The Kincaids: Denver

By Nancy Morse

Oldest of the Kincaid boys, Denver Kincaid is a hard-working loner haunted by guilt over his part in his younger brother’s abduction by the Kiowa years earlier. Convinced no woman would want a man who’d been unable to protect his own kin, he has resigned himself to a life without love.
Nell Hayes flees the lonely life of a circus performer in New Orleans and arrives in Texas under false pretenses only to find her life in danger when a greedy railroad tycoon covets her land. Denver comes to her aid, never expecting to fall hard for the pretty lady. But will Nell’s secret, and Denver’s inability to come to terms with the past, stand in the way of these two lonely hearts’ long-awaited chance at love?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Morse
• Release date: Jul 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005732080

Nancy Morse

Award winning author of historical and contemporary romance novels.

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THE KINCAIDS

~ DENVER ~

Kincaid Series

Book 2

By Nancy Morse

Copyright © Nancy Morse 2020

Smashwords Edition

Cover design by SelfPubBookCovers.com/Shardel

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About This Book

Oldest of the Kincaid boys, Denver Kincaid is a hard-working loner haunted by guilt over his part in his younger brother’s abduction by the Kiowa years earlier. Convinced no woman would want a man who’d been unable to protect his own kin, he has resigned himself to a life without love.

Nell Hayes flees the lonely life of a circus performer in New Orleans and arrives in Texas under false pretenses only to find her life in danger when a greedy railroad tycoon covets her land. Denver comes to her aid, never expecting to fall hard for the pretty lady. But will Nell’s secret, and Denver’s inability to come to terms with the past, stand in the way of these two lonely hearts’ long-awaited chance at love?

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THE KINCAIDS

~ DENVER ~

Chapter 1

Colorado County, Texas, June, 1848

Nell Hayes stepped off the buckboard, put down her tapestry carpetbag, and looked around.

In the distance the gently rolling hills were partially wooded in black jack oak, walnut, pine, and cedar, with a haze of thick underbrush. But here, where the cabin was situated, the land was flat and treeless, the only water source coming from a little stream that meandered down from the hills and cut right through the heart of the homestead.

The brim of her bonnet was wide enough to shield her face from the oppressive sun, but it was hot. Untying the chin strap for relief, before she knew it, a gust of dry wind blew it right off her head. She watched with dismay as her best dress bonnet of watered silk skipped along the ground, but she had no energy to chase after it.

She was tired. It had been a long, arduous trip from New Orleans through the Gulf. Upon docking in Galveston, she had boarded a paddle-wheeler for the ride up the Brazos. Belching black smoke, its whistle blowing and bell clanging, it followed the twisting, muddy river that was filled with snags and sand bars, driftwood tangles, rocky shoals peppering the riverbed, and cottonwoods littering the bottom. When a stage plank was finally laid to the shore at San Antonio, she had never been so happy to set foot on solid land.

From there it was a bumpy two-day ride by stagecoach to the town of Columbus that lay on a rise southwest of a lazy horseshoe bend in the Colorado River. It was a small nondescript town with a general store, a tavern, a restaurant, a gristmill, a saw mill, a cotton gin, a courthouse, a blacksmith, and a few houses scattered on the outskirts. On the day she arrived the town folk were gathered for a horse race. Amidst the betting, drinking, tobacco-chewing and spitting, she found a local farmer who was willing to take her to the homestead several miles outside of the town.

A road with tree stumps no higher than six inches was indeed a first class ride, but even if the road had been pitted and rutted, anything was better than staying in New Orleans. With shipping vital to New Orleans, it also brought disease. Cholera swept through the city, carried aboard steamboats that docked in the harbor. Was it any wonder that people were fleeing by the hundreds? But just when it seemed that she was destined to be trapped there, fate had intervened.

