Alma caught up with Jude in a dry gulley not more than a couple hundred yards from the opening of the box canyon. The steer started in surprise when he heard the sound of her horse’s hooves approaching, and he almost jerked the lead rope out of Jude’s hand.
Alma saw the steer rolling his eyes and pulling back, and she stopped her horse a little distance away. She dismounted and walked up to Jude, leading her horse by the reins.
“What are you doing here?” Jude asked.
“I decided to come with you,” she told him. “I thought you might need a little help bringing him in.”
“I don’t need any help,” Jude shot back. “I told you that.”
“You might not need help,” Alma admitted, “but I didn’t want you bringing him in by yourself, just in case he tried any funny stuff.”
Jude grinned. “Alright. Just come along for the walk, then. It beats walking all the way back by myself, anyway.”
Alma fell in next to him, and the steer settled into a steady pace. “You sure were right about him following you when you’re on foot. He’s always been a vicious brute, but I guess that’s because we’ve always been on horseback.”
“You see?” Jude replied. “You might have a thing or two to learn from me after all.”
“You’re right,” Alma returned. “Allegra just said a few minutes ago that we shouldn’t have doubted you. We should have trusted you. We’ll know better next time.”
“I guess we were all wrong about each other,” Jude agreed. “Let’s make a pledge to give each other the benefit of the doubt from now on. We’ll all know that each of us has something unique and important to bring to the running of this ranch. We should respect that.”
Alma beamed. “Alright. It’s a deal. We’ll talk it over with the others when they come in tonight. I think they’ll be happy about it, too.”
Jude stopped and regarded Alma. “Now if we could only get your father to agree, we’d be set.”
“You know,” Alma replied. “I think we should take the same position with him.”
“What?” Jude gasped. “You don’t mean give him the benefit of the doubt, too, do you? We can’t do that!”
“Why not?” Alma asked. “He’s not completely out of his mind, you know. He has some very good points and opinions about a lot of things. We could do a lot worse than to take his advice on things.”
“Do you mean,” Jude growled. “That you should have taken his advice about me? Are you going over to his side now, and wishing you could undo our marriage?”
“It’s not like that,” Alma replied. “You don’t have to get all worked up about it. I’m just saying that giving him the benefit of the doubt and listening to him every now and then wouldn’t hurt us at all. In fact, it could only help us to build a stronger relationship with him.”
“I won’t give him the benefit of the doubt,” Jude snapped. “If I did, I’d be admitting he’s right about me, that I killed all those people, and that I misled you about who I am and everything else.”
“You don’t have to admit anything, just to give him the benefit of the doubt,” Alma insisted. “You could just show him you respect him enough to explain yourself to him. He’s not completely off his rocker. He’s right about some things.”
“Like what?” Jude asked.
“Like the fact that we have nothing but your word on who you are,” Alma told him. “Amelia and Allegra just said exactly the same thing, and they’re right.”
“Oh, that’s just great!” Jude burst out. “Now you’re repeating what they said, and you’re taking your father’s side against me. That’s just terrific!”
“I’m not taking anyone’s side.” Alma stopped in her tracks. “We’re doing it again. We’re arguing about the same thing all over again. We should just put it aside and let it play itself out. We shouldn’t give it the time of day.”
Jude stopped, too. “You’re right.” He circled her waist with his arm and pulled her against him. “Whatever happens, let’s not let anything that anyone else does come between us. Let’s stick together, through thick and thin.”
Alma smiled. “For better or for worse?”
“That’s right.” Jude kissed her, and their walk back to the house took longer than expected.
Toward the end of the day, Jude and Alma reached the top of the rise overlooking the house. The slanting sun lit up the adobe walls and the surrounding countryside, casting everything into a golden red against the pink and green of the evening sky.
They slowed their pace even more. “It’s too late to butcher the steer tonight,” Alma remarked.
“What will we do with him?” Jude asked.
“We’ll stable him in the barn overnight,” Alma told him. “Then we can butcher him tomorrow.”
“Who will butcher him?” Jude asked. “At least three of us will have to get out to the pasture to water the cattle.”
“And that leaves one to stay behind,” Alma pointed out. “Either you or Allegra will do it. Or else we can go out and water the cattle and then two can stay to guard them while the other two come back here.”
“That could work, too, I guess,” Jude agreed.
