Frontier Lady (Lone Star Legacy Book #1)

by Judith Pella

  Sam jerked around to find Griff McCulloch standing over him. He was looking bleary-eyed and meaner than usual, having visited one too many of Abilene’s saloons.

  “I don’t see where that’s your concern, McCulloch,” said Sam, taken aback by the outlaw’s menacing tone.

  “I figger someone better look out for Deborah’s interests.”

  “Are you implying I ain’t?”

  “I ain’t implyin’ nothin’. Seems she’s gettin’ cheated if she has to pay three hundred for land that’s worth two.”

  “Maybe if you’d eavesdropped on the entire transaction, you’d know why.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe you better just tell me!”

  “I don’t see why I should. Deborah never gave me leave to discuss her personal affairs with everybody.” Sam realized he was antagonizing Griff, but the man’s belligerent, surly attitude was irritating. Moreover, he believed it risky to discuss Deborah in public with the drunken outlaw.

  “Well, I ain’t just anybody! I saved her neck—”

  “Shut up, Griff!” Sam cut him off.

  “What? Why you—” But instead of completing his sentence verbally, Griff lunged toward Sam with a clenched fist.

  Sam’s reflexes were too quick for him. He easily caught Griff’s fist, twisting it to the side, forcing him to the ground. As soon as Griff hit the plank floor, he scrambled to his feet, cursing and sputtering, and sprang at Sam again.

  The preacher jumped up from his chair, causing Griff to lunge at empty air, sprawling once more on the floor, this time on top of the chair, splintering it into pieces with his weight. Still not discouraged, Griff lurched once more to his feet, obscenities pouring from his mouth.

  “You no good rattlesnake!” he yelled. “You ain’t nothin’ but a yellow-bellied coward, spoutin’ all your religious jargon. I don’t know what she sees in you!”

  “You ain’t yourself, Griff. Go somewhere and cool off; then we’ll talk.”

  “You think yer a mighty cool number, don’tcha? Let’s just see how cool you are, big, tough Texas Ranger! I’m callin’ you out!” Griff’s hand went for his gun.

  “I ain’t armed!” said Sam quickly.

  “You ain’t gonna hide behind your Bible this time, Preacher! You got to the count of five to get a gun!”

  “Be reasonable, Griff. You ain’t got no quarrel with me—it’s the drink talking.”

  But Griff responded only with, “One, two, three …”

  “Hey, Preacher!” someone called from the crowd of onlookers. “Here you go!”

  A Colt .44 came sailing through the air. Griff counted, “Four … five!”

  By pure reflex, Sam’s hand flew up and caught the pistol an instant before Griff drew his own gun. Sam fired a split second after Griff discharged his first shot. The entire scene was over before any of the crowd had even a chance to blink. Griff was standing, very bewildered, rubbing a painful right hand, while Sam, in silent shock, watched. Sam’s shot had blown Griff’s gun from his hand.

  Someone in the crowd whistled. “Now, that’s shootin’!”

  But another was less impressed. “Whatcha mean? Ain’t no one dead, is there?”

  The brief interchange brought Sam to himself. He dropped the gun on the floor as if it were a poisonous snake; then he strode over to Griff.

  “You okay?” he asked with real concern.

  Griff shrugged away from him. “Leave me alone!” he growled.

  At that moment, Slim hurried forward. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute, you fool!” he yelled to Griff, then turning toward Sam, “Thanks, Preacher. You coulda killed him.”

  “He shoulda killed me!” blustered Griff. “’Cause soon as my hand’s better, I’m comin’ after him!”

  “Aw, pipe down, Griff!” said Slim. “You ain’t going after nobody.”

  “Leave me alone!” Griff stalked away toward a table in the corner of the saloon. “Gimme a chair!” he demanded of the occupants of the table, who responded by immediately vacating their places. None of them was as good with a gun as the preacher and dared not antagonize this fellow’s hair-trigger. “Hey you, barkeep!” Griff shouted toward the bar. “Gimme a bottle of whiskey!”

