“Fifty-three, but who’s counting,” Luke said. Wearily, he leaned back against a tree trunk and closed his eyes. Puffing his cheeks, he let out a long, slow exhale. His shirt was soaked with sweat.
“How long’s it been since you done this?” Scully asked, talking around a mouthful of beans.
“Not long enough,” his boss said, not opening his eyes.
It had been a long time since he’d had to rope and brand like this himself. On a big spread like Stuart’s, it wasn’t required. He’d been the boss. But at one time or another in his life, he’d done everything there was to do on a ranch – from line riding to cooking to trail-bossing. He knew cattle like he knew his own name.
But at that moment, tired and sore, Luke wondered if maybe he’d left Stuart’s too soon. Over the years he’d saved almost enough to buy a small ranch. It was what he’d always dreamed about – a place of his own, the kind of cows he’d have. And no more wild longhorns. He intended to crossbreed with those white-faced Herefords from Kentucky, a hornless breed. He’d had enough horns to last him a lifetime.
He lay back, cocked his boot up on his knee, and tipped his hat down over his nose.
Build my own house, too, a small place to start.
Funny, whenever he’d imagined it before, the house had always been empty. But now it took no effort at all to slip one cat-eyed redhead and a bunch of babies into that dream. The problem was keeping her out of it.
Easy enough to say when she wasn’t around. It was when she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him that his mind shut down. Until now, he’d never felt a need for a permanent relationship. Caught in any girl’s net, he’d have been miserable. Just the thought of settling down in one place with one woman and raising a family had always turned his insides to jelly. But he’d almost asked Emily to marry him that night on the mountain, and he knew it. And he’d come close again last night when they went for a walk.
A long time ago he’d learned to recognize the marrying look in a girl’s eyes. Because he could, he’d always managed to stay two long jumps ahead of the preacher and broke it off before anyone got hurt. Emily didn’t have that look. So how come he was waiting for the net to settle around his shoulders? How come he wasn’t running this time?
Because she’d brought something into his life, filled a hollow place inside him that he didn’t know was there. And she was on his mind all the time, there when he went to sleep, there when he woke up.
Dear Lord, I hope you know what I’m doing, because I sure don’t.
He pushed Emily from his mind and sat up. Luke regarded New Hope’s crew, mentally sizing them up. Today was the first chance he’d had to see them work. They did all right, he thought proudly. Old Jeb Simson, his face windburned and tough as rawhide, might limp a little when he walked, the result of a horse falling on him a few years before, but he had cow sense and was wily as they came. Henry Bertel and Will Brown, both his own age, came up from Texas on a cattle drive a few years before and never went back.
The last two were a pair of ropy, towheaded brothers named Cosgrove from over near Billings. Of the two, he liked John better. Young Tom Cosgrove talked too much. The big bony Swede was always singing under his breath or squirming in the saddle. Can’t keep his backside still for ten minutes, Luke thought. Just a kid really, a year older than Emily.
The six of them had worked like twelve that morning, and every one of them was tired, himself included. Tom Cosgrove and Henry Bertel were stretched in the shade of a tree, napping. The others were sitting around the fire. Jeb, closest to it, had his stiff knee bent awkwardly and was trying to roll a smoke. Luke watched Jeb fumble the drawstring closed on the small tobacco pouch. He dropped it. Tobacco scattered across his legs.
Luke frowned. Not a good sign. Jeb was branding. A man could get hurt when he got that tired.
“Let’s call it quits. We’ve done enough today,” Luke said.
The instant relief he saw in their faces told him he’d done the right thing. They were all tired. “Better get your appetites back,” Luke said. “The ladies in the kitchen were peeling apples when we rode out this morning. I’ll bet we get pie tonight.”
“Especially if the boss put in a special request before we left, which he did,” Jeb Simson said. “I heard you myself. You know something, Luke? You got those ladies eatin’ out of your hand, Miss Molly included. How you do that?”
