INNOCENT HEARTS.

By RADCLYFFE.

CHAPTER ONE.

MARTIN BEECHER HALTED the wagon on a knoll overlooking a sprawling town that lay nestled in a valley hewn from the eastern reaches of the Rockies. He sat forward eagerly, anxious for his first glimpse of their new home.

"There it is, Martha. Come look, Kate. We've finally arrived!" he exclaimed, reaching for his wife's hand. She sat beside him on the rough wagon bench, stiff from the lingering chill of the late spring nights, bundled to the nose in a heavy blanket.

Martha Beecher surveyed the scene before her and tried to quell the quick surge of dread. There were perhaps a dozen buildings in all on either side of a rutted dirt road that was clearly 'Main Street'. She shielded her eyes, squinting in the early morning sun to make out other houses scattered along the outskirts of the town and further into the foothills wherever homesteaders had settled.

A young woman pushed between them from the rear of the covered wagon, one gloved hand on each of their shoulders. Despite the chill she was bareheaded and her glossy hair shone darkly in the bright sunlight. "Is that it?" she asked, her voice alight with an echo of her father's enthusiasm. "Are we here?"

"At last, darling Kate," Martin answered cheerfully. "New Hope, Montana."

"I am so glad! I can't wait to meet the Schroeders! Do you know which is their house?'"

He laughed, delighted by her eagerness. Perhaps he needn't have worried about her after all. He pointed toward the spire-peaked square clapboard building nearest them. "That's the church. Thaddeus says it was the first building they raised, and next to that the schoolhouse, I imagine. The Schroeders live somewhere near the center of town. I'm sure that we will have no trouble finding them."

Kate did not see the stark simplicity of the town and the wild countryside as something to fear, as her mother did. Like her father, she saw a chance that her life might be more than she had been raised to believe it would be. Kate thought about the last year of her life, the year that most girls her age remembered as the most exciting. It had not been for her. She had attended the required coming out parties, and the afternoon socials, and the debutante b.a.l.l.s. She had been properly introduced and had made the proper connections. It had been pleasant, but somehow it struck her as frivolous, too. She found the conversations considered appropriate between young ladies and gentlemen tiring and the attentions of would-be suitors tiresome. Perhaps here she would find that there was more to life than that.

She gripped her father's shoulder harder, asking, "And the newspaper office, where you'll be working? That's here, too?"

"One of the very first in the territory," Martin p.r.o.nounced proudly, throwing his arms around his wife. "Just think of it!"

His excitement was so boundless, and so simple, that Martha's heart lifted at the sight of his pleasure. She returned his hug and said softly with more conviction than she felt, "It will be wonderful, darling. I'm sure of it."

As he snapped the reins, the horses surged forward and the wagon jerked into motion. Martha clutched her husband's arm, remembering how impossible it had all seemed at first. A letter from Martin's boyhood friend Thaddeus had arrived in Boston nearly a year before, extolling the virtues of the unsettled west and the Montana Territory in particular. Pure air, clear skies, no crowds or stench of factories, he had written. The war that divided the nation was a distant thunder out in the northern territories where any man could claim land just for the tending of it and make his fortune with the sweat of his brow. Thaddeus Schroeder wanted a partner for his fledgling newspaper, and he wanted Martin Beecher to be that man.

The idea of moving west had been only a wild dream then. True, Martin had been growing steadily more discontented with his teaching position, and the offer of a partnership on a newspaper had electrified him. With each letter from Thaddeus, Martin's interest grew. They had searched the library for a map of the new territory to locate the town that had then been only a name. Martha quickly smothered her look of horror when she saw the glow in her husband's face.

"But Martin, isn't it very far away?" she began cautiously. All she could appreciate was a vast open area marked by very little evidence of civilization. What had Martin said? Most of the settled areas had started out as mining camps during the rush west to find gold.

