Beckett's Birthright. Bronwyn Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ time the trail had led him to Durham, in the state of North Carolina, he’d been dead broke, flat out of leads and exhausted from months of tracking, being sometimes only hours behind. He’d been nursing a beer and helping himself to an occasional pickled egg, idly glancing over a local newspaper someone had left on the table when he’d happened to overhear a discussion about a man who evidently ran one of the biggest cattle operations in this part of the country. His ears had perked up, because working cattle was one of the things he was qualified to do.

      “I heard Jackson fired old Shem and he’s looking for a new manager.” The speaker polished off his beer and slid the tankard across the bar for a refill. Half a dozen men played poker at a nearby table, a few more lined up at the bar.

      One of the first things Eli had learned about the man he was hunting was that he could usually be found in bars and gambling dens, any place where men might gather to risk a week’s pay. So he’d leaned back in the scarred bench seat and watched a fly crawl across the table while he eavesdropped.

      “Burke Jackson? Stingy ol’ sumbitch, if he’d pay a decent wage, he might hold on to his crew.”

      “I worked there once. Didn’t last out a week. I heard ol’ Shem’s still there, he just can’t cut the mustard no more. Reckon Jackson’s meanness plumb wore him down.”

      There’d been a general agreement from the men gathered at the bar. “They say that daughter of his is cut from the same bolt o’ cloth,” another man had remarked.

      That had been the first time Eli had heard mention of the daughter. He remembered feeling relieved at the description. At least she didn’t sound like the fragile, feminine type. Being tall, tough and short on polish, Eli admitted to an unfortunate weakness for petite, delicate females that invariably landed him in trouble.

      Mean, though, he could handle. In all his off-and-on years of wearing a badge, he rarely had to resort to force. Unless a man was blind drunk or desperate, Eli’s size alone usually did the trick.

      The clincher had been when the bartender had said, “Sooner or later, I reckon half the men east o’ the Mississippi turn up lookin’ for work on the Bar J. Never stay more’n a few weeks, though.”

      “Can’t much blame ’em ,” one man had commented.

      There was a nodding of heads and a general agreement, then the bartender swiped a rag over the bar and said, “You gotta admit, though, some men jest don’t like to work for their money.”

      “I’ll drink to that,” said a grizzled farmer as he downed the last of his beer and wiped the foam from his bushy mustache with his sleeve.

      “It ain’t the piss-poor pay,” declared the man standing next to him, “It’s that daughter of his. They say she’d scare the gizzard out of a wild hog.”

      Eli thought now about all he’d heard about Jackson’s legendary daughter, who was currently away at school. According to rumor, Lilah Jackson was big, tough, could outride and outshoot any man and would deck the first one who touched her.

      Eli didn’t feel the least bit threatened. She could be pretty as a picture and dainty as a rosebud and he still wouldn’t be in any danger. After giving his heart to one woman, offering his name to another, and losing them both, he had nothing left to give.

      When Abigail had married his best friend, he had cut his losses and headed west again. As for Rosemary, she had been stolen right out from under his nose. He’d had no choice but to go after her.

      He’d been working as sheriff of Crow Fly the day she’d come riding into town on the stage, planning on moving in with an elderly cousin. Trouble was, the cousin was already dead, her house and whatever paltry assets she’d once owned, sold to repay her debts and the cost of her burial.

      Broke, with no place to go and no means of getting there, Rosemary Smith had appealed to the sheriff. “What can I do?” she’d pleaded, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It took my last penny to come west to take care of my dear cousin—all in the world I have left is this.” She’d held out a gold chain from which dangled a big ugly pendant in the shape of a teardrop. “It belonged to my mother—see, her name’s engraved all around it?” She’d held it out for him to examine, but without shoving his face up to her bosom, he couldn’t make out the fine script.

      “Yes, ma’am,” he’d said politely, wondering if he should offer her his dusty bandana to dry her eyes.

      “Now Mama’s gone, and Cousin Carrie’s gone, and there’s no one left, and I—I—” She had blinked her enormous blue eyes, the lashes matted with tears. “I would rather starve to death than sell Mama’s necklace,” she’d declared dramatically. “Papa had it made especially for her b-before he—he died.”

      More weeping. One thing had led to another, and Eli had ended up settling her into the big empty house his grandfather had left him, with a widow woman to look after her. Crow Fly didn’t run to a boardinghouse, much less a hotel.

      He had offered to pay her passage back home, but she claimed she had no home to return to. In the end, he had offered to marry her. It was the only way he could think of for an honorable man to protect a respectable woman who had no one else to turn to.

      About a month later, having spent three days tracking a band of rustlers, Eli had headed home, dog tired and feeling, though he’d hated to admit it, more like a coyote caught in a steel trap than a man about to be married to a pretty woman. Something told him Rosemary wasn’t going to be satisfied for long being the wife of a country sheriff, but at that point in his life, it had been about his only option. If he hadn’t already squandered his inheritance, he might have been further ahead in his plans to rebuild the barns and fences, invest in a small herd of short-horn Oregonians and gradually breed up to high-quality beef.

      He’d started smelling smoke a few miles out that day. By the time he reached Crow Fly, three miles from home, he’d known. Known it in his bones, the way Shem always knew when a storm was coming, he thought now, picturing the scene that had confronted him that day.

      The house had still been smoldering. The woman he’d left behind to look after Rosemary had been tied up in the barn, which was still standing. “Scary as the devil, he were,” the woman had sobbed. “Streak of white hair right here—” She’d pointed to the left side of her head. “He took Miss Rosemary up with him, and lit out o’ here, laughing like anything. It was the devil, I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Eli. The devil done stole your woman and rode away with her, and there weren’t one blessed thing I could do about it. It’s a wonder he didn’t steal me, too.”

      Eli hadn’t blamed the widow. With a big purple knot just over one eye, probably from the butt of a pistol, she’d been trussed up and left with a handkerchief in her mouth. Likely would’ve died that way if Eli hadn’t heard the muffled sounds coming from the barn, because his first impulse had been to ride out immediately, before the trail had time to cool off.

      That had been about eighteen months ago. For a man of less than thirty years, he felt older than all the mountains he’d crossed and then recrossed, all the rivers he’d forded heading east and then west, and then east again.

      “You ain’t eatin’ tonight, boy.” Shem, his eyes wreathed in wrinkles, but still bright with interest and intelligence, finger-combed the corn-bread crumbs from his gray beard and reached for his tobacco pouch.

      “I’m not hungry. Been doing book work all day.” What he needed was to saddle up and ride for a couple of days, sleeping СКАЧАТЬ