by Janet Dailey
Straightening, Quint swung a leg over the stall partition, straddling it to face Logan. He wore a look of concentration as he studied Logan’s hair, eyes, and face. The silence stretched into seconds before he finally tipped his head to one side and asked, “Where have you been?”
Of all the questions Cat had thought he might ask, this one was unexpected. There was a quality in it of a child searching for a lost parent and finally finding him. It moved her and confirmed the need for Quint to be united with his father.
“I was working for the government a long way from here,” Logan replied.
Quint digested that information, then asked, “Were you a sheriff then, too?”
“I was a kind of sheriff, yes.”
“Did Mom know where you were?”
“No, I didn’t tell her.”
“’Cause it was dangerous?” he asked in a half-hopeful voice.
“It could have been,” Logan conceded. “After I came here, the first time I saw you, I thought your uncle Ty was your daddy. Then I talked to your mother and she set me straight.”
“Are you going to leave again?”
“No, I’m here for good.”
“Does that mean you’re going to live with us?”
Logan nodded. “After your mother and I get married.”
Quint turned to Cat. “When will that be?”
“In a couple of days.”
“Oh.” A rustling of straw distracted him. Quint turned to watch the colt’s uncoordinated attempt to explore its new surroundings. The mare nickered to it, summoning it back to her side. “What does a dad do?”
“What do you and your mom do together?” Logan countered.
His slender shoulders lifted in a high shrug. “Sometimes we go riding. When it’s warm enough, we go swimming in the river. And we go to the cemetery a lot.”
Logan’s glance flicked to Cat. There was a heat in it that burned. But his voice was remarkably calm and level when he asked, with seemingly casual interest, “What do you do at the cemetery?”
“We visit my grandma’s grave and Repp’s, sometimes Nana Ruth’s, too. Sometimes we put flowers on them, and sometimes we just look,” Quint replied, then frowned curiously. “My mom loved Repp. Does she love you?”
“Honestly, Quint.” Cat managed a stilted laugh, an uncomfortable warmth staining her cheeks. “I have never known you to ask so many questions. As for me loving Logan, I will love your father forever for giving me you.” She thought she had dodged Quint’s question quite handily while still being truthful. “I think that’s enough for a while. Molly’s out in the corral. I’ll bet your dad would like to see your horse.”
Quint shook his head. “He’s already seen her. We rode Molly together.” He unstraddled the board and jumped to the concrete alleyway. “I’d rather go down to the river. Uncle Ty takes me fishing sometimes. He says fly-fishing is an art.”
“Your uncle is right.” Logan strolled along with him when Quint moved toward the sunshine that streamed through the open barn door. Cat was slow to follow, but neither appeared to notice. Being ignored was a new experience for her, one she didn’t particularly like.
Quint released a long sigh. “I’m not very good at fly-fishing.”
“I’ve heard it takes a lot of practice.”
“Can you fly-fish?”
“About as well as you can:”
“It must take a lot of practice,” Quint concluded as they passed into the bright light of afternoon. He walked a few paces, absorbed in his own thoughts. At last, he tipped his head back. “If you’re my dad, how come we don’t have the same name?”
“Because your mother and I weren’t married when you were born,” Logan explained. “After the wedding, we’ll have yours legally changed to Quint Echohawk.”
“Echohawk,” Quint repeated. “That sounds like an Indian name. Are you an Indian?”
“My mother was half-Sioux.”
“Does that mean I’m an Indian?”
“You’re part Sioux.”
“Do you live in a tepee?” Quint’s eyes got big at the thought.
“I’m afraid not.” A wry smile slanted Logan’s mouth. “I live in a house the same as you do.”
“That’s too bad.” Quint kicked at a rock. “I think I would like living in a tepee.”
The remark was nothing more than a little boy’s idle fantasy. Cat knew that, yet it hurt to see how quickly he embraced the things from Logan’s world.
Convincing herself that the two of them needed time alone to get acquainted, she angled toward the house. “You guys have fun,” she called. “I’ll see you later.”
