Literary Samples

The Strange Courtship of Kathleen O’Dwyer
By  Robert Temple
 

Copyright©2022 by Robert Temple First Edition. First Printing:  December, 2022

Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

This novel is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents  are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U. S.  copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites.  Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

 Chapter 1

The report of a single gunshot startled Kathleen O'Dwyer awake from the wool blanket that served as her mattress.  She rolled onto the dusty floorboards of the wagon and sat up. Outside, grunts and curses erupted from the men sleeping beneath other wagons loaded with trade goods for Santa Fe, and Kathleen heard the scrape of steel muzzles on lashed down crates and the clatter of loose equipment as teamsters snatched rifles and shotguns out of wagons.  She reached for the sturdy boots she had purchased for the rough journey. Here, she was on the north bank of the Arkansas a couple of days from Upper Crossing near Chouteau’s Island—the heart of hostile Indian country—and Kathleen did not have a firearm. What had she been thinking back in St. Louis? Foolish, she thought, downright foolish to accept without question Captain Freepole’s assurance that she did not need a gun. The first woman to travel the Santa Fe Trail, indeed. Why had she ever listened to any of Captain Freepole’s crazy schemes?
She dragged on her boots and belted a plain brown, ankle-length skirt over her heavy cotton nightgown. She saw nothing of what went on outside the canvas top that enclosed her wagon. Inside the wagon was about the only privacy she had, but now, Kathleen wished she could see whether Indians crept with scalping knives toward her. 
She groped for a handhold on top of the driver's seat that formed the front wall of the wagon bed. She intended to peek out the opening in the arched canvas top of the wagon, but at a string of blood curdling cries, she snatched her hands back to her chin. Then she recognized the triumphant cries as Tom Beckenworth's high-pitched tenor and muttered a curse. With pathetic attempts to impress her, the eighteen-year-old boy had pestered her all the way from St.  Louis. What danger had the boy gotten them all into now with his mischief?
Summoning her stubborn Irish courage, she gripped the top of the buckboard seat and climbed from beneath the canvas. The night was bright with stars, and a quarter moon turned the gently waving grass of the plains into a silver ocean. The other wagons stood out in stark definition on the flat prairie. Stumbling by her, men rushed toward the sound of Tom Beckenworth's voice.  She jumped down and ran after them. 
“Miss O'Dwyer, you ain't supposed to be out of the wagon at times like this!”
Kathleen halted and turned to face Captain Freepole, leader of the expedition.  A stout man no more than five feet five inches tall, he trotted toward her with his potbelly bouncing up and down, but his back was straight and his shoulders thrown back. The familiarity with which he handled his long rifle and the jut of his chin reminded Kathleen that he had once been an officer in the Kentucky Militia during the War of 1812. 
“Get back in the wagon.”
“And be murdered alone while all you men run off to who knows where?”
He scowled and ran toward the gathering of men forty yards to the rear of the last wagon. Kathleen picked up her skirt and ran alongside him, her longer stride matching his waddling run. 
Tom Beckenworth stood with legs spread well apart, rifle grasped in his left hand and a huge grin on his face.  A lock of hair hung down on his forehead. A crumpled shape lay at his feet. Moonlight glinted off the blade of a large skinning knife Tom pulled from his belt. He crouched on one knee above the crumpled shape of an Indian corpse, grasped the Indian's long black hair, and lifted the dead man's head. 
“Good God!” German Joe Holtz bellowed. Holtz was one of three mountain men serving as expedition guides. Holtz's shadow, a half-breed named Billy Gap Tooth, was the second of the guides and stood beside Holtz. Kathleen wondered where the third guide, James Colter, was.  Holtz shook his rifle at Tom.  “You the greenest little jackdaw of a child ever sucked his Momma's tit.  You go lifting the hair of that there Injun, and ya'll might as well dig ya'll's graves come sun up.”
“I aim to scalp me this here horse stealing Injun I kilt,” Tom said and sawed at the top of the skull.  “I don't reckon you'll crow so loud about that scalp string of yourn, not after tonight.”
