McKettrick's Choice (13 page)

“Lorelei?”

The voice startled her. She turned her head, and Melina's face came into focus.

“Here,” Melina said gently, holding out something wrapped in a piece of cloth. “It's bread and cheese. Mr. Cavanagh said to give it to you.”

Lorelei's hand trembled a little as she accepted the food. Her stomach clenched, then churned. “Thank you,” she said, and tried not to shove it all into her mouth at once.

“You don't have to prove anything to Holt, you know,” Melina persisted, in a quiet voice. “Why don't you ride with Mr. Cavanagh?”

Lorelei looked with longing at the wagon, but she shook her head. “You're the one who ought to take a rest,” she said, thinking of Melina's pregnancy.

“I've been riding all my life. You're pale, Lorelei,” Melina said, clearly worried. “You look as if you might pitch off that mule headfirst.”

Lorelei forced herself to nibble at the cheese, bit by bit. Never, in the whole of her life, had she ever been so ravenously hungry. “If I'm going to run a ranch,” she reasoned, feeling a frisson of oddly delicious alarm as Holt suddenly reined his horse around and started back toward the main party at a lope, “I've got to be strong.”

As Holt's Appaloosa fell into an impatient stride beside her plodding mule, Melina drew back to ride with Tillie.

“You win,” Holt said, through his teeth. Rafe watched them from up the trail, glaring over one shoulder. “Whatever it is you're trying to prove, you've proved it. Get into the wagon with John.”

Lorelei took a huge bite of bread, chewed it assiduously and swallowed before troubling herself to answer. “I'm quite all right,” she said, when she damn well felt like talking. “Thank you for your kind concern, however.”

Holt swept off his hat and whacked it once against his thigh. Dust flew. He jammed the Stetson back onto his head. “You are a trial to my patience,” he said, after a few moments of tight-jawed silence.

She smiled, though she wanted more than anything to lean forward and sob into Seesaw's mane. “There's always a bright side to every situation,” she observed.

“If I have to drag you off that mule and
throw
you into the wagon, Miss Fellows, I will.”

“I assure you, Mr. McKettrick, I will put up a fight if you make the attempt.”

“And I assure
you,
you little hellion, that if I make the attempt, I will succeed.”

“It appears we have reached an impasse,” Lorelei said, after finishing off the bread.

“It may appear that way from your end,” Holt retorted rigidly. “From mine, it looks like an easy win.”

“I despise you,” Lorelei informed him crisply.

“Good,” he replied. “I would not want my own sentiments to go unreciprocated.” He signaled to John Cavanagh, who drew back on the reins of the team and brought the wagon to a noisy, jostling halt in the middle of the trail. Sorrowful peered curiously over the side, yawning.

The cowboys and Captain Walton tried to look as though they weren't watching. Rafe made no such effort.

“What'll it be, Miss Fellows?” Holt asked, in a slow drawl. “Will you get into that wagon peaceably, or do we put on a show for the whole outfit?”

Lorelei imagined the delight the drovers would take in such an undignified scene and was forced to relent. She brought Seesaw to a stop, braced herself and dismounted. This time, there was no flash of pain, but her legs were numb, and her knees buckled. If she hadn't grasped hold of the saddle, she would have fallen into a heap on the ground.

She looked up at Holt, rimmed with sunlight like Apollo in his chariot, and hated him with a dizzying intensity. As he bent to snatch up Seesaw's reins in one hand, she saw the self-satisfied smirk on his face and would have flung herself at him, clawing like a scalded cat, if she'd had the strength.

She waited until she could trust herself to walk as far as the waiting wagon, then did so. Mr. Cavanagh got down from the box, gave Holt a withering look and took charge of Seesaw.

Lorelei looked up at the wagon box in pure despair. She couldn't climb that far, and she couldn't ask for help, either.

It was Captain Walton who came to her rescue. He got down off his horse, made a stirrup of his hands and nodded to Lorelei. “I can see that you're about to cry,” he told her with quiet good humor, “and I would strongly advise you not to do so. If ever there was a time for a poker face, this is it.”

