Mail Order Bride: The Schoolteacher & The Outlaw From Tombstone

By Beth Overton

A schoolteacher from Tennessee corresponds with a cowboy in Arizona and decides to become his fiancé. When she arrives she is immediately swept up into a scenario that appears to be a scene from a western novel. It’s immediately apparent to her that the man she was to wed is really nothing at all like he represented himself as in his letters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beth Overton
• Release date: Feb 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311766106

Beth Overton

Beth Overton lives in Northern California with her husband and three cats. Besides writing romances, she loves to read everything she can get her hands on, as well as cooking up gourmet delights for her entire family.

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Mail Order Bride: The Schoolteacher & The Outlaw From Tombstone

By

Beth Overton

Copyright 2016 Quietly Blessed & Loved Press

Synopsis: A schoolteacher from Tennessee corresponds with a cowboy in Arizona and decides to become his fiancé. When she arrives she is immediately swept up into a scenario that appears to be a scene from a western novel. It’s immediately apparent to her that the man she was to wed is really nothing at all like he represented himself as in his letters.

Jane Whitfield never liked to leave things as they were. Even when she was a child, she was always striving to make things better for both herself and everyone around her.

While most girls were content to play with their dolls during the day and leave them in the dirt when they were finished with them, Jane built homes for hers out of old pieces of firewood. Each of her four dolls had a specific house designed with the individual doll’s interests in mind.

While most children in the small Tennessee town where she grew up were content to learn only the basics in school and then go on to farm or learn a trade for the boys or go on to housework for the girls, Jane had pushed herself in school. She learned to read not only basic newspaper articles but also classic novels. She learned to write not just her name and the names of her family but longhand poetry of her own creation.

It was this drive that, at the age of eighteen, found her teaching in the one room schoolhouse. However, it was also this drive, this need to be better, which ensured that she could not stay there. While she enjoyed her work and most of her pupils, while not as driven as she would like, were perfectly lovely children, Jane also had a deep desire to begin a family of her own.

She would not be content to simply be an old maid schoolteacher just as she would not have been content simply being a farmer’s wife. She dreamed of having the best of these two worlds and she knew that would not happen in Utopia, Tennessee.

Utopia, despite its name, was far from Paradise. It was less than one mile long on either side. It was made up of dirty creek beds, dry fields, and flat plains and what Jane found most intolerable, small minded men.

It was the latter that had driven her away from Utopia. Her desire for a husband had found her accepting offers of courtship from several men in town. She was always a fairly pretty girl. With her flowing waves of long brown hair and dark, heavily lidded hazel eyes, many a man in town took an interest in her. All of them found her annoying after only a few outings together.

She did have a bad habit of correcting grammar, posture and etiquette in general. Needless to say, after a few remarks on the correct use of ‘whom’, instructions on the proper way to sit in a chair and a lecture on why a man should always put down his coat across a puddle for a lady, the young men of her town generally lost interest. That was why she had begun to look elsewhere for a suitable husband.

When she saw one particular advertisement in a magazine entitled The Heart and Hand, she thought she had found the perfect candidate.

Joshua Walters of Tombstone Arizona was looking for a woman of intelligence, well read, excellent writing skills, educated and well spoken. He was a ranch hand just outside the city of Tombstone looking to settle down with his own plot of land and a wife he could share witty and intelligent conversation with.

Jane answered the advertisement with all due haste and she and Joshua had been exchanging letters since. In writing, this Joshua Walters proved himself to be an intelligent, well-educated and interesting young man.

Beyond his talent for elegant language, he also seemed an excellent storyteller. He spun the most amusing yarns about life on the cattle trails and songs they would sing around the fire as they drove the cattle north towards the railroads that would take the herd east. He said that some of the songs were not fit for the ears of gentle ladies and he hoped that she could overlook a few indiscretions when it came to language whilst he was out with the