Sweetwater Springs Scrooge: A Montana Sky Holiday Short Story (The Montana Sky Series) Read Free

frozen mud of the street changed to rough-hewn blocks of the same quartz as the hotel. The whole road was paved all the way to the train station. Must have cost a pretty penny. He didn’t see any need for wasting money laying fancy stone over dirt.
    Shaking his head at the changes that had come to Sweetwater Springs, Elias approached the red brick mercantile. He opened the door and stepped into the warmth, inhaling the scent of evergreen from the swags of pine boughs and holly hanging from the counter and window displays and something that smelled of cinnamon. He headed toward the round black stove, nodding at a young German woman with a pale blond braid wrapped around her head, who passed him on her way out. He remembered her as a girl, playing with Marian’s daughter.
    One by one, he placed the apples in the large basket in the corner by the door, where the Cobbs expected people to set their barter items.
    He selected from the laden shelves with a lavish hand, tucking items in the bag—first staples, and then the coveted jam. Part of him marveled at what had come over him, buying more in one shopping expedition than he had in a whole year put together. But the other part of him couldn’t seem to care.
    His arms full, Elias carried his plunder to the counter of the mercantile. Today he’d chosen with reckless abandon—huckleberry, saskatoon, boysenberry, and chokeberry—two of each. The smell of fresh-baked cinnamon cookies on the rack of shelves near the front counter also tempted him. I’ll take half a dozen. His gaze slid to the pies next to the cookies, but his habits of thrift finally caught up with him. Jam will last longer. Resolutely, he turned his head away.
    Plump Mrs. Cobb, wearing a gray wool dress, stood behind the counter waiting on a boy in front of her. She raised an eyebrow in askance at Elias’s full arms.
    He stared back at the shopkeeper, his face impassive. In thirty-five years, he hadn’t allowed Hortense Cobb to get his goat, and he wasn’t about to start today.
    With a harrumph, she turned her attention back to the boy who was carefully counting out coins on the counter next to a vase he apparently wanted to purchase.
    That looks like the one I gave Marian. His attention caught, Elias edged closer. Yep, similar fluted shape, although this one had pink roses in addition to the purple violets dotting the sides.
    He looked away, not wanting to be reminded of the old memory—of how for weeks he’d planned to ask Marian to marry him, plotting and discarding various ways and means. But in the glow of impulsively buying her the vase, seeing the sparkle in her blue eyes, how her happy smile had lit up her face, he’d blurted out a proposal right then and there in the dirt street in front of this same mercantile.
    When she accepted, he’d picked her up and twirled her around, scandalizing the busybodies who watched. But, lost in their bliss, neither had cared.
    Her mother did. In fact, Elias suspected Martha Hutchinson of thrusting a stick in the spoke of his courtship wheel every time she had a chance.
    He shook his head. The last weeks of lying sick in bed had given him time to reflect on the past. Truth be told, I had only myself to blame.
    The boy glanced over at Elias before bending back to his task, sliding a copper penny across the surface to join the pile in front of the shopkeeper. He had a heart-shaped face with curly black hair, pale skin, a snub nose, and translucent blue eyes.
    Seeing the child—the spittin’ image of Marian—made Elias’s stomach tighten. Surely, the boy must be related.
    Mrs. Cobb’s eyebrows pulled together. She sent the boy a disapproving glance from her close-set brown eyes. “Stop dawdling, Noah Turner.”
    Turner. Hadn’t Marian’s daughter married a man named Turner? Then they’d moved to Crenshaw.
    “I don’t have all day.” Mrs. Cobb prodded sharply.
    Neither did Elias, but for once he wasn’t impatient to finish shopping and retreat home.