Chapter Ten
“Blast!”
Cody kicked at the dirt, sending up a small puff of dust. He planted his hands on his waist, his jaw working. He knew that he had only a limited time to vent his temper—the rest of his workers would be watching his reaction carefully.
The fact of the matter was that he was in a rough spot.
While he was proud of his ranch’s independence, having resisted multiple friendly—and not-so-friendly—offers to buy it from him, it came with its own pitfalls.
He was quickly finding himself in the unfortunate situation of not being able to offer the wages that some of the other ranches could—those owned by businessmen and banks whose owners hadn’t ever set foot west of Ohio.
Stories abounded of good ranch hands and cowboys being enticed away to work for them.
Cody had counted himself grateful that he hadn’t encountered that particular problem just yet, but it seemed his luck had just run out.
For the past couple of seasons, he’d counted on his reputation as a fair employer and the fringe benefits his ranch provided as being incentive enough to keep them happily employed.
He’d just lost a cowboy, the fastest and best rider, to one of the larger cattle concerns further south.
When Arthur came upon him, he was standing behind one of the workers’ cabins, staring at the ground. He observed Cody for a moment, moving a long stalk of grass from one side of his mouth to the other.
“So,” he finally said, “Pedro’s leaving.” It wasn’t a question so much as a statement of fact.
Cody gritted his teeth for a moment, but his tone was flat and even as he responded, “Seems so.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment; the implications were clear.
It was already becoming difficult to find cowboys who fit the bill: hard-working, skilled, sober.
He was willing to overlook a lack of skill so long as they put their back into their work, but he refused to compromise on the last point.
He couldn’t afford to—lost or injured cattle meant less money, and he had children to consider.
“Well,” Arthur said at last, leaning back against the wall of the little cabin. He propped one foot up against the cabin and pulled the stalk of grass out of his mouth. “Figure I gotta find a hand to replace him. You want me to put a notice in town?”
Cody mulled this over for a moment. He rubbed at his chin with his right hand and shook his head slowly.
“No,” he said. “I won’t poach another rancher’s workers—it’s below me.
Us.” He took a deep breath, looking out over the stockyard.
“Let’s put a notice in the papers. Maybe we’ll have better luck casting a wider net. ”
Arthur nodded and pushed himself back upright, his boot coming back down to the ground. “As you say,” he agreed. “Though I worry we’ll get some polished dandy in here that wants to play at cowboy.”
“Then I suppose it’ll be up to you to filter them out as foreman,” Cody snapped. He immediately felt a twinge of guilt, but he was in no mood to pamper anyone’s feelings.
Arthur’s brow twitched at that, but he just nodded. “I’ll get right on it, boss,” he said, and ambled away toward his own small cabin-cum-office.
Cody gave himself another moment to collect his thoughts.
In the stockyard, the bulk of his cattle were milling about in the large corral, their coats shining red-brown in the golden evening sunlight.
A few hands were forking hay into them, and the cows clustered around, lowing eagerly for their dinner.
Cody knew the stores of winter feed were running low; he had to get the cattle out on the range, and quick.
They’d have to be moved, short-handed or no.
With that weighing on him, Cody turned and began to stroll slowly up toward the house.
Though it was on only a slight incline, it felt like a harder climb than usual.
His legs protested, and his feet felt heavy.
He stopped for a brief second when he was nearly to the house and rubbed at the back of his neck.
Good dinner and a few minutes with my children will help me put things in perspective, he reassured himself.
Moderately cheered by that thought, Cody resumed his march up to the house with new determination.
He entered through the back door, expecting to be welcomed by the smells of dinner cooking and his children greeting him.
Instead, there was quiet. He followed his nose to the kitchen, where dinner was fully prepared and waiting: fried pan bread, salted pork with stewed apples, and fresh vegetables from the kitchen garden.
Cody frowned. His first inclination was one of worry. Where in tarnation are they?
A bump from upstairs answered his question. His eyes traveled to the ceiling, and he heard the sounds of muffled voices and the occasional squeak from the floor as people moved around. Cody’s shoulders relaxed fractionally.
Amelia must be getting them cleaned up for dinner, he thought, relieved.
He looked down at himself, his shirt soaked through and his forearms coated with dust. He grimaced; he wasn’t really fit to sit at any table, let alone one for dinner.
He paused and hung his hat up by the back door, his sweaty dark hair clinging to his neck, before climbing the stairs to the upper floor of the house.
As he ascended, the children’s voices grew more distinct, with Amelia’s underneath them.
Ruby let out a squeal, and Logan laughed in response.
Despite his fatigue, Cody couldn’t help but smile.
It was nice to be reminded of why he worked the way he did, his body sore and his temper frayed.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard them so easy and lighthearted; it stung that it wasn’t with him, but he did his best to check the feeling.
He didn’t want a repeat of the other night.
He walked slowly down the hall, finding that the doors to all the rooms were open…
all of them. It took him a moment to fully understand what he was looking at.
There was too much light in the hall, which confused his eyes and his brain.
It dawned on him that there was sunlight pouring in from the end of the hall—from the door that he’d forbidden Amelia to enter.
