Texas Blonde

by Victoria Thompson

  "Of course not; I'll take Joshua with me. It would be a good experience for him to see another kind of life." Josh recognized her tone. It was the one she used to wheedle things out of his father, half-coaxing, half-seductive.

  But his father would not be moved. "You can leave here if you want to, Amelia. I won't stop you, but you aren't taking Josh. He's my son, too, and this is his home, his heritage. He stays."

  Paralyzed with fear, the boy Josh had listened as the mother he adored and the father he worshiped had argued on about his fate. Even now he could not bring himself to recall the rest of the argument, the harsh and ugly words that had decided he would lose his mother forever.

  The day she left, they took her to the train. She was pretending that she was only going back East on a visit. Although Josh's father had ridden the entire way in grim silence, Josh had not said a thing to indicate that he knew the truth. She wept bitterly when she kissed Josh goodby, and she made him promise to write to her. She hugged him tightly, so tightly that for a moment little Josh had thought she would not be able to leave him after all.

  She had, though. She had left and never come back. At first her letters arrived once a week, and at first Josh replied with childish pleas that she return home. Then her letters came less often, sometimes as far apart as six months, until at last they stopped altogether. Josh had never known whether she had simply stopped writing or whether she had died. By that time, he had convinced himself that he did not care.

  And by that time, he had his hands full with the ranch. After his mother's departure, his father gradually withdrew into himself. At first the change was barely perceptible, but after a few years, even young Josh began to notice how little interest his father took in running the ranch. By the time he was sixteen, Josh had virtually taken over, and the other men turned to him for leadership.

  It was no wonder, he often thought, that his hair had started turning white when he'd been only eighteen, since by that time he had already been bearing the full responsibilities of a grown man for several years. His father had merely sat back and watched, a glass of whiskey in his hand, until his death three years ago.

  In all the years since, Josh had been too busy to think about getting married. Or at least that was what he told himself. The truth was, he simply hadn't wanted to.

  Not that he hadn't wanted the comfort a wife could give, of course. And the children; he wanted children. He did want someone to whom he could leave his land, someone who would love it the way he did, to whom it would mean something. But he was not ready to accept the comfort of a bed partner and the promise of children in exchange for the misery he knew a wife could also bring. He'd seen that misery firsthand. No woman was ever going to have the chance to tie Josh Logan up in knots the way his mother had done to his father.

  He'd managed to resist plenty of temptations, too. Every marriageable girl within a hundred miles had been paraded before him at one time or another, at parties and dances and church sociables. And everyone knew that Blanche Delano had been dragging her rope for him for years, ever since old Sam Delano had passed on. Josh knew better than to let himself get caught, though. He wasn't about to let some woman get ahold of his heart and then rip it to shreds. He'd lost his mother, the one woman he had loved. No one should have to go through that pain more than once in a lifetime. Josh had no intention of even taking a chance that he might have to.

  Felicity was quite a temptation, though. If she stayed here much longer, there was no telling what would happen. He might kiss her again, and the next time he might not be able to stop. There was only one solution. He would get rid of her. He would send her away as soon as possible. Day after tomorrow, in fact, when she'd finished with all her picture' taking. With that decided, Josh put all thoughts of Felicity Storm from his mind and fell asleep.

  Near dawn Felicity woke for the last time. She had slept fitfully, tormented by dreams of Mr. Logan and the awful thing that they had done, the thing he had told her did not happen but which she could not forget. As she washed and dressed for the coming day, Felicity tried once more to make some sense out of Mr. Logan's kissing her. She failed.

  No wonder her father had warned her so often about men. How easily a girl could get trapped into a situation like that. And how innocently! Felicity had only been seeking comfort, and look what she had gotten. Well, if Mr. Logan wanted to pretend that he had not kissed her, then Felicity would be more than happy to go along with him, especially since she really had no choice, at least for the moment. As long as she was stuck here on this ranch, she would simply continue to treat him exactly as she had before. Except more cautiously, she decided, putting the finishing touches on her hair.

  Cookie was preparing breakfast when she slipped into the kitchen a few minutes later, but Felicity found that she was much too excited about the coming day to swallow more than a biscuit and a cup of coffee. The men were not even up when she went to her wagon to begin mixing her chemicals.

  Josh was the first man to leave the bunkhouse that morning. Disgusted with the way the others were primping and preening in preparation for having their portraits made, he went on up to the house. There he found Candace waiting for him with his best suit sponged and pressed, and a clean white shirt and collar all laid out. Scorning the finery, he went on into the dining room, determined to see the girl face-to-face. He wanted to get their first confrontation out of the way. The meeting was bound to be awkward, but once it was over with, she would know he was unaffected by her charm and unchanged in his manner toward her. Then life could get back to normal.

  But by the time he got to the kitchen, Felicity was long gone. Josh figured she was probably avoiding him. Unless, of course, the kiss had not bothered her. Perhaps she had forgotten all about it. For some reason this possibility was extremely annoying.