“When the girls get back tonight, we’ll talk about it,” Alma decided. “We’ll figure out what everyone wants to do.”
“Alright,” Jude replied.
At that moment, Amelia and Allegra cantered over the hill and streaked past them. The steer only just saw them and lifted his eyes to snort at them before they were gone. Alma laughed.
She and Jude walked the rest of the way down the hill, and they met the sisters in the barn. “You were sure right about that steer,” Allegra told Jude. “He followed you like a little tame lamb.”
“Alma says we should stable him in here for the night,” Jude replied. “We’ll butcher him in the morning.”
“That’s all right with me,” Allegra agreed. “I don’t fancy the idea of missin’ supper just to butcher him now. We’ll give him some grain, and he’ll be happy until morning.”
They slid the barn door closed and headed to the house. But they hadn’t gotten halfway across the yard when Clarence came out of the house, and in his hands he held a double barreled shotgun.
“Where is he?” he bellowed. “Where is the rotten weasel? I’ll blow him to kingdom come!” He waved his shotgun around, crisscrossing the yard with the barrel.
The thought crossed Alma’s mind that he couldn’t see well enough to do any damage. But at the same moment, her father leveled the gun straight at Jude and fired.
Alma screamed and jumped a foot into the air. The shot flew wide, giving Jude time to retreat back toward the barn. Allegra started at the deafening noise. “Papa!” she cried. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll kill him!” the old man raved. “I’ll make up for all those poor Confederate boys who were gunned down in their long underwear without so much as a sharp stick to defend themselves. I’ll settle the score with him if it’s the last thing I do.”
He raised his gun just long enough to break it open and slide two fresh shells into the chambers. Then he took aim and fired again. Jude ducked behind the rain barrel.
In her shock, Alma noticed his milky white eyes locking with keen precision on Jude, taking careful aim through the gun’s sights. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight. Why had she fooled herself all these years into thinking he couldn’t see very well? What else could he do that they didn’t know about, or wouldn’t admit to themselves?
He sure was handling that gun well. He looked forty years younger with the shotgun at his shoulder, facing his imagined enemy at long last.
But Alma didn’t have time to think about it. Clarence loaded his gun again and stalked toward the rain barrel. Alma’s mind refused to function. As a voice in her head screamed, “Run! Run for your life!”, her body obeyed a different directive. She found her legs running, but not away, not to find a hiding place to wait out this crisis.
She ran toward Jude. She ran toward the source of
her new-found joy and fulfillment. She reached the rain barrel at the same time her father did. He brought his shotgun up to his shoulder at the same moment Alma threw herself in front of Jude.
“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t shoot! If you shoot him, you’ll have to shoot me, too. Is that what you want?”
She fastened her eyes on those milky white orbs, but she no longer recognized the man they belonged to. His hair stuck out from his head in a halo of insanity, and his lips curled back from his rotten old teeth. He wouldn’t have surprised her by shooting both of them in his single-minded obsession with the past.
Somewhere in the reaches of his mind, he recognized her and hesitated. The hint of familiarity and affection crept into his wild expression. His finger moved off the trigger, and his eyes misted over with tears.
“You’re not choosing him over me, are you, Alma?” Clarence whispered. “Say it isn’t so.”
“I’m not choosing anyone over anyone else,” Alma exclaimed. “You’re making a mistake. He’s not the killer you think he is. There’s another explanation for all this. Just listen, and we can explain it all to you. If you kill him, you’re no better than those people you want to fight against.”
The old man hesitated again. “Don’t explain anything. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You have to hear it,” Alma insisted. “Jude isn’t old enough to have fought in the war. He wasn’t even born when you fought the Battle of Little Crooked Ridge.”
Rather than calming him down and ending the stand-off, Clarence’s face twisted up into a hideous mask of fury. “Is that what he told you? Is that the explanation you think is going to smooth everything over between me and him? He’s duped you, but he won’t dupe me.”
Clarence pointed his shotgun at the couple behind the rain barrel one last time. But this time, Jude launched himself out of his hiding place so fast, he knocked Alma to the ground.
He hurtled forward with his arms flailing and sent the shotgun skittering out of the old man’s hands. It landed in the dust some distance away. Jude didn’t stop, but attacked Clarence with all the hostility the old man showed toward him just a few moments before.
His arms whirled around him like a windmill, striking and punching and smacking. The first few blows landed with gut-wrenching thuds. Alma covered her ears and screamed as loud as she could to block out the sound of those blows.
