Chapter 7 #2
Duke laughed, one dry bark of it, and thumped him on the arm. "There he is. There's John's boy."
He picked up a third bucket without being asked and followed Beau around the side of the house. “You ready to talk numbers?”
Beau had been thinking about stars, and Della, and finding a moment alone with her for the first time since that morning. “Yes.”
They filled the barrel at the back of the house and stepped into the kitchen. The table was scrubbed, the range banked down low. Della was probably sitting in the living room with one of her books.
Duke fished in his vest and brought out the tally book, a small greasy thing with a curl in it from being carried in a pocket, and held it out.
"Fourteen hundred and ninety-two head carrying your iron," he said. "Four hundred and six calves branded. We got sixty-one strays back off the Nine Bar, and I give 'em nineteen of theirs, so that's square. Nine head we never found, and I'd call them wolfed or drowned."
Beau took the book.
He looked at the numbers on the front page in Duke's cramped, uphill hand. He did the one piece of arithmetic he was any good at, which was the difference between this year and last, and it came out about where he'd feared it would.
"That's down.”
Duke sighed. "It is. But what with the droughts. Losing them cattle the way we did… it’s to be expected."
Beau scratched at his chin, gut churning. "That’s two years running, though. It cannot be a third, Duke. We won’t survive."
"It's a hard country, boy." Duke offered. "It was down for Colter, and it was down for the Nine Bar. Feed prices done it. Everybody's carrying less than they was."
Beau nodded slowly and put the book in his shirt pocket.
He knew he should be grateful for Duke. There was not a man on this outfit who could have counted that country the way Duke Darby counted it, and there never had been.
But he wished the man would have lied to him and told him that everything would be fine. Just once.
"You done good," he said. "Thanks."
"I got the books ready, by the way. For Hollis."
"You went through them already?"
"Every page. Two nights on the trail with a lamp, which my eyes will thank you for never asking me to do again."
Beau’s hands went to his hips. “Did you find any leaks?”
Duke shook his head.
He thrust his hands through his dark hair, paced away, back again. “There’s a hole in this outfit somewhere, Duke. I swear I’ve near burned my eyes out myself tryin’ to find it. For the life of me, I can’t.”
A look of compassion flashed across Duke’s face. “This is just ranchin’, son. Sometimes they are easier than others. You got less coming in than there was, and the same going out. Same as everyone else about these parts.”
“No one else is struggling like we are,” Beau said, frustrated.
“You don't know that,” Duke settled back against the table. "You want to know where the money went, it went on feed in '83 and feed in '84, and thirty-one head froze in the Cutbank. Ain't nothing mysterious about it, boy. It's just hard."
"Mm."
"Which brings me to it." Duke squinted at him. "Is another bank loan the right way to go?"
"It's the only way to meet the payment."
"Taking money off Hollis to pay Hollis."
"I'm aware of how it sounds."
"Your daddy wouldn't have?—"
"My daddy isn't here, is he?" Beau snapped. “He's down at the cemetery in the shadow of that little church, under a stone I ain't finished paying for. So, no. He wouldn't. But he ain't the one who has to get this outfit through to spring and beyond.”
Duke's mouth shut.
Remorse burned through Beau’s gut. His failings weren’t Duke’s problems. He sighed. "Sorry.”
Duke folded his arms. “I know you got it in that thick head of yours, tryin’ to prove a point that you’re John Hawkins’ boy. Therefore, you should know ranchin’ better than anybody else out here.”
“But he’d know what to do,” Beau said, his eyes burning with a shame he'd have denied to any man alive. “He wouldn’t be talking to Hollis about another draw against the property.”
Duke pushed his hat back and looked at him, and his face had gone gentler than Beau could stand. "You do what you got to do. That's all any of us ever done out here."
Duke bade him goodnight. Beau sank into the kitchen chair, staring into the black at the window.
The truth of it was that his father would never have taken out the first loan. John Hawkins would have sold two hundred head and eaten the loss and slept fine, because John Hawkins had built the place out of nothing and knew in his bones it would come again.
Beau had not built it.
He'd enlisted at twenty-one, gone into the Second Cavalry out of Fort Ellis three days after the worst words he and his father ever spoke to each other. He'd stayed in for the best part of six years.
He'd buried men on the Little Bighorn two days after there was any use in it.
He'd been at the Big Hole in the dark and at the Bear Paw in the snow. When he mustered out in '78 he hadn't gone home, because a man who had been away for that long and done the things he’d done, seen the things he’d seen, had no right to walk into a kitchen and say so.
Instead, he'd gone south where no one had heard of John Hawkins and spent five years bringing other men's cattle up out of Texas.
In those eleven years, he’d sent three letters. Only Duke had replied. It had been Duke who’d sent the telegram that had found him in Ogallala.
He had come home to bury his father. A ranch that needed a steady hand, too late to ask a single question. It seemed to him that every day since, he’d been stumbling from one problem into the next, with no compass or map to show him the right path.
And now there were two of them in the house.
Della emerged into the kitchen. The scarf was gone. Her blonde hair fell in a loose plait over one shoulder. She looked tired, but when she smiled, pleasure rippled low in his stomach.
Now he was responsible for her life, too.
Which meant he'd go and see what Hollis had to say.