Emma's Blaze (Fires of Cricket Bend Book 2) (5 page)

“I’d appreciate it,” Emma replied. “Thank you. So much. For this, and for the music.”

For the rest of the day, Emma sat in the wagon as the drive continued. She peeled potatoes, mended a few more items, and dozed against the rocking of the wagon. Appie had been right about how she needed time to heal. Her exhaustion went down into to her bones, and she didn’t mind the day of rest.

They made camp as the sun began to set. Saul had Emma riding Maggie around in easy circles, when a man’s voice yelled out, “Riders!” Everyone’s attention shifted to the west, where two riders were quickly coming up on the camp.

Bill saw Emma on the horse. “Now, who gave you a horse?”

“Your brothers.”

“Soft-hearted fools.” When he winked, she realized he was messing with her.

“Are you hurt?”

She didn’t miss the look Bill shot the man beside him. “Just a little worse for wear.”

The new man studied her closely. Too close, in fact. “What do we have here?”

Bill got off his horse. “Andrew, this is Sparrow.”

Andrew looked at Emma with doubt in his brown eyes. She looked right back at him, not afraid. Bill continued, “Sparrow, this is my good-for-nothing brother, Andrew, who decided to go looking for a card game rather than follow my directions.”

“You ain’t the boss, Bill,” Andrew said as he slid off his horse.

“Actually, I am.”

“Ignore my big brother,” Andrew said to Emma. “Thinks just because he’s the oldest he gets to boss everyone around. Sweetheart, I must tell you that you’re a sight for sore eyes.” To Emma’s surprise, he also gave her a wink. She didn’t appreciate it coming from him.

Whether Bill saw and didn’t like the wink, or was just tired, Emma couldn’t tell, but his voice was especially strained when he started to speak. “Andrew—”

A loud whistle cut through the air. Everyone turned in the direction, and saw the looming specter of Josiah on horseback a few yards off from the group.

Pete called, “Hey, Andrew! Pa wants you.”

Andrew kicked the dirt. “Son of a bitch.”

“Best not keep him waiting,” Bill said, his eyes cold on his brother. Andrew turned away from Bill and Emma and walked toward his unhappy father and boss. The men parted ahead of him, knowing smirks on their faces. On his way, he gave Jess a mighty shove as he passed.

Emma glanced down at Bill. “What’ll your pa do to him?” She envisioned a cruel beating, with Andrew bruised in the aftermath.

Instead, Bill shrugged. “Probably chew him out until his ears bleed.” When he saw Emma’s surprise, he reached up to help her off her horse. “Andrew and Pa have been going at it since he was old enough to talk. Pa tried using his belt for a while, but it didn’t make a difference. Nothing seems to. He won’t listen to orders or sense from anyone. Likely to get him killed some day. Nearly got him killed yesterday.” As he got her feet back on the ground, he looked toward where his brother and father were arguing. Josiah’s words couldn’t be heard, but Andrew was definitely on the wrong end of a berating. It seemed as if the men would come to blows, perhaps, but Andrew threw up his hands and stomped away.

“What happened out there?” Emma asked Bill.

“He picked a fight he couldn’t win.”

“And you saved him.”

“I always do. Probably makes me the biggest fool in the world.”

“He’s your brother.”

Bill nodded. “Yep. He sure is.”

Emma saw his exhaustion and worry. Before she could think it through, she reached out to rest a hand on his arm. The contact was simple, a gesture of friendship designed to offer some quick comfort, but Bill’s eyes shot back to her. He didn’t say a word as he studied her face, and Emma began to feel nervous.

She indicated a small rip in his shirt near her fingers. “You’ve got a tear.”

“Just a small one.”

“I can fix it easy enough. Let’s get some supper in you first.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

***

Bill

Food never tasted as good as it did after two days of hard riding, a near-gunfight, and a scarce dinner of hunted rabbit. Appie had biscuits and beans for everyone, but also cooked up some bacon and salt pork to add to Bill’s. As he held the steaming plate in his hands and inhaled the salty aroma, Bill listened to his men jabber and argue as they always did at dinnertime. The sound relaxed him. If the boys were talking and laughing, nothing could be wrong.

