Larkspur (20 page)

“I mean . . . sick.”

“He isn’t feverish if that’s what you mean. He’s a frail old man, and his heart could give out at any time.” Her mouth clamped shut and she refused to look at him.

She had given him yet another chance to say Moss was not his father, and he had chosen to keep up the pretense.

Buck noticed immediately her change of attitude and wondered what had happened since the noon meal that had put her into such a disgruntled state.

“I’ll go see about him.”

“I just did. Sit down and eat.”

Gilly came in with his hat still on his head. Kristin’s frosty eyes fastened on it, then moved to the rack beside the door. He got the message, hung his hat on the peg and went to the wash bench.

After the men were seated, Kristin poured coffee and took her place at the table. She ate sparingly of the beef and rice she had prepared and made no attempt to enter into the conversation between Buck and Gilly.

Gilly talked at length about two pesky sinkholes on the land. It was his contention that a river of the stuff ran under Larkspur and they would be lucky if the messy black muck didn’t pop up all over the land and spoil the grazing.

Buck asked the old drover about going over to a neighboring ranch to see if Forsythe was still putting the pressure on the owner to sell.

“Ryerson’ll cave in,” Gilly said with certainty.

“Tell him to hold on a little longer. If he promised to go in and sign as soon as he gets a count on his herd it would give him more time. Anything to stall. A Federal marshal will come as soon as he gets my letter—if he gets it.”

“If’n Ryerson’s got any gumption a’tall, he’ll take his family and hightail it for Helena. Forsythe will take possession of his place, but I’m thinkin’ he can’t keep it if Ryerson don’t sign it over. The courts will go ag’in’ what Forsythe is up to.”

“He might even have the judge in his pocket. He’s got a lot at stake here.”

“Dang-bust-it! It ain’t right. Ryerson and his boys has put a lot of sweat in that place.”

When the meal was over and before Kristin cleared the table, she took the table lamp and went to the other room, leaving the kitchen area only dimly lit by the bracket lamp over the workbench. She placed the lamp on the table beside the bed and bent over Moss. He had rolled onto his back, his eyes were open as was his mouth. He was gasping for breath.

“Buck!” She dropped to her knees beside the bed and took Moss’s limp hand.

Buck was beside her in a matter of seconds. She looked up at him with both anger and anguish on her face.

“How could you? I’ll never forgive you. Never!”

Buck’s dark brows puckered. He didn’t understand her anger, but now was not the time to question her.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know!” She moved her hand over his face close to his eyes and he didn’t blink. She lifted his hand and it fell lifelessly to the bed.

“Moss, can you hear me?” Buck put his fingers alongside the sunken cheek and turned Moss’s head toward him.

There was no response.

“He’s in a . . . stupor.”

“Will he come out of it?”

“Not if it’s apoplexy.”

“I’ve heard of that. It means he can’t move.”

“My papa had it . . . at the end. So did Uncle Hansel. It’s something to do with the blood going to the brain. The doctor said it paralyzes parts of the body. See . . . he can’t close his eyes.” Tears ran down her cheeks as she cried silently.

“What can we do?”

“Nothing that I know of.” She pulled the blanket up around his shoulders.

“Might be it’s fer the best.” Gilly had come to peer over her shoulder. “Feller ain’t ort to live out his days not knowin’ nothin’ like Moss’s been doin’.”

Kristin turned on him. “Best for who? Would you think it
best
if you were lying there?”

“Ya can bet yore buttons on it, ma’am. I’d a hoped somebody’d put a bullet in my head long ’fore now.”

Buck brought a chair for Kristin, then moved to the other side of the bed. He stood for a long while with his forearm resting on the head of the iron bedstead. He had known this was coming. Moss was a mere shadow of his former self. Still, Buck wasn’t prepared for the end to come so soon. He looked at the top of Kristin’s bowed head.

How long had she known?
She had been as patient and as loving with Moss as if he had been
her
father.

The wind came up and rattled the glass window and rippled the tin on the roof. It was as if it had come to carry the soul of the man away. It was a lonely sound—a death sound. Kristin shivered.

Buck left the room and went to where Kristin’s shawl hung on the peg beside the door. He returned with it and gently draped it about her shoulders, then went back to the kitchen.

