Helping The Lonely Souls: A Pair of Mail Order Bride Romances

By Beth Overton

Mail Order Bride: Schoolteacher, Cowboy Rancher, & Some Stolen Cattle - A Boston schoolteacher heads to Kansas to meet her new mail ordered husband. Immediately starting off on the wrong foot, she finally does meet her man and from that point onwards, her life changes in a dramatic and unexpected way.

Mail Order Bride: Jennifer Plain And Tall, And Her Widower - A plain and tall young woman with a gentle soul travels back to Texas where her family ranch is, to be with her fiancé who she has corresponded with. He’s a widower with four children and barely makes ends meet, and when his relative cuts off the water to his ranch he suffers along with his cattle. He finally asks the woman to be his wife and she then takes the entire family out to see her old home, which her fiancé believes she will leave him for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beth Overton
• Release date: Mar 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311806901

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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Helping The Lonely Souls: A Pair of Mail Order Bride Romances

By

Beth Overton

Copyright 2016 Quietly Blessed & Loved Press

Mail Order Bride: Schoolteacher, Cowboy Rancher, & Some Stolen Cattle

Mail Order Bride: Jennifer Plain And Tall, And Her Widower

Mail Order Bride: Schoolteacher, Cowboy Rancher, & Some Stolen Cattle

Synopsis: Mail Order Bride: Schoolteacher, Cowboy Rancher, & Some Stolen Cattle - A Boston schoolteacher heads to Kansas to meet her new mail ordered husband. Immediately starting off on the wrong foot, she finally does meet her man and from that point onwards, her life changes in a dramatic and unexpected way.

Bernice Poe stepped off the train at Gilbertsville Station and waited for her future husband. She had answered a matrimonial advertisement in a paper out east from a farmer who was looking for a woman who would be willing to help him with his homestead. Barnabas Barney Kush had started a ranch with the money he had saved working for the railroad in 1880 and was too busy to meet any suitable women in the time he had spent getting the ranch up and running. Bernice Simpson had been a schoolteacher in Boston and longed for a place where the men were strong, the horses tall and the cattle plentiful.

It was a good match and they wrote each other every day for two months until she agreed to come out and meet him at the station near Topeka, Kansas.

Bernice was an auburn-haired woman who was fair of complexion and stood five foot five. She got off the train carrying her luggage in one hand and a copy of Homer’s The Odyssey in the other. She had always wanted to read the epic poem and the trip across the plains had given her the opportunity.

She didn’t find it too hard to identify with a man who wandered the earth trying to get back home to his true love. She had just reached the section where Ulysses had finally came back to his island kingdom, when the train pulled into the station where she would meet her future husband. She was the only passenger to get off at the station and even the conductor looked around to make sure no one else was getting off the train.

No one got back on the train. The station itself was a small wooden building in a field of tall grass. There was no station agent at it, as far as she could tell and how anyone bought a ticket for it was a mystery to her. Bernice waited until the train had pulled away to meet her husband as it had let her out on the opposite side, blocking the platform from her vision.

When the train had moved on she found herself facing not one, but four men staring at her. Bernice put her bag down and looked them over. She couldn’t tell who her future husband was because they all looked to be the same age, race, hair color and height. There were some differences in their appearances, however, and it was possible to tell them apart even at her distance.

The four men just stared at her for about thirty seconds. Finally the man on the right turned to the others and made a comment: Looks like we are three brides short.

No, Bernice called from the other side of the tracks. It looks like I have one more man than I can handle.

The other four men dropped their collective mouths open, then starting laughing. They thought what she said was so funny each had to sit down on the benches behind them to catch their breath. Finally, one man walked back up to the edge of the platform.

That was real funny, ma’am, he yelled. We are all supposed to meet a woman we met through the mail. But no one of us can remember the exact date; we lost the letters last week when we were meeting in town to play poker. I hope you don’t object to cards.

Never understood the attraction, she called back. My name is Bernice. Which one of you is Barnabas Kush?

He pointed to the man sitting in the middle. The man jumped up and ran across the tracks to meet Bernice.

Looks like it was your lucky day, Barney, the first man yelled across to Bernice and the man approaching her. I guess the rest of us will vamoose on back to town and return next week. As I recall, we were supposed to get a bride each week.

Barney Kush took Bernice back in his wagon to a small church near the ranch where he had arranged for a preacher to meet them and do the wedding. It was a stout clapboard church whose walls were painted with lime dissolved in water each year to give it a clean appearance. The preacher was an old style Calvinist who had long ago decided that whatever happened in his church was the will of God. And if it was the will of God that a bunch of bachelor farmers and ranchers showed up every week with another woman to marry, so be it.

He had the service completed in a few minutes and registered the couple in his church records by himself. He saw them off and told the couple he would look forward to seeing them every Sunday. Barney handed him a tithe and climbed back in the wagon with his new wife.

By the time he’d arrived at the ranch, they had already planned out their live over the next five years. He would raise the cattle; she would stay close to home and have the babies. Since she had taught school, it would be easy for her to teach the children to read and write.

There were a few other farms and ranches nearby with children and she could teach them as well if their parents were willing to pay. Bernice had even brought a few readers she could use to help her with the education. They found their personalities matched closely and were in agreement on just about everything.

The ranch house wasn’t very large, but it had plenty of room for both of them and he could always add on to it when their family started to grow. Barney had big plans for the future and his cattle herd was growing in size and quality. She liked the cozy house and its rustic appeal. They would be out on the plains all by themselves and it suited her just fine. Bernice had grown tired of Boston and its crowds.

Every morning, Barney would leave the house after kissing Bernice good-bye and go check on his herd of cattle. He was very proud of them, having started with twelve; they now numbered fifty in the herd. By now he was employing a few local cowboys to help him manage the herd in the daytime. In the evening, they would go home, but Barney had plans to have a bunkhouse built next to the stream, which ran through his property. He was an ambitious man with many plans.

Bernice would do what was necessary to keep the house running. With