Christmas at Blue Moon Ranch (26 page)

Willa sank into
a chair at the kitchen table and buried her head in her arms.

“We rode the
perimeter,” Nate said. Lili put a plate down in front of him. “We saw where the
cattle had been driven through the fence and onto the truck, with the tracks of
ATVs. We searched for a mile outward in all directions. We couldn’t find him.”

“Do you suppose
they took him with them?” Rosa asked.

“Maybe.” Nate
swallowed down several bites, then looked over at Willa. “Miss Willa, you need
to sit up and eat. We got more to do and you’re gonna need your strength.”

She didn’t say
anything, didn’t move. After a few minutes, though, she made a sound…a sob. As
they all stared, frozen with shock, Willa’s shoulders began to shake. Her hands
clenched. Without apology or inhibition, she sat there in the kitchen and cried
all the tears she’d dammed up for two years, plus all the new tears from recent
days.

Rosa nodded to
herself. It was about time.

The storm abated
eventually, when the old sorrows, at least, were spent. Toby and Susannah went
to stand behind their mother, patting her shoulder, stroking her hair. Rosa sat
down in the next chair and took one of her niece’s fists between her hands,
stroking and murmuring until the fingers relaxed. Lili made a pot of tea and
set a cup within reach.

When she was
ready, Willa sat up, wiped her eyes with her free hand and reached for the tea.

“I’m sorry,” she
said in a husky voice. “I didn’t mean to inflict that on anybody.” She gave her
aunts a tiny smile, a larger one to Toby and Susannah. “We’ll find him. I know
we will. He’s a strong man and he’ll be waiting for us to get there.” She took
a deep breath and looked around the kitchen, as if waking from a long sleep. Her
eyes widened. “Where’s Roberto?”

Like children
playing a game, they all imitated her, looking around the kitchen as if Robbie
had simply hidden himself for a joke. “He was here when you came home,”
Susannah said. “I didn’t see him leave.”

“I’ll check his
room.” Toby left the kitchen at a run, and came back quickly. “He’s not there.
I don’t think he’s in the house.”

“Maybe he went
to the barn to be alone.” Lili refilled Willa’s cup. “He’s spent some time out
there today.”

Willa nodded.
“That’s probably it. He bears some responsibility for what’s happened. He’s got
a lot to think about.”

But when she
called the barn, where some of their hands were resting up after the day of
searching, the news wasn’t good.

“He’s not in the
barn.” Willa hung up the phone but didn’t face them right away. “And Tar is
missing.” Turning around at last, she showed her worried frown to Rosa, Lili
and Nate. “He’s taken his horse and gone out by himself at night to look for
Daniel.”

R
OBBIE HAD SPENT A
LOT OF TIME
—more than
his mother ever knew about—in the desert outside the boundaries of the Blue
Moon Ranch. He’d camped there with his dad, learning to identify the plants and
trees and animals that thrived on the hot, dry plains of south Texas. His dad
had taught him tracking skills, too, and ways to avoid being tracked. On winter
days, when he could escape school and work—and Toby—he and Tar would pretend
they were explorers, scouting new territory on a distant planet.

If anybody could
find Daniel Trent in the Wild Horse Desert, it would be him.

He started at
the break in the fence the rustlers had made and moved in expanding circles
from there. He saw all the tracks Nate had mentioned. The cattle truck and the
ATVs veered to the left, eventually, in the direction of the road west to
Mexico.

But there were
other tracks, Robbie thought, tracks that had been erased by someone who didn’t
want to be followed. He started his circles again from that point, noticing how
smooth the sandy ground appeared, as if swept by a broom or a large brush. Or
maybe by someone with a tree branch, obscuring his tracks.

The moon passed
overhead as he worked, checking out clumps of bushes and groups of trees,
making sure the shadows of boulders hid only rocks and dirt. He didn’t get
tired, and he didn’t stop. This was his problem, and he would make it right.

