The Cowboy

by Joan Johnston

  Callie saw the stricken look on Trace’s face, but had no time for sympathy. Her son needed her. “We shouldn’t have been keeping secrets from him,” she said as she brushed past Trace.

  He caught her arm. “Where are you going?”

  “To find my son and try to explain this mess to him.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  Callie shot Trace a look that said she would rather go alone, but he didn’t back down. “All right. Come on.”

  Callie headed for the house, expecting Eli to have locked himself in his room. When she opened the kitchen door, she found her mother deep in conversation with her brother Sam. Sam had gotten drunk one night last week and had conceded he couldn’t stay sober on his own. He’d agreed to go to AA and Callie wanted to believe it would help.

  She checked him for signs of drunkenness and was glad to see he was clear-eyed. His newly cut hair was combed back from his forehead and his face was clean-shaven. “Have you seen Eli?” she asked.

  Callie’s mother pointed toward the kitchen window and said, “I saw him on horseback a few moments ago, headed toward the middle pasture. Hannah was right behind him.”

  Callie’s heart skipped a beat. “The middle pasture?”

  “What’s wrong?” Trace asked.

  “I’m having some work done in the middle pasture.” The north and south pastures couldn’t be cleared until the hunting season ended in mid-January, but Callie had seen no reason not to get rid of the mesquite in the middle pasture. “I’ve got a controlled burn scheduled there soon.”

  “Today?” Trace asked.

  “I don’t know. Might be. Maybe. I told the men I hired to go ahead and do the burn as soon as they finished clearing. It could be today or tomorrow or a week from now.”

  The mesquite was being cleared with a tractor the size of a prehistoric beast, with a bar across the front to push the mesquite trees over and funnel them underneath the tractor, where their taproots could be cut with a root plow, slowing down regrowth.

  Once the mesquite had been cut up by the tractor, fires would be set in the four corners of the pasture and tended as they burned toward the center, leaving the pasture ready for planting grass. Anyone riding into the pasture might be caught unawares and trapped by the advancing flames.

  All eyes were directed toward the window that gave them a view of the middle pasture. In the far distance, Callie saw what looked like low white clouds in the blue sky. Or was it wisps of smoke?

  “Wouldn’t they call before they fired the pasture?” Sam asked. “Give some kind of warning?”

  Callie’s cell phone rang, and she answered it. “Is it too late to stop it? I’ve got kids in there, that’s why!”

  She met Trace’s eyes and said, “That was the foreman, calling to let me know they’ve started the burn, and that we should stay clear of the middle pasture until it’s done.”

  “We’d better go find those kids,” Trace said as he headed for the door.

  Callie ran after him. “At least one of us needs to be on horseback,” she said.

  “You take the pickup and try to head them off,” Trace said. “I’ll follow on horseback.”

  “Eli won’t want to come with you,” Callie said. “I should be the one to go in on horseback.”

  Trace met her gaze and said, “He’ll come with me.”

  “Give me one reason why—”

  “I won’t give him a choice.”

  Callie stopped beside the pickup, which had the keys in the ignition, and glanced toward the middle pasture. She saw what was unmistakably smoke. “Hurry, Trace!”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he shouted as he headed for the barn to saddle himself a horse. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Callie gunned the engine, and the back end of the pickup fishtailed as she headed onto the dirt road that led to the middle pasture. The bump gate was located near the center of the pasture, but there were no cowboys there to monitor the burn. Callie realized they must be stationed at the four corners of the pasture, watching for flare-ups along the fenceline.

  She hit the bump gate going too fast and pressed her foot on the accelerator to get through before the gate could demolish the side of her truck. She hadn’t gone more than a quarter mile down the road, when she spied someone on horseback. She honked the horn repeatedly and was rewarded when the figure on horseback waved back.

  It was Eli.

  Callie shoved open the door and clambered down. “Where’s Hannah?” she called to Eli, as he slid off his horse.

  “She was bugging me, so I told her to get lost.” Eli turned to look over his shoulder at the growing cloud of smoke. “But I didn’t know about the fire then, Mom. I swear I didn’t!”

