Titans (11 page)

“Me, either,” Leon said.

S
amantha had no appetite for Grizzly's fried steak. She was feeling the pierce of sharp loss. Dr. Tolman's letter was now ashes in the grate, and she would never learn what it contained. Well, there was more than one way to pry off a boot stuck on a stubborn foot. Casually, she said, “From the way you're enjoying that steak, Daddy, your army friend must not be dying.”

“Just the contrary, I'm happy to say,” Neal said, sawing into a platter-sized sirloin. His voracious appetite did not suggest a hidden illness. “Cody and his wife have just sold their mercantile store in Charlotte, Virginia, for a large profit and are moving to the country to breed horses. It was a dream of his when we served together, and all these years later, it's come true. He wanted to give me his new address.”

“What did Dr. Tolman's letter have to say about treating cattle ticks?”

Neal spooned more gravy onto his mashed potatoes. “No information we could use. The man wrote about a compound for dipping cattle that's a better product than Robert Kleberg's preparation. I'll stick with Bob's coal-and-tar concoction. What's good for the King Ranch is good enough for Las Tres Lomas.”

His explanation, delivered with disinterest, was plausible enough, hard not to believe, but then why destroy the letter? It was a little thing and could mean nothing, but the bin beside the fireplace where scrap paper was collected for use as kindling was full and available. “Why did he write ‘Confidential' on the envelope?” Samantha asked.

“Because he didn't want just any cowpoke reading it and copying his idea. He's filing for a patent on the stuff.”

“And I'm just any cowpoke?”

Neal set down his knife and fork on their ends sharply. “The man's letter was not worth your time reading nor his product worthwhile, Sam, and that's all there is to it. You'd have given me grief over the price he was asking, and the preparation sounded dangerous to the cows. Something about carbolic acid. I threw the letter into the fire.”

Perhaps that's all there was to it, Samantha thought, though an undeniable thread of doubt remained, underpinned by her father's unusual annoyance with her. Neal Gordon, however, was not a man with much tolerance for questioning his actions once they were done. He turned the conversation to the farm for sale in Cooke County.

“Buckley says the place has got its own underground spring as well as a good-sized house, garden, and orchard,” he said. “Why, we could turn the place from a mere cow camp into a smaller version of Las Tres Lomas, nice enough for you and your mother to visit and to invite guests. The whole property doesn't have to become a livestock thoroughfare. We could grow our own hay against drought, and you could experiment with new grasses. We wouldn't be out a cent for a silo and barns.”

Samantha had not seen Neal Gordon this excited in years. His eyes were bright, his color strong and ruddy. She had not heard the whistling in his chest. She saw no overt cause for concern about his health. In his mind, the deal was done. He relished the idea of owning another full-fledged ranch with the amenities of Las Tres Lomas: a main house, real bunkhouse and ranch kitchen, indoor privies, electric lights, running water, maybe even a telephone—which Las Tres Lomas did not yet possess, since the list of subscriber applicants in the Fort Worth area was long. A second ranch would get him a notch closer to becoming a titan among Texas cattlemen.

Her father would just as soon let slide recollections of his land-grabbing years, when he bought every parcel of acreage contiguous to his ranch that came on the market. Like now, they were times of overflowing watering wells and abundant grass and healthy herds—“the green years,” he called them.
Buy now while the gettin' is good
had been his philosophy. But then “the brown years” had come, seasons of drought when most of the water sources and all the grasslands in Central Texas had dried up, and a financial crisis called the Panic of 1893 had struck the United States, casting its shadow on mortgaged ranches like Las Tres Lomas. Young as she was, Samantha's memory of those times was sharper than her father's, and they had bred caution in her so that now, even with ledger columns in the black and the mortgage long paid off, she was reluctant to part with an unnecessary penny. She believed in erecting impenetrable hedges against financial disaster.

“I declare, honeybee, your daughter is getting tighter than a debutante's corset about money,” he'd said to her mother.

“Uh-huh, so now she's
my
daughter, is she? Well, maybe Samantha's never forgotten the deep worry lines on her papa's face or the tense discussions around the supper table when it looked like we could lose the ranch because we were one payment away from default. Samantha's just trying to preserve what Neal Gordon has worked so hard for so those worry lines won't come again.”

