Miss Murray On The Cattle Trail

Chapter Six

The day started out like all the others, but after breakfast Cherry told Zach the remuda was worrying him. “Been awful hot and dry the last few days, boss. Mebbe they smell somethin’ on the wind.”

Zach patted the old man’s shoulder. “You’ll figure it out, Cherry. Maybe they’re just thirsty.” He reined away and rode toward the herd. He’d assigned Dusty to ride drag, and he sure didn’t envy her on a scorcher like today. But the damn little fool insisted she wanted to do “her fair share” of the work just like the other hands, so he gave in. Riding drag might teach her a lesson.

Still, he’d keep an eye on her. And he might as well start now. There she was, twenty yards in back of the lumbering herd, the blue bandanna he’d given her pulled up over her nose and mouth, trotting along and yipping like any seasoned cowhand. Guess her arm felt better.

He fell in beside her horse without speaking, and she gave him the barest of nods to acknowledge his presence. It was so hot and still she probably didn’t have the energy to talk, so she didn’t. She wasn’t quiet that often, and he had to smile.

They rode in silence for a mile or so and then she glanced up to the sky. “Oh, look, we’re in for a thunderstorm!” She pointed at a huge cloud that was moving toward them. It looked dark and menacing, and it had an odd yellow-brown tinge to it.

Oh, my God. He wheeled his horse forward toward the herd.

“Skip! Cherry!” By the time he clattered up, the hands were already staring at the cloud overhead.

“Turn the herd,” Zach yelled. “Get them down. Hurry!” He pointed at the cloud bearing down on them, and they jolted into action, spurring hard to round up the steers.

He couldn’t leave Dusty alone back there, so he turned and kicked his mount into a gallop.

“What’s wrong?” she shouted when he reached her. “Is a thunderstorm coming?”

“Not a thunderstorm,” he shouted. “It’s a dust storm.” She pulled her horse to a halt and sat staring up at the advancing cloud.

The sky darkened to a dirty brown. Zach dismounted, then reached up and pulled her off the gelding. He positioned Dancer next to her mount. “Stand between the horses,” he ordered.

“What? But—”

“Don’t argue, just do it!”

“Not until you explain—”

“Dusty, shut up and move! Now!” He shoved her toward the animals. Then he grabbed both bridles and pulled her forward.

“Zach, I don’t understand. Why—”

“You will,” he said shortly. He grabbed her arm, dragged her next to him and pushed her against Dancer’s neck. Then he jockeyed the horses closer together to serve as buffers.

“They’ll squash us!” she protested.

“No, they won’t.” He moved in back of her and pressed her body hard into Dancer’s quivering form. “A dust storm is dangerous. Can’t see. Can’t breathe. It’s important not to panic.”

She started to say something, but at that moment the first gusts of wind hit. “Tie your hat on,” he ordered. “Use your bandanna.”

When she fumbled, he reached over and pulled the square of cotton tight over her Stetson and knotted it under her chin.

Dirt and sand pelted them, and the air filled with swirling grit. He snugged his own hat down as tight as he could, lifted his arms and positioned them around her head. Then he stepped in close and pressed his chest against her back.

“Breathe through your mouth,” he yelled.

He felt her head dip in a nod, and then the storm hit.

The air grew so thick it was hard to see. To Alex it felt as if night was falling, and a bolt of panic stabbed through her. She jerked, and Zach pushed her hat down to shield her face and tightened his arms over her head.

“Don’t panic,” he said, his voice calm. “It’ll get dark but it will pass. Just hang on, okay?”

She tipped her head up and down and felt his warm breath against the back of her neck. In the next minute, the air grew so gritty she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and then all at once she was suffocating.

Choking, she reared back and heard Zach’s voice against her ear. “Keep breathing,” he ordered. “It’s thick and dirty, but it’s air. Just breathe.”

How was he able to breathe? she wondered. He was sheltering her with his body, but the air was just as thick and dirty for him.

The wind screamed around them with a strange, eerie cry, and suddenly she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. She began to tremble and felt his hard body press more tightly against her back.

“You’re all right, Dusty. Just hang on.” He brought his mouth closer to her ear. “Hang on.”

“But I can’t breathe!” She felt as if she was drowning. Could a person drown on dry land?

“Dusty, take real slow breaths. Don’t hurry it.”

She wanted to scream, but that would take precious air. She opened her mouth wide to gulp in air, and shut her eyes.

Zach’s breath rasped in and out at her back, wafting against her cheek every time he exhaled. Could people choke to death in dust storms?

Don’t think about it. As long as she could feel him breathing she would be all right, wouldn’t she?

“Dusty, stay quiet. Stop thinking.”

