“Quinn?”
He turned and stared up at me.
“Fawn was ... she’s hurt, in ways best seen to by another female.”
“You hintin’ at askin’ to come down to see about it?”
“I guess I ...” I drew myself up. “Yes, I am.”
He planted his fists on his hips. “Hell’s roarings, S’rena, was I talkin’ to myself just now?” I could see his frown from where I was standing. “Grab holt, girl! If you swing too wide a loop you’ll be told soon enough.”
I turned away with a sigh. What have you gotten yourself into, Serena? I trudged wearily back toward the ruined house for a jar of Belle’s heal-all salve. Grab holt, and let the devil take the hindmost.
I knew who the devil was well enough, but I couldn’t help wondering how often I could expect him to come nipping at my heels?
Chapter Sixteen
True to his promise, Quinn sent Sharo up from the barn to help me. Few words passed between us, but for a bright lad like Sharo few were needed, and he was quick to do my bidding, although plainly ill at ease in my company. Whether this was because he was unused to being alone with a woman or because I didn’t look like the woman he remembered, I could not tell.
“I’ll need a chair, and something I can use for a bed. I already have a lamp and bucket, but upstairs, at the end of a corridor, you’ll see a black bag standing outside the door to my room.” I thought of the sodden condition of Bazz and Belle’s things. “Wet or dry, just bring it along. I can always hang my clothes out in the sun, and at least I’ll have my hair brush.”
Sharo looked at me anxiously. “Your hair. Miss S’rena. You have Miss Belle’s hair; she had yours. How this happen?”
Sensing he wasn’t asking how so much as why, I was at a loss for an answer. It was too recent, too raw a hurt. “I know, it’s hard to understand, Sharo. Hard for everyone, even me. But it’s too long a story for now, maybe some day.”
“And Spotted Fawn? She try not to cry, but the tears, they leak through.” He closed his eyes, and drew the tips of his slender fingers down his cheeks.
“That’s even harder to explain, Sharo, but I’ll do everything I can to help her heal.”
“Make her good as new?”
His earnest use of the white man’s lingo made me smile. “Good as ever, anyway.” I picked up the bucket and the wet cloths I had used for washing Belle’s body. Scrubbed and rinsed they would serve as well for Fawn, an irony that did not escape me.
“There are baskets of food on the table in the kitchen,” I added. “You can take them to Mr. Cooper’s quarters after you’ve brought my things. They’ll tide us over until Cobby comes back from town tomorrow. Oh, and Sharo, at the very end of the downstairs hallway you’ll see a pile of wicker hampers. In the top one are jars of that healing salve my sister prepared. Look for the label with the star on it. Bring two, please, and mind the broken glass!”
I knocked at Quinn’s door, but when there was no answer, I let myself in. The large room in which I found myself was surprisingly homey. A row of windows had been punched through the stone walls along each side, flooding with sunlight a comfortable arrangement of wide, high-backed plank chairs centered on a huge stone fireplace. The chairs were cushioned with thick, curly sheepskins; a buffalo hide lay sprawled in front of the hearth. Quinn’s Indian heritage was well represented by an assortment of baskets and clay pots figured with curious geometric patterns and a long, beaded leather shirt lying across the end of the long, low couch under the windows. I picked it up. It was much too small for Quinn.
“Fawn?”
A faint groan, hardly more than a sigh, came to me from behind a door, slightly ajar, opening from the far side of the room. Water-filled bucket and washcloths in hand, I pushed it open with my shoulder. The room was dim, lit only by a narrow window set high in the wall, the furnishings simple: a chair, a small table, a lamp and a bed of the same simple plank construction as the chairs in the parlor. I lit the lamp. Its light revealed Fawn’s girlish form lying curled upon the bed. “Oh, Fawn....”