Her Uncle Yarby was dying. Kristin watched the breath going in and coming out of his open mouth. She reached up and gently closed his eyelids. People should not have to die with their eyes open and staring. Holding his thin hand between hers, she began to talk softly to him.

“Uncle Yarby, I wish I could have known you. You’re an awful lot like Papa even though he didn’t have white hair and a white beard. You really remind me of Gustaf. Gustaf is bigger, much bigger. But both of you have happy dispositions.

“When the letter came, telling me that you had left your land to me, I felt as if you were telling me to spread my wings, fly away and take charge of my life as you had done. Fly away, little bird. Gustaf said that. It’s something you would have said.

“For the first time since Papa died I was given a chance to get out from under Ferd’s thumb. Now I’ll never be able to thank you properly. This Larkspur land of yours is a beautiful place. I promise you, Uncle Yarby, as long as I live, Colonel Forsythe will not have it . . . not legally anyway. It was despicable of him to accuse you of such a terrible crime. Surely God will punish him.

“I don’t know why Mr. Lenning didn’t tell me about you. I have to think that he had some reason that was logical to him. Even if you don’t understand what I’m saying, I want to say it anyway. Thank you, Uncle Yarby. Already I’ve come to love this beautiful land and shining mountains.”

Buck stood in the doorway. It didn’t occur to him that he shouldn’t be listening. She was hurting, and he wanted to be near her. In the far recesses of his mind, and knowing Moss as he did, he was sure the old man welcomed this release from life. The man he had been was no more—only an empty shell remained. He owed the little man his life. As long as there had been breath in the frail old body, he would have cared for and protected him. His only regret was that he hadn’t trusted Kristin from the start, but, hell, how was he to know? He had lived for a year and a half trusting no one but Gilly and his Indian drovers.

Kristin was quiet now. Buck went to sit down on the other side of the bed. She didn’t look at him. Didn’t speak. She held on to Moss’s hand, as if to assure him that he wasn’t alone.

Time passed slowly. Buck heard Gilly put wood in the cookstove and open the oven door to allow the heat to take away the chill of the night, then the back door closed as he left to go to the bunkhouse.

When the clock struck midnight, Kristin realized the rasping sound of labored breathing had stopped. She looked quickly at Buck. He slipped his hand under the blanket and over Moss’s heart. He met Kristin’s eyes and slowly shook his head. She stood and carefully pulled the blanket up over the still face, then quickly left the room.

Buck stayed beside the body of his dead friend for a while. Without his realizing it, tears he hadn’t known he was capable of shedding came to his eyes, and one rolled down his whiskered cheek.

“Good-bye, old-timer. You’re the pa I never had, the brother I never had, the true friend few men ever find. I hope that wherever you are, you’re the old mossback you were when we first met. It may be that you’re with Anna, the woman you talked about the time you got drunk and I had to hold you to keep you from going out into a raging snowstorm to find her.” Buck wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt. “Don’t worry about Kristin and the Larkspur, old-timer, I’ll take care of her whether she wants me to or not. And I’ll see to it that she has your part of the Larkspur. In a way she’s a lot like you—gutsy and determined. It took grit for her to come out here by herself. You’ve put the world in my hand, old-timer, and I’ll do my best to keep it.”

When Buck went into the kitchen, he found Kristin filling the dishpan with hot water from the teakettle. He set the lamp on the table and carried the soiled dishes to the workbench. They worked together without speaking. She washed the dishes; he dried and put them away. Just before they finished, he put several pinches of dried tea leaves in the crockery pitcher, filled it with hot water and set a plate over the top so it could steep, as he had seen Kristin do.

Kristin slowly and meticulously cleaned the kitchen area. When all was done, she hung the dishpan on the end of the wash bench and the wet towels over the string she had hung over the stove. She turned to see Buck holding two cups of tea.

“I’d rather go to . . . my room.”

“Drink the tea. If you don’t want to talk now, we won’t. But soon you have to listen to why I did what I did.”

“You deprived me of the few days I could have spent knowing him—as my uncle.”