  “I believe you,” Callie said, taking her son into her arms. “Did Hannah turn back? Do you think she went home?”

  “I don’t know. What if she’s in there? She’ll get burned up!”

  Callie could feel Eli trembling in her arms but wasn’t sure whether it was fright over Hannah’s predicament or his own. “Trace is hunting for her,” she said reassuringly. “He’ll find her if she’s in there.”

  Callie called Trace’s number on her cell phone, but got no answer. He either didn’t have his cell phone with him, or for some reason couldn’t answer.

  “You wouldn’t really have let Trace take me away, would you, Mom?”

  “Trace is your father, Eli.”

  “So what?” Eli retorted, tearing himself from her embrace. “That’s his problem, not mine.”

  “I wish I could make this easier for you, but nothing can change the facts.”

  “Did Dad know? I mean, that I wasn’t … You know … his own kid.”

  “He knew,” Callie said. “He loved you anyway, Eli, like you were his own flesh and blood.”

  “But I wasn’t.”

  “No. You weren’t.”

  “You should have told me. How come you never told me?” he asked in an agonized voice.

  I never thought you’d find out, Callie thought. “I made a mistake, Eli. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “What if I don’t want to go with Trace. He can’t make me go, can he?”

  Callie didn’t know what to say. “We can work all that out later. Right now I need to call your grandmother and let her know you’re all right.”

  Callie made the call, realizing that the fire was moving closer. Smoke drifted over them, and she realized she had to do something, that she couldn’t just sit here and wait. “I’m sending Eli home,” she told her mother. “I’m going to go looking for Hannah and Trace, in case …” Callie couldn’t put her worst fear into words. In case I need to get Hannah to the hospital.

  “I need you to go straight home, Eli. Will you do that for me?”

  “You could marry him,” Eli said as he mounted his horse.

  “What?”

  He looked down at her from his perch on Hickory. “Trace. You could marry him. Then he’d stay here with us, and I wouldn’t have to go away with him.”

  Callie was flustered. “I don’t have time to discuss this now, Eli.”

  “I know you like him a lot,” Eli said.

  “Trace and I are already married, EH,” she said, her agitation making her more brusque than she’d intended. “We got married in a private ceremony a couple of weeks ago, after Trace found out you were his son.”

  “You mean, he didn’t even know until a couple of weeks ago? I mean, about me being his kid?”

  Callie shook her head.

  Eli frowned. “So he might have wanted me to be his kid a long time ago, but you didn’t tell him?”

  Callie swallowed over the painful knot in her throat. “I thought … I did what I thought was best.”

  Callie watched the expressions flit across Eli’s face. “I don’t understand. If you’re married to Trace, why isn’t he taking you and Hannah with him to Australia?”

  Callie hesitated, then replied, “He asked us to come. I told him I had to stay here.”


  “Why?”

  “Because this is our home.”

  Eli snorted. “We can have a home in Australia. I wouldn’t mind seeing some kangaroos. Tell him you’ll go with him, Mom. That’ll make everything okay.”

  “It isn’t that simple, Eli.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not! Now I have to go.”

  Eli shook his head and muttered, “Sheesh.”

  “Go back to the house, Eli We’ll talk more about this once I’m sure Hannah is safe.”

  “All right, Mom,” Eli said, kicking his horse into a trot. “But I don’t see why you’d want to stay here in Texas, when all of us can go to Australia with Trace and see kangaroos and platypuses and crocodiles and neat stuff like that.”

  Callie stared after her son. He made the choice sound so simple. She couldn’t believe he felt so few ties to Three Oaks. But he hadn’t had a lifetime to learn to love it as she had. He hadn’t grown up, like she had, with a father who’d insisted Three Oaks must be preserved for the Creeds, no matter what the cost.

  Callie mulled her son’s words. We can have a home in Australia. Could choosing Trace over Three Oaks really be as simple as that?

