Escape To Sanctuary Read online

  Copyright

  ISBN 1-59310-526-6

  Copyright © 2005 by M. J. Conner. All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the permission of Heartsong Presents, an imprint of Barbour Publishing, Inc., PO Box 719, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683.

  All of the characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.

  All scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

  one

  Sanctuary, Montana—Summer 1910

  “Adam needs a wife.” Ike Thompson looked across the supper table at his younger brother. “And I been thinking we should help him get one.”

  “You mean a mail-order bride?” Lewis squeezed the hand of the plump young woman seated at his right. “Like my Kirsten?”

  “That’s exactly what I been thinking,” Ike said. “Yessir, old Adam needs a good woman.”

  “You got no call to be interfering in Adam Jacobs’s life,” Ike’s wife, Bertha, said.

  “Now, Bertie, we wouldn’t be interfering.” Ike grinned. “We’d just be helping out a friend.”

  Bertha mashed a piece of potato with her fork and shoved it into the mouth of the chubby toddler on her lap. “Adam don’t want your help.”

  “Just a minute, Bertha.” Lewis rubbed the back of his neck. “Me and Adam have been best friends since we wasn’t much older than Tad there. I think Ike’s right. We should help him out.” He smiled at his wife. “I recollect I was balkier than a calf facing a hot branding iron when Clyde Simms suggested I answer that ad in the magazine for a mail-order bride. An’ just look how good it turned out.”

  “You’re not Adam Jacobs.” Bertha persisted in her opposition. “Gertrude hurt Adam real bad. My ma always said, once burned, twice shy.”

  “Aw, Bertie, that was almost a year ago. It’s time Adam got over that redheaded Jezebel.”

  “Ike’s right about that,” Lewis interjected. “Adam’s lucky Gertrude—or Trudy as she called herself—took off ’fore they was married ’stead of after.”

  “It’s our Christian duty to help a brother in need.” Ike slapped the table with his open hand. “And that’s what we’re a-gonna do. Lewis, you get the writing paper and an envelope. We’ll compose a letter that will get our friend a good wife. Kirsten, you write a pretty hand. Me and Lewis will tell you what to say and you set it down.”

  Kirsten took the pencil and tablet from her husband. Lewis sat back down beside her and draped an arm across the back of her chair. “Okay, honey, here’s what you write. Prosperous Montana rancher in his midtwenties seeks wife.”

  “Better put in that he’s looking for a Christian wife.” Ike leaned across the table. “That’s real important.”

  “Yeah, ’tis.” Lewis rubbed the back of his neck. “And I reckon we better leave out that prosperous part. We don’t want a gold digger answering this ad.”

  “Why don’t we write something like this,” Kirsten said. “Christian rancher in his midtwenties seeking wife. She must be a devout Christian woman between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, not afraid of hard work, and willing to re-settle in Montana.”

  “That sounds real good, honey.” Lewis gave his bride an affectionate squeeze.

  “I ain’t getting involved in this.” Bertha snorted. “But I can tell you right now, Adam Jacobs ain’t gonna cotton to no sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “Now, Bertie, you don’t know that.” Ike glanced from his young sister-in-law to his wife then back again. “Maybe you’d best make that nineteen instead of sixteen, Kirsten.”

  Kirsten marked through what she had written and chewed on the end of the pencil for a moment before putting pen to paper. “Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four.” She looked up. “Does that sound better to you, Bertha?”

  “Humph!” Bertha stood up, set the baby on Ike’s knee, and began to clear the table. “I can tell you one thing for certain. No matter how you word that ad, Adam Jacobs is gonna be madder than a wet hen when a strange woman shows up on his doorstep.”

  ❧

  The sun at the twelve o’clock position announced dinnertime even before the ringing of the farmhouse dinner bell brought the rakes and mowers to a standstill.

