Vows (2 page)

 
But Emily Walcott burned with indignation because she knew the stranger was right—she should have used two snap lines, but she'd been in too big a hurry.

 
She granted the stranger not so much as a nicking glance as she marched from the stall and left him behind. "We stable horses here. We feed 'em, and curry 'em and water 'em, and outfit 'em, and rent out rigs. But we don't let tinhorn hostlers work out their apprenticeships on our stock!"

 
To Emily's chagrin, as she stormed past him, the man burst out laughing. She swung around with murder in her glare and the corners of her mouth looking as if they were attached to her shoes. "Mister, I don't have time to waste on you. Your horses, maybe, if you speak up fast. Now what'll it be, inside or out? Hay or oats?"

 
"Tinhorn hostler?" he managed, still chortling.

 
"All right, have it your way." Obstinately, she changed directions, heading toward an open hatch to the hayloft, passing him with a venomous expression on her face. "Sorry, we're all full up," she advised dryly. "You can try down at
Rock Springs
. It's a few miles that way." She thumbed southwest.
Rock Springs
was 350 miles, and it had just taken him eighteen days to cover them. Up the ladder she went, until her ascent was stopped by a hand grabbing her beat-up, stretched-out, horsey-smelling cowboy boot.

 
"Hey, wait a minute!"

 
The boot came off in Jeffcoat's hand.

 
Surprised as much as she, he stood gaping at her bare foot with its dirty ankle and flecks of hay pressed onto the skin, thinking this was the most bizarre introduction he'd ever had to one of the opposite sex. Where he came from, ladies wore gingham dressed with ten-gallon petticoats, and starched white aprons instead of leather ones, and leghorn hats instead of boys' knockabouts, and dainty buttoned shoes instead of dung-crusted cowboy boots. And stockings … wispy lisle stockings that no gentleman ever saw. But there he stood, staring at her bare foot.

 
"Oh, I … I beg your pardon, miss, I'm so sorry."

 
He watched her descend and turn stiffly, presenting a face as brilliant as an August sunset.

 
"Has anyone ever told you that you're a rude, infernal pain in the hindside?" She grabbed the boot, overturned an enamel bucket, and dropped onto it to pull the boot back on. Before she managed to do so, he snatched it from her hand and went down on one knee to do the honors.

 
"Allow me, miss. And to answer your question, yes, my mother and my grandmother and my fiancée and my teachers. All my life I've seemed to irritate women, but I could never understand why. You know, I've never done this before, have you?" He held the boot at the ready.

 
She felt her whole body flush, from her dirty bare toes clear up to her brother's cap. She grabbed the boot and yanked it on herself.

 
Watching, he grinned and answered belatedly, "Oats, please, and stable them inside and curry them, too. Do I pay in advance?"

 
"We're full up, I said!" Leaping to her feet, she fled him in a swirl of wrath and climbed to the loft. "Take your business elsewhere!"

 
He peered up after her, seeing nothing but rafters and dust motes.

 
"I'm sorry, ma'am. Really I am."

 
A pitchforkful of hay landed on his head. He doubled forward, blowing and snorting. "Hey, watch it!" Overhead her footsteps clunked as she dragged her boots across the floorboards. Another forkful of hay appeared and he backed off, calling, "Can I leave the horses or not?"

 
"No!"

 
"But this is the only livery barn in town!"

 
"We're full up, I said!"

 
"You are not!"

 
"We are, too!"

 
"If it's about your bare foot, I said I was sorry. Now come down here so I can give you some money."

 
"I said, we're full up! Now get out!"

 
From the other end of the barn, Edwin Walcott listened to the exchange with growing interest. He stood surveying the stranger with hay on his hat and shoulders, watched another load come raining down through the hatch, heard his daughter's obvious lie, and decided it was time to step in.

 
"What's going on here?"

 
Silence fell, broken only by a blacksmith's hammer from down the street.

 
Jeffcoat spun around to find a stocky man framed in the doorway standing with hands akimbo, his meaty arms and hairy chest showing beneath the uprolled sleeves and open collar of a faded red flannel shirt. His black britches were tucked into calf-high boots, and striped suspenders emphasized his muscular girth. He had tumbled black hair flecked with gray, a full black mustache, blue eyes, and a mouth reminiscent of the girl's.

 
"Something I can do for you, Mister—?"

 
Jeffcoat brushed off his shoulders and whacked his hat on his thigh. Stepping forward, he extended a hand. "Tom Jeffcoat's the name, and yessir, there is. I'd like to leave my horses for a few days if I could."

 
"Edwin Walcott's mine. Is there some reason why I shouldn't let you?"

 
"No, sir, none that I know of."

 
"What's this about you and my daughter's bare foot?"

 
"She was climbing up the ladder and I accidentally pulled her boot off, trying to stop her."

 
"Emily!" Walcott cocked his head toward the haymow. "Is that true?"

 
Beyond her father's range of vision, Emily buried the fork tines in the hay, wishing she could bury herself in it and stay till Tom Jeffcoat disappeared from the face of the earth.

 
"Emily?" her father repeated, more demandingly.

 
"Yes!" she delivered in an ornery bellow.

 
"He try anything else you want to tell me about?"

 
She kicked a lump of hay, sending it flying, but refused to answer.

 
"Emily?"

 
Mortified, she stared at the hay, her mouth cinched tighter than a seaman's knot, working her hands about the smooth pitchfork handle as if applying liniment to a horse's leg. At last she clomped to the hay hatch. Planting her feet wide and ramming the pitchfork tines into the pine floor, she met her father's upturned gaze.

