Winter's Torment (3 page)

The mass of light gray clouds from the north now dropped closer to the ground, as if seeking landfall. The landscape around her was flat, offering no indication which direction she traveled. The sun was hidden behind the clouds now, so she couldn’t even use that to estimate her direction. If she urged the horse onward, she could very well find herself traveling in circles, or worse, in a direction opposite of Dodge City or Henry’s ranch.

She tried releasing her grip on the reins, giving the horse her head, but the mare stood stubbornly, as if waiting for direction from Winter. So much for the horse making the decision as to direction.

As the minutes passed, Winter’s anxiety increased. Had she taken a wrong turn somewhere back there along the trail? If she had, she didn’t know where. She looked around in all directions. She didn’t know where she was, and her heart thudded in dread.

There was nothing she could see to serve as a landmark, not even an oddly shaped tree or ridge that she might have noticed the day before. In one direction, the clouds looked increasingly heavy and ominous, promising snowfall. By the looks of it, those clouds would be on top of her in about a half an hour. It was not enough time to get back to the ranch, even if she did know where it was, nor did she feel that she should keep going – in any direction – since she had no idea where Dodge City lay.

She tried to tamp down her rising fear. She was not dressed for a snowstorm, and she rued her impulsive desire to surprise Henry. She wished she had stayed back at the ranch, inside the warm house, not lost out here on the prairie.

She supposed that the best and smartest thing she could do for now would be to find some kind of shelter. She worried about the horse, but she imagined that if she let the mare loose, she would either find her way home or find her way into Dodge City on her own.

Oh Lord.

“Henry!”

Henry Olson noticed movement in the half open doorway of his smithy and halted in between his swings of forming a horseshoe. He watched William Linder hurry inside with his wife Sarah close behind. The grave looks on their faces gave him pause.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“One of your horses just wandered into town,” William said.

Henry frowned. He glanced past their shoulders and looked outside, where heavy snow blew nearly sideways from the north. When he had ridden into town this morning on one of his horses, the sky had been overcast and heavy with humidity, but there had been no indication that they would get such a snowstorm so suddenly. Then again, it was between late fall and early winter, and the weather could change without a moment’s notice.

How could one of his horses have gotten lose? He had left the other mare tethered in the barn. Had she somehow pulled herself loose? Had he forgotten to latch the barn door? He was sure he had. “Are you sure she’s mine?”

William nodded. “She’s got your brand on her.”

Henry shook his head in consternation. “I don’t know how she got loose, but we can put her in the stable out back and I’ll take her back to the ranch with me when I’m finished. I have another hour or two and then I’ll head home.”

Sarah shook her head. “Henry, I don’t think the horse came alone. She extended a red neckerchief bundle filled with something toward him. “This was tied to the reins of her bridal.”

Everyone around here wore neckerchiefs, mainly red or blue, but Henry recognized the small tear off the corner of this one. He reached for the bundle and untied the knot to open the bundle. Inside was a squashed cheese sandwich, an apple, and a piece of dried meat wrapped in a thin layer of cheesecloth. He glanced up at Sarah and William in surprise.

“You don’t think that Winter was trying to come into town to bring you lunch, do you?” Sarah asked.

Placing his hammer on the anvil and tugging the leather apron from around his neck, Henry frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know why she would.” He paused, embarrassed. “We’re getting off to a slow start,” he explained. “I know she’s got a lot of things from her past to deal with, and she seemed hesitant to have me in the house last night so I… I slept in the barn. I left early this morning before she got up.”

Sarah looked at him a moment, and then gave a firm nod. “She probably felt bad,” she said, looking up at her own husband. “It least that’s how I probably would’ve felt.” She gestured with her chin toward the lunch. “Maybe this was her way of making amends.”

“Well if it is, then where is she?” William asked.

