by Janet Dailey
“He’s bound to know all this is coming from us,” Ty pointed out. “What if he won’t accept it?”
“He’ll accept it. He’s an O’Rourke, so he’ll consider it his due.”
The last of the cows carrying the Shamrock brand was separated from the herd and driven into a smaller holding pen. Jessy swung her sock-legged sorrel away from the gate as one of the ground men clanged it shut behind the animal. She pulled off her hat and wiped the sweat from her brow on a sleeve, then pushed the hat back onto her head. The sorrel gelding blew out a rolling snort, clearing the pen dust from its nostrils, and pricked its ears at the main body of the north herd being urged out the gate to scatter and graze. A confused calf darted the wrong way, and Jessy waved her coiled rope at him to chase him back with the herd.
After following the cattle and the pushing riders outside of the pen, she reined her mount around to the fence where two men sat on the top rail and stepped down. Reaching under the stirrup, she loosened the cinch to give her horse a breather.
“You’ve got ’em all, Arch,” she informed her camp foreman in a terse fashion, then bobbed the rolled brim of her dusty hat in the direction of the older man, weathered and cracked with age. “H’lo, Nate.”
“Jessy.” He returned her nod of greeting. Nate Moore was the bachelor sage of the ranch. His bones were too stiff and brittle to tolerate the abuse of a saddle anymore, but his eyes hadn’t failed him. And his eye for cattle made him the undisputed authority on livestock breeding on the Triple C Ranch. Since he couldn’t ride the range anymore except in a pickup, he was always on hand whenever there was a gather on any part of the ranch to take a close-up look at the breeding stock.
“We’ll hold ’em here overnight and drive ’em onto Shamrock grass in the morning,” Arch Goodman decreed and pushed off the fence rail to hop to the ground, heading off to advise the other riders of his plans.
Nate stayed on his perch. “O’Rourke’s gettin’ back a better herd than he left.” He took cigarette papers and a tobacco pouch from his vest pocket. Most of the old-timers still rolled their own smokes, but it was a trial for Nate, whose finger joints were enlarged and stiff.
“That’s true enough.” Jessy observed his awkward attempt to shake tobacco into the paper trough. “I’ll do that for you.”
He passed her the makings and watched her deftly shake the right amount of tobacco out. “Guess young Ty is at O’Rourke’s helpin’ him salvage something out of those tumbledown buildings on the place.”
“I heard that.” She caught the tobacco string between her teeth and pulled the pouch shut.
“That engagement of his sure didn’t last long. It’s off, ya know.”
“Heard that, too.” She rolled the paper around the tobacco and ran the long edge of the paper across her tongue to lick it shut.
“Jilted him, I understand,” Nate observed. Jessy passed him up the handmade cigarette and he raked a match head along the underside of his thigh to light it. “Can’t say I think much of a woman who’d give her word, then call it back.”
“She probably had her reasons.” She still felt raw inside at the way she’d been used by Ty, knowingly or not. And, in all honesty, Jessy couldn’t say she was sorry at the way he’d been treated by his ladylove. There was a certain sweet revenge in it.
“Sidin’ with her, are ya?” Nate observed while he cupped the flame to the cigarette and puffed it to life.
“Just sticking up for my own kind.” She shrugged a shoulder.
“There are kinds—an’ then, there are kinds.” He stared off a ways, contemplating the vastness of the sky. “Most ranchers het all het up about bavin’ the best breedin’ bull an’ spend whatever it takes to get top quality . . . then put him to servicin’ inferior cows. Now, if you want a good calf”—Nate pulled his gaze back to look at her with equal thoughtfulness —“ya gotta have a good momma. A lotta folks that claim to be experts don’t realize a calf gets a lot more from his momma than from the bull that covers her. A rancher’s money is better spent on a good cow than a bull. It’s the female what counts, an’ don’t let anybody tell you differently.”
