Rivals (29 page)

“Let me see if I understand this,” Flame murmured tightly. “Simply because his father married to get control of this ranch, you have tarred Chance with the same brush. Is that your proof?”

“There's more to it than that…Flame,” Ben Canon inserted, hesitating fractionally over the use of her name. “Much more. As a matter of fact, the trouble with the Stuarts goes all the way back to
his
day.” He half-turned to look at the man in the portrait.

“I suppose this has something to do with the deathbed promise Hattie referred to.” She caught a jeering note of sarcasm in her voice. Part of her regretted it, yet mockery seemed her only defense at the moment. She couldn't allow herself to take any of this seriously.

“I think it would be closer to say that this addresses the events that led up to it.” His smile failed to conceal the hard scrutiny of his glance. “Perhaps it would be best if I began by telling you a bit about the founding of this ranch, and the history of this area. After all, Morgan's Walk will pass to you on Hattie's death. It's only fitting that you should know something about it—out of respect for Hattie, if nothing else.”

At the mention of the woman's name, she felt a twinge of guilt, realizing how callous she must sound to him. She wasn't. There were simply too many emotions pulling her in different directions—anger, confusion, pity, sadness, and—however much she was unwilling to admit it—fear. Fear that Hattie might be right—that maybe she was being used by Chance. Because of it, the urge was strong to flee the room and this house so she wouldn't have to listen to any more of their lies about him. But she stayed. Like it or not, she had to know.

“You're quite right, Mr. Canon,” Flame stated, tilting her chin a little higher. “If Morgan's Walk is to be mine, I should know more about it.”

“Good.” He nodded in approval.

Without thinking, she glanced at the portrait and froze, an eerie chill running down her spine. Those eyes—the eyes of the man in the portrait—they'd lost their accusing glare and now regarded her with a pleased look. Flame tried to tell herself that she was imagining it, that her mind was playing tricks with her, yet the impression persisted.

Shaken by it, Flame walked over to the coffee tray. “I think I'll have a cup after all.”

“Help yourself, by all means.” The lawyer waved a hand in the direction of the silver pot as he crossed to the fireplace.

The coffee was every bit as black as he'd warned her it was, but she didn't dilute it with cream, for the moment preferring the strong brew. With cup in hand, she sat down in the nearest wing chair. Following her lead, Charlie Rainwater settled his wiry frame into its mate, both of them angled to face the diminutive attorney. He stood to one side of the blackened hearth, the top of his head barely reaching the marble lip of the tall mantel. She fixed her gaze on him, refusing to let it stray to the portrait that dominated the room and, currently, her thoughts.

“As you know from the documents I forwarded to you on Hattie's behalf,” the attorney began, “Kell Morgan—christened Kelly Alexander Morgan—was born in eighteen sixty on a small farm—although a southerner would call it a plantation—outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. When the Civil War broke out, his father, Braxton Morgan, joined the Confederate Army and sent his wife and young son off to New Orleans to stay with his sister and her family. When that city fell into Union hands, she took her son and fled to an uncle's farm near Dallas, Texas. Approximately six months after the war ended, Braxton Morgan rejoined them…minus an arm and with a crippled leg. Needless to say, circumstances forced them to continue living with his wife's family. A year later, your great-grandfather, Christopher John Morgan, was born.”

“That was eighteen sixty-six,” Flame said, recalling the year that had appeared on the baptismal record.

“Yes.” He moved away from the fireplace, his short legs setting an ambling pace as he wandered toward the bookshelves that lined one full wall of the library. “Much has been written about the Reconstruction years in the South, so it should suffice to say that they were rough times for children like your great-grandfather and his brother to be growing up. I don't know if you read between the lines in that obituary notice I sent you from a Dallas newspaper regarding the death of Braxton Morgan, but it seems he was killed during a drunken brawl—no doubt still defending the honor of the South. That was eighteen sixty-nine. Two years later, his wife died, probably from exhaustion and overwork. To her uncle's credit, he kept both boys and raised them. Then, in eighteen seventy-five, Kell Morgan struck out on his own at the tender age of fifteen—although I suppose we should keep in mind that in those days that made him nearly a grown man.”

