Miss Murray On The Cattle Trail

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 (#u7f29011c-f6ff-5395-84cf-b633a27f70d8)

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.