The stench of the stockyards and the Fort Worth Dressed Meat and Provision Company assaulted her as Samantha tied Pony in front of the new post office. The Ladies’ Society, of which her mother was secretary, had urged the city council to encourage the structure be built farther south where the finer residential areas lay. The powers that ran the stockyards and the Swift, Armour, and Libby’s meat-packing plants soon to come to Fort Worth had won the debate with the United States Postal Department. They claimed that access to mail service was essential to their businesses.
Samantha noticed the fine workmanship of the hitching rings that were crowned with the city’s logo, a reclining panther. Daniel Lane, a miracle worker with iron, was responsible for the design. The blacksmith’s shop where he worked had been commissioned to forge the rings, and Samantha wondered if Billie June Singleton had seen them. She did not come to town as often since her brother had put a stop to her affair with Daniel Lane in a showdown before the whole community.
“She’s become somewhat reclusive,” her mother had said of Billie June to Samantha in a discussion of the scandal that had quietly exploded with the fireworks when Daniel escorted Sloan’s sister to the Fourth of July picnic last July. “What a shame. Daniel Lane is likely to be the only suitor Billie June will ever have, plain as she is, but the girl asked for her brother’s wrath when she paraded that smithy’s helper in front of the whole town. She should have known better.”
“Sloan should have known better,” Samantha had said.
Mildred had inserted her opinion into the rehash. “Young Sloan better watch himself with that ironmonger. Daniel Lane ain’t one to forget the injury he suffered that day. Nothing sets deeper or burns longer in the human gut than the shame of public humiliation. The master of the Triple S has sowed the seed of revenge.”
To this day, Samantha winced at the memory of Sloan’s public threat to Daniel Lane and Billie June’s humiliation before her friends and neighbors and the townspeople at the Independence Day gathering. As Billie June was unloading her picnic basket, Sloan had arrived on horseback behind the family carriage. The men riding alongside him and driving the team were two of his top ranch hands, formidable bronc busters to whom people gave a wide berth. Calmly, Sloan had dismounted and approached the spread blanket. Without a word to his surprised sister and her companion, he’d loaded the fried chicken, deviled eggs, and lemonade back into the basket, picked up the blanket, and handed them to his riding sidearm. He then offered his hand to Billie June, his jaw set hard as stone, and stared a message into Daniel’s face that could be read by every eye in the crowd.
Billie June, poppy-red to her mouse-brown hair line, ignored the offered hand and marched to the carriage, the door held open by the driver, and once inside yanked the window curtains closed. Still without a word spoken, Sloan and his ranch hand remounted, and the entourage ambled off toward the Triple S, followed by the gazes of a rigid Daniel Lane and the scene’s thunderstruck witnesses. All understood that dauntless Billie June had gotten into the carriage, not out of fear of her brother, but for Daniel Lane. She knew her disobedience would result in severe consequences for her lover if she did not. Sloan Singleton had publicly flexed his muscle.
“Obviously, Billie June had been warned about seeing Daniel Lane, and Sloan did what he had to do to get her attention,” her mother had argued in favor of Sloan’s behavior and of the man she had once dandled on her knee as an infant. “We all know that Billie June can rub raw the horns of a bull moose.”
“Not anymore,” Mildred had said.
Her father’s post office box was crammed full. A postal clerk, sorting mail, helped her to dislodge it. “Glad you stopped by today, Miss Sam,” he said. “Nobody’s been sent for almost a week, and there wouldn’t have been room for more.”
“No wonder,” Samantha said. “It’s hard to spare someone during calving season.”
Samantha glanced through the bundle, looking for business envelopes containing invoices that her father would hand to her without opening. One of her responsibilities was to see to the payment of Las Tres Lomas’s bills. Most of the collection appeared to be periodicals related to the ranching business, but there were several letters, one from an army buddy who had served with her father in Hood’s brigade during the Civil War, and another of heavy cream vellum from a doctor marked “Confidential.” Confidential? From a doctor? Samantha felt the spike of apprehension her father’s wheezing had caused at her birthday dinner, but the imperceptible shake of her mother’s head at Samantha’s worried look had said there was no cause for concern. Her father was only agitated at the conversation.
