by Jo Goodman
It was not an answer to the question she asked, but Jane did not bring it to his attention. “I wondered why you did not introduce me.”
“His business was with me.”
There was nothing rude in Morgan’s tone, but neither did it invite further comment. “You spoke for rather a long time.”
“We have not seen each other in a while.”
“It seems as if Bitter Springs is a quiet town. Is that his doing?” Jane saw Morgan press his lips together. He regarded her over the rim of his coffee cup.
“You have a lot questions, Miss Middlebourne. Is there something in particular you want to know?”
She shook her head. “Not one thing in particular,” she said. “Everything.” When he simply continued to stare at her, she added, “Why, for instance, does no one I’ve seen wear a gun? I read articles, pieces in the newspapers, which led me to believe everyone wears a gun. You don’t. I’m not certain that even the marshal was wearing one.”
“He was. But the rest have to abide the town ordinance. I checked mine at Bridger’s office when I came in yesterday. I’ll get it when I leave.”
“Everyone does that?”
“I don’t know. I do.”
“It’s unexpected.”
“That I obey the law?”
Jane shook her head. “No, I meant it’s unexpected that no one wears a gun.” She caught a glimmer of a smile change the shape of his lips. “Oh, you knew that’s what I meant. You were teasing me.”
“A little.”
“There was no opportunity to do that in our correspondence. I remember thinking I wanted to impress you with my serious nature. I was cautious. It seems it might have been the same for you.”
“I would say I was restrained.”
“Yes. Just so. Restrained.”
He was still restrained, she thought. He contemplated his coffee as if it might hold answers to questions yet unformed.
“Why are you not already married?” he asked suddenly.
The question took her by surprise. “The simplest answer is that no man has ever asked me to be his wife. Until you, that is.”
“What is the complicated answer?” he asked.
“That no man was ever allowed to ask.”
“That is complicated. Something to do with Cousin Frances?”
Staring into her own cup, Jane nodded. She said quietly, “I regret that you were able to draw that conclusion with so little difficulty. I disclosed more in my correspondence than was either prudent or proper.”
“As I recall, you wrote very little. Last night’s fish story was revealing.”
Jane touched one hand to her temple, recalling her headache the evening before. There was the source of her wayward tongue. “There is no satisfaction in judging her harshly.”
“If you say so. I could find some satisfaction in it.”
His wry tone made Jane look askance at him. She returned her hand to her lap and surprised herself by confessing, “Sometimes I hate her.”
After a moment, Morgan said, “That’s not always a bad thing.”
“Do you think so?”
“I do, but I told you I’m not a godly man. I reckon you have to make peace with the hate and every other way you feel about her.” He shrugged. “About anyone.” He took another swallow of coffee. “I guess I always knew you were running more than coming.”
“Pardon?”
“Coming here because you’re running from there. I accepted that when I posted my advertisement. A woman with opportunities where she is doesn’t look for opportunities where she isn’t.”
“I am disturbed that I understood that, Mr. Longstreet.” She watched his mouth take on that vaguely sardonic twist she found a trifle alarming for its effect on her heartbeat. “I wish I could deny it, but you are right, of course.”
“Did you discourage suitors, Miss Middlebourne?”
“Discourage them? Whyever would you think that?”
“Because if you gave a man the slightest hint that his attentions would be welcome, there is no fence that Cousin Frances could have put up that would have stopped him.”
Jane stared at him blankly. His words were slow to register. When she understood what he was saying, laughter rolled lightly at the back of her throat. “It is your humor again, isn’t it? You are teasing me.”
“You embrace some peculiar notions about yourself.”
She sobered. “What do you mean?”
Morgan shook his head slightly and released a short sigh. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s for the best.”
Before Jane could ask him to explain further, he rose and headed for the kitchen. This was done without so much as a by-your-leave. Watching him go, Jane realized he was not in the habit of excusing or explaining himself. It was not that he had no acquaintance with manners. He walked on the street side of the boardwalk when he escorted her, tipped his hat to acknowledge passersby, did not slurp or spit or slouch. She caught herself and amended this last point. Morgan Longstreet did slouch. In fact, he had not been introduced to a chair that could keep him upright or all four of its legs on the ground. Jane accepted this as pardonable since there was no evidence of poor posture when he stood, and his rolling, rhythmic stride kept him straight and tall.
It was probably good that she had defined some standards, she thought, no matter how arbitrary they were. Otherwise, she risked seeing him not as he was but as she wanted him to be. He had already done that where she was concerned; it was the only thing that accounted for his observation about men who would not be discouraged by fences. If he truly had not said it to tease her, then the comment meant he was deceiving himself into believing that she was more like Rebecca Ewing of the photograph than she was like Jane Middlebourne of the letters. He could say that he wanted the virtues of strength, but what he wanted was to walk with beauty.
Jane recalled what he’d said before he left the table. Perhaps it applied here: Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s for the best.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Morgan’s reappearance. He was not alone. He had Mrs. Sterling with him.
Without preamble, Mrs. Sterling said, “Morgan wants me to tell you straight up that if you think he has a sense of humor, you are the only one.”
