Cattleman's Choice

She opened the door and fixed the tall, blond man with a rueful smile. “Where is he?” she asked.

He took off his hat with a sigh. “In town,” he replied. “At the Rodeo bar.”

“Is he drunk?” she asked warily.

The foreman hesitated. One corner of his mouth went up. “Yes, ma’am,” he said finally.

“That’s the second time in the last two months,” she said with flashing gray eyes.

Jake shrugged, turning his hat around in his hands. “Maybe money’s getting tight,” he guessed.

“It’s been tight before. And it isn’t as if he doesn’t have options, either,” she grumbled, turning. “I’ve had a buyer for that forty-acre tract of his for months. He won’t even discuss it.”

“Miss Bush, you know how he feels about those condominium complexes,” he reminded her. “That land’s been in his family since the Civil War.”

“He’s got thousands of acres!” she burst out. “He wouldn’t miss forty!”

“Well, that particular forty is where the old fort stands.”

“Nobody’s likely to use it these days,” she said with venom.

He only shrugged, and she went off to change her clothes. Minutes later, dressed in a yellow sweater and designer jeans, she drew on her suede jacket and went out to climb in beside Jake in the black pickup truck with the Circle Bar W logo of Carson Wayne’s cattle company emblazoned in red on the door.

“Why doesn’t anybody else ever get called to go save people from him?” she asked curtly.

Jake glanced at her with a faint smile. “Because you’re the only person in the valley who isn’t scared of him.”

“You and the boys could bring him home,” she suggested.

“We tried once. Doctor bills got too expensive.” He grinned. “He won’t hit you.”

That was true enough. Carson indulged her. He was fiery and rough and lived like a hermit in that faded frame building he called a house. He hated neighbors and he was as savage a man as she’d ever known. But from the first, he’d warmed to her. People said it was because she was from Charleston, South Carolina and a lady and he felt protective of her. That was true, up to a point. But Mandelyn also knew that he liked her because she had the same wild spirit he possessed, because she stood up to him fearlessly. It had been that way from the very beginning.

They wound along the dusty ranch road out to the highway. There was just enough light to see the giant saguaro cacti lifting their arms to the sky, and the dark mountains silhouetted against the horizon. Arizona was beautiful enough to take Mandelyn’s breath away, even after eight years as a resident. She’d come from South Carolina at the age of eighteen, devastated by personal tragedy, expecting to find the barren land a perfect expression of her own emotional desolation. But her first sight of the Chiricahua Mountains had changed her mind. Since then, she’d learned to look upon the drastically different vegetation with loving, familiar eyes, and in time the lush green coastline of South Carolina had slowly faded from memory, replaced by the glory of creosote bushes in the rain and the stately stoicism of the saguaro. Her cultured upbringing was still evident in her proud carriage and her soft, delicately accented voice, but she was as much an Arizonian now as a Zane Grey character.

“Why does he do this?” she asked as they wound into the small town of Sweetwater.

“Not my business to guess,” came the reply. “But he’s a lonely man, and feeling his years.”

“He’s only thirty-eight,” she said. “Hardly a candidate for Medicare.”

Jake looked at her speculatively. “He’s alone, Miss Bush,” he said. “Problems don’t get so big when you can share them.”

She sighed. How well she knew that. Since her uncle’s death four years before, she’d had her share of loneliness. If it hadn’t been for her real estate agency, and her involvement in half a dozen organizations, she might have left Sweetwater for good just out of desperation.

Jake parked in front of the Rodeo bar and got out. Mandelyn was on the ground before he could come around the hood. She started toward the door.

The bartender was waiting in the doorway, wringing his apron, his bald head shining in the streetlight.

“Thank God,” he said uneasily, glancing behind him. “Mandelyn, he’s got a cowboy treed out back.”

She stopped, blinking. “He’s what?”

“One of the Lazy X’s hands said something that set him off. God knows what. He was just sitting quiet at the table, going through a bottle of whiskey, not bothering anybody, and the stupid cowboy…” He stopped on an impatient sigh. “He busted my mirror, again. He broke half a dozen bottles of whiskey. The cowboy had to go to the hospital to get his jaw wired back together….”

“Wait a minute,” she said, holding up a hand. “You said he had the cowboy treed…”

“The cowboy whose jaw he broke had friends,” the bartender sighed. “Three of them. One is out cold on the floor. Another one is hanging from his jacket on a hook where Carson put him. The third one, the last one, is up in a tree out back of here and Carson is sitting there, grinning, waiting for him to come down again.”

Carson never grinned. Not unless he was mad as hell and ready for blood. “Oh, my,” Mandelyn sighed. “How about the sheriff?”

“Like most sane men, he gave the job of bringing Carson in to his deputy.”

Mandelyn lifted her delicate eyebrows. “And?”

“The deputy,” the bartender told her, “is in the hall closet, asking very loudly to be let out.”

“Why don’t you let him out?” she persisted.

“Carson,” the bartender replied, “has the key.”

“Oh.”

Jake pulled his hat low over his eyes. “I’m going to sit in the truck,” he said.

“Better go get the bail bondsman out of bed first, Jake,” the bartender said darkly.

“Why bother?” Jake asked. “Sheriff Wilson isn’t going to get out of bed to arrest the boss, and since Danny’s locked in the closet, I’d say it’s all over but the crying.”

“And the paying,” the bartender added.

“He’ll pay you. He always does.”

The bartender made a harsh sound in his throat. “That doesn’t make up for the inconvenience. Having to order mirrors…clean up broken glass…it used to be once every few months, about time his taxes came due. Now it’s every month. What’s eating him?”

“I wish I knew,” Mandelyn sighed. “Well, I’d better go get him.”

“Lots of luck,” the bartender said curtly. “Watch out. He may have a gun.”

“He may need it,” she told him with a cold smile.

She walked through the bar, out the back door, just in time to catch the tail end of a long and ardent string of curses. They were delivered by a tall man in a sheepskin coat who was glaring up at a shivering, skinny man in the top of an oak tree.

“Miss Bush,” the Lazy X cowboy wailed down at her. “Help!”

The tall, whipcord-lean man turned, pale blue eyes lancing at her from under thick black eyebrows. He was wearing a dark ranch hat pulled low on his forehead, and his lean, tough face needed a shave as much as his thick, ragged hair needed cutting. He had a pistol in one hand and just the look of him would have been enough to frighten most men.

“Go ahead, shoot,” she dared him, “and I’ll haunt you, you bad-tempered Arizona sidewinder!”