The doctor’s name was Donald Tolman and the return address listed a post office box in Marietta, Oklahoma Territory. Samantha had never heard either the name or place mentioned. Perhaps the writer, too, was an old army comrade getting in touch, but thirty-five years after the war? And why write and underline “Confidential” in bold black print as if a warning against anyone but the recipient from opening it? Disturbed, Samantha stowed the bundle in her saddlebag and set Pony to a gallop before she could be delayed, now even more eager to get home.
Chapter Twelve
Pony was at the crossroads to the pasturelands of Las Tres Lomas and the Triple S when she heard a fast-approaching horse behind her and the cry, “Samantha, wait up!” The voice quickened her heartbeat, but not enough to throw it out of rhythm. It had been trained against racing at the sight of Sloan Singleton some time ago. Samantha reined Pony around to observe her neighbor pounding toward her on his sleek Thoroughbred, halfway wishing she’d pretended not to have heard him. She felt the letter from Dr. Tolman burning a hole in her saddlebag.
As horse and rider drew closer, Samantha wondered if Sloan had been aware of his father’s hopes for them. He had never given any sign of it, but he had learned a few tricks of demeanor, had Seth Singleton’s son. It was necessary for a boy making his way in the world of tough, sometimes cunning and ruthless men to adopt the artifice of camouflage to conceal his thoughts and feelings. It was true that they no longer saw each other as they once had. The diversions of childhood they’d enjoyed together were relics of the past.
“Yes, Sloan?” Samantha greeted him as he reined up.
It was an unintentionally cool greeting, and Sloan’s blue eyes tightened with surprise. If ever there was a man who looked bred straight out of the cow land of his heritage, it was Sloan Singleton. Tall, slim, straight as a Comanche arrow, brown as river rock, hardened by wind and sun, saddle seasoned, he could have passed for none other than what he was—a son of the range.
“That had a little ice in it,” he said.
“Did it? I’m sorry. I’m in a hurry, and I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
Sloan shifted in his saddle. “Like what?”
It was a question Samantha once would have answered without a second’s thought. They used to tell each other everything. She gave him a tepid smile. “No time to tell.” He was dressed in a business suit, and Samantha remembered that this morning had been the monthly board meeting of the bank of which Sloan was chairman. The bank was owned by Noble Rutherford, Anne’s father. Samantha unbent a little. “You must be coming from your board meeting,” she said. “You didn’t stay for your usual luncheon with Anne?”
“Wasn’t in the mood for it today. As a matter of fact, I went by your mother’s town house to see if I could take you to the Worth for a bite, but Estelle said you’d already left.”
Samantha doused a flicker of joy before it lit her face. Sloan had preferred her company to Anne’s for luncheon? Her mother would be dancing a jig in the foyer. “Well, then, I’m sorry I missed you, but Mother must have told you I need to get back to the ranch. Daddy is expecting me.”
“Can you spare a few minutes for me to apologize for Anne’s unfortunate topic of conversation at your birthday party?”
“No need for that, Sloan. Really.”
“Yes, there is. I think she did it to impress without once thinki
ng how it might affect you and your parents.”
Of course she did, Samantha thought, but a man in love would not see that. “Think no more about it. The subject was informative. Well, if there’s nothing else…”
“There is,” Sloan said, moving his horse a trifle into her path. “It’s about Billie June. She’s still… well, she’s still mad at me.”
“After almost a year? I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I can’t get her to understand that I had to do what I had to do. It was the only way I could get her to stop seeing Daniel Lane.”
