Titans

by Leila Meacham

  After leaving Grizzly and Wayne, Samantha planned to ride out to Windy Bluff and herd Saved back to give his horns a refresher coat of paint, but an unexpected visitor showed up. Silbia met her as she entered the Main House to pick up her wide-brimmed hat for the ride to one of the farthest points of the ranch. “I was just about to send one of the girls to get you, Miss Sam. You got somebody waiting for you in the great room.”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Anne Rutherford.”

  Samantha heard the name in surprise. Why on earth would Anne Rutherford come to call on her? She’d seen much of the girl, Sloan at her side, at the prenuptial socials held for Todd Baker and Ginny Warner in the last two months, their wedding the last occasion where they’d met, but only to exchange pleasantries. She and Anne, though they shared the same lifelong social acquaintances, had never been friends. Samantha thought that not surprising, since they had no interests in common.

  “Anne! What a surprise!” she greeted her visitor, who appeared to be tenuously seated on the edge of a lounge chair as if fearful it might swallow her. “What brings you out here to Las Tres Lomas?”

  “Sloan Singleton,” Anne said. She rose quickly but gracefully at Samantha’s entrance, a lithe figure in a filmy spring frock, its pastel flowers a complement to her ivory skin and deep black hair.

  Samantha checked her move to welcome Anne with a friendly embrace. “Sloan?”

  “I am sure the reason for my visit will remain confidential, between only us, Samantha. I had no one else to come to, and I thought you could be of help. You know Sloan better than anybody other than his sisters, and they don’t like me. I’m aware that they don’t want him to marry me.”

  Samantha stood speechless. Anne’s blatant declaration—and that she would make it to her, given the girl’s known consideration of every word she uttered and to whom she delivered it—genuinely shocked her. Samantha sat down and with a hand invited Anne to do the same. “Why not?”

  Anne shrugged as if the answer was obvious. “Oh, the typical thing. They’re jealous old-maid biddies who don’t want to share the house they’ve ruled over for years, but I don’t believe Sloan would listen to them. Something else seems to have… come between us in the last several months. Sloan has changed, and I don’t know why. I thought maybe you could tell me. He confides in you. Don’t deny it. I don’t mind. Truly, I don’t. Has he said anything about… us?”

  For a moment, Samantha was too stumped by Anne’s brazenness to reply. “No, nothing, but he would not confide such personal matters to me,” she answered. “When we were children, yes, but not now.”

  Doubt clouded the irises of Anne’s eyes, the color of dark sapphires. “The change set in around the middle of April—on Saturday, April fourteenth, as a matter of fact,” she said. “I know because I keep a daily diary. It began then. Sloan was to have telephoned to set a time to call on me that evening, but he didn’t. Nor did I see him the next day. We usually spend Sundays together. I heard nothing from him for an entire week and sent a note of concern out to the Triple S. Who knows but that one of his sisters intercepted it, but he did not respond. When he finally turned up, he gave the excuse that he’d been on a hunt after a mountain lion that Saturday and busy at the ranch afterward, but I could tell it was something else. Do you recall anything else that happened involving Sloan on April fourteenth?”

  Samantha was not likely to forget the date, a pivotal day in her life. It was the day her father had learned of her betrayal and she’d set Sloan straight about his “brother” role, but how could those personal and private events relate in any way to Sloan’s feelings for Anne? “I can verify that Sloan did go on a hunt that Saturday,” she said, “and you should believe him when he says he was busy at the ranch. I’ve never known Sloan to lie, and the spring months on a ranch are our most demanding. Other than that, I fear I can’t be of more help, Anne. Are you sure you’re not imagining Sloan’s change toward you?”

  “Oh, Samantha!” Anne hopped up, the filmy skirt of her dress swirling around her. She strolled off a distance, latching her hands together, and spoke as if to an unseen audience in the room. “You’ve… never… well, you’ve never had experience with men, so you wouldn’t know the signs that tell a woman her lover’s affections have cooled…”

  “Lovers,” Samantha repeated, a sharp pain flitting through her and her face stinging from resentment at Anne’s condescending assumption of her sexual naïveté.

