Wyoming Wildfire (25 page)

“The only thing wrong with him is a lot of outmoded ideas he refuses to give up. I’m sure some girl, if she cares enough to bother, will be able to convince him he’s wrong. As rich as he is, I’m sure he can find any number of the silly things willing to try.”

“Maybe hell find one at the Christmas party,” her aunt said, nodding her head. “You’ll have to make sure we invite plenty of girls for him to choose from. We wouldn’t want him to make a poor choice.”

“What?” exclaimed Sibyl, thrown out of stride by her aunt’s suggestion.

“Lasso tells me that people are coming from over a hundred miles away to this party, that even the settlers will be here, and they are the ones with the pretty daughters. If we invite several more families, maybe he can find one willing to undertake reforming him.”

“I hope he does,” Sibyl professed stiffly. “He’s getting so old they won’t have him if he waits much longer.”

“But I don’t know what we’ll do if he does marry.”

“Why should that affect us?”

“You must know that it’s bound to be difficult, with three women in the house and only one of them his wife. She will naturally expect to make the decisions.”

“Then she will soon learn different,” asserted Sibyl. “This is half my house and I’ll not hand over the reins to some grasping, insinuating little hussy.”

“That’s what I meant about it being difficult for us. Naturally Burch will have to take his wife’s side whenever there’s a disagreement. Since you two already find it so difficult to agree on anything—” Augusta’s voice trailed away, leaving the thought unfinished. “I suppose something can be worked out, but I think in the end Burch will buy himself another ranch or expect us to return to Lexington.”

Clearly none of these eventualities had ever occurred to Sibyl, and she found them unpleasant and extremely unsettling. She should have realized that it was inevitable Burch would someday bring a wife to Elkhorn, if not her, then someone else. It should have been equally obvious that they could not all continue to live in the house together. Someone was going to have to leave.

“I expect I’d better start on my list if I’m to finish today,” Augusta said vaguely and floated off, leaving her niece deep in thought.

Augusta remained a picture of benign concern until the parlor doors closed behind her. Then a complete change came over her, and she tottered to a sofa and dropped into its deep cushions, overcome with muffled laughter.
Augusta Hauxhurst,
she thought to herself,
you ought to be ashamed of yourself for mistreating that poor door so cruelly.
But it was worth it to see the look on Sibyl’s face when she realized that Burch could marry someone else.
If she can just keep from losing her temper every time he speaks to her, he’ll marry her yet. It’s plain as can be that he’s very much taken with her, but no man is going to ask a woman to many him if she argues with every word that comes out of his mouth. I never could make Sibyl understand that being right all the time could be very lonely.
Augusta pulled herself together and began to make the list for the shopping.
A little time apart is just what they need,
she reasoned.
It’ll give them both time to cool off and decide that they miss each other.

In spite of Sibyl’s proclaimed indifference, the intensity of the argument with Burch had given her a very nasty shock. Burch’s injury had delivered him, virtually helpless, into her control, and she had fooled herself into thinking that they were growing closer together. Now she was forced to admit that they were no nearer understanding each other than they ever had been, that their enormous attraction for each other only complicated things, and that once he got back on his feet things were likely to get even worse. Why did she insist upon his giving in to her, and why did she always think that if he didn’t, she had to try to
make
him? If she wanted a man to agree with everything she said, she could marry Jesse. She didn’t want a man who would let her run over him, but neither was she a meek female to say yes and amen to his every word. Surely it wasn’t asking much for him to assume she could do something more than fix dinner or arrange the furniture.

