“Sometimes. Forget about the dust storm. Just standing here in one spot for twenty-four hours will probably kill us.”
“Oh, but—It couldn’t really go on for a whole day, could it? What if I have to, um, relieve myself?”
That made him laugh out loud. He pressed her face back against his neck. “Dusty, stop talking. It takes air.”
He let ten minutes go by while the wind screamed across the plain and threw dirt in their faces. After another ten minutes she raised her head and wasted some more air.
“I can’t wait to write down some notes about this windstorm!”
Zach just shook his head. She was either crazy or she was a great newspaper reporter. Maybe both.
The storm finally moved off to the north, and Zach heaved a sigh of relief. Their ordeal was over. He took a step away from her, and she moved out of his arms and began brushing dirt off her clothes. Yeah, he was relieved it was over, but maybe he was the crazy one, because part of him was sorry.
Everyone gathered around, and they decided to set up camp for the night. Dusty immediately began scribbling away in her notebook and Zach took stock of the damage. The storm had left his hands gritty but uninjured and his herd of cattle was still intact. Cherry assured him the remuda was restless but untouched, and he was already brushing the animals down.
The men were all filthy and the chuck wagon was gritty with sand and dirt. Roberto was beside himself.
“Señor Boss, I cannot cook with dirt in pans, and the wagon—ay de mi—it must be scrubbed before supper.”
Dusty looked up from her writing. Her face was dirty, and when she stood up, grit sifted from her jeans. “Roberto, give me a bucket of water and a scrub brush. I’ll help you clean up.”
Zach grinned all the way out to check on the herd, and when he’d ridden twice around the subdued steers, he was still smiling.
She might be green and scared and a little bit crazy, but maybe she was worth riding the trail with.
That night Alex interviewed the scout, Wally. He told her some of his adventures over his considerable years “on the drover’s trail,” as he termed it.
“Kinda hard to get used to it at first, scoutin’ for a cattle outfit. Gotta ride ahead of ever’body, and it kin get mighty lonesome with nobody to talk to ’cept my horse. Got to be purty good friends with my horse after a while, but...aw, heck, Miss Alex, you don’t want to hear about this stuff.”
“But I do, Wally. Honestly I do. And just think, thousands of readers back East will want to hear about ‘all this stuff,’ too. You’ll be famous!”
“Aw, heck, Miss Alex. I don’t want to be famous. Somebody might come after me for money I owed in a poker game somewhere. Golly, I remember one time down in Texas...” And he was off again.
When Wally stopped regaling her with his wild tales, the hands began to spin their own yarns. Nothing was too outlandish or unbelievable. Skip recalled one cattle drive when they ate “nothin’ but oatmeal and bugs” for four days straight. Curly told about riding two days on a spring roundup with a broken foot; it had happened when his horse stepped on his boot, but he’d wanted to stick it out because one of the riders was “a pretty little filly” from a neighboring ranch.
“Aw, that’s nuthin’,” Jase challenged. “One time I was night-herdin’ during a blizzard and my fingers froze up. Had to chop ’em off myself the next morning. Had to, or they’d a got the gangrene.”
Alex didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but when she noticed his middle two fingers on one hand were missing, she decided he was telling the truth. She dug out her notepad again. This was wonderful human-interest material about the type of people who worked these cattle drives. She could see a whole series of pieces about the men on the trail; maybe she should get to know them better.
After an hour of after-supper talk, she acknowledged she was certainly getting a good education about life on a cattle drive. And it wasn’t just about the men. Cherry was constantly instructing her about the horses in his remuda.
“Don’t never walk up to a hoss what’s pullin’ yer rope tight, Miss Alex. Good way to git stomped. Why, I remember one time...” And, like Wally, the wrangler talked nonstop for half an hour.
Chapter Seven
Night after night she watched the men around the campfire, how they teased one another and played practical jokes and sang and told stories about other cattle drives they had been on. Sometimes one of them would start to talk about a girl “back home,” or a woman of questionable reputation, and then Alex noticed the men would tip their heads in her direction and quickly shush the speaker. She guessed they didn’t want to offend her.
