LOVE OF A RODEO MAN (MODERN DAY COWBOYS)

by Hutchinson, Bobby

  Mitch choked on his coffee and nearly fell off his chair.

  In the next hour, for the first time he could remember, he and his father actually tried to have a conversation. The fact that it was about whether or not Wilson should trade the station wagon in on a four-wheel-drive unit didn’t matter at all.

  The fact that he asked Mitch’s opinion mattered one hell of a lot.

  Mitch called Sara’s cell several times that day and missed her each time. Finally, just past noon, he gave up and drove into Plains, absolutely determined to snatch her away from her work for just an hour, to talk through the strain that was between them... and hold her in his arms and kiss her until she was breathless, until all the tension between them disappeared.

  He was parking the truck in front of the vet office when the sirens started wailing down the street. A fire truck and an ambulance tore by, and when he opened the office door, Sara was frantically snatching vials and supplies from the drug cupboard in the hall and stuffing them into a case.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw him, and he took a quick, anxious step toward her when he saw the naked fear and the relief on her pale features.

  “Mitch, oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here. How did you know? C’mon, there’s no time to waste, carry this...” She thrust another bag at him and raced for the door. “I called Doc Stone and he’s meeting us out there, Floyd’s gone to fetch him...”

  “What the hell’s going on? I came to see you...”

  She was already half out the door. “You didn’t know? Oh, Mitch, it’s Bill and Carol Forgie...their barn’s on fire. Some of the horses are already. ..” Her voice broke, and her face crumpled. “Oh, Mitch, I’m so scared.”

  After the first, paralyzed instant, he took charge. “C’mon, I’ll drive.”

  Together they raced for the veterinary van.

  From several miles away they could see the black smoke rising ominously over the rolling hills.

  “The barn’s so damned old,” Mitch said fearfully, and Sara swallowed the fear in her throat and nodded. “It’ll go up like tinder,” she said in a strained voice. “Horses aren’t smart about getting out, either. They panic and refuse to leave what they figure is the safety of their stalls. I only hope Bill doesn’t try being a hero.”

  Mitch remembered the ambulance racing past and cold fear overcame him. He cursed the potholed road and stepped still harder on the accelerator, ignoring the bone crushing jolts the van made.

  They rounded the final corner, and both of them gasped aloud with horror. The stable was an inferno, with flames shooting high into the air. Several neighbors were already on the scene, their trucks parked helter-skelter in the meadow, and men ran frantically in pursuit of two horses crazed by the fire and out of control. The animals had huge, raw burn patches on their hides.

  But it was the ambulance, and the sight of a blanketed human form being carefully loaded into it that was most horrifying to Sara and Mitch. The instant the van stopped, they hurried over, just as the ambulance attendants were about to shut the doors.

  Carol, hugely pregnant, was crouching in the back beside the stretcher, her face streaked with soot, the pupils of her eyes dilated with shock.

  “It was a beam, one of those old heavy logs, it fell on Bill’s leg. Sara, the colt...” she was saying urgently as the doors shut and the ambulance started to move.

  The next few hours were chaos, and Sara could never remember them afterward without shuddering and feeling again the awful, helpless nausea that had engulfed her all that day. The pitifully few horses that had survived all suffered varying degrees of burns, and she began at once putting packs of sodium bicarbonate on the worst of the wounds and injecting the animals with antibiotics to combat infection and painkillers to calm them and make them more comfortable.

  Mitch helped her until Doc Stone and Floyd arrived, and then he left them with the animals and added his efforts to the volunteer firemen who were desperately trying to keep the flames from spreading across the grass and engulfing the old log house. Most of the outbuildings near the barn were smoldering masses of black ash.

  Sara was humbly grateful for the solid, impassive presence of the old vet working beside her, and now he had no qualms about having Sara double-check the name of any drug he administered.

  Nine animals died that day, three of which Sara and Doc Stone were forced to destroy.

  Floyd wept openly, and Sara wrapped her arms around him and gave him a quick hug.

