The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1) by Brad Dennison (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

all here to the wilderness of Montana. So, when Johnny, Josh and the men were rising in the early morning, so was Ginny, cooking breakfast for them all.

Tonight, however, Johnny had been too restless, too filled with missing Lura, to sleep. And Ginny was worried about him.

She sat on the porch, her cup and saucer in hand replaying the conversation with him, listening to his words again in her head.

It was indeed true that when a loved one dies, you never truly recover. Ginny had never known her mother, who had died delivering Ginny’s younger sister Sabrina, Lura’s mother, when Ginny was but three. Ginny had been raised primarily by a nanny as her father was at sea much of the time, but she loved her father dearly and treasured her time with him, and when he died, it was a loss she bore to this day. And she had come to love her nanny as a mother, and mourned her passing as well.

Ginny believed death was not an end, but a transition, and so, she talked to the spirits of her father and her nanny sometimes, believing fully they could hear her. This was a practice she picked up, she supposed, from hanging about the docks when her father’s ship was anchored in the harbor, and listening to Chinese elders talking about their beliefs.

Ginny also knew about loss from one other, though she talked of this to no one but her father and her nanny. Even her sister didn’t know about the one man who had been the love of Ginny’s life, but who had lost his life in a shipwreck.

Most people thought of Ginny as an old, eccentric spinster, without ever realizing, she was sure, that she had once been a young girl so hopelessly in love she could scarcely think straight. And when she thought of her young man, his body never even recovered from the wreck, to this day she could feel tears welling. No, you never really recovered.

There was one who didn’t think of her only as an eccentric spinster, and he was the man Lura had taken to be her husband. Somehow, John was able to see her more three-dimensionally. When she fixed him with the Gaze for the first time, which she often used on people only because she found it amusing (her quirky sense of humor, her father used to say), John simply shot it right back at her.

And when Lura passed onward, so tragically young, and Ginny had told John she knew what he was going through, he didn’t ask about how. He simply accepted it.

We each deal with loss in our own way. John would ride off into the mountains when the hurt became too unbearable, and scream to the heavens or whatever he did. Sometimes Ginny would lie in bed at night and think of her young man, seeing his face still so vividly when she closed her eyes, still seeing his shining eyes and his broad smile. And sometimes, this old woman so many were afraid of, would cry herself to sleep.

She took another sip of tea. Everyone had always been so afraid of her. Everyone except her father and her young man. And Lura and John.

Johnny McCabe had stepped into Ginny’s life as a young cowboy who was too good with a gun, but who had backbone and a heart of gold. Ginny remembered the first time she had turned the Gaze on him. She had learned how to do this from her father, a man with a deeply lined face from all of his years at sea, and a heavy, bushy brow. He would drop that brow into a fearsome looking frown and fix his almost gunmetal gray eyes on you, and you would feel the resolve just drain out of you.

Lura’s father was a doctor John had met Lura in a cowtown north of Stockton. Her father was the town doctor. John was working as a cowhand on a local ranch. He and Lura had fallen in love, much to the consternation of Sabrina and the good doctor. They had hoped to send Lura off to a finishing school, either in San Francisco or the doctor’s native Boston. A dusty cowboy who used “ain’t,” didn’t know the first thing about selecting wine, and wore his gun too low, was like a nightmare come true for Lura’s parents.

When Lura found herself with child, Sabrina and her husband sent her east, to have the child with relatives of his, so as not to bring direct humiliation to them in front of their neighbors. Except, Lura hadn’t gone to Boston, as instructed. At sixteen, she was willful, and decided if she was old enough to have a baby, she was old enough to make her own decisions. She headed instead to San Francisco, and her Aunt Ginny. Ginny’s father was by then passed on, and Ginny still resided in the Brackston house.

John had been spending a month with the line riders when Lura discovered her pregnancy, and her parents sent her away. So, Lura waited for him at Aunt Ginny’s, yet he never came for her. Lura swelled with pregnancy as she waited. One month rolled on into another, and eventually little Joshua was born.

It turned Lura’s mother had written a note to John, copying Lura’s handwriting as best she could, stating Lura no longer wished to see him, and she was going away and did not wish him to follow. The forged handwriting was good enough to fool the young boy. Johnny was heart sick, and went on a drinking spree, something he was known for in his youth, and it was a bad one. As Zack had said once, when Johnny goes on a bender, he really goes on a bender. It was on this bender that the boy called Dusty was apparently conceived.

Once John discovered alcohol can never truly remove your pain, he sobered up and he and Zack simply started riding. John wanted to