by Janet Dailey
She gave him an angry look of wounded betrayal. He’d forgotten how sensitive he’d been to thoughtless actions of others at that age. No matter how self-contained and confident Jessy appeared, she did have feelings that could be hurt.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he offered.
Her angry look hardened. “I’m not a kid,” she declared in a clipped voice and laid the reins alongside the grulla’s neck to turn it. Vaguely irritated by her failure to accept his apology, Ty let go of the bridle. No one had ever apologized to him, so maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut.
Jessy walked the mouse-gray horse away from the fence gate while the others swung loosely in behind her. She wasn’t hot all over anymore, and for that she was grateful, but she was shaking inside. The sensation of his warm mouth on her lips continued to linger, along with the feel of his arms around her.
She wanted to touch her mouth, but she didn’t dare raise her hand. They might think she was crying, and she’d die before she’d have them think that. It was bad enough that all had seen how embarrassed she’d been—embarrassed and hotly disturbed.
It had been her first kiss, and she’d always dreamed that Ty would be the one to give it to her. That dream had come true, but bitterly so. He had kissed her, all right, but only as a joke. And it had hurt to think Ty did it only to make fun of her . . . and in front of Buzz Taylor and Bill Summers to boot. By tomorrow, it would be all over the ranch and everyone would be laughing about it.
Jessy held her head a little higher as the four riders traveled in a loose group toward the South Branch camp. The conversation was minimal, but gradually Jessy took part in it. On the surface, everything seemed to be back to normal by the time they arrived at the camp, but it wasn’t.
7
With a heaving toss, Jessy threw the large suitcase in the back end of the pickup truck, then shut the tailgate. The smell of snow was in the air; solid cloud cover hung low in the sky. She shoved her bare hands into the lined pockets of her new parka and trotted around the truck to the front porch of the big log house. She had one foot on the first step when the front door opened.
“Hi, Mr. Grayson,” she said to the forty-year-old geologist. He was bundled in a pile-lined coat with a wool scarf wrapped around his cap and neck and fur-lined gloves on his hands. By contrast, Jessy had no gloves or scarf, and the top buttons of her parka were unfastened. She was wearing her good black Stetson—she always wore a hat. “I was just coming in to see if you were ready to go.”
“I’m ready.” He paused at the top of the steps to rub his gloved hands together and study the gloomy gray late-October sky. “It’s a cold one today.” Anything below forty was cold to the Texas native, and the morning temperature was hovering around that mark. “I put my suitcase on the porch earlier.” Leo Grayson swung his head in search of it, peering through his wire-rimmed glasses.
“I’ve already loaded it in the trunk,” Jessy informed him. “Did you have anything else?”
“No.” He glanced expectantly toward the barn. “Is your father ready to leave?”
“Dad got detained at the last minute. I’ve been deputized to drive you over to The Homestead so you can catch your plane.” She pulled her foot off the step and turned around to walk to the driver’s side of the pickup cab.
“Shouldn’t you be in school today?” There was a faint smile on his face as he followed her to the truck. In the short time he had stayed at this southern outpost of the Triple C Ranch, he’d learned that Jessy Niles had her own opinion on the relative importance of certain things.
“Not really.” She shrugged indifferently, hopped into the truck, and slid behind the wheel, all in one fluid, effortless movement. She waited until he had climbed into the passenger side and shut the door before she elaborated. “There wasn’t anything special going on in school today, no tests or anything. I can call Betty Trumbo tonight and find out what the assignments are. But I didn’t see any point in going and maybe getting snowbound in town.”
The truck rumbled to life under the turn of the ignition key and the pumping of her foot on the gas pedal. Her last comment drew a curious look from Leo Grayson. “The weather forecast said there was only a chance of flurries today.”
“According to Abe Garvey, we’re in for the first snow-storm of the season. He was born and raised here on the ranch, nearly seventy years ago. I’d take his word before I’d listen to some meteorologist who doesn’t understand the peculiarities of this climate. Abe’s hardly ever wrong,” she concluded.
“It looks like I’m getting out of here just in time.” Once Leo Grayson would have scoffed at the less than scientific weather predictions of old-timers in this area who cared not a hoot for the patterns of fronts. But he’d found their predictions just about as accurate as any professional meteorologist’s. If one said snow flurries and the other said snowfall, something was bound to happen.
Once the buildings of the south camp were lost from sight, there was nothing for miles in any direction but the monotonous sweep of rolling grassland, rising on swells of earth and dipping into shallow hollows. Trees were so few and far between they became landmarks, consisting mainly of cotton-woods along some vagrant stream. The raw, gray day made the lonely stretch of country seem bleak and empty. There were wide, open spaces in Texas, but nothing in Grayson’s experience as desolate as this.
Hot air began blowing full force out of the vents as the truck’s engine warmed up enough to release its excess heat. When his glasses steamed over, Leo took them off and wiped them on the inside lining of his coat. Absently he squinted to look out the window, but not even his blurred vision could make the muscular landscape appear more inviting.
“I don’t know how you can stand it out here.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose, then glanced at Jessy.
