Coming Home to Wyoming (Peaceful Valley Series Book 1) (4 page)

After they had rested for a while, Griff turned Jack toward a small sheep ranch in Kansas that belonged to old friends Abner and Martha Goodspeed. As a young bride, Martha had insisted on calling their new home Rainbow Water, because of the way a nearby stream looked when the sun was setting. Abner and everyone else told her that it was a foolish name for a farm, but Martha wouldn’t be swayed, and Rainbow Water it had remained for all the years they’d lived there.

Under the best circumstances, and with good weather, it was a three-day ride to Rainbow Water, and with Jack carrying two people instead of one, it would be slow going. But Griff knew that, with a bit of luck, he might just find a loving home for Eileen a ‘Roon at the end of this particular rainbow—and a clear conscience for himself.

* * *

He and Abner had met when they served together during the war, at Appomattox Station, Abner as a surgeon’s assistant, and Griff as a badly wounded and still green cavalry lieutenant with a shattered right leg. He had dropped out of college late in the war to join the Union Army, vowing to stay until it was over, which he missed doing by one day. Severely wounded on April eighth, he was transferred to an army hospital a few miles away from where the fighting still continued. The very next day, in a brief, unpretentious ceremony in the parlor of a private home in the nearby village of Appomattox Courthouse, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant. Three days short of four bloody years, the war was finally over.

Two days after the surrender, Abner was assigned to accompany Griff and several other badly wounded men on a train north, and ended up staying on at the army hospital as a volunteer. During the long, painful months of Griff’s recovery, he and Abner became close friends, spending hours each day batting around ideas about what they wanted to do, now that the war had ended.

Griffin Harper was the son and only child of Benjamin Griffin Harper, who operated a small but successful Nebraska cattle ranch left to him by his father, and by
his
father before him. Griff had grown up around cattle, and around horses—the kind of kid of whom it was often said that “he’d been in the saddle before he could walk.”

The old expression was accurate. Griff had never wanted, nor ever imagined himself doing anything
other
than running a cattle ranch and training the remuda of working cattle horses that every working ranch needed. It was Ben who insisted that his only child go to college, not merely to study the usual academic subjects, but to learn everything they could teach him about the growing science called animal husbandry, which promised exciting modern methods of cattle ranching.

Griff lasted three years before he tired of simply
learning
about cattle. He wanted to do what he’d grown up doing—feeding, roping, branding, and
herding
cattle from the back of an intelligent, well-trained horse. When and if science came up with a truly better way of doing all that, he’d be first in line to try out the new theories. In the meantime, he needed to get back in the saddle, and maybe spend the few off-hours he had pursuing a couple of his other interests—like women.

Ben hadn’t been pleased when Griff left school, but in one way, his son’s coming home was a much needed blessing. After thriving for three generations, the ranch had just suffered through and barely survived a two-year drought. Now, facing serious financial trouble, Ben had been forced to let most of his ranch hands go. His own boy had always been the best, most reliable cowhand he’d ever had—the best hand he’d never hired, was the joke between them. Moreover, after a bad fall from a horse, Ben was still feeling stiff, and had begun to spend more and more of his time out of the saddle.

Two weeks after Griff returned home to help with the ranch, his father died—a stroke, the doctors said, but Griff knew better. The old man had simply lost interest in living after he learned that in spite of everything he’d done to save everything he owned from bankruptcy, he was still going to lose the ranch to the bank. After a lifetime of hard work, though, after burying a beloved wife on a green hill behind the house she’d loved, and after seeing all his efforts to save the place fail, Ben closed his eyes for the last time a contented man. Until the last two years, when the price of beef had suddenly plummeted, he’d had a good life, and a happy one, and he died with only one regret. He had nothing but a battered saddle and his wife’s best china dishes to leave to his only child.