Kathleen clamped her teeth together and watched the grisly sight. Now was no time to betray weakness, not with the way these men treated any trace of weakness.  She wished she was back in St.  Louis—far better to fend off a hundred widowers like Caleb Jenkins than to deal with this. The knife sliced flesh away from the Indian's skull.  He was a short, dark man with legs even more heavily bowed than those of the three mountain men. He resembled a large child with his long, slipper-like moccasins and skimpy leather breechclout. He had no facial hair, not even eyebrows. German Joe spat and resumed cursing. 
“You damn fool! You—”
“Mr. Holtz, that's enough cussing,” Captain Freepole said.  “I've told you before to mind your mouth in front of Miss O'Dwyer. 
“Tom, killing a thieving Injun's one thing, but acting like a savage Injun's another.  As long as I'm paying the wages on this trip, no man—especially my wife's kin—is going to lift scalps.”
“I caught him thieving horses and I kilt him,” Tom replied. He was the youngest member of the expedition. Kathleen knew that Captain Freepole looked on Tom as the son his wife had never born him. Someday, the young man would take over the trading firm with Freepole's blessing. “It's for me to do with him as I like, and I say I'm going to lift his hair.”
“Boy, you're young, so I'm letting them hot words pass,” Freepole said and then gestured with his rifle at Kathleen, “but I can't let this go no further in front of Miss O'Dwyer.”
Hands frozen on the Indian's skull, Tom looked at Kathleen. She let none of the horror but all of the loathing for this senseless act show on her face. Tom's eyes wavered. 
“Miss O'Dwyer, please go back to the wagons,” Tom said.  “Captain Freepole's right.  A woman hadn't ought to see this.”
“Were you planning to show me the scalp later on?” Kathleen asked. Tom's eyes dropped.  “Did you think that would impress me?”
“You hear that, boy?” Holtz snorted.  “Even the schoolmarm knowed you's wrong.  Damn near as smart as she is purty. Boy, let ole German Joe tell you just how wrong you is.  Ain't much about Injuns I don't know, and I know for a plumb sure fact this here buck's a Comanche.  You kilt him for nothing worse than horsestealing. How many you figure one brave was going to make off with? The whole kit and kaboodle?
“Stealing horses is what every mother's son of a Comanche's born to do. It's their way of collecting toll for crossing their land.  But no, ain't bad enough you go kill one. You got to lift his hair to boot. You done fixed this bunch of pilgrims good. We still got halfway to go before we reach Santa Fe. Them Comanches going to make it hell to pay every step of the way. Ya'll be thankful if they leave the hair on nary a one of ya'll. 
“And the Missy here you been so sweet on. Did you stop and think what them bastards'd do to her? No sirreee! Some buck's going to latch onto—”
“Mr.  Holtz, I warned you once already to mind your mouth!” Captain Freepole shouted.  Glaring at the vulgar mountain man, Kathleen brushed back a lock of the flame red hair that fell down her shoulders. Holtz leered at Kathleen. She felt the other men's eyes on her but controlled her reactions, neither blushing nor dropping her eyes. She drew herself up to her full five feet ten inches and stared down at Holtz. More than once, she had intimidated men with her size, but Holtz's leer only broadened. 
“Captain, I'm just letting everybody know what's in for them,” Holtz said. His eyes squinted, and his lips pulled back from his teeth.  “Folks should be obliged to me for telling them straight. I got the smarts some ain't.  I'm just doing all concerned a favor.  I'm …”
While Holtz blustered, Kathleen looked away from the circle of men. Holtz and the half-breed were outcasts. She wondered again where the third mountain man was. James Colter kept to himself. Perhaps, he had left the rest to whatever fate the Comanche intended. Mountain men were a strange breed. They dressed much in the manner of the frontier scouts described by her favorite author, James Fenimore Cooper, but during her two years in St.  Louis, she had seen too many vicious brawls among mountain men celebrating the end of trapping season.  Natty Bumpo was a common drunk, thief, and back stabber on the streets of St. Louis. Decent people avoided him. 
“I ain't seen any other Comanche among the horses or wagons so far,” James Colter said. He was suddenly there, not quite at the fringe of the gathering. Startled faces turned in his direction.  “Ya'll best break up this church social and keep an eye on the stock yourselves. Bound to be more of them Yamparikas sneaking about.”
The other men streamed back toward the double row of wagons while Captain Freepole shouted needless commands to check the wagons and draft animals. With Billy Gap Tooth at his side, German Joe trotted toward camp cursing the greenness of the others.  Even Tom Beckenworth raced back, leaving the Indian's scalp hanging by a single flap of skin from the bloody skull. Kathleen turned away from the sight. 
