CAROLINE AND THE RAIDER

by Linda Lael Miller

  Dear Readers, Old and New,

  It is with joy that I give you one of the novels written earlier in my career. Some of you have read it, and will feel as though you’re meeting old friends; to others, it will offer a completely new reading experience.

  Either way, this tale is a gift of my heart.

  The characters in this and all of my books are the kind of people I truly admire, and try to emulate. They are smart, funny, brave, and persistent. The women are strong, and while they love their men, they have goals of their own, and they are independent, sometimes to a fault. More than anything else, these stories are about people meeting challenges and discovering the hidden qualities and resources within themselves.

  We all have to do that.

  We are blessed—and cursed—to live in uncertain times.

  Let us go forward, bravely, with our dearest ideals firmly in mind.

  They’re all we have—and all we need.

  May you be blessed,

  Linda Lael Miller

  4235 S. Cheney-Spokane Road, Ste. #1

  P.O. Box 19461

  Spokane, WA 99219

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Copyright © 1992 by Linda Lael Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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  eISBN 978-1-43910-710-2

  First Pocket Books printing March 1992

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  Illustration by Matthew Frey

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  For Janet Carroll. a friend for centuries

  CAROLINE AND THE RAIDER

  Prologue

  Lincoln, Nebraska

  December 9, 1865

  The train whistle gave a piercing shriek. Feeling her six-year-old sister, Lily, tremble beside her in the stiff, sooty seat, Caroline slid an arm around the little girl’s shoulders.

  Lily’s brown eyes peered at Caroline from beneath straggly, white-blond bangs. Emma, who was seven, sat next to the window, watching the snow-laden frame buildings of the prairie town slip past. Her coppery hair glinted in the thin light of a winter day. Like Lily’s, it needed brushing.

  Caroline despaired of making her sisters and herself presentable. There were no hairbrushes, no changes of clothes—all they had were their worn coats, shoes, and plain dresses, given them by the nuns at St. Mary’s in Chicago.

  The conductor lumbered along the narrow aisle, a big, beefy-looking man without a whit of charity in the whole of his being. “This here’s Lincoln, Nebraska,” he boomed out. “Got your farmers and storekeepers and blacksmiths.” He paused and let his beady gaze sweep over Caroline, Lily, and Emma. “I reckon folks like that will be looking for boys,” he finished.

  Caroline held Lily just a little closer and glared fearlessly up into the conductor’s face. His nose was big as a potato, with tiny purple and red veins all over it. “Girls are every bit as good as boys,” she said staunchly, calling upon all the aplomb she’d managed to gather in eight years of living. “And they’re a whole lot less trouble, too.”

  “Just get out there and stand on that platform with the others,” the big man commanded, as a dozen boys scrambled toward the back of the car. They were all unwanted children, or outright orphans, with little papers bearing numbers pinned to their clothes, hoping to be adopted by one of the families waiting along the line.

  The train rattled, and the metal wheels screeched against the tracks. Puffs of steam billowed past the windows.

  “Everything will be all right,” Caroline said softly, looking from Lily’s dark, troubled eyes to Emma’s fearful blue ones. She knew the words were probably a lie even as she uttered them, but she had no choice. She was the eldest sister, it was her place to look after Lily and Emma.

  Fat snowflakes wafted down, nestling in Lily’s and Emma’s tousled hair, as the three girls trooped out onto the platform.

  Standing just behind Lily, Caroline gripped the little girl’s narrow shoulders tightly, trying to give her courage. She’d been pleading with God to let the three of them stay together ever since Mama had tearfully ushered them onto the orphan train in Chicago, but in her heart, Caroline knew He wasn’t going to answer her prayer.

  Come to that, Caroline couldn’t remember the last time God had answered a prayer. Sometimes she wondered why she even bothered talking to Him.

  A huge man with a black beard and a dirty woolen coat stepped onto the platform; his dark eyes narrowed as he surveyed the small crop of orphans lined up for his inspection.

  Caroline breathed a sigh of relief when he chose two boys and left. Maybe, just maybe, she and Lily and Emma would have a little more time together before they were parted. She crossed chilly fingers where they rested on Lily’s shoulders.

  A fat woman in a faded calico dress and an old woolen cloak huffed up the platform steps, stomping snow off her feet as she went. Her cheeks were round and red, but there was no merriment in her gaze.

  “I’ll take you,” she said, pointing at Caroline.

  Caroline swallowed. No, she pleaded silently. I can’t leave Lily and Emma. She tried, one last time. Please, God—they’re little, and they need me so much.

  Remembering the manners her grandmother had taught her, before her death a year before, Caroline curtsied. “Ma’am, if you please,” she blurted out, “these are my sisters, Emma and Lily, and they’re both good, strong girls, big enough to clean and cook …”

  The dour woman shook her head. “Just you, miss,” she said sternly.

  Caroline couldn’t hold back the tears any longer; they brimmed in her eyes and trickled down her cold, wind-burned cheeks. She’d hoped to be chosen last, if she was to be separated from her sisters, because she was the oldest and the most likely to remember where the others had left the train.

  But God wasn’t willing to grant her even that much.