  Five horses survived, two of which were Scarlett and the colt, Butler.

  It was Sara’s turn to burst into grateful tears when someone led the tall mare and her rangy foal out of the woods and into the makeshift corral where the surviving animals were. Somehow, the two had escaped without a mark, the only animals totally uninjured.

  Mitch happened to be there, and wordlessly he gathered her into his arms and held her for long moments, knowing exactly how she felt about the mare and the foal they’d helped deliver.

  Before evening, more and more vehicles bumped their way down the dusty road, bearing relatives and friends of the Forgies, but also concerned residents of the area who’d heard about the tragedy and wanted to help in any way they could.

  “Bill’s got a badly broken leg and a couple of burns on his back, and Carol’s gone into labor,” one of Bill’s cousins told Mitch that afternoon. “It’s one hell of a tragedy for them, losing this stock and their barn.”

  Sara heard, and tears filled her eyes again when she remembered Carol telling her once how much she wanted Bill present when the baby came. All those bright and shiny dreams, lost in one day.

  Mitch thought bitterly about dreams as he sweated and coughed his way through the thick haze of smoke that hung over the area. Bill’s dream of a breeding stable was Mitch’s as well, and the tragedy that had befallen his friend seemed a personal loss to Mitch.

  The time finally came when there was nothing more to be done that day, for either Mitch or Sara, and they drove wearily back to Plains, exhausted both mentally and physically.

  Mitch drove immediately to the hospital, but he and Sara weren’t allowed past the nursing station. Bill was resting comfortably, the pudgy nurse informed them, a statement Mitch seriously doubted, and Carol was still in labor. No visitors were allowed.

  “Want to come out to Bitterroot with me?” Sara asked.

  Mitch shook his head. “I have to get home, there’s chores to do.” Belatedly he remembered telling Wilson at noon that he’d be gone only an hour or so. It was now nearly ten at night. Well, they must have heard by now about the fire. All the same, it wasn’t fair to leave him with Mitch’s work as well as his own.

  It was an excuse, however. Mitch hadn’t talked to Sara as he’d planned to do that day, and now he just couldn’t. Partly the problems between them seemed insignificant now, buried by the day’s happenings...but partly, too, Mitch was no longer certain about dreams and futures.

  All the cheerful optimism that he’d felt that morning seemed to have burned away with the fire, blown away with the smoke that was all that was left of Bill and Carol’s hopes.

  He kissed her apologetically, and through the bone weariness felt the surge of need she inevitably stirred in him. If only that was all there was to consider.

  “You were wonderful with those animals today,” he told her, wishing he had more to offer, wishing he could regain the confidence he’d had earlier that day about the two of them.

  Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair stank of smoke.

  “So were you. But our being heroes doesn’t much help Carol or Bill, does it? Do you think they had insurance to cover the loss?”

  Mitch shook his head. “Bill told me they couldn’t afford it. They had a small fire policy on the buildings, but I think the animals will be a total loss.”

  Sara shuddered at the memory of those dead animals. “Life doesn’t seem very fair sometimes, does it?” she said.

  Mitch remembered his brother as he’d been
a year ago last Christmas, with his youngest daughter on his shoulders and a smile on his face that seemed never to fade.

  “No,” he said roughly. “No, life isn’t fair. I used to think you got out of life what you worked for, but now I’m not sure anymore.”

  There didn’t seem anything else to say.

  Mitch heard that Carol had given birth to a baby girl in the early hours of the morning, nine pounds, seven ounces, and wonderfully healthy, and also that it was several hours before Bill could be brought on a stretcher to the nursery to see his new daughter.

  Everyone in the community said what a terrible thing the fire had been, but it was Dave Hoffman who did something about it. He called a meeting in the school gym that Friday night, and half the town turned up. “We’re a small community,” he began, “and the way I see it, we can’t afford to lose many more people off the land hereabout. Neighbors used to help one another when a barn burned down, and, of course, we can do that, have a barn raising for the Forgies. But seems to me these youngsters need a mite more than that, losing their horses the way they did. No use having a barn without stock to put in it. Seems to me if we could figure out a way to raise some cold hard cash, give them a new chance at some breeding stock, they could begin again.”