Martin had traced the route of the Oregon Trail with his finger, oblivious to his wife's reservations. "Thaddeus says about four months altogether, and the roads are good all the way into Nebraska. Of course, we would have to leave most of the furniture behind-- but Martha! Think of it! It's a brand new country out there, just beginning to grow. With the Homestead Act promising land to any man who lives on it, a whole new world is going to spring up overnight! We could be a part of something grand, and the newspaper would be at the heart of it!"

He was taken with the idea already. His wife recognized the tremor in his voice. She knew he was dissatisfied with the changes in their life that the war and industrialization had brought, but what did they know of frontier living? They who had never been further west than Albany?

"What about Kate?" she had asked quietly, struggling to hide her apprehension. "She is eighteen now and at the age when a girl should be marrying. Can we ask her to simply leave this behind and begin again in a place we know nothing of?"

Martha would go anywhere her husband chose, because his happiness was hers, but could she ask the same of their daughter? Didn't they owe her more? Who knew what type of men they might find in such an unsettled place. Kate was much too refined to become the wife of a shopkeeper, or worse, a farmer!

"Martha, I don't know how I know, but I feel it would be right for us. We could do as we liked with our lives again. It would be hard for you to give up your friends and the comforts we have here, but we would have friends there, too. There would be so much you and I could share!"

His voice was thick with emotion and his eyes grew cloudy. "But Kate? You may be right. A young woman like her, giving up all of this - the dances, the parties, the finer things. Perhaps it would be too much of a hardship."

Doubt had crept into his voice, and Martha could not bear that. She took his large hand into her small one and said with sudden determination, "Kate can stay here with my sister Ellen. She is almost of the age when she would be leaving us soon for a husband. Perhaps it will be sooner, that's all." Her calm, strong words comforted him, and he smiled again. Then Martin and Martha went together to talk with Catherine.

"Kate, darling," Martha began, "your father and I have talked at great length about this move west, and we feel that we should go." She glanced at Martin who was strangely silent and took his hand. "We are not sure what lies ahead, but it will be very different from our life here. We are prepared to leave, but you're a young woman now, and this is the only life you have known. There are many opportunities here, and comforts that you might never have in Montana. The theater, opera, your friends..." Her voice trailed off and she looked intently at her daughter, who seemed to be struggling not to interrupt.

Kate was seated in front of the fire, the flickering light highlighting her elegant features and shimmering waves of shoulder length hair. Her hands were folded gently in her lap, but her face was alive with laughter as she glanced from one to the other.

"You two! Do you think I would let you go without me and miss this great adventure? There is nothing I care for enough to keep me here, and no one I care for more than you. I want to come. I feel somehow that this is not where I belong. Perhaps I will not find that so in Montana."

Her father looked at her with his mouth agape. Surely, there was none more popular nor more accomplished than his daughter! She had many friends and not a few would-be suitors. In addition to her dark-eyed, black-haired beauty, her wit and intelligence quickly won her acceptance in any circle. Not belong here? Preposterous!

Martha ignored the excitement, so like Martin's, in Kate's voice. Kate had altogether too much of her father's adventurous spirit. Martha blamed herself for allowing Kate to spend so much time with her father as a child and not emphasizing enough that Kate needed to prepare for a life as a wife and mother. She had warned Martin that the college library was no place for a girl to be spending so much time, and although she accepted a young lady's need to read and write, Kate spent far too many hours alone with her books. Martha had finally put her foot down after Martin had insisted on giving in to Kate's demands that he teach her about his photographic pastime. A dark room filled with foul smelling chemicals was no place for a girl, even if Kate was a 'natural' at image making, as Martin so proudly proclaimed. If Kate needed something to occupy her time, she could learn needlepoint!

"There are not likely to be the prospects for your future that you would find here," Martha insisted. She looked to her husband for support, but found none.

Kate spoke carefully, because she knew that her mother could insist that she remain behind. "Whether I am here or there, Mother, I will only make a match that feels right in my heart. I do not believe that love is dictated by geography. You know there is no one here for whom I have any attachment."

