The Christmas Brides Read online

  “Seems to me,” observed the peddler, having recovered a modicum of composure, “that we’d all better sit on the other side of the car.”

  “Good idea,” Lizzie agreed.

  Whitley took a seat very slowly, his face a ghastly white. Lizzie, the peddler, and John Brennan crossed the aisle carefully to settle in. So did the old folks and Woodrow.

  Outside, the wind howled, and Lizzie thought she could feel the heartbeat of the looming mountain itself, ponderous and utterly impersonal.

  Where was Morgan Shane?

  Lost in the impenetrable snow? Buried under it?

  Fallen into one of the treacherous crevasses for which the high country was well known?

  Lizzie wanted to cry, but she knew it was an indulgence she couldn’t afford. So she cleared her throat and began to sing, in a soft, tremulous voice, “‘God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…’”

  Slowly, tentatively, the others joined in.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MORGAN HADN’T INTENDED TO wander far from the train—he’d meant to keep the lantern-light from the windows in view—but the storm was worse than he’d thought. Cursing himself for a fool, his own lantern having guttered and subsequently been tossed aside, he stood with the howling wind stinging his ears, bare hands shoved into the pockets of his inadequate coat. It was as though a veil had descended; he not only couldn’t see the glow of the lamps, he couldn’t see the train. All sense of direction deserted him—he might be a step from toppling over the rim of the cliff.

  Be rational, he told himself. Think.

  For the briefest moment the wind collapsed to a whisper, as though drawing another breath to blow again, and he heard a faint sound, a snatch of singing.

  He pressed toward it, blinded by the pelting snow, blinked to clear his eyes and glimpsed the light shining through the train windows. Seconds later he collided hard against the side of the railroad car. Feeling his way along it, grateful even for the scorching cold of bare metal under his palms, he found the door.

  Stiff-handed, he managed to open it and veritably fall inside. He dropped to his knees, steadied himself by grasping the arm rest of the nearest seat. His lungs burned, and the numbness began to recede from his hands and feet and face, leaving intense pain in its wake.

  Frostbite? Suppose he lost his fingers? What good was a doctor and sometime surgeon without fingers?

  He hauled himself to his feet and found himself face-to-face with a wide-eyed Lizzie McKettrick. He could have tumbled into the blue of those eyes; it seemed fathomless. She draped something around him—a blanket or a quilt or perhaps a cloak—and boldly burrowed into his coat pocket, brought out the pint the peddler had given him earlier.

  Pulling the cork, she raised the bottle to his lips and commanded, “Drink this!”

  He managed a couple of fiery swallows, waved away the bottle. His vision began to clear, and the thrumming in his ears abated a little. With a chuckle he ran a shaky forearm across his mouth. “If you have any kindness in your soul,” he said laboriously, “you will not say ‘I told you so.’”

  “Very well,” Lizzie replied briskly, “but I did tell you so, didn’t I?”

  He laughed. Not that anything was funny. He’d seen little on his foray into the blizzard, but he had confirmed a few of his worst suspicions. The car was off the tracks, and tipping with dangerous delicacy away from the mountainside. And nobody, McKettrick or not, was going to get through that weather.

  If any of them survived, it would be a true miracle.

  ONCE MORGAN STOPPED SHIVERING, Lizzie returned the quilt to Mrs. Halifax and went forward again to sit with him. Whitley glared at her as she passed his seat.

  She’d gotten used to wearing the conductor’s coat by then; even though it smelled of coal smoke and sweat, it was warm. She considered offering it to Morgan, but she knew he would refuse, so she didn’t make the gesture.

  “I heard you singing,” Morgan said, somewhat distractedly, when she sat down beside him. “That’s how I found my way back. I heard you singing.”

  Moved, Lizzie touched his hand tentatively, then covered it with her own. His skin felt like ice, and his clothes were damp. Once he dozed off, not that he was in any condition to stop her even then, she’d make her way back to the baggage car. Raid her trunks and crates, and Whitley’s, too, for dry garments. And the freight car might contain food, matches, even blankets.