A flash of anger sliced through his brain and his reason.
Like some terrible avenging deity, he darted down the hall, all tiredness instantly gone.
He reached the open door in only a few bounding steps, his long legs spurred on by his temper.
He braced both of his hands on the doorframe and simply stared into the room for a moment, his mind unwilling to understand what it was he was looking at.
In the room, all the furnishings looked almost hazy from the thick coating of dust. It floated in the shafts of light that streamed in from the window, which had been thrown open to allow fresh air.
The room was much as he had remembered it, so much so that he expected to see Anne there, sitting on the bed, turning to smile at him before rising.
Grief stabbed at him, making him bristle.
“Pa!”
Cody blinked, disoriented from the onslaught of emotions, the past colliding with the present.
Ruby, with a withered flower crown on her head, tripped merrily toward Cody.
She smiled, and it was Anne’s smile. He shook his head and dug his fingers hard into the wooden doorframe, determined to root himself in the present.
“Look, Pa! Amelia brought us up here to see Ma’s things!
” Ruby announced gladly. “I haven’t been in here in years,” she continued, chattering away as if Cody’s heart wasn’t being scraped raw all over again.
“I forgot she had that old spinning wheel up here. And look, her brush is still on her dressing table!”
Logan, doing his best to shrink into the background of everything, reached out tentatively toward said brush.
“Don’t!” Cody barked, his voice hoarse. Logan froze, his eyes growing even wider.
Cody, unable to bear the way that Logan stared at him, turned his ire on Amelia.
He rounded her. “What do you think you’re doing?
I’ve told you a thousand times not to go in here!
What right do you have to disturb her things? !”
Amelia, who had been partially hidden behind an open trunk, stood slowly. With deliberate movements, she put herself between Cody and the children, which only angered him further. She crossed her arms over her chest and threw her head back, her shoulders straight and square.
“They’re her children,” Amelia answered calmly. “They want to remember her.”
Cody’s eyes slid over to her. His nostrils flared as he pulled in a deep breath. “They don’t need your interfering and nosiness to remember her,” he replied, his voice low. “I told you to stay out of here, and you didn’t listen.”
“Pa—” Ruby began, clearly winding up for an argument.
“No,” Cody said sharply, his tone and expression cutting her off.
“I asked for very little from you,” he continued, his eyes finding Amelia again.
“All that you had to do was mind the children and the house, and to stay out of this room, and you couldn’t do that.
I knew letting you stay would be a mistake. ”
Amelia’s eyes narrowed, and she unfolded her arms. “You’ve made that clear from the start. But this is—”
“Enough!” he roared, his temper finally reaching the breaking point.
Logan, startled, backed up against the dressing table.
The half-empty bottles rattled against each other.
The porcelain hair keeper, a dusty lock of Anne’s hair still in it, teetered and fell.
The porcelain shattered on the wooden floor into dozens of pieces.
The lock of hair lay sadly among the wreckage.
Cody stared at it for a long moment, the silence as ominous as a great yawning abyss.
He didn’t have the presence of mind at the moment to consider that it was his own actions that caused this; the hurt was too great, too irrational.
“Get out,” he said quietly without raising his voice. “All of you, out of this room. Now.”
Silently, Ruby pulled the withered flower wreath from her head. She filed past Cody, shooting him a sidelong look as she did so. She held her arm out, and Logan, his eyes wet and swiping at his nose with his wrist, found shelter under it.
As Amelia started to pass him, Cody reached out and snared her by the wrist. She tensed up and rounded on him, her whole body going taut.
For a moment, Cody had the irrational thought of trying to hold onto a lynx, all coiled energy that could become teeth and claws at any moment.
Her hazel eyes flashed, and for the first time, he could see that she, too, had deep wells of anger to call on at any given moment, but she’d kept them tightly controlled to this point.
“I want you out of here,” he said slowly. “Tonight. I don’t care where you go—I just want you gone.”
“I will go,” Amelia replied, matching his volume. She bit her words off, enunciating sharply. “But it’ll further upset the children if I just leave in the middle of the night without even a farewell.”
“Don’t you even think of using my children against me,” Cody warned.
“They’ve endured enough loss as it is,” Amelia hissed angrily, bringing her face closer to Cody’s. He could smell the orange blossom water that she used to rinse her hair. “You look at me and tell me I’m wrong.”
Cody obliged, staring into her face for a moment.
She was breathing hard from anger, her nostrils flaring.
Her eyes were hard, but her mouth was open and soft, her breath panting out.
Cody stared at her, unsure if she was the most handsome woman he’d ever seen, or simply the most infuriating.
That thought alone made a sour taste in his mouth—what on Earth was he doing thinking of a woman’s beauty in this moment?
He hated being wrong, and he’d had enough of that since she’d arrived to last him a lifetime.
“Fine,” he relented at last. “Two days, then I’ll put you on the train myself.”
Amelia stared at him, still unflinching. Though she didn’t yield, something in her face seemed to come undone. She pulled away from him, shouldering bodily past him. Cody couldn’t help but think that porcelain wasn’t the only thing shattered that day.