Millie Criswell, Mary McBride, Liz Ireland

by A Western Family Christmas Christmas Eve; Season of Bounty; Cowboy Scrooge

  But inevitably, there were problems. Linus started the trouble. Ivy should have known when she saw his sticky fingers, during their first meal, that the boy was enamored of the sweet honey. The next afternoon Linus managed to find and overturn a whole jar of the stuff so that for days, even after both John Tall Tree and Ivy had vigorously scrubbed and scrubbed, everyone’s boots stuck to the floor and left dirty honey mud tracks all over the house.

  Ivy wasn’t certain whether Justin’s order to keep the children out of sight extended to mealtimes, but she couldn’t ask John Tall Tree to fix another meal just for the benefit of the children and herself. She could tell Sophie’s steady stare during dinner unnerved the men, especially Justin. But it served him right, the uncivil beast! He’d only acknowledged the children once, with a curt nod. And he could hardly complain about Sophie, who in the presence of grownups was solemn and silent, just as Justin had requested.

  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Joe Junior. Immediately, despite Ivy’s warnings, he was all over the ranch, especially anywhere there were horses. In the barn. In the corral. Underfoot. Getting in trouble. You’d think that the huge ranch would be big enough to swallow one boy and his shenanigans, but no. Not Joe Junior. Every time he was dealt a reprimand, he just seemed to hang back for a while and cook up something worse to do next.

  He stole Justin’s favorite mare one day to take for a pleasure ride. Then he interfered while Sam and Wink were corralling heifers, sending cattle running for the farthest reaches of the ranch; it took hours to get them back in.

  Justin pulled Ivy aside after that episode. Yanked her aside, really. “I know you said you were no nanny, but you didn’t tell me that you couldn’t control the children at all”

  She laughed. “You don’t know what your life would be like if there were no curbs on them at all”

  He sighed raggedly and let her go. “What did you do before coming here? Don’t you have any idea of order?”

  Oh, didn’t she! A flash of her crowded, putrid smelling jail cell came to her, of days regulated by ruthless matrons. The memory made her cold right down to the marrow of her bones. But jail, the shame of it all, wasn’t an experience she could talk about, especially not to a man who was employing her to take care of his children. Even if the pay was only a lousy dollar a week.

  “If you wanted references, Mr. Murphy, you should’ve said so right off.”

  He stared at her long and hard, so intently that she finally averted her eyes. “Just make sure Joe Junior keeps out of trouble,” he said.

  But how? How could you keep an eleven-year-old boy from running wild on a ranch? When she told him to stay close to the house, he created havoc for John Tall Tree, and the last thing in the world Ivy wanted was an angry Indian on her hands.

  John had already been kinder to Linus than she ever would have believed, especially after the honey episode. But the old Indian seemed fond of having a child about the kitchen to taste batter and dough, and to lecture on the proper way to dress and wash his hands and speak, “in the white man’s way.” And wouldn’t you know, Linus behaved for John Tall Tree as he never would for her!

  One day she’d been in the house reading the children A Christmas Carol aloud, becoming lost in the story that so reminded her of the Ebenezer Scrooge in her own life, when she glanced up and realized the children had slipped away. With Arnie’s help she traced them to the barn, where Sophie and Linus were pitching hay at each other and Joe Junior was climbing monkey style across the rafters. She could just imagine Sophie poking one of Linus’s eyes out with that pitchfork, or Joe Junior falling from the ceiling and breaking every bone in his body. Why, they could all get themselves killed!

  Cursing the day she had ever even heard of Texas, she braved the rickety ladder up to the hayloft and retrieved the pitchfork. “Get down from here this instant!” she scolded Sophie and Linus, then leveled a gaze at their brother, who was hanging upside down about twenty feet away. “Joe Junior, you climb down from there, too!”

