Two Brothers (26 page)

“I’m sorry,” Tristan said, and for some reason it shamed her, his sympathy.

She met his gaze. “It’s your turn,” she told him briskly. “You and Shay McQuillan are clearly twins. Why do you have different names?”
Who is that smiling couple in the daguerreotype upstairs?

“That’s a long and rather remarkable story. To be brief, Shay and I were born on a wagon train, somewhere in the Rockies, to a young couple making their way west. Our father—his name was Patrick Killigrew—was killed by Indians the same day we came into the world, and our mother, Mattie, died that night. A family called McQuillan took Shay in, while I went on with the Saint-Laurents.”

It was indeed an amazing tale. “Did you know where he was while you were growing up?”

Tristan shook his head. “My mother—my adoptive mother, that is—told me what had happened when she took sick a few years back, and gave me a remembrance book that belonged to Mattie. I found out where Shay was by other means, but I might never have come here if I hadn’t been looking for somebody else.” For the first time since she’d
met him, and then just for the briefest moment, Tristan looked uncertain. “I meant to move on, once I’d taken care of business.”

Emily felt uncomfortable. Although Tristan Saint-Laurent seemed affable, and even boyish, she sensed that there were uncharted depths to his nature, knew somehow that the currents could be dark and treacherous. “Business?”

His smile was dazzling, like a sudden show of sunshine on a cloudy day. “I got what I came for,” he said. “And I found out I liked having a family again.”

Emily waited. She wouldn’t ask about the likeness in the frame on Tristan’s bureau top, wouldn’t ask if he’d ever had a wife and children of his own.

“Shay and I butt heads on a fairly regular basis,” he went on, and a rueful light danced in his eyes. “All the same, it’s a fine thing to have a brother. Were you close to your uncle?”

The question caught Emily quite unprepared. She had never really been close to anyone, except for some of the characters in the books she read and the made-up people she turned to when she was alone too long, or scared. “Well, no,” she said, in a surprised tone. “My father died before I was born, and my mother passed on soon after. I boarded on a neighboring farm—that’s where I learned to cook.” She blushed. “I don’t usually talk so much.” At least she hadn’t blurted out that the farm was Cyrus’s, and she’d joined the household to take care of his ailing wife, Mary.

He laughed and glanced at her empty plate. “Or eat so much, I reckon.”

Now it was Emily who laughed. She’d consumed twice as much food as Tristan had, and she could have eaten more, if the platter between them hadn’t been scraped bare. The ease she felt frightened her more than all those nights alone on the trail had done, and she composed herself, bit her lower lip, sat up very straight in her chair.

“What is it?” Tristan asked, his voice quiet. It might be her undoing, that gentle voice.

She stood, managed a wooden smile. Tristan rose, too, and faced her over the table. “I must get back to my sheep,
Mr. Saint-Laurent. I appreciate your generosity, but we are adversaries, aren’t we?”

“Are we?” he countered.

She retreated a step, for no other reason than that she wanted so much to draw nearer to him. “Yes,” she said, and the word came out sounding strangled and dry. “Yes.” With that, she made for the door, open to the crisp midsummer morning.

“Miss Starbuck,” he said.

She looked back, saw him standing in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, one shoulder braced against the jamb. “You’ll need your horse,” he said reasonably.

She stopped, glanced questioningly toward the barn.

Tristan pushed away from the door frame and ambled toward her. He had left his hat inside, and the sun caught fire in his hair. “I put Walter out to pasture,” he said.

“What?”

“The mare is worn out, Emily.”

Through difficulty after difficulty, Emily had kept her chin up and her eyes dry. Now, in the face of Tristan’s determined goodwill, she felt like bursting into tears. “Walter is a mare?” she asked, partly because she wanted to know, and partly because she needed a few moments to shore up her backbone.

“Yep,” Tristan answered, with another crooked grin. His arms were folded again, and his eyes were narrowed against the cool brightness of the morning. “I don’t mind making you the loan of a horse,” he said, “if you’ll take one of the nags that usually pull my buckboard.”

