Scotsman Wore Spurs (6 page)

Sensing his presence, the lad's head jerked toward him, and in the next instant, he stuffed the hat back on his head. Dark blue eyes grew wary. Then hostility, so strong it almost reached out and touched him, filled them before the lad looked away.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

Drew ignored the hostility and went into the stall, walking over to the horse, running his fingers down its side. It trembled at his touch.

“Get away from him,” the boy said. “He doesn't like …” The boy stopped suddenly.

“What doesn't he like?” Drew asked curiously.

But the boy's face went utterly still, and Drew was stunned. Control. Complete control. Something one didn't see in a face that young.

“He don't like foreigners,” Gabe said after a moment, startling him into remembering his own question.

“And how would he be knowing I'm a … foreigner?” Drew asked with amusement.

“Yer accent, of course,” the answer came airily and with just a dash of superiority at besting an adversary.

“And Billy can distinguish among accents?” Drew said.

“He's a very smart horse.” The slightest twinkle of mischief shone in those blue eyes before coming under control again.

It was amazing. Despite the boy's grammar and rough demeanor, Gabe Lewis was bright—very bright—and also a little bit of an actor. Perhaps a great deal an actor.

But Drew's amusement quickly faded. Someone was after Kingsley. And there seemed more to this lad than what lay on the dusty surface. Gabe Lewis had claimed to be sixteen and, Drew figured, might be as young as fourteen. But Drew had seen boys even younger than that on Glasgow docks who were thieves and killers. Some had the faces of angels. Some wouldn't have thought twice before staving in a head if a few pence were offered.

Drew decided then and there he would keep an eye on young Master Lewis.

“You might want to discard some of those clothes,” he suggested. “It's going to be a bloody hot day.”

The boy merely huddled his slight body more into the offensive garments and turned back to his horse. His posture made it clear he wasn't going to take anyone's advice. Well, he'd learn. Drew would bet his saddle that the boy would discard at least some of those layers before late afternoon.

Leaving Gabe to his own devices, Drew went to find the pinto he had ridden yesterday. He was damned if a horse was going to get the best of him.

Sitting behind his huge walnut desk, Kirby reviewed his preparations for the drive. He had cash—wrapped in oilcloth and locked in a strongbox that would go in the chuck wagon—along with powers of attorney from neighboring ranchers participating in the drive. He was leaving his own power of attorney for his brother Jon in case anything happened to him.

When he was finished, he leaned back in his chair, his fingers toying idly with the pen he held. Through the open windows of his office, he could hear the cowboys in the yard, laughing loudly about some wager one of them had lost. Their energy and excitement were high. Tomorrow was the big day. They would saddle up and ride out with an unprecedented ten thousand head of cattle. Hell, he was excited, too.

Staring out the window, Kirby frowned. He would have liked to go into town to say goodbye to Laura Sellers, but he had no right.

Laura.
Even her name was pretty. So was the sound of her voice. He pictured her in his mind. Lovely taffy-colored blond hair, intelligent dark brown eyes, a curvaceous body that made him ache. He had known the widowed dressmaker for five years; her husband Bill had been a lawyer and Kirby's friend until he died a year ago, leaving barely enough for her to live on. She might have returned east, where apparently she had relatives. She'd stayed, though, and started a successful dressmaking business. He recalled the several occasions that he'd paid her a visit. He could do that under the guise of friendship without it causing talk. He'd never asked her out, though, despite knowing she would have accepted his invitation. He hadn't gotten so old or out of touch that he couldn't tell when a woman would welcome his attentions.

His fingers clenched around the pen. When he thought of Laura, the vow he'd made never to marry was strained to the limit. But he still feared that the ugly secret he harbored might destroy him someday, and he wanted to make very sure that no one he loved was also destroyed.

For that reason, he lived a solitary and lonely life except for his brother and nephews, and even then he'd tried to make them independent of him. It was difficult. Since he was fourteen, Kirby had taken care of Jon, who at the time of their parents' death was eight. He had been father as well as brother, and Jon had never completely learned to stand on his own two feet. Nor had his sons.

