“Cattle.”
But Madolyn wasn’t listening. She had seen the boy’s black wavy hair, his vivid green eyes. “Who is he?”
Tyler shrugged. “Just a kid.”
“He’s Morley’s son.”
Tyler turned wide eyes to her.
“He looks just like Morley did when he was young.”
She watched Tyler’s Adam’s apple bob. “Morley’s complexion wasn’t as dark,” she conceded, “but his hair was like that. And his eyes. Those green eyes.”
Tyler stared a moment into her own green eyes, but she couldn’t read his expression.
“Stop,” she instructed him. “Stop this wagon.”
“Now, Maddie…”
“Don’t now, Maddie me, Mr. Grant. Stop this wagon. Turn around. I shall speak with the boy.” Anticipation fluttered impatiently inside her. “He’s my nephew.”
Tyler sighed, exasperated.
“Isn’t he?”
“Suppose so,” he mumbled, refusing to meet her eye. By this time he had stopped the wagon, but instead of turning it around, he called to the boy, who came running. After a rapid-fire exchange, the boy doffed his hat to Madolyn.
“Hola, Tía Maddie. Bienvenida.”
“What did he say?”
“Hello, Aunt Maddie. Welcome,” Tyler translated.
Madolyn’s breast swelled against her corseted ribs. Aunt Maddie. “How do you do, George Washington Sinclair. I am most delighted to make your acquaintance.”
The boy grinned.
“Doesn’t he speak English?”
“Not much,” Tyler responded.
“Not much?” Madolyn perused the boy again. Bare feet, in a land where every plant had thorns. And a shotgun. Threatening people with a shotgun! Whatever had become of Morley to allow his son to run around unattended this way?
“Climb in,” she told Jorge. When he didn’t budge, she motioned to the wagon bed. “Tell him to climb in, Mr. Grant.”
“Now, Maddie…”
“Just do it, Mr. Grant.”
Tyler shoved his hat back. “What are you up to?”
“I’m…” Madolyn stared from the boy’s quizzical expression to the treacherous landscape. When her gaze alighted on Tyler, her mind was made up. “We shall take him home, where hopefully he has a pair of shoes.”
“Now, Maddie, I wouldn’t—”
“And I shall replace that shotgun in his hand with a schoolbook.”
“Maddie—” When she tried to interrupt, Tyler held up his hand. “This is none of your business.”
“None of my business? The boy is my nephew.”
“Not necessarily.”
“You said he’s Morley’s son.” She smiled at Jorge. “Even if you hadn’t, I would have known. He’s near the age Morley was the last time I saw him. And the spitting image, except for—”
“Be that as it may, Jorge has a job to do, and he’s out here doin’ it. You’ll play hell meddlin’ in Morley’s business.” He frowned at her. “Likely I know Morley better’n you do, and I’ll be frank. He won’t cotton to a stranger meddlin’—”
“I am no stranger, sir.”
“An unfamiliar relative, then. Meddlin’s meddlin’, Maddie, any way you cut it.”
“If this is how Morley treats his son, it’s high time someone meddled in his affairs.”
Tyler watched Jorge study Maddie from beneath the brim of his sombrero. The boy seemed to be wavering between curiosity and downright confusion. If he could understand one half of what his auntie had planned for him, he would likely hightail it into the brush. Tyler grinned.
The moment he spied Maddie tapping that toe at the depot, he had known she was an old maid of the first order. Now she was proving it. She was about to wreak havoc on Morley Damn-his-hide Sinclair.
“Tell you what, Maddie,” he drawled. “Leave Jorge to his chores an’ you can take it up with Morley when we get there.”
Madolyn gazed longingly at the boy. How she would love to climb down off the wagon and hug him close. But she didn’t, she couldn’t. She didn’t even know how to do something so bold.
Standing before her was her nephew, her own flesh and blood, as near as she would ever come to having a son of her own. Not her business? This child was most definitely her business. “I suppose you’re right,” she relented. Still craving contact with the boy, she extended a mitted hand.
