Adrienne deWolfe - [Wild Texas Nights 03] (2 page)

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank the people who made researching this book so much fun: Texas cattle rancher Murray Callahan; veterinarian Greg Biehle, D.V.M.; and Ken Horton, the executive vice president of the Texas Pork Producers Association.

Most especially I would like to thank Texas sheep, goat, and cattle rancher Coni Ross and her Border collie, Fran, for introducing me to the life of a lady "cowboy"—and for putting up with a city girl who asked a million and one questions.

Chapter 1

Bandera County, Texas

June 1884

"Lookie there, boys. The little lady ain't got no underwears!"

Pausing just inside the swinging doors, Bailey McShane felt her face turn branding-iron hot. The patrons of the Bullwhip Saloon hooted, sloshing whiskey, to toast their fellow cattleman's jest. Cowboys were notoriously creative when ridiculing sheep, but likening the animals' fleece to a female's unmentionables was a new insult, even to Bailey.

She gripped her shotgun tighter and glared at her snickering audience. Her heart was speeding faster than it had any right to be, which she considered akin to betrayal. She liked to think she'd never been afraid a day in her life. To feel the dampness of her palms and the roiling in her gut made her as mad at her body as she was at the cowpokes who'd vandalized her fences. She hated feeling weak because she was a woman.

Her foreman would have wanted to come to protect her—a constant struggle between them which irritated her to no end—so rather than telling McTavish about her property damage, she'd ridden off without him. She'd figured the wire cutters she was hunting would take a Scottish immigrant no more seriously than they took a sheep-raising female.

Tonight would be different though. Tonight she'd be someone to reckon with. She'd come to the enemy camp to demand the compensation she was due, and she'd be damned before she'd hide behind some man's britches. In business, as in war, there was no room for ladies.

Hiking her rolled-up blue jeans, she narrowed her eyes beneath her Stetson and stalked with her hound into the smoky squalor of the Bullwhip Saloon.

The main room was unusually crowded for droving season. Bailey darted her gaze past the counter, with its clutter of dirty glasses, whooping gamblers, and spinning dice cage, then scanned the flushed and craggy faces laughing around the tables. The drought had forced most of Bandera's cattlemen to drive their steers to market early, selling their best beef at prices that amounted to robbery. With time on their hands and boulder-sized chips on their shoulders, cowpokes came to the saloon each night to grouse about the usual: heat, sodbusters, barbed wire, and woollies.

But one of these men, Bailey was certain, had done more than grouse. Someone in this nest of rat snakes had committed an act of vandalism that had provoked war in several of Texas's other drought-stricken counties. She steeled herself against her secret hurt, that one of her neighbors had lashed out at her when she'd done everything in her power to accommodate them through their hardships. She didn't want bloodshed, but she did want what she deserved: the right to ranch her land in peace.

"Hey, Bo Peep!" another cowpoke bellowed, winking lewdly as he grabbed his crotch. "If it's a ram you've come lookin' fer, I got one over here!"

Boo halted at her side. With a rumbling growl, he turned wolfish yellow eyes on her heckler and bared fangs as long as her thumb. Bailey knew a fleeting sense of satisfaction when her detractor blanched, edging unsteadily toward the safety of the counter.

Tugging a man's glove from her belt, she dangled it beneath her hound's twitching nose. "Find the wire cutter, Boo. Find the bastard who's been raiding my wells."

Boo's spindly tail wagged in understanding. Snout to the sawdust, he weaved among the lip-locked couples on the dance floor. One of the hurdy-gurdy girls interrupted her kiss long enough to pat Boo's massive head. Her partner scowled.

"Here now, Miss Bailey," the barkeep called above the abysmally tuned piano. Balancing a fistful of empty mugs in one hand, he planted the other on his hip. "I told you you can't visit the Bullwhip no more if you've come to raise a ruckus."

Boo paused, sniffing suspiciously at the barkeep's wooden leg. The old man went rigid, his whiskered, sun-weathered face paling.

"Don't get your shorts in a knot, Stumpy," Bailey called as Boo, apparently dissatisfied, snuffled onward to the counter. "I'm paying a neighborly call on a wire cutter. Won't take but a minute."

"Neighborly, my ass." Stumpy muttered something more virulent as Boo inspected each of the boots propped along the counter's runner. Their owners allowed this examination with a mixture of amusement and wry tolerance. One cowpoke even tossed the hound a piece of beef jerky. But Boo, faithful to his mission, ignored this flagrant bribe.

"If that slobberin' varmint of yours gnaws another hole through one of my table legs, I'm chargin' you double."

"Boo gave up table legs for railroad spikes," Bailey retorted. "He's not a puppy anymore."

Meanwhile, Boo had lost interest in the silver rowels and dusty heels lounging at the counter. Winding his way through the clutter of furniture and humans, he trotted toward the stairwell that led to the second story's "heifer corral," where Stumpy's advertisements bragged "a bull could get his fill." Bailey didn't much like the idea of her childhood playmates throwing away their bodies and their dreams, but at least Stumpy fed and clothed them and kept a roof over their heads. It was better treatment than some of the girls had gotten from their fathers—or from the husbands who'd abandoned them.

