Crawling under the boys’ bed with a skittering creature appealed to Ella immeasurably more than sharing dinner with Cale Hutton. Maybe he wouldn’t come inside. Maybe he was ashamed of forcing her to ride when she had plainly told him no.
And maybe she should thank him.
Never!
Waiting while Jay washed, she clenched her fists and blinked her stinging eyes, staving off tears of anger and humiliation. The idea of thanking him was unconscionable. He’d forced his hand with her, clearly against her wishes.
Glancing down at her split skirt and boots, she rued the fact that she had dressed herself into his assumption that she knew what to do. He would never have set her on that horse had she been wearing her low tops and a suit.
And yet . . .
She flexed her fingers open. She’d done it. Hope rushed through her in a thrilling torrent. She’d actually ridden again, and the realization tingled through her arms and into her swirling thoughts.
The back screen door snapped her out of her musing, and she pumped chilled water into one hand, then splashed her face, hoping to quell the conflict heating her neck. A questionable-looking towel hung sadly from a nail. She let it be and shook her hands and palmed her cheeks as she stepped inside.
“Just in time.” Missing nothing, Helen handed her a napkin. “You’ve got a bit of water hanging from your fringe there.”
Further mortified, Ella patted her hair and face with the clean cloth, then laid it aside and carried hot biscuits to the dining room. Drawing herself up, she marched as best she could to the table anchored by four men of varying sizes and shapes. If she could ride under her own strength, she could bear the remarks of these brothers, whether children in age or in deed. A tiny humph pressed against her pursed lips, and she held her eyes to the tabletop where a pot of savory stew assaulted her nose. Crocks of butter and jam waited to be rushed upon, as well as fresh coffee.
Helen took her seat and Ella followed, with Ty at her side and Jay across the table scowling. Cale clomped through the back door and joined them. Again he led in grace, but this time soberness clouded his features, a discovery that pleased her immensely. It served him right, taking advantage of her like he had, setting her up to either accept his preposterous plan or limp all the way back to the house.
Even as she roasted him over the flames of her ire, joy bubbled up, threatening to spill into her cheeks and out her mouth, forcing her to admit her exhilaration at riding again. Even such a short distance. Even at such a humiliating price.
How could anger and exuberance coexist within her? She darted another look his way and found him staring into his stew. Hugh, at the opposite end of the table, scowled as usual. Helen ignored them both and kept her attention on the youngsters and their manners.
Tension charged the air around them, and she suspected it had nothing to do with a brief jaunt through the pasture. Tableware clanked against dishes, stitching the stillness until Hugh snapped it. “Harper lost another one last night.”
She glanced up to find him clearly agitated as he mauled the biscuit he was trying to butter. He cut her a scathing look on his way to his brother, as if she were to blame for whatever had been lost.
“While you were strayed off this morning, he rode over to see if we’d been hit.”
Strayed off? The heat she’d tried to abate with cold well-water resurged. Did he think she had lured Cale away from his responsibilities?
The boys silenced themselves, and their eyes jumped from their father to Cale as if waiting to see who would strike first.
“You tell him?” Cale spooned in a bite she didn’t expect would pass his tight jaw.
Hugh nodded.
“It’s that devil bear, ain’t it?” Kip’s eyes rounded above his whisper.
“Isn’t,” Helen chided. “And don’t be saying such things at the table. All creatures are the good Lord’s.”
“’Cepting that one.”
Helen’s gaze turned toward Jay, and he ducked and shoveled his stew.
Ella dabbed her mouth, sought boldness in her coffee cup, and carefully returned it to the table near her plate. “May I ask what was lost? Perhaps we can look for it.”
Hugh snorted and shook his head, assuring her that she’d misspoken.
Cale’s quick grab of his knife drew her eyes to his face, hard and cold as stone. He sliced off a slab of butter before speaking but did not return her regard.
“Ranchers are losing their stock. Either to rustlers or a marauding bear. Maybe both.”
Hugh grumbled into his coffee. “Rustlers don’t take ’em one at a time and leave ’em half eaten in the brush.”
Cold shivers skittered across her back and she dropped her hands to her lap, staring hard at Helen, willing the woman to disperse the tension with one of her cheerful deflections.
She said nothing.
Hugh soon left the table, and his dishes clattered into the kitchen sink. The screen door banged open and shut, and young shoulders relaxed beneath a collective sigh.
Cale closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He’d aged since their stroll in the pasture. “You boys stay close to home till this clears up.” His voice was somber, fraught with warning. “I mean it.”
“Yes, sir.” Jay kicked Ty under the table.
“Yes, sir.”
Helen nudged Kip.
“Yes, sir, Uncle Cale.”
