Chapter Eight #2
“I will thank you to mind your own paddock,” George finished, lifting his eyes at last with the small, declared note of a brother making a stand.
A small, dry laugh escaped Wade. He picked up his coffee. He took a swallow.
“I will mind my own paddock when you mind yours, brother,” he answered, the laugh still at the back of his voice. “Ben Greene has a rifle over the kitchen door,” Wade said, “that he has kept loaded for twelve years.”
“I am aware of the rifle,” George replied pleasantly.
“He has also a deputy named Cord who is six feet four and very fond of Ben Greene’s daughter.”
“I am aware of Cord, as well. Cord is a good man. He is also, as it happens, engaged to a girl in Gallatin City, which Alice has known for some time and which Ben does not appear to have inquired into.”
A pause.
“You’ve done your research,” Wade said.
“I’ve done my research,” George agreed, without apology.
They stood in the cold September morning and watched the mare soften, degree by degree, under Ben Greene’s steady hands.
“She’s not going to be easy to convince,” Wade said. “He’s careful with her.”
“Yes,” George replied. “He is.”
“He’ll want to know who you are before he decides what he thinks of you.”
“Then I’ll make sure he knows who I am.”
It was, Wade thought, the most straightforward thing George had said in the better part of a year. He glanced at his brother sideways. George’s face was settled and calm, as it always settled when he had made a decision that satisfied him.
“When?” Wade asked, lifting his coffee mug again.
“When I have spoken to you about the arrangements,” George answered, his eyes on the paddock. “And when the fall muster is finished. And when I have figured out how to ask a man for his daughter when the man is sitting at the top rail of his own round pen with a sheriff’s badge under his coat.”
Wade’s eyebrow lifted a careful quarter inch.
“You’re speaking to me now,” he observed dryly.
“I am giving you the general outline,” George returned, the rim of his ear still pink. “The specific conversation will be different.”
Wade set his mug down on the rail.
“Ask me now,” he said quietly. “Get it out of the way.”
George turned and looked at him, then, with the full steady attention he usually reserved for horses and things that mattered, and his easy grin went quiet and something older came up behind it.
“The bunkhouse,” he said. “I’d like to expand the east side. Enough for two rooms. When the time comes.” A pause. “With your blessing, Wade.”
The cold morning moved around them. The mare at the end of Ben’s lead took a slow, considered step toward the man and stopped.
“You have it,” Wade said.
George returned his eyes to the paddock. The grin came back, different from before, warmer and more private.
“Thank you, brother,” he said quietly.
They worked the mare through the noon hour and into the early afternoon.
Alice Greene brought out a second round of biscuits at half past twelve and a pot of fresh coffee that smelled, Wade noticed, of the cold-water trick Inga had taught him eight years ago.
Wade left George helping Ben cool the mare at the water trough and crossed to where Alice was heading back to the kitchen, tray in hand.
He wondered, briefly, whether the two women had crossed paths over coffee pots, and concluded that in a valley this small, they very likely had.
“Miss Greene,” Wade said.
She turned.
“Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “You use cold water to settle the grounds.”
“Inga Andersen showed me,” she replied with a small, warm smile. “Years ago.”
“She showed me, too,” Wade said. He paused for a moment. “I believe you have been to the ranch to see Zoe.”
“I have,” Alice replied warmly. “She’s wonderful, Mr. Collins.”
“Wade.”
“Wade.” Her pale eyes were direct. “She’s very good for Sadie. And I believe she’s good for the ranch. And I believe, but I will not presume to say more than I know, that she is good for you.”
He held her gaze for a moment.
“She is,” he said, very quietly.
***
They started for home at two in the afternoon.
The road ran south through the cottonwood stands and along the lower edge of the valley, wide enough for two horses abreast, and the afternoon sun had burned the frost off the grass and left the long pastures in a warm pale gold that reached clear to the foothills.
A meadowlark tried a few notes from a fence post and thought better of it.
A pair of ravens flew overhead in a loose, easy spiral, talking to one another in low, unhurried voices.
Wade let the bay settle into its road pace.
George rode beside him, comfortable and quiet, with the satisfied ease of someone who had put in a good morning’s work and drunk good coffee and eaten biscuits twice.
They rode for two miles before Wade said anything.
“She suits you,” Wade said.
“Yes,” George answered, the small private smile coming through at last. “She does.”
“She’s young.”
“Seven years younger. No more than Pa and Mama.”
“Pa was not asking another man for his daughter in 1867,” Wade said, his eyes on the mare in the paddock.
George took a swallow of his coffee.
“No. He was asking in 1834, which is a different thing in some ways and the same thing in most.” He adjusted his hat against the afternoon sun. “Ben Greene is an honest man, Wade. He will hear me.”
Wade turned his head a quarter inch toward his brother for the first time in the conversation.
“He will, brother. That does not mean he will say yes.”
“No,” George replied. “But honest men can be persuaded by honest argument. It is only dishonest men who cannot.” He looked ahead at the road, easy in the saddle, the sorrel mare moving steadily under him. “I intend to make an honest argument.”
Wade kept his eyes on the road.
He thought about honest arguments. About Zoe in Inga’s parlor with three small conditions and a clear eye, meaning every word of all three.
He thought about Zoe’s hands.
A specific and particular thought about her left hand, which he had seen that morning at six o’clock holding a coffee cup with both palms wrapped around the tin, the way she held it when the coffee was still hot.
She had turned the cup twice, slowly, as though warming her hands from the inside out.
Then she had drunk from it with her eyes closed for one second and said, softly, Thank You, Lord, to the steam.
Wade had been standing four feet away at the fire he was building, and he had heard it, and he had kept his eyes on the kindling because to turn his face toward the table would have been to make a thing of it.
He had little wish, that early in the morning, to make a thing of a woman thanking the Lord for her coffee at his kitchen table.
He thought about her hands at the washboard at the basin behind the kitchen on the Tuesday morning he had stood at the side yard rail and watched her at Sadie’s elbow; red to the wrist in the cold water, working with the same even steady strokes she brought to every task she did not have to do but did because it was in front of her.
He had stood at the rail with his hand on the wood and had told himself he was watching his niece. He had been watching the hands.
Across two miles of quiet autumn afternoon came the sound of Sadie crying.
Wade’s hands tightened on the reins.
The first piece of a prayer rose at the back of his throat. Please. He had not said the word in three years. He swallowed it back down before the rest of it could come up, and his heels touched the bays, and they moved forward at a run.
The sorrel mare gathered herself under him.
Job, who had been ranging ahead, wheeled and came back at a flat run, low and urgent, and planted himself in the road with his hackles raised.