THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

About the Author

1920s
Eastern United States

G
regory Sterling rode slowly out of town toward his little shack among the hills. He had just come from signing the papers that gave over to the Blue Star Production Company full right and title to the land for which he had grubbed and starved and fought and almost died. He was going back to pack up and leave.

Ten years before, a mere lad with a sore heart and a great determination, Greg had come to the Far West and taken up land, worked hard, and raised a few cattle, striving against great odds year after year. Now suddenly within the last few months, a rich yield of oil had been discovered, and the land that had been so hard to subdue had become worth millions. Actually millions!

Greg said it softly over to himself when he was out on the desert alone: “I’m clearing out! I’m going back east. I’m going home
wealthy
, just as I said I would!”

He set his grim young lips, gazed wistfully off toward the purple heights of the distant mountains, and sighed.

“But it won’t be home,” he added. “Not with Mother gone. There’ll be nobody there I care about. Nobody left! Not even little Alice Blair!”

He was silent again, reflecting on how his mother had hated to have him going with Alice Blair. And then Alice Blair had run away with Murky Powers. Well, that was that! There wouldn’t even be Alice.

He half closed his eyes and tried to visualize Alice as she had been, a little pink and white and golden wisp of a thing with big blue eyes. Impudent eyes, his mother had called them. He hadn’t thought of her for several years now. He had been grimly set on making a living. And now, before he could have dreamed it possible, while he was still young enough to enjoy it, his fortune had come to him without any effort of his own!

He had never expected this thing. The utmost he had hoped when he first came out to these wilds had been the right to do as he pleased, to hide his stricken young life after the death of his mother, to hide away from people who thought they were elected to manage him, and earn a meager living through hard, daily toil.

Then suddenly in a night he was rich! He was going back! Back to the place where they wouldn’t lend him twenty dollars to start a newsstand down near the station. Back where they wanted him to be apprenticed to learn a trade.

He threw his head back and let out his triumph in a bitter laugh, the lightest that had passed his lips since his mother died and left him, a seventeen-year-old boy, with everybody trying to boss him. Well, now he could buy any house in town, pay twenty dollars for a single newspaper if he chose.
Rich!

He laughed again that astonished, mirthless laugh, as if it were somehow a joke on himself.

The thin, old rackabones of a horse he was riding heard that unaccountable laughter, threw his head back in astonishment, and gave a swish to his bobbed tail and a canter or two to express his interest. A squirrel whisked up into a tree and dropped the nut he had been so deftly manipulating, turning his head from side to side, taking in this most phenomenal sound on the wide open spaces. Guns he knew with their whistle of death; swearing he knew, and drunken calls; raucous singing he had heard at nighttime when cattlemen were riding home from a brawl. But this strange, uncertain sound of mirth without joy was new, and there was a desperate wistfulness in it that even a wild creature would sense.

All the way back those monotonous miles to his shack, Greg was staring ahead, not at the desert before him, but at his new life, trying to find a gleam. It must be going to be wonderful, but he felt dazed when he should have been thrilled. He had been thinking so long in terms of cattle and feed and the land and the bare necessities of life that his brain and imagination were numb. He could not seem to grasp the possibilities that were his.

He began to visualize his cabin on the mountain. A rude structure of logs and boards that he had built with his own eager, inexperienced hands; a strong door, three small windows with wooden shutters. A sheet iron stove of ancient make, a cupboard with some tin dishes, salt pork, the end of a loaf of bread, a table against one wall made of a packing box. Two other boxes for seats, an army cot with gray blankets, and an old decrepit couch of the kind known as a “sofa,” that he had bought from a settler about to move. Its decrepit springs were bursting forth like fallen soldiers from the old Brussels carpet covering, faded and long since worn beyond all thought of its original pattern.

