The Passionate and the Proud (19 page)

Emmalee gave up. There was nothing she could do about it now. Yet her suspicions were confirmed, and there was something unspeakably sad about a good man’s fall from grace, to say nothing of his taking others over the precipice with him.

She spent the rest of the day setting up Torquist’s tent and unloading his wagon. The wagonmaster had gone out to reconnoiter possible plots of farmland, and Emmalee was glad of his absence. She felt morally compelled to speak to him about the dangers of his scheme, and she also had to discuss with him the nature of her duties here in Olympia. If, somehow, she could arrange to work for him part of the time, leaving the remainder of her days free, then she might have a chance to make some progress on her own. Obviously, money was going to be a real problem.

First things first: get the land.

By late afternoon Torquist had still not returned. Seeing no sign of Randy either, Emmalee decided to take a look around for herself. She left Arcady, walking south along the banks of the Big Two-Hearted. The slow, mournful murmur of the river put her into a peaceful, dreamy mood and she strolled along happily, conscious of little but gentle sun, easy wind, and the perfume of flowers and tall, waving grass. Looking up, she saw a thick grove of willows in the distance, a wild cluster of trees growing along the river, and caught a glimpse of Conestoga canvas behind the leaves. Some of Pennington’s people she figured. Approaching more closely, she heard the sounds of many axes and the occasional instructions and comments of people at work.

Were the ranchers building shelters already? They hadn’t even claimed land yet. And willow was hardly sound construction material. The wood was too soft.

Curious, Emmalee left the riverbank and ducked into the tall grass, bending down and making her way toward the grove. She slipped into the trees and edged toward a small clearing. There she saw a group of women cutting branches from the willows and stripping them of bark. The branches were white, wet and slippery when stripped. Emmalee was puzzled. The branches were too wet to be used as kindling and too weak for construction. Moreover, several other women were chopping the branches into yard-long lengths and sharpening one end of each length into a point.

Weapons or spears of some kind? Was Pennington counting on a fight over the land claims?

Then, behind one of the wagons, Emmalee sensed movement, saw the prancing hoofs of horses, and into her line of sight came three riders.

Otis, Pennington’s rangy head scout.

A small, mean-looking man whom Emmalee did not recognize.

And Lottie Pennington, dressed in a pink frock and a matching pink bonnet. She was mounted sidesaddle on a magnificent black stallion.

It was Garn Landar’s horse!

Emmalee was as astounded by that as she was puzzled by the activity taking place. Would Garn have gambled or sold his horse? Or would he have…
given it to Lottie
?

Lottie looked demure and, as usual, faintly bored. Otis and the other man sat tall in their saddles, surveying the working women with the air of impatient supervisors. Whatever was happening was something of considerable importance. Emmalee edged closer to the clearing to see if she could find out what it was.

“Is this all you’ve got done?” the small man was demanding of one of the women. She was solid and sunburned, holding a hatchet in one gnarled hand.

“You don’t like it, get down off that horse and lend a hand,” the woman retorted with spirit. “We’re doing the best we can.”

“Come now,” said Otis conciliatingly. “We’re all in this together. It’s just that we’re going to need over a thousand stakes.”

Stakes. The word touched a chord in Emmalee’s memory but she didn’t have time to think about it just then because Garn’s horse caught her scent, neighed anxiously, and Lottie cried out: “There’s somebody in the trees! There!”

Emmalee turned to run, but she didn’t get far. The little mean-faced man, moving fast, leaped from his horse, dashed into the willows, grabbed Emmalee, and dragged her back into the clearing. He had snaggly teeth and a very hard hand.

“You’re hurting me,” Emmalee said, trying to pry his fingers from her arm.

“Well, I do declare,” said Lottie, laughing, as she recognized Emmalee.

“Let her go, Alf,” ordered Otis. “What are you doing here?” he asked casually but without amusement.

“I was out for a walk,” Emmalee flared, rubbing her arm and glaring at Alf, who grinned malevolently back at her. “Anything wrong with that?”

“You’re pretty far from Arcady,” Lottie pointed out. “I should think you’d have had enough walking in Kansas and Colorado.”

The women who’d been cutting branches stared suspiciously. Emmalee was sure she’d stumbled upon something of importance. Something that she ought to be able to figure out.

