Chapter 3
The weeks passed quickly and the year 1870 rolled around. At the beginning of January, when Genie O'Hara was still in New York, a thin coat of snow covered the flat expanse around young Johnny Folsom's homestead in Kansas. The ice on the pond was mushy and had wide holes in it by now, but the ponderosas behind it still stood snow-covered like silent sentinels. It was a quiet morning.
The door creaked when Johnny opened it and stepped out onto the veranda of the long log cabin. Frowning, he eased it shut carefully, so as not to make it creak again. A creaking door was bad under the present circumstances.
"Got to fix that," he muttered under his breath.
Johnny cast flickering glances over his left and then his right shoulder when he walked over to the barn, where he heard his two cows mooing. His eyes roamed the landscape. But there was nobody. His hand still came to rest on the handle of the six-shooter that he carried in a low-slung belt around his hip.
He slid the door of the barn open and entered its twilight. At the sight of him, the cows mooed again.
"I hear you," he said. He wrinkled his nose. "And I smell you, too." At least it was warm in here. Stinky and warm.
Johnny grabbed a tin bucket and a stool and sat down to milk his cattle. Not that he enjoyed it much. For him it was an acquired taste. It just had to be done. Every once in a while he emptied the milk from the bucket into a tin can on which he then put a lid. He filled two cans that he then lined up along the wall outside.
When he was done, he had to do his least favorite chore: get rid of the dirty straw around the cows and the horses. The young man sighed as he reached for the pitchfork that stuck in a bale of hay. Shoveling dung was just not what he was meant to do in life. He was meant to ride, to have the big sky for his tent at night, to rope longhorns, fillies and pretty ladies. Never mind that he'd never roped a lady in his life, much less a pretty one.
But shoveling droppings?
In those moments, Johnny hated the life of a farmer.
He'd only been one for nine months.
Scraping the gunk off the hardpacked floor and depositing it in a wheelbarrow, he thought back of the moment when he first arrived here. That had been at the end of the last winter.
That long already...
Run down and half starved, he'd barely made it to Mr. Homer MacGill's farm before he broke down over on the veranda, in front of the very door he'd come out of half an hour ago. The man was kind enough to take him in. But Johnny soon found, Mr. MacGill was in just as bad a shape as he was himself. The man's Wichita Indian wife had just passed away a few weeks before, a fact that severely depressed Mr. MacGill. The farm was in disarray, the cattle untended. His broncos had almost all reverted back to being wild. There was hardly a useful one left among them. With Mr. MacGill so apathetic, Johnny quickly found himself to be the farmer in residence.
Then Mr. MacGill didn't watch his step one day out in the woods, where he was checking on some snares he'd laid, and fell into a den of rattlesnakes. At least five hundred reptiles had congregated to spend the winter in a comfortable pit under a rock, where they accidentally met Mr. MacGill, who'd been heavy with drink and probably didn't even realize what happened to him when they bit him. Johnny walked around all night, shouting his name. He found him the next day.
Johnny had become a farmer not by choice, but out of necessity.
The wheelbarrow was full. Johnny leaned the fork against the wall, grabbed the wheelbarrow's handles and rolled it out of the stable towards the growing pile outside.
He had just dumped the load when he noticed the lone rider approaching his farm. Johnny left the wheelbarrow standing, pushed down on his hat and placed his hand on his gun's handle.
Then he recognized the man, who wore a tall cowboy hat and a long brown coat. He wasn't the point man of a gang. It was just sheriff Theophilus MacRaven on his shiny black stallion. The sheriff's office was in Courage, the nearby town. Johnny relaxed.
"Ridin' circuit, sheriff?" the young farmer said.
The lawman sported an impressive walrus mustache full of hoar frost. He nodded. "Got a letter for you, Johnny. Thought, I'd deliver it to you."
"Got much else to do?" Johnny said casually.
"County's quiet this time a year. Not much going on on the trail right now." By trail he meant the Santa Fe Trail that passed through Kansas not far from here.
Deliberately and slowly the sheriff reached into his coat. Johnny's eyes followed his every move. Then the sheriff held the letter up in his hand and his mouth split in a wide grin. He pinched the letter between two fingers and held it up to his nose. He closed his eyes and inhaled with a raptured look on his face.
"Do I smell lilies?" he said.
"Aw, sheriff, sir," Johnny said. He took his hat off and slapped his thigh with it before putting it back on. "You're giving me a hard time."
"Your redemption draweth nigh," the sheriff said.
"You're pulling my leg and it hurts."
"I'd never do it in public, Johnny, and you know it. Here it's just the two of us." He reached down and handed him the letter.
Johnny stood and stared at the off-white envelope. He wasn't a very proficient reader, but he could make out that it had been sent from Manhattan, New York. He stared at the letter long enough that the sheriff finally got off his horse and stood next to him.
"Why, don't you want to open it?"
If anybody else would have suggested that, Johnny would have deemed that person to be nosy. But Sheriff MacRaven knew that Johnny had sent for a mail order bride. As a matter of fact, it had been Sheriff MacRaven's idea to begin with and therefore Johnny could hardly blame him for wanting to know how it was working out.
Johnny slid a knife out of his bootleg and opened the envelope. He replaced the knife and took the neatly folded piece of paper out. Clearing his throat, he glanced at the sheriff, unfolded the single sheet laboriously and looked at the sea of letters until his eyes swam.
He handed the sheet to the sheriff. "Would you mind reading it, sir?"
Sheriff MacRaven didn't mind one bit. He grabbed the letter and perused it while Johnny studied his face. "It's from Wilhelmina Bartleby."
The young farmer nodded pensively. He'd figured that much.
"She has a candidate for you." Sheriff MacRaven read on and grunted approvingly. "Seems like a mighty fine lady wants to come and be your wife. Genie O'Hara. She's eighteen. Almost like you. Doesn't ask for much. Likes wide-open spaces and the big sky. She also likes to ride horseback. Her father was a horse trader before the war. She's actually from Georgia."
Johnny listened with only half an ear. He wasn't really interested in learning what his prospective bride liked and didn't like or where she came from. He didn't even care what she looked like. What counted for him was that this matchmaking lady from New York had a wife for him.
Because that meant, his days here were almost over.
Finally!
All along he had intended to split the scene as soon as she'd arrived. Let her take care of the farm and everything that came with it. He was never meant to be a farmer. Fate had foisted this on him and now he was finally getting out from under that load.
Good.
He also wasn't safe here. The sheriff didn't know it, but Johnny needed to get away from here for more reasons than just one, because any day they might find him and —
Johnny found that the sheriff was staring at him.
"Did you listen?" the lawman said.
"Sure," Johnny said.
Sheriff MacRaven put his hands to his hips, shifted his weight onto one leg and said, "Tell me what I just said."
"Um," Johnny said. He stared blankly and wrote little circles into the air with the envelope in his hand.
"Getting married knocks the wind out of your brain, huh?" the sheriff said.
...
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