* * *

With his father gone and the paperwork completed that would surrender the ranch to the bank, Griff packed a bag and rode off to join the Union Army—as a commissioned cavalry officer, thanks to a lack of trained officers and to his own three lackluster years in college. In the end, he would spend a year less in the army than he had getting an education—but learning a lot more.

It was Abner Goodspeed who had encouraged him to try settling in the Wyoming Territory area when the war was over. Griff had liked the idea, and the two friends began making plans—plans that had to be postponed until Griff was well enough to be released from the hospital. While statehood seemed unlikely in the next few years, land was cheap, Abner explained, and the Union Pacific would be reaching Cheyenne in a couple of years, making shipping cattle easier. What better place to buy a small spread of his own, settle down, and raise quality beef, the way Ben had?

Before he’d gone off to war himself, Abner had shown the good sense to marry a soft spoken, mission educated Arapaho woman named Martha Walks in Tall Grass—the “girl he’d left behind,” as the song went. It wasn’t long before they had a small ranch in the northern part of Kansas, and three growing boys. While Abner worked the ranch, Martha taught English at the mission school where she’d lived for most of her life, orphaned by the slaughter of her entire family at the hands of a detachment of U.S. Cavalry sent west to “protect the Indians’ interests.”

With no place else to go after Ben died, Griff had gone to live with Martha and Abner for a few months, working as a horse wrangler, sheep-shearer, all-round farmhand, and at whatever else needed doing on his friends’ small spread. He didn’t care much for the smell of sheep, though, and his idea of finding his own place was never far from his thoughts. So, one day, he simply walked into the kitchen where Martha was making breakfast, and told the best friends he had in the world that he was going to pack up and leave, in order to “try to go it on his own”—farther north in Wyoming.

Neither Martha nor Abner was surprised by this announcement. They’d been expecting it for quite a while, and as sad as they were to see him go, they knew it was time. Martha had her own reasons for letting him go so easily. To her way of thinking, Griff had spent far too long keeping company with women he was unlikely to marry, and her hope was that he’d finally find himself a good wife to go with the home he wanted so badly.

Griff still had his mustering-out pay in the bank, and the proceeds from the sale of his dad’s livestock and equipment—enough to buy the land he needed—if he was careful, and if he could find exactly the spread he wanted—not too big, but with plenty of grazing land and good water. He’d need a stand of timber sufficient to build a house and barn, and some sturdy fences, and he’d like the whole place to be smack-dab in the middle of a protected valley.

It was a pretty large order, of course, especially on a tight budget, but Griff knew that it was out there—somewhere. So, with a promise to write often, he rode away from Rainbow Water the next morning, not sure of where he was going, or what he wanted to do, other than look for the elusive cattle ranch he’d been talking about since he left the Cavalry—the small ranch at the end of his
own
rainbow.

Four months later, he was still looking—wandering through valleys farther and farther north of Rainbow Water in the search for what he wanted. The search had been harder than he’d expected, but he was in no real hurry. Jack was good company, even if he didn’t talk much, the country was beautiful, and there were no complications in his life to worry about.

And just when he was congratulating himself on
how
uncomplicated his life was, he passed a young woman hanging upside down in an apple tree, and his life changed.

* * *

Now, only a few short months after he’d left, he was coming back to Rainbow Water—without the ranch he’d gone looking for, and without the bride that Martha had been hinting at since he left the army. Moreover, after everything they’d already done for him, he was about to ask his friends, who’d already done so much for him, for one last favor—the biggest favor he’d ever asked. He was going to ask if Abner and Martha could see their way clear to open their hearts and take one more lamb into their already crowded fold. An Irish one this time, with a fiery temper to match her flaming red hair, and a mouth that could use a good washing out with a bar of Martha’s homemade yellow soap.

After a lot of thought, it had seemed to Griff the perfect solution—or the best one he could come up with, anyway.

And as he had more or less expected, Eileen a ‘Roon O’Malley didn’t see it that way.

“So, you’re just gonna dump me at some fuckin’ county workhouse, like I was a…”

“It’s not a workhouse,” he explained patiently. “It’s a private farm, owned by a pair of decent, God fearing people.”

