by Kaki Warner
“Have one of the Garcia boys check the buggy over then hitch a fresh horse,” he said over his shoulder as he limped through the barn. “I’ll be back directly.”
As he went out the double front doors into the yard, he saw the horses trotting through the gate. They had perked up, being so close to home, and were kicking up enough of a ruckus to bring Brady out onto the front porch.
“When did you get back?” his brother asked, then turned his attention to the horses filing past. “And what are they doing here?”
“I sent them.” Jack stopped in the yard and waited for his brother to come down the steps to meet him, preferring to do this in neutral territory rather than in Brady’s office.
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t sell them. The loan is paid off. Here’s the paperwork.” He held out the signed paper when Brady stopped before him.
After reading it over, Brady looked up, a frown of confusion drawing his dark brows together. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either, Big Brother. So why don’t you explain it to me.”
“Explain what?”
“About the account you set up for me.” When his brother just stared at him, Jack’s anger caught fire. “Did you think I couldn’t earn my own way, Brady? That I was so helpless you had to coddle me like a baby on a sugar tit?”
The blue eyes widened in surprise. “We all got equal shares, Jack. This is your ranch too.”
“Is it?” Jack gave a bitter laugh. “Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with it—or you—anymore. Just stay the hell out of my life.” He started toward the house.
Brady yanked him back, almost sending him toppling when his weight came down on his bad leg. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Jack? What did I do this time?”
“It’s not what you did. It’s what you didn’t do.” Yanking his arm free, Jack thrust his face close to Brady’s, forcing him to look directly into his eyes and see the fury he didn’t bother to hide. “You damn near lost the ranch rather than come to me for help. Why is that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why didn’t you pay off the loan with the money in that account you set up for me?” Jack demanded.
“It wasn’t mine to use. It’s your money.”
“You could have asked me for it. Or were you afraid I wouldn’t give it to you?”
“I was afraid you would.”
Jack took a step back. Now he was the one confused.
“You have Daisy and Kate now, Jack,” Brady snapped, obviously struggling to keep his own temper in check. “You need it for them. Besides, it was my mistake that got us into trouble and I wasn’t going to let you trade your future to get us out of it.”
“Let me? It wasn’t your decision.” Jack wanted to shout in frustration. Why did his brother think he had to manage everyone? When would he stop deciding what was best for all of them without even giving them a say-so? “Damnit, Brady, I’m almost thirty years old. I don’t need you taking care of me, or making decisions for me, or paying me a damn allowance.”
“I was just trying—”
“Well, don’t!” Jack cut him off with a savage slash of his hand. “I’ve got plenty of money. I don’t need yours.” He laughed bitterly. “Hell, I’m part owner of a trader. I’ve got a warehouse full of merino wool in San Francisco that has probably already sold for a small fortune, and I have shares of two more ships working the China trade. It’s time you started taking me seriously and quit treating me like your idiot little brother.”
“But you are my little brother.”
Jack threw his hands up in exasperation. “Well, not anymore. I don’t want the job, so I quit. I’ll never be you and I’m tired of trying. Soon as I load up Daisy and Kate, we’re going to Val Rosa. I’m done here.”
Whirling, Jack started toward the barn again.
Brady’s voice stopped him in midstride. “They’re gone.”
Another wave of anger rose in Jack’s chest. Slowly he turned. “Gone?”
“I sent them to Redemption.”
That was it. The final, tiniest blade of straw, the weight of which snapped the last thread of Jack’s frayed temper.
Bracing against his good leg, he drove his right fist into Brady’s jaw with enough force to send his brother’s Stetson flying.
Brady fell back, staggering for balance.
Jack came after him, ignoring the ache in his leg and the blood on his knuckles, no longer aware of anything but the decades of anger and festering resentment that demanded release. “You sonofabitch!” he shouted, swinging again as Brady ducked and threw an arm up to block him. “You had to take them away from me too?”
