“Daddy!” Sarah ran from the open door of the stone ranch house as Clay and Martin herded the horses into a corral constructed of cedar posts.
“Martin, close ’em up and make certain they’ve got plenty of water,” Clay called to his son. “They’ll be wanting it after two weeks in the Bowl. It’s a mite hotter and drier here.”
The younger Thorton nodded to his father as Clay reined his buckskin around and tugged the horse to a halt. The rancher stepped from the saddle, squatted with his arms held wide, and swept his seven-year-old daughter into them. He hugged her close, savoring the tightness of her arms about his neck when she returned the embrace.
“Daddy, I missed you.” She kissed his cheek.
“I hope so.” Clay held the young girl in his arms when he stood and started toward the house and the slender woman who stood framed in its doorway. “The only good thing about a man having to be away is being missed. That’s why he comes back home. If he ain’t got someone missing him, he might as well just keep riding on to somewhere else.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” Sarah answered. “I don’t even like it when you have to be gone overnight.”
“You can add my don’t likes to that, too.” Elizabeth Thorton stepped from the door and into the sun. A welcoming grin spread over her delicate oval face.
Clay’s gaze took in his wife as he placed Sarah on the ground. Elizabeth stood a hairsbreadth shorter than her husband. Her hair, the jet black of a raven’s wing, had only a few random strands of gray intertwined here and there. The blueness of her eyes was as bright and deep as it had been when he had first seen her working as a clerk in her father’s dry goods store in San Antonio. Sixteen years later, Clay found himself wanting her as much as he had that long-ago summer morning—if not more.
“I wasn’t expecting you two back till late this evening. I haven’t put anything on the stove.” She reached his side and kissed his cheek.
The smell of flour and yeast hung about her, belying her words. Elizabeth had been baking bread. Beneath those comforting aromas of the kitchen wafted the hint of the lilac soap Clay had purchased for his wife the last time he had ridden into El Paso.
“That ain’t the kind of a kiss a man expects to welcome him home.” Clay slipped an arm around Elizabeth’s waist and eased her to him.
Her lips met his willingly for an instant, then in a heartbeat, she pushed away. “Clayton Morgan Thorton, that’s no way to be acting in front of the children.”
He grinned. The hint of a smile on her lips and sparkle in her eyes spoke more than her words. The kiss pleased her as much as it had him. “It’s only the way I feel.”
She arched an eyebrow. “It wasn’t your feelings I was asking about. It was your stomach. I’ve got some biscuits left from breakfast and some bacon if you’re hungry.”
“Martin’s apt to be wanting something, but a cool drink to wash away some of the dust in my mouth and throat would do me fine.” Clay tightened his arm around her, noting Elizabeth made no attempt to pull away.
“Sarah, you run along to the kitchen and fetch those biscuits and bacon. Take them to your brother,” Elizabeth ordered their daughter, “while I pour your father some water.”
Under the watchful eyes of her father, the seven-year-old trotted off to a ten-foot-by-ten-foot stone structure attached to the ranch house by a breezeway. “She’s going to be a handsome woman, Elizabeth. Each day she looks more and more like you.”
“It’s a good thing.” Elizabeth’s arm went around Clay’s waist once they entered the house. “We wouldn’t want a young woman looking like you, would we?”
“And what’s wrong with my looks? I can think of several—”
She muffled the rest of his words with a long kiss that left them clinging to each other. She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “Sometimes I feel like it has to be a sin for a woman to care for a man the way I care for you.”
He nuzzled her hair and lightly kissed it. “There’s nothing sinful about what we got. It’s good—only good.”
Her head lifted, and her gaze met his. “It is good, isn’t it? Even after all these years together.”
“Still good.” He tenderly kissed her lips. “But there ain’t no reason to be talking like we was all old and gray. It hasn’t been all that many years.”
“Hasn’t it?” She turned him around and pointed outside where Sarah stood at Martin’s side while her brother wolfed down a biscuit sandwich. “Those are our children out yonder, Clay. That’s a son who’s a growed man and a daughter who’ll be looking for a husband in less years than you want to imagine.”
