Читать книгу Beckett's Birthright - Bronwyn Williams, Bronwyn Williams - Страница 11

Man, that is one mean woman.” Pete, one of the new men, spoke almost admiringly as they watched the boss’s daughter march back across the clearing that was ringed by the main house, the big barn and the cook-shack, the other outbuildings scattered closer to the back lane.

Lilah had gone to the cookshack to deliver a message from her father. Hesitating in the doorway, she had scanned the noisy, comfortable room with its mingled aromas of pork barbecue, fried onions and tobacco. Locating her target, she took aim and fired. “My father wants to see you.” She pointed at Eli.

He laid down his fork, “May I finish my supper?”

“Now.”

Eli had learned self-control in a far tougher school than the Bar J, having grown up with a domineering grandfather and a drunkard for a father. Lacking, for the most part, a woman’s softening influence, it had been a matter of survival. He took his time rising. Placing his utensils across his plate, he watched Lilah’s retreating figure while the other men waited to see his reaction.

What the hell was Jackson thinking of, using his daughter as a messenger? He could have sent the old woman. He could have come himself, for that matter. Appearances to the contrary, Jackson had not yet lost the use of his short, bowed legs.

“Save my dessert for me, will you?” he said quietly, reaching for his hat.

“Better you than me,” Mickey said feelingly.

“They say she’s got a worser temper then her old man,” said one of the more recent hires.

“Something don’t set right with her, she’ll sure enough let you know about it. I like the ladies, but damned if I’d want to tangle with that one, even if she was giving it away.” Arnold, the carpenter-blacksmith shook his head.

Mickey Lane leaned forward, his animated face alight. “You ever hear her cuss? Man, she can evermore set fire to the bushes.”

Eli was on the point of reprimanding the young brush roper when Streak took matters in hand. Looking at first one man and then another until he had surveyed the entire gathering, he said quietly, “Y’all don’t got no call to talk about a lady thataway. Don’t do it n’more, y’hear?”

On his way out the door, Eli glanced back at the man he had quickly come to respect. An exceedingly homely man, Streak, christened Thomas O’Neal some twenty-nine years ago and called Streak o’ Lean for as long as anyone could remember, had been here longer than any other member of the crew except for Shem.

The day was Wednesday, unless Eli had missed a few days on his calendar. He always reported on Fridays. Searching his mind, he tried to think of anything he’d done lately that might have warranted the peremptory summons.

The corn was finally in the ground. Late, but that was hardly his fault. The haying was well underway and the tally-branding was scheduled to start early next week, probably on Monday if they got the chute repaired by then.

Eli took his time crossing the yard. The housekeeper, Pearly May, yanked open the door and glared at him. Without thinking, he wiped his feet off on the filthy scrap of rug on the front porch. Not that it would have made much difference if he’d tracked in half the mud in Orange County. He didn’t know what the woman did to earn her keep, but it sure as hell wasn’t floor scrubbing. As for her cooking, the less said, the better. He’d had the dubious privilege of taking supper at the Jackson’s table. They’d been served underboiled chicken, over-boiled cabbage and biscuits that might’ve won the war for the South if they’d been used as ammunition.

“In there,” the housekeeper snapped, jerking her head in the general direction of the big walnut-paneled front room.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

She snorted. Eli grinned and entered the lion’s den. “You don’t want nothing to drink, do you?” she growled.

He was tempted to say yes, just to see how she would react. “Thank you kindly, Miss Pearly May, I just finished supper.”

Without another word she stalked off down the wide hall, smelling of sweat, onions and vanilla extract. God knows why Jackson kept her around. She was probably the only woman who could put up with his cantankerousness. He might be a smart man, but when it came to charm, Burke Jackson couldn’t charm his way out of a gopher hole.

Of Lilah Jackson, there was no sign. Evidently, her duty was finished once she’d delivered the message. Eli entered the room and nodded to his employer, aware once again of the overpowering smell composed of liniment and something that smelled a lot like tobacco. Jackson had been told to throw away his cigars. Whether or not he had remained to be seen.

