Authors: Jeanne Williams
“You bet.”
He dropped his hand caressingly on her shoulder. “How about a short tour tonight? There's a moon.”
The vibrant shock that went through her at his touch was followed at once by a kind of shrinking, a revulsion from his bold, sensual appeal. Shea was the only man she wanted; her body felt mute loyalty to him, though he would have laughed at it. She certainly wasn't going to feel bound to him but she didn't want to take any moonlit walks with Judd.
Not yet. She begged off. Judd slanted a quizzical frown at her, talked a bit longer to Patrick, and went down for something to eat. When Tracy descended half an hour later, she heard his voice mingling with Vashti's in the dining room.
Bickering again. They seemed to have a touchy relationship. Perhaps the dozen years between them didn't give Vashti enough seniority to command Judd's deference. Tracy slipped almost stealthily into her room. Vashti was trying to be civil, but this wasn't a comfortable house to be in. Now that Mary was here, it wasn't necessary to be under the same roof with Patrick though Tracy wanted to stay close enough to see him daily.
The old ranch house was bursting with people. But there might be some prospector's cabin, some old line shack. Tomorrow she'd watch for such possibilities. She wanted to stay at Socorro, not only for Patrick's sake, but till she'd sorted out her own directions.
As she showered, she remembered Shea, felt a wave of remembered ecstasy followed by desolation. If he hadn't meant it, how could he have been so passionately tender? His urgency had bruised her slightly but she knew that, long after the soreness was gone, she would carry the painful magic of his physical memory in her, no matter how she fought it.
And she must fight. It was tempting to try to adopt his attitude, accept the marvelous sex and quell any personal attachmentâor hope that in time he'd begin to love her. But that would violate what she felt. She wanted to laugh with him and talk with him, share thoughts and silences, show her love without fearing a cold glance from those storm-cloud eyes.
He didn't want that. All they could have was nothing.
Patrick was spinning yarns next morning, assuring Mary that he had a Ph.D. “Post-hole digging!” he chortled. “And let me tell you, you can sure hunt a long time for a mesquite straight enough to make a post!” He turned his face toward Judd's footfalls as his son came into the room. “Don't fly so low showing Tracy the ranch that you scare the cattle. Don't want any new calves to have wings in place of legs!”
“The aerial view will have to come later,” Judd said. “Vashti took the plane. She had an appointment with the hairdresser and some other chores in Tucson.”
“Oh, was that today?” asked Patrick. He winked his good eye at the women. “Let's hope a little spending spree gets her mind off selling to that damn developer. You taking Tracy in your RV then, Judd?”
He smiled down at her. “Am I?”
“If you have time. Let me get my camera.”
Shortly after, they were on their way, a lunch prepared by Concha in an ice chest, along with a jug of chablis. “I still want you to get the big picture from above,” Judd said, flashing her a white grin. “But today you can see some cattle and we'll have a
pasear
over to Last Spring. Nice shady place to have lunch and relax a while.”
“Last Spring?”
“That's what we've started calling it these dry years. Sometimes it's been the last spring running on the whole darn ranch. It's the Place of Skulls. You know, that mountain basin in the Santa Ritas where Great-great-great-grandmother Socorro killed that gang of scalp-hunters.” He laughed, shaking his leonine head. With his strong neck resting solidly between broad shoulders, he was Tracy's idea of a gladiator. “Ranch lore makes her close to a saint but that scalp-hunter yarn makes me wonder!”
“I think it was really Tjúni who killed most of the men,” Tracy said. “Socorro shot only one. Anyway, she couldn't have just let those men kill Apache women and children! What she and Tjúni did made Mangus their friend.”
Judd laughed again. “Think what they could have done with an M-16!” His amusement faded. “From what Vashti tells me, you should have had a gun day before yesterday.”
He wanted the whole story. When she finished, he struck the wheel in exasperation. “Why didn't Shea shoot the bastard?”
“Maybe he didn't have a gun. Anyway, what he did was effective.”
“By the time you get through testifying against him, he'll get a few years for assault, maybe a few more for assault with a deadly weapon.” Judd snorted. “Then he'll be out to try his luck again. Triple-Great-grandmother had the right idea.”