Lorelei put one foot in his cupped palms, grabbed for the edge of the wagon and hauled herself, with the very last of her strength, up into the box.

“Thank you,” she told the Captain.

He smiled up at her. “You done real good, Miss Lorelei,” he said. “I'd say you won that hand.”

Lorelei felt Holt's gaze on her, but she refused to meet
his eyes. If she did, her poker face might slip. “Would you?”

“Yes, ma'am.” The Captain chuckled and got back on his horse.

The sun was on a distinctly westward path when they stopped again, at a water hole, to rest the stock. This time, Holt didn't come near Lorelei, and she told herself she was glad of it, despite a pang of disappointment.

“You ought to get down and walk around a bit,” Mr. Cavanagh suggested. “Stretch your legs.” The dog had already leaped over the tailgate to squat, then chase merrily around in the grass.

Melina and Tillie dismounted easily and waited for Lorelei.

“I'm not sure I can stand,” Lorelei confessed.

Mr. Cavanagh patted her hand. “Sure you can. You've got more grit than any five women.”

Buoyed by this unexpected and, to her mind, unearned praise, Lorelei steeled herself, then climbed down off the wagon.

Melina and Tillie gestured, and the three of them made a necessary visit to the bushes.

Half an hour later, at Holt's command, they were rolling again. It was almost six o'clock when they reached the abandoned mission.

The tireless and wholly obnoxious Holt McKettrick once again raised an officious hand, and the party came to a merciful halt.

“We'll be making camp this time,” Mr. Cavanagh assured Lorelei. “I reckon we'll all sleep like logs tonight.” He got down, walked around the back of the wagon and reached up a hand to her.

She took it gratefully, and nearly collapsed against him before she could make her legs work.

She and Mr. Cavanagh had ridden in companionable silence all afternoon. Now, watching Holt riding amid the travelers, probably giving orders, Lorelei asked, “What makes him so ornery?”

Mr. Cavanagh laughed. “Holt can be a hard man when he's trying to get something done,” he conceded, unhitching the weary team from the wagon. “But I've never known anybody finer.”

Lorelei made a huffy sound, resting her hands on her hips. “I think he's insufferable,” she said.

If Mr. Cavanagh heard her, he didn't let on. But he grinned as he turned the horses loose to graze on the plenteous grass and drink thirstily from the little spring next to the mission chapel. A hundred yards beyond, a stream flowed, invitingly cool.

Lorelei shifted her attention to Melina and Tillie, who were chatting as they gathered bits of wood and dried cow dung for the supper fire. She joined them, for she would not have it said that she expected special treatment. She might be a greenhorn, but she meant to keep going until she collapsed, if that was what she had to do.

Using rope, which he wrapped around tree trunks at appropriate junctures, one of the cowboys constructed a makeshift corral for the horses and mules. Two other men took buckets from the back of the wagon and filled them at the spring so the animals could drink, and when that was done, all of them except Rafe, Mr. Cavanagh, the Captain and Holt went scrambling for the stream, hooting with exuberant laughter and pulling off their boots as they went.

Lorelei decided to explore the mission, partly because she knew it would be cool inside the adobe structure, and
partly because she wanted to avoid Holt McKettrick for as long as possible.

The moment she stepped over the threshold, a sweet sense of reverence washed over her. The floor was stone, worn smooth by time and the passage of sandaled feet. The pale outline of a large cross marked one wall. The altar, if there had ever been one, was long gone, but one pew remained.

Lorelei took off her borrowed hat and drank in the silence. The sounds of men and horses were distant, and the light pouring in through the crude stained-glass windows was soft.

She sat down in the pew, lowered her head and wept.

It wasn't just that every muscle in her body thrummed with pain. It wasn't even that she'd set out on a journey and couldn't let herself turn back, even though she didn't know the first thing about running a ranch, with or without cattle.

It was poor Raul, badly injured and in pain, perhaps even crippled.

It was the fact that her mother had died in an asylum.

It was William, taking a fatal fall before he'd lived out his childhood.

