The Wildcatter

Half the men were taking siestas in the bunkhouse. The rest had crammed themselves into two pickups and set off, whooping and jostling, for the Lone Star. They wouldn’t come staggering back until closing time.

Miguel put all thoughts of blissful naps and ice-cold bottles of cerveza firmly from mind. Today, at last, he’d make it to the Badwater—no, the Sweetwater—Flats.

Well, he’d thought he would. But when he and Jackhammer came to the bridge over the river, he noticed the trace of a path heading south along the base of the cliffs. Any cut in the earth was a siren song and this one had been singing to him for days, each time he rode the hay wagon past this point. “We’ll go only as far as that first bend,” he assured Jackhammer.

What a lie. Once a man reached a bend, there was always an obligation to peer around it. Who knew that heaven didn’t lie just beyond?

Miguel didn’t find heaven, but he found enough to lure him on. The sedimentary strata through which the ancient river had carved its winding course lay level where the bridge made its crossing. But as he rode south, gradually it began to dip. Good, that was very good; he lived for folds in the earth. He glanced wistfully over his shoulder, since the sediments apparently were rising to the north, but still he continued south. It was just as important to find a marker bed, an identifiable stratum, so he could orient himself. In Texas it would have taken only a glance or two to know where he was, but this was virgin territory.

And he the eager bridegroom. His eyes roved lovingly over the striated cliffs—a layer of dark gray shale lensed out between two layers of limestone—Mancos shale, possibly? He twisted around and dug his rock hammer out of the saddlebag, then sidled his horse in next to the wall of stone. “Be still, you. This will take only a minute.”

The steel spike chopped into the chunk he wanted—a chip ricocheted—Jackhammer’s ears flattened to his head.

“Whoa!” The gelding spun on a dime, took two stiff-legged, jolting hops as his head swung down to his hooves. “So I’m sorry, I didn’t—hey!”

The next thing Miguel knew, he was flying in a magnificent arc, hammer firmly grasped in one hand, mouth rounding to an outraged “Oh.” Off to his left, Jackhammer kicked up his back heels—who knew the brown bastard could move like that?—then shot off toward the—

Miguel hit the water headfirst and forgot about horses. There was a moment of cold confusion, frantic splashing—air, where was the damn air?—then he surfaced, cursing and coughing. “¡Hijo de—!” He burst out laughing.

So a horse wasn’t an unfeeling machine. The sooner he learned that, the better. He glanced around and grimaced. Jack hadn’t waited for an apology. By now he’d be halfway to the barn, blasted brute.

Miguel swiped a forearm across his brow, wiping the hair from his eyes, shrugged and turned back to the cliff. From this low angle he could see details he’d missed looking down from a saddle. And there in the shale, not a foot above ground level—he narrowed his eyes and waded closer—yes, por Dios, there where it had been waiting patiently for millions of years for a man to be thrown from his horse… “You were right, Harry.” Whatever the misfortune, there was always a balancing compensation. Hadn’t he held on to his hammer?

Miguel scrambled out, knelt, commenced delicately to chip stone.

Once he’d pocketed his prize he wandered on, his boots squelching softly. The beds continued to dip southward, layers of shale, limestone and sandstone striping the cliffs in diagonal alternations of gray and cream and gritty pink. He took samples, loading his jeans pockets with rocks, regretting that he couldn’t make notes and sketches of what he found. But Jackhammer had run off with his notebook. Miguel frowned. Wouldn’t want anybody at the barn to look into his saddlebags. He ought to go back.

But there was another bend up ahead. “Just this last one,” he promised himself, and, turning his face to the cliff—the trail had become only a narrow ledge some four feet above the river—he edged sideways along it. As he rounded a bulge of water-smoothed limestone, as luscious to the hands as a woman’s hips, he heard laughter and stopped short. Glanced ahead.

To where two mermaids, astride two sea horses, cavorted and wrestled in the river. Cielo, indeed! Giggling breathlessly, each was trying to shove the other off her swimming steed. Long arms flashing, pale legs twisting, the small, dark one toppled with a hapless screech and a resounding splash. The other mermaid raised her beautiful arms, arching her back as she shook her fists at the sky. “Yes!”

