The Best Man

by Maggie Osborne

  By the time Les and Freddy came dragging in for the evening meal, Les felt so exhausted that she didn’t know if she had enough energy to lift a fork to her mouth. Her eyes stung from the wind, sun, and constant dust, her tailbone was sore, and her legs and thighs ached and quivered. She could hardly walk after she slipped to the ground, groaned, and handed the reins to Grady.

  “Git back here, and take off your saddle,” Grady called peevishly. “You women just kill me. Every goldanged one of you think I got nothing better to do than wait on you hand and foot. Well, it ain’t gonna happen, so you can just…”

  Tuning out his voice, blinking at tears of fatigue, she reached deep and found enough strength to pull off her saddle before she staggered toward the lanterns hanging on the wagon.

  “It’s about time you and Freddy showed up,” Alex complained. “I could have cleaned up the supper mess twenty minutes ago and been done with it if I hadn’t had to wait for you two!”

  “We couldn’t get the laggards to hurry up, then we had to learn how the steers bed down for the night, and then—” She halted abruptly, hating it that she was always apologizing for one thing or another. It wasn’t her fault that some of the steers wouldn’t keep up with the herd.

  “Just hurry up and eat.” Alex dumped something on her plate that looked suspiciously like the noon meal only with additional vegetables tossed in.

  Les couldn’t be certain because she’d spent the noon break with Ward and hadn’t eaten. Her stomach had growled all afternoon. “I was going to tell you how sorry I am that you set yourself on fire and got drenched,” she snapped at Alex, “but you’re doing such a good job of feeling sorry for yourself that you don’t need any commiseration from me.”

  “Look who’s talking!” Contempt pinched Alex’s mouth. “Everyone within a mile has been listening to you moaning and groaning since you rode in. And in case that doesn’t make everyone feel sorry for poor little you, you’re limping and rubbing your eyes. What’s next? Tears?”

  “Oh shut up, Alex,” Freddy said, stepping up to the wagon and reaching for a plate. “I hope you didn’t put all your time into fixing your hair and changing clothes instead of doing something about your god-awful cooking. I’m just thrilled that you found time to primp, but we’re all going to starve to death if you don’t get better at preparing meals.”

  Alex put down the ladle and brushed back a wave of hair with a shaking hand. “Well, you won’t have to starve for long. I figure if you two keep losing steers at the rate you’re going, this drive won’t last a month!”

  Les drew back. “Who told you about the cimarrones?”

  “Everyone knows you two incompetents lost four cattle this morning and two this afternoon! What are you doing back there? Picking wildflowers? Exploring every little gully?”

  Les’s heart fell to her toes when she lifted her head toward the observers’ camp. It was still light enough to see Ward pacing back and forth, to see the deep scowl pinching his face. He must have heard about the two steers that got away this afternoon.

  Her appetite fled, but she knew she had to eat to keep up her strength. She didn’t think about what she was putting in her mouth, she just chewed and swallowed as fast as she could before Ward pulled out his pocket watch, held it to the fading light, then scowled at her.

  Already most of the drovers were unrolling their bedrolls and Les longed to do the same, but she dumped her scraps on the ground, carried the plate to the wreck pan, then walked out on the range. “I’ve been wanting a cup of coffee for the last two hours,” she said when she came close to him. “If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll just fetch a cup and come back.”

  “I want to talk to you now.”

  His tone of voice warned that he would only get angrier if she delayed. Well, she had waited this long for something to drink, she could wait another few minutes. Dragging her feet, trying not to limp too badly, she followed as he turned on his heel and strode toward his wagon, which she noticed uneasily was parked well behind Luther and Caldwell’s wagon.

  “Ward?” she called, hobbling after him, stumbling in the deepening darkness. “Do you suppose I could have a cup of coffee from your pot?”

  “Isn’t that just like you?” Ward hissed, turning so abruptly that she ran into his chest. “Thinking about your own comfort when everyone else except that smug bastard Caldwell is worried sick about the success of this drive because you and your stupid sister are both so careless and incompetent that any steer that comes your way just keeps going!”

