Cowboy Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #3, Kitty and Lukes story) (4 page)

             
"Do you ever get lost out here?" I asked her as we stood in the corn.

             
"You are a silly goose," Sarah said, and led the way through what, to me, was a maze of very tall stalks. 

             
Beyond the garden, the grazing fields started, shining in the sun.  Feed was hard to come by, expensive to bring in and keep in stock, and it took up space.  It was easier for her and William to grow their own or partner with grain farmers.  To the north of the ranch house, not that far from the kitchen where we'd talked, was the ranch hand bunkhouse I'd seen through the kitchen windows.  It was empty as it was early evening, everyone still working before they'd come into the ranch house for dinner, so Sarah led me through it.  The place was simple enough, with a front porch with straight back and rocking chairs and, inside, potbelly stoves, gingham curtains in the windows, cots covered with bright quilts, armoires for clothes and trunks the men had probably brought with them.  There was a sink in one corner and a bathtub, screened off behind more curtains.

             
We toured the stables, where horses snorted warmly as Sarah pitched out evening feed.  The milking shed was the other half of the stables and, beyond that, more outbuildings, barns and pastures, where cattle milled about.

             
Together, we stood with our arms on the top of the rolled metal bars that made up the gates, watching as the cattle stood swishing their tails in the evening heat.

             
"How many—cows?  Are they cows?"

             
She grinned at me.  "Cattle.  Head of cattle."

             
"Looks like the whole thing to me."

             
"Very funny."

             
"How many?  Mr. Lord said your William had taken 1,000 head to Oregon—that still sounds funny—to… "  I hadn't seen William since the wedding.  He was such a taciturn man and Sarah so vibrant and not at all reticent—Sarah could talk the wings off a magpie, our father used to say—that I was glad of the weeks between my arrival and his return.  What would he make of my flight?

             
Her gaze had returned to the pasture, where the remaining herd stood docile and seemingly uninterested in much of anything except the occasional mouthful of grass and a salt lick. 

             
"Did he sell them?"  There was a crease on her forehead I didn't remember seeing on my sister's brow.  She looked worried.

             
"Yes," she said, a bit briskly, then, "Yes, well, he did.  He got the best price he could."  She sighed, propped her chin on her folded arms, and glared at the cows.

             
Another sigh.  "The grass they're eating is dry.  Everything's dry here."  She let her head roll on her arms so she could look at me.  "What you did this afternoon?  That was important.  I didn't mean to not say so.  I was just…"  She shrugged.

             
"Surprised to see me here?"

             
"A little!"  That made her laugh, but not the way Sarah used to laugh.  Pushing herself off the gate, she started walking the perimeter of the pasture, hands tucked into the pockets of the apron she still wore.  "We're in the middle of a drought here and it's making everything so hard.  We have water for drinking, bathing and washing, but the amount of water you need on a ranch, to grow crops, to grow the grain and feed the animals, it's amazing, and the wells come up dry and the streams sometimes dry up and, other times, people upstream dam them."  Her voice was hard right then.  "There's the concern of keeping the animals healthy, so you can either drive them to graze or find water for them."

             
She kicked at the dirt, which spun into a very small dust devil, no higher than her knee.  The ground was dust dry. 

             
"William got a good price for the thousand," she said.  "The animals are still healthy, still have weight on them.  We needed to sell while that's still true."  She sounded angry, probably at having William gone, though I'd have thought that would happen from time to time.  "He's taking them about 100 miles north and that takes about two weeks."

             
Which she'd already told me, more than once.  She missed him.  I couldn't blame her.  I missed Johnny.  The rat. 

             
If only feelings turned off when they're no longer needed.  I'd cared about Johnny for years, as a friend and as a fiancé.  It never occurred to me I'd be without him, at least not for a good many years.  We were the same age, both healthy, both living more or less where we wanted to live.  I thought we had time.  Losing him meant not only losing the man I loved—which kept coming through to me, that I had loved him, as much as he'd been my friend, and that surprised me, every time—but also losing the friend I'd have turned to under other circumstances to talk things out with. 

             
I had girlfriends in Gold Hill and a few who moved when they were finished with school and lived in Virginia City, three miles north of Gold Hill.  They were good friends, like Rachel, but they'd changed after marrying or having children, or, in one case, deciding to teach rather than anything else.  They no longer wanted to do the same things I did and, even though maybe not all of my girlfriends wanted to be outside as much as I did, exploring creek sides and cottonwoods, once they were married, their interests changed so much I couldn't remember what we'd had in common before. 

             
Johnny hadn't done that.  He'd become more serious, of course, buying into his father's concern of horseshoeing,  but he still loved to hike up hills just to see what was on the other side, still loved to race our horses on flat roads.

             
I'd lost a friend as much as a fiancé.

             
I surfaced out of my thoughts to find Sarah had fallen silent.  She was simply walking beside me along the pasture, her hands still sunk deep into her apron pockets.  When she noticed me looking at her, that I was out of my own thoughts, she stopped and put a hand on my arm, then put her arms around me.

             
"I'm glad you're here, Kit," she said, holding me by the shoulders.  "I didn't give you much of a welcome."

             
"There was a fire," I said lightly.  I didn't say that as Mr. David Lord had driven closer to the ranch I'd shrunk farther away, convinced arriving without warning and without my mother's approval and blessing would cause unwelcome complications for Sarah.

