A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [47]
He was crazy.
But a promise was a promise.
“Let’s go,” he said, reaching into the wagon-bed for the short-handled ax he’d borrowed when he rented the team and buckboard over at the livery stable. “It’ll be dark in a few hours, and there’s no telling when the snow will start up again, so we’d better get started.”
Edrina and Harriet were practically beside themselves with excitement, and Chester trotted around them all in big, swoopy circles, livelier than Clay had yet seen him.
The “tree” they finally settled upon looked more like a tumbleweed to Clay, who was used to the lush, fragrant firs that grew in the northern Arizona Territory, but Edrina and Harriet were enchanted. So Clay chopped down that waist-high scrub pine and carried it in one hand back to the wagon.
Dara Rose bore silent witness to all this, cautiously enjoying her daughters’ delight.
Edrina had noticed the stone markers Clay had set in place the last time he was there, and she squatted on her haunches to peer at one of them. Harriet and Chester stood nearby.
“What is this?” Edrina asked.
Clay smiled, tossed the tree into the bed of the wagon and walked back to stand over the little girl. He was aware of Dara Rose on the periphery of things, but he didn’t look in her direction.
“This is where I plan to put up my—our—house, once it arrives, that is.”
Edrina looked up at him, brow crinkling a little. “Houses don’t arrive,” she said.
“This one will,” Clay replied, enjoying the exchange. “It’s coming by rail, from Sears, Roebuck and Company, all the way out in Chicago, Illinois.”
“A house can’t ride on a train!” Harriet proclaimed gleefully. “Houses are too big to fit!”
Clay laughed, crouched between the two girls, to put himself at eye level with them. Chester nuzzled his arm and then, quick as can be, licked Clay’s face.
“I guess you’d say this house is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle,” Clay told the children. “It’s broken down into parts and packed in crates. When it gets here, I’ll have to put it together.”
Edrina frowned, absorbing his words. Then she whistled, through her teeth, and said, “Thunderation and spit.”
“Speak in a ladylike fashion, Edrina Nolan,” Dara Rose interceded coolly, “or do not speak at all.”
Clay tossed a look in his wife’s direction and stood tall again, resting one hand on each bonneted head. “I reckon we’ll head back to town now,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of that cloud bank over there on the horizon.”
The wind was beginning to pick up a little, too.
Dara Rose shooed the girls toward the hired buckboard, but they didn’t need anybody’s help to climb inside. They shinnied up the rear wheels, agile as a pair of monkeys, and planted themselves on either side of the scrub pine.
Clay hoisted Chester aboard and fastened the tailgate, but before he could get to Dara Rose and offer her a hand up, she was already in the front of the wagon, perched on the seat and looking straight ahead.
“Will there be room for us in your new house?” Harriet asked, just as Clay settled in to take the reins.
Clay looked down at Dara Rose, who didn’t acknowledge him in any visible way. “Yes,” he said. “You and Edrina will have to share a room at first, most likely, but after a year or two, I’ll be building on, and you’ll each have one of your own.”
“Then where will Mama be?” Harriet wanted to know. “In my room, or in Edrina’s?”
“Neither,” Clay said.
A flush bloomed into Dara Rose’s cheeks and, even though she hastened to adjust her bonnet, Clay had already seen. “Harriet,” Dara Rose said, “please sit down immediately.”
Harriet sat.
Clay bit the inside of his lip, so he wouldn’t smile, turned the team and wagon in a wide semicircle and headed toward town.
The girls chattered behind him and Dara Rose, in the bed of the buckboard, Chester no doubt hanging on every word. The wagon wheels, in need of greasing, squealed as the mules