Darkness at Morning Star

by Joyce C. Ware

  “Serena.” I had never heard my name said so tenderly. “Thank God you’re alive.”

  “Bazz. ...” I gasped.

  “I see him. He’s not going anywhere; I can promise you that.”

  “But he has a gun—”

  My warning came too late. Before Quinn had time to reach for his own gun, a shot rang out. Bucket snorted, reared, and plunged away as Quinn toppled from his saddle, clutching his leg. Bazz emerged on Dancer from under the willow to stare down at us. He aimed his little gun at my head. I stared back defiantly.

  Without looking at Quinn, he ordered him to throw his revolver into the pond. “This little beauty of mine belonged to my mama,” he said as Quinn’s big Colt arched up and into the water. “Our paw bought it for her.” He laughed at the irony of it. “She taught me how to load it and clean it. She used to take me out to the trash dump to practice. That was after you tried to drown me, Quinn. She said a gentleman was obliged to protect himself from varmints. I started out plinking cans and bottles; moved up to picking off rats. Human varmints are easier targets, especially when they can’t run.”

  I felt Quinn lift himself up slowly beside me. Bucket, alerted by his groan, gave a high, excited whinny. Hearing it, something began to slide up out of my memory ... something from another day at the pond, with Quinn.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” Bazz cautioned, transferring his aim to Quinn’s dark, shaggy head. ‘“Ladies first,’ Mama always told me, but in this case ...”

  The memory snapped into focus. “Call Bucket,” I whispered.

  Bazz rambled on, savoring the unfamiliar, seductive taste of power. “Did you know Belle here poisoned my mama, Quinn? Do you think that’s something a lady would do? My mama always said ...”

  “Now!” I urged.

  I heard Quinn take a deep, ragged breath. “Bucka-Bucka-Bucket!”

  Behind me, I heard Bucket whinny again, followed by the sound of his hoofbeats. Above me. Dancer lurched forward, and I saw Bazz’s mouth fall open, his arms flying up to flail the air, the gun dropping from his hand as the big, black horse rocketed toward him, intent on reaching his master. Quinn told me later that Dancer’s reaction was just what one would expect of a well-trained peg pony: faced with another animal cutting directly in front of him, and expecting the throw of a lariat from his rider, Dancer stopped in his tracks and squatted back on his haunches. Bazz, shaken loose from his insecure seat, catapulted over his head and into the pond.

  Taking swift advantage of what he anticipated as merely a delay in Bazz’s pursuit of his murderous intent, Quinn dragged himself, one hand clutching his bleeding wound, toward the little pearl-handled gun. By the time he returned to my side, the splashing in the pond had become frantic, and we soon realized that despite the shallowness of the water where Bazz had landed, his fear of it had overridden what little reason remained to him.

  “For God’s sake, man,” Quinn yelled, “you’re no more than waist deep!”

  “Try to stand up, Bazz!” I called.

  It was too late. He was beyond hearing or thinking. We listened helplessly as he thrashed his way into deeper water, his cries growing ever weaker.

  “Mama!” He sounded like a lost child. “Oh, Mama. ...” And then there was silence.

  Quinn pulled himself nearer to me. I felt his shaking fingers fumble with the thong on my wrists. “I meant him no harm,” I heard him mutter, “I was only trying to teach him to swim ... he was my brother. ...”

  At first, intent on freeing my wrists, I could make no sense of what he was saying, but then, after the thong fell away, I recalled Lottie Wohlfort’s accusations.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Quinn,” I said, rubbing my painfully cramped fingers. “His mother saw you only as a rival for Morning Star. In the end, it’s her love that killed him, not the hate she imagined in your heart.”

  He groaned. “I swear, S’rena, with all that’s happened, if I hadn’t worked so hard to keep Morning Star, it’d sure be easy to turn my back on it.”

  “You?” I scoffed. “You’ve never given up on anything in your life, Quinn Cooper!”

  “You think so? Well, maybe you’re right at that.” His tone lightened. “Fer instance, I got no intention of givin’ up on you, ‘spite of us bein’ in a fix I don’t see no easy way of gettin’ ourselves out of.” His fingers gently rubbed my cheeks. “I bet your pretty face ain’t been this dirty since you was a tadpole.”

  I tried to smile in return, but new worries rushed in to fill the place vacated by Bazz’s drowning.

  “Your leg?” I asked, looking anxiously up into Quinn’s dark eyes.

  He grinned. “Nothin’ the sawbones in town and a jolt of whiskey can’t fix.”