Miguel turned around on his ledge, leaned against the rock and devoured her with his eyes. Tankersly’s daughter. For an instant he hadn’t recognized her. Her hair was so much darker, wet, curling in coppery ribbons over her high, apple-sized breasts. Manzanitas deliciosas. She wore a drenched white T-shirt, which clung to her slender curves like a mermaid’s pearly scales. And below that—he swallowed audibly—only a scrap of turquoise, above legs so long she might have wrapped them twice around his waist with inches to spare.

The little one scrambled up the side of her mount, then froze, propped on her locked arms, her eyes rounding as they met Miguel’s across the pool. “It’s him! Risa, it’s—” She dropped from view behind her pony.

“What?” She—Miguel was beginning to think of her simply as she—spun so fast her hair whirled out around her, chains of copper dripping diamonds.

He laughed softly—how could anything be this perfect?

Her dark eyebrows—surprisingly dark, given her hair—drew together; her golden eyes speared him. She’d taken offense.

He couldn’t blame her. Clearly he’d stumbled into Women’s Magic here. But there was no going back. No way he could unsee what he’d seen. And whatever penalty he must pay in exchange for this vision, he’d pay it gladly. A man was the sum of what he’d witnessed, and he was richer for this sight.

Her far leg arched over the rump of her palomino and she dropped down into the water—spun again to glare at him, chest-deep in the river.

Ah, so that wasn’t a bathing-suit bottom she was wearing. Odd how that realization heated the blood.

“What are you doing here?”

The little one appeared beyond the palomino, swimming toward the far bank, tugging her pony behind her by its bridle. She stopped when she reached waist-deep water, and swung to stare at him, much the way a doe will run, then turn to see if you pursue.

But her elder sister—Risa, was that what the little one had called her?—waded toward Miguel, eyes gold and fierce as a mama wildcat’s. “I said—”

“I’m collecting rocks,” he said easily, before she could scold him. “And better things.” He dropped to his heels with care and fished in his shirt pocket. “Such as this.” He held his find out and waggled it invitingly.

Ah, he had her. Her eyebrows went up. She was dying to see what he had.

“Cretaceous period,” he told her, helpless to stop himself from showing off, any more than a stallion can stop himself from arching his neck and prancing around a ready mare. “Sixty-five million years old, give or take a couple of million.”

“What is it?” shrilled the little one from the shallows.

He closed his fingers, hiding it from view. “An inoceramus.” To fix his gaze on Risa’s face as she waded warily closer took an effort of will. As the creek bottom shelved upward, she was rising like a nymph from the waves. His eyes yearned to melt down over her, praising every swaying curve and hollow.

“And what’s that?” She stopped with the water lapping her slender waist.

“You tell me.” He offered it, cocked his head in challenge. Her bottom lip pushed out a delectable quarter inch in annoyance, but still she reached. He laid it delicately on her palm. Para tú.

“Risa, what is it?” shrilled her younger sister, bouncing with impatience.

“A fossil.” Intent on its ribbed and fluted shape, Risa turned it slowly. “Some sort of clam.”

She hadn’t said “only a clam.” Abruptly it struck him that liking a woman would be more dangerous than lusting after her.

“It’s really that old?” she added.

He nodded. “Waiting here for us all that time.”

“Let me see!” The little one had waded ashore, tied both the horses, and now launched herself across the stream. Heads almost touching, the mermaids studied the inoceramus while Miguel studied them. Such different coloring, sunset and midnight—rubia y oscura. When you looked for it there was not much resemblance, either to Tankersly or each other, but still, they were unmistakably sisters.

La oscura glanced up at him. “You found it underwater?”

“No. Embedded in the cliff. One finds such in shale.”

“But you’re all wet.”

Miguel had to admit he was. “My horse threw me in the creek.”

His wry look earned him a bubbling laugh from the niña, and a twitch of those luscious lips from her elder sister.

“Then you’ll have to ride back with us,” decided the little one. “Risa’s Sunny can carry two.”

“Thank you,” he said quickly as Risa frowned and her lips parted to counter this offer. No way would he pass it up!

He waited on his ledge while the sisters crossed to the far bank. Turning his face gallantly to the cliff, still he could picture Risa shimmying into her jeans.

“What’s your name?” the little one called, her shyness forgotten.

“Miguel. And you?”

“Tess. Tess Tankersly. And this is Risa.”

Señorita Tankersly to him, till she herself made him free of her name. Still… Risa, whatever it might signify in inglés, in español it meant “laughter.” And if you were to laugh with me?

