A Timeless Romance Anthology: Old West Collection Read online

  Six Western Romance Novellas

  Carla Kelly

  Sarah M. Eden

  Liz Adair

  Heather B. Moore

  Annette Lyon

  Marsha Ward

  Copyright © 2014 by Mirror Press, LLC

  E-book edition

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief passages embodied in critical reviews and articles.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are products of the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Interior Design by Heather Justesen

  Edited by Annette Lyon, Kelsey Allan, and Jennie Stevens

  Cover image # 170729465, Shutterstock.com

  Published by Mirror Press, LLC

  http://timelessromanceanthologies.blogspot.com

  ISBN-10: 1941145159

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941145-15-9

  Winter Collection

  Spring Vacation Collection

  Autumn Collection

  European Collection

  Love Letter Collection

  Summer in New York Collection

  Break a Leg by Carla Kelly

  Other Works by Carla Kelly

  About Carla Kelly

  The Soldier’s Heart by Sarah M. Eden

  Other Works by Sarah M. Eden

  About Sarah M. Eden

  Hidden Spring by Liz Adair

  Other Works by Liz Adair

  About Liz Adair

  The Silver Mine Bachelor by Heather B. Moore

  Other Works by Heather B. Moore

  About Heather B. Moore

  The Sweetest Taste by Annette Lyon

  Other Works by Annette Lyon

  About Annette Lyon

  Faith and the Foreman by Marsha Ward

  Other Works by Marsha Ward

  About Marsha Ward

  More Timeless Romance Anthologies

  Coming July 2014

  Before the story begins

  By August of 1882, Hospital Steward Colm Callahan, 34, had decided he was bored with army life. Perhaps it was just life at Fort Laramie, which used to be interesting during the Great Sioux War. That conflict had ended when most of the hostiles were trundled onto reservations. Someone had definitely waved a white flag and declared the war done when Sitting Bull and his ragged band left Canada and surrendered at Fort Buford in 1881.

  The end of the Indian Wars had turned the grand dame of the plains into a backwater garrison. Arrow wounds and amputations had given way to catarrh with copious phlegm (hacks and coughs to laymen), and the occasional case of diarrhea— neither ever interesting. Women of the garrison still gave birth, but the post surgeon managed without help from his hospital steward. Thanks to nearby hog ranches, willing sporting women, and soldiers ripe for a spree, the clap would never go away. Venereal disease was as constant with the army as bugle calls.

  On the average morning now, Colm handled Sick Call with little or no interference from his post surgeon, Captain Dilworth. After nineteen years of army medicine, Colm knew when something warranted the more specialized attention of the post surgeon and in those cases, he summoned the surgeon from the breakfast table accordingly. When it was just catarrh or the dry heaves, he left Captain Dilworth to his newspaper and toast.

  Colm handled Sick Call, which meant admonishing any malingerers trying to put one over on the Medical Department, physicking those who needed it and sending them back to the barracks for rest, or hospitalizing the promising few. His reports were done by 10 a.m. and left, squared away, on Captain Dilworth’s desk.

  Then what? A steward could only count linens, roll bandages, and inventory the pharmacy so often. There was seldom anyone stiff and cold in the dead house to embalm. Lately, Colm found himself upstairs, staring out the window. Situated on a bluff, the hospital commanded a view of the whole garrison.

  Depending on his mood, he would look in the direction of the iron bridge— out of his sight— which still saw traffic to the Black Hills, even though the major gold strikes were ancient history now. The Shy-Dead Road, the storied route from Cheyenne to Deadwood, was traveled mostly by law-abiders now. Worse still, rumor hinted that soon, the cavalry would be withdrawn, leaving Fort Laramie with infantry only. Colm could almost hear the death knell of the Queen of the Plains.

  More profitably, Colm might look out the windows that faced the parade ground. He watched children walking to school, which was held in the newly completed admin building by the Laramie River. Soon mothers with prams would stroll the wooden boardwalks, chatting with one another. That domestic sight sometimes sent him into melancholy, as he remembered desperate days in 1876 and ’77, when troops came and went, and war waged all around. Fort Laramie looked as gentrified as a Midwestern town now. Great Gadfreys and all the Saints!

  If Colm was lucky, he might catch a glimpse of Ozzie Washington, easily the prettiest woman on the post, or so he reckoned. Depending on who might be ill among the officers’ wives, the lieutenant colonel’s wife was kindly inclined to send Ozzie, her servant, with a tureen of nourishing broth, or a loaf or two of bread to the House of Affliction.

  Ozzie was not a time waster. Bowl- or basket-laden, she moved at a clip that set her hips swaying so nicely. She was grace personified, moving rapidly but with the dignity of her race. Once— perhaps on a dare from one of the lieutenant colonel’s children— Ozzie had set a bushel basket square on her head and wore it the length of Officers Row without mishap. During Reconstruction days in Louisiana, he had seen women of color carry goods that way. So much grace and symmetry had impressed him then and did so now with Ozzie.