Jude’s fists landed again and again on Clarence’s face and body, and the old man winced and whimpered with each one. He staggered backward and fell to the ground.
Jude gritted his teeth and growled. He planted his legs wide apart above the old man and drew back his fists to finish off his opponent.
Alma saw the outcome of the fight approaching and she jumped to her feet. This time, she threw her body across her father and lifted her arm to take the blows Jude intended to rain down on him.
“Stop, Jude!” she cried. “Stop now! He’s beaten. He can’t do any more harm. Just leave him alone.”
She didn’t expect her words to penetrate his rage, but he stopped and stared at her, panting and wheezing through his clenched teeth. She held up her hand in front of his face until he calmed enough to drop his fists and stand up straight.
Alma stayed where she was, protecting her fallen father from her husband’s fury. At last, the light of recognition entered his eyes, too. He held out his hand and she grasped it for dear life.
Jude pulled her to her feet and crushed her against his body in a bear hug. “I thought I was a goner there.”
“Are you all right now?” she whispered into his ear.
He nodded with his face pressed into the side of her neck. “I’m just glad you’re okay. He could have killed us both.”
A wretched sob drew their attention to the huddled mass on the ground behind them. Clarence sat with dust in his disheveled hair. The tears streaming down his cheeks made little rivulets in the dust clogging the wrinkles in his skin. “He’s a killer, I tell you. He’ll turn against you in the end. You mark my words.”
Alma turned on him. “What makes you say that, Papa? What makes you think he’s a killer, when he wasn’t even born when the war was fought?”
“Look.” Clarence sniffed his tears away and pointed a gnarled finger toward Jude. “If you look, you’ll see it.”
“What?” Alma asked. “I’ll see what?”
“The mark,” he hissed. “The mark of the Forty-sixth Infantry. There it is! I told you he was there, and he has the proof right there in plain view.”
Alma followed his finger toward Jude. “I don’t see anything.”
Amelia and Allegra broke out of their trance across the yard and came closer. All three sisters inspected Jude, looking for the sign their father pointed to. “Do you see anything?” Alma asked them. They shook their heads.
“There it is!” Spittle foamed at the corners of Clarence’s mouth. “Can’t you see it? It’s right there on the grips of his pistols!”
Jude looked down at his gun belt, and the three sisters looked with him. He pulled one of his pistols out of its holster and turned it around so he could examine the grip. “Well, I’ll be! And I never even knew it was there!”
Jude held out the gun to Alma, butt first, and she took it. She brought it right up to her face and looked. Some artisan scratched a crude skull and crossbones in the bone handle.
“Now do you see?” Clarence shouted in triumph. “That’s the mark of the Forty-sixth. They all had that mark on their guns when they killed our men. I’ll never forget that mark as long as I live. He was there. He massacred our men in cold blood, as sure as I’m sitting here.”
Jude stared at him with wide eyes. “My father gave me these guns when I first left home. He told me he had them when he fought in the war. I always assumed he fought for the Confederacy, but he never actually mentioned which Army he fought with. I was happy enough to get the guns. I never asked where they came from.”
The three sisters looked down at their father. His head drooped until his chin hit his chest, and he broke down in sobs.
“I didn’t know my father was a Yankee,” Jude went on. “I didn’t know anything about that massacre, and I certainly wasn’t there. I’m only twenty-five, you know. My parents didn’t even meet until the war ended.”
The old man didn’t answer. He only sobbed, his shoulders convulsing and his tears falling into the dust between his legs.
Alma handed the pistol back to Jude, who put it in its holster. “Come on inside, all of you. We’re all hungry and tired, and we need to get supper on before it gets any later. Tomorrow’s another work day.”
Jude nodded toward the old man. “What will we do about him?”
“Nothing,” Alma told him. “Just leave him there. He’ll come in later when he’s had a chance to calm down.”
She went to the door and opened it. She stood back as her sisters entered the house. Jude came toward her, but he stopped and glanced back toward the wreck of the man in the yard. “I don’t like leaving him out here. We ought to bring him inside. We ought to clean him up and feed him and put him to bed.”
Alma smiled at him. “Thank you for thinking of him, but he’ll come on his own. It’s bad enough seeing your whole carefully constructed world come crashing down around your ears. Don’t make it worse by being nice to him.”
