5 
5 JESSICA WAS UP even before the twins the following morning, and after feeding and dressing the pair, she wrapped each one in a wooly blanket and then carried them downstairs, one and then the other, to the newspaper office. They rested comfortably in their separate and well-padded apple crates, which Jessica had scrounged from the shed out back specifically for that purpose. It wouldn’t be easy, raising two babies and running the Gazette at the same time, but then, she’d never expected anything to be easy. Nor had she been disappointed, at least in that respect.
The office was so cold that a layer of hoary frost covered the floor, and the woodstove was stubborn that morning, filling the whole lower floor with smoke and setting the twins to coughing and wheezing. Half panicked, Jessica threw open the door to the street and tried to shoo the smoke outside by flapping her printer’s apron.
Gage Calloway burst in, followed immediately by a woman Jessica had met briefly at the skating party the night before. Her name was Cornucopia, and it suited her well, for she was lushly made, with her shapely figure and dark red hair, the sort men generally took to right away. She ran the general store and, despite Alma’s low opinion, seemed to Jessica to be a nice person.
“Good Lord,” Gage demanded, “is the place on fire?”
The babies started to wail, and Cornucopia crooned to them, making her way past Gage and Jessica. “I’ll take the little darlings over to the store,” she said. “They’ll be perfectly safe there.”
Jessica was grateful for Cornucopia’s offer, but she had her hands on her hips as she looked up into Gage’s face. It shamed her now, to remember that she’d let him kiss her the night before. Conversely, she wished he’d kissed her again, which only went to show that he was a bad moral influence.
“I do not need your help, Mr. Calloway,” she said, suppressing a violent spasm of coughing. Cornucopia went by with one of the babies wailing in its crate, with a murmured promise to return for the other twin in a minute. “Something is wrong with the damper, that’s all.”
Despite her subtle effort to block his way, he went around her and bent to pick up the other apple crate and, thus, the baby inside. The little traitor immediately stopped crying.
“There, now,” he said.
“Put that baby down,” Jessica commanded.
Fortunately, Cornucopia returned just then and claimed little Eleanor. “I’ll bring them back soon as you’ve got the place aired out a little,” she said, and made a hasty retreat.
Gage looked at Jessica squarely. The air was clearing a little, but it still stung her nose and eyeballs. “I’m not your enemy,” he said. “I wasn’t your brother’s enemy, either. Michael’s mind took a strange turn when Victoria died—he thought everyone was against him.”
Jessica was mobilized by the mention of Michael. She marched over to the worktable and grasped the page of newsprint her brother had set before his death. She stabbed at the headline with one finger, the one warning that Gage Calloway was out to buy his way straight into the territorial governor’s office. “How, then, do you explain this?”
“Ah,” he said. “The gospel according to St. Michael.”
“Don’t you dare impugn my brother’s honesty!”
“Your brother was crazy with grief over his wife when he wrote those words. He was about to lose the newspaper—” His voice broke off, and she saw regret in his face.
“Because of you. Because you made the bank in Choteau call in his loans!” Tears scalded her eyes; she told herself it was because of the smoke, and not because she cared for a man and it was hopeless.
He grasped her shoulders. “Listen to me, Jessie,” he said. “Michael and I had our differences, there’s no denying that. But I sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with the bank calling in his note. The fact is, it’s in my safe right now.”
She felt as though the floor had opened up, as though she were dangling over a dark precipice and would surely fall if Gage merely flexed his fingers. “What?”
He let her go, and she didn’t fall. She just stood there, stricken to the soul. He thrust a hand through his hair and heaved a great sigh, while the cold Montana wind swept in and chilled them both.
“I hold the note on the newspaper, Jessie,” he said at long last. “Legally, it’s mine. Morally—well, that’s another question.”
This time, her knees did give out. She groped for a chair and sank into it, just in time. Gage closed the door and crossed the room to adjust the stove damper.
He owned the Gazette. God in heaven, she had nothing, except for a few hundred dollars tucked away in a St. Louis bank account. Once that small legacy was gone, she and the babies would be destitute.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me think—?”
“You had just lost your brother. You were in no condition to hear news like that.”
“But you were going to buy something that was already yours. Or were you offering me charity, Mr. Calloway?”
He drew up another chair, with a scraping sound, and sat astride of it, facing her, his arms resting on the high back. His eyes, far from pitying, were snapping with annoyance. “You’ve got the same kind of stiff-necked pride your brother had,” he said evenly. “He couldn’t accept help, either. I was his friend, and I believed in him.” He paused, sighed. “Michael wanted to be a part of Springwater, but at the same time he held himself apart, just like you’re trying to do.”