It was the sound of that rifle shot, still echoing in her mind all these years later, and knowing the pony had paid a terrible price for stumbling with all of Judge Alexander Fellows's hopes riding on his back.

“Lorelei?”

She stiffened. Of all the people who might have wandered into that dusty, forgotten little sanctuary and caught her with her face in her hands and her shoulders trembling, why did it have to be Holt McKettrick?

“Go away,” she said, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath, desperate to compose herself.

She might have known he'd do precisely the opposite of what she'd asked. He swung one leg over the pew bench and sat astraddle it, facing her, turning his hat in his hands.

“I was pretty rough on you today,” Holt said quietly. “I'm sorry.”

She knew he didn't use those words often, both by his behavior and the awkward way he said them, but it was little or no consolation. “You flatter yourself if you think you've broken me,” she said.

“Lorelei, I'm not
trying
to break you.”

She met his gaze, defiant, swiping away the traces of her tears with the back of one hand. “Oh, no? Kindly do not insult my intelligence with lies, Mr. McKettrick. You'd like nothing better than to see me run back to San Antonio, leaving my ranch for you and Mr. Templeton to fight over.”

He lowered his head for a moment, perhaps searching his thoughts, and when he looked at her again, his eyes held an unsettling blend of laughter and chagrin. “If you weren't crying about a hard day on the trail,” he began, “what was it?”

“It's personal.”

He pulled a surprisingly clean handkerchief from his shirt pocket and handed it to her, but not before a thin blue ribbon, the kind a young girl might wear in her hair, wafted to the stone floor.

He bent to retrieve it, smiled as he ran a callused thumb along its length.

In the meantime, Lorelei employed the handkerchief to good effect, first swabbing her wet face, then, as deli
cately as possible, blowing her nose. The linen cloth was streaked with trail dirt when she'd finished.

“Does that belong to your daughter?” she heard herself ask, referring to the little strip of blue silk.

Holt nodded, closed his fingers around the ribbon for a moment, then slipped it back into his pocket. “Lizzie gave it to me before I left the Triple M.” He smiled wistfully. “I guess she was afraid I'd forget her.”

Lorelei could have made a pointed comment, given that he'd apparently forgotten Lizzie's mother easily enough, but somehow, she didn't have the heart to do it. The way he'd held that ribbon, clasped it in his palm, said a great deal about his affection for the child.

Moreover, she'd been presumptuous, assuming that he'd followed her into the mission just to bedevil her. Perhaps he hadn't even known she was there. He could have come in for reasons of his own, ones that had nothing whatsoever to do with her.

“Why were you crying?” he asked.

“I'm not going to tell you,” she said, “so please stop asking.”

He chuckled. Shook his head.

“Did you come in here expecting to be alone?”

He studied her face with an exaggerated, mocking sort of interest, his eyes dancing. He was probably thinking about repeating her own words back to her. “No,” he said, at such length that Lorelei nearly perished from the waiting. “I saw you come in. And I wanted to apologize.” He paused, considering. “Maybe
wanted
is the wrong word. Both John and the Cap'n threatened to horsewhip me if I didn't.”

The smiled reached her lips before she had a fair chance to catch it.

“Apology accepted?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, after much thought. “But it's probably a wasted effort, because we're bound to lock horns again tomorrow.”

He laughed. “Most likely, you're right.”

“I'm nearly always right,” she said boldly.

He pretended to glower. “Or maybe it won't take until tomorrow,” he said.

Then he stood, stepped over the bench, and put out his hand to her. “Truce?”

She hesitated, then allowed him to help her to her feet. “For the time being,” she said.

He laughed. “Fair enough,” he agreed.

A
TRAILSIDE SUPPER,
Lorelei soon discovered, left a lot to be desired. It consisted of cold biscuits and the huge pot of pinto beans Tillie had cooked up the night before, at the ranch. Nevertheless, the food filled the empty places, and the coffee was hot, strong and plentiful.

The sky was pierced with stars, from one horizon to the other, and even though Lorelei hurt in places she hadn't thought it was possible to feel pain, she felt strangely content, sitting beside that campfire, with Tillie perched on one side of her and Melina on the other.