“I’ll remember that.” It seemed odd to hear such advice when she’d been reared in such a male-dominated society, and especially coming from Nate Moore, a bachelor all his life. He should have been entrenched in the old views toward women.
“Heard ya got put on full time,” Nate remarked.
“Yeah. ’Course, Dad didn’t think it would look right if I worked under him, so he farmed me off to Arch.” There had been hesitation before she was given the position of a regular hand, but no one could fault her ability, and everyone had pretty well gotten used to having her working on the range with them.
But Jessy also knew she was on trial. If being a woman caused any problems with quarreling among men too long away from the company of a female, she knew she’d get stuck in some tamer job at the barns or commissary. She had scoffed when her father hinted she had the kind of looks men might fight over, until he had explained that a face gets prettier when a man’s desperate. And she was bitterly reminded that a man could be so desperate as to imagine she was someone else.
“It looks like they’re getting ready to load up the horses.” Jessy noticed the other riders congregating around the stock trailer and picked up the reins to her horse. “See ya around, Nate.”
As she led the sorrel away, Nate gingerly maneuvered his stiff bones off the fence rail. He took a last drag on the cigarette, studied it, then glanced after the tall girl. “She rolls a damned fine smoke,” he murmured to no one in particular.
III
Loving is something like dreaming
When it comes to the woman you wed,
So why does your mind keep turning
To one who’s Calder born—and
Calder bred.
12
This is the most frustrating damned thing” Chase muttered under his breath, and the saddle leather creaked as he momentarily put weight on the stirrups to shift his position in the seat.
“What’s wrong?” Maggie’s attention strayed from the seeming chaos of the branding area to her husband. She had seen no cause for the impatience that ridged his jaw and hardened his eyes. He flashed her a look of ill-concealed disgust.
“When I was his age, I was bossing a crew. Ty is still taking orders.” The roughness in his voice was an attempt to control a smoldering anger. “He’ll be thirty before he gets any seasoning and experience at handling men.”
With a mother’s unerring eye, Maggie picked out her son among the riders roping calves and dragging them to the branding crews. His loop was running as straight and true as any man’s out there. Like the others, Ty worked without letup, never slacking off. Everyone was feeling the pressure of the gray, overcast sky, looming so darkly over the afternoon with its threat of cold rain-—or worse, snow.
“You talk as though Ty never thinks for himself,” she reproved. “Have you forgotten it was his idea to alternate steel fenceposts with wooden ones when you were running new fence lines last summer to replace the old ones?”
“I haven’t forgotten.” His hardness eased slightly in remembrance. “But it can’t be claimed as an original idea. It’s been used by a few ranchers to keep their fence lines intact in areas where prairie fires are a danger.”
In the event of a fire, wooden posts would burn, collapsing the fence and potentially allowing livestock to scatter. Using all steel posts prevented that, but it was also considerably more expensive. A combination of wood and steel, however, was a feasible alternative.
“But Ty did make the suggestion and ran all the cost projections beforehand,” Maggie reminded him.
“Maggie, I’m not criticizing the work he’s done or the way he’s done it,” Chase replied with a show of patience. “But I do know how much catching up he has to do, and that bothers me.”
Although Chase had not made the remark with the thought of the four years Ty had spent away from the
ranch at college, Maggie was sensitive to that issue and believed he was referring to that lost time. Ty had been back at the ranch for two full years, but Chase still wasn’t satisfied. She went quiet on him, letting the bawl of the cattle and the shouts of the branding teams take over.
“Cat is loving this, isn’t she?” There was a proud warmth in Chase’s voice that she seldom heard in connection with Ty. While Ty seldom did anything right in his eyes, his daughter could do no wrong. Maggie didn’t think it was fair, the amount of favoritism he showed their daughter. “It looks like riding herd got too tame for her. She’s chasing down the calves with the ground crew now.”
“I think she’s more of a hindrance than a help,” she retorted.
