Historical Cowboy Romance Two Book Box Set - Mail Order Brides (15 page)

“It’s not as bad as that,” Violet
insisted.

“Yes, it is, and you know it,” Iris retorted.
“Not only have you run the ranch and managed our affairs with
masterful efficiency, you’ve kept Cornell in the dark the whole
time. You’ve kept him blissfully unaware of your activities, so
he’s happy about what he’s doing. He even thinks you’re his
strongest ally around the ranch. I’d say that’s a pretty big
achievement.”

“It might be an achievement,” Violet replied.
“But I still don’t want him knowing about it. Can you imagine what
he would do if he found out I kept one set of accounts for the
house and another, false set just for him. I shudder to think about
it. Even you don’t want him finding out what you’re up to.”

“I sure don’t,” Iris admitted. “I feel
exactly the same way. I only hope our husbands understand when they
find out. Aren’t you at all concerned about that?”

“Sure, I’m concerned about it,” Violet
replied. “What if they think we’re liars and frauds for deceiving
Cornell? But what alternative did we have? To let Cornell squander
our estate? I don’t think so.”

“Somehow, I think the men will understand,”
Iris declared. “I think when they find out the truth, they will
take our side against Cornell. They’ll agree with us and help us to
get back control of the ranch.”

“Either way,” Violet pointed out. “There’s no
sense worrying about it now. We have to get going to pick the men
up from Butte. Get upstairs and change your clothes. I have to go
to the kitchen to give Rita some instructions for later tonight,
and I’ll go upstairs and get Rose. We can talk about this more on
the trip down to town.”

Iris ran up the stairs with her fringe
flying, and Violet went to the kitchen to hunt up Rita, the cook.
She found the kitchen empty, and after a quick glance into the
scullery and the pantry, gave up the search. She had no time to
look for the older woman before they left for Butte.

She checked the fire in the big iron stove
and added more wood to it. She peeked into the oven and found the
haunch of beef roasting for their supper. She basted it with the
juice in the pan and turned it around on the rack to brown on the
other side.

On the lower rack in the oven, she checked
the plum cake for doneness. Then she shut the oven door and trimmed
the vents on the stove. Rita wouldn’t be too far away. She would
come back to the kitchen from wherever she was and finish cooking
supper before the sisters came back.

Satisfied with the preparations for their
mail-order husbands’ arrival, Violet hurried upstairs. On the upper
landing, she turned down the hall to the row of bedrooms at the
back of the house. She knocked at the last door at the end of the
landing and pushed it open without waiting for an answer.

Rose sat at her dressing table. She gazed
into the mirror but didn’t see herself. She often fell into a
reverie in front of the mirror, seeing nothing but the passage of
images in her own mind. An outsider might consider Rose intolerably
vain for the time she spent in front of her mirror, apparently
admiring herself. But this was simply Rose’s way of thinking about
things.

Rose snapped out of her trance when Violet
entered the room. “Oh, you’re here. Are you and Iris ready to
go?”

“I am,” Violet replied. “Iris is changing her
clothes. Pete is hitching up the buggy for us, and then we’ll go.
Are you ready?”

“Yes.” Rose pushed back her stool and crossed
the room to her bed, where she picked up a satin shawl from the
foot rail of the iron bedstead. “Shall we go down?”

“Just a moment, Rose.” Violet laid a hand on
her sister’s arm. “I want to talk to you about something before we
go down. Here, sit down next to me.” Violet pulled Rose down onto
the edge of the bed.

Rose’s eyes flew open. “What is it?”

“I just had a confrontation with Cornell
about this whole mail-order husband business,” Violet explained.
“So he’s a little bit emotional about it. You know he doesn’t
approve of our plan.”

“Yes, I know,” Rose replied.

“I just want to make sure you don’t have any
second thoughts about our plan,” Violet continued. “If any of us
weakens, Cornell will attack, and the whole plan will fall apart.
All three of us have to be firm in our resolve to go through with
our marriages.”