The pen broke in his hand. The events of twenty-five years ago were as alive in his mind as if they had happened yesterday. He had tried to put them away in a mental box and close it off, but they kept coming back. Lately, they'd been coming back more and more often. He couldn't help but wonder if the ambush several months ago was in some way connected to that long-ago disaster.

Who
had hired the gunmen?

Three men came to Kirby's mind, three men who had something to gain by his death, or more likely, something to lose if he remained alive. Yet … what could have stirred the pot after so many years?

Probably nothing. Probably his conscience was working overtime. After all, there had been no further attempts, just that one freak ambush that, fortunately, had been waylaid by Cameron's quixotic rescue. Truth to tell, although he was damned happy to be alive, he wasn't sorry the ambush had happened. If it hadn't, he wouldn't have met Drew Cameron.

He smiled at the thought of the Scotsman. Kirby had made few friends in the last twenty-five years—maybe because he'd once used such damned poor judgment in choosing companions, maybe because he was afraid of losing those he might choose. Regardless of the cause, he'd held himself aloof from other men. But something about Drew Cameron made him discard his ordinary caution.

Guts, for example. Plain, old-fashioned guts. The man had taken on three gunmen for a stranger's sake. But there was much more to the Scotsman. He was intelligent, well-read, articulate, and charming. Usually Kirby was suspicious of charm; he'd seen it used to his disadvantage—and almost ruin—once before, but he could find no evil in the Scotsman, only a barrenness that matched Kirby's own.

Drew hid his loneliness well under a smile, a wink, and a joke. But Kirby often wondered what turned a Scottish lord into a wanderer, a man who would accept a pittance for backbreaking labor.

Kirby sighed. His friendship with Cameron scared his nephews. They had always expected to take over his spread and now they sensed a challenge to that natural assumption. That Drew Cameron wanted no part of it would never occur to them.

What
did
occur to Kirby was that the competition might be good for his nephews. He didn't want to think that he was using a man who had saved his life.

So he thought of Laura instead. Pretty Laura whom he could never have.

Chapter Four

“Head 'em up and move 'em out!”

The call started at the front of the sprawling, brown mass of horned cattle and moved in two directions around the perimeter of the herd, until it reached the back.

Riding drag, the worst possible position on the drive, Drew received the call last, and by the time it reached him, the very earth rumbled with movement and the plain itself appeared to be moving. Great clouds of dust swirled from thousands of hooves, and all of it seemed aimed directly at his face. He pulled up his bandanna for protection, but he couldn't cover his eyes. He knew his clothes would be brown with new dirt within an hour.

He didn't know how his horse stood the unremitting assault, but the pinto seemed to take it in stride. They had been on the trail five days now, and he and the pinto, his horse of choice, had finally reached an understanding. At least, Drew thought they had.

His mind had been wandering a bit when a cow, straggling at the back of the herd, suddenly broke away and veered to the left. The pinto veered after it and Drew was nearly unseated. He gave his head a shake to clear it. No more daydreaming about the green fields and grouse-filled woods of Scotland. He had to pay attention every moment.

The horse turned sharply again, and this time Drew anticipated the move and flowed with it. Within seconds, the wayward cow had been driven back to the main herd, and the pinto settled back into an easy walk. Drew settled in for another long and grinding day.

By midmorning, he was shifting restlessly in the saddle, wishing to bloody hell he could dismount and walk awhile. Walking was a sacrilege to most cowboys, but his body had yet to resign itself entirely to sitting in a saddle eighteen hours a day. The eager anticipation that had rippled through him that first morning, when the drive commenced, had since drained away. His sense of adventure had dimmed as dust, dirt, and heat enveloped him like a malevolent cloud.

Heat. He felt it to the marrow of his bones. The Texas sun was nothing he'd ever experienced—big and bold and burning—and he wondered how anyone ever got used to it. Scotland had three temperatures: cool, cold, and freezing. Based on the past five days, he decided that the Texas counterpart was hot, hotter, and roasting. But today felt especially miserable; the heat was accompanied by a suffocating humidity that hadn't been there yesterday.

