Читать книгу Beckett's Birthright - Bronwyn Williams - Страница 9

Orange County, NC

1899

He was tired. Tired of moving on, tired of following false leads, tired of asking the same old questions in town after town, saloon after saloon, gambling den after gambling den. More often than not, he would lead up to it in a roundabout way. “Next round’s on me, fellows. Lady Luck was with me last night. Oh, and by the way—” Here he’d offer a conspiratorial smile. “If you happen to see a gentleman with a streak of white hair to the left of a center part, don’t be too quick to get into a game with him, he’ll be out for revenge.”

As often as not, it did the trick. Someone would remember seeing a man who fit the description. A few even recalled a name—Chips. Deuce. John Smith. Nothing a man could put much stock in. After a few more casual questions, Chandler would be off again.

Another town, another game, another lead.

But God, it grew old. Sometimes to his shame, he was tempted to let go. To take root and start building himself a brand-new future, with no ties to the past.

The Bar J wouldn’t be a bad place to settle. It was a long way from Crow Fly, out in the Oklahoma Territory, but maybe that was good. There was nothing back there for him—nothing but an old barn and a few thousand acres of barren land. By now, the squatters would have moved in.

“Good luck,” he bade them under his breath. He stood and stretched, breathing deeply of the soft spring air. Removing his worn black Stetson, he rubbed his scalp vigorously, leaving his thick straw-colored hair standing on end. Replacing the hat, he stood at the office window and watched a couple of hired hands pitch horseshoes. They were supposed to be replacing the hinges on the paddock gate, but what the hell. It was spring.

He had half a mind to join them. How long had it been since he’d taken time out for something as unproductive as a game of horseshoes? The last time he could recall taking a full day off for purely pleasurable reasons had been when he’d ridden three miles out of town to take Abbie on a picnic at a riverside park.

Ironic, he mused, that after nearly two years of following the man who had kidnapped his fiancée, a woman he barely even knew, he’d ended up back in the East again, only a few hundred miles from where he’d left his best friend, his true love…and his fortune.

The mental image of a small, dark-haired woman tugged at the edges of his mind. Before it could fully take shape, the door behind him burst open.

“You ready to check out the new men, boss?”

Reluctantly, Elias Chandler reined in his wandering mind and nodded. “I don’t suppose one of them has a streak of white over his left eyebrow?” When he’d hired on as manager of the Bar J nearly seven months ago, he’d let it be known that he was looking to catch up with a gambler with a polecat streak. The general assumption was that it had to do with a gambling debt.

“No, sir, that they don’t. Sorry.” Shem, the old man he’d replaced as manager, still liked to keep his hand in by working a couple of hours each day.

“Send ’em in, then. One at a time. How many showed up?”

“Four. Three of ’em might do, but t’other one’s no good.”

Eli didn’t ask why, he merely nodded. There was little Shem didn’t know about men and ranching after working for Burke Jackson’s Bar J for nearly forty-five years. Here in the East it was called a cattle farm. In the West, it would be called a ranch.

The interviews took up less than an hour. Once the usual questions were asked and answered, Eli managed to slip in a few random remarks, skillfully framed so as to elicit the particular information he sought. After tracking a man halfway across the country, often following leads so thin a shadow would pass through them, he’d learned not to pass up any opportunity to garner information.

Today that information wasn’t to be found, but because they were shorthanded, he ended up hiring three of the men and sending the fourth man on his way.

Shem was waiting outside the office when the last man emerged. “I’ll show you fellers where you can stow your gear.”

It would be up to Streak, a gaunt giant of a man with a quiet voice and a gentle heart, to decide which men could be trusted to work cattle and which ones would be assigned other tasks. When Shem had been promoted to manager, Streak had replaced him as herd boss. What both men didn’t know about cattle wasn’t worth knowing.

“Jackson ain’t lookin’ too good,” Shem confided later that evening as the three men headed for the cook-shack.

“You implying he ever looked good?” Eli asked. Both Streak and Eli deliberately shortened their steps so that the older man could keep pace.

“Must’ve looked some better,” Streak offered. “Got hisself a wife. They had ’em a daughter.”

Eli had heard plenty about the daughter, none of it good. She was reputed to be big as a grizzly bear and twice as tough. They said she could peel the bark off a hickory tree with her tongue, and God help the man who tried to get into her bloomers.

He wondered why any man in his right mind would even try.

