Carla Kelly (16 page)

No cook ever had a more appreciative clientele,
she told herself as she went around again with the coffee. “I wish it were better, Mr. Otto,” she said as she filled his cup.

“Don't ever do a thing different,” he told her quickly.

“You can't be serious,” she replied. “I have not even begun to provide an adequate breakfast.”

“No, I mean it,” he said. He looked around the table. “Well, boys, start on those cans.” He grabbed James as he started outside with the others. “You have a special task.”

James made a face and appealed to Julia. “When he says that, I never have much fun.”

“I do not think cans will be much fun, either,” Julia replied. “Not unless you enjoy mice.”

“That is the whole point, Darling,” Mr. Otto said. He knelt beside James. “I will pay you five cents each for every mouse you kill. Today and every day until we return with the herd.”

James made no attempt to hide his disappointment. With a quiet dignity that made Julia's heart soften, Mr. Otto took the boy on his lap. “James, I mean for you to stay with Darling this time. I'll take you on the spring round-up.”

James was silent. “She needs your help,” Mr. Otto cajoled. He set James on the bench. “I would stay if I could, but someone has to keep Malloy, Doc, Willy Boy, and Kringle in line.” Mr. Otto looked at her. “There's a lot Darling doesn't know about this place, and she could use your help.”

“I really could, James,” Julia said, sitting on his other side. “If you aren't there to dispose of all those mice, I will probably run away.” She smiled. “For some odd reason, Mr. Otto doesn't want me to do that.”

“You don't want to run away,” the boy said suddenly. “You might get lost. If you left, I would be alone.” He leaped up and grabbed her around the waist.

The chill went right to Julia's bones, and she shivered. Her heart pounding, she glanced at Mr. Otto and saw that his expression was the same as hers. She waited for James to say something else, but he didn't.

“James, I won't leave you alone,” she said softly, resting her hand on his head. “I couldn't.”

With a sigh, he burrowed in closer, and she put her arm around him. “I'll catch the mice,” he said, and looked at Mr. Otto.

“Well done, James,” Mr. Otto replied. “You may have just saved me a cook. Tell you what. You pile the dead ones by the tack shed, and I'll count them and pay you tonight.” He leaned forward to look at her. “Darling here will find you a quart jar, and you'll put in the tails of all those you kill while I am gone.”

Julia shuddered. James grinned at her. “What about the ears instead?”

“And pay you twice as much?” Mr. Otto laughed. “You are too shrewd, James!”

“Like the rest of you?” he asked. Julia could hear the yearning in his voice.

“Like the rest of us,” Mr. Otto said gently. “Now go get the garden hoe. Just give'um a whack, but leave the rats to Kringle or Willy Bill.”

James hurried out the door, hollering for the men to wait for him. Julia started to rise, but Mr. Otto tugged at her apron and she sat down. “That's more than I have learned from him in all these years,” he said, keeping his voice low, as though James could hear. “Did someone
leave
him, I wonder?”

“I have no idea,” she whispered back, her head close to his. “Do people
do
such things?”

“I wonder,” was all he said.

Julia spent the day in the kitchen, dismantling the Queen Atlantic. The hands moved the can pile, the yard coming alive with evicted rodents. With steely-eyed determination, James raised the level of terror to new heights as he chased the mice with the hoe. The dirty clothes mound was already in the middle of the yard, with mice darting in and out.

Matt Malloy worked in the storeroom. He swept out a generous helping of mice, which had been done in by Willy Bill's liberal broadcast of rat poison last night.

Matt squatted by the funeral mound. “Look at that, Julia Darling,” he said in his rollicking accent. “Little paws on their neck as they breathed their last. It would make even a hard-eyed woman go all trembly-lipped.”

She laughed but stayed well away from his collection. “Just get them out of here, Matt,” she ordered, “and I will mourn them at a later date, if I think of it.”

“I ask you, boss, would you have ever thought your cook to be such an iron-willed colleen?” he joked, addressing his appeal to Mr. Otto, who stood in the doorway, slapping his gloves from one hand to the other.

“Can I help you with anything right now?” Mr. Otto asked.

Julia looked at the Queen Atlantic.
Poor, shabby old girl,
she thought. “You can loosen the bolts on the stovepipe. Don't take them off, or you'll be covered with soot. Better it's just me.”

He looked at her dubiously. “Are you going to take the whole thing apart? And get it back together?”

She nodded. “I have to set a fire in the stovepipe and blow out the creosote, just for starters.”

He frowned at the cooking range for a long minute. “Sure was a lot of work to get it up here,” he murmured, “for all the good … Well, let me get some pliers.”