She had been working at Sam Stickney’s Circus performing an equestrian act in a pavilion brilliantly illuminated by gas lights. One evening in walked Hans Ernst. The German immigrant had taken one look at Clarinda Bell, an aerialist with flaming red hair, doing aerial somersaults in a glittery white costume, and was instantly smitten. Clarinda, on the other hand, was hardly enamored of the unrefined German with rough calluses on his hands. But learning that he had come to New Orleans to transact business which he claimed would make him a fortune was enough for Clarinda. After a one-week whirlwind courtship, she married him.

He left New Orleans, promising to send for her just as soon as he settled matters in Texas. What matters, he did not say, but several weeks later a letter arrived from Columbus, Texas that squashed Clarinda’s hopes for the future. Hans Ernst was dead, killed in a Comanche raid.

Although hardly heartbroken over the death of man she scarcely knew, thinking it was in her best interest as his widow to travel to Texas to settle his affairs, Clarinda packed a bag, and telling no one except Nell of her plans, and swearing her to secrecy in case things didn’t pan out, she secured passage aboard a steamboat bound for Galveston. Before she left she pressed an envelope into Nell’s hands. I’ve written everything down in case anything should happen to me, she said. Nell had assured her friend that nothing was going to happen, but Clarinda was adamant. There’s wild Indians out there. And bears and wolves and who knows what else. Nell stashed the envelope away and bid her friend farewell.

Later that day as the steamboat was leaving the port its boilers exploded. The explosion shook houses in the city for many squares. An iron fragment cut a mule in two and struck a horse and dray, killing driver and horse. The harbor was littered with the bodies of the passengers and crew, none of whom were recognizable. The passenger list that had been given to the harbormaster was destroyed when a shard of metal propelled by the mighty blast set the wharf aflame. All trace of Clarinda was lost. Everyone just naturally assumed she had run off, but Nell knew the tragic truth.

One day several weeks after the steamboat explosion, Nell went into the elephant tent to be alone, unaware that the candy butcher, the concessionaire who sold candy and novelties to the crowd, had followed her in. To everyone else he was a hard-working, colorful character. To Nell he was a lecherous man who had tried on more than one occasion to relieve her of her virtue. In the process of fighting him off, she grabbed the nearest thing she could find, the bullhook used by the trainers. One blow to the candy butcher’s head laid him out.

With trembling fingers she felt for a pulse. He was alive. But fearing his retribution, she hurried back to her tent, stuffed her meager belongings into a tapestry bag, and rushed to the levee where, posing as Clarinda Ernst, she secured passage aboard a steamboat bound for Galveston.

Here she was now, standing before a crude cabin of post-oak joists and clapboard siding, with a roof made of cypress shingles and windows that had no glass but rather coverings made of wood that swung open on hinges and had gun slots cut into them. Uncivilized was the word that sprang to her mind.

The wind dislodged several strands of hair from tight coil at the back of her head and tossed them into her eyes where they tangled in her lashes. Sweeping them from her vision, her gaze swept the flat, treeless landscape. What a difference this was from New Orleans with its crowded and bustling levees, the diagonally wedged-in boats, the stevedores cussing, bales of cotton piled high, carts careening, and mules braying, and the colorful French Quarter where the air was filled with the delicious aroma of coffee brewing in the large shiny copper kettles of the Creole mulatto women.

Looking around, Nell wondered dismally what possibilities Hans Ernst could have seen in this drab, seemingly lifeless place. Why he had chosen to live here, where it was so open and empty, was beyond her imagination. This was where he had claimed he was going to make his fortune?

Squaring her shoulders against old memories and new deceptions, she swallowed down her trepidation, picked up her bag, and climbed the three stone steps to a wide-planked front porch. For several moments she hesitated. She ran a gloved hand nervously over the skirt of her dress in an attempt to smooth out wrinkles. The dark blue silk jacquard with its long v-boned bodice, off-the-shoulders neckline, bell sleeves, and large ruffled-tiered skirt, was hardly appropriate for traveling, but it was the best garment she owned. Not that there was anyone here to impress. The place reeked of loneliness. Nervous about entering the home of a dead man, she heaved a sigh and went inside.