  Lizzie’s stomach rumbled. None of them had eaten since their brief stop in Flagstaff, hours before, and she’d picked at her leathery meat loaf and overcooked green beans. Left most of it behind. Now she would have devoured the sorry fare happily and ordered a cup of strong, steaming coffee.

  Coffee.

  Suddenly, she yearned for the stuff, generously laced with cream and sugar—and a good splash of brandy.

  Morgan’s fingers curled around hers, squeezed lightly. “Lizzie?”

  “I was just thinking of hot coffee,” she confessed, keeping her voice down, “and food. Do you suppose there might be food in the freight car?”

  He grinned at her. “I watched you in the restaurant at the depot today,” he said. “You barely touched your meat loaf special.”

  “You were watching me?” She found the idea at once disturbing and titillating.

  “Hard not to,” Morgan said. “You’re a very good-looking woman, Lizzie. I did wonder, I confess, about your taste in traveling companions.”

  Lizzie felt color warm her cheeks, and for once, she welcomed it. Every other part of her was cold. “You seem to have formed a very immediate, and very poor, impression of Mr. Carson.”

  “I’m a good judge of character,” he replied. “Mr. Carson doesn’t seem to have one, as far as I’ve been able to discern.”

  “How could you possibly have reached such a conclusion merely by looking at him in a busy train depot?”

  “He didn’t pull back your chair for you when you sat down,” Morgan went on, his tone just shy of smug. “And you paid the bill. It only took a glance to see those things—I saved the active looking for you.”

  “Mr. Carson,” Lizzie said, mildly mortified, “is making this journey as my guest. That’s why I paid for his meal. He is, I assure you, quite solvent.”

  “Planning to parade him past the McKettricks?” Morgan teased, after a capitulating grin. “I’ve only met one of them—Kade—a few weeks ago, in Tucson. He told me Indian Rock needed a doctor and offered me an office in the Arizona Hotel and plenty of patients if I’d come and set up a practice. Didn’t strike me as the sort to be impressed by the likes of Mr. Carson.”

  All kinds of protests were brewing in Lizzie’s bosom, but the mention of her uncle’s name stopped her as surely as the avalanche had stopped the train. Though she wasn’t about to admit it, Morgan’s guess was probably correct. Kade, like all the other McKettrick men, judged people by their actions rather than their words. Whitley could talk fit to charm a mockingbird out of its tree, but he plainly wasn’t much for pushing up his sleeves and doing something about a situation. There was no denying that.

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Lizzie conceded, bereft.

  Morgan squeezed her hand again.

  The wind lashed at the train from the side that wasn’t snowbound, rocked it ominously back and forth. Lizzie spoke again, needing to fill the silence.

  “Did you practice medicine in Tucson?” she asked.

  Morgan shook his head. “Chicago,” he said, and then went quiet again.

  “Are you going to make me do all the talking?” Lizzie demanded after an interval, feeling fretful.

  That smile tilted the corner of his mouth again. “I’m no orator, Lizzie.”

  “Just tell me something about yourself. Anything. I’m pretty scared right now, and if you don’t hold up your end of the conversation, I’ll probably prattle until your ears fall off.”

  He chuckled. It was a richly masculine sound. “All right,” he said. “My name, as you already know, is Mo
rgan Shane. I’m twenty-eight years old. I was born and raised in Chicago—no brothers or sisters. My father was a doctor, and that’s why I became one. He studied in Berlin after graduating from Harvard, since, in his opinion, American medical schools were deplorable. So I went to Germany, too. I’ve never been married, though I came close once—her name was Rosalee. I practiced with my father until he died—probably would have stayed put, except for a falling-out with my mother. I decided to move west, and wound up in Tucson.”

  It was more information than Lizzie had dared hope for, and she felt her eyes widen. “What happened to Rosalee?” she asked, a little breathless, for she had a weakness for romance. Whenever she got the chance, she read love stories and sighed over the heroes. The woman must have died tragically, thereby breaking Morgan’s heart and turning him into a wanderer, and perhaps the experience explained his terse way of speaking, too.