While what he was saying had a certain ring of truth, it was entirely beside the point, as far as Jessica was concerned. “I do not need your charity.”
“Oh, no? Where do you intend to go?”
She was stymied, but only briefly. “I can find work someplace.”
“With two babies tagging along? I doubt it.”
“What do you propose?”
“That you get married.”
“Oh, that’s a wonderful solution,” Jessica raged. “To whom?”
“To me.”
She couldn’t believe it—couldn’t believe, either, the fiery sensation the suggestion sparked in the deepest regions of her femininity. “You . . . are . . . amazing. Stubborn, Insane.” And, for all of it, so damnably appealing.
His face did not soften. She was seeing another side of him now, the ruthless, unbending side that Michael had probably known all too well. “What other choice do you have?”
He’d probably said those same words to her brother. God, what fury he stirred in her—how he intrigued and confused her! And oh how desperately she wished things could be different between them.
“Very well,” she heard herself say, from somewhere in that storm of conflicting emotions. “I’ll marry you—I have no real choice, do I? But I promise you, Mr. Calloway, that I shall make your life utterly miserable!”
He laughed—actually laughed. “Fair enough,” he said. “The nights will compensate more than adequately, I’m sure.”
Her mouth fell open. He reached out and closed it by pressing one finger under her chin.
“You expect me to . . . to share your bed?”
“As my wife? Most certainly.”
“Then I won’t marry you. I’ll—I’ll”
“What?” he taunted, but not unkindly. He sounded genuinely curious, damn his hide. “What will you do?”
She bit her lower lip. As an unmarried woman—and a poor one at that—with no family to turn to, her options were severely limited. Furthermore, she had no other offers in hand, and none on the horizon, either. The men of Springwater, it seemed to her, were all married. Even Mr. Brody was courting a woman in Seattle, by telegram, according to Alma.
“I don’t love you,” she said. Unfortunately, she wasn’t at all sure that was true, but she wasn’t about to leave herself open to still more trouble by saying so.
He arched an eyebrow. “I don’t love you, either.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if we—if I went on living here, while you lived in your house—just until we get to know each other a little better?”
He immediately shook his head. “I’ve sold the house,” he said. “Some woman back East bought it. She’s on her way here right now.” He lifted his gaze briefly to the ceiling. “Looks as though we’ll have to share the upstairs, just till we’ve got a place of our own.”
She was, for a long moment, tongue-tied. He’d made a case, all right, one she was finding it hard to argue with. Aside from throwing herself and the babies on the mercy of the McCaffreys or one of the other families in Springwater—and she was far too proud to do that—she had no respectable alternatives. She’d heard of women in just such a position becoming prostitutes, and it seemed to her that if she was going to sell herself, she might as well confine her favors to one man. He was not entirely unattractive, after all.
“All right,” she said, looking down at her knotted hands. Forgive me, Michael, she whispered in her heart. “When?”
He considered the question for a damnably long time. “No hurry,” he concluded finally, and got up from his chair. “I’ll let you know.”
I’ll let you know. He meant to leave her wondering, the black-hearted rascal! He probably enjoyed seeing her wriggle on the head of a pin.
* * *
“You could do worse,” Cornucopia said, echoing Alma’s sentiments, when Jessica went to collect the babies an hour later. The story of Gage’s “proposal,” which she’d meant to keep to herself, burst out of her the moment she stepped into the general store. Despite what Alma had said about Cornucopia keeping company with other women’s husbands, Jessica liked her. “Heavens to Betsy, if Gage Calloway asked me to marry him, I’d be cooking his breakfast and pressing his shirts before you could say ‘Here comes the bride.’”
Jessica was completely confused. “You knew, I suppose, about the feud between Mr. Calloway and my brother?”
“I wouldn’t call it a feud,” Cornucopia said, smiling fondly as one of the babies—Mary Catherine, as it happened—grasped her finger in a fat little baby hand. “Folks can disagree about most everything, it seems to me, and still treat each other decent.” She met Jessica’s eye across the counter, on which the babies reigned in their apple-crate cradles. “Sit down a spell, there by the stove. It’s a cold day, bound to get colder, and you’re frazzled. What you need is some hot tea and a little woman talk.”
Jessica was too grateful to refuse, even though her pride dictated that she should be able to make her own way without leaning on others for support. She sat down, and enjoyed the delicious warmth emanating from the stove.
“I suppose that old lady told you I’m a man-chaser,” Cornucopia said forthrightly, when she returned from what Jessica presumed were the living quarters behind the store, carrying two cups of steaming tea.
