Miss Murray on the Cattle Trail(26)
Oh, no, she wouldn’t! What was she thinking? She didn’t want to ride anywhere ever again. She couldn’t wait to get back to Chicago and clean sheets and four-course dinners and tea every afternoon.
“Now,” he said, “let’s—” He broke off when he heard a horse gallop past. “Night-herders,” he murmured. “Showing off again.”
She stifled a hiccup of laughter. “Let’s what?”
“Go to bed.”
This time she laughed outright.
“Oh, hell, Dusty, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do. It’s just that it sounds so—”
“Rude,” he finished. “Sorry. Guess I’m a little tired.” He dropped the whiskey flask back into the drawer and pushed it closed. “’Night, Dusty.”
“Good night, Zach.”
She wrapped herself up in her blankets under the chuck wagon and lay listening to Roberto mumbling in his sleep on the other side of the wagon wheel. She had just closed her eyes when Zach crawled in next to her and began to smooth out his bedroll.
She reached out a hand to stop him. “Cassidy’s gone,” she reminded him.
“I know,” he said.
“So I no longer need protection.”
“I know.”
“Well, then, why—”
“Shut up, Dusty,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Just go to sleep.”
* * *
Zach lay awake, staring at the under-ribs of the chuck wagon and wondering what the hell he was doing. Dusty could scramble up his brain worse than a mess of Roberto’s eggs. He couldn’t wait to get to Winnemucca and dump her on the eastbound train. Her luggage from the ranch could follow on after her. She made him sweat in ways he didn’t want to think about.
He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. Lord knew he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since that Sunday afternoon back at the Rocking K when he’d first laid eyes on her. How many more days before he could dump her on a train and be rid of her?
He swallowed a groan. A better question was how many nights? It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, he admitted. The problem was that he did like her.
He liked her. Way too much.
In the morning he hastily gobbled a big breakfast of Roberto’s sourdough flapjacks and bacon and rode out with Curly to scout the route ahead. He didn’t feel like talking, so his companion’s bleary-eyed grunts and pointing fingers suited him just fine.
Ten miles out, Zach reined up his gray and sat sniffing the air.
“What’s up, boss?” Curly asked. “You smellin’ perfume?”
“Nope. Smoke.” He turned the horse in a circle, scanning the sky overhead.
“I don’t smell nuthin’. Don’t see nuthin’, either.”
“Over there.” Zach pointed north toward an area of rocky hills where a curl of smoke rose.
“Indian camp, maybe?”
He shook his head. “Indians take care not to let smoke mark their camps. They dig their fire pits a foot deep so they can’t be seen.” He kicked his mount into a trot. “Come on, let’s ride over there and find out.”
The sparse grass and huckleberry bushes gave way to sagebrush and greasewood that gradually thinned out to gray-and-black expanses of rock. Sparsely wooded canyons ran deep into the hills. Zach headed straight for the thin spiral of blue smoke.
“Comin’ from one of them canyons,” Curly said.
“Yeah. I think I see which one.” Zach pushed his horse up a steep, gravelly hill, then reined up. Ahead of him was a narrow trail that overlooked a box canyon.
All of a sudden he was peering down at a mooing herd of steers. Rocking K and Double Diamond brands were plain as day.
Well, damn.
Three men were hunkered down over a fire, and that fire was not heating coffee; it was heating up branding irons.
Curly spit off to one side. “Looks like they’re aimin’ to rebrand those steers.”
“Looks like,” Zach agreed.
“What’re we gonna do, boss?”
“Stop ’em.” He turned his mount and started back down the hillside. “Losing those steers could cost me my ranch. After all these years of scrimpin’ and savin’ to buy some land, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that happen.”
* * *
Alex woke suddenly when Roberto shook her shoulder. “You will miss breakfast, señorita. Everyone else has eat and gone.”
She sighed, stretched her stiff muscles and crawled out of her warm bedroll. Not only were cattle drives hard on one’s derriere, one never got enough sleep! Or enough time to wash her face and comb her hair.
Still, she reasoned as she picked up her tin plate, Roberto’s meals always tasted good, and now that she’d befriended the cowhands, she was waited on hand and foot. That made things more bearable, even if she did feel a tad guilty about enjoying their attention. Even if it was still dark, there were some compensations, she supposed.
