The Passionate and the Proud (7 page)

To a girl of sixteen, two years seemed an awfully long time. Emmalee thought it over. If she was fortunate enough to claim land, this commitment might prevent her from working her own farm. Torquist might demand most—if not all—of her time. On the other hand, the land would grow in value, and she might be able to borrow money using it as security.

“If I’m able to…to get some money together, couldn’t we agree?”

“That you could buy your way out of the two-year commitment? Yes, I’m amenable to that. Let’s say two hundred and fifty dollars a year?”

Emmalee’s spirits sank. All that money seemed more formidable than two years. Nevertheless, Emmalee reasoned, this deal with Mr. Torquist was probably the only way to get where she wanted to go. If she stayed in St. Joe, it would take her months to earn the fare, and then, by the time she reached Olympia with another wagon train, all the land would be long since snatched up. The important thing was to reach Olympia. I’ll get by somehow, she vowed.

While Torquist took from his desk an inkwell, an old-fashioned quill pen, and a piece of thick, yellow paper on which to inscribe the terms of his contract with Emmalee, she could not help but think of all the money Garn Landar had squandered while gambling and of the silver pieces he’d so cavalierly thrown away. At Torquist’s rates, two hundred fifty dollars a year, he’d blown a whole lifetime in the space of an hour.

“I assure you that agreements such as ours are as old as America, Emmalee,” Torquist told her, proffering the contract for her signature. “Even in colonial times, indenture was a respectable way for poor, unpropertied youths to make their start in the world.”

Reluctantly, thinking of time and bondage, Emmalee signed her name.

“Good, good.” Torquist studied her signature, then put inkwell, pen, and contract back into his desk, locking the drawer with a small key. “Now, what skills have you that may be of use as we traverse the Great Plains? Ever drive a team of oxen?”

“No, sir. I’ve handled teams of horses though.”

“Might come in handy. What else?”

“I sew. I’ve taken care of sick people.”

“Oh, where was that?”

“In…different places.” She didn’t want to breathe a word about smallpox.

“That might prove very useful, Emmalee. Now, you must go and find a woman named Myrtle Higgins. She’s in charge of assigning people to wagons, as well as over-seeing the daily tasks of women and children on the train. She’s out in the camp somewhere. Can’t miss her, either. She’ll be riding a mule or yelling at someone, probably both. And a word of advice. Don’t get on her bad side, or you’ll have a very unpleasant trip.”

Emmalee felt the troubled, unsettling eyes of the wildmaned wagonmaster on her as she walked away from his tent in search of Myrtle Higgins. The nature of his gaze was penetrating but difficult to interpret. It was obvious that he saw her as a woman, and that fact seemed to threaten him. True, if people did not behave themselves on an enterprise as dangerous as a wagon train traversing a thousand miles of raw land, the consequences could be devastating. Self-discipline was required of everyone. Yet Torquist had made it sound as if she might, with her mere presence, cause troubles within the party. That assumption was completely unfair. Yet he
had
accepted her as a passenger, so she had reason to be glad.

I guess Randy Clay was right, she thought. Horace Torquist is a very hard man to get a handle on.

The farther from his tent she walked, the better she felt. Then, scanning the bustling encampment, she spied her portmanteau aboard a sleek black horse. It was tied to the saddlehorn, bouncing rhythmically as the glossy beast cantered gracefully alongside a column of Conestoga wagons. She also spied her other gear in a bundle stowed behind the saddle.

“Hey!” she shrieked. “Stop!”

Randy had told her that no one would touch her things, and here somebody had gone and stolen…

She began to run after the horse, yelling again: “Wait! Stop!”

The rider reined his horse to a halt and turned to see who was shouting.

And Emmalee saw Garn Landar grinning down at her from beneath the broad brim of his hat. Around the hat was the band of hammered silver pieces, with one piece missing.

She ran up to him and stopped, breathless and bewildered. The horse was a magnificent animal, the finest Emmalee had ever seen. Its rider, however, looked slightly the worse for wear in the rough, rawhide jacket of a plainsman. A large, irregular bruise discolored his left cheekbone, and there was a touch of blood on his lip, the result of a cut broken open when he’d flashed Emmalee that grin. He looked happy to see her, but surprised as well.

