“It’s not like that between Owen and me.”
“Why ever not?”
“The reason that we were asking you,” Charlotte explained, ignoring Hannah’s teasing, “was because that first day we drove into town together, the day they were putting in the rink, you seemed so excited about it that it wouldn’t seem right for us to go without you. Besides, I was hoping that…”
“Hoping what?” Hannah asked, hands on her hips.
Charlotte paused; it was ironic that, when the moment arrived to tell Hannah of her intentions, she ended up as flustered as Hale, unable to say what she wanted. She wondered if this was what he always went through, a tongue-tied, nervous feeling that he just couldn’t shake.
“I thought… I thought that maybe… you’d like to go skating with Hale.”
“Hale McCoy?”
A sickening feeling of disappointment spread in Charlotte’s gut at the realization that there was no way that Hannah would accept. She felt like a fool. She could only hope that Hannah wouldn’t choose to tease Hale even more than she did, lording his offer over him in mean-spirited humor. But then Hannah’s expression softened, if only a fraction.
“Did he put you up to this?”
“Not at all,” she answered truthfully… depending on how you chose to look at it.
“I hope that you don’t think I’m a fool, Charlotte.”
“I would never think such a thing.”
“Because you would have to be deaf, blind, dumb, and likely dead to not realize how smitten Hale is with me,” Hannah explained. “From the first time I ever met him, not an hour off the train from Colorado, I could see that he was more than an enormous ox of a man with a voice louder than thunder but also a bashful, bumbling boy unable to string five words together without blushing like a beet.
“But I’d also have to be without any of my senses not to see that he’s a good man with a heart that’s almost always in the right place. I always figured that someday he’d screw up enough courage to start talking to me.
“I suppose I’ve tortured him long enough. I can’t say that I haven’t had my fun.” Hannah sighed, and then gave a quick laugh. “All right, I’ll go.”
Charlotte was delighted. Besides her hope that Hale and Hannah might finally be able to spend some time together, she also wanted Hale to see Owen in a different light, to know him better and to realize that he was not capable of fouling the well with kerosene. Now, there would at least be the chance.
“Hale really didn’t put you up to this?” Hannah asked. “He wasn’t so shy that he couldn’t do it himself?”
“It’s not like that at all! Honest, it’s not!”
“Then that must mean that he doesn’t know you’ve asked me.”
“I didn’t want to say anything to him until after I’d had a chance to talk to you first,” Charlotte explained. “There didn’t seem to be any point in getting his hopes up if you didn’t want to go.”
“That makes sense,” she agreed, “although I would give just about anything to see his face when you tell him that he’s going on a date with me. I hope that you don’t expect me to stop teasing him just because I agreed to this.”
“Not in the least.”
“Good.” Hannah laughed. “Because I wouldn’t even if you did!”
They made plans for when to be ready out in front of the main house for the drive into town. Charlotte had just begun to walk away, to go tell Hale the surprising and exciting news, when Hannah called to her.
“When you talk to Hale, you might want to step back from him a little ways.”
“What for?”
“Because he’s going to do one of two things,” she explained. “He’s going to either pass out or throw up on your shoes.”
For a minute, Charlotte thought one of Hannah’s predictions was going to come true; Hale wobbled, his knees suddenly going slack, eyeballs bulging out of his head, jaw hanging open. He looked as if he were drunk. Odds were that he would have collapsed at her feet had it not been for the conveniently close fence post that he clung to.
“Hale?” she asked, concerned. “Are you going to be all right?”
“We’re goin’ roller-skatin’?” Charlotte would have thought that Hale would have been over the moon with excitement at the prospect of going out for the evening with Hannah, but instead he looked sick.
“Take a deep breath.”
He tried to oblige.
Charlotte had found him standing alone beside the largest of the ranch’s horse corrals. Within the fenced enclosure, there was not a single horse to be seen; it had been emptied because the ranch was scheduled to receive twenty new horses later that afternoon, wrangled by Dave Powell and a couple of the other men, from Willingston, a town a few miles to the north. The ranch hands had been busy preparing for them for days. Owen had been among a group of men when she had arrived, and though he hadn’t acknowledged her, she felt his eyes upon her, unwavering.
Hale had been happy to see her… until she started talking. Wide-eyed, he had listened as she recounted most of her conversation with Hannah; she thought it wise to leave out the parts where Hannah had known about his infatuation from the beginning, as well as the fact that she enjoyed mercilessly teasing him; if Hannah wanted to tell him all of that, it would be up to her to do so. The effect of her words was almost instantaneous.
“I… I can’t believe you did that!” Hale exclaimed. “I just can’t believe it!”
“But she said that she would go with you,” Charlotte argued. “How can that possibly make you so upset?”
“Don’t you understand? Now I gotta come up with somethin’ for us to talk about, figure out what sorts of compliments I can give her, and even find me some clean clothes,” he explained. “I can’t rightfully take out a girl like Hannah with work stains up and down my shirt and britches!”
“It’s not that bad!”
“That don’t even take into ’count that I smell like a horse stall!”
Charlotte could barely suppress a smile. Hannah was certainly right about one thing: Hale’s heart was definitely in the right place.