“Sometime when I’m wealthy, I’ll get you a new cover.” He had promised it again and again when he had stretched his weary form upon its humpy, inadequate dimensions. Well, now he was wealthy enough to buy him a new couch with great, deep leather cushions to build him a palace and furnish it throughout, and yet he found his heart turning wistfully toward a new cover for that poor old couch, the only real longing he had allowed himself during these barren years. He felt shy about going out into the world and hunting luxury for himself. In fact, he had no standards of luxury. All he really longed for was home and somebody to care. His childhood home had been plain and simple, but it had been full of love, and it was home. And you couldn’t buy home!

He had meant to build a fireplace someday in his shack, out of native cobblestones, and spread his big bear rug, the first trophy of his western prowess, before it. Draw up the couch with its bright new cover, sit and stare into the leaping flames as they bit into a great burning log, and heal his broken young heart. Now in his thoughts, the couch seemed to rise in reproach at him as he rode along. He had sold it, couch, cabin, possibilities, and all, and was going away forever!

He had planned to bring water down from the mountain spring above his shack and install a rude water system, to plant a garden with vegetables and maybe a few of the flowers his mother used to love, just for remembrance, someday when he got time. He had meant to make the mountainside lovely, too, and his dreams had even included a better dwelling there someday. But now that could never be. He had sold it all, and before long ugly, disfiguring oil wells would spring up everywhere over his hillside site that he had selected so carefully.

Well, he was rich anyway, and there wasn’t a soul to miss him. He had gone alone these ten long years, eaten and slept alone much of the time except for a few months when old Luke was with him, Luke a wanderer on the face of the earth dropping down for a little while, helping him work. But poor Luke was gone. Killed in a drunken brawl.

Even the dog that had companioned with him during the first few years of his exile had been wounded so badly by a wild steer one day that he had to be shot. There wasn’t even a dog to care that he was leaving. No one out there in the West to care that he was not coming back.

The moon was shining when he reached his shack. He could see its silver light on the opposite hillside. His eye lingered on the wide expanse of sky; the purple mountains; the dark, plumy woods; the river winding like a silver thread in the valley. Would he someday be homesick for all this quietness as he had longed for his home when he came out here?

Off there to the right was where the sun rose, bursting through bars of crimson. Off there to the left was where it set, leaving tatters of purple and gold behind it. And there by the top of that tallest tree was the spot he watched when a storm was coming up and the tops of the tall pines bent with the wind. He sighed deeply and turned to his horse, touching the soft, old nose with a lingering caress like a farewell. The horse was sold, too.

When he went into the cabin, he lighted his smoky oil lamp and looked around. There wouldn’t be much to take with him. There were a few pelts fastened to the wall, skins of animals he had shot or trapped. His gun—he would have little need of that now.

He ate his supper and went to bed listening to the silence outside his cabin, wondering what the new life was going to be like.

It was a little past noon when he finished his packing and cleaning, for he took a certain pride in leaving everything immaculate. On the saddle were fastened two bundles, one sewed into an old piece of burlap bag, to be forwarded to himself in his hometown, the other crudely wrapped in newspaper containing a few necessities that he was taking with him. He had discarded most of his wardrobe. There was not much that would belong in his new life.

When he reached the settlement town and left the bony, old horse with his new owner, he found an uneasy regret in his heart at parting from him. And when he bought his ticket, he stuffed it into his pocket with a strange distaste. He had a passing wonder why he had consented to sell his place and be shoved out again into the world when he was just getting a foothold here and nobody out in the world wanted him. For just that instant, if the Blue Star Company had offered to sell his place back to him, almost he would have been tempted to accept. Then he turned upon himself savagely and told himself he was childish and walked away down the platform to Jake’s Place, where one could get a good dinner of liver and onions and baked beans with dried-apple pie for fifty cents. But somehow he didn’t feel like eating when he looked in the window. The pie looked tired, and there was a smell of burned fat in the air.

He walked back to the little station again and stood looking off down the track that gleamed red as two streaks of blood in the low rays of the setting sun. And presently out of the dazzle of it, the train appeared, a dark speck, growing larger momentarily and bearing down upon him.