by Diana Palmer
Luke spurred his mount, something he rarely ever did, and put on a burst of speed, insinuating the horse in front of the boy, who backed away with huge wide eyes and upraised hands.
“Get that thing away from me!” the boy yelled. “Don’t let it kick me!”
The fear in the youth’s face was a surprise. Luke reined in the horse and sat quietly, leaning slightly forward in the saddle to study the nervous youth on the ground.
“What the hell are you doing in my pasture?” Luke demanded in a cold tone.
“Looking…looking for them computer chips,” Kells stammered.
It was the very last thing Luke had expected to hear. He sat hesitating, his mind working furiously.
He wasn’t aware of Belinda’s cry or her headlong rush over the locked gate, so frenzied that she almost ripped a hole in her elegant designer jeans and scarred her boots.
“It’s all right!” Belinda cried, panting as she ran up to join Kells, moving just in front of him. “He wasn’t doing anything to the cattle!”
“Steers,” Kells corrected, feeling a little smug.
Luke looked at him with new interest. “You know something about cattle?” he asked unexpectedly.
“She was teaching me,” he replied, jerking his head toward the small woman in front of him. “About the difference. You know, steers and heifers and such. And about the computer chips under the hides.”
Luke’s hostile expression had faded to curiosity. “She told you about that?”
He nodded. “I wanted to see the chips. I wasn’t going to hurt nothing,” he added with faint belligerence.
Luke actually chuckled. He abruptly rode off toward where the steers were congregating near the fence, lifting his lariat from the saddle horn. He spun a loop and lassoed one of the steers with easy grace, the result of years of long practice, and got down out of the saddle to catch the rope tight. He motioned to Kells.
“That was great!” Kells exclaimed. “That was just great! How you learn to do that, spin that loop and lasso that cow…that steer…so easy?”
Luke grinned. “A lot of practice and a few bruises,” he murmured. He was petting the steer behind its ears, and the animal stood very still and looked content. “Come on, he’s not dangerous. I only run polled cattle here.”
“Polled?” Kells asked, curious.
“Dehorned,” the older man qualified. He searched behind the steer’s neck and felt for a small lump. He found it. “Here.” He caught Kells’s dark hand and smoothed it over the spot. “It’s a computer chip. I resisted this technology for years, but it makes roundup so much easier that I finally gave in. We can keep an animal’s entire herd history on one chip and get the information in seconds with a scanner when we sort the animals for sale.”
“I didn’t think ranchers used it on steers,” Belinda interjected.
“Oh, we don’t usually,” he agreed. “But this lot is an experiment.” He shifted a little self-consciously. “I’ve been reading about some new methods that our local cattlemen’s association is using. Vasectomy, for one.”
“What’s that?” Kells asked.
“Ordinarily, you create a steer by removing what makes him able to reproduce. But by giving the steer a vasectomy,” he explained, “the animal still produces testosterone, which we think is responsible for fast growth. But since the steer is effectively neutered, it tends to be easier to handle. You get a higher weight-gain ratio the same as with bulls, but you get the lean carcass of a steer.”
“Isn’t it expensive to do it that way?” Belinda asked.
He smiled. “Not really. It takes about the same amount of time, and we do it ourselves instead of calling out the veterinarian. But even if it did take more time, we think the benefits outweigh the cost. That’s why we’re experimenting with it. Since the animal gains weight without the use of growth hormones, we save some money there, too.”
“My brother says a lot of consumers are getting scared of those additives, like growth hormones and antibiotics,” Belinda agreed.
“There’s definitely a market for organically grown beef, and at least one cattleman I know of is offering custom-grown lean beef to supermarket chains,” he added. He noted Kells’s light, fascinated touch on the animal’s shoulder.
“Isn’t it hard to kill them?” Kells asked unexpectedly.
