the store remained undamaged. No floodwaters had encroached, at least.
“I’m going up to see if the roof blew away anywhere,” Pa said after he’d made sure the inside of the place was secure and fetched a ladder.
This wasn’t as silly a comment as it might appear to those unfamiliar with Rosedale weather. Along with the thunder, lightning and rain, the winds had howled like a chorus of tormented souls during the storm. We got horrible winds in Rosedale, generally in the springtime, although no season was immune, and they’d been known to rip roofs off houses, flatten fences and topple windmills. They’d probably have flattened trees, too, if we’d had any, but except for a few cottonwoods beside the Spring River and a few other places, so far trees were a luxury and Rosedale didn’t have many of them.
“I’m going to see what it’s like outside,” said I, boldly opening the front door and looking. Boy, what a jumble! At least water hadn’t reached as high as the boardwalk, but Second Street might as well have been another major waterway. If anyone aimed to go anywhere that day, they were going to have to do it via rowboat. “It’s going to take at least a day, and possibly two, for the water to recede,” I announced to all and sundry.
Jack had joined me on the boardwalk. “Keen!” said he. He would.
Pa climbed down the ladder from the roof to join us, looking unhappy. “Damned rain,” he muttered. Pa wasn’t much of a one for swearing, so I knew the wind had done some damage to the roof.
“What’s the matter, Pa?” I asked. Jack just stood there, frowning, as if he knew he was going to be told to do something he didn’t want to do.
“Shingles are gone in several spots,” said Pa. “Annabelle, will you row to Gunderson’s Hardware and fetch a bundle of shingles and some roofing nails? I should fix the roof today in case we get another storm tonight.”
“Hey,” said Jack. “I want to row to the store!”
“You, young man, are going into the store and begin picking up canned goods. Then you’re going to wash those windows. I can trust Annabelle to do what I ask and not waste time. You’ve proven yourself to be untrustworthy too many times in the recent past.”
“Aw, Pa,” grumbled Jack.
“That’s enough of that,” Pa growled back.
Jack had been in hot water for several months by that time because of his lousy attitude and occasionally unruly behavior. You’d think he’d mend his ways, but he was a boy. What more is there to say?
“Will do, Pa,” said I, obedient daughter that I was. Anyhow, even though floods annoyed me, I enjoyed rowing the boat down Second Street. How many other towns in those progressive days of the twentieth century could boast a roaring river as a main street, do you suppose? Well, besides Venice, Italy, I reckon, but their primary mode of transport is water all the time, so Venice doesn’t count.
“And get some tar, too. I’ll have to tar over a couple of spots.”
Jack whined and grumbled as he retreated from the front boardwalk to do his chores while I went to the back room and fetched the rowboat and oars. “Do you want them to put the stuff on your account?”
“No. Let me get some money.” Pa didn’t approve of credit, although he gave generous credit to many of the ranchers in the area. As he’d said more than once, ranching is a tough business, and he was always willing to give a good man a break when he needed one.
So he handed me some cash, I stuck it in my pocket, put on my sweater, and I set out in the boat to row myself to Gunderson’s Hardware about a block east of Blue’s on Second Street. I hoped Phil would be there.
He was, and it looked as if he and his brother Pete were being run ragged even before I tied the boat to the horse rail and carefully maneuvered my way out of it, because so many other boats had already been rowed to Gunderson’s and were similarly tied to the railing. When I entered the store, I wasn’t surprised to see the place packed with people, purchasing everything from shingles to chicken wire to lumber, rope, window glass, tacks and nails.
“Blasted chicken coop blew apart,” snarled John O’Dell, who dealt in real estate and was one of our wealthier citizens. “Got my chickens all over the whole damned town.” He spied me and said, “Sorry, Miss Annabelle.”
I waved his apology away. “I’m sorry about the chicken coop, Mr. O’Dell. Hope you can round up the flock.”