by Bella Bowen
Molly's laugh came out through her nose and she prepared to turn and run.
“Molly?” The woman's voice called through the darkness that now separated them. “We'll miss our train if you don't come with me now. But it's up to you, of course.”
Train? Our train? The woman expected to get Molly away from her family and onto a train, and she wasn't afraid to say so in front of her pa? She was crazy!
Molly reached the edge of the barn and stopped. She laid a hand on the corner of the wall to reassure herself she'd gotten that far at least. Then she looked back at the stranger. Her pa had edged out from under the roof and the starlight shined down on him. Stalton groaned and rolled over on the grass and put a hand to his nose.
Ridder came out of the house with the lantern. Everyone winced at the light. The woman stood alone in the yard, her hands on her hips, smiling at Molly.
Yeah, she was crazy all right. She was wearing britches and a man's hat. And since there were no other strangers about, she must have been the one smoking.
“You ain't taking my daughter nowhere.” Pa spat on the grass in the woman's direction. “She ain't fer sale.”
The woman laughed. “Isn't she?”
The cousins gasped as if the thought of selling a person was more foul a deed than what they had in mind for Molly as soon as they could get their hands on her.
“No,” Pa said. “She ain’t. I made that clear.”
“Actually, you didn’t. You didn’t answer our letter, so I was sent to find out why.”
“Then you shoulda known my answer was no.”
“Your loss, then.” The woman shrugged. “You just lost fifty dollars.” She looked out to Molly. “What do you say, Molly? Wanna take a train ride with me? Or you want to stay here?”
Her pa growled. “Stalton, get my gun.”
The woman pulled her long waistcoat back and tucked it behind her hip. In the starlight, it was hard to see, but since the coat stayed back, Molly figured there was a gun there to hold it. But the woman’s feet never moved—like she knew she wasn’t in danger. And that could only mean Molly’s pa was.
If Stalton came back outside with the loaded shotgun, she had no doubt her pa would shoot the woman. And she looked willing enough to put a hole through her pa.
Molly was torn. Did she wait and see who was fastest? Turn and run and let them fight it out?
How could she call herself a Christian woman and allow her pa to be hurt because of her? He was her father, after all. And her pa had to love her some if he wasn’t willing to take fifty dollars for her. But why in the world did the strange woman want to buy her in the first place?
Even if the woman were touched in the head, Molly didn’t want to see her hurt. She was, after all, trying to help Molly get away. But if Molly turned and ran, one of them would be shot, no question.
Molly sighed. Her hand dropped away from the barn wall, already knowing the answer her head was searching for.
She couldn’t have hurt her pa in order to get away, so she couldn’t very well let anyone else hurt him for the same reason.
“Wait.” She started back, but slowly. Apparently her feet didn’t agree with her conclusions. Her legs were still ready and able to get her off the farm and to the train tracks. “I don’t want anyone shot, Pa. I’ll come back. Just let the woman go.”
Stalton stepped out the door, the shotgun pulled up to his jaw, the barrels trained on the stranger.
“You want me to shoot her, Uncle John?”
Her pa held his hand out for the gun. After the boy reluctantly gave it over, Pa backhanded him. Molly could feel it as sharply as if he’d struck her.
“You don’t listen any better than Molly.” Pa turned the gun on the stranger, close enough he didn’t have to aim. “You heard my daughter. She wants to stay here, with me. Now you get gone. You tell Mrs. Carnegie my daughter is not for sale, and I’ll shoot the next one of you that steps on my land.”
Molly’s ear caught on the name and she stopped halfway to the house. She’d heard of Mrs. Carnegie at church on a rare Sunday her pa was more willing to let her attend services than listen to her praying out loud in his house. Unfortunately, she hadn’t heard enough to understand what a letter from Mrs. Carnegie meant.
“Who’s Mrs. Carnegie?” she demanded.
“She runs a school for women who want to marry and move west.” The woman’s words carried clearly above her father’s “Never you mind!”
The idea of attending school sent a thrill up her spine. But did she want to be a bride? She’d always told herself she’d only think about the future once her father mellowed a bit, but of course she’d hoped to marry. But there was something wrong about it all—more than just a strangely dressed, smoking woman showing up in the middle of the night to collect a new student.
“I’ve never heard of a school that paid the students to attend,” she said warily.
The woman laughed. “You have me there. But it’s not as strange as it sounds. The money comes from the bridegrooms. They pay a price for the right bride. It’s like a dowry, only in reverse. And your family will get a portion. Mrs. Carnegie offered your father his share in advance, to ease the burden of losing you. That’s all. Most families don’t get paid until after the wedding.”
“So, if I go with you, my pa gets fifty dollars?”
The woman shook her head. “Oh, no. He’s already refused it. Now, I’m just a woman with a gun, offering a ride out of town to another woman who looks rather anxious to leave.” She pulled her gun so quickly it seemed to appear out of the blue. “She’s old enough, Brumley. She’s free to do whatever she chooses.”
Pa looked a bit shaken by the woman’s speed. He wrinkled his nose at the end of his shotgun, to the woman, and back again as if he regretted not taking aim.