When he returned to gaze at the portrait, Flame's glance was drawn to it as well. She searched but couldn't find that stern and forbidding quality she'd first seen in his expression. Looking at the man in the painting now, she could see only the pride and strength of an indomitable will stamped in his hard, angular features…that and those dark eyes boring into her as if trying to press their will on her.

“He signed on as a drover to take a herd of longhorns north to the railhead at Wichita, Kansas,” Ben Canon went on. “That was back in the heyday of the great cattle drives north. Which isn't to say that Texas cattle hadn't been driven to northern markets before then. They had—as far back as the eighteen fifties. Most of them were brought up the Shawnee Trail, called the Texas Road by some. It cut right through the eastern half of the state and stretched from Texas all the way to St. Louis. And a wide road it was, too. It had to be, to accommodate the military supply caravans, freight wagons, and the settlers' schooners that traveled over it.

“But it was the Chisolm Trail Kell Morgan went up that spring. It wasn't until late fall when he was heading home that he saw this part of the country for the first time.” Canon stared at the portrait, absently studying the man in the painting. “I've often wondered what he thought when he topped that ridge of hills and saw this valley before him—lush with the autumn gold of its tall grass and bright with the silver shimmer of the narrow river running through it. With only three years of schooling he could barely read or write, so his impressions were never committed to paper. But he told Hattie the sight of the valley was an image that lived in his mind from that day on.”

Charlie Rainwater spoke up, nodding his head at the portrait. “According to Miss Hattie, that painting didn't do him justice—not like seeing him in the flesh. He stood six foot one in his stockinged feet—and she claimed he had a pair of shoulders that were just about that wide. She said that every time she saw him he reminded her of a double tree standin' on an upright shaft. And nobody ever called him Red—at least, not twice. No, he was always known as Kell Morgan.” His glance darted briefly to Flame. “I never had the privilege of meeting him, you understand. He passed away long before I ever came to work here. But everybody I ever talked to said he was a hard man, but a fair one. As long as you were loyal to the brand, he'd stick by you right or wrong. Miss Hattie said he never smiled much—that he did all his talkin' with his eyes. When he was mad, they'd be as black as hell, but when he was happy, they'd glow…like they was lit from inside. And he loved this land, too. He was out riding it and checkin' cattle right up to the day he died. Sixty-five, he was.”

The painting lost much of its one-dimensional quality, the smoky blue haze of its background now projecting the tall, redheaded man in western clothes from the canvas. And that dark glow Charlie mentioned was in his eyes, those eyes that seemed to look directly at her.

“Although uneducated, Kell Morgan was an innately intelligent man—and a keen observer, too,” Ben Canon inserted, again taking charge. “When he returned to Texas, he started noticing the changes in the making. The era of the open range was drawing to a close. Every year more and more fences were going up. And the long drives north to the railheads took valuable weight off cattle. Four years in a row, he made the long, arduous trek north with somebody else's longhorns. And each time, he stopped to look at his valley—and stayed longer on every trip.

“Now you have to remember that all this land belonged to the Creek Nation. And I use that term
nation
advisedly. The Creek land was a separate entity with its own boundaries, governed by its own laws. Back in the eighteen thirties, the federal government, or more precisely, President Andrew Jackson, decided with typical arrogance that it would be in the best interest of the Five Civilized Tribes—the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, and the Seminoles—to give up their lands in the South that had been their home long before the first white man set foot on this continent, and move west to escape the corrupting influence of the whites. Through a series of nefarious treaties, they succeeded in removing them to this area.

“Now, according to Creek law and tradition, no individual held title to any given parcel of land. It was all owned in common. Which meant it was impossible for Kell Morgan to buy his valley outright. But during his trips here and his sojourns in the neighboring Creek village of Tallahassee, which the cowboys on the trail dubbed Tulsi Town, he became acquainted with a politically influential mixed-blood Creek named George Perryman. Through him, Kell Morgan succeeded in leasing his valley. With the money he'd put aside from his wages, he managed to buy one hundred head of scrub cattle, drove them north to his valley, wintered them on the rich grass, and made the short drive to market in the spring.” He paused, a certain slyness entering his grinning smile. “That may not sound like much of a start to you unless you consider that he bought them at a price of seventy-five cents a head and sold them for over fifteen dollars a head. With his profits, he leased more land, bought more cattle, and repeated the process with the same results.