  Always the observer, he had noticed how nicely the races had mingled for at least a century in New Orleans, producing graceful women of café au lait skin called mulatto or the regrettable “high yaller.” He had admired them because they were so different. Ozzie’s hair was wildly curly to a fault, and her skin was more olive than coffee, but her nose was straight and her lips at least fuller than his.

  To say he admired Ozzie Washington was to minimize the matter. He was no expert, but Colm thought he loved her. He had met her seven years ago, in 1875, when the Fourth Infantry was first garrisoned at Fort Laramie. The Medical Department had assigned Colm permanent duty there— barring field emergencies— so he had ample time to watch the movements of various regiments. Ozzie stood out because the hospital had been plagued with endless winter ailments, and then-Major Chambers, commanding, ordered her there to help.

  Help she had. Ozzie had no fear of the pukes or runs and did exactly what the surgeons required. She never complained, and she kept her mouth closed when other women on similar assignments objected long and loud.

  During a welcome lull in sheet changing and basin dumping, Colm had mustered his courage and asked her how she remained so calm. She had given him a kind look, the sort of glance women reserved for the young and the addled, and said in her velvet voice, “Suh, if I didn’t help, who would?”

  She was right. Colm assured her that he was no sir, just a hospital steward. She nodded with understanding, but everlastingly called him suh. He quit arguing about it, because he liked the languid way one word glided into the next when she spoke.

  Ozzie Washington was exotic to Colm Callahan, who himself was an orphan from New York’s bleak Five Points slum, a drummer boy with the
Irish Brigade, and had become an impromptu hospital steward at Gettysburg, when he had no choice— much like Ozzie.

  Her kindness stood out more than her beauty. He remembered an endless night in 1876 when the post surgeon had stretched out onto the table in his operating bay to grab a nap. Colm had slumped to the wall in the corridor, weary nigh unto death of 36-hour days. With a tap on his shoulder, Ozzie had handed him a cup of tea and an apple already sliced, then sat beside him. When he forgot to eat, she put a slice in his hand. So kind.

  Once he had mentioned her to a friend, a corporal in the Third Cavalry, tentatively expressing himself. The corporal had looked at him in shock.

  “You know what she is,” the man had said, then said it anyway— a word Colm heard all the time, and had probably said a few times himself; everyone did. After that day, he never said it again, because it wasn’t a polite way to talk about someone as thoughtful as Ozzie Washington.

  Any fears the corporal would blab to others that the Irish hospital steward was enamored with a maid of color ended at the Battle of the Rosebud, when the corporal died. Colm had never chanced his feelings again; he kept his thoughts about Ozzie to himself. He was too shy to ever act on them.

  Still, during moments like this at the window, he wondered what he would do when the Fourth Infantry was ordered somewhere else and Ozzie went along as Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Chambers’ trusted maid. When that happened, as it inevitably would, all he had left was resignation, leaving the army far behind. Another encounter with Ozzie would be more punishment than a shy man deserved.

  Also before the story begins

  Ozzie Washington knew it was time to visit the post office. Three weeks had passed since she had given her letter to a private in A Company, Fifth Cavalry, and asked him to mail it for her when the troop reached Fort Russell in Cheyenne. He’d never asked questions, because he couldn’t read, and she always gave him a dime for her errand. He would mail the letter she had addressed to Audra Washington, Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, which would arrive back here in a week or so.

  The first time she had mailed herself a letter, the Fourth had been garrisoned in Fort Concho, Texas. Lieutenant Colonel Chambers, then a captain, had checked the mail, staring a long time at the envelope.

  “Audra Washington? Who do we know named Audra Washington?” he had joked.

  “My real name is Audra,” Ozzie had said.

  He hadn’t handed the letter to her until he teased her about a beau, which made her smile. She had no beau. Even when the Fourth had been garrisoned with one of the colored regiments, she never had one; she was too white for those men, even if they were former slaves too. The corporals and sergeants of the white regiments considered her too dark for them. There would never be a beau.

  She never wrote herself more than four letters a year. When the day’s work was done, she would make herself tea and open the letter she had written to herself. “Dearest Little Audra,” she always began, as if this letter were from her mother, an illiterate woman who had been sold away from her, screaming, when Audra was only five, and sent to an East Texas cotton plantation. In these letters, this mother she barely remembered was living as a seamstress in New Orleans, with her own shop and an elegant clientele.

  As the years passed, Ozzie wove an intricate fiction of carpet baggers and a fine man who courted her widowed mother, leaving her his fortune when he died of yellow fever. Her letters to herself were fabulous, and a welcome treat, because she had no one and would never have received a letter otherwise.

  Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Chambers was always happy to have Ozzie make the trip to the post office. While it couldn’t be said that Hattie Chambers was lazy, it could be said that she cared not to exert herself, especially in high summer when the wind blew, as it invariably did in Wyoming Territory. Ozzie knew the trick of weighting the hem of her dresses with fishing lures or lead shot, the better to fool the wind.

  Seventeen years in the employ of the same family meant that Ozzie had them all well trained. The Chambers’ children had been trundled off to relatives in the East for schooling, which meant that life in the lieutenant colonel’s quarters was simple. When her chores were done, she was at her leisure to walk to the post office.

