Joe's Wife

Meg studied the tree-lined street and neighboring houses, feeling sorry for the pony, who would have to spend all but Saturday and Sunday afternoons at the livery stable. Children and animals needed wide-open spaces. She’d been so glad to move to the ranch with Joe. From the very beginning, the hills and fields, the wide sky in all directions had appealed to her dreams of escaping town life. After growing up in a house full of siblings, and helping her father in his accounting business, she’d been eager to have the space and the freedom.

“Meg, I’ve prepared a room for you,” Edwina said. “You’ll be quite comfortable in the front bedroom that overlooks the street. There are two windows, and it stays quite pleasant even in summer.”

“Mother, that’s your room,” Wilsie said in surprise.

“It was our room when your father was alive,” Edwina corrected. “Meg will need the space to keep some of her things she doesn’t want to part with.”

“That’s generous of you, Mother Telford, but I can’t impose on you.”

“Nonsense. It’s just Wilsie and I now, since Harley and Gwynn have their own home, and we ramble around in this big old house. Before long Wilsie will marry and leave me, too.”

“Not unless some prospective husbands show up,” Wilsie said with a petulant pout.

“I am afraid the war has left us short of eligible young men, my dear,” Edwina sympathized. “In any case, Meg, the house has plenty of room, and it’s high time you gave up your silly notion of staying out there on that patch of dirt in that rustic house and moved in with us.”

“Mother’s right,” Harley said. “It’s highly improper for you to be living out there with only a couple of ranch hands who should have been put out to pasture long ago. They can’t keep up the work, and neither can you.”

Meg drew a steadying breath and lifted her chin a notch. “I have Hunt and Aldo, too.”

“They’re boys,” he scoffed.

“We’ve done all right so far.”

“All right? Talk around town is you’ve had to sell Joe’s guns and your silver to pay the help, make the mortgage payments and buy feed. What will you sell next?”

Meg resented the question because it was time to buy garden seed and another banknote was due, and she’d been pondering the dilemma herself for weeks. She’d learned how to run a business from her father; keeping the books and managing was no problem, but she couldn’t handle the physical work alone.

Thirty years ago Gus and Purdy had traveled the Chisholm Trail. They knew cattle and they knew horses. They worked hard and were as loyal friends as she’d ever had. But they were old men. The bank-notes came due regular as clockwork, and the stock had to eat. Since Joe’d been gone, she hadn’t been able to cut and rake hay.

Meg pursed her lips and refused to get angry at Joe for leaving her in this predicament. It wasn’t his fault that the war had broken out and he’d gone and lost his life honorably. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. And that’s what made accepting her situation all the harder. She had no one to blame. No one to get angry at.

And no one who understood her desire to keep the ranch and hang on to something she knew and loved.

The ranch had been Joe’s dream. It had become hers, too, and she wasn’t about to let another dream die. She’d sell the furniture if she had to. She’d sell her bed and sleep on the floor. As a last resort she’d sell some stock. But she wouldn’t sell their dream.

“I’ve started asking around at the bank and the land office, seeing if anyone’s in the market to buy,” Harley said. “Niles can get you a good price for the place.”

Niles Kestler, junior owner of Aspen Loan and Trust, had been Joe’s best friend since childhood.

“You can do your own dealings on the stock,” Harley went on. “You’ll get enough money to live on for a good many years.”

Meg closed her eyes against the Telfords’ manip-, ulations. A good many years. Years of sleeping in the room upstairs, taking her meals with her widowed mother-in-law and passing the days doing needlepoint and volunteer work. The stifling idea horrified her. She’d feel like that Shetland was going to, cooped up in a confining stall.

Meg’s widowed mother had remarried and moved to Denver several years ago, and her brothers and sisters were married and scattered from Colorado to Illinois. There wasn’t a one of them she’d want to live with or impose upon.

The whole worry was so unfair. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. She and Joe should have been stocking the Circle T by now, having children and seeing all their plans come to pass.