“You like this horse?” Lottie smirked. “I see that you’re looking at it.”

“These are serious days for us,” Otis told her sharply. “Business first, pleasure later. Your father’s warned you.”

The Pennington girl flushed, frowned.

“Miss…Alden, wasn’t it?” Otis asked smoothly. “Let me give you a ride back to town.”

“You sure, Oats?” the small man asked.

“Yeah, Kaiserhalt, I’m sure. Shut up.”

Alf Kaiserhalt seemed disappointed, giving Emmalee a glance that said,
Well, your luck, you got off easy this lime.

“The rest of you get back to work now,” Lottie told the women, who scowled at her contemptuously. They didn’t like her any better than Emmalee did. These rough-hewn, hardworking women, Emmalee realized, were much like herself. Although they regarded her as farmer and enemy, they knew as well as she, without having to express it, the shallow nature of Lottie Pennington’s soul.

And they probably wondered, as did Emmalee, how Lottie had come by such a fine horse. Emmalee’s mind flashed back to the time she’d seen Lottie and Garn talking behind the wagon in Denver, on the day of Bernice Creel’s funeral. She also recalled that Garn had promised to get Torquist’s train to Denver before Pennington’s party arrived, a guarantee upon which he had not delivered. Perhaps he had never planned to deliver! His remote manner now, his conspiratorial attitude, were more than grounds for suspicion.

Had it all been some vast scheme to defeat the farmers from the beginning? Garn’s “getting fired” in St. Joe, his fortuitous presence on the Torquist train, the little cabal around the table in the general store, and this puzzling scene in the willows?

But Myrtle Higgins wouldn’t be involved, would she? wondered Emmalee.

Otis rode a glossy chestnut roan, upon which he pulled Emmalee with scarcely less harshness than Alf Kaiserhalt had shown. He spurred the horse lightly, guiding it out of the grove and back upriver toward Arcady.

“So you made it over the mountains?” he asked, quite friendly now. “What did you come poking around for? Looking for dogies, or what?”

Emmalee remembered her humiliation by Pennington in the Schuyler Hotel in St. Joe.

“What’s the big mystery about cutting a few branches off trees?” she shot back.

Otis laughed. “There’s a lot at stake. Every small advantage might count.”

Suddenly Emmalee pieced things together.
Stakes.
Those women had been fashioning name stakes for markers on the day of the land rush. Tell had mentioned having stakes to place on the four corners of each plot of land that was claimed. Pennington’s people would have their markers ready; Torquist’s might not. He and his men were out surveying the land now, while the women were busy unpacking.

I’ll have to get them started making stakes, Emmalee realized. Nobody’s even thought of it.

She was a little apprehensive. A lot of the women were envious of her for having been able to ride a good deal of the way to Denver in Ebenezer Creel’s wagon. Many of them were not entirely convinced that the incident behind those boulders had been Garn Landar’s fault.

And Emmalee had to admit that they were not completely wrong.

“You know, you sure are one purty little gal,” Otis was saying.

“I’m happy that you think so.”

“Are you? Well, you caught my eye that first day in St. Joe and I figured, ‘Yep, she’s got a lot of spunk, she’ll make it.’”

“Did you?”

“Sure. I can tell. Whyn’t you leave them plowboys an’ come with us? Give us a year, maybe two, an’ we ranchers’ll be runnin’ this whole territory.”

“You seem pretty certain of that. But there are a lot of dedicated, determined people on the train I came here with.”

Otis laughed again, scornfully this time. “Hard work ain’t gonna have a whole lot to do with it,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out. You just come over and join us. We’ll take care of you.
I’ll
take care of you. You don’t have a beau, I hope?”

“I’m engaged to be married.”

Otis turned around to look at her, as if judging the truth of her statement. He had a hard-planed face and domineering, wide-spaced wolf’s eyes. The whites of those eyes were exceptionally large. He had a hard stare to meet but Emmalee met it.

“Who you gonna marry? I know him?”

“I don’t know. Randy Clay is his name.”

“Big blond boy?”

“Yes.”

“Farmer, of course. Tough luck for you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I know what’s gonna happen in this territory.”

“If you tell me, we’ll both know.”

“And ruin the surprise?” Otis guffawed.

Emmalee knew that he was not about to tell her anything of consequence, but, even so, she already knew about the stakes and she guessed that Burt Pennington had afoot a scheme more intricate than Horace Torquist would be likely to imagine.