I knew at a glance that she could not be made good as ever, let alone good as new. Her legs, streaked with the dark mahogany of dried blood, were drawn up protectively against her stomach; the new crop of bruises on her face and arms had ripened to the color of plums. She grimaced as I gently straightened her legs, the better to ease from her body the ragged tube of soiled burlap that served as a garment. The pain of its rough-fibered passage over her abraded flesh caused her to draw in her breath, and her exposed thighs bore the blue-black imprints of fingers, testimony to the force it had taken to rob her of her innocence. It was easier to think Quinn capable of such brutality than Bazz, but Fawn’s own words on the subject, few and halting as they had been, left no room for doubt: the only red-haired man on Morning Star was Basil Cooper.
Why Fawn? I wondered as I sponged the dried blood from her ravished thighs. Her breasts were hardly more than rounded bumps on her narrow chest; her hips still had the angularity of a child. I flattered myself I was prettier in the conventional sense than this dark-haired, dark-skinned little wilding of Quinn’s. Given a more enthusiastic wooing, I might well have succumbed to Bazz’s well-spoken charm. At the end, wooed or not, I was too drugged to resist. Had Belle been telling the truth about the reason for his preferences? I had thought it more likely my sister’s vision of others, especially men, had been fatally skewed by our father’s drunken depravity, yet hadn’t Cobby hinted at it, too? Looking now at poor Fawn, it was as if Bazz had wanted to hurt her.
I washed her from head to toe, from behind her delicate little ears to the hardened, very dirty, soles of her long, slender feet. She seemed to take comfort from my cosseting, so while I waited for Sharo to return with the salve I decided to wash her hair as well, having noticed a rain barrel close by the entrance to Quinn’s quarters. The combination of well-lathered soap and sun-warmed rain water soon dissolved the greasy dirt away, and by the third rinsing I could hear the long, dark strands squeak between my fingers.
I left her, head wrapped in striped toweling like a Hindoo grandee, to answer Share’s rap at the front door.
“I bring chair and your bag and quilt for sleeping,” he said as he handed me the jars of salve.
“No mattress?”
“No. House no good ... your mattress no good.”
“Better than quilt,” I muttered to myself, distressed at the thought of nothing but a thin layer of quilted cloth between me and the damp, cracked plank flooring in Rita’s shack. We stood in silence for a long moment. His eyes looked beyond me, searching, I suspected, for Fawn.
“The baskets, Sharo?”
His eyes sped back to mine. I sensed a reluctance to return to the house, but in the end the need for food overcame it. “Yes. I go bring them now,” he said.
After he left, I led Fawn out into the front room where the light was better. She winced as I applied the ointment to the tender places—dear Lord, there were so many of them!—but uttered not a single word of complaint. I picked up the beaded shirt from the end of the couch, unwound the cloth from her head and slipped the soft leather garment over it, tugging it gently into place on her narrow shoulders, then tied the rawhide strings at the neck. I combed her damp hair with my fingers into a long, straight fall that glistened in the lamplight like a raven’s wing. When I stood back to inspect what I had wrought, she looked up at me gratefully, the shy smile curving her mouth giving promise of the beauty she would soon become.
From Sharo’s expression as he entered minutes later with three baskets, it was clear that in his eyes the promise had already been fulfilled. I glanced from one to the other. His longing gaze kindled a becoming glow of color in Fawn’s cheeks; her long-lashed eyelids swept down. Quinn would not be pleased.
“Take one of the baskets with you to the barn, Sharo. I’m sure you’ve had an exhausting day.”
Sharo regarded me solemnly, considering my words. Exhausting? The concept of fatigue, much l
ess exhaustion, was all but meaningless to this untiring youth, but he recognized my tone of warning well enough. He turned on his heel and left without a word, allowing his proud bearing to speak for him. As I watched him go, I wondered how long his forbearance could be expected to last. One day soon, Quinn might find his lithe, young rival’s challenge more than he had bargained for.
Quinn’s performance upon his arrival home added to the pleasure I felt at the thought of his eventual comeuppance. Treating Fawn like a pretty new toy, he poked into the food baskets, taking what looked best to him, and from them choosing for Fawn the choicest tidbits. Between them, they consumed the meat pies I had made from dried beef to the last gravy-soaked crumb; I made do with cold beans and bread.