“Worser’n usual, is what I mean. No color to ’im. Lips blue, though. Reckon that’s color.” Shem nodded decisively.

Eli hid his grin. There were times when a man had to ask questions, but it had been his experience that far more could be learned from priming the pump and waiting to see what flowed out.

As the new general manager, he’d been invited to take his meals at the house with Jackson and his housekeeper, but after the first few days he’d made some excuse to take all his meals with the men. Jackson might be rich as cream, but regardless of his health—or perhaps because of it—he was about as disagreeable as any man Eli had ever had the displeasure of meeting. That went twice for his housekeeper, Pearly May, a prune-faced beanstalk of a woman who was no better at cooking than she was at keeping house.

To his credit, however, Jackson didn’t meddle in the day-to-day operations. Once he’d satisfied himself that Eli could do the job, he’d left him strictly alone, which suited both men just fine. Unless something came up that required the owner’s attention, Eli reported to his employer once a week.

Supper tonight featured pig stew, beans, greens and cornbread. For a farm that ran thousands of head of cattle, they ate an awful lot of pig meat. Eli had remarked on it once and been told about the time when Jackson’s little girl had been about seven or eight years old. She had pitched a fit when she’d come home from school to discover that her pet calf had just been slaughtered.

Shem, who’d been herd boss at the time, had taken it upon himself to change the dietary habits of the entire company, from the main house on down to the chuck wagon. As the crew cook could easily perform miracles with nothing but pork, a sack of onions, a sack of potatoes and a handful of salt, no one had ever complained. Why, Shem had reasoned, eat up the profits when hogs were cheap and Chicago paid top dollar for Jackson beef?

The cookshack was as noisy as ever, with the exception of the new men, who were mostly listening and getting their bearings. Seldom a week went by without at least one new man at the table. At a pittance a day plus room and board, which was all Jackson offered, most quickly moved on to better-paying jobs.

Eli ate silently, too, watching. Listening. A quiet man by nature, he had honed the skill of silent observation over the past two years. It paid off occasionally, but there were times when he came close to losing hope that Rosemary was still alive. It had been almost two years since she’d been kidnapped and the Chandler homestead burned to the ground. It still ate into his conscience that after promising to take care of her, he had failed. As long as there was any hope at all, he would go on searching.

By the time the trail had led him to Durham, in the state of North Carolina, he’d been dead broke, flat out of leads and exhausted from months of tracking, being sometimes only hours behind. He’d been nursing a beer and helping himself to an occasional pickled egg, idly glancing over a local newspaper someone had left on the table when he’d happened to overhear a discussion about a man who evidently ran one of the biggest cattle operations in this part of the country. His ears had perked up, because working cattle was one of the things he was qualified to do.

“I heard Jackson fired old Shem and he’s looking for a new manager.” The speaker polished off his beer and slid the tankard across the bar for a refill. Half a dozen men played poker at a nearby table, a few more lined up at the bar.

One of the first things Eli had learned about the man he was hunting was that he could usually be found in bars and gambling dens, any place where men might gather to risk a week’s pay. So he’d leaned back in the scarred bench seat and watched a fly crawl across the table while he eavesdropped.

“Burke Jackson? Stingy ol’ sumbitch, if he’d pay a decent wage, he might hold on to his crew.”

“I worked there once. Didn’t last out a week. I heard ol’ Shem’s still there, he just can’t cut the mustard no more. Reckon Jackson’s meanness plumb wore him down.”

There’d been a general agreement from the men gathered at the bar. “They say that daughter of his is cut from the same bolt o’ cloth,” another man had remarked.

That had been the first time Eli had heard mention of the daughter. He remembered feeling relieved at the description. At least she didn’t sound like the fragile, feminine type. Being tall, tough and short on polish, Eli admitted to an unfortunate weakness for petite, delicate females that invariably landed him in trouble.

Mean, though, he could handle. In all his off-and-on years of wearing a badge, he rarely had to resort to force. Unless a man was blind drunk or desperate, Eli’s size alone usually did the trick.

The clincher had been when the bartender had said, “Sooner or later, I reckon half the men east o’ the Mississippi turn up lookin’ for work on the Bar J. Never stay more’n a few weeks, though.”

“Can’t much blame ’em ,” one man had commented.

There was a nodding of heads and a general agreement, then the bartender swiped a rag over the bar and said, “You gotta admit, though, some men jest don’t like to work for their money.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said a grizzled farmer as he downed the last of his beer and wiped the foam from his bushy mustache with his sleeve.

