Carla Kelly (29 page)

Julia put her hand over his. “What do you want me to do?” she asked, her voice soft.

“My first thought is to send you back to Salt Lake City,” he said quickly, looking into her eyes.

“You know my answer,” Julia said. “This is my home. I belong here with you.”

He nodded, his eyes never leaving her face. “Well, sport, it looks like I'll have to teach you how to shoot.” He touched her face. “I know you shot my gun last year, but can you aim at a target and hit it?”

Doc cleared his throat. “Boss, uh, I've only used a rifle to scare off varmints. Shooting's not a pastime much in Indianapolis.”

“Aye to that in Cork,” Matt said.

Kringle held up his arthritic hands. “I'm doubtful.”

Paul threw up his hands. “Wagner, please tell me that your checkered career with the Clyde brothers included some shooting.”

“It did. I can help you teach them,” the cowboy said, amused.

Julia watched her husband's face, searching for something beside concern. “We'll learn, Paul,” she assured him. The others nodded.

“You'll have to,” he replied simply.

The lesson began the next morning, after breakfast and chores. Julia hadn't expected to sleep at all that night, but Paul held her close and sang “Dear Evalina,” until she drifted off. When she woke, he was in his usual place, reading from the Book of Mormon, with his feet propped on the bed. She tickled his bare foot, and he looked up.

He smiled at her, and she felt relief cover her. “Nothing's too bad in my world, if you smile,” she told him.

“Julia, you're about as easy a mark as I am,” he said. “Hopeless. I'll have to tell your father that the more I read the Book of Mormon, the better I get at remembering where things are.”

“Me too. What'd you find?” She sat up cross-legged on the bed.

“Oh, there's a real scoundrel, Amalickiah, up to serious no good. He gets on Moroni's very last nerve, going around and destroying the church. This verse, Julia: ‘And we also see the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause…’ There's more, but that's McAtee.” He put his finger in the place and closed the book. “So Moroni has to drum up help from his neighbors.” He sighed. “I can't invite my neighbors into this mess, especially since no one knows much about James except us here and some folks in Cheyenne.” He opened the book again, his expression sour. “And McAtee.”

“You can depend on us.”

“I do.” He set the book aside. “I'll have to tell your father someday that he neglected a major part of your education by not teaching you to point, squeeze, and fire, up there on the Avenues in Salt Lake City.”

“You forget. I was supposed to marry a banker.”

“For someone so bright, you show a remarkable lack of judgment now and then,” he joked. “Feed me, wife, and then we'll see if you're much of a shootist!”

She wasn't. The theory interested her, and heaven knows she wanted to set her husband's mind at ease, but there was another matter that made the whole exercise in gunfire complicated. She didn't notice for a few days, because he and Colby Wagner had lined the bunch of them up, and guns in hand, had them practice pointing, squeezing, and firing without bullets.

Paul was distracting enough when he stood next to her and put his arm around her to demonstrate the proper technique. He even blushed one morning when she suddenly turned and kissed his cheek, then he burst into laughter and grabbed her around the waist while the others watched, not sure what to do.

“Paul, behave yourself,” she said severely.

“You started it.”

Charlotte got the giggles and turned away. Doc just shook his head.

“All right. Line up again, people. If we all behave,” Paul said, giving Julia the patented Mr. Otto look, “we'll try some target shooting with real bullets. I feel confident that there are enough liniment bottles from the bunkhouse—some of them mine—to line on the fencepost. Julia, what about vanilla extract bottles?”

She had been feeling out of sorts for several days, blaming the cow gather, and then the upset caused by McAtee's note. It just seemed worse that morning. The pleasant odor of lilacs had faded now as Matt lined up a row of mismatched bottles on the fence. She wrinkled her nose against the pungent aroma of horse and cow, which up to a week ago had troubled her not at all. Well, never mind. She was looking forward to actually firing Paul's pistol and not doing it in the desperation of last summer, when she tried to warn them of the approaching fire.

