Chapter 7
Seven
The roundup wagon came in a little after noon.
Beau saw the dust of it from the east pasture and knew what it was before he could make out the shape. He sat on the hilltop and watched it come. Instead of worrying about numbers or what the count was, and the impact that would have on the ranch, he felt… disappointment.
He could have taken another day of waiting.
Maybe two.
The truth of it was that he’d enjoyed the twenty-four days his boys had been away. The quiet and the harmony. The company.
Now wasn’t the time to think about his pretty wife or how he’d started to look forward to waking up again, just so he could see her.
He turned his ride back towards the ranch and kicked him up a stride.
Beau rode into the yard to find Duke standing in the middle of the yard, hat in hand, scratching his head.
“Boy, you had that woman a month,” he groused as Beau reined in.
Beau dismounted, a smirk on his face. He looked about the place, trying to remember what had been there when his boys had left.
Laundry snapped in the brisk winds, strung between the trees where young Colt had run a line across.
The dusty windows he had left now sparkled.
The shutters were back off the parlor, and the sheets were off the furniture in it for the first time in three years.
The porch had been arranged as a spot where they could sit and watch sunsets, or stars, or just sit.
Even the weeds had been tamed back so the flower beds could be tended to when she got around to it.
“She’s been busy,” Beau acknowledged.
“And then some,” Duke nodded. Amusement glinted in his eyes as he turned to Beau. “Marriage suits you, boy. You look as different as this place does.”
Beau pulled a face. “It ain’t like that.”
“No?” Duke smirked and chuckled when Beau looked away. “Whatever it is, I like it.”
“How was it?” Beau asked instead, steering his foreman away from the arrangement that he held with Della and back to business.
“Hotter than the hinges of the gates of hell,” Duke drawled, plopping his hat back on. He grinned. “I loved it.”
“Any problems?” Beau’s eyes ran over the wagon.
Beyond it, Boyd had the remuda strung into the near corral and was working through them one at a time, checking feet.
Jed was hauling bed rolls and the food boxes down off the wagon and stacking them by the bunkhouse door, moving slower on one side than the other.
“The usual,” Duke sniffed, hitching his belt.
“Powder come up on us after the rain, and we lost the best part of two days waiting on a crossing. Cracked the wagon tongue on the second day out and had it wrapped in rawhide the whole three weeks, so that wants seeing to before it goes back out, else you’ll be seeing to it on the road somewhere.
Nine Bar's new man tried to claim a dozen slick-eared calves off the Cutbank draw and I put him right about it.
" He snorted, made a fist as if testing his knuckles. "Twice."
Beau pointed to Jed, and the rag around his arm. "And Jed?"
"Got throwed at the forks. Nothing broke. He'll tell you it was the horse." Duke waved a hand. “I’ll tell you it’s because that boy is dumber’n a box of rocks. Let me get the boys settled and the horses fed, and we'll talk numbers."
Duke wandered off.
Beau nodded. The pleasure and delight of spending almost a month at his home, riding the range with young Colt, and tending to the problems that he’d been meaning to get to whilst his foreman was off working, and spending his evenings with Della dimmed over the knowledge that he should have been out on the roundup.
John Hawkins’ favorite time of year.
Next year, he thought.
By mid-afternoon, the horses were turned out, and the wagon was stripped.
Beau found his crew standing in the corral. Only not one of them was paying any attention to the young filly in the corral with them. All their heads were turned in the same direction.
He didn’t need to look that way to know who held their attention. Della Hawkins seemed to do that wherever she went. Beau came up and set his forearms along the top rail and, because he didn’t have much else to do right now, he took a minute to watch her, too.
She was out by the line taking the wash in. No more velvet dresses. Instead, she wore a dusky pink skirt and blue blouse. Clothes she’d brought with her. He should have known she’d have fetched practical things. Della Hawkins seemed as practical as she’d pronounced herself to be.
She had a basket on her hip, and her sleeves rolled.
An old, blue scarf she’d fashioned out of one of his shirts kept covering her hair against the dust. His lips quirked.
She still couldn’t get used to her hair being dusty.
Not much dust in New York, she’d told him one evening when he’d been fetching hot water to the old tin bath for her.
She was working her way down the line fast, efficient in the way she did everything, with pegs in her mouth.
