Softly Falling (3 page)

She drew herself up taller, and he suddenly saw that this conversation was diminishing her and that she felt the need for height. He had done that a time or two in his life, when opposition loomed. Nothing loomed now except the disaster that was Clarence Carteret, and she somehow knew.

“Papa doesn’t own it anymore, does he?” she asked, her voice soft.

Jack shook his head, impressed with her courage, as though she had known all along that this was going to happen. The women he knew out West weren’t the type to shrink and faint at bad news when their own lives were hard enough, but Lily Carteret was a lady. He thought he heard a small sigh, but that was all.

“Tell me, if you know: How did he lose this ranch that I will never see?”

“He lost it in a card game.”

Her head went back a little, but that was all. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “Would I have liked the ranch?”

Even a deaf man would have heard the wistfulness in her voice. She was doing her dead level best not to show her disappointment.

“Yeah, you would have liked it. Begging your pardon, ma’am, but two thousand acres is small potatoes out here. Still, there’s a wonderful little spring on the place, which I don’t think Clarence knew about. He, uh, didn’t spend much time there. Maybe he never saw the spring.”

“Was there a house?”

“More of a shack. Two rooms, but he put up wallpaper, if you can believe that.”

“I can,” she said, getting into the spirit of the thing. “Papa has his standards.” Her shoulders sank a bit, as if she knew there was no pretense or courage to maintain, not with news like this. “You seem to know the place pretty well.”

Go ahead and tell her
, he thought.
She’ll find out soon enough
. “Yes’m, I do. I’m the fella who won the ranch in that card game.”

Jack couldn’t help wincing, certain she would come apart now. She looked away, as though the magpie hawking and spitting on the saloon roof fascinated her more than speech. When she turned back, she was even smiling, and it looked genuine. You could have barreled Jack over with a broomstraw.

“Sounds to me as though you love the place, Mr. Sinclair. How long have you owned it?”

“It was the result of a January card game.”

“Were spirits involved?”

“Most certainly.” No point in telling her that the only drinking man was her father. She probably already knew. After Clarence Carteret, eyes red, won three hundred dollars and declared himself lucky, no force in the world could have kept him from slapping the deed on the table. Jack had seen gamblers like that before, but he was usually watching the game, not sitting at the table.

He didn’t know what else to say. “It’s a grand little ranch,” he said, blundering on. “All fenced and with that spring.”

“Does your wife like it too?”

“No wife, ma’am. I have an old Mexican, name of Manuel, living there and taking care of Bismarck.”

“Bismarck?”

He saw the defeat in her eyes, and he didn’t know what to do. He could tell her about Bismarck, but maybe he should just get her to the Bar Dot so her slimy father could explain. Jack only made seventy-five dollars a month. No one paid him to mend a suddenly broken heart, which he knew he was looking at, even if the casual passerby couldn’t tell. You had to stand close to Lily Carteret to see the pain in her eyes.

His stomach rumbled. “I can tell you about Bismarck, but . . . but how about some chop suey at the Great Wall of China?”

“Chop suey?”

“You’ll like it.”

She seemed to perk up. Maybe she was hungry too, or maybe she was again the adventurous person he had noticed when she stepped off the train. “Nothing would suit me more than a spot of luncheon, Mr. Sinclair.”

He chuckled to himself over that, wondering how loud his cowhands would hoot if he suggested a spot of luncheon during the cow gather.

She made no objection this time when he picked up one of her suitcases, and she surprised him by picking up the other one.

“I can do that, ma’am,” he assured her,

“I can too, Mr. Sinclair,” she said. “Quite possibly I’ll be doing more of that in future, considering circumstances. What is chop suey?”

C
HAPTER
3

T
here was one thing Lily could say for the Great Wall of China café: She didn’t have to fight her way to the counter for a sandwich. No one rushed in, shouldering her aside as they had when the Union Pacific screeched to a twenty-minute stop, all the way across this interminable country. Not until Grand Island, Nebraska, was she brave enough to use her elbows to good effect and actually reach the counter in time for grisly beef and coffee with an oily sheen on it. (Tea was unheard of, and only brought tired smiles.)

