Carolyn Brown - [Spikes & Spurs 07] Read online

  She shuddered at that idea!

  In no time he’d cut the snake into edible pieces and tucked them away inside the chuck wagon. Then they were right back on the boring trail. She wanted to get Coosie to talking about something… anything… to make the day go faster, but the only thing on her mind was having to eat that snake.

  By evening she had convinced herself that she could eat it. If she could eat nutria down in Louisiana, then she could eat snake. She’d pretend like it was fried fish or chicken and eat one tiny little piece. Buddy helped her unsaddle Apache and she gave the big gray horse the usual thorough brushing before she turned him loose to graze on the spring grass.

  She watched him romp around in the pasture like a young colt, thankful to be free of rider and saddle. She could understand his feelings. She’d be glad to be free of horse and saddle and get back to her life, hectic as it was. Apache rolled over a couple of times in the knee-high green grass and then stood up and started eating.

  Haley’s stomach growled and she laid a hand on her midriff.

  “Guess we are both hungry. I’ll trade with you. I’ll eat your grass if you’ll eat my piece of snake,” she muttered.

  Someone touched her on the shoulder and after a day of thinking about spiders and snakes, the adrenaline rushed through her body so fast that she doubled up both fists, spun around, and was instantly ready to do war.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted you to know I was here. I rolled out your bedroll for you,” Dewar said.

  “Sorry, but after today everything is scary,” she said.

  “I expect it is, but wait until you taste the supper. Hush puppies, baked beans, and fried rattlesnake. It don’t get any better than that.” Dewar grinned.

  “Rib eyes, baked potato, and fresh green salad,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you’d be brave enough to try fried snake,” he taunted.

  “Oh, you didn’t, did you? Well, you better guard your plate with both hands, mister, because I’m hungry.” She wished for the second time that day that she could reach up into the evening breeze, snatch the words before they hit his ears, and cram them back in her mouth.

  The first bite almost gagged her, but once she got past the idea of what she was eating, she had to admit it was delicious. Like mild-flavored fish with a nice spicy cornmeal coating that was very crispy. It was much better than the calamari that Joel ordered when he took her out to his favorite restaurant for dinner. And it was one hell of a lot better than that sushi stuff that Joel thought was the best shit since ice cream on a stick.

  “Haley provided supper tonight. What are you fellers going to do to beat this kind of meal?” Coosie asked.

  “I shot that snake,” Dewar argued.

  “But you couldn’t have shot it if it hadn’t been on her bedroll, so it was her snake,” Coosie said.

  “Squirrel tomorrow night,” Finn said.

  “Young enough to fry? Won’t have time to boil one tender for dumplings if it’s an old one,” Coosie told him.

  “Young enough to fry and maybe two or three old ones to boil after supper for dumplings for the next day,” Finn said.

  Coosie pointed at him. “I’ll hold you to it.”

  Dark clouds covered the moon and the stars that night soon after supper, bringing on nightfall a full hour earlier than usual. Coosie was the first one to turn in, followed by Buddy and then Finn. Sawyer yawned a few times and then he and Rhett were snoring.

  Dewar had thrown out his bedroll closer to Haley’s than the previous nights and after they were tucked in he whispered, “You goin’ to be okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. In reality she kept hearing slithering noises and her eyes darted from one side of the tarp to the other constantly, but she would rather fight another spider attack as admit it to him.

  “I can sit watch four hours so you can sleep,” Dewar said.

  “I said I’m fine!”

  “Okay, then. You ready for squirrel tomorrow night?”

  “Of course I am. This idea of wild game will make my show even better than the one about grappling catfish out of the Red River. The contestants’ faces will be priceless when they see wild game on the supper table. What makes you think Finn will get enough for supper anyway?”

  Dewar laughed softly. “He was a sniper in the army.”

  Chapter 7

  Haley’s grandmother, Isabelle, used to sing a song while she was working in the flower gardens that had a line asking for one day at a time, sweet Jesus. Haley awoke to those words playing through her mind.

