The Best Man

by Maggie Osborne

  The black steer that burst snorting and bellowing out of the chute was on the small side, but still weighed over a thousand pounds, and the span between his horn tips approached four feet. Through a haze of dust Dal saw three of the King’s Walk hands run forward, ropes swinging. Two throws missed but the third was a good catch or would have been if the cowboy had been able to hang on. But the steer hooked left and jerked the cowboy off his feet before charging the men waiting near the bonfire.

  “Oh my God,” Freddy gasped as the steer ran through the bonfire, scattering men and wood and branding irons without giving any sign that it did more than infuriate him to run through a blazing fire.

  Dal leaned an elbow on the corral rail and stared at her white face. “Looks to me like that steer didn’t stop on his X like he was supposed to.”

  She gave no indication that she’d heard. She stood there, eyes wide with shock, her parasol drooping at her side.

  Eventually the boys brought the steer down and burned a road brand on his left shoulder. Then a couple of cowboys chased him out the gate, and another steer charged into the corral, a brindle this time, with sharp-tipped horns that gleamed wickedly in the sunlight.

  “Well, what a surprise,” Dal said tersely. “That beeve isn’t following his lines and x’s either. And I don’t notice anybody stopping and assessing. Seen enough?”

  Finally she looked at him, her green eyes as large as lily pads, and nodded. He walked toward the entrance to the barn, hearing her stumbling along behind him. He went directly to the tack room, measured out two coils of rope, then returned to the doorway where she was waiting, her head down, her shoulders slumped.

  “I guess you think I’m stupid,” she said, blinking down at her soiled hem.

  “If you’ve wasted most of a week drawing lines in the dirt, then yeah, I do.” Thinking about it pissed him off. “Have you ridden a cutting horse yet? Done any target shooting?”

  “I was waiting for you to tell me what to do!” He spotted the accusation in her eyes. Like he was to blame that she’d wasted a week. “That’s what we hired you for.”

  “No, Miss Roark,” he answered, speaking between his teeth, “I was hired to take two thousand beeves to Abilene.” He took off his hat and swept a sleeve across his brow, hoping to wipe off the anger along with the sweat. “Frankly, it doesn’t take too much sense to figure out that no wild steer is going to follow the little lines and x’s of your scene.” He stared at her. “I have a suspicion that standing at the corral just now is the closest you’ve ever been to a longhorn. Can that possibly be true?”

  “Pa didn’t like us going down to the barn. He said it was no place for ladies.” The fire went out of her eyes as suddenly as if she’d pinched out a candle. “Oh God. They’re so big. And the horns…” She swayed on her feet and for an instant he thought she was going to topple in a faint. Her eyelids fluttered and when she looked at him again, there was only a hint of her former defiance. “Mr. Frisco, I need my share of the inheritance, but I don’t think I can do this.”

  Well, hell. He didn’t want to feel anything for the Roark sisters, didn’t want this drive to be anything but a job. But he wasn’t so jaded that a beautiful woman couldn’t reach him. And her fear reminded him that he wasn’t the only one with a lot at stake.

  “All right,” he said finally, staring toward the dust and shouts billowing up inside the corral. “First, get out of those skirts and get into some pants so you can move.”

  “I don’t own any pants,” she explained in a voice that told him he should have known this. And maybe he should have. “Les is with the seamstress now. They’re making us some trousers.”

  Walking away from her, he slapped his hat against his thigh and swore.

  He was good at cattle and poker, good at reading a trail. He’d been very good at drinking. But he wasn’t good at women. He didn’t understand their ways or their thinking.

  “If you and your sister don’t start learning how to be a puncher today, you aren’t going on this drive.” He stared into her eyes. “If the three of you fail to meet my very reasonable requirements to keep your butts alive, then there isn’t going to be a drive, and it’s going to cost me sixty thousand dollars and my future. If that happens, I am going to be one pissed cowboy.”

  “I’m going to be one pissed cowboy, too, Mr. Frisco,” she whispered, looking up at him with those huge green eyes. “Because unless this drive is successful, I don’t have a future either.”

