Petticoat Ranch (2 page)

“I don’t know, honey,” Sophie said grimly as she surveyed the area, looking for a glimpse of fabric or a bit of horsehide. “I don’t hear him. He might be buried under these rocks. He might have been swept away by the creek. We only have a few minutes to search.”

“Here, Ma. I think I found him!” Mandy’s voice was sharp with excitement. A bolt of lightning lit up Mandy’s frightened face. Sophie saw Mandy’s blue eyes, so like her own, glow in the jagged glare. Her blond hair, identical to Sophie’s and the other girls’, hung bedraggled and muddy to her waist.

Sophie rushed to her daughter’s side and saw a single hand, coated with dirt, extending from a pile of mud and rocks. The two of them fell to the ground and began digging away the soil. They ignored the tear of jagged stones on their hands and the damage to their nightgowns, the only ones they owned. Sophie heard soft trudging steps as Hector came down the creek path. She dug faster, knowing that with the mule’s help they could move the man as soon as they freed him.

Another rumble of thunder sounded closer. The lightning lanced the sky just as Sophie uncovered the stranger’s face and pushed away the mud. The man was utterly still. As limp as in death. She didn’t stop
to check his condition. If there was life left in him after the fall, the suffocating dirt would snatch it away. She and Mandy uncovered his shoulders as eight-year-old Elizabeth came up.

“Get this rope around his shoulders, Mandy. Beth, hitch it around Hector’s neck. We’ve got to get out of this creek before the water comes!” Even as she said it, Sophie heard the first distant crash of waves against the sides of the creek. Once the sound was audible, there were only minutes before the wall of water would sweep by their cabin.

She kept digging as she shouted commands. She reached deep into the muck to make sure there were no heavy rocks pinning him. Her girls worked silently beside her, following her orders. Sophie felt a surge of pride in them so great, she knew it to be almost sinful.

“Ready, Ma.” Mandy turned her attention from fastening the rope under the man’s arms and went back to digging.

“Hector’s ready anytime, Ma,” Beth shouted over the raging wind. A bolt of lightning flashed brightly enough for Sophie to see the man. His legs were still well buried, but there were no rocks on him.

He was so coated in mud that Sophie couldn’t have told anyone what he looked like. She remembered the desperate speed at which he’d ridden and thought again the word:
pursuit
. Yet no one had come along behind him.

The thunder sounded again. The water roared ever nearer. Sophie shouted to be heard over the sound, “Once you start pulling, just take him all the way up! The floodwater is coming!”

Sophie knew Elizabeth, her second born, would handle the stubborn, rawboned old mule better than she could. Hector was a cantankerous beast on the best of days, but he had a soft spot for Beth, as did most animals.

Beth’s gentle cajoling urged Hector forward to take up the slack in the rope. Mandy knelt at the man’s head, and in the few remaining seconds, pushed more dirt off his arms and chest. Sophie braced herself to support his head and neck as he began to inch free. A bolt of lightning lit up their strange little group, this time with blinding brightness. The thunder
sounded almost at the same instant. Sophie prayed for the man and asked God if the floodwater could just hold off another few minutes.

In answer, God sent the first icy drip of rain down the back of her neck. Sophie took it as a heavenly warning to hurry.

The man emerged slowly from the slide. As soon as he was free, with another lightning bolt to assist the lantern, Sophie yelled, “Keep going. All the way to the top of the bank. Mandy, you run ahead with the lantern.” Anything to get her girls to safety, even if she didn’t make it herself.

She looked at the man, now being battered even further by his ride up the hill. His body was coated in mud. The slime helped him slide along the rough ground. One particularly nasty jolt over the rutted path almost woke him. He took a deep breath and turned his head sideways. He vomited up filthy, muddy water and gasped deeply for breath as he was dragged along. It was the first sign he was alive. Sophie kept to his side to make sure his head didn’t encounter a rock.