“Meg,” Harley said. “You can’t keep the ranch going with no man.”

“Harley,” Gwynn cautioned her husband gently.

His words were not a revelation. They were simply a fact Meg had been unwilling to face.

“Well, it’s the truth,” he said. “And a truth she’d better take to heart before she has nothing left to sell. A woman can’t run a cow ranch alone.”

Meg strengthened her resolve. Harley was only looking out for her interests. He thought he knew what was best for her. The life he had planned for her would have been best for Gwynn if he hadn’t returned. It would have been best for a good many women.

But it wasn’t for her, and she knew it. “I appreciate your concern, Harley. Yours too, Mother Telford. But I can’t sell our ranch.”

They exchanged a look she couldn’t quite decipher. Out of breath and giggling, Forrest and Lilly scrambled onto the veranda. “Papa, come give us rides again! Watch us, Nana!”

Edwina turned her attention to her grandchildren.

The subject was not forgotten. Meg would hear about it each time they were together. Nothing short of a miracle would keep them from chipping away at her until she conceded. And she wasn’t willing to do that.

But Harley was right. She thought about it as she drove her wagon and team home before dark. She couldn’t keep the ranch going without a man.

Someone to shoulder the workload. Someone strong and capable and willing to put in the long hours and backbreaking work required. Someone she didn’t have to pay.

Meg almost smiled at that one. Where would she ever get an able-bodied man willing to work without. pay? She could barely keep Gus and Purdy and two young hands fed, and she paid them only a meager salary.

The man she was imagining sounded like a husband. A man to take on responsibilities and have a stake in the ranch’s success.

A year hadn’t passed since Joe’s death. Since the war, many widows had already married again to provide for themselves and their children. Meg didn’t have children, which she saw as a mixed blessing. It would have been comforting to have something of Joe left behind. But she wouldn’t have wanted the added burden of raising and feeding them alone.

Ranch was a glamorous word for ten thousand acres of grass, several holding pens and barns and the modest house she glimpsed as she topped a rise, but the sight gave her the same warm sense of accomplishment and belonging it always did.

Joe’s mother had been chagrined over the fact that Joe had concentrated on the stock and the outbuildings before building an acceptable home.

But Joe’d convinced her that all they’d needed was a place to cook and sleep while they got the ranch on its feet. A more stately house was something they could build in the future. With affection, Meg studied the corrals, the barn and efficient house where she lived. She and Joe had spent their wedding night in the tiny bedroom. They’d eaten their first meals as man and wife in the long kitchen. They’d planned and dreamed as they walked the land, and lastly they had prayed beside the back door before he’d gone off to fight.

So much of Joe was in this ranch. They would have to drag Meg off this land. If finding another man was. what it took to keep it, she’d do it. Nothing would stand in the way of her keeping the Circle T. Nothing.

Chapter Two

Tye woke to the weekday sounds of horses’ hooves and clattering wagons on the street below his second-story window at Yetta Banks’s boardinghouse. The dry scent of dust filtered through the open window of his rented room. In the distance the ring of the blacksmith’s hammer punctuated the light tap at his door.

The knock came again, assuring him he’d actually heard it. He sat up in surprise. “Hold on.”

He threw his legs over the side of the bed, immediately grimacing at the pain that shot through his thigh. Awkwardly stepping into his pants, he wondered who’d be calling. The only townspeople who spoke to him were the regulars at the Pair-A-Dice, whom he doubted would be up this early, Jed Wheeler himself, the Reverend Baker and Tye’s landlady.

Pulling on a rumpled Calcutta shirt and leaving the laces loose, he ran a hand through his hair and squinted at his dark-whiskered cheeks in the mirror before opening the door.

A young boy stood in the hall, threadbare knees in his trousers, his cap askew. “Message for you, mister.”

Tye stared at the envelope. “For me? You sure it’s for Tye Hatcher?”

“Yes, sir.” The boy thrust it forward with an important flourish.