"'Evenin', Miss Bailey," Hank Rotterdam greeted her, flashing her a full-toothed smile as she followed her hound to the table near the stairwell. Hank's gaze traveled from her breasts to her shotgun, then leisurely roamed back up her cotton workshirt to her breasts. "Trouble back home?"

Bailey glared at her northeastern neighbor. His handsome blond features were aging in a beefy way, giving him a jowl like a Brahma steer's.

"I thought you might know more than most, Hank," she replied, knowing full well the Scandinavian rancher was the biggest anti-woolly campaigner in the county. Eleven years earlier, before the rivalry had started between Hank and her father, she'd practically called the Rotterdam spread her home. Hank's twin boys had been like pesky younger brothers to her. But the cattleman-sheepherder feud had taken its toll on friendly relations between the Rotterdams and McShanes. Now, with the drought heating tempers to the boiling point, Bailey spent less time extending the olive branch to the twins than she did threatening to use it as a switch on their backsides.

"Now, why would you think I'd know anything, honey?" Hank drawled.

Boo whined. Growing agitated, the hound pawed at the empty chair on Hank's left side. Bailey's heart sank to think one of the twins had been involved in the attack on her property. Had relations between her and the Rotterdams soured that badly?

"Jeez, Bailey." The towheaded youth at Hank's right squinted one bleary eye at Boo. "If that dog of yours gets any uglier, we're gonna have to shoot it to put us out of our misery."

Bailey ignored the younger Rotterdam twin, Nat—or, rather, Gnat, as she'd privately come to call him. "Don't you honey me, Hank Rotterdam. Where's Nick?"

"Nick?"

"Yeah, that's right. Your lying, no good cow chip of a son."

Hank looked amused rather than offended at her barb. "You sure are a jealous woman, Bailey. Seems a bit unsporting like, you busting in here with your daddy's scattergun. After all, you can't blame the boy for sowing his oats elsewhere. You had your chance with Nick."

"Nick can rut himself to perdition for all I care."

"That's the spirit, honey." Hank winked, much to her irritation. "Why don't you pull up a chair and sit with me and Nat for a spell?"

"Which room is Nick in?" Bailey persisted grimly, thinking to send Boo upstairs to sniff out her suspicions once and for all.

"Can't say," Hank answered jovially. "Tell you what. Me and Nat'll even buy you a drink. It's the least we can do after you've ridden out all hot to find your man... er, indisposed."

Bailey felt her color rising. Planting her hands on the table, she leaned forward and stared straight into Hank's cagey blue eyes.

"And I'll tell you what, Hank. You and your boys had better come up with five hundred dollars for the fences you cut and burned on my spread earlier tonight. Otherwise, I'm pressing felony charges."

"Felony charges?" Nat roused himself from his beer. "Gee, Bailey, I'm real sorry 'bout your fences, but I didn't have nothing to do with it."

She didn't bother to dignify his lie. More than one set of horse tracks had led away from the pile of ashes that had once been her cedar fence posts. Nat might have been smart enough to keep hold of his riding gauntlets, but she knew from experience that Nat went where Nick did. The Rotterdam twins had always enjoyed making her life miserable. It was their way of showing they cared.

"Fence cutting is a mean-spirited, cowardly crime," Hank said. "I didn't think Bandera County cattlemen could stoop so low."

"Yeah." Nat nodded, blinking hopefully at her. "You want me to ride on over to your spread and keep you safe tonight?"

"What I want," she ground out, "is Nick's hide nailed to an outhouse wall."

"You always did like Nick better 'n you like me," Nat grumbled.

"C'mon, Bailey." Hank settled back in his chair like a man relishing the entertainment to come. "What d'ya say you forget about Nick and marry Nat? Hell, they look just the same. And they've got the same equipment, if you know what I mean."

"I'll keep that in mind when I'm ready to raise hogs. And speaking of boars"—Bailey matched the old man stare for stare—"the devil will be roasting pork tonight if you don't tell me where Nick is."

As if on cue, Nat's errant twin reeled butt-first onto the balcony. Nick barely saved himself from toppling backward over the banister before a hail of clothing was flung after him into the hall. Every man in the saloon guffawed to see Nick stripped down to his scarlet long johns. Boo flared his nostrils and growled.

"Aw, c'mon, honey," Nick protested drunkenly as the Bullwhip's prettiest, hottest-tempered whore slammed the door in his face. "Don't go gettin' mad. You know I'm good for the extra fifteen dollars—"

He never finished wheedling. Boo loosed an earsplitting howl and lunged for the stairs.

"What the—?" Nick glanced unsteadily over his shoulder, saw his twin grab for Boo's collar, and lost a shade or two off his tan. Dropping his hand to his hip, he found no holster and paled even more. He started beating on the door. "Open up! You forgot my gun!"

"Like hell I did,
muchacho,"
came the muffled reply. "I earned a sight more than your piece tonight."

More laughter greeted this double entendre as Boo twisted, finally breaking his drunken captor's hold to charge the stairs. Nick cursed again. Grabbing his boots, he ran for the next bedroom, but his frenzied tugging did little more than rattle the locked door.

"Bailey!" Dashing for another escape route, Nick found that the next room was also occupied and locked. "Goddammit, Arabella, call off your dog, or I'll have it shot!"