Rangeland Romances #3 Read online

  Sweethearts of the

  Wagon Train

  by Art Lawson

  Radio Archives • 2012

  Copyright Page

  Originally published in the December 1943 issue of Rangeland Romances. Copyright © 1943 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1971 and assigned to Argosy Communications, Inc. “Rangeland Romances” and its distinctive logo and symbolism and all related elements are trademarks and are the property of Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. © 2012 RadioArchives.com. Reprinted and produced under license from Argosy Communications, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form.

  These pulp stories are a product of their time. The text is reprinted intact, unabridged, and may include ethnic and cultural stereotyping that was typical of the era.

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  Rangeland Romances

  Although romance novels can be traced back to the 1700s, there was a groundswell of the material beginning in the 1930s when magazines began to reach a wide audience of women who yearned to escape into a fantasy romantic setting. One of the most popular settings was the old west, where men were men and women were women. As many a swooning damsel could attest, "There's something about a cowboy."

  The western romance became one of the most popular types of magazines sold through the following three decades. Newsstands were filled to overflowing with titles like Western Love Romances, Romance Western, Western Romances, Western Romance Stories, Cowboy Romances, Ranch Romances, Far West Romances, Romantic Range, Romantic Western, Romance Round-Up, North West Romances, Rodeo Romances, Golden West Romances, Western Love Romances, Rangeland Love Stories, Real Western Romances, Fifteen Range Romances and yes, Rangeland Romances.

  By today's standards, these stories may be considered sweet and wholesome, but there’s still a thrill to them, the excitement of action and love waiting along the next trail. A beautiful woman thrown into the arms of a handsome cowboy. A desert sunset as two lovers' lips meet. The wide-open spaces where two lonely hearts find unexpected romance. Stories of untamed country and love make Western Romances extremely popular.

  This new series of Rangeland Romances brings back the best of those western romance stories. A short story — a quick read — and romance blooms among the tumbleweeds yet again.

  Sweethearts of the Wagon Train

  By Art Lawson

  Miles from the wagon train and afoot in hostile Indian country, Linda found herself alone at night with her sister’s sweetheart. Linda feared this handsome buckskin man, but she feared her own heart more — for she knew she’d give it to him... for the asking!

  Chapter 1: Buffalo Girl

  LINDA WALKER had had enough of the jolting wagon. Where her team had been placed, halfway down the long line bound for Oregon, the dust was a constant, stifling thing. The endless pounding of wheels, creek of gear and rattle of equipment only added to her determination. She simply had to get away for a few minutes.

  “Mind taking the ribbons a while, Sis?” she asked the girl who was sitting beside her on the high seat of the Conestoga.

  Her sister, Faith, shrugged her shoulders absently and accepted the lines to the six-mule hitch. The Walker wagon was the finest in the entire train, as well as the largest. It was the envy of every family group in the outfit.

  The mules kept up their dogged, nervous pace, aware that the reins had changed hands. Linda reached into the dark interior of the covered wagon for her shoes and stockings. While driving she had been barefooted.

  Faith guessed what Linda had on her mind. “You better stick around,” she said. “Tom Blake wouldn’t like you to ride off from the train.”

  “Who cares about Tom Blake?” Linda asked.

  “You care,” Faith said doggedly. “He’s captain of this wagon train and he’s your beau.”

  Linda did not answer. She could argue propriety all day with her sister. Blue-eyed and redheaded, you would have expected Faith to be the more skittery member of the family. But Faith had a law for everything. If a man was your beau you had to do as he ordered. If he was captain of the wagon train you had to obey his tiniest rule. Linda had heard all this plenty of times since they left the Missouri Queen at Chouteau’s Landing a month ago to join this Oregon-bound band. She was in no frame of mind today to listen to it all over again.

  She stamped into the boots, then swung down out of the high wagon. Linda was hardly as tall as one of the great wheels. In boy’s shirt and denim dungarees she seemed even smaller than she actually was. She let the wagon rattle by. Then she loosened the halter of the big gray. She vaulted onto his broad bare back, and guided him with her knees, turning him away from the train.

  Like Linda, the horse was very pleased to get away from the wagons for a while. He hit out at a steady trot, snuffing at the fresh air like a dog. He stopped to crop a bit of grass. For Linda had given him his head, then he smelled the river and ran for it.

  Below the shallow banks the Platte was like a sheet of silver a mile wide. Nowhere along here, according to Jim Slade, their guide, did the water get to be more than a couple of feet deep. It was a queer sort of river and a very odd country, Linda thought, when compared to her homeland in the Vermont hills.

  Linda let him slide down the bank and poke his nose into the water. She would not let him stand while he drank. Jim Slade had told her that the riverbed was full of quicksand — safe enough if you kept moving, but dangerous if you halted more than a moment. It was “slow” quicksand, he had told her and she remembered laughing at how funny that phrase had sounded. Jim Slade was always saying these things like that. He knew more about this country, she guessed, than even Kit Carson.

  The horse had finished his drinking. She kneed him farther into the river. It was hardly six inches deep here. When she got him into a run the spray flew all about her, soaking the horse and raining down on her like a thunder shower.