After prompting from Tyler, Jorge took it. Madolyn couldn’t tell how he felt about her. Obviously he wasn’t as captivated by this unexpected turn of events as she was. But he wasn’t as old as she was, either. He hadn’t lived through the hell she had lived through after Morley left; he hadn’t grown to adulthood and faced the terrible, sad and lonely fact that she had—that she would never have anybody to call her own, neither a husband, nor a child. Morley was all the family she had or ever would have.
At least she had thought so. Until this moment.
She closed her hand over Jorge’s dirty one, then held it a moment longer when he attempted to pull away. “George Washington Sinclair. How lovely. How utterly lovely. It proves your father hasn’t entirely lost sight of his heritage, naming you after the founder of our country.”
They proceeded along the dim road. Mountains ringed the horizon in the distance. The land that ran up to them was flat, the vegetation sparse, with a few straggly shrubs and even fewer trees. But suddenly, Madolyn felt much less isolated and lonely than an hour before, than a year before. Than for the last twenty years.
She ran a finger between her collar and skin. Heat built quickly in this country. Already her collar was damp, and her skin had begun to prickle. No matter. Nothing could dim her joy. Regardless of how this journey turned out now, she would never regret it. Not for one moment. She had gained a nephew.
Tyler whipped up the horses. By damn, but this little endeavor was turning out better than he had hoped. Miss Maddie was fixin’ to turn that no-good brother of hers every way but loose, and Tyler intended to sit back and enjoy the fireworks. Morley Damn-his-hide was in for the floggin’ of his life and he deserved every lash of her viperous tongue.
A mile or so down the road they rounded another curve and encountered another child. Dressed identically to Jorge, the boy stepped out to bar their passage with a similar shotgun. “Whoa, Tomás,” Tyler called. “Es Tyler, tu tio.”
The child flipped the sombrero back from his head. Maddie gasped; her parasol fell from her hand and lay unattended on the wagon bed at her feet.
“Another one?”
“Maddie, meet Thomas Madison. Tomás, for short.”
She squirmed on the seat. Extending her hand, she greeted the bewildered child with more exuberance than Tyler had seen her display yet in their brief association. The smile she turned to Tyler confirmed his worst suspicions—Maddie Sinclair was not only a handsome woman, she was a woman with a very human and possibly even a warm heart, regardless of the cold front she erected for the world to see.
He could tell she fairly itched to get down and grab hold of the boy. Such a move would likely surprise Tomás as much as it would her. Somewhere deep inside, Tyler wished she could work up the gumption. She deserved a little pleasure, before meeting up with that surly brother of hers. As before, she repeated the boy’s name in hushed tones.
“Thomas Madison Sinclair. My, oh, my.”
“How old are they?” she asked when they rode off, headed, once more, for the ranch house Morley Damn-his-hide had stolen from Tyler, along with their Texas range and ’Pache Prancer.
“The boys? Let’s see…Jorge would be fourteen, if I’m countin’ right. He was born the same year we settled here. And Tomás is two years younger.”
“Fourteen and twelve. My nephews are fourteen and twelve.” She turned a beaming face to him. With a start he saw that warm heart glow in her earnest green eyes.
“Certainly of an age where education is important,” she mused. “Most important.” Then they rounded a curve and encountered the third of Morley’s sons.
<
br /> “Hola Abe,” Tyler hailed. “Abraham Lincoln,” he informed Maddie.
A mitted hand flew to her breast. “Abraham Lincoln Sinclair.”
“¿Ouantos años, Abe?” Tyler inquired.
The boy shrugged. Tyler repeated in Spanish the tale he told the other boys: Morley’s sister had arrived from Boston for a visit and he was transporting her to the ranch. No need for alarm. He wasn’t about to start a shootin’ match with their auntie in the wagon. He wasn’t sure they understood the concept of aunt. Other than to call him tio, or uncle, they had never known any relatives. But his explanation seemed to work, for Abe, like his brothers before him, lowered his gun.
Or was it the effervescent reception they received from Maddie? She startled them, intrigued them, delighted them. He could tell that. And by damn if she wasn’t beginning to have the same unsettling effect to him.
“I figure Abe is ten or goin’ on it,” Tyler explained when they were once more on their way.
