Wicked Wyoming Nights (30 page)

Cord stared at Eliza, the rigid cast of his features preventing his face from reflecting the struggle going on inside. The room waited for him to speak, but still he stared at her, his gaze unwavering and inscrutable.

“I can’t have the man I’m going to marry calling my uncle a rustler,” Eliza said finally, unable to stand the almost eerie silence. “You’ve got to drop the charges.”

“And if I don’t?”

Eliza searched Cord’s face for any sign of acquiescence, but his expression was more austere than ever. Would he force her to choose between them? Would he require her to make a decision that could ruin her life forever? The alternatives were cruelly clear: If she chose Cord, she must desert her uncle and break her death bed vow to her aunt; if she chose her uncle, she could not marry Cord and would condemn herself to a life of unutterable misery. The choice was so harrowing, her mind and tongue were reluctant to put it into words. “How can I continue my engagement?” she said at last, each word produced by strenuous effort. “I can’t desert my uncle.”

“You mean to desert me instead?”

“You know I’ll never stop loving you,” Eliza said, a terrifying feeling of loss knifing deep into her heart with the swiftness and pain of steel. “I couldn’t if I wanted to, but how can I publicly choose you over my uncle when it would mean his utter humiliation? Can’t you see this is nothing but a pitiful attempt to strike back at you?”

“Can’t
you
see it’s much more than ill-tempered spite? It’s part of an organized attempt to hit at the very heart of what I’ve labored through twenty-hour days in the saddle to achieve. It’s not one man stealing one calf, it’s a dozen attempting to steal hundreds, to cripple me just when the Matador has become mine.”

“That can’t be true!” Eliza cried, thrusting aside the unwelcome picture Cord was painting. “You make him out to be a cold-blooded thief rather than the pathetically sad little man he is.”

“Pathetic! Sad!” erupted Ira, purple with rage.

But Eliza took no heed of him. “I can’t let him be portrayed as a
criminal
. You’ve got to see you’re wrong.”

“I’m not.”

“You won’t accept my word?”

Cord shook his head.

“You intend to press charges?”

Cord nodded.

“But how can I choose between you?”

“That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself.”

Unreasoning anger and heartrending pain united to destroy the last remnants of Eliza’s control, and it was all she could do to hold back the impending flood of bitter tears. “Come on, Lucy, there’s no reason for us to stay. Mr. Blaine will see that Uncle is released.”

She turned on her heel and swept out of the jail into the moonless night. She was unaware of the cold that turned her breath into steamy billows or the mud that soiled her dress and slippers. What did either of them matter when everything that made her life worth living had just been wrenched from her grasp? What did
anything
matter now?

Lucy glanced back at Cord, and the look of misery in his unguarded expression was so great she felt an almost overpowering desire to comfort him. Instead, she hurried after Eliza, already turning over in her mind how to bring them back together.

“Tell everyone to lie low” Croley growled furiously to Les. “That damned fool Ira nearly spoiled everything.”

“Did he tell on us?” asked Harker, quaking at the thought of Cord Stedman on his heels.

“No. At least he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. I hope I turned them off with that yarn about his being so angry at his niece’s engagement he tried to steal the steer for spite.”

“Say, that was clever,” Harker said admiringly.

“It’ll have to be to rescue this operation. Stedman knows something’s going on, and he won’t stop until he finds out what it is.”

“We’ll have to call off the whole thing,” said Les. “I never did like it.”

“No, we won’t,” Croley said mulishly. “The holidays are coming up, and not even Stedman’s men will stay on the range the whole time.”

Chapter 22

“But you can’t go on refusing to even speak to him,” Lucy said to Eliza. “The man has been here every day for the last week, and it’s nearly breaking my heart to have to look him in the face and say you aren’t here. Anyway, he knows it’s a lie.”

Since the evening in the jail, Eliza had experienced misery of a depth and kind she had previously thought impossible. It had been her words that had set Cord apart from her, and even though she felt she couldn’t go back on them, even though she nearly gave in at least three times an hour, the agony was no less severe. She moved though her days, eating, sleeping, and rehearsing with Iris without using more than a fraction of her mind. Often she had to be spoken to two or three times just to get her attention, and even then her answers might be totally meaningless.

“You know you love him and he loves you, so what does all the rest matter?” argued Lucy. “So your uncle gets angry and tries to steal a steer. You’re still speaking to him. But all Cord does is try to protect his own property, and you turn your back on him like he’s the one who did the stealing.”

“I wouldn’t have minded if he’d knocked Uncle down or even put him in jail for a short while, but not bring him to trial.”

“Mr. Cord is very jealous of his cows. He never lets anybody touch them.”

“People are more important than cows. If that’s how he treats my uncle before we are married, what can I expect him to do to me
after
we’re married? Will he arrest me, knock me down, or break my legs? There won’t be anybody to protect me then.”

“This is foolish talk and you know it,” scolded Lucy impatiently. “Mr. Cord loves you. He’d never hurt a hair on your head.”

“There’s more that needs protecting than the hair on my head. I practically
begged
him to let Uncle go, but he wouldn’t. He can’t love me nearly as much as I thought if one steer is more important to him than my happiness.”

“I don’t think you understand Mr. Cord very well. That steer stands for everything he’s worked for, and he means to defend it against anyone who tries to take it from him.”

“But it is just a cow. Surely he can learn to see that.”

“I don’t think so. It’s something that comes from way down inside, and I doubt he can change it. All you see is one cow, but he sees everything he has worked for being threatened. To him, it represents what he is, what he has to offer you.”