Her mother had not needed to say it, but her accusing eye and tone had declared clear enough that Neal had been at fault for their near financial ruin. His zeal to become one of the biggest landowners in Texas had led him to buy grazing range for his ever-increasing herds. The Gordons had been left land rich but cash poor. Neal had learned his lesson, but it was still a dream of his to see the distinctive brand of Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad—double
T
's flanked by a pair of smaller
L
's—spread throughout Texas. He wanted to become a titan.

“What's a titan?” Samantha, ten years old, had asked her father when he'd presented her with a book of Greek mythology as a birthday gift. Tales of gods and goddesses had been his favorite literature as a boy and—secretly—as a man.

“They were gods that once ruled the universe,” Neal answered. “You can read all about them in that book. Today the word refers to people of great importance and power.”

“And you want to be a titan?”

“God willing,” Neal said.

Her mother had rolled her eyes.

As Samantha folded her napkin and excused herself from the table, the thought occurred to her that if she and Sloan were to marry and combine the two ranches, her father would have his wish.

Since Neal had cleaned up for the day, at her suggestion, she left him to his newspapers and a nap, since he was drowsy from the bourbon and heavy meal, and rode Pony to the birthing area where she was sure to find the ranch foreman, Wayne Harris. It must be the scientist in her that she could not let a thing lie once it piqued her interest. Her father looked and acted well, but he'd received a confidential letter from a doctor. It was uncharacteristic of him not to show it to her and even less so for him to burn it. He kept personal letters for months before they ended up in the kindling bin.

No season was more exciting on a ranch than spring when the calves were born, but no time was more mentally and physically demanding for mother, calf, and cowhand. Certain pens were designated to hold cows giving birth so that their deliveries could be monitored and assistance rendered in case of difficulties. During calving season, Wayne was in charge of the birthing pens and a master at saving cows and calves in life-threatening straits, often with the assistance of Samantha. Samantha found him engaged in just such a struggle ten minutes later.

“Thank God you're here, Mornin' Glory,” he said. “We can use your help. We've got a heifer in trouble.”

“Is she going to make it?”

“Hard to tell. The calf's got problems, too.”

The cow, her head held by two men and her legs tied to prevent her from suddenly leaping up in the middle of trying to save her, aborted her calf and hemorrhaged to death an hour later. Sickened by the agonizing ordeal, their boots, jeans, and shirts soaked in mud and blood and body fluids, Samantha and Wayne headed for a water tank to wash off the gore.

“You sure have to love ranching to witness that,” the foreman said as he wrung out his shirt. “I don't reckon I'll ever adjust to the grief of it.”

Samantha glanced at him. She appreciated that about Wayne—his sensitivity, despite that he gave the appearance and had the reputation of a man it was wise not to unduly provoke. He was not a tall man, but his wiry, corded frame toughened by years of ranch work and superintending cowboys gave the impression of a greater height. In age, he had looked the same to Samantha all her life, neither young nor old, simply durable and unchanging as post oak. She considered him and Grizzly her truest friends.

“I'm glad I didn't eat much of Grizzly's fried steak,” she said. “Did everything run all right while I was gone?”

“Rawbone got into a saloon fight in White Settlement last Saturday night, and I had to go bail his sorry hide outta jail. Your pa put up the money and will dock it from his pay. Other than that, no mishaps.”

“Daddy seem okay to you? Healthwise, I mean?”

Wayne raised an eyebrow. “Far as I can tell, MG. You have reason to wonder?”

Samantha flapped the water from her arms and hands to dry them. “Mother and I noticed Daddy wheezing a little at my birthday party. It's her opinion that someday he'll have to pay the piper for that Comanche arrow he took in his lung when he was young. Also”—Samantha rolled down her sleeves—“he received a letter marked ‘Confidential' from a doctor in the Oklahoma Territory. He threw it into the fire before I could read it. I found that suspicious. I thought it might have to do with a reply to a medical question about himself, but Daddy said it was from a veterinarian in answer to a letter he'd written him about a dip he'd concocted to get rid of cattle ticks. He read about it in a magazine article.”

