Chapter 4
The bank was a large building with a sturdy-looking front door.
There were windows looking in, and by the time they got there, it had been open for five minutes.
Kevin had to park the cart around the corner as there was no space for it in front.
He had brought a shipment of copper with him to town and had taken it to the dealer the day before, which was why he had been late to meet Anita.
Some of it had to be deposited while the rest had to go to the town to Andrew. Usually, Andrew, Michael, Jeff, or Troy would do this job, but they had given Kevin a letter to allow him to do it since he was heading into town anyway.
Carrying around that much cash with him now, after the bar fight, made him nervous.
They entered and went to join the line in front of the tellers’ windows.
“I’m so excited,” Anita said, beaming at him. “I think it’s going to be wonderful. I can’t wait to see our farm.”
“Well, you have to remember that it’s all new,” Kevin said. The last thing he needed was for her to get her hopes up and then have the farm not meet her expectations.
“Are we still stopping on the way to get married?” she asked.
“We are definitely stopping,” he promised her with a warm smile. “You said we needed to get to the market early, so we will, but don’t think that all-important detail has slipped my mind.”
Anita smiled back.
There was a man two places in front of them in the line who caught Kevin’s eye. He looked terribly nervous. He chewed his fingernails constantly and kept looking down at a folder he was holding that was stuffed with several papers.
“How much do you think we’ll need for the cattle?” Kevin asked Anita quietly.
She looked thoughtful and then gave him a figure. “Give or take.”
Kevin did a little mental math and worked out how much he should have in the bank by now.
He was still calculating numbers as the nervous man reached the tellers.
He spoke softly, and Kevin could only hear the rumble of his voice, not the actual words he was saying.
The file was lifted to the counter and opened, and the man began to tell a story.
This seemed like it was going to take time.
The other teller window was occupied by an old lady. She had her bankbook open in front of the teller, and they were having a whispered conversation.
“I hope this doesn’t take too much longer,” Anita said, looking around. “If this market is anything like ours back home, then all the good cows will be gone before we get there.”
“I’m sure we’ll get there in time,” Kevin said with a smile, despite his concern that they would end up spending all day in San Antonio again.
He didn’t fancy sleeping out in the wilderness with his new wife and several cows in tow.
Frankly, he didn’t fancy sleeping out in the wilderness, period, after all the craziness he’d experienced in the last few months.
He just wanted to get Anita safely home before anything else untoward could happen.
Suddenly, the nervous man raised his voice and began to shout. “What do you mean you can’t help me?” he demanded. “You said that if I brought you all the paperwork, you would help me! That’s what you said. You and Mr. Edgar.”
“Please, sir, lower your voice,” the teller, a thin man with a mop of brown hair, said.
“No! No! I’m not going to lower my voice!” the man yelled. “This bank is run by criminals! They say they’re going to help you and then they don’t. They’re a bunch of liars.”
“Now, sir, please!” Mr. Edgar, who Kevin recognized from previous visits, came striding out of a door in the wall behind the teller’s counter. He lifted the partition and came right up to the man. “Please, Mr. McCormic, come into my office and we can talk about it.”
Mr. McCormic, who was a tall, wiry man, shook his head. “She’s going to leave me if I don’t come back with the loan. You don’t understand. She’s going to walk out on me, and she’s going to take the children. I can’t let that happen.”
“Sir, please,” Mr. Edgar said. “Come with me, and we’ll sort this out.”
Suddenly, Mr. McCormic grabbed Mr. Edgar and, in a fluid motion, pulled out a gun that had been tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He held it to the bank manager’s head.
“Now, you listen to me,” McCormic said. “You give me that loan, or I will blow your brains out!”
Kevin had had more than enough of this type of thing in the last two days. What on Earth was Anita going to think of this place! Without so much as thinking about it twice, he rushed McCormic from the side and cannoned into him.
The gun flew out of McCormic’s hand and skidded across the floor. Kevin grabbed him and quickly pulled his arms behind his back.
“Does anyone have something I can tie his hands with?” Kevin snapped, his usual even temper completely gone.
One man handed him his belt, and Kevin used the thick leather to secure McCormic’s hands.
Anita came over to him, wide-eyed, and handed him McCormic’s gun. It had apparently slid all the way to her.
“You’re a hero,” she said with so many stars in her eyes that he flushed to his toes.
