Mistletoe and Holly (23 page)

“If he asks us anything, what should we say?” The anxiously whispered question came from his son.

Angus didn’t turn his head or look around to answer. “Don’t say anything. I’ll do the talking.”

“I told you we should have hazed those thirty head back across the fence last week, Pa,” the girl stated calmly.

“And I told you they needed a few more days of good grass, Maggie!” The argument had already been hashed over several times. “Those cows just strayed, that’s all. And we’re just here to cut out our strays, like we always do.”

He reined his horse down to a walk to cross the last few yards to Webb Calder, stopping at a right angle to him. Flashing the man one of his patented smiles, he respectfully touched a finger to the pointed brim of his Stetson.

“Good morning, Mr. Calder.” Angus O’Rourke sounded deliberately cheerful and carefree.

“Angus.” The stone-faced man with the hard eyes simply nodded in response to the greeting.

Irritation rippled through Angus. He was angry with himself for not calling Calder by his first name, and putting them on equal terms. The man had a way of making him feel worthless and a failure. Hell, he was a rancher, too, the same as Calder…in his mind. But Angus hid his bitterness well.

“It’s a fine day, isn’t it?” he remarked with a broad, encompassing sweep of the clear sky. “It’s mornings like this that make you forget the long winter behind you. The meadowlarks out there singing away. Wildflowers are sprouting up all over, and those little white-faced calves all shiny and new.” It was a few seconds before he realized his prattle was making no impression on Webb Calder. Again, Angus checked his angry pride and hid it behind a smile. “You remember my son, Culley, and my daughter, Maggie.”

Webb Calder acknowledged the boy’s presence with a nod. The black-haired boy paled under the look and mumbled a stiff, “Morning, sir.” Then Calder looked at the girl.

“Shouldn’t you be in school, Maggie?” It was a question that held disapproval.

Actually, her name wasn’t Maggie. It was Mary Frances Elizabeth O’Rourke, the same as that of her mother, who had died four years ago. But having two women in the family with the same name had been too confusing. Somewhere along the line, her father had started calling her Maggie, and it had stuck.

She shrugged a shoulder at the question. “My pa needed me today,” she explained.

The truth was she missed more days of school than she attended. In the spring and fall, her father claimed he needed her to help on the ranch. Maggie had grown to realize that he was too lazy to work as long and as hard as he would have to by himself. The ranch was such a shoestring operation that they couldn’t afford to hire help, so her father took advantage of her free labor.

During the winter, the tractor was broken down half the time, which meant they didn’t have a snow blade to clear the five-mile drive to the road where she could catch the school bus. When her mother was alive, she’d saddled the horses and ridden with Culley and Maggie to the road on those occasions, then met them with the horses when the bus brought them back in the afternoon. But it was always too cold and too much trouble for her father.

Maggie no longer missed going to school. She had outgrown her clothes and had little to wear, except blue jeans and Culley’s old shirts. At fifteen, nearly sixteen, she was very conscious of her appearance. She had tried altering some of her mother’s clothes to fit her, but the results had been poor at best. None of her classmates had actually ridiculed the way she dressed, but Maggie had seen their looks of pity. With all her pride, that had been enough to prompt her into accepting the excuses her father found for her to stay home.

Her mother had been adamant that both of her children receive an education. It was something Maggie remembered vividly, because it was one of the few issues that the otherwise meek woman wouldn’t be swayed from, not by her husband’s anger or his winning charm. So Maggie kept her schoolbooks at home and studied on her own, determined not to fail her mother in this, as her father had failed her so often.

The disapproval that was in Webb Calder’s look just reinforced her determination to keep studying. Maggie made no excuses for what her father was—a weak-willed man filled with empty promises and empty dreams. All the money in the world wouldn’t make her father into the strong man Webb Calder was. It was a hard and bitter thing to recognize
about your own father. And Maggie resented Webb Calder for presenting such a stark example of what her father could never be.

Realizing the conversation was going nowhere, Angus O’Rourke turned his gaze to the herd gathered in the hollow of the plains. His face took on the expression of one reluctant to leave good company but had work to be done.

“Well, I see a Shamrock brand or two in the herd.” He collected the reins to back his horse before turning it toward the cattle. “I’ll just cut out my few strays and head them back to their own side of the fence.”

“I’ll have one of my boys help you.” Webb started to raise a hand to signal one of his men.

“We can manage,” Maggie inserted. They may be poor, but she wasn’t short on pride. She’d been taught by her mother never to accept favors unless she could return them someday, and it was ludicrous to think a Calder would ever need a favor from them.

Webb Calder’s hand remained poised midway in the air while he looked silently at her father for confirmation that they wanted no help. “The three of us can handle it,” her father stated to back up her claim, although he would have readily accepted the offer if she hadn’t spoken up.

The hand came down to rest on the saddlehorn. “As you wish, Angus.”

As he turned his horse, Angus flashed Maggie a black look and rode toward the herd. She and Culley trailed after him. Feeling the Triple C riders looking at them, Maggie sat straighter in the saddle, conscious of their overall shabby appearance, from their clothes to their ragged saddle blankets.

From the far side of the herd, Chase watched the motley trio of riders approach. Nate Moore had already passed the old man’s orders around, so he knew one of the three riders was female. Buck let his horse sidle closer to Chase.

“How do you tell which one’s the girl?” Buck’s low voice was riddled with biting mockery.

“It must be the small one.” Chase let a smile drift across his face. “She’s supposed to be the youngest.”

“She’s young, all right,” Buck agreed dryly. “I like my women with a little more age on ‘em and more meat on their bones. Crenshaw was telling me this morning that Jake Loman has him a new blonde ‘niece’ working in his bar.”