The loan of a horse, like breakfast, was more than she wanted to accept, but she knew Walter must be exhausted. God knew, she was, but she had sheep to see to, Mr. Polymarr notwithstanding, and Spud, her one true friend, would surely be wondering where his mistress had gone. “I suppose it’s too far to walk,” she said.

Tristan laughed again. “Not if you don’t mind spending half the day making the trip,” he replied.

Emily was beginning to understand the concept of killing
with kindness. “All right!” she cried, in humorous consternation, flinging up her hands. “I’ll borrow a horse!”

Tristan shook his head, and although he made an effort to look solemn, amusement lingered around his mouth. He cocked a thumb toward the barn. “Help yourself,” he said. Then he turned and walked back to the house, whistling under his breath, while she stood in her tracks, staring after him.

Chapter 3

A
FTER SADDLING ONE OF THE PLODDING ANIMALS
she found in the barn—neither of them looked fit to ride, if you wanted her opinion—Emily set out for the sheep camp in the hills. She might have been a greenhorn in every other respect, but she had a fine sense of direction, and she remembered each turn and twist in the trail that led up into the hills, where her flock was grazing.

For all her skill at finding her way, the ride took almost an hour. Emily was captivated, and kept stopping to look back over the land and admire the sparkling ribbon of water that was the creek, the stout and spacious log house with its mortar chinking and double chimneys, a mansion by frontier standards, the abundant, waving grass, miles and miles of it, it seemed, rippling and flowing in the breeze like some fragrant green sea. Tristan’s cattle dotted the landscape as well, but she didn’t begrudge them space in the promised land. In their way, they belonged as surely as the trees and stones, the ground and sky.

It was Tristan who didn’t fit, Emily reasoned, with some sorrow. When Spud came streaking toward her, barking a joyous welcome and setting the sheep to bleating, she turned from her worries and jumped down to ruffle the dog’s pointed ears.

Mr. Polymarr, who had been stretched out under a tree, pondering the inside of his ancient hat, scrabbled to his feet, roused by the ruckus, however belatedly, and cursing like a sailor. Spud, ever the gentleman, growled in disapproval.

The old man waved a dismissive hand at the dog as he trundled over to where Emily stood. “Mornin’,” he said, miser-like, as though it cost him to part with even that one word.

“Good morning, Mr. Polymarr,” Emily said, amused. She scanned the sheep, knew in that one practiced glance that they were all there, safe and well, if considerably spent from the long trek south. They would need all that was left of the summer grass to prepare for the long, snowy winter awaiting them, she reflected, but in the spring the lambs would come and, soon after, the adult animals could be sheared, their wool sold. A few, but only a few, were to be sold for mutton.

She had by no means forgotten that the cold months, not to mention Tristan Saint-Laurent and a host of other problems, stood between the difficult present and the first profits.

“I didn’t expect to see you for a while,” Polymarr said, rubbing his white-bristled chin, then spitting. “How do you tolerate these critters, carryin’ on the way they do?”

Emily laughed. “They’ll quiet down in a few minutes,” she said. “Hearing Spud barking like that, they probably thought they were going to be moved again, poor things.”

Polymarr sidestepped along beside Emily as she approached the grove of trees where he had made camp the night before. “I was kind of hopin’ to stay on, at least until St. Lawrence gives me them other three dollars I got comin’.”

The view from the knoll was breathtaking, just as Emily had expected. She stood gazing at it, stricken to the heart by an unrecognized emotion, neither joy nor sorrow, but something made up of both, and as intense as either. One hand shaded her eyes from the sun. “I suppose I could use
your help,” she said, her throat thick. She imagined the valley in autumn, rimmed in gold and crimson and orange, and in winter, muffled beneath a layer of clean, glittering snow. Spring would bring the first pale grass, the crocuses and dandelions and a riot of wildflowers. How could she turn her back on such a place?

“You may stay if you wish. Just be warned that I cannot—and will not—pay you the same exorbitant wages you’re getting from Tristan.’