Quint stopped, staring at her with a stricken look. “Aren’t you coming with us to the river, Mom?”
“No, I thought I’d help Jessy with the dinner dishes.”
“But we want you to come with us,” Quint protested in a half-fretful tone.
“Yes, we’d both like you to come,” Logan added his voice to the request.
Cat resisted their appeal with a smile and a small lift of her chin. “You don’t need me along.”
A quicksilver gleam of amusement glittered in Logan’s eyes. “I think we may have ignored your mother, Quint,” he said in a low aside to him. “Women don’t like to be ignored.”
“It isn’t that at all,” Cat insisted, flushing at his infuriatingly astute observation. “I just don’t happen to be dressed for the river.” She touched the white slacks she wore, using them as an excuse.
“We won’t go where it’s muddy, Mom.”
“We forgot to use the magic word, Quint,” Logan said. “Please will you come with us?”
“Yes, please, Mom.”
Quint’s heartfelt pleas were more than she could ignore. “All right, if it’s that important to you, I’ll come.”
All smiles, Quint grabbed her hand and kept a tight hold on it all the way to the sloping bank of the river. They paused on the high side of the slope, shaded by the patulous branches of a towering cottonwood tree. Overhead, saw-toothed leaves clattered together, stirred by a soft wind.
“Is this where you swim?” Logan asked.
Quint responded with a vigorous nod. “And sometimes we just wade. It feels good when it’s hot, doesn’t it, Mom?”
“It sure does, but the water is a little cool now.”
“It’ll feel good when summer comes, though.” Logan stood in a relaxed stance, one knee bent and his thumbs hooked in the back pockets of his jeans.
“And when you look over there,” Quint pointed across the river, “all that as far as you can see, and even farther, belongs to my grandpa. It’s been Calder land for years and years and years.”
“That’s a long time,” Logan acknowledged. “But don’t forget, your Sioux ancestors roamed this land long before the first Calder ever set foot on it.”
“They did?”
“That’s right. The Sioux as well as the Crow and Blackfoot people, along with some Arapaho and Cheyenne.”
“Gosh,” Quint murmured, plainly impressed. He asked more questions, a child’s kind, about feathered warbonnets, moccasins, and tom-toms.
All the stories Cat had told him about the long cattle drives, the stampedes, and wild prairie fires paled against the colorful and exotic images of war paint and buffalo hunts. She thought of the life she had worked so hard to build for him. Then Logan came along, sharp and lethal as an arrow from a bow, and changed it. Possibly forever.
“Mom, can I go down by the water and look for more rocks?” Quint asked, then explained to Logan, “Sometimes you find some really neat rocks here. I got a whole collection of them.”
“You’ll have to show them to me sometime,” he replied.
“Okay. Can I, Mom?”
“May I,” she said, automatically correcting his grammar. “Go ahead, but just be careful so you don’t fall in.”
“I can swim,” he countered in mild exasperation.
“You can’t if you hit your head and knock yourself out.”
&
nbsp; He turned to Logan and lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. “Mom worries a lot.”
“Your mother is a wise woman,” Logan said, but Quint gave no indication that he heard him as he scrambled down the slope. “He’s quite a boy, Cat.” Logan’s glance went to her, his eyes warm with approval. “You’ve done a good job of raising him.”
She was pleased by his compliment, and the discovery annoyed her. “I suppose I should regard that as high praise, considering how selfish and spoiled you think I am.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You left out proud and pigheaded.”
“My mistake.”
He let out a sigh, his head turning toward the river. “No, it’s mine. I thought we had come to a truce. I should have known better.”
Stung to find herself in the wrong, Cat said in her own defense, “None of this is easy for me, Logan.”
“Do you think it’s any easier for me?”
“Probably not,” she conceded with great reluctance, well aware there was danger in caring about his feelings, in fulfilling his needs and wants.
Somewhere among the masking trunks of the tree-lined river bank, there was the idle stomp of a hoof, followed by a rolling, outblown breath. Logan swung in the direction of it.