“Never been anywhere else.” She drove with the relaxed competence of a man, one hand resting on the top arc of the steering wheel and the other gripping it. Leo supposed she had been driving since she was eight or nine. That was about the age most of the ranch kids started, usually rigging up some kind of device so they could reach the brake and still see where they were going.
“I’ll bet you can hardly wait until you’re eighteen so you can leave here and see something more of the world than grass and sky.” The lonely rigors of this kind of life didn’t appeal to him. It was bound to be worse for a girl.
“I’m satisfied with my life here,” Jessy replied, aware she was in a minority, since most of the other girls her age were always complaining about the things they were missing. But those “things” didn’t interest her. “I’ve never had any desire to leave. I know”—she drew her attention away from the road long enough to flash him a smile—“that makes me strange. But I don’t care about movies and parties and all that glamorous stuff. I like riding and roping and being outdoors, even when the work is so hard you get tired to the bone. I’d like to be one of those trees, sink my roots deep into this ground and never leave.”
“You’ll change your mind when you get older.” He had observed she was something of a tomboy during the time he’d spent at the Southern Branch camp.
“So everybody keeps telling me.” But she didn’t see that happening. Most of them claimed it was a phase she was going through, but she truly loved what she was doing, and she didn’t see it changing just because she got older.
Leo Grayson just smiled, the way adults did when she showed resistance to their prediction. “Wait until you discover boys.”
“Where is it written that boys and horses don’t mix?” Jessy countered.
Her one and only crush had been on Ty Calder, now in his third year at college. But it had been too one-sided to survive, especially after that humiliating experience with that kiss this past summer. It still made her cheeks redden when she remembered what a joke it had been to him. All the other boys she chummed around with at school events were just that—boys. None of them worth getting excited about.
“I guess it isn’t.
” He looked at her again, recognizing a maturity in her attitude that he hadn’t suspected.
There was a classic purity to her profile: the strong chin, the clean jawline, and the prominent ridge of her cheekbone. Her hair, the color of spun-dark caramel, hung in loose, thick waves to her shoulders. Leo Grayson found himself admiring and respecting the girl he saw. Her features contained a strength that seemed a match for the land, and she came on with a confidence that could face its challenge. Pretty she wasn’t, but pretty wouldn’t last out here, he realized.
“You are a handsome girl, Jessy.” No other adjective suited her strong looks, yet it didn’t diminish her potential womanliness in Grayson’s eyes.
“Me? I’m as plain as a potato.” She dismissed the compliment.
“No, you’re not.”
“Look.” She sounded very patient with him for being so blind to her faults. “I’m too tall—I’m taller than most of the guys in my class.” But Leo noticed she didn’t slouch to disguise her height. “I’m too thin, and it doesn’t matter how much I eat, I can’t get any curves. And in the bosom department, I laid an egg—a pair of them.”
The few times he’d encountered her frankness, it had always amused him, but he had to struggle to keep from laughing aloud at this candid assessment of her female attributes.
“What are you going to do when you graduate from high school?” he asked to change the subject.
“Stay here and work. That’s one of the benefits that go with being born and raised on Calder land. All you have to do is go to the boss and ask him for a job. On a ranch this size, there’s always a lot of work,” she said.
“What will you do?” He frowned.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged that it was too far in the future to decide. “I might stick with range work, or help at the day school, or maybe work in the commissary.” There were any number of choices, although she preferred the first.
But she also knew that even though some of the wives, especially the younger ones, pitched in during the calving season or on a roundup when they were short of cowboys, no female on horseback was drawing regular cowhand wages. There was a silent prejudice against women holding that male-reserved job on the ranch. Nothing had ever been said about her getting paid for a cowboy’s work in the summer.
Jessy switched the subject, transferring the focus from herself to his work. “What’s the verdict on all the tests you’ve been doing? Are the drilling rigs going to be shifting to our part of the ranch?”
“No. It’s going to be my recommendation that it’s too iffy here.” Since his decision was a negative one, Leo didn’t regard it as secret information. “I think we’ve exhausted all the possibilities of future oil or gas discoveries on the Triple C.”
His gaze went to the side window of the truck, the glass steamed over at the corners. The contours of the rough land resembled rigidly flexed muscles, bulging biceps covered with hairy grass. To his eye, it looked worthless, too damned arid and barren. It required a hundred acres to support one cow with a calf. It seemed so unproductive, such a waste of so much land.
“It’s a crime,” he murmured aloud.
“What?” Jessy didn’t quite catch what he said.
Leo roused himself. “I was just looking out the window and thinking of such a valuable resource sitting idle.”
“You mean the grass?” The parched and freeze-dried grass was all she could see, definitely a resource in her experience.
“I’m talking about all the coal that’s underneath it, so close to the surface.” A huge deposit of low-sulfur coal underlay this whole region of eastern Montana. “All a man would need to do is scrape away that worthless soil and there it would be.”
“You don’t even have to scrape the ground away.” Jessy smiled as if knowing a secret and let up on the accelerator, looking around to get her bearings on how far they’d come. “Do you want me to show you?”
“Do you mean there’s a place where the vein of coal has been exposed?” he asked with growing interest, and she gave him an affirmative nod. “Yes, I’d like to see it—if it won’t take us too much out of our way.”