But such a notion was madness. If all went as he hoped, someday soon he’d have to deal with Tankersly. Negotiations would hardly go well if he’d been sniffing about the rancher’s daughter! Business might be one thing, but the old man would have a better match in mind for his crown jewel, his fire opal, than a flirtation with a Mexican half-breed.

While the girls saddled their horses, Miguel let himself down into the river and waded across. On his dignity, he walked instead of swam. At the lowest point, for five yards or so, only his eyes showed above water. He waggled his eyebrows at Tess and earned another outburst of giggles. He smiled underwater. Ay, chiquitas. She was as easy to entertain as his own little sister had been last time he’d seen her, too long ago.

But Risa was not so easily amused and she stiffened when he mounted clumsily behind her. “I’ve never done this before,” he confessed softly in her ear. What delights he’d been missing! Pale as a gibbous moon, her nape with its waving tendrils of reddish-gold was only inches below his lips.

She jammed her hat into place and its rim established a “don’t trespass” perimeter.

“May I hold on?” he asked as they set off at a trot. His hands would almost span her supple waist; his palms itched with anticipation.

“To the cantle—the back of my saddle—please do,” she snapped.

Tess rode before them, chattering over her shoulder. “So you collect fossils, Miguel?”

“Sí. Also stones. I’m a rock hound.” It was close to the truth.

“I found a piece of fool’s gold last year. On roundup. Would you like to see it?”

“Pyrite? With much pleasure.”

“And I have a chunk of something that I used to think was a diamond when I was little. It’s big as an egg! But I reckon maybe it’s just quartz.”

“More likely,” he agreed. And there were compensations to hanging on to the cantle, he was finding. At this pace, over the rougher patches of trail Risa couldn’t help but bounce a little. Her taut, smooth hips brushed his thumbs more than once. Tipping his head to one side to peer under her hat, he grinned. Her nape was now rosier than pale. Were he to brush his lips, rough with his afternoon beard, right…there, he bet she’d go off like a bottle rocket, all sparks and fizz and a firecracker pop! Ah, rubia, you bring out the bad in me!

“What were you doing back there?” she asked coolly in an undertone. “Aren’t you supposed to be haying?”

His smile faded. “Even a peón gets a day off now and then.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“No?” While he spun his fantasies, he should remember not to forget: she was a ranchera rica and he was a wet-back. He had more hope of collecting fossils on the moon than taking such a one as this in his arms. At least, not while he had hay in his hair.

But someday… He glanced over his shoulder. Tess had chosen the easier grade of the road leading to the ranch yard, instead of the cowboys’ trail. From this height, he could see the tops of the Trueheart Hills jutting east of the valley. He’d lost a precious day, flirting with mermaids.

The growl of an engine mounting the grade behind caused him to swing farther around. Uh-oh! Here came that ancient, caramel-colored Lincoln Town Car that Tankersly flogged around the ranch when he wasn’t riding. He’d driven it down to the hay fields yesterday, gunning it ruthlessly through the muddy irrigation ditches.

“Daddy!” Tess cried, reining in as the car braked alongside them. “Look what Miguel gave me!” She waved the fossil that he’d intended for Risa. Ah, hermanitas.

Little sisters could get a man in all kinds of trouble. Tankersly was bound to resent any and all contact between a summer laborer and his daughters. Miguel met the old man’s stony gaze, his own face expressionless.

“See, Daddy?”

“Huh.” Tankersly hardly glanced at Tess’s prize. His shrewd old eyes were measuring the distance between Miguel’s chest and his beautiful daughter’s shoulder blades to the very last quarter inch.

Or so it seemed to his hired hand, who was braced for the worst. What a fool I’ve been—¡qué tonto! To give this merciless geezer an excuse for firing him before he’d barely started… No woman was worth this!

“You’re wearing your stirrups a notch too short,” he growled at his eldest. “You learn that back East?”

“What if I did?” Risa leaned back in her stirrups till her hat brim brushed Miguel’s mouth.

“Should have sent you west.” The massive old sedan rumbled on past and vanished up the hill.

Not once had Tankersly cracked a smile. So why did Miguel have the strangest feeling that the old man had been pleased?

