A Lone Star Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  No, I have not dropped off the face of the earth. You won’t be able to respond to this letter, because I am not including my return address. I am not sure you would want to respond to me, anyway.

  I am mailing this letter to you in care of Live Oaks, in hopes that you are still in the employ of my father. I am sorry that I told you I loved you on the night of the July 4 th celebration. I am not sorry that I love you, but telling you seems to have caused you some discomfort, and that I did not want to do.

  I will say nothing more, other than that, while you are much in my thoughts, I do not expect to be in yours.

  Fondly,

  Rebecca

  Since Rebecca knew that her father would be picking up both letters, she had Candy address the one to Tom, so that her father would not recognize the handwriting. Then she made arrangements with someone to mail the letters from two locations other than Dodge City. In that way, she hoped to keep her location a secret, both from her father and from Tom.

  Fort Worth, September 10

  When Big Ben Conyers picked up the mail at the post office, he found a letter from Rebecca. There was also a letter to Tom, and his first thought was that it, too, would be from Rebecca, but when he checked the handwriting it was obviously different. Also, the postmark for his letter was New Orleans, whereas the postmark for the letter to Tom was St. Louis.

  He stuck both letters in his inside jacket pocket then drove the surrey home. By the time he got home, the letter felt as if it weighed ten pounds, so anxious was he to read it.

  When Mo came to take care of the surrey, Big Ben gave him the letter that was for Tom.

  “Mo, here is a letter for Tom that I picked up at the post office. Would you give it him, please?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Conyers,” Mo said. “Soon as I get this surrey took care of.”

  “Thanks,” Big Ben said. He almost bounded up the stairs, and was calling out loud to Julia even as he opened the front door.

  “Julia,” he called as soon as he got inside. “Julia, we got a letter from Rebecca!”

  Big Ben went into the parlor, then settled into the oversized leather chair that had been built to accommodate his bulk. Then, pulling the letter from his inside jacket pocket he held it until Julia came into the room.

  “Oh, thank God, Ben!” Julia said. “That means she’s all right. Read it aloud, please.”

  Big Ben nodded, then taking the letter from the envelope, began to read aloud:

  Dear Papa,

  I am doing well, so I don’t want you and Mama to be worrying about me. I hope everything is going well at the ranch. I won’t talk about Tom Whitman because I know that will just make you angry. I hope you did not fire him. He did nothing to warrant being fired. Please believe me, Papa, Tom Whitman was always very much the gentleman around me.

  I don’t know when I will be coming home. Maybe I will come home by Christmas.

  Love,

  Rebecca

  Big Ben finished reading the letter, then folding it over, he tapped it against his hand.

  “This letter was almost more frustrating than it’s worth.”

  “No, don’t say that, Ben. You know as well as I do that we have spent the last two months worrying about her, wondering if she was all right. I’ve had nightmares about what could have happened to her. It is good of her to write to us, to let us know that she is all right,” Julia said.

  “That’s true, I guess. She’s been gone for almost three months now, and this is the first letter we have gotten from her. Why did she wait so long? She had to know that we would be worried about her.”

  “At least she has written. And she did say that she might come home for Christmas.”

  “I hope I can believe that,” Big Ben said.

  “Why wouldn’t you believe it?”

  “She didn’t bother to tell us where she was, or how we could even get in touch with her,” Big Ben said. He handed the envelope to his wife.

  “As you can see, this is postmarked from New Orleans. Is she really in New Orleans? Or did she just give the letter to someone who was going to New Orleans to have them mail it?”

  “Why would she do something like that?” Julia said.

  “Because she is a very smart girl,” Big Ben said. “And if she was serious about keeping us from finding her, this is exactly the kind of thing she would do.”

  Even though Big Ben had already read the letter to her, Julia re-read it. “Oh,” she said. “Ben, do you think she really will be back by Christmas?”

  “I don’t know,” Big Ben said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “I know that you are worried about her, as am I,” Julia said. “But I have a feeling that all will be well.”

  “I pray that you are right,” Big Ben said.

  “Who knows? Maybe she will be back home for Christmas,” Julia said. “She suggested that.”

  “What a wonderful Christmas present that would be,” Big Ben said.

  He walked back to his chair and sat down again and thought about his conversation with Tom Whitman. What if she did marry him? How bad would that be? Tom Whitman was, without a doubt, the most unusual cowboy Big Ben had ever been around.

  But that’s because he wasn’t a cowboy, Big Ben realized. At least he certainly was not a cowboy in the normal sense of the term. But Clay liked him, Dusty liked him, Mo liked him, even Dalton liked him. He was smart as a whip, strong as an ox, and had as even a disposition as anyone Big Ben had ever known.

  So why was he here? What was he running from?

  That was what bothered Big Ben more than anything else—not just that he wasn’t really a cowboy.

  Back in the bunkhouse, Tom put the letter under the false bottom of his locker, then lay back on his bed with his hands folded behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling, and thought of the letter he had just read. He was the cause of her leaving. He had thought that all along, and this letter confirmed it.