“You’ll have plenty of time to get cleaned up,” she explained. “All the way until seven o’clock. That’s when Owen and I will meet the two of you at the ranch house and from there we can drive to town.”
“You and Owen?”
This was the one part of the story that Charlotte had neglected to tell him, choosing instead to focus on the fact that Hannah had agreed to accompany him to the roller-skating rink.
“We’re all going to go together,” she explained cheerfully.
Hale frowned. “I don’t know about that, Charlotte.”
“Are you telling me that you would give up a date with Hannah, the girl you have been pining away for from the first day she arrived here, all because you’re unsettled by the idea of being around Owen, who, I might add, is the girl-of-your-dreams’ brother?”
“It ain’t that simple…”
“Do tell!”
“I ain’t tryin’ to upset you, but I got me a responsibility to John Grant and the ranch to make sure all’s well. Just like I already told you, far as I’m concerned, Owen’s the one most likely to have ruined that well, regardless of the fact that he’s Hannah’s brother.”
Ever since she had seen Hale at the breakfast table, Charlotte had been hoping that he had found a reason to absolve Owen, some evidence that was contrary to his earlier accusation of guilt. She was disappointed that Hale was as suspicious as ever.
“I told you before that I thought you were looking at the wrong man,” she reminded him, straightening her back in a clear indication that she meant to stand her ground. “I just think that if you spent some time with Owen, if you really let yourself get to know him a bit, you’d soon realize that he couldn’t possibly be responsible for what you’re accusing him of.”
“I know you think kindly on him,” Hale said, looking down on her with eyes that were filled with confusion, “
maybe even a bit more strongly than that, least from where I’m standin’, but I think you should be careful. I’ve come to care for you an awful lot since you’ve been here, like a brother would a sister,” he hastily added out of fear she might take it the wrong way, “so I’m gonna do my best to look out for you.”
“Then come to the roller-skating rink. What better way to ensure that Owen doesn’t make any untoward advances?”
Hale sighed heavily, realizing that he was never going to be allowed to win the argument. “All right, you win.” He threw up his hands. “But don’t think that I ain’t gonna be watchin’ you like a hawk.”
“If you can manage to take your eyes off Hannah long enough!”
Charlotte found Hale’s overprotectiveness flattering and rose up on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek; she wondered if Owen was still watching them and if what she was doing made him nervous.
Before Hale could so much as mumble a form of reply, a shout rose up from somewhere close by; all heads turned to see Dave Powell leading the ranch’s latest batch of horses to their new home. It was quite the sight to behold; dozens upon dozens of hooves pounded the earth as the horses, their ears pricked high and whinnies rumbling in their throats, came toward her and Hale. Dave and the other men kept circling the horses tightly, not allowing them much room to maneuver. Charlotte’s breath caught in her throat. To see so many beautiful creatures together was a sight she was thankful to behold.
“Hold ’um, men!” Hale bellowed, springing into action.
The ranch yard was alive with activity. Men worked furiously at a multitude of tasks, whistling and shouting, pulling open gates, whirling coils of rope over their heads, and waving their hats this way and that. Owen stood opposite her, he and another man ready to funnel a number of the horses into the largest corral. John Grant supervised them nearby with Del, the two of them enjoying the spectacle.
And on the horses came…
Large and majestic, taut muscles straining at their forequarters, the horses surged forward. Charlotte marveled at their many colors: dirty white and tan, coal black, mottled grey, earthy brown, and every shade in between. Though she had been at the ranch for several weeks, she hadn’t managed to lose her sense of wonder when she saw them and she had never seen this many at one time.
Stepping up on the bottom rung of the nearest corral fence, Charlotte strained to survey all the activity. The lead horses, just behind Dave Powell’s saddled mare, entered into the narrow space between the first two corrals. Now the task was to move them into the corrals.
From where Charlotte stood, she could see nearly to the end of the train of horses. She found herself smiling uncontrollably, but just as she was thinking how wonderful it would be for Christina to see something like this, she caught sight of something troubling at the rear of the procession.
A ranch hand she didn’t recognize, slightly older and with a large stomach that overhung his pants, leaned against a gate as if he didn’t have a care in the world. That was what drew her attention to him; his lack of activity was so obviously different from that of the other men.
Then he picked up a board that, from a distance, looked as if it had a couple of nails driven through it. He looked around carefully, as if he wanted to see if there were any eyes on him. He never looked in Charlotte’s direction.
What is that man doing?
Without warning, the man swung the board hard, driving it into the rump of one of the last horses in the procession. The black horse screamed in pain, rearing up on its back legs, huge eyes wide and rolling, before finally hurtling headlong into the group of animals just in front of it. Its panic caused a chain reaction; it was like watching a boulder as it began to roll down a hillside or a tree just cut as it crashed to the ground, each picking up speed as it went. One wild horse collided with a second who struck a third, which barreled into a fourth and fifth, and so on until what was once an orderly group became a riot, a calamity that instantly roared out of control.
There was nothing that anyone could do fast enough to stop it. It was a stampede, and it was coming right at the men.
