Thea Devine Page 5
“Especially money,” Maggie added sarcastically. “Can’t fight that money. Lord, I wish …”
“Now, Miz Maggie, we got work to do.”
“I know. But I can’t send Arch. I just can’t. And I have to know, damn it. I think … A.J., I think I’m going to drive out there anyway.”
“Oh, Miz Maggie, now you can’t go gallivanting, you have to do the editorial today.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Maggie retorted. “I’m the boss, remember.”
“No, ma’am. Everybody thinks I’m the boss.”
“Nonsense. It’s an open secret, A.J.”
“I’ll go.”
“And what will you look for, A.J.? You know about boundaries and water holes and downed fences, covenants and titles?”
“Only in the Bible,” he admitted with a trace of humor.
“So, you see …”
“Miz Maggie, I just reckon you ought not to go riding out there alone, given how high tempers are running about this whole thing.”
“Are you suggesting that I wouldn’t be welcome—alone—anywhere I chose to go, A.J.?”
“Oh no, ma’am, I wouldn’t think of it,” A.J. said, thunking his coffee cup down on her worktable as he got to his feet. “Though maybe Mr. Frank’s brother might be available to escort you out this morning, Miz Maggie.”
Maggie stared at him as he picked up his cup and ambled into the back room. “Humph,” she muttered. “Mr. Frank’s brother, indeed …”
“In word and deed, Maggie.” A moment later, as if she had conjured him up by her mere thoughts, Reese appeared in the doorway, dressed to the teeth, a cracked coffee cup from the supply in the back room steaming in his hand.
No more coffee, she thought. “Good morning, Reese. How did you sleep?”
“Fitfully. Frank wasn’t in love with comfortable beds.”
“Oh, he had a bit of the martyr in him. Besides,” she added cryptically, “he spent very little time there.”
He let the comment pass, storing it for a time in the future when he would be powerful enough to make Maggie reveal all her secrets.
She was really something so early in the morning. She wore practical calico in a dark blue pattern, unhooped, without a bustle, the kind of dress that wore dirt very well: the dust of a bustling small town main street, the invariable spot of ink that coated her fingers and sometimes her clothing, the printing inks that smeared generously over the thick leather apron that she wore to protect her clothes. But she wasn’t wearing the apron now, and the slightly larger-than-fashionable buttons that fastened the bodice of her dress strained across the unexpectedly sensual dip between her breasts, which were accentuated by the tight fit of the dress. Her black hair was braided as usual, and curling strands that had not caught in the fastener tumbled around her cheeks. Even in the strong first light of day, she was as beautiful as she had seemed last night, more so, because he could see the creamy texture of her skin and the smooth firm line of her lips. Her eyes were bright and clear, and as she turned to hand something to A.J., he had a superb view of her straight, perfect profile.
All she needed, he thought, were the right clothes and the right surroundings. She would be a sensation in San Francisco society.
He could see why Frank had been taken with her. In the face of all that radiance, he would never have considered anything but her loveliness. He must have been shocked out of his wits when he discovered she was intelligent too.
“Tell me what Mr. Frank’s brother can do for you today, Maggie.”
So he had heard her. She slanted a look up at him. “Keep your mother busy and out of my business, if you please.” She had hoped to startle him with her rudeness, but he took her comment with an equanimity that suggested he was well aware of his mother’s propensity to be dictatorial.
Downright interfering, in fact.
“Mother is busy with church things this morning, Maggie. I really am at your disposal if you need me.”
“Your mother? Church? Oh no, she doesn’t go to church. Don’t tell me she pulled the wool over your eyes.”
“Maggie, you’re trying to distract me.”
“Yes, because you were eavesdropping and I don’t like it.”
“I promise never to do it again.” He smiled at her winningly. “I thought we came to an understanding last night, Maggie.”
“Really? I don’t believe it included your poking your nose into my business as well.”
He sloughed off this candor. “But I’m here; you must let me help you when I can.”
He was so sincere. Her eyes swept over him assessingly. How much did he mean? How much like Frank was he after all? Her sleepless night was testament to her confusion. In the cold light of morning she still wasn’t sure. But he met her gaze squarely, hiding nothing. His expression was concerned, soft; the lines around his eyes crinkled as he smiled ruefully.
“You don’t trust me,” he said, absolutely sure that this plain speaking would elicit the denial he wanted.
“Maybe I don’t,” she responded. He was surprised by her candor and her refusal to be backed into a corner.
“Tell me what I can do.”
“I will,” A.J. said, ambling back into the room. “You can take Miz Maggie out to the survey site so she can assure herself that the team isn’t encroaching on her property or anyone else’s up at the basin.”
“No one is going to ‘take’ me anywhere,” Maggie contradicted firmly, getting up from her worktable and sending A.J. a warning look. “I will go. By myself.”
“Perhaps a friend might accompany you,” Reese suggested, carefully choosing his words.
She relented. “Perhaps … a friend … might.” She threw down her pen. “You win, A.J., but just this time, and only because Danforth’s article is coming out this weekend.”