If the quick grimace could be interpreted as a smile, Jackson was in an unusually genial mood. “Heard you put a new man onto the books.” The smile disappeared as he leveled the charge at point-blank range. “What you got to say about that?”

Since he hadn’t been invited to sit, Eli leaned against a dusty credenza. “You heard right.”

“That’s what I hired you for. You ain’t up to the job, say so.”

“Ace is better with numbers than I am. I’m starting him on the monthly accounts, under my supervision. If things work well enough I’ll extend his responsibilities. We’re shorthanded, Jackson. I can’t be in the office and out checking up on the new hands at the same time. Maybe if we increased the pay a few dollars, we’d get some competent men and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time keeping behind them.”

“I pay ’em what they’re worth.”

“And get what you pay for.”

“Shem did all that and still kept the books.”

“Shem’s eyesight has been bothering him.” Eli wouldn’t say more than that. Jackson had to know that the old man had allowed things to slide for so long that it had taken Eli weeks to sort things out. In some cases, all he could do was cut his losses and start fresh. “Most operations this size hire a bookkeeper, a herd manager and a general manager.”

“How many spreads you worked on?”

“I believe we went over this before I was hired.”

“Wild West cattle. Spanish stock, all bones, horns and gristle. What d’you think of my herd?”

Eli banked the coals of anger. Jackson was working toward a point. He would get there in his own time. Eli could afford to be patient. He had a new lead; he could move on anytime, but it suited him better to wait until he’d picked up a bit more information. It would be best if he could do it without arousing too much interest, but if weeks passed and he learned nothing more, he might just have to lean on Glover a bit to improve his memory.

First, though, he needed to know whether or not he could trust him. Giving him a set of books to work on was a test. Eli fully intended to go over every single entry and keep his own tally.

The older man, swallowed up by a king-size chair and ottoman, studied him from beneath bushy white brows. Burke Jackson couldn’t be much more than fifty, yet he looked to be at least twenty years older.

“Well? I asked you a question, boy. Speak up.”

“It’s good stock. It’ll bring top prices, especially as you can freight it to market directly instead of having to drive it a hundred or so miles to the nearest railhead.”

“What d’you think o’ my daughter?”

Eli cleared his throat. Talk about coming out of left field. “Your daughter? Well, uh—” Definitely more than bones, horns and gristle, although he didn’t think the old man would appreciate the comparison. “She rides well.”

“Ha! Rides like a damned man. I spent a fortune sending her to that fancy girls’ school and what do I get back? A bossy female that dresses like a man and sneaks around behind my back, stealing food out of the kitchen to feed a pack of poachers!”

That one, he wasn’t about to touch. Poachers? Shem evidently knew where she went several times a week. If there was a problem he’d have reported it, either to Eli or to Jackson himself.

“As to that, I couldn’t say.” He was wondering how to end the conversation and escape. Wondering why he’d been summoned in the first place. He’d actually taken a step toward the door when the man seated in the leather-covered chair, a lap robe spread over his short legs even though the weather felt more like June than early May—spoke again.

“I’m dying, you know.”

Eli dropped his hat. As Pearly May hadn’t offered to take it and hang it up for him, he’d been holding it ever since he’d arrived. He cleared his throat again. What the hell did a man say to something like that?

“I guess we all are.” A philosopher he wasn’t, but some truths, he’d heard tell, were self-evident.

Jackson uttered a short nasty laugh, which turned into a fit of coughing. Before Eli could decide whether to whack the man on the back or summon help, Lilah burst into the room and demanded to know what in hell’s name he had said to her father to set him off.

“Ma’am, I didn’t—”

“Don’t you ma’am me, you scoundrel, or I’ll tell my father—”

The look on her face was priceless. Eli had no trouble finishing the rest of her accusation. She would tell his father that Eli had followed her when she’d gone out riding?

But then she would have to admit what she’d been up to. Whoever lived in that cabin, poachers or not, he had a feeling Jackson wasn’t supposed to know about it.

