Christine Johnson - The Marriage Barter

First step in tracking is to get your bearings. Wyatt looked past the hotel to a saloon. Piano music tinkled out the open door. Some men fell prey to the lure of whiskey and gambling. In the end, they always lost. Wyatt should know. He’d done his share of stumbling in the war, but he hadn’t touched a drop since the march through Georgia. He set his jaw against the swell of memory.

He had a job to do. The sooner he got it done, the better. Baxter had only given him a quarter of the fee up front. The rest would come upon completion.

He looked past the saloon to the creek. Piles of brick and lumber stood between the grain mill and the other creek-side buildings that had suffered the greatest damage. Rebuilding had already begun.

In the opposite direction, the street stretched east toward a pretty little church with a white steeple pointed high into the blue sky. It could have been plunked down here from any New England town. That old longing for the faith he used to know welled up out of nowhere. Wyatt pushed it aside. God wouldn’t want someone like him.

Beyond the church loomed an unmarked building and then the general store. Wyatt strolled in that direction. A wagon rumbled past, and several women picked their way around muddy potholes. One glanced his way, and he nodded politely. She looked away and whispered to her companion, probably wondering who he was. This sure wasn’t a town where a stranger could go unnoticed.

The cries of children rang out in the distance. The orphans? Or just the local boys and girls? He had no way of knowing. Orphans didn’t wear signs. They didn’t look any different than any other child. Except, like him, they didn’t have a home. Like him, they belonged to no one. Like him, their future looked bleak, and they’d know it. They wouldn’t be laughing and squealing. Those playing children couldn’t be the orphans. No, orphans didn’t belong in a hopeful town with scrubbed buildings and spring blossoms any more than he did.

He absently patted the front of his buckskin jacket and his too-thin wallet. After this job, he’d have enough to settle in San Francisco. He wouldn’t have to track another fugitive or desperate soul. Maybe he’d open a shop, do something respectable. Yep, once he got paid in full, he’d never again have to take orders from men whose honor he couldn’t trust. But he hadn’t gotten paid yet.

Wyatt had lived in Greenville less than two months, but it was long enough to hear rumors about Baxter that made him doubt the man’s sunny promise of a simple, quick and completely legal job.

“Mamaaaaaa!”

The plaintive cry halted Wyatt in his tracks. A child. Very young. Female. His tracker’s instinct clicked into place. Her hiccups and wordless sobs came from very close, between the church and the unmarked building. These weren’t the ordinary cries of childhood. This girl was terrified.

He slipped into the narrow alley between buildings, but a pile of empty crates blocked his view.

“Ma.” Hiccup. “Ma.”

Wyatt paused before the crates. What was he doing? He didn’t know the first thing about children, and he didn’t know a soul in this town. Where would he take her once he found her?

He started to back away until a string of unintelligible words came out at a fevered pitch, followed by what sounded like choking. If someone didn’t calm that child down, she’d stop breathing. Seeing as he was the only one nearby, that someone would have to be him.

He skirted the pile of empty crates, but she wasn’t there. He followed the sobs to the back of the building and a muddy lane where a small, thin child with raven-black pigtails sat in the dirt. He wasn’t much of a judge of children’s ages, but she looked younger than school-age. Maybe three or four. Too young to be wandering around on her own.

Wyatt hesitated, unsure what to do as she lifted her tear-stained face to take in his considerable height. The sobs stopped. Her blue eyes widened so big they seemed to take over her whole face. One grubby hand went into her mouth, just like...

Wyatt stared.

By all the stars in the sky, she looked just like his kid sister, Ava, had at that age. Same pigtails. Same blue eyes. Same need to suck on her fingers.

The girl examined him with curiosity. She’d probably never seen such a tall man.

He knelt, his knee protesting. “Howdy, there. My name’s Wyatt. What’s yours?”

The hand didn’t budge out of her mouth, but those sky-blue eyes continued to stare at him. What lashes! They practically brushed her eyebrows. One day this little girl would break men’s hearts.

Today he needed to find out why she was crying and where she belonged. “Do you have any scrapes or cuts?”

She just stared.

He tried again. “Can you move your legs?” They looked fine, not obviously broken, but he wasn’t a doctor.

She didn’t budge. Clearly she wasn’t going to answer him. Either she was too scared or too shy.

“Are you lost?”

Nothing again.

This was getting frustrating. “Can’t you nod yes or no?”

Naturally, she didn’t move her head one inch.

He rubbed his chin and attempted to ignore his aching knee. He’d try the obvious. “Did you lose your mama?”

“Mama,” she echoed, somehow getting the word out despite the fingers in her mouth.

“Great.” Finally, he was getting somewhere. He stood to take the pressure off his knee. “Where did you last see her?”

She went back to staring silently.

“Of course she doesn’t know that, Reed,” he chided himself. Some tracker he was if he couldn’t remember that a lost child would be disoriented. Trouble was, he couldn’t quite figure out what to do. Missing children weren’t his specialty. He’d never worked with children until this job. Could this child be one of the orphans? He shook off the idea. She’d called for her mother. This girl had a family. In a town as small as Evans Grove, someone would know where to find her ma or pa.

He crouched again, ignoring his knee’s protest. “If I pick you up and walk around town, do you think you can point to the last place you saw your mama?”

The girl answered by sticking out both arms.

She trusted him.

The knowledge kicked him in the gut. No one trusted Wyatt Reed. Not since before the war, anyway. If this girl only knew what he’d done. If she’d heard the screams of terror, she wouldn’t trust him now or ever. But she didn’t know who he was or what he’d done. She just trusted him.

“Get ahold of yourself, Reed.” The girl didn’t know anything about him. She trusted him to get her home, and he’d do it, the same as any paying job.

His big hands more than encircled her tiny waist. He lifted, and her thin arms wound around his neck. So trusting. This girl would crack his tough veneer if he wasn’t careful.

He cleared his throat. “Let’s find that mother of yours.”

And soon. He couldn’t take much more undeserved trust.

* * *

Charlotte Miller fingered the paltry selection of ribbons in Gavin’s General Store. The emerald-green one shone against her pale fingers. The lovely ribbon would match her best dress, but she must buy the black. Custom dictated she hide beneath heavy black crepe for the next year or more while mourning the husband she’d never loved.

Charles Miller had treated her kindly, but all his love had been reserved for his deceased first wife. His marriage to Charlotte had been a business arrangement. She’d needed a husband when her parents died months after they arrived in Evans Grove. He’d needed a housekeeper and cook. Simple and sensible. Yet deep down, she’d hoped their marriage would one day develop the warmth and love that would usher in a large family.

She sighed. At least he’d agreed to take in one of the orphan girls. If not for Sasha, she would have no one.