Tom Prynne had made a name for himself after all, though it wouldn’t travel far. But he’d be talked about here for a good while to come, and his epitaph would read: Here lies Pecos Tom. He challenged the Angel of Death and lost. The undertaker in this town had a morbid sense of humor.

Chapter 2

Cassandra Stuart absently dropped a piece of wood into the fireplace as she passed it. Across the room a feline lifted its head and hissed in complaint. The slim girl glanced at the cat and shrugged.

“Sorry, Marabelle,” Cassie said as she resumed her agitated pacing. “Habit.”

Both Cassie and her pet were used to much colder weather in Wyoming, where she’d grown up. Here in the south of Texas, where her father’s ranch was located, it probably wasn’t more than fifty degrees outside, and they were a few days into December. One piece of firewood would have sufficed to take the chill out of her bedroom. With two… It wasn’t long before she stripped down to her camisole and drawers.

The small desk that she had been avoiding for the past half hour was still sitting in the corner, her stationery in a neat stack on top of it, the inkwell opened, the quill pen sharpened, the lamp turned up high. Her father had given her the old-fashioned writing set right after she’d arrived in the fall. And she’d been faithful in her letter writing, sending off one or two letters a week to her mother — at least she had been up until six weeks ago.

But she couldn’t avoid writing any longer. The telegram had arrived late this afternoon. IF I DON’T HEAR FROM YOU IMMEDIATELY I’M COMING DOWN THERE WITH AN ARMY.

That last part was an exaggeration — Cassie certainly hoped it was. But she didn’t doubt her mother would come, and that wasn’t going to help anything. Her father most definitely wouldn’t appreciate it when he returned. But then her father wasn’t going to appreciate that his neighbors were now his enemies, thanks to his interfering daughter.

Cassie had sent back a reply that she’d have a letter off by tomorrow to explain everything. There was no help for it now. But she had been so hoping that the Peacemaker would have arrived first, so that when she told her mother what she’d done, she could at least also tell her that she’d fixed it and there was nothing else to worry about.

She made a sound resembling a groan that had the sleek black feline following her to the writing desk to investigate the problem. Marabelle was very sensitive to Cassie’s moods. The cat wouldn’t settle down until Cassie gave it a reassuring scratch behind the ears.

At last she took pen in hand.


Dearest Mama,

I don’t suppose it will surprise you to hear that I’ve meddled again. I don’t know why I thought I could put an end to a feud that’s been going on for twenty-five years, but there you have it, my infernal optimism letting me down once again. By now you must realize I’m talking about Papa’s neighbors, the Catlins and the MacKauleys, whom I told you about after my first visit here.


This was Cassie’s second visit to her father’s ranch in Texas. She had been amazed the first time she’d seen the house he had built here ten years ago. It was an exact replica of the one he had left behind in Wyoming. Even the furnishings were the same. It was like being at home — until she walked outside.

Her father had wanted her to visit for a long time, but her mother had refused to let her travel without her until she’d reached the age of eighteen two years ago. And Catherine Stuart wouldn’t step foot on Charles Stuart’s ranch unless there was a dire emergency— involving their only child. She hadn’t seen her ex-husband in the ten years since he’d left Wyoming, hadn’t spoken to him in twenty, even though they’d lived in the same house for the first ten years of Cassie’s life. Their relationship, or their lack of one, was the one thing Cassie had never tried to meddle in. As much as she wished it were otherwise, her parents despised each other.

But Cassie had told her mother all about the Catlins and the MacKauleys when she’d returned home in the spring of last year, and about her new friend, Jenny Catlin, who was two years younger than Cassie. Cassie had found Jenny nothing but melancholy this visit because she was at an age when she wanted to get married, and lamented that the only good-looking young men in the area happened to be R. J. MacKauley’s four sons, who were, unfortunately, her sworn enemies.

Cassie really wished that Jenny hadn’t mentioned the MacKauley men in the same breath with marriage. It had got her to thinking that maybe Jenny didn’t see them in the same light that her mother and older brother did. It had got her to noticing how Clayton MacKauley, R. J.‘s youngest son, stared at Jenny in church, and how the young girl blushed each time she caught him at it.