“I’d just had enough,” he mumbled. “San Antonio hasn’t shown you its good side and I’m ashamed.”
“I’ve seen plenty of good things,” Anita replied, pressing his arm and smiling. “And you’re the best one.”
Just like that, he felt miles better.
It took the sheriff about twenty minutes to arrive. The deputy took Kevin’s statement and then he was free to go.
“But I have a deposit to make,” Kevin said, “And a withdrawal.”
“Well, we can certainly help our savior,” Mr. Edgar, a podgy middle-aged man, said. He smiled. “You saved my life. Thank you so much.”
“It was nothing,” Kevin said.
The teller who had been helping the old lady before the excitement helped Kevin and Anita quickly, and soon they were ready to head to the cattle market.
“Okay, let’s hope that things go smoothly from here on out,” Kevin said.
Anita nodded. “I’m crossing my fingers.”
“It’s not always like this,” he reassured her yet again, but realized she’d had no proof of that so far.
They drove the cart to the other side of town, where the cattle market was held on the outskirts. The ride over was quick and uneventful, which gave Kevin and Anit some time to discuss their plans.
He decided to leave it all up to her. This was her area of expertise, and he wasn’t going to get in her way.
The cattle market was an education for Kevin. The smell and the noise were both an assault on the senses, and Kevin was quite out of his element. In that way, soil and rocks were a lot better. For one, they were silent, and they had that rich, earthy scent.
Cattle were another story entirely. They were noisy, smelled of manure, and all looked unhappy and terrified to Kevin, which he didn’t like at all.
Somehow his mind had conjured up this image of happy cows leaning over a fence in a green field to say hello.
It was ridiculous, and he knew reality was far from that, but still, the image was seared into his mind from some children’s book he had read when growing up, and it wouldn’t admit defeat in the face of reality.
Luckily, Anita seemed to know her way around the place despite not having been there before. When he asked her about it, she simply shrugged and said, “They’re all alike, really.”
They located the foreman who ran the place, and soon he and Anita were in deep discussion.
“Ayrshires?” the man asked, speaking around the piece of straw that dangled from his lips. He nodded. “We got a couple. Not many to choose from.”
“That’s fine,” Anita said. “We’d still like to see them.”
The man looked over her head at Kevin as though for confirmation. Kevin shook his head. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “She’s running the show.”
The man raised a brow in muted surprise. Clearly, watching a woman take responsibility for livestock purchasing was new to him, but he didn’t protest. “All right,” he said. “They’re over here.”
The Ayrshires were lovely cows with brown and white coats. They were all in one little pen, where they hardly had any room to move.
Anita went right up to them and stroked their necks and their noses.
The cows seemed to respond to her touch.
Then Anita moved on to check their hooves and their mouths.
She even inspected their udders. Kevin just about knew a cow’s front end from its back, and that was about it, so he hung back and let Anita take care of matters.
He just hoped that Betsie, their lone cow back home, would take to the newcomers.
“All right,” Anita said, having completed her inspection. “Do you have any Ayrshire bulls?”
“One,” the man said. “He’s young, but he’s strong.”
They walked to another pen and found the bull. He was a large brown and black creature who was grazing and only raised his head when Anita came right up to the fence. Then he eyed her and went back to eating.
She did a similar inspection of his teeth and hooves—during which Kevin watched nervously, afraid she’d get trampled or worse; he really didn’t like the look of her being so close to those sharp horns—and that was it.
“We’ll take the lot,” Anita said.
The man’s eyes glowed. He gave her a figure for the animals, and Anita shot it down instantly.
To Kevin’s amazement, Anita was a born haggler. She fought for every penny and soon she had the price down by a quarter. With the deal complete, they paid up and sealed matters with a firm handshake before the man headed off to his next customer.
“You’ve got yourself one heck of a woman here,” he called over his shoulder as he walked away. “I wouldn’t mind finding me one like that, I don’t mind telling you.”
“She’s one of a kind,” Kevin called back, smiling at Anita’s pretty blush. “But good luck. Maybe there’s somebody similar.” He doubted it though. He was sure God had broken the mold after making Anita.
The cows had ropes around their necks, which Kevin tied to the cart and soon they were off, leading the animals out of San Antonio.
“Are you happy with the cows?” Kevin asked as they rode.