  Felicity watched the men pouring out of the house after breakfast and hurrying over to where her wagon was parked. Anticipation sparked along her nerve endings. This was the first time she would be making photographs without her father beside her, but as much as she missed him, she also knew a surge of excitement at her newfound independence. If her stomach also quivered when she thought about facing Mr. Logan again, she did not allow herself to admit it. She forced herself not to watch the front door to know the exact moment when he joined them.

  "Would some of you men pull my wagon over closer to the pump?" she asked Cody and several others who were the first to arrive.

  The men eagerly fell to the task. Felicity had to smile at their amazed reactions when they discovered the weight of the wagon. Apparently they had no idea how much equipment the production of one simple photograph required.

  When the wagon was at last in place, Felicity glanced around one last time. Mr. Logan had not yet come out of the house. Did he not want to have his picture made? Or was he simply avoiding her? Uncertain which idea she found more disturbing, Felicity pushed all thoughts of him aside and returned to the task at hand.

  She entered the wagon through the rear door, and once again memories of her previous life assailed her-the hours she had spent working frantically in the dark preparing plates for her father, the equal number of hours she had spent developing those plates and then making prints from them. Because of the physical strength required to haul around the huge cameras, few women became photographers unless they had the luxury of a fixed studio from which to operate. Of the few women who did know anything about the "black art," as photography had been nicknamed, most of them had been relegated to the developing room with its monotonous tasks of rinsing and washing and coating and watching.

  Felicity had been lucky, though. In addition to teaching her the mechanics of making the pictures, her father had taught her the art, too. Indeed, he had been more than encouraged in this direction by the fact that she had a natural "eye" for a shot, and a way of dealing with people that calmed the most restive adult and stilled the most rambunctious child.

  Today she would finally put all her father's teachings t
o use without his guiding hand. Pausing over the task of unpacking the glass plates from the barrel in which they had been so carefully placed, Felicity sniffed back a threatening tear. It wouldn't do to cry over him. Her father wouldn't have liked it. Any time he had spoken to her about the mother she had lost, he would quote the verse, "Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him."

  Felicity knew that her father didn't approve of crying over those who had gone on to their heavenly reward. She should be happy for her father because now, after so many years, he was with the wife whom he had loved and missed so very much. Felicity was being selfish to wish him back. Still, she sent a small, sad smile heavenward and said, "I sure would like to have his help with the camera right now, though."

  Just then Cody Wells stuck his head through the open door of the wagon. "Need any help?" he asked.

  Jumping a little, Felicity remembered to send up a "thank you" before taking Cody up on his offer.

  The camera with its tripod was as tall as Felicity and weighed almost as much, but Cody, accustomed to wrestling several hundred pounds of angry steer, had no trouble at all setting it up exactly where Felicity indicated. Then, with the help of the other men, they hung one of Felicity's backdrops on the barn wall. It was the one that pictured wide-open spaces and cacti in the far distance. While the men marveled at how realistic it looked, Felicity glanced anxiously around again. Still no sign of Mr. Logan. She put a hand over the flutter in her stomach and told herself, not to think about him. Quickly, before she succumbed to the temptation to look for him again, she ducked back into the wagon and closed the door securely to prepare her first plate in the resulting darkness.

  After donning the heavy, black India rubber gloves that would protect her hands and putting on a huge rubber apron to cover her new dress, she thoroughly cleaned and polished the first glass plate. Then she poured the prepared mixture of collodion onto the upper left-hand corner of the glass. Balancing the plate carefully on the thumb and forefinger of her left hand with practiced ease, she slowly worked the thick fluid all over the plate until it reached the near right-hand corner.

  When the collodion had set long enough to become tacky, she immersed the plate in a bath of silver nitrate to sensitize it. It was the silver nitrate with its capacity for turning a person's skin black that had given photography the nickname the black art, so Felicity was always careful to wear the rubber gloves, just as her father had taught her.

  After about five minutes, she slipped the still-wet plate into the plate holder, where it would be protected from light until exposed inside the camera. She pulled off the rubber gloves. Then, juggling the bulky holder, she opened the wagon door and stepped out.

  "Who's going to be first?" she asked brightly, slipping easily into the role of managing photographer, the role her father had always played before.

  Suddenly all her eager helpers froze into silence and stared stupidly back at her. Felicity bit down hard on her lip to keep from laughing at them. It was always the same. None of them could wait, but none of them wanted to be first, either.

  Felicity's ingrained modesty made her hesitate to order the men around, but common sense prevailed. If she didn't tell them what to do, who would? "Cody, step right up and let's show them how it's done," she commanded, sliding the plate holder into the camera. She didn't have time for coaxing. The plate had to be exposed while it was still wet, so she only had at most ten minutes in which to make the picture. "Is that your saddle?" she asked when he made no move to follow her instructions.

  "Yeah, but-" he hedged, but Gus interrupted him.

  "It sure is. He spent half the night polishing it up, too!" Gus hooted, drawing raucous laughter from the rest of the men.

  "Well, put it over here," Felicity ordered, pointing to a spot in front of her backdrop. "Have you got a lariat handy? Here, this one'll do," she decided, snatching one from a nearby cowboy. "Come over here, Cody." Brooking no further argument, she took Cody by the arm and directed him to the proper spot. "Hold the rope like this," she said, placing it into his hands. "Where's that saddle?" While one of the cowboys rushed to move the saddle to the appropriate position, Felicity reached up and adjusted Cody's hat to a rakish angle. Then she showed him how to prop his foot on the saddle and how to hold his hands, before racing back to duck under the black cape to focus the camera on her subject.

