“You wouldn’t just pick them off, would you? Wolves, I mean?”
“Of course not,” Brad replied. “But wolves are predators, and Livie’s not wrong to be concerned that they’ll track Ransom and take him down if they catch the blood-scent from his wounds.”
A chill trickled down Meg’s spine, like a splash of cold water, setting her shivering. Like Brad, she came from a long line of cattle ranchers, and while she allowed that wolves had a place in the ecological scheme of things, like every other creature on earth, she didn’t romanticize them. They were not misunderstood dogs, as so many people seemed to think, but hunters, savagely brutal and utterly ruthless, and no one who’d ever seen what they did to their prey would credit them with nobility.
“Sharks with legs,” she mused aloud. “That’s what Rance calls them.”
Brad nodded, but didn’t reply. They were gaining on Olivia now; she was still a ways ahead, and had dismounted to look at something on the ground.
Both Brad and Meg sped up to reach her.
By the time they arrived, Olivia’s saddle bags were open beside her, and she was holding a syringe up to the light. Because of the darkness, and the movements of the horses, a few moments passed before Meg focused on the animal Olivia was treating.
A dog lay bloody and quivering on its side.
Brad was off his horse before Meg broke the spell of shock that had descended over her and dismounted, too. Her stomach rolled when she got a better look at the dog; the poor creature, surely a stray, had run afoul of either a wolf or coyote pack, and it was purely a miracle that he’d survived.
Meg’s eyes burned.
Brad crouched next to the dog, opposite Olivia, and stroked the animal with a gentleness that altered something deep down inside Meg, causing a grinding sensation, like the shift of tectonic plates far beneath the earth.
“Can he make it?” he asked Olivia.
“I’m not sure,” Olivia replied. “At the very least, he needs stitches.” She injected the contents of the syringe into the animal’s ruff. “I sedated him. Give the medicine a few minutes to work, and then we’ll take him back to the clinic in Stone Creek.”
“What about the horse?” Meg asked, feeling helpless, a by stander with no way to help. She wasn’t used to it. “What about Ransom?”
Olivia’s eyes were bleak with sorrow when she looked up at Meg. She was a veterinarian; she couldn’t abandon the wounded dog, or put him to sleep because it would be more convenient than transporting him back to town, where he could be properly cared for. But worry for the stallion would prey on her mind, just the same.
“I’ll look for him tomorrow,” Olivia said. “In the daylight.”
Brad reached across the dog, laid a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “He’s been surviving on his own for a long time, Liv,” he assured her. “Ransom will be all right.”
Olivia bit her lower lip, nodded. “Get one of the sleeping bags, will you?” she said.
Brad nodded and went to unfasten the bedroll from behind his saddle. They were miles from town, or any ranch house.
“How did a dog get all the way out here?” Meg asked, mostly because the silence was too painful.
“He’s probably a stray,” Olivia answered, between soothing murmurs to the dog. “Somebody might have dumped him, too, down on the highway. A lot of people think dogs and cats can survive on their own—hunt and all that nonsense.”
Meg drew closer to the dog, crouched to touch his head. He appeared to be some kind of lab-retriever mix, though it was hard to tell, given that his coat was saturated with blood. He wore no collar, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a microchip—and if he did, Olivia would be able to identify him immediately, once she got him to the clinic. Though from the looks of him, he’d be lucky to make it that far.
Brad returned with the sleeping bag, unfurling it. “Okay to move him now?” he asked Olivia.
Olivia nodded, and she and Meg sort of helped each other to their feet. “You mount up,” Olivia told Brad. “And we’ll lift him.”
Brad whistled softly for his horse, which trotted obediently to his side, gathered the dangling reins, and swung up into the saddle.
Meg and Olivia bundled the dog, now mercifully unconscious, in the sleeping bag and, together, hoisted him high enough so Brad could take him into his arms. They all rode slowly back down the trail, Brad holding that dog as tenderly as he would an injured child, and not a word was spoken the whole way.
When they got back to the ranch house, where Olivia’s Suburban was parked, Brad loaded the dog into the rear of the vehicle.
