Wild West Christmas Read online

  I also made good use of the shovel, and while I had never had any instruction in spading up the earth, I managed to dig a wide bed all along my front fence and planted the seeds I had purchased. I watered them with used wash water and fussed over them for weeks while wagonloads of the furniture began to arrive from the station.

  Finally, three weeks later, I was thrilled to see beautiful, brave green sprouts poking up from the earth.

  Now each afternoon I sit in my new porch swing, which came unassembled and cost me three broken fingernails before I figured out how it all fit together, and envision how lovely my garden will look in another month when the nasturtiums and black-eyed Susans and baby’s breath will be in bloom. Lately I even wrestle my typewriter out to the front porch, where I prop it up on an upended apple crate and clack away at my writing.

  I cannot wait for my flowers to bloom!

  Chapter Two

  Gale

  Dammit all to hell, running cattle through town to get to the railhead is the craziest idea since Whitey Poletti used his hair clippers to shear his daughter’s pet lamb. I keep telling Charlie, my boss, that it’s nuts to drive cows down main street, but can I tell the owner of the biggest ranch in Lane County what to do?

  “You’re just the foreman of the Rocking K, not the boss,” he yells. “I’m making the decisions, not you.”

  Right. Old man’s getting gray hairs in his brain. Anyway, yesterday me and Skip and Jase and two vaqueros rounded up a hundred head of prime beef and got as far as the outskirts of Smoke River when I realized it wasn’t gonna work. The cows kept straying away from the herd, and just as we started through town, Skip and Ernesto lost control over them.

  It was too late to backtrack. Nothing to do but drive ’em on through and pray. Jase rode on ahead to clear everybody out of the way, and we thundered on down the road, riding like crazed Indians. I brought up the rear. For a few minutes I couldn’t see a damn thing for the dust, but when it lifted I wished it hadn’t. I sure hated to watch what was happening.

  The cows were spread out over the road, and Skip and Ernesto couldn’t hold ’em. Goddamn, it was hard to watch.

  The left flank barreled down that road like the Lord won’t have it, and just at the edge of town where the road narrows there was no place to go, so they milled around and trampled some lady’s front fence all to hell.

  I caught a glimpse of her as I rode past, but I was so busy trying to control those darn cows I didn’t pay her much mind. She was standin’ on her front porch and her mouth was open as if she was screamin’ at us, and I guess she was. Anyway, by the time we got the herd penned up for the night it was way past suppertime, so I stopped in at the saloon for a shot of red-eye and a bit of cool-off time.

  After dark I rode out of town on my way back to the Rocking K, but I knew I’d have to stop where we’d taken the fence down and make amends. I hate this part of bein’ the foreman, but I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t.

  Sure enough, the pickets were plumb ruined, split and shattered every which way. And some little nubby green shoots that had poked up were flattened. I tied my gelding to the only fence post left standing, swatted the dust off my Stetson and tramped up to the front door and knocked.

  Nothing happened, so I knocked again, louder.

  Still nothing. Hell’s bells, maybe she’d gone for the sheriff.

  Nah. I’d have run into the sheriff at the saloon.

  I raised my fist and was just about to bash a good one on the door when it jerked open and the lady peered out at me. Right away I started to explain about the fence, but when I got a good look at her, my tongue went numb and I just stared. I’d never seen a female anything like her.

  She had red hair, dark like good wine or that rambly rose that spangles over the bunkhouse door, and it was knotted up into a thick bun at the back of her neck. Little tendrils had escaped and curled around her face.

  She stared back at me with dark blue eyes so big they looked like pansies. In the lamplight spilling from inside the house they seemed almost purple.

  She didn’t smile. I stood there for a full minute wondering why I couldn’t talk and why she didn’t smile or say anything, and then she opened her lips and spoke.

  “Yes?”

  “Ma’am, I—” I swallowed hard. “I came about your fence.”

  “Oh, I see.” Her voice got real icy.

  I swallowed again. “My boys kinda lost control over the cows this afternoon, and I sure am sorry about your fence.”

