CHAPTER 3
“It’s an impressive string of horses, Mr. Buchanon,” intoned Lucinda Scanlon, standing next to her father at the corral fence, inspecting the stallions jostling like schoolboys inside the corral while at times testing the fence, clawing at it with their front hooves, to see if the enclosure would hold them.
They might have been gentled and ready to saddle and bridle and to ride out on a fall gather, but they still had enough “pitch” in them, as the saying went, to keep any would-be rider on his or her toes. No rider worth his salt wanted a horse without at least a little “pitch” in him. A horse without pitch and spleen—and heart—wouldn’t be worth its salt in rope-to-horn combat with a colicky steer.
Just as a ranch hand without the same thing wouldn’t be worth his salt in the same situation or in a fight against rustlers or competing ranchers. Hunter had trained his horses with some of the roughest steers on the Box Bar B. Just as he wouldn’t hire a hand without a little fight in him, he wouldn’t train the heart and fight out of any horse meant for a working ranch. He didn’t train horses for any other employ. He wouldn’t know how to.
“Please, Miss Scanlon,” Hunter said, smiling down at the lovely gal. “It’s Hunter.”
Sitting her calico beside him, Annabelle cleared her throat and gave him the stink eye.
Hunter wiped the smile off his face.
“Absolutely magnificent, Hunter,” the young lady said, shaking her head in awe at the splendid spectacle of male horse flesh before her, the dust rising and turning copper yellow as the sun continued its descent in the west. “Absolutely mag-ni-fi-cent . . . Oh, look there—that zebra dun is staring at me.”
“Watch out for that one,” Anna warned. “He’ll give you one heckuva nip. He’ll sneak up behind you and give you a nice tear in your shirt . . . won’t he, Hunter?”
“Oh, he’s not that bad,” Hunter said, chuckling.
“Look, look,” said Lucinda Scanlon, her voice hushed with awe. “He’s coming over here.”
“Sure enough he is,” said her father, puffing his pipe while he, too, inspected the herd.
“Easy, Rob Roy,” Annabelle said. “That’s what I call him. Rob Roy.”
“Ah, yes,” Miss Scanlon said as though equal to the challenge. “After Sir Walter Scott’s character . . . in one of the Waverly novels.”
Anna scowled down at the pretty and obviously well-read young woman. Hunter could fairly feel his young wife’s pique rising off her like the heat from a high temperature. Inwardly, knowing how hot-tempered Anna could be, he cringed. He’d faced down many a gnarly rustler and a whole army of Yankee soldiers before that. It was his wife he feared the most, he begrudgingly admitted to himself.
“Well, hello, there, Rob Roy,” Lucinda said as, sure enough, the big dun walked slowly toward her. He stopped seven feet away from her, slowly lowered his head, and slid his snout toward her. He laid his ears partway back as the young woman ran the backs of her fingers slowly, gently down the long, fine snout between the dark copper eyes that regarded her with—what?
Affection?
You could have knocked Hunter out of his saddle with a feather duster.
He’d never seen that expression in the horse’s eyes before.
“Ahh,” the young woman cooed. “Aren’t we just so sweet? And beautiful. Oh, what a beautiful, boy.” She turned to the old man puffing his pipe beside her. “Father, I think I’m going to claim this horse for my very own!”
Scanlon chuckled, aromatic pipe smoke wreathing the air around his weathered gray head. “Don’t doubt it a bit, my dear. Don’t doubt it a bit.”
“Well, I reckon Mister Buchanon and I better be striking out for Javelina,” Annabelle said, curtly. “Gonna be dark soon. So, if we could settle up, Mr. Scanlon . . .”
Lucinda whipped around, shocked, dark brown eyes imploring. “Oh, no—you must stay! Why, we were expecting you to stay. Four Bulls has corn on the cob, oyster stew, and an elk haunch on the spit in the back yard. And he’s prepared a guest room. I admit, the room isn’t much. The house fell into disrepair when Father was doing his government work in Denver and I was in school in England with Mother, but Four Bulls has fixed it up rather comfortably. I’m sure he has water for baths heated. Oh, you must stay. We were expecting you to stay!”
Hunter and Annabelle shared a conferring glance. Hunter arched a brow.
Then Annabelle turned to Lucinda Scanlon and said, “Did you say bath?”
Miss Scanlon shaped another warm, broad smile. “I did, indeed.”
Hunter chuckled then turned to see the man who’d been sitting on the fence earlier, and who’d opened the gate for the horses, sitting on the fence again. He was giving Hunter the proverbial wooly eyeball, but now he promptly turned away and rolled that sharpened matchstick from one corner of his mouth to the other again.
* * *
Later, as Hunter and Annabelle each soaked in their own separate, copper tubs, side by side in an upstairs guestroom at the rear of the house, staring out of a pair of open French doors onto a wooden balcony that ran along the house’s backside, Hunter chuckled and said, “Didn’t take much to convince you to stay the night.”
Her thick red hair pinned atop her head, Annabelle slumped back against the tub, arms resting on its sides, eyes half-closed. She flared a nostril and splashed water at him as she said, “Yeah, well, it didn’t take much to convince you, either.”
Hunter sniffed the air like a dog. Apparently, the spit upon which their supper was cooking was just below the balcony, in a paved courtyard of sorts. “Yeah, well, that elk haunch sure smells good!”
