Quinn laughed, fending her off as easily as a wolfhound would an overwrought terrier. “You’ve had months to get ready, Belle. Maybe if you got yourself up before noon and Basil spent less time lollygagging on the prairie with S’rena, you two wouldn’t be in this predicament.”
He settled back down in the chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Plenty of time to bunk the girl on the road, Bazz,” he drawled, “but considering how Paw got outfoxed by one of ‘em, it beats me how you’ll ride herd on the pair. Maybe you could find a nice house in town somewhere, a place you could play your pi-yanner every night. Girls like these are always in demand. Why, I reckon their rent’d pay your rent.... What d’ya think?”
“I think you’re a foul-mouthed son-of-a—”
“Don’t say it, Bazz!” Quinn pushed himself out of the chair again. “It’s you and me got differences. My maw’s got nothing to do with it.”
“She bred you!”
“Not all by herself, she didn’t.”
The two men glared at one another through narrowing eyes. Fearing Bazz would fare no better than Sharo if it came to a fight, I tried to think of a way to calm the swell of hostility, but it was Belle, brooding nearby in distracted silence, who finally broke the impasse.
“No one ever outfoxed Ross Cooper,” she said. “In the end he always won. Always.”
In my first weeks at Morning Star, unprepared for the coarseness I detected in Belle, I would have been stunned by the bitterness that lent her words their grating edge. But now, knowing of the sexual intimacies she had been forced to accept from the man she thought her benefactor, I admired her resilience. What other choice had she in this isolated, accursed place? Better coarse than cowed! Quinn’s salacious insinuations served only to reinforce my loyalty.
Belle slipped her arm through Basil’s; I crossed to his other side. Faced now with three pairs of hostile eyes, Quinn frowned, not quite sure what to make of it. Seeing him thrown off balance was a pleasing novelty, but I had no sooner registered it before his expression cleared.
“It’s the gold, isn’t it?” His mouth curved in a wicked smile. “Not ready to leave, huh? Well, I reckon not. Not ‘til you finish scrabbling around for it in the night like rats after cheese.” His frown returned, blacker than before. “As God is my witness,” he thundered, a finger thrusting skyward, “if you try leavin’ here with Paw’s gold in your poke—my gold!—I’ll hound you to the gates of hell itself!”
Quinn’s departure left us standing silently agape. Belle was the first to recover. She took my hands in hers; her eyes sought mine imploringly.
“That gold Quinn was ranting about,” she said, “we need your help.”
Bazz turned white. “For God’s sake, Belle!”
Belle shushed him. “You heard him, Bazzy, we have only two more weeks. We need all the help we can get.”
“You know I’ll do whatever I can,” I said, “but if this mysterious gold really is Quinn’s....”
Belle’s eyes glinted with familiar mischief. “Finders, keepers, Reenie, remember?”
My heart sank. Belle’s habit of blithely appropriating whatever caught her fancy had often gotten us into trouble at the orphanage. Unable to identify the true culprit—Belle never accepted blame; I refused to assign it—the director meted out identical punishments. I never denied the obligations of our relationship then, nor would I now. No matter the rights or wrongs of it. Belle, my twin, was about to be evicted from her home by a hard-hearted stranger.
I took a deep breath. “Tell me about the gold.”
It was a story that in one guise or another had been often told. Ross Cooper, Bazz told me, had come west with his parents, seeking escape from their hard-scrabble Vermont farm to the wide grassy prairie. But they were farmers, not ranchers. The unfamiliar demands of dry-land farming soon drained their hopes and energy, and by the time of their cruel death in an Indian raid their limited resources had been exhausted.
Left alone and penniless, the nine-year-old boy drifted from one to another of the modest holdings of neighboring farmers who had survived the attack. None of them were more than marginally successful, and although Ross was willing to work hard for his keep, he was neither old nor strong enough to really earn it. The humiliating need to depend on the kindness of strangers kept him on the move. He formed no ties or loyalties, determining at an early age to acquire by his own efforts whatever would bring him the independence he craved.
