The Hens: The Third Day (The 12 Days 0f Christmas Mail-Order Brides Book 3) Read online

  The Hens

  The Third Day

  Merry Farmer

  THE HENS: THE THIRD DAY

  Copyright ©2017 by Merry Farmer

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your digital retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Erin Dameron-Hill (the miracle-worker)

  ASIN: B077NRSM62

  Paperback:

  ISBN-13: 9781979950732

  ISBN-10: 1979950733

  Click here for a complete list of other works by Merry Farmer.

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  Contents

  Other Books in the Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  The Calling Birds

  About the Author

  Other Books in the Series

  The 12 Days of Christmas Mail-Order Brides

  The Partridge by Kit Morgan

  The Dove by Shanna Hatfield

  The Hens by Merry Farmer

  The Calling Birds by Jacqui Nelson

  The Gold Ring by Caroline Lee

  The Goose by Peggy Henderson

  The Swan by Piper Hugely

  The Maid by Rachel Wesson

  The Dancing Lady by Mimi Milan

  The Lord by Danica Favorite

  The Piper by Amanda McIntyre

  The Drum by E.E. Burke

  Chapter 1

  Noelle, Colorado – Christmas Day, 1876

  Liu Meizhen’s journey had been long and exhausting. It had taken her from the fertile, humid plains of her home in China’s Kiangsu province, along the Yangtze River, to the busy port city of Canton, across the ocean to the bustling city of San Francisco, along the railroads of the American West from Montana to Texas in search of her brother, and, at last, to Noelle, Colorado. Towering in the mountains. Covered in a fresh blanket of snow. To an establishment known as “La Maison des Chats”.

  “This is not what my brother would have wanted for me,” she sighed to herself in Chinese as she crossed the garishly-decorated cathouse’s sitting room. Garish to her eyes, but some of the other ladies who had come to Noelle to marry some of its citizens had found it to be beautiful and cozy.

  “What’s that?” Maybelle, one of those other women, asked, a little on the shrewish side, as Meizhen reached a window and drew back the curtains to peek outside.

  The landscape around the cathouse was rugged, white, and sleepy that Christmas morning. There was no sign of the man she had come to Noelle to marry. She had seen Mr. Woodrow Burnside briefly the day before as he’d helped her and the rest of the brides up the mountain to the town, but she wasn’t sure she would recognize him if he walked past. Meizhen turned back to Maybelle, wary of how cattish the woman could be when she’d just awakened.

  “I was simply musing to myself that this is not what my brother, Chi-ming, would have wanted for me,” she said, her words slow and measured. She had studied English before coming to America, and had spent long hours working to smooth out her accent to be more understandable, but she was still careful to make herself understood.

  Maybelle snorted and turned up her nose all the same. “What kind of a name is ‘Chi-ming’? And you’re in America. You should speak English.”

  The only sign of disapproval that Meizhen allowed herself was a slight pursing of her lips. She kept her expression neutral as she glanced out the window again. Maybelle couldn’t know that ‘Chi-ming’ was as common a name in China as ‘Bill’ was in America. Which had made searching for her lost brother that much more of a challenge. She and her twin sister, Meiying, had followed so many false leads in their search that Meiying eventually gave up and married a former railroad worker turned rancher near Haskell, Wyoming.

  And now Meizhen was giving up the search as well. She had to. The burden of loneliness that searching without her twin had pressed on her had become too much to bear. She was tired of being alone, tired of being without family. Returning to China wasn’t an option, since her twin had settled in America, and since Meiying’s husband was constantly talking about selling his ranch and returning to San Francisco…or perhaps Denver…or maybe Seattle, attempting to find a husband near Meiying was too uncertain as well. Meizhen wanted stability, a home of her own. No more moving, traveling, and searching.

  Which was why she had approached Mrs. Genevieve Walters and her organization, the Benevolent Society of Lost Lambs, which matched up women who wanted to marry with men in need of wives. Meizhen’s heart had leapt with joy the day Mrs. Walters informed her there was a man, Woodrow Burnside, in Noelle in need of a gentle, good-natured woman to marry, and that he wasn’t particular about her nationality. And then she had received his letter of introduction, which was so sweet it made her heart melt.

  Maybelle snorted as though Meizhen had said something else in Chinese and pushed herself out of her chair. “They’re not just going to come waltzing up the path with roses in their hands, you know. It’s much too early. And it snowed yesterday. And it’s Christmas.” And yet, she slipped over to pull back the other curtain by the window where Meizhen was watching, looking out herself.

  “Perhaps,” Meizhen said. “I like looking at our new home, though.”

  Maybelle made a strangled noise. “This place? It’s a dump.”

  Meizhen blinked at her. “A dump?”

  Maybelle huffed an impatient sigh. “It means it’s a backwards, dirty, uncivilized hole in the ground. A dump. Honestly, you should learn more English.”