“I’ll stay and put the horses away,” Meg told him. “You’d better go into town with Olivia and help her get him inside the clinic.”
Brad nodded. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.
Olivia gave Meg an appreciative glance before scrambling into the back of the Suburban to ride with the patient, ambulance-style. Brad got behind the wheel.
Once they’d driven off, Meg gathered the trio of horses and led them into the barn. There, in the breeze way, she removed their saddles and other tack and let the animals show her which stalls were their own. She checked their hooves for stones, made sure their automatic waterers were working, and gave them each a flake of hay. All the while, her thoughts were with Brad, and the stray dog lying in the back of Olivia’s rig.
A part of her wanted to get into the Blazer and head straight for Stone Creek, and the veterinary clinic where Olivia worked, but she knew she’d just be in the way. Brad could provide muscle and moral support, if not medical skills, but Meg had nothing to offer.
With the O’Ballivans’ horses attended to, she fired up the Blazer and headed back toward Indian Rock. She covered the miles between Stone Creek Ranch and the Triple M in a daze, and was a little startled to find herself at home when she pulled up in front of the garage door.
Leaving the Blazer in the driveway, Meg went into the barn to look in on Banshee and the four other horses who resided there. On the Triple M, horses were continually rotated between her place, Jesse’s, Rance’s and Keegan’s, depending on what was best for the animals. Now they blinked at her, sleepily surprised by a late-night visit, and she paused to stroke each one of their long faces before starting for the house.
Angus fell into step with her as she crossed the side yard, headed for the back door.
“The stallion’s all right,” he informed her. “Holed up in one of the little canyons, nursing his wounds.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t help find him,” Meg said, stopping to stare up at her ancestor in the moonlight.
“Turned out I was wrong,” Angus drawled. His hat was gone; the bad weather he’d probably been expecting hadn’t materialized.
“Mark the calendar,” Meg teased. “I just heard a McKettrick admit to being wrong about something.”
Angus grinned, waited on the small, open back porch while she unlocked the kitchen door. In his day, locks hadn’t been necessary. Now the houses on the Triple M were no more immune to the rising crime rate than anyplace else.
“I’ve been wrong about plenty in my life,” Angus said. “For one thing, I was wrong to leave Holt behind in Texas, after his mother died. He was just a baby, and God knows what I’d have done with him on the trail between there and the Arizona Territory, but I should have brought him, nonetheless. Raised him with Rafe and Kade and Jeb.”
Intrigued, Meg opened the door, flipped on the kitchen lights and stepped inside. All of this was ancient family history to her, but to Angus, it was immediate stuff. “What else were you wrong about?” she asked, removing her coat and hanging it on the peg next to the door, then going to the sink to wash her hands.
Angus took a seat at the head of the table. In this house, it would have been Holt’s place, but Angus was in the habit of taking the lead, even in small things.
“I ever tell you I had a brother?” he asked.
Meg, about to brew a pot of tea, stopped and stared at him,
stunned out of her fatigue. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.” The McKettricks were raised on legend and lore, cut their teeth on it; the brother came as news. “Are you telling me there could be a whole other branch of the family out there?”
“Josiah got on fine with the ladies,” Angus reminisced. “It would be my guess his tribe is as big as mine.”
Meg forgot all about the tea-brewing. She made her way to the table and sat down heavily on the bench, gaping at Angus.
“Don’t fret about it,” he said. “They’d have no claim on this ranch, or any of the take from that McKettrickCo outfit.”
Meg blinked, still trying to assimilate the revelation. “No one has ever mentioned that you had a brother,” she said. “In all the diaries, all the letters, all the photographs—”
“They wouldn’t have said anything about Josiah,” Angus told her, evidently referring to his sons and their many descendents. “They never knew he existed.”
“Why not?”
“Because he and I had a falling-out, and I didn’t want anything to do with him after that. He felt the same way.”
“Why bring it up now—after a century and a half?”
Angus shifted uncomfortably in his chair and, for a moment, his jawline hardened. “One of them’s about to land on your doorstep,” he said after a long, molar-grinding silence. “I figured you ought to be warned.”
