The Wildcatter. Peggy Nicholson

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СКАЧАТЬ his daughter. “Then you two be back by suppertime, princess, you hear me?”

      Foster laid a hand on her knee as he cut in smoothly, “We’ll certainly try.”

      Speaking for her, as if she had no mind of her own. Joe didn’t like it a bit, as he tipped his brim to Risa and smiled her on her way. She brushed her blowing, sunset hair from her cheeks and waved back at him, then to her father. Then she turned forward to call a greeting to this hand or that as the convertible threaded through the bustling yard.

      “Hay fever,” Joe said quietly, looking after them.

      “See what I mean?” Ben spat in the dirt again. “Can the girl pick ’em or what? You know what he asked me at dinner last night? How much land I have here!”

      “He did?” That was the worst kind of manners. You knew how much land a man owned you knew his worth close to the penny. Might as well ask to see his bank book.

      “Let a bad ’un like that into your breeding stock,” Tankersly fumed, “and you’ll be culling out his knock-kneed, greedy get for the next four generations!”

      But try to tell a woman what to do. Joe had never had any luck at that, and neither, for all his land and wealth and sheer cussedness, had Ben Tankersly. Risa would follow her wistful heart, even if it led her straight on to heartbreak.

      And ain’t it a cryin’ shame? Joe jammed his old straw down over his nose and rode off to spoil somebody else’s day—Jake’s, he decided. And if he heard one peep about hay fever…

      CHAPTER TWO

      HE’D HAVE TO EAT some crow, Miguel Heydt reflected as he turned his dusty old pickup off the county road. Serious crow. Driving under the arching name board, he glanced up. Suntop Ranch was emblazoned between two rising suns, both the letters and suns shining gold in the morning light—gilded to perfection. It was that kind of outfit.

      With pride to match, he didn’t doubt. The biggest, richest spreads always had the best jobs—and didn’t they know it. He’d made a bad mistake rejecting that old man’s offer last night.

      Then to show up today, hat in hand and crow feathers all over his mouth? He’d be lucky if they didn’t run him off the place.

      But how was I to know? The one map he had, marking the Badwater Flats, was eighty years old. It located the plateau on Kristopherson land.

      Last night at the Lone Star he’d learned that the Kristopherson Ranch was still in existence, still lying east-northeast of Trueheart. So he’d been looking for Kristopherson cowboys, not Suntop men. Buying them drinks when he found them, pumping them casually, discreetly. Making up stories, then seeing what stories he got in return.

      He’d told his tale about a water hole that poisoned cattle back on a ranch in Texas where he used to work—and heard tales about locoweed poisoning in return.

      He’d tried again, spinning that yarn about an old mud pit on the home ranch—greasy thick mud, black as tar, that would suck down deer, stock ay, Dios!, even unwary children.

      His listeners came back with stories of quicksand, of bad river crossings on trail drives. He laughed softly. That hilarious story the old-timer had spun about a pig wallow and helping the boss’s pretty daughter feed the sows, and his punch line that even after that fiasco she’d forgiven him, married him—and forty years later they were still happily married…

      Miguel rubbed the smile off his face. Wonderful stories, but not the story he wanted to hear. Not one of those cow-hands would admit to bad water on Kristopherson land.

      By midnight he’d been ready to give up in frustration. Badwater. The name could have come from most anything—a dog fell down somebody’s well. Or some early traveler had tapped a new keg on his wagon while passing through here and found his drinking water had gone scummy, so he named the flats to mark the occasion. Maybe it was a corruption of an Indian word and had nothing to do with water at all.

      Then another geezer had wandered over to the table where Miguel had sat drinking and swapping yarns. Willy, a Suntop man. Smiling insults had been traded—the Kristopherson crew had apparently bested the Suntop cowboys in a local rodeo a few weeks back.

      Fighting hard for his outfit’s honor, Willy had dredged up an ancient triumph. Let the Kristophersons sneer, but Ben Tankersly’s father had beaten old Will Kristopherson decisively in the thirties, and they were still laughing about it. Sam Tankersly had won the Badwater Flats in a game of stud poker. He’d bluffed Kristopherson out of ten square miles with a pair of threes and a pair of jacks, and what do you think of that?

      Miguel thought he’d better not kiss the old man, but he was tempted. Instead he’d bought him a round, then teased him, apparently defending his Kristopherson pals. Yes, Sam Tankersly had won the Badwater Flats, old man, but so what? Of what earthly use was a patch of range with bad water?

      It was worth plenty, Willy had insisted. Since the creek made the cattle sick, Suntop had drilled wells. Put in windmills to pump up tanks of good, clear water. Nowadays that section was a treasure, with some of the best graze anywhere around Trueheart. It had been rechristened Sweetwater Flats, as the Kristopherson hands well knew. And weren’t they sorry their boss’s granddaddy had been such a blind fool at the card table back in ’34?

      Miguel was a lot sorrier than any of the Kristopherson crew, who shrugged amiably and ambled off into the star-filled night shortly thereafter. A bunch of hired hands, what did they care? It was Miguel who’d played his cards wrong, turning down the job at Suntop.

      Because one look at the map told him the flats—Badwater, Sweetwater, by whatever name—were remote. Not to be inspected on foot from any public road. He’d need to ride in five miles through Suntop land to reach them. And from what he’d heard around the Lone Star, Suntop’s owner didn’t take kindly to trespassers.

      He needed a job on the ranch as his cover.

      But haying?

      Only as a last—his very last—resort.

      HE’D BEEN DRIVING as he replayed last night’s happenings. Following what seemed to be the main private road, though smaller dirt roads branched off to left and right. He’d come more than three miles west across the wide, rolling valley. There was no sign of a house or barn yet; only the neat barbed-wire fences marching along either side of the road. A herd of twenty or so horses grazing on a distant hilltop, miles north. Two tiny cowboys riding a fence line, as far south. Hard to get a grasp on a place this big, and the mountains threw everything out of perspective. That big humped one up ahead might have been two miles distant—or twenty. The jagged peaks to the north, maybe fifty?

      It wasn’t just the scale of the place that was making him edgy. This land was too rich, too lush. Green as money. He was used to the red dusty plains of West Texas. Hardscrabble land, where a man had to scratch for his luck—scratch hard and deep. Here luck seemed to be served up on a wide, green plate with a golden rim.

      A plate set on some other man’s table, not one where a poor boy from Dos Duraznos, Mexico, would be welcome.

      But then, Miguel needed no invitation. No scraps from another’s table. He’d been making his own luck for years.

      Still, when he reached the river at last, it was a welcome change. The trees along it rose like a shaggy wall, cutting off the eastern valley from what СКАЧАТЬ