“I gave them back to you, you stupid bastard.” Dropping his right shoulder, Brady drove his fist into Jack’s stomach.
Air whooshed out. Jack doubled over.
“I sent them to Redemption for you!”
Momentarily distracted by Brady’s words, Jack didn’t see his brother’s leg shoot out and hook his ankle. A moment later, he was toppling backward. He hit with a thud that drove the air from his lungs a second time, and all he could do was gape up at his brother, who stood over him shouting.
“They were leaving, you dimwit! I sent them to Redemption because there’s no way out of there, and you’ll be able to catch up to them before they get too far. Christamighty!”
Once he caught his breath, Jack rolled over and, using his good leg, pushed himself back onto his feet. He leaned over to spit the dust from his mouth, then straightened. Resting his hands low on his hips, he scowled at his brother. “What do you mean, they were leaving?”
“Christ.” Brady swiped blood from a cut on his top lip, then bent and snatched his Stetson from the ground. “It was the singing thing.”
“What singing thing?”
“Jesus. Don’t you two ever talk?”
“What singing thing, damnit!”
“Ask her.” Shoving dark hair out of his eyes, Brady put the hat back on, then reached into his pocket. “Or read this.” Pulling out a folded sheet of paper, he passed it over. “She said it would explain everything.”
“You haven’t read it?”
“Hell no, I haven’t read it! How low do you think I am?”
Jack let his glare answer for him. Opening the paper, he started reading. By the time he’d finished, he was mad all over again. “Hell and damnation! Does everybody in the world think I’m a damn fool?”
Wisely, his brother didn’t answer that.
Muttering under his breath, Jack whirled and started toward the barn. If he left now, he could be over the pass before dark. And when he caught up to Daisy ... damn her. Did she think he would just let her and Kate go?
“What are you going to do?” Brady called after him.
“None of your goddamned business.”
A moment later, he heard his brother coming up behind him. “Jack, wait.”
“For what?” he said without slowing. “More talk? You’re never going to change and I’m never going to be more than your little brother. So I’m done talking.” With a backward wave, he continued on into the shadowed barn, speaking as he went. “Adios, Brady. Give my good-byes to Hank and the ladies and the kids. I’ll leave the horse and buggy in Redemption.” Having a better idea, he stopped and reached into his pocket. “Or I can pay you for them now if you’d prefer.”
Before he could pull his hand from his pocket, he was on the ground again.
Brady loomed over him, his face red with fury. “You’ll stay until I have my say. Then if you still want to go sniveling off, I’ll hitch your goddamn horse myself. Now get up!”
Jack got up. Slower this time, but still game if his brother preferred to use fists rather than words. He just wanted it over with. “Go ahead then,” he said, once he’d regained his feet. “Say your words.”
Brady’s eyes seemed to snap fire. His chin jutted belligerently and his teeth
were a white snarl beneath his dark mustache. “You want to be taken seriously? Then be serious. Commit to something—anything. Take a chance and believe in something bigger than yourself. Don’t be a drifter all your life—you’re a better man than that. I know, because I helped raise you.”
When Jack started to interrupt, Brady held up a hand. “Maybe you don’t want to hear that. But the fact is, Jack, I am your big brother, and I do worry about you, same as I worry about Hank and Jessica and Molly and the kids and Daisy and Kate and everyone else in my family.”
“I don’t need your worry.”
“Well, that’s too bad. Because even if you ride off tonight and never come back, I’ll still be your big brother, and I’ll still worry about you.”
Not sure how to respond, Jack studied dust motes drifting through a beam of sunlight shining down through the open loft door. They looked like tiny golden flecks suspended in space, like stars hanging in a twilight sky. He let out a weary breath and watched them scatter in swirling chaos.
He wanted to stay mad. He had a right to his resentments.
But in truth, he was weary of them.
“I may have been hard on you,” Brady went on, sounding as drained as Jack felt. “But I never gave up on you, and I never disrespected you. Hell”—he gave a rueful laugh—“sometimes I even envied you.”
