A Creed Country Christmas. Linda Miller Lael

Sometimes it was harder to think about him and the way he’d died, than to recall Beth succumbing to that fever.

      Juliana straightened against Lincoln’s side, yawned. If the darkness hadn’t hidden her face, the brim of her bonnet would have, but he sensed that she was embarrassed by the lapse.

      “We’re almost home,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear.

      She didn’t answer, but sat up a little straighter, wanting to pull away, but confined by his arm and the cloth of his coat.

      When they reached the gate with its overarching sign, Lincoln moved to get down, but the Indian boy, Joseph, was faster. He worked the latch, swung the gate wide, and Lincoln drove the buckboard through.

      His father and Tom Dancingstar had cut and planed the timber for that sign, chiseled the letters into it, and then laboriously deepened them with pokers heated in the homemade forge they’d used for horseshoeing.

      Lincoln never saw the words without a feeling of quiet gratification and pride.

      Stillwater Springs Ranch.

      He held the team while the boy shut the gate, then scrambled back into the wagon. The horses were eager to get to the barn, where hay and water and warm stalls awaited them.

      Tom was there to help unhitch the team when Lincoln drove through the wide doorway and under the sturdy barn roof. Part Lakota Sioux, part Cherokee and part devil by his own accounting, Tom had worked on the ranch from the beginning. He’d named himself, claiming no white tongue could manage the handle he’d been given at birth.

      He smiled when he saw Juliana, and she smiled back.

      Clearly, they were acquainted.

      Was he, Lincoln wondered, the only yahoo in the countryside who’d never met the teacher from the Indian School?

      “Take the kids inside the house,” Lincoln told Juliana, and it struck him that rather than the strangers they were, they might have been married for years, the two of them, all these children their own. “Tom and I will be in as soon as we’ve finished here.”

      He paused to lift the two smaller children out of the wagon; sleepy-eyed, still wrapped in their blankets, they stumbled a little, befuddled to find themselves in a barn lit by lanterns, surrounded by horses and Jenny Lind, the milk cow.

      “I’ll tend to the horses,” Tom told him. “There’s a kettle of stew warming on the stove, and Gracie’s been watching the road for you since sunset.”

      Thinking of his gold-haired, blue-eyed daughter, Lincoln smiled. Smarter than three judges and as many juries put together, Gracie tended toward fretfulness. Losing her mother when she was only five caused her to worry about him whenever he was out of her sight.

      With a ranch the size of his to run, he was away from the house a lot, accustomed to leaving the child in the care of his now-absent mother, or Rose-of-Sharon Gainer, the cumbersomely pregnant young wife of one of the ranch hands.

      The older boy’s gaze had fastened on Tom.

      “Can I stay here and help?” he asked.

      “May I,” Juliana corrected with a smile. “Yes, Joseph, you may.”

      With that, she leaned down, weary as she was, and lifted the littlest girl into her arms. Lincoln bent to hoist up the smaller boy.

      “This is Daisy,” Juliana told him. “That’s Billy-Moses you’re holding.” The girl who’d spoken of working for her keep at the Diamond Buckle ducked her head shyly, stood a little closer to her teacher. “And this is Theresa,” she finished.

      Leaving Tom and Joseph to put the team up for the night, Lincoln shed his coat at the entrance to the barn, draped it over Juliana’s shoulders. It dragged on the snowy ground, and she smiled wanly at that, hiking the garment up with her free arm, closing it around both herself and Daisy.

      They entered the house by the side door, stepping into the warmth, the aroma of Tom’s venison stew and the light of several lanterns. Gracie, rocking in the chair near the cookstove and pretending she hadn’t been waiting impatiently for Lincoln’s return, went absolutely still when she saw that he wasn’t alone.

      Her cornflower-blue eyes widened, and her mouth made a perfect O.

      Daisy and Billy-Moses stared back at her, probably as amazed as she was.

      “Gracie,” Lincoln said unnecessarily. “We have company.”

      Gracie had recovered by then; she fairly leaped out of the rocking chair. Looking up at Juliana, she asked, “Did you answer one of my papa’s advertisements? Are you going to be a governess, a housekeeper or a wife?”

      Lincoln winced.

      Understandably, Juliana seemed taken aback. Like Gracie, though, she turned out to be pretty resilient. The only sign that the child’s question had caught her off guard was the faint tinge of pink beneath her cheekbones, and that might have been from the cold.

      “I’m Miss Mitchell,” she said kindly. “These are my pupils—Daisy, Billy-Moses and Theresa. There’s Joseph, as well—he’s out in the barn helping Mr. Dancingstar look after the horses.”

      “Then you’re a governess!” Gracie cried jubilantly. Young as she was, she could already read, and because Lincoln wouldn’t allow her to travel back and forth to school in Stillwater Springs, she was convinced that lifelong ignorance would be her lot.

      “Gracie,” Lincoln said, setting Billy-Moses on his feet. “Miss Mitchell is a guest. She didn’t answer any advertisements.”

      Gracie looked profoundly disappointed, but only for a moment. Like most Creeds, when she set her mind on something, she did not give up easily.

      For the next little while, they were all busy with supper.

      Tom and Joseph came in from the barn, pumped water at the sink to wash up and joined them at the table, while Gracie, who had already eaten, rushed about fetching bread and butter and ladling milk from the big covered crock stored on the back step.

      His daughter wanted to make Miss Mitchell feel welcome, Lincoln thought with a smile, so she’d stay and teach her all she wanted to know—and that was considerable. She hadn’t asked for a doll for Christmas, or a spinning top, like a lot of little girls would have done.

      Oh, no. Gracie wanted a dictionary.

      Wes often joked that by the time his niece was old enough to make the trip to town on her own, she’d be half again too smart for school and ready to take over the Courier so he could spend the rest of his life smoking cigars and playing poker.

      As far as Lincoln could tell, his brother did little else but smoke cigars and play poker—not counting, of course, the whiskey-swilling and his long-standing and wholly scandalous love affair with Kate Winthrop, who happened to own the Diamond Buckle.

      Gracie adored her uncle Weston—and Kate.

      Casting a surreptitious glance in Juliana’s direction whenever he could during supper, Lincoln saw that she could barely keep her eyes open. As soon as the meal was over, he showed her to his mother’s spacious room. She and Daisy and Billy-Moses could share the big feather bed.

      Joseph bunked in with Tom, who slept in a small chamber behind the kitchen stove, having given up his cabin out by the bunkhouse to Ben Gainer and his wife. Theresa was to sleep with Gracie.

      Lincoln’s young daughter, however, was not in bed. Wide-awake, she sat at the table with Lincoln, watching as he drank lukewarm coffee, left over from earlier in the day.

      “Go to bed, Gracie,” he told her.

      Tom lingered by the stove, also drinking coffee. He smiled when Gracie didn’t move.

      “I couldn’t possibly sleep,” she said seriously. “I am entirely too excited.”

      Lincoln sighed.