  They were camped south of a town called Ninnekah up next to a farm pond that watered cattle but was useless for bathing with all the mud around the rim. Dewar had ridden away before they turned the horses loose for grazing and returned with a dark gray donkey before suppertime. The silly animal bypassed all the cattle and stood right beside Haley when Dewar herded it into the camp at dusk. And now, it stood only a few feet from her bedroll, looking right at her.

  “Friday. What kind of trouble will happen for the contestants tomorrow?” she whispered.

  The donkey brayed loudly and pawed at the ground as if answering her question.

  “What do you know about my reality show?” she asked him.

  It brayed again and pawed.

  “I think he’s talking to you,” Dewar said.

  She looked over to see Dewar all sleepy-eyed and propped on one elbow. She really, really needed to stop being so damn stubborn and take him up on that phone call. Every time she looked at the man she wanted to go to bed with him and that wasn’t even a possibility.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “The lady I bought him from said that he was hell on wheels when it came to coyotes or anything that threatens the herd, but he’s a big baby. Her granddaughter raised him from a baby and the granddaughter has red hair. Guess that’s what draws him to you,” Dewar said.

  “You bought a crazy jackass knowing he’d plague the hell out of me because of my hair?” she asked.

  “You are so welcome,” Dewar said.

  “Oh, hush!” She looked away from him and back to the donkey. His eyes looked like his feelings were hurt that she’d say a thing like that about him. “Okay, I’m sorry. Stop pouting. With that hangdog expression, you look like Eeyore.”

  “That’s what the lady said his name is. I figured we’d just call him Jack,” Dewar said.

  “No, he is definitely an Eeyore,” Haley said.

  The donkey nudged her hand as if he was accepting her apology.

  “See, he likes you.” Dewar rolled up his bed. “He can be your pet. Bet you left a cat behind, didn’t you?”

  “No cats. No dogs. Never had a pet.”

  “Well, looks like you got one now,” Dewar said.

  The animal stood watch over her all night, waited the next morning while she rolled up her bedroll, went with her to breakfast, and stood beside her while she saddled up Apache.

  “Looks like that jackass has done beat all you cowboys out for the lady.” Coosie laughed.

  “They didn’t have a chance anyway,” Haley said. “I’ll take a four-legged jackass over a two-legged one any day of the week. They don’t break your heart.”

  It was another parade day, basically forced upon them by an interstate highway that they couldn’t cross. They had to take the cattle through Chickasha, Oklahoma, using an underpass. Dewar said this time wouldn’t be as big a deal as the Comanche parade but that it might take longer. They herded the cattle out onto the access road in the middle of the afternoon with Haley, Dewar, and Eeyore riding point.

  The cowboys and cattle came in behind them and when they passed a Walmart store over to the east, Coosie pulled into the parking lot and tied his team to the cart station. Haley noticed a man picking up trash in the parking lot and would have traded places with him for fifteen minutes in the Walmart bathroom. She longed to stand in the middle of the ladies’ room and just look at toilets, sinks with running water
, and hand driers.

  They made it through the underpass and back into the wilderness without any fanfare. No sexy women to yell at the cowboys and no kids dashing out to slap a cow on the fanny or touch the old rangy longhorn. Even though the town was much larger and she’d spotted such luxurious places as Holiday Inn and McDonald’s, it was rather anticlimactic after the Comanche welcome.

  From her research, she knew that Chickasha wasn’t even a town during the cattle trail days, but she wondered, since it was located near water, if there weren’t a few brothels and saloons situated close by. She imagined a fine-looking trail boss like Dewar giving a few of his cowboys the evening to go blow off some steam and flirt with the barmaids.

  Jealousy flashed through her heart like lightning. “For cryin’ out loud, there’s not even a saloon around here. But I’d love to be a barmaid if he did swagger through the doors of my saloon. Just call me Miss Kitty,” she whispered with a grin.

