Alma's Mail Order Husband (Texas Brides Book 1) (9 page)

Alma stared at him. Then, she frowned. “First
of all, I’m not going to be your wife. I
am
your wife.
Second of all, I would tell you my plans and movements out of basic
respect for your time. I wouldn’t leave you standing around
wondering where I was or what I was doing. That’s just simple human
consideration. Or is that too much for you to comprehend?”

Jude squinted at her from under the brim of
his hat. “You better learn to watch that tongue of yours.”

Alma’s eyes flew open. “What has gotten into
you? What happened between this morning and now to make you so
hostile all of a sudden? After last night….”

Jude cut her off. “Don’t talk about last
night. Don’t talk about anything private between you and me in
front of your sisters. What happened last night is none of their
business, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happening
right now. So don’t talk about it.”

“All right,” Alma replied. “I won’t talk
about it. And I won’t ask you anything more. Just tell me if you’re
coming up to the main herd with us right now, because if you’re
not, we’ll go and leave you here to do whatever it is that you want
to do. We’re late already, and we have to get going.”

“I’m not coming with you,” Jude told her. “I
have other things to do. You go ahead.”

“Fine,” Alma snapped.

She yanked her horse’s head around and jabbed
the animal in the flanks with her spurs. He shot away underneath
her, and Alma galloped off with her sisters at her heels.

They charged up an embankment and down a
gulley. Then they plowed up another small hill and Alma pulled her
horse up on top of it. Amelia and Allegra reined in their horses as
well, so that the three sisters sat side by side on their horses,
overlooking the plain below them.

Their cattle ranged on the floor of the
plain. Clusters of dots speckled the landscape as far as the eye
could see. Alma scanned the herd with her eye, making a mental note
of the number and location of their stock.

Jude’s sudden change in behavior annoyed her
and distracted her. What could be wrong with him? Could she rely on
him to tell her at some point? Would they reconcile whatever
precipitated this conflict? Or would he let it fester and drive a
wedge between them?

How could this happen so soon in their
marriage? They’d been married less than twenty-four hours, and
already, they’d had their first quarrel. Not a good start to their
life together.

Alma closed her eyes on the cattle. She
couldn’t sigh in front of her sisters without revealing to them
that she gave Jude’s behavior a second thought. She wouldn’t reveal
it. She wouldn’t give them any reason at all to doubt her decision.
She couldn’t doubt it, either. She had to stick with it and make it
work, no matter what. Isn’t that what marriage was supposed to
be?

Alma opened her eyes. “Let’s get down there
and start rounding them up.”

“Look over there.” Allegra nodded her head
back over her shoulder in the direction from which they’d come.

A cloud of dust rose up from the far
embankment. It dropped down the gulley, and the next minute, Jude
drove his horse up the rise and stopped in a lather next to the
sisters.

Alma smiled at him. “I thought you weren’t
coming.”

Jude shrugged. “I changed my mind.”

“So,” Jude continued. “Tell me what we have
going on here today.”

Allegra cleared her throat. Alma shot her a
glance and pressed her lips together. “We’re just getting ready to
round them up and drive them down to the river. We water them once
in the morning and once in the evening. That’s our daily routine.
Why don’t you help us? That way you’ll learn where things are
around here.”

“Why don’t you water them in the middle of
the day?” Jude asked. “They don’t need water now. There’s dew all
over everything, and the plants are cool and juicy. They’ll be
getting enough water from their food. You should take them down to
the river in the hottest part of the day when they really need
it.”

Alma cringed. She didn’t need to look at her
sisters to know where this conversation was going. “They get too
stressed if we take them in the middle of the day. We do it now
because they have more energy now. The water they get from their
food in the early morning gives them the strength to make the trip
down to the river and back. They’re too weak in the middle of the
day, and they fight too much because they don’t want to go. It’s
too hard on them and on us.”

“Well, I’m here now, so that will make it
easier,” Jude declared. “They don’t need water now, and they do
need it in the middle of the day. You should take them then.”