  Ideas flew thick and fast. Someone suggested a dance, and someone else said why not a barbecue as well?

  It was Millie Jackson, the postmistress in Plains, who came up with the rodeo idea. Everyone loves a rodeo, she boomed in her foghorn voice, and they could incorporate the barbecue and dance, and it would draw a much larger crowd than anything else and make a heap more money.

  Everyone agreed enthusiastically. Mitch wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but before the evening was over, he found himself in charge of the rodeo committee.

  He tried to explain that being a rodeo competitor didn’t qualify him at all for organizing one of the damn things, but nobody listened, and he felt totally alone and less than confident about the massive job ahead of him.

  Just when he needed Sara for moral support, of course she wasn’t there. She’d come to the meeting with Mitch, but a call had come for her before Dave even got through his talk. She’d whispered to Mitch that someone’s horse had colic, shrugged apologetically to him and quietly slipped out of the hall.

  He wondered if the time would ever come when they’d make it together through one single social occasion, start to finish. Their wedding, maybe? It didn’t look too promising.

  Mitch found out in the next week that he despised and abhorred committees. Every suggestion he made required endless discussion and hundreds of phone calls and never ended up amounting to a hill of beans in the end. In desperation, he consulted Dave, who gave him great advice.

  Put one person in charge of the others, Dave instructed, someone formidable, with a sense of order and a knack for making decisions fast, who isn’t scared of having everybody else scream at them. Then just go ahead and make the major decisions yourself and tell the committee afterward.

  It worked. There was a certain justice in appointing Millie Jackson head of the hive, Mitch decided. The rodeo had been her bright idea in the first place, so she might as well absorb some of the flak. And having run the post office for years, she was used to telling people that certain things just wouldn’t do. And at two hundred and thirty pounds, with lungs like a drill sergeant’s, Millie managed just fine at keeping the committee in perfect order as it argued over whether the rail fence should be six or eight poles high, which let Mitch get on with the important stuff.

  Mitch didn’t need to check the rodeo schedule to know there was a professional rodeo in Spokane, easy driving distance from Plains, the second week in August. It surprised and shocked him a bit to realize that he still knew precisely where the next rodeo was scheduled, and when. It was Saturday, August 13. He craftily set the date for the Plains Rodeo for Sunday, August 14, and then sat down one evening with the phone, a list of his old buddies’ numbers and a couple of cold beers to wash away any slight guilt he might feel at coercing those buddies into donating their time and talents for a good cause, seeing they were in the area, anyhow.

  Wasn’t there an unspoken rodeo code that said one cowboy helps another, he queried plaintively time after time in the next hour? He threw in the promise of barbecued beef and cold beer and bent the truth a bit about the dozens of sex mad female rodeo fans in the area, and the Plains Rodeo suddenly took on the shine of a major event.

  The best of the riders good-naturedly volunteered their talents, and an unexpected offer of fine rodeo stock came out of the blue.

  “I phoned Frankie. She’s offered her services as bullfighter for the day,” Sara told Mitch when he dropped, by her office at noon one day.

  She was filled with excitement at the thought of seeing her sister. Now, if only there wasn’t this constraint between her and the man she loved, everything would be perfect. The antique ruby engagement ring still circled her finger, but as each day went by Sara had the panicky feeling she and Mitch were getting farther and farther apart.

  She hardly ever saw him since this rodeo benefit came up, and for once, the fault wasn’t hers. Mitch seemed distant and preoccupied whenever they were together. He was like that again today, the same way he’d been ever since the fire.

  They were in her office, and Sara had hastily put the Closed sign on the door outside and switched the phone to the answering service.

  “It’ll be great to have Frankie here, just like old times,” he remarked in an absent tone.

  “Are we going out for lunch, or do you want to share my sandwiches here?” she asked after a long silent pause.

