Chapter Twelve

It was not the old man’s heart that carried him off, as everyone had expected would be the case, but pneumonia.

Toward the end of October, Walter came down with a cold. It didn’t seem to be anything severe. Not at first, that is. But when he took to his bed again, finding it hard to breathe and complaining that his chest hurt, Annie and Brady feared the worst.

They sent Luther to town to fetch Dr. Thomas. When the physician arrived, he listened to Walter’s chest with his stethoscope, then took Annie and Brady out in the hall.

“Pneumonia,” he pronounced. “His lungs are filling.”

“What can be done?” Annie anxiously asked him.

The doctor shook his head. “Not much, I’m afraid. He’ll either survive it, or he won’t.”

Brady was forthright about it. “But you don’t think he will make it, do you, doc?”

“The prognosis isn’t good, not with his weak heart and frail condition.”

“But there must be something,” Annie pleaded.

“A few things,” he instructed them. “Don’t let him lie flat. Keep him elevated against the headboard with pillows. It will be less difficult for him to breathe that way. And have him drink as many cool liquids as he’ll take. I’ll leave a few powders for you to give him. One every three hours stirred in water. They may allow him to rest easier. Beyond that...”

“And that’s all?” Annie wanted to know.

“I’ll come out again in the morning to check on him.”

He didn’t say it, but the solemn expression on his face told her that he might just as well have added, “If he’s still with us by then.”

Dr. Thomas departed with his bag. Annie and Brady went back into the bedroom. Walter wasn’t sleeping, although his eyes were closed. Their entry had him peering out at them shrewdly under his now slightly raised lids.

“Don’t have to tell me the sawbone’s verdict,” he wheezed. “I know what’s in store for me, and I’m ready for it.”

What could they say? Walter Johnson was no fool. He would never accept any denials from them.

Seated on either side of his bed, Annie and Brady kept a vigil through the night. The longest night she had ever endured. They spoke only rarely, their brief exchanges concerned with nothing but efforts to make Walter as comfortable as possible.

Not that he ever was comfortable through those endless hours. Restless, he plucked fretfully at the hem of the quilt that covered him, silent except for his hacking cough and increasingly labored breathing. Sounds that unnerved Annie, who hated her state of helplessness. The same helplessness she had known when she watched her mother die.

Mercifully, the old man finally slept. Only once, sometime after midnight, did he struggle to speak to them.

“You two... I want you two...”

Brady leaned over the bed. “What, Walter? What is it you want us to do?”

Walter didn’t finish. They never learned what he was trying to tell them. His eyes shut again and didn’t open after that. In the small hours of the morning, he sank into a coma. He declined rapidly then, his breathing growing more shallow until just before daybreak it ceased altogether.

Two months ago Annie wouldn’t have cared anything about her grandfather’s death, but that was no longer true. Stricken with grief, she could feel her cheeks wet with tears of genuine sorrow.

Brady was stoic about their loss. Getting to his feet, he lowered Walter to a prone position, folded his gnarled hands over his chest and raised the sheet over his face. Then, coming around the bed, he hunkered down beside Annie’s chair and put his arms around her, holding her while she wept on his shoulder.

When she had no more tears to shed, he released her and stood. “You’re worn out, Annie. And no wonder with no sleep all night. You need to go lie down.”

She shook her head emphatically. “I couldn’t possibly. The others will have to be told, Delores and the hands. Delores will take it hard. I think, in her way, she cared for him a great deal in spite of their disagreements. Then there’s the burial. Arrangement will have to be made for that and his friends and neighbors notified.”

“I’ll handle all of that. You just rest.”

Brady wouldn’t listen to any of her objections. He insisted she go to her room and try to sleep. She made an effort to do as he asked, stretching out on her bed. But after an hour of lying there fully awake, she rose, tidied herself, and wandered outdoors.