  To emphasize her demand, she planted the pitchfork tines down into the hay, causing a high, shrill shriek to go up. Looking down, she saw she’d inadvertently stabbed a fat lazy rat in the tail. She shrieked right back at him, jumping away, then, losing her footing, found herself falling bustle first back on the hay. Not just the injured rat but also one of his companions streaked across the bottom of her skirts, and she flailed wildly in the hay for a moment, yelling curses she hadn’t heard since leaving jail. She was frantic. Sophie and Linus were doubled over with laughter and blocking the ladder, so in her hurry to escape the angry rats, Ivy dove for the edge of the hayloft, flipped over the side with an acrobatic skill she never dreamed she possessed and dropped into the stall below.

  A stall, she discovered to her dismay, which had yet to be cleaned.

  The milk cow, Katy, gave her a blank stare as Ivy pulled herself out of the muck and stood on wobbly feet, flapping her hands and twisting to inspect the damage to her dress. She groaned at the stain all over her seat. And the stench! She wanted to weep. She couldn’t wait for the day when she got back to the city, where she never had to deal with cow flop and barns and inadvertently stabbing rats with farm implements !

  At least it had just been rats, not snakes, she thought in consolation. She limped out of the barn as fast as she could, trying to ignore the delighted giggles she left in her wake. So much for maintaining discipline! Thank heavens, she had no adult witnesses.

  But, of course, who should she run smack into as she fled the scene of her embarrassment but Justin himself? She walked right into his chest. Reflexively he pushed her away from him, dark eyes wide and his nose twitching in revulsion as her ripe smell struck him a split second after her body had.

  “What the he—”

  Ivy was too cross and miserable to put up with questions. “I’ve been watching after your niece and nephews, trying to keep them from breaking their necks!” she shot back before he could get his question out. “And if you’re going to criticize me, maybe you should start setting some traps in that barn of yours.”

  His brows rose. “Traps?”

  “For rats!”

  “I let the barn cats worry about them.”

  “Well, what about snakes?”

  He frowned. “Did you see one?”

  “No,” she huffed, “but I’m sure that’ll be next!”

  He shook his head. “If we sat around trapping snakes here we wouldn’t have time for anything else in the spring time. Right now it’s too cold for snakes.”

  The wild beating of her heart settled down some. “Too cold?”

  “We’ll start seeing them again around February.”

  “Fine! I’ll be gone by then.” She hoped. Oh, Lord, how she hoped.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something, Ivy,” he told her.

  She let out an exasperated breath. No doubt she was in for more criticism, and right now she wasn’t in the mood for it. “First, let me tell you a thing or two, Justin Murphy. You might have grievances against those kids—heaven knows they’re no angels!—but this place isn’t exactly the best setup for them, either.”

  He looked surprised that she had the nerve to lecture him. “Oh, it’s not?”

  “How’s a boy supposed to react to the temptation of having a whole barn full of horses? Of course, he’ll have to sneak a ride at least once. Would you consider him a red-blooded healthy boy if he didn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Justin replied. “I’d be grateful, I know that. Also, I’d be grateful if Linus wouldn’t shred my best, newest shirts to make himself a rope to lasso the chickens with.”

  She put her hands on her hips. As if the man didn’t have a shirt or two to spare! “Your problem is you know nothing about children. You can’t blame them for being a little…rambunctious. They just got here, and frankly you haven’t been much of a help.”

  He straightened. “I’ve opened my home to them, haven’t I?”

  But what about
your heart? she was tempted to ask. She, who had laughed at the very notion of heart just days before. Of course back then she had yet to come up against Justin Murphy, a man with no apparent heart at all. She’d never met a man with less family feeling! It made her boiling mad to think that here was a man with his family handed him on a silver platter, with no financial worry about three more mouths to feed, and the holidays coming up—the very time for family—and all he could do was grump and grumble and find fault!

  “Sure, you’ve given them a roof over their heads, and you can bet they’re grateful. But you, you old curmudgeon, you just act like a mean old crank and don’t even speak to them.”

  “What am I supposed to say? “Thank you for terrorizing my livestock and shredding my wardrobe and nearly burning down my barn?”

  “Wink said that anyone could have knocked over that lamp!”

  He let out a sigh of irritation. “Wink is a soft touch.”

