Chapter 1

THE KIDNEY-BUSTING DRIVE DOWN THE GRAVEL road to the Buckeye is extra rough in a diesel with stiff suspension like Ol’ Blue’s, but rolling closer to the ranch always makes me smile. My teeth air-dried by the time I eased the truck under the gate header. Charley got up from his snooze, shook his furry, yellow self, and did a chortle-woof in appreciation of our destination.

“No herding today,” I told him.

My dog didn’t look best convinced. The second I opened the truck door, which bears the decal DALE’S HORSESHOEING along with the house phone number, Charley bailed out with hope in his heart, staring at the faraway rangeland like anyone with a working soul does, before he got busy with his sniffing.

“No good, no good.” Manuel, the guy who works seasonally for the Nunn Finer Hay Company, was muttering under the hood of the pickup between the main barn and the all-quiet ranch house.

“Hey, Manny.” I don’t know if he heard my greeting as he continued to commune with the innards of his engine, but I reckoned Skip and Harley, the geldings I planned to shoe, were in the corral at the run-in shed on the other side of the house. Soon as I found the horses, I’d move Ol’ Blue so I wouldn’t have to haul my anvil too far.

“Miss?”

“Miss”-ing me—instead of calling me by name—is one of Manuel’s things, but I try to have the kind of faith my dog does and gave him another chance.

“Rainy,” I reminded him.

“Miss, you know a phone number for the Mister?”

I always enjoy when anyone makes the mistake of asking Hollis something about ranch plans and Hollis directs them to Donna, who’s Hollis’s new wife and the real owner of the Buckeye ranch.

“Mister Hollis, he gave me money to take the bull to the sale down in California, but today my truck, it has problems, and I cannot do it.”

“Oh.” I sort of got it now. Not due in ’til after this weekend, Donna and Hollis. Ranch folk don’t often get to get away. “They’re kind of out of town.”

“Yes, but you have a way to talk to them?”

“They’re not cell phone people.” No way, no how was he going to reach the honeymooners. Their wedding was last November. With spring around the corner, the old newlyweds were more than ready to ride off into the sunrise. They’d gone so deep in the back-country with four horses, they’d probably slipped back in time a full century.

Manuel spun his eyeballs a lap like I was the one a little deaf or half-stupid. “The bull is supposed to be at the big sale tomorrow.”

“Oh!” Now I got it extra good. Donna’s killer bull was supposed to go to the Black Bluff bull sale, down California way, and Manuel was supposed to haul the blasted beast there. Suggesting Manuel to Donna and Hollis as a ranch hand had been my doing. They’d needed help, didn’t need to be breaking their backs as hard as they did. Donna has given me all the pull to shoe her horses when and how I thought best. Plus, her stock are so well-handled, they stand like a dream, no fussing or yanking away while I work on their feet. I even shoe the ranch geldings in the pasture sometimes. Real well-behaved, old-style Quarter Horses. With most clients, I require a person be there to handle the horse, but I trust Donna and her stock, and she trusts me. I just about love Donna. She’s become like another mother to me, and her horses behave so well that I shoe them when my schedule’s open.

Fact is, the horses I’d planned to end my afternoon shoeing, they could wait a couple days just fine. Twisting my ponytail around my thumb made the idea come quicker. I’ve always wanted to go to the Black Bluff bull sale, even though Hollis has said a time or two, kind of weird-like, that I ought not visit there. Now fate was handing me a great excuse to go. I’d be helping out Hollis and Donna by getting a bad-news bull off the Buckeye ranch. It’d get me to the best-of-the-West sale I’d long wanted to see—horses, cattle, and herding dogs worth big bucks would compete and change hands at the Black Bluff sale. Tonight, my Guy was going up to Seattle to buy special food at a big market for our wedding, which was slated for Wednesday.

Rare is the night and day I’m alone, but right now I could make the free time to do Manuel’s hauling job. All kind of good could come from me hitching Ol’ Blue to Hollis’s stout stock trailer, loading that bull, and hitting the road.

If I left right away, I could be back before Guy had a chance to miss me.

My boot heel ground the dirt as I turned for the barn to call home off the landline. I let the phone ring ’til the message machine came on, hung up, thought hard, then called the restaurant. This road trip idea of mine was coming together. I’d put the diesel charges on my debit card, sort it out later with Donna and Hollis. Tomorrow was Saturday. I had no clients scheduled until Monday afternoon. The last day of the bull sale was tomorrow, and I could maybe send Charley on cattle at the sale, which everybody knows is cooler than ice. I mean, herding at the Black Bluff bull sale, for mercy’s sake? Everyone in the world wants to work their herding dog there someday, it’s the cream of—

“Cascade Kitchen,” a gal’s voice said, sounding rushed over the clink of coffee cups and plates and whatnot.

