The First Lady Of Hardy Ranch

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

Lynette Humphry stood at the depot counter with her heart pounding in her chest. Was she really going to do this?

“Do you want a ticket, ma’am?” the clerk asked again as he glanced uneasily at the line forming behind her.

“I believe there’s a ticket waiting here for me already,” Lynnette said, making up her mind. She would do this flighty thing as her mother would have called running off thousands of miles to marry a man she’d never met. “My name is Lynnette Humphry and the ticket should be to Laramie, Wyoming.”

The clerk cocked his brow and stared at Lynnette. “Oh, yes,” he said with a slight sneer, “the ticket for the mail order bride.”

Lynnette flushed. He probably thought she was homely like her father had always told her and couldn’t get a man in St. Louis. She was taller than most of the young men her age and had always been gawky and clumsy in her awkward body. Her father had been right. No boys had come to ask to court her the way they did the other girls. Some had called her teacher’s pet and teased her mercilessly because she enjoyed school and made good grades. Lynnette hadn’t cared as long as she had her books to take her to other places.

She found solace in books and could escape to faraway places in them—far away from the farm and her strict father who treated his children and wife like slaves on the plantation his family had owned before the war.

Raymond Humphry was a proud man and losing everything in the war had diminished him. He’d moved from Alabama to Missouri and married the first woman with prospects who’d have him. Marion Lambert came from a good family and her father owned a small farm outside St. Louis. She was the only child and the farm would come to her and her husband after her parents died.

Raymond was a smart man and snapped up the young woman as quickly as he could. Marion became pregnant almost upon their wedding night and presented him with four more children after the first. With that, he had strong bodies to work the twenty acres without the need to pay anyone. To ensure they stayed where he wanted them, Raymond belittled his children and told them they could never be successful away from the farm and his supervision. Their places were there with him to guide them.

The belt and their fear of it was his means of control, and Raymond used it with abandon on his children. Lynnette was the oldest and knew it was wrong, but he was her father and she couldn’t do anything. As she stood at the ticket counter, guilt overwhelmed her. How could she leave her younger brothers and sisters to Raymond’s continued domination and abuse? Tears stung her eyes and she batted them back. It was time for her to break free.

While in the apothecary, Lynnette had picked up a fashion periodical and was thumbing through it when she came upon an advertisement from a mail order bride service. She had heard of them but had never given it much thought. With her prospects for a husband low in St. Louis, Lynnette had taken the periodical home and written to the service with the response directed to the postal box she’d rented, and her father didn’t know about.

She received an application soon after and had cabinet cards made of herself to send back with it. With the money she’d saved from sewing projects, she went to the photographer’s office in her best dress and had four cabinet cards of her image printed.

A month after sending off the application and cards, she received her first letter. It had been crude and the penmanship terrible. Lynnette made a curt reply of thank you, but no thank you. The second letter came soon after and bolstered Lynnette’s hopes. This one came with a cabinet card of a man in his middle years in military dress. His letter was sweet and told her how he was a widower with a young child and asked her to write and tell him about herself. She did and told him about her life on the farm near St. Louis and her hopes to go on to become a teacher someday.

In his next letter, he asked her to tell him more about the farm. By the time she received his fourth letter, Lynnette knew the man was looking for a wife with a farm to inherit and not a mother for his child. She thanked him for his interest but told him she was not interested.

When Lynnette was about to give up on this silly notion of mail order husbands, she received a letter from Laramie, Wyoming. The man, Jacob Hardy, said he owned a small ranch and was looking for a wife with farm experience to share the labors and the fruits of those labors with. His words were sweet, his penmanship neat, and his face on the enclosed cabinet card handsome. He said he was thirty-years old, healthy, and stood six-feet-two-inches tall. That was of particular interest to Lynnette as she stood five-feet-eight inches and towered over most of the young men her age. Thankfully, she’d stopped growing a few years ago, but at twenty-four she was still taller than most and felt uncomfortable in her own skin. Her sister Josie was only five-foot-four and Lynnette envied her petite stature.

After exchanging five letters over three months, Jacob had proposed marriage and asked her to come to Laramie. He would purchase her a ticket on the Union Pacific and have it waiting for her at the station in St. Louis if she would consent to be his wife and partner on the ranch.

Lynnette had written back with her consent and eagerly awaited his reply. A month later she stood at the depot counter with her carpetbag of clothes and personal items in her hand.

* * *

Jacob sat in his favorite chair beside the fire and stared at  the cabinet card with Lynnette Humphry’s image upon it. The young woman sat in a chair with her back stiff and her head held high. Her hair was swept up on the top of her head with a few ringlets of her brunette locks coiling down around her pretty face.

He shook his head as he remembered her letter, apologizing for not being an attractive woman. He wondered how she could think such a thing? Lynnette Humphry was beautiful and not only on the outside. Her letters had been intelligent and filled with compassion when she talked about how much it pained her to slaughter the chickens or a hog. He smiled. Would she have the same compassion for him?

“Are you certain you want to do this, Jacob?” Thomas, his twin brother asked as he entered the room with a leather satchel in his hands.

“It’s the only way I can think of to make certain of her, Tom.”

“Maybe if you’d just been honest in the first place,” Thomas scolded as he dropped into a matching chair on the other side of the wide fireplace hearth.

Jacob snorted. “Do you honestly think she’d have replied favorably or at all had I sent her a cabinet card with my picture on it and not yours?”