“Hey, Sparrow! Sing us a song!” Ollie called out.

Bent over her own plate, Sparrow fluttered her eyelashes and wiped her mouth daintily with a blue cloth; Bill recognized the material from her discarded dress. “What would you like to hear?”

“Somethin’ lively!” Blue jumped in the conversation. “Do you know “Susannah”?”

“Of course,” she replied. “But I’ll only sing if Saul plays along.”

As Bill watched, Sparrow looked over at Saul and grinned broadly. His little brother, shy as a maid, pulled the harmonica from his pocket and held it up to her. They commiserated for a moment before Saul began to play “Susannah” and Sparrow joined in to sing.

The moment she opened her mouth to sing, Bill couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Though she wore men’s clothes that were too big for her, and her hair was tied back in a rag, she shone. Her face brightened. Her cheeks flushed red. The joy she took in singing showed, even across the fire. The voice that came from her sounded pure and sweet as a bird’s call.

The men clapped, and some sang along. Pete kept on eating, but Bill could see even he was listening closely. She’d clearly made friends with the crew in his absence.

And she was singing along to Saul, and he was watching her and keeping time as he played. In front of everyone and in the center of attention, Saul was standing tall and proud.

She worked a strange kind of magic, Bill figured. As strange as her arrival had been, and as strange as she seemed to him, with her mysterious story and her bold manners, he was glad she’d come to the drive from wherever she’d come from. He’d never been one to think of roaming. Bill preferred home. The warmth of his small house back on the ranch, built from wood he’d cut himself, and sparsely decorated—a quilt from his mother, a famed photograph of the family, and not much more—felt like where he belonged. An old rocking chair from his grandfather sat outside, and he’d sit in it for hours and watch the peaceful world around him.

Sparrow, whoever she was, would likely never look twice at a man like him. He was too simple. Despite her trail clothes, she was still an exotic bird with a wounded wing relying on them to get somewhere. Once she got to Cricket Bend, she’d likely fly away, fast and furious, never to be seen again.

Something about her still pulled at Bill. He hadn’t experienced sensations of excitement for a woman as intensely in a long time. Maybe it was the way she moved, gently swaying as she sang. Maybe it was something more.

Whatever it was, the song ended too quickly for his liking. After, the men took to drinking and chattering. Bill lost Sparrow in the night, until she appeared by his side and pulled needle and thread from her pocket. She settled beside him and focused on a tear in the arm of his shirt. “I can fix this in a heartbeat, if you hold still.”

“Holding still for a while sounds real fine. Thought you weren’t planning to sing without pay.”

She waved a hand. “Your boys, they grew on me. It makes them happy to hear music. And Saul is very talented, like you said. I could hardly resist.”

“Saul’s never been real comfortable with strangers. He’s not one to talk much.”

“He talked to me.”

“Then you’re more special than I thought.”

“I’m nothing special.” She seemed almost shy when she said it.

“You’re wrong about that,” Bill answered.

Her small fingers worked quickly to mend the rip in his shirt. Bill wished she’d work slower. He didn’t mind having her sit beside him, or seeing wisps of her hair blow in the breeze and her long eyelashes blinking. He didn’t mind feeling the gentle pressure of her fingers where she held his arm, or her knee barely against his thigh.

“Think Appie could live without you for a day?”

“Why?”

“Thought you might want to ride Maggie tomorrow. Come on up front with me.”

Her eyes got big. “That would be real nice. Will Josiah be mad?”

“I don’t rightly care if he is. I could use the company, and it’ll keep you from battling that crutch broom all day long. We’ll go out right after breakfast. I’ve left Jess alone with the job for a few days. I’m sure he’d appreciate the company too.”