The early morning air was cold, but she didn’t feel it. She paced aimlessly around the yard, vaguely aware that the work on the ranch was going on as usual. That didn’t seem right to her, not until she realized that her grandfather would have wanted it that way.

Every one of the hands was reverently quiet, but they kept busy with their tasks while Annie felt utterly useless. If nothing else, she knew she should be thinking about her future. She had fulfilled her promise to remain on the ranch until her grandfather died, and then she would be free to go. Free to find Judd Halter and punish him on behalf of her mother and her half-sister. Only that plan now seemed to be in limbo.

Because there was Brady. Always Brady.

****

Walter was buried in the little family cemetery behind the ranch house. He was laid to rest in the plot he had reserved for himself between his son and his wife.

Annie recognized many of the mourners who gathered for the service read by the preacher from Banning. Dr. Thomas was there with his daughter, Doreen, who looked stunning in black. Judge Rawlins, Delores, and all of the ranch hands were present as well. There were others, of course, Annie hadn’t met. Walter Johnson had been widely known and respected throughout the valley.

Brady stood beside her, registering no emotion she could detect.

After the service, leaving Luther and Casey to fill in the grave, they all trooped into the house where Delores served refreshments in the parlor while Annie and Brady accepted condolences.

Walter’s lawyer, Chester Seavers, a dour little man with a pince-nez perched on his nose, waited for the last words of sympathy to be expressed before he approached them.

“I realize this is not an appropriate time to be conducting business, but Walter directed that I do so immediately after he was laid to rest. You will be honoring his wish if I can speak to both of you in private.”

Annie and Brady exchanged looks. She felt he had to be thinking the same thing she was thinking. That the lawyer’s solemn tone suggested he wanted to tell them about Walter’s will. Although she remembered that the bulk of her grandfather’s estate would be used to finance a ranch museum in Banning, she imagined he must have left some kind of sum for each of them.

“Annie?” Brady asked her.

“Yes, of course. We can go into the office.”

Making quick excuses to their guests, she led the way across the front hall and into the ranch office. Brady shut the door behind them. After arranging themselves in chairs facing one another, the lawyer unclasped the leather case in his lap and produced a document from its interior.

“This is the last will and testament of Walter Johnson. The original is in my safe back in town, but I had my clerk make a copy. I’ll leave it with you to read at your leisure. The terms are very simple and direct.”

“And they are?” Annie said.

“There are modest legacies of his appreciation for each of the hands on the WJ and a more generous one for his housekeeper. The rest of the estate, including the ranch in its entirety, he leaves jointly to his granddaughter, Annie Johnson, and his foreman, Brady Malone.”

Chester Seavers looked at each of them in turn, as if expecting their reactions. He didn’t get them. There was silence in the office. Annie was too dumb with shock to speak. She wasn’t sure what Brady was experiencing. Whatever it was, he recovered first.

“I don’t understand. Walter told me himself that, except for my own spread I was buying from him in installments, he was leaving his property to fund a ranch museum in Banning.”

The lawyer shook his head. “He abandoned that plan. This is a new will he had me draw up less than two weeks ago. It was signed by him and witnessed by the housekeeper and one of the hands in my presence here at the ranch. Naturally, it will no longer be necessary for you to purchase your own acres since you and Miss Johnson own them now along with the rest.”

Annie’s numbness had worn off sufficiently enough by now to permit her to feel another emotion. Anger. A hot anger directed at her grandfather. Hadn’t she made good on her part of the bargain, stayed here with him until the end? Oh, she knew he’d been hoping for a match with Brady and her. But this?

The crafty old devil was reaching out from the grave with an inheritance meant to bind her both to the ranch and Brady. Yes, she was angry. Angry and feeling suddenly trapped.

The lawyer stood, placing the copy of the will on the desk.

“If there are no further questions, I must get back to town. There are papers for you to sign, but that can be done later at your convenience. In the meantime, if you need anything, I’m at your disposal.”

