Neither of them said anything for a while.
She curled up in his arms and managed not to cry. She would have hated herself for that. Caleb would not have held it against her, would not have seen anything female or weak about it—he was not that kind of man.
But she knew she had to be strong in the fight with Victoria Hammond that lay ahead.
They sat nestled before the stone fireplace as if it were warm and not just a cold well-arranged pile of stones, and finally she rose and held out her hand and led him to her bedroom.
They had become very intimate during the blizzard, and what followed had become an event if not regular, not infrequent, either.
Perhaps half an hour later, in her metal-post double bedstead, they lay under a cool sheet together with a light blanket at their middle, and he said, “Even with all the land that woman has grabbed up, her property pales next to yours. She covets the Bar-O—she wants it for herself, to make the Circle G the biggest cattle outfit in the Territory. She said so.”
“She can go jump.”
“You can make her jump, Willa. She has Sugar Creek, but you have all this range. Squeeze her dry.”
“She can make me the dry one.”
“I say you still have the advantage. You want some water rights—temporary at that, because the Purgatory won’t always be fouled. She wants . . . everything.”
The mistress of the Bar-O leaned on an elbow. The sheet fell to her waist and her pert breasts were exposed and she didn’t care a whit. She was comfortable with this man, and she wasn’t some fool female who had to undress in the dark with her mate.
And that’s what he was. It wasn’t official yet, but that’s what he was. Her mate.
He was propped on an elbow, too. He grinned at her. “Listen, darling child. You’ll have money coming in from the railroad, for the right-of-way you’re granting—now that spring’s here, they’ll be putting track down soon.”
“They will,” she said, nodding. “That at least is a blessing.”
“And I’m gonna be well fixed, you know I am. I’ll co-own the train station with Raymond Parker, thanks to the land your papa left me. Trinidad will boom before long, and I’m the county sheriff and the acting marshal now. How about that?”
She curled her fingers in the hair on his chest. “I guess I can put up with having a rich husband.”
“Good. Because as tax collector, I get a nice cut, plus my share of rewards for outlaws too dumb to know what it means to face Caleb York down. They’re providing use of a house, you know.”
She smiled a little, amused by how talkative the normally taciturn Caleb York could be in her bedroom. “You don’t need a house,” she told him. “I have a house.”
“Well, we can have two houses, or maybe we’ll sell yours and—”
The smile went away. “If I sell out to that witch, why would I have my house?”
He shrugged. “She said you could keep it. Could keep enough land to farm a little, as well. She just wants the range, and what’s left of your cattle.”
“Oh, is that all she wants?”
“I can only tell you what she told me. But if you have this place, it’s not so far out of town that I couldn’t put down stakes here. Ride back and forth.”
Her brow furrowed. “Caleb . . . if . . . when . . . we marry . . . you intend to stay a lawman?”
“I do. Money will roll in from the train station and I’ll invest in businesses in town. A man can’t be a gunfighter forever.”
“But as long as you wear a badge . . . two badges . . . young fools like William Hammond will face you down. And some day one will be quicker than you or a better shot or just . . . luckier than you.”
His smile said he didn’t take the threat of that seriously. “Sweetheart, the West is changing. Blink and a new century will be at our feet.”
She was shaking her head. “Don’t you see, Caleb? You can live here with me. Into the next century. We can run this ranch as a business. A smaller herd, with fenced-in grazing . . . some farming. No cowboying for you. No fixing fences or riding herd or roping runaways.”
“That’s not the future your father imagined for the Bar-O.”
“No, but he never suffered a winter the likes of what we did. And what I’m talking about is real. It’s practical. And it’s not dangerous. No drunken boys with six-shooters to deal with, or brothers of men who you justly sent to hell. Just me and you and . . . a family.”
He didn’t respond at once. He was digesting it.
“I do want a family with you,” he said finally. “But I’m not a rancher. I’m not a farmer.” His gaze intensified. “Do you know where I grew up?”
He had never told her.
“No,” she said.
“Ohio. My father was a farmer. He struggled, he near broke his back toiling, and he never got anywhere. I worked in his fields and I hated it. I hated it. Long, hard, punishing days for nothing. When I had the chance to enlist, just a boy really, I joined the Union Army and I killed Confederates. Then they sent me west and I killed the Red Indian in my blue uniform. I’m not sure anybody I killed deserved it, grayback or redskin, but I learned how, all right. To kill. To use guns.”
“Caleb . . .”
He was out of the bed and getting into his clothes, now.
“I got a job with Wells Fargo and I fell into man hunting. I was still a killer, but I became a detective, too, which is a better trade than soldier. I didn’t mind tracking down Southern boys when they’d robbed or killed, or Indians when they’d done bad things also. Didn’t mind taking their lives if they tried to take mine. It made what I did not so . . . horrible.”
He was pulling on his boots. She had never heard him say so much all at once.
“So that’s who I am, darling girl. I am a man who would rather kill than farm. Who would much rather eat beef than raise it.”
She was still naked and he was fully dressed when he leaned in and said, not without humor, “This is what we call in my trade a Mexican standoff.”