“Guy still there? This is Rainy.” This last bit of information would make sure she didn’t just put me on hold. My husband-come-next-week always takes my calls.

“No, he left like a half hour ago. He thought he wouldn’t go ’til five or six, but he made it out of here earlier even though he thought he’d have to get the dinner rush moving before he could go, but he didn’t.”

Yeah, that was Sissy on the phone, that server-and-dishwasher Guy hired. She talks in funny circles, always. I thanked her and called our house again, this time leaving Guy a message that I was going to take an all-of-a-sudden road trip to get that bad bull Dragoon to Black Bluff since Manny couldn’t do it. I promised to call him later and be back tomorrow night. The big thing on the list—getting my horses taken care of while Guy and I were both out of town for a night and a day—would need more than a phone message left on an answering machine, but my best friend was probably working right then. I left a message on Melinda’s cell. I’d call her again later, go ahead and hit the road now.

It was that simple. Manuel and I got the stock trailer hitched up to Ol’ Blue, checked the lights and brakes—the left signal flickered, but mostly worked—then opened the trailer and backed it to the pen gate. That big Brahma gives me the heebie-jeebies. We didn’t need to risk getting into the pen with him. We swung the gate open to the inside then hollered and waved around the outside until Dragoon decided the hay in the trailer looked like a better deal than a bare pen being circled by a couple of shouting idiots.

So what kind of an omen is it that as I pulled off the ranch road onto the two-lane highway that would take me to the interstate, a marked deputy’s car with a man and woman in the front seat was coming in the opposite direction? I flashed my lights, then eased Ol’ Blue and the stock trailer onto the highway’s shoulder. The cop car activated the spiffy, rotating up-top lights, did a one-eighty, and came up behind me. The male cop stayed in the patrol car as the uniformed woman left the driver’s seat.

Charley thumped his stubby tail as she sauntered up.

“Hey,” I said, when probationary Deputy Melinda Kellan stuck her nose in my window just a hair. Ever since she went to police school, Mel’s got all these weird habits, like the way she stood just back of my truck’s door post and leaned to talk to me.

“Hey, yourself.” She nodded at me, then gave Charley a proper howdy. “You being good as gold, pretty boy?”

It’s like Melinda thinks she’s the funniest thing ever, every time she says that about Charley being gold. True, his long coat is all shades of yellow—not super-common in Aussies—but he’s no beauty queen, he’s a worker. As though to prove he’s come from some school of tough knocks, his ear tips are missing, though the long fringe pretty well covers the flaw. Charley’s a fine example, considering he’s a stray I picked up along the interstate on my way to Oregon.

When they got done nuzzling each other, both glanced at me. Charley’s eyes said I was really the only girl for him. Melinda asked, “What’s up?”

“Wondering if you could maybe swing by tonight and tomorrow to feed the horses and Spooky, too, if the spirit moves you. Guy’s gone ’til tomorrow afternoon-ish and now I’m going to take Donna’s bull down to a sale. I’ll probably make it back late tomorrow night.”

She swung her head the quarter turn it took to squint at the swaying stock trailer Ol’ Blue was towing, and wrinkled her nose.

Bulls have a more than manly scent, it’s true. Dragoon smells like the bad news he is. Manuel and I had put plenty of hay in there and a water bucket tied up that I could fill without having to open the escape door. Not one to turn your back on, Dragoon. I planned to rest the bull’s legs by stopping on the three-hundred-plus-mile drive, but I wouldn’t let Dragoon out of the trailer until I backed up to a waiting pipe corral at the Black Bluff sale grounds.

Melinda stood with her arms folded across her chest, then shifted to rest one elbow on her pistol, the other wrist across a couple of extra magazines in her gun belt.

“You know,” she said, “the only reason I ran from that son of a—”

“Bull,” I put in, doing my part to keep her from cussing all the damn—oops—all the daggummed time. “Son of a bull, Dragoon is.”

She glared at the trailer. “I didn’t have a gun on me at the time. Now, I could drop him at a hundred yards with a twelve-gauge slug. Or six of them, if that’s what it takes.”

Carries a grudge, my friend Melinda does.

“At this sale you’re going to,” she asked, “will there be mules?”

“Not officially. It’s a stock dog thing and beef cattle thing, mostly. Replacement females. And some real nice geldings will be sold. But I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for your mule.”

She nodded. “You said you’d find him.”

One thing that’s a little annoying about this buddy of mine is the way she remembers everything. There’s that, and the block on her shoulder she packs around.

Melinda glared at me good and hard, up one side and down the other. “Do I still have to wear a dress next Wednesday?”

“Well, yeah. Since I do.”