“Look at that moon,” Melina marveled, tipping her head back to admire the huge silvery orb.

Tillie was admiring her doll, which rested in her lap, stroking its frilly little dress with one hand, but Lorelei followed Melina's gaze.

That moon had looked down on all manner of things in its time, Lorelei reflected. And when they were all dead and gone, it would still be there, following its path, while new generations of people lived out their stories. “What do you suppose it was like out here, when the mission was still open?” she mused.

“Lonely,” Melina said, with a small sigh. Sorrowful
had come to rest his muzzle on her thigh, and she stroked his head idly, still sky-gazing. “I wonder if Gabe can see that moon.”

Tentatively, Lorelei touched Melina's hand. “Whatever happens to Gabe,” she said, “you'll be all right.”

“Will I?” Melina asked softly. And when she turned her head, Lorelei saw that there were tears standing in her eyes. “Gabe and I, we've been apart more than we've been together, but I always knew he was out there someplace. That he'd turn up when I least expected, bringing me presents, saying pretty words, making me laugh and cry and everything in between. He gets me mad enough to pull the nails out of a horseshoe with my teeth, but when he's around, well, even the most ordinary things seem special.”

Tillie held up her doll for their inspection. “Doesn't she look pretty in her store-bought dress?”

“She surely does,” Lorelei said.

“Her name is Pearl,” Tillie announced. “I wish
my
name was Pearl.”

Melina leaned forward to catch the other woman's eye. “What's wrong with Tillie?”

Tillie shrugged. “It's plain,” she said. She sighed, stood up. “I guess I'd better put Pearl to bed. She's had a real long day.”

“Haven't we all?” Lorelei replied. She would have sold her soul for a hot bath, but there was no sense in wanting what she couldn't have. “Where
are
we sleeping tonight?”

Melina, too, got to her feet, gently dislodging the dog in the process. “Holt said we ought to put our bedrolls in the mission.”

Despite the truce they'd agreed upon earlier, Lorelei tightened her mouth a little. Holt said this, Holt said
that. It made her want to rebel, with or without a valid reason.

“I think I'll stay up a while longer,” she said.

“Don't be too long,” Melina counseled, stretching.

“We'll be rolling again before you know it.” With that, she departed, as Tillie had, with the feckless Sorrowful trotting at her heels.

Lorelei sighed, watching the fire. The wood was beginning to crumble into embers, and the sparks rose like lightning bugs, bursting toward the sky as though trying to reach the moon.

Most of the cowboys had already spread their blankets on the ground and stretched out for the night, but Holt, Rafe, Captain Walton and Mr. Cavanagh crouched nearby, in a tight circle. Holt drew in the dirt with a stick, and the others nodded and made comments.

Presently, the conference ended, and the four men stood wearily and went their separate ways.

Holt nodded to Lorelei as he passed, headed in the direction of the stream, but he didn't speak. She was at once relieved and disappointed by that, and, being embroiled in this small paradox, she failed to notice that she wasn't alone until the Captain sat right down beside her.

“You ever played poker?” he asked.

Lorelei laughed. “No,” she said.

“A person can learn a lot from a good game of five-card stud,” he told her, his eyes twinkling. “When to hold and when to fold, for instance.”

“I have no earthly idea what those terms mean,” Lorelei said, tossing the dregs of her coffee into the fire.

“Holding and folding, I mean.”

“That's plain to see, Miss Fellows,” the Captain told her good-naturedly. “When you hold, it means you've
got good cards, or a chance to bluff your way through if they aren't what you'd hoped for. It's knowing when to fold that's tricky. If you've drawn a losing hand, you'd best throw in your cards.”

Lorelei frowned. “Are you trying to tell me that I ought to give up?” she asked. Even mustering up some indignation would be too much work after the day she'd put in, but she felt the stirrings of it, just the same.

“No, ma'am,” the Captain said. “I'm just saying that some battles are worth fighting and others are a pure waste of time and effort.”