He didn’t know
what time it was when he heard the first groan. Tar halted and they both stayed
still, listening to the desert sounds. A breeze ruffled stalks of grass and the
leaves of trees. Here and there, a lizard scrabbled across a rock, or some
sand. An owl hooted in the distance.

Not too far
away, someone moaned.

Robbie stood up
in his stirrups, peering into the night. “Daniel? It’s Rob. Make some more
noise. Throw a rock. Help me find you.”

He’d almost
given up when a noise came to him, a strange, whining, singing sound. Robbie
choked back a laugh when he realized it was singing.

“Over
hill…dale…hit the…trail…as the caissons…go rolling…Oh, it’s hi-hi hee…field
artillery…” The U.S. Army’s theme song. He remembered his dad singing it.

Walking Tar
slowly, carefully, Robbie followed the sound. In the distance, he saw an old
mesquite tree twisted by the wind, with a sharp-edged shadow underneath it—a
shadow slanted in a different direction than every other shadow on the ground.

“Yes!” He urged
Tar to a jog and reached the mesquite in a matter of minutes. Throwing himself
out of the saddle, he dropped to his knees beside the man on the ground. “I’ve
got you, Daniel. You’re gonna be okay.”

“Good to know.” The
man tried to roll over to look at him but clearly didn’t have the strength.

Robbie used both
hands to ease him backward and caught a sharp breath. “You’ve been shot!”

Daniel nodded.
“That would explain the way I feel.” He shivered, his teeth chattering. “Cold,”
he said weakly. “Need to sleep.”

“Don’t sleep.
You have to help me get you back to the house.” On his feet again, Robbie tied
Tar’s reins to a branch of the tree. “Come on, Daniel.” He leaned over and
hooked his hands under the injured man’s armpits. “You gotta get up.”

“N-n-not th-that
way.” Trent opened his eyes halfway. “Roll me over to the f-f-front.”

“Are you sure?”

“D-don’t argue.”

Robbie did as he
was told, and rolled Daniel face-down in the dirt. Then he added his strength
to the effort it took to get the man’s knee bent beneath him and his shoulders
off the ground.

“Good,” Daniel
panted. “Now I get up.”

He was heavier
than he looked, and Robbie bore almost all of his weight before Daniel finally
stood upright. With the injured man’s arm over his shoulders, they walked the
ten feet to Tar’s left side.

Daniel looked up
at the saddle. “C-c-can’t d-do it. L-leave me here, b-bring b-b-back help.” He
started to sag in the middle.

“No!” Robbie
held him up. “I’m taking you with me. You’re getting in that saddle.”

The major looked
down at him sideways. “Yeah?”

Robbie set his
jaw. “Yeah.”

Afterward, he
could never say just how they did it. But somehow, Daniel ended up astride the
horse, tied there with the rope Robbie always carried on the saddle.

Then he and Tar
walked Major Trent out of the Wild Horse Desert.

“W
ILL YOU
LOOK
THERE
?” Standing at the fence line of the
New Moon Ranch, Nate gestured out into the desert.

Willa followed
the direction of the foreman’s pointing finger. In the predawn darkness, she
couldn’t see anything. “I don’t…”

Then she
distinguished movement, like one shadow separating from another. A white oval
became a face. Robbie’s face.

“It’s them!” She
tightened her legs, and Monty jumped forward into a lope, lengthening quickly
to a gallop. Cheers and hoofbeats followed her, and truck engines roared, but
they couldn’t catch up. Willa beat them all by a quarter of a mile.

Once they were
seen, Robbie and Tar stayed where they were. Monty made a sliding stop just ten
feet away. Leaving the horse’s reins on his neck, Willa hit the ground running.

And then she was
hugging Robbie, rubbing his head, scolding and kissing and crying all at the
same time. “You should never take off like that by yourself. Never, do you hear
me?”

He grinned and
gave her a one-armed hug in return. “I hear you.”

Letting him go,
she turned to touch the man on the horse. “Daniel? Daniel, are you awake?”