  “And my garden,” she said. Her voice was awful quiet.

  “Oh, yeah, I guess we tore up the ground a mite.”

  The way she kept looking at me with those eyes of hers kinda unnerved me, and I couldn’t think what to say next.

  God, I’d never seen a woman as beautiful as she was. I looked her over real quick like and that just made it worse. She had on a ruffly red-striped shirtwaist with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, tucked real neat into a plain gray skirt. Looked like denim or twill, and it flared over her hips just right.

  “My fence?” she reminded. Still icy.

  I tried like hell to get my eyes past where her breasts pushed out those red stripes. “Uh, yeah, your fence. I’ll send one of my hands out to repair it tomorrow, soon as we get the cattle loaded.”

  “And what about my garden?”

  “Well, I s’pose he could fix that up, too. Sure am sorry.”

  “A garden cannot be ‘fixed up.’ It is destroyed beyond repair and must be replanted.”

  “Okay.”

  “I grew it from seed, you understand. That takes time. Eight weeks, to be exact.”

  She didn’t sound so frosty now. She sounded as though she’d like to brain me with a two-by-four. She looked at me as if I was gonna fix it, but hell, I didn’t want to take that on. Now I didn’t know what to say.

  “Eight weeks, huh?”

  She nodded. “I was anxious to see the flowers bloom because…well, I was anxious.”

  “Sure sorry to have ruined it, ma’am. My name’s Gale McBurney.”

  “Mr. McBurney.”

  “I’m the foreman at the Rocking K, and like I said, I’m real sorry.”

  “You will, of course, have everything repaired?”

  “Yeah, well, hope I didn’t interrupt your supper.”

  “Actually, I was hanging wallpaper in the upstairs bedroom.”

  Now, that caught my interest. This old place had been empty for years. Probably needed a bunch of work. How come her husband wasn’t hanging the wallpaper? Or maybe she lived here alone?

  “What is the Rocking K?” she asked all of a sudden.

  “It’s a ranch, ma’am. About six miles out of town.”

  “Oh. I arrived on the train from the East. To me, it all looks like one big ranch.”

  I caught myself watching her mouth as she talked. “The Rocking K is the biggest ranch in the county, Mrs….?”

  “My name is Lilah Cornwell.”

  I nodded. “Missus Cornwell.”

  “It’s Miss Cornwell.”

  Miss. As in not married. For some reason that made me real happy. Not that there was a shortage of single women in the county, and not that I hadn’t had some dealings with one or two over the years, but…Well, it just made me feel good. She was sure something to look at.

  I settled my hat on my head, then snatched it off again. “Like I said, Miss Cornwell, I’ll have one of my hands fix your fence.”

  “And replant my garden,” she reminded me.

  All the way back to the ranch I thought about her voice, kinda low and throaty, like a nesting dove. Miss Lilah Cornwell, huh?

  Chapter Three

  Lilah

  The man stood there on my front porch in an open-collared blue chambray shirt stuffed into tight, dusty Levi’s, looking like a character in one of those dime novels. He was very tan, with eyes the color of green leaves. As he talked, an unruly shock of black hair kept flopping onto his forehead. I wondered if h
e was part Indian. Probably not, with a name like McBurney. Black Irish, perhaps.

  But he was promising to fix my fence. And my garden. Studying his obvious chagrin over the destruction his cows had wrought on my property, I felt my fury ebb. So he would send one of ‘his’ hands tomorrow. That must be what a ranch foreman did all day, boss people around.

  I decided that I disliked him.

  Still, something about the man was arresting—perhaps the odd hunger in his eyes. I found it disturbing. For that alone I should dislike him even more.

  But I did not.

  The next morning, after my breakfast of tea and marmalade toast, I commenced hanging the yellow-flowered wallpaper in the second bedroom, which would serve as my office. I filled a bowl with the lumpy paste and lugged it and the roll of wallpaper upstairs. For hours I smeared the sticky stuff on the wrong side, slapped it on the wall, smoothed it out and trimmed the edges. I worked steadily until I was lightheaded with fatigue and famished to boot.

