Montana Bride (20 page)

Hetty gasped. “Karl Norwood, how could you!”

He laughed and his arms closed more tightly around her. “This is what marriage is supposed to be like. I know it. I feel it.”

Hetty stiffened in his arms as bile clawed its way up her throat. She’d felt the magic, too, but it couldn’t last. And it might end much sooner than either of them hoped.

Because of the lies.

“Hetty? Have I spoken amiss?”

She shook her head. “I feel it too, Karl.”

He pulled her close and whispered, “I’m glad.”

Hetty leaned her head against his chest and listened to his steadily beating, not-quite-so-lonely heart.

Karl couldn’t believe he’d let Hetty talk him into bringing Griffin onto the mountain to work. She’d given him some cock-and-bull story about Griffin needing to spend his days around men, instead of being stuck at home with his mother and sister. It had done no good to mention that it had only been a few days since the boy’s little toe had dried up and fallen off, that his hands and feet were barely healed, or that he was too young to be involved in such dangerous work.

Hetty had insisted, Grace had urged him to agree, and Griffin had argued, “I hardly have any limp at all. I want to go with you.”

To Karl’s surprise, Griffin had proved himself a quick study with a short ax. Maybe it was all his experience with a whittling knife, but Griffin could now buck the small limbs off a ponderosa pine as fast, or faster, than any of the grown men assigned to the job. He was more grudging about carrying the chopped-off limbs to a nearby slash pile to be burned later, but he did it.

Karl just wished everyone else was as committed to getting the job done as his stepson. He spent a great deal of his time urging the men to give their best effort.

“Come on, Stefan,” he said with a smile of encouragement, “put your back into it.”

Stefan was working one side of a crosscut saw, with Buck on the other side, cutting the trunk of a downed 150-foot-long pine into 1,000-pound sections that could more easily be skidded down the mountain by Andy’s 2,400-pound team of longhorn oxen. The crosscut saw was pulled by one man through the trunk of the pine, then had to be pulled—not pushed—by the other man in the opposite direction.

Stefan wasn’t pulling hard enough or fast enough to keep the saw moving freely back and forth through the trunk. He stopped, mopped away the sweat on his sun-and-wind-ravaged brow with a red kerchief, and said, “If you think you can do better, Boss, you’re welcome to come take my place.”

Before Karl could take him up on the offer, Buck said, “Pull the damn saw, Stefan. The sooner we get this last section cut, the sooner we can quit for the day.”

Stefan muttered an obscenity, but he tucked the kerchief back in his coat pocket, bent his back, and began pulling the saw with a great deal more energy than before.

Cutting down a tree had seemed like a simple job to Karl, until he’d learned all the variables that had to be considered. Where did you want the tree to fall? Did the tree lean? Was there a strong wind? Was the area where the tree would fall clear of obstacles, so it wouldn’t lodge on the branches of another tree twenty feet off the ground on the way down? Was there plenty of open space—at least double its length—to swing an ax? And, most importantly, did you have a clear path of retreat when the tree finally fell?

There were dozens of mistakes that could be made, and Karl had seen most of them over the past month. Some of the loggers knew what they were doing. Others had lied about their experience to get the job. Karl was training them as fast as he could, but accidents happened every day.

One of the loggers didn’t check his ax before he started swinging, and the loose head went flying. Another ruined the blade of his ax by cutting at roots on the ground and hitting a stone instead. A third left his ax lying on the ground, and another logger tripped over it and went flying.

It was sheer luck that no one had been seriously injured or killed. Karl spent most of his day keeping an eye on everyone and didn’t get to cut wood himself as often as he would have liked.

But he loved the smell of the wood chips when he swung his ax and reveled in the flash of the sun off his blade. He had a heady feeling each time the straining muscles in his shoulders and back drove the razor-sharp ax deep into two-hundred-year-old wood.

The blisters he’d suffered in the beginning had healed, and he was now growing calluses on his hands and building muscles in his arms and shoulders. He wasn’t as exhausted each day as he’d been during his first weeks on the mountain, either. He had energy left over now to lie awake in bed and imagine what it would be like to make love to his wife.

Christmas was only a few days away. The reprieve he’d promised Hetty was nearly at an end. It might be tonight or tomorrow or the next day, or it might be next week, but sometime soon, he would have the exquisite pleasure of joining their bodies and making them one.

That is, if she kept her promise.

Karl worried that Hetty would find some excuse to delay again. For the past month, he’d spent every night holding her in his arms. But she’d made it clear, with that definite, “Good night, Karl,” that holding her was all she wanted.

She also kissed him before he left each morning, the sort of peck an old married couple might give one another, but she stayed out of range in the evening. She talked with him. She laughed with him. She teased him each night with the promise of what they might share. But whenever his touches became intimate, she bolted like a skittish filly.

He’d always been able to entice her back into his arms to sleep, but she never lingered there in the morning. He’d gotten into the habit of waking up before her so he would have a few moments to gaze on her face before she awoke and fled.

Karl had no explanation for Hetty’s reluctance to make love to him. He thought she liked him. Maybe even a great deal. But there had been no encouragement in her eyes to consummate the marriage. He realized that sometime over the next few days he was going to have to take the bull by the horns—a particularly inappropriate metaphor, but the one that kept coming to mind—and do something about his sexless marriage.

Karl knew better than to let his mind wander to Hetty. Lumbering was far too hazardous an occupation to allow for daydreaming. He forced his frustrating thoughts about his wife to the back of his mind. He had to stay focused. And he had to make sure everyone else stayed focused.

He noticed one of the men pause to roll a smoke near a pine where a bucker was knocking a wedge into the notched hinge with a wooden maul, the last step before the logger made his final cuts to take down a massive pine.