Jane blinked and needed a moment to orient herself. She supposed Mrs. Sterling’s statement was in response to her own comment about Morgan teasing her. “Is it true?” she asked. “I understand he wants you to say it, but is it true?”
Mrs. Sterling pushed her spectacles up until they rested above her salt-and-pepper widow’s peak. She regarded Jane with slightly narrowed eyes. “You think he could convince me to lie for him?”
“I do, yes.”
Ida Mae’s head snapped sideways, and she looked sharply in Morgan’s direction. “Did I not say she is no one’s fool, least of all yours? Now, I did what you asked, and you can see for yourself what’s come of it.”
Morgan’s lip curled, but the tips of his ears reddened. “It was not one of your finer efforts.” He dodged Mrs. Sterling’s attempt to give his earlobe a tug and put up a hand to forestall her second attempt.
“He should have the grace to blush,” she said, turning back to Jane.
“Then he does have a sense of humor?” Jane asked.
“Oh my, yes. Not so you can tell right off, but it’s there. Wicked, too. I don’t suppose many folks know that about him, so he really should have asked someone else for an opinion.” Mrs. Sterling wiped her hands on her apron, reset her spectacles on the bridge of her nose, and looked askance at Morgan. “Anything else?”
“No, you have been extraordinarily helpful. It’s hard to know what else I could possibly ask.”
Ida Mae Sterling winked at Jane. “See? That’s his wit. Dry as four-day-old cake.” She turned smartly and headed back to the kitchen.
Shaking his head, Morgan sat. “Lesson learned.”
“Then something has been accomplished. Why did you do it?”
He sh
rugged lightly. “An attempt to remove the scales from your eyes, I suppose. I was probably right that it doesn’t matter.”
Since Jane had been thinking along similar lines, she thought she understood. “It is in our nature to see what we want to see first and come to the truth later.” She hesitated, thoughtful. “Or never come to it at all.”
Morgan did not argue her point. He checked his pocket watch. “We have almost five hours. What do you propose we do?”
“Will you take me to Morning Star?”
Jane was not surprised when he did not answer immediately.
“I suppose I could take you to see the house,” he said finally. “You’re probably most interested in that anyway.”
“I would be pleased if you would show me the house.”
“All right. I have to get the buckboard at the livery first. And my gun. You stay here, and I’ll come back for you.”
Jane agreed and stayed seated until he was gone. Then she went into the kitchen to speak to Ida Mae Sterling.
• • •
They were five miles beyond the Bitter Springs town limits when Morgan announced they were on Morning Star land. Beside him, Jane leaned slightly forward as though this posture might improve her distance vision. “You won’t see the house from here,” he told her. “We have three miles to go.” He was aware that Jane was still straining to see something.
“How do you recognize the edge of your property?” she asked.
“How do you recognize the back of your hand?”
Her smile was a quiet one. “Of course,” she said.
Morgan pointed off to his left. “See that rise in the grassland? And the slip of cottonwoods just beyond it? That’s the marker most folks use to distinguish my property from what can still be homesteaded. If it stops being respected, I’ll have to stake it or put up a fence. There’s enough fence already, in my opinion, so I don’t like the idea of it. I keep what the Burdicks put up in good repair and try not to unroll more barbwire.”
“I thought fence was good.”
“Something else you read?”
“Yes.”
He did not miss the slight defensiveness in her tone and realized he had not suppressed the sarcasm in his. “I’m sorry. It’s good you wanted to learn things before you came, but most of what I read in New York papers that make it this far west is wrongheaded. Some of it is just wrong. Like everything else, there’re two sides to putting up fence.”
“Explain it to me.”
He wondered if she was interested or merely being mannerly, and then wondered why he thought she couldn’t be both. “Well, the fence keeps the cattle in. That’s the obvious advantage. Limits the open range. Makes pulling the herd together or sectioning it off easier. That’s helpful when your cattle number in the tens of thousands.”
“You have so many?”
“Not now. Market for beef is down some after the boom. I’m building the herd back, testing what the market will bear. I understand the Burdicks had near that many head at one time, but lost about twenty-five percent in the blizzard in ’86 and fifteen percent of what was left during the drought that followed. When the ranch was sold at auction, they barely had two thousand head. You see, when a big snowstorm is gathering, the cattle will move out ahead of it. It’s in their nature. I don’t know how they know what they know, but you can depend on it. When the weather calms, there they are where the grass is, or at least where they can get to it. With the wire up, they move until they’re stopped by it, and then they pile up against the fence and die. It’s not in their nature to push through.”
Jane whispered, “How awful. Those poor creatures.”
“Cattle would have died during the blizzard regardless of the wire, but there’s a case to be made that wire made it worse. Weather here is unpredictable. It can happen again, did actually the following year, but by all accounts that winter was not as hard as what came before it. ’Eighty-six is the marker folks around here use for comparison.”
Morgan noticed that Jane was no longer holding the seat under her as tightly as she had when they started out. He guessed she had learned to relax and roll with the juddering instead of trying to fight it.