“You can believe him, MG,” Wayne said, buttoning into his shirt. “Fact is, Neal showed the article to me, and we both agreed the stuff wasn't for us. The ticks might've died but the cow wouldn't have lived.”

Samantha blew out a little breath of relief. “Well, okay then.”

“But the article wadn't written by no doctor.”

Samantha stared at him. “Are you sure? A Dr. Tolman from Marietta in the Oklahoma Territory?”

“Sure, I'm sure. It was written by a rancher up in Denton County.”

“Oh, God, Wayne.” Samantha put her hands on her hips, anger peppering her concern. She'd been lied to, and so adeptly, too.

“Now, don't go gettin' mad at your pa, Mornin' Glory. He might'a had a good reason for keepin' that letter from you. The person who'd know is Grizzly. Neal can't keep nothin' from Grizzly, hard as he might try.”

Samantha said, “Well, I believe I'll just go pay Grizzly a visit. You won't mention this conversation to Daddy?”

“Lips tighter'n a miser's pocket. I'll see if the magazine is still around. I may have it in my quarters in the bunkhouse.”

Samantha removed Pony's saddle and set the quarter horse free in a paddock, then took off for the long log-timbered building that housed the kitchen and dining room of the ranch cook's domain.
TRAIL HEAD
was burned above its front door, named for the point of a cattle drive's conclusion. Grizzly ran a finely tuned staff of four that assisted him in feeding thirty cowhands three meals a day, six days a week. Sundays, his day of rest, ranch employees could fend for themselves, which they did by usually roasting a side of beef over a pit fire, with the more skilled among them stirring up deep-dish cobblers to go with the pans of biscuits and kettles of beans. On Sundays, Grizzly attended church in town, treated himself to dinner in the dining room of the Metropolitan Hotel, and spent the afternoon as a volunteer in the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home, erected the previous year, in 1899. Nobody on the ranch saw him until he reappeared in his own quarters Sunday night, where he could be observed reading by lamplight in his chair by the window.

Samantha found him in his small office next to the pantry tallying monthly receipts. Short in stature and bearish in build, he was teased as being almost as big around as he was tall, but wisely out of range of his rolling pin. When Samantha appeared in the open doorway, a frown was in place to bestow upon the intruder, but it cleared instantly when he spun around in his desk chair and saw his visitor.

“Mornin' Glory!” he cried, getting up to hug her. “Happy belated birthday! How did the party go? All we got from your pa was that you looked as pretty as a spring sunrise.”

“Tell you the truth, it was just so-so this year, Grizzly.”

Grizzly sat back down with a rueful grin. “Turnin' twenty get you down?”

Samantha chuckled at his quickness. “How'd you know?”

“ 'Cause you're a woman turnin' twenty, that's why.”
And unmarried
, Samantha was sure he was thinking. Not that her single state would be a cause of worry to Grizzly. He abhorred change. What if the man she married came in, threw his weight around, and upset things? He sniffed and looked her over. “You already been at the birthing barns?”

“I went out to talk to Wayne and got caught in a situation. We lost mother and calf.”

Grizzly grimaced in sympathy. “Too bad.”

“And now I've come to talk to you.”

“Sounds dire. What about?”

“Daddy. Have you noticed anything or has he said something to suggest he's not well?”

Grizzly pressed his lips together, fleshy as plump plums. After a thoughtful second he said, “Nooo, not a whiff. What did Wayne say?”

“Same thing, but I'm worried, especially since he bald-faced lied to me when I questioned him about a letter he received from a doctor marked ‘Confidential.' ”

“What did the letter say?”

“He threw it into the fire before I could read it.”

Grizzly leaned back in his chair. “Oh-oh, that's not good. Who was the letter from?”

“A Dr. Donald Tolman from Marietta, Oklahoma Territory.”

Relief flooded Grizzly's bearded face. “Oh, Samantha, hon, there's nothin' wrong with your pa, thank the Lord. That letter was from the doctor who put you into your pa and ma's arms!”