Paul loaded his weapon and handed it to her, after making sure everyone else was ready. Two of the Colts were his and two belonged to Wagner, so they would take turns.

She, Charlotte, Matt, and Doc stepped to the line Wagner had drawn in the road. “Just remember: squeeze deliberately. Don't rush. Keep your eyes open, Julia,” Paul cautioned. “Fire when you feel ready.”

Matt fired first, and Paul nodded as a liniment bottle shattered. Charlotte was next, with a miss. Doc took his time and broke another liniment bottle.

Julia raised her gun to fire as the smoke from the guns drifted back across her face. The smell made her drop her gun, turn away, and stagger toward the bunkhouse, retching as she went.

“Julia!” Paul called, alarm in his voice.

She waved him away and leaned against the rain barrel, bent double, hoping to ward off the nausea before she really embarrassed herself.

While the others hurried toward her, she felt her face burn with shame. She heard someone rush inside the bunkhouse, and then Doc came out with a tin cup of water. He handed it to her, after Paul wiped her mouth and sat her down on the bench outside the bunkhouse.

“Drink it, Julia,” Doc said.

“That smell!” she exclaimed, when her stomach quit lurching.

Paul looked at the others. “Let's give her some room. Wagner, how about you keep the others practicing. I'll help Julia into the house.”

“I'll invite myself along,” Doc said. “In fact, Boss, how about you get them started again, and I'll give Julia a hand.”

A slight smile on his face, Doc helped her down the road the short distance to the house, as the gunfire continued behind them.

“Want to sit on the front step a moment?” he asked, when they reached the house. “Are we far enough from that smell?”

She nodded. “Oh, Doc. I think…”

His smile grew. “Julia, want to tell me a few more of your symptoms, or may I guess?”

She had been too shy to say anything to Paul, which had surprised her, considering that there wasn't anything she thought she could keep from him. And here she was, telling Doc—a man she knew well, but who wasn't her husband—about the calendar that she had forgotten to mark and the dizziness and the nausea.

She finished and was too shy to look at anything except Paul, who was coming toward them now. “I think what I have isn't contagious,” she said cautiously.

“It's not. You'll feel better in a few months.”

“Months!”

“Well, let's call it eight weeks, maybe twelve, if that helps,” Doc said, eyeing Paul as he approached. “Any idea when this big event took place, so Dr. McKeel can make a long range forecast?”

She put her hands to her red face. “We had a real dry spell during the cow gather. Had to have been before that.”

Doc turned away, his shoulders shaking. “In other words, you haven't a clue,” he said when he could speak, his eyes merry.

“Clue about what?” Paul said, concern on his face. He sat down beside Julia.

Doc stood up. “I think I'll go shoot a few more liniment bottles. Julia, talk to the boss. He's generally reasonable and a whole lot sweeter since you married him.”

“All right, sport. What have you done?” Paul asked, when Doc was out of hearing.

“What have
we
done, you mean,” she said, speaking softly, as though the whole crew sat on the porch. “Paul, I'm anticipating.”

Poor man
, she thought.
Here he is, anxious about McAtee, and protecting me—all of us—and now I tell him this
. “At least, I think I am,” she said, when his silence continued. “Pretty sure, in fact.” She finally worked up her courage to look at him. “Nearly positive.”

His eyes were closed. As she watched, a tear rolled down his cheek.

“Please don't cry,” she whispered, dabbing at his eyes with her apron, her nausea forgotten. “I know the timing is awful, but…”

He opened his eyes and put his arms around her, still silent, but breathing deep of her hair until he seemed to collect himself.

He still hadn't said anything, but maybe he didn't have to. “I guess you're okay with this,” she ventured.

He shuddered, and she hoped he was laughing. “‘Dear Evalina, sweet Evalina, my love for thee will never never die,’ ” she sang softly. “Maybe you'll want to expand your repertory and learn a lullaby.”

“Count on it,” he said finally, his voice not quite his own. “I never thought I would ever be a father.”