  “That’s not true,” she whispered, stepping back from him. “We must have turned around at least a dozen or more beeves. Ward, we did very well considering this was our first day and considering we’ve never done this before and didn’t really know what to expect.”

  “You let six get past you today! Six, Les.” Grabbing her sore shoulders, he shook her so hard that her hat fell off. “At this rate, Lola won’t have to wait for Abilene to win.” His fingers dug into her arms and he pushed his face so close to hers that spittle landed on her lips and chin. “Don’t you care? Don’t you ever think about anyone but yourself?” Moonlight gleamed on his bared teeth. “I sold my store! I’ve shaken my bones to powder driving a team over this rough ground. I’ve put up with the company of two men who can’t talk about anything but gambling or law torts. And for what? To find out that you blithely let six cattle stroll past you!”

  “Please, Ward,” she whispered. “I ache all over. I’m so exhausted that I can hardly stand upright, and I feel half-sick because I haven’t eaten much today.”

  “It’s always you, you, you, isn’t it?” He flung her against the side of the wagon so hard that she knew her back and shoulders would bear bruises tomorrow.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” she whispered, fighting a flood of tears. “You don’t know what it’s like back there. It’s constant anxiety, and the cimarrones come out of the dust all red-eyed and wild and wanting to go home. Several of them at a time, and it’s hard to—”

  “Excuses aren’t going to replace those steers, Les. Excuses won’t get my store back. Excuses aren’t going to make it possible for us to marry or put food on the table if we do.”

  She was so tired that her mind reeled. All she wanted to do was splash water on her face to remove some of the dust, and then fall into her bedroll. Closing her eyes, she leaned against the wagon and let him rail at her, detailing her selfishness, her incompetence, her disregard for him and their future. When she tilted forward and missed vomiting on his shoes by mere inches, he was so disgusted that he slapped her and stalked away without helping her to her feet.

  Staggering and wiping her mouth, trying not to cry, she returned to the main camp and the fire, which was burning low now. The coffeepot still hung above the embers, but she was too tired to think about the coffee she had wanted so much an hour ago.

  Fetching her bedroll, she carried it over near Freddy, who was already asleep. Silent tears spilled down her cheeks while she struggled to pull off her boots. Then, when she finally and gratefully crawled inside her blankets, she discovered she’d chosen a site scattered with small rocks that dug into her flesh. She was too exhausted to brush the rocks out from under her or move to another place. In less than two minutes she was sound asleep.

  She didn’t twitch or roll over until Dal nudged her awake a few hours later.

  Then she sat up, startled and confused to see stars overhead and the other drovers still in their bedrolls. “What’s wrong?”

  “Night watch,” Dal reminded her in a low voice. “It’s your turn. Put your boots on and grab a quick cup of coffee. I’ll ride with you tonight, and for the rest of the week.”

  Blinking, trying to swim out of a deep sleep, she rubbed her back while she watched him return to the fire. Night watch. Now, she remembered about taking a two-hour shift each night. She wanted to weep when she realized this meant they would not have a full night of uninterrupted sleep until the drive ended.

  She
didn’t know how she was going to live through this.

  Freddy woke when Les gave her a kick on the way back to her bedroll. Sitting up to rub her leg, she hissed an insult then yawned. “Night watch,” Dal called softly, his voice coming out of the darkness. “Grab a quick coffee, then we’ll go.”

  Stretching the kinks out of her shoulders and rubbing her eyes, Freddy stood, then stumbled across a couple of bedrolls on her way to the fire, earning muttered curses and insults for her carelessness. The sharp rebukes were further proof, if she’d needed any, that she wasn’t going to be shown any special consideration on this drive.

  Silently, she drank a cup of scalding coffee, studying the spangled sky and wondering how she would know when her two-hour shift had elapsed. Unexpectedly, a long-ago memory popped into her head, and she remembered sitting on the porch steps of the ranch house, leaning against Joe’s shoulder, inhaling the mingled scents of leather, soap, and cigar smoke while he pointed out the constellations and talked about the stars. Since Freddy hadn’t imagined that she would ever need to tell time by the position of the Big Dipper, she had forgotten the incident until now.

