But that was years ago. Sean had gotten married and gone back to Texas. Luke had vanished into California. Pete was on his own, and having this young woman look up at him as if he was Paul Bunyon and Wild Bill Hickok rolled into one didn’t help.
Still, it was a real nice change. He’d had more than enough of his adopted brothers being irritated at having to help him out of scrapes. Isabelle said he didn’t think things through properly before he acted. Jake said he was plumb loco. It was a relief to discover Anne didn’t think any of that. He squared his shoulders and stood a little taller.
“That may be so,” he said, “but I’d like to know what’s going on just the same. You never can tell when trouble might start up again.”
She ducked her head, acting demure. “You ought to ask Eddie about that. He wouldn’t like me talking about the ranch.”
“Who’s Eddie?”
She looked surprised. “Eddie Kessling. The foreman.”
“Can’t remember everybody’s name,” Pete mumbled, wondering how long it would be before he gave himself away. “We’ll leave that for the moment. Tell me about yourself.”
She looked really startled this time, as if she’d expected him to know everything. “I don’t mean what was in your letters,” he said quickly. “There must be lots of bits and pieces you didn’t tell me. Seeing that man about to haul you off gave me quite a turn.”
“My uncle never liked me. He didn’t want Papa to marry Mama. After Papa was killed, he was mean to us. After Mama died, he threatened to sell me.”
“Looks like he did sell you to that burned-up-looking scrap of a man. Wouldn’t be surprised if he gives his horse a bad fright every morning.”
Anne giggled. “He is old and little, but he owns a big ranch. Eddie says he’s very rich.”
“Only in cows and sagebrush. How long has your uncle been trying to marry you off? I know you wrote and told me, but my memory’s not too good. I forget all kinds of things.”
“Is that why you weren’t doing so well in the hardware business?”
“What? Oh, yeah, something like that.” He was going to have to start paying close attention to what he said. Belser was just waiting for him to make a mistake.
“Why didn’t Belser stop him?”
“He doesn’t like me. He said I’d have to leave anyway when he took over.”
“That’s just the kind of cowardly double-cross he’d pull,” Pete said.
“I’ve lived here ever since my parents died. Uncle Carl said I’d always be safe. I was until he died. I told my uncle you’d married me, that you were coming soon and you’d have the sheriff put him in jail if he so much as laid a finger on me. But when you didn’t come and didn’t come, he decided I was lying. Why are you so late? I was afraid you’d decided you didn’t want to marry me after all.”
“What? And give up a ranch for such a paltry reason as that?”
Anne’s face registered shock.
“I mean I’d have given up the ranch before I’d have done anything like that. A promise is a promise. I would have been here on time if I hadn’t been shot.”
Her quick smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “I should have known something terrible happened. You always were very nice to me.”
Pete got the feeling he was sinking deeper and deeper into a pool of quicksand of unknown depth. It seemed every time he opened his mouth, he landed on unsound ground. He’d done the chivalrous thing so he could find his money. But being a husband was getting complicated already, and he hadn’t been married for thirty minutes. He didn’t know how people stood it for years at a time. If he didn’t get things straightened out soon, he would put his head in a noose.
“I was terribly sorry to hear your brother had been killed,” Anne said.
“Huh?” Pete didn’t know anything about a brother. How much more family could Peter have?
“I said I was sorry to hear Gary died in that blizzard,” Anne said. “I know you two hadn’t seen each other for years, but it must have been very painful.”
“Yeah, sure.” Hell, he didn’t even know his brother’s name. He wondered about the whereabouts of his father and mother. Other brothers and sisters. He could have a biblical tribe on his heels right now. Why hadn’t Peter written all of that stuff in his Bible?
“I never liked the way Uncle Carl preferred him to you. He was going to leave the ranch to Gary, not leave you a thing. I know Gary liked the ranch, but he was always quarreling with Uncle Carl. If he hadn’t lost his temper so often, he wouldn’t have run away, and he wouldn’t have died. I’m sorry about Gary, I truly am, but I’m glad you got the ranch.”
