Free The Vigilante's Bride by Yvonne Harris Page B

him.
    Two at time, Luke took the steps to the back porch and crossed to the kitchen door. Stomping his feet, he batted his hat against his thigh to knock off the snow and then went on inside. The big kitchen was steamy and warm and bustling with the women getting supper on the table.
    He stuck his head in the door and grinned. “Timed it just right, I see.”
    “Better hurry,” Ida, the cook, said as she took up potatoes from a pot on the stove. A hired girl stood by the side table, ladling out bowls of gravy. He caught a glimpse of Molly’s broad figure disappearing through the doorway with a plate of biscuits in each hand.
    But no one else was in the kitchen.
    Luke hung up his coat and hat on the hook board running down the length of the little room outside the kitchen. A shelf holding a bucket of water and a gray graniteware basin ran along the other side. On the wall behind it hung a small mirror and a towel on a peg. He filled the basin and washed up quickly for supper. Then, two-handed, he combed his hair in the mirror, stooping so he could see better.
    Ida called, “Supper’s ready.”
    “On my way.”
    “Bring the pickles.”
    He ambled through the kitchen, grabbing up the pickle dish from the side table as he passed, and headed down the hall for the dining room to find Emily McCarthy so he could ignore her.

CHAPTER
6
    Luke leaned back in his chair and frowned across the table at Molly. The two of them were sitting at the end of one of the tables after dinner, going over the accounts. Spread open between them was Molly’s big black ledger. Papers and receipts were scattered across the table.
    “Doesn’t make sense,” he said, tapping a finger on the page in front of him. “With the railroad into Billings, you should’ve sold a thousand head more than you did.”
    “That’s what I thought, but we didn’t,” she answered. “The market wasn’t there. Happens all the time. Scully drives a herd to Billings, talks to the yardmaster, and finds out the order was already filled. So we either sell at a lower price or else we bring them back home. Scully did that once when the price went down to fifteen dollars a head.”
    “Scully was right. Fifteen dollars was giving them away. You’d have lost money. If we had more help, we could forget Chicago and sell to the mining camps. They never have enough beef.”
    Molly nodded. “I sold some to Bozeman camp a couple of times, but it’s a six-day drive up there and took every man on the place. Nothing got done here when they were gone.”
    And it still wouldn’t , Luke thought. He liked trail-bossing, had gone back and forth to Oregon with Stuart’s herds many times, but those days were over as long as he was at New Hope. He couldn’t manage the rest of the herd at New Hope by himself.
    “Once we get New Hope back in the black, we can hire more cowhands and go for the camps,” he said.
    Molly wet her finger and flipped back through the ledger pages to the household accounts. “Emily says we should be making our own clothes and bed linen, instead of buying them or paying Ellie Butler in Repton to make them. Emily says we could save five hundred dollars a year if I bought another sewing machine and we did most things here. What do you think?”
    “Sewing machines cost money is what I think.”
    “Fifteen dollars, but the machine would pay for itself in a month with what we’d save.”
    Luke raised an eyebrow. “Emily McCarthy’s a teacher. What does she know about expenses and cutting costs?”
    “I’m surprised what all she knows about running an institution.” When Luke looked skeptical, Molly smiled. “I grabbed one of the boys running in the hall yesterday, and his shirtsleeve just ripped off in my hand. Straightaway, Emily asked me who made the starch. I told her the hired girl Anna did. She didn’t say a word, but a few minutes later, she came back and told me Anna puts too much borax and turpentine in the starch, says it weakens cloth