  Anne swung around in a froth of batiste and lace. “Yes, lovers!” she cried. “Or at least as close to lovers as one can be without… marriage. One does not have to have physical intimacy to become lovers.”

  “Oh,” Samantha said in a tone implying she’d been rightly enlightened. She rose. The girl was imagining things. Anne Rutherford was exquisite. How could any man, for all her insipidity, resist her? Samantha had not noticed Sloan giving his soon-to-be-betrothed a lack of attention at the social gatherings in honor of Todd and Ginny’s nuptials. It could be that all the wedding folderol had made him, soon to be a groom, nervous at the permanence of marriage. But she would not give Anne Rutherford the comfort of that possibility.

  Her guest seemed unwilling to take Samantha’s hint that the visit was over. Anne stepped farther into the cavernous space of the great room and swept her gaze over the thick-beamed ceiling, the wood-paneled walls, and the wide oak staircase to the landing that ran the circumference of the second story. Samantha’s resentment flared. Anne was thinking of the ranch house of the Triple S, whose interior was built on similar lines. She stared at the girl in some shock. Anne Rutherford was purportedly the classic model of social correctness. Yet she stood in the heart of Samantha’s home, swiping her critical gaze over its layout and furnishings like a dust rag, ignoring the affront her shameless inspection might be to her hostess.

  “I could get used to a place like this,” Anne said.

  “It might take some doing.” Samantha spoke through a gritted-teeth smile. The Rutherford residence in Fort Worth was a white, palatial edifice built in homage to her family’s money and social prominence.

  “Not if Sloan was part of the adjustment.” Anne turned to see Samantha’s tight expression and gave her a faint smile. “Forgive me. I’m not myself today.”

  “I can see that.”

  A handkerchief materialized from the fluffy folds of Anne’s sleeves, and she dabbed at the tears pooling in her jeweled eyes. “It’s just that I’m beside myself with worry over this situation. By now I thought Sloan would have proposed, and I’d have a ring on my finger. Everybody expects us to marry. How can I face people if… we don’t? What would the insult do to me and my family?”

  Samantha’s hackles rose further. Ah, so the shame and jeers of society were Anne’s real concern. “Do you love Sloan?” she asked.

  The sapphire eyes scoffed at the question. “Why, of course I do. Why would I spend so much time with a man I don’t love?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that, since I’ve had so little experience with men,” Samantha said. “I’d offer coffee and rolls, but I’m running the ranch alone since Daddy has taken off to our cattle camp in Cooke County.”

  This time Anne took the hint and reached for her parasol, the handkerchief tucked back into the sleeve of her dress. “I must get back anyway before the heat sets in, and I never eat between meals.” She seemed suddenly to remember her manners. “I hope I didn’t interfere with”—she whisked a sapphire inspection over Samantha’s work attire—“whatever you were doing.”

  “I was happy for the interruption,” Samantha said, smiling. “We’re castrating the young steers this morning.”

  Anne’s face blanched. “I’ll see myself out,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Late in the afternoon, by a rope tied loosely around his neck and his horn tips a bright red, Samantha led Saved back to his preferred grazing area at Windy Bluff. The steer, almost the size of Pony, followed along docilely as a lamb. The tre
k gave her time and solitude to think. What had come over Sloan? She would not flatter herself by thinking Anne’s cause for concern had to do with their quarrel. They’d had many quarrels in the past, but none that had called their brother-sister relationship into question. Could Sloan indeed have had a change of heart toward Anne? “Once my brother gets a few more years on him, he’ll see through Anne’s artifice,” Millie May had predicted. “I hope she won’t snag him before that day comes.”

  Had that day come? In a few weeks, Sloan would turn twenty-four. Were those enough years to make his sister’s prediction come true?