“Why was Uncle Carl going to do that?” Pete asked before he had time to think. “I mean, I don’t think anybody ever told me. Not exactly.”
“I don’t suppose you remember it. Or want to. I remember every word he said. ‘You’re a soft, weaselly, fella,’ he told you that day. “You don’t like work, you’re afraid of cows, and you haven’t got the sense God gave a woman. I’d be a fool to leave you so much as a foot of this ranch.’”
“A crabby old coot, wasn’t he?”
“You told him you didn’t like him and wouldn’t have his filthy cows if he gave you every square inch of the place. Mama said it wasn’t a smart thing to say, especially with you having a shiftless pa and your ma being dead as well as disowned by her family for marrying your pa, but I was proud of you.”
She was besotted. And any fella with a shiftless pa, a dead brother, and a disowned ma was a fool to throw a whole ranch in the teeth of a rich uncle. He didn’t know how he was going to tell her the silly fellow was dead.
“It must be terrible to be the last one in your family. Sometimes I feel lonely, too. That’s why I was so glad you agreed to marry me. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“A man of honor couldn’t do anything else,” Pete said. “Now I’d better unsaddle my horse and turn him out in the corral. Want to come with me?”
Thank God Anne was young, nervous, and willing to talk. He didn’t want a chattering female on his heels, but if he could keep her at it long enough, he might learn enough to keep both their necks from being put into the noose. Apparently Peter hadn’t been on the ranch in years, hadn’t made a very good impression when he was here, and hadn’t been much of a success in business, so Pete could depend upon everybody thinking him something of a dolt. That wasn’t going to do his pride any good, but he figured he could stand it until he found his money and left.
And he would leave. He was anxious to get to Colorado. Or maybe he’d go to Arizona or New Mexico. He liked the freedom to wander from one place to another, and he was tired of bitterly cold winters. Arizona sounded good.
He couldn’t leave without doing something about Anne. She was a pretty young woman, charming, trusting, and really rather adorable. She was too young for a twenty-nine-year-old miner, even if he did look five years younger than that, but she was just the right age for some fuzzy-cheeked cowpoke eager to start his own spread.
So Pete let Anne walk with him to the corral, chattering away about everything that had happened since Uncle Carl died. He was going to have to ask her why she called this guy her uncle when she hadn’t mentioned being related to him at all. He stopped her when she mentioned the rustlers.
“Whoa! Back up to the rustlers,” he said. “I want to hear more about that.”
“I told you about them in one of my letters.”
Damn. He wished Peter had had enough sense to keep all those letters together. Knowing Anne as he did already, she must have written him at least a hundred times. “I told you I’m terribly forgetful. I couldn’t concentrate. You know, the business failing and all of that.”
“I guess it would be hard to worry about things here when you had creditors beating on your door demanding payment. Where did you hide?”
“Hide?”
“When they came after you. Uncle Carl said when your pa lived here, he used to go off to th
e hills where nobody could find him. He’d take a saddlebag full of whiskey and not come back until he’d drunk it all up.”
“It wasn’t as bad as that,” Pete said. “I’d pay them a little something. It would keep them off my neck for a few weeks.”
The ranch was well appointed. The corrals were constructed of sturdy poles, pine and cedar. A couple of roomy sheds were piled high with hay for the winter. The bunkhouse was a large structure of sturdy logs. There was even a blacksmith shop and a low, rambling barn. Clearly the Tumbling T was a successful ranch. The large amount of glass used for windows was further proof of old Carl’s success.
“Let’s get back to those rustlers.” They’d reached the corral. “When did it start?”
“I’m not sure. Uncle Carl didn’t like to talk about business until after Dolores and I left the room.”
Uncle Carl wouldn’t have gotten away with that if Isabelle had been around. She’d have filled his ear good and proper. “Guess.”