“Yes, Miz Maggie,” he said meekly.
“Tell Jean I’ll be back by noon,” she added from the hallway as she reached into the under-stairs closet for her well-worn cloak. “Come, Reese; let me show you the countryside in and around Colville.”
What he saw was land, acres and acres of land, some of it free range, especially the farther away they traveled from town. Most of it was fenced in, claimed and now owned by a generation of first-comers who had ventured into the wilderness, or bought by the enterprising speculator who saw beyond the moment and the desolation.
The land was thick with forestation and creased by rutty roads that veered off in all directions. They followed one that led past several neat ranch houses that were visible from the road, and headed north toward Gully Basin, a small lake that was the point of the triangular meeting of the boundaries of the Colleran and Mapes acreages.
“Frank snapped it up before Sean could blink,” Maggie said reflectively as they jounced down the dirt track that led to the rough clapboard cabin that was euphemistically called the Colleran ranch. “He should have had first shot at it. We spent our first year here, Frank and I,” she added as the house, a rectangular cabin that could not have been more than one room deep, came into view.
“Appalling,” Reese murmured, pulling on the reins to slow the pace of their wagon. But he saw immediately what Maggie could not have known: Frank wanted the land and, for some reason, Maggie herself, and with his usual cunning, he had gotten both.
“Oh, I don’t know. We had a spirit of adventure when we first moved in. You can see—it’s quite obvious—there is only one room, one side with the bedstead and the other with the stove and a table and some chairs. Quite luxurious by pioneering standards, of course. They had dirt floors and sod roofs and an open fireplace only if they were lucky and there were stones enough to build one.”
“What did you do? What did Frank do?” Reese could not even envision it, given what he knew Frank had been used to. And yet he had done it.
“We ran cattle. Or we tried to. I will say Frank had thought I ought to be in the kitchen churning butter all the time, and I was adamant about riding with the herd.
But we made out. After, when he died, Sean Mapes or Logan Ramsey took what was left to winter pasture and to market. I think there’s still a few dozen head of calves between them. I did love riding out,” she added pensively, “almost as much as I love working at the paper.”
The morning was bright with a sun that picked out every wart and crevice on the surface of the walls of the rude house. Reese couldn’t get over it. Frank here, and Maggie!
“This land,” she went on, “is geographically dead in the middle of the course that Denver North wants to lay up to Cheyenne. Now, they didn’t buy near town except for what they needed to build the station, but this beyond here is all free range, where drovers winter over on the way to Cheyenne. They’ve bought the rights to lay track there. But they’ll have to go wide around Gully Basin if the three families here won’t sell up, and Sean and Logan aren’t about to because they’re still running cattle on the land.”
“And the money is no inducement?” Reese asked curiously. He couldn’t understand her; the ranch and the acreage were useless to her unless she intended to ranch, and it didn’t in the least look like she cared about that.
“I’ll tell you what is no inducement,” she said suddenly, passionately. “Cheap housing for the track workers, camp kitchens that could burn down the forest, cheap entertainments that will set up shop in town and bring in gamblers and prostitutes …”
“And money—”
“And upset the balance of things. The people coming in won’t be builders, they’ll be transients. They’ll take the money all right, and maybe they’ll become indebted to the corporation or some gaming house, or they’ll get someone in deep trouble and they’ll just walk out and leave the town with the problems. They won’t care about options and freedom, just about the money, how much stake they can get from day to day until they can make it big anywhere from here to Cheyenne. And this town will have to clean up the mess. But the progress will look great in the company’s report to the Denver North shareholders, and they won’t have to be accountable to anyone, least of all to the towns along the way that they wreck.”
Her passion silenced him. Maybe this was what Frank had seen in her, but everything she said smacked of the kind of meddling Frank never would have tolerated.
“I grew up here,” she added after a while as they sat staring at the Colleran ranch house. “I’ll still be here when Denver North has gone.”
She stopped abruptly as she listened to the bitterness in her words. She was saying too much and he was too skillful a listener. She bit her lip. It was so easy to sermonize when the fact remained that the town of Colville stood to gain enormously from the presence of the line north. No one, except she and perhaps Sean and Logan ever saw past that, and everyone always raised the exact same point as Reese: money.
It always came down to money and who stood to gain most and the hell with the consequences. It was Harold Danforth and his cronies’ attitude, and it was so blatantly self-serving that it was painful.
“Well,” she said finally, “now you’ve seen the homestead. It’s time to rout out those railroad men.”
With some difficulty, Reese turned the team around and the wagon bounced back to the road. From there Maggie directed him east, toward the most likely place the team might be.
“It’s so beautiful here,” she murmured at one point. And then again, after another three quarters of an hour: “This is Ramsey land now, and that adjoins leased acreage and the Danforth property.” She kept her eyes resolutely on the road, praying they wouldn’t see Logan. She felt ill-prepared to deal with him at the moment.
The sun was behind them now, warming her back and her chilled thoughts. Beside her, Reese was silent, companionable, making no judgments and asking no further questions.
