Two Brothers (23 page)

In time, he had a good bit of water heated, enough to fill the copper washtub, and he stripped down until he was naked as God’s truth and gave himself a good scouring right there in the kitchen end of the house. Figuring he needed rinsing, he wrapped a sheet of toweling around his middle and headed for the yard again, meaning to douse himself with a bucket or two at the pump.

That was when he first heard the sheep.

Head dripping, one hand clasping the towel in place, Tristan stood absolutely still and listened. Yes. That bleating sound, growing ever nearer, was unmistakable.

He looked around and saw dust rising against the eastern sky in great, surging billows, like the aftermath of some apocalyptic eruption. The din was louder now, and he made out the barking of a dog, woven through in uneven stitches of noise.

The flock came over the rise behind his house then, a great, greasy-gray mob of complaining wool, heading hell-bent for the creek. Before Tristan could deal with his indignation at the intrusion, they were all around him, carrying on fit to rouse the mummies of Egypt, brushing past, raising enough grit to ruin the effects of his bath.

He watched, hot-eyed, as the sheepherder came toward him, mounted on a little spotted pony. He was a small man clad in a battered slouch hat, butternut shirt, dirty serape, indigo denim pants and scuffed boots, about as unprepossessing as he could be. The dog, some type of long-haired mix, paid Tristan no mind at all, but continued driving the
sheep toward water. God knew, the beasts were probably too stupid to find it on their own.

“I guess you didn’t notice the fence,” Tristan said moderately, taking a hold on the pony’s bridle, when the shepherd would have ridden right past him.

The trespasser’s face was hidden by the shadow of his hat brim. The sheep were still spilling over the rise, and raising such a cacophony that Tristan thought his head would split. That was probably why it took a moment for the soft timbre of the stranger’s voice to register on his senses.

“Let go of my horse. It’s thirsty and so am I.”

Tristan held on, frowning. Took a tighter grasp on the towel. “That fence—”

The slouch hat fell back on its ties at a toss of the shepherd’s head, revealing a head of honey-colored hair, wound into a single plait, a pair of brown eyes, thickly lashed and snapping with furious bravado, and a wide, womanly mouth. She was perhaps twenty years old, and about as ill-suited to the task she’d undertaken as it was possible to be, by his reckoning at least. Her features were refined, her bone structure was delicate; no, indeed, she was not fitted for the occupation she had chosen.

“I pulled down the fence,” she said, without apology, patting a coil of frayed rope affixed to her saddle. “I won’t be kept off my own land.”

Tristan, still dealing with the fact that the shepherd was a woman, and the finest he’d ever seen into the account, for all that she was in sore need of tidying up, was a beat behind. The towel around his waist had taken on a whole new significance, now that his perception of the circumstances had been so drastically altered.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

He grinned, standing there in his dooryard, covered in goose bumps and sheep dust and damn little else. “That is an audacious question,” he said, “given the situation. My name is Tristan Saint-Laurent, and this is
my
land.”

The change in her face was barely noticeable, just a slight faltering of an otherwise resolute countenance. “You are mistaken, sir,” she said. Her gaze strayed over his bare chest, took in the loincloth arrangement, and careened back up to his face. A flush stained the smooth skin beneath all that trail dirt. “Or perhaps you are simply a squatter.”

“I have papers to prove I’m neither,” Tristan answered, not unkindly. He was beginning to feel a little sorry for the woman, which was a laudable change from feeling sorry for himself. Of course, if she’d been a man, he might have shot her by now.

He took in the sheep, still trampling the grass in their migration to the creek, and then looked up at her again. “This is cattle country, Miss—?”

“Starbuck,” she said, grudgingly. “Emily Starbuck.”

He scanned the horizon, now a ragged scallop of lingering dust. The dog had gone back to collect the stragglers, but there was no sign of another horse, a wagon, or a herder on foot. Still up to his ass in sheep, Tristan was nonetheless distracted from the immediate problem. “You’re not traveling all by yourself, are you?” he asked, bemused.

“Of course not,” she answered, with a brittle, impatient little smile. “I’ve got Spud with me.” With a toss of her head, she indicated the hardworking dog, then leaned forward slightly to pat the pony’s gritty neck. “And Walter, here. Now, if you wouldn’t mind getting out of my way, I’d like to water my horse at my stream.”