  Adam Jacobs stepped down from the bare metal mower seat. As he stretched to release the kinks in his sore arms and back, his gaze swept over the mown field with its neat windrows of felled grass. The hay should be ready to stack tomorrow. He felt the satisfaction of a job well done.

  Turning, he gazed across an expanse of tall, undulating grass to a simple four-room house surrounded by a plain board fence and backed by large barns, corrals, and sheds. The roses his mother had planted were a splash of red against the fence. He had grown to manhood there. Now it was his older brother John’s home.

  He looked some six hundred feet to his left. Whatever good spirits Adam felt over the morning’s work vanished at the sight of his one-room unpainted cabin and outhouse sitting alone on the prairie.

  “Hey, Adam!” John hollered. “You ready to eat?”

  Adam unhitched the horses and led them to the shade. After they were watered and staked out to graze beside John’s and the Thompson brothers’ teams, the four men walked toward the house.

  “We should have your hay put up by the end of the week,” Ike said.

  John nodded. “Should be able to move into your fields Monday morning.”

  “If it doesn’t rain.” Adam scowled at the cloudless blue sky.

  Lewis gave a good-natured slap to Adam’s shoulder. “It ain’t gonna rain before we get the hay put up. Where’s your faith, man?”

  “I’ve got faith.” Adam shrugged his friend’s hand from his shoulder. “Faith that anything bad that can happen, will.”

  “That ain’t so, Adam.” Lewis shook his head. “There’s lots of good in this world. All you gotta do is look around you.”

  “I’m looking.” Adam turned his head toward the small cabin sitting alone on the prairie. “And I don’t see anything good.”

  The other men made a halfhearted attempt at conversation, but Adam’s foul mood cast a pall over the group, and the remainder of their walk was made in silence.

  Bertha stood on the back porch with an armful of towels. “Get cleaned up before you come in the house.” She laid the towels on the washstand beside a steaming basin of water. “Your dinner is waiting. Don’t tarry or everything will be cold.”

  The screen door squealed and slammed behind her as she went back inside.

  After the men washed up, they sat down to eat. Several minutes later, Ike sopped up the last of the gravy on his plate with a piece of fresh bread. “You surely outdone yourselves today, ladies.” He popped the morsel in his mouth. “These is mighty fine eats.”

  Ruth and Kirsten both smiled in acknowledgment of the compliment. Bertha grunted and continued to spoon mashed potatoes and gravy into baby Tad’s mouth.

  “One of these days, everything I’ve got will go to Tad and his brothers.” Ike leaned back in his chair. “It gives a man a sense of. . .of. . .immortality, I reckon you’d say, to know he’s building something for the future. Why, when me and Lewis is dead and gone, there’ll still be Thompsons farming this land. Ain’t that right, Lewis?”

  “Yessir, it surely is.” Lewis speared a piece of fried chicken and deposited it on his plate. “There ain’t nothing like having a good, God-fearing woman to share your life with. I didn’t know how lonely I was till my Kirsten came to me.”

  He looked across at Adam sitting in his usual
place at the old round oak table that had belonged to his mother. “You ever give any thought to getting married, Adam? I mean, since Trudy left.”

  Adam looked up from his plate. “No, I haven’t, Lewis.” His voice was level and flat. “I’m perfectly content the way I am.”

  “Well now, Adam, you know that ain’t true.” Ike put his two cents’ worth in. “God never meant a man to live alone. That’s why he created the woman to be his helpmeet.”

  Ruth set a piece of cherry pie in front of John. “Would anyone else care for pie?”

  Both Thompson brothers nodded yes to the pie but were not deterred from their train of thought. “Trudy ain’t worth moping over, Adam.” Ike spoke around a mouthful of pie. “You oughta thank your lucky stars she left when she did.”

  “I’m not moping, Ike.” Adam clenched his hands beneath the tablecloth. “But if I were, it would be my own business.”

  “Well, that’s neither here nor there now,” Lewis chimed in. “What you oughta do is send back East for a wife like I done.”