Alma braced herself. “We do it this way, and
we’re going to keep doing it this way. We aren’t discussing whether
to do it. We’re doing it now. We’re going down to round them up. Do
you want to come along and help us or not?”

Jude frowned down at the cattle spread out
below them, but he didn’t answer. Alma sensed her sisters watching
her. She tugged her reins and wheeled her horse around. Then she
kicked him forward and cantered down the hill toward the herd.

Amelia and Allegra followed her lead. Alma
heard the pounding of their horses’ hooves on the powdery clay
behind her. When she reached the bottom of the hill, she charged
forward and skirted around the cattle. Her sisters went the other
way around the other side of the herd, driving them toward the
center of the plain.

Only when she was part of the way around the
cattle did Alma happen to glance back and see Jude riding after
her. She heard a shrill whistle, and he steered his horse left and
right to send the stock toward the middle of the circle.

Alma’s heart soared, and she tore off to the
other quadrant of the circle, relieved and happy to leave him in
command of the area. On the other side of the plain, Amelia and
Allegra split up, too, so each rider drove the cattle in from one
quarter of the circle.

In no time at all, the herd converged in the
center of the plain. Allegra took off her hat and waved it over her
head. She waved it back in the direction of the hill they just sat
on. Jude and Alma pressed in on their animals and sent them
stampeding toward the hill. At the last moment, the cattle shot
down a side gulley and thundered down it with the riders driving
them from behind.

Jude and Alma raced their horses after them,
keeping them moving into the gulley until the last crowd of cattle
disappeared into the cloud of dust in front of the gap. Alma
flushed with happiness as she pulled up her horse next to her
sisters.

Jude waved his hand and shouted at them.
“Don’t stop! Keep them going. You don’t want to lose the advantage
you’ve gained. Keep them running. Let’s go!”

“We don’t have to keep going,” Alma called
back. “This gulley takes them all the way to the river. The cattle
in the rear will keep the ones in front running until they get
there. We don’t have to chase them. They’ll be calmer and they’ll
drink more if we leave them to take their time. Then they’ll wander
back here and keep grazing. We always do it this way.”

Jude scowled. “It’s sloppy. I never saw such
a sloppy operation.”

The smile fell from Alma’s face and her lips
stretched into a hard, straight line. “We know the terrain, and we
know our own animals. We’ve done this enough times that the cattle
know the routine. They know how to water themselves and then
they’ll come back here. They’ll have enough water to keep them
going, so they won’t be completely dry at the end of the day.
They’ll have the energy to get down there again.”

Jude pressed his lips together. “You’ve done
it this way for years, I guess.”

“That’s right,” Alma replied.

Jude shook his head. “It just goes to show
you haven’t had anything to do with real cattle punchers. You’re
women. You don’t know any better. And you’ve been working alone all
this time, so I guess it stands to reason that you don’t know what
you’re doing.”

Alma didn’t dare glance over her shoulder at
Amelia and Allegra, but she knew for certain they heard the
exchange. “Maybe it isn’t what you’re used to, but it works for us
and it works for this herd. Now, come on, let’s get back up the
hill. We have to keep a look-out for coyotes. They’ll be after our
calves before you know it.”

Jude frowned again, but followed Alma back up
to the top of the hill, where the sisters took their positions in
the same mounted line. Alma settled into her saddle.

She loved the cool morning best of all. A
bloom of green lightened the landscape. It would disappear in a
little while, as soon as the morning sun heated everything and
dried the dew from the rocks and bushes. She smiled down at the
landscape.

The cattle started coming back through the
gap and milling around on the plain. They nibbled the leaves of the
scrub and the occasional clumps of grass. “Something’s different
about this herd,” Jude remarked. “They look different from the
cattle I’ve worked with on other ranches.”

 
Allegra spoke up.
“That’s because they’re part Brahmin. We use a Brahmin bull. You
can see the cows and calves that come from him.”

“But some of them are regular Longhorns,”
Jude returned. “I recognize them.”

“That’s right,” Allegra told him. “We started
with a base stock of Longhorn cows and bred them with the Brahmin
bull. We still have a few of the original Longhorns, but most are a
mixture.”