CHAPTER SIX

MORNING. Joe Wiggly and the Old Man sat their horses in their usual corner of the yard, watching the hands saddle up and ride out. Two cars rolled up the hill, parked by the tool shed and disgorged those men of the hay crew who slept down in Trueheart. The rest of the crew shambled out of the bunkhouse, stretching and yawning, to clamber aboard the two empty hay wagons that waited by the barn.

“Been keeping an eye on him for me?” Tankersly nodded toward Heydt as the young man vaulted onto a wagon’s flatbed. He sat down immediately, then flopped backward on a broken bale, pulling his hat over his face.

Joe smiled wryly at that. He knew just how the fella felt. He meant to catch a few winks himself, soon as he and Tankersly had planned the day’s work. “Yep, I’ve been watchin’ him. Didn’t get really interesting till last night.” He’d hoped Ben would ask. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled a cigarette out of his pack, and stuck it between his lips. Proceeded leisurely to light it.

The tractors fired up and hauled the wagons down the road, off to the fields for a day of baling. Tons of hay to be stacked and moved and stacked again. Heydt’s tail would be dragging by the end of this day for sure.

“He’s been ridin’ most evenings, going a little farther every night, mostly upriver and down. But last night, danged if he didn’t set off like a dog smelling a bitch over the mountain. Straight line. Along the road to the main gate, then north, then through our gate on the other side. On and on east till he comes to the gate to the Sweetwater Flats. I’m hanging way back, you understand, but ’bout then we lost the last of the light.” The foreman drew on his cigarette, squinting through the smoke as he exhaled.

“You know how ragged that section is. Reckon I’d’ve broken my neck a dozen times if there hadn’t been a half-moon.” Maybe, come to think of it, that was what Heydt had been waiting for—enough moon to see by?

“Anyways, I move up a bit closer. I’m starting to wonder if maybe he’s scouting cows to rustle.” He’d begun to regret that he’d not thought to pack his .22 along. Heydt was unfailingly pleasant, but something told a man that he’d be a rough one to cross.

“Ya think?” Tankersly scowled. Rustling was no longer a hanging offense, and that was a pity, because it was a growing problem in the West. A thief could fill a cattle truck with twenty head, drive ’em to hell and gone, earn himself a year’s pay in a single night.

“Not now I don’t. Eventually he comes to where we’ve fenced off the creek bed, and he ties his horse and climbs through the wire. I’m figuring he’s forgotten his canteen and he’s meaning to drink from the stream, and I’m grinnin’ to myself, picturing his face when he tastes that water. So I wait, expecting him to come scrambling back up the bank, spitting and wiping his mouth. But he doesn’t show.”

He leaned over to tap his ash off on his boot heel, then straightened again. “After a bit, I get kinda curious and I ride up t’where I can see over the fence and down into the cut. It’s about twenty feet deep along there…” He dragged in a lungful of nicotine, smiling inside at the look on the boss’s face. Oh, he had him, all right. “’Bout a quarter mile on, I see a light–bright light, one of them halogen lanterns. Kid’s walking real slow, playing his beam over the banks, first one side, then t’other. Stops every so often, looks real close at something, then moves on.”

“Huh.” Tankersly spat thoughtfully into the dirt.

“I follow along the top of the flats, find another place to peek over the side. But he’s just moseying on, flashing his light.”

“He ever find anything t’speak of?”

Joe shrugged. “Not’s so as I could tell. I hung around till two or so, till I was yawnin’ so hard I feared he’d hear m’jaw crack. He was still hard at it when I headed on home.” He’d flopped onto his couch at the foreman’s house not long before sunrise. Had slept for an hour, then saddled Tankersly’s mount for the day and set off to fetch him. “If Heydt made it back to the bunkhouse in time to snatch the last biscuit, I’d be surprised.” And served him right for keeping an old man out all night.

Tankersly rubbed his craggy jaw. “Now, what the devil’s he up to?”

RISA RODE her outrage all the way down to the ranch yard. How dared he? Did Ben imagine she was still a rebellious fourteen, to be sent to her room without supper when she disobeyed? Or fifteen, forbidden to drive with her girlfriends to Durango to see a movie?

But to have intercepted Eric’s messages…this was a new low in high-handedness even for her father!

And worse, he’d almost succeeded in driving a wedge of misunderstanding between her and her fiancé. After three days of echoing silence, she’d begun to fear that Eric had stopped returning her calls. That perhaps he’d found someone at the law firm where he was working. That he’d finally come to his senses and realized he could do much better than Risa Tankersly.