His own discomfort made him wonder how Two-Bits was faring. Despite the temperature, the lad still clung to his preposterous garb. The other hands, who were all down to the minimum necessary to protect their bodies from occasional branches and brush, were taking bets on how many days it would be before the cook's louse shed his layers of clothing.

Drew couldn't help but feel sympathetic, as well as grateful, toward Gabe Lewis. The lad had saved him from being the cowhands' favorite target, taking all the joshing and pranks upon himself. And, God knows, he gave the hands enough to tease him about. His own initial suspicion of Two-Bits had faded to almost nothing; no villain, no matter how young, could possibly be as inept. He'd have been in jail, or dead, with his first unlawful act.

Stories already abounded about the louse's incompetence, and Two-Bits had been banished to the sole duty of collecting cow chips. No one was betting that he wouldn't find a way to fail at that, too. The lad would have been fired on the first day if it weren't for the fact that he tried so hard; even Pepper had to admit that he did.

The day wore on, seemingly endless, and sometime late in the afternoon, Drew noticed the temperature start to drop. The air became heavy, and the humidity went from oppressive to unbearable. It seemed to collect on Drew's skin, and the reins, even through his gloves, felt like wet leather, limp and slippery. And yet he was aware of a peculiar energy in the still, moisture-laden air. A short time later, a sharp wind started to blow. The sky, clear that morning, began to grow thick with dark, ominous layers of clouds; they piled up like a chain of mountains, filling the sky.

The cattle became perceptibly restless. The wind and the wicked-looking sky made Drew nervous, too. For the last hour of the day, he and the other two cowhands riding drag—Ace, a black man, and Juan, a Mexican—were constantly moving, trying to keep the back of the herd together.

By the time the call came to stop for the day, about an hour before dusk, he was flat-out exhausted, and hunger gnawed at his stomach. Since breakfast at dawn, he'd had only jerky during the day, along with warm water from his canteen. He'd changed horses three times during the day and was now riding a black.

When he'd completed his share of work, getting the herd settled for the night, he rode with Juan and Ace to the temporary corral that had been set up for the remuda. There, he dismounted and unsaddled his horse, leaving it in the hands of the wrangler.

Grateful to be on his own feet, he walked toward the chuck wagon, which he knew would have arrived with the hoodlum wagon hours ago to set up camp. The wagons always moved out before the rest of the drive, camping early in order to fill the barrels with water before the cattle soiled it.

As he approached camp, Drew looked for Two-Bits but didn't see him. The coffee was ready, though, and the stew smelled as good as an eight-course meal in a fine Edinburgh restaurant. He poured himself a cup of coffee and took a couple of swallows, using it to rinse the dust out of his mouth and throat.

“Don't get too comfortable,” Kirby told him as he sipped his own cup of coffee. “You have the first watch.”

Drew nodded, sighing inwardly. He'd told Kirby he didn't want favors. It was obvious he wasn't going to get any. Being the newest man, he was usually assigned to the meanest jobs, and that included first night watch as well as drag.

Pouring more coffee into his tin cup, he helped himself to a bowl of stew and a chunk of fresh bread, then ate as he paced slowly around the campsite. After so many hours in the saddle, sitting held little appeal. Most of the other hands had finished their meals and were drinking their coffee and talking. A couple were unrolling blankets preparing to sleep. Several were playing cards. As he watched, a couple of men wandered off, away from the campsite, to tend to private matters.

Drew's stroll took him past the chuck wagon, where he stopped to talk to Pepper, who was working on a batch of biscuit dough. “Where's the lad?” he asked Pepper.

“Gone after more wood for the fire,” Pepper said.

Drew took another drink of coffee. “He get rid of any of those clothes?”

“Hell no.” Pepper shook his head in disgust. “Damn fool kid. Almost like he's afraid somebody's gonna steal 'em.” The cook looked up at the sky. “On the other hand, could be he's smarter than any of us. He might need them things he's got on real soon.”

Drew's gaze turned upward. Although it wasn't yet dusk, the sky was even darker than it had been minutes earlier. Dark clouds churned ominously. And the wind had turned cold. All around the campsite, cowhands were putting on coats.