by Janet Dailey
"If I'd come over and take a look at it," Smitty finished with a laugh. "Sure I will. My old man's given me a free hand to come over any time you need me. Were you able to talk Johnny into coming back?" Casey had confided in him the previous day that she was going to try.
"No." The deep sigh that accompanied her negative reply told him the futility of the attempt which he had already predicted. "That's not all either." Casey's hand clenched the steering wheel in a nervous, angry gesture. "Fred Lawlor from the bank is making arrangements for a man to come in and take over the ranch operations until dad is on his feet."
Smitty's eyebrows raised at the announcement while he exhaled a silent whistle. He had known Casey too long not to know what her reaction to that news had been.
"They don't trust a woman," she added, her forehead knitting together in a bitter frown.
"My poor little independent Casey is going to have to take orders from some big boss man," Smitty teased. At her glowering stare, he reached out and let his fingers follow the gathering of freckles that bridged her nose before his finger ended up under her chin, which he lifted as he leaned inside the window and planted a firm kiss on her lips. "I'm glad. I never did want my girl tied down to a ranch twenty-four hours a day for the rest of the summer."
Casey knew she should have felt flattered by his pronouncement, but the idea of someone other than a Gilmore holding the reins of the Anchor Bar ranch was more than she could tolerate. Her sense of humor completely deserted her on that subject.
"How would you feel if someone came in and started bossing you around on your ranch?" she retorted. "You're not a woman, so it probably would never happen to you."
"Ah, come on, Casey, don't take it as a personal insult." He had heard her before when she got started on the subject of equality between the sexes. He had the feeling that she was about to step up to the podium again. "It's not going to be forever."
"I thought you'd understand," she accused.
"I do. It's just no good getting upset about something you can't change. Which reminds me, I was flying over the west pasture today. I think I saw those ten head of cattle you were missing mixed in with our own herd over there," he informed her.
"That means there's a fence down somewhere," Casey sighed, relieved that the cattle had been found and were not rustled as she had feared.
"I'll meet you out there tomorrow and we'll check it out," Smitty offered.
"Thanks. I want everything in perfect order when this…this man comes?"
"Who is it?"
"Somebody from Ogallala," Casey shrugged. She had been too upset to get any details. "I'd better be going. I want to be home before Mark."
"The bus went by about a half hour ago." He tapped the car lightly with his hand as he moved back toward the pickup. "Say, we had a date for Saturday night. Is it still on?"
"I have to go into Scottsbluff with Mark. Why don't you just come over and we'll watch some TV or something?" Casey suggested, shifting the gears into reverse and backing on to the road as Smitty waved his agreement.
Two miles farther on the graveled road, Casey turned on to the lane leading back to the ranch house grounds. Her eyes instinctively studied the rolling hills, the sturdy prairie grass beginning to change from its spring green color to a straw-colored yellow, the darker green clots of yucca plants, and the colorful rusty-red hides of the Hereford cattle. The hills stretched out interminably from horizon to horizon, the skyline broken occasionally by towering windmills. Following the curving track around one deceptively larger hill, Casey saw the small valley open before her and the buildings that signified home nestled against the bottom of the north side so that the hills could shelter them from the blasts of the cold north wind.
Bounding out from under the wooden porch at the sound of the slowing car came a dog of such mixed parentage that he always proved a topic of conversation. His ears were erectly pointed; his coat was long and shaggy; his forehead was wide and his nose was long; and the bushy tail wagged happily. Everyone agreed there was a shepherd breed somewhere in his ancestry, but one look at the black and tan color led everyone to speculate whether he was mixed with a coyote or a German Shepherd or both. But Shep was a member of the family and had been since the day he wandered into their yard, a frightened, skinny puppy. He was no longer skinny as all ninety-five pounds of him launched himself at Casey, the most cherished member of his adopted family.
Mark appeared on the porch as Casey greeted the exuberant dog and gradually quieted him to a more controllable state. She smiled at the ungainly boy with his denim Levis that stopped above his ankles, betraying the way he had suddenly grown this spring. His crumpled shirt was unbuttoned, leaving his ribs to poke out of his tanned chest. Mark had the same sandy hair and blue eyes of their mother and promised to be as tall as their six-foot father. He was already eye level to Casey, who was five foot four inches tall.