Weary eyes found hers, apology swimming in their blue sea. “You too, Miss Canaday.”
For as mad as she’d been, his formality pained her. It was more than likely for the boys’ benefit, she supposed. But he’d not yet addressed her by her given name, though he’d insisted she call him Cale.
She nodded. Voiceless with unexplained disappointment and a new and quickening fear, she was unable to look away from the deep concern cutting across his rugged features.
Suddenly, she felt as welcome at the table as a hungry bear at the corrals.
~
Ella spent the remainder of the day working on Helen’s dress, safely indoors away from wild animals and angry ranchers. And completely flummoxed by her conflicting emotions.
Riding Barlow without benefit of a saddle had terrified her—and taken her back to her childhood. Once she found her center on the old mare’s broad back, a sense of control overpowered her fear of falling. How quickly old memories overwhelmed her—cantering bareback across the paddocks, loose hair flying, and her father’s groom grinning at the rail, faithfully keeping her secret. Her family would have been horrified to learn she rode like a “plains Indian” from one of the Wild West shows.
But she could not bring herself to thank Cale Hutton for his heavy-handed ways. She could have fallen. She could have broken her neck. She could have re-injured her leg.
But she hadn’t. And she’d enjoyed a brief reprise of her lifelong love of riding. If she gained nothing else from this time at the ranch, she’d gained that. And for that she was grateful.
Someday you will love again. Nana’s words worked to the surface. Why hadn’t she said Ella would ride again? Had she viewed that as more of an impossibility than marriage? But to be fair, Nana hadn’t said marriage either. She’d said love.
Only her father insisted that she marry, and within six months of the accident had invited suitors to their home on a regular basis. Even now Ella shuddered at the array of interested and eligible men. Interested not in her, but in her father’s fortune.
If only he approved of her choices and used a lighter hand on the bit he’d placed in her mouth at birth.
Her last memory of him wavered, then focused. Standing in Grand Central Station’s cavernous waiting hall, he resembled the marble pillars with his unrelenting countenance. He’d gone so far as to blame her behavior on the gaseous tail of Haley’s comet and threatened to have her detained for examination.
Nana had intervened.
Dear woman. Unshed tears had sparkled in her eyes at their hushed parting.
“Be careful, dear.” Nana’s trembling voice gave Ella pause, but she’d gripped her ticket and answered with her own fragile smile. That ticket had cost nearly every cent of her savings after she had “shamed” Patrick Canaday III by taking up with “the rabble and rubbish of a moving-picture company.”
She’d thrown her arms around the grandmother for whom she’d been named, the woman whose loving kindness had made life bearable for a motherless child. In a way, Ella pitied her grandmother, for she could not leave the confines of proper society and estate life. “I will, Nana. And I will have wonderful photographs to share with you when I return.”
Her father’s dismissive huff sealed her resolve, and she waved good-bye as she followed the Selig Polyscope troupe to the train platform.
Later that evening after a light supper, she pushed the memories away and the dining chairs against the wall and helped the boys lay their bedrolls beneath the table. Cale’s mirthless order to sleep indoors left them all down in the mouth. And it left her shouldering guilt for putting them out of their beds in the first place.
“You boys are spread out in here like a week’s wash.” Helen’s tone belied her frown.
Kip’s lower lip sagged. “I don’t like squash.”
“Whatever brought that on?” Helen planted her hands at her hips.
“And I ain’t weak.”
“Land sakes, boy, I didn’t say you were weak.” She ruffled his hair. “A week’s wash. A week’s worth of washing. Not a weak squash.”
Ty snickered, but Jay patted the bedroll beside him. “Come on, Kip. This is almost like camping out.”
Helen wrapped a warning in a bribe on her way to the kitchen. “Quiet down and I’ll bring you each a cookie before I put out the lights.”
Ella knelt and fluffed the boys’ pillows, then scooted over to the sewing machine and settled against its scrolled iron legs. “Would you like me to tell you a story?” She had nothing else to offer that might settle three rambunctious brothers.
“Yeah!”
“About robbers!”
“No, grizzlies!”
She shuddered. Blood and bluster. Not exactly the type of tale she had in mind. “If I am to do the telling, I shall choose the story. But only if you are quiet as a church mouse.”
She tucked her stockinged feet beneath her, mentally thumbing through her favorite Bible stories.
Helen brought each bedded boy a cookie, gave one to Ella with a wink and a pat on her shoulder, then ambled down the hall.
Cale and Hugh were nowhere to be seen, probably at the barn securing the animals and doing whatever ranchers did when bears were about. The gun cabinet facing her across the room bore two empty notches where rifles had rested. Evidently, the men were prepared.