“Fourteen, twelve, ten,” she mused. “Jorge, Tomás, Abe. Three little nephews. And I didn’t even know they existed.”
Tyler thought how her surprises were just beginning.
“Since they don’t speak English,” she began, “I shall—”
“Damnation, Maddie. Stop your—”
“I shall have to learn Spanish,” she finished with a supercilious tone that ordinarily would have set his teeth on edge. That it didn’t was cause for worry.
A few bends in the road later, Tyler drew rein in front of the smallest child yet. This boy, like his brothers before him, held a shotgun steady, barring their progress.
“Little Jefferson Davis is eight.” Tyler said. “I know that, for a fact.”
Astonishment took its toll, silencing Maddie, another fact Tyler felt inspired to investigate one of these days.
Little Jeff was more inquisitive than his brothers had been. “¿Tía?” he repeated after Tyler explained who Maddie was. Tyler nodded.
The little boy’s eyes danced from Tyler to Maddie, then back again. “¿Tía y tío. Tío y tía?” He sang the phrase backwards and forwards, startling Tyler with such an association.
“What is he saying?” Maddie questioned.
Unwilling to explain and feeling the fool for it, Tyler shrugged and headed for the ranch house, which lay just around the next corner.
“Jefferson Davis?” Maddie inquired. “However did Morley settle on that name? He didn’t marry a Rebel, did he?”
Tyler chuckled. “Little Jeff’s named for me.” The insipid expression Maddie turned on him reinforced Tyler’s notion that four nephews in one morning had taken a bit of the starch out of her.
“My ties to the South,” he explained. “I hail from Georgia, ma’am. Atlanta, Georgia.”
“A Rebel?”
“Johnny Reb, himself.” He winked, experiencing an alarming sense of light-headedness in the presence of this spinster. “But the war’s over, Maddie.”
Then they arrived at the ranch house—if the two-room adobe hut could be called by such a highfalutin name—and Morley made a liar out of him. This war wasn’t over, not by a long shot.
Tyler drew rein under a mesquite tree, where he had hitched the reins over a low limb and stepped around to assist Maddie down from the seat before Morley saw them. One thing was clear as rainwater: In the month since Tyler had last seen him, Morley Sinclair had lost none of his belligerence.
“How the hell’d you get out here, Grant?” Morley stomped toward them, bellowing. “Those harebrained kids let you through? I’ll blister ever’one of ’em.” When Tyler didn’t respond, he continued to bluster. “You ain’t gettin’ your hands on that filly.”
Tyler’s hands tightened on Maddie’s waist. He lowered her to the ground, then turned her to face Morley. “Thought maybe we could work out a trade, Morley.”
Beside him Maddie straightened her waistcoat, then her skirt. Tyler didn’t miss her trembling hands; hell, he could practically feel her nervousness. That is, if he hadn’t been so busy feeling like a first-class heel, he would have. When she reached for her parasol, he stopped her.
“I’ll fetch it, Maddie. Go ahead and greet the ol’ sonofabitch.”
Morley’s belligerence evaporated like a puffball on a hot summer’s wind. “What the hell…Maddie?”
Four
Morley. Madolyn gaped at the stranger, stupefied. He bore little resemblance to her brother, not nearly as much as did his sons. He was older than when she last saw him, of course; she had expected that. He was larger, too, much larger. Although he could still pass for lean, he had filled out and looked solid now—his shoulders, his girth. He and Tyler were similarly built. But Morley had a paunch.
Like Papa.
Weakness swept over her at the comparison. She forced herself to search for some sign of her beloved brother in the man who stood defiantly before her. Her assumption about his attire had been right: He wore duck britches stuffed into knee-high boots, vest, chambray shirt, and Stetson hat. Like Tyler.
Unlike Tyler, she corrected. For there was nothing well-kempt about Morley. Indeed, he could more accurately be described as slovenly. His hat was sweat-stained and grimy. His shirt had probably never seen starch or a flatiron.
About the only familiar feature on the man was his eyes, green eyes that took her in even as she stood before him. His assessing gaze left no doubt that he found changes in her, too.
