“Come on, Sam, I’m not trying to win her hand or anything.” Rex frowned and adjusted his roping glove. “It just annoys the hell out of me that she thinks I’m some kind of hopeless city slicker.”
The humorous creases deepened around Sam’s eyes as he jerked his Stetson in the direction of the hidden Cadillac down the trail.
“Son, you are just a city slicker. It’s been a long time since you were any kind of cowboy. I figure this is all a big waste of time, pretending to be something you’re not.”
“But I’m not doing it just for that,” Rex said, hauling himself into the saddle again. “I mean, not just to make Lindsay see me in a different light. I’m doing it for myself, too. I want to find out...what I really am,” he concluded, feeling a little awkward at the turn their conversation was taking.
Sam rode alongside, eyeing him thoughtfully. “Seems to me a man should know what he is. I reckon that’s what being a man is all about.”
“It always sounded simple when you said it back it in the old days,” Rex told his friend and mentor. “But nowadays things aren’t as cut-and-dried as they used to be, Sam. Life can get really complicated.”
Sam shook out his loop and gave it a few experimental swings. “So that’s what made you decide to waste a whole lot of my time taking team-roping lessons?”
Rex grinned. Despite the brusque tone, he knew how much the old man was enjoying their secret afternoons at the corral. But the smile faded as he considered his answer.
“I guess,” he said slowly, “it started last year during the bachelor auction. Lindsay made it so clear she had no desire to spend any time with me, even though she was supposed to have bought a weekend of my time and we used to be good friends. It made me wonder, if she feels that strongly, just what’s been happening to me these past few years.”
“Maybe the real question is what’s happened to her.” Sam urged his horse forward in a sudden burst of speed to practise swinging the loop, then reined in and came back to Rex’s side.
“To Lindsay?” Rex watched his friend, startled. “Has something happened to her?”
“Seems like it,” Sam said. “You haven’t been around enough to notice, but I see her every day. That’s a different girl from the one she used to be.”
“In what way?”
“She seems sad,” the old man said after a moment’s thought. “It’s like something’s hurting her, real deep down.”
“Since when?” Rex recalled suddenly that her cousin, Nick Petrocelli, had said much the same thing last summer at the bachelor auction.
Sam shrugged. “I’d say three, maybe four years ago. Quite some time, anyhow.”
“Did she—” Rex’s gloved hands tensed on the rope. “Do you think somebody hurt Lindsay? I mean, did she have a boyfriend who broke her heart, or something like that?”
“Not as I recall.” Sam squinted at the row of long-horned steers waiting patiently in the roping chute. “It just seemed to me one day she was different, but when I tried to find out why, she’d never talk about it. After a while I quit pestering the girl.”
“And now...”
“Nowadays she seems like her old self most of the time,” Sam said, “but she’s stayed sort of...sad. Like there’s some kind of big unhappiness at the back of her eyes.”
Rex nodded, frowning.
“Well, come on, boy,” Sam said at last. “We can’t waste the whole day gossiping. Let’s see if you can learn to lay a decent figure-eight loop in front of that steer’s heels. Now, take the rope in your right hand...”
With an effort, Rex put aside his worries about Lindsay, shook out a loop and tried to concentrate on the things Sam was telling him.
Soon he was caught up in the intricacies of team roping and his dream of riding out into the arena at the Lightning Creek Rodeo next month while Lindsay watched in stunned amazement.
* * *
THE TWO MEN finished their roping practise, turned the steers out and sat for a while on a fence rail in the sun, chatting amiably about trivial things while their horses cooled down.
Sam could see how much Rex enjoyed the drowsy summer stillness, the chatter of insects and the smell of dust and horse, the feeling of the sun on their faces. It was probably like traveling back to his boyhood, no doubt a pleasant change of scene for a city lawyer.
Finally Rex got up, coiled his ropes into the metal can and headed off down the leafy trail to the grove where he’d hidden his Cadillac, pausing to wave before he vanished into the trees.
Sam waved back, then mounted his horse and gathered up the rein of the sorrel gelding, heading in the opposite direction toward the main ranch. It was a considerable distance because Rex, in his obsession with secrecy over this project, had chosen a practise area as far removed from the ranch buildings as possible.
But it was a beautiful summer day and Sam had nothing pressing to do. He liked the placid ride, the gentle creak of saddle leather and the clopping of hooves on baked earth.
As he rode he thought about Rex and his surprising decision to become a team roper just so he could impress Lindsay Duncan.
“That poor boy’s in love and he doesn’t even know it yet,” Sam told his horse. “You’d think such a smart fellow would have a better handle on a thing like that, wouldn’t you?”
The horse’s ears twitched as he jerked his head at a passing fly, looking as if he nodded agreement.
Sam grinned. “Not that I know enough about being in love to criticize anybody,” he ruminated aloud. “Seventy years old and never had much to do with women. I’m just a crusty old bachelor, but I can still tell when a man is smitten.”
Maybe it was harder for Rex, he mused, because he and Lindsay had been such good friends all during their growing-up years. They’d had a rough-and-tumble relationship, full of adventure and fun, but that probably made it even more awkward when the time came to turn things around and start being romantic.