"It's about time you got home," Mark grumbled in a voice that threatened to break into a squeak with each word. He more or less collapsed into one of the porch chairs and picked up a worn pair of boots sitting beside the door. "I'm starved. Can't we go into town tonight and have a pizza?"
"Are the chores done?" Casey asked, ignoring his never-ending plea for food.
"No, I just got home."
"Smitty said the bus went by his place a half hour ago, which means you've had time to finish those cookies Mrs. Barker sent over and the half gallon of milk in the refrigerator," Casey replied perceptively. "That should give you enough energy to do chores."
"I was hungry," he shrugged, pulling on his boots. "How's dad?"
"Better, I think."
"Do I have to go to school tomorrow? Can't you take me in to see him and write me an excuse?"
"Good heavens, Mark, tomorrow is Friday. One more day isn't going to hurt you. Besides, next Wednesday is your last day before the summer holidays." She walked up the steps onto the porch. "Hurry up with the chores."
Mark was still grumbling as he dumped down the steps toward the larger of the three buildings that, with the house, comprised the only ranch structures.
"Don't forget to bring that saddle in tonight so you can soap it down," Casey called after him as she swung the screen door open to enter the house.
The empty milk pitcher and the white-filmed glass stood silently on the kitchen table amidst the cookie crumbs. Casey shook her head in hopelessness as she cleared the table and wiped it off. There was no doubt that she'd be glad when her mother came back. Next to cooking and cleaning, she hated washing dishes the most. She and Mark had been lucky with the neighbors pitching in to provide precooked casseroles and desserts after their father's accident on Monday and their mother's departure to Scottsbluff so she could be at his side during the recuperation from the operation to insert a pin in his hip. Tonight, however, Mark had devoured the last of the neighbors' offerings. Casey walked to the sink, then groaned as she realized that she had forgotten to get any meat out of the freezer for the evening meal.
If that had happened to her mother, which it never would, she would have been able to raid the refrigerator of its leftovers and the shelves of their tinned supplies and come up with a delicious meal. Casey took one look inside the refrigerator at the spoonfuls of leftovers and knew she could never do it. Bacon and eggs and hash browns, she decided. A person couldn't go wrong with that, Casey thought, as she removed the dish of cold potatoes from its shelf.
Nearly an hour later, she heard two large thumps coming from the barn which doubled as a stable. That meant Tally, her buckskin horse, had just finished his grain. Ever since he was a yearling, he had kicked the back of his stall twice the minute he had finished his oats, another personality quirk that made horses into individuals. If Mark was on schedule, he would be in to dinner in fifteen minutes.
Casey turned the fire on under the grated potatoes, flipped the sizzling bacon over in the second skillet and added a spoonful of lard to the third skillet. The table was already set, the toaster sitt
ing to one side with slices of her mother's homemade bread in the compartments. Opening the refrigerator, she placed a half dozen eggs in a bowl while juggling the jar of preserves in her other hand. She was beginning to feel very efficient as she sat the bowl of eggs by the stove and the preserves on the table. She popped the slices of bread into the toaster, stirred the potatoes around so that they browned evenly and straightened out the curling bacon. Remembering that Mark liked his eggs turned over easy so that the yolks remained runny, Casey lit the fire under the last skillet and removed a small saucer from the cupboard to break the eggs in as she had seen her mother do many times before.
When she tapped the first egg on the saucer's edge, it broke smoothly, then she dropped the shell into the saucer accidentally. The ragged edge of the shell broke the yolk of the egg. Grimacing but thinking that she didn't really mind eating hard cooked eggs, she slid it in the skillet. But when the second, third and fourth eggs met the same fate under different circumstances, Casey lifted her hands in despair, vowing that Mark could eat scrambled eggs and like it. Hurriedly she broke the remaining eggs into the skillet and began stirring them together as fast as she could with a fork. Simultaneously she smelled the bacon burning and heard the toast pop up. As quickly as she could, she transferred the barely charred bacon strips onto a towel to drain, stirred the increasingly crisp hash browns and ran to the table to butter the toast, before suddenly remembering the eggs.