Annie and Brady saw him out, then returned to the parlor where their guests were themselves preparing to leave. Annie managed to get through all the polite farewells. When the last mourner had gone, she looked around for Brady. He had disappeared. Where had he wandered off to? They needed to talk about this idiotic inheritance. Did he, too, feel trapped by it?

Delores was clearing away the things in the parlor. “Did you happen to see where Brady went?” she asked the housekeeper.

“Took hisself off upstairs.”

Brady had been pragmatic over the last two days, first with Walter’s death, then his burial, and just now with the lawyer. Was he still being practical, perhaps already making a start on sorting through the clutter of papers on her grandfather’s bedroom desk? His lack of emotion bothered her. It seemed unnatural.

Worried about him, Annie hurried upstairs and down the hall to Walter’s room. The door was closed. Maybe he wasn’t in there after all. She entered the room without troubling to knock.

She found Brady not standing over the desk but seated in the rocking chair beside the bed. He had one of her grandfather’s checkerboard pieces in his hand, his thumb and forefinger rubbing it slowly. It felt strange to find him idle like this.

Sensing that the situation demanded privacy, she shut the door behind her and crossed the room to the rocking chair. Although he didn’t look up, she knew he was aware of her standing there in front of him.

“He loved his checkers, didn’t he?” he said. “He was so good at the game that I asked him once why he never learned to play something more challenging, like chess. ‘Chess is for city folks,’ he told me. ‘Checkers is for country folks, and I’m pure country, boy.’ That was Walter.”

Brady chuckled softly, but it was a chuckle that conveyed sadness, not amusement. He lifted his head, and she saw for the first time a sorrow etched across his rugged features. That’s when she understood that the tough, independent Brady Malone could be as vulnerable as any man.

All this time he had been keeping his grief hidden inside himself. Convinced, she supposed, he had to be strong for the rest of them. He had been there for her, comforting her in the cabin, then again at her grandfather’s bedside. Now it was her turn to comfort him.

Drawing up the stool, she sat on it, facing him. “You cared for him a great deal, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Why? Why was he so important to you? What did he do for you that mattered so much?”

“What? You told me your story up at the cabin? Now you want me to tell you mine?”

“Not for my sake, for yours. Brady, I think you need to do this.”

“Only fair, I suppose.”

But he didn’t begin, not at once. He kept fingering the red checkers piece, rocking gently now in the chair. Annie waited for him patiently.

“What did Walter do for me that mattered so much?” he finally said. “He saved Nathan and me, that’s what.”

“Nathan?”

“My brother.”

This was a revelation. He had never spoken of a brother, or any family.

“We lived back east in South Dakota. My father was a schoolmaster there.”

Which explained Brady’s better than average education that had been obvious to her from the beginning, although puzzling for a cowboy.

“School teachers don’t make much money. Pa certainly didn’t, which is why we lived in this run-down house that turned out to have a bad chimney. The place caught fire one night while we were sleeping. It went up so fast Pa and Ma never had a chance. I was luckier. I managed to get Nathan and myself out a window. He was fine, but I ended up getting burned.”

And this explained the scars he carried on his back. “How old were you when this happened?”

“Fourteen. Nathan was younger. There was no other kin after we lost Ma and Pa. All we had was each other, and here they were going to separate us.”

“Who were they?”

“The good townspeople of Medicine Bend. I was to be placed with a family willing to take in the eldest Malone boy, and Nathan was to be sent off with a couple moving to Iowa. I wasn’t going to let Nate be parted from me like that, whatever their decent intentions. We might never have seen each other again.”

“And you couldn’t persuade them to keep you together?”

“Not a chance of it. They were the adults. They knew best. But I knew something, too. I knew all about cowboys and cattle rustlers from these dime novels I used to read. Exciting stuff that poor Pa tolerated when what he wanted me to read was classic literature.”

Which wouldn’t have been Brady’s style at all, Annie thought.