Sam patted the horse’s arching neck and thought wistfully about romance.
Oddly enough, it was something he missed more all the time as he grew older.
He’d had a good life, and with the procession of boys passing through Lost Springs over the years, he’d raised hundreds of “sons.” Many still kept in touch with him. But there were times nowadays, though he wouldn’t admit it to a soul, that Sam Duncan was terribly lonely.
He hungered for a kind of relationship he’d never really known, except for a few shy, awkward love affairs back in his youth.
In his early twenties, just when other men were settling down and starting families, Sam had gone off to fight in Korea. When he came back, the girls he’d known were all married and raising babies, and his brother was starting the ranch at Lost Springs and needed his help. Sam had settled in to teach horsemanship to a whole lot of troubled boys, and the years had flown by with dizzying speed.
Nowadays he didn’t regret most of his choices, but he cursed the youthful shyness that had kept him from going out and finding a lifetime partner.
It would be so nice, he thought wistfully, to have somebody who cared about him, who knew all his secrets and liked to be with him, somebody who’d sit next to him while he watched television in the evening, and travel with him to all the places he’d never seen.
Finally he forced his thoughts back to his niece, who worried him these days by apparently following in his footsteps and choosing a solitary life.
Sam frowned, thinking about Lindsay’s luminous smile, her generous warmth and absorption in the boys at the ranch, and the troubled sadness he often detected in her face.
He wondered if she felt the same about Rex as the lawyer did about her, and it was only shyness or stubbornness keeping them apart.
Probably not, he decided.
Lindsay didn’t seem the least bit interested in findin
g a husband or starting a family of her own. Whenever Sam teased her gently about the subject, she brushed him off by saying there’d be plenty of time for that kind of thing once the ranch was running smoothly and the work was caught up.
But there wasn’t plenty of time, Sam thought sadly, looking back at his own life. The years went by so fast and the work never got caught up. Before you knew it, you were old and alone.
His gloomy turn of thought was interrupted by a sudden change in his horse’s gait, a tensing of the ears and a quick jerk on the bit.
Sam followed the horse’s gaze and saw a patch of color in the brush next to the road. It was bright-red, probably some boy’s lost coat or sweater.
But then along with the color he sensed some rhythmic movement, almost as if somebody was crouching in the tall grass, rocking back and forth.
Frowning, Sam reined in, dismounted and looped the reins over a fence post, then made his way into the brush with an awkward, bowlegged gait. He parted the tall grass and found somebody huddled on a big flat rock, curled up in obvious misery.
He hesitated, looking down in confusion, unsure what to do.
The person crouched in the brush was a woman, and she was clearly in distress. At his approach she raised a panicky, ravaged face and wrapped her arms tightly around herself, shuddering and gulping.
“Are you hurt, ma’am?” Sam asked, touching her shoulder.
She jerked away from him and lowered her head, beginning to cry again.
It was, he now realized, the older woman who lived with Rob Carter and his new wife. Rob and Twyla had got together because of that bachelor auction last summer. This woman was Twyla’s mother, he recalled, dimly remembering the woman from a few social events in Lightning Creek over the past year.
He searched his memory, trying to come up with her name.
“Mrs. McCabe?” he ventured at last, hoping he had it right. “Can you tell me what’s the matter?”
She gulped and shook her head, keeping her face hidden while Sam watched her uncertainly.
Though she looked terrible at the moment, he now recalled seeing her at Rob’s wedding and thinking what an attractive woman she was. Gwen McCabe was probably in her sixties, with nicely styled white hair and pretty blue eyes.
At the wedding she’d smiled pleasantly when anybody approached but kept to herself mostly, sitting at the back of the hall with Twyla’s young son. Sam even remembered wanting to go and ask her to dance, but he’d refrained because she looked so self-contained and he was certain she’d refuse.
Now, completely at a loss, he sank onto the rock beside her and put a hand on her shoulder again, patting her the same way he soothed a nervous horse.
“Easy now,” he murmured. “There, there. It’s all right. Easy now. Just take it easy.”
He was relieved to see that her panic appeared to subside a little, and she was no longer violently rocking back and forth. But she couldn’t look at him, and Sam still had no idea what the problem was.
“There, there,” he said again, still patting her. “Easy now.”
Gwen McCabe wore jeans, a checked shirt under the red jacket and a pair of businesslike-looking sneakers. She smelled pleasantly of some kind of woodsy fragrance that Sam liked.
At last she was still, huddled next to him on the rock, though she shivered occasionally and gulped aloud like a child recovering from a sobbing fit.
“Did something scare you?” Sam asked when he thought she might be able to talk.
The woman shook her head and muttered something inaudible.
“Beg pardon?” Sam leaned forward. “I didn’t catch what you said.”
“I’m such a mess,” she whispered. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize.” Sam lifted his face to the sun. “This is a real nice place to sit, this big rock. You know,” he added in a casual, conversational tone, trying to set her at ease, “I’ve ridden down this same road probably a thousand times, and I never knew this rock was even here. How did you happen to find it?”
