Courting Carrie in Wonderland

by Carla Kelly

  Evie Marchant gasped. “You wouldn’t!”

  “Try me,” her grandmother said. “You will behave from this moment on or so help me, it’s Saint Thomas Aquinas’s School for Young Ladies for you! One word to your parents will suffice.”

  Bravo, Ramsay thought, impressed. “I think my work is done here,” he said. “If you have any more trouble in the park, Mrs. Evans, I’ll refer you to Judge Meldrum. He runs the district court and is located at Mammoth Hot Springs. He’s a personal friend of mind. Mr. Bell? Maybe you and I should have a chat in the lobby and leave these two alone.”

  They walked into the lobby. “Would you like a room for the night, courtesy of the Fountain Hotel, Sergeant Major?” Mr. Bell asked. “A stiff drink?”

  Ramsay said no to both, but he couldn’t deny personal pride in getting the tightfisted hotelier to actually offer him a room. “With your permission, I’ll return to the back porch. I think I’ll stay there with the broom.”

  “You’ll be sending soldiers for a few nights?”

  “I will. I’ll also tell them to train a few of your men to take over when the season gets busy and the troopers are needed to patrol the geyser basin,” Ramsay said. “Good night.”

  Wrapped in a thick blanket with the Fountain Hotel crest on it, Ramsay dozed and watched until the sun came up, his broom ready. When it was light enough to see, he had the stableboy saddle Xerxes. He arrived at the Fountain Station in time for poached venison, which the corporal insisted came from a deer on his last legs.

  “It was a mercy killing,” the corporal insisted, and Ramsay gave him no argument. The boys at the Fountain Station knew how to cook venison.

  Halfway through as tender a steak as Ramsay had ever eaten, the corporal remembered a telephone message from last night. “I wrote down the message from Major Pitcher,” the corporal said and handed it over. “I had to ask him to repeat himself several times. I think he was laughing, but it could have been a bad connection. Lots of crackle.”

  Heaven spare me, Ramsay thought. What now? He read the note and suppressed the most impressive swear word he could think of, only because he was a leader of men.

  Sergeant Major Stiles, you are needed here immediately, Ramsay read. I have a directive from the president of the United States about a visitor, and it is the assignment of a lifetime. Yrs, Major John Pitcher.

  He followed the arrow and turned over the note. P.S. Everyone on the staff will be watching this one with bated breath. How are you at escorting rich old musical theatre stars? Pretty good? JP.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Thank goodness Xerxes had the good training to travel north on the Grand Loop with a sleeping sergeant major on his back for a portion of the journey. Years in the saddle had made Ramsay adept at dozing and riding.

  The sergeant at the Fountain Station hadn’t helped matters with his cheerful comment, “Better you than me, Sergeant Major.” Ramsay had bit back another evil word or two and earned a reproachful look from Xerxes when he applied his spurs more firmly than usual as they left at a fast trot.

  Deciding that no one would like him at all pretty soon, he didn’t stop at the Willow Park Wylie Camp. He would have whined to Carrie, which he knew wouldn’t prosper his cause, whatever that might be.

  Still groggy from sitting up all night, alert for a cookie-loving bear, he crested the hill into Mammoth Hot Springs in early afternoon and sat there a moment. He collected what thoughts he could muster that weren’t profane in the extreme and tried to steel himself for what was to come.

  All he wanted to do was stomp over to the barracks, toss out the perfectly competent sergeant of B Company and resume his former position there. Someone else could be sergeant major if it meant turning into Major Pitcher’s designated idiot for stupid assignments.

  Xerxes gave him a most meaningful look and started down the slope on his own volition. Nothing like a horse to keep a trooper humble.

  “You win, Xerxes,” he said.

  He took his time over his horse, grooming his faithful mount. When he couldn’t stall any more, Ramsay put his hat back on, cocked it at the proper angle, squared his shoulders, and went in pursuit of Dame Duty, that fickle mistress.

  Major Pitcher looked up when Ramsay knocked on the doorframe. “Good to see you, Sergeant Major Stiles,” he said most formally, then ruined it with a slow smile. “You’re probably loathing the air I breathe, aren’t you?”