“But you’re the one—”

I waved her off. Best she not get started and dig too deep. “I’ll find your mule.”

“You’d better.”

Melinda is sometimes a bit of a jawbone.

Guy says we could be sisters.

***

I made good time crossing the state line not too many hours after dark. It’s a border I hadn’t touched since I found my way into Oregon looking to get back my childhood horse, Red, nigh two years ago. Touching the northern edge of California then had been lucky, as it’s how I acquired—and named, come to it—good old Charley.

He’d watched me as I relieved myself at an unofficial interstate pull-off, wary and tired, though he wasn’t in too bad of shape, just alone. I’d known his feeling purely. He’d needed someone. Back then, I wanted to need no one.

“Sorry, Charley.” That’s what I’d said, crushing the half hope glimmering in his gold-ringed brown eyes. But then, as I’d opened my truck door, something in my soul made me pause, changed my mind. I’d waved the stray into Ol’ Blue’s cab.

Within a few miles, Charley and I had started calling each other by our first names. What and all with him having no collar, I took that “sorry, Charley” and made it something we could both live with.

Charley wasn’t sorry as a dog, and he never seemed sorry to have joined me. He’s loyal and a good judge of character. He had Guy figured for a keeper way before me. And his herding’s solid, fun, and a time-saver. When a killer loosed Dragoon on Melinda and me last fall, Charley was a genuine lifesaver.

***

At a spot along the dark interstate with an extra-wide shoulder, I pulled Ol’ Blue over for a snooze and wrapped myself in the familiar scent and creak of my worn leather jacket. I prefer this kind of rest stop to something full of truckers and tourists and weirdos and what-not. It swerves on the nerves something fearsome, a lack of space. Here, the interstate is bordered by real ranch land. Charley stared across the freeway, up the steep hill that angled down to the northbound lanes. Stock dogs always want to work, but my good old boy finally settled, curled against my ribs, and we kept each other warm.

Being on the road, on my own, was a good rinse for my brain. I’m trying not to get too clutched up in the throat about what’s going to happen next week. Until the last year of my life, I’d figured I was best off with a good dog as my hot water bottle and general nighttime warmer.

This Friday night alone, my first in forever, was the reason I was able to jump in and get this blasted bull gone for Donna and Hollis. Guy had taken as much time off as he could for the coming celebration and would be back tomorrow night, cooking up a storm. My coming wedding would be followed by a lazy, married weekend, which would make two Saturdays in a row with no horseshoeing scheduled or even contemplated.

***

Dragoon woke me in the dark, rocking the truck with his motion in the trailer, but at first, I didn’t remember where I was or why. My brain’s transmission was stuck two years back, when I’d driven north in search of my horse Red. The warm breath on my neck made my hand reach to feel Charley’s fur, remember I had a dog, had already found Red and established myself as a horseshoer up in Cowdry, and had fallen in love, for real.

“Look how far we came in two years,” I told Charley as I redid my ponytail.

He wiggled and stared at Ol’ Blue’s condensation-coated windows. Four a.m.

We went out in the dark to do what comes natural. Dragoon was fine, as was his hay and water. I called Charley back from too much nosing at the hill across the northbound lanes, and we got gone.

Interstate 5 is blessedly calmer after midnight. The easy driving gave me thinking time. I need plenty of pause to chew on things, and I don’t often get it. Miles zinged past.

The famous Black Bluff bull sale had a canvas banner across the main entrance. The red-haired cowpoke with a gray-flecked mustache at the main check-in gate looked right across Ol’ Blue’s cab, eyeing my dog instead of me. I like that real well in a person. Given where we were, the attention wasn’t unusual. This yearly sale is not just about the bulls and other cattle on the offer. No, the running of the working dogs, one right after the other, moving rough stock with reason, is the other big draw of the Black Bluff sale.

I leaned toward the man to be heard over Ol’ Blue’s diesel engine. “Got a bull here from the Buckeye Ranch up in Cowdry, Butte County, Oreg—”

“Bring it over there.” He waved and jabbed his pointer finger toward the heaviest pipe corrals at the back of the sale grounds. He was already making a phone call as I pulled away.

Trucks and trailers of all sorts lined the acres of open fields beyond the many pens surrounding the huge main arena, but I couldn’t gawk, had to pay attention to backing in where I was directed. The way it is, is the bull’s my responsibility ’til it’s out of the trailer, then the salespeople have the charge of moving him and handling the auction. But if Dragoon didn’t sell, it’d be my job to get him home again. After I backed the stock trailer to a stout corral, the receiving stockman complimented my driving and asked if I minded unhitching the trailer, so he could get Dragoon out when he had a couple more hands at the ready.

“Makes sense,” I agreed.

Clear of the trailer, I parked, let Charley out for air and a pee, then hupped him back into Ol’ Blue’s cab and opened the rear slider window for ventilation.