“Practice, Jeb. Just practice.” Luke laughed. “Miss Molly’s like a mama to me.”
Lying on his back, Tom Cosgrove chuckled, his voice muffled by the hat over his face. “Bet Miss Emily ain’t like a mama to you though, is she?”
Luke rocked to his feet, his face heating. “Watch your mouth, kid!” Fists balled, he stood over Tom. “Get up and let’s go.” His voice was like a blast from the arctic.
Luke rode on ahead, alone. What’s wrong with me? Tom was only teasing, yet Luke knew he’d come dangerously close to punching the kid out. One of these days the boy might make a good cowhand, if the little snot ever learned to keep his mouth shut.
When Luke was safely out of earshot, Tom turned to Scully. “I didn’t mean nothing. What’d I say to make him so mad?”
“Not a thing, boy. Not a thing. The man’s in love.”
Scully studied the man on the gray horse riding up ahead. For someone as worried as Luke was about missing cattle, he’d seemed mighty cheerful all morning. Scully wondered if all that whistling and happiness had anything to do with the walk he’d seen Luke and Emily take last night. For the first time, Luke had his arm all comfortable around her waist, as if he didn’t care who saw.
Scully kept his head down and hid a smile from Tom. “Right now he’s like a bull that ain’t been branded before. Most likely, he’s trying to sort out his own feelings about the little lady.”
“You mean he ain’t made up his mind yet?”
Scully’s weather-beaten face crinkled around the eyes. “Oh, I reckon he’s done that all right,” he said, chuckling. “He just don’t like it none. I got a feeling that young bull’s trotting himself over to the fire right now, and he knows it.”
A sly grin stole across Tom’s face. “Well, he better get a move on, ’cause I just might ask Miss Emily to go for a walk with me after supper tonight.”
“Then you ain’t got a lick of sense,” Scully said softly. He pointed to the man in the black leather jacket sitting stiffly on his horse ahead of them. “That’s your boss up there, boy. He’s twice your size, can ride anything with hair on it, and handles a gun like no man I’ve ever seen. What happened back there ain’t like him. He don’t get mad easy, but right now I’d say you got him riled right down to his saddle. If I was you, I’d back off till you see which way the wind blows.”
Tom studied the back of Luke’s jacket for a minute, then looked at Scully and shrugged. “I like her, too. She sure is pretty.”
Scully snorted. “So’s heaven, I hear. Get between him and his lady, I reckon you might find out.”
Emily selected a dark green skirt with side pockets from a rack and took it over to Bobbins’s main window. She held it up to the light and examined it. It had to do for a day and a half on the train.
Just right.
Molly wanted something to wear on the trip tomorrow that wouldn’t wrinkle too much or show the dirt.
Emily walked back to the rack and flipped through the garments hanging there until she found a large-size pale green sweater to go with the skirt.
“Miss McCarthy, you find what you’re looking for?” Mr. Bobbins called from the back of the store.
“Yes, thank you.”
“I’ve got the perfect hat to go with that,” he said.
She smiled across the rack of sweaters. Repton, Montana, was a thousand miles from nowhere and yet Bobbins knew merchandising and sales appeal. Like the big department stores in Chicago, he displayed his clothes on hangers. The other merchants in town still stacked garments in piles on tables.
The bell on the
front door jangled, and Luke came in. He’d used the telephone at the express office.
With Molly’s new outfit over her arm, Emily hurried to him. “How’s her brother? What’d the doctor say?”
“He’s going to be fine. Says he’s in some pain, but that’s common with broken bones. He agrees with you and Molly. Thinks it’s a good idea for her to go stay with him until he’s off the crutches.”
“And you don’t?”
Luke took the skirt and sweater from her and handed them to Bobbins to ring up. “Until Molly gets back, you’ll have to run New Hope by yourself. It’s a lot on you.”
“Not a problem.”
Emily forced a confident smile on her face, hiding how she really felt. Twenty-four kids. Could she do it?
She had to. It was a family emergency for Molly.