She’d just forked up a big bite of pancake when Zach and Curly galloped up. “Skip! José! Get your rifles. Juan, ride east till you catch up to the Double Diamond herd. Tell Gibson we’ve found his missing steers.”
Zach dismounted, disappeared into the interior of the chuck wagon and emerged a moment later carrying a rifle and a shotgun. Around his hips he buckled a gun belt with a big, mean-looking revolver, and all at once Alex felt uneasy. He tossed the shotgun to Skip, jammed the rifle in the leather scabbard attached to his saddle and remounted.
Thunderstruck, she watched Curly and José retrieve their rifles, and suddenly it dawned on her what was happening. Zach was going after the men who’d stolen his cattle. Now she felt more than just uneasy.
She stood up, her tin plate of uneaten pancakes clutched in her hand. Four men armed with guns were riding off to do battle over a few lost cows? Surely this was the ultimate in idiocy.
Cherry hastily saddled a horse for Juan, and with a whoop the young cowhand clattered off. Zach and the other two grim-faced men loaded their weapons, heaved themselves atop their horses and rode away.
Alex sank back down beside the fire and shook her head. “Idiots,” she murmured. “Men are idiots.”
Jase frowned at her from across the fire pit. “Don’t say that, Miss Alex.”
“Well, they are! What is so important about a few cows? Why risk your life to get them back?”
Jase brought his coffee mug over to her side of the campfire and stood looking after the men who had just ridden off. “Ya ought never tell a cattleman that his steers ain’t important, Miss Alex. At forty dollars a head, that’s four thousand dollars Charlie’s gonna lose unless Zach can get ’em back.”
“Oh.”
“Is more, too,” Roberto said at her elbow. “Boss need money for buy his own ranch. This he want very much.”
Chastened, Alex took a small bite of pancake. Another thing she didn’t like about cattle drives was how easy it was to say the wrong thing. Suddenly everything tasted like dust.
Roberto set a mug of coffee on the ground beside her. “But is true,” the cook admitted. “I, too, do not like the guns.”
She dawdled over her breakfast until Roberto began to pace back and forth from the wash bucket to the fire, and then she hurriedly gulped the last of her coffee and rose to drop her tin plate into the soapy water.
She helped the cook wash up the dishes and dry them, and then he packed up the chuck wagon and it rumbled off after the scout, Wally, and Cherry and the remuda that traveled with the herd under his watchful eye.
The aging wrangler managed to give loving attention to each animal in his care, and he always picked out an even-tempered mount for her. Reluctantly she mounted the roan Cherry had saddled for her today and joined the cowhands trotting alongside the herd.
Because they were now short-handed, she ended up riding alone in the left flank position, but by now the cattle were so docile, tossing their heads and swishing their tails to drive away the flies, that they lumbered after the bell steer with little prodding, and she had little to do but think.
Hours passed. As she rode, she scanned ahead, watching for Zach and the other men, but morning turned into afternoon and there was no sign of them. When the sun was like a boiling orange ball over her head and the air was so hot she thought she would melt, she ate the rolled-up pancake she’d slipped into her shirt pocket and told herself not to think, just keep going.
* * *
Zach reined up on the rim of the box canyon and sat gazing down at the branding operation. He and his three hands, with dust-covered hats and rifles laid across their laps, were quiet for some minutes. “Ain’t gonna be easy, boss,” Curly remarked at last.
“Maybe not. But I want those steers.”
“Ya might wanna live till we get to Winnemucca, too.”
Skip spit off to one side. “Shut up, Curly.”
“Is no mystery what they do, señor,” José offered, his voice flat. “Change brand so not recognize.”
“Yeah,” Curly said. “Then they sell ’em like they owned ’em and go home with the money.”
“Over my dead body,” Zach growled.
“Don’t want your body dead, boss,” Curly grumbled. “Gotta go about this real careful-like.”
Zach said nothing for a long minute while he studied the steers, the angle of the sun and the three men working on the canyon floor. “Curly, you think you could pick off one of those men from up here?”