“It ain’t the piss-poor pay,” declared the man standing next to him, “It’s that daughter of his. They say she’d scare the gizzard out of a wild hog.”

Eli thought now about all he’d heard about Jackson’s legendary daughter, who was currently away at school. According to rumor, Lilah Jackson was big, tough, could outride and outshoot any man and would deck the first one who touched her.

Eli didn’t feel the least bit threatened. She could be pretty as a picture and dainty as a rosebud and he still wouldn’t be in any danger. After giving his heart to one woman, offering his name to another, and losing them both, he had nothing left to give.

When Abigail had married his best friend, he had cut his losses and headed west again. As for Rosemary, she had been stolen right out from under his nose. He’d had no choice but to go after her.

He’d been working as sheriff of Crow Fly the day she’d come riding into town on the stage, planning on moving in with an elderly cousin. Trouble was, the cousin was already dead, her house and whatever paltry assets she’d once owned, sold to repay her debts and the cost of her burial.

Broke, with no place to go and no means of getting there, Rosemary Smith had appealed to the sheriff. “What can I do?” she’d pleaded, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It took my last penny to come west to take care of my dear cousin—all in the world I have left is this.” She’d held out a gold chain from which dangled a big ugly pendant in the shape of a teardrop. “It belonged to my mother—see, her name’s engraved all around it?” She’d held it out for him to examine, but without shoving his face up to her bosom, he couldn’t make out the fine script.

“Yes, ma’am,” he’d said politely, wondering if he should offer her his dusty bandana to dry her eyes.

“Now Mama’s gone, and Cousin Carrie’s gone, and there’s no one left, and I—I—” She had blinked her enormous blue eyes, the lashes matted with tears. “I would rather starve to death than sell Mama’s necklace,” she’d declared dramatically. “Papa had it made especially for her b-before he—he died.”

More weeping. One thing had led to another, and Eli had ended up settling her into the big empty house his grandfather had left him, with a widow woman to look after her. Crow Fly didn’t run to a boardinghouse, much less a hotel.

He had offered to pay her passage back home, but she claimed she had no home to return to. In the end, he had offered to marry her. It was the only way he could think of for an honorable man to protect a respectable woman who had no one else to turn to.

About a month later, having spent three days tracking a band of rustlers, Eli had headed home, dog tired and feeling, though he’d hated to admit it, more like a coyote caught in a steel trap than a man about to be married to a pretty woman. Something told him Rosemary wasn’t going to be satisfied for long being the wife of a country sheriff, but at that point in his life, it had been about his only option. If he hadn’t already squandered his inheritance, he might have been further ahead in his plans to rebuild the barns and fences, invest in a small herd of short-horn Oregonians and gradually breed up to high-quality beef.

He’d started smelling smoke a few miles out that day. By the time he reached Crow Fly, three miles from home, he’d known. Known it in his bones, the way Shem always knew when a storm was coming, he thought now, picturing the scene that had confronted him that day.

The house had still been smoldering. The woman he’d left behind to look after Rosemary had been tied up in the barn, which was still standing. “Scary as the devil, he were,” the woman had sobbed. “Streak of white hair right here—” She’d pointed to the left side of her head. “He took Miss Rosemary up with him, and lit out o’ here, laughing like anything. It was the devil, I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Eli. The devil done stole your woman and rode away with her, and there weren’t one blessed thing I could do about it. It’s a wonder he didn’t steal me, too.”

Eli hadn’t blamed the widow. With a big purple knot just over one eye, probably from the butt of a pistol, she’d been trussed up and left with a handkerchief in her mouth. Likely would’ve died that way if Eli hadn’t heard the muffled sounds coming from the barn, because his first impulse had been to ride out immediately, before the trail had time to cool off.

That had been about eighteen months ago. For a man of less than thirty years, he felt older than all the mountains he’d crossed and then recrossed, all the rivers he’d forded heading east and then west, and then east again.

“You ain’t eatin’ tonight, boy.” Shem, his eyes wreathed in wrinkles, but still bright with interest and intelligence, finger-combed the corn-bread crumbs from his gray beard and reached for his tobacco pouch.

“I’m not hungry. Been doing book work all day.” What he needed was to saddle up and ride for a couple of days, sleeping on the ground, watching the stars wheel overhead. Trouble with that was it gave a man too much time to think.