“I was running and I fell on top of it,” she said, her voice still so muffled that he had to strain to catch her words.
“Why were you running?” he asked.
“Because I’m crazy,” she told him in obvious despair. “Completely out of my mind.”
Sam leaned back and extended his boots, digging the spurs idly into the soft grass at the base of the rock.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve seen you around town a time or two, and last fall at Rob’s wedding, and I sure never thought of you like that. You always seemed to me like a lady who had her life together.”
“I did?” Gwen looked up at him in bleary surprise. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face still pale with strain, but again Sam was astonished by her prettiness.
“You sure did. I especially liked that dress you wore at the wedding,” he continued. “It was a real soft yellow, like sunshine. I remember thinking you looked as pretty as a buttercup.”
He paused abruptly, hot with embarrassment. Sam had been rambling just to set her at ease, but she must think he was some kind of idiot, blathering on about sunshine and buttercups.
No doubt she’d start to panic again, finding herself alone in the woods with such a fool of a man.
But she didn’t seem frightened. In fact, she turned to him with a twisted expression that he recognized as a gallant attempt at a smile.
“What a lovely thing to say,” she murmured. “Thank you, Sam.”
He relaxed a little and felt the flush of embarrassment slowly fading from his cheeks. There was a long, awkward silence while both of them stared down at the grass.
“Now,” he said at last, “do you think you can tell me what scared you?”
“It was an owl.” She shuddered again, gripping her hands between her knees. “A big gray owl. It kept flying back and forth over my head like a ghost, sweeping down closer and closer. I just...panicked.”
It seemed like a strange thing to be frightened of, especially for a woman who’d lived any length of time in the country, but there had been no doubt of her terror. Sam looked down at her thoughtfully.
“That owl probably has nestlings somewhere nearby,” he commented. “She was looking out for her babies, not trying to hurt you.”
Gwen nodded in an abrupt, jerky fashion, looking away from him toward the road.
“Were you just out for a walk?” Sam asked.
Another brief nod. “I’ve been trying...” she whispered, then swallowed hard and forced herself to continue. “I try to go for a walk every day, and make it a little farther from home each time. But today the sunshine felt so lovely, and I got...too ambitious.”
She shivered again and shifted nervously on the rock, then got to her feet. Sam watched her, wondering how it could be so difficult to go for a walk in the country. Maybe she had some kind of physical illness he didn’t know about.
“Well,” she said without looking at him, “I’d better... start heading back. Sorry to have been such a bother.”
But he could see the pallor of her cheeks, and the way her hands shook before she jammed them into her jacket pockets. The woman was in no condition to walk a mile or two down a deserted country road, Sam decided.
“Can you ride?” he asked.
She glanced up, clearly startled. “Well...yes, I can. I used to ride a lot.”
Sam jerked at thumb toward the two horses. “Then I’ll put you up on my bay. He’s a gentle old fellow, and I can ride the sorrel. We’ll have you home in no time.”
Her blue eyes widened in alarm. “But I couldn’t possibly. It’s so far out of your way.”
“No problem, this is a real nice day for a ride,” Sam said comfortably. “Come on, let’s mount up.”
She followed him, looking timid, and allowed Sam to
help boost her into the saddle. Her body when he lifted her was firm and light, and Sam’s hand tingled like fire as it brushed against hers.
“Well now,” he said with false heartiness to hide his embarrassment. “You sure do look fine up there, Mrs. McCabe.”
And in fact she did sit a horse well, he thought as he busied himself adjusting the stirrups. Her crown of silvery-white hair glistened in the sunlight, and a touch of pink even appeared in her cheeks. Sam had an urge to tell her how pretty she was, but resisted firmly, knowing he’d already made a big enough fool of himself for one day.
The poor woman would probably never speak to him again.
In fact, they didn’t exchange a word as he led her slowly down the trail, then across the meadow to Twyla and Rob’s place. But he had the sense she was actually enjoying the ride. A couple of times when he glanced back at her, Gwen met his eyes with a touch of alarm, but her body swayed easily in rhythm with the horse, and her hands on the reins seemed calmer, almost relaxed.
At the old house he helped her down from the saddle, hoping wistfully for another smile, maybe even an invitation to drop in for coffee.
But Gwen trembled and ducked her head with a return of the painful uneasiness Sam had witnessed earlier. She whispered a few embarrassed words of thanks and bolted for the house, leaving Sam watching with his two horses.
Finally, after the door closed behind her, he mounted the bay horse and turned to ride off, feeling strangely bereft.
CHAPTER FOUR
THAT SAME EVENING, wholly unaware of Rex’s secret rodeo practise or her uncle’s curious meeting with one of their neighbors, Lindsay Duncan was in her bedroom at Lost Springs Ranch, preparing for an upsetting encounter of her own.
After the television van left at noon, she’d tried to call Rex but his secretary kept saying he was out and they had no idea when to expect him back. Lindsay was on the verge of giving up when he finally returned her call late in the afternoon.
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