It crossed Rose’s mind that this should have been her room, but she knew she would never sleep here. It would remain closed, a monument to all that had gone wrong in the Randolph past.
A thin trail of smoke curled across the horizon.
“I thought she would have been finished with the wash long before now,” Hen commented.
“She probably didn’t have time, what with keeping an eye on Zac,” Jeff said.
“We did have a lot of dirty clothes,” George pointed out.
“If she’s waiting for us to hang them up for her, I’m leaving,” Monty declared.
“Good God,” George exclaimed. “We don’t have a clothesline. She can’t have dried anything.”
“Christ! That means everything I own is wringing wet,” Monty groaned. “What am I going to wear?”
“What’s wrong with what you’ve got on?” Jeff asked. “You’ve only worn it a week.”
“Shut up,” Monty growled. “You don’t smell so sweet yourself.”
“If you two are going to start arguing again, you can stay out here until you’re done,” George said. “I’ve had enough for one day.”
“Me, too,” said Tyler. “You’re worse than a pair of girls.”
Monty jumped his horse at Tyler, but the boy was already off and running toward the corral.
“Wouldn’t be any arguing if Jeff would lay off Monty,” Hen said.
“I wouldn’t bother him if he would just think before he opened his mouth,” said Jeff.
“You should have stayed in Virginia,” Hen said, his eyes bright with anger. “I don’t think you’re going to like Texas too well. It sure as hell ain’t going to like you.” He jabbed his ankles into his horse’s side and cantered after Monty and Tyler.
George and Jeff rode in silence for about a minute.
“You agree with him, don’t you?” Jeff demanded angrily.
“Dammit, Jeff, when are you going to stop letting your bitterness poison everything you say? The boys are convinced you hate them.”
“I wouldn’t say anything if I wasn’t concerned about them. They ought to know that.”
“They don’t. Even Rose commented on it.”
Jeff stiffened so alarmingly George knew he’d made a mistake by bringing Rose into the discussion.
“You can swell up like a toad if you want, but if an outsider can see it in just one day, it’s worse than you think,” George went on.
“I don’t intend to take her as a judge.”
“You apparently don’t intend to take me or the boys, either.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You got a raw deal, Jeff, nobody’s denying that, but you’re alive. You can walk. There are hundreds of thousands of men who’d count themselves lucky to be able to do that.”
But Jeff’s angry silence didn’t occupy George’s thoughts for long. As he rode into the yard, he saw Monty and Tyler angrily shouting at Rose. Hen and Zac also seemed to be lined up against her. With an exasperated sigh, he spurred his horse forward.
Chapter Six
“You’ve got to get rid of her,” Monty shouted.
Tyler agreed. “She’s crazy.”
“I did what you said. I asked them,” Rose told George, “but it didn’t do any good.”
“I should think the hell not,” Monty exploded.
“What did you ask?” George said.
“She wants them to take a bath and put on clean clothes before supper,” Zac announced. “And you gotta make them do it. She already made me.”
Exasperated as he was, George couldn’t help but smile at Zac’s indignation. The little boy would never forgive him if he ended up being the only one to take a bath.
“The bathtub is already filled with hot water,” Rose said, “and I have plenty more in the wash pot. Your clothes are folded on your beds.”
“What did you use for a clothesline?” George asked.
“Zac found some wire. We strung it between two trees, but the clothes would dry faster in the sun.”
“I didn’t even think about it until I was nearly home,” George apologized.
Clearly the woman was ingenious. She might be bossy—she was bossy—but she could be depended upon to do her work without a lot of fuss and bother.
Not like Ma. With her, nearly everything was a crisis. She needed help deciding what to wear.
Just thinking of his mother made him feel guilty about not having been home to take care of her or to relieve the twins of a responsibility which must have been too much for their young shoulders.
“Do we have to take a bath?” Tyler demanded, bringing George’s thoughts back to the point of contention.