by Carla Kelly
“Take my cook to Wisner and stick her on the train,” he told Jack.
“Can’t get through with the buckboard or wagon yet,” Jack said. “She’ll have to go on horseback.”
Mr. Buxton gave his gallows smile. “I hope she suffers!” He stopped at the door. “Get any mail. There should be a telegram from the consortium secretary and maybe one from Clarence, so you’ll know when to get him.”
After a long look at the northwest sky, Jack rode out with Pierre and Winnie the cook, who complained loud and long about her transportation. Jack listened as long as he thought polite, then stopped her with a chop of his hand.
“Miss Winnie, if you want to leave now, this is how is happens. Well?”
The hefty cook glared at the saddled horse as if willing it to turn into the Union Pacific Railroad. When nothing happened, she let Jack heave her into the saddle, no mean feat. He tied stuffed carpetbags behind each saddle, and they started for Wisner. Pierre took a detour at the schoolhouse, deserted and bereft with no students, and left grain for the Little Man, a.k.a. the Wyoming Kid. The cook was not amused.
Jack and Pierre rode abreast, partly to break the way for the cook’s long-suffering horse, and partly to avoid conversation. She complained anyway, going on and on about Mrs. Buxton’s weird crochets and lengthy arguments between the Buxtons, all of which ended with door slamming and tears, which usually advanced into hysteria.
“I’m amazed Luella isn’t stranger than we already know about,” Jack whispered to Pierre, who only grunted and kept his eyes ahead.
When they passed the drifts by the road to his own ranch, Jack resisted a powerful urge to turn in and see how Manuel and Bismarck had fared. He could see the cabin in the distance, but no smoke climbed from the chimney. Now what? he asked himself, imagining his old hand dead and Bismarck failing.
“Don’t borrow trouble. We have enough,” Pierre commented.
“How did you . . . ?”
“Jack, I know you.”
Wisner looked bedraggled and defeated, with snow mounded everywhere, testimony to as severe a time as the one they weathered on the Bar Dot, except the snow here was turning black with smoke from the train and wood and coal fires.
Still muttering about her cavalier treatment, Winnie brushed before them into the depot and plunked down her money for Cheyenne.
“One way or round trip, ma’am?”
Winnie leaned over the counter and the clerk reared back, terrified. “One. Way,” she declared in a voice impossible to misunderstand.
“Jack.”
Vivian from the Back Forty sat on the bench closest to the pot-bellied stove. Jack noted her luggage and handsome traveling coat, and couldn’t help wishing there was such a coat for Chantal.
“Taking my advice?” he asked, sitting beside her.
“I am. I’ve saved enough and I’m going home.”
“Which is?”
“Moberly, Missouri. If you’re ever through there, you’ll see a millinery shop with my name on it. Time to leave faro behind.” She held her hand out, and he shook it. “You were always a gentleman.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
She tightened her grip, then released his hand. “Don’t sell yourself short, Jack Sinclair.”
He nodded and followed an amused Pierre out the door. “I don’t even know her last name,” he said outside. “I played cards there off and on for five years, and I never asked.”
Thoughtful, he picked his way across the slushy street to the post office and asked for Bar Dot mail. The clerk found the pigeonhole and handed him newspapers, mail for Mr. Buxton, and a telegram. He stared at it. “Should I open it?” he asked Pierre. “Suppose there needs to be a reply.”
“Go ahead,” Pierre said. “Not that you need my permission.”
Jack slit the thin envelope and pulled out the message. He started to hand it to Pierre to read, but the Indian pushed it back.
“You’ve been learning with Lily. At least, I think that’s what you do in the evenings,” Pierre teased. “You try first.”
Jack looked at the telegram, thinking, not for the first time, how ironic that a mixed breed Indian could read better than he did. He cleared his throat. He knew these letters. He could even string them together. “Wh . . . wh . . . where.” That was it, and the next work was simple. “Is.” He knew the third word, but he felt a chill that had nothing to do with cold and snow. “Carteret?”