“There’s an awful lot of land out here,” she tried, as they rode easily along the river. “It seems enough to satisfy all of us.”

“And here I thought you was smart. Don’t you know that one hungry longhorn needs at least ten acres of grazing land per season? A lot more than that if there ain’t a lot of rain. Can’t make money ranching cattle less’n you have a
lot
of longhorns, roamin’ free an’ eatin’ to their hearts’ content. Then here come you farmers with your dinky little crops an’ your fat, stupid milkin’ cows an’ them damn fences to cut apart an’ chop up God’s free earth. An’ this here barbwire, that cuts the hell out of grazin’ cattle.” He was getting angry now, thinking of barbwire. “Tell you what, if I ever see me a stretch of barbwire fence in these here parts. I’m gonna loop a length of it around the neck of the nearest fanner, so he can get his throat slit and strangle at the same time.”

“Well, I hope I’m not that nearest farmer,” said Emmalee.

“Hey. You don’t have to worry. You just do like I say an’ come on over with us.”

In spite of his crude frankness, or maybe because of it, Emmalee found that she did not dislike Otis. He was hard and unlettered but not malicious; she did not think he would actually attack a fellow human being without provocation…although she had to admit that she did not know the many things Otis might regard as provoking, barbwire excepted.

“There’s a nice girl in
your
train,” she suggested. “Lottie. You could ask her to be your girl.”

“Hah! The boss’s daughter.” He sounded as if he were talking about farmers again. “She’d suck a man dry in ten minutes an’ leave him dyin’ in a ditch. Besides, she’s taken.”

“She
is
?”

“Yeah. By that scout the boss canned back in St. Joe. Landar. Lottie goes into town one day an’ she comes back on Landar’s horse. He gave it to her. She’s his girl now, looks like.”

Emmalee sat there behind Otis, jouncing along as the roan neared little Arcady. One part of her treated Otis’s news quite matter-of-factly. After all, she had already seen Lottie upon Garn’s stallion. Emmalee felt confused, because she felt that something of hers had been taken away. Yet how could that be, because Garn was not hers and she didn’t even want him? She was engaged to marry another man.

But then she figured things out and understood: She felt as she did because she was simply reacting to Lottie Pennington’s spite. That was all.

“Here we are,” Emmalee said, as they rode into Arcady. She bounded down from the horse in front of the general store. “Thanks for the ride.”

“My pleasure,” said Otis. “Now, come callin’ any time you want, hear? But don’t come snoopin’ around. Folks is pretty antsy an’ you never know…”

Otis touched his hatbrim, wheeled the horse around, and spurred away. Emmalee watched him go, then turned to find Myrtle and Hester Brine watching her from the store’s entrance.

“Where’ve you been?” Myrtle asked.

“Quick,” said Emmalee. “Are the men back yet?”

“Nope. What’s up?”

“We’ve got to get started right away.”

“Started on what?”

Emmalee explained about the stakes. “We’re way behind. Pennington has hundreds of markers cut already.”

“Slow down, girl,” said Hester. “The job’ll get done.”

“That’s right,” Myrtle agreed. “Don’t go gettin’ yuhself all agitated.”

“Don’t go getting myself all…? Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“What
!” Myrtle snapped.

Emmalee faced the old woman down. “A lot of things are funny around here!”

“That’s true, an’ right now you’re one of ’em. Instead of standin’ there, get goin’ and round everybody up.
If
they’ll listen to you. I seen people watchin’ you ride in on Otis’s horse. How you think
that
looks, huh?”

“I thought of that myself, believe me. Come with me. Myrtle. Please. They’ll listen to you.”

“I’ll be around if you need me, but whyn’t you give it a try on your own? You never know. One day a whole lot might depend on whether the folks listen to you or not. Try your wings now.”

Most of the women were at the chuckwagon helping prepare fire and food for the evening meal. They’d observed Emmalee returning on Otis’s horse and they scrutinized her warily as she approached.

“Listen, everybody,” she began. “There’s something very important that we have to do.”

“Says you!” Alma Bent, Festus’s wife, grinned. “We been workin’ our fingers nigh on to the bone while you been bouncin’ yo’ bottom…on a rancher’s horse, anyways.”