I brought over the pot of coffee I had brewed in the fireplace and filled the cup he held up. To reach it I was forced to negotiate the log jam created by his long legs, stretched out and crossed at the ankles.
“Mighty fine chuck, S’rena. If you could get shed of those airs of yours, you might make some rancher a good wife.”
“Are they all like you, these ranchers?”
He looked up at me, his expression bland, but I sensed amusement in his dark eyes. “Mostly. Dumber, maybe ... uglier for a fact.”
“Oh, my. Dumber and uglier, you say? Not much of a bargain. I think I’d rather earn my own keep, thank you very much.”
He peered at me over the rim of his cup. “Well, now, one tasty meal don’t make a summer’s worth. I don’t keep on anythin’ don’t earn a place here, folks and critters alike.”
“And how are you expecting Fawn to earn hers? I’m not sure I did her a favor by cleaning her up!”
Quinn’s eyebrows rose. He began to laugh. “By God, if that ain’t just like a woman. Fawn’s what, fifteen? Sixteen? And you must be pushin’ thirty. You’re jealous, pure and simple.”
Thirty! Deciding a correction would serve only to encourage more insults at my expense, I looked down my nose at him. “It’s your expectations of Fawn that are simple; purity has nothing to do with them.”
“And bein’ righteous don’t have much to do with bein’ right.”
We glared at each other. Out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of Fawn’s mounting distress as she looked from me to Quinn, aware our anger was because of her, but not understanding why. Quinn, alerted by my distracted gaze, got up and leaned down to scoop her up like a kitten out of the chair next to his.
“Off you go, little one,” he said as he carried her back to her little room. “I reckon you’ll know better’n me what needs doin’,” he added as I followed him through the door.
“I reckon so,” I said coolly.
“Quinn?” Fawn murmured from the cot where he’d laid her down. “You stay?”
“I’ll look in on you later,” he said, smiling down into her anxious face, “after S’rena leaves.”
Disgusted by the implication I interred, I closed the door firmly behind him, wishing it had a lock and I the key. I helped Fawn off with her shirt and applied more salve to her bruises. I was newly shocked by the extent of them, but relieved to see no signs of inflammation. She had no nightdress; but the old wool blanket was soft and warm, and before I had finished tucking her in she had fallen asleep.
“It won’t be necessary for you to disturb her,” I announced as I joined Quinn in the front room. He was seated in front of the fire, a lamp at his elbow on the roughly cobbled table beside his chair.
“I said you needn’t disturb her.” My tone was louder, testier.
He looked up, startled, the glow from the ruddy embers tracing out the craggy contours of his face. There was an open book in his lap.
“You’re reading?”
“Godalmighty, is that a sin, too?”
“No ... no, of course not. I didn’t mean ...” I faltered. If my voice had expressed but a traction of the astonishment I felt, it was no wonder he took exception.
“Course you did. The likes of me, readin’ ... it riles you, don’t it?”
“Surprises, not riles. What are you reading?”
He turned the leather spine for me to see the title stamped on it in ornate gold letters.
“Ivanhoe?” I clapped my hand to my mouth.
Quinn turned the tables of astonishment on me by laughing out loud. “Can’t bluff worth a damn, can you, S’rena? I’d surely like to play poker with you— why, I’d strip you clean in no time.”
I could feel the heat rise in my cheeks. “It’s just that Ivanhoe isn’t the type of book ... it doesn’t have much to do with cows and ranching, the kind of life you know.”
He shrugged and tapped the cover with his finger. “Different place, different time, maybe, but folks is folks, even if these in here talk prettier’n we do ... me, anyway. A bullet doesn’t kill a man any deader than a sword through the belly did in olden times, and his family mourned him and laid him to rest just like . .. well, just like you did Belle today.”
To hide my confusion, I turned back to the dishes I’d left to soak in the big washtub Quinn used for a sink. Quinn Cooper, a reader of romantic adventure? It hardly seemed credible.
“Brian Niven, the English feller I worked for up Nebraska way? He had a whole shelf full of books. He said I’d have to learn to read if I ever hoped to run a ranch on my own. Started me oft on schoolroom stuff, and kept me at it ‘til I worked up to something I didn’t want to stop readin’.”