The Great Wall was dim, if not cool. At the moment, she preferred dim to cool, because how long could a lady keep up the pretense that nothing had rattled her with Mr. Sinclair’s wry announcement? She would study him and keep her mind off her increasingly precarious future in this Wyoming Territory.

But first there was the Chinaman, wiping his hands on an apron that should have been washed weeks ago.

He bowed to Lily, then turned to Mr. Sinclair. “Boss, where you find pretty lady?”

“On the train, Wing Li,” Mr. Sinclair replied, without even a blush. “No ladies in Wisner.”

That seemed to be as far as Mr. Sinclair wanted to delve into the matter. “You got any chop suey?” he asked, motioning away the menu.

“Always for you, chop suey,” the cook replied. “If you have twenty minutes, I kill a chicken. Whoosh! You have chicken and dumplings.”

Mr. Sinclair glanced at Lily. She tried hard not to laugh, because she was imagining such a conversation in Carteret Manor. She thought of all the boring meals she had endured with Uncle Niles, who only wanted to get back to his ledgers and avoid his niece. She decided this was better, if more rustic.

“And you, pretty missy?”

“I’d like the chop suey, Mr. Wing,” Pretty Missy said. “Or is it Mr. Li?”

Mr. Wing or Mr. Li giggled.

“What’s in it?”

“I’ve never asked,” the foreman said in a low voice. “What
is
in it, Mr. Li?”

Mr. Li shrugged. “Some of this. Some of that.” He frowned, perhaps considering better food on another continent. “Comes with soy sauce.”

“Which hides a multitude of evils,” Mr. Sinclair whispered. “Hasn’t killed me yet, Miss Carteret. Price is right, too—fifteen cents.”

“That’s the deciding factor,” Lily said, thinking of her thin purse. “Chop suey for me too.”

“I’ll buy,” Mr. Sinclair said when the Chinaman retreated behind a beaded curtain and started shouting orders to whoever worked there.

“You needn’t,” she said quickly, not wanting to be obliged to the man who won her father’s ranch in a card game.

“I asked you if you wanted lunch, so it’s my business,” he told her with a certain dogged air that suggested he wasn’t used to argument.

“But . . .”

“No discussion,” he said with real finality this time.

“Tea, missy?” Mr. Li asked, back from the kitchen.

“Oh, my word, yes,” Lily said. She couldn’t even remember her last cup of tea. Apparently no one in the United States drank it except Chinamen.

Wing Li retired behind the beaded curtain again. Lily prepared herself for conversation, but Mr. Sinclair got up and walked to the counter, to a row of thick china coffee cups. She felt a smile coming on as he looked over the mugs carefully, perhaps after one with no chips and sort of clean. She hadn’t expected such nicety, and it charmed her.

While he took his time, Lily watched him. He was tall and had that hip-sprung walk she had noticed on other men from mid-Nebraska on. She had never seen better posture, not even among the men who comprised her uncle’s hunt club back in Gloucestershire. They just rode on occasion; this man rode for a living.

He had left his hat on a peg by the door. From the look of his hair, and the white line on his tanned neck, she knew he had recently sat in a barber’s chair. His hair was blond, his eyes brown like her own. She looked down at her ungloved hands; his skin was even darker than hers. She knew that his would change with the seasons, while hers would remain the same.

Straight back, straight nose. He might have been a handsome man, except for a scar that ran from his left nostril down to the corner of his mouth, giving his lips, nicely chiseled, a lopsided look.

She hadn’t meant to stare. Maybe he was sensitive to observation. He stopped his inventory of the china mugs and looked at her. “I earned it at Sayler’s Creek,” he said with no embarrassment. “I call it Sinclair luck. I fought through two years and got wounded in the last battle before Appomattox. I was fifteen.”

Sounds like Carteret luck
, Lily thought.