“Warned? Is this person a serial killer or a crook or something?”
“No,” Angus said. “He’s a lawyer. And that’s damn near as bad.”
“As a family, we haven’t exactly kept a low profile for the last hundred or so years,” Meg said slowly. “If Josiah has as many descendants as you do, why haven’t any of them contacted us? It’s not as if McKettrick is a common name, after all.”
“Josiah took another name,” Angus allowed, after more jaw-clamping. “That’s what we got into it about, him and me.”
“Why would he do that?” Meg asked.
Angus fixed her with a glare. Clearly, even after all the time that passed, he hadn’t forgiven Josiah for changing his name and for whatever had prompted him to do that.
“He went to sea, when he was hardly more than a boy,” Angus said. “When he came back home to Texas, years later, he was calling himself by another handle and running from the law. Hinted that he’d been a pirate.”
“A pirate?”
“Left Ma and me to get by on our own, after Pa died,” Angus recalled bitterly, looking through Meg to some long-ago reality. “Rode out before they’d finished shoveling dirt into Pa’s grave. I ran down the road after him—he was riding a big buckskin horse—but he didn’t even look back.”
Tentatively, Meg reached out to touch Angus’s arm. Clearly, Josiah had been the elder brother, and Angus a lot younger. He’d adored Josiah McKettrick—that much was plain—and his leaving had been a defining event in Angus’s life. So defining, in fact, that he’d never acknowledged the other man’s existence.
Angus bristled. “It was a long time ago,” he said.
“What name did he go by?” Meg asked. She knew she wasn’t going to sleep, for worrying about the injured dog and the stallion, and planned to spend the rest of the night at the computer, searching on Google for members of the here to fore unknown Josiah-side of the family.
“I don’t rightly recall,” Angus said glumly.
Meg knew he was lying. She also knew he wasn’t going to tell her his brother’s assumed name.
She got up again, went back to brewing tea.
Angus sat brooding in silence, and the phone rang just as Meg was pouring boiling water over the loose tea leaves in the bottom of Lorelei’s pot.
Glancing at the caller ID panel, she saw no name, just an unfamiliar number with a 615 area code.
“Hello?”
“He’s going to recover,” Brad said.
Tears rushed to Meg’s eyes, and her throat constricted. He was referring to the dog, of course. And using the cell phone he’d carried when he still lived in Tennessee. “Thank God,” she managed to say. “Did Olivia operate?”
“No need,” Brad answered. “Once she’d taken X-rays and run a scan, she knew there were no internal injuries. He’s pretty torn up—looks like a baseball with all those stitches—but he’ll be okay.”
“Was there a microchip?”
“Yeah,” Brad said after a charged silence. “But the phone number’s no longer in service. Livie ran an internet search and found out the original owner died six months ago. Who knows where Willie’s been in the meantime.”
“Willie?”
“The dog,” Brad explained. “That’s his name. Willie.”
“What’s going to happen to Willie now?”
“He’ll be at the clinic for a while,” Brad said. “He’s in pretty bad shape. Livie will try to find out if anybody adopted him after his owner died, but we’re not holding out a lot of hope on that score.”
“He’ll go to the pound? When he’s well enough to leave the clinic?”
“No,” Brad answered. He sounded as tired as Meg felt. “If nobody has a prior claim on him, he’ll come to live with me. I could use a friend—and so could he.” He paused. “I hope I didn’t wake you or anything.”
“I was still up,” Meg said, glancing in Angus’s direction only to find that he’d disappeared again.
“Good,” Brad replied.
A silence fell between them. Meg knew there was something else Brad wanted to say, and that she’d want to hear it. So she waited.
“I’m riding up into the high country again first thing in the morning,” he finally said. “Looking for Ransom. I was wondering if—well—it’s probably a stupid idea, but—”
Meg waited, resisting an urge to rush in and finish the sentence for him.
“Would you like to go along? Livie has a full schedule tomorrow—one of the other vets is out sick—and she wants to keep an eye on Willie, too. She’s going to obsess about this horse until I can tell her he’s fine, so I’m going to find him if I can.”