  Adam shoved his chair back and stood. “You order a saddle blanket, Lewis. Not a wife.” He blurted the words before he thought them through.

  Over Lewis’s shoulder, he saw Kirsten’s stricken face. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Truly I am. I meant no offense to you. But I don’t want a wife, mail-order or any other kind. Now I’m going back to work.” He turned and stalked out the door.

  ❧

  Two months later, the Thompson brothers were uncharacteristically quiet and ill at ease when they sat down across the table from Adam at the church’s October fellowship dinner.

  Lewis cleared his throat. “Adam, I reckon you haven’t had a change of heart about that mail-order bride, have you?”

  “I have not.” Adam raised his head and looked directly into Lewis’s eyes. “Look, Lewis. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I don’t want a bride—mail-order or otherwise.”

  If they hadn’t been at a church dinner, he would have told Lewis exactly what he thought of a woman who would resort to answering an ad to find a husband. Instead, he continued his meal, shoving the food into his mouth with a vengeance and hoping the Thompson brothers would take the hint and go elsewhere to eat. They didn’t.

  “Adam, me and Lewis got something we need to tell you.” Ike pulled at his collar. “Now don’t go getting mad at us. We meant well. And when we found out how you felt about it, we tried to undo it. Honest, we did. But it was too late.”

  The brothers had the sheepish appearance of a couple of egg-sucking dogs caught in the act. A sense of foreboding crept over Adam. “Too late for what, Ike?”

  “It ain’t really as bad as it sounds.” Ike’s voice took on a cheerful note. “On account of Bertie made us put this clause in.” He leaned forward. “Kind of like an escape clause, you might say. You got six months to decide if you want to keep her.”

  “Keep her!” Adam gripped the fork in his hand so tightly the handle bent. “Keep who, Ike?”

  He looked slowly from one brother to the other, a feeling of dread churning his insides. “What have you done?”

  “Now don’t go getting all upset,” Lewis said. “We was only trying to help. And it ain’t like it can’t be undone.”

  “What can’t be undone?” Adam watched the brothers wilt under his daggered stare. “What have you done?” he repeated.

  “Well, you see, it’s like this.” Lewis took a swallow of water. “My Kirsten is a real jewel. We’re expecting a little one in six months. There ain’t nothing like having a family, Adam. And, well, me and you been friends since we was boys. I couldn’t stand to see you so down in the mouth.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean, you been moping around, and me and Ike decided you needed a good woman to take your mind off things. So seeing as how we had a little extra money, we sent for a bride for you.”

  “A bride!” Adam trembled with barely suppressed rage. “You had no right to stick your nose into my affairs.”

  “We know we didn’t. And, well, we’re right sorry we done it. But at the time, it seemed like a good idea.” Ike reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. “This here telegram come for you last week.”

  When Adam refused to take it from his outstretched hand, Ike laid it on the table between them.

  “If we weren’t in church, I’d thrash the living daylights out of both of you.”

  “Well, we kinda thought you might feel that way.” Ike’s laugh sounded forced. “That’s why we decided to tell you at church.”

  Lewis pushed back his chair and stood. “I reckon we’d best be getting on home, Ike.” His gaze rested on Adam for a moment before sliding away. “Kirsten wasn’t feeling too good, and Bertha stayed home with her. We wouldn’t have come neither, but we thought we ought to tell you about your bride coming and all, so’s you can pick her up. She’ll be arriving at the depot tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!” The blood pounded in Adam’s ears. “You ordered her, Lewis Thompson. You pick her up.”

  “Well, I would. . .” Lewis and Ike edged toward the door. “But it wouldn’t look proper, what with me being a married man and all. Besides, with my Kirsten feeling so puny, I can’t see my way clear to leave her alone any more than’s necessary.”

  As the door swung closed behind the brothers, Adam grabbed up the telegram and read a confirmation of what they had just told him. Tomorrow afternoon, a woman he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want would arrive at the train station expecting him to meet her.