  “And Bingo?”

  He hesitated. His eyes gazed down into mine, tender as flowers. “From the look of it, her leg’s broke, S’rena.”

  “Nonsense!” I protested. “She’s as sure-footed as a mountain goat. Besides, the bullet struck her neck—”

  “Taking her attention, most likely. She must have stumbled into a gopher hole.”

  I stroked Bingo’s strong, warm neck, recalling the feel of her collapsing beneath me; her hide felt like satin under my fingers. She whickered softly. “Good girl,” I crooned. “Such a good girl.”

  Quinn struggled to a sitting position and reached over to untie the thong securing my ankle to the stirrup. Can’t do much about the other one until—” He broke off. “Sharo’ll be along soon,” he said. “Fawn was some worried about you, S’rena. Woke me in the middle of the night. I went on up to the house, and when I saw Bazz’s room, I rousted Sharo. We wondered if you’d gone off on Bingo, but when we found Dancer gone, too ...” He shook his head. “I thought morning’d never come. Sharo spied your tracks first—he’s off followin’ ‘em—but I had a hunch. Seein’ that room Bazz was living in, his dead mama’s room ... it didn’t seem natural, know what I mean?”

  I nodded. I did indeed.

  “And then I got this queer feelin’ he’d end up here at the pond, where everything started going wrong all those years ago.” He paused; the rest could wait. “Sharo’ll be along soon,” he repeated.

  I looked up at the sky. As I watched, little puffs of white slowly unfurled first here, then there, into cottony sails adrift on a wide blue sea, harbingers of an afternoon I thought I would never live to see. Quinn eased down beside me. Shoulders touching, our hands intertwined, we waited in silence together.

  Epilogue

  Quinn’s leg healed rapidly; by August, his limp was barely perceptible. The wounds to my spirit lingered longer.

  I was aware of his dark eyes upon me more often than he knew. Loving him, I was always aware of his presence. Proud as an Indian one minute, stubborn as a whole team of mules the next, soft as thistledown the moment after, I knew he would never bore me. But every time I looked in the mirror my fears revived.

  “Hell’s roarings, woman!” he growled at me one day, impatient of pussyfooting. “Are you goin’ to make me wait ‘til your hair turns all the way back to silver? That henna got poured over your head, not into your heart—why, you’re the same sweet Serena you always was, always will be.”

  But my doubts continued to fester, yielding neither to reason nor his embraces. Even Fawn’s expressions of marital bliss left me unmoved for all the tears of joy I had shed when Quinn gravely placed her little hand in Sharo’s. Our relationship seemed to have reached a dead center. Then Rita returned.

  Her arrival that late-August morning was observed by no one. She stolidly set about taking up residence, and by the time Quinn plodded up from the corrals to wash up for supper, her hens were scratching in the dooryard. As he strode in grim-faced to the quarters he had relinquished to me, his arms heaped with his belongings, I was forced to admit the scales of fate had finally been tipped, albeit by a most unlikely hand.

  Shortly after daybreak the next day, Quinn took the wagon to town, arriving back with it full of supplies and a preacher on the seat beside him. H
e announced it wasn’t fitting for a maiden lady to be sharing space with a roughneck like him, and he aimed to do the right thing.

  “Besides,” he added later, to the delight of the hands who had gathered to wish us well, “it’ll be a whole lot cheaper havin’ her as a wife than payin’ a housekeeper’s wages.”

  My wedding bouquet was a bunch of prairie flowers;, and my wedding night.…

  I never dreamed wildness could be so sweet.

  The stone mansion has been razed. The new, smaller, cozier house being built for us from its weathered blocks is almost finished. Belle’s garden was burned and plowed under, and the pathetic bones unearthed there were buried along with Belle and Bazz in the graveyard in the cottonwood grove. Belle’s herbal—and Lottie Wohlfort’s—have been shelved with Quinn’s novels. Perhaps, in time, I will put in a herb garden of my own.

  I don’t visit the pond much these days, except to put a bunch of tender grasses on Bingo’s grave under the willow. I’m riding Dancer now. He’s not as playful as dear Bingo, but Cobby says he’s the cleverest cow pony he ever saw—except for his own sorrel, of course. Fawn confided that seeing me work him puts Sharo’s nose quite out of joint.

  What I most want to tell you happened early this summer, after the round-up of the calves born during the preceding winter. Fawn and I were expecting babies of our own. I suspected, from the sly, speculative looks given our swelling bellies by the hands, that bets were being laid in the bunkhouse, but I did not share my suspicion with Quinn, whose awestruck view of impending fatherhood allowed little room for levity.