  During my lunch of bread from the bakery and hard yellow cheese, I wondered why I didn’t just hire a man from town to hang the wallpaper? But the answer was so obvious I had to laugh. After Aunt Carrie’s cautionary tales, I wanted no man inside my private space, for any reason. So I would cope on my own.

  After lunch I finished up the wallpapering and began to paint the downstairs, starting with the front parlor. The paint I’d selected from Ness’s mercantile was a creamy yellow, which I liked because it reminded me of the daffodils that bloomed each spring in Mama’s garden.

  By midafternoon my shoulders ached, but I pressed onward, loaded up my paintbrush and carefully painted around the door molding and the window frames. The paint smell made me dizzy and a bit headachy, but I resolved I would finish at least one wall before I collapsed. I had just restirred the paint when I heard a rhythmic pounding coming from my front yard. I climbed down from the ladder and looked out the window.

  A cowboy was bent over my decimated fence, hammering nails into the pickets. His back was toward me, but I guessed it was one of the ranch hands Mr. McBurney had promised to send. The afternoon sun was simply broiling, and a damp patch of perspiration showed on the back of the man’s shirt.

  I kept on painting, and he kept on hammering. By teatime my neck felt as if a carriage wheel had rolled over it, so I rescued the pitcher of lemonade from the cooler, poured a tall glass and gulped it down.

  Never had anything tasted so good! I sank down at the kitchen table and laid my head on my folded arms. I had one more yellow wall to paint in the parlor, but I wasn’t at all sure I could drag my aching body back to work.

  Another glass of lemonade and an aspirin powder gave me courage. On my way back to the parlor, I passed by the front window and glanced out at the man still laboring over the fence pickets. By now the sweaty spot on the back of his shirt was platter-size.

  Poor fellow, working away on orders from that slave-driving foreman, Mr. McBurney. I set my brush in the paint bucket, poured him a glass of lemonade and took it outside.

  “Would you like a glass of—?”

  “Sure would, whatever it is.” He rose and turned to face me.

  “Oh,” I blurted out. “It’s you!”

  He pushed his hat back with his thumb. “Who’d you expect?”

  “I expected your ranch hand. You said you would send one of your ranch hands to fix the fence.”

  “Sorry. All the hands are busy down at the rail yard.” Without shifting his gaze from mine, he reached out and lifted the lemonade glass out of my hand.

  “This for me?” The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled. He brought the glass to his lips and gulped half of it down.

  “I thought you would be too busy bossing around your ranch hands to bother with my fence.”

  “‘Bossing around’?” He polished off the rest of the lemonade. “You think I work a crew of slaves, is that it?”

  I could not think of one sensible thing to say, so I kept silent. When I didn’t respond, he grinned and went on.

  “I don’t ‘boss’ them around with a bullwhip. Ranch hands get paid like everybody else.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “No, you don’t, ma’am. I can tell by that little frown between your eyes.”

  I hadn’t realized I was frowning. Or that he was watching my face that closely. I found myself watching his face as well, especially his eyes. I was embarrassingly aware of his green eyes. I felt my cheeks grow hot.

  “I did not mean to be insulting, Mr. McBurney.”

  He handed back the empty glass. “You hangin’ more wallpaper?”

  “What? Why would you think that?”

  “Your hair.” He brushed a finger over the tendrils of hair straggling onto my face. “Looks kinda spotted.”

  “I’ve been painting the walls of my parlor.”

  “Yellow, right? Nice color for a parlor. You like to paint?”

  I had to laugh at that. “I have no choice, unless I want to live with dingy gray walls.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then he smiled. The man’s mouth was beautiful, his lips well formed and…well, curved into a smile like that, they were most attractive.

  Mercy! My belly flipped up into a slow somersault and my cheeks grew even warmer. Never in my entire life had I admired a man’s mouth. I felt as if I were thirteen years old!

  “What about the fence?” he asked.

  “What about it?”

  “You want it white? Yellow?”

  I had to laugh. “I cannot imagine a picket fence painted yellow.”

  The shoulders under the blue work shirt lifted in a brief, eloquent shrug. “I can.”