To call him one last time at work had taken all her courage. She’d gotten past the secretary who’d recorded her previous messages and reached Eric himself.

And learned that over the past three days, he’d called Suntop four times! Once her father had answered the phone, and the other times Socorro, their cook and housekeeper, had taken Eric’s calls.

Neither of them had passed his message on.

Furious as she was, Risa couldn’t blame Socorro; the woman had worked for Ben for thirty years and she knew who signed her paychecks. She only would have been following orders. But Ben? “You manipulative heartless bastard!” she swore, swinging down from Sunrise by the barn. Pity her father wasn’t here so she could say that to his face! He was off in his Town Car, at one end of the ranch or another.

She knew because she’d checked the garage, up at the Big House. Had she found his car, she would have taken it and paid the consequences later.

But no such luck.

Which brought her here. She would not sit meekly at home, letting Ben think he’d won again. After tying Sunny’s reins to the hitching rack, she loosened the mare’s cinch, then stalked off toward the bunkhouse.

Her steps shortened as she neared it. The bunkhouse was off limits to her and her sisters. Ben insisted that the men liked their privacy, and no doubt that was true. But over the years, the forbidden had bred fascination. To the Tankersly women, the shabby old one-story barracks had an aura of masculine mystery, much like the sacred ritual house of Hopi men. A kiva for cowboys.

Don’t be silly, she scoffed at herself. It’ll just be a bunch of hands, wandering around without their shirts on. Bad enough. She should have brought Tess along for support. Go on. All you have to do is rap on the screen door and ask for him.

Then endure the knowing smile on the face of whichever man answered her knock! She came to a halt, one foot on the bottom step of the stairs leading up to the sagging porch.

“You look lost, señorita!” called a low mocking voice from across the yard.

She jumped, then glanced over her shoulder. Miguel Heydt sat astride the tow hitch of a horse trailer that had been uncoupled and left parked alongside the tool shed. Leaning back against the trailer’s streamlined front, he held a beer balanced on one blue jeans–clad knee. He tipped his head back in inquiry, but he didn’t rise as she approached.

At least he still has his shirt on, she told herself. Actually, it was a T-shirt, clinging damply to his broad chest. She stopped close enough to smell an aroma of hay and hot male that did funny things to her pulse. “You’re not inside,” she said, suddenly at a loss over how to begin.

“Waiting for my turn in the shower.” He rubbed the hard angle of his jaw and she heard the tiny rasp of bristles. He hadn’t bothered with shaving this morning; the blue shadow gave a rakish air to his weary smile. He looked like a bandido one jump ahead of the posse.

But not worried about the outcome—far from it. “Looking for someone?” he inquired politely.

“You.” There was no way she could think to hide that fact. “I was wondering if you’d—” She ran out of air, had to stop for a breath. “If you might loan me your truck—that is, if you don’t mean to use it yourself. Tonight. I’d be happy to fill it with gas for you. Pay you something, if you like.”

His dark eyes narrowed behind thick black lashes. “Ah.” Absently he raised the bottle of beer to his lips, then seemed to focus on it. “Could I offer you una cerveza? Or maybe you’re not of age. Perhaps a cold drink. We have lemonade.”

He, also, saw her as a child? She felt her temper kick up a notch. “I’m quite old enough to drink, thank you, but no, thank you. But your truck…?” She couldn’t manage an ingratiating smile—bit her bottom lip anxiously, instead; this was even harder than she’d imagined.

“Your own car is not working?”

“I don’t own a car.” She’d asked—begged—Ben for one, for her graduation from high school. She was so cut off from the world, here at Suntop. Most of her friends lived in Trueheart, some twenty miles away. She’d have been happy to take a job in town to earn the price of a car, but there was no way she could reach the job without wheels in the first place.

All that last month before graduation, she’d circled ads in the Durango newspaper for used compact cars at reasonable prices. Left the classifieds on Ben’s desk where he couldn’t fail to see them.

On graduation night, he’d given her a pair of two-carat emerald ear studs, which she’d yet to wear. Because she’d read his gift’s message loud and clear. He’d treat her like a princess—as long as she remained under his thumb.

“You own all this…” Heydt’s eyes swept the horizon beyond her. “But you own no car?”