Trilby. Diana Palmer

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СКАЧАТЬ “It will be worth the trouble to have you happy.”

      “I can hardly wait!”

      “I am not surprised.”

      He drove her back home. There was a celebration that night for Trilby’s good fortune. Then, just as they began to prepare for bed, loud gunshots echoed through the desert, accompanied by the sound of bellowing, stampeding cattle.

      Jack and Teddy rushed into their clothing and out onto the front porch. Old Mosby Torrance was already there, tall and stiff-necked, his watery blue eyes blazing out of a face like honed leather.

      “Ten of them,” he panted, having run from the bunkhouse. “Vasquez and Moreno saw them. Mexicans, they think, after the cattle.”

      “We’ll give chase,” Jack said coldly. “I’ll have Mary fetch some rations. Roust the men and I’ll break out some extra ammunition for the rifles.”

      “No sooner said than done, boss. I’ll get my Winchester—”

      “Oh, not you, Torrance,” Jack said abruptly, staring at him as if he thought the old Texas Ranger was off his bean. “No, you have to look after the women. You, too, Teddy,” he told his son, who looked shocked. “This isn’t a job for either of you. I’ll get my guns.”

      Torrance looked violent. Teddy moved forward. “It’s okay, Mr. Torrance,” he said miserably. “I guess we’re both out of it.”

      The old man swallowed. “Damnedest thing about getting old, boy,” he said huskily, “is that everybody thinks you’re no account anymore.”

      “I think you’re magnificent, sir!”

      Torrance felt the sting go out of Jack’s words as he looked down into the hero-worshiping face of the youngster. He had a son of his own somewhere. But his wife had died of pneumonia one winter while he was out chasing outlaws; he didn’t know where the boy had been sent. By the time he got home, it was all over and his only child had vanished without a trace. He’d searched, but to no avail. He looked at Teddy and hoped that his child was as sturdy and brave as this one.

      “Can you shoot?” he asked Teddy.

      “I sure can,” Teddy replied. He grimaced as he glanced after his father. “He doesn’t think so, though. Gosh, Mr. Torrance, nobody thinks we’re any good for a fight, do they?”

      “I reckon not. Well, I’ll go get my gun anyway, in case they make a play for the house. You can help me keep watch outside.” He glared toward the hall. “I don’t guess he’ll mind that.”

      “Not if we don’t tell him,” Teddy said, and grinned conspiratorially.

      Torrance chuckled. Teddy really was one hell of a boy.

      He went back to the bunkhouse and took out his nickleplated, mother-of-pearl-handled .44 Colt revolver. The gun had been in a lot of battles with him over the years. It was still a respectable weapon, despite the .45 that most everyone carried these days. Like himself, the gun was out of place in a century that boasted machines that went as fast as a horse on the land and in the air. He was like a prehistoric man, he sometimes thought. Someone who’d lost the world he belonged in, and who couldn’t quite fit into the new one.

      It was a different story just after the Civil War when he became a Texas Ranger and wrote his own history as he went. Along with men like Bigfoot Wallace, he was a legend among Texas peacemakers. He’d backed down outlaws and gunfighters; he’d once backed down a whole damned lynch mob after a prisoner. But none of that was known out here, and nobody cared what he’d been fifty years ago.

      Maybe he should be grateful that he even had a job, he supposed. Not that Jack Lang had had much choice about hiring him. He was foreman until Lang had inherited the place. Now he was the cattle foreman. Lang was his own boss.

      He stuck the gun in its gunbelt and picked up his Remington, checking the action before he strode back out the door. He was tall and lithe. Except for his white hair, he looked much the same as he had when he was in his thirties, his step sure and firm on the wooden floor of the porch, his carriage erect and proud. What a hell of a shame, he thought, with faint amusement, that a man had to go and get old. There had been a time when he was sure he was going to be young forever.

      Jack Lang came out the door buckling on his gun belt with fingers that just barely managed it. He was dressed in an exaggerated Western style, with woolly shotgun chaps and leather wristbands, new boots with heavy rowels on the spurs, and a pair of pearl-handled six-guns that looked like something out of a dime novel.

      The Easterner always dressed like that when they went out to hunt rustlers. They never found any, because Lang didn’t trust the Apache boy who scouted for them, and he didn’t believe that anyone could track a man through a stream.

      Torrance shook his head. Somebody ought to tell that dude that woolly shotgun chaps were suited to Northern winters and were worn by Montana and Wyoming cowboys, not Arizona ones. Those heavy rowels were Mexican—no self-respecting, civilized man would think of using them on his horse. The pistols were pretty, but they’d never been fired. And those wristbands would come in handy for a roper, but Jack Lang couldn’t throw a rope.

      Torrance kept his thoughts to himself, though, and just nodded when the boss told him to watch the women. He could track as well as that Mexican, Vasquez, whom Lang had given scouting chores to. Better. And he could still outshoot any one of Lang’s other cowboys. He knew Mexicans because he’d trailed so many of them in his Ranger days. But Lang would never know that, because he didn’t think a man Torrance’s age was fit for cowboy work.

      He sighed more wistfully than he knew when the outfit rode off without him. Teddy came to stand beside him.

      “It’s all right, Mr. Torrance,” Teddy said. “I know that you could do a better job of it than any one of Dad’s men. Even if he doesn’t.”

      Torrance looked down at him with pure delight. “You’re a wonder, Teddy.”

      “So are you, Mr. Torrance.”

      Inside, Trilby watched the men ride away and worried. One of the hands had mentioned going by Los Santos to pick up Thorn Vance. Her father had argued with the man, and Trilby knew why he didn’t want Thorn involved. But then she’d heard the telephone being rung, and her father muttering because it took the operator so long to wake up and put his call through.

      He had the operator ring Los Santos and presumably spoke to Thorn, quite curtly. There was a pause, and her father muttered his agreement to stop by Los Santos on his way after the bandits. She hoped Thorn wouldn’t lead her vulnerable father into any gunplay. Jack Lang posed very well, but he knew next to nothing about violent men….

      When the makeshift posse got to Los Santos, Thorn was already waiting for them. His rifle was in its sheath and he was wearing a sidearm, a black-handled Colt .45 that had belonged to his great-uncle.

      He’d had to browbeat Jack Lang into letting him join the party. The Easterner had been hell-bent on going alone with his few men, and Thorn had a sudden mental image of the older man lying dead in the Arizona dust.

      His conscience had burned him raw over his assumptions about Trilby. He’d done enough damage to her reputation that he hadn’t felt right about going back over to the Lang place. He knew Jack and the rest of the family despised him for what he’d said to Trilby, СКАЧАТЬ