Beautiful Bad Man (18 page)

After a day in the fields planting, her father, brothers, and Joe had all eaten supper in silence and gone straight to bed. Caleb never did. He took one of the books from the crate by the bed and kept her company as she made up the new dresses or did other chores by lamplight.

The only book Norah had seen since leaving Baltimore was the Bible. Her curiosity about the books had been building steadily, and tonight it got the best of her.

“What are you reading?” she asked without thinking. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t interrupt, and I could look for myself when you’re not reading, couldn’t I?”

“You can read any of them any time you want.” He looked down at the book in his hand again. “I don’t suppose you have much time for it either, do you. This one is called
Around the World in Eighty Days
, and it’s about a fellow who makes a bet he can do that and what happens when he tries.” With that, he flipped back to the first page and began reading aloud.

His hair was dark gold in the lamplight, his voice deep, sharing the story a gift. The scarred hands that cradled the book and turned the pages would run over her body soon and dissolve all the cares of the day into a pleasure she’d never imagined existed. Her needle stopped in the cloth.
This is the way it’s supposed to be. Partnership, marriage. No matter what we call it, this is how it’s supposed to be. I was wrong. I don’t want him to leave. If he does, I’ll never stop missing him.

M
ANY THINGS COULD
start Early growling in the night — wind soughing around the house, coyotes or other animals. Cal no longer paid attention to the minor episodes and neither did Norah. When a deep, steadily escalating growl woke Cal in the middle of the night, he didn’t have to wake Norah.

After yanking on trousers and stomping into boots, he reached for the rifle. “Bar the door behind me and don’t open it until you hear my voice.”

He moved as quietly as possible in the dark house and could see Norah doing the same only because her night dress was white. He found Early’s rope, slipped it on past his ears, and let the eager dog out into the night ahead of him.

Pulling hard, the dog made straight for the horse corral, but Cal saw a match flaring over near the haystack. He snapped off a shot, the flame died, and Early’s growls changed to frantic barking as he lunged against the rope.

A distinctly human shadow moved near the corral. Cal fired again. Running footsteps pounded away.

“Good boy.” The dog whined under his breath. “Me too,” Cal said, but I can’t see in the dark, and we don’t want to be the ones shot.”

Nothing smoldered in or near the hay. After checking the corral gate and the horses, Cal took the disappointed dog back to the house.

“Are you all right? What was it?” Norah’s hands ran over him as if she expected to find a wound he didn’t know about.

“I’m fine. At least two men were skulking around, one to fire the hay and the other after the horses. The way they ran, I don’t think I got lucky.”

“You were right about a dog.”

“Try not to sound so surprised.”

She laughed, and the husky, nighttime sound of it ran over him like a caress. “Let’s go back to bed. Early can keep watch. You and I can do better things.”

Cal found the burned out match by the first light of the sun. It had fallen onto bare dirt instead of into the hay.

“I guess we did get lucky after all,” he said to Norah.

The hatchet dropped next to the corral gate affected him differently. Through the red rage, he heard Norah asking what anyone would use it for.

“Even without a dog, we’d hear someone chopping from the house. Why not open the gate to let the horses loose?”

After several deep breaths, he managed to answer in what sounded to him like his normal voice. “They weren’t going to chop wood. They were going to cripple the horses.”

“What kind of men...?” Her voice tapered off.

The anger raced hot through his belly, and he let it out on her. “Evil men. That’s what kind. My kind.”

She stared at him, silent and wide-eyed.

He picked up the hatchet and threw it as hard as he could. Early raced after it, tail waving, but Cal ignored the dog and his wife, and strode off toward the fields.

The sun was high overhead by the time he returned, carrying two rabbits. Killing hadn’t put him in any better mood. Neither would butchering, but he dropped them on the table and pulled his knife.

Early had greeted him with forgiving affection. Norah didn’t. The two of them worked in silence until dinner was on the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I know you wouldn’t do something like that.”