“You made it here!” he said, jumping down from the horse and walking toward her.

“Of course I did. You had doubts?”

Actually, Garn had entertained some misgivings, and even after diving from the
Queen of Natchez
he’d worried that Emmalee, an unpaid passenger, might have gotten into trouble on the boat. Now he realized that she was fully as ambitious as she seemed and a lot more capable than he’d believed.

“Didn’t doubt it for a second,” he told her, smiling widely, unfazed by his battered appearance. “First time I laid eyes on you I knew you were my kind of—”

Abruptly, yet not ungently, he took her by the shoulders, swung her into the shadow behind a nearby Conestoga, pulled her to him, and kissed her. Emmalee was too startled to know what was happening until she felt his mouth on hers. He held her very close to him and a delicious quiver ran all through her body. Emmalee found herself kissing him back.

It required as much effort of will as it did physical strength to tear herself away from him.

“I’m glad that you’re happy to see me.” He grinned as she smoothed her dress and collected her wits.

Emmalee was irritated by his presumption, but secretly even more appalled at her reaction to the kiss. Her breath was coming fast. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“Sure I figured you’d get here,” he was saying, looking into her eyes, standing so close that she could feel the heat of his body. “From the time we started talking on the
Queen,
I had a feeling you’d be able to do whatever you set your heart on. I like that in a woman. I really do.”

“What on earth
are
you doing here?” she demanded, stepping a little away from him and putting her hands on her hips, so that anyone watching might get the impression that this conversation was entirely proper and detached. “And would you be so good as
not
to kiss me again?”

He put on a wounded look. “But that’s why I came here. To kiss you. I never got a chance when we were on the
Queen
.”

“Would you be
serious
for once?”

“I
am
being serious.” His voice, which had been light and teasing in a way Emmalee found both amusing and infuriating, suddenly changed. The words came out like beats on a subtle drum.

“I wandered into camp,” he went on, “saw your bag, and knew you’d be around somewhere.”

“You just ‘wandered in’?” Emmalee responded. She’d noticed his horse, clothes, and battered face. Now she took a complete look. Bulging saddlebags hung from both sides of the black horse, along with two leather scabbards, from which the polished wooden stocks of high-powered rifles protruded. And from a thick leather cartridge-laden belt partially concealed beneath the drooping rawhide jacket hung an unholstered revolver with a barrel the size of a club. Yes, this was indeed a man who might have crossed the Rocky Mountains eight times.

Knowing that Garn must by now have been fired from his job as a scout for Burt Pennington, Emmalee decided to give him a little rope and see if he’d hang himself with it.

“So you just happened to be passing through St. Joe?”

“That’s right.”

“And it occurred to you to look around for me?”

“No other reason, angel.”

“Don’t call me ‘angel.’”

“All right. What shall I call you?”

“Miss Alden will do.”

“Fine with me, Miss Alden will do.”

“Ride along now,” she said. “Give me my things and go.”

“Why? I just got here.”

“I’m very busy now. I’ve just bought a berth on this train.”

Garn laughed. “What’d you buy it with?” he asked sharply. “Was that ungainly old joker chasing you down the Cairo docks because you absconded with orphanage funds? Or were you lying to me about that whole orphanage business in the first place?”

“I wouldn’t talk about lying if I were you,” Emmalee responded. “I know you were supposed to work for Burt Pennington. I know you arrived here in St. Joe late…”

“That would never have happened if I hadn’t tried to impress you at the roulette table.”

“…and I also know that Pennington
fired
you, so there!”

Garn’s black eyes widened. “You know all that? Miss Alden, you continue to surprise me. I figured that, with luck, you might get as far as St. Joe. But if you plan on traveling across the Great Plains, you’re going to need my help. So since I’m here I’ll just sign on as a scout for Horace Torquist.”

Emmalee laughed, trying to sound brave and nonchalant. But she was beginning to understand, from the things she’d heard, that passage overland might prove more difficult than she’d anticipated.

“You don’t think you need my help?” He grinned.

“Thank you, no. But that’s not what made me laugh. You see, I’ve just come from a meeting with Mr. Torquist, and I don’t think you’ll quite fit into his plans. You’re not the kind of man he’s looking for.”

