Diamond in the Rough

“I guess she’s stronger than she looks,” John remarked, but he didn’t like it.

Tarleton nodded absently. He was putting Gil Callister’s name in his ledger.

“I’ll be back,” John told him as he picked up the toolbox.

Tarleton nodded again.

John glanced at the girl, who was straining over a heavy bag, and walked out of the store with a scowl on his face.

He paused. He didn’t know why. He glanced back into the store and saw the manager standing on the loading platform, watching the girl lift the feed sacks. It wasn’t the look a manager should be giving an employee. John’s eyes narrowed. He was going to do something about that.

One of the older cowboys, Chad Dean by name, was waiting for him at the house when he brought in the toolbox.

“Say, that’s a nice one,” he told the other man. “Your boss must be stinking rich.”

“He is,” John mused. “Pays good, too.”

The cowboy chuckled. “That would be nice, getting a paycheck that I could feed my kids on. I couldn’t move my family to another town without giving up land that belonged to my grandfather, so I toughed it out. It’s been rough, what with food prices and gas going through the roof.”

“You’ll get your regular check plus travel expenses,” John told him. “We’ll pay for the gas if we have to send you anywhere to pick up things.”

“That’s damned considerate.”

“If you work hard, your wages will go up.”

“We’ll all work hard,” Dean promised solemnly. “We’re just happy to have jobs.”

John pursed his lips. “Do you know a girl named Sassy? Works for Tarleton in the feed store?”

“Yeah,” Dean replied tersely. “He’s married, and he makes passes at Sassy. She needs that job. Her mama’s dying. There’s a six-year-old kid lives with them, too, and Sassy has to take care of her. I don’t know how in hell she manages on what she gets paid. All that, and having to put up with Tarleton’s harassment, too. My wife told her she should call the law and report him. She won’t. She says she can’t afford to lose the position. Town’s so small, she’d never get hired again. Tarleton would make sure of it, just for spite, if she quit.”

John nodded. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I expect things will get easier for her,” he predicted.

“Do you? Wish I did. She’s a sweet kid. Always doing things for other people.” He smiled. “My son had his appendix out. It was Sassy who saw what it was, long before we did. He was in the feed store when he got sick. She called the doctor. He looked over my Mark and agreed it was appendicitis. Doc drove the boy over to Billings to the hospital. Sassy went to see him. God knows how she got there. Her old beat-up vehicle would never make it as far as Billings. Hitched a ride with Carl Parks, I expect. He’s in his seventies, but he watches out for Sassy and her mother. Good old fellow.”

John nodded. “Sounds like it.” He hesitated. “How old is the girl?”

“Eighteen or nineteen, I guess. Just out of high school.”

“I figured that.” John was disappointed. He didn’t understand why. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do about those fences temporarily…”

In the next two days, John did some amateur detective work. He phoned a private detective who worked for the Callisters on business deals and put him on the Tarleton man. It didn’t take him long to report back.

The feed store manager had been allowed to resign from a job in Billings for unknown reasons, but the detective found one other employee who said it was sexual harassment of an employee. He wasn’t charged with anything. He’d moved here, to Hollister, with his family when the owner of the feed store, a man named Jake McGuire, advertised in a trade paper for someone to manage it for him. Apparently Tarleton had been the only applicant and McGuire was desperate. Tarleton got the job.

“This McGuire,” John asked over his cell phone, “how old is he?”

“In his thirties,” came the reply. “Everyone I spoke to about him said that he’s a decent sort.”

“In other words, he doesn’t have a clue that Tarleton’s hassling the girl.”

“That would be my guess.”

John’s eyes twinkled. “Do you suppose McGuire would like to sell that business?”

There was a chuckle. “He’s losing money hand over fist on that place. Two of the people I spoke to said he’d almost give it away to get rid of it.”

“Thanks,” John said. “That answers my question. Can you get me McGuire’s telephone number?”

“Already did. Here it is.”

John wrote it down. The next morning, he put in a call to McGuire Enterprises in Billings.

“I’m looking to buy a business in a town called Hollister,” John said after he’d introduced himself. “Someone said you might know the owner of the local feed store.”

“The feed store?” McGuire replied. “You want to buy it?” He sounded astonished.

“I might,” John said. “If the price is right.”

There was a pause. “Okay, here’s the deal. That business was started by my father over forty years ago. I inherited it when he died. I don’t really want to sell it.”

“It’s going bankrupt,” John replied.

There was another pause. “Yeah, I know,” came the disgusted reply. “I had to put in a new manager there, and he didn’t come cheap. I had to move him and his wife from Billings down here.” He sighed. “I’m between a rock and a hard place. I own several businesses, and I don’t have the time to manage them myself. That particular one has sentimental value. The manager just went to work. There’s a chance he can pull it out of the red.”

“There’s a better chance that he’s going to get you involved in a major lawsuit.”

“What? What for?”

“For one thing, he was let go from his last job for sexual harassment, or that’s what we turned up on a background check. He’s up to his old tricks in Hollister, this time with a young girl just out of high school that he hired to work for him.”

“Good Lord! He came with excellent references!”

“He might have them,” John said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if that wasn’t the first time he lost a job for the same reason. He was giving the girl the eye when I was in there. There’s local gossip that the girl may sue if your manager doesn’t lay off her. There goes your bottom line,” he added dryly.

“Well, that’s what you get when you’re desperate for personnel,” McGuire said wearily. “I couldn’t find anybody else who’d take the job. I can’t fire him without proper cause, and I just paid to move him there! What a hell of a mess!”

“You don’t want to sell the business. Okay. How about leasing it to us? We’ll fire Tarleton on the grounds that we’re leasing the business, put in a manager of our own, and you’ll make money. We’ll have you in the black in two months.”

“And just who is ‘we’?” McGuire wanted to know.

“My brother and I. We’re ranchers.”

“But why would you want to lease a feed store in the middle of nowhere?”

“Because we just bought the Bradbury place. We’re going to rebuild the house, add a stable and a barn, and we’re going to raise purebred young bulls on the place. The feed store is going to do a lot of business when we start adding personnel to the outfit.”

“Old man Bradbury and my father were best friends,” McGuire reminisced. “He was a fine rancher, a nice gentleman. His health failed and the business failed with him. It’s nice to know it will be a working ranch again.”