Janet Quin-Harkin Read online

  “It was my impression he turned you down,” Gabe said, grinning.

  “Believe me, Mr. Foster, now that I have seen the man, I would not have signed on with him at any price, even if he were riding to California in a golden coach with half the U.S. cavalry at his side.”

  “So what are you aiming to do now?” Gabe asked.

  “I’ll find another company that can take me,” she said. “There are enough men out there to find one with civilized manners and a kind heart.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Gabe said. “Gold and kind hearts don’t go well together.”

  “Pray don’t concern yourself about me, Mr. Foster,” she said. “I am a very determined woman.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a moment,” Gabe said, “and I’ve no doubt at all that you could walk all the way to California if you had to. But you’ve two little girls with you that need looking after. I hear you had a narrow brush with cholera on that damned ship. I’ll ask around for you, if you like.”

  “I can do my own asking, thank you,” Libby said. Then a worrying thought struck her. “You didn’t follow us this far to keep an eye on us, did you?”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” Gabe said, laughing. “As a matter of fact, things got a little too hot for me in St. Louis. The young man on board I helped part from his cash turned out to be the son of a judge—a hanging judge. And since I rather like my head and neck just the way they are, I thought I’d take me a little trip westward. So you see, I’ve got enough headaches in my life without having a mean-tempered, high-moraled, ice-cold woman to worry about.”

  Libby flushed. “Then I bid you good day, Mr. Foster,” she said, nodding her head slightly.

  “I was just about to eat,” Gabe said. “I don’t suppose you’d care to join me, or would you still consider that to be one step away from supping with Old Nick himself?”

  Libby looked longingly at the white cloth, the polished silver and thought of the last time she sat in a proper restaurant, eating good food and enjoying civilized company. She was aware that Gabe Foster represented the one familiar face in a sea of strangers, also that his presence still strangely disturbed her, however much she might despise him. She actually found herself thinking, what harm could there be in a cup of coffee? before she took control of herself. Aside from any other consideration, she was not going to give Sheldon Rival the satisfaction of seeing her dining with a known gambler, especially such a handsome one.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’ve left my daughters alone and must return to them right away. Please excuse me. I wish you good luck, Mr. Foster.”

  “And I you, Mrs. Hugh Grenville,” he said.

  She spent the rest of the day walking among the campsites, seeing if any party was willing to take on three extra female passengers, but nobody seemed at all willing to divide their precious supplies with three extra mouths, even for money, and even less willing to be saddled with the extra responsibilities of three helpless females. “We don’t aim to stop for nobody, ma’am,” one man said, looking away rather than face her pleading eyes. “If you or your kids gets sick, I couldn’t hold up the wagons for you and I couldn’t provide a doctor for you either. I’d sure hate to watch little kids die, or you for that matter.”

  She tried reasoning with him, assuring him that she was as tough as any man, but it was clear that he, like the other men she spoke to, had made up his mind. They were after gold, they had brought enough supplies to get them there, and they were not going to be tied down. Libby came back despondent as night was falling. All around her campfires glowed like red eyes in the dark.

  The next morning her luck changed. She was taking Eden and Bliss out for an early morning walk when she heard someone yelling down from an upstairs window. At first she ignored the yelling, sure that it could not be directed at her, but when it went on, she hesitated and looked up.

  “Yes, you—who else did you think I meant!” boomed the voice, and there, at the open window of the second-floor suite, was Sheldon Rival, still in his shirt and suspenders with rolled up sleeves and no collar or tie. “You wanted to join my party yesterday. You still want to?”

  Libby longed to say that there was no way she would ever consider joining him again, but she remembered all the flat rejections of the day before. “Come up and talk about it, if you do,” Sheldon Rival shouted. “Those brats yours?”

  Libby nodded. “Then leave ‘em downstairs in the foyer. Can’t stand whining brats around the place.”