“By eighteen eighty-two, Kell Morgan was justly considered a cattle baron. Three years earlier, the U.S. Postal Service had opened its
Tulsa
Station, subtly changing the town's name once again. And by eighteen eighty-two, the Frisco Railroad had extended its line into Tulsa. No longer did Kell Morgan have to drive his cattle to the railhead; it had come to him.”

Without a break in his narrative, the balding attorney turned and scanned the rows of books on the two shelves directly in front of him. “During all this time, he hadn't forgotten his little brother, Christopher, back in Texas. By then, Christopher wasn't little any more. He was a strapping lad of sixteen. With his newly acquired wealth, Kell sent him off to college in the East, determined that Christopher would have the education circumstances had denied him.” He extracted a wide volume from the shelf and flipped it open as he swung back toward Flame. “When Christopher finished college with a degree in engineering, he returned here to Morgan's Walk. In that interim period, Kell had been adopted by the Creeks. Now with full rights to the valley—as full as any Creek had—he had Christopher design and build this house. Prior to that, the only structures had been a dog-trot cabin and a log bunkhouse for his cowhands.” Pausing beside Flame's chair, he handed her the leather-bound volume, an old photo album. “Hattie thought you might like to see some pictures of your ancestors. Here's one of your great-grandfather, Christopher Morgan.”

His finger tapped the thick black paper directly above an old sepia print pasted on the page. A young man sat in a stiff pose, one large hand resting on his knee and the other holding a dark, wide-brimmed hat. He wore a dark suit and vest, the jacket opened to reveal the looping gleam of a watchfob and the white of a starched shirt collar tight around his throat. Although unsmiling, the expression on his smooth-shaven face conveyed an eagerness and a love of life. It wasn't closed and hard like the man in the portrait, although the strong, angular lines of their features were very similar. Their hair color was different, of course. In the brown-tinted photograph, Christopher Morgan's appeared to be a light shade of brown with even lighter streaks running through it.

“You can tell they were brothers,” Flame remarked idly as she turned the page, curious to see more of the old photographs.

“Miss Hattie said back then they were as close as two brothers could be,” Charlie Rainwater declared with a faintly envious shake of his head. “They weren't a lot alike, though. About as different as daylight and dark, I hear. But just like daylight and dark go together to make a whole day, that's the way it was with them.”

“In your great-grandfather's case, it was probably hero worship for his older brother,” Ben Canon added. “And Kell Morgan probably saw in his younger brother the educated man he wished he could be. I understand there was a good deal of mutual sharing of knowledge—Christopher teaching Kell about history and philosophy, and Kell giving him lessons in range lore.”

The next pages in the album contained photographs of the house under construction, some posed and some not. Flame was able to pick out Christopher Morgan in two of the pictures. Then she found a third photograph of the brothers. Side by side, the differences in their personalities were obvious—Kell Morgan looking impatient and uncomfortable, and Christopher, happy and smiling.

“I don't understand.” Flame turned her frown of confusion to the attorney. “If they were so close, why did Christopher Morgan leave and never come back?”

“I'm coming to that,” he assured her.

Impatiently she flipped to the next page, irritated by this air of mystery and dark secrets. She wished he'd get to the point of all this and stop dragging it out. Then her glance fell on the lone photograph on the facing page of black paper.

It was a picture of a young woman in period dress. Dainty and refined were the two adjectives that immediately sprang into Flame's mind. She looked as fragile as a china teacup, and Flame could easily imagine the elegant curl of her little finger when she sipped from one. Her dark hair was swept up at the sides, ringlets peeking from beneath the small brim of her high-crowned hat trimmed with ostrich feathers and shiny ribbons. Her heart-shaped face appeared ivory smooth and pale, needing no artifice of makeup to enhance its doll prettiness.