             
"There was a fire and there was worry.  I thought something had happened to Mother or—well, we went over that.  But I'm glad you're here.  I've missed you."

             
The sharp ache at that moment reminded me that as much as I'd lost Johnny, I'd lost Sarah.  We'd shared everything growing up, as sisters and best friends, and she was part of the reason I didn't have that many girlfriends—we were the closest friends.  So when Johnny came into my life, I thought all the pieces were complete.

             
Then Johnny left and Sarah married and moved.

             
"I've missed you.  More than you know."

             
Sarah widened her eyes.  "You mean the letter a day isn't proof you miss me?"
              She meant it lightly but it stung, somehow.  "And your not writing means?"

             
But she was saved an answer when Mike returned from Redding, bringing back change and proof my message to Mother had been sent, telling her where I was and requesting she send back a trunk with clothing and her blessings for me to stay until October.  Sarah told Mike when to expect supper, and he went off to whatever chores were waiting for him and we went into the garden to pick corn for the supper.

              Over the next couple of days, a routine established itself.  I woke up early every day, not that I could sleep through the clarion call of the rooster, who sounded as if he were perched directly under the window of the room where I slept.  After stumbling through washing, I made my way into Sarah's huge, shining clean kitchen, where I helped her cook breakfast for the six hands still on the ranch.  Adding in the ten on the trail with William, I guessed the ranch usually had some 16 or 20 on it and at least a dozen for breakfast each morning.  They came around for midday meal too and then again for supper, so that most days were spent cooking, cleaning and cooking again.  In between, we worked in the garden, helped feed the animals, made runs into Redding to collect parcels from the train or shop at the grocers.  In the evening, Sarah read her Bible, sewed, or made bread for the next day or did all of those things before she sat with a lantern and read, briefly, from one of the mysteries I had brought her.

             
She seemed nothing like my sister, Sarah, who had moved away to California.  That Sarah preened and dressed and worried about her hair and helped with chores under protest and was interested mostly in which boy would take her to what dance and whether or not someone had asked her to the newest play at the opera house.

             
When I asked her, at one point, if she thought she'd changed much, she said, shortly, that once you'd helped with the calving because the heifers had more problems birthing than the older cows and all the heifers tended to birth at the same time so that there wasn't always a veterinarian to assist, you found yourself changed.

             
Just hearing about it was enough for me.  I was grateful to be with her, enjoying her company and the hard work that kept me from thinking overly about Johnny and Sissy and Mr. Overton and even my mother, but I couldn't imagine staying on at the Big Sky Ranch longer than the weeks we'd argued for in the message to Mother.  I wasn't anxious to leave, and I'd miss her again once I got home, but I couldn't imagine staying.

             
Then the team returned from the trail.

              We were outside working with the horses when the call came up from one of the ranch hands. 

             
"Riders!"

             
Sarah instantly abandoned the horse she'd been currying, picked up the front of her skirt in both hands, and began to run.  "That'll be William!"

             
I followed her out of the stall.  Against the setting sun of the early August day, clouds of dust rose in the dry air, tinted salmon and gold like the sunset.  I could hear the riders before I could see anything more of them than the dust.  Maybe I didn't know any of the team, except my brother by marriage, but excitement swept me, anticipation like something new was about to happen.  I ran after Sarah, my own traveling skirt held aside.

             
They rode into the yard, trail weary and dusty, a clutch of cowboys wearing sweat-stained denim and dust-covered hats.  They were laughing, tired, but talking about the trip, about the sale, about a rattlesnake one of them had killed with one shot at 10 yards.

             
"Could've done it better, had you not been in the way," one of them said.

             
"See you try," said the shooter.

             
Good natured laughter and someone said, "We leave Tiny behind?"

             
"Yeah, we tried," William said, pushing through the throng of horses and men.  "There's my beautiful wife."  He caught sight of me as he started to dismount and stared.  "Kathryn?  What are you doing here?"  He looked half pleased, half worried.

             
"She came to visit, my love," Sarah said more smoothly than I'd ever seen her move into a situation.  "Come down from there and greet your wife."

             
Which he did, grabbing her tighter than I would have expected given the company of men still standing in the stable yard.  When he let her go, he walked over to give me a cautious and polite kiss on the cheek, then turned back to Sarah, checking.

             
"Everything alright with your kin?"

             
"Mother's probably apoplectic," she said.  "We're sheltering young Kathryn here.  When she returns to family bosom, no doubt—" And she cut off the grand speech with a gesture that clearly meant "The End."

             
William, smiling but confused, said, "I don’t understand."

             
"I left—precipitously," I said.

             
"She left without telling Mother," Sarah translated.

             
"She's insane," William interpreted.  "What happened?"  He was brushing down his horse, taking the saddle off, ignoring the hands trying to help him.  From the looks of things, he needed someone to do for him much of what he was doing for the horse.

             
"More than can be explained here and now," Sarah said.  "We've let Mother know and, for now, Kitty is staying with us."

             
William clearly had more questions and just as clearly needed food and, eventually, a bath and to talk to his wife.  It seemed like a very good time for me to make myself scarce. I could weed the garden, which, despite it having been done that earlier in the day, undoubtedly had a new crop of weeds starting up.  Or I could take a walk along the very low flowing stream that edged the property where homestead
became grazing land.  Or…