by Regina Scott
“Nancy,” she said, climbing the porch to enfold her in a hug. “I was hoping you might feel up to company today.” She cast a glance at Edmund as if to encourage him to speak. He yanked the brown Stetson from his head.
“Mrs. Bennett,” he said with a nod that seemed respectful enough. “How are you faring?” The way he shifted on his feet told her she wasn’t the only one concerned about this meeting. She resolved to welcome him all the same.
“We’re faring well, thank you, Mr. McKay,” she told him. “Mr. Snowden sees to the ranch for me, along with Billy Jenks and Mr. Upkins. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
Edmund nodded. “They’re a good bunch. Sheriff Fuller said they were real helpful making sure there were no more stolen cattle on the range.”
All her good intentions vanished, and Nancy cringed despite herself. “I’m so sorry, Mr. McKay. I had no idea Lucas was stealing.”
“There, now,” Lula May said, reaching out a hand. “I told the other members of the Lone Star Cowboy League that you had nothing to do with any of it.”
That only made her feel worse. She’d appreciated her neighbors’ efforts in banding together to help each other in times of need. But Lucas had shrugged off the idea.
“Any fool knows it’s every man for himself out here,” he’d scoffed. Still, he’d agreed to let Hank represent their interests in the league. She’d thought Lucas was merely trying to do his civic duty. Now she was fairly sure he’d used the information the cowboy brought him to help plan his thieving.
“She convinced us,” Edmund was saying, with a glance to Lula May that was all pride. “There isn’t a man—”
“Or a woman,” Lula May put in.
“Who holds you accountable,” Edmund finished.
Nancy drew in a breath. How easy it was to latch on to their forgiveness. A shame she could not forgive herself.
“Thank you,” she said. “But I should have realized what was happening. I should have warned the league, told the sheriff. Because I was blind, you all suffered. I’m so sorry.”
The clink of spurs told her Hank had returned.
“No call to be sorry,” he said, stepping onto the porch behind Edmund. “If there’s anyone to blame for this mess, it’s me.”
* * *
Edmund McKay shook his head, and Lula May, as she’d asked the league members to call her, had that lightning sparking in her eyes again, but Hank knew he spoke the truth. McKay knew it too. He’d been there the day they’d caught Lucas Bennett with a whole herd of cattle not his own.
The members of the Lone Star Cowboy League had been trying to discover who had been stealing cattle from the area. The rustler had hit nearly every spread for miles around, caused a fire that had leveled the Carson barn. But it had taken Lula May to put the pieces together. And the picture she painted had made Hank sick.
His boss was the rustler, and Hank had unknowingly fed him the information to plot the thefts.
When Sheriff Fuller offered to deputize Hank, McKay and another local rancher named Abe Sawyer to go with the lawman after Lucas Bennett, Hank hadn’t hesitated. He’d ridden with the other men to confront his boss. Hank had been pretty sure where the man was hiding, in a box canyon on the spread. But when they found him with more than three dozen head of cattle, Bennett and McKay had squared off, with Bennett drawing fast. The sheriff and Hank had both fired at the same time. Hank knew which shot had hit home.
Nancy Bennett was a widow, and it was all his fault. He was about ready to admit it, take his licks as his due.
But she turned on him, hands going to the curve of her hips. “Nonsense, Mr. Snowden,” she said, hazel eyes wide. “You’re the best hand my husband ever had. He told me so himself.”
He felt as if she’d twisted a knife in his gut. He’d always prided himself on doing a good job, but the fact that Lucas Bennett had bragged on him only made Hank’s betrayal worse.
He tugged the hat off his hair. “Just doing my duty, ma’am. I’m glad to see other folks come out to help, as well.” He nodded to Lula May and the rancher.
“Anything you need,” Lula May assured her friend.
He waited for Mrs. Bennett to brighten. That was one of the many things he appreciated about her. She was mostly quiet—shy, he was coming to realize—but when she smiled, it was like the sun rising, warming the whole earth with its glow. She hadn’t been smiling much since even before her husband had been killed. When she’d beamed at him earlier on the porch, he’d about slid from his chair in thanksgiving.