That was precisely what concerned Martha most. There had been more than one suitable young man to appear at their door, and Kate had received each one politely and had just as politely sent each one on his way. Before Martha could protest further, Martin interceded, for in truth, he could not bear the thought of leaving for a new life without his daughter.

"Are you sure, Kate?" he asked.

"Quite sure, Father," she answered, feeling the first thrill of new possibility. "Make no mistake - I want to go!"

Once the decision was made, things happened quickly. Martin resigned from the college and sold their house and most of the furnishings at a good profit. People were moving to the city in great numbers for work in the factories that seemed to have sprung up overnight, and there were plenty of buyers. Martha donated much of her wardrobe to charities that cared for those who were displaced or left behind by the rapid pace of progress. Silk dresses and finery would be useless in a small frontier town. She purchased simple, sensible traveling clothes for her family. She would not have believed that all of their worldly goods could fit into less than a dozen stout trunks, along with several boxes of books and a wardrobe of her mother's with which she refused to part.

They had left their home before the last graying snows of winter had melted from the streets, planning to follow the warm winds west. Like so many hopeful travelers of the time, they had no idea what truly lay ahead. The first leg of their journey had been by rail to Independence, Missouri where the 'regular' railroad service ended, and where most expeditions into the western territories began. The previous year, in 1864, a Congress still divided by the uneasy sentiments of war had pa.s.sed the second Pacific Railroad Act, allocating funds for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Shortly after the surrender of the Confederacy, the Union Pacific railroad began moving westward, rail by rail, but it hadn't yet been completed when the Beecher's set out.

In Missouri they joined a wagon train, both for safety and to afford company for Martha and Kate, neither of whom had ever been beyond the civilized confines of eastern society. Spring had first overtaken, then threatened to pa.s.s them by somewhere along the northern trail through the Great Plains to the newly created Montana Territory. As they traversed the flat lands toward the eastern slopes of the Rockies, the last snows retreated, swelling riverbeds and streams to overflowing, making the last few weeks of their trek arduous for animal and human alike. The journey had been longer than expected, and harsher than they had imagined, but Martin's unfailing optimism and Kate's buoyant sense of antic.i.p.ation kept all their spirits from flagging. Now, with Boston receding into a distant memory, they were about to begin their great adventure.

CHAPTER TWO.

MARTHA WAS ASTOUNDED at their reception. Thaddeus Schroeder's wife Hannah took them into their home as if they had been long-awaited relatives.

"John! John Emory! You carry those bags upstairs while I get these folks something to eat!" she bellowed merrily, while herding the Beecher family into her living room. She was a head shorter than Martha and almost twice her size, with a round face and twinkling dark eyes. She had none of the pampered look of the Boston matrons Martha had called friends, and her nearly palpable energy threatened to overwhelm the sedate Martha.

"Oh no, really," Martha protested, looking to her husband and daughter for support. "We only stopped to let you know we had arrived. I'm sure Martin can find us suitable lodging at the -er- hotel."

"Don't you believe it," Hannah responded earnestly, while hastily moving books and papers from the worn couch in the sitting area. "That hotel is sure to be full with cowboys in for the week's end or worse, and no place for you folks to be staying. You'll stay right here with us 'til you get settled! We've plenty of room, and a couple more mouths to feed is no hardship."

Kate recognized the look of consternation on her mother's face, and took her arm. "Mother, I think we should accept Mrs. Schroeder's hospitality. It will give Father a chance to talk things over with Mr. Schroeder, too."

"That's right, my dear," Martin added. "I'm sure that Thaddeus has suggestions for a place we might acquire."

Hannah nodded. "That he has. Now, I'll get busy heating water because I should think you'll be wanting proper baths along about now."

"Why don't you rest awhile and I'll help Mrs. Schroeder in the kitchen," Kate urged. "Perhaps we can make some of that tea we've been saving."

"Right you are child. You come with me," Hannah said with authority and bustled out.