“We'd best get back with the rest,” Colter said. About twenty-five feet away, he made no move to come any closer, as most of the teamsters would have after speaking to her, and he looked away when she met his eyes.  Expression closed and wary, he studied the prairie around him, glanced once more at her, and shifted his gaze again to the prairie. Colter was a misfit, as skittish as the animals he trapped. She murmured agreement and walked toward the wagons. She noticed that he followed, but at a distance. 
Back inside the wagon, she took off her boots and socks but not her skirt, despite the stuffy May heat inside the enclosed wagon. She hunted through her belongings and found her hairbrush, but the brush stretched the skin of her scalp tight. She dropped the brush. She picked up a white towel, dipped a corner in a basin of water next to her blankets and wiped her face. Then she wrung out the towel and tossed it on top of the brush. The image of the scalping refused to leave her mind. Most of the teamsters had eagerly watched the mutilation. Holtz's only concern had been Comanche revenge. Colter had hardly glanced at the corpse. 
She sat on a stack of packing crates and wondered whether this time she had taken on too large a task. If she had stayed in St. Louis, she could have put off Caleb Jenkins awhile longer—at least until she found a new teaching position closer than Santa Fe, New Mexico. She had dealt with a Caleb Jenkins in every city: Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans. She knew the signs. She had at least six more months before her neighbors stopped finding her obstinate rejection of Caleb Jenkins amusing and questioned why a single woman of twenty-eight spurned the proposal of a respected widower storekeeper. She had perhaps a full year before parents began to keep their children away from her classroom. Until then, she would have had children to sit on the benches she had made out of scrap lumber, children to work arithmetic on the sheet of slate she had framed and hung on the wall, and children to study grammar out of the books she had carried across half a continent. Before St. Louis, she had never run away; she had to be starved out. 
But in St. Louis, Caleb Jenkins had a daughter with limp blond hair, narrow hips, and hungry eyes. Sarah Jenkins had endured two years without a teacher when Kathleen reopened the wood frame schoolhouse. One of Jenkins's neighbors had used it for a storage shed for the furs he bought from trappers and Indians. While Kathleen swept out mounds of hair, thirteen-year-old Sarah had come to the door with a basket of food and offered to help. Together, they had scrubbed walls and floor with lye water to remove the stink of animal grease and mildew, dismantled wooden storage shelves and bins, and hammered this lumber back together as benches and desks. Sarah's blue eyes watched while Kathleen explained how much lye to put in a bucket of water or how wide to make the benches. The child used scrub brush and hammer without hesitation. She never missed a spot on the walls or misjudged the height of a bench leg. 
When they paused for lunch, the questions poured out of her like water from an overturned jug. Did Miss O'Dwyer teach more than arithmetic and grammar? Sarah had heard of geometry and algebra. Did Miss O'Dwyer teach those? Was there more to reading and writing than just grammar and spelling? Would Miss O'Dwyer teach poetry? Had she ever seen a real play?
The first week of school, Sarah stayed after to help tidy up and asked for harder lessons. Kathleen started her on algebra and French. Soon, Sarah studied Shakespeare.  Whenever Kathleen opened the school door in the morning, Sarah perched on the steps helping other girls with their lessons. The older boys wrestled or tossed knives a few feet in front of Sarah.  Winners invariably called triumphs to her attention. 
As months passed, Kathleen fretted at the way the older boys gathered more and more around Sarah. Her hair was the shade of ripening corn, and her grey eyes the color of grass smoke, but her bones were thin and brittle looking. Her hips were especi¬ally narrow. Her veins lay close to the surface of the skin and looked ready to burst at the slightest pressure. People often remarked how much Sarah favored her mother, who had died giving birth to her only child.  Kathleen added Spanish to Sarah's after-school instruction. 
At the end of Kathleen's ninth month in St. Louis, Caleb Jenkins had come to the schoolhouse late one afternoon and told Sarah to run along home and start supper. Then he turned to Kathleen and asked to speak to her for a moment. He was a tall man, as tall as Kathleen, and looked more like a blacksmith than a dry goods storekeeper. His brown hair was oiled and carefully parted. He wore an ill-fitting black coat, homespun white shirt, and a poorly knotted, black, bow tie. With his arms folded across his chest, he studied Kathleen. His gaze roamed up and down her broad shoulders and hips, her firm arms and legs, her full bosom. There was nothing vulgar or leering in his expression; rather, he studied her as if she were a potential brood mare for his draft horses. His head just barely nodded. She told him to speak his mind. 