“Fence has critics in Washington, too,” he said. “Ranchers settled the territory, claimed the land that their cattle roamed as their own. Hundreds of square miles. Entire valleys. They could do that because no one was there to dispute it. The railroad and the federal government had already beaten back the Indians. Fence went up to mark ranch land. The problem came when Congress granted homesteads to encourage more settlement. The homesteaders were given plots and proper deeds and told to go west. They ran right into the fences, and unlike cattle, they pushed through.”
“The range wars,” said Jane.
Morgan nodded. “Ranchers accused the homesteaders of something worse than taking their land; they accused them of taking their cattle. There’s swift and widely accepted justice for cattle thieving, and the ranchers enforced it. Land disputes were usually settled with a gun or a rope before they ever had a chance to be settled in court. Around here, the Burdicks had influence with the land office, so homesteaders were usually bought off. Scared off, if it came to that. Their deeds were turned over to the Burdicks.”
“Is all of Morning Star deeded now?”
“Yes.”
“So you benefited from the tactics the Burdicks used.”
“Not just from them. The eastern speculators that came after had a hand in securing what the Burdicks hadn’t. They wanted government contracts for dams and hydraulic works. If they had gotten them, they would have parceled out the land and sold off the pieces they didn’t need. Homesteaders would have populated this entire area. One more way the government works against its own interests. Now I’m here, alone, on almost seven hundred square miles, and I’m not inclined to put any of it up for sale.”
“Do you have problems with rustlers?”
“When I first took over, I did. It’s been a couple years now. There was some testing of the waters, I suppose you’d call it. Cattle thieves looking to see if I was an easy mark.”
“Were you?”
Morgan glanced sideways. “What do you think?”
“I think you applied swift justice.”
He did not deny it. He gave the reins a little snap instead and lifted his chin toward the horizon. “Look there. You can just make out the house sitting low on the curve of the earth.” He risked a second glance at Jane’s profile and saw nothing in her finely etched features that hinted at her thoughts.
Chapter Four
Jane’s eyes never strayed from the house as they approached. She wanted to take in everything about it. Morgan wrote about the house at Morning Star in his first response to her inquiry, but it was clear to her that he viewed it as a shelter from the storm, not a home. In Jane’s mind, it should be both.
The long log house was larger than she had permitted herself to believe it could be. She said nothing to Morgan about the photographs of rough-hewn cabins that she had seen and upon which she had based her expectations. This house looked solidly built, the mortar lines straight and parallel to one another, the corners squared off at what appeared to be true right angles. It sat low to the ground and was so wide that it looked as if it squatted on the land. The house was sturdy, in service of its purpose, and had none of the architectural embellishments that distinguished Manhattan mansions along the avenue.
From what she could tell at a distance, and then again as they drew closer, the house was in good repair. The porch did not run the length of the front of the house, but it was long and wide enough to hold a swing. That swing, she noted, looked as if it had recently been given a fresh coat of white paint, and the thought that this might have been done in anticipation of her coming to Morning Star both warmed Jane and made her anxious.
The windows were glass, another feature she had not been certain she could expect, and where the sun did not reflect too brightly, she could see lace curtains
framing them on the inside. The empty flower boxes beneath the windows were also freshly painted, and Jane permitted herself the indulgence of imagining what she might plant there.
As Morgan guided the buckboard abreast of the house, Jane’s eyes were drawn to the large door front and center. In contrast to the dark, weathered frame of the house, the door was varnished and polished so that it fairly gleamed from under the protective roof of the porch.
Jane stayed in her seat as directed until Morgan secured the horse and wagon. She took his hand when he offered it and let him assist her descent. It fell to her to release his hand when she was steady, but Jane held it longer than that because there was comfort and calm in his support.
“What are those buildings?” she asked, pointing off to her right.
“Woodshed. Smokehouse. That’s the barn next to the corral. The bunkhouse is on the other side of the barn. Hard to see from this angle, but the men have a good view of the road leading up here from where they are.”
As Jane’s eyes were drawn to search for the outbuilding, a figure appeared on the far side of the corral. “Someone is coming.”
“I see him. That’s Jem Davis. I think I mentioned him. He’s the one set on marrying Renee Harrison.”
“Cecilia Ross’s cousin.”
“Yes. That’s the one. Did you see Renee at the Pennyroyal this morning?” When Jane nodded, Morgan added, “Good. Because Jem will want every detail. It’s better if you don’t have to make them up.”
Jane clutched the sleeve of Morgan’s duster as he turned back to the house. “Who am I?” she asked. “I mean, who are you going to say I am?”
“If I know Jem, I won’t have to say anything. He’ll figure it out for himself.” He gestured to the front door. “This way. He’ll come in the back.”
In the entryway, Jane allowed Morgan to help her remove her coat and scarf. She gave him her gloves but kept her hat. He hung her things on a hook beside the door before he shrugged out of his coat and took off his hat and gloves. He put his outerwear next to hers.
It was the first time Jane had seen his gun belt and holster. She stared at the weapon at his side.