He didn’t seem to mind talking about either defeat or his wound. “Someone dragged me to a Yankee aid station. They still had chloroform, so it could have been worse.” He couldn’t help going a little grim about the mouth. “Can’t say I was sorry to miss Appomattox.”

He saw her puzzled expression. “The War of Yankee Aggression, ma’am,” he explained. “Maybe you called it the War between the States.” He gave her a wry look. “You know, we could have used some help from England. Just sayin’.” He returned his attention to the mugs.

He had the same starved look as other cowmen Lily had noticed. She decided that western men were well enough, but there was no denying a certain gauntness of face, the look of hardworking men who never quite got enough to eat. She found herself hoping that Wing Li’s portions of chop suey were prodigious.

He found a cup to his liking, reached over the counter to a coffee pot, and filled the cup. Another reach brought a tin of canned milk, followed by several scoops of sugar.

She hadn’t meant to stare—so impolite—but she must have, because he grinned at her, which made his face look less gaunt. He did have good teeth. “The hands tell me I don’t drink manly coffee, but I don’t like it black. Do you?”

“I don’t like it any way,” she said frankly.

He chuckled. “In that case we’d better stop at the mercantile and get you some tea,” he told her, then glanced around as the beaded curtain rattled. “Slap my knee, Mr. Li, you’ve outdone yourself.”

Slop mah nay
, Lily thought, wondering what on earth he meant. He did have a lengthy way of speaking that she hadn’t heard before. Would it be impolite to ask the man where he came from? And what did he mean by “hands”?
I thought we spoke the same language
.

Mr. Li slid a plate of something questionable in front of her and stepped back, perhaps expecting some sort of admiration.

“Lovely,” she said, trusting that to be adequate.

It must have been more than adequate, because Mr. Sinclair looked away and smiled at the wall. “There you go, boss,” the Chinaman said as he slid a plate in front of him. “You get more rice, even though she tall too.”

Mr. Sinclair nodded. When Mr. Li retreated to the kitchen, his shoulders started to shake. “He’s a piece of work, Miss Carteret.”

Lily observed the steaming mound in front of her, trying to identify something familiar. “Seriously, what
is
it?”

Mr. Sinclair started eating through what fifteen cents bought at the Great Wall of China. “I told you, never ask,” he replied. He pushed a brown bottle toward her. “Soy sauce?”

Uncertain, she sprinkled it on the chop suey. Maybe if it all turned brown, she wouldn’t wonder about its origins.

“He’s probably never seen a tall woman before,” Jack said, taking the soy sauce from her when she finished, and dousing his meal. “Don’t know why he wouldn’t think you’d be hungry too.”

“I’ve never been convicted of being dainty,” Lily said, discarding once and for all anything she knew about polite conversation.

Mr. Sinclair winked at her, then turned his wholehearted attention to the chop suey. He ate with some relish, so she picked up her fork and tried. Not bad; not good, either.

“What do you think?” he asked, after a few minutes.

“I’m pleasantly surprised,” she told him and then nodded to Mr. Li when he brought a tea cup, no saucer, and a pot. She poured fragrant green tea into the cup and felt a care or two slide from her shoulders. Papa had told her once that the English could solve any problem with tea. In his case, it wasn’t true. Still, it was tea and not to be trifled with.

She knew she had not a single thing in common with the man seated opposite her except species and planet, but here she was, and here she would remain until she thought of something else. Lily took another bite and considered Mr. Sinclair’s one comment spoken with affection.

“Why Bismarck?”

He chewed, swallowed, and put down his fork. “A grandiose name for a bull, I’ll admit, but I expect great things from Bismarck.”

Lily felt laughter welling inside her, not that bulls were objects of humor, but that this conversation was going to be unlike any she had ever been party to anywhere. Her uncle would drop dead from mortification, but she gloriously did not care.

“Sir, what makes him so special?” she asked, pushing aside her chop suey.

His eyes were merry, as if he knew precisely what she was thinking. “Do you seriously want to know?”