He removed his hat, revealing wavy black hair, now streaked with gray. Morley, her brother, gray-headed.
“What’re you doin’ here, Maddie? Didn’t Jed tell you to go back to Boston?”
“Jed?” She turned to Tyler, who glanced away too quickly. “Yes, he did, but Mr. Grant explained—”
“Well, you should have done it. What’d you mean, gettin’ this sonofabitch to drive you out here?”
Madolyn steeled herself against the disappointment she had expected. After all, she was here uninvited. And although she had longed to see Morley, obviously he had not been all that anxious to see her. “Mr. Grant was the only person who offered.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have let him. You shouldn’t have got off that train on the wrong side of the tracks.”
“The wrong side…?”
“Hold on a cockeyed minute, Morley. No need to take it out on Maddie. She didn’t start this fight between you and me. Truth is, she doesn’t even know about it.”
As her nephews had done earlier, Madolyn struggled to comprehend the conversation taking place around her.
“You shouldn’t have come, Maddie,” Morley was saying. “This ain’t no place for a lady.”
She glanced around. From what she had seen so far, she tended to agree with him. The house—could that hut be considered a ranch house?—was small, no more than one room, with an even smaller addition made of some sort of dried pickets or stalks. The roofs on both sections were thatched, both sagged.
The barn, or what she supposed was a barn, was adobe, also, and a little larger than the house. It was surrounded by a picket fence that probably formed a corral.
The buildings sat in the middle of nowhere. The land surrounding them stretched to infinity, which shrunk them even further in one’s perception. A distant ridge of blue mountains ringed the western horizon. Two trees were in sight, only two: the mesquite Tyler hitched the team to, and another one out beside the barn. Indeed, from every angle, this was a hostile, barren land.
Returning her attention to the man before her, she squinted through the harsh midday sunshine, trying to see her brother in this stranger, who was every bit as hostile as the landscape.
But stranger or not, he was still her brother. A deep sense of sadness suffused her. Not ten yards away stood the brother she had cried for and mourned; the brother she had longed impatiently to see. Envisioned as a reunion with the prodigal son, their meeting was nothing like she had expected—or hoped.
Angrily, she fought tears. Hope had never come easy for her, but, after believing
Morley dead for twenty years, upon learning that he was alive and living in Texas, she had been unable to suppress a swelling of hope. Now once again hope had let her down. When Tyler touched her shoulder, she started.
“Go ahead, Maddie. He might sound rough around the edges, but he won’t bite. You were brave enough to come all the way from Boston; surely you can stand up to one reprobate of a brother.”
Madolyn drew a shaky breath. Tyler was right about it taking courage to have made the journey. But that was nothing compared to standing here now, facing a brother who was sorry to see her—and beside a man who had obviously used her for his own gain. Whatever the trouble between Tyler and Morley, she wanted no part of it. “I need to talk to you, Morley. To tell you—”
“That the old man died?” Morley spat a stream of brown chewing tobacco juice off to the side. “You wasted good money to come out here an’ tell me that filthy old man died?”
“Papa left—”
“I don’t care what he left, Maddie. I don’t want a damned red cent from him. Go on back to Boston where you belong. You can have it all.”
She glared at the hostile stranger who shouted at her like she hadn’t been shouted at for three blessed years—not since Papa lost his mind. What peace she had enjoyed then. Even at the cost of a guilty conscience, the peace had been a welcome respite. Now, it seemed, she was faced with another battle.
She squared her shoulders, straightened her spine, and stepped toward him. “Not without your help.”
“I ain’t interested.” Morley turned, dismissing them.
“Morley, please,” she called. “Let me explain. I need your help…” Pausing, she glanced toward Tyler who wore a pained expression. Pity? Well, she didn’t need his pity. He had done enough already. Perhaps if she had come alone…
“Papa didn’t leave anything to you,” she told Morley. “But I can’t have it either, not without your help.”
“That’s no concern of mine.”
“It is.” One glance at this run-down operation revealed that Morley needed Papa’s money almost as badly as she did. “I’ll gladly share the inheritance, if you will help me get it.”
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