The Barefoot Bride (17 page)

Seth was more moved than he could say. Molly's belief in him was a balm for his battered soul. He wanted to reward her confidence in him by telling her everything. The first words were on his lips when he bit them back. He couldn't tell her the truth. Not without taking the chance that she would despise him for it.

And now that he'd had a taste of it, he wanted, craved his wife's admiration. So he sat still and stolid and saw her expression
cool when he didn't respond to what she had said.

“Do you still want to go to town today?” he asked.

“Why, yes, if we have the time before dark.”

“You aren't too tired?”

Discouraged, yes. Tired, no. “I'll be fine. Besides, I'd like to get a present for the baby.”

“All right. We'll drop by the house and exchange the buggy for the buckboard and then go on.”

Molly removed her hand from Seth's sleeve and folded it together with the other one in her lap. She looked at Seth from under her lashes, trying to decipher the expression on his face. But his features were stony. There was nothing to see.

Only now, Molly was more curious than ever about the man she had married. She had a thousand things she wanted to ask Seth but couldn't think how to begin the conversation. At long last she simply said, “Tell me about Patch's mother.”

At first she thought he wasn't going to answer. Then he took a deep breath and said, “What do you want to know?”

“What was her name?”

“Annarose.”

“What was she like?”

“She was blond and blue-eyed. Tall. And her left cheek dimpled when she smiled.” Which had been often.

Molly tucked a strand of hair behind her ear that had blown loose in the wind. She pulled her straw bonnet down and retied the bow a little tighter under her chin. “That's what she looked like. Tell me something else about her.”

For a long time he just stared off over the grassy plains. At last he said, “She was terrified when she found out she was going to have a child. Her mother had told her that birthing a baby was a painful ordeal. But as the baby grew inside her and started to move, she became fascinated and excited by the whole idea.

“As she grew more confident, I became more terrified. I didn't want to lose her. Annarose had become the light of my world, my happiness, my heart. It turned out that I was right to be afraid. It was a hard birth.”

Seth cleared his throat and continued. “After Patch was born, Annarose's skin was white as chalk, she had lost so much blood.”

“Is that how she died? In childbirth?”

He shook his head. “Annarose cheated the
Devil. Two days later, she was on her feet. She took to mothering like a kid to hard candy and nursed Patch for almost a year. I never got tired of watching. I learned what it meant to be father and husband. I was their protector; it was up to me to keep them safe from harm.”

“It must have been a comfort to have all that knowledge of medicine.”

“I wasn't a doctor then,” he said flatly.

That surprised Molly. “What did you do?”

He hesitated, then said, “It doesn't matter. That's all in the past.”

Molly had opened her mouth to ask just how and when Annarose
had
died, when Seth cut her off.

“Anyway, it's my turn to ask some questions.” He looked her straight in the eye and said, “Tell me about James—-and I don't mean what he looked like.”

The first words out of Molly's mouth surprised her. “He was hardly ever home.” They sounded resentful, even to her ears. She hadn't felt that way at the time—or had she? She tried to explain away the condemning inflection in her voice. “He was the captain of a whaling vessel, you see, and had to be gone for years at a time.”

Seth cocked his head to look at her. “You say that as though he had no choice.”

“He didn't, really. The men in his family had been whalers for a hundred years. He was born and bred to it. And he loved it.”

“More than he loved you?”

Molly drew in a hissing breath. “I don't think that's a fair question. He loved me, and he loved whaling.”

“So he had both a wife and a mistress.”

Molly frowned. “I don't understand.”

“You and the sea,” Seth said.

“He loved me more,” Molly insisted.

“But he always chose the sea.”

Molly was silent for the rest of the trip home. In the eleven years she had been married, it had never occurred to her to question the fact that James had spent seven of those years at sea. Gallaghers were whaling men. They came home to unload the whale oil in their holds, to impregnate their wives, and to spend what they'd earned. Then they repaired their ships, restocked them with provisions, and set sail again. It had never occurred to her to be jealous of the sea. Until now. When it was much too late.

Maybe with Seth she ought not to take things so much for granted. Maybe this time around, she should not be so indulgent of her
husband. Maybe on the trip to Fort Benton, she would just have to ask Seth where he had gone last night, and demand an honest answer.

“That damned Masked Marauder has been at it again!”

Drake Bassett kicked at one of several broken whiskey kegs that littered the ground. Pike Hardesty had brought him up to the butte overlooking town to see for himself the damage that had been done. Drake was used to opposition; he had learned how to crush it. But this Masked Marauder was turning out to be as hard to pin down as campfire smoke.

The man Bassett had hired to sell whiskey to the Blackf eet lay on the grass groaning. He hadn't been shot—just forced to drink a great deal of the alcohol-turpentine-tar mixture he'd been selling. The poor sot might have been better off dead, Bassett thought. The whiskey concoction had blinded him.

“Get him into town and see if Doc Ken-drick can do anything for him,” Bassett told his henchman.

Pike leaned against a scrub juniper, cleaning
his teeth with a broken twig. “Sure, boss. Whatever you say.”

“I want you to find a way to stop this Marauder,” Bassett said. “He's costing me a fortune, dumping whiskey faster than I can make it. I'm paying you for protection, Pike. If you can't do the job, I'll get someone who can.”

Pike scratched the stubble under his chin with the twig he'd been using on his teeth. “Just can't figure out who this Marauder fella could be,” he said. “Isn't a man in town I can name with the balls to do a thing like this.”

“It's damned certain somebody was here. I want him caught.”

“That Masked Marauder don't hang around long enough to get caught,” Pike protested.

“That's your problem,” Bassett said. “Clean up this mess. And I don't want to see that ugly face of yours again until you've come up with a way to get rid of that damned Masked Marauder!”

