Rimfire Bride (15 page)

She picked up the script and began to read through it rather quickly, silently thanking Sister Mary Kathleen for insisting that she learn to read German when she was in grammar school. When she was finished, she stepped out of the window in search of Mrs. Watson.

“Are you sure the ladies of the Christian Union want to put on this play?”

“Oh, yes,” Fern Watson said. “Clara Hollenbaugh says it’s a wonderful melodrama that’s all the rave in Europe. Can you translate it for us?”

“Yes, I can do it, if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

“Good, I’ll tell Mrs. Steward, and she can pass the word around that you are who you say you are. Can you finish before Thanksgiving?”

“I don’t think that will be a problem.” Jana was puzzled by what Mrs. Watson had said:
you are who you say you are.
What did that mean? She hadn’t spoken to anyone except the customers she had seen in the store or the patrons who came into the saloon, or to Frank Allen and Drew Malone.

Drew Malone. He could certainly be a cast member of this play. A play that was all about adultery. Except in this play the woman was the adulterer.

Jana took a pencil and wrote the words
Misanthropy and Repentance
across the top of the first page.

Misanthropy
. That was a word she could take to heart. Not that she hated anyone, but she certainly
did distrust certain people, and the number one candidate was Drew Malone. She would have let him kiss her the night of the election if he hadn’t been interrupted by Frank Allen, and then Frank told her about Elfrieda and his children.

Elfrieda was a name that surely stuck in the memory, and when she heard Mr. Watson call out to someone with that name, she left the window to see what this Elfrieda looked like. A large woman at least twice Jana’s age, she had come in to buy a seal hat. Jana was sure this was not Mrs. Malone. Maybe Mrs. Malone was the misanthrope because of her flirtatious husband.

If Drew Malone were her husband, he wouldn’t . . . Jana’s cheeks flamed with embarrassment. What was happening to her? Such thoughts about another woman’s husband.

Jana went back to her translating, and the very next line spoke to her:
“I beseech you—There are strings in the human heart, which touched, will sometimes utter dreadful discord—I beseech you—”

Jana Hartmann was in a state of dreadful discord. Right then she decided she would work for Mr. Watson only until Christmas. Then she would set the process in motion to find a plot of land to homestead. She did not come to Dakota to get involved with a married man. Another line from the play spoke to her:
Moments, which steal the roses from the cheek of health, and plow deep furrows in the brow of youth
.

This would not be her plight.

Drew, Sam, and
Benji were on board the eastbound Pacific Express, returning from Rimfire. Drew smiled as he listened to the boys’ lively conversation. He decided this had been a worthwhile trip. The house was coming along nicely and would probably be finished by Christmas, but the most important thing was his talk with Sam. He needed that talk with Sam, as much for himself as for his son.

After Addie died, Drew had thrown himself into his work, withdrawing from anything that was social. Frank and his wife, Caroline, had tried to draw Drew out, but he had used the boys as an excuse not to do anything. Now it was time he accepted responsibility for how his behavior may have impacted Sam.

It was one thing to tell your son that things happen that we don’t like, and when they do happen, we have no choice but to live with them, but it was completely different to have to live that. For the good of his children, he had to start living a normal life. At first he had hired Elfrieda to satisfy Addie’s mother, but now he told himself he should take advantage of her presence and do some things—some things that were fun.

The train stopped at Dickinson to take on coal and water, and Drew and the boys stepped off the train to walk around for a moment. This town had a population of about fifteen hundred people, most of whom worked in some capacity for the Northern
Pacific. There was a passenger depot, a freight warehouse, a commodious railroad shop, and a roundhouse that until recently had been the end of the track.

“Boys, we’d better get something to eat here,” Drew said as he led the way across the street to one of the two hotels in town. “We’ll only have about fifteen minutes before the train gets under way again.”

When they walked into the restaurant, the proprietor had just taken out a batch of potato fritters, and the smell was tantalizing.

“We’ll take a dozen of those,” Drew said. “Oh, and put in a couple of cream cakes, too.”

“You on the Pacific Express?”

“We are.”

