NINE

Hoss talked about the beauty of Nevada territory and told Nash Jeffers that a few months ago, his family had bought an additional 100 acres to add to the Ponderosa and it just happened to have a small ranch house on it. Hoss was certain that his family, his pa in particular, would love to have a young couple living on it.

Nash Jeffers said that from what Hoss had told him about Nevada, it sounded perfect.

"But, Nash," his wife said, "our money has been sent to Sacramento and the house is waiting for us. We can't just change our minds."

Adam could tell that she was panicking. Piper desperately didn't want to stay so close to him and Adam wondered why. Did she still hold feelings for him and were those feeling love or hate? Adam needed to know.

With impatience in his voice, Nash responded to his wife. "Yes, my dear, we can. We can transfer our money to…what was that city?"

Adam's deep voice answered and Piper quickly looked at him. "Virginia City." Their eyes locked and then Piper looked back to her husband.

"We can't stay in Nevada. We have to go on to California. We had decided, Nash. We would go to California."

"Why are you so afraid of staying in Nevada, Piper? Have you any special reason for not wanting to accept the Cartwright's generosity? Have you, my dear?"

"No," she said quietly. "I have no special reason and I don't mean to seem ungrateful to you, Mr. Cartwright, but…" Piper's voice died.

Nash Jeffers sat listening to his wife's voice, his hands, one on top of the other on the top of his cane. He recognized a tinge of anxiety in her voice. "I just wondered if there was a special reason, a hidden reason that you haven't told me. After all, here in this stage we've run into a former student of your father's and you haven't asked him one question about your father nor he you-as a man or as a professor. Your Aunt Audrey raised you and you spent such little time with him, I would think that you would have inundated Mr. Cartwright with questions about your father by now."

"Perhaps later," Adam said. "I would be happy to share my pleasant memories of your father with you. He was admirable in many ways."

"Did you know he had a daughter, Mr. Cartwright?" Nash asked.

"Yes, I knew."

"Did you know she was so pretty?"

"Every young girl is pretty just by the fact that they're young. Why should Professor Naismith's daughter be any different?"

Hoss was confused. It wasn't like Adam to be so vague; he was straightforward in all his dealings but here he was dancing around trying not to be pinned down with a specific answer.

"Well, I just wondered. Her aunt told me about a scandal in Boston-something about a young girl...who was it about, my dear?"

Adam stopped Nash from continuing. Piper's face revealed that she was anxious. "I think that you've upset your wife, Mr. Jeffers. I don't know where your conversation is going and it's not up to me whether you continue or not, but I won't participate in anything that upsets her so much. Perhaps all the reminders of her father and his passing are too much. "

Nash Jeffers reached out a hand to touch his wife's cheek. "I'm sorry, my dear. Of course, if the conversation upsets you, I'll go no further. You should have told me."

And Adam decided that he didn't like Jeffers. He decided that he heartily disliked Jeffers. Adam understood how a man would be bitter after losing his sight-he could no long gaze at the beauty of his wife and that, among other things, must be a source of despair. But yet, Jeffers also seemed to take some pleasure in punishing her. Adam didn't know why this should be, it just was. And Adam also knew that Jeffers was astute; he had already put together Piper and Adam in Boston and he let Adam know by his comments that he was aware of Piper's annulled marriage; the aunt would have told Jeffers, probably to explain Piper's lost virtue. Jeffers may not have recognized Adam's name right away when he heard it-if he had heard it before-but when he heard that Adam had been at Harvard, that he knew Piper's father, it wouldn't be difficult to come to the conclusion that Piper and Adam Cartwright not only had been in love, but were foolishly romantic enough to marry behind her father's back.

And so Piper unpinned her hat, placed it in her lap, leaned her head against the interior of the coach and closed her eyes as a way to escape. And Adam saw a few tears slide from under the closed lids and she reached up and wiped them away.

It had been dark for two hours when the coach finally pulled into a home station and the stage travelers staggered into the building. Dinner was a watery beef stew and as the stationmaster said, home-made biscuits although Hoss asked the stationmaster if he used sawdust instead of flour. The man just laughed and suggested that Hoss slather on more butter. There was a huge pot of coffee passed among the passengers who all sat at a long, wooden table.

Adam watched, trying not to stare, as Nash Jeffers used his hands to hold his plate and quietly asked his wife questions. She would give him the answers and Jeffers nearly finished his meal. Then Adam felt ashamed of disliking Jeffers so much. The man had not only been disfigured but blinded and needed to rely on his wife to help him. Adam had underestimated the everyday consequences of the man's injuries.

Adam had been entertaining the idea of perhaps winning Piper back, of her going away with him and taking up their love where they had left off but he knew as they sat in the glare of the lamps in the shabby room of the stationmaster's house that it would never happen; Piper would never leave a man who needed her the way that Jeffers did, even if she didn't love him and Adam was certain that she didn't love Jeffers and wondered if she ever had.

Piper, as the only female, was given the sofa in the parlor on which to sleep. It didn't matter that she was married; there was no bed for her to share with her husband and for that, Adam was relieved; he didn't like the idea of their sharing a bed together although he knew that they probably did. And he also knew that as husband and wife, Piper and Nash had relations but he didn't wish to acknowledge it in his consciousness. The station master gave Piper a pillow and a blanket which he assured her were clean. Nevertheless, Piper severely shook the blanket out and checked the pillow for lice before she would use it. Piper asked the station master to please allow her to leave the lamp on. At first he was loathe to allow it-there was the matter of the oil, but then he reconsidered and smiled at the beautiful woman and told her that, of course she could.