“I’m glad you came back,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re still here,” he replied. “Got worried you’d have run off without saying goodbye.”

Sparrow met his eyes with her own. “I’m not going to run off, and I promise to at least say goodbye first if I change my mind. Even if I was thinking of running, where the hell would I go?” She flipped her hand a little, and Bill took in the vast expanse of open land around them. There was nothing for miles. Until he got her to Cricket Bend, she’d be stuck on the drive with him.

“I’m glad to know that.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Bill and Sparrow rose before the sun. Thanks to Saul’s creativity, Maggie wore a blanket tied onto her by a rope. The drive didn’t carry a spare saddle, so it would have to do. Bill rode beside her to the front of the herd, where he spent his days leading the cows along the safest and easiest paths to Abilene. Jess joined them on their way out, headed to the front himself.

“Good morning, ma’am.” Jess greeted Sparrow with a yawn.

“Morning?” Sparrow looked at the still-dark sky. “I have yet to see proof of that.”

As if on cue, Appie began banging pots and pans.

“I stand corrected.” Sparrow said. “Now I believe it to be morning.”

As they reached the front of the herd, Bill saw Maggie skitter away from a cow. Sparrow held on and rode the little jump, and Jess shooed the troublemaker cow back to the herd.

“Maggie’s right not to trust him. That one,” Bill said as he pointed to the particularly surly looking cow standing at the head of the pack. With horns at least five feet across, and a scar on his muzzle from some argument long past, the longhorn huffed and glared at the riders. “We call him King. He’s made himself leader. Bossy, grumpy, does whatever he wants.”

“Should have named him Andrew,” Jess joked.

“He’s worthy of it. But the others follow where he goes. You need a leader, a cow who’ll go first, or the others won’t budge. Pa may be the boss out here, but King, he calls the shots. Jess and I ride the point, up front.” Bill began to explain the order of things, and she listened up. “We lead the way. It’s a formation, like soldiers.”

“If soldiers were going to be turned into meat at the end of their march,” Jess said.

“Pete, Ollie, Nick, and Blue ride flank—that’s at the sides, keeping the cows from drifting wide. Andrew, he brings up the rear and keeps the weak and the lazy in line. At least, he’s supposed to. ’Cept he vanishes all the damn time, so Hiram shares the position and does most of the work. We call it dragging. The dust eaters are the men in the back.”

Jess laughed. “If Andrew wasn’t blood, Pa’d have fired him years ago. Last year, especially.”

“What happened last year?” Sparrow asked.

Jess charged ahead with the story before Bill could shoot him any looks. “I’m embarrassed to say that a bunch of us went into a little town to visit the saloon and take a break from hard riding, and wound up causing a little trouble.”

Bill scoffed. “Trouble. You nearly burned down the saloon, then went back and fought half the town in the street.” He looked at Sparrow. “They all landed their behinds in jail.”

“And Bill, like an angel down from heaven, came and bailed us out,” Jess said. “Andrew started the brawl, I still say. Drank too much and decided to get rough with the working girl at the saloon.”

“What did he do?”

Jess set his jaw before he answered. “He beat on her. Won’t say why to this day.”

“Was she hurt?”

“Bruised. But she was a tough one, and threw him off a balcony.”

“Well.” Sparrow looked deeply uncomfortable. “Sounds like he deserved it.”

“He did,” Jess agreed. “She tossed him right over the side, but he was drunk and mean. He didn’t stop fighting until the owner of Porter’s Saloon pounded him into the dirt. I thought he was going to kill Andrew, I truly did.”

Sparrow had been listening intently, but Bill saw her eyes change quickly. “Porter’s Saloon. In Cricket Bend?”

“That’s the one.” Jess nodded. “You know it?”

“Heard of it,” she replied.

Bill made note of how she’d perked up at the mention of Cricket Bend and the saloon. She hadn’t given him many clues as to who she was after. Maybe Porter’s meant something to her. There wasn’t much else in Cricket Bend to commend the little town, but their saloon was impressive.