The two men looked at each other.
“We have a problem,” Pierre said quietly. “It’s a big one.”
CHAPTER 35
Jack swore so fluently that the mail clerk told him to leave. He banged the door behind him for good measure but felt only embarrassment, followed by a fierce anger he had not felt in years.
“That old scoundrel!” he said, looking at the telegram again to see if the words had changed. “How could he do this to Lily?”
Without a word, he crossed the street again to the depot. Vivian looked up from the book she was reading, and the cook glowered at him. He rapped his hand on the counter and the clerk returned to the window.
“Did you sell a ticket to Cheyenne to Clarence Carteret last week?” Jack demanded. “A tall, thin, Englishman? Works at the Bar Dot?”
“I did. It was the day of the blizzard and by the eternal, it was snowing so hard.”
“The train made it to Cheyenne?”
The clerk laughed. “Eventually! That four-hour trip took two days.”
Two extra days was still plenty of time for Clarence Carteret to hand the money over to the consortium secretary. Jack looked at the telegram again. How could the man do this? And how in the world could he, Jack Sinclair, tell Lily?
“Did he say anything, you know, anything to you?”
“Besides just the business of a ticket?” the clerk asked. “I remember that he looked at the ticket, chuckled, and told me that come spring, he’d be heading to San Francisco.”
“That was it?”
“Yes, indeedy. The depot was filling up with folks doing their dead-level best to get out of Wisner, but I remember that. Anything else, Jack?”
“No, nothing,” he mumbled. He nodded to Vivian again and shoved the telegram in his pocket.
Pierre stood on the boardwalk, looking at the sky. “Clouds gathering. If you want to stop and see your expensive bull, we’d better ride.”
Jack nodded. He made Pierre wait while he ducked into the emporium for a sack of beans and a quart bottle of lemon juice, which he had Watkins wrap in several layers of cardboard and brown paper. He tied it securely to his saddle and strapped the beans to the riderless horse. Six more skeins of gray yarn took care of the rest of his cash. Pierre crammed them in his saddlebags.
They rode north in silence, both of them watching the gathering clouds. He had grown used to the snowy mounds with cattle underneath, but here and there, the drifts had blown themselves out, shifting the blankets of cruel snow and exposing death on the hoof. How could Clarence do this to Lily? kept echoing through his brain, even as he stared at death all around. He tried to think of some reason that Clarence wouldn’t have deposited the money, and there was only one reason. How could he do this to Lily? he thought, and the words went round and round.
If anything could salvage the day, his reception at the Double J did not fail him. Grim and silent, he rode toward Manuel’s cabin, where no chimney smoke wound its way toward the clouds. They dismounted at the cabin and he knocked, then opened the door. Nothing. He was past cursing, so he walked from one wallpapered room to the next and stopped in surprise.
The bedding was nowhere in sight. He looked into the lean-to kitchen, two weeks ago cluttered with dishes and sacks of food, enough to last a careful man all winter. It was bare.
“I can’t take it,” he said out loud, heartsick. He couldn’t remember a day this bad since the surrender.
He went outside, dreading one more minute on his property. Pierre was already sauntering toward the barn, a low-slung af
fair ideal for his bull and girlfriends. Jack had planned to enlarge it next year, but what was the use now? Maybe Manuel was a scoundrel too, and Bismarck was gone.
Pierre stood just inside the small door next to the closed barn doors. He waved Jack closer, but there was nothing urgent in the motion. Of course, it wasn’t Pierre’s bull missing or dead, was it?
“Jefe, jefe, calm yourself! I decided to move.”
Manuel’s cheerful voice greeted Jack as he ducked through the low door. Only a month ago they had knocked together a roomy stall for Bismarck and company. Manuel had moved himself into a smaller stall and roofed the little enclosure with wood from a farther enclosure. Jack stooped to look inside to see bedding, a chair and table, sacks of beans, and all those onions in the corner.