A sudden somber tone to his wife’s voice caught Clay by surprise. Her eyes shifted to the floor, and she eased away from him to retrieve a pitcher of water on the table when he looked at her.
“Is there something wrong, Elizabeth?” He looked back at his children.
There was no way to deny they were growing—and their parents slowly aging. Clay shook his head. In his mind, his thoughts, he still felt as young as the day he had brought Elizabeth to their home. Yet there was no ignoring a receding hairline and the few strands of hair that barely covered a balding spot at the back of his head. Nor could he overlook a stomach once taut and firm that now threatened to sag toward a middle-aged paunch.
“Nothing more than what usually bothers me when you’re gone. I just get on the pensive side—start thinking about things.” Elizabeth handed him a fired red-clay cup colorfully painted with Mexican designs.
“Things?” Clay drank deeply, enjoying the coolness that washed the desert dust from his throat. “What things?”
His wife gave her head an uncertain shake. “All sorts of things, like the thoughts women have when they are girls.”
His brow creased, unsure of what she spoke.
“I guess a man doesn’t have those kind of thoughts.” She smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in that expression. “When a girl’s young with what beauty she’ll ever have, she worries more than just about finding a man to love and who’ll return that love. She worries about how she’ll keep his interest when the years start to leech away her youth.”
He drained the last of the water and set the cup aside. Taking her hands, he met her eyes with his gaze. “Elizabeth—”
“Clay”—her hands squeezed his—“it’s just that what I’ve had with you is good, and I get to wondering if it’s the same for you. More than you just feeling tied down and having to take care of a family.”
“Far more.” He wished for words, fancy words like those he read in books. Words never came easy for him, especially when he wanted to describe the feelings that moved within his breast. “Elizabeth, I wouldn’t want to have it any way but the way we’ve had it together. A man—this man—couldn’t ask for more.”
He drew her close, enfolding her in his arms. Her mouth lifted to his, and he kissed her, trying to focus all the feeling he held for this woman who was his life in that kiss. His desire stirred as it had for sixteen years whenever they kissed.
Apparently Elizabeth felt the rise of his passion. She arched a questioning eyebrow when their lips parted. “Clay Morgan Thorton, I’ve got the thought that you’ve got more than just a little spooning on your mind.”
He smiled and nodded toward a door on the left of the ranch house’s main room that led to their bedroom. “It would be like old times, Elizabeth, back when there was nothing more important than our loving.”
A pleased smile answered his, and her blue eyes shifted to the bedroom door. Reluctantly she shook her head. “That was a long time ago, before we had two children who might come bounding into the house at any moment. And before you had cattle and horses to attend.”
“The stock can wait, and we can shut the front door to keep Martin and Sarah out,” he suggested.
Again she shook her head. “There’s a time and a place for everything, but this ain’t the time for what’s on your mind. Go on with you. You’ve got your chores, and I’ve got mine.”
Clay shrugged and heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Reckon you’re right. But it would have been a nice way to spend the afternoon.” Elizabeth lovingly kissed his cheek. “And what would the stage do this evening when it came rolling in?”
“When you’re right, you’re right. Best be about my chores.” Clay abandoned his attempts at an amorous afternoon.
Since the end of the war a man named Shiner had run a stage line between Santa Fe in the New Mexico Territory and El Paso. The Sweet Water Creek Ranch served as one of the few way stations in the long stretch of arid terrain between Albuquerque and the stage’s final destination. The line only ran one coach a week. For keeping a fresh team of horses ready and waiting and for the meal Elizabeth prepared for the passengers, Clay collected ten dollars a stage. The hard cash was often all he saw in the long months between the sale of his steers or a horse.
Drawing his hat brim down against the sun, Clay stepped outside. He made a mental note that when time permitted he would add a covered porch to the front of the house. Three years had passed since his last addition to their home—Sarah’s room built at the back of the house beside the room he had constructed for Martin.
A porch, a real porch, he realized, would require wood, cut and milled boards. Flat rocks piled atop each other and mortared together with adobe, the main building material for the ranch house, would not do for a covered porch. Those boards would cost greenbacks, unless he could find a merchant needing a horse broke in trade.
