The Lover

by Genell Dellin

Of course, he had to admit that Nat had a powerful sweet tooth, so he had a reason to be friendly with the cooks. He wasn’t necessarily flirting with Susanna.

  And he himself had a soft spot in his brain. What the hell was he doing noticing who talked to Susanna—who was not his wife—when he had big trouble ahead and more decisions to make than a Philadelphia lawyer?

  A shocking thought struck him. When Nat arrived and mentioned the silly fake marriage, he’d thought about that so much that he hadn’t even thought to ask Nat if he’d heard anything about Molly!

  Molly was fast enough to be famous throughout the Southwest. Horsemen all over Central Texas knew she belonged at the Sixes and Sevens. Nat might’ve heard something about her whereabouts, but now he’d have to wait until Nat came back to even ask about her.

  He sighed as he walked back to the fire. Damn it. He was losing his mind and he needed every bit of brain power he’d ever had to get these herds across the river.

  “Men,” he said, “I’m sending Nat to look for another spot where we can get across the Brazos. I just got back from the ford and there are five herds already holding there.”

  “Then we’d have to hold here,” somebody said.

  “Right. The grazing near the ford is already taken up by the waterbound herds, so we can’t crowd in there and we’ll be behind them all the way if we stay on the trail.”

  “How long they been there?” Marvin asked.

  “The river’s been impassable for a week.” Eagle Jack took a minute to look each man in the eye. Swollen rivers were as sure as stampedes to make drovers nervous and on edge. They’d have to trust him on this and he’d have to make the right choices to get it done with no loss of life.

  “We gonna swim the wagon over?” Maynell asked.

  She sounded as calm as if this happened to her every day.

  He turned to look at her. “I’m hoping the Sycamore ferry’s running so I can send the wagons around that way. Rod’s gone to find out if they are.”

  “My mules are swimmers,” Maynell said, and turned back to her work.

  That surprised Eagle Jack. He’d expected her to get into one of her famous swivets at the thought of floating her wagon on a swift-running river.

  Susanna didn’t even glance at him. She went to the wreck pan and picked it up, then took it around to the other side of the wagon. Eagle Jack followed her.

  “We’ll know when Rod gets back,” he told her, “but if the ferry’s not operating, you’ll have to get the wagon ready to go in the water. Break the supplies down into packages that can be carried by a man horseback and lash the bedrolls to the top…”

  She set the pan on the fold-down shelf and turned to face him. “Don’t give me orders, Eagle Jack. I’ll just take my herd and boss it myself and go on, since Maynell’s not scared to swim the river.”

  He couldn’t believe he’d heard her right.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’ll be short a man without you, but I’ll take your place.”

  She turned her back on him, picked up the hot water bucket, and poured some onto the dirty dishes. Anger blossomed in his gut like a fire on the prairie.

  “Did you ever think that if you can’t hire men, you can’t boss them, either? Now stop this nonsense and listen to me. We’ve got to get ready to cross this river.”

  She flashed him a look that would singe the paint off a barn. “Oh, yes. When it comes time to give orders, you can talk to me just fine.”

  “I don’t have the patience for riddles,” he said, and turned to go.

  “Stay right where you are,” she said. “And you listen to me.”

  Grudgingly, he stopped.

  “Don’t ever try to feed me that line of palaver again, Eagle Jack Sixkiller,” she said. “All that about how much I’m learning and how skillful I’m becoming and how I’m your valued segundo and your right-hand, trail-driving woman.”

  Stunned, he thought about that. He whirled on his heel and faced her.

  “What do you mean, line of palaver? I meant what I told you.”

  “But you didn’t tell me you had another herd coming to meet us.”

  Perplexed, he stared at her. “It was my business.”

  “Mine, too. Another herd thrown in with mine affects my business plenty.”

  “It’s the other way around, Susanna. Your wet herd slows down my beef herd.”

  “You still should’ve told me.”

  “I told you tonight.”

  “When you told everybody else.”

  He held her steady gaze. “Yes.”

