The Outsider (24 page)

It was not unusual to see her working, for she was a rancher’s wife, after all. Yet in all the years of his life in this house, Quinten couldn’t remember ever seeing her face damp with sweat, or a single strand of hair come loose from her tight chignon. He had never heard her shout. If she had a temper it was tamped down inside her so deep it never blasted loose. He had never heard her laugh. He had seen her smile only rarely, and never once for him.

And yet sometimes he thought that the only thing he’d ever truly hungered for in this life was something as simple as the touch of her hand in his hair.

He knew she was aware of him, aware that he had come into the room just to be with her. But she gave no sign of it. He thought he could stand there until he turned into a pillar of salt, and she would merely walk around him on her way out the door.

He went up to her, his boots making no sound on the thick Turkey carpet. He was conscious suddenly that he must smell of mud and horse sweat.

“Let me help you with that, Mrs. Hunter,” he said. He’d always addressed her formally, since his first day here at the ranch, and she had never once asked him to call her anything different.

“Thank you, Quinten.” She had a voice that was as silky and cold as dry snow.

As he took the polished globe from her hands, their sleeves brushed with a soft sigh and he caught a whiff of lavender water. He climbed the stepladder and began to screw the globe back into the chandelier. She stood beneath him and looked up at him in that way of hers that made it seem as if she wasn’t seeing him at all.

An old Chesterfield clock chimed softly. The fringed drape on the fireplace mantel stirred. He turned his head and looked at their reflection in the gilded mirror.

He was struck by how they had the same crow black hair and slender build. Two years of living in a city had leached out his skin some, and he was dressed no differently than any other man on the ranch.

A stranger, walking into the room in this moment, he thought, could easily have mistaken them for mother and son.

HIS FATHER SAID:
“It appears to me you spent precious little of your time back there book-learning and most of it girling about, behaving like a randy tom in a cathouse. And if you’re opening your mouth to lie, then you can just shut it.”

Quinten hadn’t been opening his mouth to any purpose at all—unless it was to stuff in one last forkful of Saratoga chips. The crisp disks of fried potato were one of his favorite things, although he’d never told anyone that. If he had, he knew he’d sure never see them served at Ailsa Hunter’s table again.

He glanced down the length of the table with its pristine lace cloth. His father’s wife brought a crystal glass filled with whiskey up to her pale lips. Her violet gaze was lost in the red flock wallpaper above his father’s head, but they both knew she was listening.

He looked back to his father and gave him a man-to-man grin. “Why should a fellow lie when he can brag, Pa? Soon as those big city ladies, with all their la-di-da airs, discover I’m part savage, they get all hot and bothered to discover the
particularly
savage part of me that stands tall beneath my breechclout.”

His father laughed, puffing out his chest as if his son’s
“girling about” somehow reflected on his own sexual prowess. Not that the old man needed a beacon to draw attention to himself in that regard. Hell, he didn’t even need to strike a match. The Baron paid gentlemanly calls on the girls of the Red House every Saturday night, come blizzard or high water.

To Quinten’s surprise he suddenly felt her watching him. Not just listening, but watching. When he turned his head and looked down the table and into her dark purple eyes, he thought he caught a glint of something—amusement, contempt? To his disgust he knew he was grateful for either one.

As it was, he thought, this was a conversation more suited to the bunkhouse than a proper dining room, and especially one with a lady present. But then the lady present was the whole reason for the conversation in the first place.

The Baron sat at the head of the table, wearing pearl gray California trousers, a black frock coat, and a gray silk four-in-hand tie fastened with a ruby stickpin. His flat belly was spanned by a watch chain hung with a half dozen gold seals.

At the other end of the table sat Ailsa Hunter, in a black taffeta gown and a shawl of jet-studded lace that glittered in the light cast by a matching pair of crystal candelabra. She wore pearl drops in her ears and a pearl choker collar around her neck.

They could have been a Chicago society couple, man and wife enjoying a quiet evening together in one of those fine mansions that graced the city’s lakeshore, Quinten thought. Except for the man’s red-skinned bastard and Wild West Wharton, hired gun, who were also in attendance.

The hired gun had placed a wad of damp chewing tobacco on one side of his gold-rimmed eggshell china plate while he ate. Now he put the plug back into his mouth and sucked hard on it.

Quinten looked again at his father’s wife. As always, she sat straight as a hat pin. He knew she put Woodrow Wharton into the same category as what was scraped off the bottom of a horse’s hoof, yet he knew as well that she would never question her husband’s reasons for inviting the man to their table, any more than she would have questioned the topics he chose to converse about. To say anything would have been to admit a defeat.

Red-skinned bastards, Wild West Whartons, and conversations about whores—they were just some of the salvos the Baron fired in the daily war he waged with his wife.

His father’s tobacco-fed voice cut into Quinten’s thoughts. “Well, now that you are home, Quin, you can help me to rid the valley of those bedamned, holy-howling, Bible-banging mutton punchers. Christ, who would’ve ever thought they’d stick like they have for ten long years, like bloody cockleburs on a blanket.”

The Baron had taken a fat cigar out of a silver case and was lighting it now with the candelabra. “I ask you,” he went on when the cigar was drawing, “what kind of people is it goes to kirk in a barn?”

“The Son of God was born in a stable.”

Quinten spilled a good part of the whiskey he’d been aiming for his mouth down the front of his vest. He looked at his father’s wife, but she was back to contemplating the wallpaper again. She could do that—be silent for hours and then say something that would stop a person cold.

In many ways she was much better at war-waging than his father could ever hope to be.

She used to bring him to church with her sometimes, Quinten suddenly remembered, whenever the saddlebag preacher was passing through on his circuit. He went along to please her. Even after he came to understand that there
was no pleasing her, or displeasing her for that matter, still he went with her.