  Callie called her foreman again and asked whether he’d seen anything—anyone—as they’d followed the fire in from the fence line. “Nothing,” Callie repeated. “I understand.”

  Where was Trace? And where was Hannah? What was happening to them?

  Callie called home again. “Mom? Have you heard any word from Trace? Has Hannah shown up?”

  Callie felt her stomach turn over at the fear she heard in her mother’s voice. “I’m scared, too, Mom. I don’t know what to do. I—”

  Callie heard hoofbeats and said, “Wait a minute, Mom. I hear someone coming. It might be—Oh, no. Oh dear God. No.”

  Callie stared at the riderless horse that came flying past her. It was Hannah’s pony.

  “Blackie just came racing past me, Mom,” she gasped into the phone. “The saddle was empty! My baby is on foot somewhere in that burning pasture. I have to go, Mom. I have to find her!”

  Callie felt frantic. She couldn’t lose her daughter like this. Not when she was about to lose her son. God couldn’t be that cruel.

  She got in the pickup and took off straight across the fields, doing her best to avoid the skeletons of mesquite that threatened to tear out the truck’s undercarriage. She kept a sharp eye out for a second riderless horse. Had Trace found Hannah? Was he keeping her safe? But where could they possibly be safe in this burning inferno?

  Callie slowed as the thick smoke made it difficult to see where she was going. She had the air conditioning off and the vent closed, but even so, smoke was seeping into the cab of the pickup. “Where are you, Trace?” she muttered. “Where are you?”

  And then she knew. The pond.

  Callie headed in the direction of the pond where they’d had their picnic. It was the one place Hannah and Trace might be safe from the fire. Only, Hannah couldn’t swim. What if she’d gone there alone and gotten into the water…

  Callie suddenly found herself facing a wall of fire, with no way to get past it or around it. She looked in the rearview mirror and realized the only safe route was back the way she’d come. She considered trying to drive through the fire but realized that would be foolhardy. If the fire didn’t kill her, the thick smoke would.

  She hit the steering wheel, swearing loudly and profanely as she put the truck in reverse and gunned the engine. She coughed and realized the cab was nearly full of choking smoke. She was having trouble breathing, and as soon as she saw clear sky, she opened a window and gasped a lungful of air. She stared at the crackling fire, which raged across the pasture, leaving nothing behind but embers and ashes.

  “Noooo,” she moaned. “Oh, please, no.”

  There was nothing she could do but wait. It wouldn’t take long for the fire to burn its way past the pond. She could only hope that Trace had thought of the water, as she had, and that Hannah had managed to find her way there.

  It was way too much to hope for. Callie braced her arms across the steering wheel, laid her head on her arms, and said a silent prayer.

  She was startled when someone pounded on the fender of the truck. She sat up abruptly, a smile already on her face, expecting to see a soot-faced Trace holding her daughter. But it was her brother Luke. Her smile faded.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Sam and I came to help.”

  Callie looked beyond Luke and saw Sam waving at her from the van. “I’m glad you’re here,” she admitted. She was afraid to go looking on her own. Afraid of what she’d find.

  “What are you waiting for?” Luke asked.

  “I’m waiting for the fire to get past the pond.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Good idea. That’s where I’d go, too,” Luke said. “Looks like it’s pretty much done burning. Wanta give it a try?”

  Callie started up the engine. “Let’s go,” she said.

  She drove fast, not sure how hot the ground still was and a little worried about whether a piece of burning wood kicked up by her tires could start a fire in her gas tank. The cattails stood tall against the charred landscape. The total lack of vegetation growing in the shade of the live oak had saved the tree from burning.

  “The tree,” Callie said to herself. “I’ll bet they climbed up in that damned wonderful live oak tree!” She was almost laughing with relief. Until she saw the lump near the edge of the pond and recognized the charred remains of one of her striped saddle blankets draped over it. The flesh prickled on her arms, and her heart started to pound.

  She hit the brakes, shoved open the door, and went running. As Callie got closer, she could see Trace was actually lying half in and half out of the water. He had the blanket draped over the upper half of his body. Where was Hannah? She didn’t see Hannah!