  “Well, what about that promise way back there before we got to Brushy Creek? The promise that we’d make decisions together?”

  He lost all patience. “Susanna, get a handle on this. The decision that we’d trail these herds together was already made—the minute I accepted your offer in the jail.”

  “You never said a word about it to me when you were calling me ‘partner’ and you had every opportunity to do so.”

  “I would never have agreed to your deal if I hadn’t already been going up the trail. You’re just lucky, that’s all.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes. Lucky that I hired someone who lies to me. Lucky as a four-leaf clover.”

  “Save your sarcasm. Get this wagon ready to cross the river.” He wheeled and started to walk away, then stopped and turned back. “And I’ve never lied to you. I don’t take kindly to your saying that.”

  She advanced on him, dishcloth and tin plate in hand. She shook them at him.

  “You most certainly have lied to me. Lies of omission. Those are lies, too, you know.”

  “You’ve been out in the sun too long. Wear your bonnet tomorrow.”

  “I’ll wear what I please. You’re the one who’s sun-addled if you think you can relegate me to sitting underneath a bonnet on the seat of the cook wagon. I aim to cross my own cattle tomorrow—my fate and my fortune are in the hands of no man.”

  He was so mad he didn’t dare speak to her. Despite the blood roaring in his head, he made himself bite his tongue and walk away.

  All he cared about was that she didn’t do something foolish tomorrow and cause a disaster. He didn’t care what she thought of him personally. This was nothing but strictly a business deal, pretend marriage or not.

  It was hard to imagine how she could be any more trouble to him if the marriage were real.

  Nat came back around midnight and Rod an hour or so after that. Susanna knew, because she didn’t fall asleep until the graveyard shift came in and the bobtail guard took over duty to watch the cattle for the tail end of the night until breakfast.

  Eagle Jack was still up, sitting by the fire drinking coffee, when Nat came in. She heard the low murmur of their voices but she couldn’t catch a single word, which added to her frustration.

  It made no difference. Frustration wasn’t important. What was important, what made all the difference, was determination. She had learned that from a thousand different lessons since Everett had been gone.

  She had meant every word she had said to Eagle Jack. Maybe the men wouldn’t take bossing from her and maybe she couldn’t split her herd off and go her own way to Abilene, but she could lead the men in taking care of her herd and that was what she was bound and determined to do.

  Let them think they were working for Eagle Jack—she didn’t care—but she was going to oversee every detail about her cattle. Eagle Jack had another cook with his herd, Maynell didn’t need help to make only desserts, and she, Susanna, might as well do what she’d set out to do in the first place before she found out men were so all-fired stubborn about working for a woman: drive a herd up the trail to Kansas.

  So, when she heard Maynell climb down from the wagon at dawn to wake the wrangler in charge of the remuda (usually that was Jimbo), Susanna rolled out, put on her clothes, and then strapped on Everett’s handgun that she’d been wearing ever since their short-lived stampede. She’d also be scouting on her own
sometimes, now. No telling what danger she might meet.

  Quickly, with the ease of a growing habit, she tied her bedroll and got everything ready to load on the wagon.

  She had just stepped out of the tent when she heard a rider coming in from the west.

  The newcomer was at the fire drinking coffee with Eagle Jack by the time she’d stowed everything in the wagon. Susanna joined them.

  “Tolly Walters, ma’am,” the man said, as he stood and tipped his hat, “of the Rafter W.”

  “Susanna Copeland with the Slanted S herd,” she said, and briskly filled her coffee cup before she sat down on the log beside him.

  Eagle Jack gave her a horrified look, raised his eyebrows, and waited for her to leave, but she ignored him. Anything the stranger had to say that could affect her herd was imperative for her to hear.

  It didn’t seem to bother Tolly that she was a woman inviting herself into men’s conversation.

  “So what we’re doing is building a bridge across a slough upstream where the river’s already gone down,” Tolly said. “That gets us across to the bank of the shallowest part of the river without bogging in the mud.”