  It had been a good year. The Appaloosas shipped to Virginia had generated additional orders, and the money set aside for Bazz’s holdings, having reverted to Quinn, allowed him to chart the future of the ranch along the lines of quality he had spoken of with a fervor I had come to share.

  But the mild winters of recent years had encouraged an influx of ignorant newcomers, and in the cold winters that Sharo saw coming, the over-grazed prairie could not sustain the swelling herds loosed upon it. Short of “shootin’ the dern fools!” which was Cobby’s oft-expressed solution, we needed to store up every cent we could against the hard times.

  * * * *

  It was very hot that third week in June. I was in my eighth month, with a yen for a fresh-pulled carrot to crunch between my teeth. I looked out from Rita’s vegetable patch to see a pair of scrawny calves bawling near the old wooden trough. I could hear their cries above the creaking of the windmill’s rusty vanes.

  They were ugly cut-back scrubs, canning quality at best, but they were alone, either lost or motherless, and as I felt my unborn baby shift within me I was moved to foolish tears by their thirsty plight.

  How long had it been since anyone thought to clean out that slimy old horror? Not since I’d come to Morning Star. Cradling my belly in my hands, I made my way down to the barn as fast as I could waddle, and demanded the kit Ross Cooper had kept for cleaning the trough.

  Quinn, leaning against an Appaloosa none to happy about his inspection of its hoof, looked up at me. “What the hell you talkin’ about, woman?” The horse slyly bent its neck to nip him. “Ouch! Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “That can wait, Quinn!” I said sternly.

  Cobby, who, from the excessive care with which he treated Fawn and me, seemed to think our wombs harbored nitroglycerine, darted forward to take the horse from Quinn. “The kit’s stored above the feed bins. Painted red. Can’t miss it.”

  “There are calves out there about to die of thirst! I understand your father kept that old trough to remind him of his beginnings. Cleaning it was supposed to help keep him humble—something you haven’t been much of lately.”

  He glared at me. “Hell’s roarings, S’rena!”

  I ran my hands over my belly and looked up at him through my lashes.

  “Oh, shoot....”

  It didn’t take long. He cleaned out the clogged intake, then knocked out the two plugs with the mallet he found in the box, and as the stinking water ran out, I scrubbed the slimed sides as best I could. For all its neglect, the wood seemed sound. I hitched the hem of my skirt into my waist band, climbed in, and began to scour the bottom.

  “Godalmighty! You oughtn’t be doin’ that!”

  “Do me good. Besides, considering the heat this week, I wouldn’t mind if the baby came a little sooner than expected.”

  Just then the rag I was using caught on the edge of one of the planks. I tugged at it, and a two-foot square, nailed together like a lid, edged up above the others. Quinn climbed in beside me. He lifted it, revealing a dark hole. He reached in, grimacing as he groped through the muck.

  “Feels like stone at the bottom,” he muttered. “Yep, a slab of stone....”

  Quinn began feeling for a handhold, and all at once I knew. Belle had said that once, when Ross Cooper asked her where her heart was, he added, “Is it hidden in stone, like my gold?”

  Quinn pried up the stone slab, which was much thinner than expected, and tossed it outside. Heads jostling, we peered down into the revealed cavity. One thing was for sure, there were too many gold bars down there for us to carry in one trip.

  I plunked down on my bottom, heedless of the fresh water pumping in. Quinn’s face was streaked with slime. I lifted a corner of my wet skirt to clean it. “Like your father said, my darling, it does a man good to be reminded of his beginnings.”

  The calves rolled anxious eyes at us over the edge of the trough, bewildered by our presence there. “It’ll be your turn soon,” I promised.

  I raised my damp face to the June sun. The windmill’s blades rotated gently above me. Squinting against the glare, my eyes traced an imaginary line back from its tower to where the arc of great stone pillars once stood. For the first time in many years, June was bringing good things to Morning Star.

  “Quinn? What’s the date today?”

  “Hmm-mmmm-mm?” he murmured, happily lost in heaving the heavy gleaming bars, our insurance against hard times, out into the dust.

  “Doesn’t matter, dear heart...just wondering.”

  I shook back my silver hair, worn loose as he liked it, and smiled.

  Copyright © 1992 by Joyce C. Ware

  Originally published by Zebra Books (Kensington Publishing Corp.) (0821739387)

  Electronically published in 2006 by Belgrave House

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228

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  This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.