Montana Gold. Genell Dellin

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      “It’s a dog,” Elle called back. “It’s a Husky. Or an Eskimo.”

      “If it’s hurt, it could be dangerous. Wait ’til I get there.”

      Elle squatted down at a safe distance while Missy Jo ran to her, talking as she did so.

      “I’m not going to let you drive another mile,” she said. “Nobody but you would stop out in the boonies in the middle of the night for a hurt dog. You can’t help him, Elle.”

      But the dog stood up right then and they saw that, aside from his left hind leg hanging at a weird angle and a cut bleeding into the fur of that shoulder, he appeared to be healthy. Sort of. Under the thick—and admittedly, horridly matted—haircoat, he was too thin.

      Elle started talking to him and holding her hand out for him to sniff.

      “It’s just a broken leg,” she said. “A good veterinarian can fix him right up.”

      “Do you see one anywhere around here?”

      Elle let that pass without comment except to say, “He’s not wearing any tags.”

      “You can’t do this to Carlie,” Missy Jo said with an exaggerated sigh of sympathy for the woman who was Elle’s landlady. “If you take in any more strays, you’ll have to stay home and take care of them yourself.”

      “Carlie calls them her grandchildren,” Elle told her, letting the dog lick the tips of her fingers. “She likes them. They keep her from being lonesome.”

      “You’re her biggest stray,” M.J. said, with her usual tendency to speak truths that struck too close to the bone. “She just doesn’t want to hurt your feelings, Elle.”

      M.J. definitely had a point, but Elle did, too.

      “She says—all the time—that she’s a rich widow with nothing else to do but feed, water, doctor and entertain the hurting four-footed creatures I drag in there.”

      She was stroking the dog’s head by now. He was whining his thanks.

      “Talking to you is like talking to a rock,” M.J. said.

      “Well, what would you do?” Elle said, keeping her voice as calm as she could so as not to excite or scare the dog. “Leave him here to suffer?”

      “I never would’ve stopped in the first place,” M.J. said. “But now that you’ve done it, damn it, I’ll go get a blanket.”

      HE’D DONE IT NOW.

      Chase moved slowly as he sat up in bed, swung his feet out onto the floor, and stood up. He was sore all over and the pain in his bad leg seared through him like a firebrand, but he tried to shut it out of his mind. He had two pins and a screw in his left femur and that same kneecap had been cracked like a walnut in his very next ride back from that surgery, but all that had healed up six months ago. Surely it didn’t mean he couldn’t take it anymore.

      He wasn’t going to let his body crater on him. Not yet. No way.

      He’d planned to do a little cutting today to try a couple of his colts that’d just been started. But maybe he ought to take it easy instead.

      Damn. The day a man couldn’t do anything and everything that he wanted to do was the day he might as well count himself old. He wasn’t there yet. He still had two more buckles to win.

      He set his jaw and walked to the window in spite of the hurt, which began to turn into a sharp ache that ran all the way up into his teeth. Probably that was only because this Montana morning at the end of March was a whole lot colder than Texas, where he’d just been. Surely it wasn’t because he had too many bones that had been broken too many times.

      Carefully, he widened his stance and began to stretch, bending to one side and then the other, breathing deep against the pain and keeping his eyes on the pinkening dawn outside the window. He’d been having crazy dreams, which were what had wakened him.

      He rarely dreamed. Or else he didn’t remember his dreams. All his life, he’d been so tired when he finally went to bed at night that he had no trouble sleeping no matter what. Except maybe when he was a kid and never knew when his dad would jerk him out of bed in the middle of the night to berate or beat him.

      Retirement wasn’t going to change that. Whenever the day rolled around that he had to get off the road and come home to this new ranch to stay, he would keep on working. Maybe not riding all the young ones, but he’d work. He’d ridden through the pain and worked through the pain and he was going to keep right on doing it as long as he could move.

      That decided, he pulled on ragged jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, his wool-lined Carhartt jacket and sheepskin moccasins. Coffee and the sunrise. That was the ticket. After that, he wouldn’t jog or run, but he’d damn sure shovel some shit. He wasn’t gonna let being the big boss and the ranch owner go to his head.

      Two hours later he was on his second pot of coffee and still on the porch, feet propped up on the railing, still no boots on, doing nothing but looking around like a pole-axed steer. What a lazy bum.

      In a rocking chair, no less, like he was on his last legs. He’d have to talk to that designer woman who’d picked out the furniture. What’d she think this was? A rest home for old cowboys?

      He’d get up and get to work as soon as he finished this pot. He’d just sit here for a few more minutes and decide what all he needed to do today. Only two days home and then he’d be back on the road.

      Home. That seemed so strange to him. This new place was home.

      Big house, good quality, but not fancy. Lots of glass and wood and stone but homey. Make it look like it grew out of the ground, there in front of the big grove of aspen at the foot of the mountain. That’s what he’d told the architect. That’s what he’d got.

      Now he couldn’t believe it was his. And he couldn’t believe that someday he’d be here all the time. No cowboy could rodeo forever.

      Looking that fact right in the face made him feel the earth shift underneath him: What would he do with a home? Home wasn’t just for one person, was it? But two people—him and his dad—hadn’t been a home, either. Not even the three of them, when his mom was still there, had made one. He didn’t know what a home was.

      But if building could make one, then he’d have one. There were two buildings and several miles of fence under construction that he could see from here, just by turning his head. There were more that he couldn’t see right now. All of it belonged to him. He was the one making it happen.

      His new barns, his new outdoor arena, his new shop, his new breeding lab, his new landscaping, his new manager’s house for Tucker and his wife Helen, his new bunkhouse for whatever help they needed, his new indoor arena, his new garage, were all springing up out of the ground because he’d ordered them to be built. Except for the mountain ranges rising against the sky, all the land he could see from this spot where he sat belonged to him, either deeded or leased.

      He, Chase Lomax, was settling down. Well, he was preparing to settle down. Sometime. Not yet.

      But he couldn’t deny that he was building a homeplace. Something to last, a fine СКАЧАТЬ