“He may not know it yet, but I’m exactly the kind of man he desperately needs.”

“It seems that you figure
everybody
needs you, don’t you?”

“Well now, since you seem to know so much about it, what kind of man
is
he looking for?”

“Mr. Torquist wants men
and
women who are
responsible
and
respectful
and of
high moral character
.”

“I couldn’t be described more succinctly. Torquist took you on just because you happen to have the same virtues?”

“Well…no.” Emmalee faltered. “That is, not exactly. I made an agreement with him…”

“You don’t seem too happy about it. What were the terms of agreement?”

“Actually, it’s a fairly standard thing. In return for passage, I agreed to work for him. For two years.”

“What?” cried Garn, astounded. “You signed away two years of your life?”

“It’s not that bad,” she told Garn. “I can buy myself out of the agreement for five hundred dollars.”

He seemed relieved. “Look,” he said readily, reaching into his pocket, “let me give you the money. You got yourself into a no-good deal.”

He pulled out a thick wad of greenbacks, wet his thumb, and started to peel off twenty-dollar bills, one by one. Emmalee was, once again, astounded by all the cash, and as Garn bent over his counting, she noticed again the band of silver discs around his hat.

“How did you get your hatband back?” Emmalee asked him suspiciously. “When you jumped from the deck of the
Queen,
you were broke, weren’t you?”

Garn stopped counting and looked at her. The cut on his lip reopened when he smiled. “A resourceful man—or woman, possibly—is always rich. The morning after that incident in the
Queen’s
casino, I managed to win a few games of poker in a Cairo saloon. Then I bought passage on the next steamer for Hannibal, where I boarded the
Queen
and politely requested a return of my money and silver.”

“So that’s where you got beaten up?”

“To some extent, angel…forgive me, Miss Alden will do. But I sure won’t be having any more altercations with Brutus, and I have my hatband back…minus a piece of silver, of course.”

Emmalee looked at the one vacant section on that strikingly extravagant hatband and felt guilty, both for having accepted the silver from him and for having exchanged it for money. Now he was offering her a handful of bills.

“Take the money,” he said. “Buy your way out of the contract now. Pay me back whenever you can, or don’t pay me back at all.”

“And what would you expect me to do in return for this ‘gift’ of yours?” Emmalee asked.

“What would I
expect
of you? Why, nothing that you aren’t already prepared to give me.”

“You misjudge me greatly, sir.”

“Sir?
Sir?
I thought we were friends.”

“Keep your money,” Emmalee pronounced, drawing herself up to her full five feet seven inches and assuming as dignified a stance as she could manage. “I have been prepared from the start to make my own way, and that is what I shall do.”

Garn looked genuinely startled for a moment, an expression quickly replaced by an intelligent assessment of the young woman who stood, shoulders back, chin up, and lovely chest out before him.

“So you weren’t kidding after all,” he said. “I didn’t think so, but you can see that I wanted to be sure.”

“All you wanted,” Emmalee said to Garn, uneasily conscious of the appraising way his eyes were moving from her breasts to her mouth to her eyes and back to her breasts again in a way that raised heat in her body, “all you wanted was a feather to stick in that empty place in your hatband!”

Garn put the bills back into his pocket and smiled broadly, leaving a scarlet touch of blood on an incisor. “No, Miss Alden,” he said, his magnificient voice turned too tender now to be believed, “no, that may have been what I thought I wanted at first, but now I
must
have you.”

“Lord, spare me!” Emmalee said. Thank God Horace Torquist was the manner of man he was; he would never accept onto his train a cavalier desperado like Garn.

“Just remember. Miss Alden,” Garn was saying as he took her gear from the back of his black horse, “it’s the prerogative of each of us to decide what we want.”

“That is
very
true,” Emmalee agreed.

“And when I decide what that is, I go after it. If somebody takes it away from me”—he touched his silver hatband—“well, I make it a point to get it back.”

“I’m so glad,” said Emmalee.

Garn handed Emmalee her portmanteau. “You’re different, Emmalee,” he told her. “Really different. That’s why I’m going to protect you on the trail from Indians and bandits and your own stubbornness.”