“Silly cowboy,” she whispered. “You're the man who bought the negligee in Chicago.”

“Julia, I will prize your logic until I am bald and toothless,” he told her, more himself. “That's
not
what causes babies.”

“Yes, it is.” She kissed him. “Of course, I only wore it once, so maybe it was that hickey in the Plainsman Hotel.”

“I'll explain it to you someday, sport.”

The shooting lessons had continued for everyone else as well as new rules on the Double Tipi. “No one rides alone, and no one leaves Julia alone here,” Paul had said a few nights later over dinner. “Julia and I are going to church in Cheyenne, so be watchful.”

It had taken only a small argument to allow Paul to let her take the usual ride on Suzie Q down to Gun Barrel to catch the train, and Doc had swayed the matter.

“She's not fragile, Boss,” he had assured her husband. “Another month or two in the saddle won't hurt. Still, this might be a good time to order that buckboard you've been thinking about.”

The horseback ride down to Gun Barrel was a test of her insides. Julia had stopped once to liberally douse some sagebrush, and Paul kindly handed her his canteen when she finished.

“Sport, I love you, even when you redecorate Wyoming,” he assured her, helping her back into the saddle.

For the most part, they rode silently. Julia glanced at Paul now and then, noting the furrow between his brows.
I wish you didn't have to worry about me
, she thought, determined to give him no cause for more alarm. She enjoyed the silence—the peaceful quiet between two people who know each other well.

Gun Barrel toasted in the June sun. The train was going to be an hour late, according to a salesman in the livery stable, so there wasn't the need for a mad dash to the depot. Their first stop was the post office, where Paul handed her a thick letter from her parents. He glanced at the statement from his cattle buyer in Chicago but held a telegram in his hand for a long moment, just looking at it.

Julia looked around his arm. “It's addressed to both of us. Grover, Colorado?”

“Here goes.” He opened the telegram. “Huh.” He handed it to her. “I'm surprised.”

She read out loud. “‘Sorry. JK.’ Mr. Kaiser?”

“Yeah.” He nudged her shoulder. “He's a man of even fewer words than I am.”

“I wonder what prompted that?”

“It's not impossible to imagine he has a conscience, Paul.”

“No, it isn't.” He put his arm around her shoulder. “Care to chance a bowl of clear soup and soda crackers? I've noticed that's your current diet. I'm hoping that will change. You're still a bit slim.”

“I'll chance it,” she told him. “Usually by noon I feel a bit more like Julia Otto.”

“Music to my ears.”

“What? So I won't give you cause to blush in the restaurant?” she teased.

“No. You can puke where you want. I like to hear Julia Otto.”

According to Paul, she fell asleep first on the train, which didn't surprise her. That was another symptom she had forgotten to mention to Doc: she was tired all the time. When she woke up, Paul was reading the Doctrine and Covenants. The frown was gone between his eyes, which relieved her.

“Find something to cheer you up?” she asked, leaning against his arm.

“Nothing in particular. I just like it where Jesus Christ tells the early church, ‘Doubt not, fear not, little flock.’ Sounds like good advice.” He put his arm around her. “If he helped those Saints, he'll help us.”

Paul had sent a telegram in Gun Barrel, advising the Gillespies that they would be staying at the Plainsman Hotel, but Heber was there at the depot anyway, with his boys and a dinner invitation.

At the house, it was an easy matter to coo over the newest Gillespie son, who regarded Julia as solemnly as Buddha as she held him. “Our house is too crowded for any guest's comfort,” Emma apologized. “I've put Mabel in with Amanda. Besides, you probably enjoy a little privacy with your husband.”

Julia nodded, admiring the baby in her arms. There was so much she wanted to ask Sister Gillespie about little ones, and childbirth, but it could wait. She thought of Mama and her matter-of-fact remark that Relief Society was the best place for “all knowledge,” as she put it.

“Maybe you'd share that little guy,” Paul said suddenly.