by Merry Farmer
It wasn’t until they were on their way back to the wagons with a basket full of clean, damp clothes and his revolver returned to its holster at his side that John felt up to saying anything.
“I won’t forget what you did for me today,” he said, trying to decide if he was embarrassed or deeply grateful.
“It was nothing.” She smiled at him with kindness like he’d never known. “You would do the same for me if our roles were reversed.”
He knew it wasn’t true, just as he knew he wished it would be. “Still, I’m grateful that—”
He froze as they approached the back of Callie’s wagon. Something moved inside of it. There was a rattle, then a thump, followed by a sharp curse. Silently, John extended one hand to hold Callie back as he crept forward to investigate. He drew his revolver from its holster.
As he reached the wagon, a leg swung over the back. Kyle emerged from behind the covering, a large, bulky sack in his hand. He fumbled something small and white in his hand, pushing it into the sack.
“Get out of my wife’s wagon,” John demanded with surreal calm, cocking the gun and pointing it square at Kyle.
Kyle swore and fell hard to the ground with a grunt. “Jesus! Put that thing away!” He flinched and scrambled to his feet.
“Drop the sack and step away from the wagon,” John demanded again.
Kyle jerked as if he would do what John said, but thought again. His eyes narrowed. “I ain’t takin’ anything valuable. Just some dumb old teapot.”
“My mother’s silver tea service?” Callie’s voice and eyebrows shot up.
“Put… the sack… down,” John repeated, slowly and deliberately.
“Or what?” Kyle challenged him.
“Or I’ll shoot,” John explained, cold as ice.
Callie swallowed as she glanced between the two men. John held his ground. He’d spent his emotion down by the stream, and now all he had left was solid determination.
“You don’t have the guts.” Kyle sneered. He tightened his hand on the sack and narrowed his eyes. “Pansy boys from Boston who wear glasses ain’t the kind to go shootin’ people. In fact,” he shifted his weight to appear as comfortable as possible in the face of John’s threat, “I doubt you’ll even breathe a peep about it when I take this here pot ’cause you’re too chicken.”
John’s back went rigid. His eyes bored into the Kyle’s. “Put the sack down and go away,” he repeated.
Kyle ignored him. “In fact, I wonder what else you got that I could help myself to.”
He made the mistake of grabbing his crotch with his free hand and glancing at Callie. John fired.
Callie jumped and yelped, hand slapping to her mouth. Kyle howled in pain and dropped to the ground. The rest of the camp buzzed into action. In seconds, men were swarming around, their guns out and cocked, some at Kyle, some at him. Kyle continued to writhe on the ground, clutching his arm. John stood perfectly still where he was, eyes huge, face pale. His pulse pounded in his ears. He’d actually shot a man. Slowly, he lowered the gun.
“What happened? What’s going on?”
Everything swelled up into chaos for a moment. One of the other miners jumped into the scene and lunged for his comrade. Reverend Joseph rushed out of the crowd and crouched over Kyle to see how badly he was hurt. Kyle swatted him away.
“This man tried to steal from my wife,” John explained, still staring daggers at the thief as his face flushed with shock.
Pete Evans arrived on the scene in time to hear John’s words and to see the glint of silver as the spout of Callie’s mother’s teapot poked out of the mouth of the sack that had fallen on the ground. He bent over and scooped up the sack, turning to Callie.
“Does this belong to you, Mrs. Rye?”
“Yes, it does,” Callie answered breathlessly, taking the sack when he presented it to her.
Pete turned back to Kyle, fury in his eyes.
“I thought I explained that thieving was a punishable offense in my wagon train,” he thundered.
Kyle was in too much pain to hear him, still trying to bat the persistent Reverend Joseph away with a string of obscenities.
Pete whipped back to John. “So is killing people.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him, I was trying to stop him,” John explained, still cool and level-headed on the outside. Inside he was too numb to know what to think.