  How odd. Until a minute ago, she would have sworn there had never been any close moments between her and Pa. Surprised by a sudden lump in her throat, she wondered if there were other incidents, just her and Pa, that she’d forgotten.

  After shaking her head, she noticed Dal watching her across the embers glowing in the fire pit. He sat on the ground, his wrists resting on upraised knees, his cup dangling loosely from his fingers. Even at this time of night, he radiated an intense physical energy and presence that made her catch a quick breath and hold it. Tonight, with pinpoints of flame reflecting in his steady gaze, and a new beard shadowing his jaw, he looked hard and dangerous. The sudden hot tightening in her lower stomach startled her, as she had never been drawn to hard men who couldn’t quote a line of Shakespeare if their lives depended on it.

  Wetting dry lips, she jumped up and walked to the chuck wagon, where her night horse was saddled and waiting, tied to the spokes of a wheel. Dal Frisco’s past had nothing in it to recommend him, she thought with a frown, nor did his dream of building a ranch in Montana. As far as she could see, they had nothing whatsoever in common. Yet he looked at her, and she started vibrating as if his gaze set off an inner earthquake.

  Irritated, she swung into the saddle, suppressing a groan as aching thigh muscles protested another grueling bout on horseback. “How does this work?”

  “There are two guards on each shift. You circle the herd in opposite directions. You’re looking for anything unusual, marauders, wild animals, the start of a stampede.” A light flared briefly, then she smelled the smoke of a cigar. Freddy had always enjoyed the scent.

  “And what am I supposed to do if one of those events occurs?”

  “You drive off any wild animals, alert the camp to marauders or bandits, and try to stop a stampede before it starts, which is mostly impossible, so you position yourself to control it.” Walking their horses, they rode along the starlit perimeter of the bedding ground. The heat of the animals lessened the spring chill of the night. “On second thought,” Dal said, “don’t try to control a stampede, you don’t know how yet. Observe and learn.”

  Since this was her initial experience on a bedding ground, there was plenty to observe. First, Freddy noticed the cattle slept on their sides, and they weren’t quiet as she had supposed they would be. Every now and then they made strange blowing noises that worried her half to death.

  Dal laughed softly. “Perfectly normal,” he assured her. “It’s also normal for them to stand up along about midnight, graze for a few minutes, then lie down again. What’s not normal is for one of them to jump up and start bawling. If that happens, the rest panic, they all start running, and we’re into a stampede.”

  “How did you learn all of this?” She told herself that she didn’t care about his answer. Talking helped her stay awake.

  “I grew up on a ranch in Louisiana,” he said with a shrug. “It was nothing like the King’s Walk spread, only about a tenth the size. A better question might be why didn’t you learn something about ranching.”

  “Pa had clear-cut ideas about men and women,” she said, watching the light from distant stars slide along the horns of the dozing steers. “Men do this, women do that, and they stay out of each other’s areas.” They rode so closely together, to facilitate quiet conversation, that Dal’s leg occasionally brushed hers. She didn’t like that, didn’t like being physically aware of him. At least she couldn’t see his face clearly and didn’t have to struggle against the feelings aroused by the cool speculation in his eyes or that slow smile that lifted one corner of his lips.

  “If that’s true, then it’s strange that your father would throw his daughters into the middle of a cattle drive and expect them to succeed.”

  “I don’t think he did expect us to succeed.” It was oddly intimate, riding together in the darkness, talking softly and listening to the quiet rustling of the bedded steers.

  “If Joe wanted Lola to inherit his fortune, he didn’t have to set up this elaborate contest.”

  “I don’t know what Pa was thinking,” Freddy said as they slowly circled the end of the sleeping herd and started up the other side. “Maybe he wanted to punish us. I don’t want to talk about him. It makes me furious every time I think about what he did to us!”