“She didn't have much choice.”
Judd cast Tracy a somber glance. “We don't either, cousin. The law's no protection anymore. Especially here on the border, we're back in the days of the scalp-hunters.”
“Oh, Judd, for goodness' sake!” She laughed, trying to tease him out of his Nostradamian prophecies. “There's always been smuggling on the border. I think you're looking for excitement!”
“Didn't you get more than you wanted the other morning?”
“Yes, butâ”
His hand closed commandingly on hers. “I'm going to teach you to use that gun, Tracy. You need to defend yourself as much as Socorro did.”
Incredulous laughter died in her throat. After what had happened to her in Houston, had almost happened to Mary right here, how could she argue with him?
“You'd like to pretend everything's nice and safe and civilized,” he persisted. “Preparing for danger, arming against it, makes you admit it's there.”
That wasn't all of it. Having a gun, making it part of her thinking, was like changing sides, giving in to the violence she feared and loathed. “Sometimes preparing for it makes it happen,” she said.
“How?”
“Four times as many family members are murdered with handguns every year as are burglarsâand that includes the ones police shoot. And how many children accidentally shoot each other?”
“Guns should be respected and kept where kids can't get them.”
Tracy had to laugh at that, remembering some of the places she had penetrated in a search for Christmas presents. “Now where in the blue-eyed world would that be?”
He shrugged that aside. “Miami police are telling people to get guns. So, privately, do cops in D.C. and Los Angeles. The Arizona director of the Department of Public Safety has said crime is so bad that citizens who feel comfortable with guns should learn to use them and keep them.”
His voice deepened sympathetically. “It's a hell of a thing, honey, and I wish it weren't so. But I'd rather you were kind of unhappy with me than running into trouble.”
He changed the subject, asking about her work and life in Houston while telling her about his plans to raise enough alfalfa to keep the cows fed in spite of drouth. “We're growing some now,” he said, pointing across the valley to fields where a soft hesitant green was darkening the plowed soil. “But to sustain the herds, we're going to have to produce a lot more.”
Cattle, mostly dark red with white faces, were loitering near a metal water tank by a windmill. Old-fashioned corrals of mesquite poles placed horizontally between uprights were partially shaded by big mesquites and oaks. A salt block was licked to a crescent by patient tongues.
“Most of these go to market this fall,” Judd said. “I'm trying to get another Santa Gertrudis bull, keep breeding to that strain. They're Hereford enough for good beef and Brahma enough to stand the heat and hustle.”
That breed developed by the famed King Ranch in Texas had spread throughout the world where cattle foraged in arid country. Patrick had bought the first Santa Gertrudis bull and cows. The tough little “black” Mexican cattle and the Texas chinos that Patrick O'Shea had worked with had long ago been culled out to make room for heavier animals that yielded tenderer, fat-marbled meat.
“Not much for them to eat,” she worried, looking around at the closely grazed land.
“There's plenty away from the tank.” Judd grinned. “They're just like peopleâget the easy pickings first.”
They made an irregular loop through the ranch, stopping at several camps where vaqueros were seeing to the calving. In cases where the mother had died, they tried to get a cow who'd lost her calf to accept the orphan by tying the dead calf's hide around it. The hide could be taken off in a few days after she'd adopted the little waif.
The southern extent of the ranch was the Mexican border, discernible by stone boundary markers and an ordinary fence. Heading north again, the jeep trail was often in sight of fences enclosing considerably better grass. Tracy thought it must be El Charco land, but didn't want to ask and set Judd off.
“Where do you have this Stronghold school?” she asked.
“I'll show you this weekend.” Not far from the wash where she'd found the ringtail, Judd took a set of ruts that circled wide around the new ranch house, brought them barely in sight of the old one and crossed the highway.
Driving up a cañon with a sparkling stream of water gurgling over many-colored rocks and detouring boulders, they left desert growth behind them as they gradually ascended the dirt road that wound deeper and higher into the mountains amid pines and tall oaks. Rich chocolatey-red manzanita limbs were beginning to show tiny pink flowers among olive leaves. Giant alligator junipers often showed hopeful green on one part, though the rest might be charred by fire or lightning. Redolent of pine needles, the air was intoxicating.