  She tried to time her visit with the probable appearance of Hospital Steward Colm Callahan, but lately he had been less cooperative. Either the post surgeon was picking up his own mail, or the dratted man had given Suh other duties.

  She always thought of Steward Callahan as Suh. Face red, he had told her once that he was no gentleman, so she needn’t refer to him that way. She had been just brave enough to continue calling him Suh, until he no longer objected. After that non-introduction, they had settled into the familiarity of frontier service, nothing more.

  Ozzie admired the way he looked, even if his nose did peel in the summer, and he was too vain (or busy) to coat it with zinc oxide, as some of the other light-skinned men did. He burned and peeled regularly, which detracted in no way from his admirable height and high cheekbones, which gave his face a thin look. His eyes were a surprising brown rather than the expected blue. In a moment of rare candor for a man so reticent, Suh had remarked that her eyes were lighter than his. The fact that he’d noticed flattered her.

  He once told her how much he enjoyed the gentle flow of her Louisiana accent, but she never worked up the nerve to tell him that she liked the clipped cadence of his New York speak with just a hint of the Irish. That his grammar was impeccable, even though he admitted his early years were spent in a ghastly orphanage, hinted something else: he was as ambitious as she was.

  Her own ambition had been borne of desperation. Maybe someday she would tell Suh about those dark days as the war was ending. Thinking back, she knew that the time a war was winding down was the worst time of all.

  While it was true that the port of New Orleans had been liberated by Yankees early in the game, coloreds on the state’s northern plantations had lingered in slavery. Ozzie thought she was twelve when the other slaves had simply dropped their tools or untied their aprons and walked off the LeCheminant plantation with not a word spoken. She remembered feeble protests from Madame LeCheminant and her daughters. What could they do, with all of the white men gone fighting in Lee’s army?

  Ozzie was young, so she’d stayed and found herself saddled with all of the house chores the others had done. When it became too much, she knotted her other dress in a tablecloth, along with her rosary and an ebony-backed hairbrush she’d swiped from Lalage LeCheminant, a child her own age, whose companion she had been. Lalage been the first to call her Ozzie because she could not pronounce Audra.

  At twelve, Ozzie had slung her tablecloth luggage over her shoulder and left the house just after dark, when the haunts were out, which she did not believe in, being of a practical mind. A kindly man of color with a load of chickens trussed for market handed her up beside him in his cart and shared his sandwich with her.

  He told her to find a Yankee woman to work for, that the best place was the U.S. Army encampment where he was headed. When they arrived outside New Orleans two days later in the early-evening rain, he helped her down and pointed to a row of houses, Officers Row.

  She knocked on the first door, tried to introduce herself, and received a swipe with a broom for her pains. At the second door, she introduced herself, recited her skills— some exaggerated, some not— and did not leave even when Mrs. Captain Chambers closed the door politely on her. She shivered on the porch through the night and was still there in the morning when Captain Chambers looked out the window and saw her, chin up and eyes determined, a child.

  He let her in, and she’d been their servant ever since. Ozzie Washington worked hard at every task assigned her and saved her modest wages, which were paid every other month when the army was paid. She never looked back.

  Maybe it was time to put that money to use. She’d liked the look of Cheyenne— it was more refined since the early days, when the hell-on-wheels Union Pacific crew we
nt through. The days were gone when she could knock on a door, look both desperate and determined, and find work. She had true skill now in dressmaking.

  Any day, she would bid the Chambers au revoir, catch the southbound stage at the Rustic Hotel, and land herself in Cheyenne. Every town of any size had a seamstress or two. She could find work with one of the dressmakers, see where the land lay, and start her own business.

  Any day.

  Where the story actually begins

  “Things are slow, Callahan. If I have to treat one more case of clap, I’ll take to drink,” Captain Dilworth had announced one morning.

  Colm was far too wise to say that he alone had treated those so afflicted, because it was a homely duty beneath the notice of the post surgeon. As for taking to drink, Captain Dilworth was already lurching down that road. Again, Colm was too wise to mention it.

  “Captain, are you thinking about a bolt to Cheyenne?” he asked instead.

  “I was thinking more in terms of Omaha with the missus. We’ll catch the UP in Cheyenne and spend a week there. Can you manage? I expect no trouble.”

  Yet again, Colm was far too experienced to suggest that the nature of medicine often meant a nasty surprise now and then, something beyond the official duties of a hospital steward. But who was he kidding? In the absence of post surgeons, Colm had extracted arrows, set bones, pulled teeth, prescribed probably useless medicine, done a successful shoulder resection because someone had to, and had even delivered a stubborn baby.

  “I can manage, sir. When are you leaving?”

  They had been through this conversation several times since Captain Dilworth had arrived three years ago. Colm had worked with better surgeons before, and worse ones. He could handle a hospital in a backwater garrison for a week.

  The Dilworths were gone in a day, which made Colm Callahan happy; he liked being in charge. He had stood by his favorite window, looking down on the venerable fort below. “Bring it on, Old Girl,” he boasted.