Pecos Valley Revival Read online

  Pecos Valley Revival

  (Pecos Valley 2)

  Alice Duncan

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  A Look At: Pecos Valley Rainbow (Pecos Valley 3)

  About the Author

  Pecos Valley Revival is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 Alice Duncan (as revised)

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Wolfpack Publishing, Las Vegas.

  Wolfpack Publishing

  6032 Wheat Penny Avenue

  Las Vegas, NV 89122

  wolfpackpublishing.com

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64119-912-4

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-64119-913-1

  Dedication

  This is Mimi Riser’s book, for sure! If it weren’t for Mimi, I’d never have written it.

  Pecos Valley Revival

  Chapter One

  “Herd’s comin’ through!”

  Jack, my obnoxious twelve-year-old brother, didn’t have to make that announcement twice.

  “Oh, Lord.”

  As I hurried to close the front door of our parents’ dry-goods store, leaving my best friend Myrtle Howell gaping after me, Jack raced to the windows and started slamming them closed and latching them against what we knew was sure to follow the herd of which Jack spoke. In those days Second Street wasn’t paved and during October, when the fall cattle drive was going on and all the ranches within hundreds of miles drove their herds through Rosedale, New Mexico, the dust the animals kicked up on their jaunt down Second would have been unbelievable if we hadn’t seen it ourselves for so many years.

  Fortunately the weather was cool that fall day, or we’d have suffocated. Suffocation was what generally happened during the spring cattle drives, although the May drives had become somewhat less stifling since the advent of electricity to town. Now the big rotating electrical fan we’d ordered from Missouri kept us from dying during the two weeks of the spring drives. Anyhow, around here you could never depend on the weather. It’s been known to snow in southeastern New Mexico in April, and we’ve had heat waves in October (although we’ve also had snow in October and heat waves in April). Even though the Twentieth Century had rolled in some two-dozen years earlier, and we’d been a state since 1912, life was still a little on the edgy side in our neck of the woods back then.

  As soon as we’d secured the store against the storm of dust to come, Jack, Myrtle and I, along with the few customers lingering in the store at the time, gathered around the windows to observe the action. Uncomfortable as the drives could be, they were also a whole lot of fun to watch. It was easy to get lost in the adventure of the action and to romanticize those men, the cowboys, who whooped and hollered through town, riding like centaurs and keeping the cattle confined to the street when the occasional cow or steer seemed inclined to stray onto the boardwalks in front of the stores and offices. Once or twice over the years a stray had lumbered through a window or a door, much to the dismay of it, the owner of the property, and the cowboys who had to get the animal out again.

  I know for a fact that my idiot brother (I have another brother who isn’t an idiot) had a glorified notion of what cowboys did on a daily basis, probably because he read a lot of Zane Grey novels. He’d even told me once that when he grew up, he aimed to move “west.” I asked him where he thought we lived if it wasn’t in the west, where the dad-gummed legend of the so-called western cowboy originated, but he only sneered at me.

  For the most part, I had no sympathy for my brother. Watching the drive from behind the glass panes of the store window, though, I could understand how he’d formed his opinion of cowboys as noble—if somewhat rugged and dusty—heroes, however unrealistic the image might be.

  As you observed the cowboys working, it was easy to let your mind wander to open plains and campfires and fabulous adventures featuring bad guys, red Indians, cattle rustlers, and fainting maidens. The unfortunate truth was that a cowboy’s life was hard work, blazing heat (or frigid cold), danger and boredom for the most part—but that was no fun to think about, and it was definitely not romantic.

  Suddenly Myrtle cried, “Oh, Annabelle! Isn’t that Kenny Sawyer?”

  “Where?”

  She pointed. “There. Oh, my, doesn’t he look handsome!”

  I spotted him. “Ah,” said I. “I see him now.” And he did indeed look handsome, mainly because he was handsome. He also looked more at home on a horse than any other man I’d ever seen except maybe my special friend Phil Gunderson. I didn’t say so, since I liked to consider myself above such adolescent fancies, even though I wasn’t. Myrtle and I were only nineteen in 1923, after all. “So I guess that must be the cattle from Texico.”

  The Texico Ranch, owned and run by a family by the name of Baldwin, straddled the border between New Mexico and Texas on the east side of the state, near Clovis and Portales. The Baldwins had decided to honor both states when they named their ranch. Their brand was T-X-O, which I thought was kind of clever, although I’m not sure why. The Baldwins’ Texico Ranch was not quite as far away from Rosedale as some of the herds, being almost a hundred and twenty-five miles away, but it was pretty darned far. Therefore, I figured, if the Texico herd had reached town, the drive must be about over, since theirs was the last herd to hit town most years. And none too soon, if you asked me, mainly because the big party and rodeo held annually to celebrate the end-of-the-year drive was scheduled to start in only a couple of days.

  Everybody in town loved the rodeo because it meant several days of campfires, sing-alongs, dances, and barbecues, not to mention competition between cowboys from various ranches to see who was the best bull rider, broncobuster, calf roper and bulldogger, in the area. It was, in effect, a huge town party, and we all looked forward to it.