Then she bent to set the basket down on the ground.
Young Colt spluttered.
Okay, that was enough.
"Y'all ain't paid to stare at my wife," Beau said.
Colt was the only one who looked guilty. Poor boy flushed crimson clear to his roots as he hurried to the filly.
"We ain't staring," said Boyd, gaze still in Della’s direction.
"Sure looks that way."
"We're just resting our eyes in a particular direction." Boyd half-turned, lazy grin on his face. “Just tryin’ figure out how you managed it.”
“What would that be?”
“How you managed to find yourself a woman who can do what she’s done with this place. I coulda sworn I’d ridden up to the wrong ranch.”
Jed shook his head slowly. "I got to say it, boss. You wrote to a stranger. A stranger, out of a paper. And you get that."
"Bout time the Good Lord give you some luck," Boyd added.
"Amen," said Jed.
Beau said nothing.
He watched her reach up for the last shirt and go on her toes to get it and come down again with it over her arm, and he thought about how it was his shirt, and had a mend in the shoulder she'd done herself one evening at the kitchen table without being asked, small and even and nothing like his.
Three weeks and three days.
He'd come in every night to a lamp lit and a meal on the table and a woman who talked to him across the corner of it about things he hadn't thought about in years.
He knew what time she went up. He knew the sound of her on the stair. He knew, because the house was old and every board in it talked, that she had never once turned that key. He tried not to think about the trust she’d silently placed in him already.
"Shame the cookin' ain't up to the washin'," Colt said, and shifted his chew to the other side.
The corral went quiet.
Beau turned his head and fixed him with a cold stare.
He wasn't about to stand at a fence discussing his wife with anybody.
What he could have said, and didn't, was that the stew last night had been burnt on the bottom and perfectly good everywhere else, which put it a long way ahead of the first week, when he had eaten things he could not identify and still said thank you for them.
She was a fast learner. She had that little book that she kept in the kitchen. She studied and tested the range, trying to learn how it worked. She’d had burns on her arms and picked splinters out of her fingers and not once had she complained.
Colt got about two seconds into the stare before he found something interesting to look at down by his boots. "Didn't mean nothin’ by it."
Duke cuffed him across the back of his head. “You be grateful you’re gettin’ fed, boy. Times when I’ve gone without and there’s you with a good bed and food. Them slop buckets need a good scrub.” He gave Colt a shove towards the bunkhouse. “Get to it.”
Colt went, muttering something under his breath. Boyd laughed.
Beau ignored it and pushed off the rail. "We got steer to move.”
There was a time when the bunk house was full to bursting with cow hands.
Now, trying to cut costs, Beau had to run it on a skeleton crew.
Four men to hold forty thousand acres, and two of them had just started shaving.
Every one of them could get on a horse tomorrow and ride to the Nine Bar or Colter's or the big English outfit up on the Powder and be taken on before supper at five dollars a month more than Beau was paying.
They stayed because Duke stayed, mostly.
And because of the place. And because so far nobody had told them what Beau knew, which was that come the fall he was going to have to let one of them go, and it would be Jed, because Jed was eighteen and had no wife and could get another billet in a week, and that was the only kindness available in the arithmetic.
He hadn't worked out yet how he was going to say it.
Dusk had come down and gone, and the evening sky had blended into the horizon. Another clear night. He knew that Della would want to look at the stars again tonight.
Duke came out of the bunkhouse and joined him at the water pump, wiping his hands on a rag.
“That was some fine food your good wife served us tonight,” he said.
Beau collected another bucket. Took a breath before he worked the handle once again. He liked to make sure that Della didn’t have to fill and then carry these heavy things when she worked so tirelessly elsewhere.
“You know,” Duke continued as Beau worked, “Colt didn’t mean anything by what he said. He’s young. Young makes you say stupid things, ‘specially when he’s tryin’ to show us he’s a real man.”
“Real men don’t need to prove a thing,” Beau finished for him.
Duke had been saying the same things since he was just a boy himself. Seeing the older ranch hands and trying to emulate these men so that he’d curry favor with his own father. Beau remembered it well.
“And it goes without sayin’,” Duke said. “She’s awful pretty to look at.”
"They can look. If they touch," Beau hefted the two buckets, "they'll lose a good deal more than a job."