The rugged upward trail twisted and turned. Just as it faced the north along one of its steeper sections, a bolt of lightning split the sky. Sophie saw a wall of water raging toward her like the wrath of God. “Faster, Beth! The floodwater’s coming! Get to the top!”

Elizabeth kicked Hector and yelled. Sophie knew her mule well, and whatever unfortunate qualities Hector had, stupidity wasn’t one of them. She knew he headed for the top of that creek to save his own mangy mule hide, and if he saved the lot of them along with himself, well, that had nothing to do with him.

The path snaked back to the south. A few more feet. Twenty at the most. Sophie knew the water would come along right to the top of the bank. It had been cut to its current depth by these raging torrents over thousands of years. Sophie glanced over her shoulder and saw it coming. They weren’t going to make it. Lightning lit up the sky just as Hector crested the top of the path. The roaring water changed to a scream. The thunder had become a constant jarring drumroll that only added to the fierce growl of the approaching flood. The rope dragged
against the ground, and knowing she was out of time, Sophie reached down and twisted her arms through the rope that bound the man to the only anchor there was for them in the world.

The water hit like a crashing fist. Sophie heard her own cry of fear as she was swept sideways. Her arms wrenched nearly from their sockets as the rope tightened. Her body, literally tied to the man, lifted with the angry waters. The flood caught them as if it were a greedy child not wanting to let go of its toy. Sophie had a second to despair of Hector’s strength and prayed Beth wouldn’t be swept away with the mule. Flood water filled her mouth. The life her precious babies had to face without her was the image she’d die with.

Then they were up. They landed on the top of the creek bank like a couple of battle-weary trout. Sophie was too battered to move. She lay there, choking on muddy water as the world began to right itself. She tried to catch her breath and was having precious little luck, when Mandy got to her side, followed by Beth. Only when they rolled her off the man did she realize she’d been stretched out fully on top of him.

“Ma! Are you all right?” Mandy’s anxious voice reached into her sluggish mind.

Her girls. She felt the scrambling fingers on the ropes that bound her to this stranger, and she heard their fear. She had to be strong for them. She forced the panic from her water-logged head. “Yes, I’m fine. Just got a good soaking. Let’s see if our friend here survived it.”

Sophie almost staggered when she got to her knees, but she didn’t. The girls were watching. She turned her attention to the man and pressed her hand firmly against his chest. Beneath her palm was a strong heartbeat, even though, after his one spell of coughing, the man hadn’t stirred again. She felt his chest rise and fall with a steady breath.

Sophie heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief. “He’s still alive.”

The spitting rain grew steadier, and Sophie wondered what a chest full of dirty water did to a man. A deep chill now might well be the last straw. With a renewed surge of strength, Sophie decided that, after all she’d been through, this man could just think twice before he up and
died on her. Thinking aloud, she said, “There’s no way we can carry him to the house, and we’re not strong enough to get him up on Hector’s back.”

“If Hector goes slow, maybe we can just drag him,” Mandy suggested. “Reckon it’ll kill him, though.”

Elizabeth said lightly from where she knelt beside her mother, “I don’t know how he could get much worse. He appears to be mostly kilt already.”

Sophie prayed in her heart, as she had been nonstop since she’d heard the first hoofbeats. But no better suggestions were forthcoming from the Almighty.

“Okay, we drag him. Take it real slow, Beth. Stay by his side, Mandy and. . .and. . .” Sophie was out of ideas. A sudden gust of wind and a prolonged glare of lightning, with thunder rumbling constantly now, prodded her. “Let’s get on with it then.”

They hauled him the same way they hauled logs to split for their fire. Hector pulled the unconscious man right up to the front door. When Elizabeth stopped Hector, Mandy asked, with the practicality her life had forced onto her, “Reckon Hector can drag him into the house?”

The house was small—one room, with a loft, no back door, and two front steps that passed for a stoop. Sophie tried to envision the big mule climbing the stairs, ducking through the narrow door, and then turning around in the cramped space. Hector was large and not given to cooperation at the best of times, even with Beth’s gentle urging.