  “The townspeople will think I’m crazy.”

  “You care what the townspeople think?”

  “Well, no, I suppose not. But I am new in town. I don’t want people to think I am eccentric.”

  “You mean like old-maid eccentric? I mean no disrespect, ma’am, but you’ve got a far piece to go on that score.”

  “What score?” I heard myself ask. “Old maid or eccentric?”

  “Both.” He handed me the lemonade glass. “Me, I like colors.”

  “Then you choose the color, Mr. McBurney.”

  He tried hard to curb his grin. He had beautiful teeth, too, straight and white against his tanned skin.

  “Okay. S’long as you promise not to make me repaint it if you don’t like it.”

  “Very well, I promise.” I turned toward the porch.

  “Hey, Miss Cornwell?”

  I glanced back at him. “Yes?”

  “Name’s Gale. Gale McBurney.”

  Chapter Four

  Gale

  I had the new pickets nailed in place and the whole fence standing upright by suppertime. I even reinforced the wobbly fence post. Tomorrow I’d slap on a coat of paint. I knew I could send out Skip or Jase, but I wanted to do it myself, partly because I looked forward to picking out the color. And partly, I guess, because I wanted to spend more time in the vicinity of Miss Cornwell.

  Lilah, she said her name was. Damn pretty name.

  Damn pretty woman.

  Before I rode back to the ranch, I stopped in at Ness’s mercantile to pick out some paint. Carl didn’t much like my choice, but little Edith did. I could tell by the enthusiastic bobbing of her head. That kid had good color sense.

  I dropped off the two-gallon cans of paint just inside Miss Cornwell’s repaired gate and whistled all the way home. Missed supper at the ranch house again, but I had some bacon and leftover corn bread at my cabin.

  I couldn’t sleep for the second night in a row, so I rolled off my cot, chunked up the fire and started a new drawing. Couldn’t quite get her chin right, but tomorrow I’d take a closer look.

  Chapter Five

  Lilah

  Orange! He’s painting my fence orange? I leaped out of the chair and upended my toast onto the kitchen floor, marmalade side down. While I scrubbed off the sticky jam I could hear him whis
tling out by the front fence. “The Blue Danube” waltz? Unusual choice for a cowboy/ranch foreman.

  My first impulse was to storm outside, but then I reminded myself I had let him choose the color, so it served me right. Mama always said I was too impulsive.

  By lunchtime I couldn’t stand it any longer and stepped out onto the front porch.

  “Good morning, Mr. McBurney.”

  “Gale,” he reminded me without looking up. “Like the color?”

  “It’s, well, unusual,” I allowed. “It’s sort of a peachy-orange-sherbety shade.”

  He rocked back on his heels and sent me a look from under his battered wide-brimmed hat. It shaded his eyes, which looked even more green, exactly the color of a fresh Christmas wreath made of fir fronds.

  He sent me a frown. “‘Sherbety’? What’s that?”

  “You know, like ice cream, only made with ice.”

  “You mean that Persian stuff?”

  “Yes. They call it sorbet.”

  He thumbed his hat back and sent me that smile again. “Sounds seductive.”

  I stopped breathing. Seductive? Did he really say that?

  He did. I know he did because his eyes had that crinkly look in the corners, and he wouldn’t meet my gaze. The man knew exactly what he’d said.

  Chapter Six

  Gale

  That night at the supper table I got ribbed but good, not just by the vaqueros, Ernesto and Juan, but by Jase and Skip, and even Consuelo, the ranch cook.

  “Where you been past two days, Señor Gale? Ees she pretty?”

  “Yeah, Gale,” said Skip. “Tell us all about it.”

  Jase poked the younger man’s arm. “Ya mean ‘her,’ doncha, Skip?”

  With a knowing grin Skip unfolded his long legs and slid his lanky body down in his chair. “Yeah. Tell us about ‘her.’”

  “Bueno,” said Juan and Ernesto together. Juan reached out to pinch Consuelo’s ample posterior, but she adroitly sidestepped his seeking fingers.