Trilby

Trilby
Diana Palmer

Arizona, 1910Dear Diary, It will take more than threats–and one overbearing rancher–to drive me away from my rightful property. . . When I inherited this isolated land near the Mexican border, I knew running it would be difficult and dangerous–very different from my privileged life in Louisiana, where I was the genteel Miss Trilby Lang.But I certainly didn't expect that my neighbor, Thorn Vance, would be challenging me at every turn. Or that his brusque, ruggedly appealing ways would prove a dangerous temptation that I'm finding harder and harder to resist. Now, with trouble sweeping the territory, I need his help. But how much will I risk putting myself in the hands of a man who's used to getting exactly what he wants?

DIANA PALMER

Trilby

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter One

There was a yellow dust cloud on the horizon. Trilby stared at it with subdued excitement. In the months she’d spent on the ranch, in this vast territory of Arizona, even a dust cloud had the potential to lift her boredom. Compared to the social whirl of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, this country was uncivilized. October was almost over, but the heat hadn’t lifted. If anything, it was worse. To a genteel young woman of impeccable Eastern breeding, the living conditions were trying. It was a long way from the family mansion in Louisiana to this isolated wooden frame house near Douglas, Arizona. And the men who inhabited this wasteland were as near to barbarians as a red Indian. There were plenty of those around, too. An old Apache and a young Yaqui worked for her father. They never spoke, but they stared. So did the dusty, unbathed cowboys.

Trilby spent a great deal of time inside, except on wash days. One day a week, she had to go outside, where she and her mother dealt with a big black cast-iron pot in which white things—like her father’s shirts—were boiled, and two Number Two tin washtubs in which the remainder of the clothes were, respectively, washed by hand against a scrub board and rinsed.

“Is it going to be dust or rain?” her little brother Teddy asked from behind, scattering her thoughts.

She glanced at him over her thin shoulder and smiled gently. “Dust, I expect. What they call the monsoon season has passed and it is dry again. What else could it be?” she asked.

“Well, it could be Colonel Blanco and some of the insurrectos, the Mexican rebels fighting Díaz’s government,” he suggested. “Gosh, remember the day that cavalry patrol rode onto the ranch and asked for water and I got them a bucket?”

Ted was only twelve, and the memory was the high point of his young life. Their family’s ranch was near the Mexican border, and on October 10, Porfirio Díaz had been reelected president of Mexico. But the strongman was under attack from Francisco Madero, who had campaigned against him and lost. Now Mexico was in a state of violent unrest. Sometimes the rebels—who might or might not belong to a band of insurrectos—raided local ranches. The cavalry watched over the border. The situation in Mexico was becoming even more explosive than it usually was.

It had already been an interesting year up until that point, too, with Halley’s Comet terrorizing the world in May and the sad event of King Edward’s death on its heels. In the months that followed, there had been a volcanic eruption in Alaska and a devastating earthquake in Costa Rica. Now there was this border trouble, which made life interesting for Teddy, but deeply upset ranchers and private citizens. Everyone knew people who were connected with mining down in Sonora, because six Sonoran mining companies had their headquarters in Douglas. And plenty of local ranchers also owned land over in Mexico; foreign ownership of Mexican land to exploit mining interests and ranching was one of the root causes of the growing unrest over the border.

A detachment of khaki-clad U.S. Cavalry soldiers from the encampment at Fort Huachuca had come riding through only today, their officers in a snappy touring car with mounted troops behind them, scouting for trouble and looking so attractive that Trilby had to choke down a wildly uncharacteristic impulse to smile and wave at them. Teddy had no such inhibitions. He almost fell off the porch waving as they filed by. This column didn’t stop to ask for water, which had disappointed her young brother.

Teddy was so unlike her. She had blond hair and gray eyes; he had red hair and blue eyes. She smiled as she remembered the grandfather for whom he was a dead ringer.

“Two of our Mexican cowboys admire Mr. Madero very much. They say Díaz is a dictator and that he should be thrown out,” he told her.

“I do hope the matter is settled before it ends in a total war,” she said worriedly, “so that we don’t get caught in the middle of any fighting. It worries Mama, too, so don’t talk about it much, will you?”

“All right,” he said reluctantly. Airplanes, baseball, Mexican unrest, and the often related memories of his elderly friend, Mosby Torrance, were his biggest thrill at the moment, but he didn’t want to worry Trilby with just how serious the situation down in Mexico was becoming. She had no idea what the cowboys talked about. Teddy wasn’t supposed to know, either, but he’d overheard a good deal. It was frightening to him; it would be more frightening to his sheltered older sister.

Trilby had always been protected from rough language and rough people. Being in Arizona, around Westerners who had to cope with the desert and livestock and the weather—and the threat of rustling to stay alive—had changed her. She didn’t smile as often as she had back in Louisiana, and there was less mischief about her. Teddy missed the Trilby of years past. This new older sister was so reserved and quiet that sometimes he wasn’t sure she was even in the house.

Even now she was staring out over the barren landscape, into the distance, with that faraway look in her eyes. “I expect Richard is back from Europe by now,” she murmured. “I wish he could have come out to see us. Perhaps in a month or so, when he’s settled at home, he can. It will be pleasant to be in the company of a gentleman again.”

Richard Bates had been Trilby’s big love interest back home, but Teddy had never liked the man. He might be a gentleman, but compared to these Arizonamen, he seemed pretty anemic and silly.

He didn’t say so, though. Even at his age, he was learning diplomacy. It wouldn’t do to antagonize poor Trilby. She was having a hard enough time adjusting to Arizona as it was.

“I love the desert,” Teddy said. “Don’t you like it, just the least bit?”

“Well, I suppose I’m getting used to it,” she said quietly. “But I haven’t yet developed a taste for this horrible yellow dust. It gets into everything I cook,” she said, “as well as into our clothes.”

“It’s better to do girl stuff than brand cattle, I tell you,” he said, sounding just like their father. “All that blood and dust and noise. The cowboys curse, too.”

Trilby smiled at him. “I expect they do; Papa, too. But never around us. Only when it’s an accident.”

“There’s lots of accidents when you’re branding cattle, Trilby,” he drawled dryly, imitating his hero Mosby Torrance. He was a retired Texas Ranger and the ranch’s oldest hand. Teddy looked at her, frowning. “Trilby, are you ever going to marry? You’re old.”

“I’m only twenty-four,” she said self-consciously. Most of her girlfriends back home in Louisiana were married and had babies. Trilby had been waiting patiently for five years for Richard to propose. So far, he was no more than a friend, and her heart was heavy.

She might have been swayed if other young men had come courting, but Trilby wasn’t beautiful on the outside, even if she did have a warm, gentle heart and a sweet nature. She didn’t have the kind of face that set male hearts quivering, even back home. Here on a cattle ranch there weren’t many eligible men who were marriage worthy. Not that she wanted to marry anyone she’d met in Arizona. She thought of cowboys as a lazy lot, and many of them drank, and used tobacco and alcohol, and never bathed.