Rose stared at her eldest sister with wide
black eyes. Violet saw her sister as a delicate fawn, blinking her
soft, innocent eyes at a world of danger she couldn’t understand.
But Rose was no innocent fawn. Even at the tender age of eighteen,
she understood danger better than anyone could guess, and under her
soft, gentle exterior beat a heart of iron.

Rose would never waver on their agreement to
marry mail-order husbands. If anyone second-guessed the plan, it
was Violet herself. Her own loyalty to Cornell and her long history
of complying with his wishes made her the most vulnerable link in
their armor.

“You know I won’t weaken, Violet,” Rose
assured her. “You know I agree with you and Iris on why we need to
do this. If Cornell asks me, I’ll tell him so. You know you can
count on me, Violet.”

“I know I can.” Violet patted her sister’s
arm, but in her heart, she shuddered. In spite of all her
assurances, Violet never fully trusted Rose. Her young mind seethed
with secret thoughts and schemes. She noticed every nuance of every
face around her at all times. Yet she knew how to tell people
exactly what they wanted to hear in order to get what she
wanted.

Rose kept Cornell wrapped around her little
finger. Cornell would never doubt Rose’s sincerity about anything.
Cornell would never accuse Rose of disloyalty or foolishness,
because Rose would never tell Cornell her real plans.

When Cornell asked Rose about her agreement
with Violet’s mail-order husband arrangement, Rose assuaged his
concerns with flattery and declarations of her own helplessness.
She spun the wool over his eyes until he lost the ability to accuse
her of anything more than falling under her sisters’ influence.

Violet didn’t like being forced to count on
Rose but the three sisters had to form a united front against
Cornell to bring this triple marriage to fruition. Their future and
their fortune depended on it.

“I know I can count on you,” Violet squeezed
Rose’s hand and moved back toward the door. “Now let’s go down and
see if the buggy’s ready. Cornell is in the library, so we can go
out through the kitchen, and we won’t see him.”

Rose smiled at Violet, and they went
downstairs together. Violet glanced right and left when they
reached the passage, but Rose didn’t give the surroundings the
slightest consideration. She followed Violet to the kitchen, where
they pinned on their hats before going out into the yard.

The small yard separated the kitchen from the
barn, and in the yard, they found Iris just about to get up into
the driver’s seat of the covered buggy. Two horses stood between
the shafts, while three others waited behind the vehicle, fully
saddled and bridled.

Iris’s attire couldn’t have differed more
from her work clothes if she’d been a completely different person.
She wore a gingham dress checked in beige and white. Crisp white
cotton gloves covered her hands, and a feathered hat perched on top
of the pile of hair on her head.

When she spotted her sisters, Iris stepped up
into the driver’s seat and took the reins. Violet handed Rose up
into the back seat. Then she sat up front next to Iris. Iris
clucked to the horses and drove the buggy away from the ranch house
with the three saddled horses trotting easily behind it. The three
sisters rode past the wide ranges with herds of cattle grazing,
past a few other houses, barns, and outbuildings, and at last, hit
the road leading out to the highway.

Though they rode alone, the sisters kept
silent until they passed underneath the big wooden sign over their
front gate that read Rocking Horse Ranch. Violet didn’t like to
break the silence at all. She would have ridden all the way to
Butte with only her thoughts for company.

But this mail-order husband plan was her
idea, and the sisters should go over their strategy one last time
before they met their men at the train station. But how to broach
the subject? Rose and Iris approached the business from such
radically different points of view. Whatever Violet said would ring
amiss with one of them.

Violet sighed. “Cornell sure is in a dither
about this, I can tell you.”

“You shouldn’t concern yourself so much with
what Cornell thinks,” Iris told her. “He would work himself up into
a dither no matter what we did as long as we did anything other
than lie down and obey him. That’s the only thing he understands or
cares about. You know that, Violet.”

“I just don’t like making him so upset,”
Violet replied. “He’s taken good care of us these last fifteen
years. We should be grateful to him for that.”

“He might have taken good care of us in the
last fifteen years,” Iris acknowledged, “but he sure isn’t taking
good care of us now, not with the way he’s letting the ranch
go.”

“I still find it hard to believe he would let
it get so bad without realizing it.” Violet remarked.

