A small, bearded man, a jug in his hand, had his face upturned to the rain and sky, his arms spread, yelling words I couldn’t hear.
My first instinct was to shy clear of this pair and their troubles, but there are some things a man can’t ride around, and I knew deep within myself that this was one of them.
I kneed the black forward and rode to the wagon, the teeming rain running in sheets off the shoulders of my slicker.
The girl stepped toward me as I drew closer and I reined up and touched the brim of my hat. “Ma’am,” I said, my voice suddenly unsteady.
Even in a pounding rain, her black curls plastered to her forehead under the hood of her cloak, this girl was breathtakingly beautiful. She possessed a dark, flashing kind of beauty and I thought—treacherously, I admit—that it made Sally Coleman’s blue-eyed, yellow-haired prettiness seem insipid by comparison.
The girl’s eyes were huge and brown, framed by long lashes and her mouth was small but full-lipped and ripe in her heart-shaped face. That was a mouth made for kissing and I had the urge to swing out of the saddle and plant a smacker on her.
Of course I did no such thing, staying right where I was as I said: “I figure you’ve got yourself in a tolerable amount of trouble, ma’am.”
The girl nodded, and from what I could see of her gray wool dress under the cloak, she was slender and mighty shapely. “The wagon tongue just snapped.” She turned and pointed to where the wagon’s front wheels were almost up to their axles in mud. “We got bogged down and when Pa whipped up the oxen to pull us out, the tongue just broke.”
I saw tears start in the girl’s eyes, and being young and ardent and of a chivalrous nature, I swung out of the saddle and stepped close behind her.
“Don’t you fret none, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do for your wagon.”
The girl blinked back tears. “You’d do that for us?”
I shrugged. “Name’s Dusty Hannah and since there’s no one else around, I guess I got it to do.”
At that, the man stepped from behind the wagon, saw me and let out a cheer, then yelled:
Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the
best,
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,
He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
The man stopped and blinked at me like an owl. “Well, young Lochinvar, are you come to save us or rob us?” He extended the jug. “Here, take a drink.”
I shook my head at him. “I don’t care for any right now,” I said.
The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. More for me.”
Then he put the jug to his mouth and drank deeply, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.
“My name is Lila Tryon and that’s my father, Ned.” The girl’s eyes searched my face, as though trying to find the understanding she hoped for. “He . . . he’s not been well.”
Ned Tryon had the same dark brown eyes as his daughter, but what was beautiful in her was weak in him. They were the vague eyes of a dreamer, the eyes of a man unsuited to survive in the hard, unforgiving land that lay around us.
I stepped over to the wagon tongue and Lila came over and stood beside me. “Can it be fixed?”
I nodded. “If you have a hammer and nails in the wagon.”
“We do,” Lila said. “And there’s some sturdy oak wood if you need that.”
I stood there looking at the tongue for a while, then turned to the girl and asked: “Where are you and your pa headed?”
She eased her wet hood away from her face and gave me a dazzling smile that made my heart jump.
“We’ve come all the way from Missouri. We had a farm there”—her eyes slid to her father—“but it didn’t work out. Then Pa’s brother died and left us his ranch down south of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, just a few miles east of Beals Creek.”
I nodded. “Know that country well. It’s right close to my home ranch, the SP Connected.”
“Pa says his brother wrote to him once and described the place, a strong stone cabin on a hundred and sixty acres, all of it good pastureland cut through by creeks.”
“I suppose you could keep enough cows on it to get by,” I said, “though it will take a strong back and some mighty hard work.”
Lila shook her head. “Oh, no, not cattle. Pa plans to farm the place.”
“That’s cow country, ma’am,” I said, my patience fraying fast, unable to believe what I was hearing.
“The soil is too thin and rocky for farming. Besides,” I added, then instantly regretted it, “we don’t take kindly to sodbusters down there.”
“Then you’ll just have to get used to us, won’t you, Mr. Hannah?” Lila snapped, annoyance flaring in her eyes.
That little gal had spirit and I let it go. “You go ahead and do what you must, ma’am,” I said. “But you’ll fare no better at farming in Texas than you did in Missouri and maybe a lot worse.”
Ned Tryon lurched toward us. “Ah,” he said, “the lovers’ first quarrel and all because of the poor, downtrodden farmer.” Tryon tilted back his head and yelled at the uncaring sky:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans,
Upon his hoe and gazes at the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Tryon spat between his feet, then blinked his bleary eyes at me. “You’re so right, you know, gallant young Lochinvar. Farming is a life for a hog. It’s not for me, a poet, an artist . . . a philosopher.”
Lila rushed to her pa and took him by his thin shoulders. “Pa, you promised. You told me this time we’ll make it. Back in Missouri you said this was the fresh start we needed.”
The man pushed his daughter away roughly. “As a farmer, never!” His eyes wild, Ned Tryon clutched the jug to his chest. “That was your ma’s dream, Lila, never mine and in the end it killed her. Remember the endless poverty and me trying to wrest a living from land that grew only rock and weeds? Remember your ma looking at the catalogs, her eyes bright, wishful for all the nice things I could never buy her? Remember how she just faded away, worn down by hard work and harder disappointments?” He lurched back toward the wagon. “For God’s sake, leave me be, child, and let me drink myself into blessed release.”
Lila bent her head and I heard her sob. I was of a mind to say something hard to her father, but he had put a thief in his mouth to steal his tongue and I might as well stand in a storm and chastise the wind.
I stood there, awkward and lost, looking at Lila, trying to find the right words. They didn’t come to me, so in the end I said: “I guess I better get to fixing that wagon tongue.”
The girl nodded, her tearstained eyes made wetter by the rain. “I’ll find you the wood and a hammer.”
Lila stepped to the back of the wagon and I followed. She rummaged under the canvas tarp and I got a chance to see what they were hauling. All of it—an organ, a dresser, a rocking chair, china cups and plates and a tarnished silver tea service—was suited to a lace-and-lilac parlor in Missouri but not the rawboned cow country south of the Red.
A plow was tied to the side of the wagon, its steel blade bright, the handles not honed to a honey color by sweat and toil, but still raw and pine yellow. This plow had not seen much work and had rested in a barn more often than it had dug furrows in the soil.