Jessica was startled out of her own self-absorption. “Well—”
Cornucopia gave Jessica one of the cups, sat down in the other chair, and waved a hand as if to fan away a bad smell. “Fact is, there was this rancher, over Choteau way. I went to work cooking for him, and we got friendly over the course of a long winter. Trouble was, he didn’t mention that he had a wife back East until she showed up one day. What a tongue that woman had! Like to strip the hide off both of us. I lit out right away, I can tell you that, but not before I made that old man give me the wherewithal to start up this store.” She sighed and slurped up a mouthful of tea, then swallowed. “Turns out, the missus was a friend of Alma’s. Alma never had no use for me from the first.”
Astounded, Jessica stared at the other woman. “My goodness,” she exclaimed, at long last, as the story unfolded in her mind’s eye. She was a while digesting all the images, but when she had, she steered the conversation back onto its original path: the rift between Michael and Gage Calloway. “Why did you say you wouldn’t call the animosity between my brother and Mr. Calloway a feud?”
Cornucopia shrugged her ample shoulders. She was truly voluptuous, with large breasts, perfect, glowing skin, and bright green eyes. “There toward the end, you couldn’t put a lot of store by the things Michael said. Not that he was lying, mind you. But he was plum beside himself from the time Victoria died.”
“He loved her very much.”
Cornucopia sighed and nodded. “Yes, he did. But they weren’t up to life out here, neither one of them. Some folks just aren’t cut out for pioneering.”
Privately, Jessica agreed, but out of respect for Michael’s memory and all the dreams that had died with him, she didn’t say so out loud. “What about Mr. Calloway? What would bring a man like him to a place like Springwater? He doesn’t seem to be the pioneer sort, either.”
Cornucopia weighed the question for a long time before answering. “From what I gather, he had some family problems back in San Francisco. That’s where he hails from, you know. San Francisco. Anyways, he had some sort of falling out with the home-folks and I guess Springwater must have seemed like the other end of the earth to somebody like him. Far as I can tell, he’s been happy here.” A wistful look came into Cornucopia’s eyes, and she fell silent for a few moments. “Lonely, though. Anybody could see that.”
Jessica wondered if Cornucopia cared for Gage herself, wondered if he’d ever sought solace in the room or rooms behind the store. She discovered that she hoped not—and fervently—though it shouldn’t have mattered.
Cornucopia must have read her mind, for she smiled sadly and said, “Don’t you worry, Miss Barnes. I never managed to turn Gage’s head even one time, though God knows, I tried. Until you came along, he was so full of whoever it was he left behind that he wouldn’t have noticed if I’d stripped off all my clothes and ridden a stagecoach mule down the middle of the street at high noon.”
In spite of everything, Jessica couldn’t help laughing at the picture that came to her mind. At the same time, she wondered—as if she had any reason at all to care—precisely who Gage had left behind in San Francisco. He’d built that grand house across from the Parrishes’ place for her, whoever she was. He probably loved her still.
Jessica put the thought out of her mind, for the moment at least. She had problems enough as it was.
* * *
She was alone in the newspaper office half an hour later, having given in to Cornucopia’s pleas that she leave the babies at the store, where it was warm, when Gage appeared.
She held her breath, half afraid he’d come to drag her before a preacher, and half afraid that he hadn’t. “I brought you some news,” he said. “It came in over the wire just a few minutes ago. There’s a train missing—one that passes within twenty miles of here. It should have come into Missoula yesterday afternoon, but there’s been no sign of it.”
Jessica was horrified. All thought of her own predicaments left her mind. “Have they sent a search party?”
Gage nodded, but his eyes were grim. “No luck. A few of us are going out to ride alongside the track for a ways, just in case.”
Jessica glanced at the gaping door, aware for the first time that she was freezing. Hastily, she crossed the room and pushed it shut. The snow, so pretty before, was now coming down in small, slushy flakes, and she could barely see past the windows. “Isn’t that dangerous? Going out in this weather, I mean? Cornucopia told me there might be a blizzard coming.”
Gage shook his head. “What weather?” he countered good-naturedly. “Miss Barnes, that’s just an ordinary winter day out there. When we get hit by a genuine blizzard, there’ll be no question in anybody’s mind what to call it.”
Michael had described some of those storms in his letters, telling how men and cattle froze to death on the range, how whole families smothered in cabins buried past their chimneys in snow. She moved a little closer to the stove and made a concerted effort not to think about such calamities—which worked about as well as it ever did.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the news, I mean. I’d appreciate any more details you might hear.”
He nodded, already on his way to the door. He stopped, one bare hand on the knob. “Miss Barnes?”
“Yes?”
