The Cowboy

by Joan Johnston

  Summer pulled herself free of his grasp. “Billy and I are friends. I like him.”

  “Why don’t you find yourself a nice man and get married and have a houseful of kids?”

  She stared at him as though he were a two-headed calf. “That’s the most chauvinistic, backward-thinking, Neanderthal remark I’ve heard in a long time. Ever hear of women’s liberation? A woman doesn’t need a man—”

  Owen laughed. “Whoa. Whoa. I take it all back. Then why don’t you find yourself a nice career—”

  “You would say that! Have you ever thought that maybe I’d like to manage Bitter Creek someday?”

  Owen’s brows rose toward his hairline.

  “I thought not,” she said scornfully. “Just because I’m a girl—”

  “The baby girl in the family,” Owen pointed out.

  “I’m not a baby anymore, I’m a grown woman.”

  “You’re twenty. You’re not even old enough to sit at a bar.”

  “No, but I’m old enough to get married to the ‘right man’ and have babies,” she said angrily.

  “Uh-oh. Did someone else bring up matrimony?”

  “That was mother’s suggestion. Daddy sees me as a piece of flesh he can barter to the highest bidder for more land!”

  Owen saw the desperation in his sister’s eyes and felt sorry for her. He’d never been important enough to either of his parents to suffer their interference in his life. He put an arm around her shoulder, tightening his grasp when she tried to shrug it off. “Hey. It’s me. I’m on your side.”

  “You’d never know it,” she grumbled.

  “Just be careful around Billy Coburn, all right? Use some common sense.”

  “Someday you’re all going to realize I’m right about Billy,” Summer said. “Someday—”

  He gave her a comforting squeeze, and aimed her toward the dirt road where they’d left their cars. “Yeah. Someday we’re all going to live happily ever after.”

  Chapter 9

  CALLIE WAVED HER STETSON AT THE NOISY helicopter overhead, the signal she’d prearranged to let her sister Bay know her work driving the herd of cherry-red Santa Gertrudis cattle from the north pasture to the loading chutes was done. At least they’d saved the cost of a pilot by having Bay fly the rented copter. Callie had hired a few cowboys to load the herd onto the tractor-trailer trucks that would take them to the auction house in Bitter Creek. Right now, every penny counted.

  It was only noon, and the bulk of the work was done. But here and there, pockets of wiser cows remained hidden in the thick underbrush. It would probably take Callie, Luke, and Eli the rest of the day to flush them out on horseback and drive them to the loading chutes. Even four-year-old Hannah was helping with the roundup. The little girl had been riding horseback since she was two, and Callie figured her daughter was safer out on the range than she was at home with Sam, who’d spent his days since their father’s death drinking himself into a stupor.

  The mesquite was thick and scraped across Callie’s chaps as she rode. She made a mental note to do a controlled burn in the north pasture in January, when deer and turkey seasons were over, to get rid of the troublesome mesquite, which extended its roots as much as a hundred feet across the ground, competing with the grass for moisture. She watched a red-tailed hawk swoop down and grasp a mouse in its talons and felt herself identifying with the helpless mouse.

  Predators were on the loose. There was no hiding from the disaster that loomed.

  The government was allowing them to pay off the inheritance taxes in installments over seven years. Huge installments. The price of cattle was up, so Callie had decided to wean the calves early and sell her Santa Gertrudis cows. Their cow/calf operation was going to be sorely depleted with the sale of so much stock, but they had no choice if the government was going to be paid its pound of flesh on time.

  Unfortunately, selling the cattle would provide only half the cash needed to pay the first installment of taxes. Callie had to find some way to earn the other $375,000. She could train and sell the horses she’d bought to replace the stolen fillies and come up with a hundred thousand. And the prize money in the NCHA World Championship Futurity in Fort Worth could be as much as $200,000 if she won on Sugar Pep.