Although hardly more than twenty when he hired on at the Wohlfort ranch, Ross Cooper was by then a seasoned hand. His arrival there was not by chance.
The ranch’s prosperity was a popular topic of envious conversation among the territory’s floating population of cattle stiffs, most of whom, Ross suspected, resented the demanding standards he saw as opportunity. His capacity for hard work together with an unerring eye for a promising colt or bull calf soon recommended him to Emil Wohlfort. His bold good looks attracted his boss’s pretty daughter even sooner. Neither of them, Bazz said, were aware then of the raw ambition fueling his high spirits.
Old Man Wohlfort, once he got wind of the liaison, promptly threw Ross off his spread with nothing more than he came with. No penniless cowhand, no matter how good a worker, was good enough for his cherished little Lottie, and he’d seen too many carefully bred heifers covered by scrub bulls to take any chances.
Equipped with no more than a tired horse, a second-hand saddle and a bedroll, the angry young man wasted no time brooding. Instead, using his resentment to hammer out a new purpose for his energies, he headed west to the California gold fields to seek his fortune.
“Three years later,” Bazz said, “he triumphantly returned with a starter herd of travel-weary stock bought cheaply from wagon trains arriving in Denver from the East, and a set of plans for a grand stone house drawn by a British architect lured by gold fever and down on his luck.”
“I wouldn’t have thought a herd of worn-out cattle would be much to be triumphant about.”
“That’s what they were when he bought them, Serena. But Paw was a spinner: he took his own sweet time driving them back through the free grass growing on the prairie and arrived here with a herd to be proud of.”
“What do you mean, ‘spinner’?” I asked.
“That’s a bronc that leaps and whirls backward, Reenie,” Belle broke in. “You see, whatever Ross did was usually contrary to most folks’ thinking, and in those days the wagons rattling on through to California never gave a thought to the good grass crushed beneath their wheels.”
“Green gold. Paw called it,” Bazz said. “It’s different now, what with the California gold fields all but played out and cattle on the move everywhere you look. But back then, land was cheap, so Paw bought up what my grandpa hadn’t gotten ‘round to. There wasn’t any fencing in those days, so with the herds just grazing where they’d a mind to anyway, I guess Grandpa figured he already had enough land in his name. Soon as Paw had the deeds recorded, he began building this house.”
Having explored by then to the limits of the Morning Star holdings, I asked the question that had several times occurred to me. “But why here? Why not overlooking the pond, or down in the southwest quarter below that sheltering slope?”
“I’m afraid Quinn was right about that, Serena. Paw built here deliberately, out of... oh, I guess you could call it defiance. Defiance of the Pawnees who slaughtered his parents, and of Emil Wohlfort’s refusal to ‘sacrifice’ his precious only daughter to a cowpuncher. Paw didn’t have much of a sense of humor, but maybe he thought of it as a sort of double-barreled joke.”
A gruesome sort of joke, I thought. “He told you this?”
Bazz laughed. “Oh, no. Paw hardly ever told me anything. Demanded a lot, but I don’t know that we ever had what you might call a conversation. When he felt like talking, it was Belle he chose for listening.”
“He loved to yarn about the building of Morning Star,” Belle said. “The barn and bunkhouse and corrals, they we
re the easy part. Even this house didn’t cause much excitement, though it was a sight grander than anything else in the territory at the time, but those pillars!” She giggled. “The pair with the slits? After they got ‘em hauled up into place the first time, Ross came ‘round, lined ‘em up with a compass, got madder’n hell, and had ‘em pulled right back down. I forget how many haulings-up and pullings-down it took to get them set right.”
Something nudged at my mind, but whatever it was, was overwhelmed by the thought of the cost of what Basil and Belle had described.
“Surely one herd of grass-fattened cows couldn’t have paid for all this,” I said. “Is this where the gold comes in?”
Bazz and Belle looked at one another. “There were rumors of it all along,” Bazz said. “The word spread like a prairie fire that Paw paid for the land and the building of this house with gold he’d struck in California.”