  She pulled on the halter. Her mount turned toward the bank. On dry land again he stopped, swishing his tail. Linda took a red bandanna from her hip pocket to wipe her face and neck and throat. This bit of foolishness had set her up immensely. She reckoned she could go back to the wagon train now and face the ordeal with more equanimity.

  The horse whinnied. Linda glanced upward, frightened. A rider had come into sight over the edge of the prairie. He was a tall man on a little Indian pinto pony. He wore buckskin shirt and breeches, fringed and beaded, and a dark, flat-crowned felt hat.

  The man lifted his hand in the Indian sign of greeting. Then he wheeled his horse down to her.

  LINDA had never been able to figure out Jim Slade. At first, he had not seemed quite human to her. Later he seemed only to be a savage like the Kiowas and Sioux about which she had so often heard. More recently the strangeness of him had worn off and he had begun to seem more like her kind of person than anyone else in the party. That thought frightened her.

  He brought his little horse down toward hers. “Hyah — Britches!” he greeted.

  “Afternoon — Mister Slade,” she said.

  He had always called her “Britches.” Probably he did not know her real name. He called her that because she was the only girl or woman in the outfit who wore denims, and he was probably the only person in the train who approved of her distinctive garb. Even her sister thought the dungarees
were mighty unladylike.

  Jim Slade halted beside her. He seemed entirely relaxed, yet never actually at ease. Jim Slade was the most wideawake person Linda had ever known. He sat erect in the saddle, seeming to be listening beyond the banks of the Platte, and his gray eyes had the keenness of an eagle’s. He was handsome in a big, dark brutal way that put a hard little knot into Linda’s breast. His smile and soft voice were the only gentle things about him.

  ”Better be coming back to the train with me,” Jim Slade said slowly. “Blake sent me out to fetch you.”

  A flurry of frustration swept Linda. She said, a little more harshly than she need have spoken: “Why can’t he leave me alone?”

  “Any man who could leave you alone,” Jim Slade drawled, “would have to be blind or crippled or scared to death of some other woman.”

  The answer shocked Linda. Her dark eyes flashed. She thought of a quick retort, then managed to control herself before speaking. She said, her voice very even:

  “I suppose I should be flattered by that statement?”

  “No-o —” The man shrugged his broad shoulders. “Most men wouldn’t want to fight a grizzly bare-handed. I don’t know if the grizzly would be flattered if somebody told him that. But it would be a fact just the same.”

  Then Linda made the answer she had suppressed a moment ago. “What woman are you afraid of?”

  “None,” he said.

  Her heart started to pound violently. Her mouth had parted slightly and she could not close it. His eyes held hers. For a long while they stared at each other while the wild blood boiled through Linda. Then the girl cleared her throat to say:

  “I was ready to return when you came.”

  The man’s eyes insolently moved from hers. They moved to her short nose and generous mouth, to her strong, rounded chin, to the open throat of her shirt. He looked back at her again.

  “Okay — Britches,” he said. “I’ll bet you a chaw of tobacco against a piece of your homemade candy that my runty horse can beat your big gray back to the wagons.”

  “It’s a go!” she cried.

  She kicked heels against the gray’s ribs. In seconds they were topping the river bank.

  He beat her. She reckoned it was just as well since she would not have known what to do with the chaw of tobacco. When she mentioned this to her sister, Faith had a suggestion.

  “You could put it on a bee sting to draw the poison,” she said.

  “Where did you ever get such an idea?” Linda asked.

  “Mister Slade told me,” Faith said. “It’s good for rattlesnake bites, too.”

  Linda suspected that her redheaded sister was hiding something from her. She was also surprised to find that she had developed an unsettled feeling in her breast that could easily be jealousy. It was a flutter that occurred every time she thought of Jim Slade, or when she saw Faith’s blue eyes looking dreamily into the distance. When she thought of Tom Blake she was ashamed of herself, and of the reaction she had to Jim over yonder beside the river.

  Chapter 2: Tom’s Proposal...

  THAT evening after supper, Tom Blake joined the girls. Tom was big and blond, a man with a constantly preoccupied air. He seemed forever to be adding up sums in his head. Yet he was handsome — and he had started paying court to Linda as far back on the trail as Saint Louis, where they had met while staying at the Planters’ House at the start of the journey.

  He had helped the girls buy their wagon and teams and equipment. When he heard they were headed for Oregon to live with an uncle who had a trading post on the Willamette, he suggested that they go along to Chouteau’s Landing with him where he was joining an already-organized party. That was a real piece of luck, and both girls were very grateful to him for helping them.

  Ever since then, he had given them a hand when they needed it. He had been the one who insisted that they come along when the rest of the party balked at having two unescorted girls in the train. He even argued Jim Slade into changing his mind when Jim flatly refused to guide a party containing two more beautiful girls without men-folk. Jim had bluntly insisted they would cause trouble. It had taken some doing to convince him to stay. Tonight, Tom did not have much to say for himself as he hunkered down on the far side of the little camp fire. He accepted the coffee the girls poured for him and the sweet cake they had cooked in a frying pan propped up before the fire to serve as a sort of reflector oven. Linda had expected a bawling out for leaving the train that afternoon. She was quite relieved when Tom neglected to mention her dereliction.