Jack looked over, certain that his brother was mocking him.
But Brady seemed sincere. Embarrassed, even. And really, really tired. The grooves bracketing his mustache seemed to have deepened overnight, and there was a weariness in his eyes that Jack had never noticed before. It was unsettling. Brady had always seemed so sure and unshakable, so abso-goddamn-lutely convinced of his own rightness. But maybe that arrogant high-handedness was as much for show as Jack’s carefree I-don’t-care attitude was. Maybe Brady had his worries, too, and was just trying to do the best he could with what he had, and making his own mistakes along the way.
A lot of mistakes.
“Envied me, why?” Jack asked, not convinced such a thing was possible.
Brady made a dismissive motion. “You had everything, Jack, yet you always wanted more. The ranch wasn’t good enough. We weren’t good enough. And you were ready to toss us all away for places you’d never been, places you’d never seen. On top of that,” he added with a half-smile, “you got away with shenanigans we couldn’t. No matter what foolishness you pulled, Pa always favored you.” He sounded almost embarrassed, as if admitting such a thing, much less saying it aloud, would sound unmanly and pitiful.
Which it sort of did.
“Favored me?” Jack tried to laugh the notion off. “You were the one he talked to.”
“The one he ordered around maybe.” Jack heard a derisive tone in Brady’s voice that seemed out of character for his forceful big brother. “I was just his errand boy. But you made him smile.”
I did? He didn’t remember Pa hardly noticing him. Had he been wrong all these years? And if he’d been wrong about Pa, could he have been wrong about Brady too?
It was disconcerting. Like a familiar door had opened in his mind, but what he saw behind it was altogether different from what he had expected to find.
“It wasn’t easy on me either,” Brady added. “Or Hank. You weren’t the only one who thought about leaving.”
Jack stared at his brother as if seeing him for the first time. Which in many ways, he was. “So why didn’t you?”
Brady gave a crooked smile. Motioning out the open barn doors toward the grasslands stretching like a green sea across the valley, he said, “I’m a rancher. That’s what I am and what I do. And after doing it for as long as I have, I realized one day I actually liked it. And even more important, I’m damn good at it.”
Jack couldn’t argue that. Despite this mess over the smelter and the horses, Brady had kept RosaRoja running strong through lean years and good.
Feeling suddenly embarrassed by the softer turn of the conversation, and fearing he and his brother were about to step into emotional areas that would be better left to weaker minds, Jack gave him a grin and moved back to safer ground. “I’m Hank’s favorite too. Told me so himself.”
“He counts in his sleep,” Brady reminded him. “And talks to horses.”
“Yeah, well ...”
To hide his sudden awkwardness, Jack studied the letter again, still confused and a little hurt by what Daisy had written. How could she go running off after the night they’d had? Hell, how could she move at all? He was still a bit sore himself. “I can’t believe she told you about the singing thing but not me.”
Brady prodded his toe at a dung beetle crawling through the straw at his feet. “Seems like a poor excuse for running off, just to sing on a stage.”
Jack shot him a hard look. “She deserves to be up there.”
Thrusting his hands into his front pockets, Brady rocked back on his heels and looked at him.
“She’s a damn good singer,” Jack defended. “She should have her chance.”
“So you’re going after her?”
“Of course I’m going after her.”
“Good.”
His brother’s smug look brought Jack’s hackles up again. “But not because of you. Don’t think you talked me into it, because you didn’t.”
“Of course not.”
“You’re an interfering sonofabitch.”
“I know.”
“All right, then.” Jack turned toward the waiting buggy.
Brady fell into step beside him. “You ought to go by horseback. Hank won’t be able to drive both the wagon and buggy home by himself. Unless you’re planning to bring Daisy and Kate back here. Which I’m guessing you’re not.”
Jack stopped and looked at his brother. “Hank’s in Redemption? With Daisy?”