“A lot of gold,” Belle added, “and it was rumored that a whole lot more gold was hid here on Morning Star.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really, Belle—”
“It had to be, Reenie!” she exclaimed. “It’s the only way Ross coulda kept Morning Star going in such high style through good times and bad.” Her head bobbed vigorously as if to physically drive her point home. “It was only when he died things took such a turn for the worse. Quinn doesn’t know where the gold is any more’n we do: the only way he can pay us off is by layin’ off hands and sellin’ stock. But you mark my words,” she said, her voice rising, “the minute we leave he’s going to start tearin’ this place apart!”
“But how can you be sure it’s hidden on Morning Star? Kansas is a big state; there must be a lot of banks with vaults he could have put it in.”
“Not in a bank, Serena,” Bazz said. “Paw didn’t trust banks. But the thought of us looking under every bush and searching every gully here at Morning Star would have tickled him.”
“It’s here!” Belle insisted. “Didn’t he tell me that himself, Bazz?”
“He was drunk,” Bazz returned flatly.
“All the more reason to think it the truth.” She turned to me. “Once, when we’d had a little ... misunderstanding, he asked me where my heart was, and then he said, ‘Is it hidden in stone, like my gold?’“
Bazz and I exchanged a look.
Belle sighed with exasperation. “Don’t you see? Not under a stone or beside a stone: in stone! You look around here with that in mind, Reenie, and you’ll soon see how many queer jigs and jags and thick places this house has with no reason for ‘em. And just this past winter, at a shindig over to the Faulhaber spread, didn’t one of those old codgers tell about building the bunkhouse, and the way the doorsill had to be fit in just so, like a lid on a box? Those were his very words, ‘like a lid on a box.’“
Belle’s eyes sparkled; her face shone with animation. “Remember those jigsaw puzzles at the orphanage, Reenie? You always found the hard pieces. Besides,” she added, looking at me slyly through her lashes, “it’ll be a whole lot easier searching in daylight.”
I laughed. “You roamed through my dreams, you know, and Quinn saw your candles one night. He thought you were—” I broke off, embarrassed.
“Lovers? Like I told you, just friends, Reenie. Bazz is fair game for fair lady,” she added airily, glancing encouragingly from one to the other of us.
“First things first,” I said gently. I had no wish to hurt Bazz’s feelings, but neither did I wish to make any sort of commitment before I had a clearer idea of what his feelings for me really were. I recalled the hot, demanding pressure of Quinn’s mouth on mine and the unsettling eagerness of my response. In comparison, Bazz’s courtship—assuming Belle’s interpretation of his kind attentions to me was correct—seemed ... unenthusiastic.
“Was this house completed before your parents were married, Bazz?”
“Oh, yes. Grandfather Wohlfort insisted on it being more than just an impressive set of plans on paper before he would give his blessing. The only thing added later was the storm cellar. Grandfather insisted on that, too.”
“What about the trough and that rickety windmill? They’re so much meaner than this house.”
“Those came first, to water the cows that became the foundation of that first Morning Star herd. The usual run of range cattle were longhorns driven up from Texas, gaunt at best and damn near as wild as the buffalo they supplanted. The ones he brought in were Durham stock. He liked to hear the windmill spinning in the wind, and he always cleaned that slimy old trough himself. He used to say it did a man good to be reminded of his beginnings.”
Detecting a sneer in Bazz’s voice, I thought of the boy he had described, wandering from place to place, given the lowest, meanest jobs, doing what it took to stay alive. “There’s nothing wrong with a little humility,” I said quietly.
“Humility?” Belle gave a hoarse shout of laughter. “Remember how he gloated ‘bout the bargains in cattle he got from those gold-crazed farmers, Bazz? Why, there wasn’t a humble bone in Ross Cooper’s body! How d’ya think Quinn came by the strut of his? Like tom turkeys, the pair of ‘em.”
“Tomcats,” Bazz muttered.
“That, too,” Belle agreed.
“The Wohlfort holdings came later?” I asked.
