It was an old Garth Brooks song which they were all familiar with. When she was through singing, there wasn’t a dry eye among them because they knew she was singing about Dusty.
Mattie closed the piano dust cover and the room was silent.
“We all miss him, Mattie,” Matthew finally said in a low voice.
He placed his hand on her shoulder.
“I know you miss him more, but we have to help each other get through it now. Dusty would want us to be happy and to use his piano to sing happy songs. Only when you played that song, I could feel Dusty coming back to us through your fingers, and your voice. He lives through you, Mattie, and that is how it should be. As long as you are around we will all have a little of Dusty with us.”
Then they all turned and went into the dining room and sat down at the table. Mattie sat there, on the piano stool, looking down at her hands, feeling the tears roll down her face and then she felt Matthew’s arms embrace her from behind, as he kissed the back of her neck.
“Come on, sweetheart, come in and eat with us,” he urged.
Then pulled her up from the bench and held her to him.
“Dad tells me you plan to go on that Mustang roundup with us. We will all be glad to have you along.”
Mattie tried to smile and Matthew wiped her tears away with his fingers.
“It should probably be a lot of fun,” she said as she looked up into his eyes.
Those blue eyes looked troubled. Finally, she pulled herself from his arms.
“I guess dinner is going to get cold if we don’t’ hurry up,” she said and headed towards the dining room as Matthew watched her and tried to stop himself from shaking.
Dinner was silent. It seemed no one knew just what to say except for a remark here and there, talking a little about the upcoming Mustang roundup. Mattie went up to her room when the dinner was over and laid down on her bed.
After a while, she heard piano music drifting up the stairs and she opened her door so she could hear it more clearly. There was someone singing, but she knew it wasn’t McCloud. She stepped out into the hall and came to the top of the steps. Then she sat down, as she recognized Matthew’s voice. She didn’t know he could play the piano, but when she came down a little lower, where she could look into the room, it was him and McCloud at the piano. McCloud was playing the song, while Matthew was singing. She had never heard Matthew sing before and she had never heard the song that he was singing, either, but the words seemed to grab her.
Matthew’s clear low voice carried straight into her heart when she heard him singing.
“Chances are you’ll find me somewhere on the road tonight. Seems I always end up driving high. Ever since I’ve known, it just seems you’re on my mind, all the rules of logic don’t apply. I long to see you in the night. Be with you till morning light. I remember clearly how you looked the day we met. I recall your laughter and your smile. I remember how you made me seem so at ease. I remember all your grace, your style. And now you’re all I long to see. You come to me so blessed to me. Chances are I’ll see you somewhere in my dreams tonight, you’ll be smiling like the day we met. Chances are I’ll hope and I’ll hold all I have, you’re the only one I can’t forget. Baby, you’re the best I’ve ever met. And I’ll be dreaming of the future. And hoping you’ll be by my side. And in the morning I’ll be lonely for the night, for the night. Chances are I’ll see you somewhere in my dreams tonight. You’ll be smiling like the day we met. Chances are I’ll hope and I’ll hold all I have, you’re the only one I can’t forget. Baby, you’re the best I’ve ever met.
The piano was silent and Mattie sat at the top of the steps. The song had touched her in a way she didn’t understand. She realized that Matthew still loved her, and wasn’t giving up on someday having his dream of a future with her. Only she felt she would be betraying Dusty if she went to Matthew. It was going to take some time to get over Dusty, she thought. If anyone ever touched her intimately the way Dusty had, it would be too painful to deal with. She never wanted to be touched by a man again, she thought sadly. Slowly, she stood up, going back to her room and putting her arms around Hope’s neck. She wondered if there was any hope in her life anymore, now that Dusty was gone? Now it was just her and her horse and her dog, she thought, but then she remembered she had a mare now. When she bread her to Apache, her little circle of family would grow.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Are you ready?” Matthew asked Mattie as he looked over at her sitting on Apache’s back.
“As ready as I’m ever going to be, I guess,” she told him.
Buck, Clyde, and McCloud were all mounted on their horses as well and the group rode out together, going through the back of the property until they came to the fence line. Then they all followed each other out the back gate.
“Where are these horses supposed to be?” Mattie asked.
“One of the ranchers took his plane out,” Matthew told her. “He said he spotted them about forty or fifty miles from here, but that was yesterday. They could be farther or closer, by now. We’re just going to ride out in the general direction and hope we can find tracks to follow.”
“So it’s going to take a day or two to get to the general area then?” she reasoned.
“Pretty much, unless they are headed this way, but I don’t see why they would be. They’re not hungry enough to come close to the ranches this time of year. All the fields are full of new grass. We’re hoping there will be several foals. That way, it will slow them down a bit.”
“Do you do this every year?” she asked.
“Nope, only once in a while when the herd starts building up so much that the ranchers start complaining about the wild mustang eating up the grazing land and stallions coaxing away some of their mares. Then the government thinks they should regulate the horses. When that happens, ranchers like us will take them under our wing to save them. If the government had their way, they would just corral them all up and shoot them. Less trouble than having to transport them to a glue factory, I guess.”