But how they did love to talk! “Spin yarns,” as they put it. The tales they told were often excruciatingly funny. The listeners would slap their sides and guffaw, and then the next speaker would try to top that story with another tale even funnier or more outlandish, and they would all poke fun and try not to swear too loudly in front of her.
All in all, it was entertaining, funny and heartbreaking at the same time. Alex tried to surreptitiously scribble down as many of their outlandish stories as she could in the flickering light from the campfire, and she tried to avoid drawing too much attention to what she was doing for fear they would clam up. These rough, bawdy tales would make rich reading for Easterners starved for pictures of life in the West.
* * *
Juan was right about the river, Zach acknowledged. Rain had brought the level up, and the rushing current looked wicked. It wouldn’t be easy getting a thousand head of cattle across that expanse of roiling brown water.
Roberto parked the chuck wagon just close enough to the water to make them all nervous. Cherry had the remuda snugged behind, in his makeshift corral, and as fast as the hands rode in and grabbed off their saddles, the savvy wrangler had their mounts rubbed down and turned into the roped-off enclosure to graze. Good man, Cherry. Zach hoped he’d be as spry when he was that age.
The herd lumbered up to the riverbank behind the lead steer and milled around uncertainly while the two point riders and all the flank men shouted and swore until the cattle moved into a sloppy circle and then discovered the water in the river. They forgot trying to break for freedom and spread out along the bank to drink.
Cassidy looked like a walking dust cloud from riding drag half the day. He pulled his bandanna off his sweaty face and threw himself down next to the chuck wagon. Zach trotted his bay over close to him. “Get up.”
“Aw, boss. After six hours behind them steers, I’m plumb tuckered.”
“I said get up.” Something in his voice must have alerted the big-bellied cowhand because he sat up and then jolted to his feet.
“Yessir. Guess I miscalc’lated some ’bout suppertime.”
“Then pay attention,” Zach snapped. “If you want any supper around here you’ll put in a full day’s work.”
He rode off to circle the herd. Where was Dusty? Last he’d seen her she was keeping up all right, so she should have reached them by now.
“Hey, Juan? You see Miss Murray on the trail?”
“Si.” The young man tipped his dark head over his shoulder. “Back maybe a mile.”
Dammit, that’d leave her out on the prairie alone. He craned his neck looking for a telltale puff of dust. Nothing. Maybe she’d dropped back or slowed down some to...to what? She could nibble biscuits while riding. She could tend to personal necessities just by pulling up behind a thicket of rabbit brush, and that’d take five minutes, at most. So where the hell was she?
He waited. He rode in ever-widening circles around the herd, then went back to camp and waited some more.
“Hey, boss,” Cherry shouted. “Gonna set there on yer horse all night or gonna let me rub him down?”
“Gonna set,” Zach muttered. Before he knew it, he was riding out of camp, retracing their route and trying not to let his temper boil over. Four miles back he spotted her on foot, and leading her horse through a patch of wild buckwheat. What the—
He rode a wide circle around her to avoid kicking up too much dust, and when he walked Dancer in close, he saw she was trying hard not to cry.
“You hurt?”
“No.”
“Horse hurt?”
“Yes. I think he’s lost a horseshoe.”
“Horses don’t wear shoes on a drive, Dusty.”
She peered up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. “Well, his gait is uneven, so I know something is wrong. I surmised that I shouldn’t ride him, so I thought I’d walk.”
That was smarter than she realized. Riding the gelding with a sore foot would make it worse, maybe even cause permanent damage. She plodded past him and Zach studied her sorrel.
“Left leg’s swollen,” he called out. He fished in his saddlebag for a length of rope and tossed it down to her. “Tie him on behind my horse. We’ll ride double.”
“Oh, no, I can’t—”
“Do as you’re told,” he snapped. “Unless you fancy draggin’ into camp long past supper and gettin’ Cherry out of the sack in a bad temper to doctor your mount.”
“Yes, sir, Mister Trail Boss, sir,” she said, her voice crisp. He could tell her teeth were clenched, but he didn’t care. First the rattlesnake, then gettin’ bucked off and now a horse with a swollen leg. She was bad news. And he sure didn’t have time to coddle a stubborn female.