A good stock dog has to watch his person, has to have access.

One or two fellows checked out Charley and me. Eager to show my dog’s skill, I strolled over and asked the most relevant question of the day to a fellow leaving the check-in booth. “When’re dogs working?”

“You got something to exhibit, little lady?” His lopsided grin gave way to a leer. Flirt Boy seemed to have an idea that he was all kinds of charming, which didn’t exactly sugar my grits.

“Maybe so.” I spoke gruff enough that he’d rethink whether I was meaning my words, like him, in extra ways. I’m average-plus height or more and made out of trim muscles, nothing little about me.

“Then you’re up.” He jerked a thumb over his left shoulder to the main arena and pressed a button on his radio to tell someone to release six steers to let a demo run before the official program started.

That’s more like it. Ready to run my dog in this thunderdome, I whistled. Flying yellow fur bailed out Ol’ Blue’s driver’s window, and we slipped into the ginormous arena, first of the day.

The Kelpie that was officially entered downed at the gate with a word from his handler in that way we call honoring. The dog wanted to work but was going to honor Charley and me.

At the far end of the arena, a gate clanged, admitting a half dozen rowdy cattle. They snorted, stamped, and scattered. Near me, two green metal fence panels were set up with a ten-foot gap between them. Charley would have to drive the cattle between the panels.

“Away to me,” I told Charley.

Distinctive in his work, my Charley is. Plenty of eye, confident, with a knack of knowing when to use which kind of manipulation to make cattle stop or move where needed. Younger dogs have faster out runs, sure, but Charley possesses the wisdom of experience. He ran to the end of the arena and gave the milling steers the benefit of his glare. They pretty well gathered up and began to move down the long line of the fence. Charley would have to force the loose steers toward me through the panels, then around again and out a gate at the far end.

One crusty half-breed steer decided he liked the original end of the arena better. He whipped around and charged my dog.

Feinting, Charley whirled and told the steer to get back, told it he wasn’t giving up ground. In two seconds of stubborn, Charley further explained that he was fine with either one of them dying over the issue of whether that steer should move along peaceably and join the others.

It went like that. These rough cattle didn’t cotton to being herded at all, but Charley wasn’t intimidated.

Without a wave of my hand, I verbally directed Charley to bring the stock through the panels. Charley bossed them right and proper, until he could deliver them again to the end of the arena where we re-penned the lot.

The nods we got, well, we’d earned ’em.

“That’ll do, Charley,” I told my old fellow.

Both our hearts were brimming with pride and love. We thought we were pretty much the coolest thing on the planet. I’d run my dog, my Charley, at the Black Bluff bull sale’s first run of the day. Bucket-list life item, check.

It’s a herding-dog thing. Maybe everyone wouldn’t understand.

A microphone clicked on with a squeal. They were ready to get started with the day’s official program. An announcer asked my name, my dog’s name, and where we were from. He repeated it all over the loudspeaker to clapping and cheering from the hundred or so early spectators, and he welcomed everybody to the last day of this year’s Black Bluff bull sale.

They released more burly cattle, rough enough, barely dog-broke. The first official man up gave me a considered, congratulatory nod, then sent his Kelpie, who spent a lot of air yipping. The tough little dog would need that energy for the extra out-runs he’d have to do when his stock scattered. And now Charley had to honor the Kelpie, ignore the fresh steers he wanted to work.

A big fellow across the way looked above the crowd to eye me and mine. Seemed like too much attention. Another feller—this one smaller and dark-skinned with straight black hair and no hat—eyed the one eyeing me and then stared at me way too long. He edged my way and paused, then faded back, ’til I lost him in the milling crowd.

Then I saw him again. I’m not all that given to the heebie-jeebies, but that dark-haired wiry man moved toward us in a way that made me not want to turn my back.

It’s always a sign when I start to think ill of others that someone around here needs a nap. And I was hungry, having not so much as a stale half-box of Milk Duds to munch on since I’d left the Buckeye. I’d done my road trip in hard hours. If I caught a few more winks, I could maybe unofficially run Charley again during one of the program breaks, take a gawk around, then hit the road. I just needed a small corner of the world, some open space at the end of the sale property. I fired up Ol’ Blue and cranked the wheel hard, rumbling slowly through the less traveled parts of the ground to gain a patch.

Shady, without such long grass that the bugs would have me for breakfast, and quiet, way back from the hollers and truck sounds and stock smells of the mighty sale, this was a spot where a gal could catch herself ten or twenty winks before she turned her sweet self around and rolled north again.

I slid out of Ol’ Blue then turned to ask Charley for an opinion on where we should rest, the grass or the cab.

Crack! Something smacked the back of my skull.