Brides of Prairie Gold (26 page)

But it wasn't Cora whom Sarah Jennings examined with a coolly speculative expression. And this was more than Sarah's usual resistance to anything Perrin suggested. Perrin understood that she stood as the obstacle to Sarah's acquiescence.

When Cora's voice ran down, she said quietly to Sarah, "I'll walk behind the wagons when it's your turn to drive the oxen, and you can walk behind when it's my turn to drive. We needn't have more contact than is absolutely necessary."

Sarah had the breeding to blush. She waved a hand, then shrugged. "I miss Lucy, and it's hard on a person to drive all day with no relief." She still looked at Perrin. Then she sighed. "If the others agree to this project, then I'll do my part."

But she didn't appear happy about it. Still, Perrin thought, one of the necessary pieces had fallen into place. Concentrating on the positive, she thanked Sarah profusely, then went in search of Hilda with Cora trotting anxiously behind her.

They found Hilda on the banks of the Platte, scrubbing a stew pot beneath dusky shadows that deepened toward night.

Hilda's broad face widened into a cheerful smile as she listened to Perrin's request. " Ja , education is always good." She inspected Cora as if judging her capacity to learn. "You say you can read and write a bit already. I will teach you to do it well. This, I will enjoy. It will be more interesting than squinting through the dust at the back of another wagon."

Perrin smiled her gratitude. "What's required most urgently is to improve Cora's speech. She needs to sound more educated."

Determination hardened Hilda's brown eyes. She drew to her full height and became the formidable figure who had commanded the classrooms of Chastity, Missouri. "We begin at once."

Cora shrank like a small dark child standing in the shade of a sturdy blond Viking. Awed, and enormously intimidated, she swallowed twice, then nodded. "I'll do my best, Miss Clum."

"Yes, you will." Hilda pointed to a spot near the willows. "Sit. You can scrub the bread pan while we refresh your ABC's."

Perrin smiled, then lifted her skirts and went in search of Thea.

"Why should Thea teach a crude gravedigger's daughter the womanly graces?" Ona Norris demanded. "None of us would nod to Cora Thorp if we passed her in the street! We'd have no contact with such a creature if it weren't for this journey." Her expression added that the same dismissal applied to Perrin.

Perrin glanced at Thea's stricken expression, then returned to Ona. "Is that you speaking, Miss Norris, or is it Miss Boyd?"

The firelight leaping in their cook pit shadowed Ona's face and made her scowl appear deeper. "I shall overlook your rudeness and say only that I am capable of forming my own opinion!"

"And are you?" Perrin asked Thea softly. "Or do you agree with Ona that Cora Thorp is undeserving of our assistance?"

Thea's pretty face pinched into indecision. Ona was her wagon mate; agreeing to Perrin's proposal would create dissension between them.

"What would you have me do?" she inquired uneasily, aware that Ona had stiffened into a frieze of disapproval.

"You have a beautiful singing voice. I'd hoped you might teach Cora to sing. And perhaps to sketch a little. Embroidery is a refined skill she might find useful. Many of us admire your aptitude for the gentle arts."

Thea worried her lower lip between her teeth and considered the buffalo chips burning in the fire pit. The chips burned like peat and didn't smell as unpleasant as dried cow pies. At first everyone had expressed disgust at the necessity of gathering dried dung as they walked behind the wagons. Now they were grateful to find any fuel on this treeless plain.

Finally Thea raised apologetic eyes. "I can't teach anyone to sketch or paint who has no talent, Mrs. Waverly. And singing lessons are useless unless the student has a gift for singing. As for embroidery, well, it's Ona who but she" Thea's voice faded into red-cheeked discomfort.

"I understand," Perrin said quietly. Without another word, she left their fire.

"I couldn't possibly," Bootie protested, her hands fluttering through the deepening shadows.

Mem, who had scarcely spoken a word since Perrin's arrival, looked up sharply from the mending filling her lap. "Oh, for heaven's sake. You're refusing before you even know what the favor might be. Don't you have better manners than that?"

"Well, I swan, Mem Grant. It's so rude to chastise your own sister in front of ah in front of"

Mem stood and moved to lean against the wagon's sideboard. She shoved at a wave of auburn hair falling across her forehead. "Don't pretend you can't guess why Perrin is here. Everyone's talking about what she's trying to do for Cora. Your precious Augusta, of course, is outraged." She returned Bootie's glare, then lifted her chin in Perrin's direction. "If there's anything I can do, you only have to ask."

Perrin glanced at her in surprise. When Mem had spoken of Augusta in previous conversations, she had done so with a tone of good-natured contempt. Tonight, there was something new in her voice, something angry and almost bitter.

"Actually, you both can help." She faced Bootie and arranged a smile on her lips. "If Cora becomes a bride, well, her clothes are wrong, and she doesn't own anything that would serve as a wedding dress. You have such wonderful style, Mrs. Glover, that I thought well, I hoped you would take Cora's wardrobe in hand and see what you could do to make her presentable."

"Me?" Bootie blinked and a little starch came into her spine. She considered for a moment. "Well, I do have style, that's true." Her fingers preened the grimy lace collar at her throat. "I've always designed my own gowns. Mem's too." A look at Mem suggested that her efforts were largely wasted. "Oh, dear. Material! Where will we get the material we'll need?"