But now she merely lowered her hands and her gaze as she turned to her visitors. “Where are my manners? Please come in. I don’t have anything baked, but there’s cool water from the spring.”
“And I brought a lemon cake,” Lula May announced. She put her hand on the rancher’s arm. “Would you fetch it from the wagon for me?”
She didn’t fool Hank. Lula May was one tough lady, who’d managed her husband’s horse ranch after he’d fallen ill. Now a widow, she was the only woman in the Lone Star Cowboy League, and the member most respected by the others. If she was asking McKay to do her fetching and carrying, she was up to something.
He was just as glad for it, for it gave him a moment to talk to his friend alone. As the two women passed him to enter the house, he hurried to pace the rancher.
McKay cast him a quick look, green eyes thoughtful. “Mrs. Bennett says you’re doing right by the ranch. I wouldn’t have expected less.”
Hank put a hand on the man’s shoulder to stop him before he reached the wagon. “I promised her I’d stay as long as need be. But there’s something you should know. Lucas Bennett took out a loan from a bank in Burnet before he died.”
The rancher frowned, turning to face him. “From Burnet? Why didn’t he come into Little Horn or approach one of us? We’d have loaned him money or found a way to fix whatever he needed.”
“I don’t think he wanted the money to fix anything,” Hank told him. “He may have convinced the bank he wanted to improve the ranch, but he sure didn’t use the money on anything worthwhile.”
McKay nodded. “Lula May tells me he may have been gambling with her uncle while he was in town.”
Hank felt as if he’d eaten something that had sat in the sun too long. “It wouldn’t surprise me. Not after what else he did.”
McKay shook his head. “I can only feel for his widow.”
Hank too. “It gets worse,” he said. “The bank is threatening to call in the loan. Seems they don’t think Mrs. Bennett is skilled enough to turn a profit ranching. I thought maybe the league could help her out.”
“I’ll ask Lula May to call an emergency meeting for tomorrow night,” McKay promised, starting for the wagon once more. “You can make the case then.”
Hank joined him at the wagon. “I might not be the best advocate. I’ve already done enough damage, carrying everything we discussed about keeping the ranches safe to the very thief we were trying to protect ourselves from.”
“You didn’t know you were telling tales to the wrong person,” the rancher insisted. “No one holds you accountable either. Lucas Bennett fooled us all.”
Hank dusted his hands on his Levi’s, wishing he could wipe away the last two weeks as easily. “At least we know it’s over. We stopped the rustler. Everyone can go about their lives.”
Everyone but him and Nancy.
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” McKay reached into the wagon and carefully drew out a basket covered with a gingham cloth.
Hank frowned. “What are you talking about? Lucas Bennett is dead. I buried him myself.”
The rancher eyed him. “He may be dead, but even alive he wouldn’t have been able to take all those cattle to market by himself.”
“Upkins and Jenks had nothing to do with it,” Hank said, widening
his stance. He recognized the gesture and forced his body to relax. What, was he going to draw on Edmund McKay now?
“I believe you,” his friend assured him. “I thought maybe Bennett was stealing those cattle to build his herd. But if he was so desperate for money he’d mortgage his spread, he had to have been planning to sell them.”
“Nobody in these parts would buy stolen cattle,” Hank protested.
“Nobody we know,” McKay agreed. “But someone must have made him an offer. He would have known he couldn’t hide the cattle long before one of you spotted them. And he’d need help to drive that many to a buyer, one who wasn’t concerned about the brands.”
His friend was right. Hank’s only solace for shooting Lucas Bennett had been that he’d stopped the man from shooting anyone else and he’d ended the rash of thefts that had plagued the Little Horn community. But if someone had been aiding Lucas Bennett, they still had a common enemy.