“That right?” Chase murmured, aware, as everyone was, that Jake’s “nieces” were prostitutes. “That man does have a big family, doesn’t he?”

Buck grinned. “When this roundup is over, you
and me are going to have to check her out. She might know some new tricks of the trade.”

“Another week of looking at these cattle, and I’ll be satisfied if all the new girl knows is the old tricks,” Chase replied and turned his horse to head off an errant cow, succeeding in changing its mind about leaving the herd.

By then, Buck had returned to his former position several yards ahead of Chase. And there was no purpose in trying to resume that particular conversation. The O’Rourke family worked the herd to cut out their strays, while Chase and the other riders kept the cattle loosely bunched.

T
HE WINDSWEPT
M
ONTANA
plains rolled with empty monotony beneath a freeze-dried sky. Along a fence line that stretched into the far-flung horizon, old snow formed low drifts. A brooming wind had brushed clean the brown carpet of frozen grass that covered the rough-and-tumble roll of the plains and held the thin layer of soil in place.

There was no room in this bleak, rough country for anyone not wise to its ways. To those who understood it, its wealth was given. But those who tried to take it eventually paid a brutal price.

Its primitive beauty lay in the starkness of its landscape. The vast reaches of nothingness seemed to go on forever. Winter came early and stayed late
in this lonely land where cattle outnumbered people. The cattle on this particular million-acre stretch of empty range carried the brand of the Triple C, marking them as the property of the Calder Cattle Company.

A lone pickup truck was bouncing over the frozen ruts of the ranch road, just one of some two hundred miles of private roads that interlaced the Triple C Ranch. A vaporous cloud from the engine’s exhaust trailed behind the pickup in a gray-white plume. Like the road, the truck seemed to be going nowhere. There was no destination in sight until the truck crested a low rise in the plains and came upon a hollow that nature had scooped into the deceptively flat-appearing terrain.

The camp known as South Branch was located in this large pocket of ground, one of a half-dozen such camps that formed an outlying circle around the nucleus of the ranch, breaking its vastness into manageable districts. The term “camp” was a holdover from the early days when line camps were established to offer crude shelters to cowboys working the range far from the ranch’s home buildings.

There was a weathered solidness and permanence to the buildings at South Branch, structures built to last by caring hands. Stumpy Niles, who managed this district of the ranch, lived in the big
log home with his wife and three children. A log bunkhouse, a long squatty building set into the hillside, was not far from the barn and calving sheds in the hollow.

The truck stopped by the ranch buildings. Chase Calder stepped from the driver’s side and unhurriedly turned up the sheepskin collar of his coat against the keening wind. Like his father and his father’s father, the reins of the Triple C Ranch were in his hands. His grip had to be firm enough to curb the unruly, sure enough to direct the operations, and steady enough to ride out the rough patches.

Authority had rested long on his shoulders, and he had learned to carry it well. This land that bore his family’s name had left its mark on him, weathering his face to a leather tan, creasing his strong features with hard experience, and narrowing his brown eyes which had to see the potential trouble lurking beyond the far horizon. Chase was on the wrong side of thirty, pushing hard at forty, and all those years had been spent on Calder land. It was ingrained in his soul, the same way his wife, Maggie, was ingrained in his heart.

The slam of the pickup’s passenger door sounded loudly. Chase’s glance swung idly to the tall, lanky boy coming around the truck to join him, but there was nothing idle about the inspection behind that
look. This sixteen-year-old was his son. Ty had been born a Calder, but he hadn’t been raised one, something Chase regretted more than the trouble that had driven Maggie and himself apart nearly sixteen years ago.

Those had been long years, a time forever lost to them. Her father’s death had aroused too much bitterness and hatred toward anyone carrying the Calder name. He hadn’t tried to stop her when she left; and he had made no attempt to find out where she went. There had been no reason to try—or so he had thought at the time. But he hadn’t known of the existence of his son until the fifteen-year-old boy had arrived, claiming him as his father. As much as he loved Maggie, at odd moments he resented that she had never told him about Ty. During their years of separation, Ty had grown to near manhood in a soft environment of southern California.

All this land would be Ty’s someday, but precious years of training had been lost. Chase was nagged by the feeling that he had to cram fifteen years of experience into Ty in the shortest period of time possible. The kid had potential. He had try, but he was only greenbroke, like a young horse that wasn’t sure about the rider on its back or the bit in its mouth—or what was expected from it.

With school out of session for spring break, Chase was taking advantage of the time to expose Ty to another facet of the ranch’s operation—the ordeal of spring calving. For the regular cowboys, it was a seven-day-a-week job until the last cow had calved in all the districts of the Triple C Ranch. Since Stumpy Niles was shorthanded, Chase had brought Ty to help out and, at the same time, learn something more about the business.

As he stopped beside him, Ty hunched his shoulders against the bitter March wind rolling off the unbroken plains. In a comradely gesture, Chase threw a hand on his son’s shoulder, heavily padded by the thick winter coat.

“You met most of the boys here when you worked the roundup last fall.” Chase eyed his son with a hint of pride, not really noticing the strong family resemblance of dark hair and eyes and roughly planed features. It was the glint of determination he saw, and the slightly challenging thrust of Ty’s chin.

Ty’s memory of the roundup wasn’t a pleasant one, so he just nodded at the information and held silent on his opinion of “the boys.” They had made his life miserable. The worst horses on the ranch had been put in his string to ride. When “the boys” weren’t throwing their hats under his horse, they
were hoorahing him for grabbing leather when the horse started bucking or they were slapping his hands with a rope. If he forgot to recheck the saddle cinch before mounting, it was a sure bet one of them had loosened it. They had told him so many wild tales about the tricks to catch a steer that Ty felt if they had told him to shake salt on its tail, he would have been gullible enough to believe them.