  “She decided she’d rather be a doctor than a doctor’s wife and went off to Berlin to study for a degree of her own. Or was it Vienna? I forget.”

  Lizzie’s mouth fell open.

  Morgan grinned again. “I’m teasing you, Lizzie. She eloped with a man who worked in the accounts receivable department at Sears and Roebuck.”

  She peered at him, skeptical.

  He laughed. “Your turn,” he said. “What do you plan to do with your life, Lizzie McKettrick?”

  “I mean to teach in Indian Rock,” Lizzie said, suddenly wishing she had a more interesting occupation to describe. A trapeze artist, perhaps, or a painter of stately portraits. A noble nurse, bravely battling all manner of dramatic diseases.

  “Until you marry and start having babies.”

  Lizzie was rattled all over again. What was it about Morgan Shane that both nettled her and piqued her interest? “My uncle Jeb’s wife is a teacher,” she said defensively. “They have four children, and Chloe still holds classes in the country school house he built for her with his own hands.” Jack and Ellen, living on the Triple M, would attend Chloe’s classes, because the distance to town was too great to travel every day.

  Morgan’s eyes darkened a little as he assessed her, or seemed to. Maybe it was just a trick of the light. “How does Mr. Carson fit into all this?”

  Lizzie sighed. Looked back over one shoulder to make sure Whitley wasn’t eavesdropping. Instead he’d gone back to sleep. “I thought I wanted to marry him,” she answered, in a whisper. “Why?”

  “Well, because it seemed like a good idea, I guess. I’m almost twenty. I’d like to start a family of my own.”

  “While continuing to teach?”

  “Of course,” Lizzie said. “I know what you think— that I’ll have to choose one or the other. But I don’t have to choose.”

  “Because you’re a McKettrick?”

  Again, Lizzie’s cheeks warmed. “Yes,” she said, quite tartly. “Because I’m a McKettrick.” She huffed out a frustrated breath. “And because I’m strong and smart and I can do more than one thing well. No one would think of asking you when you’d give up being a doctor and start keeping house and mending stockings, if you decided to get married, would they?”

  “That’s different, Lizzie.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  He settled back against the seat, closed his eyes. “I think I’m going to like Indian Rock,” he said. And then he went to sleep, leaving Lizzie even more confounded than before.

  “I HAVE TO USE THE CHAMBER POT,” a small voice whispered, startling Lizzie out of a restless doze. “And I can’t find one.”

  Opening her eyes, Lizzie turned her head and saw the little Halifax girl standing in the aisle beside her. The last of the lanterns had gone out, and the car was frigid, but the blizzard had stopped, and a strangely beautiful bluish light seemed to rise from the glittering snow. Everyone else seemed to be asleep.

  Recalling the spittoon she’d seen at the back of the car, Lizzie stood and took the child’s chilly hand. “This way,” she whispered.

  The business completed, the little girl righted her calico skirts and said solemnly, “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” Lizzie replied softly. She could have used a chamber pot herself, right about then, but she wasn’t about to use the spittoon. She escorted the child back to her seat, tucked part of Mr. Brennan’s quilt around her.

  “We have to get home,” the little girl said, her eyes big in the gloom. “St. Nicholas won’t be able to find us out here in the wilderness, and Papa promised me I’d get a doll this year because I’ve been so good. When Mama had to tie a string to my tooth to pull it, I didn’t even cry.” She hooked a finger into one corner of her small mouth to show Lizzie the gap. “Schee?” she asked.

  Lizzie’s heart swelled into her throat. She looked with proper awe upon the vacant spot between two other teeth, shook her head. Wanting to gather the child into her arms and hold her tightly, she restrained herself. Children were skittish creatures. “I think I would have cried, if I had one of my teeth pulled,” she said seriously. She’d actually seen that particular extraction process several times, back on the ranch—it was a brutal business but tried and true. And usually quick.

  “My papa works on the Triple M now,” the little girl went on proudly. “He just got hired, and he’s foreman, too. That means we get our own house to live in. It has a fireplace and a real floor, and Mama says we can hang up Papa’s socks, if he has any clean ones, he’s been batching so long, and St. Nicholas will put an orange in the toe. One for me, and one for Jack, and one for Nellie Anne.”