“If I were you,” the rancher said, green gaze boring into Hank’s, “I’d keep a close eye on the spread. Where one rustler steps out, another may think to step in. There may be more than rattlers hiding in those hills, and Nancy Bennett is going to need protection from them.”
That kind of protection was normally the job for a lawman or a husband. He was no lawman. And Jeb Fuller had the whole county to watch over. He couldn’t focus all his efforts on the Windy Diamond.
So did Hank dare think of himself as a husband?
He’d tried before. His father, in his usual proud way, had picked out the girl. For once, Hank hadn’t been willing to argue. Mary Ellen Wannacre had been downright beautiful, with hair brighter than sunshine and eyes the color of bluebonnets. With her on his arm, he’d felt like the man his father was always goading him to be—powerful, confident. Every fellow in Waco had been green with envy. He’d allowed himself to fall in love.
But in the end, he’d come in second best. She’d chosen to marry his friend Adam Turner, who at least had had the decency to stammer out an apology. Hank couldn’t blame either of them. He’d never managed to measure up to his father’s expectations. It didn’t come as a surprise he didn’t measure up to hers.
It had taken him five years to begin to meet his own.
Was he willing to set those aside for someone else’s, to keep Nancy Bennett and her baby safe?
Chapter Three
“It can be overwhelming, can’t it?” Lula May said as she took a seat in Nancy’s parlor. The two brown horsehair-covered chairs still sat at precise angles in front of the stone fireplace, as if waiting for Lucas to come through the door. Nancy sank onto the one opposite her friend and focused on the red-and-blue diamond shapes woven into the rug on the plank floor.
“Yes,” she admitted. “And I can’t help thinking I might have spared everyone this pain if I’d just recognized what Lucas was doing.”
Lula May raised her chin. “That’s enough of such talk. Why, I’d known Lucas longer than you had, and I had no idea what he was doing. I didn’t even know he was from Alabama, raised near where I grew up, until recently. And Edmund had no idea either, for all the two worked side by side during roundups.”
Nancy managed a smile for her friend’s sake. “Edmund, is it?”
The prettiest pink blossomed in Lula May’s cheeks. “He asked me to marry him.”
Nancy reached out and took her hands. “Oh, Lula May, I’m so happy for you! You deserve a fine fellow like Edmund McKay.”
They talked of weddings and babies and other things that lifted her spirits as they waited for the men to rejoin them. When he heard the news, Hank went out of his way to tease Lula May and Edmund about their upcoming nuptials, but his smile seemed strained, as if he expected trouble. Surely her friends were no danger. What was wrong?
He stood on the porch as she waved goodbye to them, and she could feel the tension in his lean body.
“What is it, Hank?” she asked. “Did Mr. McKay tell you something I should know?”
He flinched as if she’d poked a sore spot. “Not exactly. I should get back to work. We can talk more later.” Shoving his hat on his head, he strode off toward the barn.
She didn’t call for him to stay this time. Much as she needed to learn, she’d hardly help the ranch succeed by keeping him continually from his job.
What she could do, she realized, was deal with the bank. Returning to the house, she wrote a letter requesting more time and stating the steps she was taking to ensure the ranch earned enough profit to pay back every penny Lucas had borrowed, with interest. She could only hope that would be sufficient, for now.
The next week, she spent as much time as she could out on the range, taking the team to keep up with her boys. She’d driven her mother’s small buggy back in Missouri, but the clattering wagon took a little getting used to. And she didn’t stay out past noon, when the sun was beating down hot enough to fry her lunch on the limestone reaches that ringed the ranch.
But the six hours away from the house opened her eyes. Sitting on the porch, even tending the garden behind the house, she’d never realized the terrain surrounding the ranch was so rough. The house, barn and corral were on flat ground near Hop Toad Springs, but even a half mile away the land began crumbling like a paper crushed in a fist. Limestone reaches thrust up; streams cut draws and canyons. And everything was covered in tall grass and dotted with clumps of short oak trees and cottonwoods.