  To be diplomatic or something else? That was the question. “Not quite yet, Major,” Ramsay replied, depending on their long acquaintance to smooth over any potential misunderstanding. “Better give it to me straight while I’m on my feet. I was up all night with a bear.”

  “Mission accomplished?”

  Ramsay thought of Miss Marchant’s white face, indignant at first, then filled with remorse. Little Alice and her promising future occupied his weary brain next, followed by Carrie pinning his medal of honor ribbon back on his uniform. “All in all, yes, sir. I’ll write a report,” he said, knowing there wouldn’t be a word about Carrie McKay in such a document.

  “This business might take precedent.” Major Pitcher rummaged through the envelopes on his desk and held one out to Ramsay. “I don’t get these very often, for which I am supremely grateful. Read it and tell me what you think.”

  Even though he already knew it was from the president of the United States, Ramsay still paused to look at the embossed return address. He opened the letter, impressed with the simplicity of “White House, Washington” in the upper left-hand corner, followed by the word “Personal.”

  The letter was handwritten, but readable. President Roosevelt spent a short paragraph asking after Major Pitcher’s health and that of his wife. The next paragraph stopped him cold.

  John, I am requesting that all the stops be pulled out for Madame Louise LaMarque, Ramsay read, a former star of the musical stage.

  “The musical stage? Heaven help me,” he said.

  “New York is a wicked town,” Pitcher said, not even trying to suppress a smile growing wider by the minute.

  His cup already running over with dread, Ramsay kept reading. She was the second wife and now-widow of an advisor to President McKinley’s cabinet, who died a year ago. She wants a tour of the park and insists someone of her prestige needs an escort.

  “She surely means an officer, Major Pitcher,” he said.

  “Nope. She might, but Teddy doesn’t. Keep reading.”

  “My choice is Sergeant Major Stiles,” Ramsay read and then read it again. “After all, he saved my life from a drunk in Gardiner. He’s the one.”

  “Sergeant Major Stiles, you’re anointed,” the major said. “Bet you wish you’d left that drunk alone now, eh?”

  Ramsay set the letter down on the major’s desk, seeing in his mind’s eye anything meaningful he planned to do fly away on little fairy wings. The old trot would probably demand every moment of his time. His project condensing Captain’s Chittenden’s book would languish on his desk and wither away from neglect. Bears would roam Fountain Hotel’s lobby and corridors unchecked, searching for cookies.

  Ram, you whiner, he thought. How bad can this be? “When is Mrs. LaMarque expected to arrive?”

  “According to this letter, tomorrow.” The major held up a second letter of several pages. “You’ll want to study this tome. It lists all her demands.”

  “Demands, sir? Is it a ransom note?” Ramsay thought those days when his voice was changing were long past, but apparently not. His voice shot into an upper register he hadn’t heard in years. Major Pitcher raised his eyebrows, but wisely said nothing.

  “You heard me right, Sergeant Major.” He handed over the other letter. “She’ll bring her own satin sheets, but there will be Earl Grey tea every afternoon on some hotel terrace or another, no whistling or humming in her presence, and complete silence after ten o’clock at night. She will initiate all conversation. She likes to dance. Uh, can you?”

  “The waltz, two-step, polka, and scho
ttische under duress, sir,” Ramsay replied, grateful for the first time in his life for his mother’s insistence on dancing classes, even though he hated it. “It’s been a few years, though.” Gadfreys, more like twenty-five.

  “Better and better! Keep this instruction manual, or ransom note, or whatever you want to call it handy,” the major joked. “Take along your best uniform, because you’ll be staying in the hotels and dancing, taking tea on the veranda and doing a lot of listening to an old battle axe, I gather.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ramsay said, because there was no other answer.

  “There will be a maid accompanying her. According to that letter, a coach and driver have already been hired from the YP Transportation Company. They will fetch the two of them from Cinnabar. You will be waiting at the Gardiner Hotel by noon, with a smile on your face and a spring in your step.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ramsay saluted and went to the door. “Sir, is Captain Chittenden still around?”

  “I believe his wife and children arrived today. I doubt he’ll want a visit.”

