Jodi Thomas - WM 1 Page 5

  Travis rode on to the wagons hoping that she’d joined up with the rest somewhere along the north road. If she were on the bay, she would have been wise not to let anyone near the post see her ride away. The cowhands might not recognize Travis, but they’d know a McMurray horse.

  Two hours later, when he caught up to the settlers snailing their way across a shallow river, he saw that Anderson had been right. No horse. No woman who’d called herself Molly was among them.

  She’d disappeared.

  The travelers were newly arrived from Germany and few spoke English. He’d seen them at the dance, keeping mostly to themselves. Travis had assumed Molly was with them even though she’d tried to act like she was Irish. Since Anderson hadn’t known her, she wouldn’t have been a daughter of a local family. How could a woman walk alone into a dance and no one notice? Or, for that matter, walk away with a horse without a soul seeing her go?

  Molly with the green eyes was growing more interesting by the minute.

  He told himself he knew how she’d done it. Like him, everyone thought she belonged with someone else. No one at the dance knew everyone, so pretending to be with first one group and then another would have been easy for her.

  Grinning, he realized that at one point she’d pretended to be with him and no one had questioned her.

  William Ackland, the oldest and self-appointed leader of the group of Germans, offered to share their noon meal after Travis made sure all the wagons made it across the river. Ackland spoke a passable English and didn’t mind acting as interpreter. The women, shyly at first, asked questions about what lay north—the people, the weather, the settlements past Fort Graham. The men asked about the land, and then what danger they might encounter.

  When Travis finished answering their questions, he asked a few of his own. Not one remembered a redheaded woman at the dance. He was beginning to think she’d been a dream. Only a dream wouldn’t have kissed him or stolen a horse. A dream wouldn’t have spread her fingers over his chest as if needing to know he was real as dearly as he had wanted to hold her when he’d danced with her.

  One woman said she met a young woman named Sally who might have had red hair beneath her scarf, but she seemed too afraid to even join the women in conversation. The German woman thought she must have been a local.

  Travis doubted that would be his fearless Molly who’d run past a dozen men when she thought she was saving his life. But it made sense that she’d play more than one part; after all, she’d played two with him.

  When the leader asked him to travel with them for a while and scout, Travis couldn’t decline. Most of the men looked like farmers, and no one, as far as he could see, carried a gun handy. The new settlers had no idea how treacherous Texas could be. They thought their eight wagons would protect them.

  “I’ll go as far as the next trading post,” he said to William Ackland. “From there maybe you can find a supply wagon heading for the fort. You all will be far safer traveling with men who know this part of the country.”

  As Travis swung back into the saddle, he decided heading north to find the redhead was as good a direction as any. If he didn’t find her, he’d need the ride home to think of a reason he’d lost the bay.

  CHAPTER 5

  RAINEY ADAMS CRAWLED OUT FROM UNDER THE SAGE-BRUSH where she’d curled up to sleep and stared at the trading post a quarter mile away. Even the late sleepers from the night before had long ago left the area around the barn where the dance had been held. But to her surprise horses were gathered at the entrance to the mercantile. Too many, she thought. Something, besides everyday trade, must be going on.

  Rainey pushed back through the brush and into the shadows of live oaks growing near the creek. This had been her refuge since she arrived almost a week ago, and the clearing was starting to feel like home. The branches, newly green, formed a roof and the rocks were her furniture. The few belongings she had were safely hidden away in her traveling bag behind a fallen log.

  She’d paid for passage on a freight wagon, but asked to be let off before they reached the trading post. She wanted time to study the place before going into the little settlement. A woman alone needed to be careful. She’d watched those coming and going, waiting for the right people to travel on with before announcing herself. She had one more leg to her journey, or at least she hoped there would be only one more stop. When she’d reached Galveston, she’d thought to settle there, but the town was wild, and the only boardinghouse for women that she’d found had been loud and dirty. Though her money was getting dangerously low, she didn’t bother to look for work in Galveston.

  Rainey also knew that if her father followed her, the coastal town would be his first stop. She would be safer to journey inland. She’d met several families on the ship from New Orleans, and most of them were moving north, traveling with the freighters or spacing their wagons between them for safety.

  One older driver, with hands crippled up from years of holding the reins on a mule team, offered her a ride as far as the Anderson Trading Post if she’d do all the cooking when they camped and pay for half of the food. She kept her bargain. He ate most of the food as they traveled north dropping off families at farms and settlements along the way. By the time they reached the Anderson Trading Post, she’d been his last company to leave.

  The old freighter insisted she take a blanket and half the remaining food. He also offered her a pistol, but Rainey refused.

  She’d waved goodbye to him, then disappeared into the trees at the last bend in the road before the trading post. By the time she’d worked her way through the brush to where she could see the post clearly, the freighter had unloaded and was heading back south. She’d almost waved him down and asked for a ride back to the nearest town, but he’d told her the fort lay three or four days further and he’d heard one of the officer’s wives was sickly and had been asking for a nurse. He’d made her promise to wait until a group of wagons was heading that direction because he claimed one wagon alone wouldn’t be safe from this point on.