“How about we put him in the barn,” Mandy suggested.

Barn
was a highfalutin word for the Edwards’s one and only out-building. The building remained standing more out of pure ornery stubbornness than sturdy construction. It was a three-sided shed that stood upright, thanks to the bramble that had wound itself around every inch of the building and practically reclaimed it as part of the vast thicket that hid the Edwards’s home. Hector seemed inclined to head for it, though he usually disdained to go under the rickety roof.

The wind began driving the steadily increasing sprinkles straight
sideways. The lightning and thunder continued, and the icy drops of rain grew fatter, soaking into their thin, mud-soaked nightclothes. This was all the man needed to finish the work of his fall. Sophie finally said, “The barn it is. Let’s go.”

They hauled the injured man down a nearly invisible trail that wound away from the cabin. Another small clearing, one of hundreds that appeared inside the twisting maze of the thicket, opened up at the decrepit
barn
. Mercifully, the rain was coming from the north and the shed opened to the east. The inside was dry except for the multiple leaks in the roof. A stack of the first spring prairie grass Sophie and the girls had cut took up the driest corner. With some quick pitch-forking, they got the man situated on a soft bed of fresh-scented hay. It was a better bed than the one Sophie had.

Hector was released. As if in a huff at the uninvited company, he went to the far corner of the tiny shed. That put about ten feet between him and the intruders in his domain.

Sophie knelt in the hay beside the still-unconscious man. “Bring the lantern up close, Mandy. Be mindful of fire.”

“I’ll fetch blankets and check on the little ’uns, Ma.” Beth darted out into the storm.

As the lantern light fell on the man, and with a sudden extended flash of lightning, Sophie saw bright red soaked through the coating of dirt on his face and across the front of his shirt. The stranger was drenched in his own blood.

With a dart of aggravation, Sophie thought the man was determined to die one way or another. She felt stubbornness well up inside of her that would have humbled Hector. After all she’d been through, he’d live if she had to grab his worthless life and hold him on this side of the pearly gates with her bare hands!

T 
W O
                   

W
here’d he get to, Harley?” Judd Mason roared into the storm. Judd wheeled his horse around in a circle and looked along both sides of the forked path ahead of them. The rain slashed and their quarry’s trail washed away like dirt in a Chinese laundry.

Judd pulled back hard on his mustang. The horse reared and fought the brutal hand on the bit. Judd whipped his mount hard with the long reins and swore at the unruly horse he’d caught wild and never really mastered.

He’d seen the horse that thieving trash rode. If Judd could have gotten his hands on that magnificent thoroughbred, he’d have put a bullet in the brain of this ornery cuss and kept the beautiful bay for himself. After all, a man catching horse thieves deserved some payment.

That was why Judd had sent the bulk of the gang after the rest of those no-account varmints when they’d split up, while he, Harley, and Eli had kept after this one.

He’d have made a deal with Harley and Eli somehow. Let them keep whatever was in the man’s pockets or given them a bigger cut of the next windfall. He wanted that horse! It would have made a sound start for breeding on the ranch he’d be buying on Monday.

He thought of the Mead ranch and the twisting, turning path he’d followed so the Mead brothers’ disappearance wouldn’t be noticed. Now, the Meads’ ranch would be his. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted that thoroughbred bay!

“I’m sick of this weather, Judd. We’re not going to track him in this.” Eli wiped an arm across his face, but it did no good. Even with foul-weather gear, they were all soaked to the skin.

It was all Judd could do to not knock Eli out of his saddle. The day would come when he quit putting up with the constant carping. But for now, Eli had his uses.

Instead of knocking Eli down, he turned his temper on Harley. “Where’d ya lose him, Harley?”

“We ain’t a-gonna catch ’im tonight, Mason.” Harley, calm as usual, hunched his shoulders against the driving rain and tugged his hat low over his brow.