She’d answered the front door at New Hope yesterday, and the Western Union man from Repton had handed her a telegram from Molly’s brother. The Reverend Eli Ebenezer of Dickinson, North Dakota, had been in a stagecoach accident. The coach he was riding in plunged down a ravine and overturned. Eli, who’d been on his way to New Hope to visit Molly, now had a broken arm and a broken leg.
“She has no choice,” Emily said quietly to Luke. “He’s all the family she has. But I admit I hate to see her go. She’s the disciplinarian, not me.”
“Let’s hire someone to help you,” Luke said.
Emily shook her head. “Our budget’s not big enough as it is. Money’s tight, and the board will deduct anything else from our allowance. It’ll only be a month. We’ll be all right.”
But what if they weren’t all right? she wondered the next morning on the porch, watching as Luke drove Molly down the lane for Repton and the stage to Billings, where she’d take the afternoon train to Dickinson. Molly waved good-bye again to Emily and the collected children, and the buggy turned onto the main road.
Emily let out a sigh. That morning her insides felt squeezed and jumpy. She could feel herself trembling inside.
Dear Lord, help me.
Just the thought that she wouldn’t be able to run both the school and the orphanage made her stomach hurt. Molly, bless her heart, had been so calm about it.
“You love children, and it shows,” she’d said.
“But they were all girls, all second or third graders. I haven’t had much experience with older kids,” Emily replied, omitting that she had no experience at all with boys, old or young.
And two of the boys at New Hope were taller than her.
Thirteen-year-old Pete Brewster herded all the boys together in the hall before their morning history class.
“We got orders,” he muttered, and repeated Luke’s lecture to him earlier, a combination of threats and bribes to guarantee good behavior for Miz McCarthy.
A wide-eyed fifth grader interrupted. “That’s for girls. I ain’t gonna take no sewing class.”
“You cause any trouble, we both do. You, for causing it – me, for not stopping you,” Pete said. “And I guarantee you’ll be sorry.” None too gently, he shoved the boy into the classroom ahead of him and flopped down beside him on the bench.
Chalk in hand, Emily turned around from the blackboard where she’d sketched a picture of an animal with a row of pointed plates along its back.
“Let’s start today’s lesson on prehistoric animals by comparing it with something we already know. Teddy, did you bring your tortoise today?”
Later that morning, when the horses were inside the barn, Emily led the students up to the pastures behind. They tramped over several acres, looking for dinosaur eggs in the grass and under every bush. With a straight face she told them a discovery like that was most unlikely. In class she’d told them about a Chicago scientist who’d recently discovered dinosaur fossils in nearby Dakota Territory. Right then her students clamored to look behind New Hope.
They found only arrowheads, which Two Leggings and Red Cloud assured them, importantly, were not made by the Crow.
An hour later she led them back down the hill to the house. Walking toward them were four men she recognized, members of New Hope’s Board of Directors.
“And what are you kids out digging for?” John Armstrong, the newspaper editor, gestured to the spoons and trowels the children carried.
“Dinosaur eggs,” croaked Teddy.
Armstrong laughed and said, “That’s great. How many did you find?”
Emily filled them in on the morning’s fruitless search. “Only arrowheads and a few rocks in that pasture, nothing more.”
“No dinosaurs here, I’m afraid,” Mr. Bobbins added.
“But they used to be next door in North Dakota and just possibly were in Montana,” Emily said, aware of the disappointed faces on the children. “There was an article in the Chicago paper last week about recent discoveries. We’re reading up on them.”
She turned to the children. “Run along so the grown-ups can talk,” she said, and shooed them around to the back of New Hope to go in through the washroom.
“Let’s go inside and sit down. I’m sorry we weren’t here when you first came. What can I help you with?” she asked.
The editor spoke up first. “We were concerned with your having to run the classes by yourself and wondered if you needed anything, if we could help.”
