Chapter Four
The man behind the rifle had the look of someone who’d pulled that trigger before and wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep pulling it again.
He filled the doorway.
Even stooped with age, he had the shoulders of a man who’d spent his whole life hauling and hammering, and a gray mustache so thick it hid most of his mouth.
And the eyes on him. Lord. They bore into her from beneath a brow that jutted like a shelf of rock.
He wore a flannel shirt with a yellowish stain down the front that could’ve been an egg.
“State your business, missy.” He jerked the barrel toward her. “I ain’t gon’ ask twice.”
“My name is Grace Linton and I—”
“Is that the mother?!”
A voice came from inside the house, younger, pitched high with the tone of a man who’d just connected two dots that didn’t actually belong together. A figure pushed past the old man’s shoulder into the doorway, and Grace got her first look at Logan Foster.
Had to be Logan. Nobody else could’ve matched that advertisement’s energy of dependable, steady, and seeking a woman of good character like the man in front of her.
Sure, Mason had written the ad, but he must’ve done so on Logan’s instruction.
He had chestnut hair that looked like he’d combed it three times that morning, cheeks that lacked even the hint of a beard, and eyes the color of a pale winter sky. He was young, too—younger than she’d expected—though he held himself like a man with twice the years’ experience on him.
Would’ve cut a respectable figure, in fact, if not for the mashed… something smeared across the front of that crisp shirt, and the crease lines still visible beneath the mess.
And in his arms, red-faced and howling fit to wake the dead, squirmed a baby.
“You’re the one that left this young’un on our fence, ain’t you?”
“I—”
“Oh, you are, I’d wager my best saddle on it. Left it and come back when you started feelin’—”
“I didn’t leave no baby nowhere!” Grace’s voice cranked up an octave.
The rifle barrel pointed straight at a spot about three feet from her nose, and every inch of her screamed to step backward, to get off this porch and back down the road and onto any train headed in any direction at all.
But she dug her boots into those solid porch boards because underneath the screaming ran something hotter. Something that locked her knees and squared her shoulders and nailed her right where she stood.
“I just got off a train from New York, not three hours ago! I don’t have a child, I’ve never had a child, and I’d appreciate it mightily if you’d stop pointin’ that gun at my face!”
“New York.” The old man squinted harder. “You came all the way from New York?”
“On a train. Four days of it. Because somebody,” she jabbed a finger past the rifle toward the younger man, “put an advertisement in the paper for a mail-order bride and I answered it.”
Logan blinked. “A mail-order what?”
“Bride. A bride. As in a wife. As in the thing you advertised for in the newspaper, Mr. Foster, or did you forget you did that?”
“I sure as Sunday didn’t advertise for no—” He stopped. His mouth tightened, and then he turned on the old man. “Pa. You know anything about this?”
The old man lowered the rifle a few inches, which put the barrel at Grace’s collarbone instead of her cheekbone. Progress, she supposed, if she could call that progress.
“Don’t look at me, boy. First I’m hearin’ of it.”
“Then who in the Sam Hill—”
And then the baby screamed. Screamed. The sound tore through the doorway, bounced off the porch roof, and rattled something deep in Grace’s chest, some instinct that had nothing to do with rifles or advertisements or the fact that she’d just walked three miles on a blister the size of a silver dollar.
She frowned. “That child needs tendin’ to.”
“The child is fine.”
Logan hitched the baby higher against his shoulder, which only made it arch its back and wail harder. And of course, on top of everything, a glob of something that could’ve been milk dribbled from the corner of its mouth onto his collar.
“The child is just fussy on account of it bein’ dropped on my property this mornin’ by Lord knows who, and now you show up on my doorstep spinnin’ some yarn about—”
“I ain’t spinnin’ nothin’! I’ve got the letter right here in my pocket, and I’ve got the train ticket your brother bought me… and if you’d stop hollerin’ for half a second and let me show you—”
“My brother? Which brother?”
“Mason.”
“Mason?” Every syllable came out of Logan like he’d chipped it off a block of ice with a pick. “Mason bought you a ticket.”
“He did. Sent it right to my address in New York along with two pages of very nice penmanship explainin’ how y’all can’t cook worth a lick and your kitchen needs a woman’s touch. His words, not mine.”