  Disappointed in all ways, Ramsay dragged himself to his quarters and flopped down on his bed. He started to read through the letter. In mere minutes, he slept.

  He slept through mess call for supper and woke up in time for Extinguish Lights. Sour of face, mind, and body, he cajoled B Company’s cook out of leftovers and then walked to the bathhouse by the lower terrace. Usually a good soak in a thermal pool could cure what ailed him, but not this time. He sat in silence, dried off, dressed, and walked across the parade ground toward his quarters.

  The lights were on in Captain Chittenden’s quarters. He walked up the path to the house but changed his mind. Major Pitcher was probably right; a man with a newly arrived family probably didn’t want to hear him whine about Carrie McKay. He stood there a moment, listening to laughter and happy chatter, then turned and quietly retraced his steps.

  He sat on his front steps until the chill of evening drove him indoors. He stared at himself in his shaving mirror, saw the sun and wind wrinkles and the hard look in his eyes. Had his face always been this thin? He thought about Carrie McKay and watched his eyes soften.

  “My word, Ramsay, you old dog you,” he said to his image. “Get through the next five or six days—how bad can it be—then get serious about courting Carrie. Figure out a way.”

  It was a cheerful thought. He took it to bed, read a few chapters in The Moonstone (one of his favorite books), turned out the light, and tried to sleep.

  After a night of running away from a bear dressed like a woman in a linen duster wielding a cane, Ramsay took extra care over his grooming, which included patting some bay rum on his face. He wore his best undress blouse and khaki jodhpurs and polished his cavalryman’s boots to a mirror shine. He packed what he needed, but left his duffel inside his front door, ready to grab and go, perhaps while milady and her maid were promenading on the Mammoth Terraces.

  The five miles to Gardiner were accomplished with time to spare. According to the letter, Mrs. LaMarque and her maid would be waiting at the town’s best hotel, which meant to most people the hotel which offended genteel visitors the least. He arrived in the lobby of the Gardiner Hotel and looked around for someone elegant with a maid. No Mrs. LaMarque. He went to the door and looked out, hoping she had changed her mind east of Cincinnati and turned back.

  As he waited, indecisive, he saw a rider coming from the north, moving fast, hunched over his saddle. From instinct not called upon since the end of the Indian wars thirteen years ago, Ramsay looked beyond the rider, wondering who was following the man.

  The horse and rider practically slid to a stop in front of the hotel. Ramsay couldn’t ignore the wild look in the horseman’s eyes, as though he had seen too much.

  Ramsay came closer, taking hold of the exhausted horse’s bridle. “What’s wrong?”

  The rider thrust a note in his hand at Ramsay. “She’s not too happy, Sarge,” he said, “and she’s all yours, if you’re from Fort Yellowstone. I never saw anyone hold the Northern Pacific hostage before!”

  Ramsay released his hold on the horse’s bridle and the rider headed toward the closest bar, where he threw himself from the saddle, flashed through the swinging doors, and disappeared inside.

  He stared at the folded note in his hand and resisted a powerful urge to wash his hands of it like Sergeant Major Pontius Pilate and join the rider in the bar. With serious misgivings, he flicked it open and read, Things are at their worst. Hurry up. Dave Lassiter.

  Ramsay mounted Xerxes and rode north toward Cinnabar, full of misgivings and cursing the moment he intercepted that harmless drunk at the arch dedication.

  Cinnabar came in sight too soon to suit him, and there was the train. He saw a YPTC carriage nearby, with Dave Lassiter sitting there, his booted foot propped against the footboard, a stunned expression on his face. Ramsay knew the man as not someone easily rattled.

  He heard a woman screaming inside the train. Alarmed, he dismounted, and wrapped Xerxes’s reins around a hitching rail by the carriage.

  “Dave, what’s going on?” he asked.

  “A spectacle of unusual proportions,” the driver said. Dave Lassiter was a man well-acquainted with hyperbole, which he called “high purple-ease,” because he knew his own foibles better than most.

  Perhaps Dave was right this time. When the screaming stopped, Ramsay leaned closer to him. “Is anyone in real trouble?”