  Libby led the children inside. “Stay right here on this sofa, children,” she said gently. “Mama will be down in a few seconds. Eden, take care of your sister.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Eden said. She lugged Bliss, like a sack of potatoes, onto the velvet sofa. “Sit still, sissy, and I’ll tell you a story,” she said. Libby smiled fondly at both of them, then went up the marble staircase to Sheldon Rival’s room. On hearing her knock, he boomed, “Come in.” She opened the door. Rival was seated at a table near the window, a half-eaten peach in front of him, a fat cigar dangling at his lip. He did not get up, but beckoned Libby to come over to him.

  “Now then,” he said. “Things have changed since I talked to you yesterday. My cook’s come down with cholera.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Libby said.

  Rival shrugged. “Silly fool. I told him not to drink the river water. So what I want to know is, do you want his job?”

  “You don’t expect him to recover?” Libby asked, shocked by his callousness.

  “Probably not,” Rival said. “Not many do, from my experience. Anyway, even if he does, I don’t want him back as my cook. He could be carrying the disease and infect my food. I presume you know how to cook?”

  “Yes, of course,” Libby said, secretly going over in her mind the rare occasions she had been allowed in the kitchen and the little cakes which were her repertoire.

  “I like to eat well,” Rival said. “I’m very particular about my food. I’ve got me the best-stocked expedition ever to cross this Godforsaken wilderness and I aim to eat well all the way across. I’ve got scouts and sharpshooters and ox drivers and God knows what, but none of them know how to cook anything more than bacon and beans. So do you want the job or not?”

  “On what terms?”

  Rival’s eyes narrowed. “You get to California, of course. You get food and protection. You eat what I eat. You provide your own bedding but you get to sleep in a wagon.”

  “I see,” Libby said. “That sounds fair enough.”

  “You leave the brats behind, of course,” he added.

  “What?”

  “Those kids. I don’t have room for two extra bodies.”

  “You want me to leave my children behind? What sort of man are you?” Libby demanded.

  Rival looked amused. “It’s either them or my flour and my flour is worth more to me. You’ll find someone in town to look after them until you come back for them. Or get someone to adopt them. You’re young enough to breed yourself a whole army more.”

  Libby opened her mouth to tell this man how vile and disgusting she found him, but she closed it again. She was not going to let Sheldon Rival get the better of her. She’d take him on at his own game and she would beat him.

  “You don’t have much choice, do you?” he asked, picking up his cigar which still smoked away in his ashtray and puffing a cloud of smoke in her direction. “There’s nobody else who’ll take you to California. I hear you’ve been asking around all the companies. If you want to get there, you’ll have to go along with my terms or not go at all.”

  “Very well, Mr. Rival,” she said. “When do you propose leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning by ten o’clock,” he said, picking up the peach in one hand, while he took another puff on the cigar. “I’m having everything loaded today so we get an early start. You’ll know my wagons—they’re bigger and better than anyone else’s. Ask any of the men. They’ll tell you. Ask my trail boss. His name’s Jimmy. He’ll
tell you where to stow your stuff. Now get going. I’ve got business to conduct. I’m negotiating for extra oxen and a string of pack mules.”

  Libby hurried down to her children and took them outside. Then, with the knowledge that she was getting a free passage, she went into outfitting stores and bought blankets for each of them, some gingham to make dresses, and a sturdy man’s shirt for each of them, since there were no jackets small enough. She did manage to purchase three sunbonnets and laughed at her children’s faces when they all tried them on. “Now we really look like three pioneers,” she said. “How your father would laugh if he could see us now.” She did not mention what Mr. Rival had ordered her to do with her children.

  After she had deposited the children back with Ma Zettel, she rolled up their belongings in the new cloth and blankets and went to seek out Rival’s trail boss and wagons. As he had boasted, they were bigger and finer than any others, long bodied with metal-rimmed wheels. She found the trail boss supervising the loading of several kegs of water. “Make sure you lash these down good,” he yelled at a team of hard-looking men who were clambering over the freight with ropes. “You let the cargo shift on one of those passes and the wagon’s gone. Then Rival will have your hides.”