“Try not to burn down the newspaper office while we’re gone. If one building goes up, we could lose the whole town, and then we’d all be in as much trouble as those poor souls aboard that missing train.” With that, he was gone, giving Jessica no chance to respond. Which, she supposed, was just as well. If it hadn’t been for the danger both to the men in the search party and the travelers on the lost train, she would have been relieved. He’d apparently forgotten, for the time being at least, that they were supposed to be getting married.
It was a mercy, that’s what it was. So why didn’t she feel relieved?
If Mr. Calloway’s visit had served no other purpose, it had at least given her something constructive to do. After washing up, Jessica put on her warm cloak and ventured out into the blustery chill. The air was so dry and cold, so crisp that it stung her face, the insides of her nostrils, and even her lungs, and the snow was starting to come down in angry swirls.
A flock of mounted men were milling about down by the Springwater station, and even though they were all wearing long, heavy coats, hats, and mufflers, Jessica spotted Gage right away. He seemed to stand out from the others, as though he’d taken on some extra dimension.
She bent her head against the bitter wind and pushed on until she reached the telegraph office. She would speak directly with the operator concerning the missing train; perhaps she didn’t have a lot of experience at running a newspaper, but she knew better than to print pure hearsay.
The telegraph man was a pleasant sort, with ears almost as long as his head and spectacles perched on the tip of his narrow nose. His hair, such as it was, stood up in tufts of salt-and-pepper, and he was quick to smile and tug at the brim of his visor when Jessica came in.
“C.W. Brody,” he said by way of introduction. “And you must be Michael’s sister.”
“Miss Jessica Barnes,” she confirmed, politely, but in a businesslike manner. If she was going to be taken seriously as a journalist—however short her career might be—she must behave like a professional. “I’ve come to ask about the train.”
“Oh, we don’t expect to have one runnin’ through here much before the turn of the century,” Mr. Brody said. “Not straight through Springwater, anyways. There’s some that pass by at a distance.” He took in her wind-reddened face. “Come and sit down over here by the stove. You look like one of your arms might fall off and clatter around on the floor.”
Jessica was disconcerted by that remark, but she recovered right away. Little wonder that she looked cold; she was cold. She took a seat within the shimmering haze of heat that surrounded the stove and slipped her cloak back off her shoulders. Then she took a pencil and a pad of paper from her reticule.
“I could brew up some coffee,” Mr. Brody suggested. He really was quite dear, and obviously glad of company. No doubt his job was dull most of the time, and lonely into the bargain.
“You wouldn’t happen to have tea, would you?” Jessica inquired. She knew that Mr. Calloway shared the building; her gaze had already strayed at least once to the frosted glass door with his name penned across it in gold script.
“I could borrow some from Cornucopia, over at the general store.”
She had already imposed on Cornucopia enough as it was, by leaving the babies in her care. “Oh, no,” she said hastily, “please. That would be too much trouble.”
Mr. Brody, it turned out, was in possession of a great deal more information regarding the vanished passenger train than Jessica would have guessed. He spent a full half-hour giving her the details, right down to the names of the travelers thought to be aboard. One of them, a Miss Olivia Wilcott Darling, who had begun her journey in Chicago, was believed to be headed for Springwater. Mr. Brody lowered his voice and inclined his head slightly toward Jessica when he got to that part. “Gage done sold her his house.”
Jessica took thorough notes, but her thoughts were with the men who had ridden out to participate in the search. Or, at least, with one of them.
When her professional interview with Mr. Brody ended, she ventured a private inquiry, having guessed that the harmless little man was something of a gossip. “Do you happen to know the precise amount of my late brother’s debt to Mr. Calloway?”
Mr. Brody looked stunned, then reluctant. “Why do you ask?”
“I have my reasons,” she replied.
He flushed, started to speak, then closed his mouth. Finally he said, “Three hundred and forty-two dollars.”
Three hundred and forty-two dollars. Almost the entire amount of Jessica’s legacy from Mrs. Covington. But if she had that money in hand, she could pay Mr. Calloway back and throw his marriage proposal in his face right along with it. Furthermore, the newspaper would be hers.
“I should like to send a wire,” she said.
* * *
The train was half buried under an avalanche of snow when they found it, and the daylight, such as it was, was nearly gone. The horses were completely spent. While Pres and Trey scrambled into the one visible passenger car, which lay on its side in a drift, all of its windows broken out, Jacob, Gage, and Landry set themselves to gathering wood and getting a fire going. If there was anybody left alive inside, they’d be cold as well as hurt—maybe badly.