Chapter Twenty-one
CHARLOTTE COULDN’T SHAKE the feeling that the scene unfolding before her wasn’t actually real; it was as if she were watching an adventure serial or a newsreel at the theater. Panicked horses churned up the earth, the previously pleasant clopping replaced with a threatening thunder that shook the ground. Eyes bulged and manes twitched as the situation grew deadly serious. The fear was so thick in the air that she felt as if she could reach out and touch it.
With the horses trapped between the wooden fences of the corrals, there was nowhere for them to go but forward; they raced that way in a state of frenzy. Dave Powell tried to turn his horse toward the ruckus behind him, but it caught up to him so quickly that there was nothing he could do. The muscles on his forearms strained as he desperately tried to maintain control of his horse, but his mount was determined to bolt and he found himself swept up in the melee.
Ahead of her, Charlotte could see Hale’s mouth opening and closing, as he shouted instructions, but she couldn’t hear a sound save for the charging horses and the incessant beating of her own heart.
Someone was going to get killed…
The situation was growing worse by the second. One of the ranch hands was unlucky enough to be caught in the passageway between the corrals; the man was too close to the onrushing horses to have time to squeeze through the fence to safety. The first horse struck, smashing him into the railing with impressive force before sending him crashing to the ground in a heap. The horse barreled on. Charlotte feared that the man had been killed. Then she was relieved to see him curl up his body and cover his head with his arms.
While most of the stampeding horses raced straight forward, several of the more panicked animals tried to find other ways to get away; a black horse with a white spot high between its eyes leaped into the air, bringing its hooves crashing into a section of fence, intent on getting either over it or through it. The force of the horse’s blow buckled the wood, but the fence held. The screams the horses made spoke of their terror.
Snippets of conversation floated to where Charlotte stood, incomplete and unfinished.
“… get to the gate before…”
“Watch out for that…”
“Charlie needs…”
“Luke! Be careful of that…”
Charlotte felt that she should do something, but she had no idea what. As on the day of the fire, she knew that nothing was expected of her, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t want to help. She would never be content to stand by while others worked.
Before she could decide on a course of action, a horse collided flush with the fence of the corral on which she stood. Its powerful body sent such strong reverberations down the length of the rails that Charlotte’s hands were unable to maintain their grip and she was flung off and onto the ground, landing painfully hard on her hip.
Quick as she could, Charlotte righted herself. Only moments before, she had felt that the events unfolding around her were straight out of the motion pictures, but now they seemed unbearably real. While the danger of the fire had pressed her from all sides, she had not known the fear she felt now.
Thankfully, the terrorized horses were not racing forward in a steady group, but straggling along. Just next to her, a tan and white horse hurtled past, a few feet from where she sat, frothy spittle flying from its lips, the wind of its passing strong enough to tug at her clothes. In front of her, horses continued to collide with one another, into the railings, everywhere they could possibly go; a pair of them even managed to make their way into the main corral as had been intended. The chaos was everywhere, overpowering.
You’ve got to move… you’ve got to go now or you’ll be trampled!
Desperately, Charlotte looked around for help; it was then that she saw Owen. He was opposite her, halfway through the fence, his eyes on her as he gauged their surroundings. Suddenly, h
e raced into the gap between two horses, waved his arms at the deadly approach of another, before diving headlong to his left, landing on the ground and rolling until he reached her. Without a word, he covered her with his body, shielding her as another horse pounded past, its powerful hooves missing his leg by scant inches.
“We can’t stay here!” he said in her ear.
“You don’t need to tell me that!” she murmured in confusion. “What?”
“Now isn’t the time to ask questions! Go! Go! Get to your feet and run!”
Unsteadily, Charlotte did as Owen told her, rising to her feet and stumbling forward, paying no attention to the charging horses as she desperately tried to make her way to the fence railing. Safety lay beyond, so she focused on it. Her hip hurt from where she had landed on the ground, but she ignored it as best she could. The fence was so close, only a matter of feet, but it seemed miles.
Without warning, Owen shoved her hard from behind, sending her sprawling into the loose dirt, her chin striking the ground. She never thought to pause and wonder what had happened, choosing instead to crawl and scramble, one handful of dirt following another, inch by painful inch. She was just about to the bottom rail of the fence, about to crawl under to safety, when a sound reached her ears that stopped her cold, freezing the blood in her veins.
Behind her, Owen yelled in agony.
The force of the collision lifted Owen from his feet as easily as if he had been a rag doll, tossing him into the air without effort. The blow from the horse’s thick body was tremendous, sending brilliant chards of pain running wildly down the length of Owen’s body. It brought an agony unlike anything he had ever felt before. For a long moment, everything went blacker than the deepest night. His head incessantly rang like a church bell on the day of a wedding. All the air in his lungs was driven out by the force of the impact, leaving him gasping for air; he winced painfully from the effort and wondered if he hadn’t cracked a rib. When he hit the ground, he was so dazed that he thought he must have banged his head against a rock or a fence post. Desperately, he struggled against the urge to sleep, to close his eyes and let the pain simply fade away.
Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family] Page 19