  “Are you Jimmy?” Libby called to him. He turned around and eyed her with interest. He was very tall and lean, much younger than she had expected but tough and rugged looking as if he had spent all his young years in the outdoors. His face was deeply tanned and had a perpetual frown from being out in bright sunlight and his expression showed what he thought about having a woman along on the trip. When she announced that she was Mr. Rival’s new cook, he gave a sardonic smile as if he did not believe her duties would be confined to cooking. “You can put your stuff in there,” he said, indicating with a nod of his head a wagon piled high with sacks and boxes of food. “That’s his personal food wagon.”

  “They’re fine wagons,” she commented, trying to establish a friendly relationship with the man. She had the feeling that it might be good to have an ally on the trip.

  Jimmy sniffed. “Too fine if you want to know. I told him he’d need six oxen per wagon to get them over the divide, but now he’s got them loaded down with so much stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t need eight. Lighter is better, I’ve always found. I see you travel light.”

  “That’s because I had no choice,” she said. “But I can see now that it is a big advantage.”

  He smiled for the first time, the smile making him look almost boyish. “What’s your name?”

  “Libby,” she answered.

  Jimmy stretched out a lean, brown hand. “Well, Libby, welcome aboard. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I hope so too,” she said, laughing at the absurdity of it.

  He smiled encouragingly. “We’ll get along fine if Rival listens to me.”

  “You’ve done this trip before?”

  “Not this exact trip,” he said, “but I was born out on the frontier and I’ve crossed the plains enough times. Of course, I didn’t have all this clutter with me.” His eyes strayed back to the line of loaded wagons.

  “I’ll take a look at the food wagon, if you don’t mind. I want to get things arranged so I can find them and see if I’ve got everything I need on board,” she said.

  “Oh, I think you’ll find everything you need.” His tone indicated that there would be far more than she would need, far more than was necessary or sensible.

  Libby climbed up onto the high bed of the wagon. She looked quickly over the sacks of meat and sugar, slabs of lard, barrels of apples and potatoes, at the big black cooking pots hanging on hooks, then she glanced up to see if anyone was watching her before rearranging the stuff to make a little clearing in the middle, boxed in safely on all sides. She covered it with a board and then put a tray of peaches on top of it.

  “Fine,” she called to Jimmy as she clambered down again. “He’s certainly got enough supplies there.”

  “And he’s taking a cow along, so he can have fresh cream and butter,” Jimmy called back. “You know how to milk a cow?”

  “Heavens no,” Libby said.

  Jimmy laughed. “It ain’t hard. One of the guys will show ya. Most of them were born and bred on ranches and farms. Besides, old Rival won’t get milk for long, when the cow has to walk twenty miles a day. Still, he’ll learn soon enough, I reckon.”

  The excitement flowing through her gave Libby renewed energy. She hurried back to Ma Zettel, where the little girls, decorated liberally with flour, were rolling out dough at a big kitchen table.

  “Handy little things, they are,” she called, beaming as Libby walked in. “Made quite a passable corn-bread.”

  “Which is more than their mother can do,” Libby acknowledged. “I’m afraid I’m in for trouble when he finds out the extent of my cooking. You can’t give me a quick course, can you?”

  Ma Zettel laughed. “I can tell you some of my recipes,” she said. “Of course, cooking on the trail is not like when you’ve got a big stove at your disposal. You make your bread in a dutch oven, for one thing. I think I’ve got a recipe for it in my big book over there. You’re welcome to study it, if you’ve a mind to.”

  Libby gratefully took the book and began to scribble down recipes. She wished that she had paid more attention to domestic matters when she was growing up. Just how much was a pinch, or a gill or a peck? How did one scald milk or render fat? Her mother had tried to stress to her the importance of knowing how to run her own kitchen one day, how to order food and plan menus, but she had been glad to leave all that to her mother while she went out riding or for walks in the park. Now she tried desperately to recall which dishes she had enjoyed at home and which she could possibly make for a critical Sheldon Rival.