  But she couldn’t count on winning. She was going to have to eat some crow—and take Trace up on his offer to train Smart Little Doc. With the fees for training Trace’s horse, and with any luck, her share of the prize money he’d offered if his horse made it into the top ten, she might be able to pay off the government in time to avoid owing interest and penalties on top of the taxes.

  Of course, she was going to have to eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches along with crow over the next year, but at least they’d still have Three Oaks.

  But for how long?

  Callie didn’t allow herself to contemplate the grim future that lay ahead of them. Her mother was still in the hospital, and though she was expected to recover completely, Callie was disturbed at how despondent her mother had seemed the last time she’d visited her.

  “Maybe we should sell,” her mother had suggested.

  “That isn’t necessary, Mom,” she’d countered. “We can come up with the money to pay the taxes.”

  “For seven years? How are the two of us going to keep the ranch going and pay off that kind of debt?”

  “We’ll manage. Bay will be done with school in a year and—”

  “How can we afford to send Bay back to school next semester?”

  “Bay can borrow whatever she needs to finish up. Don’t worry, Mom. Just get well.”

  “How is Sam handling all this?”

  He’s turned into a real pain in the ass. “Sam’s having some trouble dealing with Dad’s death,” Callie said. “But we all have to find a way to go on.”

  “Why?” her mother had asked. “Why keep fighting a battle we’re losing?”

  “Because Three Oaks is our home. It’s where we belong.”

  Callie never got to finish her speech. The nurse had interrupted her. So she never said to her mother, “Where else would we go? What else would we do?”

  The truth was, Callie could probably get work training cutting horses for somebody in California or Texas. And once Bay got her degree, she could get licensed as a large animal vet pretty much anywhere. But what would happen to Sam and her mother and Luke? Callie wasn’t about to abandon her family, and she couldn’t support all of them on what she would make working for somebody else.

  And there was history to consider. The Creeds could trace their heritage back to the youngest of three sisters, Sloan, Bayleigh, and Creighton Stewart, who’d grown up on a cotton plantation called Three Oaks when Texas was still a Republic.

  Creighton Stewart had married Texas Ranger Jarrett Creed, and they’d raised a family of four sons on a plantation called Lion’s Dare. During the Civil War, Cricket had gone to live with her widowed sister, Sloan, on her vast Southwest Texas cattle ranch, Dolorosa.

  But everything the Stewart sisters owned was stolen by a conniving Englishman called Blackthorne. And when Creighton’s eldest son Jake came home from the war—the only survivor among his father and brothers—he’d built himself a home on the comparatively small piece of land along Bitter Creek that was all he had left of his inheritance.

  Callie and her family lived in that house, which had been handed down from generation to generation for more than a hundred and fifty years. The family had struggled too hard to keep Three Oaks. Callie wasn’t about to be the one to give it up to somebody else, especially when that somebody would almost certainly be Jackson Blackthorne.

  Callie had spent more than a little time contemplating Sam’s accusation that Blackjack had something to do with her father’s death. Violence had always been a possibility between the two men. But why now? Had the incident at the Rafter S been the spark? Did Blackjack want Callie’s mother badly enough to kill her father in order to have her? But her mother would have to want Blackjack in return
, and that was just plain crazy. And what about Eve Blackthorne? Callie hadn’t heard anything about an impending divorce.

  Callie shook her head. No, she didn’t think Blackjack had killed her father. But she would be damned if he was going to benefit from her father’s death. She would never give her father’s bitterest enemy the satisfaction of having Three Oaks during her lifetime, not if there was any way she could hang on to it. She owed her father that much, at least.

  The cell phone in her shirt pocket rang, and Callie pulled her horse to a stop to retrieve it.

  “Callie here. What kind of problem? That’s impossible! Don’t do anything until I get there.”

  “What is it, Callie?” Luke asked.

  “Something’s come up at the auction barn. You finish driving these cows to the loading chutes. I’ll meet you there after I’ve taken care of this little glitch.”

  “You sure you don’t need any help?”