Karl cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Move your butt, Marty, before that tree flattens you like a pancake!”

Marty’s head came up as he yelped, “Son of a bitch!” and scampered out of the way.

One more disaster averted.

Karl kept expecting the men to mutiny when he corrected them, but although they grumbled and complained, none of them had shouldered his ax and walked away. Everything he knew about logging, he’d learned from books. He’d supervised men before on his botanical research trips, but he’d been an expert on the subject. He was using his wits and a lot of bluffing to stay a jump ahead of the loggers.

Dennis had stood back and watched, waiting for the moment when things went to hell. So far that hadn’t happened, and Karl was determined that it never would.

Dennis appeared at Karl’s shoulder as though he’d been listening to Karl’s innermost thoughts and said, “Feel like cutting down one more tree?”

Dennis had seemed surprised at how quickly Karl became proficient at getting his tree to fall exactly where he intended it to land. He’d gone so far as to create a competition to see which of them could get his pine cut first and land it closest to a predetermined spot.

Griffin stopped bucking limbs long enough to say, “Go ahead, Karl. You can take him.”

At that moment, one of the lumbermen stood back and yelled, “Timmmmberrrrr!”

Karl listened for the
craaaccckkk
that signaled the tree had fallen forward on the notched hinge cut into its base, folding over toward the kerf on the other side. Both the notched hinge and the kerf were angles cut out of either side of the trunk which, along with the direction of the wind and the lean of the tree, determined where the tree would fall.

In all the weeks Karl had spent on the mountain, he hadn’t gotten over the excitement of watching the enormous pines fall. He raised his eyes and shaded them from the glare of the setting sun on the snow as he watched the tree’s majestic descent. The noise of cracking limbs was followed by the squawk and flutter of birds taking flight from nearby foliage.

Karl realized in the utter silence after the mammoth pine landed that the other lumbermen had stopped to watch as well. He wondered if they felt the same reverence as he did for the felling of the noble giant, or whether they’d stopped to keep a watchful eye on something that could squash them like a bug.

Karl heard Griffin say in a quiet, respectful voice, “Holy cow.”

He turned to his stepson, met the boy’s gaze long enough to share the wonder in Griffin’s dark eyes, and said, “Yeah. Holy cow.”

Griffin abruptly turned his attention back to the pine he was bucking as though the brief moment of togetherness had never happened.

Karl was frustrated by his lack of progress getting the boy to trust him. Griffin did his work and kept his distance. Maybe Hetty was right and the kid simply needed time to adjust to having a father. “You can finish bucking those limbs in the morning,” he said.

At that moment, the final length of the felled log Stefan and Buck had been sawing separated into two pieces, which rolled apart.

Karl turned and yelled loud enough to be heard by the men who were spread out through the forest, “That’s it for the day!”

He heard shouts of relief and name-calling between friends as each man shouldered his ax and began collecting bark to take back down the mountain for the bunkhouse stove.

“You mean you aren’t going to take Dennis up on his challenge?” Griffin asked.

Karl was surprised into blurting, “You want me to?”

“You like doing it, so why not?”

Stefan rubbed his aching back with the knuckles of both gloved hands and muttered, “I’ll lay a sawbuck that Dennis wins.”

“I’ll take that bet,” Griffin said.

Stefan looked startled that his wager had even been heard, let alone accepted.

Karl wasn’t happy, either. He was pretty sure gambling wasn’t one of the things Hetty had intended for Griffin to learn by spending time with the loggers. “Where did you get the money to take that kind of bet?” he asked the boy.

“I’m earning a wage, aren’t I?” Griffin replied.

Karl hadn’t considered paying Griffin, but the boy was doing a man’s work, and the loggers were earning forty dollars a month plus room and board. “Are you sure that’s how you want to spend your hard-earned cash?”

Griffin nodded. “You can do it, Karl.”

The thing was, Karl was pretty sure he
couldn’t
do it. He was good, but he wasn’t quite as fast as Dennis. In fact, Dennis had beaten him every single time they’d engaged in one of these matches. And he’d rather not have an audience.

“It’s getting dark,” he said. “You men should get started down the mountain.”

“I’ve got four bits I’d like to bet on Dennis,” one of the loggers said.

“Who’s going to hold the cash?” Stefan asked.

“I will,” Buck said. “Will you take that bet, Boss?”

“Come on, Karl,” Griffin said. “I think you can beat him.”

He was so surprised at Griffin’s encouragement that Karl said, “Sure. Why not?”

By the time the betting was done, more than thirty dollars sat in the pot. Only one person besides Griffin had wagered against Dennis. Andy Peterson had bet a five-dollar gold piece that Karl would win.

Karl was surprised Andy had bet on him to win, because he’d been giving the kid a hard time ever since Hetty had told him how the boy had lured Grace to the barn. Andy had never once gotten riled at Karl’s probing questions about his intentions, and he’d worked hard and without complaint skidding logs down the mountain with his team of longhorns. As far as Karl could tell, there was nothing wrong with Andy Peterson. He just didn’t want the Texan anywhere near his stepdaughter.

Karl turned to Griffin and said, “Want to come pick a tree for me?”

“Can I?” Griffin said.

“Sure,” Karl replied.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Andy asked.

Karl thought the Texan was probably having second thoughts about betting his gold piece on the boss. “You can help me figure out where to put the stake,” he said at last.

If Karl angled the kerf and the notch for the hinge correctly and gauged the wind and the lean of the tree, the trunk of the falling pine should drive the preplanted stake into the ground. In order to win the bet, he not only had to get his tree down first, he had to place it where he wanted it to go.