This probably won’t surprise you, either, Mama, but I’ve managed to include the Stuarts in the feud — at least the one with me. Papa doesn’t even know about it yet, but I’m sure he won’t be happy about it when he finds out. I’ll get to leave, after all, but he’ll still have to live with these people after I’m gone.

And before you start cussing him for letting me meddle, I have to tell you he wasn’t here to stop me. Actually, it started before he left, not long after I arrived, but it was all done in secret like a conspiracy, and then Papa got a letter from this man in North Texas whom he’d been bargaining with for two years for the purchase of a prize bull, and the man finally decided he’d sell. And don’t cuss Papa for leaving me alone, either, to go get his new bull, because he was only supposed to be gone for less than two weeks, and I am twenty now and fully capable of running his ranch — when I’m not meddling. Besides, he wanted me to go with him, but I begged off, since I had already begun my… well, there’s no easy way to put this. What I did was try my hand at matchmaking again, and unfortunately, this time I succeeded.

I managed to convince Jenny Catlin and Clayton MacKauley that each was in love with the other. And it really did seem as if they were, Mama. They were so surprised and pleased by my fabrications. It was so easy to get them together and, after only three weeks, to help them leave for Austin to marry secretly. Unfortunately, on the wedding night they discovered that neither one loved the other, that the romance was only in my own wishful imagination. Apparently I mistook the situation entirely, but that is nothing new. I seem to do that quite frequently, as you well know. Of course, I have tried to set things right. I went to the Catlin ranch to try to explain that my intentions had been good, if misguided. Dorothy Catlin wouldn’t talk to me. Her son, Buck, advised me to leave Texas and not come back.


Buck hadn’t put it as nicely as that, but her mother didn’t need to know how nasty he’d been in his anger, or about the threats she had received from the MacKauleys, who had actually set a date for her to vacate, or else they’d burn her father’s ranch down. There was no need to mention that Richard MacKauley had been picking up her mail and then telling her he’d lost it, which was why she hadn’t had a letter from her mother these past six weeks, or that she’d come out of the bank in Caully to find molasses dumped all over the seat and floor of her carriage, or that three of her father’s hands had been intimidated into quitting, including his foreman. Nor did she intend to mention the note slipped under the front door that said if her cat was found out on the range again, she’d be invited to the barbecue.

And it was best that her mother not know that Sam Hadley and Rafferty Slater, two Catlin hired hands, had cornered her in the livery in town and frightened her badly with their manhandling before someone happened by to put a stop to it, or that she had been wearing her modified Colt gun to town ever since that incident, rather than just out on the range, and would continue to do so despite the amusement it was causing the good folks of Caully.

And she most especially wasn’t going to tell her mother that her father had been gone seven weeks now and wasn’t expected back for another three because his new prize bull had kicked him and he’d broken two ribs and one foot in the fall. It sufficed for her to say:


They are such nice families, but when they don’t like someone, they are pains in the asses, and right now neither family likes me very much.


She thought about scratching out the “pains in the asses,” but decided her mother could use a laugh about now. Cassie certainly could, but then she had only three more weeks to set things right, because she knew exactly what her father would do when he returned. He’d simply abandon what he’d built here over the past ten years and relocate. After all, he ranched because he enjoyed it, not because he needed to earn a living from it, not when he came from one of the richest families in Connecticut. But Cassie would never forgive herself if the situation came to that.


Since they won’t even listen to my apologies, I did the only other thing I could think of. I sent for Grandpa Kimbal’s good friend, the man they call the Peacemaker. I have no doubt whatsoever that he will be able to end the hostilities here the very day he arrives, and I expect him any day now.


Actually, she had expected him several weeks ago and was definitely starting to worry over his delay, after he’d assured her that he would come. He really was her only hope. Perhaps she ought to send him another telegram when she went to town tomorrow to post her mother’s letter.


So now you know why I haven’t written. I really hated having to admit that I’d put my foot in it once again, at least before I’d mended what I’d wrought. And I will write again just as soon as it’s all over and Papa’s neighbors are back to just hating each other.