  In 1923, rodeos weren’t the huge moneymaking operations they became a few years later, with men who considered themselves professional rodeo performers. In those days they were more in the nature of big festivals, celebrations of a whole lot of hard work completed, during which real cowboys who worked on real ranches demonstrated their real skills to an admiring, if somewhat restricted, public. At the time, only about 20,000 folks lived in our fair city. Well, sort of fair.

  We in Rosedale got to host the party because Rosedale was the hub of the ranching world for an area almost two hundred miles in diameter. Since Rosedale itself, as noted above, only boasted around 20,000 people, you can tell we weren’t exactly the hub of western civilization. Still, we liked where we lived. Once in the spring and once in the fall, ranchers drove their cattle through Rosedale to the big pens a little bit east of town, where the beasts were rounded up and guided onto railroad cars and chugged on to Kansas City. There the poor animals would be slaughtered and distributed—I guess to the entire nation. Which made us pretty darned important, even though I’m sure few people outside of the town itself had ever heard of Rosedale, New Mexico, much less thought about Rosedale as they ate their pot roasts, T-bone steaks or beef stews.

  That particular October was an unusually interesting one for us, because not only did we have the cattle drive going on, which was a big deal in itself, but a tent revivalist had also come to our town, thereby giving the citizens of Rosedale two form
s of entertainment. I don’t think I’m supposed to look upon tent revivals as entertainment, but I do. Those revivalist preachers can get folks more stirred up than anything else I know of, barring a big bank robbery or the smashing of a bootlegger’s still.

  Not that I’m a heathen or anything. In fact, I’m a good, churchgoing, Christian girl, and I sing an almost-on-key alto in the choir at the Methodist-Episcopal Church (North) in town. But, darn it, I don’t like people telling me I’m going to hell if I don’t believe exactly as they do. From everything I’ve read in the Bible, Jesus Himself didn’t consign people to hell as often as did most of the revivalist preachers who’ve come through town.

  Unfortunately, Myrtle, who, as I already mentioned, is my best friend, and my other best friend, Phil Gunderson, had both gone to some of the revival meetings and been “saved.” Ever since then they’d been begging me to go to a meeting or three. They weren’t the only ones, either. Worse even than Myrtle or Phil, my mother thought it would be a good idea for my obnoxious brother Jack and me both to go. I guess she thought we were sliding into sin or something, unless she just wanted to get rid of us for a couple of hours in the evening. I guess I couldn’t blame her for that, but I still didn’t want to go.

  This was especially true since the preacher, Reverend Milo Strickland, had the world’s most beautiful sister. This sister was a young woman named Esther, about whom both Myrtle and Phil had been waxing ecstatic for several days. Myrtle’s infatuation with the Stricklands I could stand, if barely. However, I found Phil’s rhapsodizing very trying, since for years he’d been sweet on my own personal self. Mind you, I didn’t want to wed him anytime soon, desiring to experience an adventure or two before I got married and faded into obscurity. My personal ambitions aside, I sure as heck didn’t want to lose Phil to some female revivalist. Or any other kind of female, either, for that matter.

  It’s not that I’m ugly or anything. I’m actually kind of pretty. But my plain brown hair and blue eyes are no match for Esther Strickland’s beautiful blonde hair and ethereally lovely azure eyes. And I was a normal-sized person, being approximately five feet, four inches tall. Esther was tiny and fairy-like. Shoot, I didn’t even know the woman, and I hated her. Which maybe indicates that I should go to the next tent revival that hits town. But I didn’t want to go to the one conducted by Reverend Strickland and his teensy, gorgeous, angel-like darned sister.

  “The rodeo begins the day after tomorrow, Annabelle,” Myrtle said, excitement shimmering in her voice. “What are you going to wear to it?”

  I looked at her slanty-eyed. “Wear? What do you mean?” I glanced down at my plain old white shirtwaist and blue skirt, covered by a big, more-or-less white apron. This constituted my usual costume when I was minding the store. “I guess I’ll wear trousers and a shirt. And I’ll take a sweater in case it gets cold.”

  “You’re going to wear trousers?” she all but shrieked.

  “Well . . . yeah. Why not? I always wear trousers to the rodeo. You do, too.”

  She tilted her head to one side and pursed her lips. “I used to.”

  “Used to?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

  Myrtle lowered her eyelashes and fluttered them slightly. I considered this an alarming sign and, putting two and two together, anticipated what was coming next. Lousy revivalists. “But Reverend Strickland believes women should be feminine at all times. It’s what the Bible wants us to be, he says.”

  “He would,” I muttered, wishing Reverend Strickland and his beautiful blasted sister to the devil. Evil of me, I know.

  Myrtle turned on me with a frown. “You know it’s true, Annabelle. The Bible says that men should act like men, and women should act like women.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  Myrtle smirked at me, and I instantly knew it had been a mistake to ask. Darn it, she’d been listening to the stupid preacher too closely if she had a reference handy. “Titus. Chapter Two. Read it, if you don’t believe me.” She sniffed. “It might do you some good.”

  “Nuts. Anyhow, back then everybody wore skirts,” I reminded her. “Including the men. Wouldn’t you just love to see Kenny Sawyer in a dress?”