How could he know that I’m thinking?

She wanted to ask him how long this would last.

She wanted to thank him for protecting her.

She wanted to stay alive!

Zach could feel her shaking, sending little tremors against his chest, but instead of making him feel protective it made him mad. Damn mad. She was scared? She shouldn’t be out here in the first place. Newspaper reporter or not, she had no business on a cattle drive. It put his men at risk. It put his cattle at risk. And, goddammit, it put him at risk!

Well, now, Strickland, just how do you figure it puts you at risk?

He tried to shut his mind down and concentrate instead on the wind. And the dust. And the...

Oh, hell and damn, it was hard not to think about Dusty when he could feel every little hitch in her breathing and every shudder traveling along her spine.

He had to admit she didn’t complain. She didn’t cry. She didn’t shirk her share of the work. She didn’t ask for special treatment because she was female. Dusty was maddeningly agreeable. He hated to admit it, but she was good company.

And, oh, God, she smelled good.

He could feel grit and sand sifting through his shirt and into his jeans, making his sticky skin itch. He heard the wind pick up. A dust storm could blow for half a day or longer, and this one showed no sign of letting up.

One of the horses tossed its head, but it didn’t move. He tried to keep his mind on the animal, but his thoughts kept coming back to Dusty. What was it about her that he found so maddening?

And how much longer can you stand here with her trim little butt snugged into your groin?

Guess he had a bad case of Dusty getting under his skin.

Suddenly she pulled away from the horse she was leaning against and with a half sob turned into his arms.

“Zach, I’m scared.”

Well, maybe she did cry sometimes. He pressed her head against his neck and wrapped his arm around her.

“H-how long will this last?”

“Don’t know. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes a day.”

She gave a little jerk. “A day? A whole day?”

“Sometimes. Forget about the dust storm. Just standing here in one spot for twenty-four hours will probably kill us.”

“Oh, but—It couldn’t really go on for a whole day, could it? What if I have to, um, relieve myself?”

That made him laugh out loud. He pressed her face back against his neck. “Dusty, stop talking. It takes air.”

He let ten minutes go by while the wind screamed across the plain and threw dirt in their faces. After another ten minutes she raised her head and wasted some more air.

“I can’t wait to write down some notes about this windstorm!”

Zach just shook his head. She was either crazy or she was a great newspaper reporter. Maybe both.

The storm finally moved off to the north, and Zach heaved a sigh of relief. Their ordeal was over. He took a step away from her, and she moved out of his arms and began brushing dirt off her clothes. Yeah, he was relieved it was over, but maybe he was the crazy one, because part of him was sorry.

Everyone gathered around, and they decided to set up camp for the night. Dusty immediately began scribbling away in her notebook and Zach took stock of the damage. The storm had left his hands gritty but uninjured and his herd of cattle was still intact. Cherry assured him the remuda was restless but untouched, and he was already brushing the animals down.

The men were all filthy and the chuck wagon was gritty with sand and dirt. Roberto was beside himself.

“Señor Boss, I cannot cook with dirt in pans, and the wagon—ay de mi—it must be scrubbed before supper.”

Dusty looked up from her writing. Her face was dirty, and when she stood up, grit sifted from her jeans. “Roberto, give me a bucket of water and a scrub brush. I’ll help you clean up.”

Zach grinned all the way out to check on the herd, and when he’d ridden twice around the subdued steers, he was still smiling.

She might be green and scared and a little bit crazy, but maybe she was worth riding the trail with.

That night Alex interviewed the scout, Wally. He told her some of his adventures over his considerable years “on the drover’s trail,” as he termed it.

“Kinda hard to get used to it at first, scoutin’ for a cattle outfit. Gotta ride ahead of ever’body, and it kin get mighty lonesome with nobody to talk to ’cept my horse. Got to be purty good friends with my horse after a while, but...aw, heck, Miss Alex, you don’t want to hear about this stuff.”

“But I do, Wally. Honestly I do. And just think, thousands of readers back East will want to hear about ‘all this stuff,’ too. You’ll be famous!”

“Aw, heck, Miss Alex. I don’t want to be famous. Somebody might come after me for money I owed in a poker game somewhere. Golly, I remember one time down in Texas...” And he was off again.

When Wally stopped regaling her with his wild tales, the hands began to spin their own yarns. Nothing was too outlandish or unbelievable. Skip recalled one cattle drive when they ate “nothin’ but oatmeal and bugs” for four days straight. Curly told about riding two days on a spring roundup with a broken foot; it had happened when his horse stepped on his boot, but he’d wanted to stick it out because one of the riders was “a pretty little filly” from a neighboring ranch.