  I’ll tell him he’ll have to eat what I prepare or starve, she thought bravely. Although when she considered it, she decided that Mr. Rival would probably not be squeamish about dumping her along the trail if her cooking didn’t please him.

  In the middle of the night she woke the children and dressed them in the darkness. “We’re going for an exciting adventure,” she whispered, “but you both have to be very brave and very quiet. Can you do that?”

  Two sets of big eyes stared at her and they nodded silently. She felt a great rush of tenderness and concern well up in her throat as she tied their cloaks. Was she really doing the right thing, risking their lives in this way? Surely, Ma Zettel would look after them, as Sheldon Rival had suggested, for a fee, and she could come and pick them up on her way back with Hugh and all the gold.

  “We’re ready, Mama,” Eden whispered and slipped her warm little hand into Libby’s, making Libby realize that she had not left them behind in Boston, where they were in perfect safety, and she was not going to leave them behind now.

  “Come on, then. Let the adventure start,” Libby said, and led them silently down the stairs.

  The camps were full of sleeping men and restless animals. Dying campfires gave enough light for Libby to pick her way around them. Dogs growled from time to time, but sniffed at the children and relaxed again. Sheldon Rival’s wagons glowed white, like huge sails, in the light of a waning moon.

  “This is where we have to be very, very brave,” she whispered to the girls. “I’m going to hide you in a little secret room, because they don’t allow children on this trip. If they find you, they’ll leave us all behind and we’ll never get to Papa. Do you think you can play quietly in a little secret room for a couple of days? Mama will be right there and will come to you whenever nobody is watching. Mama will sleep next to you at night.”

  “All right, Mama,” Eden said. “I’ll make sure sissy stays quiet.”

  “I can stay quiet on my own,” Bliss said a little too loudly, then put her fingers to her lips, giggling as the others both tried to shush her.

  Libby went around to the back of the food wagon and lifted the children in. She lifted the tray of peaches, moved aside the box of
hard biscuits, and had the children crawl through to the little space she had lined with blankets. “See how cozy it is?” Libby whispered as she tucked them in. “You just go to sleep. Mama is going into town say goodbye to Mrs. Zettel and then I’ll be back. As soon as it’s light, we’ll start moving. You can peep out through a little hole I’ve made in the canvas for you and I’ll walk right alongside,”

  “What if we need to go pee-pee?” Bliss whispered in her mother’s ear.

  “There’s a pot in the corner,” she whispered back, smiling. Then she kissed both children and replaced the box across the opening.

  I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but this has to be the craziest I have ever attempted, she thought as she glanced back at the silent wagon.

  CHAPTER 8

  NEXT MORNING, ON the stroke of ten, the wagons moved off. Sheldon Rival had made his appearance around nine-thirty, walking down the line of wagons for a brief inspection before taking up his place beside the driver of the lead wagon. He was still dressed like a city businessman with highly polished boots, a gold stickpin in his silk cravat, and his big golden watch chain draped across a stripe-vested stomach. His eyes narrowed when he saw Libby perched on the running board of the cook wagon.

  “Didn’t think you’d show up,” he said.

  “I told you I would,” she said coldly.

  “Got rid of the brats then?”

  “You don’t see them, do you?”

  “Smart woman. You know what’s good for you,” he said. “Maybe you’ll do after all.” Then he walked on, leaving Libby with her heart hammering.

  For the first time she was able to see just what constituted Mr. Rival’s expedition and she had to admit it was very impressive: twelve wagons in all, each covered with a bowed white canvas top, each pulled by six oxen, a couple of men to each wagon, twelve spare ox teams, a string of pack mules, well laden, several riding horses and the milk cow brought up the rear of the party. Several men rode alongside on mules or horses, their belongings packed in saddlebags, their rifles slung across their saddles. Libby presumed they were the guards. They all looked weather-beaten and tough, as if they were used to frontier fighting.