“Wouldn’t it have said more about her if she had?” Thomas replied in an aggravated tone. “They were your words she was replying to and not the face and body on that damned card.” Thomas reached across to pull the cabinet card Jacob held from his hands. “How do you even know this is who you were writing to?” He shook the card. “This could be her damned sister and you could be getting some hideous beast in her place.”

Jacob struggled to stand and then reached for the card. “It’s why I have to do this, Thomas,” he said and slipped the cabinet card into his jacket pocket. “Is the buckboard ready?” he asked as he lifted the leather satchel.

“All ready to go,” Thomas said as he brushed past his brother to open the heavy pine door, “but I still don’t understand why you’re putting yourself through this. It’s a long damned trip from Laramie to St. Louis, and then back again just to talk to a damned girl and see what she looks like.”

“She’s the damned girl who would be my wife, brother. I have to know if she’d have a man like me or if she’s as superficial as all the women here in Laramie seem to be.”

“Had you simply sent her a card with your actual image on it, to begin with, Jacob,” his brother said with a sigh, “you’d already know, and you wouldn’t need to burden yourself with this tiresome journey.”

“That new bull will be arriving from Cheyenne next week,” Jacob said, “make certain the boys let him rest up for a few days before they put him with the cows.”

Thomas grinned. “We wouldn’t want to wear him out on the first go around,” he said with a chuckle. “And you take care with that cow you hope to bed as well.”

“I beg your pardon?” Jacob said with his eyes wide.

“I hear those Pullman beds are quite handy.” Thomas continued to chuckle. “Maybe you can lure this little gold digger into one of them and try her out before you put a ring on her finger.”

“You think Lynnette is only after money?” Jacob asked in surprise.

Thomas snorted. “All the bitches who answer those mail-order bride adds are looking for a man with money, Jacob. Had you sent her an honest picture of yourself, I’m sure she would have been just as receptive when she learned you had a productive ranch with a thousand head of prime beef and a bank account to match.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t have needed my picture to lure her in.”

“That’s what I need to find out, Tom,” Jacob said with a deep sigh. “I need to see what kind of woman she really is.”

“Well,” Thomas said with a chuckle, “if you bed her on that train and she’s worth a damn, bring her back for me. If she can cook worth a damn, I’ll marry her. We could use a woman around here who can couple and cook too.”

Jacob rolled his eyes. “I think you care more about your cock than your belly, Tom. Doesn’t Felicia down in town keep that taken care of for you?”

“Felicia’s good for a poke or a suck,” he said as he sat enjoying the fire, “but she can’t cook worth a damn. I want a woman who’s as good in the kitchen as she is in the bedroom.” He rose and slapped his brother’s back. “It wouldn’t hurt if she knew how to milk a cow and sew on a button too.”

Jacob shook his head. “You don’t want much, do you? Should she be able to read and do ciphers too?”

“We’ve got you to do that, brother,” Thomas said with a grin. “God made women to be used and enjoyed by men. He gave men the brains to manage businesses. Women are and will always be beneath men and that’s the way I like ‘em—beneath me with my cock deep inside.” He laughed. “Ain’t that what the preachers say?”

Jacob smiled and shook his head. “I think Mother would have slapped the back of your head if she heard you say that about women.”

“Yes,” Thomas said with his face going dark, “well Mother’s gone now, isn’t she?”

Lillian Hardy, their mother, had been a fierce woman who’d managed the Hardy Ranch for twenty years after her husband’s death in a cattle stampede. She’d raised her boys to be strong, capable men, and seen them both educated. Lillian never coddled her son Jacob for his injuries received in the same stampede that had taken his father, though many women might have. She’d treated him no different than Thomas and made him do the same chores around the ranch as his brother once he’d recovered as best he ever would. She’d died five years before from cancer in her breast and Jacob missed her strength and guidance. Thomas missed her cooking.

They arrived at the depot and Jacob got down from the buckboard without his brother’s offered assistance.

 “I really wish you’d reconsider this, Jacob. Just send for her, and if she rejects you outright when she sees your deception,” Thomas shrugged, “then send her back where she came from.” He put his arm around his brother’s shoulders. “But I bet she won’t once she sees the ranch. She’ll wed you and spread her legs for you no matter what to say she’s the wife of a rancher like the one Jacob Hardy owns. I’m sure she’s no better than any other whore and would be your wife for the price of the Hardy name and a fine house.”

Jacob shook off his brother’s arm. “That’s just it, Thomas. I want to know Lynnette Humphry isn’t that kind of woman. If I wanted to marry a whore, I’d go into town and marry Felicia or one of the others.”

“Not Felicia,” he cautioned with a grin, “but I think Betsy can cook some. I’ve heard her talking about it.”

Jacob shook his head as he approached the ticket counter. “I’ll take my chances with this plan,” he said and ordered the ticket to be waiting for Lynnette in St. Louis and the one for himself from Laramie to St. Louis and back again.

Thomas waited with him for the train to St. Louis to arrive and walked with him to the waiting first-class car. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Jacob,” Thomas said as he helped his brother up the steps and onto the train.

“I’ll be fine,” Jacob said. “Just make sure that bull from Cheyenne gets to the ranch and rested up before the boys let him in with the cows.”

“I’ll see to it,” Thomas said with a grin before turning away without the grin leaving his face.