Mark walked into the kitchen, took one look at Casey as she muttered to herself between trips from the stove to the table and shook his head in disbelief.
"Wouldn't it have been much simpler to go to town and eat?" he asked, his eyes glancing sadly into Casey's angry gaze, before returning to the too crisp hash browns, the burnt bacon, the globs of unmelted butter on the cold toast and the scorched eggs. "I don't understand how Mom could have possibly had a daughter who's as rotten a cook as you."
"Just shut up and eat!" She jerked her chair away from the table and sat down, trying not to look too closely at the unappetizing food before them.
"It was bad enough last night." Mark's voice croaked as he rose from his chair to open the refrigerator door and take out a bottle of ketchup. "When you boiled the potatoes dry and forgot to turn the oven on to heat Mrs. Gordon's meat casserole." The hash browns snapped like potato chips when he touched them with his fork. "But an entire meal cooked by you?"
Casey was chewing the rubbery eggs with false contentment, wondering if she swallowed them whether they would go all the way down. She glanced over at her brother just as he picked up a more thoroughly charred piece of bacon and it crumbled in his hand.
"When's mom coming home?" he moaned.
"Not until Sunday," Casey replied in an equally depressed tone.
The two pairs of eyes met and with one motion they rose from the table.
"With both of us helping, we can clean the kitchen up in ten minutes and beat the restaurant within an hour," Mark vowed.
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Chapter Three
CASEY WAVED GOODBYE to Mark as he set out on his bay gelding. It was nearly five miles from the house to the graveled road where the school bus picked him up. And Mark believed wholeheartedly in the western motto: "Never walk when you can ride." He was counting the days until his sixteenth birthday when he could get his driver's licence and not be forced to take the bus. That time wasn't a long way off either, Casey sighed, just five months away.
Sam Wolver, their hired hand, was already hammering away at a horseshoe beside their portable blacksmith equipment. Unwillingly Casey glanced at the horse tied to the nearby post. It was Injun Joe, the horse that had thrown her father. Studying him from the rear, she admired again the almost perfect quarter horse conformation. His coffee-brown coat gleamed in the morning sun while his nearly black tail swished idly at the flies. He should have been a bay horse with black points, but his legs were snow white from his hooves to about four inches above his knees. The horse swung his head around as he heard Casey's boots making their soft sound on the mixture of sand and gravel. She couldn't suppress the shudder that went through her as she stared at the almost totally white face with just a small amount of coffee-brown color visible on his cheeks. A changeling, her father had called him and Casey agreed, especially when she looked into his eyes. One was brown and one was blue.
Just meeting the horse's gaze was unnerving. She had often argued with her father to sell him, but he had always pointed out what a good cowhorse he was. It was true. Injun Joe was probably the best cutting horse on the ranch. Any time he was near a herd of cattle, it was a joy just to sit back in the saddle and let him work. It was the rest of the time that Casey was uncomfortable with him. He was totally unpredictable at any other time and couldn't be counted on to perform the simplest task.
The day of the accident, Casey had tried to persuade her father to take her buckskin out to check the well in the near pasture since his favorite mount was lame. But he had insisted on taking Injun Joe, who hadn't been ridden since the spring roundup nearly a month before.
She hadn't liked the way the horse had set off with such a stiff-legged walk. Casey knew she never wanted to relive the moment nearly three hours later when she saw the empty saddle on the horse when he wandered into the yard. The terror that had gripped her with its ice-cold fingers had practically numbed her voice. Her knees had shaken so badly when she mounted her own horse that she had trouble holding him. Thankfully Smitty had been there. It was his calmness that had finally settled her down enough so that she was able to backtrack her father's trail while Smitty followed in the pickup.