  “Lunch?” He sounded as if it were a foreign word and shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t stay, Sara, no time. I just dropped by to pick up those vitamins you said I should give Misty now she’s in foal.”

  Sara’s heart plummeted. “Oh, sure, I’ve got them right here.” She felt absurdly disappointed that he hadn’t come by just to see her.

  He took them and thanked her, saying he’d see her at Bitterroot probably the next night.

  Undoubtedly he was only coming to Bitterroot to talk to Dave again, she raged silently as she watched him hurry out the front door and down the sidewalk toward his truck.

  Mitch and Dave spent more time together lately than Mitch and Sara. And if he did have any time left over for her, he’d be in a hurry, just as usual.

  Sara smashed her fist down on her desk hard enough to hurt.

  Why did it seem as if she and Mitch were constantly going in different directions at the same time?

  Chapter Twelve

  August 14, rodeo day, dawned clear, with hardly a cloud in the wide canopy of blue Montana sky.

  Everyone on the rodeo committee breathed sighs of relief. The weatherman had obviously paid attention when Millie Jackson ordered sunshine for the day.

  The last of the preparations were complete. Huge banners tacked to power poles for miles around trumpeted RODEO TODAY, as if one single person in the entire area could forget an event that had been the sole topic of conversation and argument and downright chaos ever since the fire at Forgie’s ranch.

  At Bitterroot, Sara was up at dawn. She’d left a message on the answering machine at work, firmly directing emergency calls to the service in Thompson Falls, no exceptions. She’d had no choice about the matter because Mitch had arbitrarily nominated her as official vet for the rodeo and so she had to be there.

  It would have been an ideal morning to sleep in for a while. Instead she got up and showered quickly, plugged in her coffeepot and crept along the path to the tiny cabin next to hers, where Frankie was still asleep. They’d spent last evening gossiping until midnight with Jennie and Gram and Dave, but there were other, more private things Sara wanted to discuss with Frankie, things she’d rather not get into in front of Mom and Gram.

  It was a struggle at first to get Frankie awake enough to do more than grunt, and Sara felt a momentary pang at waking her sleepy s
ister so early. But in a very short time, the whole place would be awake, and with the rodeo starting at noon, there wouldn’t be another peaceful moment all day. And there was no telling when Frankie would be home again to share confidences.

  The birds were sending up a chorus of song and the sun wasn’t quite over the mountain as the two women settled with mugs of strong coffee on Sara’s tiny porch.

  Frankie’s tall, bone-slender frame was still enveloped in a long blue flannelette nightgown. She tucked her bare toes up under the hem and yawned hugely, then took a deep gulp of coffee and settled deeper into the rocking chair.

  “Did Gram give you that nightdress?” Sara asked, studying the decidedly old-fashioned garment.

  Frankie laughed and shook her head. “I bought this myself. You oughta see the one Gram sent me for Christmas.”

  “Don’t tell me. It’s all black froth and see-through lace, right? She gave me one exactly the same.”

  They shared an amused look, and Frankie said, “Poor Gram. She figures she’s never gonna get any great-grandkids out of us unless she takes some drastic measures. She must be delighted about your engagement. She’s going to be asking you ten minutes after the wedding if you’re pregnant yet. In fact, I’ll bet she’s already started knitting little clothes.”

  “Not her.” Sara shook her head. “Gram detests knitting. She’ll probably be out in the shed hammering together a cradle instead.” She sighed and added, “Gram’s going to be disappointed. If we do get married, it’ll be a long time before we can have any kids.”

  “Okay, Sis,” Frankie drawled, sleepy gray green eyes on Sara. “Spill the beans. All last evening I could tell there was something wrong. You look like you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in months, and if it was Mitch keeping you awake all night, you’d be smiling more than you are.” She tilted her head to the side and mused, “Y’know, it’s hard for me to get used to the idea of Mitch Carter as a future brother-in-law. When I knew him he was the idol of every rodeo-crazed female from Calgary to Texas. He left a lot of broken hearts behind when he packed up and came back here.”