by Kim Redford
She cocked her head as she looked at him with a smile on her lips and mischief in her eyes. She picked up her last fry and held it out to him.
He took it in his mouth and slowly chewed as he watched her, nodding in agreement that her assessment of him was true.
“If you want your wild thing to never leave, it’s best to feed them something that’ll keep them coming back for more.” And she reached up, rubbing her thumb across his lips to remove a speck of potato.
He licked her thumb before sucking it into his mouth while he watched her with eyes turning dark with desire.
“Still hungry?” She gently tugged her thumb from between his lips even though she didn’t want to do it. She wanted to continue that and so much more with him. But regretfully, now was not the time or place.
“Always…for you.”
As if he understood, he turned away, zipped open the case, slipped out his guitar, and swiveled his legs over the side of the bench. He crossed his leg at the ankle over his knee and plucked a few strings. He glanced at her, raising an eyebrow.
She swiveled so her legs were outside the table, too, and she faced the tall grass and wildflowers in the pasture behind them. She caught the scent of high summer, from the dusty grass to the blooming flowers, and the sound of buzzing bees to chirping birds. She leaned back against the edge of the table and gave a sigh of contentment.
“I wonder”—he played a riff that turned from major to minor key—“if we really need any more than what we have right this moment?”
She sang a few notes that wove up and down and around his music, answering his question with her voice as they created something new, fresh, and unimagined until this very moment of perfect togetherness. They leaned toward each other, excitement building between them, as their music soared above, beyond, and ahead of anything they’d experienced before this time.
“Wait.” Craig abruptly stopped, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and turned on the recorder. “We don’t want to lose our song.”
“We won’t.” She smiled, leaned toward him, and kissed his lips. “And to answer your question, we are at the heart of all we need…and all we’ll ever need. Everything else is simply icing on the cake.”
Chapter 23
After they’d made their recording with several variations of their new song, Craig set his guitar back in his truck, along with the blankets, towels, and trash. He picked up the plats from where Fern had left them on the dashboard and walked back to her. She was still enjoying the aftermath of food, music, and relaxation, so he regretted having to disturb her, but if they were going to search for her lost dance hall, they’d better get started before it was too late in the day.
“I know Sure-Shot and its environs pretty well, so I think I’ll recognize locations on the plats.” He sat down beside her and spread out the copies on top of the table so he could get a better look at them.
“Let me know if I can be of help, but I doubt I know this area well enough to be of much benefit.” She glanced at the papers, then turned her attention back to a red-tailed hawk wheeling above the pasture.
“Thanks for the offer, but I’ve got it.” He studied the plats, one after the other, setting in his mind the locations of early buildings.
“It’s just so beautiful here.” She pointed toward the hunting hawk.
“I know. North Texas is the best of all worlds. We’ll go back to the ranch soon, so you can enjoy the wide-open spaces at your leisure.”
“I’d like that a lot.”
“If these buildings aren’t connected to the town, they’ll be on private property.”
“Does that mean we won’t be able to see them?”
“I think we can get to most because they’re near the old roads and railroad tracks. We might have to wade through tall grass, but we should be able to get close enough to tell if a structure is still there.”
“Sounds workable.”
“It is.”
“I almost hate to leave here because it’s so pretty and peaceful. And it’s special to me now.”
“We can always come back another time,” he said.
“Let’s do. This picnic area harkens back to an earlier time when life wasn’t so hectic and frantic.”
“When we get on the other side of Wild West Days, things will settle down and you can dig into your new life.”
“I want that. I really do.” She reached over and squeezed his fingers.
“You’ll get there.” He clasped her hand, running his thumb over her palm, feeling her softness and warmness go straight to his heart.
“Guess we better be on our way.” She raised his hand, pressed a soft kiss to his fingers, and stood up. “I’m ready for my afternoon adventure.”
“Let’s get to it.”
When Fern was seated shotgun, he settled inside, pulled onto the highway, and headed toward Sure-Shot. His mind whirled with the possibilities that lay ahead, but he didn’t think they were going to find what she had in mind. If the structure still stood, he figured the owner would have investigated its viability long before now and locals would know about it. On the other hand, they were in the Cross Timbers, so if it was located in dense undergrowth, folks could have missed it for many a year.
When they neared Sure-Shot, he pulled off on a rutted road that paralleled what had once been a narrow gauge, north-south railroad line that had connected communities that were no longer in existence, not even as ghost towns, since their pine construction had rotted long ago. He didn’t figure they’d find much because the railroad ties would have been salvaged at some point for their hardwood. Still, he followed the road to what would have been close to the right location. Knee-high grass filled the area, but he didn’t see any structures.
He stopped the pickup. “If a building was still standing, you’d see it from here. It wouldn’t have been a dance hall anyway. Most likely it was a farmhouse.”