So he smiled at her. Jackson already knew. Eli had a feeling there was little that went on around here the man didn’t know.

Tapping her foot, Lilah glared at him.

Jackson looked back and forth from one to the other, a curious expression coming over his flushed face. Outside the window a mockingbird cut loose with a rambling threnody. The familiar scent of cow manure and wildflowers drifted in on the warm, humid air, competing with the acrid smell of the room.

Eli, hat in hand, began edging away. Whatever Jackson was thinking, he didn’t want to hear about it. If he was about to be fired, he’d prefer to postpone it until after he’d had another shot at getting Glover to remember something more specific. At the very least he needed a last name.

It was Jackson who broke the silence. “One thing I’d like to see before I die,” the man said sanctimoniously.

Eli and Lilah turned as one to stare at the older man. “Papa, don’t talk like that,” Lilah said. “You’re not about to die.”

“Shut up, girl. You got no notion of what I’m about to do.”

Eli stepped out into the hall and looked around for Pearly May. The old woman was used to handling him. Must be, else she’d have been fired long before now.

“It’d please me mightily to see my little girl settled down with a husband,” Burke Jackson said wistfully. He coughed again, as if to underline his words.

Lilah was first to react. Eyes widening, breast heaving, she cried, “Your little girl! Why, you wicked, scheming old son of a bitch, don’t you dare try to push me off on another man! You’re damn well stuck with me, whether you like it or not! And whether you know it or not, I’m a damn sight smarter than that son you never had that you keep whining about!”

Eli had never heard any mention of a son, whining or otherwise. He did know when it was time to leave. Less than a minute later he found himself outside the front door staring at a row of grinning cowpokes, elbows and booted feet propped on the rail fence. They had obviously heard every word.

Streak and Shem weren’t among them, but that didn’t keep him from thinking it might not be a bad idea to get out before things got any crazier.

A husband for Delilah? The man would have to be seven feet tall, with brass balls and the hide of a rhino.

Through the open door he could hear raised voices. Hers and his. God knows, that was one argument he didn’t want to get in the middle of. What the devil did the man have against his own daughter? All she’d done was show proper concern. Was that any reason to shout curses at her?

For that matter, why should she be surprised that her father wanted to find her a husband? Any decent man would want to be sure his daughter was secure before he passed away.

Something crashed noisily. Glass, from the sound of it. If he had to guess which one had thrown it, his money would be on Delilah. She had a temper to go with all that red hair, and from the looks of him, Jackson didn’t have the strength to spit more than two feet, much less grab something breakable and throw it.

Early the following morning Lilah hitched up the buggy, neither waiting nor asking for help. Three men paused in what they were doing to watch. Eli was one of the three.

“Going somewhere?” he asked, knowing he was risking a set-down in front of his men, something a smart manager avoided whenever he could.

“What does it look like?”

“Then you won’t mind if I take Demon today? I’ll be out all morning, so if you were planning on riding later…?”

She opened her mouth to retort, then clamped it shut again and swung herself up into the buggy.

Watching her ride away, snapping the whip so that it curled just above the little mare’s shiny rump, he had to admire her style. Underneath all that flash and fire, he had a sneaking suspicion there lurked a woman no one knew. What kind of lady would go out of her way to alienate everyone around her, including her own father?

A daughter whose father didn’t approve of her? Didn’t even appear to like, much less to love her?

At least Burke seemed to have her best interests at heart, Eli told himself as he saddled the stallion and set out toward the south pasture to look over the crop of fall calves one last time before the final cut was made.

As much as he hated to admit it, his own childhood had not been all that different as far as family relationships went. According to Shem, during one of their late evening, front porch discussions, Lilah’s mother had given birth to a stillborn son, and a year later she had died giving birth to a daughter, leaving behind the helpless infant and a brokenhearted husband. Both had evidently survived, after a fashion.

His own mother had waited until her son was eleven years old to run off, claiming in equal parts her father-in-law’s nasty disposition, having to work her fingers to the bone, and the freakish Oklahoma weather.

