Chapter 1
The Texas Panhandle
Wednesday, December 21, 1887
James Elliott III glanced up and squinted, finally noticing the angry grayish white clouds scowling on the northern horizon. Afternoon light had taken on an oddly brighter hue than what the morning offered, paling the prairie’s beauty. Snow clouds.
Better watch out
, he told himself as he rose from a bentknee position where he’d been digging in the prairie,
or you’ll wish you knew a little more about keeping warm in Texas and a little less about its so-called legends.
If he’d been paying attention, the drop in soil temperature the past few hours should have warned him that some kind of storm was brewing. But he hadn’t been. The excitement of knowing his search for the rosettes might finally be over had kept him absorbed and digging, ignoring caution.
This
was
the place he’d been seeking from one end of Texas to the other since spring. He knew it. Felt it to the marrow of his bones. Victory was so close he could almost imagine the tiny red bulbs that, come spring, might bloom into the mythical buffalo clover of Texas legend—pink bluebonnets.
All spring he’d found blue bluebonnets, even the somewhat rarer albino ones near the Alamo. A few of those had pink tips, but none were totally pink. A
curandera
, a half-Indian, half-Mexican medicine woman who had great knowledge of plants and herbs, had told him to seek the end of the buffalo trail and he would find what he sought, but to make sure it was what he truly wanted. He’d thought her mutterings odd at the time but found she had given sage advice. The last Indian uprisings had been quelled in the Texas Panhandle and the buffalo had met their end here on the Staked Plains of the Llano Estacado. Testing of the soil promised that this stretch of Texas might actually offer up the pink prize.
James dusted the dirt from his hands, then stretched his fingers and long, lanky legs to ward off the cold settling into them. He loved the feel of working with his hands and had elected not to wear gloves to work the soil. He’d wanted no hindrance to come between him and the first touch of his sought-after treasure.
Maybe finding your gloves and spectacles should be the first order of business
, he told himself. James immediately patted the top of his head, remembering how many times he’d gone looking for his spectacles only to find them straddling the unmanageable dark tangle of curls he’d inherited from some family member he’d wished he’d known.
Not there.
He checked the lapel of his chambray shirt. No, he hadn’t hooked one edge of the wire frames into the lapel where it gathered at the neck as he sometimes did. Where had he put them?
In the saddlebags with your gloves
, he remembered suddenly, not wanting to leave them somewhere out in the prairie in case he got distracted. Up close, he simply saw better without them and, since he’d planned to work in the soil all morning, logic had said it would be better to put them where he knew he could find them.
As he swung around, James’s breath suddenly rushed from his lungs and lodged midway in his throat. Where in God’s creation was his horse?
He’d left him hobbled near the cottonwood tree so the roan could forage some of the fresh mint growing near it, but there wasn’t a tree in sight now. How far had he walked from his campsite that morning? The hours of the day ticked by in James’s memory and he realized that in his growing sense of excitement, he’d covered more of the rolling prairie on foot than he meant to.
Absentminded, that’s what you are
, he berated himself.
Mister I’ll-Do-What-Nobody-Else-Can-Do
.
Now look at you. You’ve proven yourself nothing but a lost greenhorn
.
The reality of how deeply in danger he’d placed himself rooted James where he stood. He was out in the middle of nowhere. Wearing no coat. No gloves. All of those things and his spectacles were back at the tree with his horse. And . . . and it was a big
and
. . . he had no idea how far away he was from that tree or shelter.
A snowflake kissed the tip of his nose. Another cooled his cheek, dissolving as the heat of his hand brushed it away. Suddenly, a gust of wind swirled around him in a dervish of snowflakes, chilling him to the bone at the strangely beautiful sight of dancing white death.
“Better find the roan and save the beast from your stupidity,” he warned, his words now rushing visibly from his mouth as frosty wisps of air, “so you can do the same for yourself.”
Snow eddies rushed ahead of the whiskey wagon making its way down the rutted path that led from Old Mobeetie near the Oklahoma border toward the town of Kasota Springs. Already, snow piled in drifts against any barrier that opposed the growing force of the wind. Not that there were many in the long stretch of treeless prairie. The team of four oxen pulling the heavy load had slowed their steps considerably a couple of hours ago warning Anna Ross, their driver, that what she feared as possibility had become fact.
A blizzard had set in. The snow clouds from the north had rushed faster than she’d expected to belch white fury upon the Texas Panhandle. The poor ranchers had barely survived last winter’s storms, the worst in Texas history. Now the fear of more to come sent a chill of foreboding through Anna, making her wish she could take her hands off the reins long enough to put another blanket over her lap and tug the yellow slicker she wore a little more securely up behind her neck.
Jack had refused to stay beneath the blanket she’d thrown around them, insisting to cast his one-eyed attention at the poor beasts making their way home in a lumbering race alongside them.
All morning she and her dog had watched cattle drifting down the two hundred miles of fence that the XIT ranch had built a year earlier to guide their stock home in case they wandered too far from food. For hours, the drift fence ran parallel to the wagon’s path. If she hadn’t already suspected the brewing storm would be a mighty one, the movement of the cattle trying to reach safety was evidence enough to warn of the approaching danger.
“We should’ve taken the train,” she told the tiny goldenhaired dog sitting next to her on the driver’s seat, then called out encouragement to the oxen to keep pushing on. But if she had taken the train, she would have had to deal with all the fuss and bother with the people who were bringing in the new bell for the church steeple. And then there would be all those children on board headed for the orphanage. She just didn’t have it in her to see those sad little faces. It was hard anytime to see such need, but at Christmas, it broke her heart.
No, taking the wagon to Mobeetie to fetch her saloon’s supply of whiskey for the winter had been the right thing to do. She’d make it right. Come hell or a high-winded blizzard.