“Just think, once upon a time a husband and wife raised children and animals and crops here. They’d have laughed and loved and probably sung songs at the end of a long workday. But now the house that held all those memories is gone.”
“Yet their descendants probably live around here. They’d still be raising kids and horses and maybe singing in the gazebo at Sure-Shot.”
She smiled at him. “I like that idea. Life continues no matter what gets thrown at us.”
“And we build bigger, stronger houses that will withstand the seasons…and storms that always come with them.”
“I was disappointed at first, but now I’m not. We’re just seeing the progression of life.”
“And we’ll probably set it to music.”
She chuckled, nodding at him. “No doubt.”
“Don’t lose hope yet. We still might get lucky.”
He backed out and hit the highway again, watching for traffic and trouble. Out here, all was blessedly peaceful, so he drove to the next turnoff, followed the dusty road—not much more than a couple of rutted tracks in the grass—to another of the plat locations. The area had been brush-hogged, so it was easy to see that there was not a standing structure anywhere in the area.
“Do you want to get out and look around?” He glanced over at her. “We might find an old foundation or something.”
“No point.” She shook her head, looking regretful. “I’ve brought us on a wild-goose chase, haven’t I?”
“No. It’s interesting. Farmhouses out here, I’d guess. I think if there’d been a dance hall, it would have been near the town instead of on the plains. And I also think we’d have heard about it before now.”
“I bet you’re right.”
“Let’s try at least another one just to test my theory. It’s not too far away.”
“Okay.”
He returned to the highway, then turned north and drove along a rutted field that paralleled the
road, sending dust and debris flying around them. He stopped, looked at the area, and shook his head.
“There was once a building here?” She lowered her window to get a better view, but there was nothing but horses grazing in pastures as far as the eye could see.
“That’s what the plat shows, but it’s long gone now.” He could smell dust and horse and hay carried on the breeze coming in through her open window.
“What we need are stone structures.”
“That would help a lot.” He picked up the plats again, thinking there was one in a location that seemed familiar. He checked it again. “This one is closer to Sure-Shot. Why don’t we try it?”
“Okay. I’m willing to see another location before we head home.” She raised her window, cutting off the clear view. “Today’s been wonderful even though we’re not finding any buildings. It was just a wild thought anyway.”
“But a good one.”
He returned to the highway, watching for a little-used dirt road that meandered its way onto the east side of Sure-Short, where horse pastures stretched up to the town. After he’d gone several miles, he stopped again, picked up the plat he wanted to look at more closely, studied it a moment, and laughed out loud.
“What is it?” Fern glanced at him in concern.
“There’s this crazy little triangle of property I bought recently, sight unseen. It was too small to do much with, and the land had been through several family member’s hands after the owner died years ago, so they put it up for sale. Nobody was bidding on it, so I picked it up.”
“Why did you want it?”
“It connected my ranch to the town, so I thought it might come in handy someday. Plus, I like to expand Thorne Ranch whenever I get the opportunity, which isn’t often since families hold on to their land.”
“Are you telling me there’s a building on your new property?”
“Looks like it, if the construction was originally sound, but we can’t expect it to still be standing.”
“What kind of building?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well, let’s go check it out.”
He started back down the road that had turned into little more than washboard ruts that bounced the truck with every turn of the wheels. Pretty soon that played out into nothing but a tall stand of horse-belly-high grass. He stopped there, feeling puzzled. Far as he could tell, his new land started somewhere around here, but there was no road, no fence, no gate. What he saw instead was a thick section of old growth vegetation that reared up out of nowhere.
The Cross Timbers once stretched from Kansas to Central Texas, cutting a wide swath between East Texas and West Texas. Each side of the plains was densely bordered by sturdy post oak, flowering cedar elm, hard-as-nails bois d’arc, blossoming dogwood, Virginia creeper, and thorny blackberry.
The area had originally been part of the Comanche empire that had stretched from Central Kansas to Mexico. In the old days, there had been a brush fire every year and the tree line that made up the border of the Cross Timbers would grow back too dense to penetrate. Comanche warriors had used the prairie between the two tree lines as a secret passage, so enemies couldn’t see or attack them.
Lots of folks in Wildcat Bluff County were descendants of the Comanche and still protected thousands of those acres, but they kept the wildfires under control, so the thicket line didn’t grow back as dense. But this section didn’t grow north-south. It grew east-west. And no way, no how did it belong here.
“What is it?” Fern sounded concerned at his silence.
“You know about the Cross Timbers, don’t you?”
“Yes. We’re in the center of it, aren’t we?”
“Pretty much.” He pointed at the thicket line. “That’s out of place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at it. Hundred-year-old-plus post oaks do not grow in a circle, or semicircle from what I can see from here, with a pretty dogwood tree set in between each trunk. It’s not natural. Dogwoods grow well in the shade, but eighty years is about their limit…unless the soil is enriched in some way so the trees last longer.”