Henry stared between Sarah and William, and then couldn’t stop some of the worst-case scenarios from running through his thoughts. Maybe she’d been thrown and was now on foot. He looked outside at the snow. Maybe she’d fallen off the horse, hit her head, and now lay unconscious out there in the cold. He knew, with the temperature dropping, that it wouldn’t take long for frostbite to set in. Either way, she might still be caught out in the storm unless she’d managed to make her way back to the ranch on foot. It all depended on when, and where, she’d lost the horse.

William sensed what he was thinking. “I’ll hitch up the buckboard. You get your horse and we’ll go looking for her.”

“I’m coming along,” Sarah said.

“Oh no you’re not,” William argued. “If we’re not back within two hours, I’ll need you to go to the sheriff and put together a search party. That storm out there isn’t going to let up anytime soon. By the looks of it, it’s going to snow all night, and if it does it’s going to drop at least a foot of snow. If the wind kicks up, we’re gonna have a good old-fashioned blizzard and whiteout on our hands.”

Henry quickly doused the flames in the firebox, moved his hot tools to the cooling tub filled with water, then quickly grabbed his hat and coat, hanging on a hook by the door. The thought that Winter could be out there in the snowstorm alone concerned him greatly. He couldn’t say that he knew her well, but he did admit to himself that he already cared about her. She had a vulnerability about her that tugged at his heart. She had had a tough time of it, and he wanted to be the one that helped her learn how to live again, to laugh again, and to love again.

He dearly wanted a family, a mate for life, but he was also a patient man, willing to give Winter the time she needed to deal with her past, her present, and most especially her future. He hadn’t really minded sleeping in the barn last night. In fact, he had put himself in her shoes and realized that it was the only logical thing they could have done. If they weren’t ready to share the same roof, let alone the same bed, he had planned to give her a few days, no pressure, spending the time instead to get to know each other.

With winter coming on, he was usually busy at the blacksmith shop, putting new rims on wagon wheels, shoeing horses, repairing tackle and wagon traces, among other things. Soon he would also be out in the fields stacking bales of hay for his cattle in strategic locations. He had built several lean-tos scattered throughout his property to offer them shelter from some of the worst of the winter winds that would soon sweep over the prairie.

Still, for someone used to city living and most likely staying indoors when the weather was inclement, Winter would probably be frightened. Being from Maine, it was certain that she had experienced her share of winter storms, and probably more than her share of what they called nor’easters back there, but from inside a warm and cozy house. He doubted that she had ever been surrounded by hundreds of miles of prairie, unsure of where to find shelter, or how. The fact that the horse had arrived in town without her gave him great cause for concern.

“I’ll meet you at the edge of town,” he told William, already hurrying outside the blacksmith shop to hitch up his wagon. “I’ll get my mare saddled.”

“I’ll go home and grab blankets, water, and food for William to stow in the wagon,” Sarah said.

So it was that together, they all busied themselves with one task on their mind.

Find Winter. The sooner the better.

Winter huddled in a cluster of bushes, shivering and stiff with the cold. She wished now that she had never left the security of Henry’s ranch, but how was she to know that an overcast day would turn into what turned out to be quite a severe snowstorm? She wrapped her heavy sweater tightly around her, but it did little to keep out the cold blasts of wind. Her bonnet kept some of the driven snow out of her face, but soon it was saturated.

She sat with her back pressed into the bushes, her knees pressed close to her chest, her arms wrapped around her knees. She tried to make herself into a tiny ball, keeping her back to the wind.

She knew that Henry had no idea that she had left the ranch, nor did she know how long he would remain in town. How would he know to look for her? Or where? The snow was four inches deep already, and in the span of an hour the tracks of her mare had been completely obliterated.

She had hesitated to move too far in any one direction, and then the horse had suddenly lost her balance, perhaps stepping into prairie dog hole or perhaps it was a slip as her hoof slid off a rock covered with snow. Winter had nearly fallen off, and only by tightly grasping her knees and clenching her fists around the horse’s mane had she managed to stay astride.

