Chapter 5 #2
He tossed her the cleanest rag he had, even more eager to get this woman off his hands, though not quite sure what to do with her.
She climbed back up rather unsteadily but he wasn’t keen on offering assistance.
Not just to get it thrown back in his face.
He knew the suffragists’ mantras—Independence is happiness.
Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.
There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.
No, if this woman wanted to be treated equally, he’d oblige her. At least as much as his upbringing and common sense would allow. He offered her the canteen and, to her credit, she drank in small sips. Eager to get home, he urged the mules on.
Not a mile down the road, the light sprinkle stepped up its game. Dodge shrugged off the oiled rain cape and held it out to her. She managed a quiet, “No, thank you.” But a minute later when the sky unleashed its storehouses, he offered again and she accepted, pulling the tarp up over her head.
Jessie whined and looked up at him longingly.
“Mrs. Dunham, would you mind letting Jessie get under there with you? She’s a mite skittish of the rain.”
Looking none too sure, she held open the cape and Jessie nudged close to her, looking equally uncertain. Quite the pair.
“How much longer?” Mrs. Dunham asked after a while.
“Another hour or two, depending on the roads.”
Disbelief shone in her features, as did dread.
But she kept any complaint to herself. He honestly didn’t know how she still remained upright after what she’d been through.
The wounds on her face were fresh. His guess?
After the beating, she’d just up and left, blind with fear and fed up with it all.
Again, give him a whip and five minutes with the man who’d done this to her.
Nearly two hours later with the rain ceased and the hills draped in darkness, they pulled into Lynchburg.
Despite having been raised here, having buried his parents and then younger sister Kathleen in the cemetery a hefty stone’s throw beyond the church, despite knowing every nook and cranny of this town and the lives of most everyone in it, Lynchburg didn’t feel like home.
Not anymore. Not since that trip last spring.
He still appreciated this place and these people, but nothing here matched the soul-deep pull he’d felt riding the vast stretches of wide-open plains out west last year.
Rich grasslands dotted with sagebrush and wildflowers.
Rolling plains jutting into mountains so steep he wondered if their heights had ever been trod by anything but angels, then those soaring peaks falling away into breathtaking plunges, giving way to valleys so deep and wide only the hand of God himself could have carved them.
All that beauty, so wild and untamed, had reached deep inside him, grabbed hold of a long-held dream, and refused to let go. Then Kathleen had taken ill, and everything changed. His promise to her on her deathbed came first, and he would guard the treasure she’d entrusted to him. Or die trying.
Just seven months since his sister’s passing, yet the pain still felt brutally fresh at times.
For both him and her daughter, Bethie. The reality that he was solely responsible for Bethie now still put the fear of God in him.
Being an uncle? He wasn’t too terrible bad at that.
But being the only parent to a nine-year-old girl?
Especially one so feisty and stubborn, and the spitting image of her mom—so much so it was like looking back through time at his sister? That was something else.
Yet that wild, open Wyoming land with its fertile fields and crystal rivers rushing with winter melt still had a hook in him, stuck hard and fast. And the purchase of ranch land he’d made before Kathleen took ill was his life’s savings. Almost everything he’d had.
He knew he needed to let it go, return the documents to the broker in Cheyenne, and get the land up for sale. But how did a man let go of what he knew he’d been born to do? What he’d spent his life preparing and saving for . . .
But that’s what had to happen. No way could he take Bethie out there.
It was no place for a young girl. Then again, raising her around a distillery wasn’t the best answer either.
But in a town of scarcely four hundred people, options were few, and none paid as well as Jack Daniel.
He valued his position as foreman of the cattle farm and was good at it.
But when he’d started working at the distillery at age twelve, doing odd jobs, whatever needed to be done, there hadn’t been any cattle.
He’d stumbled across that idea later, and had spent the bulk of his adult life raising someone else’s cattle and pigs, growing their farm, making them richer—and that’s what he would have to keep on doing.
Not that Uncle Jack wasn’t generous with his employees. He was. Generous was the man’s middle name.
Dodge held back a sigh as he guided the wagon down the shadowed street, working to shake off the melancholy while determining, yet again, to reframe his situation in a better light.
Most men would kill for his position with Jack Daniel Distillery, for his pay, his life.
So he just needed to let go of that Wyoming dream—and whatever money he would lose in the sale of it—and just accept it.
But as happened every time he told himself that, the hook inside him just sank deeper.
But one thing he had figured out—where he was taking the woman beside him. Just thinking about it brought a slice of pleasure. Because Mrs. Josephine Dunham was about to meet her match.