“She’s having fun.” And that justified it for him. “If she really starts to get in the way, the boys will boot her out.”
Even though that was true, Maggie also knew the cowboys spoiled her as much as Chase did. It was amazing how one girl could wrap so many grown men around her finger, considering that she had only recently celebrated her ninth birthday.
It was difficult to keep Cathleen in sight now that she had dismounted from her flashy black-and-white paint horse. It was tied to the picket line, the hand-tooled black leather saddle and matching bridle adorned with silver conchos still on the small-built horse in case Cathleen changed her mind. She always had to be in the thick of things.
At nine, Cathleen was just as beautiful as she’d been at any other age. Even when she was playing tomgirl, as now, she always seemed more girl than torn. Maggie suspected it was the reason she appealed so strongly to the men. She was the ideal, growing from a gorgeous child into a lovely young girl.
“Sit on his neck and hold him down, Cat!” Binky Ford instructed with a wide grin as he straddled the calf he’d flanked to the ground.
Laughing, Cat tried to sit sideways on the calf’s neck, but it was a hefty animal. Its struggles unbalanced her and she slid to the ground with a plop. Not that it mattered. It was all a game anyway. Her assistance wasn’t required to keep the calf down. The boys were just including her so she could be part of the action. And Cat knew how to play it to get their attention. The cowboys liked it when she mixed right in and got dirty—and they laughed when she wrinkled her nose at the stench of burning hide and hair, or when she flinched at the dehorning.
The heifer calf was branded, tagged, vaccinated, and released to go tearing back to the herd in search of its momma. Cat dusted off her stiff new jeans and headed toward the next melee of men converging on a roped calf. As she trotted to them, she recognized the whip-slim figure with a chunk of dusty tan hair hanging down the middle of her back.
“Hi, Jessy.” She stopped beside her and crouched down. “Can I watch how you castrate that calf?”
A chortle of surprise came from one of the crew working on the downed animal. “I swear you got the curiosity of a cat.”
“Why?” she asked in all innocence, but the man reddened slightly and didn’t answer.
Jessy bent her head to hide a smile and calmly passed a can of antiseptic to the girl. “You can squirt some of this on when I’m finished.”
It amused her that these husky men were uneasy over the prospect of the young girl watching a calf getting castrated. But Jessy had been younger than Cathleen when she got her first close-hand look at how ii was done. Besides, the girl was nine years old, so she knew what was done. The idea of it wasn’t new to her.
“Does it hurt a lot?” Cat asked, pulling her face together in anticipation of pain. There was a smear of dust on her cheek, which gave her a gaminlike charm.
“The trick is to do it so quick that by the time the calf feels the pain, it’s all over,” Jessy explained and cupped the scrotum in her hand to make the incision with her knife.
There was a hissing intake of breath from Cat at the first show of blood. Operating with the deftness of long practice, Jessy removed the male reproductive glands and nodded to the girl to apply the antiseptic. She started to rock back onto her feet away from the calf to toss the testes into the fire.
“Can I see them?” Cat asked, and Jessy heard one of the men muttering a protest at the child being subjected to such indelicacies. She wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Men didn’t mind females knowing such things, but they didn’t want to be around when they found out about them.
“Sure you can,” she replied and noticed, out of the corner of her eye, how quickly the men became absorbed in their work.
Another team nearby had just removed the rope from the neck of their calf. Ty began coiling it up as he turned his horse back to the herd to catch up another. The striped-nosed gelding under him was fresh and eager to work. It sidestepped impatiently at the checking bit in its mouth, chomping on it noisily. The gelding’s angling course brought Ty close to the second crew. He noticed his little sister among them and wouldn’t have thought twice about it except that she was peering very intently at something Jessy was holding. He caught a glimpse of the bloodied organs and seethed with a kind of outrage.