  He continued staring at her, fighting a sudden urge to laugh. Standing there in her fashionable black dress with her silly little parasol, she looked about as far from a cowboy as a person could get.

  Until this minute, she’d been wearing a chip on her shoulder. Now she looked up at him with a moist appeal in her gaze, stripped bare of her pride. He saw a raw vulnerability that he doubted few people who knew her would have believed her capable of exhibiting.

  His swore under his breath. Something about this mercurial woman attracted him almost as much as she irritated him. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A half dozen men turned to look, and he motioned one of them forward, handing him the coils of rope. “Teach Miss Roark how to make a lasso,” he said gruffly. “When she learns that, teach her how to use it.”

  “Wait,” she said, her eyes filled with alarm and her voice spiraling upward. She clutched his arm. “I can’t… those steers are so…”

  His muscles tightened beneath her fingers. “We won’t start with a live one.” When she felt his arm harden, she hastily dropped her hand and spun toward the cowboy so she didn’t see Dal frown then step back and rub his arm. He didn’t want to think about her grabbing him.

  Inside the barn he found a pair of sawhorses and carried them outside to the space between the barn and house. Then he went up to the house, and he lifted down the steer head over the parlor fireplace. After a few minutes of tinkering, he’d lifted the sawhorses to approximate the height of a steer, and he’d nailed the head on the end of one, nailed a stick to the other. He beckoned Freddy and the cowboy forward.

  This is “Marvin Drinkwater,” she said by way of introduction.

  Freddy walked around the contraption he’d built, took off a glove and touched the tip of the horns, shuddered, and closed her eyes. Her dark lashes swept her cheeks, a crescent of ink against a milky background. Now what the hell was he doing, thinking about eyelashes?

  “All right, Drinkwater,” he said irritably. “Work on roping in the morning, and put the ladies up on a cutting horse in the afternoon. I’ll get the other one.”

  As Freddy had predicted, he found Les sewing and chatting with a seamstress from town. When she saw him standing in the sitting-room doorway, her expression altered to one of sullen dislike. So that’s how it was. This one was easy to read.

  “What happened to your cheek?” he asked bluntly. If she’d been in an accident, he hoped the injury was limited to the bruise on her cheek and hadn’t incapacitated her further.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, Mr. Frisco, but I got up two nights ago and bumped into the edge of my bedroom door.” Scowling, she lowered her needle and a length of butternut-colored material.

  He gave her the same speech he had given Freddy. And then he waited. When she was finally ready to step outside, he led her toward the branding corral, having decided she needed to see the same demonstration he’d shown Freddy.

  The next longhorn came snorting and pounding into the corral, and Les’s mouth rounded, her eyes widened, and her hands flew to cover her face. She peeked through her fingers with terrified eyes. When Dal put out a hand to steady her, she forgot that she disliked him and leaned on him gratefully, gasping for breath and trembling.

  “I can’t,” she whispered, staring as three cowboys took down the steer.

  The stink of burning hair and scorched cowhide filled his nostrils, and he had to raise his voice above the bellowing outrage of the steer and the shouts of the men. “Yes, you can,” he
said, offering reassurance that he didn’t believe himself.

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Not if you don’t learn what you need to.” Taking her arm, he led her to the side yard where Drinkwater was watching Freddy examine a coil of rope as if she’d never seen one before. Dal handed Les a lasso that Drinkwater had made. “Study the knot. Learn how to tie it.”

  The two women glared at him as if he were solely to blame for their predicament. He narrowed his eyes back at them because he for damned sure knew they were the cause of his predicament. “When I ride in here tomorrow morning, I want to see both of you tie a lasso and swing it.” If they had been men, they would have flung an obscenity at him, and he would have returned the compliment. Instead, he walked away feeling angry and frustrated, and calling himself a fool for thinking the one in the wheelchair was going to be his biggest problem.

  He found Alex in the ranch-house kitchen, helping Señora Calvos chop onions. At least she was in the general vicinity of where he’d hoped to find her.

  “Would you care for a cup of coffee?” she inquired with cool politeness.