“Then I’d better put ’em in paper for you. That train don’t stay here very long.”

“I’d be much obliged if you’d do that.”

When the train
started rolling again, the boys, with bellies full, and rocked by the gentle motion of the train, fell asleep. Drew watched the afternoon slowly begin to fade as all the new little towns rolled by: Gladstone, Taylor, Richardton. No wonder he was so busy filing claims, since most of these towns were formed to accommodate the immigrants who were homesteading their section of land from the undulating hills of fertile soil.

And then he saw a small, insignificant sign saying
NEW SALEM
. There was only one building.

So this was where she was going. Drew checked
his watch to see what time it was. By his schedule, New Salem would only be about thirty miles from Bismarck. That would be an easy trip.

A little more than half an hour to go and they would be home. He settled back in his seat, intending to take a nap as well, but that was not to be. As they approached Bly’s Mine, the track took a sharp turn.

Suddenly a loud crashing noise reverberated through all the train. No longer traveling smoothly on the rails, the car was now bucking badly, as if going over a lot of bumps. A couple of women in the car screamed, and some of them shouted.

The commotion awakened the boys as they were jostled about; Benji was thrown on the floor. Drew grabbed him and pulled the boy to him.

“Are we going to die?” Sam said with more calmness than Drew was sure his son felt. The boy held on to the armrest of his seat, his eyes opened wide in terror.

“No, Son,” Drew said without conviction.

From the window, he saw that the tender had left the track and was now in the ditch. It sounded as if someone were outside, beating on the side of the car with a sledgehammer, until finally they stopped. All the cars had been thrown from the tracks, and the baggage cars were whirled diagonally across the roadbed. Two passenger coaches were at a precarious tilt, but miraculously, the wheels of the passenger coach Drew and his sons were in rested upright on the ties.

“What happened? Why did we stop?” Benji asked.

“We ran off the tracks,” Sam said.

“You mean we had a train wreck?”

“I wouldn’t say it was a wreck, because everybody is all right. I think the tender ran into the ditch, and then all the cars got off the track,” Drew said as he pulled the boys closer to him.

“You know why we weren’t hurt?” Sam asked.

“Why?”

“Mama. She’s taking care of us.”

Drew smiled. “That could very well be, Sam. She loved us more than anything else in the world, and she could still be looking out for all of us.”

Jana was helping
Greta set up the soup kettle when a whistle began blowing in several short toots. The sound galvanized everyone in the saloon, and many of the men got up and started toward the door.

“Carl, what’s that?” Greta asked. “Where’s everyone going?”

“Those whistles mean something’s happened to a train someplace,” Carl said.

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know, but I imagine we’ll find out soon enough. It could be engine trouble or the track is out or it could be a wreck. It’s really hard to say.”

Jana and Greta joined some of the Custer regulars at the front window of the hotel. They saw several people milling about the depot, some railroad workers and townspeople as well.

After a while a couple of the men who had been having their supper returned.

“What is it, Mr. Dempsey?” Greta asked one of the men. “What happened?”

“It’s the Bly’s Mine curve again. The eastbound left the track,” Dempsey said.

“Oh, dear, was anyone hurt?” Jana asked.

“I don’t think so. Leastwise we haven’t been told of none. It’s just that curve is the worst one in all of Dakota, and somethin’ happens there every little whipstitch. They’re puttin’ an engine and a passenger car on now to go get ’em.”

It had gotten
quite dark, and the dim lights inside the car caused the windows to act as mirrors so that Drew could see nothing but his own reflection when he tried to look outside. He knew what had happened, though, because shortly after the accident he had gone outside to have a look around.

Ironically, the locomotive had not left the track, though the tender had, breaking loose from the couplings and turning over in the ditch. Several people were walking around, a few dazed and disoriented.

“A fine thing this is!” one man was saying angrily. “I paid my fare and I expected to be transported, safely, to Chicago. But I didn’t even get out of Dakota. A fine thing this is.”

“Mister, don’t take on so,” another passenger said. “I’ve been in train wrecks where people were killed or badly injured. You don’t have a scratch on you.”