Kate followed, as eager for the chance to talk with Hannah Schroeder about the town as she was for the promise of a bath.

Martha turned to her husband in dismay, "Martin?"

He looked back good-naturedly and turned his hands up. "I guess it's decided."

It turned out that a few days became a week before Kate's father decided upon a house on the southern edge of town. The dwelling was a modest but sound two-story wood structure, and Kate was especially pleased that there was a small room adjacent to hers that she might use for her photography. It was a brisk walk to work for Martin and near enough to the other townspeople for Martha and Kate to socialize. Kate knew that he was worried that she and her mother would be lonely. As it was, his concerns were unfounded.

During their stay at the Schroeders, Martha and Kate were besieged by visitors. Newcomers, especially Easterners, were a rarity, and everyone wanted to meet them. Kate enjoyed herself thoroughly and found herself accepting invitations to tea and something on Sat.u.r.day afternoons called a quilting circle. Martha found the easy familiarity of the women both captivating and a little unnerving.

"My goodness, they're quite intense, aren't they?" she gasped after one particularly busy morning of entertaining in the Schroeder living room.

"Oh, I think they're wonderful!" Kate exclaimed. "I feel so welcome!" She reached for her shawl and bag, adding, "Mother, I asked John to show me the town this afternoon. We've been here for days and I scarcely know what the place looks like. Would you like to come?"

"Not today, darling. I've had quite enough new experiences for one morning, thank you!" Martha sank wearily to the sofa, sighing with relief.

Laughing, Kate leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek and said briskly, "All right. I'll be home soon. I promised I'd help Mrs. Schroeder with dinner."

John Emory Schroeder was seventeen years old, tall, strong and st.u.r.dy. He was more than pleased to be strolling down Main Street with Miss Catherine Beecher. He had never seen anyone quite as fetching as she, especially in that dress that was far finer than anything he had seen the girls in town wearing.

"This here is the main street, Miss Kate. We've got a general store, right over there next to the livery, and the bank across from that of course. Down yonder is the schoolhouse, and --"

"Wait, John! Just show me as we go, please, or I'll never remember a thing!" Kate laughed, pushing back her bonnet to let the sun strike her face. Her mother would disapprove of the effects on her skin, but Kate didn't care. She couldn't stand to be hidden away. It was almost the first of June and the air was still crisp and cool, so unlike the muggy early summer days she recalled in the city.

"Oh right, sure," he said, blushing to the roots of his sandy-brown hair.

By the time they had walked the five blocks to the end of the central thoroughfare, Kate knew where women bought their dry goods and sewing materials, where the children went to school, and where the men from the surrounding ranches came to have a drink and spend their wages on a Friday night. Turning back, she was struck with the efficiency and order of the small town. Every need was met, simply and without embellishment. But the street was clean and the board sidewalk st.u.r.dy, and all the faces she pa.s.sed were kind and friendly.

"Let's rest awhile, shall we?" she said suddenly, brushing off a place to sit on the bench in front of the dry goods store. "It's so beautiful today I don't want to go back inside just yet.'

"Why, okay," John said, at a loss for words. He sat down beside her on the bench and stretched his long legs out in front of him. He swallowed audibly several times, but when it became apparent that Kate did not require him to converse, he began to relax.

Everything was new to her, right down to the hard packed earth of the street before her. Gone were the cobblestone roads and fine horse-drawn carriages she was used to seeing. These had been replaced by plain board-sided buckboards and heavy draft horses, accustomed to pulling loads of supplies or stubborn stumps, whichever their owners required. The houses, though carefully tended and built to last, were a far cry from the stone townhouses where Kate and her friends had lived. Despite the stark utility of the place, Kate sensed an air of vitality and vigor she had not noticed in the staid surroundings in which she had grown up. There was a steady stream of ranchers and homesteaders in and out of town loading wagons, men calling to one another as they led horses in and out of the livery, and women pa.s.sing by on the sidewalks, laden with parcels. She couldn't help but feel a thrill of excitement to find herself a part of this strange new world.