Perrin repressed a smile. "Perhaps Mem will accept the task of locating fabric. Surely most of us have a gown we can spare, something that might be refashioned for Cora. Or a length of cloth, some draperies, something that would serve."

Bootie tapped a finger against her chin, thinking, already flattered into compliance. "We'll need a good bonnet. Mr. Kelsey might be persuaded to make a frame, and we'll have to find trimmings. Then there's hair!" She rolled her gray eyes. "I swan, Cora's hair looks like a bird's nested inside. I'll have to do something with her hair. Then we have to think about"

Before Perrin left their fire, she managed a word alone with Mem. Rocking back on her heels, she studied Mem's handsome face and the underlying bone structure. Mem would never be a beauty, but the years would be kind to her. When the beauty of her contemporaries had faded, Mem would still be striking.

"You seem rather listless lately. Are you well? Are the headaches severe?"

"No worse than usual," Mem said uncomfortably. Turning her head, she gazed toward the men gathered around Smokey Joe's cook wagon, then turned back to Perrin. "Do you ever wonder if it's morally right to marry a man whom you don't know and for whom you have no feelings?"

"Isn't it rather late to be asking that kind of question?" Perrin inquired in surprise.

Mem smoothed her hand along the edge of the sideboard. "When I read the advertisement for Oregon brides, all I thought about was the journey and what a wonderful adventure it would be. But lately, I've been thinking about Mr. Sails, my bridegroom. I'm wondering about well, very unladylike things." She glanced up with a short embarrassed laugh. "I'm thinking there must be a large difference between offering oneself to a man one loves or surrendering to the affections of a man toward whom one feels ambivalent." Her cheeks flushed as coppery bright as her hair. "Is there?" she whispered, her eyes large and anguished.

"Oh, Mem," Perrin said softly. "Being Mrs. Sails is going to be the greatest adventure of all. There will be good times, exciting time, bad times, and discouraging times. But Mr. Sails will come to love you, I know he will. How could he not? You're intelligent and handsome, a skilled homemaker, capable, and wonderfully curious. There isn't a nonsense bone in your body. You're practical, and"

"Perrin that isn't what I asked."

"No, it isn't." She gazed into Mem's troubled brown eyes, and her voice sank. "The difference between lying with a man you love and one you don't is the difference between heaven and hell."

Mem trembled in the darkness. "That's what I feared," she whispered.

An hour before dawn the first gunshot exploded through Cody's dream. A fusillade of answering shots rang in his ears as he burst out of his tent and sprinted toward the arms and molasses wagons. Cutting through the middle of the squared wagons, he pushed through panicked animals and shoved bullets into his pistols as he ran.

The animals would have told him something was wrong even if the gunshots had not. Oxen, cattle, Smokey Joe's mules, and the teamsters' horses snorted, pawed, butted one another, then stampeded forward, sweeping Cody along. At once he understood a breech had opened in the square and the animals were flooding out onto the prairie.

Shouting and swearing, he fought through the surging mass and emerged behind the arms wagon. Dropping to the ground, he rolled beneath the wheels, his pistols in his hands.

"What the hell happened?" he shouted at Miles Dawson.

He couldn't see a goddamned thing through the dark and the dust kicked up by the animals spilling onto the plains. The noise of bawling animals, intermittent gunshots, and screams from the tents muffled Dawson's reply and he had to shout again.

Dawson crawled closer. "Bill Macy and Jeb Holden are both dead," he shouted in Cody's ear. Macy and Holden had been posted to the night watch. "One of the molasses wagons is gone. Stolen."

Instantly Cody understood he faced a crucial decision. He could pursue whoever had stolen the wagon, or he could order his men to round up the animals before they scattered to the four winds. He didn't have enough men to do both.

The need to chase the bastards who had invaded his camp and killed Bill Macy and Jeb Holden burned in his gut. But the last thing he needed was a bunch of women stranded out here with no oxen to pull their wagons.

"It was Indians!" Miles Dawson shouted in his ear, choking on the dust billowing beneath the wagon as the animals ran past them. "I saw them."

In this area, that meant Sioux. But Dawson's claim didn't hold water. There was unrest among the Sioux, but so far attacks on the wagon trains had been intermittent and directed at stealing animals, not wagons. And it was a safe bet that had the intruders been Indians bent on stealing something other than horses or cattle, they would have stolen the arms wagon, not a molasses wagon. The Sioux Cody knew would have scouted the train thoroughly before a shot was fired. That was another point. The Sioux had guns, but not enough to equip every warrior. He should have seen a few arrows if he was looking at an Indian raid.

Webb Coate hit the ground behind them and rolled under the wagon beside Cody.

"Six white men," he said between his teeth, squinting into the dust. "Painted and dressed like Dakota Sioux."

Cody's mind raced. With Macy and Holden dead, he had six men left, counting Smokey Joe, who couldn't shoot the side of a barn if he was standing in front of it. If he pursued the killers and thieves, he would be one man short of an even match.

He stared at the hooves thundering past his line of vision, churning up the darkness. "Jake Quinton," he said, spitting the name.

Webb nodded. "That's my guess."