And Eli had too much to think about, most of it painful.

“Rain comin’.”

“Yep. Noticed the clouds.”

“Miss Lilah, she’ll be coming home pretty soon for the summer.”

“Lord he’p us,” Streak said.

There was general laughter, and even Eli had to grin. Might be entertaining to watch the new hires—single men, all three of them—react to the ball-busting Miss Delilah Jackson. He wondered if any of them had signed on after hearing that Jackson had a marriageable daughter. Anticipating some pampered, petite female, they’d soon be splashing off at the horse trough, slapping on cologne and lining up to go courting.

Catching Shem’s eye, he could tell the old man was thinking the same thing he was. “How ’bout you, Eli, you bein’ the manager, you got first dibs. She’s a real sweet woman. I’ve knowed her since the day she was born. It was me that named her, did I ever tell you ’bout that?”

He had. Several times. Shem liked to talk, and Eli was in the habit of listening.

“You already told him,” Streak growled, to no effect.

“Well, the way it happened, see—Burke, he was so broke up over her ma’s dyin’, he didn’t pay no mind a’tall to the babe. It was me that found her a wet nurse and finally give her a name so she could be sprinkled in the church. It was me that set her on top of her first horse and taught her to ride. She growed up to be a fine woman, too, so don’t you listen to what nobody says. You could do a whole lot worse.”

Eli’s grin broadened. Considering his weakness for delicate ladies, he’d be safe enough from Jackson’s paragon. He liked women as much as the next man—liked their frailties, their femininity—truth was, he liked everything about them, even when their tears leaked all over the front of his shirt the way Rosemary’s had the first day she’d come tumbling out of the stagecoach, landing practically at his feet.

Oh, yeah, he was a sucker when it came to helpless females. Never had been able to resist them. But even if he’d been free, Miss Jackson wasn’t the kind of woman he would ever be drawn to.

Burke Jackson in skirts? No, sir, he sure as hell wouldn’t be tempted by that.

“I’m going home, I don’t care what Papa says,” Delilah Jackson declared as she slammed another layer of clothing into her trunk. She was barefooted, wearing only a petticoat and camisole, her wild red hair tied back with a stocking. “Shem wrote that Papa was sick. At least I think that’s what the letter said. With Shem’s writing, you can never be sure. Hand me those shoes, will you?”

Isobel handed over a pair of elegant high-tops. They would have been, perhaps, a bit more elegant several sizes smaller, but then, if Lilah had been smaller, the two women might never have become best friends. They were opposites in all ways but one: Lilah was beautiful, while Isobel had been compared unfavorably to a mud fence. Lilah was wealthy, whereas Isobel was the daughter of a preacher whose congregation, at his death, had done the only thing they could think of to do with his penniless daughter in light of the fact that she had no living relatives. They’d given her a scholarship, unable to bring themselves to simply turn her out to fend for herself. Last of all, whereas Lilah was as tall as most men, Isobel had not grown an inch since she was a scrawny twelve-year-old.

The two young women had one thing in common, however. Both were shunned by their classmates—Isobel for being plain, shy and poor; Lilah for being unfashionably large and far too outspoken.

“Another month and you could graduate,” Isobel reminded her. “Then you could teach school.”

Lilah heaved a sigh. Looking down at her friend, who was bouncing on the trunk, trying to force the lid shut, she said, “Do I look like a schoolteacher to you?”

The freckle-faced young woman with the serious overbite shook her head. “I guess you wouldn’t have to teach, but you could do something else.”

“I intend to do something else. Something that doesn’t require a scrap of paper with a silly gold seal on it.”

They both knew what Lilah intended to do with her life. Isobel could only admire her for her ambition, but she would miss her sorely. They had been fast friends ever since the day Isobel had been delivered by mule cart with her single suitcase to the pillared entrance of the prestigious girls’ boarding school. The friendship had only grown stronger through nearly four years of college.

“Here, fasten this latch while I hold it down,” Isobel said.

Lilah, who could easily have held the trunk shut with one hand and fastened it with the other, fastened the latch and then reached for the leather strap. “The very day you finish here, you’re going to catch a train to Hillsborough. I’ll meet you at the siding and we’ll have a grand time. The first thing I’m going to do is teach you to ride.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Izzy, not all horses bite, and I’ll see that you don’t fall off.”

“Can you keep me from sneezing?”

“Oh.” Lilah scratched her elbow. “I forgot. Well, anyway, you’re coming to spend the summer with me.”