“You don’t know anything of the kind.”

“Yes, I do. You don’t just like horses more than people. You like horses, and you don’t like people.”

He met her eyes finally and saw if not forgiveness, acceptance. She was right. With a few exceptions such as snakes, he liked pretty much everything on earth better than people.

The knot in his belly loosened a little. She didn’t need to know it, but she was an exception too. He liked her most of all.

C
AL OPENED THE
door a few mornings after the nighttime attack, and Early bolted straight for the creek. Early usually trotted around the yard in the morning, and the behavior triggered alarms.

Whistling and calling, Cal finally lured the reluctant dog back to him. He pushed Early into the house, told Norah to keep him there, and set out to find the cause of such unusual behavior.

A dead coyote came into sight first, then a fox, then crows, one still in the process of dying. The beef that had killed them was farther along, half hidden in the bushes by the water.

Cal cursed steadily as he hauled enough coal oil and wood to the site for a pyre, cursed even more vehemently as he piled the bodies and the beef that had poisoned them, careful to touch them only with rags that would burn too.

“Strychnine,” he told Norah. “I couldn’t find but the one carcass laced with it, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t leave more somewhere.”

“They’d kill one of Mr. Van Cleve’s cows just to do that?”

“Preston has a free hand. He wouldn’t tell Van Cleve he sacrificed a steer to kill our dog. They know they can’t sneak up on us unless they find a way to get rid of him.”

“They brought the carcass to the far side of the creek. I suppose Early heard them but didn’t growl loud enough to wake us.”

Cal nodded agreement, but his mind was elsewhere. “Can you shoot?”

“Yes.” She hesitated before adding, “But I can’t hit anything.”

“We better start working on that then. I’m going to be gone for a while tonight. I’ll leave you the pistol or rifle, whichever you do best with.”

She didn’t look happy. Neither was he when he found out how true her words were. She could probably hit the side of a barn if it was a very big barn and she stood very close.

He left her the pistol and rode to the V Bar C in the same small hours of the night Preston and his men favored.

The only way Van Cleve’s ranch dogs would be effective against Cal was if they were replaced. During the time he’d worked on the ranch, Cal had established firm friendships with the animals, and they greeted him happily in expectation of handouts of bacon or ham.

He didn’t disappoint, and they escorted him to the corrals containing the ranch’s working horses. Opening the gates, he propped them wide so the horses could find their own way out nice and quiet.

The largest of the several barns on the ranch housed hay, equipment, and the big bay Thoroughbred stallion Van Cleve had purchased to improve his working stock. Cal risked a lantern rather than stumble over pitchforks — or into the jaws of the stallion, which had turned out to be so intractable, the hands all swore they’d quit before anything he sired was old enough to ride. Halfway to the stallion’s stall, Cal jumped as something massive crashed into wood to his right.

A bull. Mean little eyes glinted red in the lantern light and showed clear intent to get to Cal and grind him into the dirt of the floor. This one must be so valuable he’d only go out on the range with the cows for a few months for breeding to minimize chances of injury.

Cal continued back toward the stallion, revising his plans as he went. Releasing the stallion without getting hurt was easy, and the horse took off at a run. Within minutes he’d be terrorizing the loose geldings so thoroughly, they’d be in Canada by morning. He’d have the few mares in the bunch rounded up and be ready to defend them against any and all intruders.

The stall the bull was in had been heavily reinforced. Two latches and two bars. Cal dropped the bars, opened the stronger-looking of the two latches, and ran. Behind him he heard a bellow and wood splitting. He kept running.

The dogs joined him, frolicking happily around as they escorted him back to where he’d left Forrest. He was glad of the company. He really wouldn’t want to meet either that stud horse or the bull on foot.

C
AL GAVE A
self-satisfied grunt as he finished tamping the last post for a fence that would give the horses summer pasture and keep them out of the crops.