  Rainey agreed. And thanked him for the help. She knew nothing of nursing, but she had taught school since she was thirteen and figured it was time to give nursing a try. That is, if she could get to the fort and if the poor woman were still alive and in need of a nurse.

  Frowning, Rainey sat on a rock a few feet from the stream. The ifs in her life were starting to outnumber the maybes, and that was never good news.

  Last night, at the dance, she’d had a clear plan. She picked out a good horse, borrowed it without anyone seeing, and hid it near the stream. After dawn, she hoped to blend in with the eight wagons heading north. The German farmers would be miles away before they noticed they had a stranger among them. If she was lucky, they might even think someone in their party had invited her. She’d played that game to get on the boat from New Orleans and had been surprised at how well it worked.

  But this morning nothing worked as she planned. She’d overslept. The horse wandered off and was nowhere in sight. The Germans must have left before dawn. Bad luck followed her like a hungry mouse running toward the smell of ripe cheese. Maybe she should develop a new strategy and plan to fail; surely then she’d succeed at something besides making a mess of her life.

  She’d waited days for the German wagons. Who knew how long it would be before more settlers passed the post heading north. She couldn’t live out here in the woods forever without someone in the small settlement noticing. She’d been lucky to find this small bend, but several times she’d heard folks watering their horses less than thirty feet away.

  Six months ago, when she’d decided to run away from her father’s matchmaking scheme, she thought marrying some nitwit fish merchant twice her age whom she didn’t love would be a fate worse than death. Since she arrived in Texas, she’d reconsidered.

  Rainey pulled off the red wig she’d slept in and scratched her head. The hairpiece she’d borrowed from an aging actress on the boat from New Orleans not only hurt her head, she was
sure it had fleas. Hurrying to the edge of the stream, she tried her best not to swear at the latest turn of events. As if oversleeping and losing the horse wasn’t enough, now she sensed trouble at the trading post. This was not turning out to be a good day. Not that she would recognize one if it came along.

  She might be an “old maid,” as her father called her constantly, but she was not without resources. From the time her parents started running an exclusive girls’ school near Washington, D.C., she’d read. Surely she’d learned something in all those years of books that would help her now.

  At thirteen Rainey had taken a teaching position at her father’s school, not because of any great love of teaching, but so she could stay at school and practically live, as she always had, in the library. She’d seen enough of the way her father treated her mother to know she never wanted marriage. She thought he would pay her a rightful wage when she reached sixteen, the legal age to teach. She would save her money before heading out on her own. After all, her aunt May had left home and made it in New Orleans alone. Her letters to Rainey’s mother told of grand adventures and fascinating people. Rainey planned to do the same.

  Her father, however, made other plans. On her sixteenth birthday he said she’d have to wait another year to draw a wage, but he did increase her responsibilities. At seventeen he made her head of one of the dorms but again refused her a salary, claiming that she was still a minor and therefore everything she made legally belonged to him. At eighteen her mother died and her father refused to talk to her for months. She allowed him his time. At nineteen the school made enough money for her father to build a grand house for his second wife, but he said she must stay in the dorm because it wouldn’t be proper for her to live with him and his new wife. When she turned twenty, he said she was ungrateful for all he’d done for her.

  At twenty-one, when she threatened to quit if he didn’t pay her, he called her a worthless old maid. A week later he handed his plain little bookworm of a daughter over to the middle-aged widower with six children who owned the fish market. The widower didn’t seem to mind, her father had said, that she was worthless and money hungry. They’d both agreed that with a stern hand she would make a passable wife.

  Rainey refused to marry and her father refused to listen. He simply said she had no other choice.

  Two days before the wedding Rainey took wages for a year of work from her father’s safe and boarded a train to New Orleans.

  She fought back tears as memories came back raw as ever. Her father had said she’d never had the spine to disobey him and if she ever tried he’d crush her like a bug. She felt like she’d been waiting for the blow to come since she boarded the train almost two months ago.

  Moving along the edge of the water, she tested its depth with a stick as she forced her thoughts back to today’s crisis. Somewhere in her reading she’d learned that the best way to get from one place to another without leaving a trail was to wade along a stream. Problem was, without the horse, no one would bother to look for her, and even a stream in this wild country might be over her head. No one would care, or probably even notice, if she and the fleas drowned.

  Except for that tall man she’d kissed last night. He might spend a minute wondering what happened to her.

  She’d been hiding in the brush last night when Travis McMurray looked for his horse. It had been so dark she could only make out his shadow, but she knew who he was with one glance. The look of his outline against the night sky seemed familiar, as if it had always been in her mind. Her own private ideal formed from a hundred heroes inside a hundred stories.

  He might be a hero, but Rainey knew she’d never be his lady.

  Of all the horses tied up around the dance, why’d she have to take the bay that belonged to him? His eyes had been so cold when he’d stared at her that first glance. She had no doubt that he’d snap her in two if he knew she took his property.

