Harper's Bride

by

Copyright © by Alexis Harrington, 1997

www.alexisharrington.com

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Dawson, Yukon Territory

June 1898

"No more credit, Logan. Not a dime. You
already owe me one thousand two hundred dollars and fourteen cents.
I'll forget the change, but I want the rest of it. Now."

Melissa Logan stood just inside the door at
Harper's Trading Company, a rough, two-story log building on Front
Street. The combined smells of wood smoke, tanned hides, bacon, and
raw log walls clung to the place. Holding two-month-old Jenny in
her arms, she watched the tense exchange between her husband, Coy,
and Dylan Harper. At the end of the counter, a friend of Harper's
named Rafe Dubois regarded the proceedings with obvious bland
amusement.

Twelve hundred
dollars . . . Melissa could hardly conceive of
such a sum. Although prices in the Yukon were unbelievably high,
she hadn't realized that Coy had acquired such a debt. And they had
been in Dawson for only six weeks. It was plain that Coy had made
the man angry. But, then, Coy had a genuine talent for making
people angry, and he got mad at everyone else.

He straightened his skinny length and
adjusted his one suspender, clearly offended. The seat of his
dungarees drooped beneath his flat backside like an empty feed
sack. He gestured behind him in Melissa's general direction. "I got
me a wife and baby to feed. I can't do that till I make my big
strike. You wouldn't see them go hungry, would you?"

On the other side of the plank counter, Dylan
Harper towered over Coy, his long, blunt finger anchoring a page in
a ledger book in front of him. He was a wild-looking man, Melissa
thought, tall and lean, with long, sun-streaked sandy hair that
brushed his wide, muscled shoulders. His buckskin pants were
decorated with a short fringe down the side of each leg, and she
saw some kind of Indian amulet around his neck, which remained
mostly hidden under his shirt. At his waist he wore a long-bladed
knife she suspected he wouldn't hesitate to use. From a high window
a shaft of sunlight fell over him, highlighting his sharp,
masculine features in muted amber, and making his eyes shimmer like
hard green stones.

Instantly, she realized what Coy most
obviously did not: he was a fool to cross this man.

"You didn't come in here today to buy them
something to eat, and you didn't charge over a thousand dollars
worth of food. You bought tobacco, nails, a case of
champagne"
—
Harper paused to look him up and
down, as if wondering what a man like Coy Logan would do with even
one bottle
—
"kerosene, and a lot of other
things. But mostly you bought whiskey, three gallons of it." He
glanced briefly at Melissa, then turned his unforgiving gaze back
on Coy. "There's nothing written here against your name that would
feed a family, Logan. Anyway, it's pretty hard to make that big
gold strike when you're cutting wood for the North West Mounted
Police." He tapped the ledger page with his fingertip. "I'm calling
your debt. You'll pay or I'll bring in the Mounties, and they'll
have you chopping on their woodpile again."

Melissa felt her face get hot, and knew it
was more than just the stifling summer heat. Coy had already been
in trouble with the iron-handed law in Dawson for public
drunkenness. The police had sentenced him to two weeks of their
standard punishment
—
hard labor on the
government woodpile. Until now, she hadn't realized that anyone
else knew about it.

Coy shifted his weight, and his tone took on
a whining edge. "I know you give credit to some of the others at
the diggings
—
Moody, Black-Eyed Charlie,
Mose Swindell. And they run up lots bigger bills than me. You ain't
made them pay."

"I like those boys, Logan. I don't like you."
Dylan Harper's low voice rang with finality.

Melissa knew Coy would not be able to wangle
his way out of this. She looked at the sleeping child she held in
her arms; if Harper had Coy arrested, what would happen to her and
the baby? Jobs up here were hard to come by, and anyway, who would
hire a woman with an infant? Melissa didn't know if she had the
courage or the strength to face it if things got much worse. Going
hungry herself was one thing, but what if her milk dried up and
Jenny began to starve as well?

"I'm telling you, I ain't got nowhere near
that much money," Coy said, pushing down his dusty bowler hat on
his head. "I ain't got nothing but
—
" He
stopped then and turned to consider Melissa. His long, narrow face
and cruel mouth perfectly reflected his shiftless, unreliable
character. Often, she wondered tiredly why she had married him. She
certainly didn't like the speculative glint she saw in his
red-rimmed eyes now. Suddenly, Coy reached out and grabbed her arm,
yanking her forward. Jenny shifted in her sleep and then settled
down. "All's I got are her and the little one."

Harper stared at him with a blank
expression.

Coy gave Melissa a push that thrust her
forward for inspection. She lowered her face in embarrassment.
"She's a quiet type, not like some gabby females, and it don't take
much to keep her in line. The baby's quiet, too. Lissy sees to
that. She can cook and keep house
—
" He
glanced at her and rubbed at a smudge on her cheekbone, making her
flinch. "And she ain't bad to look at when she's cleaned up and her
face is washed."

"What's your point, Logan?"

"Well, I'm a thinking man, Harper," Coy said
with a sly grin, and tapped a dirty finger against his temple. "I'm
always thinking. Maybe you and me can work a trade. This gal and
the baby for the bill in your book, there. All fair and square, and
the Mounties don't need to know a thing about it."

Melissa's head came up and she gaped at
Coy.

Dylan Harper pulled back as if he had just
been offered a box of scorpions.

Rafe Dubois chuckled and shook his head as he
leaned an elbow on the plank counter.

"What the hell do— Are you crazy?" Harper
demanded.