  “Just have a civil conversation with them,” she pleaded. “All you’ve done is grunt and glare.”

  “I noticed you weren’t so happy with them when you stomped out of that barn,” he pointed out.

  “But I’m not their uncle! Why should you hate them so? You should have every reason to love them.”

  His cheeks were mottled red. “Careful, Ivy, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you think they consider it odd that you’d board them and feed them and not have the slightest curiosity about them? Haven’t you wanted to talk to them about their father, your own brother?”

  “No!”

  “Don’t you think they need to talk to you, then?” Maybe she was speaking too frankly, but she didn’t care. Justin wasn’t doing her any favors. She had nothing to lose. “They’ve just lost their last parent. Don’t you have a human heart beating under one of those precious shirts of yours, or are you really just a penny-pinching ogre who doesn’t care if he goes through life like some reptile, cold as a snake and completely unloved!”

  He flinched, and for a moment, to her shock, the expression in his dark gaze seemed vulnerable. Then his eyes narrowed on her. Pierced her like two daggers.

  Perhaps she had gone the teeniest bit overboard, but once she’d started, a week of bottled up indignation had simply blown out of her like smoke from a stack. Now she was caught in Justin’s blazing glare, and she swallowed anxiously. Anger throbbed in his temple. Even though they were standing in the middle of the barnyard for all the world to see, he looked as if he might reach over and throttle her.

  It seemed an eternity before he spoke, his voice a bare rasp. “By the by, that matter I wanted to speak to you about…”

  She lifted her chin and steadied herself as if preparing to absorb a blow. His criticism was bound to be merciless now. “Yes?”

  “I wanted to thank you, Ivy,” he gritted out, “and furthermore to inform you that I had intended to pay you an extra four dollars a week which, after some consideration, I had decided would be more fair.”

  As she listened to the speech, the blood drained out of her face. He wanted to thank her? To…

  And she ’d called the man a reptile!

  She swallowed. “Oh.” The word was barely audible.

  His lips twisted cynically. “I suppose you’re going to apologize now.”

  She would have, if she’d been able to find her voice. But she knew from his sneer that pleading forgiveness would be the worst possible mistake. He would just accuse her of saying the words because she wanted the money. So she shook her head, hoping to look contrite, even if she couldn’t say so. She didn’t have to ask if he still intended to raise her pay.

  “You’d better get back to the house and clean up now.” The dismissal was as icy, as reptilian, as she’d accused him of being.

  She didn’t point that out, however. She just went, and gladly. She’d never felt so small, or so smelly.

  The next week was a struggle. Ivy wanted to apologize to Justin, but of course she couldn’t. Every time she passed him coming and going through the house, at meals, around the barn, she tried but failed to meet those dark eyes of his, to at least convey silently that she was sorry she had spoken so frankly and insulted him.

  Actually, the word that most often came to mind when she remembered that rare moment of vulnerability she’d caught in his expression was hurt his feelings. But how could she have injured the feelings of a man who seemingly had no emotions?

  She spent more time puzzling over this question than she cared to admit. The man had cut off his own brother. He’d committed, according to the children, some unspeakable insult against their mother. And he certainly hadn’t been killing his nephews and niece with kindness. How could she have hurt his feelings by telling him the simple truth? The man was a reptile!

  Only she’d never seen a reptile look so wounded.

  She decided that the only way she would be able to make it up to him was to try to get the children to behave, and she did a fair job of it, if she did say so herself. There were no major incidents for five days running. She began to expect that Justin might pull her aside again, to thank her and tell her all was for given. Maybe he’d decide to raise her pay again after all. At five dollars a week she would be on her way in no time!

  Then, at the beginning of dinner on a Friday night, Wink asked where Joe Junior was. Ivy frowned at the empty chair across from her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him. Neither, apparently, could anybody else.

  “Seems to me he took the mule and went riding sometime around noon,” Arnie said.

  Noon? That was seven hours ago!

  “I haven’t seen Beulah all day, neither,” Sam said. “I’s lookin’ for her this afternoon to haul brush.”

