Larkspur Read Free

it was her most startling feature. Her eyes ran a close second. They were large and blue-gray, deep-set, under well-defined brows only a shade darker than her hair.
    She leaned closer to the mirror. Faint lines of worry had appeared lately between her brows and at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her face had a pensive look. The shadows beneath her eyes told of sleepless nights. Her wide mouth, its lower lip fuller and softer than the upper one, was turned down at the corners, reflecting her less than happy mood.
    Ferd had called her a spinster. She guessed she was, but she had not thought much about it. She had been courted by several men when she was younger. None suited her brother, which had not mattered because none had suited her either. Now word was out that a man had to go first through Ferd to reach his sister, and lately not one had thought the effort worthwhile except for a couple of widowers who had been left with young children and little else. The thought of bedding with either of them made Kristin’s stomach heave.
    She had not settled as happily and as gratefully into the life of sister-servant as Andora and Ferd had believed. The girls, ages six and eight, were resentful of her authority. Andora indulged them in whatever they wanted to do, and of late they had begun to follow their mother’s example and treat their aunt as a servant in the house.
    Many times, when resentment bubbled up in Kristin, she longed to have something of her own and to see some of life other than the small confines of her brother’s house here in River Falls, Wisconsin. Cousin Gustaf had helped to feed that ambition. He had told her of life beyond this small town and had even urged her to consider taking a position as governess or housekeeper in Eau Claire or St. Paul. Until now she had not had the courage to make the break.
    Her life had taken a sudden change when the letter had come from Yarby Anderson’s solicitor, a Mr. Mark Lee, telling her that after his being missing for a year, Yarby’s remains had been found and identified. In a will dated twenty years earlier, when Kristin was four years old, he had left her all of his worldly possessions, which now consisted of ranchland called Larkspur.
    To Kristin, who had never had more than five dollars of her own to do with as she pleased, it was a miracle. She had been elated until Gustaf had explained that several thousand acres of land in Montana might not equal forty acres of good farmland in Wisconsin.
    Nevertheless it was something.
    Kristin sat down in her mother’s rocker. She would have liked to grieve for this uncle who had remembered her in his will, but she was not very successful. She had never seen him and all she knew of him was from what Gustaf remembered about him and that he had written her mother two letters after her father had died. She had searched the trunk for them, but they seemed to have disappeared. It gave Kristin a warm feeling to know that somewhere there had been a man who had cared enough about her to bequeath her some property.
    She’d had no idea the furor that would result when she showed the letter to Ferd. He railed against Uncle Yarby for being so stupid as to leave an estate to a woman, railed at the time it would take to get the estate settled and the money in the bank.
    After a week of hearing about the wrong done in her favor to the rest of the family, Kristin began to get not only stubborn but angry. She decided that if it was the last thing she did on earth, she was going to see this land that was hers now and stand at the grave of the man who had left it to her. She had every legal right to go there, and she was backed by her cousin, who insisted that he finance the trip. She accepted after promising to return the money as soon as the estate was settled.
    Kristin and Gustaf had been born on the same day on adjoining farms. They had played together as children and had gone to school together. At sixteen Gustaf had left the farm to