“Do you want to know something?” Iris
replied. “I think he refuses to change his stance on the ranch
because I’m the one who brought it to his attention. If I’d kept my
mouth shut and let him figure out for himself that the ranch was in
trouble, he would have done something about it long ago. He’s
letting the ranch go out of spite because I presumed to tell him
how to run his business. That’s what I think.”

“I just can’t believe that,” Violet
exclaimed. “It isn’t like him at all.”

“Would you rather believe he’s grossly
incompetent?” Iris asked. “Would you rather think he’s befuddled on
account of his age, or that he’s just too short-sighted to realize
the ranch is in danger?”

“In danger?” Violet repeated. “Is it really
in danger? I don’t think you ever put it like that before.”

“I told you already,” Iris replied. “The
ranch can’t go another year the way it is. We have five thousand
head of cattle and two cowboys, and those two cowboys are aging
fast. If we don’t get these mail-order husbands, we won’t have
enough hands to bring the stock to the sale yards in the
autumn.”

“And then what will happen?” Violet
asked.

“We don’t have enough range to feed them all
over the winter,” Iris told her. “If we don’t bring them to the
sale yards, then come the spring, we’ll have nothing and they’ll
starve to death. So you see, we need cowboys, and we need them now.
Cornell refuses to hire any more hands. This marriage plan of yours
is our only hope.”

“Oh, heavens!” Violet gasped`. “You told us
it was bad, but I didn’t realize it was as bad as that. If that’s
the case, I’m glad we have this mail-order situation well on the
way to completion. We don’t have a moment to lose.”

“That’s what I told you,” Iris maintained. “I
only hope we can keep Cornell at bay long enough to marry these
men.”

“I hope they’re the cowboys we need them to
be,” Violet added. “I would hate to get them home and get married
to them and find out later that they can’t do the job we need them
to do.”

Iris shot Violet a sidelong look. “I’m sure
they will be. We have their letters telling us their experience and
their backgrounds. It sounds to me like they are competent cowboys.
At least, the one I’m marrying is.”

“Mine is, too.” Violet took a folded paper
out of the cuff of her sleeve and opened it. “Listen to this.

‘
Dear Miss Kilburn, I trust this letter
finds you well. I am just getting on the train in Santa Fe, on my
way to you. Who knows, but I may see you before you get this
letter. I have been working on a ranch down here near Jemez
Springs, and we have just finished the spring branding. How are you
getting on with yours?’

Do you hear that, Iris? How are we getting on
with the spring branding?”

“We haven’t done any spring branding,” Iris
grumbled. “I told you, we don't have enough people to do it. Who is
this mystery man, anyway?”

“I told you before,” Violet replied. “His
name is Chuck Ahern. He’s twenty-five years old, and he’s from
Pecos, Texas. He’s been working all over the Southwest on ranches
like ours. He’s even worked as manager on a few of them. He’s
exactly what we’re looking for.”

“That’s good,” Iris declared. “What else does
he have to say?”

Violet read the rest of the letter. “Your
ranch sounds really nice, and I can’t wait to see it. Also I look
forward to meeting your sisters. They sound like nice people, and
the Fort House sounds like the perfect place to stay until we can
get married.”

“You told him about the Fort House?” Iris
asked. “What did you do that for?”

“Well, I couldn’t very well agree to have him
stay in the main house, could I?” Violet folded the letter and put
it back inside her sleeve. “I had to explain where he and the other
men would stay between their arrival on the train and the wedding
on Friday. He couldn’t stay in the main house with us. I’m
surprised at you, Iris. Didn’t you tell your groom he’d be staying
in the Fort House with the others?”

“No,” Iris replied. “We never discussed that.
He left all the arrangements to me.”

Violet laughed. “Well, what did you talk
about? Don’t tell me you spent all your time discussing ranch
business. That would be just like you.”

“We didn’t spend
all
our time
discussing ranch business,” Iris shot back. “But I can tell you I
made sure he knew his way around a ranch. He wouldn’t be much good
to us if he didn’t. You and Rose can get all romantic with your men
if you want to. We’re getting them in to work the ranch, and I’m
making sure mine can, even if you won’t.”