“I figured if I could get Nathan and me somewhere out west, the real West, I could support us by becoming a cowboy myself.” He laughed dryly. “When you’re fourteen years old, there isn’t anything you think you can’t do, irrational though it might be.”

“But you did become a cowboy.”

“It wasn’t as simple as all that, Annie. Here were a couple of kids who sneaked off in the middle of the night without a nickel between them, traveling across the country on foot with one of them still recovering from his burns while having to find whatever odd jobs he could along the way to feed himself and his little brother. Madness.”

A brave madness, Annie thought. But that, too, was Brady, even at that age.

“It’s a wonder we were never stopped and returned to Medicine Bend. And another wonder we made it to Wyoming. We were half starved and squatting in this abandoned shack on a remote corner of the WJ when Walter found us. His foreman at the time wanted to turn us over to the sheriff, but Walter said no. ‘I’ll give you food and let you both stay on here in the shack,’ he told me, ‘providing you make yourself useful around the ranch. We’ll see what you’re made of, boy.’”

Yes, Walter Johnson would have admired Brady’s brand of spunk. The same kind of courage and determination he, himself, had possessed when as a young man he had built a cattle ranch in the wilderness.

“You did show him what you’re made of,” she said. “You did prove yourself.”

“Eventually, yeah.”

“What became of your brother?”

“Being a rancher was my dream. It was never Nathan’s. He wanted to be a doctor, and Walter made that possible, too. Said that Banning is growing so fast, it could use another sawbones. When Nate was old enough, Walter sent him east to Boston to study medicine and paid for everything. That’s where Nate is now, and when he’s fully qualified, he means to come back here and join Dr. Thomas’s practice.”

Annie could hear the pride in Brady’s voice when he spoke of his brother’s achievement. All thanks to Walter, except even now she couldn’t help resenting her grandfather a little for his failure to extend that same tough generosity to her mother and her. But then Walter had never valued females, she remembered. Not until the end, at least.

“Now can you understand why Walter meant so much to me?”

Yes, she could understand why Brady had been so loyal and devoted to the old man. Her grandfather had given both his brother and him not just a home but a purpose in life.

Brady stopped rocking. He looked down at the checkers piece as if he just now realized he still had it in his hand. Tossing it back on the little table beside the chair, he sat there in stillness for a long moment, his hands covering his parted knees.

When he spoke again, his voice was husky with emotion.

“You know what else I’m grateful for, Annie? Walter taught me not just what it really means to be a cowpuncher but the importance of the land. I can still hear him saying it. ‘Land is everything, boy. Don’t you ever forget that.’’’

And Brady clearly hadn’t, which is why he’d placed such value on his own spread that Walter had permitted him to acquire. But if that was the extent of his dream, then she had no place in his life.

He was silent again. She was convinced that, if he had allowed them, there would have been tears in his eyes at this moment. As it was, she could detect a mistiness in his brooding, faraway gaze. A bleakness that had her heart aching for him.

Leaning forward on the stool, she laid her hands over his. Words of comfort should have followed her action, but her simple contact was apparently all that was necessary. Turning his hands over beneath her own, he gripped her in a kind of desperation.

The next thing Annie knew, she’d been plucked from the stool and lifted onto his lap. Holding her tightly against him, Brady crushed his mouth over hers in a deep, forceful kiss that had her senses reeling.

He was still kissing her, while managing not to separate them, when he rose with her from the chair, placing both of them on the bed, his hard, solid body covering hers.

What followed was a renewal of the rapturous hours they had shared at the cabin. A hurried, impatient shedding of clothes. A series of other exchanged kisses on almost every portion of their heated, naked flesh. Kisses that were sometimes slow and lingering, at other times swift and intense. All of it building to a need that had Annie pleading for their joining.

She was dimly aware, when Brady at last guided himself into her center, that they were making love on her grandfather’s bed only hours after they had buried him. It was an act that would have scandalized society, had they known about it. But she realized that Walter would have been pleased by this. It was a realization of what he’d wanted. And it was what Annie had been wanting since that night on the mountain.