At the water’s edge, Quint heard it, too, and looked up, raised a hand in a saluting wave. “Hi, Uncle Culley,” he said and immediately went back to his rock collecting.
Culley walked his horse from among the trees, slouching in the saddle, his hat pulled low on his forehead. Beneath the brim, his glance snaked from Cat to Logan and back. He reined in near her, hesitated a moment, then swung out of the saddle, his legs bowing a little when he stepped to the ground.
“Afternoon, O’Rourke.” Logan nodded to him, his eyes studying him in a watchful way.
Culley nodded back, then centered on Cat. “You okay?”
The simple concern in his eyes made it easy for her to smile. “I’m fine.”
His glance skipped to Quint, then over to Logan. “I guess he knows.”
“Yes.” Cat glanced at Logan and missed the glimmer of satisfaction that showed so briefly in Culley’s expression. Logan didn’t.
“What happens now?” Culley fiddled with the reins, sliding them back and forth between his fingers.
“We’re getting married as soon as it can be arranged.” Saying the words brought back the clutching of her stomach and the swift rush of nerves. She had been railroaded into this agreement, both by her father and by Logan. She could fight it, even now. But she had given her word, and a Calder didn’t give his word, then try to back out of it. Honor bound her to the agreement she had made, no matter how much she regretted it. But that didn’t mean she had to pretend to like it.
“Are you okay with that?” Culley eyed her with a sidelong look.
“I agreed to it.”
Culley dipped his head. “I guess it’s all but done, then.”
“Yes.”
“Hey, Mom!” Quint shouted, waving a hand to summon her. “Come look at this.”
Logan watched as Cat made her way down the sloping bank to Quint’s side. There was something half-angry and half-possessive in the way he looked at her, Culley noted. It was the look of a man seeing a desirable woman and resisting the lusting urges rising up in him. It worried Culley a little.
“I guess she and the kid will be livin’ with you now,” Culley ventured.
Logan’s glance jerked to Culley, his expression once again wearing that cool, impartial look of a cop. “After the wedding, they will.”
Culley’s gaze bored into him, green and icy hot. “She’s been hurt a lot in this life. I’d like to think she’ll be safe with you.”
Logan had the distinct impression that if she wasn’t, he’d find himself coming to blows with the old man. “She’ll be safe.”
“She better be.” It was a warning, clear and simple. “She’s all I got left in this world.” Drawing the reins up, he turned to his horse and looped them over its neck.
“We’ll see you at the wedding,” Logan said.
Culley threw a look at The Homestead and gave what passed for a shrug, then slipped a toe into the stirrup and stepped into the saddle, without a single creak of rubbing leather. The horse instantly moved out at a soft-footed walk.
NINETEEN
The guineas set up a racket when the pickup came rattling up the rutted and weed-choked lane. Pulling into the ranch yard of the old Simpson place, Rollie swung the wheel toward the house trailer, his face grimy and streaked with black coal dust from his day’s work in the strip mine. In his idle sweep of the yard, his glance briefly touched on the wiry, thin figure of his mother, coming from the direction of the old barn, the vegetable basket under her arm mounded with fresh lettuce.
“You’re late.” The sharpness of her voice turned the observation into a criticism when he climbed out of the truck.
“I had to stop for gas.” Rollie gave his ponytail a quick flip, lifting it off his sweaty neck and letting it fall back, a gesture of his discomfort with her reproach.
“Fedderson got his new pumps installed, did he?” She continued toward the trailer.
Rollie nodded. “They finished hooking them up early this afternoon. Nearly every vehicle in town was there waiting to get gassed up.” He looked around. “Where’s Lath?”
“He’s been messing around all day fixing up that old root cellar. I expect he’s still at it,” she said. “Leastways, come canning time, I’ll have a place to store all our vegetables.”
The root cellar was more like a cave that had been dug out of the hillside. The instant Emma had learned of its existence, she had insisted that the house trailer be positioned near it.