  “Maybe he recognized something in each of you that you’re not seeing yourselves. When you make a horseshoe it begins as a lump of metal that doesn’t look like much. But fire and pounding transforms it into something hard and useful. Maybe Joe figured you ladies needed a little fire and pounding and figured you’d get it on a cattle drive.”

  “I told you I don’t want to talk about this!”

  Instantly, his hand shot through the blackness and gripped her arm so hard that she felt his fingers crushing her bones. “Don’t ever raise your voice on night watch!” Releasing her, he moved ahead, scanning the herd, his silhouette tense against the starlit sky.

  Heart pounding, Freddy also peered hard at the herd, and she didn’t relax until Dal returned and brought his horse up close beside her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered between her teeth.

  “We got lucky,” he said with an obvious effort at patience.

  “It makes me mad when you talk about Pa. You didn’t know him.” Sometimes she wondered if she had known him. She tended to think of Joe in stark tones of black and white. But her earlier memory of sitting together on the porch steps had shaken that image.

  “You’re wrong, Freddy. I know Joe Roark through what the man built and how he built it. I see hints of him in each one of you.”

  She started to tell him that was nonsense, but midway down this side of the herd, a shape loomed toward them and Freddy sucked in a breath, holding it until she saw the shape was only Drinkwater, the other guard. He reined up and reported in a low voice, “Everything seems quiet. There was a moment up front. The brindle with the frayed tail couldn’t find his partner.”

  “A big black with a chipped horn,” Dal said.

  Freddy peered at him, incredulous. To her the longhorns were as alike as kernels of corn.

  “That’s the one,” Drinkwater agreed, moving away from them.

  “What did he mean about partners?” she asked, vowing to look for a brindle with a frayed tail and a black with a chipped horn.

  “Longhorns choose a traveling partner for the drive, and then walk and sleep near the partner. Won’t settle down until they find each other.” They continued riding along the side of the herd, their legs occasionally brushing like magnets drawn together. “The steers also travel in roughly the same position every day. The same animals take the point, the same steers fall into the middle, and the same steers lag behind.”

  “Sort of like people,” Freddy said with a smile, inhaling the sweet smoke of his cigar. It pleased her when he laughed. “Dal?” she said when they had rounded the front end and sta
rted up the side again. “Do you really think we’ll succeed with this drive? Or is it all just a waste of time?” His long silence made her heart sink.

  “We have a chance,” he said finally. “If the weather holds, if the rivers aren’t flooding, if we don’t run shy on good grass and clean water. If we don’t lose too many beeves.”

  She ground her teeth together. “We aren’t going to lose any more.”

  “Yes, we will. I don’t want to see you and Les lose any more, but we’ll lose some in other ways.” On the far side of the herd, they heard Drinkwater singing softly. “We’ll lose them because sometimes a few stubborn beeves just won’t follow their x’s and lines.”

  This time she laughed. “I can’t believe I did that.”

  She knew better now, but she still tended to think of the drive as an enormous stage production. Dal was the maestro; she and the drovers were the actors; Luther, Ward, and Jack comprised the audience; the cattle provided the stage business. The story line was clear-cut and tinged with just enough drama to make it interesting. Only the script was ambiguous, offering too vague an outline and too much room for extemporaneous action.

  Dal laughed softly when she told him her thoughts, but it was uneasy laugher and his voice was sober when he said, “Make no mistake, Freddy. There’s no script here. This is real, and anything can happen. You worry the hell out of me because you approach life as if it’s a role you’re playing.”

  She lifted her head. “What difference does it make, as long as I play my role well?”

  “You aren’t playing it well. You lost six steers today,” he said flatly. “You’re going to keep messing up until you stop dreaming and start connecting with what’s real.”

  It was like being in the touring company again, standing silently, her cheeks flaming, feeling unjustly maligned while Maestro Delacroix criticized her performance. Anyone could fluff a line… or lose a few steers. She would have explained this except Frisco would have argued that today was not a performance, and she couldn’t think of a convincing rebuttal.