Chapter 16
Sixteen
Beau spent the next morning watching Duke Darby.
A slower morning, and the boys were all seeing to chores about the yard.
Beau tried not to stare as the old man ambled across the yard, buckets in hand, whistling something with no tune to it.
Sixty-two years old, bandy as a barrel hoop, rolling along on those bowed legs that had once been straight.
That man had started here heaving manure out of a stable that didn't exist anymore. He'd carried Beau on his shoulders. He'd taught him to sit on a horse, and how to fall off one. There wasn't a draw or a seep or a bad crossing on forty thousand acres he couldn't name in the dark.
It's a mistake.
He spotted the plume of dust coming up his drive and set the hammer down, recognizing the horse before he knew who was in the wagon. By the time it pulled up, he had his hands on his hips and his jaw set.
"Beau." Hollis lifted his hat. "Fine morning."
"Ezra,” he nodded once, uneasy to have the bank manager on his property with his ranch hands staring. “What are you doing this far out?"
"Well, that's a welcome." Hollis climbed down, taking his time about it, and stood pressing a fist into the small of his back. "I was over at Colter's on a piece of business, and I thought, I'll call by. I've been meaning to see this place again."
Beau clenched his teeth as the man looked around, taking in the bits that needed repairing, the decay that was setting in. “Back to work,” he called, gratified when Jed, Boyd and Colt jumped. Only Duke stood watching them from afar.
Hollis smiled and looked about the yard, at the barn and the bunkhouse and the windmill turning slow.
"I'd have thought you'd be out on the land," he said. "Working."
Beau indicated the gate and lengths of wood laid out on the ground in front of him. “This is work to me, Ezra.”
Hollis dabbed at his face, indicating the house. “Could do with a lick of paint.”
Beau waited for the man to get closer. This felt too much like mixing business with where he washed his face. “I like it just fine the way it is. The way my father had it.”
“I think I’d like to modernize it a little,” Hollis said now, eyes drifting along the wide house. He came back around to Beau. "The clock's ticking.”
"I'm aware,” Beau said coolly.
“Have you made a decision about the next loan?"
Beau’s stomach tightened. “Not yet, no.”
Hollis was about to say something else when his whole expression changed. He did a small double-take that Beau saw and did not care for at all.
"My, oh my," Hollis said under his breath.
Della came down the porch steps. She’d removed her apron, and her hair was pinned up this morning, instead of her usual plait.
Tendrils tumbled, framing her beautiful face.
She crossed the yard as though it were a drawing room, a warm smile on her face.
Hollis made a sound, close to a gargle as she approached.
"Mr. Hollis," she said. "How very nice."
"Mrs. Hawkins." He had his hat off and her hand in his before Beau could blink. "Forgive me. We met but briefly and under a good deal of pressure of time, as I recall."
“That we did,” she smiled demurely, and Hollis flushed with pleasure.
“You’re looking well,” Hollis crooned. “You’re settling in all right here?”
Della glanced at Beau, though she seemed at ease, even though the bank man still held onto her hand. “I am, yes. Though it’s a little different from New York.”
Hollis laughed out loud.
And Beau stood there in his own yard with a rush of something hot and ugly going straight up the back of his neck.
He watched his wife ask Ezra Hollis about the wet spring and what it had done to prices out of Miles City.
Steering the topic to the new brick front of his bank, and the property he owned out on the other side of town, and then onto the Chicago yards that made Hollis's eyebrows go up, and his chin come down, and start answering her the way he'd have answered a man.
She was easy. Completely, effortlessly easy, and Beau had seen her drop a pan and cuss out loud when she thought no one was there. Here she was talking freight rates with a bank manager as if she'd been doing it all her life.
Hollis was lapping it up like a cat at a saucer of cream.
"Won't you come in for some tea?" Della said. "It is a long drive. I have some cake that is, I’m told, edible."
He chuckled, delighted. “I only wish I could stay and enjoy your delightful company a little longer,” he purred. "But I must get back to the office. I only called to see your husband."
"Oh?" said Della.
Hollis's eyes came over to Beau's, and there was a question sitting plainly in them.
"I'll see you by the end of the month," Beau said.
"Very good." Hollis put his hat back on. "Very good indeed."
Then he took Della's hand again and bowed over it, low, the way men did back East. Beau's hands closed at his sides.
He waited until Hollis was back in his wagon and turned away before Beau steered Della up the steps and into the house.
“What are you doing?” she snapped, pulling her arm out of his grip.
"I don't like the way that man looks at you."
She rounded on him in the kitchen, rubbing at her arm. “And I don't like the way you just manhandled me.”
Irritation simmered in his blood. "He was looking at you."
"Yes," she said, leaning against the table and shrugged. "He was. Men look, Beau. They have looked at me since I was fifteen. There is nothing I can do about it except conduct myself well, which I did."
“And you’re holding his hand.”
She rolled her eyes. “He was hanging on to me. I wasn’t about to embarrass you by causing a scene. I steered him onto subjects, and he soon forgot about my hand so I could take it back.”
His mouth snapped shut.
"He can look all he likes." She was watching him steadily, openly. "I have your last name."
Beau's breath went out. She looked up at him, with her temper banked in her pretty eyes and her mouth firm in annoyance.
He wanted to take her in his arms and make sure that every one in the whole territory knew she was a Hawkins.
But he'd have been doing it because a fat man in a gray suit had held her hand too long in his yard, and if he ever did kiss Adele Hawkins, he was not going to do it in a temper about somebody else.
"Why was he here?” She folded her arms. “In my experience, bankers in New York City only ever make house calls when they’re getting fed at dinner parties.”
"Doesn't matter."
"Beau."
"It doesn't."
Her sigh was hearty and was like a punch in the gut for him.
“I’ve sat at John’s desk for nigh on a fortnight.
Dealt with Mrs. Vance. Used my earrings to settle an account.
I’m in this, whether you want me there or not.
” She crossed to him, placing her small hands on his wrists so that she could look up into his face.
“Tell me something before somebody else does. "
That went in under his ribs.
Beau couldn’t look at her. His attention went out of the window, although his body hummed with her standing so close, torn between guilt and want.
He swallowed, the click of it filling the kitchen. “I have forty-one days left.”
"Forty-one days until what?"
"Till a payment falls due at the Stockmen's Bank.
I took it out on deeded ground early last year after losing the cattle, and the feed prices going through the roof.
Hollis has papers drawn up for another loan against the land to cover it, and that's what he was out here about.
" He made himself say the rest of it. "I should've told you.
I stood on that depot, and I had every chance to, and I never took it. "
Della was very quiet. He looked at her, wondered at the look that sat on her face. Disappointment that she’d married a failure?
"How much is the payment?"
"Four thousand, four hundred dollars."
She digested it, paled a little. And made a half-laugh, half-sob sound. “That’s a lot of money to find in a short amount of time.”
“A tenth of the herd’s value. If I can’t make that payment, Silver Sage will revert to the bank.”
“Well.” She sighed. She pursed her lips and nodded. “You’d best get back out there. I want that creaky gate fixed, Beau Hawkins. Then we’ll get to cow counting later today.”
Beau’s mouth quirked as she returned to the stove. “Yes, ma’am.”