“I thought there were laws about protecting the wild horses,” Mattie commented.
“They are always making and changing laws, Mattie, while going against some of them with special permission when they see fit. So we work to stay on top of things to try and protect the horses. It’s a lot of work. We don’t keep that many and have to try to find good homes for most of them. It’s getting harder and harder because fewer and fewer people have the means or the desire to take them in.”
“Dusty was talking about getting some mustangs to train in order to sell and make more money for his ranch,” Mattie told him.
“It’s too bad Dusty couldn’t be here. Then he wouldn’t have to buy them, we could just give him the ones he wanted. When the government adopts the mustangs out, they brand them and you can’t sell them after that. You have to give them away if you want to get rid of them. We only charge what it takes to round them up and feed them when we sell them.”
“A lot of things are too bad,” Mattie said under her breath and Matthew gave her a steady stare. He was thinking the same thing.
“I heard you singing the other night,” Mattie suddenly piped up. “You have a nice voice.”
“You have a nice voice too. I bet we could make a halfway decent sound if we ever tried singing together,” he said, his eyes taking on a soft gentle look.
“Maybe,” Mattie said. “Maybe we could go in and do Karaoke together,” she suggested.
“That sounds like it would be fun,” Matthew said, smiling and thinking that she was starting to come out of her blue mood.
“When we get back, all of us should go,” she said. “What do you think McCloud? You have a good singing voice. In fact, all you boys sing pretty decently. You want to go do Karaoke with Matthew and me when the roundup is over?”
“Sure, why not?” McCloud said.
“I’m in,” Buck replied.
“Well, I’m not gonna be left out,” Clyde added.
Buck gave Matthew the thumbs up sign and he grinned and winked. Mattie was starting to get her spirit back, they all thought.
By noon, they stopped and ate the sandwiches that the cook had packed for them, while they sat under the shade of a clump of trees they found. It seemed like it was rolling hills forever, Mattie thought. She missed the mountains of Eastern Idaho, but they weren’t so far into Montana that there weren’t a few mountains in the distance, that she could look at.
“You ever been to Bannack Montana?” Matthew asked Mattie.
“Nope. This is the first I ever set foot in Montana,” she told him.
“Well, Bannack is a Ghost town now, but back in the day it was some town, and was the Capital of the Montana territory at the time. There was a gold mine there and that is what kept the town going. A man named Hennery Plummer came up from California. No one actually knew he was a criminal. He came and settled in Bannack and eventually became the sheriff of the town. It wasn’t a very big town as towns go, just one street. But there was a bank, a Saloon, a hotel, general store, a schoolhouse, and Mason’s lodge above it. There was also a Christian church and houses along the street. But there was no jail, so Plummer built a little jailhouse with a sod roof. He put rings on the floor to chain the prisoners so they wouldn’t poke holes in the sod roof to escape.
“Unbeknown to the decent people of the town, Plummer was running a gang, or so they thought, that not only stole the shipments of gold but also they stopped stagecoaches and robbed the people riding in them. Since ol’ Hennery knew when all the stages came in, and when the gold went out, they say he would inform his gang, and there was no one that was safe from getting robbed by the gang.
“Everyone was trying to figure out who the gang was, and who led it. They even got a militia up to try and weed the gang out. They ended up hanging men they believed to be gang members, but the gold still got stolen. Finally, they caught someone who had a bone to pick with Plummer and accused him of being the gang leader. Hennery was with his mistress one night and some of the men from town came to the door and told him they needed to see him. He said he would get his coat, but they said he wasn’t going to need it. They took him straight to the jail that he built and he found several of his friends there as well. He and his friends stayed there for as long as it took the town to build a hanging scaffold and then they hung them all together, and buried them next to where the scaffold was built.
“Funny thing, though. Even after the hanging, it did not stop the robberies. Several years later, the mine went bust, and everyone moved from Bannack because Bannack is out in the middle of nowhere, so it was hard to keep the town running. It sat empty for years, and then during the depression, homeless people moved into the little town and started living there. They had a regular community but the state did not want them squatting there, so they kicked them all out, and made Bannack into a state park. They keep the town open for people to go through and have fixed up a couple of the house exactly the way they looked back in the day, so you can look in the windows and see how people used to live back then. All the other buildings are empty.
“The Jail has writing all over the walls, where people that visited signed their names. I think there was already writing on the walls made by the prisoners and the visitors started adding to it. The jail has a terrible feeling when you go inside. All the other buildings feel just normal when you go in them, but that jail, it feels like the old prisoners are calling out to you or something. It gave me the willies when I went inside.
“You know, though. A historian finally figured out who the innocence gang was…that’s what they called them… ‘The Innocence’. It turned out that the members of the militia were actually the gang members and so they were just killing innocent people in the town to keep the suspicion off of them. So the sheriff wasn’t the leader of the gang after all! He and his friends were hung for nothing.”