“I’d like to go,” Meg said. “What time are you leaving the ranch?”
“Soon as the sun’s up,” Brad answered. “You’re sure? The country’s pretty rough up there.”
“If you can handle rough country, O’Ballivan, so can I.”
He chuckled. “Okay, McKettrick,” he said.
Meg found herself smiling. “I’ll be there by 6:00 a.m., unless that’s too early. Shall I bring my own horse?”
“Six is about right,” Brad said. “Don’t go to the trouble of trailering another horse—you can ride Cinnamon. Dress warm, though. And bring whatever gear you’d need if we had to spend the night for some reason.”
Alone in her kitchen, Meg blushed. “See you in the morning,” she said.
“’Night,” Brad replied.
“Good night,” Meg responded—long after Brad had hung up.
Giving up on the tea and, at least for that night, researching Josiah McKettrick, and having decided she needed to at least try to sleep, since tomorrow would be an eventful day, Meg locked up, shut off the lights and went upstairs to her room.
After getting out a pair of thermal pajamas, she took a long shower in the main bathroom across the hall, brushed her teeth, tamed her wet hair as best she could and went to bed.
Far from tossing and turning, as she’d half expected, she dropped into an immediate, consuming slumber, so deep she remembered none of her dreams.
Waking, she dressed quickly, in jeans and a sweat shirt, over a set of long under wear, made of some miraculous microfiber and bought for skiing, and finished off her ensemble with two pairs of socks and her sturdiest pair of boots. She shoved tooth paste, a brush and a small tube of moisturizer into a plastic storage bag, rolled up a blanket, tied it tightly with twine from the kitchen junk drawer and break fasted on toast and coffee.
She called Jesse on her cell phone as she climbed into the Blazer, after feeding Banshee and the others. Cheyenne, Jesse�
��s wife, answered on the second ring.
“Hi, it’s Meg. Is Jesse around?”
“Sleeping,” Cheyenne said, yawning audibly.
“I woke you up,” Meg said, embarrassed.
“Jesse’s the lay-abed in this family,” Cheyenne responded warmly. “I’ve been up since four. Is anything wrong, Meg? Sierra and the baby—?”
“They’re fine, as far as I know,” Meg said, anxious to reassure Cheyenne and, at the same time, very glad she’d gotten Jesse’s wife instead of Jesse himself. He’d look after her horses if she asked, but he’d want to know where she was going, and if she replied that she and Brad O’Ballivan were riding off into the sunrise together, he’d tease her unmercifully. “Look, Cheyenne, I need a favor. I’m going on a—on a trail ride with a friend, and I’ll probably be back tonight, but—”
“Would this ‘friend’ be the famous Brad O’Ballivan?”
“Yes,” Meg said, but reluctantly, backing out of the driveway and turning the Blazer around to head for Stone Creek. It was still dark, but the first pinkish gold rays of sunlight were rimming the eastern hills. “Cheyenne, will you ask Jesse to check on my horses if he doesn’t hear from me by six or so tonight?”
“Of course,” Cheyenne said. “So you’re going riding with Brad, and it might turn into an over night thing. Hmm—”
“It isn’t anything romantic,” Meg said. “I’m just helping him look for a stallion that might be hurt, that’s all.”
“I see,” Cheyenne said sweetly.
“Just out of curiosity, what made you jump to the conclusion that the friend I mentioned was Brad?”
“It’s all over town that you and country music’s baddest bad boy met up at the Dixie Dog Drive-In the other day.”
“Oh, great,” Meg breathed. “I guess that means Jesse knows, then. And Rance and Keegan.”
Cheyenne laughed softly, but when she spoke, her voice was full of concern. “Rance and Jesse are all for finding Brad and punching his lights out for hurting you so badly all those years ago, but Keegan is the voice of reason. He says give Brad a week to prove himself, then punch his lights out.”
“The McKettrick way,” Meg said. Her cousins were as protective as brothers would have been, and she loved them. But in terms of her social life, they weren’t any more help than Angus had been.
The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's HomecomingThe McKettrick Way (Hqn) Page 28