Pete nodded, satisfied with his answer. “Don’t let it happen again,” he admonished John. “You.” He whipped back to Kyle, who had been helped to his feet. “You’re coming with me.”
He grabbed Kyle by his uninjured arm and dragged him down the line of wagons to the back. Reverend Joseph skittering along behind them, Bible in hand.
For the next couple of minutes John and Callie were stuck at the receiving end of awed comments and questions. “Did he make off with anything?” “I didn’t know you had it in you.” “Was that miner acting alone?”
One or two men slapped John on the back. “Why you old dog, you.”
The rest of the wagon train let out a collective sigh that the brief confrontation was over. John was deemed a hero for protecting what was his. He shook his head as people began to disburse. He would never understand what some people thought constituted heroism.
“Thank you.” Callie showed her appreciation with a smile as she returned her mother’s teapot to its place in her wagon.
He let out an unsteady breath in answer, letting her see the nerves that now caught up with him. A fine layer of sweat had broken out on his forehead and his hands trembled as he stared as Kyle’s blood on the grass. “I think I need to sit down.”
“Good idea. I’ll make us some tea.”
John moved well away from Callie’s wagon and sat heavily in the grass with his back against the wheel of his own wagon. He set his gun in the grass beside him and deliberately ignored it. Callie poured him some cold tea and came to sit next to him, handing him his cup. He glanced at her with a look of pure disbelief as he took it. Of all things, Callie burst into a fit of giggles.
“You should have seen yourself.” She grinned, blushing and pressing her hands to her cheeks to cool them. “For a second there you looked as grim as a gunfighter.”
John took a long swig of tea. The humor of the situation caught up to him and he returned her laughter with a sheepish smile. “Oh God, I can’t imagine.”
He could imagine it. He could imagine himself, round glasses, pale face, fresh from ripping open his soul and pouring all his grief out onto the prairie and Callie’s lap, standing over a man with a gun. There was nothing he could do but laugh along with Callie. That only made Callie’s eyes shine with mirth. John’s whole world may have been shifting sands and unsettled emotions, but at least he had Callie with him. He had laughter.
His amusement was short-lived as other thoughts occurred to him. He’d shot a miner. He took another drink of his tea and his expression clouded to worried.
“Knowing that lot, there will be reprisals.”
Chapter Eight
Callie wanted to brush off the incident with Kyle as an unfortunate bump in the road of her journey. She wanted to focus instead on how John had valiantly stepped up to defend her. But few people were willing to let the excitement go. She spent the next several days fielding nosy questions from their neighbors, even from the miners, as they journeyed on across endless miles of grasslands. Every time they stopped, she was beset by curiosity-seekers. Oddly, it made her miss Greg all the more. He should be the one to answer the pesky questions.
“What did old Kyle try to snatch that was so special?” Kyle’s friend Cletus asked her when they stopped at midday.
“Does it matter what he tried to steal?” Callie answered him. “It was still theft.”
“Course it matters.” Cletus sniffed at her. “It matters plenty. So what was it?”
Callie gaped at his audacity without answering. She looked for John, but he was off searching for the wagon train’s blacksmith.
“Hey,
Cletus, you get away from there.” Of all people, Reverend Joseph marched up to rescue her.
Cletus narrowed his eyes at the reverend. “I was just makin’ polite conversation with the lady.”
“She doesn’t need your polite conversation,” Reverend Joseph told him. “Get.”
Cletus growled and shoved his hands into his pockets, but moved on.
“Sorry about him,” Reverend Joseph went on, clutching his Bible tight to his chest. “So what did he want to know?”
Callie blinked and pressed a hand to her stomach to settle herself. “He wanted to know what that miner Kyle tried to steal from my wagon.”
The reverend’s brow shot up. “Did he?” Callie nodded, turning her attention to him fully. “So what did he try to steal?”
“The teapot from my mother’s silver tea service.” As soon as she told him, she felt as though she’d given away a secret. She told herself she shouldn’t be cagy. He was a man of the cloth, after all.