Issues of ownership aside, Walter was a mare, Tristan had observed that right off, but he concluded that maybe it gave Miss Starbuck comfort to call the animal by a masculine name. “Go ahead and attend to your mount,” he said. “Then you’d better come inside, where we can talk this out.”

She eyed him, letting her gaze stray no lower than his breastbone this time, and blushed again. “I’m not stepping
foot over that threshold or any other in the company of a near-naked man,” she said with conviction, casting a glance back over one slender shoulder at the house. “Have you got a wife in there? Or a sister, at least? Somebody to serve for a chaperone?”

“No,” Tristan answered, “but you’re perfectly safe all the same. I am a gentleman.”

Her glance was skeptical. His hold having slackened on the bridle, she reined the horse away and rode past him, through what must have been four acres of bawling woollies, toward the water.

He might have been amused by the whole situation, if it hadn’t been for those blasted sheep; if they got onto his range, they’d crop the grass off flush with the ground, leaving nothing but stubble for his cattle. Those he hadn’t already lost through the gap in the fence, that is. He had to get rid of Miss Starbuck and her flock, soon, whether he liked the prospect or not.

Suddenly self-conscious, Tristan hurried into the house and up the stairs to his room, where he dressed hastily. His bathwater was still sitting near the kitchen floor, and he was almost as dirty as if he’d never taken a bar of soap to his hide at all, but expediency precluded all other considerations.

He nearly collided with the Starbuck woman when he wrenched open the front door and burst through it with the full momentum of urgency behind him. He gripped her shoulders, lest she fall, and in that tiny fraction of time, the merest shadow of a moment, something eternal happened. He released her as instantly as if she were made of hot metal, but it was too late. He knew he wasn’t the same man who’d taken hold.

“Come inside,” he said.

She seemed as shaken as he was, and he wondered if she’d felt the same strange, elemental tumult he had. “All—all right.” She looked a lot smaller, now that she was down off that horse. Tristan figured she’d feel as fragile and fine-boned
as a bird, if he were to touch her again. Which, of course, he wasn’t about to do. Not yet, anyway.

There were no makings for tea in his bachelor’s cupboard, but he did produce coffee, in fairly short order, while Miss Starbuck—he already thought of her as Emily, though he supposed that was presumptuous of him—sat primly at his plain pine table, her hands folded in her lap, her outsized hat resting on the floor beside her. The infernal babble of her sheep seeped through the chinking in the sturdy log walls of the house, serving as an irritating reminder that women were women and business was business. And sheep sure as hell were sheep.

“This
is
the Eustace Cummings place, isn’t it?” Emily inquired, at some length, when Tristan set a mug of steaming coffee before her.

“It was,” he answered. “I bought it from him a year ago. Are you hungry? You look a little peaky.”

Great tears swelled and glistened in her eyes, but she blinked them away, simultaneously shaking her head. Although she sat with her head high and her backbone rigidly straight, her despair was evident. Her hands trembled as she pulled off her leather gloves and shoved them into a pocket of the serape. “I have a marker here,” she said, and stood a moment to pull a folded document from the pocket of her denims. Intrigued by the concept of a woman in pants, Tristan started wishing she’d remove the serape, and had to bring himself back to the moment by force of will. “Mr. Cummings put this place up as collateral for a debt,” she went on, handing him the paper. “He defaulted, as you can see by this paper, and ownership was transferred to my uncle—”

He was touched by the earnestness of her expression. “Your uncle,” he prompted, somewhat hoarsely, when she fell silent in the middle of the sentence.

“He died a month ago. But he left me this land and those sheep out there.” She shoved the document toward him and he scanned it, and was more convinced than ever that it was
a forgery. Eustace Cummings had been illiterate, but the paper bore a flowing signature. “They’re all I have in the world.” This last was no bid for pity, but instead a clear warning against such sentiments, should he be harboring any.

Tristan wondered if there was a blade of grass left on the acre surrounding his house; like as not, he wouldn’t be able to walk to the barn without sinking to his ankles in sheep shit. He was strangely unconcerned, given how much sweat, money, hope and calculation he’d put into the place.