  “I know what ‘a dump’ means,” Meizhen said quietly. She’d seen plenty of such places in her travels. She glanced out the window once more. “I don’t see that here.”

  “Really?” Maybelle sneered, eyeing Meizhen as though she might be just as contaminated as everything outside.

  “I see beautiful mountains,” Meizhen said, a smile softening her face. “I see snow, glittering like diamonds. I see businesses and homes, a whole world of potential.”

  A man walked across the snow-clogged street several yards down from the cathouse, hugging himself against the cold, his collar turned up. He sneezed when he reached the building next door, and snow plopped on him as it slid off the roof.

  Maybelle scoffed, shook her head, and turned away from the window. “It’s a dump,” she confirmed her previous assessment. A proud grin came to her face. “But I’m marrying the very best man in the entire town. Mr. Horatio P. Smythe.” She spoke his middle initial as if it gave the man that much more importance, and clasped her hands to her chest. “He’s the richest, handsomest, best man in this entire town, and he’s mine.”

  “You are very fortunate.” Meizhen let the curt
ain fall back into place over the window and followed Maybelle as she swayed her way over to the fireplace. A few of the other women who had come as mail-order brides were already up and enjoying coffee or tea in the sitting room, but they rolled their eyes at Maybelle and purposely ignored her self-satisfied rapture.

  Maybelle seemed to notice the others. “They have tea. I want tea.”

  Meizhen nodded and walked to the table near the fireplace, where a tea service waited. She poured a cup.

  “Two sugars. Extra cream,” Maybelle snapped.

  Meizhen nodded and set to work fixing the tea just right.

  The woman sitting next to the table, Miss Avis Smith, looked at her in horror. “Why are you serving her?” she whispered.

  “I don’t mind, if it keeps her quiet,” Meizhen answered.

  Avis shook her head and moved to another chair, as if she wanted no part of anything Maybelle did. Meizhen took the tea to Maybelle, who snatched it out of her hands. She took a drink, made a face, then flopped as dramatically as she could without spilling tea on herself into a chair by the fire.

  “This place is a dump,” she repeated, unable to come up with an original complaint. “They can’t even provide good coffee. And you lot—” She looked around at the other ladies in the room and sniffed. “I would be insulted if anyone told me I had to marry an ugly, brutish, ignorant clod, like your grooms.”

  Avis scowled and left the room. The other women either pretended they hadn’t heard Maybelle or deliberately turned away from her.

  “Pathetic,” Maybelle murmured. She glanced back to Meizhen, the only one who had enough patience to continue giving Maybelle her attention. “Your brother is right to think this place isn’t good enough,” she said, misinterpreting what Meizhen had said before. Maybelle frowned. “Where is your brother anyhow? Why has he let you come here?”

  The hollow ache that had been growing in Meizhen’s chest intensified. “I do not know where he is,” she explained.

  Maybelle sent her a flat look. “How can you not know where your brother is?”

  “Chi-ming came to America long before my sister and I. He worked in San Francisco, amongst the Chinese community there. He found husbands for my sister and I, and sent for us to come. But when we arrived….” She shrugged. “He was not there.”

  “What do you mean, he wasn’t there?”

  “Simply that,” Meizhen said. “Chi-ming had left the city, following work. His friends didn’t know where.”

  Maybelle frowned. “What about the men you and your sister were supposed to marry?”

  “One had found another wife,” Meizhen explained. “The other had left the city without keeping ties with anyone there.”

  “So what did you do?” A spark of genuine interest lit Maybelle’s pinched face.

  “Meiying and I performed as part of an acrobatic troupe in China,” Meizhen explained. “We trained from youngest childhood. When we found ourselves on our own, we put those skills to use and joined up with a traveling theatrical troupe run by a man named Miles Kopanari.”

  “Oh heavens,” Maybelle said, her eyes wide, somewhere between horrified and titillated. “You traveled as an actor with a troupe of gypsies?”

  Meizhen shook her head. “Acrobat, not actor.”

  Maybelle continued to gape at her as if she’d confessed to being a train robber. She shook her head. “I don’t think you should talk to me anymore. I don’t associate with actors and gypsies.” She turned her face away, started to take a sip of her tea, then put it down as if Meizhen might have poisoned it.

  For a moment, Meizhen thought about calling Maybelle out for her rudeness. Back home, her parents and her instructors would have scolded the woman firmly for her lack of decorum. But there didn’t seem to be much use in telling a snake not to hiss.

  Meizhen walked calmly back to the window, looking out again. There was no denying that Noelle was much rougher than what she and the other brides had been lead to expect. But it truly wasn’t as bad as Maybelle and some of the others were complaining that it was. The air was clean and crisp. The landscape was breathtaking. Potential whispered through the pines and sang along the stream. The only thing Meizhen was missing to feel perfectly content with her decision was her groom.