Gage and Landry were making a sort of lean-to out of fallen branches when they heard a shout echo from within the train. Both of them dropped what they were doing and hurried toward the overturned car, though it was hard, slow going. The wind was rising, and Gage could feel it biting right through his clothes.
Trey scrambled up out of the car through one of the windows, and crouched beside the opening. Just as Gage and Landry reached the scene, Pres handed up a small, inert body from inside—a little boy, Gage realized, no more than four or five years old. Trey took the child gently and passed him down to Landry, who immediately started back toward the lean-to and the fire.
“Here’s another one,” Trey said, and produced a second boy, this one around seven, and at least half conscious. One of his legs was twisted at an alarming angle, and his short pants and patched jacket were soaked with blood. Soon, Gage too was on his way toward the improvised camp, the lad moaning in his arms.
There was one last passenger—a tall, slender woman of the sort men usually described as handsome. She looked essentially unhurt, though rumpled, shaken up and very, very cold. When Trey lifted her carefully up through the broken train window, she batted at him with her handbag and told him to watch where he put his hands. Five minutes later, the wind was howling like a thousand wolves serenading a full moon, and the bonfire provided scant protection.
“What happened?” Pres asked the woman. He had climbed out of the train and was next to the fire with the rest of them, kneeling beside the boy with the broken leg. He had already set the bone, and now he was applying a splint. The other boy was awake now, but he was pale as death, and his eyes seemed to fill his whole head.
The woman blinked, and Gage realized she was trying to keep from crying. He couldn’t say he’d have blamed her if she had broken down, after an experience like that. “The train was moving very slowly—mounting a grade, I think. Then we heard a dreadful roaring sound, and—and we were all thrown this way and that—” She paused and put both hands over her face.
Without speaking, Landry pulled a pewter flask from inside his coat and held it out to her. She hesitated for a few moments, then accepted the offering, unscrewed the lid, and poured a good guzzle straight down her throat. Her eyes didn’t even water, which was something to behold, because she sure didn’t look like the type who could swallow homemade whiskey without so much as a sputter.
“The engineer and the conductor—?” she began. “Are they—?”
“Dead,” Pres said. Sometimes he was about as tactful as a sledgehammer. “You and these boys are the only survivors, I’m afraid. Did you have family on the train?”
She shook her head distractedly, then put a hand to her mouth, scrambled to her feet, and rounded the tree to retch into the snow.
“Couldn’t you have broken the news over the space of, say, a paragraph?” Trey demanded of Pres in an irritated hiss.
Pres didn’t miss a beat. “What would be the point of that? A fact is a fact. Everybody else on that train was either killed outright or died of exposure.”
The smaller boy began to sob. He had a scrap of paper pinned to his coat with the number 18 scrawled on it, along with a name. Gage squinted. “Here now, Tommy,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”
“Stop that cryin’,” instructed the older boy, through teeth clenched against the pain in his injured leg. “We’re alive, ain’t we? That makes us lucky, the way I figure things.”
Tommy sniffled, making a valiant effort to pull himself together. “But I’m cold, Ben, and I’m hungry, and now we ain’t going to be ’dopted.”
Gage understood then. The boys were probably brothers, though not necessarily, who’d been sent west to find homes for themselves. A fair number of these “orphan train” kids ended up working like mules, but a lot of them were taken in by good people and raised as blood kin, too.
The woman returned, looking as ghastly as she surely felt. “We aren’t going to spend the night out here, are we?” she asked, dabbing at her slender throat with a wadded handkerchief.
Pres gave her a downright unfriendly look, probably worried that she’d raise a fuss and scare those kids even worse. “If we try to go back tonight,” he said, “we’ll freeze to death.”
That was Pres. He knew how to embroider a phrase, all right.
Tommy had moved closer to his brother. “Does that hurt?” he asked, indicating the splint.
Ben took a swat at him but, fortunately, missed. “What do you think?” he snapped.
Gage sighed and leaned back against the trunk of a cottonwood. It was going to be a long night.
“Where did you boys come from?” Pres asked, as he finished up with Ben’s leg and then patted him on the shoulder, his way of telling the child he’d been brave.
“Boston,” Ben answered. “We was supposed to get adopted.” His expression was fierce, even in the firelight. The kid had pride—and plenty of it—though little else, probably. “Tommy’s my brother, and we mean to stay together, no matter what. We got to find somebody who wants both of us.”
Pres seemed to be in a reflective mood, there for a moment, and he even went so far as to look toward Springwater, which was a good fifteen or twenty miles off. “I think I might know somebody who does,” he answered.
Landry elbowed Gage, and out of the corner of his eye, Gage saw that his friend was grinning.