In a rocking chair, Manuel sat close to Bismarck’s pen, knitting. He had found a square iron stove from somewhere and there it sat, giving off plenty of heat. Jack just shook his head, amazed at the resourcefulness of one old man.
“Uh, where did you get the stove? And how in thunder did you move it here?”
Manuel stuck his knitting needles through the ball of yarn. Clever man, his knitting covered his legs. He gestured over his shoulder. “It was there in the corner. I hitched up Bismarck. He is kind to me.”
Jack stared in amazement, picturing the stately progress from one end of the barn to the other. He doubted Bismarck even broke a sweat. “He’s your friend,” he told Manuel. “I don’t have to tell you to be extremely careful with fire in here.”
“No, you don’t, señor, but I understand why you do,” Manuel said. “Bismarck cost you very dear.”
“It’s more than that,” Jack replied, shy to say it, but so grateful that one thing had gone right today. “You’re my friend too. If it comes down to life or death, I value your life more.”
Manuel gave a philosophical shrug. “If the wood gives out, I have lots of straw to burn. We will outlast winter, and you will have calves. Adios now. There will be snow tonight.” He looked down at his knitting. “And I have work to do.”
“I may have trouble returning, if the snow is too deep and it is cold,” Jack said, reluctant to leave. Everything he wanted was here in this barn. Well, almost everything.
“I have never minded solitude, señor,” Manuel said gently. “Think of the years I herded sheep.” He looked around at the barn and the cattle, contentment on his face. “This is enough.”
The snow came sooner than nightfall, but there were no blizzard winds. They rode silently, each man to his thoughts, with the Indian’s probably more productive, no matter what he was thinking. How in the world do I tell her warred with If I see you, Clarence Carteret, I will murder you.
By the time they reached the schoolhouse, that first landmark of the Bar Dot, darkness had fallen and the snow was beginning to drift.
“You going to Buxton first?” Pierre asked.
“He’ll keep. I’m going to talk to Lily.”
“I wish you had good news.”
“So do I. D’you know, I was becoming genuinely fond of Clarence Carteret.”
He curried Sunny Boy in silence, then turned the tired horse into a stall and added more hay than he probably should have, considering. One hand on the rope, he walked behind Pierre, who branched off to the cookshack. Jack could just make out a light on in his old quarters. Hand still on the rope, he drew frigid air into his lungs and patted his pocket with the telegram.
Lily opened the door with a smile. “We were starting to worry about you. Come in,” she said.
He looked around the front room, now the school, with the winter count, maps a little worse for wear from their trip from the old school to the new one, and the table and bench that took up most of the space. He could see beyond the room into his bedroom. He wondered if she made the bed every day. She had hung her precious pictures in there. On the small table by the bed was a photo of her father. It took all his willpower not to rush in there and throw the thing into the snow.
He sat at the table moved from the cookshack, noting that someone had drawn lines to separate each student’s area. They had created a classroom, a little refuge from what he knew with vast uneasiness was going to be a tough winter. All was orderly and calm. He felt his shoulders relax.
“We are careful about our space,” Lily said. “It might matter a great deal when we are snowed in.”
She spoke with calm practicality, her words so precise. He loved the sound of Lily.
“It might come to that,” he said, at a loss of where to begin.
He hesitated, heartsick at what he had to do, when all he wanted to do was sit with her in his old house and pretend they shared it—as simple as that. He could imagine that he lived there again, and he didn’t have to leave once he had delivered his fearsome message. He could comfort her and share the misery, not leaving her to stare down the long, solitary corridors of her disappointed hopes.
He pulled out the telegram, watching her eyes as he pushed it toward her as she sat across the table from him. She picked it up, read it, and gasped. He kept his eyes on her face, but she refused to look at him. He didn’t even hear her breathing; maybe she wasn’t.