At that, the old man made a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh and covered it by stroking his mustache. Next to him, Logan ground his teeth so hard the muscle jumped beneath his skin.
From behind Grace, boots pounded up the porch steps.
“Hold on, hold on, hold on now, everybody just hold on!”
Two men scrambled into view, both of them gulping air and dripping sweat as they crowded onto the porch on either side of Grace in a tangle of hats and spurs.
The stocky one with the round face planted himself between Grace and the rifle with both palms raised, while the taller one, all jaw and dark hair and looking like he’d rather be anywhere else on God’s green earth, stepped up behind the old man and put a hand on his arm, guiding the gun barrel toward the floor.
“Pa, for the love of—she ain’t a trespasser. Logan, stop growlin’. Everybody just simmer down a minute.”
“Mason,” Logan said the name the way a preacher says sin. “You got about ten seconds to explain to me why this woman is standin’ on our porch claimin’ I sent for a bride.”
The stocky one, Mason, pulled off his hat and wrung the brim between both hands. Up close, he looked even younger than his years.
“Well, now, see, here’s the thing.” He shot a look at the taller brother, who responded by examining the porch railing as if he’d just discovered it for the first time. “Thomas and I, we might’ve... taken some initiative.”
“Initiative.”
“We placed the ad, Logan.” The taller one, Thomas, delivered it flat, like ripping a bandage. “A couple months back. In the New York papers. For a mail-order bride.”
“Why—”
“For you.”
For about two heartbeats, nobody on that porch so much as breathed. And then Logan took a step forward, and the baby between them let out a shriek that could’ve curdled fresh milk.
“You did what?”
Mason coughed into his fist. “Now, before you go gettin’ yourself all riled up—”
“I am so far past riled, Mason. I have blown clean through riled and come out the other side into territory that don’t even have a name yet!”
Thomas sighed. “I know, but—”
“And why New York?”
Mason groaned. “Because this. We knew you’d react like—”
“Mason.” The old man set the rifle against the doorframe and crossed his arms over the stained flannel. “Enough.”
“But, Pa—”
“Logan.” The old man looked at Grace, then at the wailing baby, then at Logan. “Maybe we oughta talk about this inside like civilized folk ‘stead of puttin’ on a show for the whole county.”
Logan exhaled slowly. “Ain’t nobody around for miles, Pa.”
“That’s beside the point, and you know it.” The old man stepped back from the doorway and swept one arm toward the interior. “Miss Linton, is it? Come on in outta the sun. You look about ready to fall over.”
Grace stepped through the doorway because, at this point, the alternatives included walking three miles back to an empty train platform or pitching over sideways from legs that had quit taking suggestions about an hour ago, and neither one appealed much.
The house opened up around her.
A front room flowed straight into a kitchen at the back, with a staircase running up along the right wall and a stone fireplace anchoring the left.
The furniture looked like it could survive a stampede.
There was a long kitchen table scarred with use, ladder-back chairs, and a hutch displaying mismatched crockery.
And every last piece of it had a designated spot.
It all showed the kind of obsessive precision that bordered on military. Pots lined up above the stove in descending order of size. Even the firewood filled the box beside the hearth, with each log cut to an identical length.
But for all that careful order, the details told on them.
A film of greasy dust clung to the hutch shelves, the kind that built up slowly over months of cooking smoke when nobody thought to wipe things down.
And the floor, though swept, grabbed at her boot soles near the stove with a sticky residue that pulled at the leather with every step.
Water stains ringed the table where cups had sat too long.
On top of all that, there came the smell of it—sour milk layered over something scorched, drifting through the kitchen the way pipe smoke drifted through a saloon.
These men had tried. They’d clearly tried. But trying and managing amounted to two quite different animals.
Thomas and Mason had followed her in. Now, all five of them—plus one screaming baby—crowded the kitchen in what amounted to a standoff.
Logan stood at one end of the table, bouncing the baby.
Over by the hutch, the old man leaned back and crossed his arms. Near the door, Mason and Thomas hovered like a pair of horses eyeing a gate.
As for Grace, well, she dropped her bags by the wall and planted herself in the middle of all of it with her boots throbbing and her temples pounding.