“Good thing Bill is the one taking you to town,” Jess said. “If any of the rest of us stepped foot there, the Sheriff would fire first and ask questions later. His deputy ain’t so bad, though. Heard he was engaged to that girl, the pretty one Theo went after.”

“Theo?” Sparrow asked.

“Enough,” Bill cut off the conversation with a meaningful look to Jess. “Whyn’t you go right and keep the edge.”

Jess took the hint in Bill’s tone, and trotted away.

“It’s a nice view,” Sparrow said of the endless land ahead of them. “I’ve spent the past few days looking at the rear end of cows.”

“Thought you might appreciate a new view,” he said. Bill clicked his tongue and lashed the whip, and King started to move. The other cattle trickling into line behind him. They walked shoulder-to-shoulder, like bovine soldiers, just as he’d said. The herd flowed into a moving ribbon of white and earthen brown. Bill and Sparrow led the pack, riding side by side. She seemed to breathe easier when she was alone with him, away from everyone else. He noted she rode with a little trepidation. It was likely she’d never spent much time on horseback before. Good thing Saul had given her Maggie, the most level-headed mare a man could ask for.

“Do you all do this every year?”

“Yep. And when it’s done, I look forward to the next and start planning for it.”

She looked around and took in the scenery. “I can understand the appeal. From what your brothers have said, it sounds like you’re a man with plans.”

“Not that Pa wants to hear any of them,” Bill answered. “He had a fit last summer right before we reached home. Couldn’t move or talk for a few months.”

“My goodness,” Sparrow said.

“Thought it might be the end of him right then and there. But he’s tougher than rawhide, as you’ve seen, and got back up on his feet and insisted we drive again this year. This life—the drives—it ain’t the future. Folks are buying land. Soon there won’t be open land, maybe there won’t even be cattlemen. If I’m being honest, this is likely the last drive we’ll ever do.”

“Is it?”

“Cattle travels by trains now, mostly. And folks are switching over to stockier breeds of cows that are easier to raise than longhorns. Things are changing. My mama says it’s progress. There’ll always be ranches, and folks’ll always eat beef, but life sure won’t be like this much longer.”

A hawk swooped overhead, and Bill pointed at it. Sparrow watched the bird fly off into the open sky that stretched on for miles and miles, a blanket of blue as far as the eye could see. He watched her as she took in everything around her, even the stomping cows trailing behind them. Finally, she spoke. “That’ll be a sad day, I suppose. The end of something simple and beautiful.”

“A man’s gotta keep moving.”

“Amen.”

“Speaking of moving,” he began. “Where will you go once you’ve caught up to the man you’re seeking? I’m guessing it’s a man. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“He is.”

“He hurt you?”

“No,” she said. “He stole from from me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to get it back.”

“How?”

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

“What will you do after you get it back?”

“After? I…don’t know, honestly.”

“Between not knowing how you’re going to get back your money, and what you’re going to do after, I have to say your plan might not be too well laid-out.”

“My plan also didn’t involve cattlemen.”

“Will you go home?”

“I don’t have a place I call home,” she answered. “I have places I’ve stayed at for a while.”

“Everyone needs a home,” Bill replied. “How do you know who you are if you don’t know where you can go back to?”

“That’s a good question.” She went silent for a bit and pondered his question before changing the subject. “It’ll be a sad day, I think. The end of the drives. It’s beautiful out here.”

“It is,” he agreed. “But there’s other beauty in the world. Sitting right next to me, in fact.”

Where had that come from? The words had come out of his mouth before he’d thought them through. Sparrow’s face changed completely. The troubled expression on her face relaxed.

“Why, Bill, are you flirting with me?”

“Depends. You got any rocks to throw at me?”

Even though she wore a lovely smile, he saw her curiosity. She’d surprised him so many ways over the few days since they’d met, it seemed he’d finally surprised her for a change. “As a matter of fact, I have left all my best rocks behind today.”