A shudder rippled through her. She’d not bargained on wild animal attacks when she’d agreed to stay.
She finished her cookie and dusted her hands, settling upon a story that might entertain three adventurous little urchins. Readjusting her feet, she rested her hands in her lap. “Once there were three boys named Shad, Mesha, and Abe.”
“Those are mighty strange names.” Ty raised up on an elbow and gave her a doubtful look.
“Except Abe,” Jay said. “We go to school with Abe Hutchins.”
“Stuff it.” Kip suffered for his rebuke but refused to bear his brothers’ jabbing fingers in silence. “Stop or I’m telling Pa!”
“I can’t continue until you are quiet.” She folded her arms and waited for the squirming to still.
Heavy sighs and grunts faded until the mantel clock’s ticking filled the room, and her audience returned to staring at the underside of the cherry-wood dining table.
“Shad, Mesha, and Abe lived in a land far, far away, across the Atlantic Ocean. One day, a very wealthy king from another land rode into their town and . . . snatched them up as prisoners.” She reached out as she stressed the word, and each boy flinched beneath his covers.
“He hauled them away to his kingdom and made them his slaves.”
Ty huffed like his father.
“However, these three boys were very, very smart. They learned their lessons and did everything the king told them.” She held her breath for several ticks of the clock before continuing. “Except for one thing.”
Three little heads turned toward her in unison, expressions expectant.
She feigned a yawn and covered her mouth. “Oh, I’m getting so sleepy. Shall I continue tomorrow?”
“No.”
Swallowing a chuckle stirred by the choral refusal, she cleared her throat. “Very well, then.”
She adjusted her feet once more and traced a nearby floral pattern in the carpet. “Where was I?”
“They did everything they were told ’ceptin’ one.”
“Oh, that’s right. They did everything the king told them to do. But when he told them they had to bow before him as if he were God, they stood straight and tall.”
“Why would he say that?” Jay said.
“Because he was a very arrogant king.”
“What’s air-gunt mean?” Kip asked.
“It means he thought he was better than everyone else, and he wanted everyone to bow down to him. And everyone did, except the boys.”
Three little Huttons lay silent, mulling over the situation.
“What’d the king do?” Ty ventured.
Saddened that he and his brothers did not recognize the story of the three Hebrew children, she wondered if they knew any Bible stories at all. No doubt their father did not read to them or tuck them in at night. A memory slipped in of Nana’s gentle teaching and storytelling. How dearly these boys needed such care.
She looked each one in the eye and leaned close to whisper. “He threw them in the fire.”
They lay as still as death.
“They died?” Kips eyes rounded with horror.
“No, they lived. Since they knew the king was not God, they were brave and did the right thing—even risking the king’s anger that meant they could have died. But God saved them from the fire. In fact, their clothes weren’t even burned.”
She could hear wheels turning beneath the cherry-wood table as Helen came in from the hall and turned down the lamps.
“I figure you three are as smart as those boys, so you already know there’s no rough housing tonight.”
Surprised that Helen had been listening, Ella gripped the side of the sewing machine and pulled herself upright, hoping she hadn’t stepped over an invisible line. Perhaps the story would chase bears from the boys’ dreams and fill them instead with images of faraway lands and the courage to make right choices.
She could use a dose of courage herself, though she believed the courage it had taken to defy her father and come West certainly proved something.
But had she done the right thing?
That question remained to be answered, and she tucked it back in the pocket of her heart where she kept perplexing queries.
One unexpected adventure had come from her bold step onto the train. Perhaps riding again was truly within her reach, but next time it would be on her terms, not someone else’s.
Next time? The idea rushed through her, so unfamiliar she shuddered in anticipation. Such a thought had not occurred to her since the accident, and after only two days on an isolated ranch in Colorado, it had found its way back to her soul.
An hour later, she lay stone still in bed, listening for the scurry of little feet, when heavy boot steps entered the hallway. They ended at the room next to hers before the door softly closed.
Cale.
A shiver coursed through her at the bold blue of his challenge earlier that day, prodding her into doing the unthinkable. Shifting beneath the covers, she dug through Helen’s tent-like nightgown and fingered the long, ugly scar. Her leg hadn’t pained her all evening. Perhaps the walk today had been good for it.
And the ride? Muscles long dormant had wakened in response to sitting astride Barlow, maintaining her balance. Demand had required response that she had not believed she could produce. Yet she had.
Harsh steps pounded into her thoughts, scattering her musings. They faded to the opposite end of the hallway and a slamming door cut them off completely.
Hugh.
He wore his anger like she wore her scar.
Closing her eyes, she saw again Cale’s worried expression at the dinner table. Was it the bear that troubled him so? Or was it her?