“So, let me make sure I’m trackin’ this right.
” Logan’s voice had gone quiet now, which somehow landed worse than the yelling.
“You two went behind my back. Placed an ad in a New York City newspaper. For a wife. For me. And you didn’t see fit to mention any of this at any point in the last two months? ”
Mason just opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“We knew you’d say no.”
“You’re darn right I’d say no!”
“And that, right there, is exactly why we didn’t ask!” Thomas pushed off the wall. “Look around, Logan. Look at this place.”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong—”
“Look at us.”
“What do you mean?”
“We got a baby we can’t feed, a ranch we can barely run, and Pa ain’t gettin’ any younger. Ma’s been gone two years, and this house ain’t had a woman’s hand in it since, and you’re too mule-headed stubborn to admit we need the help!”
“You—”
“The boy ain’t wrong, Logan.” The old man shook his head. “I didn’t know about this ad business, and I ain’t pleased about the sneakin’. But I got eyes, son. And now we got a baby to think about on top of everything else.”
Logan clenched his fists.
The old man nodded at Grace. “The Lord works in peculiar ways, and sometimes them ways show up dusty and put out on your front porch.”
Now, Grace would’ve had something to say about being called dusty and put out, except, just then, the baby coughed, hitched, and deposited a generous mouthful of half-digested milk down the front of Logan’s shirt.
The curdled stuff spread in a lumpy streak from his collar to the second button, and she could pinpoint the exact moment it soaked through to his skin because he stiffened from his boots to his hairline, and sucked a breath through his nose like a man counting to ten.
“Confound it—every single time—that is the fourth shirt today—”
Grace held out both arms. “Give me the baby.”
“You ain’t touchin’ this child. I don’t know you from Adam.”
“And that child don’t know you from Adam, neither, but somebody’s gotta hold it right, and it sure ain’t gonna be a man who’s bouncin’ it around like a sack of feed corn.”
She closed the distance between them in two strides and planted herself within arm’s reach.
“I’ve been mindin’ babies since I could walk.
Tenement livin’ back east, every woman on the floor takes her turn with every child in the building.
I’ve burped, fed, changed, and rocked more infants than you’ve branded cattle, I promise you that.
Now hand that baby over before you shake the poor thing to pieces. ”
“I ain’t shakin’ it, I’m—”
“You are most certainly shakin’ it.”
“I am bouncin’ it. There is a difference!”
“Not from where I’m standin’ there ain’t.”
And, right on cue, as if casting a vote, the baby let out a wail so piercing that Mason winced and Thomas covered one ear. Even the old man’s mustache twitched. After that, Logan glanced at the child, then at Grace, then down at the stain on his shirt.
He thrust the baby to her.
Grace scooped the child up and tucked it against her chest, cradling its head in the hollow of her neck and pressing one palm flat against its back.
At first, the baby squirmed, stiffened, opened its mouth for another scream, and then.
.. stopped. Just like that, the little thing melted into her, turning its blotchy face against her collar with a hiccup and then nothing but breathing.
All four men gaped at her as if she’d just pulled a rabbit out of a flour sack.
“All of you.” Grace rocked on her heels the way she’d rocked a hundred colicky babies in the tenements, keeping her voice pitched just above a whisper. “Out. Every last one.”
Mason blinked. “Where—”
“Go sit on the porch, go tend your horses, I don’t care where you go, but this baby needs quiet and it ain’t gonna get any with four grown men stompin’ around arguin’ like a pack of barn cats fightin’ over a fish head.”
Nobody moved.
“I said git.”
Mason went first, grabbing Thomas by the sleeve and hauling him toward the door. The old man followed at his own pace, pausing to retrieve his rifle. On his way out, he gave Grace a look she couldn’t quite read, and then the door frame swallowed him up.
Logan, of course, stood last. “This ain’t settled.”
“I expect not.”
With that, he turned and walked out. The door clicked shut behind him.
Grace stood alone in a stranger’s kitchen, swaying on sore feet, with a stranger’s baby breathing softly against her neck and four days of grime itching along her collar.
“Well,” she murmured into the downy hair at the top of the baby’s head. “Ain’t this somethin’?”