“Yes,” Luke replied unexpectedly. “I’m in the cattle business because I like animals, so I get attached to the damned things. They all have personalities. They’re all different. I try not to get too close to the beef cattle, but I’ve got a ton-and-a-half bull who follows me around like a pet dog, and two Holstein milk cows who think they’re cats.”
Kells chuckled. “No fooling? What’s a Holstein?”
“They’re dairy cattle…. Look here, are you really that interested in cattle?”
Kells shrugged and lowered his gaze to the steer. “Never saw cattle before,” he murmured. He glanced shyly at Luke and then away again. “I like them. I didn’t mean to let them get loose. I wanted to see them up close, you know. And after she told me about the computer chips…” He grimaced. “I just wanted to see what it looked like.”
Luke pursed his lips, aware of Belinda’s stillness. “Want to come see the Holsteins?” he asked.
Kells caught his breath. “You fooling?”
Luke shook his head. “Nothing a cattleman likes better than to show off his operation.” He almost laughed aloud at the expression on Belinda’s face.
Kells was fascinated. “Reckon I could see that bull?”
Luke chuckled. “Sure. Why not.”
“Aren’t you scared of that thing?” Kells persisted, moving back from the big black-spotted white horse.
“She’s gentle—a mare,” Luke explained. He frowned. “Why are you afraid of horses?”
“I lived in New York City until this year,” he muttered. “A cop on a horse tried to run me down. It reared up and if I hadn’t moved, it would have pawed me.”
Luke wisely didn’t ask what Kells had done to provoke the man. Still, trying to ride a boy down, for any reason, was reprehensible. “You should have told someone in authority,” he said curtly.
Kells shrugged. “Nobody ever wanted to do anything for me until my mom moved us to Houston a few months ago and I got in trouble for taking a CD player out of a shop. She—” he indicated Belinda “—went to bat for me and got the owner not to press charges. But I got sent to juvy anyway, ’cause I was sixteen then.”
“Juvy?”
“Juvenile hall,” Belinda told him. “Courts are harder on juveniles these days, because there’s so much violence in the inner city.”
“I see.” He didn’t. He studied Kells, who was watching the cattle with such fascination that he was drawn to the boy. All his prejudices about “coddling juvenile delinquents” were going up in smoke. It was easy to be intolerant when you didn’t know the people you were intolerant toward. Kells was giving him an education in gray areas, where before he’d seen only black-and-white.
“When do you want me to bring the guys over?” Belinda asked him.
“No time like the present,” he said. “Load ’em up and come on. Know how to find it?”
“Yes, I’ve seen it from the road,” she replied. She smiled with genuine gratitude. “Thanks.”
He shrugged. “Just being neighborly.” He took the loop from the steer’s neck and coiled the rope, with Kells watching every move. The young man had a quick mind and nimble fingers. Suddenly he had an idea that might bear consideration.
There were six kids from the ghettos of Houston in Belinda’s group, ranging in age from nine to fourteen. Kells was the oldest. The youngest was Julio, a Mexican boy. Two were white and one of the others was black, like Kells. The middle boy, Juanito, was Native American, although he wouldn’t say which tribe. He didn’t talk about himself at all. In fact, he didn’t talk much, period. He was living with an uncle and aunt who didn’t seem to notice what he did, or care. It was the sam
e story with most of the others. That’s why they’d landed themselves in juvenile court and detention centers. They cared as little for themselves as the adults around them did. It was important to Belinda that someone cared about them, built their self-esteem, made them proud of their races and history. She didn’t delude herself that she could change the whole world. But maybe she could change one person.
She drove the boys to Luke’s ranch in the rickety old van she’d bought for the occasion. It was in good mechanical shape, even if it did look like the dark side of the moon. She thought of having it painted, but it seemed a waste of time and money.
As she reached the end of a long, winding graveled road that led off from a paved highway, she noticed Luke was waiting for them. The house was nice, big, white and friendly with a long porch. There was a stable and corral back away from the flower garden that Luke’s sister had kept until her marriage, and there were fenced and cross-fenced pastures reaching all the way to the main road.
