entered the house by the side door, stepping into the warmth, the aroma of Tom’s venison stew and the light of several lanterns. Gracie, rocking in the chair near the cookstove and pretending she hadn’t been waiting impatiently for Lincoln’s return, went absolutely still when she saw that he wasn’t alone.
Her cornflower-blue eyes widened, and her mouth made a perfect O.
Daisy and Billy-Moses stared back at her, probably as amazed as she was.
“Gracie,” Lincoln said unnecessarily. “We have company.”
Gracie had recovered by then; she fairly leaped out of the rocking chair. Looking up at Juliana, she asked, “Did you answer one of my papa’s advertisements? Are you going to be a governess, a housekeeper or a wife?”
Lincoln winced.
Understandably, Juliana seemed taken aback. Like Gracie, though, she turned out to be pretty resilient. The only sign that the child’s question had caught her off guard was the faint tinge of pink beneath her cheekbones, and that might have been from the cold.
“I’m Miss Mitchell,” she said kindly. “These are my pupils—Daisy, Billy-Moses and Theresa. There’s Joseph, as well—he’s out in the barn helping Mr. Dancingstar look after the horses.”
“Then you’re a governess!” Gracie cried jubilantly. Young as she was, she could already read, and because Lincoln wouldn’t allow her to travel back and forth to school in Stillwater Springs, she was convinced that lifelong ignorance would be her lot.
“Gracie,” Lincoln said, setting Billy-Moses on his feet. “Miss Mitchell is a guest. She didn’t answer any advertisements.”
Gracie looked profoundly disappointed, but only for a moment. Like most Creeds, when she set her mind on something, she did not give up easily.
For the next little while, they were all busy with supper.
Tom and Joseph came in from the barn, pumped water at the sink to wash up and joined them at the table, while Gracie, who had already eaten, rushed about fetching bread and butter and ladling milk from the big covered crock stored on the back step.
His daughter wanted to make Miss Mitchell feel welcome, Lincoln thought with a smile, so she’d stay and teach her all she wanted to know—and that was considerable. She hadn’t asked for a doll for Christmas, or a spinning top, like a lot of little girls would have done.
Oh, no. Gracie wanted a dictionary.
Wes often joked that by the time his niece was old enough to make the trip to town on her own, she’d be half again too smart for school and ready to take over the Courier so he could spend the rest of his life smoking cigars and playing poker.
As far as Lincoln could tell, his brother did little else but smoke cigars and play poker—not counting, of course, the whiskey-swilling and his long-standing and wholly scandalous love affair with Kate Winthrop, who happened to own the Diamond Buckle.
Gracie adored her uncle Weston—and Kate.
Casting a surreptitious glance in Juliana’s direction whenever he could during supper, Lincoln saw that she could barely keep her eyes open. As soon as the meal was over, he showed her to his mother’s spacious room. She and Daisy and Billy-Moses could share the big feather bed.
Joseph bunked in with Tom, who slept in a small chamber behind the kitchen stove, having given up his cabin out by the bunkhouse to Ben Gainer and his wife. Theresa was to sleep with Gracie.
Lincoln’s young daughter, however, was not in bed. Wide-awake, she sat at the table with Lincoln, watching as he drank lukewarm coffee, left over from earlier in the day.
“Go to bed, Gracie,” he told her.
Tom lingered by the stove, also drinking coffee. He smiled when Gracie didn’t move.
“I couldn’t possibly sleep,” she said seriously. “I am entirely too excited.”
Lincoln sighed. She was knee-high to a fence post, but sometimes she talked like someone her grandmother’s age. “It’s still five days until Christmas,” he reminded her. “Too soon to be all het up over presents and such.”
“I’m not excited about Christmas,” Gracie said, with the exaggerated patience she might have shown the village idiot. Stillwater Springs boasted its share of those. “You’re going to marry Miss Mitchell, and I’ll have Billy-Moses and Daisy to play with—”
Tom chuckled into his coffee cup.
Lincoln sighed again and settled back in his chair. Although he’d thought about hitching up with the schoolteacher, he’d probably been hasty. “Gracie, Miss Mitchell isn’t here to marry me. She was stranded in town because the Indian School closed down, so I brought her and the kids home—”
“Will I still have to call her ‘Miss Mitchell’ after you get married to her? She’d be ‘Mrs. Creed’ then, wouldn’t she? It would be really silly for me to go around saying ‘Mrs. Creed’ all the time—”
“Gracie.”
“What?”
“Go to bed.”
“I told you, I’m too excited.”
“And I told you to go to bed.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gracie protested, disgruntled.
But she got out of her chair at the table, said good-night to Tom and stood on tiptoe to kiss Lincoln on the cheek.
His heart melted like a honeycomb under a hot sun when she did that. Her blue eyes, so like Beth’s, sparkled as she looked up at him, then turned solemn.
“Be nice to Miss Mitchell, Papa,” she instructed solemnly. “Stand up when she comes into a room, and pull her chair back for her. We want her to like it here and stay.”
Lincoln’s throat constricted, and his eyes burned. He couldn’t have answered to save his hide from a hot brand.
“You’ll come and hear my prayers?” Gracie asked, the way she did every night.
The prayers varied slightly, but certain parts were always the same.
Please keep my papa safe, and Tom, too. I’d like a dog of my very own, one that will fetch, and I want to go to school, so I don’t grow up to be stupid….
Lincoln nodded his assent. Though it was a request he never refused, Gracie always asked.
Once she left the room, Tom set his cup in the sink, folded his arms. “According to young Joseph,” he said, “he and his sister have folks in North Dakota—an aunt and a grandfather. Soon as he can save enough money, he means to head for home and take Theresa with him.”
Lincoln felt a lot older than his thirty-five years as he raised himself from his chair, began turning down lamp wicks, one by one. Tom, in the meantime, banked the fire in the cookstove.
They were usual, these long gaps in their conversations. Right or wrong, Lincoln
