Saga: Contance's Story Read online

  Saga: Contance's Story

  by Maren Smith

  Newsite Web Services Publishing

  www.disciplineanddesire.com

  Copyright ©2007 by Maren Smith

  First published in 2007, 2007

  NOTICE: This eBook is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution to any person via email, floppy disk, network, print out, or any other means is a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. This notice overrides the Adobe Reader permissions which are erroneous. This eBook cannot be legally lent or given to others.

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  Saga: Contance's Story

  by Maren Smith

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * * *

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  Saga: Contance's Story

  by Maren Smith

  Saga

  Constance's Story

  By

  Maren Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright 2007 © by Maren Smith

  Published by Newsite Web Services

  by arrangement with the author

  This book may not be reproduced in whole

  or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without written permission of the author, who may be reached at [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales, and events are either a product of the author's 4

  Saga: Contance's Story

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  imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, and events are purely coincidental. 5

  Saga: Contance's Story

  by Maren Smith

  CHAPTER ONE

  All Charles "Buster" Henry wanted out of life was quiet. That was it in a nutshell. Quiet.

  But as he stood on his front porch in his baggy gray long johns and bare feet, his rifle held loosely in one hand, staring down into three sets of wide, little girl eyes, somehow he just knew he'd never again get what he wanted. They stood in a row, reminding him of a set of little tin stackers, each being just a head or so taller than the one to her left. The oldest couldn't have been more than four, the youngest was maybe two. Their pinafores were dirty and so were their hands and faces, which were streaked by tears and runny noses. All three of them were crying, and that middle one especially had a holler on her that was beginning to set his teeth on edge.

  It was all this caterwauling that had startled him straight up out of bed first thing this morning. It had brought him running out onto the porch without giving him a chance to light the stove or start the coffee to boiling. He hadn't even pulled his pants or his boots on. Heck, he hadn't even peed!

  What in tarnation was he gonna do with three little girls?

  He wasn't a fatherly man. He wasn't married. He wasn't even nice!

  What mother in her right mind would just drop her little darlin's—well, they might have been darlin's if that one in the middle would ever stop squallin' and hiccuppin'—on the front porch of a grumpy, scruffy, grouchy old man, such as 6

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  himself? She'd have to be a lunatic. Or exceedingly desperate. Personally, Buster was strongly leaning towards lunatic since that made it a whole lot easier to dislike the woman, whoever she was, sight unseen.

  Edging past the children, he walked to the end of his porch and looked down the empty road leading to and from his house. Tall evergreen pines and hazel nut trees waved their branches in the cool morning breeze. The only thing standing in his garden was the scarecrow. The open door to the privy showed no one hiding in there, either. Aw, hell! There was no guessing which direction that lunatic mother had come or gone in, or how long ago she'd left.

  He turned around and once more took a long gander at the three little tin-stacker girls, standing in a row in front of his door. T'weren't a one of them any higher than the knee on a cricket. And now that his shock was starting to wear off and he got a better look at them, if these girls had the same mother, then there was no way any of them could of had the same father.

  The oldest of the trio was gazing up at him with large green eyes and a thick mane of dark curls haloing her dirty round face. The middle was a carrot top if ever God had created one, with hazel eyes framed by long, orange lashes and a smattering of freckles that dusted her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. The littlest, barely even a toddler, stood sucking two fingers, her overlarge baby blues fixed unwaveringly on him and her mop of sandy blonde hair a 7

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  mess of tangles and snarls that probably hadn't seen a brush in over a week.

  They were skinny, scrawny little things, dusty and dirty and their noses all needed wiping. What in the world was he gonna do with them? The right thing, he supposed, would be to take them to the Pastor Garris. And warn the man that he had at least one, and quite possibly three, lunatic mothers running around the countryside.

  That meant going into town, cuss it.

  Buster heaved a disgruntled sigh and shifted his gun to his other hand. "Blast," he growled, glared back over his shoulder at the empty road again and, finally, across the yard to the privy. That was going to have to wait. First things just had to come first.

  Buster took the little girls into his house and made them breakfast: eggs and bacon and coffee. On retrospect, milk might have been better for them, and were he planning on doing the fatherly thing for any length of time, he might have been tempted to get a cow. But he wasn't. So he wouldn't. He just dumped some sugar in their cups, spooned out the majority of the loose bean chunks, and the trio drank it down just fine. In fact, they sat around the table for some time, swingin' their feet and munching on what coffee grounds he'd missed.

  Having full bellies shushed them up right nicely, too. Ah, peace and quiet. There was no sound in the world quite like it.

  Now to get them into town.