“Aw, that’s nuthin’,” Jase challenged. “One time I was night-herdin’ during a blizzard and my fingers froze up. Had to chop ’em off myself the next morning. Had to, or they’d a got the gangrene.”

Alex didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but when she noticed his middle two fingers on one hand were missing, she decided he was telling the truth. She dug out her notepad again. This was wonderful human-interest material about the type of people who worked these cattle drives. She could see a whole series of pieces about the men on the trail; maybe she should get to know them better.

After an hour of after-supper talk, she acknowledged she was certainly getting a good education about life on a cattle drive. And it wasn’t just about the men. Cherry was constantly instructing her about the horses in his remuda.

“Don’t never walk up to a hoss what’s pullin’ yer rope tight, Miss Alex. Good way to git stomped. Why, I remember one time...” And, like Wally, the wrangler talked nonstop for half an hour.

Chapter Seven

Night after night she watched the men around the campfire, how they teased one another and played practical jokes and sang and told stories about other cattle drives they had been on. Sometimes one of them would start to talk about a girl “back home,” or a woman of questionable reputation, and then Alex noticed the men would tip their heads in her direction and quickly shush the speaker. She guessed they didn’t want to offend her.

But how they did love to talk! “Spin yarns,” as they put it. The tales they told were often excruciatingly funny. The listeners would slap their sides and guffaw, and then the next speaker would try to top that story with another tale even funnier or more outlandish, and they would all poke fun and try not to swear too loudly in front of her.

All in all, it was entertaining, funny and heartbreaking at the same time. Alex tried to surreptitiously scribble down as many of their outlandish stories as she could in the flickering light from the campfire, and she tried to avoid drawing too much attention to what she was doing for fear they would clam up. These rough, bawdy tales would make rich reading for Easterners starved for pictures of life in the West.

* * *

Juan was right about the river, Zach acknowledged. Rain had brought the level up, and the rushing current looked wicked. It wouldn’t be easy getting a thousand head of cattle across that expanse of roiling brown water.

Roberto parked the chuck wagon just close enough to the water to make them all nervous. Cherry had the remuda snugged behind, in his makeshift corral, and as fast as the hands rode in and grabbed off their saddles, the savvy wrangler had their mounts rubbed down and turned into the roped-off enclosure to graze. Good man, Cherry. Zach hoped he’d be as spry when he was that age.

The herd lumbered up to the riverbank behind the lead steer and milled around uncertainly while the two point riders and all the flank men shouted and swore until the cattle moved into a sloppy circle and then discovered the water in the river. They forgot trying to break for freedom and spread out along the bank to drink.

Cassidy looked like a walking dust cloud from riding drag half the day. He pulled his bandanna off his sweaty face and threw himself down next to the chuck wagon. Zach trotted his bay over close to him. “Get up.”

“Aw, boss. After six hours behind them steers, I’m plumb tuckered.”

“I said get up.” Something in his voice must have alerted the big-bellied cowhand because he sat up and then jolted to his feet.

“Yessir. Guess I miscalc’lated some ’bout suppertime.”

“Then pay attention,” Zach snapped. “If you want any supper around here you’ll put in a full day’s work.”

He rode off to circle the herd. Where was Dusty? Last he’d seen her she was keeping up all right, so she should have reached them by now.

“Hey, Juan? You see Miss Murray on the trail?”

“Si.” The young man tipped his dark head over his shoulder. “Back maybe a mile.”

Dammit, that’d leave her out on the prairie alone. He craned his neck looking for a telltale puff of dust. Nothing. Maybe she’d dropped back or slowed down some to...to what? She could nibble biscuits while riding. She could tend to personal necessities just by pulling up behind a thicket of rabbit brush, and that’d take five minutes, at most. So where the hell was she?

He waited. He rode in ever-widening circles around the herd, then went back to camp and waited some more.

“Hey, boss,” Cherry shouted. “Gonna set there on yer horse all night or gonna let me rub him down?”

“Gonna set,” Zach muttered. Before he knew it, he was riding out of camp, retracing their route and trying not to let his temper boil over. Four miles back he spotted her on foot, and leading her horse through a patch of wild buckwheat. What the—

He rode a wide circle around her to avoid kicking up too much dust, and when he walked Dancer in close, he saw she was trying hard not to cry.

“You hurt?”

“No.”

“Horse hurt?”

“Yes. I think he’s lost a horseshoe.”

“Horses don’t wear shoes on a drive, Dusty.”

She peered up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. “Well, his gait is uneven, so I know something is wrong. I surmised that I shouldn’t ride him, so I thought I’d walk.”

That was smarter than she realized. Riding the gelding with a sore foot would make it worse, maybe even cause permanent damage. She plodded past him and Zach studied her sorrel.

