Short Straw Bride. Dallas Schulze

sense in you trying to weasel me into getting hitched. Seems to me that you should be the one to find a wife. You’re younger, less set in your ways.”

      “I’m only three years younger,” Daniel protested. “Besides, I don’t want to get married.” The thought was enough to make him reach for his glass and down a healthy shot of whiskey.

      “I don’t want to get married, either,” Luke noted.

      There was a lengthy silence while they considered the problem. Outside, a cricket scratched plaintively, the sound swallowed by the vast emptiness of the land.

      “We could draw straws,” Daniel said. “Whoever gets the short straw has to find a wife.”

      “Might work.” Luke rolled the idea around. It wasn’t ideal. Of course, the only thing that would be ideal was to forget the whole thing. But Daniel was right, they did need a wife. And since neither of them wanted a wife, it was only fair to let chance decide which of them had to be sacrificed on the matrimonial altar.

      He got up and crossed to where the broom leaned in the corner. A thick lacing of cobwebs tied it to the wall and the handle stuck to his fingers. Frowning, he lifted it and broke two dusty straws off the bottom. He brought them back to the table and sat down again. Daniel watched as he measured the two straws and then carefully broke one off halfway down. There’d be no mistaking which of them had drawn the short straw.

      “You sure about this?” Luke asked.

      Daniel dragged his eyes upward to meet his brother’s. “I’m sure.”

      Without looking at what he was doing, Luke rolled the straws between his fingers, then closed his fist around them. “You first.”

      Both men looked down. The tops of both straws were visible above the tanned skin of his hand. One straw was higher than the other but there was no telling which was longer overall. Daniel studied the two straws as intently as if his life depended on it, which, Luke guessed, it more or less did. He reached out, his fingers hovering above Luke’s hand, and then quickly drew a straw, choosing the one that showed the least.

      There was a moment’s silence and then Daniel drew a deep, relieved breath. His face expressionless, Luke slowly opened his hand and stared at the short piece of straw lying on his palm.

      Damned if he wasn’t going to have to find himself a wife.

      

      Eleanor Williams leaned her elbows on the windowsill and looked up at the fat yellow moon. It sat in the middle of the sky, surrounded by twinkling stars like a plump matron with dozens of servants dancing attendance. But Eleanor barely noticed the beauty of the view.

      Today had been her birthday. She was now twenty years old and, according to her cousin, Anabel, could consider herself practically an old maid. The catty remark was the only acknowledgment there’d been of Eleanor’s birthday and Anabel had only mentioned it because it gave her an opportunity to say something unpleasant. Unfortunately, in this case, Anabel’s nastiness was nothing more than the truth. She was practically an old maid, Eleanor admitted with a sigh. And likely to remain that way as long as she was so completely overshadowed by her younger cousin.

      Anabel had just turned sixteen and had every expectation of being a wife before her next birthday. How could she not be, pretty as she was? Her hair was the color of just-ripened wheat, all soft and golden, and when it was tied up in rags, it turned into perfect ringlets that set off Anabel’s pink-and-white complexion like a gilded frame.

      Unlike Anabel’s obedient golden locks, Eleanor’s waist-length hair was a mass of thick, soft curls that refused to be completely tamed. Even now, when she’d just braided it for bed, tiny curls had already sprung loose to lie against her forehead. And instead of being rich gold, it was a plain brown—dirt brown Anabel had told her when Eleanor first came to live with her aunt and uncle six years ago.

      With a sigh, Eleanor released the heavy braid, letting it fall back over her shoulder. It wasn’t just Anabel’s golden hair that made her so lovely, Her eyes were a beautiful clear blue, the color of a summer sky, as one smitten swain had told her. No one was going to wax poetic about plain brown eyes. And Anabel was tall. Not too tall, Aunt Dorinda would have quickly pointed out. Just tall enough to display the elegant slenderness of her figure.

      Thank heavens her Anabel wasn’t a little dab of a thing, Eleanor had once heard Aunt Dorinda say, with a pointed glance in her niece’s direction. At barely five feet tall and with a figure that was neither elegant nor slender, Eleanor couldn’t even attribute the remark to Dorinda Williams’s acid tongue. She was a little dab of a thing, and there was just no getting around it.

      His little chicken, her father had called her. Always fussing over him like a mother hen with only one chick, he’d tease. Every night he’d come to her room wherever they were staying and she’d solemnly inspect his person. Always, there’d been some small flaw for her childish fingers to adjust—a tie not quite properly tied, a lock of hair slightly out of place, a loose button to be quickly stitched onto the crisp white linen of his shirt.

      The memory made Eleanor smile. It was only after he was gone that it had occurred to her that those little flaws had been deliberate. Nathan Williams had understood his daughter’s need to be needed. If they’d had a settled home, she could have fussed with the cooking and cleaning. But he was a gambler and they rarely stayed in one place more than a few weeks at a time. Since he couldn’t give her a house to fuss over, he’d given her himself.

      Eleanor’s mother had died when Eleanor was six, and for the next eight years she’d traveled with her father. Nathan Williams had been a gambler by profession. He’d started out gambling on the Mississippi riverboats before the war. When he married Emmeline St. Jacques, he’d purchased a store in St. Louis and settled down to try his hand at being a tradesman. Eleanor had vague memories of a high-ceilinged room, with sawdust on the floor and goods piled high on every side.

      But after Emmeline’s death Nathan hadn’t been able to stay in one place, and he’d gone back to his old profession. He’d brought his young daughter west and they’d traveled from town to town, staying in each only a short while, until he judged it time to take his skill with the cards and move on. It hadn’t been a conventional upbringing and Eleanor knew there were those who’d say that he’d had no business dragging a child all over the country the way he had. But she’d never minded the travel as long as she could stay with her father.

      It had been six years since he was killed by a stray bullet in a barroom quarrel between two cowpunchers, and she still missed him. Eleanor’s eyes grew wistful, remembering her father’s quiet smile and the gentle warmth of his laugh. There was rarely any laughter in her Uncle Zebediah’s house. When she’d first come here, newly orphaned and almost paralyzed with grief, one of the first things she’d noticed was how seldom her aunt and uncle smiled.

      At first she’d thought it was because they were sorry about her father’s death, but it hadn’t taken long for her to realize that Zebediah had sternly disapproved of his older brother’s profession. Gambling was an activity steeped in sin and, as far as they were concerned, Nathan’s death in a common barroom brawl was confirmation that God punished all sinners, even if it did occasionally take Him a little longer than Zeb would have liked.

      Eleanor might have been offended on her father’s behalf if she hadn’t already begun to realize that there wasn’t much that Zeb and Dorinda Williams didn’t disapprove of. Where her father had always made it a point to find pleasure, even in small things, his younger brother and his wife seemed to try to do just the opposite. They could find fault with anyone and anything, no matter how small. Over the past six years Eleanor could almost count the number of times she’d seen a real smile from either of them, and she couldn’t ever remember hearing them laugh.

      Anabel smiled and laughed, but her smiles were well practiced in front of her mirror and her laughter was generally at someone else’s expense. Her parents doted on her, and they’d spoiled her terribly. Anabel had only to express an interest in something for them to leap to get it for her, whether it was a new pink ribbon