Drew (The Cowboys) (21 page)

Cattle and pigs had grown fat from summer grazing and rooting through the fields for dropped kernels of oats and wheat. Even chickens and geese seemed to be getting as fat as possible before they were slaughtered on the first cold days in October or November. It was the picture of an idyllic countryside, grown fat from the fertile land and the peace and prosperity since the war. So very different from Texas, where the open wounds of war were still visible.

Their visit to New Orleans would be the first time Earl had taken the Wild West Show to the deep South.

“How many brothers are still at home?” Cole asked.

“Two.”

“Where are the others?”

“Buck got married and bought a ranch next to Jake’s. Sean and Pete left for the Colorado gold fields early this year. Luke left a while back to hire out his gun. Chet followed to keep an eye on him. Bret went off to Boston a few years back, but nobody cared much. Bret was always hard to like.”

“Who helps Jake?”

“Will and Matt. I expect Matt will stay even if Will leaves. Matt hates being around strangers even more than I do.”

“Doesn’t seem like your parents were able to make all of you feel that you were part of the family.”

“Isabelle says it’s hard for orphans to feel close to anybody. She says they’ve spent so long being rejected and having to look out for themselves, they’re afraid to believe they don’t have to any longer. Isabelle was an orphan herself, so she ought to know.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“I was never really an orphan. They found me just after my parents had been killed. Besides, I’ve got family. Too much. Now I’m tired of talking about myself, and I’m tired of plodding along like some fat, lazy tenderfoot who doesn’t know what to do with a horse. I’m ready for a gallop. Keep up if you can.”

Drew had expected to leave Cole in the dust. He kept up with her without any visible effort. She settled her horse down for a hard gallop, but he still stuck to her side even when they thundered past a wagon heavily loaded with oat straw.

“Where did you learn to ride?” Drew asked.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Texas,” he said with a grin.

“Doing what?” she asked.

“Riding, roping, drifting about.”

“You were a cowboy?”

“You could say that.”

“What would you say you were?”

“More like an inspector. My job was to see that things went the way they were supposed to.”

“Do you mean you went after rustlers and Comancheros?” She couldn’t believe that. You had to be tough and knowledgeable to handle rustlers. You had to be all that and lucky to go after Comancheros and come back alive. Cole had never given her the impression he wanted to work very hard at anything. Still, he could shoot very well. He might be able to do other things she hadn’t expected.

“I went after rustlers occasionally.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t care?”

“No.”

That surprised her. She’d be furious. “I know you can shoot and ride,” she said. “What else can you do?”

He regarded her with curiosity. “What did you have in mind?”

“Can you throw a steer?”

“You want me to prove it?”

She looked around. She saw a few cows in the distance, but they were obviously milk cows. They wouldn’t have enough sense not to give up and lie down.

“Can you rope?”

“Can you?”

“I can rope better than anybody except Ward. I had to,” she said, remembering past slights. “They wouldn’t let me throw the steers.”

“Jake probably thought it wasn’t suitable for a woman.”

“He said I was too light, that the steer would hardly know I was riding his horns.”

She hadn’t liked being told to leave that to the boys, but Jake could be mighty stubborn when he made up his mind. Once, when she defied him, he picked her up, tucked her under his arm, and deposited her unceremoniously on her bottom at the campfire. She had been very careful not to put herself in the position of having to suffer that humiliation again.

She took up the rope she carried on her saddle. She hadn’t expected to need it, but riding out fully equipped made her feel better.

“I’ll rope that fence post,” she said.

“That doesn’t look very hard.”

“You do it, too, and I’ll find something harder.”

After roping angry steers determined to risk breaking their necks rather than allowing themselves to be roped, it was a simple matter to toss a loop over a stationary fence post.

“Your turn,” she said when she’d recoiled the rope.

It was apparent from the moment Cole took the rope in his hands that he knew what he was doing. He handled it with the familiarity of an old hand. His loop settled over the post just as easily as hers had.

“What next?” he asked.

Drew looked around her, but she couldn’t find anything that offered a challenge. She didn’t see any horses or mules, and sheep, if there were any, were just as useless as cows.

“How about one of those goats,” she said, pointing to a small herd of goats grazing in a field close to a line of trees.

A smile crinkled the corners of Cole’s mouth. “I’ve never roped a goat before.”

A gurgle of mirth began to bubble inside her. “I haven’t either. Think you can do it?”

“Sure, but you’ve got to rope one, too.”

“How do you propose to enter the pasture?”

“Jump. You can jump your horse, can’t you?”

Now he was being insulting. Without bothering to answer, she rode a short way back down the road, put her horse into a gallop, and easily cleared the fence into the field. Cole executed the jump just as easily. Drew felt the pinch of her competitive drive, the prod that had always forced her to try to be better than her brothers.

“I jumped first,” she said. “You get to rope first.”

“Afraid to rope a goat?”

She refused to rise to his bait “Embarrassed.” Much to her surprise, both of them laughed. “You’ve got to promise never to tell anyone. Zeke and Hawk would never let me forget it”

Cole uncoiled the rope, then trotted his horse toward the goats. They broke and ran. Cole let out a whoop that would have made any Texas cowboy proud and went after his chosen goat, a female. He roped it without difficulty, jiggled the rope off the panicked animal’s head, and calmly recoiled it as he rode back to where Drew waited.

“Your turn,” he said, handing her the rope.

“Why did you pick on that poor female?” she asked.

“She was running faster than the others.”

