Chapter 2
Near Weatherford, Parker County, TX
Cora Scott snatched the jug from the dark corner of the near-empty smokehouse and threw it out the door as hard as she could.
It cracked against the water trough and rolled across the gravel.
Not good enough. Fists at her sides, she stomped over, yanked it up, and smashed it against the metal trough. Pottery shards flew.
Four months, and she was still finding traces of the habit which had taken her father’s life. Taken him from her long before he drew his last breath.
Cora stared at the empty prairie that stretched toward the canyons. Grasses that should be filled with cattle. Her mother had loved this land. So had her father once, and her brothers too. She would not abandon it.
A red-tailed hawk circled in the distance.
A tug on her sleeve. She turned.
Not quite as tall as her shoulder, Charlie stared up at her, his light-copper skin belying the fact that her father’s gray eyes stared out from his face. “I saddled Sandy.”
“Thank you.” She handed the boy the small sack of chittlins she’d retrieved from the smokehouse. “You can add these to the pot of beans cooking over the hearth. I’ll be back before sunset.”
“I should come too.” He puffed out his chest.
“Not today. You finish making furrows in the garden so we can get the planting started.” She ruffled his smooth, dark hair.
“I want to go with you.” He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his patched trousers and trudged along beside her as she headed for the well-chinked log stable. “It’s too far for you to go on your own.”
She quirked her mouth to the side and smiled down at him. Already acting like the little man. “I’ll tell you what. You run grab Pa’s rifle. I’ll take it with me, and I promise to be home before dark, but going to see Mr. Coffin is something I’ve got to do on my own.”
Charlie spit on the brown dirt at their feet. “That’s what I think of him.”
“Me too.” Her smile faded. She could don her best dress, smile, and bat her eyes at the man.
She’d rather go hungry than stoop to flirting with vermin.
But it wasn’t hungry they were talking about.
It was losing their land. “You’d best fetch the rifle while I fill my canteen from the well.
I want to be home in plenty of time to finish fixing supper. ”
He hurried to the porch while she filled her canteen and turned to her sorrel Quarter Horse, Sandy, tied to the corral gate.
The mare had been a gift from Jeb. Was he still among the land of the living?
It’d been almost a year since the war had ended.
Surely, he’d be home by now if he’d made it through.
Home? She scoffed. This had stopped being his home a year before the war.
Jeb had no idea Pa was dead. Didn’t even know about Charlie.
She loosed the lead rope from the weathered pole. Sandy nickered, and Cora rubbed the mare’s neck, her fingers trailing through the blond mane.
If Jeb were here, he’d find a way to keep Mr. Coffin’s grubby fingers off their home.
Pa probably wasn’t sober when he’d put the deed up as surety for his gambling debt, a debt he’d never spoken a word about.
She had no idea of it until Mr. Coffin rode out here in his fancy suit and fringed buggy to deliver the news shortly after she and Charlie moved back from town.
Charlie stepped alongside her as she stuck her left foot into the stirrup and heaved herself into the side saddle.
“Here you go.” Charlie handed the Enfield rifle up to her. “Is it for the Comanche or Mr. Coffin?”
“I hope it’s not for anybody.” Seven miles to town, and she wouldn’t draw an easy breath until she made it to the outskirts of Weatherford.
But she’d not let fear hold her hostage, not after being in town for almost four years, listening to her father say, “Someday we’ll move back to the ranch, someday we’ll fix the place up, someday this and that.
..” Well, someday had come a month after he passed.
Ben smoothed his hand over his sweat-dampened hair and donned his felt slouch hat, with its dented crown.
Weatherford at last. Five days by railway from Philadelphia to Cairo, Illinois, and then another five on a steamboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, followed by a steamer across the Gulf to Galveston, train to Houston, and a stage beyond Dallas to Weatherford.
It felt as if he ought to be all the way to California by now, instead of the Texas frontier.
“Good day, Mr. McKenzie. See you around town.” Dressed in plaid, the drummer who’d spilled one story after another for the last two days scurried out of the stage with his case of tonics for sale. “Stop by the saloon, and I’ll buy you a drink.”
Last place Ben needed to go. “Good day, to you, sir.” Ben edged down the step and braced himself against the stagecoach door.
His stomach twisted worse than a shirt having every last drop wrung out of it by a skilled washerwoman.
Twenty-one days and twelve hours without his medicine.
If he had any sense, he would have holed up in a hotel in Cairo or New Orleans until the worst had passed. But he had a promise to keep.
The stagecoach driver with his rumpled hat and rawhide vest dumped a trunk at Ben’s feet.
Flakes of dried mud crumbled beneath the weight.
“Where’d you like this carried, Mr. McKenzie?
You see that two-story fancy building down the street there with its columns and wrap-around porch?
That’s the Carson and Lewis House, finest hotel in Weatherford.
” He chewed on a cigar stub. “But if you’re looking for something a little less pricey, there’s Mammie Sykes’s place at the end of town.
Mighty good cookin’, and she rents rooms besides. ”
All he needed was a simple room. Provided the proprietor could keep her nose to herself. “If you could have one of your boys take the trunk to Mammie Sykes’s, I’d be much obliged.” Ben straightened and dusted off his blue linen sack coat.
The driver waved to a boy at a shoeshine stand in front of Miller’s Dry Goods. The boy sped his cloth into action polishing his elderly customer’s boot at bullet speed and then hurried over.
A mule-drawn wagon rumbled past them. A fellow on horseback and wearing a wide-brimmed hat and chaps followed.