“I hope he shored up that one beam.” Rollie glanced toward the cellar’s entrance, its framework slanted to match the slope of the hill. Its warped and weathered wooden door lay open at a crooked angle, a visible reminder that it needed new hinges as well as boards. “I heard a bunch of hammering earlier, so I expect he has. I wouldn’t worry about Lath. He knows what he’s doing.” Something in her voice insinuated that Rollie didn’t.
Rollie smothered the flare of resentment and bowed his head, accepting that he would never be equal to his brother in her eyes.
“Hey, Rollie!” Lath waved to him from the cellar’s tunnellike opening. “Come take a look at this. Not you, Ma,” he added when she started toward him as well. “This isn’t something you should know-about.”
Without questioning his decision, Emma resumed her course to the trailer steps. His curiosity heightened, Rollie headed for the root cellar as Lath ducked back inside it.
An electric work light hung from one of the overhead beams, and it lit all but the corners of the earthen cellar. Sidestepping the extension cord that ran to it, Rollie walked a few feet inside and stopped in surprise. On all three sides there were nothing but shelves, stacked three high, strung with cobwebs and coated with a decade’s accumulation of dirt.
“Lath?” He turned in a complete circle, his searching glance ransacking every dark corner. But there was no sign of his brother. “Lath, where the hell are you?”
The musty smell of bare earth and stale air pressed in around him. The silence of the place was suddenly eerie. The skin along the back of his neck crawled with it.
“Damn it, Lath,” he swore, angry now. “I don’t know what kind of trick this is—”
“No trick, little brother,” was the muffled reply. “Just a hidden door.”
The short shelving on the back wall moved, one side swinging open. A grinning Lath poked his head out, a flashlight in hand.
“Care to come into my parlor?” he invited. “Watch the corners of those shelves, though. I need to make them narrower.”
Rollie had to squeeze through the opening, made tight by the jutting shelves. On the other side was near-total darkness. The play of Lath’s flashlight beam ran over dirt walls that confined an area of roughly four by five feet.
“I didn�
��t know this was here,” Rollie murmured.
“It wasn’t. I took out the shelving that was in this area, used some of the old boards from the barn to create a false wall, then covered it with part of the old shelves. Clever, huh?”
“It’s clever all right, but what’s it for?”
“I needed someplace to stash the shipment of automatic rifles I’ve got to pick up.”
“Rifles?”
“That’s right, little brother. Rifles.” Lath clamped a hand on his shoulder and steered him toward the narrow doorway. “You don’t think I’ve just been sitting on my hands while you’ve been working all day?”
Crowded by Lath, Rollie pushed his way through the opening, then turned on him. “You aren’t selling guns again, are you?” It was an accusation rather than a question.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking, little brother.” Lath held up his hands in a placating gesture. “But I made the mistake of selling to somebody I didn’t know once. I’m not about to repeat that. I’m buying from a guy I’ve known for years and I’m selling to one I’ve known even longer. Neither one of ’em can afford to turn informant.”
“Just make sure you leave me the hell out of it,” Rollie warned.
“Whatever you say. But I will need you to drive me into Blue Moon tonight. I finally talked that Kershner fella into sellin’ me his van with only three hundred dollars down.”
“Only three hundred dollars? Damn it, Lath, I haven’t got three hundred to spare, not if I’m gonna make the trailer payment on time.”
Lath drew back his head in feigned surprise. “Did I ask you for the money, little brother?”
“You didn’t have to,” Rollie answered in disgust. “You’ve been bumming money off me ever since you came back.”
“And you’re such an easy touch, you keep forkin’ it over.” He grinned and sauntered over to a rusty metal canister sitting by a shelving post on the cellar’s dirt floor. Squatting beside it, he wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his T-shirt, pried off the metal lid, then reached inside and pulled out a thick wad of bills. Rollie’s mouth dropped open when he saw the amount of money still left in the can.
“How much is in there?” he breathed the words.