  “As long as it’ll take to build a bridge, the whole riverbed will be down to a trickle,” Eagle Jack said. “And it’s a day’s drive to get there. We might as well just sit around the fire and wait for the water to go down if we’re gonna hold up here that long.”

  That didn’t even dent Tolly’s enthusiasm. “It won’t take more than a day if you’ll bring your men to help,” he said. “We’ve already got our outfit and the Broken O boys.”

  “You’ve got cowboys working on foot, felling trees and stacking brush so you can drive your cattle across a bridge, onto a little spit of land and then you still have to swim them across the river,” Eagle Jack said. “Could be low enough we could even ford it by tomorrow or the next day.”

  Tolly grinned and shook his head. “Buildin’ a bridge beats heck out of hundreds of cattle gettin’ drowned or scattered plumb to kingdom come.”

  “Have to be a heck of bridge,” Eagle Jack said.

  “We’d have to keep them moving at all costs,” Susanna said, “onto the bridge and into the river. No hesitating.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the cheerful Tolly. “Once the leaders take the bridge, we can’t let ’em even think about stopping. Especially with two more herds behind them.”

  “But we can’t crowd ’em, either,” Eagle Jack reminded them.

  “Nope,” Tolly said, and he took a sip of coffee, “then we’re liable to have ’em mill and that’d be hell on the bridge or in the water.”

  While Maynell finished cooking breakfast, the three of them talked about it from every angle they could see. It felt good. Susanna loved it. Both men were listening to what she said and taking her ideas into consideration.

  “It’ll take you a day to drive your cattle up there, and another day, probably, for us all to finish the bridge,” Tolly said. “That’ll still put our herds way ahead of the five waterbound outfits. This ford’s not going to be passable for another week.”

  Susanna held her breath. Tolly had convinced her and she thought they ought to do this but she was afraid to say that in so many words. Then Eagle Jack might feel she was pushing him and do the opposite. At least, that’s the way Everett had been.

  “I’m in,” Eagle Jack said finally.

  “So am I,” Susanna said.

  He looked at her, surprised, as if to say he’d already spoken for both of them.

  But Tolly took her for her own boss. “That’s the both of your crews, then,” he said. He slapped his leg and stood up. “We’re in business. We’ll all be north of the Brazos and on our way to the Red in two days’ time. Very well, then, boys and girls, let’s eat our breakfast before we hit the trail, ’cause we never know where we’ll be for dinner.”

  That made Susanna smile. Not only that Tolly, who was the visitor, was calling everyone to eat, but also because he’d fully accepted her. It would be Tolly bossing the building of the bridge, so she’d get a chance to show Eagle Jack what she could do.

  Susanna had quit scouting with him and started riding out alone in front of her herd. Eagle Jack kept thinking of the old joke about the snuffdipping woman in church who, when the preacher began to condemn that habit, called out, “You’ve done quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’, now.”

  He had ridden back to talk to Nat and the boys as they drove the Sixes and Sevens herd up behind the Slanted S, and Susanna had just gone right on out of sight without him. Without a word. Come to think of it, she hadn’t given him very many words after Tolly left them.

  Or while Tolly was there, for that matter. She’d been talking to Tolly, not to him, Eagle Jack.

  The one thing certain was that Susanna had quit listening and gone to meddling, now—sitting in on his talk with Tolly and speaking right up like she knew what she was talking about—and it was liable to have dire consequences for her. He couldn’t allow it. He absolutely could not. Whether she wanted it to be true or not, he was responsible for her and he had to make the big decisions, like whether to help with the bridge and cross their cattle over it or not.

  Thank goodness, they had agreed on what answer to give Tolly, but next time things might not work out so well.

  There might not even be a next time if she wandered off and got herself killed or kidnapped by some lowlife or else hopelessly lost.

  His stomach clutched and he lifted his horse into a slow lope.

  He had to go find her, whether or not it made her even angrier with him. He was the one who should be angry with her, anyhow—this kind of behavior just to pay him back for not telling her every detail of his business in advance was too petty for him to endure.