Then he was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Shortly after Caleb York left the library at the Circle G, Victoria Hammond—her features set in a scowl that challenged their loveliness—called for Byers.
“Yes, ma’am?” he said from the doorway. The stout little bookkeeper was trained to know that half of the time his mistress wanted an errand and the other half desired his presence at her desk for business. Only in the latter case would he enter the chamber.
This was an errand.
She asked, “Is Mr. Colman with the contingent at the creek?”
“Yes, Mrs. Hammond. He and half a dozen armed men are positioned there. They’ve set up camp.”
That was less than a mile away.
“Send for him,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her black lace–gloved hands were spread apart, clenched very tight, as if she were a child about to beat her fists on the desktop in a tantrum. But tantrums were not something Victoria Hammond allowed herself. Still, it had taken all of her self-control to withhold the depth of her feelings, to quell the extent of her hatred, while the Trinidad sheriff who had slaughtered her boy was in her presence.
William had been flawed, as were all human beings. But he was her son. The sheriff should have known that the progeny of Victoria Hammond, who was already an important landowner in his county, should have been handled with care. With courtesy. With forbearance. For William to lose his life over some slatternly Mexican wench was a travesty of justice.
Victoria Hammond’s definition of justice, as with so many in the Southwest after the war between North and South, was part of a personal code derived from family and business concerns, and had little to do with anything to be found in law books.
She had grown up in a bordello—her mother, Irene McCalley, was among the first madams in San Francisco—with dozens of soiled doves as her surrogate sisters. Her father was Jack Daley, her mother’s common-law husband, who ran
a Barbary Coast gambling hall. Her mother’s place had been a plush parlor house, her father’s a wide-open saloon, and both catered to clientele that included judges, senators, and a governor or two. By the time she was eight, her parents had moved to Nob Hill and she was enrolled in various all-girl schools locally, all Catholic of course, instilling in her a disdain for religion that had only grown in time.
Not yet twenty, she was courted by Andrew Hammond, a Wyoming cattleman who had started out her father’s valued customer, then became his best friend, and finally business partner. But after the Frisco vigilantes strung up her father and drove her mother to suicide, with the collective fortune of her parents swallowed up by a corrupt local government, Victoria was swept to safety by Andrew Hammond. The older man’s ranch near Cheyenne became her sanctuary, or at least seemed so until her drunken savior ravaged her one storm-swept night.
Sober, in the sunshine, Andrew had apologized, and within a year they had wed, she sixteen, he forty-six. She had come to admire his strength and ruthlessness, and continued success in a hard business. Living well made up for her husband’s boorishness, when drink took over, and she had a grudging affection for the sober version of him in the early years. Three boys came of their alternately tender and violent marital bed.
Should she have believed the disgruntled, fired ranch ramrod who between the sheets shared secrets perhaps better kept? That Andrew had swindled and stolen far more money from her late father than had San Francisco’s venal city hall? That her boys’ father had sold her own father out to the vigilantes and handed him over to them for their necktie party? And that her mother’s suicide had been less about the loss of a husband and their fortune, and more about being rejected after years as Hammond’s secret lover?
Skepticism would have been the better part of valor, but she knew the truth the ramrod’s words suggested. She stayed with Andrew, never a mention of any of this passing between them, and she went on sharing his bed, in both his sober and inebriated states. She did this for many years, until on another stormy night—one that recalled the nightmare of her deflowering—she’d had enough of his drunken debauchery.
She had sat naked by his bedside with a Colt .45 in hand, waiting for him to stir, waiting for him to wake, and when he did, she fired a bullet into his belly. She did this knowing full well the placement of her gunshot would mean he’d take a good while to die.
When her oldest boy, Hugh, sixteen, ran into the room and saw what she had done, and stood open-mouthed while his father bubbled blood, the youth put an arm around his mother’s shoulder.
“We’ll make up a story,” he said.
His father had often beaten the spunky, wiseacre boy, for cause (sober), and for sport (drunk).
Hugh said, “We’ll say a thief broke in.”
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“Someone with a grudge.”
“Yes! But there are so many. . . .”
“This will be a stranger. One we heard shout,‘At last my indignities are avenged!’ ”
Having witnessed this exchange, eyes wide, mouth filled with frothing red, Andrew Hammond died seconds later, his hands clasped over his wound and blood oozing between his fingers. But the oozing soon stopped, as dead men do not bleed.
Mother and son worked up a story, and created the impression of a break-in, and of course a description of no real person, and spread some money behind the scenes. With the ranch now hers, rumors swirled. She built the spread up over the next few years, sold out, and moved to Colorado, near the New Mexico Territory, toward new opportunities, and away from the talk.
The hard winter of the Big Die-Up had inspired this southward move, where opportunities for investing in cattle land were one benefit of the otherwise disastrous blizzards.
A knock at the library door interrupted her reverie.
“Yes?”
Byers stuck his head in. “Mr. Colman is waiting on the west veranda, ma’am.”
“Good. Tell him I’ll be a few minutes. Have Conchita bring him a coffee with whiskey. Remind her he likes more of the latter than the former.”