  Callie stared into Luke’s worried eyes. “Thanks for the offer, Luke, but I can handle this. I appreciate you doing a man’s job.”

  Leather creaked as Luke shifted his weight in the saddle. He lifted his eyes from the ragged buckskin gloves that protected his hands, which were perched one on top of the other on the saddle horn, to meet her gaze. “I could do more, Callie. I could be a big help. I don’t have to finish high school.”

  She laid a hand on Luke’s thigh, then shifted it to avoid the searing heat from one of the silver conchas decorating the leather pockets on his chaps. “You’re a big help right now. I’m counting on you to finish up here. I’ll see you at the loading chutes later on.”

  Callie spurred her horse to get away before Luke saw the tears stinging her eyes. She couldn’t believe another disaster had befallen them, especially not the one Bay had called to explain. Brucellosis. The vet at the auction barn was claiming one of their cows had tested positive for brucellosis!

  Brucellosis was a sexually transmitted undulant fever that caused cows to abort their fetuses. Their cows had all recently dropped healthy calves. Therefore, they didn’t have—couldn’t have—brucellosis.

  According to Bay, an inspector from the Texas Animal Health Commission had quarantined their cows based on the determination by the vet that their cattle were infected. Which meant they couldn’t be sold—except for slaughter—until the quarantine was lifted.

  Of all the bad luck! The cows were worth only half as much if they were sold for beef, rather than breeding stock. And lifting the quarantine could take months! They wouldn’t be able to make the first payment to the government. Three Oaks would be seized and sold for taxes!

  There must have been a mistake. Callie wanted to see the results of the card test—the blood drawn from one of her cows and put on a cardboard card that revealed the disease—with her own eyes.

  Callie shouldn’t have been surprised to find Blackjack at the auction arena, but she was. Corporate buyers stood by the rail smoking unfiltered cigarettes, eyes narrowed against the smoke, or sat in clumps in the stands swatting at flies, observing the beef cattle being herded into the arena, checking to see whether they had been fed to a grade of “choice” or “prime.” Although with everybody nowadays so worried about cholesterol and calories, there wasn’t much market for the marbled fat found in a “prime” piece of beef.

  Callie crossed to me small stand of wooden bleachers beside the covered, pipe-railed auction arena and climbed up the several rows to where Blackjack sat with his segundo, Russell Handy. It seemed Blackjack had come, like a vulture, to wait for her last dying breaths, so he could feed on what carrion was left.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “I’m auctioning one of my bulls,” he said, gesturing to an enclosed pen beyond the arena.

  That made sense. It was also very coincidental. “Have you heard what happened?”

  He nodded, as though in commiseration, but he couldn’t keep his lips from quirking. “Too bad about your cows. My offer for Three Oaks stands. It’s a fair price, considering I can probably pick up your land at a tax sale for a lot less.”

  “There’s been some mistake,” Callie said.

  Blackjack lifted a black brow. “Is that so? Did you have your cows vaccinated?”

  “No, and you knew very well why I didn’t!” Not only was Strain 19 vaccine expensive, it was risky to vaccinate cows for brucellosis, because sometimes a cow infected with live Brucella abortis bacteria would get hot and go wall-eyed and turn into a “banger,” and you’d get precisely the result you’d been trying to avoid.

  Even if that didn’t happen, the brucellosis antibodies could give you a false positive on the card test at auction, and your vaccinated cow would get a big red B painted on its flank to indicate it could be sold only for slaughter.

  “There are no bangers in my herd,” Callie said.

  “You’ll have to talk to the vet about that,” Blackjack said.

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do.” Callie started down the risers, then stopped and turned around. “You know, we have a common fence line. If my cows end up quarantined for brucellosis, yours could end up being quarantined as well.”

  Blackjack shrugged. “Wasn’t planning on selling any cows anytime soon,” he said. “Guess I’ll have to take my chances when the time comes.”