"Coy!" Melissa cried, so startled that for a
moment she forgot to keep quiet."You can't
mean . . . " she broke off, unable to finish.
She must have misunderstood him—he couldn't mean that he would
actually sell his wife and his own flesh and blood to this man
Dylan Harper. No one would do that, it was . . . it was immoral, it
was . . . 

"Not a word out of you, girl," Coy warned her
in a low voice, and pointed a finger at her. "I ain't got time for
none of your foolishness." He turned to Harper and continued. "Now
she's all right, I s'pose, but she's holding me back. If it wasn't
for her, I could be panning heaps of dust. This is my big chance
and I aim to grab it."

Melissa ducked her head again, mortified. She
could hardly believe the horrifying, humiliating situation she was
in. Marrying Coy to escape her drunken, abusive father had been her
chief mistake. Not long after the wedding she had discovered that
her husband and father were very much alike. But she had compounded
that error when she followed Coy to this wilderness. She'd had to
cross the snowbound Chilkoot Pass when she was six months gone with
Jenny, only to deliver her in a tent on the frozen banks of Lake
Bennett. It was a wonder the baby had survived.

Unable to keep the scorn out of his voice,
Dylan Harper gave a low laugh and said, "I came to the Yukon to
make money, Logan. I'm not interested in your offer." He considered
the weaselly little bastard in front of him and thought he'd never
felt such contempt for a man. He only wanted to be paid, not assume
the burden of this silent, haggard-looking woman. Damn, Logan
offered her as though she were nothing more than a head of
livestock. And a baby too?

In this business Dylan had run across his
share of lowlife no-accounts, but if prizes were given for the
lowest no-account, Coy Logan would definitely win. Dylan hadn't
been lying when he said he didn't like Logan. From the moment they
met, he'd despised him and had found no reason to change his mind
since. That was Dylan's sole reason for calling in the debt. In the
scope of the Yukon economy, where kerosene cost forty dollars a
gallon and a dozen eggs could bring eighteen, Logan's
twelve-hundred-dollar balance wasn't that large. In fact, others
owed Dylan more. But he trusted them to pay him back. He didn't
trust Logan at all.

Let him dump a wife and baby on him? Hell,
no. Dylan had come North two years earlier with one purpose in
mind, and he wasn't about to let anything get in his way. A
worn-out female and her child were not part of his plans. He
couldn't tell how old she was exactly, probably younger than she
appeared. She was thin and pale, with hair even lighter than his
own falling out of a loose knot at the back of her head. Her
clothes were old; the pattern in her calico dress was so faded it
was nearly indistinguishable. And except for the moment she'd dared
to say something—if he could call her small, soft protest
speaking—she seemed as indifferent as a rock.

But when he looked again at the woman Logan
had called Lissy, he paused. She mostly kept her gaze lowered, and
she didn't talk. When she stole a glance at Logan, though,
something in her dove gray eyes—a glittering hatred combined with
forlorn fear—made him think twice. That was no dirt mark on her
cheekbone, as Logan would have him believe. It was a bruise,
probably a souvenir from her husband's fist. Dylan had a hunch that
was Logan's method of keeping her "in line." The thought made him
tighten his jaw.

"Dylan," Rafe Dubois said then, and motioned
him to the end of the counter. Rafe's breathing was rattling today,
as it did sometimes. "You know he'll either keep beating her, or
he'll sell them both to someone else who might treat them even
worse," he drawled softly.

The same thought had already crossed Dylan's
mind. Still clenching his back teeth, he cast a glance over his
shoulder at the woman again. He didn't want to feel sorry for her,
damn it. A woman and a kid? He shifted his gaze back to his
friend.

Rafe leaned closer. "I was about to go next
door to the saloon to see if I could interest a miner in some
high-stakes poker. You all can come along, and I'll preside over a
little hearing to dismiss Logan's debt and transfer, shall we say,
the bonds of matrimony from him to you. That is if the lady is
amenable to the idea."

Dylan gaped at his friend. "What would I do
with a wife? Jesus, Rafe, none of it would even be legal."

"Well, that's a fact, now isn't it? But it
would get her and the baby away from the pusillanimous son of a
bitch."

"If the Mounties got wind of it, we'd all be
sentenced to that damned woodpile of theirs or worse. Besides, you
don't even practice law anymore."

"A trifling point in this case, don't you
think?"

"If you believe it's such a good idea, why
don't you take her?"

Rafe shrugged. "It's not my debt to settle.
But where I come from, chivalry would demand that she be rescued."
He reached into his breast pocket and extracted a slim, dark
cigar.

Dylan tried one final argument. "This is the
Yukon, not New Orleans."

"That doesn't matter, does it," Rafe said. It
was not a question.

Dylan breathed an exasperated sigh and
glanced at the woman again. He knew Rafe was right. Although his
friend had a whipsaw tongue and a cynical view of life, his
Louisiana upbringing gave him a curlicued code of honor. But
Dylan's honor ran just as deep. If something was to happen to
Logan's wife, and that seemed like a certainty, his conscience
would give him no peace. And with Logan being the lowdown scum that
he was, the chances were pretty good that something serious would
happen.

While he wished mightily that fate had chosen
another man to take on this woman and her child, he was the one
standing here.

He turned to face Logan again. "All right,
Logan. I accept your offer, under two conditions. One, the lady has
to agree to this—"

Logan hooked a thumb in his suspender. His
attitude had turned suddenly cocky. "Oh, she agrees just fine."

Dylan fixed his gaze on her blond, downturned
head. "I want to hear it from her."

Coy Logan prompted her. "Go on, girl, answer
him."