  “This isn’t a social call, Mrs. Mills. If you’re ready, we’ll drive out to the brush poppers’ camp and I’ll show you a chuck wagon.” The day was slipping away from him.

  His instinct was to push her chair, but he didn’t. There wouldn’t be anyone to push her on the drive, and he needed assurance that she could manage by herself.

  At the edge of porch steps she glanced up at him with an annoyed expression. “I’ll need your assistance on the stairs. If it isn’t too much trouble.”

  Pressing his lips together, he bumped her down the stairs, then he let her wheel herself to the buckboard that he’d asked one of the hands to bring up to the house.

  She halted beside the wagon and fixed her gaze on the horizon, her expression stony. “You’ll have to lift me onto the seat.”

  Silently, he lifted her onto the seat of the buckboard, feeling the waves of humiliation that flowed out of her, then he loaded the wheelchair into the bed of the wagon. The high back and seat were woven of rattan framed by sturdy wood. Hard rubber tires capped the wheels. It surprised him to discover how heavy the chair was.

  “I can’t spare a man to help you,” he informed her as he drove the wagon out of the yard. “The wrangler helps the cook when he can, but it’s hit-and-miss. He’ll help you only after his own work is done.” He glanced at her sharp profile. “Can you push that chair over rough ground?”

  “We’re about to find out, aren’t we?”

  They drove the next two miles in silence, then she shifted slightly and glanced at him. “In case you’re wondering, my husband’s sympathies were Union, but he did not serve in the army.”

  “The war’s over, Mrs. Mills.”

  “Is it, Mr. Frisco?” She swept a gaze across his shirt.

  He shrugged. “No sense wasting a good shirt. You’ll see pieces of Confederate uniforms all over the South.” He waited a beat then turned it back on her. “In case you’re wondering, I served in the Confederate army, but not as a soldier. I served in the Quartermaster Corps, trailing cattle for the troops, usually to New Orleans.” Immediately he thought of Lola, and his face darkened. Abruptly, he changed the subject. “How did you lose your leg?”

  “You, sir, are an offensively blunt man.”

  “That seems to be the consensus,” he agreed, smiling. “I’m also a man with a lot to do and not much time to do it.” For about a quarter of a mile, he didn’t think she was going to answer.

  “My husband was a professor and a lecturer of some renown.” She paused as if she expected him to say something, but he didn’t. She lowered her head, fiddling with the braid trimming the bottom of her jacket. “We were late for a dinner party at the home of the university’s president. It was raining.” Her voice thinned. “The driver was going too fast, and the road was slick. We… the carriage went off an embankment and rolled.”

  “And?” he asked when she stopped speaking.

  “When everything was over, my husband was dead, and I was pinned beneath the carriage. My leg was crushed.” She pulled her skirt away from his thigh. “I don’t remember the amputation.”

  He thought about her story. “Have you considered a wooden leg?”

  “Never!” When he looked at her, high color burned on her cheeks. “My husband is dead, Mr. Frisco. We both should have died that night, but I didn’t. I don’t want a wooden leg. I don’t want to walk again as if that night never happened! Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He had no idea. Was she saying if she couldn’t die with her husband, the least she could do was be crippled? Or that her husband’s death somehow became trivialized if she went on with her life?

  “I don’t understand limiting yourself if you don’t have to,” he said finally.

  “If you’re suggesting that I enjoy feeling helpless and dependent, that isn’t true!”

  The color blazing on her cheeks and the ice in her eyes told him that if she’d been able, she would have jumped out of the buckboard. Her chin came up, and she turned her face away from him. “I don’t wish to discuss personal matters with you.”

  “You don’t have to talk about your leg if you don’t want to,” he said. “But you do have to get out of your chair, Mrs. Mills. We’ll measure you today for a crutch, and I’ll have one of the boys make it for you. Or could you manage with a cane?”

  “You have not been listening, Mr. Frisco, so I will repeat myself. I will not use a crutch. I will not use a cane. I can’t think of any way to make my position clearer. It would be a sacrilege for me to walk again when my husband is in his grave.”