“I wasn’t talking about the elk haunch, and you know it.”
“Oh, you mean Miss Lucinda? Pshaw. She’s ain’t got nothin’ on you, darlin’.”
“If it were she up here, you’d clean up your English. Or at least try!”
Slumped back in his own tub, Hunter laughed. “Why, you’re jealous.”
“As soon as she joined the little party there by the corral, you were blushing like a lovestruck schoolboy!”
“Ah, heck. Now, that’s not true at all. She’s just a right fetchin’ gal, is all. And, hey, she can’t be too bad—she likes our hosses.”
“If it were she up here, you’d say ‘horses.’”
Hunter gave a throaty chuckle.
Anna turned to him, frowning. “Did you and Scanlon talk money yet?”
Hunter shook his head. “No, not yet.” They’d been given a quick tour of the sprawling, time-worn house appointed with mostly out-of-date furnishings before being led to their room where, indeed, the Indian servant, Four Bulls, had provided them with the steaming baths.
“I ain’t so worried about it now, though. Sounds like Scanlon worked in Denver for a time, for the government, an’ you heard Miss Lucinda said she’d been to England. They must have the cash layin’ around somewhere. Sounds like this might not be their only home.”
“Just the same, I’ll feel a lot better when that money’s in our saddlebags, Hunter.”
“Oh, I will, too, honey. I will, too. I’ll bring it up just as soon as I get the chance.” Hunter scowled pensively through the open French doors toward a broad, panoramic view of open, dun brown prairie stretching away from the ranch yard to the distant, hazy southern horizon. “Hmm,” he said, tapping his thumbs on the edge of the tub.
“What is it?”
“That fella sittin’ on the corral fence? You seen him, didn’t you?”
“I saw him.”
“He looked dang familiar.”
“Really? You think you’ve seen him before?”
Hunter nodded. “Yeah. I think I might know where, too.”
“Where?”
“Tigerville. Leastways, for a while. Pretty sure he was a deputy sheriff out of Deadwood for a while. Jack Tatum, I think is his name. If that’s Tatum, he was caught with a group of rustlers and hanged by a rancher up that away—Noble Price. Only, somehow Tatum cut himself down and skedaddled. The story was told by Price’s men who went out to bury the bodies after they’d hung there a good long time as a lesson to others. Tatum’s noose was still there but Tatum was gone.”
“Why would such a scoundrel be working for Scanlon?”
“Got no idea. I sure caught him givin’ me the wooly eyeball, though.”
“He knows you?”
“Yeah, we had a run-in in Deadwood, a few years back.”
“Over what?”
Hunter felt his ears warm. “Uh . . .”
“What?”
“Uh . . . well . . . remember, this was long before we met, honey . . .”
Again, she splashed water at him. “You cad!”
A woman’s scream rose from the courtyard below, making both Hunter and Annabelle jerk with such starts that water overflowed both tubs. “Oh, my gosh. There’s a coyote out here! He’s eyeing the haunch!”
“Oh, no,” Hunter said, bounding up out of the tub.
“Um . . . Hunter . . .” Annabelle said as her big husband ran out onto the balcony.
He peered over the rusty iron rail to see Bobby Lee sitting on a hillock about twenty feet from the edge of the paving stones, tail curled behind him. Sure enough, General Robert E. Lee’s namesake was out there, eyeing the haunch on the large, bowl-shaped, cast-iron spit below Hunter and to his right.
“Bobby!” Hunter yelled, waving an angry arm. “Get away from there! Get away, you idiot. You wanna get yourself shot? Most people wouldn’t understand . . . you know . . . our relationship!”
Bobby’s gaze found his lord and master on the balcony. He rose and wagged his tail delightedly.
“Bobby!” Hunter said, again waving his arm. “Get away. We’ll be back on the trail again tomorrow!”
“Um, Hunter . . .” came Annabelle’s voice behind Hunter again.
The coyote lifted his long, pointed snout and gave a single, mournful wail. Then he turned and, casting dejected glances behind him, trotted off into the stage-stippled prairie.
Behind Hunter, Anna cleared her throat. “Um, Hunter . . .”
“That’s your coyote?” asked Lucinda Scanlon.
She was standing by the smoking spit, beside a short, broad-shouldered, large-gutted Indian wearing a stained white apron, long, salt-and-pepper hair hanging in a braid down his broad back. Four Bulls, no doubt. Hunter hadn’t met the Scanlon servant and housekeeper yet. Both he and Lucinda, who also wore an apron, her hair piled prettily atop her head, held large wooden bowls and long-handled brushes of what Hunter assumed was basting sauce for the haunch.
“Yeah, well,” Hunter said, opening and closing his hands on the balcony rail, “I reckon you could say me an’ Bobby Lee . . . I mean, Bobby Lee and I . . . sorta belong to each other. He and me . . . er, I . . . are pretty much joined at the hip. Don’t worry about him. He’ll stay away now until . . .”
He let his voice trail off when he looked down and just then realized he was standing out here on the balcony as naked as the proverbial jaybird. Both Lucinda and the stout Indian were gazing up at him shiny-eyed and with lips stretched amusedly, as though at a great joke only they were in on.
Which, in a sense, they had been.
“Oh, Lordy!” Hunter exclaimed, crouching to cover himself with both hands as he whipped around and ran back into the room.
“I tried to tell you, you big galoot,” Annabelle said.