  Callie felt the anger welling inside her, that feeling of helpless frustration she’d had too often in the days when Nolan was dying of cancer and the doctors shook their heads and said there was nothing they could do. She’d stopped praying to a God who seemed to have abandoned her. She’d thought He’d done his worst when she’d found her father dead.

  But it seemed there was worse to come.

  Callie left the stands without another word and headed for the outdoor pens, where cattle were unloaded from the trucks. It occurred to her long before she got where she was going that Blackjack had most likely loaded the deck in his favor.

  He was president of the local Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, which was responsible for hiring the auction vet. Which meant the man Callie was about to confront had been handpicked by Blackjack and held his job only so long as he kept him happy.

  “Dr. Guerrero!” she called over the noise of the bawling cattle.

  When Tony Guerrero turned to face her, Callie was startled to discover that he’d been talking to Trace. She hid her distress as best she could and crossed to the vet’s side. “What’s this I hear about one of my cows turning up a banger?” she demanded.

  The vet pulled a card out of his shirt pocket and held it out to her. “Read it and weep,” he said sympathetically.

  Callie was sure he didn’t mean his words literally, but it was all she could do not to burst into tears. She turned on Trace and said, “How could you let Blackjack do this?”

  “Callie, my father—”

  “Your father owns the vet, and as sure as I’m standing here, he arranged for that positive card test.”

  The vet shook his head. “That’s not true, Mrs. Monroe.”

  “Oh, really?” she said, doing nothing to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “Who took the blood that supposedly turned out positive on that card test?”

  “I hire a couple of men to draw blood,” the vet said.

  Callie was surprised. She’d thought the vet did it himself. She looked around to see if she knew the cowboys who’d drawn the sample. Maybe she could find out the truth from one of them. “Who did you hire?”

  “Just a couple of drifters looking for day work,” the vet said. “And Billy Coburn.”

  Callie felt her heart skip a beat. “Bad Billy Coburn?”

  “I think they call him that,” the vet said.

  Callie rounded on Trace. “Doesn’t he work for your father?”

  “Not anymore. I fired him for fighting with your brother the night of the Rafter S auction. Remember?”

  Callie rubbed her temples in an attempt to ward off the headache that was threatening. Was it possible Bad Billy C
oburn blamed her brother Luke for losing his job? Had Billy faked the positive card test to get back at the Creeds because he’d been fired? “I want to talk to him,” Callie said.

  The vet stood on the bottom rail of the corral, stuck two fingers in his mouth, and whistled shrilly. When he had Billy’s attention, he waved him over.

  It took Billy a few minutes to weave his way between the cattle and reach them, and Callie watched his face the whole way, hoping for some clue as to whether he was the guilty party.

  When Billy reached the other side of the fence, he stopped, stuck a boot up on the bottom rail, and touched his fingertip to the brim of his hat. “Mizz Monroe.”

  Bad Billy Coburn reminded Callie of a young James Dean. His black hair lay in waves beneath the brim of his hat, and his dark brown eyes glittered with defiance. There was something raw and animalistic about his sharply defined features that appealed to her as a woman. Callie felt a shiver of unwelcome response as his heavy-lidded gaze slid over her body.

  “Did you draw the blood that tested positive, Billy?” she asked.

  “That depends,” he said, eyeing the three of them.

  “Answer the question,” Trace said.

  Billy shot an insolent look in Trace’s direction. “I don’t work for you anymore, big man.”

  Callie spoke before the situation could worsen. “I’m trying to find out if someone fixed a card test on one of my cows.”

  “I didn’t do the card tests,” Billy said.

  Callie frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  Billy took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked it into the dirt. “I gave the blood samples to the guy who was working with me, and he put it on the cards.”

  Callie turned to the vet. “Is that how it’s usually done?”

  The vet shrugged. “We do it all kinds of ways. That way works as well as any.”

  “Where’s the cowboy who was working with you?” Callie asked Billy.

  “Don’t know. He left a while ago for lunch. Hasn’t come back.”

  Callie turned to the vet. “Doesn’t that sound a little suspicious?”