  “Remember all that I told you,” she said softly, after frantic hugs had been exchanged. She crouched down and took Lily’s small, chapped hands in her own. “And when you get lonesome, just sing the songs we learned from Grandma, and that’ll bring us close.” She paused to kiss Lily’s cheek. “I’ll find you both again somehow,” she added. “I promise.”

  She rose and turned to Emma. “Be strong,” she managed to say. “And remember—please remember.”

  Emma nodded, and tears moved down over her reddened cheeks. She mouthed the word “good-bye,” unable to say it out loud, and Caroline understood.

  The conductor herded the remaining children back into the railroad car then, since it was plain that no more orphans would be chosen. Caroline followed her adoptive mother down the slippery platform steps, not daring to look back.

  “If you ask me,” muttered the strange woman, broad hips swishing from side to side as she led the way through the ever-deepening snow, “Miss Phoebe and Miss Ethel are tempting fate, taking an outsider in like this, just because they need a companion—”

  Caroline was paying little attention; her grief was too raw and too keen. Only as the train lumbered loudly out of the station did she turn t
o watch; the noisy beast was carrying away the two people she loved most in the world.

  The woman grabbed her roughly by one shoulder and pulled her along. “I don’t have the day to waste on this fool’s errand, you know,” she fussed, intent on her progress again. “I dare say, Miss Phoebe should have done this herself, instead of sending me.”

  The snow was deep and muddy and dappled with manure, and Caroline had a difficult time keeping up. She hardly heard the woman’s prattle, for her heart was on board the train, chugging steadily west, and she longed to chase after it.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” the woman demanded, as they passed a general mercantile and made their way toward a brick hotel.

  “Caroline Chalmers,” Caroline answered regally, straightening her charity coat and tossing back her long, dark hair. She could feel the snow seeping through to wet her scalp. “What’s yours?”

  “Mrs. Artemus T. Phillips,” the woman replied, at last troubling to look at Caroline as she dragged her along the slippery sidewalk, past a store and a hotel. “Merciful heavens, now that I truly look at you, I see you’re a scrawny little thing. You probably won’t last the week.”

  Caroline was determined to hold on as long as it took to find Lily and Emma. She raised her chin. “I’ll last, all right,” she said.

  “Don’t you be pert with me!” warned Mrs. Artemus T. Phillips, gripping Caroline by a frozen ear and propelling her around a corner. “I declare, the poor haven’t the sense to know when they should be grateful …”

  Caroline flailed one arm to free herself, but Mrs. Phillips was strong, and there was no escaping her.

  They turned another corner onto a street lined with houses and Mrs. Phillips stopped in front of a snow-frosted picket fence and pushed open the gate. “Here we are,” she said, with no small measure of relief in her voice.

  Caroline lifted her eyes to take in the house. It was a sturdy two-story place with green shutters on the windows and smoke curling from a brick chimney, the kind of home she’d always dreamed of having.

  There was an oval of frosted glass in the front door, and Caroline thought she saw the suggestion of a face behind it. A moment later, a brown-haired woman in a pink crepe dress stepped out onto the porch. She wore a shawl around her shoulders, and there was a cameo brooch at her throat.

  She smiled at Caroline, and despite everything, Caroline smiled back.

  “So this is our girl,” she said. She was neither beautiful nor plain, young nor old. “Come in, come in.”

  Caroline was ushered into a house that smelted pleasantly of lavender and cinnamon.

  Another woman, looking exactly like the first except that her dress was blue, came down the steep stairway, one hand sliding graciously along the banister. “Is this the child?” she asked, coughing delicately into a handkerchief. Her eyes moved to Mrs. Phillips. “Oh, Ophelia, you chose wisely. She’s lovely.”

  Caroline gulped and stepped back, assessing the two women with wide brown eyes.

  “I dare say she has a mind of her own,” complained Ophelia Phillips, dusting snow from the shoulders of her plain brown cloak. For all her talk about the poor, she didn’t look too prosperous herself.

  “That’s as it should be,” said the woman who had opened the door to admit them. She bent to smile into Caroline’s face. “I’m Phoebe Maitland,” she said. Then she gestured toward the woman in the blue dress. “And this is my sister, Ethel.”

  Caroline liked the middle-aged sisters, and despite the heartache of that day, she was grateful to know she’d be staying with them, instead of the fearsome Mrs. Phillips. She curtsied. “How do you do?”

  The sisters twittered, obviously charmed.

  Mrs. Phillips cleared her throat loudly. “Now that I’ve done my Christian duty,” she said, “I’ll just go and see to my own affairs.”

  Miss Phoebe thanked Mrs. Phillips warmly and ushered her right out the door.

  “For a while, I was afraid she was going to adopt me,” Caroline confessed to Miss Ethel in an earnest whisper.

  Miss Ethel laughed prettily, then coughed again. “Bless your buttons, child. Ophelia’s our neighbor, and Sister only sent her to meet the train because I was feeling poorly and she didn’t wish to leave me.”

  Caroline looked around at the tall clock and the umbrella stand and the oak wainscoting. To think this was only the entryway. “I’ve never been in a house this big,” she confided, stepping closer to Miss Ethel. “Am I supposed to clean it?”

