Jodi Thomas - Two Texas Hearts

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© 1997

WINTER MCQUILLEN PLANTED HIS BOOTS FARTHER apart and adjusted the brim of his worn gray Stetson against the glare of the late afternoon sun. He stared down into the six-foot hole, dry-eyed and angry.

‘‘Lower the coffin,’’ he ordered, feeling the words tighten in his throat. ‘‘Let’s put the captain to rest before sundown.’’

‘‘Yes, Boss,’’ Logan Baker mumbled, around a wad of tobacco.

Winter didn’t move as several of his ranch hands followed his instructions. Then, hesitantly, each stepped away, allowing their boss room to say goodbye to Captain Russell for the last time.

Only Logan remained within the boundary of the small wrought-iron fenced cemetery with Winter. ‘‘He was like a father to you, Win,’’ Logan said. ‘‘We’ll all miss the old man, but he’s where he’d want to be, next to his Miss Allie.’’

Winter realized Logan hadn’t used the shortened version of his first name in more than a year. He’d been Winter as a boy, but as his height passed six feet, his name had been shortened to Win. Last year, when the captain’s health began to fail, Win had taken the reins of one of the biggest ranches in Texas without anyone saying a word. Logan, the oldest hand, had stood by his side and began calling him simply ‘‘Boss.’’ Everyone in Armstrong County knew the ranch would be Winter’s when the captain passed on. Everyone but Captain Russell, it seemed.

‘‘My father, an Irish trapper, died before I had more than a handful of memories of him.’’ Winter forced each word out as if needing to state the facts before rumors and legends got started. ‘‘My mother was killed in one of Custer’s raids into Indian Territory a few years after the War Between the States.’’

His words drifted across flat, frost-hardened land colored in shades of brown. ‘‘I ran away from the good people who’d offered to finish raising me, thinking I was old enough to make it on my own. Captain Russell found me in the back of one of his supply wagons coming in from Dallas a few months later. I thought he’d skin me alive for eating a bushel of his apples.’’

‘‘But he took you in and gave you a home.’’ Logan nodded as if proving some unspoken point. Logan had been around in those days, but paid little attention to the skinny half-Indian kid the captain spent most of his day issuing orders to.

Winter lowered his gaze, not wanting the other man to see the anger in his eyes. ‘‘If you call letting me sleep in the coldest corner of the bunkhouse and working me from dawn till dusk six days a week giving me a home, I guess he did.’’

Looking back at a time twenty years ago, Winter stared at the horizon. ‘‘I used to live all week for Sundays, when I’d get to go up to the big house and study all day from mail-order books with Miss Allie. She’d even insist that I eat meals with them, like I was somebody. But the captain never let me forget he thought I was nothing but half-breed trash who came in with the supplies. Once a month he’d pay me a man’s wages, then sell me an acre of land for the money.’’ Winter tightened an already rock-hard jaw as he continued, ‘‘About dark, he’d play me a game of checkers for the land, double or nothing. I was twelve before I won.’’

He pulled a checker from his leather vest pocket and tossed it on top of the casket. ‘‘I won all but the last twenty acres of this place. The captain never would play me for the square with the house on it. He always told me, ‘Don’t bet more than you’re willing to lose.’ I think the captain was never sure what I’d do if I won the house.’’

‘‘All the boys are guessing he left it to you in his will,’’ Logan mumbled. ‘‘You may not have noticed, but there wasn’t another human alive the captain cared about but you. I remember back in the blizzard of seventy-nine, he had everyone including the cook watching for you to come in off the open range. He was about ready to send every hand back out if you hadn’t come riding in when you did.’’

Winter shook his head. ‘‘He never cared about me, or gave me anything in life. Chances are he won’t in death, either. He was a hard, cold man who never cared about anyone, except maybe Miss Allie. He never gave me an inch. But don’t worry, whoever he willed the ranch house to, I’ll deal with-even if it’s the devil himself. Whoever it is couldn’t be any harder than the captain.’’

Logan watched in silence as Winter walked away. Somewhere inside the tall, powerful man was the little boy Logan had seen the captain shaking that night so many years ago. Winter had yelled that he was only seven, and the captain had shouted back for him never to tell folks what he ‘‘was only.’’ Winter had never given excuses after that night, or backed down from anyone, including the old man.

Lifting the shovel, Logan leaned against it. The new boss was wrong about one thing. There was a man harder than the captain. He was walking down the hill now toward the big house to hear the reading of the will. Not yet out of his twenties, Win McQuillen was harder than Captain Russell had managed to get in eighty years of rough living.

Logan shook his head, thinking of the will he’d witnessed one night over a year ago. Win was going to be madder than a rattler when he found out the captain left the twenty acres not to Winter McQuillen, but to his wife… a wife Win didn’t even have yet, but according to the will, had better find within a month.

‘‘I CAN’T JUST WALK INTO THE WIDOWS’ MEETING LIKE a beggar looking for a handout.’’ Winter shifted in the saddle and glared down at Logan, who was already hitching his horse to a rail. The banty rooster of a man had been pestering him all month, and now Logan had dragged him halfway across the county to a meeting.

‘‘This was a damn fool idea,’’ Winter mumbled. ‘‘They’ll laugh us into the next state.’’

Logan folded his spider-thin arms and waited for his boss to quit complaining.

Frustrated, Winter said, more to himself than the suddenly deaf Logan, ‘‘I’ve got diseased cattle from down south to worry about. This whole area is fixing to break into a battle. I don’t have time to go courting. Seems like blocking any herds to keep half of mine from dying is more important than dropping in on some ladies’ tea party.’’

‘‘You want to give up the prettiest twenty acres on your place, Boss?’’

‘‘I’ve never given up anything in my adult life!’’ Winter growled. He’d been hell-raising angry for a week after they’d read the will. Win had thought all he’d have to do was ride over to Tascosa and ask that pretty Mary Anna Monroe to marry him. She’d given him enough signs every time she was here visiting her kin. During the few socials he’d attended in the past five years, she’d made it plain she was interested in getting to know him better. Plus, the woman could talk ranching as good as any man he’d met when she wasn’t batting her eyes and acting coy.

But flirting was obviously one thing to Mary Anna, and marrying another. He would never forget standing in her aunt’s parlor like a greenhorn as Mary Anna not only turned him down but told him that she didn’t care how many miles of land he owned because everyone in the country knew he didn’t own a heart.

‘‘Well, if you’re not giving up’’-Logan spit a long line of brown fluid-‘‘then you’d best get off that horse. Because according to the will, come sunup, if you ain’t married, the First Methodist Church gets that house and the twenty acres smack-dab in the middle of your spread.’’

‘‘The old man did this to me just to get the last laugh from the grave. He knew I never wanted a wife, any more than I’d stand for some preaching farmer living on my land.’’ Winter swung his long leg over the saddle, shoved his dark brown hair out of his eyes, and stepped to the gate. ‘‘Let’s get this over with, Logan. I’ll marry the devil’s sister to keep what’s mine. I swore once that no one would ever take anything from me as long as I live, and it’s time to make good on that promise no matter who I have to partner up with.’’

The two dust-covered cowmen walked to the side of the huge window of Widow Dooley’s home and looked in at the circle of women, mostly dressed in black. They were having tea, and though Armstrong County had little society, it was plain these ladies all considered themselves gentlewomen just by the way they held their china cups. Leaving a widow was a hard fact of life in this country. The society had started up about the same time as the cemetery.