and the army is buying up every rear resting bench between here and the Great Lakes. Just be glad you aren’t a confederate. They’ll have to walk home. Besides, I need you to lead your company until then. Someone has to keep them in line.”
Luke nodded slowly as a sick feeling filled him. He knew deep in his stomach that Becky needed his help and he had half a continent to cross to get to her.
Chapter Three
Rebecca Johnson wiped her hands on her apron then quickly tucked a strand of hair behind her ear before taking the plates from the counter. Steaks, beans, and biscuits. All the Emporia served, that and Helen’s cobbler.
“Knowing Frank Peterson,” she said to Helen as she balanced the plates, “he’s going to want seconds.”
Helen laughed as she shook her head. “We’re busier than a beaver with a busted dam. And I know it ain’t my cobbler that are bringing them in. It’s amazing what a pretty woman serving them food will do for a man. They’re coming in all the way from Becket Wells and Sulphur Springs hoping you’ll smile at them.”
Rebecca felt her cheeks blush. Helen was always doing that. Ever since taking her in six months earlier, she’d gone out of her way to tell Rebecca that she was an asset, not a hindrance. One of the many reasons she loved the woman.
“Yes, well,” she stammered before turning for the dining room of Helen’s restaurant. “The stage will be in soon and Chester Polk is riding shotgun again.”
Helen’s cheeks turned a faint pink as she quickly turned back to her stove.
Rebecca smiled to herself as she backed through the batwing doors and into the dining room. Her life would be lost without Helen. At forty, a plain woman, larger than most with a touch of gray in her hair. Helen was tougher than boot leather. A woman had to be to hold her own in this town. But Rebecca knew that deep inside of Helen was a woman. A woman who liked the way Chester Polk looked at her.
Weaving her way through the tables, Rebecca served up the food then topped off their coffee but her mind quickly wandered back to Helen Scarsdale. What would she have ever done without the woman?
A quick shiver ran down her spine. First, she’d lost her uncle, then the ranch. A young woman alone in a rough town with no family, no money.
She’d come to town on Homer, their last remaining mule, hoping to sell him for enough to get a ticket on the stage. Every possession in her carpetbag. As she left the livery station she’d passed through town, past the Red House Saloon, and shuddered when she saw the women in their shameful clothes. Was that to be her fate? she couldn’t stop from wondering.
Walking quickly, she had hurried down the dusty street. It had been the smell of peach cobbler that made her stomach rumble and drew her into the restaurant. She’d sat at a table for hours nursing a cup of coffee with nowhere else to go as she fought to not cry. Her world was ruined. Everything she had ever loved gone. Once again.
Nothing lasted, she had realized. Everything was always taken from her. It was just the way of the world. First the town she had grown up in and all her friends when her father had insisted they go to Oregon. Then both her parents to cholera only a month into the trek. Next, the Parker family. The people who saved her and brought her back to her uncle and aunt. Her family had turned off for California while the Parkers had gone on to Oregon.
Then Aunt Abigail. And now her Uncle Tom. No, nothing was permanent, she realized. Nothing could be trusted to last.
It had been Helen who saved her. She’d stepped out from the kitchen and taken one look at her and known immediately what had happened. She hadn’t asked. Instead, she’d pointed to two miners in the corner and said, “If you want a job, get them some coffee. I can’t be doing everything around here.”
Thinking back, Rebecca couldn’t stop from smiling to herself. Helen was an angel. The mother she hadn’t had since forever. The woman had insisted that Rebecca live with her in a room in her small shack at the edge of town. But there was more. She had become a friend. A person to be trusted.
Smiling to herself, Rebecca began to gather dirty