  For the better part of an hour they meandered east to get back on the trail with Coosie catching up and falling into place a little after they’d turned back to the north again.

  She rode up to the front of the line where Dewar was and said, “Tell me a story.”

  “About what?”

  “Just a cowboy story.”

  “And how does just a cowboy story start?”

  “Like all good stories, once upon a time. Tell me about a cowboy.”

  He smiled and began, “Once upon a time a cowboy wished he could go back in time. Just get on his horse and ride out across the pasture and when he got back home everything would be way back in the past. So he got this opportunity to play like he could do that for a whole month. The End.”

  “That’s not long enough,” she grumbled.

  “It is for Rachel.”

  “And who is Rachel?”

  “Rachel is my niece and she likes once upon a time stories, but I’ve learned to keep the beginning and end close together. So that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.” He laughed.

  “Okay, then question time. Why did the cowboy want to go back in time anyway?”

  “Because he always thought he’d been born in the wrong century. You ever feel like that, Haley?” Dewar asked.

  “Not in the wrong century. In the wrong place maybe.”

  “And where would that be?”

  “Dallas, Texas. I always liked the wild freedom when Momma and I went to visit the Cajun cousins down on the bayou in southern Louisiana. Have you always lived in Ringgold? My Granny Jones lives in a little bitty community outside of Jeanerette. It reminds me of Ringgold.”

  “I was born in the Bowie hospital and brought home to the ranch. It’s where I’ve lived my whole life and I love it there. It’s home and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I’ve got friends and family everywhere and I’m doin’ what I love. Granny O’Malley says that makes a man a success.”

  Sawyer whistled loudly and Dewar left her side to go round up a couple of strays that wanted to turn around and go back south. Haley fell back to travel with Coosie, who was ready to talk about the store and what all he’d bought. Evidently, shopping for flour and sugar loosened up his tongue.

  They camped that evening on a flat piece of ground with nothing but dirt and sky as far as she could see. Another farm pond provided water for the cattle and her new best friend, Eeyore. It wasn’t fit for bathing, so she made do with her washcloth and soap and a pan full of water that she carried under a weeping willow tree and pretended that the drooping branches were the walls of her bathroom in Dallas.

  Time on the trail was like time in a hospital. It was all out of kilter, going as slow as a lazy snail, and then suddenly the whole day or night had passed. She couldn’t believe that she’d survived six whole days, and who would have guessed she would be washing up under the semi-privacy of a weeping willow tree and enjoying it? When did she stop hating the trip and enjoying it, anyway?

  The twang of guitar music floated across the pasture and she cocked her head to one side. Surely she was imagining such things. Music in the middle of nowhere? She buttoned her shirt and peeked out between the thick tree branches. Coosie stirred a pot of stew and the warm night breeze carried the aroma straight to her nose. Sawyer, Finn, and Rhett lazed on their beds and Buddy sat on an old stump not far from the campfire.

  Dewar strummed the guitar, frowned, and tightened up a couple of strings. To be just a plain old cowboy, he sure had a lot of surprises up his sleeve. He strummed again and then broke into a guitar medley. She recognized “Bill Bailey” and “Red River Valley,” but that was all.

  “Sing something,” Coosie said.

  Haley dropped the tree branch, combed her hair with her fingertips, and dumped the water. She didn’t want to miss hearing Dewar sing, not even if he was off-key and it had the coyotes howling at the moon.

  “What do you want to hear?” Dewar asked.

  When Haley parted the willow limbs and started toward the campsite, Buddy motioned for her to take his tree stump for a chair. She thanked him and shook her head.

  “I’d rather sit on the ground after riding all day. Does he really sing?” she whispered.

  Buddy backed up and sat back on the stump. “They all d-d-do.”

  “All of them?” She nodded toward the other three O’Donnells.

  “All,” Buddy answered.

  Dewar’s fingers picked out a prelude to Ricky Van Shelton’s old song “Simple Man.” When he began to sing, Haley’s breath caught in her chest. His voice was deep and pure and goose bumps popped up on her arms. He’d be an instant star in Nashville with his looks, his voice, and his ability to make that guitar do everything but talk.