“I think it started soon after Uncle Carl got hurt. He couldn’t ride anymore. He said the wolves always started to close in when the grizzly went down.”
Sometimes they didn’t wait that long. “Have they taken much?”
“Eddie says it’s hard to tell. He’s worried because the cows are thin this year. They can’t find enough grass because we didn’t get any rain the whole summer.”
If he didn’t start worrying about the rustling, there might not be enough cattle left to worry about. “I’ll talk to him later. Anybody gotten hurt?”
“No.”
Then things couldn’t be too serious. At least not yet.
He stripped the saddle and cloth off Sawbones. The horse trotted away, squealing with delight. He found a bare spot of ground and immediately knelt down and started to roll in the dust.
“It’ll take a half hour of brushing to get him clean now.” But Pete didn’t mind. Sawbones was probably the only reason Pete was alive now. Which reminded him of why he’d come to the ranch in the first place. The killers’ trail had led him here, but he’d lost it before he reached the ranch buildings. The killers had probably come through here ten days ago. Lots of riders had used the trails since then.
“I want to take a look around before supper,” he told Anne. “Do you know if these horses belong to anyone in particular?” He gestured to several horses in the large corral.
“I don’t think so,” Anne said. “Uncle Carl always complained he had to provide everything for his men—horses and saddles as well as beds.”
“Why do you call him uncle? You’re no relation.” He hoped he hadn’t put his foot in it again.
“He said he’d always wanted to marry my ma, that he would have if my father hadn’t beaten him to it. He said since I couldn’t be his daughter, I could be his niece.”
“He should have left the ranch to you.”
“Uncle Carl would never leave anything to a woman,” she said, apparently shocked at the idea. “He said women didn’t know a thing about taking care of themselves, much less a ranch.”
It was obvious Uncle Carl had never met women like Isabelle or Pearl. Not to mention Marina, Hannah, and Melody.
“Then he could have left it to you and Peter together … I mean to you and me together.”
“Uncle Carl said women didn’t have any sense when it came to property, that they’d waste it on the first handsome face they saw.”
“Since you were already Pet—my wife, I don’t see how he could say that.”
“Uncle Carl said what he wanted.”
That’s what came from being set up as a king in a little bitty kingdom. Isabelle would have straightened him out in five minutes.
“I’m going for a ride. Tell Dolores not to serve supper without me.”
“She never would. It’s your table.”
“That’s going to take some getting used to. Seeing as how all I had before was a hardware store,” he added.
It wasn’t going to be as easy to be a property owner as he’d thought. Just remembering he was supposed to own a couple hundred thousand acres of grazing land was a bit staggering. It was a good thing this Peter fella whose shoes he’d stepped into was a real dunce. Pete had a whole lot to learn himself.
But one thing he did know about was tracking. He’d gotten Hawk to teach him when they were both still living with Jake and Isabelle. Pete had himself two killers to find. After he did that, he’d figure out what to do about Anne, the ranch, Belser, and her miserable uncle. Then he’d get the hell out of Wyoming.
“I can hardly worry about rustling for worrying about what we’re going to do to help the cattle we do have get through the winter,” Eddie was saying. “There isn’t any grass. It seems like every week I hear of somebody else bringing in a new herd.”
Pete couldn’t figure out the man’s attitude. He seemed angry, confused, unable to concentrate. If he was like this all the time, Pete would have to get a new foreman.
“It’s all that Eastern money,” Belser complained. “They think the grass is endless, that all they have to do is bring in a thousand cows—or twenty thousand—and they can make twenty-five percent profit a year.”
“Can they survive a tough winter?” Pete asked.
“That depends on how tough.”
“I came along the Missouri and down the Yellowstone to the Powder,” Pete said. “The Indians say the signs are bad. They’re preparing for the worst winter within living memory.”
“We won’t survive anything like that,” Eddie said.
“Then round up everything you can and sell it.”
