"Annie, you can't go trotting around here in them pants."
Annie looked down at her blue trousers and the heavy boots with the worn toe and split sole. "It's all I have, Bertha, until I can get my clothes from Mr. O'Connell's office."
She handed Annie a big, white apron from a hook on the wall. "Put this on over your clothes. It'll get you down to the office."
Annie took the apron, held it up in front of her, and scowled. "It's way too big."
"I know, but put it on, anyway. It'll have to do."
Annie left the cookhouse and holding the long apron high, started down the gentle grade to the wide road by the dock. It was nearing seven o'clock and the loggers were already in the woods, leaving the road empty. When she drew abreast of a man, probably in his mid-fifties, sweeping out the Company Store, he stopped sweeping and shoved his felt hat back on his graying brown hair. "Good morning."
"Good morning to you," Annie replied as she offered him her hand. "My name is Annie Trowbridge; I'm the new schoolteacher, here."
The man made a strange strangled sound, cleared his throat and said, "Ma'am? You-you're the new teacher?" Later she would swear that his salt and pepper beard even stood out from his ruddy cheeks. Annie nodded with a wide but defiant smile. "Yes sir. I came up from Seattle."
He stammered, "S-Seattle? When?"
"Yesterday,on the River Queen. As I said, my name is Annie Trowbridge. And your name is."
He shuffled his feet, spit in the dirt and finally said, "I'm Bud Collins, I-me and my misses run the company store, here. You gunna be opening school soon?"
"Yes, as soon as Mr. O'Connell and I get the particulars worked out. That's where I'm headed now and I'd better get down to his office. I'm sure I'll be speaking with you again. Good day, Mr. Collins."
The man lifted his hat with a finger and thumb to scratch his head. "Yeah. I guess you will. Maybe."
Was it the twisted humor of the gods that put the long apron under Annie's foot, or simply her own carelessness? Whatever it was, she made the first step up to the office porch then she was flying forward, hands outstretched, to land with a resounding thud on her hands and knees on the small porch.
"Well, I'll be damned," a deep voice above her said. "I've never had a woman fall for me that hard before." Thick boots nearly touched her nose.
Annie scurried to her feet, brushing at her clothes. Still swiping at the two black dirt marks her knees had made on the front of the apron she looked up into Jed O'Connell's laughing face. "It's this damned apron," she muttered, jerking the ties knotted at her waist. "It's too big."
As the apron fell in a pool at her feet exposing her small slim legs and rounded bottom in the britches, Jed grabbed her wrist. But when he tugged her forward her feet became helplessly tangled in the fabric of the huge apron and she cried out, grabbing at him. "Don't!" She felt herself heading to the floor a second time.
"Shit, woman?" Jed scooped her up in his arms and kicked his door open. Turning sideways to get her through the door, he saw Bud Collins standing on the small porch of the store, broom in hand, watching him with an amused look. "You're going to be the death of me, yet," he growled down at Annie as he stepped into his office and kicked the door shut behind him. The woman hadn't been in his camp twenty-four hours yet, and she was already turning his whole world upside down.
)
In the late 1800s logging was king in the Pacific Northwest. When Annie Trowbridge heard that Jed's Landing needed a teacher for the children in their family housing she was determined to have the job. The fact that Jed O'Connell would accept only a male teacher was only a minor obstacle for her to overcome. Dressed as boys, Annie and her four-year-old daughter, Holly, disembarked from a sternwheeler at Jed's Landing. If Jed O'Connell was so narrow minded to want only a male teacher.well, a male teacher he'd have. That is until the boat headed back down to Skagit City. By then it would be too late and he would have to accept her as his new teacher. In the tall evergreens and towering mountains Annie awakened to a love so powerful that it shaped her very being.