Belinda got out of the battered old van and opened the side door so the boys could get out with her. “Remember not to go through any fences, okay?” she cautioned them. “Bulls are dangerous and unpredictable. If you’ve ever watched rodeo, in person or on television, you’ll know that already.”
“Mr. Craig said his bull follows him around,” Kells reminded her.
“So he does. But the bull knows Mr. Craig, doesn’t he?” she replied.
Kells grinned. “I guess so.”
Luke came down the steps to meet them, greeted the boys and led them toward the barn. “This ranch has been in my family for three generations,” he began. “My grandfather started out with longhorn cattle and I ended up with Herefords. Most ranchers have a breed they prefer above others. Cy Parks, who lives across there—” he gestured back toward the space the summer camp occupied “—runs purebred Santa Gertrudis. One of his bulls cost a million dollars.”
Kells eyes widened and then his face fell. “Gosh, I guess you got to be rich to have cattle, huh?”
Luke smiled at him. “Not really. You could start out with a young bull and a few heifers and build a ranch from there. It’s not as expensive as you think.”
The light came back into the youth’s eyes. He looked past Luke to the big Hereford bull in the pasture adjoining the barn and his breath caught. “Oh, Lord, what an animal!”
Luke burst out laughing. “He sounds just like me at his age,” he explained when everybody looked at him. “I thought there was nothing on earth as pretty as a bull.”
“There isn’t,” Kells agreed. He got up on the bottom rung of the high wooden fence and wrapped his arms around the top rung. “Isn’t he great?”
“His name’s Shiloh,” Luke told him. “I raised him from a baby and now he’s mentioned in just about every major cattle journal as a top stud bull. I can’t keep up with the demand for his progeny. There’s even a waiting list.”
“Got any buffalo?” one of the boys asked.
Luke shook his head. “I know of a ranch or two that runs some, but they’re dangerous to keep. They’ll charge at the least provocation and they can go right through a fence.”
“They have buffalo up on the Yellowstone,” Juanito said. “I saw a whole herd when my uncle drove us through the park.”
“I never saw a buffalo,” another boy murmured.
Belinda smiled at her charges. “The whole of the western states used to have herds of them, before white people came along and killed them off.”
“Why’d they do that?” one of the others wanted to know.
“Greed,” Luke said flatly. “Pure and simple, greed. They wanted the money that people back East and even overseas were willing to pay for buffalo hides. And, too, there was a lot of money to be had for guiding shooting parties out on the plains so that they could kill hundreds of buffalo for sport and leave them lying in the sun.”
Belinda stared at him curiously and then she smiled. They were kindred spirits. She hated the loss of the buffalo, too.
He glanced down at her while the boys murmured to each other about the size of that big bull in the fenced pasture. She had a pretty face, he thought, and a big heart to go with it. He liked her already. He smiled slowly and was surprised and delighted to see her face flush.
She had to drag her eyes away from his. That look had gone right through her. Over the years she’d had plenty of boyfriends, but they were all just casual acquaintances. Or they had been until Russell, who gave her an engagement ring and swore he loved her, and then eloped with her best friend. That had been four long years ago. She hadn’t looked at another man since.
“What’s wrong?” Luke asked perceptibly.
She caught her breath. “Wrong? Why…nothing.”
“You were thinking about something and it hurt. What was it?”
She shifted. “I was engaged. He eloped with my best friend.”
“Well, well.” He studied her carefully. “So that’s why you aren’t married. No inclination to try again, I gather.”
“None at all.”
“Join the club.”
She shot a quick glance at his averted profile. “You, too?” she asked softly.
He nodded, a jerk of his head. “Me, too. She promised to be true, but the minute I went off on business, she was entertaining an old boyfriend at the local motel.” He laughed coldly. “You can’t do that sort of thing in a town this small and not be gossiped about. Two people told me about it when I got off the plane.”
“It’s the world we live in,” she said quietly. “Fidelity doesn’t seem to mean much, anymore.”
