Addie frowned, wondering if there had been a compliment hidden in there. It was hard to tell. "I'm glad you've got a foreman smart enough to tell us what to do, Daddy," she said, her eyes round. If she'd had Mary Pickford curls, she would have twirled one around her finger.
Russ harrumphed irritably. "No one tells me what to do with my daughter, Ben. She's lookin' over the ranch with me today. "
"By all means." Ben's face was smooth, wiped clean of all emotion.
By the time Addie and Russell arrived at the barn, Ben had already left to organize the ranch hands as they began the projects that would keep them busy all summer. The horses were saddled and ready to go. Russell exchanged a few words with one of the cowboys who had been assigned to do some of the necessary farmwork near the ranch. Someone had to take care of the chickens and gather eggs, harvest alfalfa hay and stack it.
Making hay was a difficult job. It took experience to know when the hay was well-cured, when the color was right, how long it should lie in the swath after being mowed, and when it was dry enough to be stacked. It was drying out in the fields right now, changing color under the bright, hot Texas sun. There was nothing like the sweet smell of well-cured hay. It had a perfume that seemed to saturate the air for miles around.
But the cowboys took little pleasure in such work.
They felt it was beneath their dignity to perform such tasks-why, that was a job for sodbusters, not cowboys! And since they were merciless in their teasing of each other, the hands who had to do sodbuster work were artfully ridiculed by the other cowpunchers.
While Russell was talking with the ranch hand, Addie approached Jessie from the side. " 'Morning, Jessie. I see you're not wearing that nasty old sidesaddle today. What a pretty horse you are. Yes, you are." Jessie's head turned in her direction, ears twitching expectantly. "We're not going to have any problems like we did yesterday," Addie continued, reaching a hand in her pocket and pulling out a lump of sugar. "We're making a deal, Jessie-you know what it is-and this is evidence of my good faith. And believe me, if you live up to your end of the bargain, there's more where this came from."
Jessie bent her head and took the sugar delicately between her lips, looking at her with wary brown eyes. Suddenly she gobbled it and pushed her nose strongly against Addie's midriff, nudging her for more. "I can tell we're going to be good friends," Addie said conversationally, pulling out another lump and extending it to the horse. Jessie's nose was as soft as velvet as it brushed her palm in search of the sugar. She stroked the side of the mare's neck and showed her the spurless boots she wore. "See, Jessie? Slick-heeled, just for you."
Jessie offered not one twitch of protest as Addie slipped the tip of her boot into the stirrup and hoisted herself up into the saddle. After swinging a leg over the saddle, she arranged her divided skirt and looked at Russell expectantly. He had just finished his conversation.
"I'm ready."
"Looks like y'are." Russell mounted his horse, a large white gelding named General Cotton, and they rode away from the house, out into the range. "I guess you know your mama wasn't too happy 'bout this," he said, looking like a boy who had just gotten away with a prank..
"I don't understand why," she replied, sincerely puzzled. "What could be wrong with me looking over the ranch with you?"
"She's always had plans for you, Adeline. Plans about making you into somethin' you aren't meant to be. Sending you to that school in Virginia to learn about fancy manners and poetry books, hoping you'd' find some eastern lawyer or businessman to hitch up with-well, I knew it wouldn't work. I knew you'd want to come back where you belong. Cade and Caroline favor your mama. She wasn't born to ranching. She's settled into this life pretty well, but in her heart she'll never stop hankerin' for her people in the East. But I think you favor me, Adeline. And you and I were born to this." He waved his hand at the land in front of them. "Look around you. Would you trade all this to live in a hotel or a town house with the kind of goody-goody May wants for you? You don't want a man decked out in city clothes, someone with soft hands and white skin, afraid of dirt and animals, and everything that's nat'ral. They city whips the manliness out of 'em. Our boys out here are rough-cut, Adeline, but they're men, and they got respect for a woman. Too much respect to let 'er wear the pants in the family and do their work. A man out here knows how to take care of a woman."
Addie listened to him with growing alarm. She didn't want to wear the pants in the family or to bully any man. If or when her thoughts ever turned to marriage, she would need the kind of husband who would let her be his partner, his lover and friend. Was it useless to hope that someday she would find someone who would let her be his equal?
"Let's talk about something else," she said, her forehead creasing, and obligingly Russ started lecturing heron the running of the ranch. The horses' hooves splashed through a shallow stream, then thudded along the edge of an alfalfa field. A line of trees bordered the other side, having been planted there to act as a windbreak. On the other side of the field, the lush green of the land turned to the dry brown-green of true rangeland. Addie noticed that all the trees they passed by had clipped edge on the bottoms, like skirts that had been hemmed too short.
"Why have the lowest leaves of all the trees been clipped like that?"
Russell seemed pleased by her interest. "That's the browse line, honey. That's about as high as the livestock can reach when they browse over the land and chomp on the trees. When you see that, you know the land is being overgrazed. That's why Ben moved the herd further out to richer land. If he didn't, the grass would be so thin the cows'd have to eat on a dead run to get enough. "
"But how long can you keep moving the herd around before you run out of good land?"
"Run outta land?" Russell laughed uproariously.
"We got half a million acres. We're not gonna run out anytime soon. And if we did, there'll always be more land in Texas."
"I don't know if Texas is as big as you think. Sooner or later the land-"
"Texas not big? It covers practically the whole country, 'cept for the little bit we let the other states divide amongst themselves. "
They rode over miles of arid rangeland, past herds of longhorns whose heads were dipped low as they grazed lethargically. Russell's face was alight with an emotion beyond pride as he regarded the animals with their swishing tails and lethal horns. "Beautiful, ain't they?"
"There certainly are a lot of them."
"Not bad for a man who started out with nothin' but two dollars in cash and an empty belly. Feels good to a man, Adeline, to look over what he owns and know he's built somethin' that'll last forever. To know he'll go on forever. This'll never be anything but Warner land, and I was the one who took it for his own."
Addie stared at him and felt a rush of pity. But when you were killed it all fell to pieces. There was no one to take over, no one to hold it together. The herds were rustled or sold off, the ranch was ruined. Cade was too young to take over. And I guess Caroline's husband was too weak, not the kind of man that others would follow. It didn't last forever.
"This is all mine," Russell said, relishing the thought. His voice lowered a few notches. "And someday it'll be yours."
"Mine?" she repeated, startled.
"Now, honey, don't tell me you weren't listen in ' when I explained it to you the other day. "
Addie had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe he'd explained something to Adeline Warner. But not to Addie Peck.