But did she
really
know as much about running a ranch as Burch? Sure, she could run a farm with stable hands and stock pens and breeding bulls and brood cows, but what did she know about directing ranch hands, managing thousands of wild cows, when to sell to get the best price, how to get the stubborn beasts to market? And what about grass, water, and hay? She knew they had to have plenty of all three to grow fat, but she didn’t know how to keep them alive in subzero-temperatures and week-long blizzards. And Burch did. She slumped down in her chair. The mental argument was getting her nowhere. She was of two minds about Burch, and perverse enough to argue for both of them. Before long, she wouldn’t know what she thought. Unexpectedly, she felt a great desire to cry, to fling herself on her bed and give over to an undignified bout of tears. Just as suddenly, her chin went up. She was not going to give Burch Randall the pleasure of crying over him. She might be besotted and developing the temper of a shrew, but she was not a sniveling weakling.

Burch slammed his door, as angry with himself as with Sibyl. Why, after all this time, did he allow himself to be so infuriated with her? It was his self-control that had caused his uncle to turn over the day-to-day operation of the ranch to him while he was still in his teens, yet Sibyl could unsettle him with no more than a word or a glance. He didn’t give a damn about that bed. As a matter of fact, he’d probably like sleeping in it, but instead of accepting it with at least a pretense of pleasure, he had turned it into an excuse to start the same old argument all over again. Why was he so unwilling to meet her halfway? Why didn’t he trust her intelligence? Surely he was willing to give her credit for some good intentions.

“Good Lord, I’m becoming as weak and indecisive as a woman.” Burch heard his own words, and in a flash of insight recognized the crux of his problem. He
did
think Sibyl was inferior—not to all men, certainly, but to himself. It was true that she didn’t know enough to run the ranch by herself, but didn’t he also discredit her ability to be able to
learn?
It was disconcerting to think that any woman could run the Elkhorn as well as he could. For years men had said he was one of the best natural-born cattlemen in the West, that he knew more by instinct than the rest of them could learn by hard work. He had been rightly proud of their praise, but maybe it had gone to his head. Maybe he felt
nobody
could ever do
anything
as well as he could. He knew that wasn’t so. And if that was the case, wasn’t it possible that Sibyl, as well as some others, could learn to do things around the ranch as well as he could?

He had never stinted his praise for her cooking or her household organization. During the weeks he had lain in bed, he discovered that Sibyl saw jobs that needed to be done that had never occurred to him or Aunt Ada. Balaam and Ned were really her employees, not his, and the work they had done with the buildings, the stock pens, the garden, the orchards, and the preparing of food for winter had proved her mettle. If she could accomplish so much in such a short time, how much more would she be able to do five or ten years from now? She obviously wasn’t willing to limit herself to choosing wallpaper and deciding what kinds of seeds to order for next year’s garden. He might as well realize that she was never going to be a quiet, retiring wife like his aunt, or an uncomplicated, fun-loving companion like Lasso’s Mary. She was going to be a dynamic, inquiring, demanding, full-time partner in everything.

She had the intelligence to learn, but he didn’t know if she had the ability to compromise, to disagree and yet allow someone else to make the decision without carrying a grudge. His desire for her had continued to grow more intense, but he knew she would never accept their physical relationship without marriage; he hadn’t spent weeks lying in bed without figuring that out. Her ownership of half the ranch made their union an even more logical conclusion, a merger of interests as well as convenience.

He didn’t hold himself free of blame for the acrimonious turn their arguments had taken, and in the future he intended to make sure that he
did
control his tongue and give a fair hearing to her suggestions. However, he was not going to be swayed by a pretty face and a tempting body, not by a full purse and sumptuous meals, into risking marriage before he was sure that’s what he wanted. Nothing was worth that kind of sacrifice.

The trip to Cheyenne was a welcome change. Sibyl sometimes had to grit her teeth to endure Lasso’s constant company and boundless cheerfulness. But she didn’t care about Lasso, and unless he were annoying her, which seemed to be nearly all the time, she forgot about him. They spent their first night at Lasso’s ranch, and she was pleasantly surprised to find mat his house was quite comfortable, not nearly so large or pretentious as the Elkhorn, but very sensible and well-furnished. “It lacks any trace of female influence,” she remarked to her aunt.

