by Terri Farley
So what? Sam thought. What did price have to do with anything? If the dogs had escaped once, they could do it again.
“Their names are kind of common, but they’re bred and trained in Louisiana,” he bragged. “And they cost me a pretty penny, let me tell you. Gator, he’s the bluetick, kind of a speckledy one?” Linc looked at Sam and she nodded. “Then there’s Bub. He’s the pointer, and Shirley is the boss of ’em both, she’s the black-and-tan Walker hound.”
“If they turned feral,” Brynna continued coldly, “they would be exceedingly dangerous. They’ve been trained to hunt, you say, so that’s what they’ll do. Feral dogs don’t have the natural fear of man that wolves and coyotes do.”
Brynna was right. The dogs had scattered only when Jeep had fallen on a member of the pack.
“I’ll alert the Elys, Trudy Allen, and Sheriff Ballard—” Brynna began.
“Aw, now, there’s no sense doing that,” Linc said.
“It would be negligent not to,” Brynna insisted. “Trudy Allen has that blind foal—”
“I just don’t think they’ll bother the horses. I think this”—Linc motioned toward Dad—“was a one-shot deal. I mean, horses are just like big dogs, aren’t they? I don’t see any reason they can’t get along.”
Although Brynna’s face flushed even darker at Slocum’s statement, she didn’t bother educating him. She just finished her sentence.
“—and her grandchildren come to visit, too.”
Brynna crossed her arms in a rigid bar at her waist, waiting.
“I promise my dogs won’t get out again.” Linc’s voice overflowed with mock patience. He raised his right hand as if swearing in court.
“Huntin’ dogs want to hunt,” Dad said.
“I’ve got a dog handler,” Linc protested. “His name’s Karl.”
Sam looked over in time to see Brynna’s eyebrows arch in surprise.
“He wasn’t around today,” Linc said, shrugging. “But Karl keeps them in line.”
Sam had to call Jen. That’s all there was to it. Jen lived on Gold Dust Ranch where her dad, Jed Kenworthy, was Slocum’s foreman. They’d know the dogs and their handler, Karl. If he even existed.
Judging by Dad’s and Brynna’s expressions, they hadn’t heard of a newcomer, either.
“I’m going to take this inside, okay?” Sam said, holding up the plant.
“Yeah,” Dad told her, then nodded at Linc and said, “Thanks.”
Sam hurried toward the house. She’d caught Linc Slocum lying more than once. This time it should be easy.
Sam’s nose tingled at the aroma of the sauce Gram was stirring.
“Oh, yum,” Sam said as she placed the potted plant in the middle of the kitchen table.
“Burritos for dinner,” Gram said. “I should be making better use of that cooking class I took in New Mexico. What do you think?” she asked as Sam stared into the dark-red chili sauce.
“I think I may start drooling if I don’t call Jen right now.”
As she dialed, Sam summed up Linc’s conversation with Brynna and Dad for Gram.
Gram shook her head. “That man’s more irresponsible than a teenager.”
Sam felt her mouth curve in a lopsided smile, but just then Jen answered the phone.
“Have you dried out yet?” Jen teased.
“Oh yeah. You’ll never guess what happened on my way home.”
After she told Jen about Dad’s accident, Sam asked Jen to tell her all she knew about the dogs and their handler.
Jen hesitated. “I can’t say much,” she mumbled. “Mom might think this falls into the ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ category.”
There was such a thing as being too polite, wasn’t there? Sam twisted the phone cord, impatiently.
“Hold on. She’s on her way out to hang laundry,” Jen hissed.
“I’m patient,” Sam said between gritted teeth. “I can wait.”
Gram was cutting beef into bite-sized pieces for burritos, but she didn’t pretend not to be listening. She smiled when Sam claimed to be patient, then gave her two onions, a cutting board, and a knife.
“So you don’t get bored waiting,” Gram said softly, though she knew Sam hated to peel onions.
After a full minute of silence, peeling, and sniffing away tears the onions brought to her eyes, Sam heard Jen take a long breath.
“The guy’s a sleaze,” Jen announced.