After realizing that she was lost, she had slid off the horse’s back and dismounted, thinking to examine the mare’s leg. She had gently run her hand over her pastern and joint, her fetlock, and then lifted her hoof to make sure she hadn’t thrown a shoe. Everything looked okay, but she was no veterinarian.

Then, quite to Winter’s surprise, something had spooked the horse and she had reared, nearly pulling Winter off the ground. Reflexively, Winter had let go of the reins to prevent being dragged. She’d then watched in horror as the horse had trotted off into the distance before disappearing into a nearby gully. Winter had tried to chase after her, but had taken a fall herself at the top of the gully, rolling to the bottom before she stopped, covered with dirt, snow, and praying to God that she hadn’t broken something.

So it was that she was now holed up against the side of the gully, surrounded by bushes and hoping that they would provide adequate shelter from the snow, which seemed to fall heavier and faster as the minutes ticked by.

“
Oh Lord
,” she prayed. “
Please let someone find me. I want to live! I don’t want to die out here in the middle of nowhere, with no one to find or bury my bones. I really do want to try to have a chance to begin my life again with Henry. If it is Your will, Lord, help him find me
.”

Henry’s heart began to pound with dread. He should’ve taken the time to go inside and speak to Winter this morning, tried to assure her that things would be okay. The truth was though that he wasn’t quite sure what he could say to her that would help her overcome her qualms. He knew that she wondered if she had made the right decision about getting married, because he had felt the same way.

The truth of the matter was, Winter was a little more docile than he had expected. Then again, with what she had admitted about her husband’s behavior following her child’s death, he supposed he could understand her reasons for gradually retreating into herself.

Still, he was heartened by the fact that she had attempted to overcome the newness of her situation by bringing him lunch. It was a small matter, really, but the fact that she had thought of it and then carried it through gave him hope that they could make a connection. Gradually, she
would
learn to trust him.

He had left town on his mare about thirty minutes ago, wearing his heaviest coat. He had also wrapped a buffalo robe around him, one that had been traded to him in lieu of cash when he’d forged new shoes for a trapper’s horse the past summer. The robe had laid forgotten in his supply shed, but he’d brought it out before he’d left, thank goodness. The robe was huge, wrapping around him and covering half of his horse as well.

His friend William had also bundled up, and Sarah had placed a warmed brick on the footboard between his feet to keep them warm as he told Henry that he would head for the ranch. He knew the way like the back of his hand, regardless of the weather. So did the horses.

“Chances are, she’s gotten off the trail somewhere along the way,” Henry shouted, having to lift his voice over the sound of the rising wind. It wailed occasionally, driving cold bits of sleet into their faces.

This storm was turning out to be not just a snowstorm, but had the makings of a blizzard. In the past half hour, another inch or two of snow had fallen. They had to find Winter, and
soon
or she would freeze to death out there.

“I’ll make my way up the gully, you take the road,” Henry suggested. The gully paralleled the dirt track most of the way from Henry’s ranch to Dodge City. With any luck, and smarts, Winter, if she was not terribly off the trail, had taken shelter there.

William nodded. “I told Sarah that if we weren’t back within a couple of hours to send a search party out to the north of the trail since we’re covering the trail and the south side of it back to your ranch.”

Henry nodded, and then the two bid farewell with lifted hands and headed out of town.

Henry shoved his hat firmly onto his head, and then decided to tie it down with the red neckerchief that Winter had wrapped his luncheon in. It would not only serve to keep his hat on his head, but might keep his ears from freezing off.

The wind felt bitterly cold and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees or more during the past hour. It was typical for the area this time of year, and nothing that he wasn’t particularly used to. Still, he worried about Winter. Despite her name, she wasn’t prepared for this. How could she be?

Would he lose his new bride before he even got a chance to get to know her? He already admired her pluck. She might be grief-stricken and cowed, but she had shown a definite spirit and bravery in heading out west into the unknown, away from everything and anyone she had ever known. That took guts, and he admired her for it.

He should’ve told her that last night at supper.