After listening to the driver, the blond, freckled boy, all of ten or eleven years, lifted one end of the trunk and slid it onto his back. “I’ll show you the way, sir.”
“Much obliged.” Ben squinted in the sunlight.
He’d worked on tuning out the incessant throb across his temples, but the piercing pain behind his eyeballs was another matter.
The sooner he got himself a cool pitcher of water and a decent bed, the better off he’d be.
His money belt pressed against his waist. “Could you tell me where the bank is?” He picked up his pace alongside the young man.
“Don’t got one.”
A couple of thousand people in the county and no bank? There’d be no easy solution for what to do with his money.
Livestock mooed from a corral down the street past the livery stable. A harness and blacksmith shop stood across the way. A weathered building with the word Hides painted on a shingle stretched along the corner. The odor wafted on the breeze.
But the boy turned at the intersection past a clothiers, and…
Ben halted. A druggist. The slender green building called to him.
He needed a herbal remedy for his headache, didn’t he?
But that wasn’t all he needed. His hand trembled in anticipation.
Would it really be the end of the world if he bought a small bottle of laudanum?
What if he only took half a dose? Just enough to slack off the worst of the pain and the severe cramps.
A half dose every other day, and then he’d work down to a quarter every third day until the tincture was gone.
One last bottle. It’d been insane to quit so abruptly.
Who knew if his stomach could even function without it?
“Need something, sir?” The boy gazed up at him.
Yes. No. Ben curled his fingers inward and dug his nails into his palms. “I’m wondering if you have heard of the Scott family. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Scott. I believe they have a ranch—”
“Dead.” The boy lowered the trunk to the ground.
The word reverberated through Ben. “Dead? Both the man and wife?” He gripped a hitching post. Had he come too late?
“Yup. But I just saw Miss Scott a little bit ago.”
“Miss Cora Scott? Where?”
“Down by the land office, and she was fit to be tied.” He wrinkled his nose and pointed at the other end of the main street.
Ben dug in his pocket for a dime. “Take my trunk on to Mammie Sykes’s, and I’ll give you a nickel more next time I see you.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy tipped his cap and hunched over to tug the weight onto his back once more.
Ben’s chest tightened as he strode past a log cabin with a doctor’s shingle and a clapboard attorney-at-law’s office.
When had Jeb’s mother died? Would Ben’s coming here last fall have made a difference?
According to Jeb, the father had been a difficult man.
Jeb’s lack of confidence in the man’s ability to take care of his family was the reason he’d made Ben promise to look after them.
He reached the town square. A two-story brick courthouse loomed solid amongst the scattering log and frame structures.
Two ladies—one dressed in drab brown and the other in mourning purple and black—strode by him with polite nods.
They’d probably flee to the other side of the street if they heard his Pennsylvania accent.
He halted at the whitewashed building with the large black letters that spelled out Land Locator. Adjusting his hat, he exhaled and ascended the steps.
A middle-aged couple sat by the window, their clothing and faces careworn. The man’s dusty boots beat a steady rhythm against the oak plank floor. The lady fumbled with a small drawstring sack on her lap. A make-shift reticule?
Behind a desk, a young man wearing spectacles and a tweed sack coat looked up from his paperwork. “Can I help you, sir?”
“He can get in line after us.” The middle-aged man shifted a chaw in his cheek.
A female voice echoed down the hallway. “—offering you half of my land. That’s more than fair.”
A male voice replied, the words indiscernible.
“Sir?” The desk clerk peered at Ben over his spectacles.
Ben chewed his lip. “Would that happen to be Miss Scott?”
“I’m afraid so.” The clerk quirked his mouth to the side.
Her voice resonated. “I don’t care what my father signed. You took advantage of him. You—”
The man’s low rumble interrupted her.
A door banged against the wall. “You have about as much sympathy as a tin can.”
“You have a week to come up with the funds, Miss Scott.”
The door slammed, and hard-soled shoes struck the plank floor like the rat-a-tat-tat of repeated gunfire.
Ben stepped into the hallway.
Cora Scott bounded toward him, wide-brimmed straw hat and strands of silky chestnut hair hanging loose around her slightly tanned face. She bunched a fold of her purple linen skirt in her hands on either side. Sharp blue eyes sliced into him. Her scowl could cook raw meat without a flame.
He jumped aside to avoid a collision. His breath caught in his throat as the door slammed.
Jeb had mentioned a quiet, thoughtful sister who liked to race across the prairie, climb trees, and laugh. Obviously, a lot had changed since he’d left home.
The middle-aged couple murmured. Down the hall, a red-haired man with whiskered jowls and a silk-covered barrel chest strode out of the office. A smirk contorted his lips. “Carter, send in the next one.”
Ben turned and reached for the door handle.
Already half a block away, Cora Scott marched down the mud-caked street, close enough to the middle that a man on horseback had to swerve out of her way.
Her loose braid bounced against her back with each step.
A fighter, no doubt, like her brother, except Jeb had been soft-spoken and even-tempered.
Ben followed at a distance but hung back beneath the awning of Miller’s Dry Goods as Miss Scott mounted a sorrel mare and rode off toward the edge of town.
Head held high, shoulders thrown back, and gripping those reins like she was ready to whip somebody with them.
But she had started her horse with a gentle click.
The animal would not feel the brunt of her anger.
No use trying to introduce himself until she settled down. He scrubbed his hand over his jaw and headed for the livery stable. He’d rent a horse and ask directions. Somehow he’d help her. He’d keep his promise.