“Besides dinosaur hunting, what classes have they had today, Miss McCarthy?” Bernard Stanton, the local banker cut in, his tone implying she was neglecting their education.
Emily gazed at him a moment and decided she didn’t like the man.
“Reading and arithmetic before the egg hunt,” she said, and smiled. “After lunch we’ll do geography and English, if we can squeeze it in. Today is art class, and sometimes English comes in second to art and music.”
Stanton cleared his throat and stepped forward. “The dinosaur hunt was ridiculous, if you don’t mind my opinion. English is important, my dear. I insist you shelve the art and music and teach them about the world they live in.”
Emily weighed her answer before she spoke. “I agree E nglish is important, but so is art and music. We’ll fit it all in.”
He pulled a paper from his pocket. “And this request of yours for free tickets to the Repton Music Festival next month is over the line. As long as I’ve been here, no one ever asked for that before.”
“Repton never had a music festival before, Bernard,” Mr. Bobbins said quietly.
Mr. Bolton, one of the ranchers who used the same range that New Hope did, smiled to the others and said, “I’m glad we stopped out. Miss McCarthy has everything under control.” He paused. “How many tickets do you need?”
Emily swallowed. “We have twenty-four children, if I can bring them all.”
“Twenty-four it is. You’ll have them. Plan on it.”
CHAPTER
17
Scully said it was a bad omen.
High overhead a red-tailed hawk screamed, hunting its breakfast. It wheeled and soared in the updrafts in the early morning sunlight, then dived and sped a foot above the ground. Legs outstretched, it struck. Powerful wingbeats climbed for altitude, a small rabbit clenched in its talons.
Scully reached back and slipped his rifle from the scabbard.
Luke followed the bird with his eyes. It had carried its prey to ground and was now feeding a short distance away.
“Ah, don’t shoot him, Scully,” he said softly. “It’s not an omen, good or bad. It’s just nature for both of them.”
Every morning he and the New Hope crew were out by seven, cutting calves and branding. Another couple of days and they’d be finished. Everything should ease up a little then. Maybe things would go right after all.
Axel had taken the closing of the rangeland with a strange silence. He hadn’t said a word to him, just sent a crew in the next day and turned his cattle back.
Luke wondered if Sam Tucker had something to do with that. On the way back from Billings, Luke had stopped by the sheriff ’s office. Stuart had come inside w
ith him and introduced himself as a friend and former employer.
Tucker had listened, growing increasingly quiet as Luke recounted Jupiter’s murder and described the gunman.
“Lots of men ride spotted horses around here, Mr. Sullivan,” Tucker had said. “You could be wrong about it being Haldane.”
“I don’t think so. He never took his hat off, but I’m sure it was Haldane.”
“Well, I’m going out there tomorrow to talk to Mr. Axel about something else. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Luke reined in and pulled Bugle up. Sitting astride the big gray, he watched the cows, his brain clicking along, making mental tallies of each group, filing it away in some side pocket of his mind to be pulled out and added in with the others later.
At first he thought the herd had just scattered more than usual, that the roundup had made them jittery, and they spread out. But by midmorning, the vague perception that something wasn’t quite right had jelled into the solid conviction something was quite wrong.
On the surface, things seemed little different from the day before: the heaving brown backs in front of him, the clouds of dust rising as Henry Bertel and Tom Cosgrove moved deeper into the herd. The weather was the same – clear and sunny and not a sign of rain in the sky – a twin of the day before, and the day before that.
Numbers flashed in his head again. They didn’t add up. The herd was smaller. He was sure of it. Fifty or sixty fewer, he guessed, maybe close to a hundred. Exact figures were hard to come by in a herd that size. Twenty head would never be missed. But fifty? Maybe. If you had good eyes.
He rode back to the branding area and slid down. Hand curled around the saddle horn, he waited until Scully and Tom Cosgrove straightened up over a calf. The young heifer scampered back to her mother, mooing at them from the edge of the herd. Luke stepped over to the fire.
Scully looked up. “Something wrong, boss?”
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