A Place Of Our Own (Contemporary Cowboy Romance) (Texas Heat series: Book 3, Jim and Maddies story) (8 page)

Jim and Maddie rose early the following morning, sacrificing a morning of lingering, sweet loving in favor of starting in on the mountain of jobs that faced them. It became apparent very quickly that the new room to the house, the wet area, was going to be a priority if they were to avoid spending precious time fetching buckets of water. As he got started with laying out the fence posts to enclose his twenty acres, he let his mind wander, pondering a solution.

Francis came over after a while to see how he was getting on and Jim decided to share his thoughts rather than keeping the problem to himself to sort out. It turned out to be a good move.

“Jim, it will be easier than you think. Most of what you are going to need is here already, over at my place.” He stopped short, realizing it wasn’t his place any more, but what the heck. “I mean your dad’s place. There’s a demountable the size of your cabin I bought years ago for the hired hands that's been sitting unused for years now. I’ve got a tank and a tank stand along with an electric pump. I was going to do the same as you to run water to the demountable. But then, the ranch started going downhill and there was no need for the hired hands. The gear’s been sitting there unused for years.”

“Francis, you’re the answer to my prayers. I had no idea you were into that kind of technology.”

‘Well, lad, you’ll find we probably have similar ideas about lots of things, except for the goats, but then again, I’ll be happy to change my mind about that if you can make it pay. If you can arrange to move the gear over here, you’re welcome to it.”

“I’ll take you up on that. Let me make some calls to arrange to get it moved.”

“Let me know when you want to move it. I’m too old for the hard work these days but I can help with advice about setting up the pump, where to run the pipes, and the rest of it. It’s a good system for out here. Well, I’d better get out of your hair. Looks like you’ve got plenty to do.”

“Sure do, Frances. Michael, Joseph, and William are coming over tomorrow to help put up the fence, so I’m getting the posts laid out ready. I’m going to order a prefab barn too, a big one. Otherwise I’d build it myself.”

“That’s a great idea, lad. A good sized barn will always give you a place to work out of the weather, a place for the animals, and storage. You can’t go wrong with a good sized barn. Anyway, I’ll be seeing you later, Jim.”

After Frances had gone, Jim went inside to tell Maddie the good news.

“That’s great, Jim. I knew all that stuff was there but had no idea it could be moved. It’ll save us a ton of time and money, not to mention thousands of trips out to the well for buckets of water.”

“I’ll go over to the Circle O and start with making those calls. Dad has a lot of catalogs too that I can look through for a barn. It’d be good to order it today. Did you want to help choose it?”

“No, I’ll leave that in your capable hands, but think about one with a loft and lots of windows.”

“Okay. Good idea. I should order some lumber too, to put a new floor in here and a porch all the way around.”

“Brilliant, so then we can have some furniture out there to loll around in, instead of in here.”

“You have it, Maddie. Before I go, where were you thinking of putting your kitchen garden? I wouldn’t want you to dig one, only to have me come along running water pipes through it.”

“I’d hit you over the head with my spade if you did that!”

“Good thing I asked first then,” he teased. ‘I’m also going to order the lumber for your picket fence, so I’ll measure that out as well. Then after that, I can have dibs on a patch of ground for the barn out the back.”

“Great. Maybe we could go into town later too because I’d like to stocked up with plenty of food and beer, with your brothers coming on the weekend. Now, let’s go and get the fence and my garden located.”

******

The day passed in a flurry of activity and when it came to ordering the barn, Penny made sure it really was a big one, just in case she, Maddie, and Jean ever decided to go in for making boutique goats cheeses. There was a lot of spare furniture at the Circle O too, so a few trips were organized for transporting it over to the cabin. Jim made it clear that they didn’t want to waste money buying brand new things until they had the money.

With the fences going up, there was no reason for Jim to delay purchasing some Angora goats and he decided to start looking at yearlings. With twenty freshly fenced acres he would be able to graze around eight goats per acre. That made for a lot of goats but he wanted to buy good quality goat stock rather than go for quantity. He wanted to breed quality goats to sell later on, as well as to shear and sell mohair fleece.

When he was with his dad over at the Circle O, he printed off some information about the different goat breeds for milking and cheeses, as well as markets for raw and washed mohair. Hand spun mohair was a high demand product as well. Another thing he found out was that putting goats in with the cows produced better pasture for grazing. The goats thrived on the weeds the cows spurned. Better grazing for the cows meant better quality beef. Frances would like that.