“Pa?” Martin called to his father. “Is it all right if I cut Misty and her colt out from the others? I’d like to keep ’em in the pen beside the barn the next couple days until we take ’em to pasture.”
For a moment Clay considered admonishing his son for over-pampering the Appaloosas, but let it slide. Martin’s displayed pride in his own stock was a good sign that he was maturing. “Do what you like, but don’t take all day with it. Stage comes in this evening, and it’ll be needing a team of eight ready for the harness.”
Martin nodded and pointed to the Appaloosa colt. “Think he’ll bring a handsome price when he’s old enough?”
“Reckon he will. Spotted-rumped horses are rare enough in this country, and a lot of folks got an eye for ’em,” Clay replied. “But it’s still a while before he’ll be ready for a buyer.”
“If he’s ever ready for a buyer,” Martin said.
Clay peered questioningly at the boy.
“I’ve been thinking about keeping him,” Martin added. “He’s got the looks of a good pony. Maybe my own saddle horse.”
“Like I said,” Clay commented when he turned to the barn, “there’s still a while before he’ll be old enough to sell. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
The answer seemed enough to hold Martin, who made no further comment. Clay had been expecting this. He hoped that when the time came to sell the Appaloosa colt Martin would have a choice. The hard facts of the matter were that the money the colt could bring to the family might outweigh all other considerations, including Martin’s desire to keep the animal.
“Clay!”Juan Morales stepped from the barn and waved an arm.
Clay grinned when he saw his neighbor. Although several years his junior, the Mexican rancher was the closest thing to a friend Clay could claim in this barren land. An inch shorter than Clay, Juan appeared at least twice the rancher’s weight. That girth came from muscle and not fat. A neatly trimmed mustache crawled on Juan’s upper lip when he returned the grin.
Behind Juan came three cousins—Augusto, Ernesto, and Manuel, each greeting the rancher with a “Señor Clay” and an acknowledging tilt of his head.
Clay welcomed them, calling the four men by name, then asked, “What brings the Morales clan by this sunny day? I didn’t expect to see y’all till day after tomorrow to help move my stock closer to the creek.”
Juan Morales, his wife, five children, three cousins, and a various assortment of aunts, uncles, and in-laws, who came and went on a sporadic basis, were Clay’s closest neighbors. The Mexican ran a spread ten miles to the south.
Occasionally during the year, especially in the long spring and summer months, Juan and his cousins helped out on the Sweet Water Creek Ranch. When there was money to be made, they were paid. Usually their payment was in kind; Clay and Martin often rode the ten miles to the Morales ranch to help run Juan’s stock. The trade-off was equally beneficial in a country where ranch hands were as scarce as hen’s teeth.
“Maria’s mother has come to visit.” Juan spoke of his wife’s mother. “Me and my cousins were in need of a rest from all the little jobs she finds for us.”
The three younger men who stood a step behind the thirty-year-old Mexican smiled sheepishly and nodded their heads. It was Ernesto who said, “We are hunting rabbits for the stew.”
Clay grinned. “Reckon you found a whole passel of them in the barn.”
“As many as we found on the ride here, my friend.” Juan’s chuckle was echoed by his cousins.
Augusto added, “It is strange how the rabbits they shied from our trail. On other days they seem so plentiful. It’s hard to keep your horse from stepping on them. But today”—Augusto threw up his hands and shrugged as though totally perplexed by the situation.
“Ain’t that the way it always goes?” Clay played along. He had met Juan’s mother-in-law during her last visit two years ago. He had been ready for any excuse to get away from the rotund woman after ten minutes.
Juan glanced back to the barn, which, like the ranch house, was constructed of flat rocks held together with adobe. “When Elizabeth told us you and Martin were up in the Bowl, I realized there would be a stage running through this evening. We were just checking on the horses. We were going to have them ready in case you and the boy got hung up looking for the mares and foals.”
“One of the team has thrown a shoe and three others have loose shoes,” Manuel said. “I was going to light a fire to heat the shoes.”
