The Hired Man by Lynna Banning

Author:Lynna Banning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

“Blackberries are ripe in the cow pasture,” Danny announced the next afternoon. “And the apple trees are loaded with big red apples!”

Cord hoisted the water bucket and headed out to water Eleanor’s flower bed. “Guess summer’s really here,” he remarked.

“Already,” Eleanor added.

Her flower bed had burst into a riot of color. Looking at them in the evening after supper made her giddy with joy, especially when the red nasturtiums began to twine over the gravestone at the far end of her garden.

She picked lush bouquets for every room in the house, even the kitchen, where a fat mason jar of black-eyed Susans, blue delphiniums and frothy white baby’s breath appeared on the kitchen table at supper one evening. Molly wanted to make a daisy chain of the black-eyed Susans, so Eleanor went out at dusk and picked another handful. When she returned, Cord had stuck one blossom in his buttonhole and Danny was washing up the supper dishes while Molly worked on her daisy chain.

Cord poured a second cup of coffee for each of them. They didn’t talk, just sat at the supper table and listened to the children’s sporadic chatter. Eleanor was feeling stronger than the day she had fainted. She was resting more, and she felt in increasingly good health since the pneumonia had sapped her strength and her spirits. And she was feeling happier.

Especially pleasing was the thought of picking bushels of Anna and Fiesta apples and taking them into town to sell. Already Carl Ness at the mercantile was asking when he could expect them. His storefront was now painted a rich turquoise blue, and Edith Ness was spending the summer painting the fronts of other establishments up and down Main Street. Even the sheriff’s office now sported a bright sunshiny yellow facade. Eleanor laughed every time she and Cord drove past in the wagon.

Today Cord was delivering a wagonload of apples, eight bushel baskets, to Samson Northcutt at the mercantile in Gillette Springs. He left at dawn, and drove the hot, dusty forty miles. It took him all day, and by the time he unloaded all the apples he was dead tired. He thought about staying at the hotel in town, then decided he didn’t want to be away from Eleanor and the kids all night.

He collected Samson’s payment for the apples, grabbed a steak and a beer at the Shady Lady Saloon and fed the horse a hatful of oats. Then he headed for home.

Dusk threw lavender shadows across the road and he worked to keep his eyelids open. Probably shouldn’t have had that beer—it cost two bits of Eleanor’s hard-earned money—and now he regretted not topping off his meal with a few cups of strong coffee to help him stay alert.

This was the loneliest damn road between Smoke River and Gillette Springs, and it was studded with potholes deeper than one of Eleanor’s dishpans! Made him wish he’d brought Danny with him for company, but he knew Eleanor would have had a fit if he’d even suggested it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.