  “Just you, Sarge, if you’ve been sent to gather up these women,” Dave replied, his long face longer than usual and verging on mournful. “And me. I’m the lucky driver.”

  The shrieks began again and the conductor, a man Ramsay also knew as calm and unflappable, leaped from the train. He puffed over to Ramsay. “You’d better do something!”

  “I’m not so sure the army pays me enough,” Ramsay said, attempting to inject a little humor into a situation where no one was laughing.

  No one even smiled. Ramsay took a deep breath and stepped onto the back of the train, a private car tacked on in Bozeman for Yellowstone’s wealthiest visitors. He knocked on the outside door, listened as it became quiet, and entered the car.

  A tall, handsome woman glared at him. She carried a cane and she shook it at him. Startled, Ramsay stepped back.

  “I was expecting at least a lieutenant,” she snapped.

  “All you get is me, ma’am,” he said. “What can I do? Is someone in need of a doctor?”

  “No,” she replied, injecting several syllables of disdain into the word. “My maid refuses to leave the train because she is afraid she will be scalped and dragged into captivity.”

  “That won’t happen,” he assured her, looking at a woman in a maid’s uniform, her eyes wild in her face, and her hair every which way on her head. “There haven’t been any Indians in Yellowstone Park since 1877. Well, not too many. She’s perfectly safe.”

  He might have been a cricket chirping on the hearth for all the impression that he made on either woman. “She is also convinced that if she leaves the train, she will roll off the mountainside.”

  Ramsay couldn’t help himself. He laughed out loud, which made the servant burst into tears again and the well-dressed dragon favor him with an elegant sneer. She was ten times worse than the lady in the lobby of the Fountain Hotel, and she was his, for the duration of a Yellowstone Park visit. No, the army didn’t pay him enough.

  As the old lady glared at him as though he were dog poop she would scrape off the bottom of her shoe, Ramsay thought about life as a private citizen. He thought of combat and the need for quick decisions.

  Suddenly, he had an amazing idea, one that nearly hit him on the head like a sledgehammer wielded by one of the Katzenjammer Kids in the Sunday funnies. He knew better than to discard it out of hand, because it was the perfect solution to everyone’s problems in the super-expensive rail car. Mostly it would solve his biggest problem, and for a change, he didn’t think of other people first.

  Hoping for the
same control over two overwrought women that he was accustomed to as a sergeant of no mean ability in the US Army, he raised his arm and pointed at the maid. “Stop it. Just stop it,” he commanded, and she obeyed. “Thank you.”

  He looked the battle-ax right in the eye until she shifted her glance. So far, so good.

  “I can solve your problem, Mrs. LaMarque.”

  “I doubt it,” she snapped, on the attack again.

  He had to give her points for indomitability, but he wasn’t about to surrender the field, not when everything he cared about was at stake. Maybe he could tell Captain Chittenden about this in the near future, or his own children someday.

  His heart in his throat, Ramsay turned to the rail car door and opened it. “Then good-bye, Mrs. LaMarque, if you won’t even listen to my proposition. Go back to Washington with this nitwit you employ and complain to President Roosevelt.” He walked out the door and closed it behind him, then he gave her five seconds before he left the platform and rode Xerxes out of Cinnabar. Maybe.

  The door opened when he was two steps down the few stairs that led to the depot platform.

  “What do you have in mind, Sergeant?” he heard behind him, the voice frosty enough to freeze his backside.

  He turned around but did not take a step up. “That is Sergeant Major to you, Mrs. LaMarque,” he said in what he hoped was a quiet voice of command. A man can only feel his way through life as best he knew how.

  They glared at each other, but mercifully, the maid had not resumed her caterwauling.

  “Sergeant Major.” She bit off the words like a grizzly would rip the guts from a trout.

  He took a step up. “I can get you a useful maid from the Wylie Camp at Willow Park. It will take a day and some persuasion.”

  He took another step up until he stood on the platform with her. “She is not a maid, either, but a cook. The first time you raise your voice to her I will personally escort you right back here to Cinnabar. It comes down to this: How badly do you want to visit Yellowstone Park?”