Tomorrow he’d start stringing the new wire that would save him more night trips to haul wood rails from the same source as the posts — Van Cleve’s private lumber yard.

Leaning back against the post, he looked out over the greening fields with satisfaction. Three months now and everything was shaping up the way he’d imagined.

He had put the lumber and equipment salvaged from the abandoned homesteads to good use, but boards wouldn’t do for fence posts. With the fence done and no more immediate need to visit the V Bar C, Norah wouldn’t have any reason to make that muley face for the foreseeable future.

Norah. Muley face and persnickety attitude over what he should and shouldn’t do and all, she might yet make him change his mind about humans in general. Years ago she had climbed into a wagon with him and freed him with no ulterior motive he had ever been able to puzzle out.

He had a notion she’d suffered consequences that family loyalty kept her from admitting. She fought him tooth and nail every time he wanted to do something she considered wrong, and she fretted over it too much, but she wasn’t much of a grudge-bearer.

Having a wife who welcomed him in the night the way she did sure kept a man easy in himself. He never should have humored her over the horror of coupling in daylight, though.

One of these days he’d override that one because in daylight the way her dresses tucked in here and rounded out there the same way her body did made him think randy thoughts. Taking her against a building or flat in a plowed furrow with the scent of fresh-turned earth all around would make a nice change from the bed.

He straightened, picked up his tools, and whistled to Early, uneasy at where his own thoughts had headed. She was willing and a good cook. Former luxuries like clean sheets and clothes had become everyday items.

Still, appreciating a woman was one thing. The unfamiliar feeling that came over him more and more often at the sight of her was something else, something dangerous that could weaken a man.

The look of her as she served dinner put him more on edge. No woman who had spent the morning doing laundry should be able to heat the blood of a man who had spent the morning tamping fence posts.

When she first started getting prettier, he thought it was the new dresses, but right now she had on one of the drab old rags, the front still wet. The air out here must do something town air didn’t because her skin glowed and her hair caught the light, and her eyes, which he knew for absolutely dead damn certain had been gray that first time he saw them, shone bluer than ever.

If she knew the effect she had, she’d use the power it gave her. Time to provoke the muley look.

“After all the years you lived here, you must have been stealing chips from Van Cleve’s cows last winter. I didn’t plow many under, and there are hardly any on the grass I’m fencing.”

She sipped coffee, unprovoked. “You have enough stolen wood piled up we don’t have to worry about it, and you know Mr. Van Cleve will renew the supply any day now.”

That drove all thoughts of dresses, what was underneath them, and shining hair out of his mind. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s almost time for his cows to suffer their spring attack of wanderlust. Hundreds of cows all over the place for days make a lot of cow chips.”

No woman, no sane woman, could be saying such words as if they had no meaning. “He stampedes a herd through here every year, and you didn’t bother to tell me?”

Her eyes widened, even though he’d kept his voice low.

“It’s not a stampede. They gather hundreds of them a few miles from the property line and then drift them this way in the night. You worked for him. How could you not know that?”

“I worked for him for a little more than a month in the dead of winter. Do you think he gave me a written history of everything he’s ever done?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s not as if you can do anything about it.”

“The hell I can’t.”

“You can’t. One man can’t stop hundreds of cows. It took us days to drive them all off, and when we were almost done, Mr. Van Cleve’s men showed up, apologized out of one side of their mouths, laughed out of the other, and rounded up the last few.”

At least she sounded bitter. A little anger would be nice. She got angry at him for salvaging used lumber off land Van Cleve had all but stolen.

“So hundreds of cows ground everything to dust, and you stood there and watched them do it?”

“You don’t have to yell. No, we didn’t stand and watch them. We worked to exhaustion to move them back to the V Bar C from the minute we heard them. It was different every year, but last year about half the crops survived. Joe did some replanting.”

Cal dropped his fork in his food, appetite gone. “You didn’t tell me because I might do something to stop them, something you and some preacher wouldn’t like.”