Softly Falling (38 page)

School began in the morning with spelling words on a makeshift blackboard made of tin, probably a remnant from the larger piece that rested underneath Madeleine’s cookstove. It had appeared mysteriously in Jack’s front room, left there during the night by someone determined not to waken her in the back room. She had her suspicions. Written on the tin sheet, its edges carefully turned under for safety, was “Teach me good judgment and knowledge, Psalm 119:66.”

“Preacher, what are you doing here in Wyoming?” she asked the tin sheet.

Before they left for another cold day, Pierre nailed his winter count to the wall and announced to her children that he had a handful of wheat to leave for the Wyoming Kid. More dried beef found its way by the inside door. She left it there, wondering if Francis would leave his place of safety under Jack’s bed. By noon, the cat was curled in Amelie’s lap.

The men told the same story that night at supper, giving Lily and Madeleine a glimpse of the tragedy unfolding, precisely as Jack had predicted. They had found more cattle and trailed them closer, but other ranchers had horror stories of their own.

“It’s only October, and barely that,” Preacher said.

“Could you pray us good weather?” Chantal asked.

Preacher shook his head. “I don’t think it works that way,” he told her. “I think sometimes the Lord has to deal with what He has before Him, when it comes to weather, same’s us.”

“No miracles?” Amelie asked.

He regarded the child for a long time. “I’m starting to think the Almighty expects us to do everything we can first.”

“And then?” Nick asked.

“We wait and look for His mercy.”

The miracle is we are still alive
, Lily thought, too shy to speak.

Silence settled over the group, broken when Lily took
Ivanhoe
out of a pocket in the apron Madeleine had loaned her. She ruffled the pages. “Jack and I are on chapter sixteen, but we’ll start over. Bring the lamp closer, Nick, please.”

It snowed the next day, which meant that Fothering and Luella had to flounder through fresh snow, arriving just as Lily finished the spelling test. Her classmates waited while Luella took the test. The men rode south toward Wisner, coming back with enough cattle to make Jack’s pinched look of disappointment leave his face.

“We’ve lost a lot, but not everything,” he told her after
Ivanhoe
as he walked her and Amelie back to his house. Madeleine had decided that her girls would take turns staying with Lily, which calmed her heart. Lily assured her children that she would be fine when her father returned from Cheyenne, which made Chantal frown.

“We
like
to stay with you,” Chantal said. “It is a rare treat.”

Jack laughed at that and nudged Lily. “They sound more like you every day.” He nudged her again, but gentler, making it almost a caress. “I have to tell you, as I ride and cuss and rope cattle out of air holes and deep snow, I still think about that first day, when you asked me if I tend cattle, like they were delicate creatures needing me.”

“They are,” she told him and nudged gently in turn.

The Buxtons’ cook forced the issue of a trip to Wisner, declaring that if she did not leave immediately, she would do herself damage. Oliver Buxton must have believed the old biddy, because he issued his own ultimatum in a rare visit to the bunkhouse the next morning. Jack groaned inwardly as his boss looked around the cluttered room, taking in the unmade beds and jumbled clothes, disdain all over his face.

“Take my cook to Wisner and stick her on the train,” he told Jack.

“Can’t get through with the buckboard or wagon yet,” Jack said. “She’ll have to go on horseback.”

Mr. Buxton gave his gallows smile. “I hope she suffers!” He stopped at the door. “Get any mail. There should be a telegram from the consortium secretary and maybe one from Clarence, so you’ll know when to get him.”

After a long look at the northwest sky, Jack rode out with Pierre and Winnie the cook, who complained loud and long about her transportation. Jack listened as long as he thought polite, then stopped her with a chop of his hand.

“Miss Winnie, if you want to leave now, this is how is happens. Well?”

The hefty cook glared at the saddled horse as if willing it to turn into the Union Pacific Railroad. When nothing happened, she let Jack heave her into the saddle, no mean feat. He tied stuffed carpetbags behind each saddle, and they started for Wisner. Pierre took a detour at the schoolhouse, deserted and bereft with no students, and left grain for the Little Man, a.k.a. the Wyoming Kid. The cook was not amused.

Jack and Pierre rode abreast, partly to break the way for the cook’s long-suffering horse, and partly to avoid conversation. She complained anyway, going on and on about Mrs. Buxton’s weird crochets and lengthy arguments between the Buxtons, all of which ended with door slamming and tears, which usually advanced into hysteria.

“I’m amazed Luella isn’t stranger than we already know about,” Jack whispered to Pierre, who only grunted and kept his eyes ahead.

When they passed the drifts by the road to his own ranch, Jack resisted a powerful urge to turn in and see how Manuel and Bismarck had fared. He could see the cabin in the distance, but no smoke climbed from the chimney.
Now what?
he asked himself, imagining his old hand dead and Bismarck failing.

“Don’t borrow trouble. We have enough,” Pierre commented.

“How did you . . . ?”

“Jack, I know you.”