  Samantha thought back to their quarrel that she now acknowledged had taken on a much darker, deeper cast than a mere tiff. You’re not my brother, Sloan. She would never forget his jolt of surprise at hearing those words, then something else had swum into his eyes, another brand of surprise. But then she’d added: You’re my friend. No more, no less. Like an idiot.

  She still believed that for all Anne’s “experience” with men, which Samantha doubted, the girl could be imagining the chill between her and Sloan. Ranchers’ worries were never-ending, but some came like a swarm of bees, blocking the sun. Sloan may have gone through a period like that these past months. The Triple S was not as financially solid as Las Tres Lomas. Sloan had invested heavily in breeding stock to increase future production of his herds. A strange blight had attacked his hay fields. Come winter, he would have the expense of buying fodder for his cattle beyond what the Gordons could spare. Also, unlike the Gordon ranch, the Singleton ranch carried a loan against it held by the Rutherford City Bank. Samantha assumed that when Sloan and Anne married, the debt would be forgiven.

  And Sloan was still disturbed by the rift between her and her father. He had left her room deeply upset that day in April, and his concern had not abated. Sam, I told myself I’d butt out of what you’ve made clear is none of my business, but I can’t help myself, he’d said in an urgent whisper at Todd and Ginny’s wedding reception, the first and only time they’d conversed since that fateful afternoon. I saw Neal in town the other day, and he looks awful. I’m worried about him. Whatever is going on between you two has got to be resolved. It’s clear that you two have not patched things up.

  Not clear to everybody, Samantha had thought, but then everybody wasn’t looking. Not even her mother had as yet suspected anything at odds between her husband and daughter. You’re exaggerating, she’d said, looking around to see if they’d been overheard.

  Not from where I’m standing, he’d said.

  Before she could answer, Anne had drawn to his side and taken his arm, and Samantha had excused herself to go to the punch table, unable to stomach Anne’s adoring gaze up into Sloan’s face and the return of her smile.

  In the vastness of the silence around her, broken by the occasional sounds of milling cattle and the high overhead screech of hawks, Samantha allowed her imagination to fly. She would scold herself later, but right now, with the breeze pleasant on her face and the saddle warm under her and her throat tight from a permeating sadness, she imagined what it would be like for Sloan to love her, not as a brother or friend or his surrogate father’s daughter, but as a woman. For a long time now, she’d thought of them together in ways that had never entered her mind when they had romped together as children. When had her memories of their innocent play as boy and girl given way to a woman’s sexual fantasies of a man? They were so right for each other in every way. Even their differences complemented the other. She’d once heard a friend of her mother’s complain that she wished she hadn’t married a man she’d known all her life. There was nothing left to learn about the other. We’re as dull together as a pair of old boots, she’d said. The couple was dull to begin with, Samantha had thought, but not she and Sloan. They were familiar territory to the other, but there were still peaks and valleys to be discovered, unknown terrain that made her skin tingle to imagine exploring.

  Across the flat distance, the twin boulders of Windy Bluff rose up to meet them. Samantha had never understood why they were called bluffs, since they were really peaks, but so the name had been recorded in the grant document giving her great-great-grandfather ownership of the ranch. Saved tossed his heavy-horned head, recognizing home. Samantha sighed and allowed her daydream to drift away. “Okay, buddy, we’re here,” she said. She dismounted and slipped the rope from around the steer’s neck, then released Pony’s reins to amble with him to the nearby underground spring for a drink.

  There had been a wind storm in the night that had resculpted the sandy bed of skimpy grass found only on this particular strip of the ranch. It was marine sand, surviving proof of the large body of water that had covered Las Tres Lomas millions of years ago. In its recession, it had left this swath of beach sand good only for producing sprigs of grass as sparse as hair on a balding head.