“Molly?” His gaze flicked in her direction for just an instant before it returned to the revolver with the silver starlight glinting off it. “You wouldn’t leave your old pa to fend for himself, would ya now? You know how I need you. Tell this woman you can’t just up and leave me.”
Molly took in the scene, wanting to store it away with the little doll’s arm, so she could pull it out now and again to remember what it was like to see her cousins and her pa at the mercy of that woman. It was a sweet sight indeed, but it was time for it to end.
“No, Pa. I won’t just up and leave you.” She smiled at the woman. “I’ll ask this nice lady to reconsider leaving you with that fifty dollars before she and I go catch our train.”
CHAPTER THREE
Once upon a time, Molly whispered in her head, there was a princess mistaken for a housemaid. An evil woman switched the girl with another babe soon after birth and the girl grew up thinking the lot she lived was her own. But that just wasn't so. And she knew, deep down, that something was wrong, that she was meant for happier things. And one day, someone from the palace discovered where she was and came for her. The ornery man she'd believed to be her father wasn't about to let her go, but the knight from the palace—never mind she was a woman—gave the man a bag of gold and he had no choice but to let the princess go.
Boarding the train was terribly exciting. Instead of running alongside it and trying to catch on as she’d dreaded, she calmly climbed up the steps while the train stood still, huffing and puffing steam while it waited for her to board. She still carried her Sunday bloomers, but instead of hanging around her neck while she attempted dangerous things, they were rolled up into a neat little bundle and tucked beneath her arm. A porter offered to take it from her for some reason. But she shook her head and he went away.
She might have thought of another thing or two from home she would have liked to take away with her. But once her father had no choice but to let her go, she couldn't have walked back into that house—she was afraid the woman and her gun would be gone by the time she came out again.
Or worse yet, that the woman had never been real in the first place.
She'd had vivid dreams be
fore. She knew that moment of heartbreak when she woke from them. And to find it was all a dream—that she was back in her bed and not heading for freedom—would have broken her heart so cleanly nothing could repair it.
So she'd settled for the things she'd already packed. Even with fifty dollars in his fist, Pa had wanted to know what Molly was stealing from him. Luckily, the woman had stepped in before he could get a hold on the bloomers. No matter what her treasures were, he would have taken them from her, just to show her he must be reckoned with.
The woman, Nadia, promised Molly wouldn't have to worry about meals for a good long while, so the food in her bloomers was now just a stash of treasure she’d poached from the greedy, overfed dragon himself.
John Brumley spent the better portion of his days proving he was right. And though she hated to admit it, he’d been right about how fast a locomotive could go. For a long while, Molly clutched the arm of the seat with both hands and waited for the train to crash into something. But soon she realized none of the other passengers suffered from such worry and she relaxed.
A while later, the rocking of the train lulled her and she closed her eyes, welcoming the chance to sleep. Although she'd never remembered a day in her life when she'd been allowed to rest while the sun was up, the night's excitement had taken a toll on her. So she let go of all thought...
~ ~ ~
They changed trains in Tennessee.
At the restaurant in the depot, Nadia paid for her supper. It was a surprisingly pretty name for a woman who wore guns at her hips, but Molly thought it better for that thought to go unspoken. While tucking in a piece of peach pie, made even more tasty because she hadn’t had to make it herself, Molly finally got up the gumption to ask some questions.
“What is Diamond Springs Ranch like?”
Nadia shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been there. This will be my first time seeing it too.”
Molly was surprised by that. “But don’t you work for her?”
“Mrs. Carnegie? Yes. I have for three years. I met her once in New York City, but we’ve not spoken since. I do all my business through her lawyer. This time, they thought your family might need a little…persuasion.”
“But why me?”
“A recommendation, I hear. One of the brides, some woman who knows you, asked that you be invited. When your father didn’t respond, they sent a Crawler.” She raised her eyebrows and grinned. “Me.”
“A Crawler?”
“Someone who will crawl around in alleys and unrespectable places if need be, to get the job done.”
If Molly hadn’t already been awed by the woman’s ability to subdue her father, coins or not, she was even more intrigued by Nadia’s bold occupation. Maybe it was a sense of kinship since Molly had so recently felt reckless, willing to do whatever it took to get away from home.
“Maybe I should learn how to be a Crawler,” she said with a laugh.
Nadia laughed too. “And maybe I should enroll at the bride school!”
Though they’d been teasing, Nadia’s excitement grew along with Molly’s as they crossed onto the Wyoming Territory.
“I wonder what the men will be like,” Molly worried aloud after she’d allowed herself to fret about it for hours. “I always hoped to find a husband, don’t misunderstand. But I wasn’t in an all-fired hurry about it.”
Nadia laughed, though she never took her eyes off the scenery out the window. “Nobody’s going to make you hurry, Molly. You can take all the time you need. But you won’t have to wait long for a good man to come along. They’re all good men. Other Crawlers, like me, have been checking up on them, making sure no piece of trash gets through the cracks.
“Sometimes we watch ‘em for a month or more. We talk to the help, the neighbors. Make inquiries with their creditors. Sometimes we light a fire under them, so to speak, just to see how they’ll react in a difficult situation. Though some men will behave badly for no reason at all. Those boys are never invited to Sage River.”