  He loped up to Nat. “I’m going on to pick a nooning place,” he said.

  “Right, boss.” Nat grinned. “Tell that pretty wife of yours I hope she’s the one doing the cooking this time.”

  Eagle Jack answered with a noncommittal wave of his hand and rode off. That was another thing. If she was going to keep on spreading that story around, she had better start acting like his wife.

  By the time he caught up with the wagons an hour later, he had a dozen things ready to say to her, but Susanna wasn’t there. Unfortunately, both Cookie and Maynell were.

  What had looked, from a distance, like a normal scene of two chuck wagons peacefully setting up in a shady meadow to cook a meal for a couple of outfits was, up close, a battle of wills and a war of words, all guaranteed to leave a bunch of drovers as hungry to ride out as they were the moment they rode in.

  Eagle Jack rode into the meadow, crossed behind the wagons, and pulled his horse up in the shade of the low-growing limbs of a big live oak tree. He got down. He loosened his cinch and dropped his reins for a ground-tie.

  He walked toward them.

  All that time, neither cook so much as glanced at him. Maynell had a fire going with a coffeepot hanging over it and hot coals in a trench to one side. She appeared to be guarding her handiwork with the spade she’d been using to move the coals.

  Cookie stood facing her, legs apart, heels dug in. “That’d be the dumbest waste of wood I ever seen,” Cookie was saying. “I ain’t takin’ orders from nobody and I ain’t buildin’ no second fire.”

  “Suit yourself,” Maynell said, “but you won’t be usin’ mine. If you’re such a cook, you oughtta know to carry wood on the wagon.”

  “I do,” Cookie said, “and we’ll use it for supper.” He stared her right in the eye.

  She stared back.

  “Women should never go up the trail,” he said.

  “Men should never be cooks,” she said.

  “And meals should never be late,” Eagle Jack said, “or the three of us might have to drive four thousand head of cattle from here to Kansas.”

  Finally, they both turned and looked at him.

  “I know it’s dangerous for me to get in the middle of this,” he said, “
but I reckon I can take a chance since there’s two cooks on this drive.”

  “Is that a threat to fire one of us?” Maynell said.

  “Take it any way you want to,” Eagle Jack said.

  Maynell and Cookie exchanged a glance.

  “Well, fire away,” Maynell said, “but I can tell you right now neither one of us is leavin’.” She looked at Cookie for confirmation.

  “Damn straight we’re not,” he said. “This outfit’d starve to death down to the last man if I rode away from here.”

  Maynell nodded at Eagle Jack triumphantly, then she realized exactly what Cookie had said. She rounded on him, hands on her hips. “If you rode away from here? That sounds like an insult to me, old man.”

  He repeated Eagle Jack’s words. “Take it any way you want to.”

  “Then I’ll take it as a dare,” she said, and hit her spade against the leg of the cook rack for a ringing note of emphasis. “Put your best foot in the soup, Mr. Cookie, and we’ll see whose fire them boys comes back to for second helpings.”

  That was all it took. Cookie started building his fire, Maynell started a skillet heating on hers.

  Eagle Jack set his jaw. He’d thought he brought this whole situation under control when he’d had his brilliant idea to assign all the sweets to Maynell. Now they’d be cooking more than could be eaten at one meal and the men hated leftovers with a passion.

  But he certainly didn’t want to get crossways of them again—either or both of them.

  Damn it all! Where was Susanna? If she was going to insist on coming along on this drive, and then insist on trying to be the one to take her own herd across the Brazos and do the scouting all by herself, why didn’t she take care of the cooks?

  If she wouldn’t be one, she could at least keep them straightened out.

  “Why don’t y’all pick one thing a day?” he said, trying for an offhand tone. “It could be a contest of coffees one day and sourdoughs the next.”

  “And stew the next and steak the next,” Maynell said.

  “And fluff-duff the next,” Cookie said, in a tone that brooked no disagreement. “I ain’t lettin’ you be the only one makin’ sweet stuff.”