He wanted to talk as they had in the old days when no trouble went unshared between them. Samantha could see he was deeply bothered by the rift between him and Billie June. Sloan adored his sisters. Five and seven years older, Billie June and Millie May had been maternal substitutes after the death of his mother when Sloan was four, but the girls, especially Billie June, had given Seth Singleton fits. His daughters were for nearly everything their father had been against: Prohibition, women’s suffrage, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Their list of rebellious acts to support their causes had become the stuff of Fort Worth family legend. Among them was the girls’ emptying of Seth’s bottles of prized bourbon into the Trinity. Another time, they arranged the escape of two suffragettes arrested for disturbing the peace, and on another occasion, they marched onstage to break up a performance by Wild Bill Hickok to protest the mistreatment of his horses in his Wild West Show. They set animals dangerous to livestock free from their traps, released quarry captured for the hounds to tear apart in the Triple S’s famous hunt breakfasts, embarrassed their father at dinner parties by espousing beliefs contrary to the guests, and could be relied on to take the side of every controversial figure in society.
While his father had been alive, Sloan had thrown his support to neither faction. Once head of the household, he had continued to assume a live-and-let-live policy, until Billie June’s affair with Daniel Lane.
Sloan had no one to talk to about personal matters such as how to get out of this pickle with the remaining members of his family. Neal Gordon would unequivocally agree with his protégé’s quashing the only possibility for marriage Billie June might ever have, and no confidants like Grizzly and Wayne Harris were on the Triple S payroll. Anne Rutherford worshipped him like a king, and since kings did not confide in subjects, Sloan Singleton stood virtually alone with no one in his life to lend an objective ear and offer an unbiased opinion.
Unless it was Samantha.
“Do you think I’m a bastard for what I did?”
Pony nibbled at his bit. He wanted to go home. “Are you looking for affirmation or denial?” Samantha said.
“You know better than to ask. The truth will do. I can always get it from you, painful as it is sometimes.”
“Was there not some other, less public way to express your disapproval of your sister’s friend?” Samantha asked. “It was awfully brave of Billie June to appear at the picnic with Daniel Lane, and she did it to show her love for him.”
“She did it to defy me.”
“I doubt she was thinking of you at all.”
“Daddammit, Sam—” Sloan pushed back his Stetson, and a shock of sun-bleached hair sprang forward. “Billie June knows damn well Dad would never have allowed her to see a man like him. He’s not worthy of her.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, come on, Sam! What would a man like Daniel Lane see in my sister other than her trust fund? Lane’s a good-looking guy, years younger than Billie June, not a nickel to his name while Billie June is… well, not to be unkind, but plain as a tin plate.”
“Your sister is smart, funny, and interesting, Sloan. Perhaps Mr. Lane has the intelligence to see beyond the plainness of the plate to its worth.” Unlike you, who can’t see beyond Anne Rutherford’s décolletage to her little black heart, she thought.
Sloan looked aghast at her. “You’re as blind as Billie June if you believe that of him.”
Samantha patted Pony’s neck to quiet him. “You may be the blind one, Sloan.”
Sloan remained silent for a moment, his eyes thoughtful upon her. “I’d hoped you’d agree with me and talk some sense into her.”
“I can’t speak against a man I do not know. If I were to talk sense into anybody, it would be you. You’re lucky to have siblings, Sloan. I wish I did.”
“You’re telling me to make my peace with Billie June, is that it?” Sloan said, disappointment souring his voice. He reset his hat firmly. “Well, I can’t if it means giving her my approval to continue seeing Daniel Lane. I’m doing what my father would have done. I’m protecting her from hurt.” He nudged his horse closer, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes. “And what is this… wistfulness I heard in your tone just now? You have a sibling, Sam. You’ve got me. I’ve always been a brother to you and will continue to be. These last years… if I haven’t been around as much, it’s because I’ve been so occupied just keeping my head above water. The Triple S takes so much of my time—”
“And of course, Anne,” Samantha said, too quickly.
“She’s been taking a part of it, yes.” Sloan gave her a searching look, and Samantha bent down to pat Pony’s neck to disengage from it. Sloan had an uncanny way of reading her thoughts. He could detect trouble in her as clearly as he could spot a fish in clear water.