“Sage River?”
“The town nearest the ranch. Men are never allowed onto Diamond Springs, so the prospective bridegrooms have to wait in town for the brides to come look them over. There’s a town hall and dances every Wednesday.”
“Dances?” She tried not to sound horrified. She’d heard the gals at church talking about dances before as if they were the most exciting event of their lives, but Molly’d only danced with her pa, and with her cousins, when she’d been given no choice in the matter.
Her heart raced like a galloping horse remembering Stalton holding onto her, swinging her around the drawing room so fast she had no choice but to cling to him. Then that look in his eye when she did.
“Molly?” Nadia reached forward and shook her arm. “Molly, are you all right?”
“I…” she cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “What happens if I don’t like to dance?”
Nadia’s smile was a bit kinder than Molly expected from the rough and tumble gunslinger who’d rescued her.
“Don’t you worry,” Nadia said. “Mrs. Carnegie is a wise woman. She’ll find another way for you to meet those nice gentlemen. Nobody will make you dance if you don’t want to.”
Molly nodded and turned toward the window to watch the pine trees pass by at an impossible speed. And though Nadia had said all the right things to put her fears to rest, she’d done just the opposite. Because there was no chance a place like Diamond Springs Ranch could really exist.
More likely, what awaited her was a thinly staffed whore house. Wasn’t that what her pa always told her? That the only place in the West in want of women were the houses of ill repute? That it was so easy for a man to find a wife, all he had to do was order one in the mail.
If she tried to return home, her pa would have much, if not all, of that fifty dollars spent on new stock by the time she got to Booneville, and there was no way for Molly to repay that kind of money even if she had a lifetime to do it. She couldn’t go back.
But if Diamond Springs turned out to be a whore house, Molly hoped Mrs. Carnegie would consider making her a Crawler instead of a…
Heaven help her, she couldn’t even think it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Samuel gave the saddle cinch one last tug and tucked the leather tail before letting the stirrup hang straight. A heartbeat later, he was mounted and ready to go.
He’d toyed with the idea of warning Rosie that when he returned from Wyoming, he’d be bringing a wife with him. But each time he intended to tell her, the woman’s chattering took him in another direction entirely. The curtains she wanted for the living room? Well, how the hell was he going to tell her not to fret about it because another woman would be picking out those curtains?
It seemed like each plan Rosie had for the house would soon be someone else’s concern. But for the life of him, he didn’t know the right words to explain. So he took the coward’s way and figured the women could work it out between themselves once he brought that wife back to Colorado.
He’d been so secretive about his plans that Rosie wasn’t the only one scratching her head that morning. Darby and Cruikshank stood beside her out front of the house waiting for an explanation.
Samuel urged his horse in their direction. “I’m headed north to do some business. I’ll be back in two weeks, maybe three, if everything goes well.”
He turned the horse’s head toward the road and three jaws fell open together. He was gone before they had a chance to ask any questions.
When he was out of earshot, he laughed aloud.
Let them take care of each other for a while.
CHAPTER FIVE
Molly slipped away from the women gossiping in the bathtubs and returned to her lovely pink room fit for a princess.
If it was all just a dream, a month-long dream, she'd have died in her bed already.
Diamond Springs Ranch hadn't been a whore house after all, and she'd realized early on that Mrs. Carnegie could afford to throw fifty dollars i
nto the fire every night before bed if she wanted, she was that rich.
Molly had also come to realize that the wealthy woman had a pure heart and a real desire to help as many young women as she could. Most of the ladies Molly'd just left in the bathhouse had come from circumstances similar to Molly's, or worse. All had been saved, in one way or another, and brought to Diamond Springs for a taste of a different life where chores were shared, folks were treated with kindness, and whatever skills they brought with them had been polished up and added upon.
Molly's favorite class to attend was the painting class taught by Mrs. Carnegie herself. Of course one day she'd have to get around to repenting for all the time she wasted painting, but not just yet. Not until her little picture of heaven was completed. And once it was, she'd stop being so indulgent.
Her second favorite class was Manners and Deportment. It brought her a bit of knowledge she couldn’t imagine a need for, but it showed her it was possible for her to someday be as graceful as Mrs. Carnegie. Molly had mastered the ability to walk around a room, doing this or that, all while balancing a book on the top of her head. She only had to imagine it was a crown she might forfeit if she wasn't very careful. And though she didn't see much improvement herself, her instructor assured Molly her speech had improved faster than anyone she'd taught before. But Molly believed the woman was only trying to be kind.
Molly was careful to pronounce her words properly. She had also removed the word ain't from her vocabulary. But to her own ears, she spoke so slowly she didn't sound very smart. Only a man with a lot of pity in his heart would choose her for a wife.
That afternoon, she and Mrs. Carnegie were alone together in the garden, painting the same flowering bush.
Molly cleared her throat delicately and found some courage. “Ma'am?”
“Yes, Molly?”
“I...am...concerned,” she said. “I worry that, when I mind my...vocabulary, that I speak too slowly. The only husband who would...find me interesting...would need to be soft in the head...or too soft in the heart.”