Reverend Joseph nodded. He did his best to seem compassionate, but there was a spark in his eyes that reminded Callie too much of Elton. “Teapot. I see, I see.” He stood there nodding, rubbing his chin. The reverend needed to shave.
An awkward prickle made its way down Callie’s back, turning her mood sour. “I have work to do, Reverend.” She hoped she didn’t sound too curt.
“Teapot,” he answered without meeting her eyes, then wandered off. “Makes sense.”
The hair on the back of Callie’s neck stood up. “What makes sense?”
Reverend Joseph drew in a sharp breath and blinked several times, as if he had only just noticed her standing there. “Why, um, that he would attempt to, uh, steal something so valuable. That’s it.”
“Yes,” she said, only because there wasn’t anything else to say.
“All right, then.” He nodded and waved at her in what could have been a blessing or just have been brushing away a fly. “You… you take care.” He wandered off muttering to himself, flushed pink, clutching his Bible.
The whole encounter left Callie feeling beyond uneasy. It was bad enough that someone had tried to rob her. She didn’t need odd reverends and nosy miners driving home the point of how vulnerable she was on the trail. She didn’t like feeling so exposed. And where was John anyhow? It was another small shock to realize he hadn’t been far from her side for weeks.
He didn’t return from his errand for another half hour. When he did, he hardly noticed how unsettled Callie was.
“I have an idea for hitching our wagons to each other, end to end,” he said without preamble. “We can harness all four of our oxen to the front of one wagon to pull both of them. That way we can protect our things from thieves and ride together during the day.”
He walked past her toward the wagons without a second glance.
The prickles of anxiety in Callie’s gut rolled themselves into a ball of resentment. “Where have you been? I’ve had more than my share of strange questions this morning.”
“I was asking Nick Costner how we might connect our wagons,” John replied as he studied the back of Callie’s wagon. “I thought I mentioned where I was going before I left.”
“You did, it’s just that….” She didn’t know what it just was. The worry that gnawed at her had no basis, and even if it did, it wasn’t right for her to take it out on John. Still, he had left her to deal with things alone, just as Greg had. Grief poked at her, as much as she tried to shoo it away and be strong. The gaping chasm of loneliness was too much for her.
“We don’t have much time to figure out the logistics of joining wagons,” John went on, all of his attention on the puzzle he’d set out for himself and none of it on Callie. “It should be simple to attach my wagon to the back of yours, it’s harnessing two teams of oxen that will prove the biggest challenge.”
“I suppose,” Callie said. She hugged herself and chewed her lip as she watched John stride the length of his wagon, studying it. She had no right to demand his attention or his sympathy, but somehow she needed it. “About all of the people asking me impertinent questions today,” she mumbled as he crossed in front of her. “I think—”
“Nick. There you are.” John looked past her shoulder as the strapping, barrel-chested blacksmith traveling with them came striding up. He had a yoke over his broad shoulder. “Good, you brought the yoke.”
“And I have an idea of how we can rig it up,” Nick said.
Callie was forced to swallow her concerns and watch as John and Nick spent the next hour lifting, fitting, hammering, and otherwise strapping her and John’s wagons together and adjusting the harness to fit two teams of oxen. As much as she knew the work John was doing was important, the unease that knotted her stomach refused to let up. Even when she attempted to distract herself by lending the men a hand, the feeling that someone was watching her, waiting for another opportunity to steal from her, and that John didn’t notice or care, that Greg should have been there to defend her, remained.
Once the operation was completed, John climbed into his wagon and fished out a small, unobtrusive metal box with a lock. He brought it out and balanced it on top of one of the wagon wheels.
“What do I owe you, Nick?” he asked, opening the box with a key from his pocket.
“Two dollars should do it.” Nick shrugged.
John opened the box and Callie nearly choked at the fat stack of bills it contained. He took two bills and handed them to Nick. “Many thanks.”