  Her foot struck something, and Samantha looked down, expecting to have stepped on a small outcropping of caliche rock. She looked closer, then bent down for another, longer inspection. A chill swept her flesh. She knelt and carefully brushed away more of the sand and sediment. There was no doubting the impression. Exposed by last night’s wind—unmistakably—was what appeared to be the petrified form of a prehistoric animal head recognizable only from pictures in newspaper articles and from drawings in her paleontology texts. Excitement mounting, holding her breath, Samantha gently scraped further. The rest of the skull, if it was there, appeared deeply imbedded, mortared to its burial site, and she dared not dig further for fear of disturbing the bed. If her preliminary inspection was accurate, she was looking at the full forehead, blunt nose, and intact jawbone of a dinosaur.

  Trembling from the shock of her discovery, Samantha got to her feet and walked carefully toward Pony with an eye on the ground for other remains. Todd Baker must see this. She must contact him to come out here immediately to assess her find. If her guess was correct, Todd, with his geological background, would know what to do, who to approach for further analysis. Windy Bluff could be the site of a huge field of dinosaur skeletons like the kind discovered in the Garden Park area in Colorado and at Camp Bluff, Wyoming, in the late 1870s.

  Exhilarated by her treasure, Samantha unhooked the gate separating Las Tres Lomas and the Triple S and urged Pony to a fast pace in the direction of the Singletons’ sprawling Spanish-style ranch house. She would use their telephone to contact Todd in Dallas at Waverling Tools. Worrisome thoughts of her father, Sloan, and Anne Rutherford flew out of her mind as she contemplated the possible enormity of the identity of the species she’d found. When she’d been in school, the study of dinosaurs was relatively new to the field of paleontology. The first full skeletal form of the creature that proved its existence and gave an idea of what it looked like had been unearthed in Haddonfield, New Jersey, in 1859, and the feverish hunt was on for further evidence of its actuality, a search that had ushered in what newspapers called the “golden age” of dinosaur paleontology.

  An educated guess suggested the creature’s snout and mandible belonged to the genera of the sauropods, the largest animals known to live on land. They possessed huge bodies, tremendously long necks and tails, and tiny heads less than two feet in size. The exciting fact Samantha recalled of the group was that the plant-eating sauropods ran in herds. That suggested the remnant at Windy Bluff could be among hundreds an archeological dig would excavate. The herds had come to drink from the huge body of water that once covered Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad.

  The smell of smoke from branding pits and the sounds of raucous male voices and bawling cattle carried across the distance. Samantha drew a breath of relief. The Triple S was working its cattle today—as always, under Sloan’s supervision. Still trying to prove himself, was Millie May’s perception of it, but Samantha knew Sloan to be a hands-on rancher who saw it as his responsibility to oversee every aspect of the Triple S’s operation. That’s what trusted foremen are for, she’d argue, one of their sundry disagreements about ranch management where they did not see e
ye to eye.

  The red-tiled roofline of the main house, set in a dip in the topography and fanned by gardens, outbuildings, and corrals, came into view. The white stucco structure glowed in the light of the late afternoon sun, and as she neared it, Samantha caught sight of a man and a woman emerging from the kitchen side of the house. The couple walked to a horse tethered out of view of the windows, and there the man took the woman’s face between his hands and kissed her long and passionately. Samantha slowed Pony. She had been in the man’s presence only a few times, but she recognized Daniel Lane and the woman in his arms. She was Billie June Singleton.

  The sound of an approaching rider must have carried. The man, tall enough to see over the stucco fence, turned his head to see Samantha on Pony cresting the small rise of land fronting the compound. She nodded at him and kneed Pony to the front of the house, certain the man’s face had drained of color beneath his deep tan.

  Millie May threw open the door before Samantha had reached the porch. “I heard you ride up,” she said. “Thank God it’s you.”

  “You were expecting someone you didn’t wish to see?” Samantha inquired dryly, having a good idea of who that might be.

  Millie May gave her a nervous hug. “Just not right now. Happy to see you, Sam, though surprised. What brings you our way?”

  “The telephone, if I may. I have to make a call to Dallas. It’s important.”