One Heart to Win (20 page)

“I somehow assumed you grew up around here like your husband,” Tiffany said.

“Goodness, no, but Zach wasn’t born here either. No one but trappers and Indians lived around here back then. Zachary’s father, Elijah Callahan, was a rancher in Florida; mine was a butcher who did business with him, which is how we met.”

Tiffany was surprised. Why had she thought these people had been here so much longer? Was the feud not that old either?

“So you actually moved here with your husband?”

“Yes, and with his father, with whom we lived. Elijah’s wife had just died. Elijah had no reason to stay in Florida after that, and every reason to leave. Bad blood with his neighbor was what really drove him away.”

Mary had almost whispered that last part, yet Mary couldn’t be talking about Warrens, so why would she add that so quietly, as if it were a secret Tiffany shouldn’t know about? But she wanted to ask Mary about the feud, and this was somewhat of an opening to do so.

Carefully she said, “How . . . ironic, since your son Cole said your neighbors here aren’t friendly either. It would seem it’s the bane of your family to have—”

“Oh, it’s worse than that, but we’re hopeful that it will be over soon. Well,
I’m
hopeful. Zach is more skeptical. Seeing is believing, you know? But who can blame him when it was she who followed us here and instilled that hatred of hers into the rest of her family.”

“Who did?”

“Mariah Warren. Has no one told you about the feud?”

Tiffany choked out, “I was going to ask, since I seem to have landed in the middle of it. Who is Mariah Warren?”

“Elijah Callahan’s one true love. She was Mariah Evans back then when they lived in Florida. Elijah and Mariah were to marry.”

“But they didn’t?”

“No, they surely did not.” Mary sighed. “The night before the wedding, Elijah’s best friend got him drunk and thought it a fine joke to dump him in a whore’s bed so he’d wake up there and think the worst. But Mariah wanted to talk to him that night. Some people think she was having wedding jitters, others think she didn’t want to wait for the wedding night. She spent hours at Elijah’s ranch, waiting for him to come home. Finally, she went to town to find out what was keeping him. When she entered his favorite tavern, looking for him, everyone got quiet. At the point of her musket she demanded to know where Elijah was, and someone told her he was upstairs.”

Tiffany gasped. “She shot him?”

“Not that night. That night she was just in shock. But she shot him the next day when he came to explain. She didn’t believe he didn’t have relations with the tavern floozy. She meant to kill him; she just wasn’t a good shot and left him with a permanent limp instead. But that jealous rage that took hold of her that night never did let go. Within the week she married an old suitor, Richard Warren, just to spite Elijah. That’s when Elijah got jealous, too. It took him longer to find a wife, yet he married for the same reason, just to spite Mariah.”

“Why couldn’t they both just let it go?”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you? That would have been the sensible thing to do. But their love for each other was powerful. That’s why it turned into such powerful hatred. Jealousy can do
that to a person, you know, when it festers like that, and hers festered for the rest of her life.”

“How did both families end up here?”

“Elijah was trying to get us as far from Mariah as it was possible to get. Mariah’s husband, Richard Warren, had died early in their marriage. He gave her three children, but only Frank survived to adulthood, and she raised him to hate us, too. They followed us here . . . well, she did. To be fair, Frank didn’t know that’s what his mother was doing. She was a little crazy by then, she had to be, to come all this way just to finally have it out with Elijah.”

“An actual confrontation? How did that turn out?”

“As might be expected. They couldn’t live together but they died together.”

“Indians?”

“Goodness, no, the Indians in the area weren’t at war with the white man yet. They were mostly friendly or we never would have built here when there was only a fur-trading post nearby.”

“Then how did Elijah and Mariah die?”

“They shot each other.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

T
HE STORY OF MARIAH
and Elijah might be old news to Mary Callahan, but it was a fresh tragedy to Tiffany. She had trouble getting the tale out of her head.
They shot each other
. How could anyone get so angry they’d want to shoot—well, obviously, that happened all the time. Duels, war, gunfights here in the West. But to leave that legacy to your children and their children? How dumb was that? And now she was supposed to pay for her grandmother’s lunacy?

She felt bad now, since it sounded as if her family was ultimately to blame. Or was it? She’d only heard one side of the feud today, the Callahans’ side. Yet to hear the other side, she’d have to talk to her father.
No
thank you. Besides, what else could he add? That Elijah wasn’t eloquent enough to make Mariah see reason? Or that Mariah was a little crazy to begin with to keep that fury alive for so many years?

Tiffany hadn’t expected to like Mary Callahan. She didn’t want to disappoint the woman by admitting she couldn’t cook and asking for help. She decided to give it a try on her own
first. So she spent the rest of the afternoon reading her little cookbook, which didn’t take long as thin as it was, and making a list of the ingredients she would need. She went through the pantry thoroughly and discovered the ice cellar next to it. It was packed with large chunks of pond ice and a lot of salted meat. None of the ice was melting yet, with summer only just beginning.

She couldn’t find a few of the ingredients mentioned in the cookbook.

“What’s wrong?” Andrew asked as he came in the back door.

Tiffany realized she must have been frowning. She held up the cookbook she was reading. “Several of these recipes call for eggs and I can’t find any in the ice cellar.”

“I think I heard some chickens when Jakes was getting me settled in the bunkhouse.”

“Really? Let’s go find out.”

They found the henhouse behind the barn. It held quite a few adult birds, but she didn’t see any eggs lying around. There were also dozens of chicks, some perched on the planks where the nests were lined up, others picking at seeds on the ground. She was fascinated. She’d never seen live farm animals before, or dead ones ready for cooking either.

“Get away from there!” Jakes barked at her, coming around the corner of the barn with a basket on his arm. “Those gals belong to me.”