The irony of it was that the Chandler family had had plenty of money. They could have hired help if there’d been any help to be found in the desolate area Matthew Chandler had chosen to settle in. The trouble was that like Burke Jackson, the old man had been a skinflint of the first order. He figured that as long as he had women in the family, why go to the trouble of hiring outsiders? He didn’t like strangers in his house.

For that matter, he hadn’t much liked having his own family there. Eli had grown up in a house so big and empty it echoed, set out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest settlement, consisting of a jail, two saloons, and half a dozen shanties, was three miles away. By the time he was old enough to give much thought to women, he’d been convinced that the Chandler men were congenitally incapable of forming a lasting relationship with any of them. Nothing that had happened in the intervening years had changed his mind.

At least after Grandmother Ianthe had left, his grandfather had channeled his bitterness into amassing a fortune by buying up more land and reselling it, mostly to the railroads. Randolph, Eli’s father, had drowned the sorrow of his wife’s desertion in a bottle. When the old man, furious at his son’s weakness, had threatened to take custody of young Eli, Randolph had made an effort to sober up and find work. His good intentions hadn’t lasted. Drunk again, he’d been riding point on a herd of longhorns for a neighboring rancher when he’d started firing at imaginary rustlers. The cattle had spooked; Randolph’s horse had bolted and Randolph had been trampled to death in the ensuing stampede.

No sooner had his son and heir been laid to rest than Matthew Chandler had set out to tame and educate his grandson, who’d been fifteen years old at the time, wild, tough and already towering over most men.

There followed a string of major battles between the two remaining Chandlers, with the old man usually winning. Gradually, mostly against his will, Eli had been educated and a few of the roughest edges polished off.

Now, looking out over the tall pines, a rocky stream and acres of lush green pastures, all so different from the barren land he’d inherited—thinking of the fortune his grandfather had worked so hard to acquire, and that his only grandson, on inheriting it, had given away, Eli had to wonder if there was a pattern to the things that happened over a man’s lifetime. He’d about come to the conclusion that God simply scattered his children over the face of the earth like handfuls of confetti and left them to the will of the four winds.

A few miles to the south at the train station, Lilah waited impatiently for the last of the passengers to disembark. She was certain she had the right day. If Isobel had changed her mind, she would have written or sent a wire. It was one more way in which the two women differed. Lilah was prone to barging full steam ahead once she’d set her mind on a course of action. Small, timid Isobel Dinkins would hang back, awaiting permission before ever making a move.

“Growing up in a parsonage,” she had once explained, “you learn early not to offend a single soul for fear of finding your whole family uprooted and moved to a new charge before the cat can lick her paw.”

Isobel’s parents had perished in a house fire that the church board felt somewhat responsible for. They’d been told that the chimneys in the parsonage were in sad condition, but had put off having them repaired in favor of more important matters, such as new carpeting for the church.

Lilah had been sent off to school by a father who didn’t approve of her, didn’t want her around and could well afford to pay someone else to contend with her. He’d been sick to death of the constant wrangles between his housekeeper and his daughter. The two women had despised each other since the day Pearly May had been hired to look after the house, the man and his newly weaned daughter.

“There you are, the last straggler off the train. I might have known,” Lilah exclaimed, rushing forward to embrace her friend. “Where’s the rest of your luggage? Is this it? I told you you’d be staying here all summer, didn’t I? Well never mind—we’ll just start all over again. I know a woman who can make you a dress in a day’s time. Shall we shop for cloth while we’re in town, or come back next week?”

“Whew!” The smaller woman caught her breath and readjusted the bonnet that had been knocked crooked by the enthusiastic greeting. “I’ve got everything I need. Just because I came for a visit, don’t think you’re going to manage me the way you did at school. I’ve graduated, remember? You didn’t.”

“Oh, so now you’re going to rub my nose in that, I suppose.” Both women laughed. As oddly assorted as they were, they were closer than most sisters.

Isobel swooped up her cardboard suitcase and looked around. “Where’s the cart?”