Abruptly, the road dropped down to the stream and stopped. So did the RV. Judd got a gun and holster out of the back, buckled on the holster, thonging it snug above his knee, then loaded the chamber, grinning at Tracy.
“To commence your education, doll, this is a forty-four-caliber Smith and Wesson Magnum. It's the only handgun to bring down big game, uses a two-twenty-grain bullet. I have only four of those in here. The other two are snake shot, number eight, good up to about ten yards for snakes and small varmints.”
“Do me a favor. Don't kill anything unless it jumps on us.”
“Nothing's going to do that unless it's got hydrophobia,” he scoffed.
“Then why kill it?”
“Hell, coyotes and wildcats kill calves!”
“They kill a lot more rabbits and rodents. Our outdoor editor told me five rabbits eat as much as a cow.”
“Coyotes are no damn good.” Judd spat against a rock. “If you don't care about calves, how about the fawns they put away?”
“Deer are beautiful, but our editor told me their natural enemies have been killed out till they often overrun an area and begin to starve. Then the hunters have to come in and âmercifully' thin them out.”
His golden eyes widened. “You rather they starved?”
“I'd rather people quit messing with natural balance. What happened when they killed out the predators in the Kaibab forest up by the Grand Canyon? Deer multiplied till they starved in droves. That was in 1906 and the country still bears the scars.”
“I suppose you don't believe in poisoning coyotes!”
“Damn right I don't! Even if I believed in wholesale extermination of coyotes, which I don't, you can't poison them without getting a whole bunch of other animals. Anyhow, coyotes clean up carrion. I imagine a lot of the calves they get were already dead or so feeble they couldn't make it.”
He stared at her as if he couldn't believe his ears, ran his hand through his close-clipped hair. She could almost see him deciding to make allowances for her female ignorance. “You've been away too long, Tracy. Got brainwashed by city people who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.” He gave her a brief, conciliatory hug. “Come on, let's amble up to the spring and have lunch.” He laughed and brushed a kiss across her ear. “I'm hungry as aâas a coyote!”
They crossed the stream on boulders rising above the flow, Judd surefooted in spite of the food cooler and blanket he carried, and were in a lovely basin perhaps a mile wide. Enclosed by pine-covered slopes and rose-gold sandstone palisades, the center of the park had better grass than the rest of the ranch, and white-trunked stands of aspens patterned themselves ethereally against somber pines.
A small log cabin stood in a broad clearing, shaded by an immense oak. The log outhouse was tucked discreetly among young aspens. A shed stood by an old corral. There was a hand-pump outside the cabin, and firewood stacked beneath the roof that extended out far enough to form an outside room. She'd forgotten the old line shack, but it struck her at once as a wonderful place to escape the troublous politics of Vashti's house. Without lying a bit, she could say it was a much better place for photographing wildlife.
“No one seems to be using this,” she said.
“Not for years on a regular basis. This is just a small pocket in the National Forest, a hundred acres, homesteaded for the spring. Can't run enough cattle to make it worthwhile. Some developers have offered a bundle for it but Dad's stubborn as a mule when it comes to getting rid of any of the original holdings.”
Tracy wandered over and opened the creaky door. Not so bad as she'd expected. One big room with a wood cookstove, table and chairs, and a small bedroom. The old iron bedstead was intricately scrolled and the springs were in good shape, but there was no mattress. Pegs for clothes, a chest of drawers with a tin-framed Mexican mirror above it.
All the furniture was homemade, rough and sturdy. The shelves in the main room held a few old books and magazines and a supply of canned foods, dishes and cooking utensils. A neatly lettered yellowing sign said in Spanish and English: “Eat if you are hungry, and be welcome. Please cut wood to replace what you use and leave everything in good order.”
By ranch tradition, such signs were in all the line shacks. Shelter and food could save the lives of lost hikers or hunters, but Mexican workers, illegal or legal, probably benefited most.