“That can be easily remedied.” Sibyl’s comment had been offhand, but her aunt’s unparalleled inquisitiveness about everything she saw put Sibyl off balance. For a moment she allowed herself to believe that her aunt was actually
interested
in the house, but she agreed with herself that it was an absurd thought and only Augusta’s general tolerance enabled her to endure Lasso’s showing them everything from the pantry to the corral.

The only time she didn’t have to fight to keep from yawning with boredom was when Lasso introduced them to his little girls, two wild things that looked more like range animals than children. They were clearly more at home on a horse than in the house, but their father took great pride in his rambunctious seven-year-old tomboys. Sibyl expected her aunt to cringe at the sight of twin girls in vests, flannel shirts, boots, and hats—miniature cowboys really—but Augusta had a quiet air of contentment about her that Sibyl found baffling.

True, she was a little awed by her surroundings, but she didn’t flinch when Lasso shoved the helpless children up to her, saying, “I knew you’d be anxious to meet these critters. I had to give them orders to be off their ponies just so you would know they had legs of their own. Don’t see them myself for days at a time.”

Sibyl felt uncomfortable, like something important was eluding her, and she was relieved when they resumed their journey.

Cheyenne was fun. It was a bustling town full of more things to buy than Sibyl had ever seen back home. The railroads bring it in in a hurry, and the cowmen buy it up even faster,” Lasso told her one afternoon as they rode down Longhorn Avenue, the road lined with mansions built by absentee cattle barons. “They even have a club house that will knock your eyes out. You didn’t expect to find anything like this out here, did you?” Sibyl admitted that she was properly surprised by the luxury and obvious wealth the cattle industry represented.

Augusta had fallen strangely quiet the last several days, and even though Sibyl found herself having to make most of the purchases and discuss them with Lasso, she still managed to get their shopping done within a week. Lasso prophesied that they would have to buy another wagon to carry everything home, but with careful packing all the bolts of cloth, boxes of ornaments, and furniture and hangings were carefully settled into a single wagon when at last they began their return trip. Up until then Sibyl had been able to banish Burch from all but her dreams.

The first night away from the Elkhorn Sibyl had dreamed of making love to Burch. It was the first time in her life she had ever dreamed of such a thing, and she woke with quite a start. However, when she realized it was merely a dream and that every person she had ever known in her life was not standing around watching her, she went back to sleep vainly hoping to recapture the threads of her dream. Over the next few nights her dreams increased in scope and intensity until she became so restless and agitated that Augusta was prompted to ask her if she was feeling well.

“I’m fine” Sibyl answered distractedly. She could feel her skin burn with the heat of embarrassment and was thankful that the dark obscured the crimson flush that covered her face. “I guess I’m just uncomfortable at being away from home.”

“The beds aren’t very soft. Mine has several very hard lumps in it, but I’ve never known you to be so fidgety. Are you certain there is nothing bothering you?”

“No, I’m not worried about a thing. You’d better go back to sleep, or you’ll have bags under your eyes. And I hate to think what Lasso will have to say about that.”

“He would never mention it,” replied Augusta comfortably as she drifted back into an untroubled sleep.

But once they turned toward home, Sibyl’s problems couldn’t be put off any longer; they came crashing down on her, occupying her mind to the exclusion of everything else and changing her dreams from memories of ecstacy to nights of misery.

At first she relived every agonizing moment of their arguments, adding even more devastating remarks that served to drive them further and further apart. Then, as they neared the ranch, her sleep was disturbed by dreams of Burch marrying a dazzling blonde who deferred to him in everything and rode and shot like a professional. Every night she woke up crying when Burch ordered her to pack her furniture and return to Virginia, and for the rest of the night she could do no more than sleep in fits and starts.

The evening air had already turned cold with a threat of unseasonably early snow when the wagon lurched over the rough stones of the rise that brought the Elkhorn into view.