“It figures,” Sam said. “Why didn’t you tell me about him before?”
“I only met him once, and if he’s the dogs’ handler, he’s controlling them—or not—by remote control.”
“What do you mean?”
“Right after Linc hired him, the guy left,” Jen said.
Knife poised in midair, Sam thought that over.
“Mince them,” Gram whispered.
Sam rolled her watering eyes, but she didn’t protest. She was too busy wondering why Linc had lied.
“You know how everyone’s always saying Linc needs more cowhands, but he doesn’t hire any?” Jen asked.
“Except that creep Flick,” Sam put in.
“Right, and—hey, are you crying?” Jen asked incredulously.
“Chopping onions,” Sam said with a sniff.
“Oh, okay. So you know how Flick turned out to be a criminal? This guy Karl—I don’t know his last name—is the same sort of lowlife.”
Sam believed her. Though she was only fourteen, Jen had the mind of a scientist. Instead of jumping to conclusions, she analyzed situations. If Jen said Karl the Dog Man was a crook, Sam was 99 percent certain he was.
Sam’s pulse seemed to buzz in her wrists.
Linc Slocum had hired Flick to capture the Phantom. Why had he hired Karl?
Sam told herself to stop worrying. Jen had said Karl was gone.
“If this guy comes back, is he a good enough cowboy that he and your dad can handle the Gold Dust herd alone?”
Jen didn’t answer. Her words came out in a tumble.
“Mom’s done with the laundry and I’m supposed to be dusting furniture. I can see her through the window and she’s coming this way. Gotta go.”
Then, just before she hung up, Jen added something Sam couldn’t quite make out. As the receiver clicked down, Sam tried to replay the words.
But they didn’t make much sense, because it sounded as if Jen had said, “Karl’s no cowboy. No way in the whole wide world.”
Chapter Eight
Gram looked at Sam with open curiosity.
“So what did Jennifer have to say?” Gram asked as she placed the meat into a cast-iron pot to brown.
“She didn’t know much about the dogs or Karl, the guy who’s supposed to be their handler. Jen met him, but she said he didn’t act like a cowboy and she never saw him work. He was there one day and gone the next.”
Gram didn’t comment. She just carried on with dinner.
“Put those”—Gram nodded at the onions Sam had cut—“in with the meat.”
Sam used the dull edge of the knife to sweep the onions off the cutting board and into the pot. As the onions sputtered, Sam’s mind remained on the dogs.
Linc had come close to admitting only Karl knew how to control the hunting hounds. And Jen said he’d vanished. That didn’t make sense, and it made her worry.
Of course, Dad, Jed Kenworthy, and the Elys would try to protect the cattle and horses on the three ranches bordering the La Charla River. But what would happen to the mustangs? If those dogs were fearless enough to attack a horse with a rider, tackling a foal would be like play.
The Phantom, New Moon, Yellow Tail, and the other mustang stallions would watch for raids on their bands, but could the foals keep up with a fleeing herd?
Sam gnawed her lower lip. What could she do?
Only when the onions and meat sputtered and a spatter of hot shortening hit her hand did Sam step back.
She almost collided with Blaze. The dog frisked around Dad and Brynna as they came into th
e kitchen.
“Well, that was a useless apology,” Brynna said.
Dad shrugged. “Might be the best he can do.”
Brynna gave a groan of disbelief.
“Wyatt, he wasn’t sorry! Linc Slocum wants what he always does—his own way. He doesn’t care about other people, animals, the land, or anything else. And what,” Brynna asked as she pointed an accusing finger at the plant in the middle of the table, “is this about?”
Sam laughed. Brynna was right. Buying a potted plant for Dad was kind of silly.
“I’ll rescue the poor thing,” Gram said. “There’s a sunny spot in the living room that might suit it.”
“The apology isn’t the point,” Brynna said loudly. Then, as if she’d run out of anger, she sank into her chair at the table. She leaned back and tilted her head to look up at Dad. “I wouldn’t accept his apology anyway, not when you got thrown.”
“Jake was shocked, too,” Sam said.
Dad gave her a wry smile. “So you been announcin’ I fell off my horse.”
