He broke off. “One summer I headed for Oregon.”
He stopped speaking for so long Alex had to poke his arm with her pencil. “And then?”
He bit his lower lip. “Then I worked for an old, used-up rancher, a real mean son of a—He ran too many cows and drank too much liquor. I stuck it out for two years. Ended up bein’ his top hand, and then one day Charlie Kingman rode in.”
“My Uncle Charlie, you mean?”
Zach nodded. “Charlie hired me on the spot. After a couple of summers he made me his foreman and later the trail boss on his cattle drives. When this one’s over...” His voice trailed off.
“When this drive is over?” she prompted.
“When this drive is over, Dusty, I swear I’m gonna have my own spread or die tryin’.” Again he fell silent. “Guess I ride hard on everybody because I want that ranch so much.”
“You’re a tough boss, Zach, but you’re fair. The men respect you.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe you’re hardest on yourself.” She had long since stopped taking notes. When he got to the part about riding a wagon west to Colorado when he was so young, she’d folded her hand around her pencil, closed her eyes and just listened to his voice. He spoke softly, but she could hear the pain behind the words. He’d been on his own since he was ten years old. No wonder he was so...so...hard.
And somehow tender, as well.
“Are we done?” he asked, his voice gravelly.
“You mean,” she said, keeping her eyes closed, “is my interview over?”
“Yeah. Are we finished?”
Finished? She swallowed. She had a million more questions for Zach Strickland, but some instinct told her to leave it alone for now, not to push too hard or too fast. Zach was a far more complicated man than she’d thought, and she didn’t want to scare him off. She’d ask more questions later.
“For now, yes, we’re finished,” she said quietly.
“Good. I’m tired of talkin’. Never talked about any of this stuff before. Feels real funny.”
“‘Funny’ might be good, Zach.” She raised up on one elbow and studied him. One arm lay across his eyes. Had he drifted off to sleep?
“One more question, Zach. Have you...have you ever been married?”
He waited a long time before answering. “Nope. Never been married. About the only thing I ever cared much about besides owning my own ranch is my horse, Dancer. He’s the best friend I ever had.”
“Do you ever hear from your family? Your father? Or your mother?”
Again he waited a long time. “My mother’s dead.”
“Oh? How did she die?”
“She was shot,” he said. “Don’t ask about her again.”
She gulped. “What about your father? Is he still alive?”
“Oh, yeah, there’s Pa. I don’t ever want to hear from him or lay eyes on him as long as I live. And don’t ask me why, Dusty. That’s between me and him.”
Stunned into silence, she quietly folded up her notebook and laid her pencil down. There was much more to know about Zach Strickland, but she sensed she’d touched enough nerves for one interview. There would be other nights.
“Good night, Mr. Strickland,” she whispered.
After a long silence he rolled away from her. “’Night, Miss Murray.”
Her throat ached for some reason. Maybe she was catching a cold.
But she didn’t think so.
* * *
He couldn’t sleep. This annoyed him because his body hurt all over from a long, wet day in the saddle, and morning wasn’t far off. Must be all that palavering he’d done about himself, things he’d never talked about in all his thirty-four years.
She hadn’t asked that many questions, but he couldn’t seem to stop telling her things he’d kept bottled up inside all this time. He couldn’t imagine what she’d find interesting in any of that. And he hoped to hell she wasn’t going to write about any of it in her newspaper.
Nah, she wouldn’t do that. He didn’t figure his life would be all that interesting to readers back East. She was a good interviewer, though. She had a way of making a man just open himself up.
He rolled over onto one elbow to look at her. She opened her lids once, closed them, and then they fluttered open again and she looked straight into his eyes. She didn’t say anything, just smiled kinda funny and let out a long breath. Then she closed her eyes again.
He lay studying her small, pale face in what light there was from the dying campfire some yards away. It wasn’t much to see by, but it was enough. Hell and damn, she is pretty. Why wasn’t she married? Was she engaged? Must be a hundred males sniffing around her, especially in a big-city newspaper office where she was the only woman.
