Love's Rescue Read Online Free

didn’t expect the clerk would much care what happened to her brother.
    Her brother.
    Jess’s head dropped back restlessly, her temples throbbing with pains of worry. Ambrose had written frequently over the past three years, and though an occasional letter had been lost, she’d received word from him nearly every month since he had left for the war.
    The last letter he’d sent was dated almost four
months ago.
    Jess stared angrily at the coattails of the man in front of her. She hated herself for waiting this long, for hoping for word. Something had happened to Ambrose. She knew it had. She knew it right down to her boots.
    When his letters had stopped, she had written to his commanding officer, but her letter was neither responded to nor returned. For weeks, she had pored over newspapers and casualty lists until long into the night, but she never saw his name. Now few options remained. This telegram had to work. She had to know what had happened to Ambrose. She had to know what to tell their mother.
    Three or four of the miners chuckled over another man’s jest, and the line moved slowly forward. Jess pulled her cloak tighter around her. Ambrose, were he nearby, would remind her that the Lord was with her, even in this place. Jess tried to believe that He was, and she took another step closer to the chatter of clicks and beeps coming in over the wire.
    ***
    Jake Bennett lifted the saddle from his horse and laid it over the top rail of the corral fence beside him. The winter morning was still dark, the corral and barn wall dimly discernible in the starlight, and the livery stable had yet to open for business that day. No matter. During the previous day’s ride from the ranch, his men, seldom known to interrupt a good silence with talk, hadn’t passed a mile without one of them commenting on a new hat or saddle he wanted to see in Carson City. All four had been content to break camp before sunrise, and, when they’d arrived, to look through shop windows until proprietors unlocked their doors.
    Resting a gloved hand on his stallion’s back, Jake leaned over to swipe the road dust from its flank. Almost four years had come and gone since he had built his ranch up near Honey Lake in ’59, and he and his men now supplied horses and fresh beef to settlers in gold and silver mining towns that hadn’t existed then. Even Carson City, though a fledgling compared to long-established urban areas, looked closer to being cosmopolitan than the open stretch of wilderness it had been only a few years ago. Board buildings and adobes stood in the valley where the easternmost Sierras parted. When Jake had ridden in a short while earlier, they had seemed to rise out of the desert, the silhouette of a growing town beneath star-rimmed mountains.
    With a hearty pat on his horse’s neck, Jake straightened. Hurried citizens bustled past, bundled in coats and scarves. A small man scuttled along the storefront toward him, head bowed low against the wind. He stepped off the boardwalk, glanced up in surprise at the huge black horse he had nearly collided with, and lifted his eyes higher to Jake’s. The man blinked, murmured an apology, and eased around the stallion, gasping when it flicked its tail warily. Jake watched the fellow’s hat pass beneath him as he slipped by, then shifted his regard to the telegraph office across the road, where he had seen a young woman enter a few minutes earlier. Even by lantern light, the woman had appeared agitated about some matter, yet she’d held her head high as she strode through the door with unmistakable boldness, like a cat he had once watched tree a bear. He hadn’t seen such beauty and fortitude in a townswoman in quite some time. It was a refreshing sight.
    Jake returned his attention to his horse. He reached into his pocket for a comb, which he used to pull tiny burrs off its flank.
    ***
    Jess stepped up to the counter. The thin man in shirtsleeves standing behind it grabbed a blank form, barely