Come Spring Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stairs. The woman was thin, almost to the point of emaciation. Her hair was lank and long, not really blond, nor was it brown, but a faded, indiscriminate color. Her eyes were blue, her skin sallow. The pinched lips, held tight beneath her narrow nose, made the woman appear older than she really was. Although Annika nodded in greeting, the woman ignored her and moved on. With a shrug, Annika stepped aboard and quickly put the incident behind her. She took her seat again, left on her cloak because the car had become drafty with both doors open, and opened her journal.
    A T ten minutes past twelve, Buck Scott cursed himself as he rode down Capitol Avenue toward the Union Pacific passenger station in Cheyenne. He had lost track of time when he made one last stop at Myers and Foster’s shoe store on Sixteenth, and now feared he had missed meeting Alice Soams when the noon train arrived. As it was he was so far behind that he had not had time to get a haircut or a shave. He had taken longer than necessary when he stopped at Tivoli Hall to partake of some St. Louis beer, went into Zehner and Buechner and Company to buy a simple gold wedding band, then there had been those last few moments he’d spent standing in front of the window at the Wyoming Hardware Company staring at an ornately decorated Aladdin ventilating stove, wondering how he could get one up the mountain.
    If not for all the delays he would have been at the station well before noon, for he had made it to Cheyenne in record time—a day and a half—but it had been a day and a half of hard riding leading an extra mare and two pack mules. He could only hope the trip back into the mountains would go as smoothly, especially with an inexperienced rider and all her possessions in tow. As he urged his horse on, careful to avoid the buggies and wagons vying for space in the crowded, muddy street, he tried to quell the roiling nervousness that had plagued him since he neared Cheyenne. What would Alice Soams be like? How would she take to him and life in the Rockies? Why in the hell had he ever decided that marriage was the only way he could cope with his present predicament?
    He was used to his life of isolation. Hunting and trapping filled his days, sporadic trips into Cheyenne took care of any need he ever had for companionship. Whenever he wanted a woman to ease his loneliness, he’d bought and paid for one for a night. Until now, that had always been enough. But now, matters were such that he couldn’t even leave the cabin unless there was someone there to watch over the place, so after endless hours of careful deliberation, Buck took the only option he felt was open to him—he had answered the advertisement in a Boston newspaper and found himself a wife.
    There was a crowd milling about on the platform. Even though he was a good head taller than almost everyone there, by the time he had tied up his animals and mingled among them, he still had not spotted anyone who might have been Alice Soams. There was only one unaccompanied female in the group. She was standing off to the side of the platform alone, but she was nearly seventy years old. He hoped to God she wasn’t Alice.
    Buck took off his hat and ran his hand over his hair. He’d tied it back into a thick queue with a strip of leather, but the stuff was so naturally wavy that some of it was always working its way out of the tie. He slammed his hat back on and pushed his way through the crowd to the ticket window.
    When he had the clerk’s attention he asked, “There been a lady here askin’ after Buck Scott? She was due in on the noon train.”
    “She couldn’t have asked,” the clerk said shortly, “because the noon train’s late.”
    Buck looked around at the crowd, passengers waiting to depart, folks there to meet new arrivals, and asked, “How late’s it going to be?”
    “No tellin’. When I hear anything from down the line, I’ll announce it.” With that the man motioned forward an