That church in Miawa City was little more than a board-and-batten shanty with a tin roof that rattled in the constant wind. During its busy times, it probably smelled no better than those barns the Plain folk did their praying in. He wondered if she still went there on Sundays, if her faith was so strong. It surprised him to think of her believing in anything beyond herself.

The Baron was glaring down the length of the table at his wife. He puffed so hard on his cigar, a nub of ash fell from its tip, leaving a gray smear on his black frock coat.

“I don’t give a sweet damn if those holy-howlers were born in the much straw right alongside the baby Jesus. They think they can come into this valley after the fact and reap the reward of those who came before. It took grit and brawn to make the Miawa what it is today. Grit and brawn. Not like those men you knew back in the old country, eh, Ailsa? Those pansy-faced lords, with their white hands and gilded titles—they couldn’t have managed to make of this spread what I’ve made of it.” He waved the hand that held the cigar, drawing smoky patterns in the air. “To wrestle all
this
out of nothing.”

“Those men you speak of, Fergus, they have never felt a need to wrestle anything.” Even with that silky lady’s voice of hers, she’d managed to imbue the word “wrestle” with the same meaning it bore when used to describe a pair of drunks brawling in the mud in front of a saloon. And Quinten saw that she had cut his father deep.

The Baron stared at his wife, a hard glitter in his black eyes. Then his wide, handsome mouth broke into a sudden and dazzling smile.

“I’ve never flinched before anything, not even before
your tongue, my lovely Ailsa. And I’ll not begin with a bunch of holy-howling mutton punchers.”

Slowly, Ailsa brought the whiskey glass back up to her lips. Her face was as cold, as silent, as falling snow. And the cold silence drifted from her to settle over the room, until it seemed to Quinten that even the candles in their crystal holders shivered and dimmed.

“How come it is, Pa,” he said loudly, his voice breaking like a raw boy’s, “that you’re back to wanting to rid us of those Plain folk after all this time? I’d’ve thought we all had pretty much gotten used to having them around.”

The Baron said nothing, only shifted his glare from his wife to his son.

“Well, it seems to me,” Quinten went on, “that any poor fool who tries to raise sheep suffers enough persecutions without you adding to them. Coyotes and bears, death camas and stomach bloat. I once saw a ewe roll over to scratch a tick itch—she wound up getting stuck on her back and suffocated to death before the herder could get to her. Sheep go out looking for ways to die.”

“Aye, and I hope they find every bloody damn one of them.”

Quinten opened his mouth, and then shut it. His father behaved as if there was something privileged, even sanctified, about raising cattle. As if a cow was somehow a higher class of animal than a sheep. But the truth was you could graze five to six sheep on the same ground it took for one cow, and they got along on a fraction of the water.

If left to graze in one place too long, though, sheep could chew the grass down to the nub. And what went in one end came out the other, creating an odor that was intolerable to cattle, and not easily stood by humans either. But Quinten suspected that what probably galled the Baron most about
his “bedamned, holy-howling mutton punchers” was that wool now sold at a premium, whereas the glutted beef market had crashed last year to the point where you could hardly give even the hides away.

The glutted beef market also maybe explained why, after a good seven-year lull in his persecution of the Plain folk, the Baron had suddenly taken up the crusade again. The Circle H would need to put even larger cattle herds on just that many more acres of grassland for there to be a hope of seeing a profit in the coming years.

Yet Quinten thought he’d probably find himself knocked out of his chair and into next week if he suggested to the old man that they put a sheep band of their own out to graze on their range.

He settled for saying, “The open range wasn’t going to last forever, Pa, much as we might wish for it. Didn’t you always tell me that what you can’t duck, you’d better figure out a way to welcome?”

The Baron pointed at his son with the wet end of his cigar, his eyes tightened into slits. But then he grunted and stabbed the cigar back in his mouth. “Ah, bloody hell,” he said. “We’d only be doing those mutton punchers a favor to chouse them on out of here. This country is no place for pilgrims and amateurs.”

For the first time all night Wild West Wharton unhooked his small clasp of a mouth for something besides spitting and chewing. “Something tells me that come spring it’s not going to be a good time to be a woolly.”

Quinten stared into the man’s pale eyes, but he was frowning more over the memory of that skinny Plain boy. “Woodrow and I nearly rode down one of their young’uns while we were out searching the coulees for bogged strays this morning.
He
at least appears to have a friend who
is willing to shoot us all stone dead if we don’t mend our wicked ways.”

Wharton scratched his head, plucked out a louse, and crushed it between his fingernails. Ailsa was watching him with a look of polite interest on her face. “He was probably talking about that stranger who got himself shot up while passing through here a while back,” Wharton said. “One of them Plain women is supposed to’ve taken the sumbitch in. The widow of that Plain sumbitch we hung last spring.”

Quinten’s head snapped around to his father. “You hanged a Plain man? My God, for what—for being a cow thief? What Plain man even knows how to build a loop, let alone swing a wide one? Or was it for having the audacity to actually make a go of his few measly acres—”

“He was rustling our beeves, dammit! Leastways we caught him with a bunch of slick-eared calves, so what else were we to think?” The Baron’s hand trembled slightly, and the smoke that rose from his cigar shimmered in the candlelight. “It isn’t anything for you to get all wild-eyed about. It was an honest mistake. I told his woman, I’ve told everyone, it was an honest mistake.”

“An honest mistake . . . Good Christ, Pa. You know as well as I do that a Plain man wouldn’t pocket a bruised apple from Tulle’s Mercantile, not even when there’s a sign that says to help yourself.”