He didn’t stir,
and she looked over at Robbie. “Are you sure he’s…”

At that moment,
Nate arrived on horseback. Lili and Rosa had brought the truck, with Toby and
Susannah. Hobbs and two deputies pulled up in a sheriff’s department van. An
ambulance had just reached the top of the last ridge and was starting down the
hill.

The men took
over, lifting Daniel off the horse and laying him back on the ground. Willa
stood with her arms wrapped around her waist, her lips pressed between her
teeth as Rosa handed Nate a jug of water and a cloth. The older man sponged off
the scratched and bloodied face. “Hey, Boss, wake up. We got you back now. Need
to ask some questions.”

No one breathed.
Daniel didn’t move. Susannah pressed against Willa’s side. “Is he going to be
okay, Mom?”

“Sure, he is.” Did
she believe it herself? “He’ll wake up in a minute.”

The ambulance
arrived, and a new set of attendants pushed Nate and Hobbs out of the way. “Gunshot
to the left shoulder,” she heard someone comment. “Massive blood loss.”

“Severe
concussion,” one of the other EMTs responded. “Temp one-oh-three. Probably
infected.”

If Daniel would
only open his eyes…if he could say just a word before they took him away…

But in minutes
he’d been lifted into the back of the ambulance. Before she could ask to ride
along, the doors were shut. And then Daniel disappeared once again.

“Come with me.”
Hobbs put an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll get you to the hospital.”

She glanced at
her children, her aunts and Nate. “I’ll call,” she promised.

And then she
buckled herself into the sheriff’s van for the endless drive into Laredo.

“Y
OU, AGAIN?”

Daniel opened his eyes to a blur of gray and white. Gradually,
his eyes focused on a white doctor’s coat over a pair of faded surgical scrubs.
“I guess so.”

Cool fingers touched his cheek and turned his face away from the
pillow. “Remember me? Dr. Dobbins. I saw you last time you showed up in the
ER.”

“I remember.” He wasn’t sure what kept him on the bed. His body
felt light enough to float away.

“You lost more blood than we usually allow,” the doctor said from
somewhere beyond his range of vision. “And we don’t recommend spending
thirty-six hours in the desert without food or water.”

“I’m better at giving orders than following them.”

“Like most men. Fortunately, I’m a very good doctor and you’re
going to be okay. The bullet nicked a vein and plowed through some muscle,
which will take a while to heal. We’ll keep you a few days, make sure that
pesky infection you kept yourself amused with is knocked back with some IV
antibiotics, and then we’ll send you home, where you will stay off horses and
out of the desert for at least a month. Got that?”

“Got it.” The way he felt right now, he wouldn’t have the energy
for horses or anything else for at least a year.

The next time he woke, the room light had been dimmed and only
blackness showed behind the window blinds. He’d spent many nights awake on a
hospital bed, pondering his past, wondering if his future included a home on
the range.

After the latest fiasco, he didn’t have to wonder anymore. He’d
surely topped any limit there might be to the number of mistakes allowed a
beginning rancher. He’d had great advice, good help, and the best of
intentions. Yet he’d ended up with dead cattle. Despite his high-tech methods,
he’d botched his chance to catch the rustlers—they’d probably made off with
most of his herd that night. And how ludicrous was it that he, an Army officer
and decorated war veteran, had let himself be ambushed by an amateur sniper and
hauled into the desert to die?

He’d set out to prove himself as a man and a rancher. What he’d
proved was that he should find a nice, safe desk job somewhere. Take up
computer programming, or systems analysis, efficiency management…he’d swallowed
a bellyful of training in the military. A bum leg and an overdeveloped hero
complex wouldn’t be such a handicap in a padded office cubicle under
fluorescent lights.

Just don’t let him loose under the wide Texas skies. Willa had
been right from the beginning. He didn’t belong.

Nate showed up the next morning. “You’re looking a sight better
than the last time I saw you.” He straddled a chair backwards, resting his arms
across the seatback. “We’ll have you back on the job in no time.” He squinted
through one eye. “Well, maybe you oughta wait till after Christmas, anyway.”

“I don’t think so.”

Nate cocked an eyebrow in question.