Polymarr squinched up his bulbous nose, baffled. “Tristan?”

“Mr. St. Lawrence,” she said, with a little laugh, aware that if she said “Saint-Laurent” he wouldn’t know who she was talking about. “I’m offering twenty dollars a month, and you won’t see any of that before spring.”

“What I
don’t see
is, I don’t see no wagon. I ain’t takin’ to the trail with no means of shelter. ‘Round about October, it’ll commence to snowin’, and it won’t let up much afore April.” He studied her with a sort of hopeful speculation.” ‘Less you’re headed south, o’ course.”

Emily sighed. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, gazing toward the distant ranch house. “I intend to settle right here, on this land. If you choose to hire on, you can either stay in the line shack or make a place for yourself in one of the outbuildings on the ranch.”

Polymarr’s Adam’s apple went up and down, galloping the length of his neck like an ostrich in a trench. His filmy eyes were narrowed, and he pointed one scrawny and none too clean index finger at Emily. “You couldn’t keep sheep around here, miss, even with St. Lawrence’s say-so. The other ranchers won’t put up with it for a minute. Fact is, I’ve been expectin’ ‘em to come in here shootin’ since last night, and I got nary a wink of sleep for imaginin’ my demise and sayin’ my prayers, lest my soul go astray ’twixt here and heaven.”

“I see.” Along her slow route down from Montana, Emily had encountered quite a few ranchers, some with small
spreads, some with large. They’d watched her coldly as she passed through and by their towns, sometimes touching a hand to a hat brim in acknowledgment, but never smiling or extending any kind of welcome. The women had kept a careful distance, always, peering at her from behind fluttering curtains, as though she were an oddity, too dangerous to approach. Once or twice, men on horseback had surrounded her and the sheep, “escorting” the flock through their territory without even a pretense of friendliness. She’d been an outcast then, and it seemed now that things would be no different in Prominence. Her dejection was profound, for she wanted nothing so much as a home, though she wasn’t precisely surprised.

“You got a gun, miss?” Polymarr pressed. “Somethin’ to protect yourself with?”

She showed him the .38 caliber pistol in the holster under her serape. She had a cartridge belt, too, but she dreaded having to shoot anyone or anything, for she’d taken little practice, being possessed of a Christian aversion to violence. Anyhow, the noise of gunfire invariably upset her nerves.

“Not much of a weapon,” the old man said. “Still, I guess it’d be better’n nothin’. You mean to stay around these parts, ma’am, you best get yourself a rifle. One of them carbines, maybe, like they use in the army.”

Emily shuddered. “Maybe,” she agreed, somewhat forlornly. She hadn’t dared to attempt the long southward journey unarmed, but she had no plans to become another Annie Oakley, either. Her dearest hope was to make a place for herself in the valley by peaceful means; she wanted a home, like Aislinn McQuillan’s, a place of love and laughter, of light and warmth, with bright, pretty dishes on shelf and table, and plenty of hot water always near at hand. It didn’t seem like so much to ask, but she had met with discouragement too many times in her life to believe that dreams were ever assured of coming true, however plain and ordinary they might be.

She drew a deep and somewhat shaky breath. There was nothing to do, as far as she could determine, but press on.

Sure enough, at least fifty yards of his fence lay flat, the posts pulled right up out of the ground. From the looks of the tracks in the dirt, half his cattle must have been on the lookout for a chance to make for Powder Creek and mix in with the Kyle herd. They’d practically stampeded, those miserable animals, completely obliterating all sign of the sheep Emily had driven in from the other direction.

Until then, Tristan had run the operation alone, except for occasional help from Shay and old John Polymarr, but it had become clear to him of late that he’d have to hire on a couple of cowpunchers if he wanted to make any real headway. He preferred his own counsel, being a man with secrets to keep, and independent into the bargain, but he’d reached a pass where a choice had to be made. He could take to the trail again, or he could stay and put down roots for the first time since leaving the home place in Montana, after his folks died.