Victoria went to her bedroom and got out of her mourning gown with its mantilla and slipped into black crepe, not for grieving, rather a dress with gaucho-style pantaloons and a scooped bodice, its jacket decorated with white filigree trim. She added a silver necklace, then allowed two plump tendrils of her black curls to fall to her shoulders. She did this only in certain situations, as hair as long as hers worn down was the way of saloon wantons. So was make-up, but she paused at her mirror to apply just enough for her purposes.
Black leather boots were the last touch, fit for riding.
On the veranda, at a wicker table in a wicker chair, her ramrod, Clay Colman, sat sipping his coffee and looking out at the stand of tall firs edging the shallow backyard, its grass well-tended in the modern manner. Hearing her footfall, he stood quickly and turned to her, hat in hand.
He was a handsome devil of perhaps thirty-five, blond, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, sharp-featured, in a brown leather vest over a brown-and-green plaid shirt, his pants canvas, his Boss of the Plains hat dark brown and sporting a rattlesnake band.
The hatband was a vestige, a symbol, of his having ridden with the criminal gang in Arizona known as the Cowboys. This was not a drawback—as a long experienced rustler, her ramrod knew his way around cattle. And the future of the Circle G depended on raiding below the border for fresh stock.
“You wear black well . . . Miz Hammond,” he said. His voice was slow, like melting butter. Yet there was always something at least a little salty in the way he spit his words out. Maybe that came from the cocky bastard knowing how handsome he was. Of course, she was well aware of her own beauty. With her money, that put her one up on him.
She gestured to the wicker table and he pulled a chair out for her and she sat, then he sat opposite.
“I don’t waste time in mourning,” she said. “I leave lamentation to my lessers.”
Showing her broken heart to anyone, she felt, was beneath her. If a woman wanted to be strong in the West—if she wanted to be strong anywhere—she could not so indulge herself.
“No, Miz, you go straight to revenge,” he said, and there was a wolfishness about the way half his upper lip curled as he spoke the words. “The way a man would.”
Her shrug was barely noticeable. “Revenge will come in time. William’s murder is not our major concern at the moment.”
“It’s not?”
She shook her head. “It was William’s own frailty that led to his ruin. I won’t pretend with you, Clay, that I’m not aware of that. Of my son putting himself in that position.” Her rage bubbled but she contained it. “The point is this—Caleb York disrespected me, disrespected all of us at the Circle G, by handling William’s bad judgment in so . . . final a way.”
Colman was outright sneering now, and lifting a vein-roped fist, shaking it. “That son of a bitch York.... Wearing a badge don’t make him any less a killer.”
She frowned in interest. “You have a history with our famous sheriff?”
Colman let the fist become fingers and pawed the air. “Not that he’d ever know. But he took the lives of more than one good man I rode with. Back when he was working for Wells Fargo.”
“Ah.”
The ramrod sat forward, knitting improbably dark eyebrows in the midst of all that blondness. “You know how it says on them posters, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’? I don’t know of him ever bringing a man back alive.” He grunted. “Dead was easier than watching a prisoner on the ride back and feedin’ him and sleepin’ round a campfire with some poor bastard angling to light out.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “York may not be the man he once was.”
Colman blinked. “How’s that, Miz Hammond?”
“I spoke to him today. Our famous sheriff came around with his tail tucked between his legs. Humble and sorry about what he had to do. Dripping with pity for the poor mother of his victim.”
Colman frowned as he shook his head. “Don’t sound like Caleb York. Don’t sound like him a’tall.”
“He’s older. He’s seen more. And this gives us . . .” By which she meant me. “. . . an unexpected advantage.”
“How so, Miz Hammond?”
She folded her arms, crossed her legs. “York will be more sympathetically inclined toward me and my thinking than he otherwise might have been.” She cocked her head. “Have you ever seen the Cullen girl?”
He nodded. “In town. Never spoke to her. No cause to. Pretty young thing, though. But hard to imagine she’s up to running a ranch—any ranch, let alone a spread the size of the Bar-O.”
Victoria’s eyes narrowed. “She grew up on that ranch. I have it on reliable authority that she has a good head on those slim shoulders of hers, supported by a spine inherited from her late father. And the late George Cullen is rather beloved in these parts.”
He snorted. “I heard he was just a blind old coot.”
“Cullen established Trinidad. Practically . . . invented it. He brought in shopkeepers and a banker and a doctor and more, just for the personal convenience of having a town nearby. When the way you buy supplies is to set somebody up in the supply business, well . . . you may have wound up a dead blind old coot, but you were a living, breathing man once. The kind of man who built this country.”
“Like your late husband.”
“Like my late husband,” she said, and she meant it, though she would gladly kill that monster again a hundred times over.
As for Claymore Colman, he was the third ramrod since the disgruntled ex-foreman who had, in bed, told her the truth about Andrew Hammond. She had a habit, or perhaps it was a policy, of getting close to her ramrods. Of having a man she could depend upon—not lean on—who could bring a strong hand to the cow herders, and give them someone to look up to and even fear . . . since some of them would never learn to respect a woman boss, even when she literally wore the pants.
“You play poker,” she said to him.
Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) Page 5