“But I would love him just as much if he were nothing but a plain cowboy or dirt farmer.”

“No, you wouldn’t. If he had been content to remain a cowboy, he wouldn’t be the man he is now. And he wouldn’t be the man you fell in love with.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Eliza protested.

“You’re surrounded by cowboys, but did any of them bother to build you a schoolhouse or fill it with students? Who paid a fortune for the privilege of eating dinner with you, and talked Ella Baylis into virtually letting you live at her place?”

“What difference does that make?”

“You like Sam, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Do you love him?”

“Of course not!”

“Only because he’s married?”

“I wouldn’t love Sam no matter what he was.”

“How about all those cowboys?”

“None of them either.”

“Just Cord?”

“Yes.”

“Then there must be something special about him, and whatever it is that made him special enough for you to fall in love with made him rise from being a cowboy to a rancher, made him determined to hold on to his own and see it increased. You can’t take a man apart, keep the pieces you like, and toss the rest away. Men come with the good and the not so good, just like women, but it all comes together.”

“How do I know you haven’t been blinded by Cord’s smoldering eyes and muscled shoulders just like every other female in town?”

“I’ve lived in almost every city from New York to San Francisco, and I’ve seen every kind of man there is. I’ve seen handsome creeps who would sweep you off your feet, use you, and discard you all in the same night. I’ve seen honest Joes with hearts of gold, but no backbone and no ambition, and I’ve seen all the kinds in between. Mr. Cord belongs to the group at the top. Only in his case, he’s the best of the cream. He got where he is by being tough, and he’s going to be tough on you. This is only the first of many times, and probably not the hardest. He’s a man worth having, worth fighting for, but he’s going to cost you a lot.”

“He’s already cost me too much,” said Eliza, struggling to hold back tears that swam in her eyes.

“Give him a little time,” Lucy urged, giving Eliza a hug. “You’ll find a strong man is a mighty nice thing to have around.”

The trial was a mockery, and Cord would have been the first to admit he was a fool to have bothered with it at all.

“He got off with a warning,” Royce muttered in disgust. “We could have done that without bringing him in.”

“What are you going to do now, boss?” Sturgis asked. “You can’t leave things like this.”

“I’ve got to. I knew I was handing him over to the judge when I had him arrested. I have no other choice now but to abide by his decision.”

“But you’ve got to do something.”

“We will. I intend to keep a twenty-four-hour watch on every foot of my land until we catch whoever is stealing those calves.”

“And this time we don’t waste time with the courts?”

“I’m not sure what I’ll do, but no, I won’t waste time with the courts.”

“I want a word with you, Cord Stedman.” Ella Baylis’s sharp voice cut through the crowd. “And I want it away from the sharp ears of your hired guns.” She glared at Sturgis and Royce, who held back, unsure of how to deal with a woman as forceful as Ella. “Come back to the store with me. Everybody’ll be at the saloon getting drunk, and well have the place to ourselves.” Ella marched off without waiting to see if Cord followed.

“There’s that Liza Hanks, made up like one of Lavinia’s hussies, giving you the eye,” she said as they walked.

“I can’t say I remember her,” Cord responded, nodding to a woman obviously trying to attract his attention.

“She’s shameless, and her with a husband and children. There goes Ellis Gaddy, drunk as a skunk and the trial not over thirty minutes. I don’t know when I’ve set eyes on a more worthless weasel.”

“You don’t seem to like much of anybody today.”

“I’ve never had any opinion of fools,” Ella stated flatly. “And don’t get off with the idea I think a whole lot more of your intelligence,” she said the moment she closed the door behind them. “You couldn’t have done anything more useless if you’d set down and thought about it.”

“It doesn’t give me any pleasure to agree with you, ma’am.”

“You knew locking up Eliza’s uncle was bound to set her against you.”

“I guess I was so mad I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“The way I see it, you weren’t thinking at all.”

“If you’d spent as many nights in the saddle as we have, you’d understand why it goes against the grain to let anybody off,” he explained. “You’d think with three of us swearing to his having a rope on that steer, and him not denying it, they couldn’t do anything but find him guilty.”

“Have you been to any of the rustling trials before?”

“No, ma’am. I haven’t had the time.”

“If you’d taken the time, you’d have known better. Last fall, Preston Spears thought he had some scoundrel dead to rights. Caught him in the act just like you did, but the scalawag got his friends to stand up in court and swear—under oath, mind you—it wasn’t unusual for an unweaned calf to leave its mamma and lock itself up in a barn. Swore they’d seen it happen many a time, and the judge let him go. Now if they’d do something like that, how do you think you’re going to get a conviction? There’s not a person in Buffalo who believes Ira was taking that steer for anything but spite. And there isn’t anybody who knows him that thinks he would have done anything with it except let it go once he cooled down.”

“Ira is part of a gang. They may just be using him, but there were others on the plain that night. His carrying on warned them off, but I know they were there.”

“And you thought you’d get to them through Ira?”

“Yes, ma am, I did.”

“I used to think you had some sense, but now I’m beginning to wonder. If someone is using Ira, and I don’t want you to think I’m swallowing that idea whole by any means, then they won’t hesitate to get rid of him the minute he’s no good to them. You’re wasting your time with him.”

“So it would seem.”

“And then there’s Eliza.”

Cord’s body stiffened. “I’m not talking about Eliza.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll talk enough for both of us. How many calves have you lost?”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Two dozen, maybe more.”

“How many calves is Eliza worth?”

“I’d give the whole damned ranch for that woman.” Cord’s words exploded from him with such intensity even phlegmatic Ella was astounded.