  Just then Miss Phoebe reappeared, shivering as she was borne in on a cold winter wind. “How Ophelia does run on,” she said, pushing the door closed with visible effort.

  “Caroline thinks she’s supposed to clean our house,” Miss Ethel imparted to her sister, looking chagrined.

  Miss Phoebe came and laid a gentle hand on Caroline’s shoulder. “Oh, dear, no,” she said. “You’re to be a companion to Sister and me as we undertake grand adventures in the West.”

  Caroline felt her eyes go wide. Maybe there was still hope that she and Lily and Emma would be reunited. “The West?” she echoed.

  “We’re off to Wyoming,” said Miss Ethel, with a pleased nod. “We’ll all make a fresh start.”

  Caroline had never heard of Wyoming, but she’d discerned that the place was in the west, that great, mysterious land that had swallowed up Lily and Emma. She was eager to set out.

  Miss Phoebe started off through the house in a determined rustle of taffeta petticoats. “Come, child—you must be hungry, and you do look a fright. Sister and I will see that you’re fed, and then we’ll decide what to do about those dreadful clothes.”

  Despite her reduced circumstances, Caroline still had a measure of pride, and she bristled. Maybe her dress and stockings had come from the parish ragbag, but they were hers and they weren’t dreadful, only shabby. “I don’t need anything,” she said firmly, though she followed close on Miss Phoebe’s heels.

  They ended up in a kitchen grander than anything Caroline could have imagined. Miss Ethel offered her a seat at the giant oak table, and Caroline took it.

  “Of course you need things,” said Miss Ethel, laying a gentle hand on Caroline’s shoulder before sitting down. “What a treat it will be to sew for you.”

  “You’re our child now,” said Miss Phoebe resolutely, taking a plate from the warming oven above the stove, with its glistening nickel trim. “Sister and I will take care of you.”

  Even though Caroline had made up her mind not to eat, when Miss Phoebe set the food before her, she gobbled it down, desperate to ease the gnawing ache in her belly.

  “Poor darling,” said Miss Phoebe, much later, clucking her tongue as she poured fragrant tea from a squat brown china pot. “Do tell us—how did you come to be traveling all alone on an orphan train?”

  Caroline eyed the remains of her reheated meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and creamed corn glumly. Lily and Emma were hungry, too, but all they would get today would be a piece of bread and some spotty fruit. It shamed her that she’d eaten while her sisters had to do without.

  “Caroline?” Miss Ethel prompted.

  Caroline drew a deep breath and sat up very straight in her chair. “I wasn’t alone,” she said, near tears again. “I was with my sisters, Emma and Lily.”

  The Maitland sisters exchanged sad looks.

  “Oh, dear,” whispered Miss Ethel. “We’ve parted her from her loved ones, Phoebe. She’s like a little bird, plucked from the nest!”

  Miss Phoebe patted Caroline’s hand. “From now on, we’ll be Caroline’s family,” she said. “We’ll travel west, the three of us, and make a fine home for ourselves.”

  Miss Ethel sighed philosophically, lifting her teacup to her mouth. “Papa did make us promise to look out for his mining interests out there,” she reflected. She paused to smile fondly at Caroline. “With Phoebe marrying Mr. Gunderson almost the moment we step off the train, I would have been very lonely.”

  After tea, Caroline stood on a stool i
n the parlor and was measured for new clothes. Although she couldn’t help grieving for Lily and Emma, she did take a little joy in her own good fortune.

  Caroline was warm and full for the first time in days, and she was going to have new clothes that had been made just for her, rather than bought from rummage or scrounged by the nuns. Miss Ethel sat at the spinet playing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” and snow drifted lazily past the parlor windows.

  It was easy to be optimistic. Surely it followed that if she and Lily and Emma were all headed west, the three of them would be together again soon.

  Chapter

  Bolton, Wyoming Territory

  April 15, 1878

  He was the most disreputable-looking man Caroline had ever seen, and everything depended upon him.

  Squinting, she took a neatly pressed handkerchief from the pocket of her coat and wiped away some of the grime from the saloon window to take a closer look. If anything, Mr. Guthrie Hayes seemed even less appealing after that effort. He certainly didn’t look like the war hero her student had told her about with such excitement.

  A muscular man, probably only a few inches taller than Caroline herself, he sat at a corner table, engrossed in a game of cards. A mangy yellow dog lay at his side on the sawdust floor, its muzzle resting on its paws. Mr. Hayes wore rough-spun trousers, a plain shirt of undyed cotton, suspenders, and a leather hat that looked as if it had been chewed up and spit out by a large, irritable animal. His face was beard-stubbled, and he sported a rakish black patch over one eye.

  Caroline couldn’t see his hair, because of the hat, but she figured it was probably too long. She sighed, dampened a clean corner of the hanky with her tongue, and cleared a bigger area on the glass.

  Just then one of the men at Mr. Hayes’s table must have pointed Caroline out, for he raised his head and looked her directly in the eyes. An unaccountable shock jolted her system; she sensed something hidden deep in this man’s mind and spirit, something beautiful and deadly.