“Lily,” he said, mainly to start her drawing breath again.
She still did not look up. “I am so ashamed,” she said finally. She put her arms on the table and rested her head on them, a woman mortified and stunned by such betrayal. He almost wished Clarence had begun no reformation, because Lily would be in less pain right now. He hesitated only a moment, then rested his hand on her head. He felt her shake.
“What will Mr. Buxton do?” she whispered. “Tell me truly.”
Keeping his hand on her head, wishing the space between them was smaller, he said, “He will order you off the place.”
“I have nowhere to go, and little money to do it with.”
“You asked me what he would do, and that’s it. But I will remind him that you are teaching his only child, and you are desperately needed.”
“He won’t care.”
“No, he won’t, but Mrs. Buxton will, and she has the power to make him miserable.”
Lily looked up at that. She sat up. “Do you approach her, or I?”
“Both of us.”
She gave a little sigh at his words, and he felt in his bones how desperately tired she was of trying to bend events in her life by herself. Maybe he was tired of it too. He reached across the table and took her head in both of his hands.
“We’ll do this together.”
“When?”
“Now.”
CHAPTER 36
Jack waited in the front room while Lily pulled on the extra long johns and wool socks that Preacher had left for her. She had less trouble buttoning her dress over all the excess underwear than she expected, which told her she was losing weight. The worst of the winter still loomed ahead, and Madeleine had already put them on shorter rations, probably at the foreman’s suggestion.
Lily tried to think of anything except her father, but all she could think of was the man who had left last week, smiling and happy, the man who had deserted her over and over again. This was the last time, she vowed to herself as she stood there, hands clenched.
She covered her mouth, but her anguish came out anyway, half a sob and half a cry of fury.
“Lily?” Jack asked on the other side of the closed door. “Lily?”
She took several deep breaths, determined not to be a further burden to an already overburdened man. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
Drat the man. Why couldn’t he be superficial like her uncle? If she had told Uncle Niles she was fine, he would have searched no deeper because it was the answer he sought. She yanked open the door.
“Actually, I have seldom been worse,” she said, wiping angrily at traitor tears she hated to feel, because they showed how thoroughly Clarence Carteret had rummaged through every hope she possessed. Her voice softened. There was no need to disturb this kind man
only trying to help. “Really, Jack, I’ll get over this. I have before.”
He nodded, troubled because she was troubled, which touched her heart down to its dusty center. He held out his hand and she put her hand in his, craving nothing more than a touch that told her she was not alone.
He managed a smile, the philosophical kind. “You have a long winter ahead to decide what you will do, come spring.”
“Provided Mr. Buxton doesn’t turn me out in fifteen minutes.”
“Let’s find out.”
Snow pelted them as they slipped and slid from building to building, guided by the ropes the men had strung earlier. Deep twilight had come and gone, leaving an eerie light created by falling snow. She tugged on Jack’s hand, and he obliged her by slowing down and inclining his head toward hers.
“Do you know, I really enjoyed that very first snowfall,” she said. “It was a novelty to me.”
He laughed and clapped an arm around her shoulder.
He had to tug her up the two steps to the Buxtons’ porch. Fothering may not have been a real English butler, but he held the door open before Jack even knocked.
“We need to see the Big Boss,” Jack said.
Fothering looked from one to the other. “What has happened?”
“How . . . how do you know anything is wrong?” Lily asked.
“My dear delightful Lily, no one goes outside in this weather. Tell me, please.”
Jack showed him the telegram. Fothering’s eyes narrowed. “Lily, you can do better than this father.”
“I know, but this is my dilemma,” she said.
“Our dilemma,” Fothering corrected. Ever proper, he turned to Jack. “You already have a plan, don’t you?”
“Not much of one,” Jack admitted. “I’ll take any suggestions.”
“Something will come to me,” Fothering assured him. Then he bowed and went his serene way to find Mr. Buxton.