“Maybe I should start looking for work before all the good jobs are taken.” Other than music, Isobel had no particular talent, so far as they’d been able to determine. Unfortunately, the curriculum prescribed by the terms of her scholarship hadn’t prepared her to earn her living. She had spent summers and holidays working for the Dean’s wife to augment her scholarship.

As for Lilah, she knew very well what she intended to do with the rest of her life. She was going to manage her father’s farm. At least then he might pay some attention to her. Dammit, she couldn’t help it if she hadn’t been born a boy.

“Now remember my instructions. Just keep thinking about how much fun it’s going to be, a whole summer without having to open a single book.” Isobel was bookish; Lilah was not. “But if Papa’s really sick, he’s going to need me, which means I’m going to need you, so don’t you dare think of not coming.”

Lilah knew too well what it was like not to be needed, much less wanted.

Two days later Eli strode into the barn, looking for the lackwit that had left a gate open, allowing the bred heifers to trample a newly planted field. He was tempted to tell the man to collect his pay and move on. Then he saw the fellow’s eyes shift toward the door and widen. At the same time another of the new men dropped the bridle he was supposed to be mending, tripped on the trailing end and caught himself by grabbing the wall, noisily toppling two pitchforks and a post-hole digger.

“Jesus,” Eli muttered, distracted. He turned to see what the men were staring at and then said it again. “Jesus.”

He’d barely caught a glimpse of her the day before when the livery wagon brought her up to the front gate. A big woman wearing a full skirt and a rain cape, she’d looked to be the size and general shape of a haystack. She had snatched a bag in each hand and hurried into the house, leaving the poor driver to struggle with her trunk.

In the midst of trying to track down a bill he knew damned well he’d paid, but which had been sent again, Eli hadn’t given her a second thought.

Until now. The woman who filled a good portion of the personnel doorway was definitely no haystack. With sunlight behind her, glinting off a mop of wild red hair, he couldn’t see her face, but he felt as if he’d been poleaxed.

Today she was wearing trousers. Not just trousers, but tight ones. Her hips and thighs looked as if they’d been poured into them like butter into a mold. She was a big woman, all right. Some might have said a magnificent woman, but Eli wasn’t among them. Weren’t women supposed to be small and helpless, so that a man could take care of them?

This woman looked more than capable of taking care of herself, and anyone who tried to interfere.

Clearing his throat, he stepped forward. “Ma’am—Miss? Is there something I can do for you?”

She came all the way inside the barn and turned toward the sound of his voice. “Who are you?”

He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. He swallowed and cleared his throat. What the devil ailed him? He felt as if he’d grabbed on to the business end of a hot branding iron.

Deep breath. “Name’s Elias Chandler, ma’am. I’m the new manager. Or foreman,” he added as an afterthought. Jackson had spelled out his duties, but nothing had been mentioned about a title.

“Shem’s the manager,” the woman said flatly. Or as flat as a voice could be when it resonated in regions of his body where voices weren’t supposed to resonate.

“Then I’m his, uh—assistant. If you’re looking for Shem, he and Willy went to town on an errand for your father. If there’s something I can do for you…”

“You may bring my horse around,” she replied, as if conferring a great privilege.

Imperious witch, he thought, more amused than irritated. One of the new men headed for the tack room. Eli leaned against a stall and watched as the lady—if a woman in men’s trousers could be called that—examined everything in the spacious interior. He took momentary pride in the fact that nothing was out of place. Nothing, that was, except the two pitchforks and the post-hole digger. The dirt floor had been raked clean, the air redolent with the clean smell of hay, leather and animals.

She was something, all right. Arrogant didn’t begin to describe it. The cowboy came up behind her leading one of the big draft horses used to pull the ten-gang disc harrow through the dense red clay. “This the one you wanted, ma’am?” He snickered and glanced at his mates for approval.

Waiting for all hell to break loose, Eli considered the man’s serious lack of judgment. Eyes narrowed against the light slanting in through the wide barn doors, he tried to gauge the Jackson woman’s reaction. In a fair fight, she could easily take the young fool.

No one spoke for a moment. The big gray gelding stood patiently, as if waiting to be hitched up. Then, cool as anything, the lady lifted an eyebrow and said, “Get on with your plowing, boy. I’ll fetch my own horse.” Turning to Eli, she said, “I’ll be riding Demon this morning. I’ll be riding Demon every morning.”