“Only to Jake,” Sam rushed to tell him. “And only because he trapped those dogs and I thought he should know to be careful.”
“I’m joking, honey. A man’s pride don’t count for much in a situation like this.”
Was Dad still joking? Sam couldn’t tell.
“Where are you hurt?” Brynna asked sternly.
“I’ve already been seen to by an expert,” Dad said, looking toward Gram as she heated tortillas on a griddle.
Brynna followed Dad’s glance. When she still didn’t look satisfied, Sam explained what she’d seen.
“Jeep reared and went over backward,” Sam said. As the attack played out in her mind all over again, she used her hand to show the Appaloosa falling like a huge tree. “Dad’s shoulder hit first, then he and Jeep sort of pressed the black-and-tan dog—”
“That would be Shirley,” Dad said.
Brynna ignored Dad’s light tone.
“So Jeep fell on top of you?” Brynna asked.
“No, I kicked free of the stirrups before my leg got trapped under him. That’s why I fell off.” Dad looked thoughtful, as if he was weighing his decision. “If I’d stayed in the saddle, I might have ridden through it. That mighta been best, ’cause it sure scared me when he didn’t get up.”
“What?” Sam asked. “It seemed like he got up right away.”
Dad shook his head. “You were busy with Ace. That little mustang wanted to go after those dogs and teach ’em some manners, didn’t he?”
Brynna still didn’t smile.
“One rein got pinned under Jeep, so he couldn‘t swing his head to get up,” Dad explained. “Took him a minute to figure out what was going on, but he didn’t panic. Lucky they were split reins. Soon as I fished that one out from under him, Jeep just lurched up on all fours.”
Brynna’s sigh coincided with the arrival of their dinner plates. For a while, Gram’s spicy burritos drove out serious conversation.
They lingered over dinner, but conversation was sparse. By the time Gram set a plate of cookies on the table, Dad was ready to talk about the accident again.
“Seemed like an awful long time between knowin’ Jeep would fall and the instant I hit the ground,” Dad said.
“Like slow motion,” Gram agreed. “At the heart of an emergency, time seems to click off one second at a time.”
Dad rubbed the back of his neck. His brown eyes met Sam’s. She didn’t think she could have looked away if she’d wanted to.
“Here’s the thing,” Dad said. “In this sorta life, I could get hurt bad, even killed, any time.”
Sam pushed back from the table. She didn’t want to hear this, but Dad’s eyes said she’d better not leave.
“I’m careful, sure,” he said. “But total safety’s impossible when you do what we do.”
Why was Dad saying this? It was exactly what she tried not to think about.
“But job safety’s not what I was frettin’ about as Jeep was falling,” Dad said with a half smile. “One sentence musta run through my head a dozen times. Know what it was? ‘Oh shoot, I haven’t taught her how to run the ranch.’”
The kitchen was quiet except for the coffeepot starting to perk.
Sam’s gaze swung to Brynna, but her stepmother shook her head.
“You.” Dad touched Sam’s shoulder. “After I’m gone—”
“Dad, do we have to talk about this?” Sam felt tears prick the corners of her eyes.
For most kids, this conversation would be an ugly “what if” situation. Not for Sam. She knew Dad could die. After all, Mom had.
“Starting tomorrow, I’m gonna start teaching you what it means to be a rancher,” Dad told her.
Sam leaned back against her chair and felt as if she were shrinking. She hadn’t even mastered life as a high school student, and now Dad wanted her to learn to take over the ranch.
Is that why Dad had let her go after the horses alone? Because he wanted her to know how to do things in case he died? That was way too much responsibility.
“Now, what else do you want to talk about?” Dad asked.
It was the opening Sam had been waiting for. She pushed aside her fear and started talking.
“Remember when I told you that Jen and I want to go on a campout?”
By the time Sam finished explaining Jen’s plan to round up the strays as a Father’s Day present, Brynna had gone upstairs to change out of her uniform and Gram was washing dishes.
Dad might have given her an outright “no” if Blaze hadn’t jumped to his feet and begun sniffing at the bottom of the kitchen door.