Together they had found her father trying to crawl back to the main track in the pasture. His face white with pain, he had told them what had happened. How the horse had done some minor bucking when they first reached the pasture meadow. How John Gilmore had been lulled into thinking that the friskiness, or whatever it was, was over, then without warning the horse had suddenly lowered his head and began bucking in earnest. In the first jump, her father had lost a stirrup and by the second, he had already started his flight through the air. Only his retelling of the escapade wasn't so mildly worded.
Casey shook off the unpleasant memory with an effort. She hurried quickly toward the corral where her buckskin waited, already saddled and ready to go. The rich golden-yellow color of his coat was beautifully complemented by his black mane and tail and black-stockinged feet. Docilely he followed her as she took his reins and led him out of the corral to the waiting horse trailer. The dog Shep was sitting beside the pickup, somehow managing to have all four feet beating an anxious tattoo while still not moving from his place. Once she had the horse securely tied in the trailer Casey gave the command for Shep to get into the back of the pickup. He needed no further word, obeying the command with alacrity.
Once Casey hopped into the cab of the truck, she tooted the horn twice at Sam to let him know she was leaving. He had been working so long for them, nearly ten years, that he no longer needed to be told what to do or when to do it. As long as it wasn't mechanical, Sam Wolver could do anything on the ranch and ably, too.
Silent Sam, Mark called him. They didn't really know very much about him. He didn't seem to have any family that he cared about. He had refused offers to sleep in the bunkhouse, choosing instead to park a ramshackle trailer alongside one of the ranch's so-called lakes, which were really more like large ponds. Sam never talked much, hence his nickname, but when he did, you could bet it was important or informative. He had an "Old West" attitude toward women, treating them with the utmost respect and courtesy. Casey had more than once thought his behavior toward her mother was almost worshipful. She had the feeling that he was the last of a mold of men that had shaped the western frontier. Long and lean and shy and well-versed in the vagaries of Mother Nature's plants and animals, be had told Casey of the different plants that grew in the Sand Hills, of the uses that they had been put to by the Indians who once roamed the area, and of the time
when the bison had ruled these prairies, their numbers mounting into the millions.
Casey remembered how Smitty and Johnny used to tease her when she was younger that Sam was an orphan from a wagon train that had been raided by the Indians, that Sam had been captured and raised as an Indian himself. His nearly ageless facade and his amazing lore had convinced her for a time until her father had at last explained that it was impossible. Still, that was the way Sam Wolver appeared to her and always would—a throwback to a bygone era and another breed of men.
Casey was almost to the gate at Burnt Hollow pasture when she saw the dust of Smitty's pickup approaching from the opposite direction. By the time he had parked his pickup and trailer behind hers, she already had Tally unloaded and was opening the gate. Smitty, like Casey, wasted no time in unloading his horse and leading him through the gate. They both knew work came first and talk afterward. Once the gate was firmly closed, they mounted, both horses setting out in a ground-eating trot with Shep's feathery tail waving merrily in front of them.
They followed the fence for some distance before Smitty broke the companionable silence.
"What did Mark say when you told him about the new man coming?"
"You know Mark. The most major catastrophe in his life was when he thought he was never going to grow any taller." Casey laughed easily, before a slight frown that had nothing to do with the bright morning sun creased her forehead. "He seemed relieved that he wouldn't have so much work to do this summer. I guess it's a natural reaction for someone as young as he is."
"So the wise old woman says," Smitty teased, "with the learned wisdom of her years."
Casey blushed lightly, recognizing the patronizing note that had been in her voice. The slight budding of color in her cheeks gave her a very feminine glow that seemed at odds with the boyish jeans and boots and the plain blouse. Her hair was bared to the sun which illuminated the brown color with a golden sheen. The gentle breeze fluffed the close-cropped curls so that dainty swirls kissed her face. Dark, naturally arched brows had never known a tweezer to ensure their graceful shape. Her brown eyes that sometimes seemed to snap with angry fires were warm and almost shy. The sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks seemed to have been dusted on her tanned skin to give her the air of pert innocence. Although her mouth was small in keeping with the rest of her features, her finely shaped lips were pleasingly generous.