  She went down on her knees beside the scorched blanket and slowly pulled it away. Trace lay facedown, his eyes closed, his eyebrows singed, his face blackened with soot. She couldn’t tell if he was alive, and she was afraid to find out. There was no sign of Hannah.

  “How is he?” Luke asked.

  Callie looked up at Luke through eyes blurred by tears, but she couldn’t speak.

  I love him. I need him. How will I live without him?

  Too late. She’d realized the depth of her feelings for Trace far too late. She should have told him how she felt long ago. Eleven years ago.

  Luke reached for Trace’s shoulder and pulled him onto his back—revealing Hannah beneath him.

  “Hannah!” Callie cried.

  Her daughter’s eyes flickered open. “Mommy,” Hannah wailed. “Mommy!”

  Callie pulled her daughter into her arms and clutched her tight, smoothing her tangled, singed curls away from her soot-covered face, reassuring herself that she wasn’t dreaming.

  “Trace doesn’t look too good,” Luke said. “We better get him to a hospital.”

  “I’ll take Hannah to Sam and be right back to help you,” Callie said, struggling to her feet with her daughter in her arms.

  “Is Trace gonna be all right?” Hannah asked as Callie jogged toward the van.

  Callie forced words past the lump in her throat. “I’m sure he’ll be fine, sweetheart.” She resisted the urge to ask what had happened. She didn’t want Hannah to have to relive what must have been a terrifying experience.

  “Trace saved me from the fire,” Hannah blurted. “Blackie threw me off and ran away and I was scared and then Trace came and found me but the fire was all around me.”

  Callie shuddered. That explained her daughter’s singed hair and Trace’s singed eyebrows. “You’re safe now, baby. That’s all that matters.”

  Hannah put her hand on Callie’s cheek and said, “Trace said he loves me and he loves Eli and he loves you. He promised he’ll be my daddy and love me forever and ever.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Callie crushed her daughter against her,
hiding her face against Hannah’s neck so her daughter wouldn’t see the tears spurting from her eyes. What if there was no forever?

  She yanked open the passenger door to the van and buckled Hannah into the seat next to Sam. “Will you take her to the hospital and make sure they check her out? We’ll be right behind you with Trace.”

  “I’ll meet you at the hospital,” Sam said, as Callie shut the door.

  “Thank you, Sam,” Callie said through the open window. A look of understanding passed between them. Her brother was no longer a burden but another member of the family willing to carry his share of the load.

  By the time Callie got back to the pond, Luke had already lifted Trace upright. He still showed no signs of regaining consciousness.

  “I’ll take his shoulders. You take his feet,” Callie said.

  “He probably just breathed too much smoke,” Luke said. “They can probably give him some oxygen or something at the hospital and he’ll probably be fine.”

  Callie didn’t contradict Luke. “Probably,” she agreed, using the adjective he favored. She hoped he was right. But the icy shiver that ran up her spine confirmed her fear that he was wrong.

  “Do you mind driving?” she asked her brother as they loaded Trace into the bed of her pickup. “I want to stay in back with Trace.”

  “No problem,” Luke said.

  As Callie held Trace’s head tenderly in her arms, she wondered if she ought to be doing some kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But when she bent her head down, she could feel his faint breath on her cheek. Maybe Luke was right. Maybe all he needed was a little oxygen at the hospital and he’d be fine.

  She touched his singed eyebrows, shivering when she thought of the risk he’d taken to save her daughter, knowing how close he must have been to the fire. She marveled that he’d managed to find Hannah, and that he’d figured out a way to keep her daughter safe from the suffocating smoke.

  “I love you, Trace,” she murmured in his ear.

  He didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes remained closed, his breathing faint and shallow.

  “Please, Trace. Live.”

  Trace disappeared into the emergency room as soon as they got to the hospital. There was no question of filling out insurance forms for Trace Blackthorne, no question of deposits to ensure payment of his bill when he checked out.