Dust particles danced in the sunlight that flooded the room, catching her face in profile as she looked around. The cabin’s walls were made of logs, chopped and faced by hand with an axe. The hand-hewn beamed ceiling was covered with canvas in places that sagged from the dirt that had collected there. There was a cypress cupboard and a trunk of heart pine. A pine wagon seat fitted with legs served as a bench for seating at a pecan table. Flour buckets, salt boxes, broad-bottomed candlesticks, and earthenware jars were neatly arranged around a fireplace of hill country limestone, its firebox lined with soapstone. In the center of the fireplace a cooking kettle hung from a hook on an iron post. On a shelf above the fireplace was an iron mortar and pestle and glass jars which, upon examination, were found to contain cloves, mustard, honey, and cornmeal. Beside them was a small box with coffee that had been ground in a hand mill. On one side of the fireplace was a covered dough trough. On the other side was a chair whose well-worn deerskin seat told her its occupant spent many hours sitting before the fire. She wondered what Hans Ernst had been thinking about as he sat there staring into the flames. Was it the business he had traveled to New Orleans to transact? The fortune he claimed he was going to make? His new bride?

Turning away, her flat-heeled shoes clicked over the puncheon floor with its top logs smoothed off by hand and cracks that she had to step wide over. In the bedroom she found a one-leg bedstead over which was spread a leaf-filled bed tick. A curtain was suspended from a movable rod overhead for privacy. At the head of the bed, atop a shelf on pegs set into the logs were a shaving mug and razor and a little wooden box which. Looking inside it, she found needles, thread, and a few horn buttons. A small round table made from a block of wood sat beside the bed. On it was a ceramic hot water bottle to warm the feet on cold Texas nights. Tucked against one wall was a walnut wardrobe.

Back in the main room, she was struck by how neat and tidy everything was. As her gaze traversed the cabin, it came to rest upon an earthenware pitcher into which had been placed several sprigs of wild flowers. Their colors had faded and their leaves were crackling dry. It was suddenly obvious to her that Hans Ernst had intended to have everything ready for his bride.

A wave of sadness and guilt washed over her. With a gasp, she turned around and rushed from the cabin.

She ran without knowing where she was running to, the hot Texas wind stinging her face. Her flight took her past the lean-to that had been added to the back of the cabin, past the smokehouse and the woodshed, a corral of pine posts, the ash hopper, and the corn crib. As she rounded the corner of the log barn, her steps came to a grinding halt.

There before her was a stone marker at the head of a grave. Panting from her flight, she swallowed down the lump in her throat and approached, squinting against the sunlight to read the words that had been crudely etched into the stone.

Here lies Hans Ernst

Neighbor, Friend, Husband

1812-1848

As she stood there staring at the headstone and the seven words that summed up a man’s life, Nell thought that maybe she should have stayed in New Orleans. But then she thought about the circus and realized that anything was better than that. It hadn’t started out that way, though. It was an exciting, carefree life…until it wasn’t.

Raised on her grandparents’ Wisconsin farm, as she grew older she became restless and dissatisfied with farm life. Then, one day, the circus came to town. She snuck into the tent and was discovered by one of the equestrian trainers. Rather than throw her out, he took her on to care for the horses. Upon discovering how well she rode, the equestrian director brought her into the act. And so, at the age of sixteen, she ran away from home and joined the circus.

At first, decked out in beautiful draperies and manipulating a long silken scarf, she would strike various poses and hold them while going around the ring on horseback. But her manipulation of the reins and her spirited maneuvers were the height of perfection, and soon she was performing on four and six horses, leaping, cutting, pirouetting, and one-foot riding with grace and ease to the cheers of the crowd.

But after eight years with the circus she’d had enough. She longed to get away from the