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  After donning some clothes and leaving them at the table while he took himself out to the privy, Buster stalked down to the barn and hitched up his wagon. He tossed some hay into the back to provide the girls with a little comfort during the long ride, and when everything was ready, went back inside to get them. And promptly discovered that the ingenuity of a four-year-old was not something to take for granted. His particular four-year-old (not that he was laying claims of ownership, mind you) had pushed her chair up to the stove, lifted down the near empty coffee pot and set it on the floor. Having diluted what little liquid remained inside with enough sugar to create a thick, syrupy goo, at the point that he walked into his house, she was squatting over the pot on a floor covered in sugar, fishing out syrupy coffee beans with a spoon and feeding them to each of her siblings in turn. All three girls jumped up and down, shrieking and hollering and throwing hay in the back of the wagon for the entire hour and half it took to drive into town. If he ever again heard the happy squeal of laughing children, it would be too soon. Thankfully, by the time he pulled up to the Pastor's house, they had darned near jumped and squealed themselves plumb tuckered out. Not only were they quiet again, but they were laid out, half-buried in the hay like puppies, an indiscriminate pile of arms and legs and wide, coffee-wired eyes that should have been sleepy.

  "Stay put," he told them as he pushed in the brake and climbed down from the driver's seat. They sat up curiously, watching as he climbed
the Pastor's front porch and knocked on the door.

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  Margo, the Pastor's plump, pretty, spinster of a sister answered a few minutes later.

  Buster snatched off his hat. He'd always liked Margo. She had laugh lines around her eyes and streaks of grey in her honey-colored hair, but she was always kind and always smiling. Even at a grumpy old man like himself. And she never nagged. Leastwise, she'd never nagged at him, and that was a rare quality in a woman. He never could figure out why she hadn't ever married.

  "Why hello, Buster," she smiled, her cheeks rounding and her eyes sparkling in a way that made a man's heart flip-flop to stop right inside his chest.

  Buster wrung his hat between his big hands and backed up a respectable step, as though some extra distance between them might make her less of a siren's draw. Dropping his eyes to the porch, he thumbed over his shoulder at the wagon and the three hay-bedraggled urchins that sat silently staring back at them. A man of few words, he said, "Got left on my porch."

  Margo rose up on tiptoes as she glanced past his shoulder and her face quickly reflected her shock. "Oh my stars!

  Buster! Oh, the poor little dears!" And that was it for Margo. She shoved past him and was off the porch and up into the back of the wagon with a graceful agility that her plump, round loveliness belied.

  "Oh, Buster! They're just darling! But—" she looked at him aghast, having already scooped the littlest one into her arms to rock her. "Whatever will you do with them?" 10

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  "Think your brother might take 'em?" He couldn't help but sound just a little hopeful.

  Margo looked surprised again, and then she winced. That was another thing about Margo. She was always right expressive. "He's in Salem until next Monday. But I'm sure he'll be happy to take them after that. I'll bet he'll know just the right family for them, too. Can you hang onto them until he gets back next week? Just one week?"

  "My crops need tendin', Margo."

  "Well, I'll watch them during the day so you can take care of your farm." She smiled at him then, that dazzling smile that was chalk so full of sunshine and sparkle that it pierced his body with a warmth that went straight to his... She was the Pastor's sister, he told himself firmly. That practically made her a nun. A man his age had no business thinking of nuns like that. And his automatic reaction to her smile was certainly enough to convince him that he really didn't need Margo in his house every day for a week. It wouldn't be good for her or her reputation, and it would be an absolute hell for him. He opened his mouth to tell her so.

  "Okay," he said instead.

  She beamed another sunny smile at him. "I'll be out bright and early tomorrow. It'll all work out for the best now, you'll see. The week will just fly by. And in the meantime, I'll see if some of our local mothers don't have some hand-me-downs they'd be willing to donate to these little angels." She cuddled all three to her ample bosom, kissed the attention-sponge of a toddler on top of her golden head, and then stood up to climb out of the back of the wagon. Buster 11

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  remembered his manners in time and jogged down off the porch to help her. But when he held up his hands to catch her round the waist and swing her safely to the ground, she shooed at him.

  "Oh, I'm too heavy for that, Buster. Land sakes, I'm like to crush you. You'll be laid up for a week with a bad—oh!" He caught her waist anyway and lifted her down. No way was he having Margo Garris in the back of his hay wagon without his touching her at least once. She turned the most becoming shade of pink as his hands lingered on her waist a second or two longer than was necessary. "Oh my," she said weakly. "My, my." He put his hat back on his head and tipped it to her. "I reckon I'll be seein' you tomorrow then, Miss Margo." She cleared her throat noisily as he climbed up into the driver's seat and released the wagon's brake.

  "You, uh ... you take care of those babies," she called out as he gave the horses a light slap with the reins. Turning the wagon, Buster drove for home. His scowl was just as black as it ever was, although a man with less emotional control might've been just a-grinnin' like a fool. He glanced over his shoulder at the little girls, giggling softly as they played some sort of half-buried-in-the-hay game of hide- n-seek. Looked like there was a good and a bad side to everything. The good side here was that three little girls made for a mighty powerful Margo magnet. Of course, the bad side was that now he was going to have to get a cow.

  * * * *

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  Saga: Contance's Story

  by Maren Smith

  Sixteen years later...