  He was glad to have gotten the letter, because he had been feeling very anxious about her. He wished, though, that she had told him where she was.

  The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, and that was exactly why he had reacted as he did. If he could only tell her the truth, tell her how much he loved her. But he couldn’t tell her, because he knew that there would be as much pain as joy in such a relationship. And while he could live with it, he had no right to inflict that on anyone else.

  “Hey, Tom, did you hear?” Mo asked, stopping by Tom’s bunk. “Big Ben heard from Rebecca.”

  “Did he?” Tom asked.

  “Dalton is the one that told me about it, and he said she didn’t tell him where she was, just that she was all right.”

  “I’m glad to hear that she is all right,” Tom said.

  “Who was your letter from?”

  “What?”

  “When Big Ben went into town, he picked up a letter for you too. I’m the one who gave it to you, remember?”

  “Oh, yes, you did. It wasn’t anything, just a letter from someone I used to know.”

  “Mo!” someone called from the other end of the bunkhouse. “Want to play some cards?”

  “I ain’t got no money,” Mo said.

  “That don’t matter none. We’re playing for matches, tobacco, and cigarette paper and such.”

  “Yeah,” Mo called back. “If that’s all we’re playin’ for, it’s fine by me.”

  Tom thought of the cowboys he was living with now. This was an entirely new experience for him. Never before had he been around men like these, men who fight at the drop of a hat, with fists or guns, men who would gamble for matchsticks with as much intensity as if they were gambling for real money, and men who were loyal to their last breath to the outfit they rode for.

  Tom was not a gambler, and because the ranch provided him with food and a place to sleep, his forty dollars a month was enough for him. Nobody knew, and he had not yet had to touch, the five thousand dollars in cash he had brought with him. That money was hi
dden in his chest, under the same false bottom where he had put his letter.

  He and his father had talked about the money just before he left home.

  “If you are going to run away, there is no need for you to wear a hair shirt,” his father had told him. “Take some money with you. Take the time to travel, see the country, hell, see the world. It isn’t like you can’t afford it.”

  “You don’t understand,” Tom said. “I need to find out what I’m made of. How am I ever going to find that out if I travel first class, live in the finest hotels, dine at the best restaurants?”

  “Do you really want to see what you are made of ?” Tom’s father had asked. “Take some money with you, say, five thousand dollars, and see if you have the strength of character to have the money, but not use it.”

  “You think I can’t do that?”

  “No. I think you can,” Tom’s father had said. “But I think that you don’t believe you can. This would be the ultimate test for you, Tom. If you have the courage to do it.”

  After breakfast the next morning, Big Ben walked around to Julia’s side of the table and kissed her. “I’m going to go into town for a while,” he said. “Is there anything I can pick up for you? I’m taking the buckboard, so it would be no trouble.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “But I can’t think of anything I might need.”

  When Dusty saw Big Ben getting a team together to hitch them up to the buckboard, he hurried over to perform the chore for him.

  “Thanks, Dusty,” Big Ben said as Dusty started attaching the harness. It only took him a couple of minutes until he had the team hitched and ready to go. He indicated that Big Ben could climb into the buckboard.

  “Dalton said you got a letter from Miss Rebecca,” Dusty said as he handed the reins to Big Ben.

  “I did.”

  “But he said that she didn’t tell you where she is?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it, Colonel. I expect she’ll come back home bye and bye,” Dusty said.

  “I pray that you are right,” Big Ben said. He snapped the lines against the team and clucked to them. The team started forward, pulling the buckboard and Big Ben out of the barn and into the open.

  Dusty was the only one who ever called Big Ben ‘Colonel’ because he, alone, of all the hands who worked on the ranch, had served with Big Ben during the war. He had just told Big Ben that he believed Rebecca would come back home bye and bye, but would she?

  He certainly hoped that she would. He hoped she would not do as he had done. Because from the time Dusty left home, at the age of fifteen, he never saw his mother again.

  Clarksville, Tennessee, 1853

  “I’ll teach you to damn well do what I tell you to do,” Angus Livermore yelled at Dusty. Angus Livermore had married Dusty’s mother shortly after Dusty’s father died.

  Dusty, fifteen at the time, and Livermore were standing in the barn, and Livermore was angry because he didn’t think Dusty had done a good enough job in mucking out the stalls. Livermore took a cat-o’-nine-tails that he had constructed from old leather reins, each of the seven leather straps embedded with nails and other sharp bits of metal, and began beating Dusty. He beat Dusty until Dusty was crying for mercy, and when Dusty’s mother came out to the barn to beg him to stop, Livermore took the cat-o’-nine-tails to her.

  “I’ll not have you buttin’ in to the way I treat this boy!” Livermore said. Each lash of the cat brought red whelps and blood. “I’ve told you before, you only got two things to do on this farm. Cook my meals and warm my bed!”

  Livermore continued to beat the woman until she was too weak to even cry out anymore. But because he was beating Dusty’s mother, he had forgotten, temporarily, about Dusty, and Dusty was able to get away from him.

