Page 6 of The Prospector's Only Prospect
“Ha ha. My sister is not the hardy, frontier type, Mr. Gardner. She struggles in Topeka, and we have amenities, and steamboats, and large trains of wagons coming through half the year. She’s warm and lovely but far too soft for the life you offer. She answered your ad because she was worried for your motherless children.”
“And you’re not? I’m shocked.”
“Pearl and I both suffered when we were orphaned,” she assured him coldly.
He visibly swallowed, but he didn’t apologize.
“As the elder, I’ve always done my best to protect her. I lobbied for her to refuse the Express ticket before you went to the trouble of sending it, but Pearl imagined this as a romantic adventure. She was convinced you two would fall in love.”
His lip curled as he said mockingly, “You’ve come all this way to save me from her fanciful notions? How charitable.”
“I’m saving myself. If you don’t want me, I’ll take myself around the corner and ask if any of those men want a practical woman who is currently in debt one hundred twenty-five dollars and fifty cents.”
“I’ll do it! I’ll marry you!” The muted voice came from behind her and was accompanied by a number of knocks and thumps on wood.
Marigold turned to see the outhouse door burst open. A heavyset man stumbled out, buttoning his baggy trousers.
“Ain’t no women here to marry, but I want a wife,” the stranger said with a bobbling nod. “I’ll be good to you. Swear. I can make payments on the debt, too,” he added to Mr. Gardner. “I got a claim up on—”
“You were in there thewhole time? Listening?” Marigold cried with disbelief.
“It sounded personal.” The man finished pulling his suspenders into place. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Hell.” Mr. Gardner grabbed her carpetbag. “This is going to be all over town before dusk.”
Chapter Three
Virgil didn’t have many options. Three children were a lot to handle.
He’d bribed the cousin of one of his partners to stay the summer but hadn’t found anyone willing to live with him and his children in a half-built cabin through the winter. Even the women at the cathouse said it was easier to look after fully grown men, one at a time, than marry into a ready-made family.
Levi, his son, was old enough to watch the little ones for an hour here and there, but Virgil couldn’t leave him all day with his little sister and the baby. Nor could Virgil spend all day with them himself. He needed to work. Grubbing for gold gave him the means to provide for his children. It wasn’t a matter of putting his back into farming to do so, either. His partners were depending on him, looking to their company and the claim they’d staked as the means to a future that wasn’t as hard as all their pasts had been.
No, damn it, he needed a mother for his children, or at the very least, a motherly minder.
Blast this one for seeming to know that. The few women who had answered his ad hadn’t been suitable. Most had barely been literate. Two had had children of their own. And none had been in the hurry he was. They had wanted to exchange multiple letters and ask a lot of uncomfortable questions before they committed. Only Pearl had sounded eager, educated, and earnest. He should have known she was too good to be true.
Could he trust Mrs. Davis, dee-vor-say? A woman who had traveled here under false pretenses? He’d been crossed by a wife once already.
As they returned to the front of the Express office, the men quit jabbering and gave Mrs. Davis a mixture of hopeful, hungry looks, like dogs waiting for a chance to snap a cut of meat from a butcher’s block. Prospectors and claim jumpers, every last one of them.
Mrs. Davis might be an opportunist, too, but Virgil didn’t want to let her go until he knew for sure.
“You’ll work off your debt as my housekeeper,” he told her loud enough to dampen enthusiasm in every face around him, including hers.
He paid a man at the front of the line so he could get his mail without waiting.
As the bundled stack was handed to him, Virgil asked her, “Which trunk is yours?” He nodded at the ones stacked near the door. “I’ll have it loaded on my wagon.”
“I don’t have a trunk. Just that.” She pointed at the carpetbag he still held.
“This is all you have?”
“I told you there was a fire,” she said with threadbare dignity.
He shook it—it wasn’t even full. And that backed up her story of being destitute. He heard again the hopeless way she’d said she wanted protection, and it punched a fresh hole in his gut. He wordlessly started down the street to the creek bridge.
It sounded like her uncle had dragged her and her sister from some finishing school out east to scratch potatoes from the dirt while being stoned to death by slavery-supporters. Her sister hadn’t mentionedthatwas how she came to be in Topeka.