“A fine thing,” the man said again, his grumbling unabated.

The conductor informed the passengers that word had gone forward, informing the authorities of the accident. “I’ve no doubt but that a rescue train will be here soon enough,” he said.

That had been more than an hour ago, and the car was beginning to cool, as the steam heat was generated by the now-defunct locomotive. Several others in the car huddled together for warmth while a few, like Drew’s two sons, were sleeping. Some conversed quietly, and at the back end of the car a card game had begun.

Drew looked at Sam and Benji. When the commotion had begun, Addie’s image had come to his mind as well, but not as the guardian that Sam had voiced. Drew’s thoughts had been about what would come of the boys if something happened to him.

And he knew the answer: Rose Denton. Growing up next door to the Dentons, he had never realized what a pain that woman was. He shuddered as he thought about his children having to go back to Evanston to live with her.

“Here it comes!” someone called. “I can see the light! A train’s comin’.”

“I hope it’s the rescue train, and not some limited that’s roaring down the tracks like a cannonball,” someone said. “Why, it could plow right into us.”

“What?” one of the women asked in concern.

“Oh, pay no attention to him,” another passenger said. “He’s just talkin’ to hear himself talk.”

“Anyhow, it’s slowin’ down now,” someone else said. “He sees us, and he’s come to get us.”

By now the train was close enough that everyone could hear it, and the conductor, who had been in one of the other cars, came in.

“Folks, grab whatever you’ve got with you, and be ready to get on the train.”

“Come on, boys,” Drew said as he scooped Benji into his arms and guided Sam through the car.

The rescue train
rolled into the Bismarck depot at eleven thirty that night. Ordinarily a train arriving in the middle of the night would be met only by those people who had business with it, but as Drew looked through the window, it seemed as if half the town had turned out. He searched through the crowd looking—looking for what?

Benji woke up and rubbed his eyes. “Why did we stop?”

“Because we’re home,” Drew said.

“I’m going to tell Mrs. Considine about our train wreck.”

“It wasn’t a train wreck,” Sam said. “The cars got off the track. That’s all.”

“But that’s a train wreck, isn’t it, Daddy?”

“You’re both right,” Drew said. “The cars ran off the track, and that’s not an actual train wreck, but it is sort of like one.”

When Drew stepped off the train, he watched as many of the other passengers were met in joyous reunion, and with exclamations of love and thankfulness that no one was hurt.

But of course no one met him, or his two sons.

“Oh, Johnny, my sweet Johnny, Mama was so worried about you!” a woman gushed as she
embraced a young boy, a few years older than Sam, who had been on one of the other cars.

Drew felt Sam squeeze his hand more tightly, and looking down at him, Drew saw Sam watching the reunion of the mother and son. Sam didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to. His eyes, wide-open and gleaming in the depot platform lamps, were portals to show the ache that Drew knew was in his son’s heart. Drew returned the squeeze.

“It’s good to be home, safe and sound, isn’t it?” Drew said, not only to get Sam’s mind off the pain of not being met, but his own as well.

“Yes, sir. But I wish . . .”

“That Mama was here to meet us?”

“I know it’s dumb.”

Drew reached down and put his arm on Sam’s shoulder to draw him closer. “No, Son, it’s love. You don’t stop loving someone just because they died. And love is never dumb. Come on, let’s go home.”

Elfrieda met them
when a dray left them at the back door. She, like nearly everyone else in town, was aware that there had been an accident, but she had no idea that Drew and the boys had been on the train.

“We were in a train wreck!” Benji said excitedly as he ran toward Elfrieda. “And one of the cars was in the ditch.”

“It was the tender,” Sam said knowledgeably.

“My, my, that must have been frightening for you,” Elfrieda said.

“We weren’t ‘a scared a bit,” Benji said proudly. “Were we, Sam?”

“No,” Sam agreed. “We weren’t scared.”

“That’s because you are both brave boys,” Elfrieda said. “But let me ask you this. Would you like a cup of hot chocolate and an apple croûte before you go to bed?”

“Yes, please,” Sam said.