“Yes,” Bazz said, “after my grandparents died of the cholera. Mama was expecting me when they took sick, and Paw refused to let her visit them. She never saw them alive again. They left everything to my mama, and Paw bought up most of the land from her over the years. Never paid her what it was worth, of course.”
“Wasn’t there anyone to give her advice? No trusted family friend? Other relatives?”
Bazz shook his head. “It never occurred to her she needed any advice. The garden preoccupied her: nothing had ever grown for her like that before. In those years before she took to her bed, when she wasn’t digging and planting and harvesting her herbs, she was stirring and bottling or drying and sewing them into sacks. First Mama, now Belle. Between the two of ‘em the kitchen’s hardly ever had an inch to spare for anything as uninteresting as food preparation.”
Belle frowned. “If we don’t find the gold, you’ll be glad enough of the money the herbs will bring when we leave here.”
“I was only teasing. Belle,” he said with a placatory smile before turning back to me. “To finish what I was saying, Serena, Quinn’s settling with me now for what’s left of the Wohlfort spread.”
“Is he paying what it’s worth?”
Bazz shrugged. “He’s paying only what it’s worth to him to get rid of me.”
“But surely there must have been other buyers for good grazing land like this!”
Bazz spread his hands wide. “My dear girl, the acres Mama left to me are virtually surrounded by Morning Star. Over the years, seeing the price of comparable acreage rise, Paw put off buying the best of Mama’s holdings until last, knowing damn well no one else would buy it without access. As a result, the more valuable it became as grazing land, the less it was worth to an outsider. A vulture couldn’t have stripped her cleaner.”
“Reenie, I don’t see these questions taking us anywhere.” Belle’s tone was testy.
“Just one more,” I said meekly. “The plans that British architect drew, do you know where they are?”
“Whatever do you want them for?”
“Maybe they’ll tell us something about those jigs and jags you mentioned.”
“Lordy, Reenie, I swear we’ve pushed and pulled at nearly every block of stone there is.”
“Nearly isn’t every. Belle.”
“She has a point,” Bazz said. “For instance, we could have pushed on the wrong side, or on the top instead of the bottom.”
“Could they be in his desk?” I asked, pointing to the huge fumed oak structure that dominated the wall on the other side of the room.
“Quinn and the lawyers cleaned that out first thing after the reading of the will,” Belle said. “I swear, Bazz, wasn’t it a treat to see Qui
nn’s face when he come across that stack of bills Ross hadn’t paid?” They exchanged amused glances. “The only other place I can think of that hasn’t already been looked through is that big old rawhide Mexican trunk up in his bedroom.”
“Then, let’s go up and look in it now,” I said.
Belle and Bazz looked at one another.
“Is there a reason we shouldn’t?” It was my turn to be testy. It seemed a little late in the day to turn squeamish.
“Ross kept what he called souvenirs in that trunk,” Belle said. “Some are ... well, a mite unusual.”
“Like?”
“Like ... oh, Lordy, Bazz!”
“Like Pawnee scalps, Serena,” Bazz said.
An acid flux rose in my throat. “You can’t be serious.”
“That’s what he said, Reenie,” Belle added. “Called them his ‘hate tokens.’“
“Are you telling me Ross Cooper actually scalped—”
“Oh, no, not Paw himself!” Bazz said. “He bought them years and years ago off some Indians—Sioux, Comanche, I don’t remember exactly. Old enemies of the Pawnee is all I know, and there were a lot of those.”
Even if true, I wondered how bad they could be, refusing to be daunted by the unpleasant picture that invaded my mind. “Those plans might save us a lot of time,” I said, firmly quashing a sudden impulse to deny further involvement. “Which room was his?”
“I haven’t been in it since Ross was laid out,” Belle said, her eyes wide with dismay.
“I’ll go, Belle,” I said. “Just tell me which it is.”
* * * *
As I made my way upstairs the lantern’s steady glow chased back the shadows. The room, first door on the right on the third floor, was very large and austerely furnished. The bed’s feather tick had been removed; across the rope lattice that had supported it lay a soft draping of deerskins, so pale they were almost white. It looked like a catafalque for a warrior chief.
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