Drew made up her mind to rope the big male. He might not be able to run as fast as the younger female, but he was a more wormy target. She worked the rope in her hands as she rode toward the scattered herd. The big male didn’t appear interested in running very fast. Drew rode by him a couple of times, yelling loudly each time. Finally, the sluggish brute took off at a decent pace. She brought her horse up behind him and dropped the rope neatly over his horns.

The big male grunted angrily, turned, and charged her horse.

Drew couldn’t count the times a longhorn had turned on her. After the first time, it never bothered her. For some reason, maybe the unexpectedness of it, the goat’s attack caught her flat-footed.

“Looks like you got a temperamental one,” Cole called out.

He was making fun of her, something she’d never allowed before without striking back. But instead of getting angry, she started to laugh. The whole episode was foolish—the one-upmanship that had caused her to challenge Cole, their lassoing fence posts, invading a pasture to lasso goats. This was something adolescent boys might do. Sober, serious adults wouldn’t even consider it.

“Let’s get out of here before we’re battered to death by your victim.”

The goat was headed in her direction again. A devilish urge struck her. Instead of jostling the rope off his horns, she spurred her horse forward, cantering across the field just ahead of the enraged goat. Instead of feeling embarrassed at doing something so foolish and irresponsible, she felt an almost childlike elation.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

She turned to see Cole riding next to her. “Having a little fun,” she replied. “He looks too fat. A little exercise will do him good.”

“Probably, but I don’t think his owner will agree with you.”

“What owner?”

“The one heading toward us with a shotgun tucked under his arm.”

Instead of feeling embarrassed, Drew wanted to laugh hysterically. She didn’t know what had gotten into her, but she was clearly not herself. “I guess I’d better let him go.”

“I don’t think that’s going to satisfy his owner.”

Drew jostled the rope off the angry goat’s horns. That didn’t appease the goat, who chased her halfway around the field before he gave up. Unfortunately, that brought her practically face-to-face with the angry man carrying a shotgun.

“What are you doing, trying to steal my goat?” he demanded, the shotgun pointing in Drew’s direction.

“I wasn’t trying to steal it,” Drew said, determined to face up to the consequences of her foolishness. “I just roped it to prove I could.”

“I roped one of your nanny goats,” Cole confessed. “She couldn’t stand to be outdone, so she had to go for the biggest goat you had.”

The farmer looked at them as though he’d stumbled across two escapees from an insane asylum.

“Drew’s from Texas,” Cole explained. “She’s used to roping savage steers every day. Having been away for about six months, she was getting real homesick. I brought her out here trying to restore her spirits. We tried roping your fence posts, but that didn’t do the trick. I thought the goats might work, but it’s just not the same.”

Drew didn’t know whether Cole was trying to spin a story the farmer would believe or make her look like an idiot It was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud.

“A Texan, you say,” the farmer said, giving Drew a piercing look.

“Born and bred,” Cole said.

She’d never told him where she was born.

“I’ve heard about Texans,” the farmer said. “Never anything good.”

“You can’t blame them,” Cole said. “It’s all that heat. Then there’s the ticks.”

“Ticks?” the farmer asked.

“The ones that give northern cattle a fever that kills them.”

The farmer’s expression grew dark. “I’ve heard about the fever.”

“The tick bite doesn’t make people sick, but every so often they start to act a little peculiar. It wears off in about an hour. But while it lasts, you never know what they’re going to do.”

“Like what?”

Drew couldn’t tell whether the farmer believed Cole or not, but he obviously wanted to know what strange things Drew might do while under the influence of this dangerous tick.

“Once she wanted to lasso a buffalo.”

“A buffalo!” the farmer repeated. “Did she do it?”

“Sure. Drew can lasso anything, but buffalo have thick necks and short horns. The rope wouldn’t stay on. Besides, buffalo have bad tempers. It chased us from San Antonio all the way to Fort Worth.”

“Is that a long way?”

“That buffalo chased us for a week. We wore out half a dozen horses.”

Drew bit her lip. That was a trip of nearly three hundred miles, two and a half weeks on a cattle drive.

“But that’s not the worst,” Cole said. “She lassoed a pig once. Not just an ordinary pig, but one of those great big boars with tusks that can rip a horse’s belly wide open. Then she put a saddle on it.”

“A saddle! What for?”

“So a monkey could ride it.”

The farmer’s eyes grew wide. “A monkey! Where’d she get something like that?”

“From a circus passing through town,” Cole said. “She stole the poor little critter from its cage, tied it to the saddle, and raced the two of them right through the middle of town. Women screamed and fainted all around. Horses reared, riders fell in the mud, and wagons crashed into each other. You never saw such a mess. We had to get out of town before they arrested us.”

Drew could have sworn she noticed a twinkle in the farmer’s eye.

“Does she do stuff like this often?”

“No. But when the fit gets hold of her, there’s nothing to do but ride it out.”

The farmer subjected Drew to a good looking-over. “She seems like a sweet little thing. You’d never suspect she was subject to such peculiar fits.”

Now Drew knew the farmer hadn’t been taken in by Cole’s story.

“I take her out into the country when I sense one coming on,” Cole said. “She can’t do as much damage out here. Besides, we don’t want people to hear about it. They might not want to come see her in the show.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a sharpshooter,” Cole said, “the best there is.”

The farmer looked at her with renewed interest. “You’re not spinning a tale, are you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of trying to fool you,” Cole said. “Come to the show tonight and see for yourself.”