  Cody was in heaven. Miss Felicity had touched him. More than once, too. To a boy who rarely even had a chance to talk to a girl like Felicity, such contact was intoxicating. He didn't think he'd ever forget the way her little hands felt when they had brushed against his. Just thinking about it made him feel all weak inside.

  "Look here at the camera, Cody," Felicity called.

  Cody didn't have any problem doing that because that's where she was, too.

  "Look tough, Cody," one of the men advised.

  "He couldn't look tough if you put a piece of shoe leather over his face," another scoffed.

  Cody knew he couldn't look tough as long as he was looking at Miss Felicity anyway, so he didn't try. He looked serious instead.

  "That's perfect," Felicity decreed, ducking out from under the black cape again. "Hold perfectly still until I put the lens cap back on. Now ready." She reached up to remove the cap and recited the little verse her father had always used to time exposures because it was exactly ten seconds long. As soon as she had finished, she carefully replaced the lens cap and rushed to pull the plate holder out and return it to the darkness of the wagon.

  Once inside, she removed the plate from the holder and applied the developing solution the same way she had applied the collodion. Then she rinsed the plate in clean water-water that would have to be changed frequently during the day, which was why she had asked the men to move her wagon over near the pump. After immersing the plate in a solvent of silver iodide to fix the image, she rinsed it again.

  At last she could light a lamp, and she did so, holding the plate over the flame to dry it thoroughly. While the plate was still warm, she coated it with varnish to protect the emulsion until she would have time to make a print from it.

  Like all good field photographers, Felicity had developed a sixth sense about being able to judge how good a negative was simply by looking at it. People usually didn't mind having their picture remade on the spot if the first one didn't come out, but if they came back the next day for a print and then discovered they had to have it done over, they got a little testy. Felicity judged that Cody would be more than pleased with his portrait.

  As swiftly as possible, she prepared another plate, and when it was safely locked into the holder, she left the wagon again. This time, Cody was waiting right there to carry the heavy wooden contraption for her.

  "Where's Cody's picture?" someone demanded.

  Felicity always hated to disillusion people. She really should have explained it all to them before she started. "It takes another whole day to make the prints, so I'll only be able to shoot the pictures today. I won't have time to actually develop them."

  The groans of disappointment died away when Felicity assured them that Cody had taken an absolutely famous picture and wondered aloud who was going to be next. This time she had no difficulty securing a volunteer. She purposely did not look around. Whether Mr. Logan had come or not, she did not want to know.

  Josh had watched everything thus far from the front porch of the ranch house. From a distance, the scene was almost comical, that little slip of a girl ordering around men twice her size and being obeyed with fierce devotion. Josh hadn't found all that much humor in it, though, especially when he saw the way she fussed over posing Cody. And the way Cody was following her around like a lovesick puppy dog.

  "Ain't you gonna change your clothes?" Candace inquired from behind him.

  Making a sudden decision, Josh turned to her. "I don't need to change my clothes to go to town."

  "Town? What are you going to town for?" Candace demanded, outraged that he would even consider such a thing on an im
portant day like this.

  "It's Saturday, isn't it? I always go to town on Saturday," he explained reasonably. Besides, he did not intend to sit around the ranch all day watching the spectacle in the yard.

  "You were just there day before yesterday," Candace pointed out.

  "Yes, but I didn't get any supplies," he said, uneasily aware that his own impulsive trip to town to purchase clothes for the girl was probably the reason Candace had gotten the idea for pairing the two of them up in the first place.

  "We don't need any supplies now," Candace said, but Josh was already on his way down the porch steps.

  "Hey, Mr. Logan," someone called out. "You gonna be next?"

  Felicity's breath caught at the sound of his name, and she turned slowly to face him.

  "We're glad you decided to join us," she said, fixing her gaze on the third button of his shirt. She did not trust herself to look into those penetrating gray eyes.

  "I'm not joining you. I'm on my way to get the wagon. Cookie, is there anything you need from town?" he said with creditable nonchalance.

  Felicity stared at him in dismay. He was leaving! He wasn't even going to have his picture made! All her plans for repaying his kindness were shattered, but worse than that, all her hopes for showing him that his kiss had not affected their relationship were shattered, too. Not only was he avoiding her, he would not even look at her. Fortunately, her pride would not allow her to reveal how much he had hurt her.

  Then Felicity recalled that her time was precious. She would not waste a minute of it worrying about Mr. Logan. Resolutely, she returned to the job of posing the cowboy named Gus. But suddenly she was all thumbs. When she adjusted the man's hat, it slid down over his eyes instead. When she propped his shiny Winchester beside his leg, it looked more like a crutch than a deadly firearm. Hastily rearranging the sitting, she forced herself to forget that Mr. Logan was nearby so that she would not completely ruin the shot. While she was mooning over Mr. Logan, her plate was rapidly drying, and she had best remember that.