“I took Papa’s buggy.” Lilah grinned. “He purely hates for me to drive it.”

“I see being back home hasn’t changed you. Was your father furious when you told him you’d dropped out three weeks short of graduating?”

“Mad as a wet hen. Not a blasted thing he could do about it, though. Fussed a lot about the waste of money. Since then I mostly just try to stay out of sight so that he forgets I’m around.”

After stopping to buy three bolts of dimity in pastel colors and one of pale blue sateen, all over Isobel’s protests, the two women climbed back in the buggy. Catching up on gossip about classmates which neither could claim as friends, Lilah drove them to the Hillsborough Inn for refreshments, knowing her friend would not have had the pennies to spare on the journey from Salem.

“Now, what is this exciting new development you hinted at in your letter?” Isobel blotted her lips with the linen napkin. At four foot nine, she was plain as a woman could be short of being downright homely.

“Oh, that. Well, I told you Papa was ill. Doc Bender said it was a consumptive heart. Or was it congestive? Anyway, he’s gotten worse since I’ve been home, and before you say a word, no, it’s not because I’m there.” There were no secrets between the two young women. Isobel knew that Lilah’s father had no use for her, but she was determined to make him respect her.

“I still intend to take over managing the farm,” the vibrant redhead continued. “At least then Papa won’t have so much to worry about.”

“Has he agreed?”

“Not yet, but he will. He’s hardly in a position to stop me,” Lilah replied, not without a hint of regret. He was her father, after all, even if he did resent her very existence. “And honestly, Izzy, it makes sense. I do know how to study. I can learn whatever I need to know, and who has a bigger stake in seeing the Bar J succeed than I do? Well, there’s Shem, of course.”

She had told her friend all about the man who had taken care of her all her life, even giving her a name to live up to. Shem’s given name was Samson, he’d once confessed, although no one had called him that in half a century or more.

“I don’t know,” Isobel said, frowning. “I don’t think your daddy’s going to let you do it. What if he comes right out and forbids it?”

“He always forbids things, no matter what I ask,” Lilah dismissed airily. “Don’t you worry, I have my plans all laid out. The first thing I’m going to do is get rid of Pearly May and hire a neighbor of ours, who really needs a job, to take over the housekeeping. She happens to be the same woman who’s going to make you a whole new wardrobe.”

“No, she’s not, either,” stated the freckle-faced girl with the dun-colored hair.

“Oh, hush. I’m certainly not going to wear all those pretty pastel colors. Mrs. Randall sews beautifully, and besides, she needs the work.”

Over the long ride back to the Bar J, the women talked over plans for the future. Lilah was not quite as confident as she tried to appear, but if she’d learned one thing over the course of twenty-two years of being a misfit, it was that no one was going to shape her life for her. If she wanted something, she would have to go after it herself. And what she wanted was a real home, one where she was both needed and respected.

She was definitely needed in her father’s house. Unfortunately, he was not yet ready to admit it, and until he did there was little she could do to earn his respect without setting him off. He would roll his eyes and his face would turn red, and then he’d clutch his chest and make her feel like the vilest creature who ever lived for daring to upset him. The trouble was, she had a temper to match his, and sometimes she just couldn’t hold back.

They pulled into the yard just after five that evening, hungry, dusty, their throats raw from talking nearly nonstop throughout the journey. Catching sight of a familiar trap tied off in front of the house, Lilah frowned.

Streak emerged from the barn and came shambling across the clearing. He stared at the passenger for a moment and then reached for the reins. “Here, let me take her for you, Miss Lilah.”

“What’s the doctor’s trap doing here?”

The herd boss glanced over toward the house. “Well now, as to that, I reckon Doc Bender just stopped by to pay his respects to your papa.”

Lilah jumped down and handed over the reins. “The devil, you say. Papa’s had another spell, hasn’t he?”

“All I know is when Shem went up to the house this morning, he come out threatening to wring Pearly May’s neck for not sending Willy to fetch Doc Bender.”