The Outsider (47 page)

She turned away from him, suddenly shy. She began to walk toward the house, and he fell into step beside her.

“I know of such a thing as a symphony orchestra,” she said. “That is, I’ve heard it spoken of. Tell me what it sounds like.”

“I’ve never heard one myself. I did go to an opera once in Leadville, Colorado. It seemed mostly just a lot of fat ladies caterwauling.” His mouth crooked slightly, not quite forming a smile. “And once, somewhere down in Texas, I heard this phenomenon called a cowboy band. It was mostly a lot of brassy horns. It was led by a man with a baton in his one hand and a six-shooter in his other, I reckon so’s he could kill the first man who blew a sour note.”

They laughed together again. She felt light-headed, and light-footed. She wanted to lift up her skirts and twirl around and around and around, until she became dizzy and collapsed into a heap in the grass, the way she used to do when she was a little girl.

“Have you ever done any dancing?” she asked him.

“Now, I have indeed been to more than a few fandangos in my time.”

Somehow they had stopped walking and were facing each other. The wind fluttered her cap strings. He took one in each hand and pulled them down until they were stretched taut, with his fingers barely brushing her breasts, and yet she felt his touch all the way to her toes.

He surprised her by starting to sing, a lilting song about a girl named Annie Laurie, filling in with la-di-das when he forgot the words, and at some time he had let go of her cap strings to take her hand, and he was now fitting his palm to hers, entwining their fingers, while his other hand had lifted her arm by the wrist and was draping it over his shoulder, and he was sliding his arm around her waist.

And they were dancing.

He twirled her around and around in dipping, sweeping
circles, and his knee came in and out between her thighs, and her skirt wrapped around his legs. She could feel every inch of her own skin, every prickling hair on her arms. She could hear her own breathing, and his.

She clung to him as he turned her faster. Her head fell back and she opened her eyes to the wide blue sky spinning crazily above her while the earth tilted and swayed beneath her floating feet. The dance and the wind snatched away the last of his song, and they were laughing, laughing.

And then suddenly they weren’t laughing anymore. Their bodies slowed and drew closer and his mouth came down over hers, pressing her lips, opening them, filling her with his breath, with his heat, with his tongue. She dug her fingers into the hard muscles of his back to hold on, hold on. And they might have been dancing still, for the way the sky spun and the earth tilted.

It lasted forever and ended too soon. His mouth let go of hers, but slowly, slowly, coming back to touch her lips with his once more, and then again.

“I want you, Rachel,” he said, his breath washing hot and urgent over her face. “I want to lie with you.”

She put her fingers on his mouth. Her heart was fierce with panic, because she needed him so and loved him so, and she was so very weak. “No, we can never,” she said, her voice breaking over the words. “You know we can never. Not only is it a terrible sin, but what you would take from me is so much less than what I would end up giving. And what you would give to me can be nothing.”

His mouth moved beneath her fingers, but she pressed them harder to his lips.

“There’s nothing you can give me,” she said, pulling away, letting him go, taking one step backward and then another and another and another, so that they were no longer within
touching distance of each other. “Not even if you somehow came to love me, because you are an outsider.”

She turned and walked away from him. She kept her back stiff and her head up because she didn’t want him to know how hard this was when she needed him and loved him so much.

“You ask too much, Rachel,” he shouted after her. “You ask too much.”

THAT NIGHT THE WIND
blew hot and smelled sweet, of fresh cut hay and sun-baked earth.

The men on horseback pulled up on the north bank of the creek, where they were shielded by the thick willow brakes and cottonwoods. The small logwood farmhouse, the sloped-roofed barn, the squat lambing sheds all looked quiet. Nothing stirred but an empty milk bucket which the wind blew tumbling across the yard.

“You sure you got the grit for this, lad o’ mine?”

“I’m less worried about my grit than about your good sense,” Quinten Hunter said. “The whole valley’s like a tinder box and you’ve taken a notion in your head to play with fire.”

His father’s laughter came to him from out of the dark, carried on a gust of tobacco-laden breath. “You don’t intend to ease up on me, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“But in the end you’ll do what I tell you, where I tell you, and how I tell you. Won’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Quinten’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a hard smile, but the branding iron he carried was heavy in his sweating hand. The Circle H mark glowed fire-red in the dark, like a giant eye.

He made himself think of the grassland they had ridden
through to get here, of how it was grazed down to the roots in places, and cut up by hundreds of sharp and pointed hooves. He remembered the first time he’d ridden over this end of the Miawa. He’d been with his father then, too, only so small he’d been riding a pony instead of a horse. The grass had grown as high as his stirrups that summer.

When Quinten thought of the grassland, of how it had been before the Plain folk had brought their sheep into the valley, the burning brand didn’t feel so wrong.

“Let’s get it done, then,” the Baron said, and sent his horse splashing across the creek and toward the stacks of fresh mown hay.

Quinten spurred his own horse to catch up with his father. Three other Hunter cowhands crossed the creek on their heels. These others had joined up with Quinten and his father shortly after they had left the small campfire they’d built to heat the iron, and Quinten had paid them little mind. The Baron had made it plain that tonight at least he was putting the Circle H brand and all that it stood for into the hand of his breed son.