Eddie looked startled, but Belser looked shocked and angry. “I knew you were a fool. Those steers are fifty pounds underweight. They won’t bring what they’re worth.”
“They won’t bring anything dead,” Pete said.
“Uncle Carl wouldn’t have sold early,” Belser said. “You know what he used to say?”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Anne interrupted. “How could he, being in Illinois all this time?”
“He always said the same thing,” Belser said, glaring at Pete. “I don’t think you know what it is.”
“He said never send a steer to market until both the weight of the steer and the prices on the market are as high as you think they can go,” Anne said.
Belser had been doing this all evening, tossing out things he seemed to think Pete ought to remember, trying to catch him. Anne had come to his defense from the beginning, answering Belser’s questions, often adding information to help fill in Pete’s knowledge of a past that wasn’t his own. Pete just sat there smiling and letting Belser get more and more angry. It didn’t surprise Pete that no one on the place seemed to like Belser. Pete was becoming more and more convinced Belser was responsible for Peter’s death. Pete couldn’t figure out any other reason he should be so certain Pete was an imposter.
“Selling now is a pretty big gamble,” Eddie said.
“I’ll ride out with you tomorrow,” Pete said. “We’ll decide then.”
“You’ve got no right doing anything like that,” Belser argued.
“He owns the ranch,” Anne said. “I can’t think of anybody who has a better right.”
Belser looked as though he was bursting to say something, but he bit his tongue. “You’ll have to tie him to the saddle to keep him on his horse. From what Uncle Carl said, he not only can’t stay on a horse, he’s afraid of them.”
“That horse in the paddock doesn’t look like the mount of a man who’s not very good in the saddle,” Eddie said, then looked angry at himself for defending Pete.
“Ten years can make a big difference,” Pete said to Belser. “A man can learn to do all kinds of things. Now,” he said, turning back to Eddie, “I want to hear more about this rustling.”
Pete listened carefully as Eddie outlined what had been happening over the last year. It seemed as though it had started as a small-time operation—a few steers now and again. But this summer it had turned into a regu
lar problem.
While Eddie and Belser argued over solutions, Pete took stock of where he stood. Except for Belser, everyone at the ranch took him at his word that he was Peter. But sooner or later he’d foul up somewhere, and his deception would be discovered. There was no point in fighting it. It was going to happen. He had to figure out how to get as much done as he could before that happened.
He kept asking himself why he was doing this. Any sane man would have simply tried to stop Anne’s uncle from dragging her away. It would never have occurred to him to pretend to be her husband.
But having done so, Pete now found himself playing a false role. He was determined to save her, but he didn’t know how. So he had to keep up the pretense until he could find an answer.
“I want to see the books,” Pete said. He rose without waiting for Eddie to respond. “I’d like to know how we stand before I look at the herd.”
“You can’t wait to get your hands on Uncle Carl’s money, can you?” Belser asked.
“It’s his money,” Anne said. “Or have you forgotten Uncle Carl left the ranch to him?”
“How the hell could I forget anything like that!” Belser shouted. “It was supposed to be mine. He promised.”
“He only said you could have it if Peter didn’t want it. I heard him say over and over again that he wanted it to go to his blood kin, even if he didn’t think Peter deserved it.”
“It should have been mine!” Belser shouted. “I worked for it. I deserve it.”
“You’re not kin.”
“I’m his nephew.”
“Great-nephew,” Anne corrected, “on his wife’s side. You’re not blood kin. I heard him say that many times.”
“He paid you a better wage than the others,” Eddie said, “and he let you live in this house. You can’t think you’ve been treated badly.”
“I’ve been cheated!” Belser bellowed, his face purple with rage. “But I’ll have this ranch yet.” He pointed an accusing finger at Pete. “You wait and see if I don’t. And when I do, I’ll hang you from the nearest tree.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” Eddie said as Belser stormed out of the room. “He’s always had a temper, but he’s never acted like this.”
Pete (The Cowboys) Page 3