Clay heaved an inward groan. Blacksmithing was backbreaking work, but it was something a man who settled so far from a town had to do for himself. “I’d appreciate that. I’ll handle the loose shoes first, give the fire time to get hot enough to heat iron.”
Ernesto pointed to four water barrels that stood outside the barn. “They are almost dry. Want that Augusto and I should fill them?”
Clay nodded his approval. “Get Martin to lend a hand.”
Until the stagecoach reached the natural water basins of Hueco Tanks, over fifty miles to the east, the only water it would find would be in the two barrels it carried. Water in the desert was more important than a fresh team of horses. With sufficient water men could cross the hundred miles of desert to El Paso on foot if need be.
“I’ll bring out the first horse,” Juan said when he turned to the barn.
Following his friend just inside the structure, Clay stepped into a small tack room, its walls hung with harnesses, bridles, rope halters, and four saddles. The latter were all Mexican-made, with broad horns to solidly hold a rope when its opposite end was looped about the neck of a stubborn steer.
From a wooden peg, Clay took a leather apron and placed his hat on the empty peg. The apron, which covered him from chest to the knees, was now slick and stained from years of use. In a corner of the tack room he lifted an oblong wooden box from the floor and quickly rummaged through the prongs, files, and hammer within to make certain all his tools were where he left them. Martin had a bad habit of forgetting to return tools to their proper place.
At the bottom of the box he found a cracked coffee mug half-filled with horseshoe nails. He made a mental note to send an order to El Paso for more with the stage driver. The box also held ten horseshoes forged by a smith in the border town. Although having the shoes shaped saved work, he still had to fit them to a hoof. That meant fire, bellows, anvil, and hammer. He softly cursed. The desert was hot enough without having to work with red-hot iron over a blazing fire.
Outside, Juan stood holding a haltered bay gelding. “Right hind on this one. The shoe is pretty loose. You might have to put on a new one.”
Clay gave a noncommittal grunt in reply while lifting each of the gelding’s other three hooves and checking the shoes before examining the hoof Juan mentioned. “Shoe’s still in good shape, but it’s too loose just to tack back on. It’ll have to come off.”
Balancing the horse’s ankle on a knee, Clay used the hammer’s claw to pull out the four nails still holding the shoe. He tossed it aside and used a file to smooth the hoof.
“Sam Dunton is putting together a drive,” Juan said. “He is talking about heading north the second week of May.”
“Mmmmm.” Clay half-listened while he placed the old shoe atop the filed hoof, and judged how much the curved sides would have to be hammered in to fit the hoof. He gave an approving nod. A few taps would do the trick. He would not have to fire the shoe.
“He has ten ranchers interested,” Juan continued while Clay stepped outside the barn to where Manuel had set a small anvil beside the fire he stoked. “He asked me to see if you were interested?”
“What about you? Spring rains’ll have your stock ready for a drive.” Clay worked at the shoe with the hammer, lifted it for inspection, judged it slightly off on the left, and gave it two more sharp raps before returning to the horse.
“My cousins will go with my stock,” Juan answered. “I will stay here and take care of the ranch.”
“If they’ll take my stock and not me, I’m interested.” The shoe was a close-enough fit. Clay began to nail it in place, careful to avoid driving into the quick and leaving the horse lame.
“Dunton needs hands as well as cattle for the drive,” Juan said. “I can’t leave here,” Clay said around the nails he held at the side of his mouth. He now understood the reason for his friend’s unexpected visit. “Not with the stage and my horses.”
Juan tilted his head toward the rancher’s son. “What about Martin? He is old enough, and he handles himself well.”
Clay caught himself before he said, “But he’s only fifteen.” He remembered all he had done at the same age. A trail drive was almost a Sunday picnic in comparison. Martin was old enough for the drive, and he did know his way around cattle and horses.
“I’ll have to think about it.” Clay drove in the last of the nails, cut off the sharp points which protruded from the hoof, and began to file them smooth. “Have to see what Elizabeth thinks of the idea. And, of course, what Martin has to say.”