  Dusty didn’t go far. He went only as far as the door to the barn, where he saw the axe he had used earlier in the day to chop up firewood. Grabbing the axe, he stepped up behind his stepfather and swung it as hard as he could. The axe opened up the side of Livermore’s head, spilling brain, blood, and bone. He was dead before he hit the ground. Dusty left that same day, but not until he wrote a letter explaining that he was the one who had killed Livermore.

  In the twelve years after Dusty had left home, he had been a pony express rider, and spent some time at sea before going to war. Not until the war was over did he come back home, and when he did, he found the barn had fallen down and the house nearly so. There was no livestock, not so much as a chicken, and in the fields where cotton and corn had grown before, there was nothing but weeds.

  Dusty walked through the house, which had been emptied of anything of any value. When he came back out onto the front porch, he saw Mr. Dement, who he remembered as their next-door neighbor.

  “You would be Dusty, wouldn’t you?” Dement asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I seen you ride by and thought that might be you. But, bein’ as you’re all grow’d up now, I wasn’t real sure.”

  “Do you know where my Ma is, Mr. Dement?”

  “I sure do.” Dement pointed. “She’s lyin’ over there, next to your Pa. I’m surprised you didn’t see that first thing when you come up.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t think to look. I didn’t even know she was dead.”

  “She’s been dead six months now,” Dement said. “Had a real nice funeral for her, we did. Nobody in her family come, ’cause she didn’t have nobody but you, and most figured you’d been kilt in the war. All the neighbors come, though.”

  Dusty walked over to the place where his father had been buried. Next to him was a newer gravestone:

  EMMA MCNALLY

  1821–1865

  He was glad to see that Livermore’s grave was not there with his parents. He didn’t know where it was, nor did he care. As Dusty stood over the graves, looking down at them, Dement walked up to stand alongside him.

  “You should have come back,” Dement said. “Miz Emma missed you somethin’ terrible.”

  “I always thought that if I came back, I would just cause trouble for her,” Dusty said.

  “I thought it might be somethin’ like that,” Dement said. “Then, like I said, awhile ago I seen you ridin’ up the lane, and I was pretty sure it might be you.” So I brung you this letter which your Ma wrote not long before she died. She wanted me to give it to you. In it, she tells how she told the sheriff that she kilt Mr. Livermore after he beat her real bad. They had a trial and found that she had a good enough reason for killin’ him, so they let her go.”

  “Wasn’t her that killed him,” Dusty said. “It was me.”

  “Yep, after all these years, most particular with you not comin’ back and all, I sort of figured it might have been you that done it,” Dement said. “But I figure that you done it for the same reason your Ma said she done it for, and that makes it all right in my book. It don’t matter none now anyhow, seein’ as it’s all said an’ done. Will you be farmin’ the place?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t made up my mind,” Dusty said.

  “The place is yours now, but I’ve had the papers all drawed up in case you’d be willin’ to sell it.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  Dusty knew that the farm was worth more than that. But he also knew that he had no wish to stay around. And five hundred dollars was a lot more than he had now.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  Now, a quarter of a century after he sold the farm to Dement, Dusty had no regrets. After a bit of a wild spree where he had actually robbed a couple of stagecoaches and even a train, he had settled down here on Live Oaks, and the people here were the closest thing to a family he had ever had.

  He hoped that things could be worked out between Big Ben and Rebecca.

  As Dusty started back toward the bunkhouse, Mo and Tom tossed him a wave as they rode out toward the field. With no stock on the range, most of the work being done at the ranc
h now was maintenance, and he saw that Mo and Tom had wire and pliers with them in order to make some repairs on the fence line.

  Nobody had ever said anything directly to him, but Dusty couldn’t help but harbor the idea that, somehow, Rebecca’s leaving had something to do with Tom.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Union Stockyards, Fort Worth, October 1

  “I understand that you have yet to replace your stock,” Hurley said. The two men were in William Hurley’s office, a place that had almost become Big Ben’s home away from home since he sold all his stock.

  “I haven’t yet, but I’m going to have to do something fairly soon,” Big Ben said. “Otherwise I’ll be having to let some of my permanent hands go and I would hate to do that. But there is only so much make-work that can done on a ranch that has no cows.”

  “Are you going to buy Herefords?”

  “I suppose I will,” Big Ben said. “I certainly see no profit in buying any more Longhorns. I sure hate having to do that though. Walter Hannah is my friend, but if he gets something on you, he never lets go of it. The moment the first Hereford sets foot on my ranch is the moment he will start crowing.”

  “Maybe you would feel better about it if you knew that Herefords were bringing thirteen dollars a head this morning,” Hurley said.

  “Yes. Well, that’s why I came into town today. I wanted to check the highest price being paid, just to reinforce my decision. So I guess I’ll be buying Herefords.”

  “That’s a good move,” Hurley said. He chuckled. “Though the truth is, if you were just buying according to the highest price, you wouldn’t be buying Herefords.”

  “I wouldn’t?” Big Ben replied, curious by the strange answer. “What would I be buying?”

  “Black Angus.”

  “Black Angus? Yes, I think I have heard of those. I haven’t seen any in Texas, though.”