  Slim and Sam headed toward the table, Sam pausing at the bar to get a pot of coffee instead of the whiskey. When he came up to the table and slid into a chair, Griff, his head slumped over the table nearly unconscious, made no comment.

  “What’s his problem?” asked Sam of Slim as he poured out three cups of strong coffee.

  “Griff never could hold his liquor. Always gets crazier than a March hare when he’s drunk.”

  “Then maybe he shouldn’t drink.”

  “He don’t usually.”

  “Does he have some special reason for doing it now?”

  “Woman trouble.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow, recalling Griff’s remarks about Deborah. “Really?”

  “Got himself a gal at the Longhorn Saloon. They been sparking each other for a couple of months. Well, he walked in on her with another fella.”

  “That’s too bad.” Sam restrained his inner relief that the “woman trouble” apparently had nothing to do with Deborah.

  “Yeah. It woulda been better if he had killed the man right then, but instead, Griff went out and got himself drunk.”

  “And nearly killed me!”

  “I don’t think it was anything personal-like.”

  “It sure woulda been if I had ended up on Boot Hill.”

  “You was taking a big risk aiming for his hand like that,” observed Slim. “First rule of gunfighting is always shoot to kill, ‘cause that’s what the other fella is doing.”

  “I learned that rule, too, and I used to live by it, but now I’ve got a higher rule to follow. It goes something like this, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”

  “Seems like a mighty shame wasting a gun hand like yours on Bible beating.”

  “Do you really believe that, Slim?” asked Sam pointedly.

  Slim thought for a moment, then said, “Naw, I don’t reckon I do. I suppose there’s a lot of fellas alive today ‘cause you gave up gunfighting.”

  Sam nodded gravely, but he was thinking more of those poor souls who weren’t alive because of him. He sent up a brief silent prayer for the grace to look at it from Slim’s viewpoint, and to remember that if the altercation in the Drover’s Cottage had happened ten years ago, Griff McCulloch would also be dead now. There was always something to be thankful for.

  As if Griff had been reading Sam’s thoughts, he raised his head from its drugged stupor and peered hazily at him. “You still here?” he slurred.

  “Have some coffee,” said Sam.

  Griff shook his head but raised his hand anyway to take the offered cup. The moment he tried to grasp it, he winced. His hand was red and black with powder burns. Sam jumped up, fetched a basin of water from the bar, and washed Griff’s hand, and then bandaged it with his handkerchief.

  Griff accepted all this attention passively, but at one point he stared at Sam and mumbled, “You’re crazy!” Then his head slumped over, missing the basin by an inch. He was out cold.

  Slim and Sam carried him upstairs to a room in the hotel where he slept soundly for the rest of the night. When he awoke in the morning, his head throbbing more painfully than his injured hand, he went downstairs and didn’t know whether to be dismayed or relieved when Slim told him the preacher was gone.

  63

  As Griff approached Fort Dodge about a week later, he noticed a cloud of dust rising in the air a few miles west of the fort. Curious, and half expecting to find soldiers in a fray with renegade Indians, he rode past the fort to have a look.

  With his rifle lying across his saddle at the ready, he was relieved to find no Indians at all, but surveyors and workmen tramping over the dusty sod along the river.

  “What’s going on?” Griff called to one of the workers.

  “We’re building a town,” the fell
ow replied, wiping a sleeve across his sweaty brow.

  “Here, in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Won’t be for long. Railhead’s coming through here. It’s going to be a cow town.”

  “What’s wrong with Abilene?”

  “This’ll cut miles off a trail drive.”

  “Yeah, but another cow town … ? Don’t make no sense. That many folks want beef?”

  “They’ll take as much as can be shipped east. Cattle-raising is the way to wealth, man!”

  Griff shrugged, not fully convinced. Of course, he’d already heard this kind of talk in Abilene, but he had dismissed it as the boasts of Texas cattlemen, always eager to promote anything from their state as bigger and better. Yet, seeing with his own eyes a town being built for that express purpose could not help but make an impact on him.

  “They got a name for this here town, yet?” asked Griff.