“Cat!” He barked her name, and his sister jumped with an almost guilty start. “Get back on your horse!” She eyed him with surprise, taken aback and made wary by the sharp tone of command in his voice. It seemed wise not to question his authority over her at this particular minute, so she did as she was told. Still ignoring Jessy, Ty swung his glaring look at the other men. “How come you’re letting her castrate the calves? That’s no job for a girl.”
“What’s the matter, Ty?” Jessy asked in challenge. “Are you worried my knife might slip and end up cutting a two-legged critter? Well, don’t. I’ve cut more calves than you’ve got whiskers.”
He threw her an angry look, then ordered, “Jobe, put her on the iron.”
Jobe Garvey hesitated. “She’s clean and quick with a knife.”
His lips came together in a tight line. Jobe was head of the ground team, and it wasn’t Ty’s place to be changing assignments. He could only pull rank on the basis of being a Calder, and he wouldn’t do that. There was no choice but to leave the matter to Jobe’s judgment.
“I guess if she draws a man’s pay, she can do a man’s work,” Ty declared roughly.
The calf was up and gone, and Jessy had discarded the testes and was on her feet, standing beside his constantly shifting horse. At his statement, the others moved off, considering the matter closed, but Jessy remained. There was an angry blaze in her hazel eyes.
“Which is it that bothers you most, Ty?” she demanded in a low voice that couldn’t be heard by anyone else. “That I’m doing a man’s work, getting a man’s pay, or doing the job better than you?”
“Maybe I resent the way you keep showing off how good you are,” he snapped.
“Dammit, I am good! And I’m not going to hide or pretend I’m not good just to please some man!”
“I suppose you’re like some of those bra burners that want to be treated as equals.” There was a derisive curl in his voice.
“If that means equal respect, yes!” she shot back.
“All right.” Ty was hot, breathing deep and rough. Her accusations had stung him, hitting a little too close to the truth. He seemed to instinctively know just how to get even. “For a girl, you make a damned good man.”
He saw her stiffen as he reined his horse to one side and booted it forward. Jessy glared after him, hurt by his insult. She had taunted him with her role in a man’s world to remind him she was a woman. This summer she’d turned nineteen. She had all the needs, desires, and longings of a woman. And he was too blind to see it.
A drop of rain fell on her cheek and splattered; then another came. Jessy lifted her eyes to the Broken Buttes, but their jagged outline was shrouded in a gray mist. The rain was on its way.
“Break out the slickers!” someone shouted.
Chase and Maggie sat astride their horses on a rise of the grassy plains to observe the branding process. He nodded an order to Maggie. “Better get Cathleen and head for the
cook tent. There’s no need in you two getting wet.” He reached behind him to untie the yellow slicker from his saddle.
In the distance, there was a low hum that became steadily louder. Maggie had turned her horse to ride around the herd and take shelter at the mess tent before the scattered raindrops became a downpour, but the sound became a low roar. Chase looked up almost at the same moment she did.
A twin-engine aircraft came out of the south, flying just below the low clouds. It wagged its wings as it thundered by them on the left.
“That’s Dyson’s plane.” Chase recognized it.
“Were you expecting him?”
“No.” He watched the plane dip a wing toward the ground and make a swinging turn, leveling out in the direction of The Homestead.
“He’s awfully low.” The plane seemed to skim above the tops of the rolling hills.
“He’s probably flying over the gas wells,” Chase guessed. “It looks like we’d better head home and meet our company.”
The plane raced ahead of the rain, so close to the ground that all its undulations were apparent, belying its flat look. From the window, the land below seemed to slide by slowly for inspection.
“Look. There’s a herd of cattle . . . and some riders.” Tara pressed closer to the window, trying to see more clearly. She wondered if Ty was down there among them.
“It looks like they’re in the middle of spring branding,” E. J. Dyson observed. Their view of the scene was broken as the pilot made a slow wigwag of the plane’s wings. When they leveled out again, Tara had lost sight of the gathering of animals, but she continued to look out the window.