The crescendo of their union came much too quickly, satisfying though her release was. Brady’s deep sigh afterwards was evidence of his own pleasure. Rolling to her side, he gathered her close in a position that was both possessive and endearingly protective.

There was a long silence that had her supposing he had drifted off. She was startled when he suddenly propped himself up on one elbow and looked down on her. She was even more startled when, in a tone that plainly said he knew what he wanted, he blurted an aggressive, “Marry me.”

For a moment she was too stunned for words. When she did find them, she voiced them in a disbelieving, “Do you know what you’re saying?”

“I know just what I’m saying. I want us to be husband and wife.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s right for us.”

“Right how?”

“For so many reasons.”

“What are those reasons, Brady?”

“You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

She had no intention of making it easy for him. But it wasn’t necessary for her to tell him this. Her silence must be making it all too evident.

“Look, Annie, we’re joint owners of the WJ now. Why shouldn’t we be partners in more than just business? Why shouldn’t be life partners as well?”

This wasn’t what she wanted to hear. He was being evasive, and she didn’t like it. “I’m not going to marry you because it’s the practical thing to do. Or because my grandfather wanted marriage for us either.”

“That isn’t what I’m saying.”

“Then just what are you trying to say?”

“That we belong together. You must know how much you mean to me.”

No, she didn’t know. Caring about her wasn’t the same thing as being in love with her. And without that love...

She suddenly felt very despondent. Wanting what he couldn’t seem to give her. Wanting what she didn’t dare to ask him for, because it would be awkward and embarrassing for both of them. Because she feared hearing a truth that would make her even more depressed.

Instead, what she said to him was a blunt, “Aren’t you forgetting that I have something to do, and that it doesn’t include marriage? Not yet, anyway. Maybe never.”

He sucked in his breath sharply, frowning down at her. “Annie, no. It’s madness for you to go after Halter. The law will catch up to him one day. Let the law hang him.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “I can’t count on that. I have to punish him myself, as I swore I would do.”

“You might think that’s justice, but the law will call it murder. That’s if Halter doesn’t end up killing you first.”

“I’ll just have to take that chance.”

“Oh, God, I seem to be making a mess of this proposal. The timing is all wrong, isn’t it?” Not waiting for her response, he went on swiftly, “Sweetheart, listen to me. Think about us and a future together. How good we would be as husband and wife. Do that much for me,” he pleaded, “and I won’t ask for more, except...”

“What?”

“A promise that you won’t go off trying to find Halter until you’ve decided about us. And even if the answer is no, I’ll go on hoping that you won’t throw your life away. I can’t do otherwise.”

In the end, she wasn’t sure whether it was weakness or fair-mindedness that had her giving him the promise he asked for so earnestly.

****

Brady had made her a promise of his own to give her time to make up her mind. She was grateful that he obeyed his pledge, although he was so busy in the three days that followed he scarcely had a moment to press her about anything.

The ranch demanded his attention. Cattle needed to be cut from the herd for this season’s market, preparations made for those not selected to be wintered over on both ranges, the new calves branded, even the ordering of a headstone for Walter’s grave.

Meals were the only opportunities they had to meet each other. To Annie’s relief, these were relaxed sessions in which they discussed nothing but the activities on the ranch.

Brady’s thoughts might be occupied solely with his work, or seemed to be, but away from the table her own mind was in a constant turmoil.

She loved Brady, maybe even enough to marry him in the hope that in time he would come to love her with the same intensity she loved him. Or was that a foolish wish? As wrong as his argument that she would be committing suicide by going after Judd Halter.

Marrying Brady would mean abandoning that intention. She could already feel her determination softening. A weakening that deeply troubled her. How could she surrender the vow she had made to her mother and live afterwards with the guilt?

And so it went, this helpless seesawing of her emotions. Not until late morning of the third day, when Luther returned from Banning with the mail, was her indecision resolved.