He said Sarah needed a mother. The girl hardly spoke of anyone else besides Miss O'Dwyer. He saw how good Miss O'Dwyer was with children, especially Sarah. He was a decent Christian, willing to overlook that Miss O'Dwyer was Catholic. As a prosperous merchant, he could provide for many children. No!
Sarah had stayed away from school for two days. Then she came to class with red, swollen eyes. She fumbled through her lessons. When Kathleen dismissed class for the day, Sarah started for the door behind the other children. At the doorway, she turned and asked whether Kathleen wanted her to stay for Spanish grammar drill. 
“What do you want, Sarah?”
“I want you to be my momma.”
But Kathleen had turned away and scrubbed the blackboard.  Two days later, Captain Freepole had come to her with his silly scheme to ingratiate himself with the Mexican authorities by bringing a good Catholic schoolteacher to Santa Fe. She accepted immediately. She had run away from a small girl about whose future she feared she knew too much; now, she was here among Comanche and other violent men about whose ways she knew very little. 
She thought again about guns. She had never touched one. She disliked guns. All the same, back in St. Louis, she had suggested obtaining one but readily accepted Captain Freepole's assurance that there was no need. Perhaps, a gun was one of the tools she must now learn to use. 
The head and shoulders of James Colter appeared in silhou¬ette a few yards from the wagon. He glanced into the wagon, met Kathleen's eyes, and looked away.  Then he was gone from view, passing on with his survey of the terrain around the wagons. In her need for information, Kathleen decided to gamble on Colter's wary solitude. 
“Mr. Colter,” she called out, paused a moment, and then called again.  “James Colter.”
“Ma'am?”
The moonlight highlighted smallpox scars that pitted his weathered face. His eyes were cold blue, intelligent, and shy with suspicion. He was tall, six feet even, lean and supple like his buckskin clothing.  His neck-length brown hair contained no grey; she guessed his age at five years either side of her own. 
“I wonder about Mr. Holtz's warning concerning the Comanche?” She picked her words with care, keeping her tone for¬mal and unemotional. His eyes flickered from her face to the surrounding prairie. He shifted his weight from right to left foot, looked back at her and then away again. She suppressed a smile.  “I'm sure you will agree that Mr.  Holtz talks a great deal about a number of things but not always in the most believable fashion?” He glanced over his shoulder toward the northern horizon.  “Don't you agree?”
“German Joe does talk a heap more than he ought to.”
“Is he to be believed about these Indians?”
Colter looked straight at Kathleen.  “That Injun was a Comanche.”
“But was Holtz exaggerating the certainty of attack?”
“He wasn't lying none then.  Too scared.”
“You just agreed with Mr.  Holtz that the dead man was a Comanche, so why did you earlier call him a Yama …Yampar… Yam …”
“Yamparika.” At least, Colter spoke without the crude vocabulary that marked German Joe's speech.  “Type of Comanche. Could tell by the beadwork on the moccasins. Besides, his eyebrows were gone.”
“Why is that?”
“Most Injuns don't like hair on the face. Comanches hate it more than most. Pull it all out, including the eyebrows. Sure sign of a Comanche. ” He no longer fidgeted from one foot to another, but those cold wary eyes were never still. 
“And they will attack?” she asked. 
“That boy scalped a Comanche,” he said.  “That's a powerful insult to Comanche. If he'd been a Kiowa … close friends of the Comanche … Kiowa might think twice about jumping so large a group of whites, thirty of us. That won't mean squat to Comanche. They're going to kill at least one of ya'l1.”
Kathleen looked away. Fear, she had tried to run away from it. Now, here it was again, all around her. Mocking her. 
“Funny you calling me 'James.' ”
“What?” Kathleen jerked her attention back to the man standing in front of her. With a shock, she realized a hint of longing had crept into Colter's voice. 
“Ain't nobody called me 'James' since my ma died. Jim will do just fine, if you want. ”
“Thank you for answering my questions, Mr. Colter. Goodnight. ” She sat down on the floor of the wagon, using the raised driver's seat to block him from sight.