  She huffed. “You’re avoiding the issue. Wearing trousers is dressing like a man. And trousers show off your shape. According to that chapter in Titus, women are supposed to be discreet and chaste and not . . . not. . . .” She struggled to find the right word. I waited, irked. “Not seductive.”

  My irritation suffered a keen and blood-boiling spike. “Seductive? What’s seductive about wearing a ratty old pair of blue jeans while you’re sitting on a fence watching a rodeo? I should think having your skirts blow up around your neck would be more seductive than that, Myrtle Howell!”

  “You’re being deliberately obtuse, Annabelle. You know what I mean.”

  This conversation was really beginning to aggravate me. “Darn it, Myrtle, you’ve always worn trousers at the rodeo. We both have. Wearing a skirt to a rodeo is stupid unless you’re old and can’t climb fences.”

  She lifted her chin. “Nevertheless, I believe Reverend Strickland is right. And his sister never wears anything but modest, feminine clothing. She’s a shining example of what a woman ought to dress like.”

  “I just bet she is.” How else could she make all the men in her brother’s congregation drool over her? I didn’t say that last part out loud, since it sounded spiteful—probably because it was.

  “Well, I’m going to wear a skirt and shirtwaist,” Myrtle said firmly, her chin tilting obstinately upward. “It’s modest and . . . and feminine and polite.”

  “What’s so polite about wearing a skirt and a blouse?”

  “It shows a proper respect,” Myrtle said. If her chin tilted any higher, she’d be staring at the ceiling.

  “Towards whom, exactly? The cowboys who will be rolling in the dirt when they fall off their horses and bulls? Or maybe it’s the horses you want to respect? I know! You want to impress the bulls!”

  “Annabelle Blue, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Myrtle, as annoyed as I’d ever seen her (Myrtle being a very even-tempered girl, unlike yours truly, who can be a trifle touchy at times). “It wouldn’t do you any harm to go to one of Reverend Strickland’s meetings, you know. Listening to the word of God might put a civil tongue in your head.”

  “Oh, pooh. I don’t believe God cares what kinds of clothes young women wear to rodeos and barbecues,” I said back at her. “In fact, anybody who’d turn water into wine so that the wedding guests could keep on slurping it up doesn’t sound anywhere near as stuffy as your precious reverend and his silly sister.”

  “That’s blasphemous, Annabelle Blue!”

  “No, it’s not. It’s the truth. You can read about it yourself in John, Chapter Two!” I was really proud that I’d remembered which chapter this bit of biographical (and miraculous) information came from. My brain isn’t always that quick.

  The herd had passed the store by that time, although there was still a pall of dust hovering in the air outdoors. Therefore, I didn’t open the windows or the door before I stamped back to the counter and ducked under it. I rose on the other side just in time to see the front door open and Phil Gunderson stroll in. I was about to greet him with enthusiasm when I saw him step aside and hold the door open for someone else to enter.

  When I saw who the someone else was, I felt as if God had decided to punish me for my ugly words to Myrtle and for using His word to establish my own petty argument. Esther Strickland, looking as delicate and waiflike and beautiful as Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella and the Princess with the stupid Pea all rolled into one divine human package, wafted into the store. She smiled at Phil as if he held the key to all her happiness. I wanted to drown her. Unfortunately, I lived on a desert.

  For all the tea in China, I wouldn’t allow Phil to know I was jealous of the woman. Rather, I smiled brightly at the couple—the couple, for Pete’s sake! I could hardly stand it—and spoke in a friendly manner.
“Hello, Miss Strickland. Hey, Phil. Hope you guys didn’t get all dusty out there.” I noticed that Phil was carrying the princess’s sweater. Nuts. He never carried my sweaters. Not that I wanted or needed him to, since I was an able-bodied, independent young woman.

  “We watched the herd go by from Mrs. Pruitt’s store,” said Phil, taking Esther’s arm and guiding her as if she might fall down or bump into something if he didn’t, her being so fragile and feminine and all. To give Phil credit, she did walk as if she existed in some sort of unearthly haze. Cynical creature that I am, I wondered how she did that. I was pretty sure I knew why she did it.

  “Is Reverend Strickland with you?” Myrtle’s voice sounded rather wistful, as if she were hoping the answer would be in the affirmative.

  “No, he’s working on tonight’s sermon, Miss Howell.” Esther Strickland gave Myrtle a sickly-sweet smile. Oh, very well. It wasn’t sickly-sweet. It was just a lovely smile, and I had the dreadful suspicion that Miss Strickland was a genuinely nice person, which meant that Phil’s interest in her was probably justified, confound it. “But thank you for asking. I’ll be certain to tell him you asked after him. We’ve found the citizens of Rosedale to be truly filled with the spirit of the Lord, Miss Howell. You’re all so kind to us traveling servants of God.”

  I suppressed my incredulous snort.

  “I’m sure the sermon will be wonderful,” murmured Myrtle. “I’m looking forward to going to the meeting tonight.” She added fervently, “Mr. Strickland preaches the most wonderful sermons!”