  Good heavens. It seemed everyone had missed Beulah before anyone had missed Joe Junior, though of course it wasn’t everyone’s job to look after the boy. Just hers. Ivy ducked her head with shame. She didn’t have to look up to know that Justin was glaring at her accusingly. After this whole week of trying so hard, she’d gone and lost his nephew.

  But Joe Junior couldn’t be gone. Not really gone, she thought with growing hysteria. She turned to Sophie. “Do you know where Joe Junior went?”

  Sophie stared back at her, then slowly lifted her shoulders in a shrug. She might know, but she wasn’t going to say a word.

  Ivy worried her lower lip as her mind raced frantically. Where would Joe Junior go? Back to Otis? She couldn’t imagine anyone homesick for that godforsaken place! “Where could he be headed?” she heard herself ask aloud.

  Arnie shook his head and drained his coffee cup. “Back in my day, everybody was hotfootin’ it to California. “

  Ivy felt sweat bead on her forehead. California? There were deserts and mountains between here and there!

  “But I’d imagine most folks’d head somewheres else nowadays,” Arnie continued. “Gold’s a bust anyhow. Most adventurous sorts take to the sea.”

  “The sea!”

  “Sure, they got freighters bound for the Orient now,” Arnie said.

  China ?

  Wink frowned. “You think they’d let Beulah on a freighter?”

  Ivy felt as if she was about to burst. She turned to Linus. “Do you know where your brother went?”

  Linus, who was licking butter off his fingers, stopped long enough to answer nonchalantly, “Wishbone, was what he said. Said he was gonna trade Beulah for a horse and get us all outta here.”

  For a moment Ivy thought she might expire with relief. “Well, why didn’t you say so earlier, you scamp?”

  “You told us not to speak ’less we was spoke to.”

  An irritable growl sounded from the other end of the table, and then Justin rose and strode out the kitchen door without saying a word. Ivy jumped out of her chair and ran after him.

  She caught up with him halfway to the barn. “What are you doing?” She had difficulty keeping pace with his long strides.

  “I’m going after him.�
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  But what would he do if he found him?

  Trepidation must have been written all over her face, because Justin glowered at her. ‘ ‘What did you expect? I can’t just let him loose on the people of Wishbone. Considering the ruckus he creates here, imagine the damage he could inflict on that unsuspecting town.”

  She wanted to point out that there hadn’t been a ruckus of any kind for days, but she had only to remember the eagerness of the residents of Otis to rid themselves of the Murphy children to know that Justin was right to be worried. But she also feared the havoc Justin could wreak on Joe Junior. If those two butted heads, there would surely be fireworks. “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “That’s not necessary.”

  She planted her hands on her hips. “You’ve never spoken two words to that boy. I’m coming along.”

  “I guess I can’t stop you.” He nodded toward a stall. “Saddle up Brindle.”

  Ivy gaped at the horse, then at the wall draped with saddles and bridles and things she had no idea what to do with. Didn’t the man recall that she was from Boston ?

  Apparently not.

  Ivy again looked uneasily at the horse, an animal she’d seen a dozen times at least. Never before had Brindle seemed so huge. At least twice as big, and with ten times as much pep, as Old Pokey, the horse Wink had given her a riding lesson on.

  “Maybe I should take Old Pokey,” she said uneasily.

  Justin rolled his eyes. “I’d like to get to Wishbone sometime before Christmas.”

  Seeing her frozen in hesitation and confusion, however, Justin let out an impatient sigh and grabbed a saddle off the tack wall and quickly bridled, blanketed and saddled Brindle. He handed Ivy the reins, saying tersely, “Now see if you can lead her out of the stall and mount up before I’m ready to leave.”

  Smart aleck! Ivy took the reins from him and led Brindle from the stall. Thanks to that brief riding lesson from Wink, she wasn’t completely in the dark about horses. She approached Brindle’s left side and doggedly worked her way up the mountain of horseflesh. The beast seemed to be pulsing with energy, but finally Ivy perched uneasily astride in the saddle, her skirts bunching around her. But she was indeed ready when Justin mounted an even larger gray horse.