  “Dodge City.”

  “How creative,” said Griff with a smirk.

  He spurred his horse around and rode back to the fort, sensing only peripherally what an impact this little encounter was to have on his future. The monetary potential of the cattle business was only part of it; far more weighty was the realization that civilization was slowly encroaching upon him. He well remembered the days when a man could ride these plains for days on end and never see another white man, and sometimes not even Indians. He remembered when the buffalo blackened the prairie. And now he knew that the railhead coming in was as much to ship the hides of slaughtered buffalo as it was for cattle. No one hunted buffalo anymore; they simply exterminated them. Griff had always been a man who loved a challenge. That’s why robbing a train had appealed to him far more than owning one. Yet as he saw the changes creeping in on him, he began to feel as near extinction as the bison.

  He was getting old—too old to have to always wonder where the next bullet was coming from. And the truth was that even if he was pretty much in the clear with the law, he still had made plenty of enemies in other arenas. After he had quit robbing banks and stagecoaches, he had made a living hiring out his gun when he could—a fact that he had never mentioned to Deborah. He had been wondering more and more of late about when a man ought to know the right time to stop tempting fate.

  He had started out from Abilene a week ago with the vague idea that he was ready to take it easier. How much the incident with Killion had colored his thinking he didn’t want to know. He still wasn’t sure why he had flown off the handle like that. Killion wasn’t a bad sort, despite all his religious prattle. And Griff didn’t think it had anything to do with jealousy. If he wanted Deborah, he had no doubt he could win her from the likes of Killion.

  Not being the analytical sort, Griff gave no further thought to the unfortunate incident. It happened and was over; it didn’t matter why.

  He didn’t think his present decision had anything to do with it. He vaguely thought he would tell Deborah that he wanted to hire on as one of her hands in Texas. She was going to need help, and he was looking for a little stability in his life. There’d still be plenty of challenge with hostile Indians roaming loose, but it was a step in the right direction.

  Now, as he left the new town site of Dodge City in the rising dust, he was more certain than ever of his decision.

  At the fort, a company of infantry was drilling on the parade ground, making dust clouds of their own. Griff wondered when was the last time any of them had fought Indians. They looked bored and slovenly. Griff knew the Texas forts were having a hard time clearing out hostile Comanche and Apache, and the northern army units still had a ways to go before subduing the Sioux and the Northern Cheyenne. These boys at Fort Dodge might any day be sent off to fight other Indian wars, but for the time being they seemed representative of the waning frontier.

  “Won’t be long,” Griff muttered to himself, “before we’ll all be a bunch of old fossils.”

  He rode up to the Sutler’s store, dismounted, tied his horse to a rail, and strode into the store. Deborah was standing in front of the counter trading with a couple of Arapahoe braves. They were speaking Cheyenne, and it still amazed Griff at how easily the Indian lingo flowed from Deborah’s lips. But on this particular day, he was impressed even more by her appearance than by her speech.

  She no longer wore the Indian buckskin shift. Instead, she was dressed somewhat after the white woman’s fashion, although not in the calico frocks Griff was accustomed to seeing the settlers’ wives and army wives wear, with their full skirts and ruffles. Deborah wore a simple dark blue cotton skirt and a pale blue chambray shirt, belted at the waist with a brown leather belt. The blue of her shirt brought out the color in her eyes, making them appear as dazzling as a river in spring. On her feet were deerskin boots—Indian made, as far as he could tell. Her hair, grown long again, was done in the Indian fashion, braided with beaver strips woven into the silky yellow strands.

  His surprise at seeing her in this new garb lay not so much in its contrast to her previous attire, but in how very appropriate it all looked. He was immediately struck with the thought that she finally looked as she was meant to look. She was a woman of the plains who could ride and no doubt shoot and hunt as well as most men. He suddenly realized that her decision to buy that ranch in Texas might not have been so crazy after all. He also realized that his magnanimous offer to help her out on the ranch now seemed pretty lame. Yet even a seasoned frontiersman couldn’t run a ranch that size all by himself. She was going to have to hire help, so he might as well be the one.