“Lucky me.”

“Was Theo your brother?”

Damn. He’d hoped she’d forgotten Jess’s mention and the previous conversation.

“The youngest of us. He was real hot-headed, worse than Andrew. Mean from the time he was a baby.”

“He’s dead.”

Bill nodded solemnly. “Last year. Even after I bailed him out of that jail, he went back to Cricket Bend. To do what, I have no idea. But there was a man, a wanted killer, and he left Theo lying bloody in a barn. We buried him about three days outside of town.”

Sparrow was silent for a long time before she spoke again. “Is Andrew like him? Is that why you protect him like you do?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Is it a crime to be curious about the man who saved your life?”

She had him there. “Theo and Andrew were two of a kind. I don’t want Andrew to wind up the same way,” Bill confessed. “But it seems there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I thought if maybe he came on one more drive, I could talk some sense into him, but it seems I was fooling myself. He’s hell-bent on gambling and drinking and fighting, and it’s likely to be the death of him.”

“You might be surprised,” Sparrow answered. “I’ve known men like him. Some of them, sailing on luck or stupidity, live lives far longer than you can imagine. Like cats and their nine lives. They’ll outlive a good number of sensible men, unfair as it seems.”

For the finery he’d found her in, she didn’t always speak like a refined woman. A hint of darker things lay just beneath her words. Yet again, he wondered about her past. “Seems to me you know a bit about it.”

“I’ve spent a good deal of my life in saloons and music halls. I have known a lot of people, and seen my share of trouble.”

“I look forward to hearing that story, when you’re ready to tell it.” When her eyes went down to her fingers, either from sadness or embarrassment, Bill quickly changed the subject. “Let’s run these two for a bit, see what’s up ahead and waiting for us.” He whistled loud to Jess, who moved into point position as Bill and Sparrow kicked their horses into gallops and crossed the grass side by side.

Bill watched her face go from scared to exhilarated as the horses ran over the flat land, up a small incline, and down into a valley. All of it would be fine for the cows to cross, with easy walking and no sharp turns or drop-offs to avoid. They rose up out of the valley, a few miles ahead of the drive, and Bill caught the sparkle of the sun off water out the corner of his eye. He turned Orion toward it. Sparrow and Maggie followed.

As Bill came over the incline of a hill, Orion jumped a bit.

Bill immediately saw why.

Death lay ahead. He rode closer to a tiny creek and wished he’d kept on going straight. The sun-bleached bones of a few cows lay on the rocky shore, cleaned by the vultures and the sun. Most of them had been small cows, probably underfed and overwalked, judging from the size of their bones. Bill got off Orion a distance back from the bones, and approached. He stepped over the bones and studied them until he reached something that made him stop. Kneeling, he picked up the perfectly-preserved skull of one cow. The cow had been magnificent in size, same as King. The horns were sculpted and dried with not a crack or missing piece.

As Sparrow arrived and took in the sight, she gasped and dismounted. “What happened to them?”

“We had the hardest winter I can recall, and it followed last summer, which was hotter than it’s ever been. We had a drought. Most likely, they got lost and starved, or got hurt. Hard to say for certain. They’re picked clean. Maybe coyotes.”

“I detest coyotes,” Sparrow declared. “I spent those nights in the woods listening to them howl, and I’ve never heard anything so frightening.” She hobbled slowly over to where Bill stood.

“How’d you survive?”

It was a simple question, one Bill had been desperately wanting to know since they’d met.

“I climbed up in a tree,” she answered. “Every single night. Figured there were less things that could get me up there.”

“That’s smart.”

“I have no intention of dying out on the open plains like these poor souls.” She bent down and touched one of the bones.

“We’ll keep the herd moving straight past this place,” Bill said, standing up and leaving the skull in its resting place. “We’ll take them west a bit. They’re smart. If they smell death, they could panic.”

“What happens when they panic?”

Bill swallowed hard. “They stampede. And God help the man, or woman, who’s around when they do.”