  Lizzie nodded, still choked up, but smiling gamely. “Your brother is Jack,” she said, marking the names in her memory by repeating them aloud, “and the baby is Nellie Anne. What, then, is your name?”

  The small shoulders straightened. “Ellen Margaret Halifax.”

  Lizzie put out a hand in belated introduction. “Since I’ll be your teacher, you should probably call me Miss McKettrick,” she said.

  “Ellen,” Mrs. Halifax called, in a sleepy whisper, “you’ll freeze standing there in the aisle. Come get back under the quilt.”

  Ellen obeyed readily, and soon gave herself up to dreams. From the slight smile resting on her mouth, Lizzie suspected the child’s imagination had carried her home to the foreman’s house on the Triple M, where she was hanging up a much-darned stocking in anticipation of a rare treat—an orange.

  Having once awakened, Lizzie found she could not go back to sleep.

  The baggage and freight cars beckoned.

  Morgan, the one person who might have stopped her from venturing out of the passenger car, slumbered on.

  Resolutely, Lizzie buttoned up the conductor’s coat, extracted a scarf from her hand luggage and tied it tightly under her chin, in order to protect her ears from a cold she knew would be merciless.

  Once ready, she crept to the back of the car, struggled with the door, winced when it made a slight creaking sound. A quick glance back over one shoulder reassured her. None of the other passengers stirred.

  The cold, as she had expected, bit into her flesh like millions of tiny teeth, but the snow had stopped coming down, and she could see clearly in the light of the moon. The car was still linked to the one behind it, and both remained upright.

  Shivering on the tiny metal platform between the two cars, Lizzie risked a glance toward the cliff and was alarmed to see how close the one she’d just left had come to pitching over the edge.

  Her heart pounded; for a moment she considered rushing back to awaken the others, herd them into the baggage car, which was, at least, still sitting on the tracks.

  But would the second car be any safer?

  It was too cold to stand there deliberating. She shoved open the next door. They would all be better able to deal with the crisis if she found food, blankets, anything to keep body and soul together until help arrived. And help would arrive. Her father and uncles were probably on their way even then. The question was, would they get there before there was another snowslide, before eve
ryone perished from the unrelenting cold?

  Lizzie found her own three steamer trunks, each of them nearly large enough for her to stand up inside, stacked one on top of the other. A pang struck her. Papa had teased her mercilessly about traveling with so much luggage. You’d never make it on a cattle drive, he’d said.

  God, how she missed Holt McKettrick in that moment. His strength, his common sense, his innate ability to deal ably with whatever adversity dared present itself.

  Think, Lizzie, she told herself. Fretting is useless.

  Chewing on her lower lip, she pondered. Of course the coat and her other woolen garments were in the red trunk, and it was on the bottom. If she dislodged the other two—which would be a Herculean feat in its own right, involving much climbing and a lot of pushing— would the inevitable jolts send the passenger car, so precariously tilted, plummeting to the bottom of the ravine?

  She decided to proceed to the freight car and think about the trunks on the way back. It was very possible, after all, that orders of blankets and coats and stockings and—please, God, food—might be found there, originally destined for the mercantile in Indian Rock, thus alleviating the need to rummage through her trunks.

  Getting into the freight car proved impossible—the door was frozen shut, and no amount of kicking, pounding and latch wrenching availed. She finally lowered herself to the ground, by means of another small ladder, and the snow came up under her skirts to soak through her woolen bloomers and sting her thighs. She was perilously close to the edge, too—one slip and she would slide helplessly down the steep bank.

  At least the hard work of moving at all warmed her a bit. Clinging to the side of the car with both hands, she made her precarious way along it. Her feet gave way once, and only her numb grip on the iron edging at the base of the car kept her from tumbling to her death.

  After what seemed like hours, she reached the rear of the freight car. Somewhere in the thinning darkness, a wolf howled, the sound echoing inside Lizzie, ancient and forlorn.