  She had a voice that could freeze water when she wanted it to. Clenching his jaw, he peered into the distance, relieved when he spotted the chuck wagon and noticed there was no one in camp. He set the wagon brake, then fetched her chair and lifted her into it.

  “All right, there’s your kitchen. Take a good look.” Leaning against the side of the buckboard, he crossed his boots at the ankle, found a cigar in one of his pockets and lit it.

  The ground wasn’t too rough here, but she still had a difficult time rolling herself forward over small stones, bumps, and the dry winter grass that caught in the spokes of her wheels. Face grim, she shoved herself forward and stared at the utensils hooked on nearly every inch along the sides of the chuck wagon. There wasn’t one of them that she could reach without standing.

  “Come around back,” he said, not offering to assist her though her arms were shaking from exertion. This entire demonstration was a waste of time if she wouldn’t get out of the chair.

  He dropped the hinged face of the chuck box and propped the support leg on the ground. She could see above the work surface, just barely, enough that he could show her the drawers and storage bins, none of which she could reach from her chair.

  “There’s room behind the chuck box to store the outfit’s bedrolls and any large items the cook needs,” he said, showing her the space. He touched the hoops curving over the wagon bed. “In bad weather, there’s a canvas cover.” He wasn’t sure if she was listening. She was looking at the water barrel hung high on the side of the wagon. It was something else she couldn’t reach. “All right, Mrs. Mills,” he said, crushing the cigar under his bootheel. “Pretend that you’re going to make bread. Go through the motions and show me how you’re going to do it.”

  “You know I can’t,” she said in a low angry voice. “I can’t reach the flour bin.”

  “That’s right.” Raising his arm, he lifted a spade from a pair of hooks on the side of the wagon, then handed it to her. “Let’s try another exercise. Eleven hungry punchers are coming in for supper and the first thing they want is their coffee. Dig a pit and make a fire.”

  Pale eyebrows lifted, and she looked at him as if he were insane. After a moment, she drew a breath, then lifted the spade and poked at the ground. Her chair rolled forward, and she juggled the spade awkwardly. After observi
ng several attempts, Dal sighed.

  “Isn’t there a brake on that thing?” When she shook her head, he swore. “There will be by tomorrow morning.”

  “I can’t dig a fire pit,” she said after another couple of tries. She threw the spade on the ground. “I can’t do this at all.”

  “Here’s what is expected of a trail cook.” Lifting a hand, he ticked down his fingers. “You’re the first up, before dawn. You make coffee and breakfast, then call the hands out of their bedrolls. You wash the dishes and pack them away. You make sure all the boys have put their bedrolls in your wagon. You drive the wagon ahead to the noon camp and make dinner. You wash the dishes and pack them away. You drive the wagon to the bedding grounds and make supper. You wash the dishes and prepare for breakfast. If the wrangler doesn’t have time to do it for you, you collect wood or chips for fuel, and you refill the water barrel. If any doctoring needs to be done, the cook does it. If there’s sewing to be done, the cook does that, too.” He hooked his thumbs in his back pockets and rocked back on his boots, staring at her. “Can you handle those duties without getting out of your chair?”

  “Why are you bothering to ask?” Even her lips were white. Her hands shook on the wheels of the chair. But no tears brimmed in her eyes, just anger and frustration. “Even if I could reach everything and dig a fire pit, I don’t have the faintest notion how to cook over an open fire.” Lowering her head, she pressed her fingertips against her forehead. “This is hopeless.”

  “Difficult, but not hopeless,” he said, leaning a shoulder against the chuck wagon. Truly, she was a beautiful woman, with an elegance of dress and manner that would have made it impossible to imagine her on a cattle drive even if she’d had both of her legs. She belonged back East in her social, cultured world, not out here on the range.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she whispered, fixing her gaze on the utensils hanging on the side of the chuck wagon. “My husband… everyone thought we were… but it cost more than you imagine to keep up appearances, and we…” Halting, she dropped her glove and raised her head. “I need my share of the inheritance. I can’t support myself without it.”