The mental picture of Quinn puzzling out the pious preachments of a child’s primer was too much for me. I giggled.
“What’s so funny?” Quinn demanded.
“I was just thinking of that old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Your Brian Niven seems to have done just that.”
“Good man,” he said. “Good rancher, too, for all his highfalutin talk. Shows his neighbors proper respect. Fer instance, he always boards line riders from other spreads without expectin’ payment, but thinks twice ‘bout askin’ favors from one-hoss outfits. Spaces ‘em out far’s he can, and if he can figure out a way of payin’ without them knowin’ it, he does. A bolt of calico for the missus, maybe, or playthings for the kids.”
“Generous as well as good—a rare combination.”
“That’s for sure,” Quinn agreed, ‘“cept in the case of anyone oversteppin’ property lines. Grass pirates we call ‘em. He reads the scriptures to anyone does that fast enough, friend or foe.”
I wiped the last of the dishes and put them back in the baskets. “Why did you come back, Quinn? It appears to me if Mr. Niven went to all that trouble preparing you to run a ranch, he was hoping the ranch you’d one day run was his.”
“Reckon you’re right about that, S’rena, but it’d never be mine, not like Morning Star. Ranch work’s hard, no matter what job you got, but runnin’ one— well, the way I see it, that’s nothin’ I’d want to hire out for. All that sweatin’ for something you can never call your own?” He shook his head slowly, emphatically, from side to side. “Besides, those English fellers, they got their fancy names and schoolin’ and more money back of ‘em than I’ll ever see, but they don’t know the country, never will. They ship their blooded stock over here for feedin’, many as they can, fast as they can, in and out, with no thought for tomorrow. A grass factory, that’s how they see it— just like the factories they came here to get shed of, only a whole lot bigger.”
“How can you say that? All I see are the differences: the clean air and the big sky and the spaces—why, there’s enough space here for the whole world to grow and prosper in!”
“That’s ‘cause you growed up lookin’ at those little rain-watered pastures you got back East, where a herd of cows can be grown on the ten acres it takes to feed one measly cut-back maverick out here. You figger what we got here just goes on and on, no end in sight, like when they started shootin’ buffalo for sport from railroad cars, leavin’ ‘em to rot where they fell. Why, when my paw was a boy, the herds were so big he said the sound of ‘em
put the thunder to shame....”‘
Quinn got to his feet and began to pace, dark eyes flashing, hands waving. “Mark my words, S’rena, the grass’ll go, too, just like the buffalo. Fact is, it’s already happenin’. The newcomers just keep crowdin’ in with too many cows on too little grass, never seen a bad winter or a two-year dry spell....” He shook his shaggy head. “When the grass factory shuts down, those poor gaunt critters’ll never make it through the first big blizzard, and come spring the stink of ‘em will hang over this land as heavy as coal smoke ever did over those mill towns in England I heard tell about.”
He turned to confront me, expecting an argument, unprepared for my openmouthed stare of wonderment at this unexpected flow of eloquence. For the first time since I met him he looked discomfited. He cleared his throat, hooked one thumb behind his tooled-leather belt and combed through his thatch of unruly hair with the other. “Listen to my yammering,” he muttered, looking away.
“Why, I do believe you’ve got a plan.... You do, don’t you? A way of keeping Morning Star going in the face of this disaster you see coming?”
“Not much of a plan, S’rena, more like common sense.” His voice was gruff, but he looked more his cocky self again. I doubted if a woman had ever paid him attention of this sort before, and I sensed he found it pleasing. I tried to ignore the flex of his muscles as he lazily stretched, intertwining his fingers as he reached high above his head.
“Tell me about it,” I said, walking over to sit in one of the chairs in front of the fireplace.
“You’re not too tired?”
This simple courtesy, awkwardly delivered, surprised me, touched me even, but I had no intention of showing it. “Yes, I am, but why don’t you tell me anyway?”
Darkness at Morning Star Page 22