“If you're not talking about my ranch—”

The Captain patted her hand. “You think about it,” he said. With that, he stood up again, tugged at the brim of his hat in mannerly farewell and disappeared into the darkness, going from substance to shadow to nothing at all.

Lorelei felt a peculiar tightening in her throat, along with a twinge of confusion.
You think about it,
the Captain had said.

Think about what?

She was too weary and sore to wrestle with a mystery, but she knew she'd worry at it until she went to sleep. She carried her cup to the spring, rinsed it thoroughly and returned it to the supply wagon, as she had seen the others do.

Mr. Cavanagh handed her a roll of blankets. “Tillie and Melina have already bedded down,” he said. “You'd best do the same, Miss Lorelei.”

She nodded and yawned. If she'd had the strength, she'd have asked him about the Captain's cryptic remark, but she would be lucky to get inside the mission before she collapsed from exhaustion, so her questions would have to wait.

She crossed the grassy camp, the bedroll in both arms, and resigned herself to a stone floor and a short night.

Tillie was already asleep, cradling her doll under her chin. Sorrowful lay curled at her feet, Melina a few feet away, eyes closed, her fingers entangled in a rosary. Lorelei spread out her blankets, took off her shoes and lay down.

Having so much on her mind, she had expected to toss and turn a while; instead, she plunged into sleep like someone hurled headfirst down a well.

A stirring awakened her, somewhere in the depths of the night.

Crickets chirped outside the mission, and a coyote howled in the distance. Except for those things, the silence was vast, a dark cloak spread over the sprawling landscape. What, then, had brought her out of that fathomless, dreamless slumber?

Lorelei raised herself onto her elbows and squinted, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. If it hadn't been for the moon, strained by the colored windows and pouring through the open doorway, she wouldn't have been able to see at all.

Melina lay sleeping, moonlight illuminating the soft contours of her face. She was still clutching her rosary.

Tillie and Sorrowful were gone.

Lorelei put a hand to her throat as a sense of alarm surged up from her insides. There was no clear reason to be afraid, but she was.

She flung back her blankets, pulled on her high-button shoes and scrambled to her feet. Outside the door, she paused, listening hard, trying to get some idea which way they might have gone. If she shouted Tillie's name, she'd awaken the whole camp. She choked, swallowing her own voice.

They'd probably gone to the supply wagon, she decided, calming down a little. Yes, that was it. Tillie must have gotten hungry, or perhaps she'd had a bad dream and wanted to be near her father. Physically, she was a woman, but in every other way Tillie was a child.

Lorelei rushed for the wagon, peered under it.

John Cavanagh slept in the grass, snoring lightly. There was no sign of Tillie.

A touch at her elbow made Lorelei jump, and she whirled to see Holt standing behind her, hair and clothes rumpled, yawning.

“What's the matter?”

Before she could think of an answer, for she was still half-asleep herself, Sorrowful began to bark, somewhere in the endless dark that surrounded them.

Lorelei drew a mental bead on the sound. “It's Tillie,” she explained, hurrying over the rough ground, Holt taking long strides beside her. “She's wandered off someplace.”

Sorrowful's barking intensified, and there was a frantic note to it that made both Lorelei and Holt break into a full run. Lorelei couldn't hope to match his pace; her feet kept catching on roots and sinking into unseen holes. Still, she raced on. Once, she caught the flash of moonlight on the barrel of Holt's .45 as he drew it, and a chill spun its way up her spine.

When she came to the stream bank, Lorelei was breathless with exertion and fear. There was Tillie, on her knees on the ground, her face buried in both hands. One of the cowboys stood over her, his hands out in a conciliatory gesture, and Sorrowful bounded around them in a circle.

Holt shoved his pistol back into his holster, grabbed
the cowboy by the back of his collar and flung him away from Tillie.

“What happened here?” he demanded.

Tillie raised her head, and the moonlight glimmered in the tears on her face. “He broke Pearl,” she said, with plaintive sorrow. “He broke Pearl. She's dead.”

Holt whirled on the cowboy.

“I didn't do nothin', boss,” the young man said, backing away.