He returned with a wrench and a bandanna. “Wrap that around your hair,” he told her. “Creosote's pretty greasy.” After a few minutes of tugging, aided by some choice words that Julia generously overlooked, Mr. Otto loosened the bolts and some other fastenings at strategic locations that she pointed out. When he finished, his hands were black.

Julia began her frontal assault on the Queen Atlantic. The stovepipe came off with a groan and a shriek of metal that made her skin crawl. Soot floated in the air and settled around her as she blinked her eyes and coughed. She tacked an old sheet to the archway leading to the rest of the house and retied the bandanna over her nose. The bandanna also smelled of bay rum, much more pleasant than the evil smells from the stovepipe.

The pipe was heavy with creosote, but she struggled outside and dropped it in the yard. With no small satisfaction, she went back inside and took several of the more lurid calendars off the wall.

She jumped when Mr. Otto reached over her shoulder and took the matchbox.

“You are entirely too quiet,” she scolded.

“Can't help that,” he said as he pocketed half the matches and pulled the bandanna down from her nose. “Oh, it's my cook!”

As he said that, a mouse under the influence of poison staggered out of the storeroom and collapsed dead at her feet. She shrieked, and he winced.

“It's just a mouse.” He pulled the bandana back over her nose, raised his hands as though she held him at gunpoint, and left the kitchen whistling.

She decided Mr. Otto was a worse trial than her brothers and turned her attention to the stovepipe. She gathered the calendar pages into a bundle and tied them with string. One good bang with a well-placed fire would rid the Queen of creosote.

She took the bundle and matches outside. Mr. Otto sat on his horse by the newer barn, one leg casually draped across the saddle as he spoke to Doc. The men laughed about something but neither glanced her way. She lowered the bandanna and gulped in the fresh air. Mindful of time passing, she went to the stovepipe, which lay on the road between the house and the bunkhouse, and stuffed the bundle of calendars inside the pipe. James, his hoe raised high to flog another mouse, stopped what he was doing and came over to her.

“Mr. Darling, I don't think you will be able to cook with the stovepipe out here,” he said solemnly after watching her for a long moment. Matt laughed; James hung his head.

“Don't tease him, Matt,” she said. “Stand back, please. I aim to blow out all the creosote. Best cover your ears, James.”

Julia struck the match on the stovepipe, knelt, and lit the end. To her satisfaction, the calendars with the racy women burst into flames. Julia ran back to the ranch house steps and covered her ears.

The explosion was even more impressive than the model the students had used for practice in cookery school. Julia lowered her hands cautiously. Even for a demonstration model, she was certain that Miss Farmer would never have allowed them to use a stovepipe with more levels of creosote than a torte had layers. “In extreme cases, the sound will amaze you,” Miss Farmer had said, and Julia could not argue.

Before Julia even had time to survey her handiwork up close, James shouted, pointed, and started running. Alarmed, Julia looked where he pointed, and her mouth dropped open.

She had forgotten Mr. Otto and Doc by the barn. Her eyes wide, she stood rooted in horror as her employer's horse, spooked by the blast, reared until she thought it would topple over backward. Unprepared for the explosion, his face set, Mr. Otto hung on to the pommel and tried to bring his leg back over the saddle and into the stirrup, which dangled too far back to reach now. He grabbed at his horse's neck as the animal rose higher and higher.

I can't watch,
she thought, and covered her face with her hands. She looked again just when Mr. Otto fell off the horse and landed on his back with a smack that she heard from the kitchen step.

Julia gasped. “I just killed my boss!”

r. Otto lay still on the ground. For some reason, Julia thought of the newspapers overhead on her ceiling. “Cook Kills Wyoming Employer,” she murmured as she started toward the prone man, who was beginning to move his legs.

Before she could say anything to stop him, James darted toward the plunging horse. She watched in further alarm, and then relief, as he grabbed the flapping reins and quieted the horse. In another moment he had led the horse toward the barn.

Doc knelt beside Mr. Otto, who gasped like a fish hooked and tossed onto the bank.
Oh, Heavenly Father, I thank thee that I have not killed my employer,
she prayed silently as she knelt next to Mr. Otto.
Especially on my first official day as cook on the Double Tipi. Amen.

Holding her own breath, she waited for Doc to do something. To her astonishment, he looked at Willy Bill, who was calmly rolling a cigarette. “Willy B, I never thought I'd see the day…” he began, but stopped to shake his head.

“Boss pulling leather?” Willy Bill licked the cigarette paper shut and turned away as his shoulders shook with silent laughter.

These men are insane,
Julia thought in desperation since no one made a move to help her employer. After only a slight hesitation, she grabbed Mr. Otto by the shoulders and sat him up until his head plopped against her bosom. “He can't breathe,” she stated to Doc and the other hands, enunciating carefully, as though they spoke another language.