people found out he was not married to the woman living with them. And, there would be no way to keep the woman a secret. He’d be a fool to even try.
Of course, when he’d first heard of the widow, he’d assumed she would be older and practical enough to make an arrangement with him. Jake looked up at the sky searching for stars. He hadn’t counted on Mrs. O’Brian being young or having eyes that made him want to protect her from things he didn’t even see.
The truth was he couldn’t even protect her from the things he could see coming. He and the girls were going to have a battle finding acceptance in Miles City and any woman he married would be in the battle with them. There was no limit to the mean-spiritedness of human beings and Jake figured his little family was going to see their share of it this winter.
It made him weary just thinking of it. If he had a fire going, he would read some from the Bible his mother had given him as a boy. It never failed to comfort him. His mother had been a fine lady. Of course, she’d been totally unsuited to the roughness of life out here. He relaxed just thinking of his old home, hidden on the side of a mountain northwest of here by the pines growing thick and tall all around. His father had brought them there, not believing the reports he’d heard that the trapping days were almost over. He thought it was all just rumors spread by the Hudson’s Bay Company. He pictured getting rich on furs once the other trappers gave up, but he barely managed to feed his family.
Jake had grieved when his mother died a couple of years after they came West. The crude cabin where they lived seemed to shrink and grow empty without her. He and his father never talked about his mother after her death. They had both felt too guilty for failing her. His father hadn’t even put a marker on her burial place. The last thing Jake had done, before he left to go out on his own, was to find a smooth slab of rock and place it in front of his mother’s grave with her name scratched on it.
By that time, his father had married again, this time to a Lakota squaw. Red Tail was their son.
If he didn’t have the girls, Jake would not consider marriage—especially not to a woman like Elizabeth O’Brian. She reminded him too much of his mother. This land had changed in the almost forty years he’d lived here, but it still wasn’t a place for pretty, young white women. He didn’t want to watch another one of them grow bitter and fade away here. He didn’t have much choice, though. Not if he wanted to keep the baby alive.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure if it was the pebble under her back or the smell of frying salt pork that woke her the next morning. She could see out the flap in her tent well enough to know there were heavy gray clouds hanging low in the sky. There was also a biting cold to the morning air. Winter was coming. The low bluffs in the distance might even have snow on top of them by now.
Elizabeth hadn’t slept well and it was later than she’d planned to waken. It had taken her hours last night to coax the older girl close enough to the tent so that Elizabeth wouldn’t worry about her. Finally, Spotted Fawn had agreed to sleep beside her tent when Elizabeth said she might need help with the baby.
Fortunately, the baby only stirred twice during the night. Elizabeth had fed her both times and the little one was doing better. Maybe this man, Jake, would be content to spend a few more days near the fort so Elizabeth could nurse the baby. That should give him enough time to find someone else to take care of the infant.
In the cold light of morning, Elizabeth accepted the fact that she was going to live. She looked down at the sleeping infant. Maybe God was keeping her alive to save this Indian baby. That was the only thing that made sense, even though she couldn’t help but wonder why He saw fit to worry about this little one when He had not hesitated to take her Rose away.
Elizabeth knew no one was supposed to question the ways of God, but she couldn’t help her thoughts. It would be a wondrous, as well as a bitter thing, if God used her to save this heathen child’s life when she had not been able to do anything but watch her own baby die.
Unfortunately, no matter what her thoughts, she could not spend her day hiding inside her tent. Whether or not she wanted to see him again, Jake Hargrove was out there and he’d naturally want to know about the baby.
Elizabeth pulled the blankets closer to the sleeping infant before she tried to smooth back her hair. Maybe she could slip around to the wagon without being seen and get her mirror. She didn’t want anyone accusing her of being untidy again. Maybe if she rubbed her cheeks with a damp cloth, the color on her face would even out, as well.
When Elizabeth opened the flaps to her tent, she could see that Jake wasn’t the one frying the pork. There was a layer of frost on the ground and someone had hollowed out a place in the dirt to build a cooking fire, even though the blackened ashes from her own fire were only a few feet away.
Elizabeth didn’t recognize the man who crouched by the fire’s coals, although he was wearing the usual army uniform so he clearly belonged to the fort. She took a quick look at the ground around him and didn’t see any signs of his belongings. She did see that the man had a coffeepot settled at the edge of the fire and was heating a rock that looked as if it had some biscuits warming on it.
She took a deep breath. The coffee didn’t have the faintly bitter smell of green coffee, either. That’s what she usually smelled around the fort. No, this was the kind of coffee a man would buy special in the mercantile. That soldier had probably been hoarding that bit of coffee for months. And now he was celebrating something.
Elizabeth frowned. The only thing around here to celebrate was his new camp. Why—she drew in her breath as she finally understood. That man wanted her place. Elizabeth’s needs had been pushed aside by others all of her life, and she’d accepted it. But now that she’d been cheated out of death too, something rose up inside of her. She refused to be pushed any longer. She didn’t care what her hair looked like.
“This spot’s taken,” Elizabeth said as she stepped out of her tent. The canvas had kept the frost away from the ground inside, but the icy cold outside made her gasp when her foot touched the ground. She had worn a hole in her left shoe from all of the walking she’d done on the way here and the cold went right through her stocking. She saw her breath come out in white puffs again today.
But she ignored all of that. As cold as she was on the outside, she felt a growing heat inside. For all this man knew, she was still dying. People needed to wait for the dead to be finished with their business before they took everything from them. She liked the spot where she was camped; she intended to keep it.
“If you’re planning to set up a camp, you might try a little farther down the ravine. There are more cottonwoods and dry thistle down there anyway so it will be easier for fires and all.” Elizabeth forced herself to smile. If she stood in one place, the ground under her shoes grew a little warmer.
“I’m not setting up camp.” The man stood up indignantly. His nose was red from the chill of the morning and his hair was slicked back with some kind of grease. He looked vaguely familiar. “I’m cooking you breakfast.”
“Me?” Elizabeth was astonished. She forgot all about her manners and her cold feet. “Whatever for?”
What would possess the man to do something like that? No one had ever cooked breakfast for her, not even the morning after she’d given birth to Rose. Maybe the doctor had decided she was going to die after all and this soldier had been sent to prepare her last meal. Really, that was no way to break the news to a person.
“Who told you to cook me breakfast? That doctor?”
“Nobody told me to do it. I just know women like to have breakfast cooked for them once in a while.”