They rode through a flock of sheep, scattering the bleating animals into broken streams of gray wool. Inside the farmhouse a dog barked. One of the cowhands fired two shots from his six-shooter, and a door slammed shut.

Quinten clamped his legs tighter to his horse, urging the big gelding to go faster. Fear and excitement pulsed through him, and a wild shout surged up his throat, hot and wet, like the thrumming of his blood. He threw back his head and let it loose into the starry, wind-swept sky. The Blackfoot war cry.

Whooping, Quinten put the burning brand to one of the haystacks. The timothy grass was fresh and green and slow to catch. But then spirals of white smoke curled up from the
end of the iron, and the hay melted into tongues of orange and red flame.

From out of the night, a gun fired. The cowhand next to Quinten slumped over in his saddle with a soft cry.

“Christ. Ailsa!” the Baron shouted. He pointed his gun toward a sheepherder’s wagon which was parked next to the barn, and fired off three quick shots. The two other Circle H men opened fire on the wagon as well.

His father’s words had so shocked Quinten that he dropped the branding iron. He twisted around trying to peer through the veil of smoke and flickering light. The cowhand, what he had thought was a cowhand, was sitting up in the saddle again, one hand gripping the other arm.

“Ailsa!” the Baron shouted again.

“Regrettably you must delay the celebration, Fergus,” said that snowdrift voice. “I am not yet dead.”

“Aw, woman, why are you always saying such things? Quin, what in hell are you doing to set that fire, rubbing two sticks together?”

Quinten bent over his horse’s neck, searching for the branding iron. The gun fired again from the sheepherder’s wagon, and he heard a bullet kiss the air where a moment before his head had been. He couldn’t see the brand, and then he did—a glowing red Circle H in a spilled shaft of hay.

He stretched out his hand for the iron just as the haystack went up in a sheet of flames, spitting sparks, lighting up the night bright as day. And silhouetting them against the horizon like wooden ducks at a shooting gallery.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” his father bellowed, but Quinten had already dug the heels of his boots hard into his horse’s sides.

They all rode low on their horses’ necks back across the creek and through the cottonwoods, firing off random shots.
When they were sure they weren’t being pursued, they pulled up their mounts and looked back at the sheep farm. They could see figures with buckets running to and fro between the burning haystack and the creek and a yard pump.

But Quinten could only look at his father’s wife. In all the years he had been at the ranch he had never seen her on a horse, and yet she sat the saddle as if born to it. He had never known her to wear anything but silk and taffeta. Now the sleeve of the man’s shirt she had on was black and wet with her blood. Her face was alight with a wild and desperate excitement.

He didn’t understand what she was doing here, why his father had allowed her to come. Quinten’s throat felt thick with what he realized to his shame were tears of jealousy.

“I left our branding iron back there, Pa,” he said, his eyes still on Ailsa.

The Baron pulled his horse’s head around, toward home. “Don’t fret about it.”

The two other cowhands followed him, but Ailsa Hunter lingered, and so did Quinten. She took off the man’s hat she was wearing, and her hair fell thick and heavy over her shoulders. He had never seen her hair down before. It shimmered in the starlit night.

Quinten brought his horse closer and leaned toward her. He was compelled to touch her, although in the end his courage failed him. He pulled his hand back and gripped the pommel of his own saddle instead.

The word tore out of him, heavy with years of uncertainties and fears, and desperate longings. “Why?”

She looked at him. A glaze had come over her eyes, like a film of ice. And then, although he hadn’t been able to touch her, she touched him. For the first time in all his memory, she touched him.

She laid the tips of her fingers against his mouth. “What
a poor fool of a boy you are,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be asking that question of yourself?”

“THE DEVIL SHOULD BE
well pleased with his work on this night.”

Rachel pulled her gaze away from the blackened, smoldering stack of hay that Noah had built so high and tall and straight for her. She looked at him, her good neighbor and friend. He had seen the fire from his farm and ridden over to help put it out. Now his long beard was singed, his face streaked with soot, his eyes red rimmed and watering from the smoke.

She lifted the Circle H branding iron that she held awkwardly in her hand. “It wasn’t the Devil,” she said.

He shook his head, his mouth set stubborn. “This happened because the outsider killed that stock inspector.”

She turned away from him and threw the branding iron into some willow brakes. The outsider, along with her son and Noah’s boy, Mose, were soaking blankets and gunnysacks in the creek and laying them over the smoldering mound of hay to prevent the wind from fanning an ember back into life or stray sparks from setting more fires.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said. Her eyes stung. Her throat was so raw and gritty it hurt to swallow. “Perhaps if Mr. Cain hadn’t provoked them, they would’ve set fire to your haystacks instead.”

Noah’s big rough hand grabbed her arm. “Send him away, Rachel. For the sake of your immortal soul, send him away.”

“No.”

He let go of her, although she hadn’t tried to pull away. His gaze searched her face, then went slowly over the rest
of her. She had run out of the house to fight the fire barefoot, wearing only her nightrail. She had on her night cap, but most of her hair had fallen out from underneath it. She knew she should feel shame to stand before him with her hair uncovered, but all she felt was tired.

Noah made a strangled sound deep in his throat. “You’ve said you’ll be marrying me come the mating season. But who is the woman I’ll be taking as my wife?”