  A couple times he stared very intently at the dark-eyed Linda, then turned away quickly when she happened to glance across the fire toward him. Apparently he had something on his mind. Afraid it might be her ride to the Platte, Linda did not try to draw him out.

  Their conversation had just about bogged down when Jim Slade came along. Tom Blake stood up to greet him.

  “How’s everything look, Jim?” he asked. Jim said: “Fine. But we’ll have to do something about Andy Waterhouse’s bulls. Their hoofs are splitting. Oxen are fine for heavy hauling, but can’t travel as fast as mules. We may have to drop Andy at Fort Laramie.”

  “He won’t like that,” Tom said.

  The scout shrugged. He turned to the girls and smiled. It was careless and carefree and impersonal, as much for one as for the other, with no trace of that afternoon’s events in it.

  “Got to finish the rounds,” he said. He tipped his hat and bowed to Faith. “Miss — a man becomes lonesome at nightfall. I’d deem it an honor if you would walk with me a while.”

  The odd formality hit Linda very hard. This man who had so insolently looked into her eyes that afternoon and stirred up her heart was now asking her sister to walk with him. Faith was accepting. Faith had stood up and was smoothing her skirt.

  “You are very kind,” she said.

  She joined the scout who took her arm and led her through the dusk toward the next wagon. That formerly thin bit of jealousy in Linda was kicking up. She stared after them; at the tall man with the broad shoulders and narrow hips, at the rather small girl so femininely curved who walked so daintily beside him holding her skirts above boot-tops out of the dust of the prairie.

  She had forgotten her silent friend who stood across the fire from her. And he misread the look in her eyes.

  “That’s all right,” he said a bit nervously. “I asked him to do that. I hope you’ll forgive me. I wanted to see you alone and couldn’t think of any other way to arrange it.”

  Linda faced him, dark eyes wide, bright in the firelight. “You mean — you asked him to take Faith walking?”

  “Sure,” Tom said. “Faith will be all right. Jim’s wild as a Sioux but he didn’t even know her name — or yours — until I told him. He’s afraid of women.”

  This interview was not going the way Tom would have had it. He had not come to talk of Jim Slade and Faith Walker. He had come to talk of himself and Linda. Now he bulled right into it. Stepping around the fire he took Linda by the shoulders and moved her into the shadow behind the wagon. Astonished by his unusual behaviour she made no protest.

  “I had to ask you something — alone.” His voice was choky. “Uh — I —”

  His hands moved from her shoulders to her arms. He held her that way close to him. She had to tip her head back to look up at him and with her long dark curls down her back she was truly lovely. Tom Blake had never before known any one like this girl, so soft and desirable she left him weak as a baby.

  She had begun to suspect what was up. She smiled. But even as she did so her heart gave a twisted little thump for the man who was walking down the line of wagons with her redheaded younger sister.

  “I — uh — want your hand —” Tom said.

  Linda wanted to cry. She had never before been proposed to, and somehow this endless prairie seemed to be such a fit place for proposals. Between two lives, she was, with a man who had been as good to her as her father had ever been. But Linda was not sure of her h
eart.

  “Maybe I’m not your kind of girl,” she said. “Ma always said I was skittery as a colt. She always said I should have been the redhead of the family. You’re steady and solid, Tom. I —”

  “You’re just young,” he insisted. “You’ll settle down.”

  “I’m nineteen,” she said. “I’m almost an old maid.”

  His fingers tightened on her arms. “Will you marry me?” he asked tensely. “Slade says there’s usually a parson at Fort Laramie.”

  Tightly Linda closed her eyes. When she opened them again Tom was still there. A couple of tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “I don’t know, Tom. I have to think about it. When I marry it will be forever. You have to know your mind when you make a deal that lasts that long.”

  Tom said: “I know my mind. Tomorrow —?”

  She nodded her head. The dark curls danced and her eyes shone in the starlight. Then he kissed her. She had not been kissed very often back home and then usually by some foolish, hurried boy. Yet she knew right away that this man did not make a practise of kissing girls. He was just a little bit clumsy. His lips touched hers briefly. He hugged her as a bear might.

  She was astonished at how cold it left her. All her life she had dreamed of her lover-to-be’s first kiss. It would be something wonderful. It would be something that lifted her clear out of this world and set her on a rosy cloud in some paradise. But this kiss was not like that. It was like shaking hands with the parsons after Sunday service.

  She said hurriedly: “My sister’s coming back, Tom. They’re at the Carbon wagon now. We better —”

  He dropped his hands. He knew that kiss had been a failure. He looked miserable...

  THE wagons were again on the move — grinding, creaking, rattling. Today a steady breeze from the river drifted the dust-plume away from the wagon train that stirred it up. Faith had the lines. Linda had gotten out their two rifles, the carbine and four pistols to draw the shot and reload with fresh powder. Last night Jim Slade had told Faith they should sight buffalo today this side of Scott’s Bluffs. Faith had told Linda, and Linda was preparing to replenish their meat supply.