Words of protest died on Jane’s lips before she could get them out. She gave a little laugh that sounded both nervous and a bit excited. Barton chortled.
“That’s all very well for you, Thundercloud.” She nuzzled the baby’s fat cheek. “You’re more accustomed to being on horseback than I am.”
Back astride his own mare, John reached over and took the baby from her. “Hold your reins loose, now, and hang on to the saddle horn if you have to.”
“How do I make him go?” Jane clutched the saddle horn so tightly her whole hand whitened.
“Don’t worry about that, today. He’ll follow along wherever the mare goes. They’re kind of like an old married couple—easy with each other and always sticking close together.”
He urged the mare to a slow walk and, true to his word, the gelding followed.
“Is that what your parents are like?”
Jane’s casual question almost knocked John out of his saddle. He’d been thinking of old Bearspeaker and Walks on Ice.
A hundred possible responses raced through his mind, some bitter, all pained. “My folks didn’t get the chance to be that way.”
For a few moments the horses continued their sedate walk, while Barton wriggled in John’s arms and made loud noises of delight.
So loud, they almost drowned out Jane’s next words. “I’m sorry. Did they pass on long ago? My father was lost at sea.” She balked for an instant. “Then my mother and my brother died of the typhoid when I was twelve.”
John didn’t intend to answer. He had never talked about the deaths of his parents and his brothers with anyone. Not Bearspeaker. Not even Ruth.
But Jane’s experience paralleled his own too closely not to acknowledge. “Mine were killed by white buffalo hunters when I was ten.”
He didn’t look at her as he spoke, and he hardly noticed her horse pulling alongside his. Then her hand settled on his arm, with no more force than a hovering butterfly. Through the sturdy cotton of this shirt, her gentle touch communicated so many things words couldn’t express.
Understanding. Sympathy. Comfort.
Sometimes he could bring himself to offer such gifts to others. Receiving them, especially from so foreign a creature as Miss Jane Harris, gave him a chilling sense of vulnerability. A warrior of the Big Sky could not afford that dangerous indulgence.
Abruptly he pulled away from her and wheeled his mare back toward the ranch house.
If John Whitefeather had lashed out and struck her, as Emery had so many times, Jane could not have been more shocked. Or dismayed.
His guarded confession of their painful common bond had rocked her. It had also called to her on a level deeper than her fears, and she had battled her fears to respond. She had little to offer a man like John Whitefeather. But she did have a heart that remembered and understood the loss of a family to cruel, capricious forces beyond a child’s control.
She’d reached out to him, and he had slammed the door in her face. It might have hurt less if she had not sensed that door momentarily held ajar for her, a warm hearth light flickering from within. Or had she only imagined that because she wanted it to be true?
The way she had imagined strength and protectiveness in Emery’s character where there had been only a domineering will and an easily provoked temper.
Men had other ways of hurting a woman that left no visible bruises or scars. From what she’d come to know of John Whitefeather over the past week, Jane doubted she had reason to fear for her physical safety with him. Just now, he had served her warning that she needed to be cautious around him, all the same.
The more she found herself drawn to him, the more cautious she must be.
Perhaps her poor gelding was as startled by the abrupt turn of John’s mare as Jane herself. With more energy than he’d shown since she mounted him, the horse swung about to follow his companion, speeding his pace to catch up. Jane bit back a scream and hung on for dear life.
As she bounced and swayed in the saddle, the hard-packed earth beneath the gelding’s hooves looked a long way down. She imagined it lunging up to meet her, like an enormous brown fist.
She was almost faint with relief when her horse caught up with John’s at the corral fence. Then a fresh worry rocked her back in the saddle. Would John Whitefeather pass Barton back to her, then lift the two of them down off the gelding’s back?
After the way he’d rebuffed her, she wasn’t sure she could stand the sensation of his hands on her body. Nor the fleeting moment, as her feet touched the ground, when she stood in the circle of his arms with the baby cradled between them. Why, she’d sooner throw herself to the ground and be done with it. Experience had taught her that bones healed easier than hearts.
Fortunately, Ruth and Caleb Kincaid were waiting for them. As Ruth held up her arms to receive little Barton, Jane extracted her feet from the stirrups. Clinging to the saddle horn, she melted off the gelding’s back until her feet gratefully touched the earth.
She shrank from a sharp look Caleb Kincaid shot her. Despite his gruffly respectful manner, Jane knew he didn’t have much use for her. But his wife liked her and so did his sons. That made three more friends than she had back in Boston.
Jane couldn’t bear the thought of being exiled from them so soon. If only some kindly matchmaker in Bismarck would set up the widowed Mrs. Muldoon with a new husband. Then she might stay put in North Dakota and leave Jane to the relative peace and security she’d found in Whitehorn.
Chapter Five
“That girl needs a husband.” Ruth Kincaid looked up from her beadwork at her husband and brother.
John spared a glance from his late evening checker game at the kitchen table with Caleb. His sister had a determined look in her eye. It made him uneasy.
“What girl?” Caleb asked absently as John jumped two of his checkers.
“Why, Jane Harris, of course. What other girl is there?”
John plucked Caleb’s black checkers from the board and said, “King me,” as though he hadn’t heard his sister.
But his conscience squirmed like a heifer under the branding iron. In fact, he wondered if the memory of Jane’s white face and stricken eyes had been seared into his brain along with the recollection of her hand squeezing his arm. Like a brand, they stung. They would never go away.
And in some baffling fashion, they had put her claiming mark upon him.
“She’s a willing little thing.” Ruth bowed her dark head over her beadwork again, but kept on talking as the men jumped their red and black disks across the checkerboard. “She works hard and she’s eager to learn, but she needs looking after. I can’t help feeling bad that she came all this way and lost everything in that train wreck on our account.”
Caleb’s head snapped up. “It’s not our fault the fool gal didn’t even stop to read the letter we sent.”
Hard as John tried to clamp his mouth shut, the words spilled out. “I reckon there’s more to that than she’s letting on, Caleb.”
His sister nodded. “There’s much more to Jane Harris than she’s willing to tell.”
Turning his attention back to the checkerboard, Caleb muttered, “Don’t expect an argument from me on that score. I sent off a wire to the Boston police yesterday, just to make sure she isn’t on the wrong side of the law.”
“Oh, Caleb, of all the foolishness! That girl hasn’t got it in her to hurt a fly. Can you imagine her holding up a bank or a train?”