A Bride for Donnigan by Janette Oke Page B

assurance from the presence of her friend.
    Quickly they compared sheets and found to their relief and excitement that they shared a common destination. With excited cries they threw their arms around each other and wept unashamedly. It would be so wonderful—so wonderful to know someone, to have a friend in the new, strange land.
    Soon they had boarded another train and were chugging their way out of the station. Though still not given a berth, they were not so crowded. By now they were so weary that Kathleen felt they could have slept almost anywhere.
    She was right. The girls from the Continent fell asleep almost as soon as they boarded the train, the oldest of the group soon snoring loudly.
    Kathleen did not stay awake to see if it annoyed other passengers. She rolled up her shawl against the coolness of the window, laid her head against it, and fell asleep.
    She was stiff when she awoke in the morning, but at least she felt somewhat better.
    “And how long are we to be on this train?” she asked Erma.
    “I’m not sure. Someone said three days.”
    Kathleen winced. She was so tired of travel. Travel and heat and people and dust. It seemed that it all went together in America.

    After the train came the stagecoach, which they met in a small, dusty frontier town of gray wooden buildings and gray wooden boardwalks. The sign at the post office indicated that it was Raeford. Kathleen felt that they must be going to the end of the world. She had given up craning her neck to look out the window. There were so many miles of the same thing. She did find the herds of deer and antelope and buffalo rather exciting. She had seen no such animals on the back streets of London.
    But for the most part, they rode in silence. There was really very little to talk about.
    When they reached a small station by the name of Sheep’s Meadows, one of the girls from the Continent was separated from them and sent in another direction on another stage. Kathleen could sense the girl’s panic. She felt her own hand go out to grasp Erma’s. She was so thankful that she would not be going off all on her own.
    Later, two of the other girls were sent off in another direction. Kathleen wondered how far they would travel before they were separated again.
    There were still three of them when the stage pulled into Aspen Valley. They all looked at their sheets of paper one last time. They were home.

    Donnigan wished he had made arrangements for Wallis to ride along with him to town. He could have used some support. Never in his whole life had he felt so nervous—not even when he had been treed by a big grizzly or the time he had been thrown in the path of stampeding cattle. Somehow he had managed to escape those perils. It seemed there was no escaping this one.
    He cast one last glance around his snug cabin. All the dishes had been washed. Even the pots. They were all stacked carefully on the shelf beside the stove. He had made his bed rather than just tossing the blankets up to cover the pillow. He had even used a scrub brush and hot soapy water on the floorboards. Things looked pretty good.
    He moved from the room and closed the door firmly behind him. As he walked the dirt path toward the barn and corrals, he studied his makeshift flower garden. He had lost only one of the plants that he had brought from the meadow. But only three were still blooming. Still, it was better than nothing, he reasoned.
    He would have loved to show up in town with the black. Everyone around admired the magnificent horse, and Donnigan couldn’t help but feel that the big stallion would make some kind of favorable impression.
    But the black hated the harness, and Donnigan knew that he could hardly ask his new wife to climb up behind him and be toted back to the farm cowboy fashion. Then there would be all the trunks and cases that she would have with her. No, it just wouldn’t work to take the saddle horse. Donnigan hitched the team to the wagon and started off to