One thing he would do right away, though, was to join the American Goat Breeders Association because they had records of all pure bred Angora goats. That would allow him to check the records of any pure bred Angora goat he was thinking of buying. He wanted excellent breeding stock and high quality mohair. If he started out with good quality and built up his flock, he’d be able to charge top dollar for his stock and fleece. The other option he wanted to consider was selling washed fleece because it sold for a lot more and he knew he could get $150 a pound for spun fleece and double that if it was knitted into a sweater or shawl. He wondered if Maddie knew how to spin.

Penny and Red were further impressed with this information, not for the Circle O, but for their own twenty acre lot and their retirement. At the same time, Red was wishing Andrew would get himself interested in it from the perspective of lowering the ranch overheads to improve the quality of their grazing. It was an idea worth pursuing.

Jim wanted to start out with twenty yearling Angora goats. That would set him back by about $10,000 but he figured he could afford it now that he didn’t have to buy everything for the running water project. He calculated that each goat could produce ten pounds of top quality fleece, twice per year. That would be four hundred pounds of fleece and if he washed and carded it, he could get $40 per pound for it. That would make him around $16,000 for the year and if he could convince Maddie to spin it, it would make $48,000.

That would definitely put him in profit, provide them with something to live on and expand the herd. He would need to buy some equipment to look after the goats properly, keep them disease free and their fleeces clean. He figured he had the money to do that if he limited himself to an initial purchase of twenty goats. Red was figuring how much two hundred goats could produce and the figure left him reeling. Not that it would be possible to spin all of the fleece, but he realized quickly that his own twenty acre lot, as well the Dupont place, would make him and Jim a lot of money.

It was also a lot easier to work with goats than running cattle, a fact that was important in keeping overheads low. Red realized what Jim had always known. It was possible to make more money using less land if you raised quality Angora goats. It was also something the women in the family could participate in, goats being much smaller and better natured than cattle. He immediately decided to purchase twenty for himself, in addition to the twenty Jim wanted, deciding eventually to round up the total to make it an even fifty, making twenty five goats for each of them.

Red was thinking ahead to his working retirement. He’d ask Andrew to buy the Circle O and let him do what he wanted with it. Jim was onto something with raising goats and he was pioneering a new direction in ranching for the O’Connors. Damn if that boy wasn’t a chip off the old block after all.

Meanwhile, Maddie had been measuring and laying out her kitchen garden. She wanted to raise as much fresh food as possible because it would save money. It wouldn’t be swimming in chemicals either. She’d already decided what she would plant and would pick up the seeds this afternoon when they went into town. Now, she was turning over the soil and preparing it for planting, making a mental note to pick up some fertilizer along with the seeds. She wanted a hose and a sprinkler as well as some flowers for out the front.

During a break from digging, she imagined what the old cabin would look like when it had a wraparound porch, was enclosed by a picket fence, and had a thriving kitchen garden and flower borders along the small path leading to the door. She’d put rose bushes along the front fence and a porch swing out the front and the overall effect would be pretty as a picture.

She wondered if old Seamus had put in a garden out here. It was a perfect spot with just enough morning sun and afternoon shade to produce a fine yield. Digging was hard work but she didn’t mind. In fact, if she was honest with herself, she liked working on the farm a lot better than teaching school. How good would it be if she could quit? She was shaken out of her reveries when her mattock hit something.

What the..,
she thought to herself as she grabbed the spade and started to poke around the area where she’d hit something. “Maybe there are already water pipes under here!” She kept digging and in a few short moments, it was evident that the thing she’d hit with the mattock was a large, solid metal box.

She excavated around it but it was way too heavy for her to lift out on her own. Jim was coming though, she could hear the pickup. She took a swig from her water bottle and waited for him, glad of the shade on this side of the cabin. He drove around to the back of the cabin to meet her.

“Hi, Jim, come and give me a hand with this. I hit something when I was digging and there’s some sort of heavy box buried here. It’s too heavy for me to lift out.”

Jim laughed. “Hmm.., buried treasure is just what we need. We might need you to dig over some more gardens at this rate. Seriously, though, where is it? It’s probably some old tools or rubbish they buried, or something.”

He went to have a look at the spot where Maddie had been digging and sure enough, it was a box. She was right, it was heavy. “Told you so.”

“Well, why don’t you take hold of that side and I’ll take this one.” They pulled at it together and managed to raise it up to the edge of the hole and Jim began brushing off the dirt. “This is good Texas soil, Maddie, just perfect for your garden.”

Maddie wanted the box opened and Jim was going too slowly for her liking. She wanted to see what was in there sooner rather than later. “Hurry up, will you? I want to see what’s in there.”  She could barely contain her excitement.

“I think the latch is rusted shut. Hang on while I go get something to break it off.” Jim went in search of a hammer in his tool box in the back of the pickup, found one, and came back.