The instant Patch saw her father drive up in the buggy, she sought out Whit. He was just pulling his suspenders up over his shoulders after leaving the outhouse when Patch intercepted him. “Come on. It's time.”

In the bright light of day, Whit had begun having doubts. He dragged his feet as she hauled him toward the buckboard. “I'm not so sure—”

“Look, when I talked to you last night, you said you wanted to run away. Now do you, or don't you?”

Whit's brow furrowed. “I do. But I've been thinking. Maybe I need to plan some more. What if I get hungry on the trip?”

“I'll pack you a tin full of sandwiches and some dried apples. That ought to hold you till the steamboat's a fair distance from Fort Benton. Then you can let the captain know you're on board and work your way to St. Louis.”

Whit thought of the severe punishment for a stowaway on board a sailing ship and wondered if the same treatment applied on the river.

“Do you want to stay here in Montana for the rest of your life?” Patch asked.

“No.”

“Then what are we waiting for? I thought you wanted to be a sailor—and get back to the sea,” she taunted.

“All right,” Whit said, his jaw firming as she whipped at his pride. “Let's go.”

Patch hid Whit under the canvas tarp that
covered the bed of the buckboard, then went to the kitchen to pack a lunch for him. She thought the game was up when Ethan caught her wrapping sandwiches in brown paper.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm—uh … packing some food for me and Whit. We're going fishing. Is that all right with you?” she asked with just enough belligerence to back him off.

Ethan stuck his thumbs in the front of his jeans. “I think it's nice of you to take Whit under your wing like this.”

“Who said I—” Patch cut herself off. Let Ethan think what he wanted. The truth would be out soon enough. “I gotta go. Tell Pa where we are, will you?”

“Sure, be glad to.” He grinned and added, “By the way, you might see if you can hook your shoes while you're at it.”

Patch grimaced and looked down at her bare feet. After Ethan had retrieved his black leather boots that morning, he had retaliated for the trick she'd played on him. Her oldest, most worn-out—most comfortably worn-in— pair of shoes had been pitched into the pond. She had newer shoes, but on general principle she chose not to wear them. It wasn't the first time, and wouldn't be the last, that she had gone barefoot.

Patch wasn't even out the door when she saw Ethan pick up Nessie and rub noses with her. That baby definitely had to go! She hurried to the wagon, looked around to make sure she wasn't observed, then slipped underneath the canvas to join Whit. A second later the dog-wolf, Maverick, jumped under the tarp to join her. Standing up as he was, the dog's figure was clearly outlined under the canvas.

“Hey! What's he doing here?” Whit demanded. “He's going to ruin everything.”

“Go away, Maverick,” Patch said, shoving at the dog's haunches. He didn't budge.

“Come here and help,” she ordered Whit.

“He'll bite me.”

“No, he won't. Come on, hurry. Before they come.”

The two of them shoved with all their might, but the most they accomplished was to get Maverick to lie down.

“This is just great,” Whit said in a voice that made it clear that he thought it was anything but. “What do we do now?”

“This isn't really such a bad thing,” Patch said. “Nobody's gonna come around asking us any questions in town with Maverick along.”

Whit pursed his lips. “Yeah, maybe you're
right. Just make sure you keep him quiet till we get there.”

Patch lay down with her head on Maverick's fur. She settled herself none too soon. A moment later, she heard her father helping Molly up onto the buckboard.

“What an awful message to find waiting for you,” Molly said. “Do you think you'll be able to help that poor man who was blinded?”

“Won't know till I see him. You sure you still want to go along? We're liable to end up spending the night.”

“Yes. I just wish I'd had a chance to talk to Whit,” Molly said. “I wanted to ask him to help Ethan with Nessie.”

“Don't worry. Ethan'll take care of everything. Look at the bright side. Patch and Whit are doing something together for a change.”

//
only he knew,
Patch thought, eyeing Whit in the shadows across from her. //
only he knew.

Indeed, if Seth and Molly had realized their children were hidden in the back of the buckboard, they might have guarded their conversation more carefully. As it was, Patch's ears burned, and Whit's face turned scarlet as their parents exchanged humorous yet personally revealing stories about their children.

“I'll bet you'd never guess how Patch got her nickname,” Seth said.

“I thought it was a shortened name for Patricia.”

Seth grinned. “It could be, but it isn't. Ethan gave her the nickname when she was just three.”

“Uh-oh,” Molly said with a smile. “I think I know where this story is heading.”

“Patch had this habit of crawling up on Ethan's chest when he was sleeping. Every time he woke up, there was this patch on his long Johns where Patch's wet bottom had been. He took to calling her Patch, and the name stuck.”

“That's almost as bad as how Whit got his name,” Molly said.

“What's Whit short for?” Seth asked. “Whitley? Whittaker, Whitcomb?”

“Whittling.”

“You're kidding.”

Molly grinned and shook her head. “When we were first married, James spent time every evening after dinner sitting on the back stoop whittling. He was gone to sea when I found out I was expecting a child, and I had no idea what I should name the baby. The one thing I knew James loved was—”

“Whittling,” Seth said with a laugh.

Whit rolled his eyes, and Patch grimaced back at him. They didn't think their parents were the least bit funny. To make matters worse, the heat was stifling under the canvas. Ticklish rivulets of sweat inched their way down into embarrassing places that couldn't be scratched with someone else watching. When Maverick started to stand up halfway through the trip, it took their combined weights, and overlapping body parts, to hold him down. By the time they reached the town limits of Fort Benton, neither Patch nor Whit could look the other in the eye.

Meanwhile, several times during the conversation, Molly had been on the verge of confronting Seth about where he'd spent the previous night. But the mood between them had been so pleasant that she couldn't bear to spoil it. Maybe he had been telling the truth. The least she could do was give him the benefit of the doubt.