“I’m sorry for that.” Buck set the two cups of tea on the table and waited until she sat down, then went to the other side of the table and straddled a chair.

“Why?” Kristin looked up from the cup that she bracketed with her two hands. His light eyes were unusually bright. She could almost believe they were teary.

“I didn’t know you . . . and I had to be careful that no one but me and Gilly knew Moss was alive.”

“I understand
that.
But later—”

“I was afraid that if you knew your uncle wasn’t dead and that you had no claim to the land—you’d leave.”

“You think I would have gone off and left you to take care of him when he was my kin and had thought enough of me to leave me his land?”

“Later I knew you wouldn’t have done that, and I was waiting for the right moment to tell you. I had finally got up the courage and was going to tell you tonight.”

“Did you start calling him Moss after I arrived?”

Buck almost smiled . . . remembering.

“I’ve always called him that. He called me the youngun, and I got to calling him an old mossback. That’s how it started.”

“I figure Uncle Yarby to be about sixty.”

“Ten years ago he would have been fifty. I was just sixteen years old when I was shot and left to die by a man who wanted my horse. It was in the dead of winter, and I’d have frozen to death before nighttime. Moss’s old dog, Sam’s pappy, led him to me. I was too heavy for him to lift, so he made a sled out of pine branches and pulled me over the snow to that shack over there in the woods. He told me later I almost died on him a couple of times, but he’d not let me because the ground was frozen. He couldn’t bury me and he didn’t want to spend the rest of the winter with a stinking youngun.”

Buck watched her intently. She didn’t smile. Her face was set in a blank mask and her lashes veiled her eyes, allowing only a thin glittering line of blue to show between her gold-tipped lashes. She didn’t speak for a long while, and when she did, her voice was a breath above a whisper.

“Who is the man in the grave at Big Timber?”

“I don’t know. Gilly found him. There was nothing on him to say who he was. We got the idea to put something of Moss’s on him and let someone else find him. If they found Moss dead, they’d stop looking for him. I had no idea that Moss had a will. I thought it would take a while to find next of kin and it would give me time.”

Kristin stood, turned her back to him and went to the workbench. Her eyes burned with unshed tears. She had to believe in the man’s sincerity. He had done what he had thought best. The small lie he had told was certainly overshadowed by the care he had given to her uncle. How many men would have gone to so much trouble to keep one old man alive?

“Kristin?”

She turned back. Buck was standing beside the table, his black hair tousled as if he had just come in out of a windstorm. His dark face was lined with concern.

“I was too quick to judge you. I think now you did what you had to do.”

“Nothing is changed, Kristin.”

“I know. For all practical purposes Uncle Yarby died a year and a half ago.”

“You will stay?”

She lifted her hands in a futile gesture and her eyes filled with tears.

“I have nowhere to go.”

Buck came around the table and gripped her shoulders with his hands. She was too proud to turn away and faced him with tears sliding down her cheeks.

“You have a place. This is yours now. All yours.” His voice was smooth, but rough around the edges.

“Not the . . . house.”

“It’s all yours,” he repeated. “If you want it. You like it here, don’t you? You like the Larkspur?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you like it enough to fight for it?”

Her legs trembled, and her voice wavered out of control.

“If I stay, I’ll be another Anderson for you to take care of.”

“No. We’ll be partners . . . just like Moss and I were before he . . . took sick.”

Even as he said the words, an inner voice was protesting.
No, not like that. I want you for my life’s mate. It’s unthinkable that I live my life without you by my side as my wife.

Without conscious effort he was drawing her closer to him. Finally his hands slid behind her back and she was leaning against him, her head pressed against his shoulder. Buck turned his face into her hair.

“Please, Kristin. Please, stay here with me.”

His words echoed to the core of her being.
What did he
mean?
She summoned all her determination to ask. Her voice came out thin and weak.

“As housekeeper?”

“That, and only that, if it’s what you want.”

“It’s too soon for it to be anything . . . else.”

She moved back to look at him. He didn’t answer for such a long while that her eyes wavered beneath the intensity of his. Her lower lip quivered and, as she stared up at him, tears filled her eyes. He lifted a finger and wiped a teardrop from her cheek. Her skin was as soft and smooth as the down on a bird’s breast.