“You’ve been cheated,” he said, very quietly. He wished he had some tea to offer her; the stuff seemed to perk a woman up. His mother had always taken orange pekoe when she felt melancholy, and Aislinn generally brewed the like for Dorrie, if she got to pining for her lost love, Leander.

She sat even more stiffly than before, looking miserable. Her white, even teeth were sunk into her lower lip. Presently, she said, “You will be called upon to prove that assertion, sir.”

“Stop calling me ‘sir,’” he ordered. “This is not a cotillion or a box social, and we’re casual out here in the countryside. Where are you from, anyway?”

She sighed. “Minnesota.”

“You came all the way from Minnesota driving that flock, with just a dog to help you?”

That was when she smiled, and if Tristan had been standing, he’d have rocked back onto his heels. He damn near turned his chair over as it was, such was the impact of a simple change of expression. “I did not acquire the sheep until I reached Butte,” she replied, and the smile was gone as quickly as it had arrived. The effect of its absence was quite as dramatic as that of its appearance, though in the opposite way. “You see, my uncle was my only remaining relative, and I was his ward, after a fashion. He contracted consumption, and summoned me to his side, but by the time I arrived, he was gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Tristan said, and he wasn’t just talking. He had no blood family but Shay, and even though he’d really only known his brother for a year, he didn’t like to think what it would mean to lose him. He didn’t realize until she looked down at the tabletop that he’d laid his hand over hers.

She withdrew none too hastily. “Your proof?”

Tristan was momentarily baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

Emily tapped the document with the tip of a grubby index finger. “You claim to own my land. I should like to see on what authority you base your declaration, sir—er—Mr. Saint-Laurent.”

“Tristan,” he said, getting up. “You might as well call me by my Christian name, because I fully intend to address you as Emily.”

Once again, she colored, but she let the remark pass.

He was grinning a little as he crossed the long room to the plain wood table he used as a desk. It was situated near the fireplace, a handy thing on cold nights. He took a deed from the single drawer—there was another just like it in the bank vault in town—and came unhurriedly back to where Miss Starbuck waited. Outside, the sheep continued to raise a mournful dirge.

She read the deed and if it hadn’t been for the dirt covering her face, she’d have had no color at all. She swallowed hard. “Do you suppose Mr. Cummings deceived my uncle?” she asked, when an interval had passed, chopped off second by second, one tick of the mantel clock at a time.

Tristan knew only that his title to the land was legal. Looking at Emily Starbuck, sitting there in her oversized clothes, needing a bath and one of Aislinn’s hearty meals even more than he did, he almost regretted his advantage. “It’s possible,” he said. “Cummings wouldn’t be the first to cover a debt with a worthless note.”

Emily sagged a little, inside all those clothes, and Tristan braced himself to catch her, fearing she was about to swoon.
Instead, she rallied, her spine straight as the handle of a pitchfork. “We shall have to carry this matter before the law,” she said decisively.

Tristan pointed out the date on her marker, which fell a full six months after his own cash purchase of the ranch, but he could see that even an obvious prior claim did not convince her. “I’ve got a few acres up in the hills where you can put those sheep,” he heard himself say. “Just until everything’s been decided, I mean.”

She looked at him steadily for a few moments, but he knew nonetheless that she was doing everything she could to keep from breaking down to weep. He put away an urge to take her into his arms and assure her that things would work out, he’d see to it. She stood.

“That’s kindly of you,” she said. “If you’d just point the way—”

He was on his feet. “I’ll lead you there myself.” He intended to talk her into putting the sheep in the dog’s care, just long enough to come to town with him and tuck into some fried chicken at Shay and Aislinn’s place.

“I couldn’t abandon them,” she said, when he had made the suggestion, indicating the ocean of moving, baaing wool with a nod of her head. He was mounted on the gelding, and she was beside him, riding the mare she called Walter. “One cannot merely leave them to wander and round them up whenever you want. Sheep are not like cattle, Mr. Saint-Laurent.”

“I do know that, ma’am,” Tristan agreed good-temperedly. “And it’s Tristan.” He adjusted his hat and sighed, looking up at the twilight sky as he spurred the gelding into an ambling trot. The smell of live mutton filled his nostrils like an itch. “There’s an old man in a line shack up ahead; I’ll get him to keep an eye on the flock for you. You can’t spend the night up there alone anyway.”