He turned to face her. “It means the world to me,” he said flatly. “I’m an old-fashioned man. When I give my word, I keep it.”
She grimaced. “So do I.” She smoothed her fingers carefully over the hard wood of the fence. “He said I was a dinosaur.”
One eyebrow levered slowly up.
“I wouldn’t go to bed with him because we weren’t married,” she said simply. “So he found somebody who would.” She shrugged. “I can’t blame him, really. I mean, every woman does it.”
“Not every woman,” he said coldly. “Virtue is so rare as to be priceless these days.”
“Show me one virtuous man,” she dared.
“That would be difficult,” he agreed, “although it’s not impossible. I’ve known a man or two who felt the way you do about it. Still, men can’t get pregnant, can they? Women are the childbearers, the civilizers. I believe that when children are going to be involved, there should be one man, and no others.”
She stared up at him quietly. “You’re a dinosaur, too.”
“You got a dinosaur?” one of the boys, overhearing, asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” another boy answered him, “there’s no such thing!”
“I read that dinosaurs turned into birds,” another ventured.
Juanito grinned for the first time. “My grandad used to say he could turn into a bird when he liked. And my mom said no wonder he ate like one.”
Everybody laughed, but kindly.
It broke the ice. Luke showed the boys around, and they warmed to his easy, friendly manner. He led them through the barn, where he had two calves being treated for scours and a heifer with a snakebite.
“They’re all improving,” he said, watching the boys stare at the animals. “They’ll go out into the pasture in a day or two. There were three calves in here, but we lost one of them yesterday.”
“What’s scours?” Kells asked.
“It’s a disease calves get that prevents them from keeping anything in their stomachs,” he replied. “They die if they aren’t treated. The vet has been giving them medicine for it. Usually it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t, no matter how hard you try.”
“I guess you have to use a horse to work cattle,” Kells continued.
“I’m afraid so. Although,” he added with a chuckle, “I used to know a man who used an all-terrain vehicle to do it.”
“One o
f those four-wheeled things like a big lawnmower?”
“The very thing. He hit a stump unexpectedly and went headfirst, right into the lagoon. I hear he gave the vehicle to his nephew the next day and went back to using horses.” He saw the question in Kells’s eyes and before he could ask it he added, “A lagoon is where animal waste is collected.”
Kells doubled over laughing. “No wonder he gave the thing away!” He sighed. “I guess I could learn to like horses.”
“Sure you could,” Luke assured him. “A horse that’s trained right will do what you tell it to, although I’ve seen some bad horses. In fact, a neighbor of mine has a twenty-year-old horse that killed a man in an arena and was about to be destroyed. He saved it.”
“Must be a nice man.”
He shook his head. “Not a chance. He’s like a rattlesnake, coiled up and waiting for somebody to come within striking distance.” He grinned. “Most people walk wide around him.”
“Can we go back out there and look at the bull?” Kells asked.
“Sure, go ahead.”
They ran out almost in a unit, leaving Luke and Belinda together at the steel gate that contained the calves in their stall.
He glanced at Belinda. “That neighbor lives on the other side of your camp, by the way. You’d better make sure nobody trespasses in his direction. I’m a reasonable man. He’s not.”
“I’ll remember,” she promised.
He watched her openly, his blue eyes narrow and thorough on her soft oval face. “Do you like your job?”
“I like kids,” she said. “Especially kids who need something society isn’t giving them.” She jerked her head toward the boys. “There’s not one thing wrong with them that a little love and attention wouldn’t have taken care of. They just want someone to care about them, and they find unorthodox ways to attract attention.”
“Kells said he stole a CD player.”
She nodded. “But not because he wanted it,” she murmured. “His mother’s boyfriend had beaten him up that morning. He was getting back at her, for exposing him to that sort of treatment.” She shrugged. “The boyfriend is the reason they’re out here. He sent for her, but he doesn’t want Kells. Neither did his father.”