Lorelei regained her breath and hurried to Tillie, kneeling beside her, gathering her close. Tillie clung to her with both arms, sobbing into her shoulder, and Sorrowful ceased his barking to lie down nearby, with a sympathetic whimper.

“Tillie,” Lorelei whispered, holding the girl tightly and watching Holt and the drover over her head. “Tillie, did he hurt you?”

“All I wanted was a little kiss,” the cowboy complained.

“What am I going to do without Pearl?” Tillie wailed.

Holt drew back his fist and struck the other man, first in the face, then in the belly. The cowboy knelt in the grass, vomiting. “I think you done knocked out one of my teeth!” he cried, when he'd stopped gagging.

Holt got him by the shirt and hauled him back to his feet.

Lorelei held her breath.

“Get your gear,” Holt said, “and ride out. If I ever so much as lay eyes on you again, I'll kill you where you stand.”

Lorelei had no doubt that he meant what he said, and neither, apparently, did the cowboy. He snatched his hat
off the ground, slapped it onto his head and staggered back toward the camp, one hand to his jaw.

Holt watched him go for a long moment, then turned and walked over to crouch beside the two women.

“Tillie,” he said, with a gentleness so at variance with what Lorelei had just seen that she almost couldn't believe he was the same man. “It's all right.”

Tillie pulled free of Lorelei to scrabble about in the grass. Finally, she found the doll, and held it up as evidence. The beautiful china head was shattered, dangling by a bit of thread and cloth. The tiny dress, the one Tillie had been so proud of by the campfire earlier that night, was torn and soiled.

She gave a despairing cry. “It's
not
all right, Holt,” she said, stumbling between one word and the next. “Look at her. She's kilt!”

“I'll get you another one,” Holt told her.

“Another one won't be Pearl,” Tillie said with such sorrow that Lorelei's own eyes filled with tears. “We've got to bury her proper, Holt. I got to know she's buried proper!”

“We'll do it,” Holt said, and at last his eyes met Lorelei's.

She nodded silently and stood up. Holt raised Tillie from the ground, gripping her shoulders.

“She was my baby,” Tillie wept.

Holt put his arms around the young woman, his chin resting on top of her head. “I know, sweetheart,” he said.

“I know.” Then he lifted Tillie up into his arms, as easily as if she were a child, and started for the camp.

Sorrowful and Lorelei followed.

John Cavanagh was up, and so was Rafe. The cowboy had saddled his horse by then, and he rode off at a gallop.

John's face contorted when he saw Tillie being carried, her cheeks slick with tears. “My God in heaven,” he rasped.

“She's all right, Mr. Cavanagh,” Lorelei said quickly.

“I need a shovel,” Holt said, setting Tillie on her feet.

“A shovel?” Rafe asked, thrusting a hand through his hair. He turned and looked in the direction the cowboy had taken. “Did that son of a bitch kill somebody?” He made a move toward the corral, as if to mount his horse and give chase.

“He murdered Pearl,” Tillie said.

Rafe looked confounded. “Pearl?”

“Just get the damned shovel!” Holt snapped.

Rafe did as he was asked.

Holt dug a grave over by the mission, and Tillie knelt to lay her baby in it with shaking hands. She whispered some private prayer, then looked up at Holt and nodded, just once.

Lorelei put a hand over her mouth as he covered the doll with dirt. The sun was creeping up over the eastern horizon, spilling light ahead of itself, while the moon still stood bright in the west.

Rafe had bound two sticks together with a piece of rawhide to make a cross, and he gave it to Tillie, who stuck it into the ground to mark the place.

The men lingered a few moments, none of them knowing what to say, and finally walked away.

Tillie, still kneeling beside Pearl's grave, looked up at Lorelei with a plea in her eyes.

“Do you think dolls go to heaven?” she asked.

 

B
REAKFAST WAS
a solemn and necessarily hasty affair. With the help of a subdued and thoughtful Mr. Kahill,
John brewed coffee, reheated last night's beans and fried up slabs of salt pork for everybody who wanted one.