  Not that he had any proof. She frowned at the rope lying on the ground a few feet away. Tying knots had never been her talent. There was no telling where the bay had wandered. Still, should that tall, dark Texan suspect her, she’d be double dead if he caught her. He’d probably shoot her on sight and then dance with her just to torture her dead body.

  She’d almost be willing to risk it to be near him again. Never in all her life had she touched a man the way she’d touched Travis McMurray.

  Rainey pulled off the clothes she’d slept in and slipped into the cool water wearing nothing but skin and the tiny rope necklace that held her only treasure. She washed her hair with the last bit of soap she’d bought in Galveston. It was poorly made and smelled too strongly of lye, but at least she’d die clean.

  Frowning, Rainey thought of her mother. The doctor had said she died of a fever, but Rainey always thought it had been more from unhappiness. For as long as she could remember, her mother had looked sad, the kind of bone-deep sadness that made her age twice as fast as most folks.

  Rainey closed her eyes and remembered the last time she’d seen her mother. Her father had made Rainey pack her things and leave home to live in the dorm that housed the youngest girls. He told her he was giving her extra responsibility, but she knew it was just extra work.

  Her mother had cried when she’d seen her only child leaving, but as always she hadn’t dared question her husband. But, as Rainey slipped through the door, her mother had grabbed her hand and shoved a ring into her palm. “It was my mother’s. Your father doesn’t know I kept it. I want you to have it now.”

  For the first time in Rainey’s life it seemed her mother had stepped from behind her father and shown her love. The action hadn’t been to hold Rainey, but to say goodbye.

  She touched the tiny bag that held the ring. As long as she had it, there was still a chance, a possibility that she’d find what her mother, who married at fourteen, must have never known. Freedom.

  As Rainey dried, her hair haloed around her head in blond curls. She stretched in the slender beam of sun slicing through the trees and felt more like a wild animal running free in nature than a proper schoolteacher escaping a horrible fate.

  She was changing day by day, molding into someone her parents would no longer recognize. Rainey smiled. Elisabeth Rainey Adams was coming into her own. She was no longer a product of her parents, but a woman making it alone. She’d taken her middle name—her mother’s maiden name—as her own, and now she would build a life to fit the new name. She would make her way and answer to no man. Smiling, she daydreamed of sleeping in a huge bedroom with a fireplace warming the room and a featherbed beside a light left burning all night.

  She would have it all . . . if she could come up with a new plan. So far she felt like a frog who kept jumping into muddier water. The bedroom with the fire and light looked farther away every day.

  Now she had no choice but to wait for the next wagons going north, and she had no idea how long that would be.

  She combed through her short curls. Cutting her hair had been a brilliant idea, along with getting away as fast as possible once she built up enough courage to run. She’d thought she could dress as a boy and slip onto a train just like heroines do in novels. After all, at her height, people often thought her years younger than she was, and her slim body looked more like a boy than a girl anyway. She’d read the schedules carefully every time she took students back and forth to the station and knew them by heart. Finally, just before her wedding, the dorm was clear for the break, her father was busy planning a party he’d forgotten to invite her to, and the safe had been left open for a few minutes while he checked the mail. She recognized her chance.

  She took the money, praying he would leave early to prepare for the party. The moment he did, she packed one bag, cut her hair, dressed as a boy, and ran to the train station in time to catch the last train. With luck he wouldn’t notice she was gone for a day, maybe two, and she’d be halfway to New Orleans by then.

  The disguise worked, too. No one noticed she was a woman. Once she got on the trai
n, she wrapped her cape around her like a blanket and pretended to be asleep. In the days that followed, she traveled south, and then west to New Orleans, living on apples and a box of sweets one of her students had given her for Christmas.

  Once in New Orleans, she changed into her only dress and searched for her aunt’s house. There had been no letters from Aunt May since a year before her mother died, and when Rainey reached her aunt’s last address, she found out why. Her aunt had died six months before her mother. Mrs. Haller, who ran the boardinghouse where her aunt had lived, felt sorry for Rainey and insisted on taking her in for the night. When she learned why Rainey had left home, she helped Rainey book passage from New Orleans to Texas.

  “I’ve known girls like you before,” Mrs. Haller admitted, “on the run from bad marriages or bad home life. If you think there’s a chance your pa will come after you, change your name, your look, even the color of your hair. Then he can ask all he wants, and no one will remember you passing this way.”

  “I think he’ll come,” Rainey admitted. “Not because of me, but because of the money.”

  Mrs. Haller nodded. “Some folks are like that, I guess. If he finds you, will he hurt you?”

  Rainey remembered the bruises on her mother’s cheeks. She nodded. This was the first time she’d ever dared cross him because a piece of her had always known that if she did he’d be angry enough to kill her. She’d not only stolen from him, she’d disgraced him, and her father would never forgive that. “He’ll kill me,” Rainey whispered.

  “Then you got to go all the way to the end of the earth, child. Go where he’ll never find you, and when you get there don’t have nothing to do with the law. He’s probably already filed charges on you for taking that money that was rightfully yours.”