  Adam lurched from his chair and found his brother. “I’m going home, John.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Too angry to speak, Adam thrust the telegram into his brother’s hand.

  He didn’t look back as he crossed the room and closed the door behind him. What had Lewis and Ike been thinking? The talk was beginning to die down about him and Trudy. Now this! He knew what the main topic of conversation in Sanctuary would be for the next six months. Him. And this. . .this. . .girl the Thompson brothers had bought for him. Well, he for sure wasn’t meeting her train tomorrow. For all he cared, she could sit in the train station till doomsday. As for the Thompson brothers. . .

  He mounted his horse, Copper, and rode away from the church. Why couldn’t they have just left well enough alone? Why couldn’t everybody just leave him be?

  two

  Adam’s anger on Sunday was nothing compared to the fury that roiled through him as he hitched the big draft horses to the wagon on Monday. It was spitting snow. He figured it would turn into a full-fledged blizzard before he got back home.

  “Lewis should have been the one going out in bad weather to meet this girl. I have half a notion to leave her sitting in the station.”

  “It’s not her fault, Adam.” His brother had been listening to him fume for the last hour. “She accepted your offer in good faith.”

  “My offer!” Adam snorted. “I never offered her anything.”

  “She doesn’t know that.”

  Adam checked the harness. “What kind of woman would answer an ad like that, John?”

  “Maybe she’s an orphan like Kirsten.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking. She’s probably a sixteen-year-old kid.” His shoulders slumped. “I’d rather take a beating than drive into Sanctuary today.”

  “Dad raised us to honor our commitments.” John slapped Adam on the shoulder. “You can’t leave her sitting in the depot.”

  “I know.” Adam scowled. “I’ll pick her up at the depot and drive her to Mrs. Carlyle’s boardinghouse. I’ll give her money to buy a ticket back to wherever she came from because that is the honorable thing to do. But I won’t pretend to be happy about it.”

  John raised the lid of the box behind the seat and put two folded blankets in the covered storage place. “We’ll be praying for you.”

  “I’ll be back before dark if I don’t get caught in a blizzard and freeze to death on the way home.” Adam swung
up on the wagon seat.

  He released the brake and drove out of the barnyard. The cold stung the exposed skin of his face as the gray horses plodded along. If he had ridden Copper, he would have made the trip in half the time. That’s what he should have done. Ridden his saddle horse and let the girl get her luggage to the boardinghouse the best way she could.

  An honorable man. “Yeah, and what’s that going to get me? Frozen solid most likely. I just hope when they discover my lifeless remains come spring, Lewis Thompson knows he’s responsible.”

  Lewis had been his best friend for as long as he could remember. In all those years, he had pulled some boneheaded stunts, but this was the worst thing he had ever done. Just because Lewis was happy being married to a silly kid didn’t mean Adam would be.

  Adam pulled his coat collar up around his neck. “If I was looking for a wife—which I’m not—I’d want a woman I could talk to. All Kirsten does is giggle and ask questions. I’d go crazy if I had to live with a woman like that. The sooner this girl is gone the better.”

  ❧

  Emily Foster made a halfhearted attempt to brush the soot from her threadbare coat. Bits and pieces of a Bible verse her mother always quoted about the ways of God being past understanding had been running through her mind ever since she boarded the train. She should remember all of it, but with her head pounding like this, she couldn’t think. The past week was hazy and out of focus. The only thing that stood out clearly in her mind was her abduction.

  Was it just one week ago that she had been hurrying along a dark New York City street? Fearful of every strange sound, she had kept her head bent low as she clutched her shabby coat close, although the worn garment provided little protection from the damp chill of the October night.

  She walked on, placing one tired foot in front of the other. Her footfalls were now the only sound on the deserted street. Then she stumbled over a loose brick and looked up. That was when she saw a wavering light on the corner ahead. Quickly, she shrank back into the shadows, her heart thundering in her ears.