“I couldn’t send her alone. Since we closed the mines and shut down the spur line, most folks have already left. Place is a damned ghost town.”
Hank. The man who turned women into simpering simpletons. Alone with Daisy. In a ghost town. Grand. “Then how are we supposed to get from there to the transcontinental?” The idea of being trapped in a ghost town seemed only marginally better to Jack than being trapped at the ranch.
“We still have the handcar. Hank’s figured a way to attach a sail to it so you won’t have to pump all the way up the pass. In fact, he’s probably already rigging it up.”
“Hell.”
“I know. But he’s not one to hold a grudge, so I’m sure he’ll do his best.”
A different kind of alarm moved through Jack. “Grudge about what?”
Brady looked sheepish. “I accidentally told him what you said about Molly having her hands all over you.”
“Accidentally?”
“And there’s something else I should probably warn you about.”
“Christ.” Jack was tired of standing—or falling—on his bad leg, he was hungry, and he wanted to go after Daisy. “What?”
“The ladies are planning something. Big secret. But whatever it is, me and Hank had nothing to do with it. Wanted you to know. And I don’t think Daisy knows anything either.” Brady patted his shoulder in commiseration. “Thought you should be warned, you know, in case it’s something like that thing with the Henshaw sisters.”
“Oh, hell.”
“I know.” Brady grinned. “But maybe this time, you’ll like it.”
DAISY BOUNCED HER HUNGRY DAUGHTER ON HER KNEE AND stared in confusion at the shuttered storefronts and near-empty streets and the small number of people walking along the board-walks in Redemption.
“Where is everybody?” she asked as Hank reined the team down a back street that looked like it hadn’t been traveled since the last rain. Even the train track that paralleled it was sprouting weeds between the rails.
“Gone.”
“Gone,” Kate echoed.
“Why?” Daisy asked.
“No work. Same with most mining towns since Grant changed the country from silver to gold.”
Several derelict types came out of the back door of a saloon to watch them as they came down the street. Hank nodded, but didn’t stop. After the wagon rolled past, Daisy turned and looked back to find them still watching, their eyes dulled by drink and disappointment. A shiver of unease went through her. She faced forward again, wondering if she and Kate would be safe here. And how would they get out? It was obvious the train wasn’t running. “Is there a stage office?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Then how will we go on to New Orleans?”
“We’ll think of something.”
Not much of an answer. As they passed a one-room church with an empty steeple, a man straightened from a small vegetable patch inside the unpainted fence. “Hello, Hank,” he called with a wave.
Hank waved back. “Howdy, Reverend.”
“Got time for a visit?”
“Later,” Hank called without slowing. “After supper.”
Supper. Daisy’s stomach rumbled just to hear the word. They had finished all the food they’d brought hours ago.
“Hungwy,” Kate said, looking up at Hank.
“Soon.” Reaching over, he ruffled her blond curls, his big hand dwarfing her small head. “Got your daddy’s appetite, don’t you, Katie-girl?”
“Katie-girl,” Kate said and grinned.
Daisy’s worry grew as they left the deserted buildings of town behind and passed cabin after cabin that looked to be abandoned. Finally, at least a hundred yards past the last dwelling, Hank pulled the wagon to a stop in front of a small clapboard house with a wide front porch. A horse that was still harnessed to an old-fashioned carriage was grazing in the side yard. As Hank stepped down to tie the team to the hitching rail beside the walk, a gray-haired woman came out the front door.
“Got word, I see,” Hank said by way of greeting.
“Ya, I did,” the woman answered in a heavily accented voice as she stood on the porch, smiling and wiping her hands on a faded calico apron tied around her equally faded calico dress. “And supper is waiting.”
The woman, Hank explained as he helped Daisy and Kate out of the wagon, was Anna Strobel. Her husband, Hans, had been a shift foreman in one of the Wilkins mines. His job now was to watch over what equipment was left, and to ready the house whenever it was needed.