Wisner looked bedraggled and defeated, with snow mounded everywhere, testimony to as severe a time as the one they weathered on the Bar Dot, except the snow here was turning black with smoke from the train and wood and coal fires.

Still muttering about her cavalier treatment, Winnie brushed before them into the depot and plunked down her money for Cheyenne.

“One way or round trip, ma’am?”

Winnie leaned over the counter and the clerk reared back, terrified. “One. Way,” she declared in a voice impossible to misunderstand.

“Jack.”

Vivian from the Back Forty sat on the bench closest to the pot-bellied stove. Jack noted her luggage and handsome traveling coat, and couldn’t help wishing there was such a coat for Chantal.

“Taking my advice?” he asked, sitting beside her.

“I am. I’ve saved enough and I’m going home.”

“Which is?”

“Moberly, Missouri. If you’re ever through there, you’ll see a millinery shop with my name on it. Time to leave faro behind.” She held her hand out, and he shook it. “You were always a gentleman.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

She tightened her grip, then released his hand. “Don’t sell yourself short, Jack Sinclair.”

He nodded and followed an amused Pierre out the door. “I don’t even know her last name,” he said outside. “I played cards there off and on for five years, and I never asked.”

Thoughtful, he picked his way across the slushy street to the post office and asked for Bar Dot mail. The clerk found the pigeonhole and handed him newspapers, mail for Mr. Buxton, and a telegram. He stared at it. “Should I open it?” he asked Pierre. “Suppose there needs to be a reply.”

“Go ahead,” Pierre said. “Not that you need
my
permission.”

Jack slit the thin envelope and pulled out the message. He started to hand it to Pierre to read, but the Indian pushed it back.

“You’ve been learning with Lily. At least, I think that’s what you do in the evenings,” Pierre teased. “You try first.”

Jack looked at the telegram, thinking, not for the first time, how ironic that a mixed breed Indian could read better than he did. He cleared his throat. He knew these letters. He could even string them together. “Wh . . . wh . . . where.” That was it, and the next work was simple. “Is.” He knew the third word, but he felt a chill that had nothing to do with cold and snow. “Carteret?”

The two men looked at each other.

“We have a problem,” Pierre said quietly. “It’s a big one.”

C
HAPTER
35

J
ack swore so fluently that the mail clerk told him to leave. He banged the door behind him for good measure but felt only embarrassment, followed by a fierce anger he had not felt in years.

“That old scoundrel!” he said, looking at the telegram again to see if the words had changed. “How could he
do
this to Lily?”

Without a word, he crossed the street again to the depot. Vivian looked up from the book she was reading, and the cook glowered at him. He rapped his hand on the counter and the clerk returned to the window.

“Did you sell a ticket to Cheyenne to Clarence Carteret last week?” Jack demanded. “A tall, thin, Englishman? Works at the Bar Dot?”

“I did. It was the day of the blizzard and by the eternal, it was snowing so hard.”

“The train made it to Cheyenne?”

The clerk laughed. “Eventually! That four-hour trip took two days.”

Two extra days was still plenty of time for Clarence Carteret to hand the money over to the consortium secretary. Jack looked at the telegram again. How could the man do this? And how in the world could he, Jack Sinclair, tell Lily?

“Did he say anything, you know, anything to you?”

“Besides just the business of a ticket?” the clerk asked. “I remember that he looked at the ticket, chuckled, and told me that come spring, he’d be heading to San Francisco.”

“That was it?”

“Yes, indeedy. The depot was filling up with folks doing their dead-level best to get out of Wisner, but I remember that. Anything else, Jack?”

“No, nothing,” he mumbled. He nodded to Vivian again and shoved the telegram in his pocket.

Pierre stood on the boardwalk, looking at the sky. “Clouds gathering. If you want to stop and see your expensive bull, we’d better ride.”

Jack nodded. He made Pierre wait while he ducked into the emporium for a sack of beans and a quart bottle of lemon juice, which he had Watkins wrap in several layers of cardboard and brown paper. He tied it securely to his saddle and strapped the beans to the riderless horse. Six more skeins of gray yarn took care of the rest of his cash. Pierre crammed them in his saddlebags.

They rode north in silence, both of them watching the gathering clouds. He had grown used to the snowy mounds with cattle underneath, but here and there, the drifts had blown themselves out, shifting the blankets of cruel snow and exposing death on the hoof.
How could Clarence do this to Lily?
kept echoing through his brain, even as he stared at death all around. He tried to think of some reason that Clarence wouldn’t have deposited the money, and there was only one reason.
How could he do this to Lily?
he thought, and the words went round and round.

If anything could salvage the day, his reception at the Double J did not fail him. Grim and silent, he rode toward Manuel’s cabin, where no chimney smoke wound its way toward the clouds. They dismounted at the cabin and he knocked, then opened the door. Nothing. He was past cursing, so he walked from one wallpapered room to the next and stopped in surprise.

The bedding was nowhere in sight. He looked into the lean-to kitchen, two weeks ago cluttered with dishes and sacks of food, enough to last a careful man all winter. It was bare.