Nick laughed. “If I had known you were a rich man, I’d’ve asked for more!” He slapped John on the back, tucked the bills in his pocket, and walked off, shaking his head.
John closed the box, carrying it back to the wagon with a smile on his face.
“Is that all yours?” Callie asked in a whisper from where she stood.
“No.” He shook his head, pushing the box as deep into his wagon as he could without climbing in. “It’s ours.”
Callie gaped at him, caught between shock at his generosity, irritation that he hadn’t told her before, and guilt that she couldn’t just be happy for him. “Are you telling me that somehow I married a… a man of substance?”
He closed the gap between them and brushed her arm like an old friend. “I told you my father owned shops.”
“Yes, but,” Callie sputtered, “I was imagining small general stores and the like.”
John shook his head. “I said he thought of it more as an empire, and so it is. He has ten locations throughout New England.”
“Mount up, folks! It’s time to move on,” Mr. Evans called from somewhere down the line.
“Care to see if all our hard work has paid off?” John asked her, gesturing toward the front of her wagon, which was now the front of the chain of two.
She nodded, but her thoughts were a thousand miles away as he helped her up into the driver’s seat. Ten stores in New England. Her memory conjured up all sorts of images of grand shops in Philadelphia, places that sold dresses from France, China from England, spices and silks from the Orient. John had been that kind of a shopkeeper, not the proprietor of a humble general store.
The truth settled gradually over her as they rolled on through the prairie. She didn’t truly know who John was. Even after the time they’d spent together, after the confessions they’d shared. He’d broken down and shared his darkest secret with her and the emotions that went with it, but she still didn’t know him. She didn’t know her husband.
“He’s the most intriguing man I’ve ever met,” she explained to Mrs. Weingarten later that afternoon. She’d hopped down from riding with John to walk and stretch her back and legs, and to keep Mrs. Weingarten company for a while. Talking to her older, wiser friend was what she needed while everything inside of her was so unsettled. “You’d think he was a mouse to look at him. But I’m discovering that he’s about as far from a mouse as a man can get, even though he doesn’t talk very much. I just… I just wished I knew him more.”
“But he is a good man?” Mr
s. Weingarten asked.
Callie let out a breath. “I think so.” She paused to consider. “No, I know it. I can feel it.”
“How very lucky for you.” Mrs. Weingarten smiled and slid her arm around Callie’s waist like a mother.
“He’s a good man,” Callie went on, “so I have no idea why I’m so… so irritated with him now.”
“Irritated? Why, my dear? What has he done?”
She chewed her lip before answering. “Since the attempted robbery, I’ve had too many strange questions. Nothing was taken, but something still isn’t right. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“You’re still grieving, dear,” Mrs. Weingarten said. “Could this be part of that grief?”
Callie frowned. “Perhaps. But if it is, John doesn’t seem to notice that anything is wrong.”
“Ah. I’ve seen this before.” Mrs. Weingarten’s smile grew. Callie wasn’t sure she liked what that implied either. “Have you spoken to him of your feelings on this?”
“No,” Callie answered slowly. “I haven’t had a chance. If he’s my husband, shouldn’t he see that I’m upset?”
Mrs. Weingarten laughed loud enough to bring a blush to Callie’s face, but whether from embarrassment or frustration, she couldn’t tell. “My dear one,” she said. “Even the most devoted husband cannot read a book if it is not opened to him.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“You should talk to him, tell him of your concerns. It’s the only way he will know.”
Callie frowned, watching the ground in front of her as she walked. What if she told John about her worries and he thought she was foolish?
“You like your husband,” Mrs. Weingarten interrupted her thoughts with a knowing grin of another kind.
Callie’s blush grew hotter. “Yes, of course I do.”
“Perhaps you will find a little romance in your marriage after all?”
Her statement hit Callie as shockingly awkward. “I… I don’t think so.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. “John is intriguing, but he isn’t remotely romantic or jealous or passionate.”