Page 34 of Mail-Order Lady

CHAPTER 9

The grade had been climbing since midmorning.

Robert worked the brake handle through another switchback. The off gelding leaned into the trace, and the wagon settled. The team had been pulling uphill for three hours now. They’d be driving upward another two before the trail leveled out across the saddle above and gave them a stretch of easier ground before the next ascent.

The animals were tiring. The geldings’ hard breathing heaved through the lines.

They’d left the flat plains three days behind. The country here ran with the bones of the mountains—long ridges of pine on either side of the trail, draws cutting down out of higher ground, switchbacks folded into the slope. The kind of dips and shadows where a man on a good horse could approach close behind a wagon before anyone in the rig would know.

Like the person traveling behind them.

Robert had been certain since yesterday afternoon.

Three separate times he’d seen clearly enough to know it had to be a man on horseback, not an elk or other large animal. The man’s pace had matched theirs through the switchbacks below, through the long-exposed stretch before the pine country closed in, and again on the descent into the draw where the trail turned back hard left and any rider behind them would have had to slow or risk being seen.

Whoever was back there had slowed.

The only question left was who had sent him.

Margaret McKinney would not have ridden out of Fort Benton herself. A woman in her gloves and her gray traveling dress did not strike out across mountain country on horseback.

But she had money, and money in a town like Fort Benton could buy a certain kind of man. The kind who had been at the livery the morning they left—the rough coat, the unshaven jaw, the longish hair.

That kind of man was easy to find in Fort Benton. He was also easy to send.

What the man’s orders looked like was the part to turn over.

Bring my daughter back. That was the gentlest version.

Discourage the marriage. That was the next one.

He had not let himself name the third.

“Robert?” Clara’s voice broke through his focus.

He didn’t take his eyes off the trail. “Yes.”

“Why are we driving so hard?”

The team labored through the next switchback, and he worked the brake with one hand and kept the lines steady with the other. The off gelding’s shoulder lathered with sweat.

“I want to reach the next decent water hole before dark.” The lie came out cleanly. He’d been telling it to himself for an hour.

She didn’t press.

The trail bent into another switchback. He worked the brake and the team took the curve.

When he glanced at Clara again, she had folded her hands in her lap and turned her face toward the country on her side of the wagon.

A warm pressure moved through his chest—the memory of her fingers closing over his yesterday, the press of them, the moment before she had pulled her hand back.

He pushed the memories down.

He couldn’t let himself linger on it today. Not on this grade with the man behind them somewhere on the trail and the team tiring.

Tomorrow, maybe. Tomorrow if the trail flattened. Tomorrow if the country opened up enough that he could see what was behind him without a forest of pine in the way.

The switchback above this one ran for forty yards along the face of a cut. The drop on Clara’s side was steep enough that a man’s stomach paid attention to it. He angled the team to keep the wagon as close to the inside of the mountain as the road allowed. Even still, the off wheel rode the edge for a half-second before it caught firm ground again.