For friends, she had also picked up a list of merchandise meant to be used for the Christmas holiday. She couldn’t let them down. Her friends in Kasota Springs weren’t all that many, and disappointing them didn’t set well with her. Anna flicked the reins and set her jaw to the task, giving the dog a quick wink. “Got to get these presents home, don’t we, Jack? If Saint Nick can do it, so can we . . . huh, boy?”
Jack barked, making her laugh and easing some of the tension that gripped her. Jack might be all of five pounds, his head bigger than the rest of him, but he had the heart of a longhorn.
“You make one scrawny-looking reindeer, and I suppose with my red nose,” she wiggled her nose trying to keep it from feeling so numb, “I could probably lead the team in the night sky. Do you think Santa would go for that, boy?”
Jack barked again, this time louder and with more intensity. Suddenly it became a continuous yapping that raised the hair on the back of his neck. He sprang to all four feet, then sailed off the wagon seat and into the air as if he were a bird taking flight.
“Jack, come back!” she yelled, jerking the team to a grounding halt. “You’ll kill yourself out there!”
She could barely secure the reins and jump down herself before she lost sight of his tiny body bouncing through the drifts like some kind of crazed jackrabbit.
Anna thumbed up her slouch hat just enough to see better where he was headed. A lone tree in the distance seemed to be her pet’s intended destination. Of all times for him to need to relieve himself. Jack wouldn’t hike his leg to mark his territory anywhere it was cold and didn’t have plenty of bark. Leave it to him to find the only tree for a hundred miles.
She chased after him, fearing he would land in some high drift and be unable to bounce his way out. Thankfully, she’d worn a riding skirt for the return journey home, so her legs weren’t as encumbered as they might have been. Still, they were getting colder by the minute as she trudged her way across the prairie after him. Good thing the dog had legs the size of buttonholes, or she’d never catch him. “Fool dog. When I get hold of you, I’m going to strap reins around you and make you lead the . . .”
The exaggerated threat died in her throat as she caught sight of the heap of snow where Jack had stopped, yards away from the tree, still yapping away. A horse lay on its side, its feet hobbled. Frosty air billowed from its nostrils with every breath. The snow around it was stained with blood. A whinny erupted from its throat and dark eyes stared at Anna as if asking for help.
“Be quiet, Jack. He’s scared,” she instructed, trying to take measure of the animal’s injuries but, from this distance away, not finding any clue of why it was bleeding. A closer look would help if the horse would let her. “Move away, Jack. Let me see why he’s down.”
The tiny dog would not budge but quit yapping. Then Jack did something totally out of character. He stuck his nose in the snow and started digging. Jack hated cold. Sometimes shivered on even a warm day. Something under that drift of bloodstained snow near the horse had the dog’s full attention.
All of a sudden the drift moved. Jack began to whine and dig more. A man’s bloody hand reached out, patted the dog, then fell back down and lay perfectly still.
Jack hiked his leg and peed on the man, marking his find.
“Oh my Lord.” Anna bounced forward in the snow to reach the stranger’s side and started brushing the snow away from him. How long had he been out here? How much blood had he lost? “Mister, can you hear me? Can you stand? How bad are you hurt?”
Her battery of questions was met with a groan and a shake of his head, but he managed to sit up just enough to brace his body with one palm. “My hand,” he said in an accent that sounded from back East. “I cut my hand when I was trying to free the roan from the hobble.” He shook his head, as if trying to gather his wits. “Don’t know how much blood I lost. Must have gotten dizzy and lost consciousness.”
He wasn’t a line rider from the XIT, as she first suspected. The men who rode each twenty-five-mile stretch that made up the two-hundred-mile cattle fence would have greater skills than this man. They wouldn’t have been so careless.
She took off the bandanna she wore around her neck and tied a makeshift tourniquet over the cut, stemming the flow. Anna reached out and raised the stranger’s beardless chin, urging him to look up at her. Eyes the color of fine whiskey stared back at her, slightly glazed and surrounded by a forest of dark lashes. Though he was pale from being out in the elements too long with no coat and no gloves, his strong jaw and solid cheekbones carved his features handsomely. She had to force herself to look at his hand to keep from staring too intently at his face.
This was no time for the heat of attraction that instantly ignited in her bloodstream and raced to quell the chill bumps that had frosted her skin for hours now. The man was hurt. She needed to get all of them to safety. “Can you walk by yourself?”
He nodded. “I think so. But first . . .” He motioned toward the horse. “Can you see if he can? I can’t let him die out here. It would be my fault.”
Anna moved to the roan and took a good look at the hobble. The beast had almost chewed it in half trying to finish the job the stranger had started with the knife. They must have been out here quite a while for the animal to have taken ground.
“Where’s your knife?” she asked, looking around the snow but not finding it.
“It’s got to be somewhere close by. I passed out almost immediately from the cut.” He carefully brushed at the snow around him. “The sight of blood and I don’t mix well.”
That fact relieved Anna somewhat. Maybe he had merely been out for minutes. Maybe he was stronger than his pale face promised. Maybe he hadn’t lost so much blood that she could still get him to safety in time. She couldn’t be sure how tall he was until he stood, but she had to make sure he could stand on his own. Getting him, the horse, Jack, and herself back to the team was going to be hard enough without her having to carry him.
“If you don’t mind getting my spectacles out of the saddlebags,” the man requested, “I’ll be more help trying to find the knife. Or maybe we can use one of the other tools in the bag.”
Anna moved toward the saddlebags, whispering low words of reassurance to the roan that she didn’t mean him any harm. “Better hope your luck is improving, mister. If they’re not on this side of the bags, you can forget about those spectacles. They’ll be crushed beneath all that weight. Why aren’t you wearing them anyway?”