  Judd Faris only came down out of the Mountains once or twice a year. Once in the spring and again in the fall when it was time to sell his furs, gather supplies, then head for his winter cabin. This year, hunting had been very good and his spirits were high. This year, he was finally going to be able to afford a house and land of his own. He was going to have a barn to stable his horse and mules. He was going to sleep in a bed every night and cook his suppers on a stove. He might even have a little bit of land on which to start up his own lumbermill and maybe to do some farming. And above all else, he was going to have a wife and a mess of kids running around and calling him Daddy.

  That in a nutshell was what he wanted. It was always what he'd wanted. And now, after nine years of hunting and saving, he was finally going to get his dream. He felt so good he wasn't even trying to hurry the pack mules along. No sir, he was content to mosey along on horseback, envisioning what his house would look like, what his kids would look like, and in no hurry at all to reach the trading post just outside of Longview. He had all the time in the world, a brand new life awaiting him as soon as he sold this last stack of furs, and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing finer than the beautiful autumn morning, sprawling out in all directions around him. The multicolored leaves clung to their branches, shivering in the gentle breeze. He could smell the damp pungent earth and the slight fresh scent of rain in the air. There was a light 13

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  trickling of creek water tumbling over rocks somewhere under all the lush brush off to the right of the road. Overhead, squirrels scampered and played in the tree branches and birds called to one another, already forming flocks that swooped and dove through the air, practicing in formation for that long Southward journey they were destined to make. And, of course, above and beyond all of that, there was the sweet and lilting sound of a woman, hidden somewhere out of sight, singing...

  Hold on.

  He reined in his horse and the two mules plodded to a stop beside him. Cocking his head, Judd listened intently, catching wisps of the melody as it floated on the breeze rustling through the evergreen trees. He turned halfway around in his saddle, trying to get a fix on the origin of the song, half sung and half hummed as it was, the way that women only did when otherwise preoccupied and no one else was around to hear them.

  Judd closed his eyes, content for a moment just to listen. He vaguely recognized the melody as a church hymn. It'd been a while since he'd heard anything so sweet as that lilting angel's voice. For a moment no longer than the span of a heartbeat, he had the most absurd inclination to pinch himself, just to make sure he really was still in the world of mortals instead of having been, say, killed by a cougar without realizing it a mile or so back.

  Nope. A quick tweak on his wrist told him that he was still very much alive. So the owner of that blessed voice must be a woman and not the angel her song suggested she might be. 14

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  His ears tracked the tune, and Judd turned his head towards the bubbling creek, his grey eyes trying hard to pierce through the dense trees and brush. She must be in there. Washing clothes, maybe. Could be fishing, he supposed.

  Well, curiosity hadn't done him in
yet. Judd dismounted, loosely tying his horse to a tree branch, and headed into the woods. He moved quietly, not wanting to scare the quarry he hunted or disturb her sweet singing, stepping over sticks, climbing cautiously down into a ravine where he finally spotted the creek. And the angel singing beside it. She was picking huckleberries. Hers was a full figure. A woman of Rubenesque proportions. The sort who wouldn't get lost when he enfolded her in his arms. And if she was only half as sweet as her voice, the idea of all that enfolding was enough to set his blood to pounding in his veins. She had blond hair, sedately pinned at the nape of her neck, just above the folded down collar of her green and grey calico dress. She looked almost matronly, rather than maidenly, and a sudden thought occurred that made his smile abruptly vanish.

  "Aw hell!" he blurted. "You ain't married, are you?" The woman dropped her berry bucket with a startled shriek and spun around, her blue eyes widening as she took in the site of him standing not twenty feet behind her. Her mouth dropped open and she grabbed at her skirts.

  "Hold on now." Judd raised his hands, belatedly realizing that a man of his size and dimensions, unshaven now for going on four months, dressed all in buckskins and wearing a 15

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  knife the length of a man's forearm strapped to his hip, might do well to make himself somewhat less threatening, especially when sneaking up behind a woman he doesn't know. He lowered himself to a squat as he said, "Easy, ma'am. Don't run. I just want to—"

  She spun on her heel and lit away from the creek with a good deal of speed for a chunky little woman her size. Judd stood up again, staring after her until the forest brush swallowed up every last glimpse of calico. But she hadn't said she was married.

  Course she hadn't said much of anything beyond her initial startled scream. Assuming she was single enough to pursue her from that alone could wind him up with an angry husband on his tail and backside full of buckshot. Still, what was love without a little danger?

  Judd went back to the road long enough to fetch his horse and mules and then, once more, he ventured back down to the creek. He gathered up her bucket and what berries she had dropped, picked a handful of late-blooming asters to fill the bucket to the top, and then began to track her. Had he only followed the road another half a mile, he would have come across the house she ran to. It was wellmaintained. A lovely two-story home with flowers around the house and a good-sized vegetable garden still growing pumpkins, corn, and peppers. A wide sea of golden stalks of wheat waved in the sun in the clearing behind the house, and in the distance beyond the garden and the huge red barn, he could hear the lowing of cattle.