She watched another of the young cowboys who had been pa.s.sing by all morning cross the street to the blacksmith's opposite her. She was coming to recognize the same purposeful gait and easy carriage that all the men seemed to have. Following the tall, lanky form clad in rough denim toward the corral, she was struck by the unusual refinement of the deeply tanned features. As he swept off his hat to wipe a sleeve across his brow, she caught sight of the thick, blond hair held back with a dark tie.

"Oh! My goodness," she cried in a startled voice, "that's a woman!"

"Huh?" John asked, rousing from his reverie. He had been nearly asleep beside her in the warm sun. "Who?"

Kate pointed in astonishment, quite forgetting that it was rude. "Right over there."

"Oh - that's just Jessie," John said dismissively. "Her mare threw a shoe this morning and she's coming to get her, I reckon." He finished, as if that settled things.

Kate stared openly at the woman who was leaning one booted foot on the lower board of the railing fronting the corral, deep in conversation with the blacksmith. What startled Kate even more than her attire was the sidearm holstered neatly against her muscular thigh.

"But she's wearing a gun!" Kate cried, amazed. She should have been scandalized, she supposed, but she was simply too surprised to be anything but curious.

"Why, I guess she'd better, riding into town alone, what with the way things are out on the range," John said matter-of-factly. "Settlers are fighting mad about expeditions crossing over their lands on the way to the Oregon gold fields, and my father says the miners are violating the treaties with the Indians, too. People are starting to get riled and the marshal can't be expected to be everywhere, you know," he proclaimed with authority, clearly still echoing the words of his father.

"Yes, but-- well, I mean, -- who is she?"

John turned to her, confused. "I told you. Name's Jessie Forbes. She has a ranch a few miles out of town. Does right well, too, so everybody says. She doesn't seem to have any trouble selling her horses. I wish I could get one of hers," he finished wistfully.

Kate turned to him, eyes full of wonder. "You mean she owns it?"

"Well, I guess so, since her father died a ways back and she's the only one left. I guess she owns it."

Kate stared at the woman whose features were shadowed now by the wide-brimmed Stetson that she wore. Now that Kate looked carefully, she could see that the body was not that of a young man. Jessie Forbes was lean and muscular to be sure, but there was a subtle curve to the hip and slenderness in the arms that betrayed her s.e.x. And under the worn denim of her shirt, sweat-dampened in the back, there was a suggestive swell of b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Never in her life had Kate seen a woman wear pants, even in the confines of her own home. She continued to stare until she realized that the woman was heading straight toward them, leading a beautiful chestnut mare. Kate quickly averted her gaze despite the fact that she desperately wanted to see Jessie up close. The woman would think she had no manners at all, staring at her like a schoolboy!

Kate heard the jangle of spurs growing louder, until suddenly it stopped right in front of them. She looked down at the dusty toes of two very well worn boots.

Jessie threw the reins over the railing and took the two stairs up to the porch in one long stride.

"Howdy, Jessie," John said amiably.

"Afternoon, John," she answered as she stepped into the dry goods store.

Kate was surprised at the deep but melodious timbre of her voice. She glanced then at the horse standing quietly before them, taking in the well-ridden but still beautiful saddle engraved with an elegantly tooled JF. Her eyes widened slightly as she noticed the rifle tucked into a case on the right side. She turned to John with another question but stopped when she heard the spurs behind them again.

"Say, John, you can tell your dad I've got that colt down from the high country if he wants to ride out and see him sometime," Jessie said as she came through the door on her way out of the store. "Oh, sorry-- I didn't mean to be interrupting," she said when she saw that Kate had been about to speak.

Kate looked up into the bluest eyes she had ever seen. Her glance traveled quickly from the sun bleached hair beneath the brim of the cowboy hat and over the strong cheekbones to a generous mouth and square chin. She dropped her gaze when she saw Jessie color slightly and felt her own face flame. What had gotten into her!