“Left leg’s swollen,” he called out. He fished in his saddlebag for a length of rope and tossed it down to her. “Tie him on behind my horse. We’ll ride double.”

“Oh, no, I can’t—”

“Do as you’re told,” he snapped. “Unless you fancy draggin’ into camp long past supper and gettin’ Cherry out of the sack in a bad temper to doctor your mount.”

“Yes, sir, Mister Trail Boss, sir,” she said, her voice crisp. He could tell her teeth were clenched, but he didn’t care. First the rattlesnake, then gettin’ bucked off and now a horse with a swollen leg. She was bad news. And he sure didn’t have time to coddle a stubborn female.

After two tries she managed to link up the two animals. “Sure hope you tied a square knot,” he called.

She propped both hands on her hips and frowned up at him. “What’s a square knot?”

Instantly he dismounted and came back to check the rope. Well, hell, nice and tight and square as you please. He remounted, settled her in front of him and kicked Dancer’s flank. The horse jolted ahead and she jerked backward against his chest.

Dusty’s body was hot and sweaty, but her hair smelled like some kind of spicy soap. The single thick braid that hung down her back was trapped between her spine and his rib cage. She kept jostling her body up and down, trying to get comfortable, he guessed, but that sure kept reminding him she was female. After ten minutes she calmed down some.

“I am sorry to cause you all this trouble,” she ventured.

“Not half as sorry as I am.”

“Why, how ungracious! I really am sorry. What makes you think—”

“Because you don’t think, Dusty. You’re a damn hazard on a drive like this. Now shut up or we’ll both miss supper.”

Stung, Alex bit her lip and gripped the saddle horn so hard her knuckles ached. Odious man. Arrogant, bossy and...bossy. She tried to think how she would describe him in her newspaper. Rude, she decided. And all the other negative adjectives she could come up with.

But if she wanted another bath after supper, she’d better hold her tongue. At least he was no longer threatening to send her back to the Rocking K.

They rode in tense silence until he drew rein in front of the rope corral. “Swollen leg,” he said to Cherry.

The wrangler peered up at him. “Bad?”

“Could be worse,” Zach said, his voice flat. Cherry helped Dusty climb down, waited for Zach to dismount, then led her beautiful sorrel away.

“Will she be all right?” she called.

“He,” Cherry said over his shoulder. “Gelding, remember?”

Embarrassed, Alex nodded. How could she forget? Almost every living creature on this drive was male. And some of them needed to improve their manners. One of them in particular.

She sat quietly all through Roberto’s tasty supper of beans and bacon and tortillas, and when they all gathered around the campfire, she told Zach she was going to go take a bath.

She expected Zach to guard her privacy from behind some trees, as he had before, but tonight he annoyed her by insisting on a much closer vantage point.

“Current’s swift,” he said at the river’s edge. “Might be dangerous to swim.”

“Oh?” She eyed the roiling water. He was right. It looked a bit muddy, too.

“I’ll bring a bucket of warm water from Roberto’s stove.” He strode off, returning in a few minutes lugging a tin pail of sloshing water. He plunked it down in front of her and stepped back.

“Where are you going to be?” she asked.

“Close by.”

She shot a quick look at him. “How close?”

He chuckled. “Close enough,” he said drily.

“And far enough away,” she said. “I do not wish for an audience, Mr. Strickland.”

“Trust me.”

Gracious heavens, she’d be a fool to do that! But, she reasoned, she really had no choice. Very well, she would take the fastest bath of her life.

She heard his footsteps moving back and forth just behind the only tree in sight, a wind-twisted juniper. They didn’t stop, or slow down, or pause, and she prayed his eyes were glued on his boots and not her.

She stripped, sponged off with the washcloth Roberto had thoughtfully included, dried herself off and donned her clothes again in four minutes flat. “All done,” she called.

He stepped from behind the tree so quickly it gave her pause. Had he been watching her?

“Find any grasshoppers in your hair?” His voice held a hint of laughter.

“What? Oh, I have no idea!” She shivered at the thought. “There wasn’t enough water to wash my hair.”

“Too bad,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” She spun to face him and would swear a flush tinged his cheeks, but in the dim light of dusk she couldn’t be sure.

Without looking at her, he grabbed the bucket and started back to camp. She wished he would look at her. She liked his eyes. They were the most startling shade of green, and his eyebrows were dark, almost black. She also liked his hands, the fingers long and purposeful-looking, and tanned brown as his exposed forearms.

She watched his long legs eat up the distance back to the chuck wagon. And had a disconcerting thought.

She liked some things about Zach Strickland. But was there anything, anything at all, that Zach Strickland liked about her?