He liked looking at her. Probably several dozen other guys did, too. When he’d been young and scrawny it had always bothered him when a gent cut in on him on the dance floor or muscled him out of the way at an ice-cream social. He didn’t like losing. After getting his heart stomped on when he was seventeen, it mattered a lot if some gal gave him a second glance or not.
And it sure as shootin’ mattered now. It shouldn’t, maybe, but it did. Ellie had waltzed off with a rich rancher from Montana who wore fancy Mexican leather boots and sported ivory-handled six-shooters. She wanted someone successful, she said. Someone wealthy. Not him.
Before he put himself through anything like that again he wanted to have his own ranch. Women at the saloon had sufficed for all these years; he had no business even looking sideways at Dusty.
But he wanted Dusty to like him. Didn’t know exactly why, but he did. He hadn’t told her everything. Didn’t intend to, either. But then he hadn’t intended to tell her about Pa or goin’ to Oregon or any of it. She could sure worm things out of him, though. Dusty had a way of makin’ him open up a vein and bleed all over her.
He noticed something else about her, as well. He noticed that something about Dusty soothed some of the broken places inside him.
Chapter Eleven
The next morning before breakfast, José’s voice jarred Zach out of his thoughts. “Hey, Señor Boss, come over here, por favor.” Zach dropped the harness he was mending and went over to where the young man stood.
A young Indian boy in a ragged flannel shirt sat atop a black pony at the edge of camp. Zach recognized him. It was the same hungry kid who had appeared with his little sister some days back and left camp leading a cow Zach had given him. What did he want now?
“José, go get Cherry.”
The boy sat his horse without moving until Cherry finally tramped over, and then he unleashed a stream of unintelligible words, accompanied by a good deal of pointing.
“If I read the sign language proper, the kid wants you to follow him,” the aging wrangler said.
“Huh? What for?”
Cherry watched the boy gesticulate. “I’d guess it’s somethin’ ’bout a ceremony of some kind back in his camp. He wants you to come.”
“Why me?”
Cherry sent him a look. “’Cuz you gave him and his sister that cow, remember? He says it saved his tribe from starvin’.”
“Maybe,” Zach said. “But I don’t think—”
The wrangler stepped in close. “If’n I was you, boss, I’d go with him. Ain’t smart to refuse an Indian tribe’s hospitality.”
He nodded. “All right, Cherry. Saddle my horse.”
“Smart man,” the wrangler muttered. He started for the remuda corral, and Zach walked over to the campfire, where the hands were now devouring Roberto’s bacon and biscuits.
Skip set his tin plate aside and looked up. “What’s goin’ on, boss?”
“That Indian kid wants me to go with him to his camp,” Zach explained. “Some sort of powwow goin’ on.”
“An Indian camp?”
“Yeah. That’s what Cherry says.”
Dusty jerked to her feet and began gathering up her notebooks. “How far away is this camp?”
“Hold on a minute, Dusty. You’re not coming. Just me.”
“Of course I’m coming! My readers will buy up every newspaper in Chicago to read about a real Indian camp.”
Cherry rolled his eyes, and Zach turned away from her. “Tough. You’re not goin’ to this one.”
She planted herself in his path. “Why not? Give me one good reason. I won’t be any trouble, I promise. Please, please, let me come with you.”
Curly appeared at Zach’s elbow. “Boss? What’s up?”
“I’m going with this Indian boy, but I want you and the boys to keep the herd moving.”
“And me,” Dusty said from behind him. “I’m going, too.”
Curly frowned. “Aw, come on, Miss Alex, I don’t think—”
“But I do!” she cried.
Cherry appeared leading two horses, Dancer and Dusty’s favorite sorrel.
Zach ignored her, swung up on Dancer and reined away. “Curly, I’ll catch up with the herd, probably late tomorrow.”
Dusty started to mount, but Curly stopped her. “Yer gonna get hot an’ dirty’ and plenty thirsty. Might be dangerous, ridin’ into an Indian camp, bein’ a woman and all.”
“Tough.” She brushed past him, pulled herself up into the saddle and spurred the gelding forward.