Free On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch by Shelter Somerset Page B

print. He had no idea where in the western part of the United States the “softhearted” bachelor lived, but his musings carried him over the vast prairies west of Chicago, past Peoria, over Iowa, to Nebraska, and onward to the frontier, where wild animals and Indians still roamed, lurking behind mountains and in canyons.
    A gentle implied honesty emanated from the man’s reaching out for human companionship, accentuated with masculine determination. Tory, both aroused and intrigued, yearned to learn more about him. Where did he live? Where had he come from? He reread the earnest advertisement again and again, as if the more he read, the more he might unlock some special meaning concealed behind the words.
    Animated in a way he hadn’t experienced since meeting Joseph van Werckhoven, he sat at his desk by Edison lamp (the latest gadget given to him by his parents for his nineteenth birthday) and withdrew a sheet of paper from the top drawer. Did he dare do what traipsed in his mind? It would be cruel and improper, wouldn’t it?
    Yet unlike most those who frequented the cabaret on 35th Street, the men who had placed advertisements in Matrimonial News were bachelors, uninterested in renters, male or female. Writing to one of those men couldn’t be horribly wrong. Living alone on the wild frontier, the man would appreciate someone taking the time to reach out to him. What if no one else bothered to write? As long as Tory kept his identity hidden, a mutual correspondence between two lonely souls would harm no one.
    He twisted the lead from the fluted end of his pencil and placed the tip on the paper. He figured the best way to compose the letter was to write with little reflection. Let his heart flow and the words would follow.
    With the pencil poised in his hand, he pictured the “tall, good-looking bachelor” with honed muscles living ruggedly on his homestead. Chopping wood, retrieving water from an old-fashioned well, trapping rabbits and possums or whatever frontiersmen trapped.
    Tory gazed toward his bedroom door. Somewhere out there in the wilds of America’s frontier, a real man needed love. Desperate to the point he’d taken out an advertisement.
    A strong man, a man who had already stolen Tory’s affections with one simple message.…

Chapter 7

    T HE pot boiled over onto the cast-iron stovetop, hissing with steam. Franklin Ausmus cursed up a storm.
    His mind was stuck on more than cooking his venison stew for lunch. He still worried over the silly personal advertisement he had placed in Matrimonial News three weeks ago. By now, the latest edition must’ve hit the kiosks across the country. Would anyone even bother to respond? He had been living in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory for nearly ten years, and the longing for companionship had begun to gnaw at him like a chigger bug. In a few more years women would most likely no longer find him a good catch—if they ever had.
    He hadn’t even set eyes on a decent woman in years. The ones he came across in Spiketrout were mostly “working women” catering to the men of the gold rush. Those who were God-fearing arrived in the Hills already married, usually to missionaries who wasted most of their time with the Indians, trying to civilize them. He only knew of one decent unmarried woman in town—a widow close to sixty. Spiketrout’s marshal had whispered to him a few years back that nine out of ten women in the Black Hills worked as prostitutes.
    He’d had his fill of those types. During the Civil War, commanding officers had brought prostitutes into the camps when the waiting for battle got so gruesomely tedious men in the same units were fighting each other to burn energy. Fearful of losing precious soldiers in careless duels, they paid “camp followers” in silver to entertain the troops. He didn’t care for women like that, but even he had had needs. An enlistee in the Union Army, like most of the boys back home in eastern Tennessee, he’d had