 
"He came in here and started spouting off about the horses and how I should've cross-tied Sergeant, and taking the liberty of examining his hoof and offering advice on how to take care of it. He made me mad, that's all."

 
"So you turned his business away?"

 
Pride held her silent.

 
"I didn't mean any disrespect," Jeffcoat interrupted, placatingly. "But I'll admit I was teasing her, and I made the mistake of thinking she was a boy when I walked in. It seemed to set her off, sir."

 
Turning away, Walcott bit his inner lip to keep from smiling. "Come into the office. We'll do business there. How many days will you be leaving your team here?"

 
Instead of following immediately, Jeffcoat stepped beneath the ladder and raised his eyes to the girl who glared down from above. "A week for sure, maybe more."

 
He knew beyond a doubt that she'd like nothing better than to fire that pitchfork at his head. But she stood with both hands gripping its handle, staring him down with silent venom.

 
"Good afternoon, Miss Walcott," he offered quietly, and with a doffing of his hat, followed her father.

 
Walcott led him through a door into a lean-to attached to the east side of the barn, a small room with a bumpy concrete floor and four small-paned windows, two facing the street and two the empty lot. At sunrise the office would be bright but now in midafternoon it was cool and shadowed. It held a scarred desk with the rolltop missing, its pigeonholes overflowing with papers above a dusty top littered with bridle rings, snaffle bits, horseshoe nails, tack hammers, horse liniment and a white dinner plate with a few green beans and a dried breadcrust stuck in a streak of hardening gravy. The desk chair was tilted on its casters and worn bare of varnish on its back and arms. Against the north wall slumped a metal day-bed, its exposed springs covered with a homemade mattress made of stuffed burlap, topped by a multicolored rag rug where a taffy-colored cat slept. To the right of the door sat a small potbellied stove. The walls were hung with an assortment of oddities: beaver traps; stage schedules; patent-medicine trade cards—an advertisement for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show; a collection of oxbow keys—last summer's schedule for the Philadelphia Professional Baseball Club; and an ancient pendulum clock, ticking slow. The office smelled of onion gravy, aromatic liniment, gram, and hemp—the latter presumably exuding from a lineup of plump burlap bags propped against the wall to the left of the door.

 
"It's understandable why my daughter would be a little touchy over being criticized about the horses," Walcott commented, dropping onto the chair and rolling it toward his desk. It bumped over the rough floor like an unsprung wagon over frozen ruts. "She's been around 'em all her life and she's corresponding with a man from Cleveland, name of Barnum, who's teaching her veterinary medicine."

 
"Veterinary medicine—a girl?"

 
"There are a lot of animals out here. She's putting it to good use."

 
"You mean she's studying by mail?" Jeffcoat inquired with wonder.

 
"That's right," Walcott confirmed, reaching for a receipt book and a pen. "It comes pretty regular now, five times a week most weeks, by horseback. Here you go." Walcott swiveled around and handed Jeffcoat a receipt made out for two bays with white markings and a doublebox wagon, green with red trim. A careful man, Walcott, one who'd never be accused of horse theft, keeping records as he did.

 
"You mind my asking what you're doing in town, Mr. Jeffcoat?"

 
Pocketing the receipt, Jeffcoat answered, "Not at all. A man named J. D. Loucks placed an advertisement in the Springfield newspaper about this town and what it had to offer an enterprising young man. It sounded like a place I'd like to live, so I took the train to Rock Springs, outfitted there, and drove the rest of the way by wagon; and here I am."

 
"And here you are … to do what?"

 
"I intend to set up a business and make my home here as soon as I buy some land to do it on."

 
"Well"—the older man chuckled quietly—"J. D. Loucks'll be more than happy to sell you as many lots as you want, and this town can use more young people. What's your line of work?"

 
Jeffcoat hesitated a beat before replying, "I do some blacksmithing. Taught by my father in Springfield."

 
"Would that be Missouri or Illinois?"

 
"Missouri."

 
"Missouri, eh? Well then, he shod plenty that came through this territory on their way up the Oregon Trail, didn't he?"

 
"Yessir, he did."

 
"This town's already got one smithy, you know."

 
"So I see. I drove the streets before stopping here."

 
Edwin rose and led the way to the team still waiting outside. "But I'll tell you something that's no secret to anyone in Sheridan. Old Pinnick could do better work and more of it. Spends more time at the Mint Saloon than at his forge, and if he'd've shod Sergeant right in the first place we wouldn't be doctoring him now."

 
"Pinnick, huh?"

 
"That's the name of your competition: Walter Pinnick. Too lazy to put a sign out above his smithy that says so. Instead he just lets the sound of his hammer bring in the customers … when it's ringing." Outside in the sun Walcott paused to cock his head and listen, and—sure enough—the ringing of earlier was absent.

 
"Old Pinnick must've got a touch of the
dry throat
," he ended with a sarcastic drawl, then moved on toward the team.

 
Jeffcoat cogitated momentarily before deciding it was best to be straightforward with this man.

 
"I want to be honest with you, sir. I've been around horses all my life, too, and I plan to do a little more than smithing. The truth is, I plan to open a livery stable."

 
Walcott paused with his hand on a bridle, and turned to look back at the younger man. The wind seemed to catch in his throat before he let it escape with a soft whistle.

 
"Well…" he said, letting his chin drop. For a moment he mulled, then chuckled and looked up. "You kind of took me by surprise there, young man."