“I would not take long doing that,” Juan said. “Word is there is talk of quarantining all cattle coming into Kansas from Texas. Dunton thinks we need to get our cattle north before they pass some half-assed law that will cost us steers and money.”
“I’ve heard rumors of quarantines because of Mexican fever.” Clay released the hoof, straightened, and rubbed the small of his back.
“They call it Texas fever in Kansas,” Juan said as he led the gelding to a stall at the back of the barn. “While they want the beef, they think Texas steers are causing all the sickness.”
Clay shook his head. If it was not one of a thousand things in the cattle business, it was another waiting to rob a man of his livelihood. Mexican fever, as Texans called it, or Texas fever did not matter; it was still splenic fever. “I thought they’d proved it was ticks that caused the fever and not cattle.”
“That is what some doctors are saying.” Juan brought another bay from a stall. “But saying is not proving as far as those in Kansas are concerned.”
“Damn!” Clay sucked at his teeth and spat. He didn’t want to think about a trail drive. But Juan was right. He had to make a decision. A quarantine could tie up a herd for months. “When does Dunton want an answer?”
“He said next week, if possible.” Juan halted the horse beside his friend.
“I’ll tell Elizabeth the situation, then talk with Martin.” Clay bent to look at the horse’s hooves. “I’ll get back to Dunton first of the week.”
He pressed a thumb into the soft flesh beneath the animal’s ankle, and the horse lifted its right foreleg. Clay stared at the hoof for a full five seconds before his mind focused on the fact that its shoe was securely in place. He let the leg drop and picked up the left foreleg and tried to get about the task at hand. His thoughts still wandered back to Martin.
The rancher had never seen himself as a mother hen when it came to his children. Yet, as he considered the possibility of his son leaving on his first trail drive, Clay’s mind was assailed by a thousand doubts and an equal number of reasons why the boy should not go. To be certain Martin was almost a fully grown man, but the life he had faced in his fifteen years was far different from what Clay had experienced at the same age.
A trail drive carried a score of ways to rob the most experienced cowhand of his life. That was the root of Clay’s uneasiness—the very real possibility that Martin might not return from the drive north. Clay had helped bury more than one man along the cattle trail, men drowned in river crossings, poisoned by snakebite, crushed beneath the hooves of stampeding steers, or cut down by Kiowa arrows.
Did all fathers face such fears when staring at the fact that it was time for their children to leave home? Clay’s lips pursed, and he sucked at his teeth. He did not know; the men he called friends rarely spoke of their families, except to brag about their children’s accomplishments. They kept what was in their hearts locked inside.
“Momma! Momma!”
Clay released the hoof and glanced back to see Sarah run toward the house. She carried a bowl with chicken feed streaming from it. The rancher looked up at his friend. “That old red rooster has it in for my girl. Chases her out of the chicken pen every time he gets a chance.”
Juan chuckled. “My father had a rooster when I was a boy that thought its purpose in life was to tear an inch or three of hide off my legs whenever he saw me. I prayed to the Holy Virgin for the day my father would let a younger rooster rule the roost and we would have the old one for Sunday dinner.”
“I can recall a—”
“Clay! Clay!” Elizabeth called to her husband, urgency in her voice. “Clay, you better come out here—right now.”
The rancher stood straight. “I’d best see what the problem is. Be right back.”
Juan nodded. “I am not going anywhere.”
Clay walked outside the barn, eyes squinting against the sun’s brightness. A few feet beyond the door to the ranch house, Sarah clung to her mother, arms wrapped tightly around Elizabeth’s waist. “What’s wrong? That ol’ red tear into Sarah again?”
Elizabeth’s head snapped around. Her eyes were wide and her facial features taut. Her right arm jerked up to stab a finger toward the north. “Clay, we’ve visitors coming.”
The rancher frowned. Visitors were a rarity this far in the desert. He turned, shielding his eyes with a hand, and stared to where his wife pointed. His heart doubled its tempo. He blinked to make certain the sun was not playing tricks on him. It was not ... Indians! There was no mistaking them, and they were headed directly for the ranch.