“Stand back, Maddie, I don’t want any bits of flying metal hitting you.” He struck several hefty blows before the lock broke open and then gently raised the lid.

When they saw what was inside the box, they simply looked at each other in amazement.

“My God,” said Maddie. “There must be a million dollars in here. It’s full to the brim with gold coins.”

“Old Seamus must have buried them. There’s always been a rumor about how he never trusted banks and preferred to bury his money, but those stories were just stories and we never took any notice of them. You know how old people like to encourage that kind of thing. Looks like it was true.”

“This will be worth a lot more now than when it was buried,” said Maddie. “Maybe we should take a coin into town and see how much it’s worth.”

“I’m inclined to give Dad a ring first and see if he knows anything about it. Technically, it belongs to him because all the paperwork for deeding us this land isn’t completed yet. Anyway, I’m inclined to put it right back in the hole for safekeeping until I’ve spoken to Dad. Regardless of the deed, it still belongs to him.”

“You’re right, Jim. That’s one of the things I love about you, totally selfless. We’ll bury it again and I’ll plant my garden over the top of it. I wonder if there are any more of these boxes buried around the cabin.”

Jim rolled his eyes at her. 

******

Andrew was sulking in his motel room in town and drinking by himself and it seemed as if he felt sorrier for himself with every mouthful of liquor he consumed. He wasn’t a happy drunk. The conversation he was having with himself inside his head were going nowhere and making him feel worse.

The smart thing to do would have been to sleep it off, then take a cold shower and go back to the Circle O. But a drunken Andrew couldn’t connect the dots. Instead, he went outside and walked unsteadily up the main street, muttering to himself under his breath. He couldn’t believe it when he came across Jim and Maddie, who were loading up with supplies for the weekend.

“Look who it is,” he slurred. “The goat lover and the scheming temptress who convinced my father to ruin my deal to buy the Dupont place. How many times did you have to spread your legs for him before he agreed to do it?”

Jim was horrified that Andrew would talk like that about Maddie, particularly in public but he didn’t know what to say or what to do.

Maddie did though and slugged him in the mouth with the bag of oranges she’d been about to put in the back of the pickup. “You are disgusting, Andrew O’Connor, and I’ll be expecting an apology for what you just said. Now get out of my way and take yourself home to sleep it off. You’re making a fool of yourself.” She pushed him out of the way, threw the rest of the supplies into the pickup, and yelled at Jim, who still hadn’t done anything, “Get in and drive us home.”

He snapped out of it then. His brother had just insulted the woman he loved more than life itself and he’d just stood there and done nothing. He’d failed her again and if looks could kill, he thought, he'd probably be a dead man. Damn, but he was stupid. He should have decked Andrew at the very least. What was it about the man that made him feel like he had no right to question his brother’s authority?

Maddie was livid and at that moment, she would have hit Jim with the bag of oranges, had she still had it handy. “What sort of a spineless fool are you, Jim O’Connor, to just stand there and let him get away with that? What is wrong with you? I know I said I liked your selflessness, but it doesn’t extend to being insulted by that dipstick you call your brother.”

“I’m sorry, Maddie.”

“You’re always sorry. You need to do something about yourself because I’m not going to put up with being treated like that. I don’t know why you think it’s okay for him to behave like that but if you think for one minute that I’m happy to be treated like a piece of shit, you’ve got another thing coming.”

He didn’t say a word for the rest of the trip home but thought about what his mother had said about standing up for the right things and the people he loved. He was a failure, as usual.

When they arrived home, Maddie stormed away without speaking to him, taking some of the supplies inside with her. Jim unloaded the rest for her but the look she gave him indicated she’d whack him with the garden spade if he so much as set foot inside.

“I’ll see you later then. I’ll be over at the Circle O if you need me.”

He took the pickup and left quietly, feeling like a complete failure. Maybe his mother could help him to understand why Andrew made him feel so inadequate. It was something he should have gotten a handle on a long time ago and if he didn’t do something about it now, he’d lose Maddie forever.

******

Maddie worked her temper off by putting away all the supplies and then doing some more work in her new garden. She was so mad, she hacked away until the plot was half as big again and then worked at turning over the soil and digging in some fertilizer. Dusk was falling as she finished up and headed inside for some clean clothes to take with her for after her shower at her gran’s house.

She relished the feel of the hot water on her body as she eased her aching muscles. It hurt, but the digging had managed to work the anger out of her system. A few sore muscles were a small price to pay to be rid of it. She’d call Jim when she got back, not to apologize for yelling at him, but to invite him back home. A little idea formed in the back of her mind that maybe if she modeled the kind of behavior she needed Jim to display from time to time, he’d get the message. Well, a girl could hope.