“I wasn’t going to disturb them,” she assured the trail cook with a smile, while she was thinking, such a grouch!

Jakes wore a full beard, brown streaked with gray, but he wasn’t that old, maybe in his forties. He was skinny, bandy-legged, short, and obviously cantankerous. But he could probably
give her tips on cooking, so she didn’t want to get on his bad side.

“I was just curious about eggs,” she said.

“I bring two dozen to the house each day. If you need more, just tell me. But by no means do you
ever
bother my hens. They don’t like strangers. Upsets them. Then they don’t produce.”

That was fine with her, since she didn’t know how to get an egg out of a hen anyway. “What about cows for milk?”

“Two dairy cows are kept in the barn. The hens and Myrtle are mine, the cows ain’t, so you’re on your own with them.”

Oh, no, she wasn’t! “Andrew?”

“Be glad to, ma’am.”

She beamed at the boy for reading her mind. He was already earning his keep, but his quick reply made her wonder, “How are you acquainted with farm animals?”

“My oldest sister married a farmer. I got to spend one summer with her in the country before I came West. I liked it. Even thought about taking up farming myself, till I got the notion to find my pa. So here I am instead.”

“If you’re done admiring my gals, take your jabbering elsewhere,” Jakes grumbled.

Tiffany grit her teeth to keep from berating the fellow for his rudeness. “Are there any other cooking resources I should know about?”

“The lake’s got fish, but cattlemen don’t fish. If you want any, you’ll have to do the fishing yourself like Old Ed did.”

That actually sounded interesting. She wouldn’t mind visiting that pretty lake again, so she didn’t delegate that chore to Andrew yet. But with the ice cellar so well stocked, she didn’t need to try fishing right away.

However, she did want to make sure she didn’t trespass
on Jakes’s domain, so she said, “You mentioned Myrtle was yours?”

“Her you can meet. Come along, I’ll introduce you.”

She blushed. She’d misunderstood and thought Myrtle was an animal! Did the man have a wife? If he did, the woman must have the temperament of a saint to put up with him. But it made her wonder if any of the cowboys had wives, too. Were there other houses on the property for employees’ families?

Jakes wasn’t waiting for her to follow him, so she had to hurry to catch up. But he stopped next to the pigsty on the back side of one of the sheds.

“Myrtle’s the sow,” he said proudly. “Won her in a poker game. Kept her to dispose of food scraps. Beats the heck out of digging daily holes to bury the stuff so it don’t lure in wild animals. Mrs. Callahan figured to make even better use of her and bought her a mate. This new batch of piglets will taste good later this year.”

Now Tiffany was blushing for thinking Myrtle might be Jakes’s wife! The two adult pigs were huge in comparison to the little piglets running about. So Myrtle was a pet . . . well, maybe not, since Jakes was practically smacking his lips over the thought of eating her young when they were grown. She tried not to feel disgusted at the thought, reminding herself the piglets had been bred to end up on the dinner table—at Mary’s suggestion, too! But they looked so cute! One piglet had even squeezed under the lowest plank on the pen fencing and was sniffing at her boots.

She was not going to think about their being dinner someday and said to Jakes, “Shouldn’t they be better contained?”

“They don’t wander far, and don’t be throwing them no rotten
food, neither, just fresh scraps. You can pick him up and set him back inside if you’re worried ’bout it.”

Pick up a pig? She stared at him aghast. “I wasn’t worried, and thank you for giving me the information I needed.”

She hurried back to the house with Andrew, who was full of surprises. He couldn’t cook other than to roast meat over a campfire, but he did know how to grow vegetables. The garden behind the house was already fully planted, but she assigned the task of tending it to him and thought she might ask him to teach her about gardens until she saw him dig his hands into the dirt. She was willing to cook food but not to grow it.

She was sitting at the table reading when Degan came in the back door of the kitchen and dropped a large sack next to her on the table. “Start with something simple to go with this,” he suggested.

The word
FLOUR
was stamped on the front of the sack, yet she knew from the delicious aroma what was inside it and gave him a delighted smile. “You brought bread from the bakery!”

“Sorry about the sack, but most people who go to the bakery bring their own baskets. Just dust the extra flour off the loaves.”

She was so pleased she actually teased him with a grin. “You expected my first meal to fail?”

“I wasn’t going to bet on it. But there’s one thing I do know about bread. If you want any, you have to start it the night before you eat it. Maybe you’ve already learned that from your cookbook.”

She shook her head. She hadn’t, but she had selected a recipe for a simple meal for that night, chicken soup—she’d just have to substitute beef for chicken—which would go quite well with the bread he’d brought.

He continued on to the bathing room. “I’ll clean up now before the brothers show up. We’ll be heading back to town tonight.”

She was surprised. He’d told her today that the cowboys rode to town for hell-raising, but she hadn’t expected the Callahans to be included in that group. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe just Degan was.

She asked, “Who is
we
?”

He paused before closing the door. “All the men who aren’t married. That would include the brothers.”

“To raise hell, as you put it? What exactly does that mean?”

“Drinking, poker . . .” He started to add something else, but finished with merely, “More drinking. Drunks tend to get in fights, and saloons get busted up. Just ordinary Western fun.”

“So you’re babysitting again? Keep a better eye on Hunter then. It looked, and sounded, as if those miners wanted to kill him today.”

“Sounded?”

“They said he’d be carried home. I think they meant dead—as a message for Zachary to give in and give them what they want.”

“Are you sure you haven’t let your anxiety over what you witnessed spark your imagination?”

“You said the miners don’t carry guns, but one of them pulled a gun on Hunter. Or maybe he wasn’t really a miner, only pretending to be one. That would be one way to get rid of the Callahans, to kill them off one by one in gun challenges.”