  And Griff was beginning to see that he needed her as much as he thought she needed him.

  The two Indians completed their transaction and turned around, both grinning and apparently pleased by the deal made with the white squaw woman. Griff stepped forward as Deborah busied herself with moving the animal pelts left by the Indians.

  “Howdy, Deborah,” he said.

  She glanced up and a ready smile formed on her lips. “Griff! Hello. It’s been a long time.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Are you just passing through, or do you have time for a visit?”

  “I reckon I can stay a spell.”

  “Well, let me take care of these skins; then we can talk.” She began sorting the pelts, adding them to the stacks behind her. She talked as she worked. “What have you been up to all these weeks?”

  “Nothing much,” he answered laconically. “Drifting here and there. Nothing exciting.”

  “At least you are staying out of trouble,” she said innocuously.

  “Some might disagree there, but I’m trying.”

  “Sam said he saw you in Abilene.”

  “Did he?” She nodded, showing no opinion over what had happened. Could it be that she didn’t know what he had tried to do to the preacher? Griff asked casually, “So, what did he have to say about that?”

  “Nothing much, really.” She glanced up from her work. “So, what do you think about me becoming a landowner?”

  “I guess I was pretty clear about that before.”

  “You thought I was crazy.”

  “More about where you was buying land than about owning it.” He paused, scratching his unshaven face. “But the more I think on it, Deborah, the more I can understand how you feel. There comes a point in a person’s life when settling down starts to look mighty good.”

  “Not for you, Griff!” she said in mock surprise.

  “Maybe so … that’s kinda why I stopped in to see you.”

  Deborah put away the last pelt and brushed her hands together to shake off the dust and fur. “Let’s have a seat, Griff. Hardee’s got a fresh pot of coffee brewing; would you like some?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Deborah filled two cups and carried them to the table where Griff had already plopped down in a chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. Deborah set the cups down and sat in the chair adjacent to him. She didn’t seem to notice or mind that Griff made no move to stand for her or help her
into her chair. He seemed to receive her as an equal, not as a helpless, ineffectual woman.

  “Now, Griff, what is this wild talk about settling down? I can see it for me with two children to think of, but I never thought I’d hear such things from you.”

  “I ain’t exactly thinking of settling down in the sense that I’m looking for a wife and family and all that—” He suddenly realized how she might have misinterpreted his words. “You understand that, don’t you, Deborah?”

  She chuckled softly. “Of course I do! I didn’t think you were proposing to me, Griff.”

  He let out a relieved sigh. Then, flustered, added, “Not that I wouldn’t be right pleased with you, Deborah. You’re about the most beautiful woman I know. It’s just that marriage and all that ain’t for me. I may think of settling down, but there’s still certain freedoms I could never give up no matter how long I stayed in one place. I guess I been thinking that I’m getting too old to be drifting around eating jerky and hardtack all the time, dodging bullets and the law, never knowing from one day to the next where I’ll be or if I’ll be anywhere at all.”

  “So, what do you plan to do about it?” asked Deborah. “Are you thinking of buying land also?”

  “I can’t hold on to my money long enough for that.” He paused to form just the right words. “Well, I been thinking, Deborah, that you’re going to need some help on that ranch of yours—some cowpunchers, you know.”

  At first Deborah rankled at this, thinking it patronizing and gratuitous. Her stubborn self immediately hardened against the thought of being protected by others all her life. Now Griff was going to make the supreme sacrifice by going with her to Texas to shield her from Indians and rustlers and whatever other hardships running a ranch entailed. Yet her growing humble self, the one that desired more than anything to respond to the voice of God, quickly interceded, telling her to look more deeply at Griff’s suggestion. She would need to hire help, and wouldn’t it be better to have someone she knew and could trust? Perhaps God had placed this idea in Griff’s mind just for this purpose. She would need help and protection. Even Farley, a man, had needed help. Besides, she would be paying Griff. It would be entirely a business arrangement. Yet, could she handle the implications of his presence? The fact that he was a friend helping her rather than someone she went out and hired?