Baby On The Oregon Trail. Lynna Banning

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      Lee was close to exhaustion, but for some reason he still couldn’t sleep. Lying on his pallet under the Borlands’ wagon, hours dragged by as he listened to Jenna’s soft breathing beside him and the night sounds around the camp. Crickets. An owl in the ash trees at the edge of camp. The rustle inside the wagon when one of the girls rolled over under her blanket.

      Sure was an odd family, he thought for the hundredth time, a young woman expecting a baby and two older stepdaughters who obviously resented her. But he’d watched the youngest, five-year-old Ruthie, gently pat Jenna’s shoulder as if she were the adult and Jenna the child.

      He puzzled over it until a new sound drifted to him, a long, mournful cry coming across the far-off plain. Tied to the wagon, Devil gave a muffled whicker; the horse had heard it, too.

      He listened for a while, his arms folded behind his head, wondering exactly where the animal was. Then another cry answered, and the first one, now longer and more drawn out, grew more intense.

      “Lee?” Jenna whispered beside him. “What is that sound?”

      “Wolf,” he answered. “Not close, just noisy.”

      “There are two of them,” she said after a moment. “They sound so forlorn.”

      “Hungry, probably. And lonely.”

      She was silent, but he could sense her listening in the dark. He hadn’t thought about being lonely since the War, but the howling from the hills sure as hell crawled under his skin.

      “Are they going to find each other?” she asked.

      The question sliced into his brain clean as a razor. “Yeah, they will. Probably going to mate.”

      He heard her breath suck in. She must be pretty ladified if the word mate brought that reaction. Made him wonder even more about her.

      “You said your mother was ‘proper,’” he ventured. “How come she let you join an emigrant train?”

      “She didn’t have a choice, really. I mean I didn’t have a choice. Mama had to let me marry Mathias and join the train.”

      “How come she let you marry a horse thief in the first place?” He held his breath, expecting an explosion of anger. No woman wanted to hear her husband called a horse thief.

      She stayed quiet for a good two minutes while he waited.

      “Again, Mama felt she had no choice.”

      “Your father still alive?”

      “No. He was killed in the War. At Antietam.”

      “Too bad. It’s hard on a woman alone. She never remarried?”

      “Mr. Carver, you ask far too many questions.”

      “Maybe. Some might say I don’t ask nearly enough.”

      “Well,” she huffed, “I would not be one of them. I thought Southern people, refined people from the state of Virginia, were too polite to probe into others’ affairs.”

      “We are, usually. No law says we can’t be curious, though. And we’re out here in the West, Mrs. Borland. Not in Virginia. We’re in Yankee country, and Yankees, I’ve observed, are often ill-mannered.”

      “That is insulting!” Her voice held more than a bit of frost. “Surely you, a supposedly genteel Southerner, recognize bad manners?”

      Lee exhaled a long sigh. “I’m less Johnny Reb now than I was a few years back. Maybe now I’m more like your bluecoats. Your husband, for instance.”

      “You are nothing like my husband,” she countered, punching out the words. “Nothing at all.”

      He laughed quietly. “I’ll take that as a compliment, if you don’t mind. I didn’t like your husband.”

      “I do mind,” she retorted. “You didn’t even know my husband.”

      Lee chose his next words with care. “I knew him enough to see some things.”

      “What things?” Her tone went from frosty to cold, stinging sleet in sixty seconds.

      “For one, he had no business bringing his family on a wagon train with as little preparation as he’d made.”

      “What do you mean?” Her voice rose. “Mathias prepared for this trip.”

      “Then I’d have to say he didn’t have much experience. And for another thing, looks to me like you’re gonna run out of food before you get halfway to Oregon. Your man didn’t plan far enough ahead.”

      Her voice turned to steel. “I’ll thank you to shut your mouth, Mr. Carver.”

      Again he laughed. “You know, whenever you’re mad, it’s ‘Mr. Carver.’ And when you’re learning something, or scared, it’s ‘Lee.’”

      “I cannot make up my mind about you, Mr. Carver.” She bit his name out in hard, clearly enunciated syllables.

      “You might want to hurry that up a little, Mrs. Borland. We’re going to be in each other’s back pockets for another two months.”

      That seemed to shut her up. He closed his eyes, listening to her uneven breathing. He knew she wasn’t asleep because she kept twitching under her quilt.

      The wolves were crooning loud and long by now. Lee let himself listen and thought about Jenna, about what she’d sound like if... Ah, hell. That wasn’t any way to get to sleep.

      But he couldn’t help thinking about it. He smiled up at the shadowy underside of the wagon and closed his eyes.

      * * *

      Odious man. He was laughing at her, and if there was one thing Jenna hated it was being laughed at. Who did he think he was, anyway? She would never last another two months in the company of this man with his outspoken ways and his subtle goading.

      The South had lost the War, hadn’t it? Mathias always said the Confederate soldiers should have slunk back to their ruined plantations and done some honest work. At the moment she half agreed with him.

      On the other hand, some of the things Mathias said, which he’d expressed often and crudely, were things she could not agree with. Now that he was gone, she could try to erase some of the hateful poison he’d spewed into the minds of his daughters. It hadn’t all been about her; mostly it was about how worthless other people were. How they owed him something. How he was better than they were.

      “Jenna.”

      “Oh, what is it?” she said sharply. She clamped her jaw shut. At least he hadn’t called her “Mrs. Borland.”

      “I owe you an apology. I had no right to question you in that manner.”

      “Oh.” Instantly her annoyance began to fade, but she couldn’t resist one last jab. “Tit for tat, Mr. Carver. The next time we converse it will be my turn to pry.”

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