She also learned that while the cattle roamed free over the wild and windswept acres, there was always something that needed tending. If Kettle Creek was running low, the whole herd had to be driven closer to the house to Hop Toad Springs, which drew from groundwater and never failed. Fences encircling their land had be to constantly patrolled and mended, or the cattle would wander too far afield. And Hank and her other boys kept a close eye on the herd to protect the cattle from predators, four-footed and two-footed.
The last gave her pause.
“You mean there are others out stealing cattle?” she asked Hank as he sat astride his horse next to the wagon. They were about a mile away from the house, resting under the shade of a copse of trees, the oak leaves chattering in a rising breeze that brought the scent of dry dust and clean water.
“Always those who want more than their share, ma’am,” he answered, gaze roaming the area as if he expected an outlaw to leap out from behind a bush.
She could believe that Lucas had turned to rustling from greed. He’d always seemed to want more than what he had. From what she could see, he’d certainly owned more than most people. Hadn’t that been sufficient?
Hadn’t she and their baby been sufficient?
“Look there,” Hank said, pointing to where a longhorn was ambling out of the shade. “See that white circle high on her shoulder? That’s our Rosebud, fairest of them all.”
Nancy raised her brows. “You name the cattle?”
He winked at her. “Only the special ones. Miss Rosebud, they tell me, has never failed to calve since she was old enough to bear.”
Sure enough, a calf, nearly grown now, trotted after its mother. A dozen more cows plodded in her wake.
“You get Miss Rosebud on your side,” Hank said, “and the rest of them will follow you anywhere. Upkins says it’s on account of the way she swings her tail all sassy like.”
Nancy smothered a laugh, and he had the good sense to color. “I didn’t mean anything by that, ma’am,” he hastened to assure her.
“I didn’t think you did,” Nancy replied. But she couldn’t help smiling at the idea that her brash and bold boys gave their favorite cattle pet names.
She tried not to interfere with their activities, but she could tell by their terse answers to her questions, their sidelong glances, that she made them nervous. Like Lucas, they seemed to prefer her safely inside the house. But how was she to learn if she didn’t com
e out?
Evenings were better. She’d take some fruit or a piece of pie to the porch to wait for her boys to come riding in. Mr. Upkins and Billy always tipped their hats as they passed before dismounting to lead their horses into the barn. One or the other would embolden himself to come closer, ask her about her day, make some comment about the ranch. But they always scurried back to the barn as if concerned they were being too forward.
She made sure Hank didn’t escape so easily. She’d call to him before he could take his horse into the barn, and he’d usually hand the reins to one of the others before joining her on the porch. His boots would be covered with dust, his shirt telling of hard work, yet he always managed a smile.
She’d hand him an apple or a sweet, and he’d lounge against the uprights and tell her about what had happened on the ranch after she’d left him. It took a lot of questions to get the answers she wanted, but she eventually learned that her husband had amassed a herd of about one hundred cows, plus eighty steers getting ready to go to market.
“Is that good?” she asked, before taking a sip of the lemonade she’d brought with her. A fly buzzed close, and she swatted it away.
“Fair to middling,” he said. “If we can get a good price, you’ll have enough to keep things going another year and pay the bank what you owe.”
That’s what she wanted to hear. She had to believe she could make a go of things, for her child.
But the bank must not have had faith even in Hank, for they sent someone to confirm her claims.
Mr. Cramore arrived one afternoon in a black-topped buggy she was surprised had made it the thirty miles from Burnet over rough country roads. A portly fellow, dressed in black with a silk tie at his throat, he hitched his horses to the rail surrounding the corral as if not planning to stay overlong, plucked a satchel off the seat and moved with solemn strides to the porch.
When she met him, he removed his top hat and bowed his head as if to give thanks.
“Mrs. Bennett,” he said in a deep, slow voice, double chins quivering. “My most heartfelt condolences. I’m Winston Cramore of the Empire Bank in Burnet. I had the privilege of knowing your husband well. He will be missed.”