“What possessed you to go and do a thing like
that?” Jude asked. “What’s wrong with Longhorns?”

“Nothing’s wrong with them, “Allegra
replied.

“Then you should have used a Longhorn bull,”
Jude maintained. “You should keep the line as pure as
possible.”

“Why?” Allegra asked. “What’s a pure line
good for?”

“When you sell them,” Jude explained. “You
get more for purebred Longhorns than for some crazy mongrel
mixture. Besides, Longhorns are the best suited to the dry
conditions than other cattle breeds.”

“They might be better suited than Jerseys and
Angus breeds,” Allegra replied. “But Brahmins are suited to dry
conditions, too They might be even better than Longhorns. And the
slaughterhouse buyer buys our cattle by bulk carcass weight. He
doesn’t care what breed they are. All that matters is that they
reach the sale yards alive.”

Jude narrowed his eyes at her. “I don’t know
about that.”

“If you don’t believe me,” Allegra shot back.
“You can ask the buyer yourself the next time we see him. That’s
what he told me, and he’ll tell you the same thing. And I’ll tell
you something else.  Mac Foley, who runs the ranch just next
to ours, loans us his Brahmin bull every year at no charge, so we
get our cows bred with no cost. If we wanted a Longhorn bull, we
would pay top dollar for him, or else we would pay a fee to hire
him every year. So it saves us money to use the Brahmin.”

“I always favored Longhorns myself,” Jude
grumbled.

“Maybe you always favored Longhorns,” Allegra
acknowledged. “I’m not saying Longhorns aren’t good. But the
Brahmin bull fits our circumstances, and the animals we get by
crossing the two breeds are just as good, if not better, than
purebred Longhorns. So that’s why we use them.”

“I still don’t like it,” he muttered.

Allegra snorted. “You don’t have to like
it.”

Alma caught Amelia’s eye and saw a flash of
amusement cross her younger sister’s face. Allegra had nailed Jude
neatly. To punctuate the conversation, she wrapped her reins around
her saddle horn and pulled her rifle out of its leather case at her
side. She jumped down.

“I’m going over to the target range,” Allegra
announced. “Who’s coming with me?”

“Aren’t you going to guard the cattle?” Jude
asked.

“We take turns,” Allegra told him. “All three
of us don’t have to sit here doing nothing the whole time. It’s
Alma’s turn to guard them. She’ll call me if anything happens and
she needs me to come back.”

“I’ll come with you.” Amelia nudged her horse
over next to Allegra’s. She slid down from her saddle and tied both
horses to the branch of a tree a little way away. She took out her
own rifle and the two sisters walked away toward a gulley behind
the hill.

After they left, Jude turned to Alma. “What
are they going to do over there?”

“Allegra likes to practice shooting during
the slow times,” Alma told him. “She’s become really good with all
that practice. Why don’t you go with them? It will be a lot more
interesting than sitting up here with me.”

Jude shook his head. “I’ll stay with you.
It’s probably a lot safer for me than going off into the desert
alone with those two. They might shoot me and leave me in the
gulley for the coyotes.”

Alma chuckled. “No, they wouldn’t. At least,
they wouldn’t unless I told them to.”

“I see,” Jude replied. “Are you sure you
wouldn’t tell them to?”

Alma smiled. “Not yet, anyway. But you’re not
makin’ any friends around here by telling them how to manage our
herd. We’ve put a lot of work into this herd, and we’ve gone to a
lot of trouble to figure out what works best for them. You just got
here. Do yourself a big favor and just watch and learn. You might
find out we know what we’re doing after all.”

Jude frowned. “I don’t want to watch and
learn, especially not from….” He shut his mouth without finishing
his sentence.

Alma understood him. “You mean, from a bunch
of women? That’s okay. I understand how you feel. But think about
it. Even if you plan to take over this ranch some day, you need to
learn about the local conditions and the ways of managing this herd
that work best for our animals. You might not like to learn from
women, but just give yourself some time to take it all in. That’s
all I’m saying.”