The stationmaster was uncomfortable as to where the blind man would sleep. Nash Jeffers said that he had no issue with sleeping on the floor with the other travelers. He wasn't going to be the one to worry about someone stepping on him so he would sleep soundly. The men laughed and the tension was broken, so blankets were issued to all the men and they lay on the floor, using their rolled-up jackets or a bent arm under their head as a pillow. And soon, the parlor was filled with snoring from the men.

Adam lay listening to the heavy, noisy breathing from the men around him and trying to ignore the stench from his traveling companions. On the stage, with the open windows, the smell of the two unwashed men who sat together on the rear seat was bearable but in the tight quarters, the smell was truly unpleasant. And his back was bothering him. He and the others lay on a practically threadbare carpet and it provided no cushioning; Adam thought that he would have preferred the cold, hard ground instead with his saddle as a pillow, albeit a hard one, but at least it would provide a little support for his neck and head.

Adam was adjusting his head on his bent arm and his jacket that he had folded as a cushion, when he heard Piper get up from the couch; she padded out of the room in her bare feet and went into the kitchen. Adam looked around at the sleeping men and then, throwing his blanket off, he followed her.

She stood drinking a glass of water and Adam was again stunned by how lovely she was. Her hair which had been piled on her head was partially down and her face was still soft from sleep.

"Piper?"

She turned quickly and saw him as he looked at her with expectation. "Don't, Adam. I have nothing to say to you and even if I did, this isn't the time." She put the glass down and wondered how she was going to get past him and back into the parlor. She would bluff-just push past him so he wouldn't see what emotional turmoil she was in but as she tried to pass him, Adam reached out and took her arm.

Piper didn't want to struggle with him and perhaps wake her husband or any of the others and she didn't really want to pull away from him and his touch. It was as if she felt the pressure of his palm and fingers on her soul and she was afraid that her knees would buckle. Piper had longed to speak to him, craved to look at him the way she was now. She had so many questions that over the ensuing years had practically driven her to madness. And the irony was that her aunt had deemed her mad after she had dragged Piper back to Virginia.

"Piper, did you ever get my letters? I wrote you constantly. I never found where you went so I sent letters to you at your aunt's house. I waited and hoped but I never heard back from you. Did you ever get them?"

"No. Did you actually think I would? I tried to write to you, tried to post letters but…they sent me away to a…'resort.' That's what it was called."

"What?' Adam stared at Piper, his heart thumping so fiercely that he could hear his pulse in his ears. "What do you mean? Your aunt told me that you had returned to a new school. I asked the housekeeper where when I went to Richmond, but she wouldn't tell me so I continued to write to you at your aunt's. I even sent letters to your father's house in the hope that maybe he or Mrs. Edwards would pass them on to you."

Piper gave a sardonic laugh and pulled her arm from Adam who gently released her. She looked up at Adam's face; to her, even with his day's growth of beard and his swollen eyes from lack of sleep, he was beautiful. But instead of the tender face he had as a young student, he looked hardened, craggy, as if he had suffered much. But then she supposed he had. His mouth was set in a certain hardness, so different from when he was so young and his lips had been gentle and broke easily into a smile-but not now.

"I tried to leave, to travel to Nevada to find your family and hopefully, you." She laughed again but not from amusement. "How foolish I was, as if your family would have accepted some silly girl who claimed to be your wife. I look back now and realize that I was…well, it doesn't matter. My aunt had me found. I didn't know that she had hired a Pinkerton man to find me and he pulled me off the train in Missouri and dragged me back where the doctor declared me hysterical. And so I was sent to a 'resort' which was really a clinic where I was kept under lock and key until I was deemed cured. I wrote letter after letter to you in Boston and begged the staff to post them and they said that they would. But it was all a lie. They were humoring me, keeping me calm and indulging me in my 'delusions,' as the doctor called them. I told him that I wasn't delusional but he said that as long as I continued to rebel, well, that showed a lack of rational thinking and I would only have to stay longer. So I gave up. I was tired and saw how useless everything was. Just useless."

Adam drew her to him and Piper didn't resist. Instead she allowed herself to rest against him, one of his arms around her waist s while his lips rested against her dark hair as his other hand caressed her. After so many years, she found the same joy being next to him, smelling his skin and hearing his warm voice as she had when she met him that first night in Boston when he came into her life.

"Piper?" They both heard Nash's voice call out. Without saying anything, Piper pulled away from Adam and left the kitchen.

Adam stayed behind and heard Piper's soft voice, obviously talking to her husband, explaining her absence. At least Nash couldn't see that he, Adam, was gone as well. He also heard murmurings from the other travelers as they were probably asking what was wrong, why Jeffers had called out and wakened them, and when Adam went back out to finish the night, all was as before but he knew he wouldn't sleep. All he could do was think of Piper and all she had been through.

The next morning as they were washing up before breakfast, Hoss asked Adam where he had been during the night. Adam just looked at him and said that he didn't know what Hoss was talking about. Adam disliked lying but if it would help Piper, he would.

"You know what I'm talkin' 'bout. Last night when Nash Jeffers woke up and was lookin' for his wife. I looked around and Nash was standing next to an empty couch and you was gone too. You know her, Adam? You know her from Boston, don't you?

Adam dried his hands on a towel that he had thrown over his shoulder. "None of your business." He threw the towel to Hoss to use and then he walked into the room off the kitchen that served as a dining room and saw that Piper and Nash were already seated, Piper doling out scrambled eggs and slices of thick bacon to her husband. So Adam sat and said good morning and then the other travelers joined them in breaking their fast.