  The lyrics said that he was a simple man and he wanted a place to lay his head and three squares in a frying pan. Heat shot up from her neck to her cheeks when he sang about wanting a soft woman and warm bed. Dewar O’Donnell was certainly not a simple man. He was very complex, and just when she did think she had him all figured out and wasn’t even going to think about him again, he showed her another side.

  He finished that song and went right into another Ricky Van Shelton song, “Statue of a Fool.” It was a sad song about a man who felt like a fool for letting love slip through his hands. Haley was a city girl and loved the bright lights of Dallas, but she’d cut her teeth on country music from her father’s side of the family and zydeco from her mother’s side. So she’d heard both songs and knew the lyrics by heart.

  Finn stood up and dusted off his jeans. Dewar put the guitar in his hands. His voice wasn’t quite as deep as Dewar’s but had a haunting sound as he sang “Don’t We All Have the Right.”

  It was about a man who laughed it off when his woman left him because he thought she’d come back again. He sang that in love there was two ways to fall.

  Dewar took two long strides to where Haley sat and held out his hand. “May I have this dance, ma’am?”

  She stared unblinking up at him. “You dance?”

  “The question is, do you?” He smiled.

  She put her hand in his and he pulled her to her feet and into his arms. One of her hands went around his neck and one of his rested on her lower back. Two-stepping on grass by the light of a campfire with a cowboy whose touch made her insides sizzle was a heady experience.

  “Which way is best?” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Which way is best to fall in love?”

  “Which two ways are there?” Dewar asked.

  “In and out,” she said.

  “I’d think the in way is less painful,” he said. “You ever been in love?”

  “Thought I was.”

  “And?”

  “I wasn’t, so I didn’t have to fall out of love because you got to be in love to fall out,” she said.

  Finn went from that song into another Ricky Van Shelton tune called “Somebody Lied.”

  It was an old beer-drinking, two-stepping song about a man having trouble getting over a woman. It
didn’t apply to Haley, but tears welled up in her eyes at the way Finn delivered it, as if he felt the words rather than just sang them. Had he left behind the love of his life when he was deployed and she left him?

  Sawyer was the next entertainer and he veered away from Ricky Van Shelton to Mark Chesnutt’s “Goin’ On Later On.” It was too fast to two-step to so Haley stepped back, did a wiggle, and fully well intended to do some fancy footwork to the song, but Dewar grabbed her hand and showed that he was as adept at swing dancing as he was at two-stepping.

  She was out of breath when the song ended, but Sawyer chuckled and went straight into “Come on in, the Whiskey’s Fine.” It was something between a country swing and two-stepping and Dewar didn’t miss a single beat when he swung her out and back to his chest, all the time singing right along with his cousin.

  Sawyer sang about it being hotter than two rats in heat inside an old wool sock. Haley threw back her head and laughed when Dewar swung her out again. It felt like the lawn parties they had down on the bayou in Louisiana where there were no walls to hold in the giggles or the loud music from the band.

  Haley giggled. “You are makin’ me hotter than that rat that he’s singin’ about.”

  “Weather-wise or otherwise?” Dewar flirted.

  “What do you think?”

  Sawyer’s next choice was “If the Devil Brought You Roses.” The lyrics asked if the devil brought her roses and a bottle of red wine would she be an angel and take him back to heaven one more time.

  Dewar twirled Haley and brought her back into his arms for a fast dance step around the grass.

  “Would you?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Would you take me to heaven if I brought you roses and wine?”

  “How do you know you wouldn’t end up kissin’ the devil smack on his forked little tail instead of an angel and winding up in hell rather than heaven?” she asked.

  “Well, guess I’ll save my red roses and wine if there is that possibility,” he said.

  Sawyer handed the guitar off to Rhett, who decided to sing Travis Tritt’s songs beginning with “Best of Intentions,” a nice slow ballad.