“We’ll see how this hound situation plays out, first,” Dad said, distracted. “Just now, Blaze seems to think we have company.”
Their visitor was Jed Kenworthy. Before he could even knock, Dad slipped outside.
“He doesn’t want us in on whatever Jed’s gonna tell him. It’s got to be about Linc and the dogs, don’t you think?” Sam asked Gram.
“You’re probably right,” Gram said. “But they’ve been doing this for years. Whenever there’s a decision to be made about ranching, they stroll around, checking fences, looking over the stock, just generally summing things up while they talk. Sometimes they do it at our place and sometimes over at Gold Dust.”
Sam wasn’t the only one frustrated by Dad’s solitary walk with Jed.
Once she came back downstairs in jeans and saw Dad gone, Brynna paced from the window over the sink to the one in the kitchen door, then back to the big window that wrapped the front of the house and gave the kitchen table its view.
Sam could see only darkness through each one of them, but Brynna kept peeking.
“They can have their conversation without me,” Brynna said, as if convincing herself. “So I’m not going out there.”
At last, Brynna busied herself with phone calls.
“I’m just giving our neighbors a heads-up,” Brynna said as she dialed. “So they know that pack’s on the prowl.”
First, she called Three Ponies Ranch, but Jake had already warned his family. They’d increased the hours each brother spent riding the range, keeping watch over their beef cattle.
Brynna’s call worried Mrs. Allen. Just listening to one half of the conversation, Sam could tell Mrs. Allen feared the yapping of her Boston bulldogs, Imp and Angel, might attract the pack of hounds instead of discouraging them.
When Brynna hung up, she turned to Sam and Gram with a bemused smile.
“She’s not the sort to just sit and worry, is she?” Brynna said. “Tomorrow, she’s going into town to shop for dog repellent, and she’s convinced there’s something like a bug zapper, built strong enough for dogs.”
“Where would you shop for things like that?” Sam asked, thinking of the campout.
“Don’t ask me,” Brynna said.
Gram chuckled. She and Mrs. Allen had recently rekindled an old friendship.
“Trudy Allen is a world-class shopper. If t
hey exist this side of San Francisco, she’ll find them.”
When Dad returned to the house, Brynna was first to pounce on him with questions.
“Is Jed going to reinforce the kennel so those deerhounds stay home?” she asked.
“The kennel’s sturdy enough to hold them. Linc’s the problem.”
“There’s a surprise,” Brynna said.
Gram cleared her throat and suppressed a smile as Brynna turned to Sam.
“That was rude of me. I don’t mean to set a bad example, Sam.”
“It’s not like I wasn’t already thinking the same thing,” Sam said.
“Anyway,” Dad continued, “Linc can’t stay away from those dogs, but he can’t control them, either. Still, Jed thinks Linc’s a little shaken up by what happened today.”
“As he should be,” Brynna muttered.
“I’m banking on it,” Dad said, as his attention swung to Sam. “Now, as for your campout, you can go if—”
Sam bounced out of her chair and jumped up and down, celebrating.
“If,” Dad repeated, more loudly.
Sam sat down, but her mind was already spinning ahead. She and Jen would ride for two days, only stopping when they felt like it, sleeping out under the stars with two horses for company. It would be amazing, wonderful, cooler than anything she’d ever done.
But she’d better find out what followed Dad’s if.
Sam settled back into her chair. All three adults watched her with amusement.
“If?” she said patiently, as if she hadn’t just rejoiced like a five-year-old.
“You can go if, at the end of two days, I think you’re gonna be useful out there.”
“Okay,” Sam said carefully.
“You’d be riding out to do work that should’ve been done right the first time.”
So you’d better do it right this time. Sam heard Dad’s hint.
“I’m not saying you two can’t have some fun out of it, but you’ve got a lot to learn before you ride out—like ear-tagging a calf, and branding one.”
Sam struggled to freeze her face. Hurting a calf, even for its own good, wasn’t her idea of fun. But she couldn’t let her city girl squeamishness show.
“Wyatt, end the child’s suspense. How are you going to test her usefulness?” Gram asked.