“Maybe the trees aren’t that old.”
“They’re old, all right. And they’re entwined with blackberry vines that would shred most anything trying to get through on foot or hoof.”
“What are you saying?”
“At some point way back in time, a grove was planted here…looks like to keep somebody in or somebody out.”
“That’s a chilling thought.”
“You know it. And why right here near Sure-Shot in the middle of ranchland? It makes no sense.”
“And you own it.”
“Yeah.” He felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t like mysteries. He liked cold, hard facts. And he particularly didn’t like something strange and unusual on his property. It’d require investigation. And he didn’t have time for any more problems in his life.
“What should we do? Maybe MG knows what this section was used for back in the day.”
“I doubt it. I bet her memory doesn’t extend that far.”
“Wildcat Jack?”
“Maybe. But we probably need one of the last surviving elders. They’d know if anybody still remembers why this is here, but it doesn’t mean they’d tell us. If it has a dark history, which I suspect is possible, then they might want that knowledge lost in time.”
“You’re saying they might not trust us younger ones to handle the truth of Wildcat Bluff County?”
“That, yes…or they’ll think that some secrets are meant to stay secret.”
“To protect the innocent?”
“Or not so innocent but still family.” He hated to say those words, but facts were facts and he had a feeling he didn’t want these facts.
“This could turn into an ugly mess, couldn’t it?”
“Yeah. But we don’t know anything yet. It’s all speculation on our part.”
“We don’t want to stir up anything before Wild West Days.”
“That’s sure the truth,” he said wholeheartedly.
“And still…”
“I’ve got an ax with me.”
“For firefighting?”
“You never know, so it’s wise to be prepared for anything.”
“Right.”
“I think I can hack my way through the blackberry vines between that post oak and that dogwood.” He pointed at the largest gap he could see that would allow entry.
“Is it wide enough?”
“If I can’t get through, you can probably squeeze in there and see what’s on the other side.”
“It’s probably just more thick growth.”
“Smaller understory trees and lots of vines are all it could be, because there won’t be enough sunlight getting through under the oaks for something bigger.”
“We could wait and just let this be till after Wild West Days.”
“What?” He glanced over to see if she really meant it, because there was no way he could wait to see what was on the other side of that thick growth.
She smiled at him, appearing mischievous.
“Right.” He chuckled as he opened his door. “You can’t wait any more than I can.”
“So true.”
“Let’s try not to get scratched up.” He stepped down and opened his back door. “I’ve got a couple of sturdy firefighter jackets back here that ought to protect our upper bodies.”
“Good.”
When she walked around to his side of the truck, he tossed her a jacket, then slipped into the other one. He fastened it up the front, slipped his ax out of its protective sheath, and was ready to go.
“Just in case, you ought to take this.” He held out a big, heavy metal flashlight.
“We’re going to get really warm.” She r
olled up the sleeves of the too-big jacket, then glanced at the sun lowering in the west. “Hottest time of the day.”
“We can give up now and go home where it’s nice and cool.”
She just rolled her eyes as she took the flashlight, then tromped off through the tall grass.
“Watch out for snakes,” he called as he caught up with her.
“Thanks…as if I could see one in this mess.”
“If you don’t step on one, it’ll usually get out of your way.”
“That’s also good to know.” She tossed him a look that meant they were both on their own when it came to the local snake population.
He chuckled, knowing she was right. There just wasn’t much you could do about snakes, spiders, or other creepy-crawlers except hope for the best.
When he came to the vegetation line, he pulled leather gloves out of his pocket and tugged them onto his hands. He hefted the ax in one hand, checking its weight, then glanced at her.
“You’d better stay well back when I get to chopping at the blackberries. There’s no telling what’s living in there. Could be a lot of little stuff that’ll swarm out, or bigger things like possums, skunks, squirrels.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice. I’m backing up right now.”
“Good.”
When he made the first downward cut, the loud thud echoing through the area, several crows flew up, cawed loudly in protest, and swept away. After that, all went still and silent. He set to work, chopping long strands of green Virginia creeper that brought forth a swarm of flies when he pulled it loose. He hacked through the thick base of poison ivy, hoping he didn’t get infected when he jerked it out and tossed it aside. He kept hacking and chopping until finally he created an opening so he could see there was a clearing on the other side, but the twisted and thorny branches of a bois d’arc were in his way.
“Fern, we can get in there.”
“Great.”
“But I’ve got to get us past this bois d’arc.”
“Do you need help?”
“I don’t want you anywhere near it. If we got scratched or stuck, the spot could get infected or burn for days. It’s the last tree you want to see when you’re fighting a fire because you know you’re going to get hurt by it. I hate them.”
