He breathed easier. At least Dillon was alive. Marilee must be with him. Or at least with a neighbor. “Your husband?” he asked. He had assumed she was married to whoever was trying to claim this land.
“My father owns this place,” she said, defiance in her voice.
“The hell he does.”
“The law says he does.” Bright red spots appeared on her cheeks.
He wondered whether it came from defending the indefensible. “Your father didn’t pay the taxes. If my father hadn’t bought it, someone else would have.”
“How long ago?”
“Five months.”
“Don’t get comfortable. Miss…”
“McGuire,” she replied in a tight voice.
He gave her a look of contempt. He would ride into town, find friends. He would find his brother and Marilee, then decide how best to dislodge these squatters.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said with sarcasm.
She lowered the rifle slightly. “I’m sorry…about your father.”
“Why? You took his land.”
She started to say something, then shrugged. “Get your water and go.”
He started to say to hell with the water, but stopped himself. It was Sinclair-not McGuire-water. His grandfather had built the well.
He could do without, but Chance deserved more. He lowered the bucket into the well water and drew it back out, transferring the contents into a second bucket there for that purpose.
Then he offered it to Chance, who drank thirstily.
“Easy,” he said, curtailing the intake for fear the horse would get sick. He would walk the animal the several miles into town, then find a bathhouse and get cleaned up. A bath. A shave. Fresh clothes. To hell with the cost. He could get credit in town.
Then he would pay a few calls.
He would find his brother and sister.
Then he would reclaim his family’s heritage.
If it was the last thing he did.
Chapter Two
ELIZABETH TOOK A deep breath as the stranger rode away.
Not a stranger. Marilee’s brother.
Her hand shook as she replaced the rifle on the shelf above the fireplace.
Had she done the right thing?
The intruder had looked dangerous. Even if he was who he said he was, his father had threatened a government official. His brother was an outlaw who had been rustling their cattle. This man had looked more than capable of both.
Marilee was safe here.
Elizabeth told herself she couldn’t just hand the child over to someone she didn’t even know for sure was related to her young charge.
He would be back, though, if he was who he said he was. He would find out in town that she had taken the youngest Sinclair into his former home.
But she hadn’t wanted to let him into the house. She and her father had been threatened repeatedly. And maybe he wasn’t even telling the truth. Maybe he was a friend of the past owners, trying only to get inside. She kept telling herself that.
She had heard of the Sinclairs, knew there were three brothers missing, but when they hadn’t been heard from for months and months, the town and military officials believed them dead.
Why hadn’t he returned earlier if he were really Seth Sinclair? And where were the other brothers? Would they join with the one already outlawed?
If only her father had a few more men, but they’d had difficulty finding good experienced hands. Most local men were Texans to the bone, resentful of the new government and the Northerners who had come south. “Carpetbaggers,” the McGuires and other newcomers had been called more than once. It was a swearword in Texas. She had been told- unkindly-what it meant, that it referred to people who got off a train or a stagecoach with nothing but a carpetbag in hand and ready to steal anything they could from hardworking farmers and ranchers.
Major Delaney had assured her and her father that the rebs had forfeited their land when they left it to fight against the Union, that they couldn’t pay the taxes, and if loyal citizens like her father didn’t buy it for pennies on the dollar, then someone else would.
She had never liked the idea, but her father glowed with the prospect of being a landowner, a “squire,” he would say, such as those who had forced him from Ireland.
In a life marked by one failure after another, he’d finally found his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He had a way of ignoring the hatred in the community and enjoyed, instead, the company of others like him: men and women lured south by Major Delaney, who headed the Union forces in the Texas hill country.
Her father loved this land. As opposed to some other areas of Texas they’d traversed, it was green, veined by streams and dotted by trees. With the land came cattle. Even horses. He had never ridden before and it had taken weeks before he could sit a horse without falling off or being thrown. Elizabeth had never seen him so determined.
Interest had always quickly died before. He was a typical Irishman, full of charm and blarney. He’d always been immensely likable. But he had never stuck to anything before. He would always turn to drink, instead. He hadn’t done that here. She prayed he wouldn’t.
Still, she didn’t like the guilt that nibbled at her.
She reassured herself that the man who had ridden up to the ranch was a traitor to his country. He looked like a brigand, and he certainly didn’t look like someone who could care for a child. Marilee was finally losing the tight, pinched look she’d had since seeing her father die, and the fierce nightmares that had kept her screaming night after night were becoming less frequent.
If he is who he claims, he has every right to her.
But what would it do to Marilee?
And to me?
Elizabeth had given up on any idea of becoming a mother. She had once wanted children more than anything else. But she moved with her father from one location to another, often searching for him in taverns, before he lost what little money she and, sometimes, he earned. He’d had to leave Boston just ahead of the law after becoming embroiled in a dubious scheme.
Then he had met a man in a Chicago tavern who had made him an offer he could not refuse. On behalf of a third party, the man said he was looking for men to go to Texas. Land was available. Good land.
Land had always been her father’s dream. All his getrichquick schemes had been for land. When one after another failed, he drank more heavily.
Elizabeth loved him. He’d been both mother and father to her after her mother died on the voyage from Ireland. He could have abandoned her, but somehow he’d always found a woman-usually a widow-who would look after her. Some more carefully than others. All with the hope that Michael McGuire would marry them. Then one night he would leave, taking his daughter with him and often as many of the widow’s possessions as he could carry.
He loved her with totality and she did the same, cooling her conscience with the knowledge that what he did he did for her.
This piece of land-McGuire land-had broken that pattern. She had seen a new clarity in his eyes, new determination. He worked harder than he’d ever worked. He had learned to ride, to mend a fence. He had hope. Real hope this time.
And she had Marilee.
No one was going to take either away.
SETHrode into Canaan, a small farming town twenty miles east of his ranch.
By God, it was still his ranch.
Like everything else in Texas, Canaan had changed. Union uniforms were everywhere. He took fierce pride in his own worn Confederate gray trousers. They were all that survived imprisonment and the journey that followed it. The rest of his uniform was long gone.
He wore a worn shirt and a thin coat against a wind that had grown cold. He remembered the quick change of weather in fall. One day as sweet as a day in May, the next ferocious winter.