  This was it. Woody adjusted his suit jacket and brushed the sleeves, then checked himself in the shard of broken mirror he’d been using. He brushed his fingers through his hair and rubbed a hand over his freshly-shaved chin.

  “Well, girls, what do you think?” he asked.

  In the barn behind him, three chickens pecked at the hay. They lifted their heads, cocking them sideways and blinking. Most folks thought chickens were stupid—and yeah, it could be argued they were—but there was something special about Mimi, Gigi, and Fifi. They clucked at him as if giving advice on the worn but clean work trousers he wore, the boots he’d done his best to polish, and the pink shine to his scrubbed face.

  “Yeah, I thought so,” he told them through the shard of mirror. He wasn’t all that much to look at. His hair was average color, his face was average in shape, his nose an average size. The only things about him that weren’t average were probably less than average. Like his smarts, for one.

  He cleared his throat and straightened to chase off the gloomy thought. His Pop had always told him that book-learning didn’t matter. It was how you treated folks that made a man. Woody tended to agree. And to that he added that sometimes all you needed was dumb luck.

  He was the luckiest man in Noelle, as far as he was concerned. When Rev. Hammond came up with the idea of sending for a bunch of mail-order brides to marry fellas in town, Woody had never dreamed he would have been one of the men picked for the domestic life. But they’d drawn straws, he’d picked a short straw, and there he was, matched up with a woman.

  Not just any woman either. Liu Meizhen. A Chinawoman. He’d been so excited and mystified by the idea that he’d barely spoken about it to a soul. Not even to the Chinese folks who owned the laundry in town, and not to Buck, the Chinese miner who he saw just about every day over at the stamp mill.

  Liu Meizhen. The name rolled around in his mouth and down into his heart. It was like magic, and you didn’t go around talking about magic to just anyone. In fact, he’d only talked to three souls about how excited he was….

  “Well, girls. Here goes nothing,” he said, turning to the hens.

  They pecked and clucked and blinked. Woody winked back at them, waved to the donkeys and mules tucked safe in their barn stalls, grabbed his overcoat and hat from their hook by the barn’s side door, then headed out into the snow. He settled his hat on his head as he walked toward the road.

  He liked Noelle. It was about as different from his Texas home as could be, but when his boss, Charles “Golden Charlie” Hardt had struck gold and set up a town in the Colorado mountains, Woody had followed him. Someone had to take care of the donkeys, who operated the mining carts, after all. Not to mention the assorted horses, dogs, chickens, and other livestock that the people of Noelle needed to get by. On top of that, he’d struck up a special deal with his friend and neighbor, Jack Peregrine, who owned the freight and post to take care of his mules. The same mules that had been needed last night to haul the brides up to town. Folks like Jack and Charlie made him feel needed, maybe even important.

  On second thought, he would never have called himself important. But as things went, he’d been happy to get away from the hustle and noise of ranchland, and from the gang of Charlie’s other men who’d taken to calling him names and harassing him, to find a home in the mountains.

  Yep, ranching was all in the past now, and as soon as he walked down to La Maison des Chats, where the brides were holed up while waiting for their grooms to claim them, he would be a married man. Maybe he’d even be a father soon. The idea sent a thrill through him and put a wide grin on his face.

  “That’s quite a warm and cheery expression for such a cold morning.” Woody was greeted by Mr. Hugh Montgomery as
he crossed the bridge over the Cayuga River.

  “Morning, Hugh.” Woody waved at the man and fell into step with him. He’d always liked Hugh. Hugh worked hard and was reliable, but he obviously came from finer stock than most of the men in town. Or maybe it was just his English accent that made Woody think that.

  “Merry Christmas,” Hugh said, thumping Woody on the back.

  Woody blinked, slipping in the snow. “Oh yeah. I forgot it was Christmas.”

  Hugh laughed. “How could anyone forget it’s Christmas?” He paused, then answered his own question with, “Of course, I could see that happening if you had something even better to look forward to.”

  Woody just grinned in return. “You going to meet your bride too?”

  “In a bit.” Hugh nodded. “I have an errand to run first.”

  “What kind of errand?” Woody lost his grin. “Is there something else I’m missing? Something else I was supposed to do?” He cursed under his breath. “I knew I’d do this whole bride thing wrong.”

  “No, no.” Hugh chuckled and thumped Woody’s back. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine. My errand is something else entirely.”

  “I dunno.” Woody rubbed his hands together to keep the cold from stiffening them. “I still can’t believe I was chosen for this whole thing.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  Woody shrugged. “It’s what Horatio said the other day. There’s not much a fella who spends his days in a mule barn can offer a woman.”

  “Nonsense,” Hugh laughed. “How much more do you think a miner or a rancher, or even the mayor of a remote town like this can offer? Any woman with sense would be happy to call a hardworking and kind man like you her husband.”