Badlands Bride. Cheryl St.John

of reporting on the boxing matches,” she said to her reflection. The sporting event would make the front page every day for weeks, and Hallie could think of nothing more exciting than seeing her name beneath the headline.

      “I’m sure I could get interviews with the participants,” she said convincingly. “Perhaps they’ll share insights with me they wouldn’t give the men.” Forest green curtains obscured the interior of the newspaper office, but she didn’t need to see in to picture her oldest brother, Turner, setting type and her father in the office beyond.

      “I’ve been doing the menial jobs without complaint. It’s time you gave me a chance. I’ll do my best.” Hallie gave her likeness a last confident nod and opened the door.

      The reassuring smells of ink, paper and grease, which she’d grown up with, boosted her confidence. Turner didn’t glance up as she strode pass the Franklin press to her father’s office. She rapped twice and opened the door.

      Samuel Wainwright glanced up and immediately returned his attention to the papers on his desk top.

      “Father, I —”

      “No.”

      Her mouth dropped open. “How do you even know what I was going to say?”

      “You have that stubborn look on your face.”

      “I want to cover the boxing matches.” She placed her fists on her hips. “Evan—” her lip curled around the name of the new apprentice “—gets all the good stories.”

      Samuel shifted his smoking cigar stub from one side of his mouth to the other and leaned back in his creaky leather chair. “Now, Hallie,” he cajoled. “Don’t get in a huff. You know it wouldn’t be acceptable — or safe—for you to take up with that rowdy crowd in the Piedmont district. Any female in Boston with half a brain in her head wouldn’t set foot within a mile of the place.”

      She rolled her eyes. “That’s all the brain you give any woman credit for having.”

      He harrumphed, then shuffled through a stack of papers, finding one he wanted and ignoring her while he checked the list in his other hand against the sheet.

      “Hello, Precious,” Turner said, entering.

      Hallie winced inwardly.

      He’d rolled his white shirtsleeves back, and his dark hair stood up on his head in finger-combed waves. He handled the office work, overseeing the typeset and presses. “I want to check this against your copy,” he said to their father.

      Samuel extended a paper, and the two men concurred. Used to being ignored, Hallie sat on the corner of the ink-stained oak desk and crossed her arms over her chest, unwilling to acknowledge her father’s wisdom in this particular case. So what if he was right for once? Her father and brothers, Charles and Turner, always came up with some inane reason that she couldn’t handle a story, and ninety-nine out of a hundred times the real reason—the infuriating reason — was that she was a female.

      Turner reached for a strand of Hallie’s hair that had fallen loose. “You’re a sight.”

      She batted his hand away.

      “What are you pouting about now?”

      “I’m not pouting.”

      He laughed. “You’re mad as a March bare. Still in a fix over Evan? He says he can’t sleep nights for the ringing in his ears. For the last week at supper, you’ve managed to discredit everything about the man, including his parentage.”

      Hallie uncrossed her arms and shot a glance at her father. He wore a smile of bored amusement. “I keep hoping someone around here will notice that he’s not any more capable than I am.”

      “And as we’ve told you a thousand times,” Turner said, raising a superior brow, “Father needed Evan.”

      She tried her best to swallow her resentment. Her father did need help, and she’d worked so hard to prove herself. Samuel had hired the young man to assist Charles with the reporting, so he could devote himself to the book work and editing. It hurt immeasurably that none of them had considered her for the position. And it frustrated her beyond words that they refused to listen to her reasoning.

      It was one thing to constantly defer to her brothers, but now an outsider had displaced her! “Perhaps if I put on a pair of trousers, the lot of you will notice I have a whole brain in this head.”

      Turner scowled. “If you put on a pair of trousers, the men around here will notice more than that. And I’ll have to turn you over my knee and discipline the object of their attention.”

      Hallie resisted the urge to stick her tongue out. Just because they treated her like a child didn’t mean she’d give in and behave like one.

      “Did you turn in the piece on the quilting society?” Turner asked.

      “Now that was an unequaled challenge,” she replied, tracing a worn scar on the desk top with an index finger. “Think it’ll make the headlines tomorrow?”

      “Look,” her father said, interrupting. “Remember those classifieds we ran a while back? Here’s more of the same.”

      Turner bent over the desk and read aloud. “‘Bride wanted.’ Another one—‘Wife wanted to cook, do laundry and care for children.’”

      “What kind of self-respecting woman would answer an ad like that?” Hallie asked, frowning her distaste.

      “A woman who wants a husband,” Turner replied, directing a pointed glance at his sister. “Unlike you.”

      She ignored the familiar taunt. “It’s barbaric.”

      “But newsworthy,” her father added. He caught his cigar between two fingers and squinted at her through curls of blue-gray smoke. “Some of the young ladies at Miss Abernathy’s Conservatory answered the last ads. Why don’t you do a story on them, Hallie?”

      “Really?” she asked, jumping up.

      “I haven’t seen anything in the other papers,” he continued. “Maybe, for a change, we can print a story before they get the idea.”

      The assignment filled Hallie with a new sense of importance. The Daily was always trying to get the jump on the bigger papers, and even though the other newspapers always managed to edge them out, the Wainwrights had increased circulation over the past year. Any newsworthy story that first appeared in The Daily was a feather in their journalistic cap.

      “I’ll work on it right away.” She kissed her father on the cheek and smugly tilted her chin on her way past Turner.

      Samuel and Turner exchanged conspiratory grins. “How long do you think that will keep her out of our hair?” Turner asked.

      Samuel ran a hand over his balding pate. “Let’s hope until Evan has a foot in the door. It’s hard enough being a cub, without having to deal with Hallie when she’s got her hackles up.”

      “Well, then, we’ll just have to keep her busy.”

      

      “Isn’t it just the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard?” The young woman with golden hair and ivory skin ignored the cake and tea on the tiny table and stared vacantly across the front of the lace-decorated establishment where the ladies of Boston came to socialize over afternoon tea.

      Hallie thought traveling to God-only-knew-where to marry a man she’d never laid eyes on was the most asinine thing she’d ever heard, but she politely refrained from saying so.

      “Where are the northern Dakotas, anyway?” Tess Cordell asked, coming out of her dreamy-eyed trance. “One of the girls said up by the North Pole.”

      “I don’t think it’s quite that far.” Hallie tried to recall her geography lessons. “It’s far to the west and up north. Quite remote, I’m sure.”

      Tess took