She sneered. “Like them so-called Christians at that orphan place, I bet. And let me tell you somethin’, Mr.
I
Know What’s Right For Ever’body in the Whole Danged World
. I had me just about all the Christian charity I can handle at that last shithole some righteous fool went and dropped me down.”

Griff groaned inwardly, imagining Martha’s reaction when she heard the girl swearing the way she usually did—like a drunken muleskinner. According to Abner, his brand new bride had cured him of cussing more than eighteen years ago, by kicking him out of the bridal bed—three miserable, lonely days at a time for every cuss word he uttered.

“The Goodspeeds aren’t like that,” he explained. “They’re Quakers. And it’s not a workhouse or an orphanage, either. It’s their home.”

“What the blazes is a Quaker?”

He thought for several moments, trying to remember how Abner had described it.

“It’s a group of people who belong to a church that teaches peace and brotherhood,” he explained lamely. “Only they don’t have real churches, or even preachers.”

She nodded. “Well, that’s one thing they got right, at least—no damned preachers. They the ones I heard about—who don’t hold with war, or whippin’ their young’uns?”

Griff chuckled. “You’re half right. Abner and Martha Goodspeed are fine people—the kindest and most patient I’ve ever known, and no, they don’t believe in going to war, but you’ll still get your backside warmed if you give them trouble. They’ve taken in more hell-bent young heathens and straightened them out than anyone else in the territory. So, while they’re saving you from perdition, they’ll see that you get an education, and do their best to turn you into a lady.”

“Who’s askin’ ‘em?” she shot back. “I’m just fine like I am. I ain’t never been sickly, I got all my own teeth, ‘cept for the one in back some kid knocked out when I called him a… Anyway, I can read and write pretty good. I can break and ride any horse you’re able to catch. I can push a plow, plant crops, raise pigs and chickens, and cook—if you ain’t too particular. And, like I already told you, I can play a damned harp, to boot. I can do a lot more stuff, too, but what I
don’t
want to do is to be no lady!”

Griff shook his head wearily. “Would you mind telling me why? What’s so wrong about being a lady, or at least
acting
like one?”

She slipped down from the horse and stomped off, then turned and shouted at him. “I already told you why! I’m about blue in the face from tellin’ you, damn it! It ain’t my fault you’re too fucking dumb to get it!”

“Would you just listen for a minute,” he pleaded, “and try to be reasonable? I’m not sending you off to state prison, for God’s sake! These people are…”

He stopped talking, because Eileen a ‘Roon had stuffed her fingers in her ears, stuck out her tongue, and started singing
The Star-Spangled Banner
—badly off-key, but at the top of her healthy young lungs.

“That’s enough!” he ordered, knowing perfectly well that he might just as well be talking to a fence post. Miss O’Malley had her back up, and until they’d had this out between them, all his plans for both their futures weren’t worth a plugged nickel.

There was no point arguing. He had run out of things to say.
She
wasn’t listening, and after the exhausting three-day ride to get here,
he
was too worn out to go through it all again. All the talking he’d been doing since they left Brewer’s Creek had gotten him nowhere, and he sure as hell didn’t want to introduce her to Abner and Martha in the mood she was in right now. What he needed was a few hours’ sleep, and at this point, what this small Irish
wildcat
needed was a spanking she’d remember for a hell of a long time.

Which was easier said than done. The girl had obviously seen it coming, and while she may have been small, she was quick on her feet, and agile, and it took a lot of muscle and even more determination to get her where he wanted her—across his knee, with her skirts over her head and the seat of her drawers within easy range. Later, Griff regretted thinking it, and attributed the ungentlemanly thought to exasperation and weariness, but for one vengeful moment, he came close to pulling her drawers down to her knees and letting the ungrateful little hellion have it, bare-assed. An unchivalrous idea, maybe, and probably not the way to treat a lady—even a reluctant one.