She didn’t think it odd, either. Reese had been in town a day and had learned her side first. No doubt he’d hear the rest in the course of the next several days, at the hotel restaurant or around the stove at Bodey’s store or over the front desk at the Morning Call if he stayed in town long enough.
“I suppose now,” she said at length, “it could be said we’re trespassing. This used to be Danforth land.” She pointed to a turn in the road. “They may be down there.”
Reese marveled. She knew her town and her territory like no one else. They could just see the big white tent and men moving around as they approached—and someone else.
“Damn, that looks like that Ramsey fella,” Reese growled.
“Yes it is,” Maggie said, her voice neutral and her heart filled with a sudden shot of resentment. What was he doing here, at this hour, and why did she feel as if his presence here took something away from her?
Reese drew the wagon up beside him, looking for all the world as if he would have liked to trample him. Logan came to Maggie.
“Mornin’, Maggie. They’ve set up shop here already.”
“So I see. You remember Reese?” Maggie asked pointedly.
“So I do,” Logan said laconically, but he kept his sky-blue gaze on Maggie. “They’ve plotted out a way to get around the basin, Maggie; I just went over it with them.”
“Sounds like you ought to hire this go-getter as a reporter,” Reese said ungraciously. He was just a little suspicious of Logan’s appearance on the scene so early, a little wary of how much information he had already acquired.
“Oh no, not me. I’m just a range-roving cowboy.” A faint smile quirked across his lips. “Want to come see, Maggie?”
“Sure, lead the way.”
“No, this is not accessible by wagon. We have to ride. I’ll take you up, and when we’re done, I’ll take you back to town.”
Maggie looked into his eyes. She had known him forever and had always felt secure with him. And yet, for that moment she hesitated, hesitated because of what he had said, because of his kiss, because she would have to abandon Reese. But the lure of seeing the course was greater than any of her concerns, and she turned regretfully to Reese. “I’m going to do that.”
“If you must,” Reese muttered. Then, jacking himself up to appear enthusiastic, he added, “Of course you must. I can find my way back. It was a pretty direct route.”
“Right, just back along the track here and onto the road in the opposite direction. Take the turnoff to Colville; it’s clearly marked.”
“He’ll be all right,” Logan said. Swinging himself onto his big white stallion, he leaned over to give Maggie his hand, and hoisted her easily onto the saddle in front of him.
She mounted, Reese thought enviously, as though she had done it a hundred times just like that, with him.
But he couldn’t know the hundreds of little darting feelings that assaulted her as she sat before Logan on horseback for the first time in ten years.
Everything was different now, she thought, as they waited for Reese to turn the wagon and head off in the other direction.
“I do have you exactly where I want you,” Logan murmured in her ear, confirming her dread.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said primly.
“You could have at least asked where.”
“Nonsense, I know where I am. Logan, stop talking in riddles and let’s get started.”
“Oh, sweetheart, would I ever love to get started with you.”
“I think if you say one more word in this vein, Logan Ramsey, I will get off this horse and walk back to town.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Logan said meekly, hiding the smile he knew she could not see.
But she could hear it in his voice, and there was a sweetness in her in response to it that she hadn’t expected to feel. No, she hadn’t expected to feel anything: this was Logan, her childhood friend, dependable and secure.
This was not a man in whom she was interested, and yet, and yet … she was insanely aware of the long length of his torso behind her, solid as a rock. And of his words, what he had said, what he meant. His arms around her now, where no man’s arms had been for the past two years or more.
When they hit level ground again he loosened his grip and one arm moved slowly from her waist upward to hold her shoulders. Or was it her imagination that his forearm brushed against her breasts? He held her so tightly she couldn’t be sure what he had done, and the heat of his body and the iron bar of his arm around her were like living things—pulsating with a life she was responding to in spite of herself.
This was crazy. Five words in the heat of a grueling day were going to change her life forever; she could never perceive Logan the same way again. “I’m going to win you …,” he had said, and now somehow, he had maneuvered her into his arms and for one moment she doubted that he even had anything legitimate to show her.
“They’ll be clearing out through here after they grade that little hill, and they plan to go around the basin and through Big Gully. Did you know?”
“No, I didn’t.” Instantly she felt ashamed of herself for doubting him.
“It may not work out, of course, but this is the way for now.” He nosed the horse through the back brush and along the free range that skirted his acreage. “They’ll have to add a hundred miles of track to the route; it’s the least direct—but you know that. I’m a little worried about how desperate the corporation feels about spending that money.”
“We all should be,” she said sourly. It wasn’t a pretty route either. There were odd hillocks and drops, and forests that would require a lumber crew to come in to clear it away.
“If they go through Big Gully,” Logan said, his voice close to her ear, “they’ll be beyond the far hundred by five miles.”
“But who is to say it still won’t affect the grazing fields?” Maggie commented, keeping her eyes resolutely ahead. She felt like she was going crazy. She had felt the faintest flick of his tongue against her ear.