“No need to explain,” she said. “Sometimes Las Tres Lomas is more than Daddy and I can handle together.” She straightened and turned Pony’s head toward his home. “I’ve got to get on, but keep in mind my comment, Sloan. Billie June misses her brother, too.”
She was about to dig her heels into Pony when Sloan called softly, “Sam…”
“Yes, Sloan?”
“I meant what I said—about being your brother. You do believe that, right?”
“I believe that, Sloan. Trust me, I do.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was the moment she relished the most when returning home, the instant Pony crested the small rise that gave a far-reaching view of the grazing acres and ranch compound of Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad. A thrill of pride nearly always raced through her at first sight of the sweeping, cattle-studded pastures, corrals, and paddocks, the sprawling ranch house and outbuildings and threads of the Trinity River that wound through the valleys of the three small hills that had given the ranch its name. Nearly always, because there had been seasons when the view from the rise had been more heartbreaking than breathtaking, years of “brown springs” when not a drop of water had fallen and the tributaries had dried up. Samantha wished she could pause to take in and savor the spring lushness of her father’s empire on this bright, rain-washed morning when the green of the fields and the russet hides of the fat, grazing Herefords were almost blinding.
But she could not tarry. Samantha had learned that truth, good or bad, was the best counter to worry. Most worries were based on uncertainty, and she could handle anything as long as she knew the truth. It might take a little working it out of her father, but eventually Samantha would get him to reveal the content of Dr. Tolman’s letter, for better or worse. He could not keep anything from his daughter, but from his wife, yes. Tell Estelle anything, and she mounts her horse and rides off in all directions, he was wont to say, but not you, Sammy girl. Thank God for your cool head and bridled tongue. Samantha could be worrying for nothing—pole-vaulting over mouse turds, as her father would say—and the letter could certainly be from an old army comrade. But then, why would the author write “Confidential” across the envelope and underline it in a strong, dark hand?
Samantha heard the one o’clock bell summoning the ranch hands to the Trail Head, Las Tres Lomas’s dining hall, when Samantha turned Pony under the crossbars of the ranch and tethered him in front of the main house. The quarter horse was fractious, nibbling at his bit, snorting. The raucous sounds of men and horses and bawling cattle in the birthing pens came from half a mile away, and Pony was demanding in horse language why
he wasn’t a part of the activity. “Soon, Pony, I promise,” Samantha said, scratching the area between his ears while she withdrew the mail from her saddlebag. The poll was the only part of his face the horse allowed to be stroked.
She found her father in the ranch library at the far side of the great room, the main living area of the house. At its dining end, the table had been laid with plates and cutlery for two. They would be having their noon meal alone together in the main house, then, rather than in the Trail Head with the work crew. Samantha was relieved. Because calving mothers required someone be with them constantly, the men would come in shifts smelling of blood and placenta to sit down at their meals. Samantha could abide the birthing odors in the barns and corrals, but not at the dining table.
“Samantha!” Neal Gordon’s greeting boomed from a barrel chest beginning to slope toward the onset of a thickening waist, but there was still a strong suggestion of the raw physical power that had made him a legendary figure among men who worked with cattle and horses and ropes and guns. He came from around his desk with arms outstretched to pull her into a hearty embrace. “I cleaned myself up just for you, so give your old man a big hug. I was expecting you earlier.”
He smelled of Ivory soap and freshly ironed cotton. He had changed out of his range wear into creased woolen trousers and a white shirt fastened at the collar with a string tie and silver clasp fashioned in the brand of Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad.
“I ran into Sloan at the crossroads and stopped to chat for a while. He was going home after his board meeting at the bank,” Samantha said.
Interest, and a wisp of hope, sparked in Neal’s eyes. “Good! You two haven’t had a chance to visit for a while. That Rutherford gal had him tied up like a roped calf at your birthday party. What did he have to say?”
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