“I might want to see that someday,” Mattie said.
“I’ll take you if you want. We could make a day of it. It is quite a ways from here.”
“Yeah, that might be interesting,” Mattie said.
After the story of Bannack, they all climbed up on their horses and started out again. Every once in a while, Matthew pulled out his binoculars and scanned the countryside.
“We should be getting pretty close,” he said. “Maybe by tomorrow morning, if not tonight.”
When the sun started sinking and there were still no signs of the horses, Matthew led them off the beaten path, to a shallow river, where he said they should camp the night. They all got down and Mattie looked around.
“Think the river is very warm?” she asked.
“You can go see for yourself,” Matthew said, as he pulled out his tent from the pack he had tied to the back of his saddle.
“Think I will,” she said and took off her boots.
“Going wadding?” he asked.
“Might,” she said. “It’s been pretty hot all day. I’m sweating as much as my horse there,” she told him, and he grinned.
All the boys were setting up camp and Buck was digging a fire pit, while Clyde collected dead wood off of the ground from around the trees and broke off dead branches.
“Not that cold,” Mattie called. “It’s a little deeper up the way, I’m going over there.”
“Fine. Just don’t wander too far away,” Matthew called.
A few minutes later, they could hear Mattie singing.
The four looked at each other and raised their eyebrows.
“Mattie must be enjoying herself,” Matthew said.
“Think I’ll go check it out,” Buck insisted and started wandering up the bank in the direction of the singing.
“Hey, wait for me,” McCloud called and then Matthew and Clyde were following as well.
When they arrived at where the music was coming from, they were met with the view of Mattie floating on her back in water about four feet deep, as she sang an old cowboy song. Her clothes lay in a pile on the bank. Her soft rounded breasts glistened in the light that was starting to dim, and all the boys just stared at her, not saying a word to each other.
Mattie’s eyes flew open and she righted herself in the water.
“Well hello, boys, wondered when you were going to come join me,” she smiled.
They all hesitated.
“You forget, I’ve seen you all naked before except maybe Matthew there. You shy, Matthew? Never took me up on any of my other invitations to take your clothes off, so I was just wondering.”
The vision of Dusty suddenly flashed through Matthew’s head, smiling and saying, “Let her be herself, give in and do things her way.”
He started unbuttoning his shirt.
“I don’t know about you boys,” he said, “but Mattie is right. I’ve been sweating about as much as my horse has.”
And he continued to get undressed. The rest of the crew followed suit as they shucked off their clothes and joined Mattie in the chilly water.
“Thought you said the water wasn’t too cold,” Matthew said as he came up beside her.
“Depends on what your definition of cold is,” Mattie smiled. “Feels fine to me. You’ll get used to it.”
“Mattie, you must be part polar bear,” Buck said. “This here water is shriveling me up to nothing.”
“Sorry to hear that, Buck,” she laughed.
McCloud and Clyde were splashing around just to warm themselves up and it wasn’t long before everyone but Matthew and Mattie, were climbing back out onto the bank.
“We’re going back to the camp,” Buck said. “Don’t get hypothermia in that river there,” he warned.
Matthew and Mattie laughed as the boys took off back down the bank. When they had disappeared, Matthew turned to Mattie. “All the boys love you. You know that, don’t you,” he said softly.
“Can’t marry all of them,” she laughed.
“Wouldn’t wan
t you to…”
He paused and looked at her.
“I just want you to know something, Mattie,” he said in a low voice. “I like you just the way you are. I don’t want to change you or make you into something you’re not.”
“I heard you singing that song the night you brought the piano,” she breathed softly, moving a little closer to him. “Were you singing that song for me?” she asked timidly.
“Everything I do, Mattie, I’m doing for you,” he said, as he moved a little closer to her as well.
“I’m afraid, Matthew,” she said.
“What are you afraid of?”
“That if ever a man touched me, it would remind me too much of Dusty touching me and I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
“I don’t want to scare you, Mattie. I won’t touch you if the thought of it makes you afraid.”
“You have been really kind, getting me the mare and Dusty’s piano,” she whispered softly.
“The piano was McCloud’s idea,” he told her.
“All you boys have been nice, trying to cheer me up the way you have.”
She moved even closer to him, almost touching him.
Matthew looked at her with loving eyes. They were standing waist deep in the water and the tips of her breasts stood hard and alert.
“You look kind of cold,” he said, leaning into her a little bit.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“Not enough to move from this position,” he told her truthfully.
“Maybe if we stood closer,” she suggested.
“How close do you want to get? We’re pretty close as it is,” he pointed out.
“Maybe if our bodies were touching…” she faltered.
“You sure you want to be that close?” he asked. “It’s up to you, you know. You’re calling the shots here.”
“You’re gonna let me?”
“Why not? Every time I try, I screw it up.”
“Maybe, if I just touch you, and you don’t touch me, it might not make me feel as afraid,” she suggested.
Mattie Page 15