“He’s a human being,” Jude replied. “You can see just from looking at him that he used to be a fine specimen of a man. He deserves better than this.”
“Come inside,” Alma told him. “Let him sit alone with his grief for a while. That’s what he wants.”
Jude stooped under the door frame into the dark house. Amelia lit the lamp and set it on the table as Alma closed the door.
Allegra prepared supper for them. She set it on the table, and Jude and the three women sat down to eat it, but Clarence still didn’t come in.
“We ought to save him some food for later,” Jude remarked. “He’ll be hungry.”
“I don’t thi
nk so,” Amelia told him. “He won’t want to eat. He’ll go to sleep, or he might sit up in his chair all night. Just carry on and let him work it out for himself. That’s our way.”
“I don’t like it,” Jude muttered.
“You should be angry with him,” Alma pointed out. “You should want to drive him out of house and home for pulling a gun on you and trying to kill you.”
“Maybe I should be,” Jude replied. “But I just can’t be mad at him. It’s like you kept telling me. He had a reason to hate me, and he had plenty of reason to think I was at that battle. He was wrong, but he had a good reason to think so. I should have gone out of my way to find out what was eating him. I should have given him the benefit of the doubt.”
A thoughtful silence fell over the table, broken only by chewing. A slight sound outside the house brought their attention back.
“Do you think he’s okay out there?” Jude asked.
“He’s fine out there,” Alma told him. “Don’t worry about him. You did the right thing by attacking him the way you did, and you did the right thing by stopping after you’d beaten him. He knows that.”
Jude sighed. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“I’m just glad the whole thing worked out in the end,” Alma added. “I’m glad we got the matter cleared up. Now we can move on.”
“So this is what getting a mail-order husband does to a family,” Allegra remarked.
Alma shook her head. “If I had known it was going to work out this way, I probably would have changed my mind.”
“Do you really think it’s that bad?” Amelia asked. “Do you really think it wasn’t worth it? I thought you were happy with your decision.”
“I am happy with it,” Alma replied. “I just didn’t know it was going to cause so much trouble.”
“It hasn’t been so much trouble,” Amelia returned. “I don’t think it’s been much trouble at all, considering how it could have gone. We’re all sitting here, having supper together very amicably. And I can’t remember when I’ve seen you so happy, Alma. You’re a different person since you got married.”
“You’re right,” Alma admitted. “I’m a different person.”
“And are you happy?” Amelia asked.
Alma’s smile lit up the table. “Yes. I’m happy. I’m very happy. I’ve never been happier in my life than right now.”
“That’s good,” Amelia exclaimed. “Because I’ve decided I’m going to get myself a mail-order husband, too.”
The End
Coming soon….
Texas Brides: Book 2
Amelia’s Mail-Order Husband
In Book 2 of The Texas Brides Series, Amelia Goodkind marries Bruce Manfield from El Paso, Texas. When Amelia first brings Bruce home, Jude and Alma and Allegra laugh at him. He’s a big, gangly hulk of a man, but he’s clumsy and ungainly in his movements, unlike delicate, careful Amelia. Jude especially sees Bruce as an easy target for his pointed sense of humor. The sisters can’t figure out why Bruce doesn’t stand up to his much smaller brother-in-law, when he could put Jude in his place with a flick of his wrist. No amount of encouragement from anyone can prod Bruce into asserting himself. He even seems to go out of his way to bow to Jude’s will. Even Alma finds Jude’s behavior toward Bruce disturbing.
But no one on the Goodkind ranch knows that Bruce is hiding an explosive secret, one which will transform the relationships of this family forever. The introduction of another man into the family brings fresh complications to the fragile peace established after Jude’s arrival. Competing loyalties and affections breed conflicts and misunderstandings, until everyone stands against everyone else. Only Amelia’s unwavering faith in her new husband carries them through to the ultimate climax. In his last battle, Bruce finds a strength he never knew he had in Amelia’s love.
Thank you for reading and supporting my book and I hope you enjoyed it.
Please will you do me a favor and review “Alma’s Mail Order Husband” so I’ll know whether you liked it or not, it would be very much appreciated, thank you.
Other Books by Kate Whitsby
Violet’s Mail Order Husband
Mail Order Marion (Chapman Mail Order Brides: Book1)
Christmas Mail Order Bride
Mail Order Josephine
Mail Order Bride Romance Box Set
Western Mail Order Brides Box Set
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