“It won’t,” she assured him and turned the truck onto a trail that was little more than two rutted tracks running through the grass. “But you’ll have to hold on. It’ll be a bumpy ride.”
The warning was an understatement. Leo Grayson ended up with one hand braced overhead and one jammed against the dashboard as the pickup bounced over the rough trail. Jessy gripped the steering wheel with both hands to keep it from being jerked out of her grasp. Conversation was impossible on the teeth-jolting ride. The trail crested a rise and fell steeply into a hollow. Jessy braked the truck to a stop at the bottom where it leveled out.
“There it is.” She gestured with her hand to a cutbank.
Except for a thin layer of sod matted with dead grass atop it, the exposed section was solidly black. There were plenty of indications that its enlargement was man-made.
“Most of the older homes on the ranch are heated with coal furnaces,” Jessy explained. “There’s a couple-three areas like this scattered around. We just come and get our own fuel. It doesn’t cost anything but the labor.”
Giving in to his professional curiosity, Leo braved the cold temperature and climbed out of the pickup to take a closer look. It was one thing to know the coal was under the ground and another to see the large exposed seam. He wrapped the scarf more tightly around his head and neck and walked forward to investigate the high black bank.
Jessy watched him from the warmth of the truck’s cab, faintly amused by his fascination over something so common. Getting the winter supply of coal was not a chore anyone on the ranch fancied. It was dusty, dirty, hard work, and constantly having to stoke the furnace was another inconvenience. Which was why most of the homes had converted to more modern sources, usually oil or propane. Coal wasn’t practical anymore, even if it was cheap.
Grayson poked around at the exposed seam of black coal, picking up small chunks to study. Finally the cold temperature drove him back to the truck. He scrambled inside the cab, shivering and rubbing his hands together, then blowing on them.
“Ready?” Jessy rested her hand on the gearshift.
“Wait.” He reached inside his coat pocket and brought out a shiny black chunk. “Do you know what this is?”
“Coal.” She gave him a look which questioned his intelligence.
“It’s buried sunshine.” His voice was enthusiastic. “Coal is the sun’s energy that was trapped in ancient forests eons ago—giant ferns and trees. In an endless cycle, plants died and rotted and more grew on top of them to die and rot. Then came floods of water forming inland seas. The pressure of the water compacted the buried layers of plant life, first making peat, then coal.” He looked at her. “This piece of coal holds the energy from sunlight of four hundred million years ago.” “Let me see it.” With a frown of curiosity, Jessy took a closer look at the ordinary lump of coal.
The next morning, Leo Grayson was in the cool, air-conditioned office of E. J. Dyson, going over his final report and recommendations. In contrast to his previous day’s attire, he was dressed in a lightweight business suit and tie, his head bare and showing the thinning patch at the crown of his brown hair.
The executive office of Dy-Corp Development Ltd. was plushly luxurious, displaying Texas money from its cloud-white carpet of two-inch-thick pile to its walls paneled with genuine walnut. The furniture was thickly padded and covered in the finest-grained leather. The walnut desk was Texas-sized, and the big swivel chair behind it was designed especially for its occupant so the slightly built man wouldn’t appear dwarfed by his own desk.
Mixed in with the room’s rich appointments were the odd pieces of Texas flash—like the Meissen vase sitting atop a table supported by twisted cowhorns or the spotted horsehide blanket thrown over the back of the leather sofa. The office lived up to the image created by its occupant.
Stricklin sat tall and erect i
n the leather-covered side chair, the wire-rimmed glasses increasing his studious air. He completed his perusal of Grayson’s report and passed it to Dyson with a short nod, silently communicating his opinion to his partner.
“I can’t say I’m surprised by your findings, Grayson.” E.J. leafed through the report they had already gone over in detail. “I had a hunch we had exhausted the potential on Calder’s ranch. It’s a good thing I started buying up leases in Wyoming. We’ll go ahead and move the balance of the men and equipment down there.”
“Whatever you decide.” Leo shrugged. His only recommendation had been to abandon the Calder ranch site and not attempt any future drilling, but he hadn’t suggested where to go from there. It wasn’t his job to become involved in such decisions.
“Are you satisfied in your own mind there isn’t anything worth going after under any of the land Calder owns?” Dyson pinned the geologist with a hard look to make doubly sure Grayson didn’t have any reservations. It was a psychological trick that tested the man’s confidence in his judgment. The ones who lacked faith in themselves were rarely able to meet the challenge.
“The only thing under that ground is a mother lode of low-sulfur coal,” Leo stated with a sad shake of his head. “It’s too bad oil is so cheap. It cuts into the market for coal.”
“Coal?” Dyson lifted his head, showing mild interest and darting a short glance at Stricklin, who was meticulously cleaning his nails with a pocket knife. “What do you mean by mother lode? Is there very much of it?”
“Very much of it? I guess so.” Grayson laughed shortly. “I’d hate to have to guess how many million tons of bituminous coal are lying a few inches under the surface.”
“A few inches. You must be exaggerating,” E.J. declared with a dismissing smile and lowered his gaze to study the report again.
