The whiteness of the smoke made him think of the milk-white perfection of Maggie’s skin. He was aware how much she had awakened his protective instincts. A sudden smile broke across his features as he realized he wanted to protect a girl who had whipped him with a rope in front of a dozen riders.
“Look, Chase appreciates my joke even if no one else does,” Senator Bulfert declared. Hearing his name brought Chase sharply back to the present. He joined in with the laughter of the other men and hoped to hell no one asked him about the story the senator had just told. He encountered his father’s steady gaze and knew that was one man he hadn’t fooled.
Removing the pan of water from the stove, Maggie rinsed the soapsuds off the dishes stacked in the sink. Both her father and brother were sitting at the kitchen table, whose white enameled paint was turning yellow with age. She didn’t bother to suggest that since she had cooked the meal and washed the dishes, one of them could help her by drying them. Neither of them did women’s work. She took a towel off the rack and started drying them herself.
There was a brooding quality to the atmosphere. Maggie could feel its heaviness. Her brother had said nothing to her, but she knew her father had told him his version of what had transpired between her and Chase Calder. Culley had avoided meeting her gaze all evening, but kept stealing glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.
“How I miss your mother,” her father murmured in a melancholy voice and took another sip from his whiskey glass. A gentleman always had a shot of whiskey after a meal, or so he had always said to their mother in defense of the practice.
“I can still remember that day my ship docked in San Diego and I had a three-day pass. Our cruiser had been out to sea for nearly three months.” He leaned on the table, directing his words to Culley. “Me and a buddy of mine went out on the town. I mean, we really painted it red. I was drunk one whole day and don’t remember anything we did. Finally, I passed out and my buddy left me to sleep it off in the car.”
“And when you came to, you heard the church bells ringing.” Culley had heard the story before, but his comment was a prompting for his father to continue.
“That’s right.” Her father refilled his whiskey glass without letting it get empty first. “The way I was feeling, I knew I had done some sinning that needed forgiving, so I followed the sound of those bells for a couple of blocks before I found the church. I was wearing my dress whites, so I brushed myself off good before I went inside. Mass was about to start when I walked in, so I took a seat in one of the rear pews.”
“That’s when you saw Mom for the first time.” It was an old story to Maggie, too, but this was the part of it she liked.
Looking objectively at her father, she could see how very handsome he had once been. She remembered the snapshots she’d seen of him in his navy uniform. It wasn’t any wonder that he’d swept her mother off her feet.
“I was looking around at all the beautiful stained-glass windows when I noticed your mother sitting in the next pew with her parents and her sister, Cathleen. I smiled at her and she smiled back. With that white scarf over her head, she reminded me of paintings I’d seen of the Madonna. She was so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes off her.” Some of the vivid roguish charm he’d once possessed was captured once more in his smile. “You can bet that after church, I made a special point of meeting her.”
“And you invited her to come out to your ship and promised you’d personally show her around,” Culley said.
“She came, too, but she brought her sister, Cathleen, along. I had an awful time convincing Mary Frances that I wasn’t like some of the other sailors in port. I had more trouble convincing her parents and her sister. But I knew the moment I saw her that she was the girl for me. We were married four weeks later. I thought I had the world by the tail,” he sighed.
Her father didn’t carry the story beyond that point, but her mother had told Maggie the rest of it—how her father hadn’t been able to find a decent-paying job in California after he’d been discharged from the navy. Since he’d always dreamed about owning a cattle ranch, he’d taken the money her mother had inherited from her grandparents and bought this ranch in Montana without ever seeing it first. Maggie remembered how her mother used to talk about their plans to remodel the house, plans that were never realized. The additions were tacked onto the main structure in a helter-skelter fashion. During the last two years before her mother died, she rarely mentioned the plans to remodel their home, as if she knew it was another one of her husband’s dreams that wouldn’t come true.
Much of what Maggie knew about the early years, she had gleaned from reading between the lines. When her father had first arrived, he had believed ranching was a snap. All a man had to do—so he thought—was turn a bunch of cows loose on the range with a bull and the next year sell the calves for a huge profit. He didn’t realize how much work went along with it, from constantly checking and repairing fences to bailing hay for winter feed, not to mention wet-nursing a bunch of dumb cows and calves.
The land on which the Shamrock Ranch was located looked ideal for raising cattle, but the rough terrain supported little grass. Each year there were cows that had to be destroyed because of broken legs. Rattlesnakes took their toll, too, as well as coyotes preying on calves or crippled cows. And the water supply was insufficient. In bad years, even the house well went dry. But the Calder ranch stretched to the south with its abundance of rich grass and water.
Her father was always dreaming of ways to make it big. One year he tried his hand at panning for gold—certain he would strike a mother lode. But gold-prospecting was hard, back-breaking work, requiring hours of labor with no guarantee of finding color. Lacking persistence, he soon gave it up. Another year, he tried to convince gas and oil companies to drill on his land, but all their surveys were negative. With visions of hitting a gusher, he tried to drill one himself, but he gave up before they had even gone deep enough to hit water. It was too much work. He was always certain there was an easier way to strike it rich—like the Calders.
Not once in all the years they’d lived there had there been enough money for her mother to return to California to visit her family. Her mother’s parents had died and there hadn’t been enough money to travel all the way there for the funeral. Her mother had cried then. They still received a Christmas card each year from her sister, Cathleen, a widow who lived in Lo
s Angeles.
Angus slammed his fist on the table, startling Maggie out of her reverie with an explosive release of his Irish temper. She turned to look at him and saw the black petulance in his expression.
“Calder isn’t going to get away with it!”
“Pa, don’t start in on that,” Maggie protested stiffly.
But he took another swallow of whiskey and paid no attention to her. “It didn’t matter to him that you were a good girl. Did he have any respect for that? No, he’s a Calder. He does whatever he damned well pleases, and doesn’t care if some innocent person has to suffer.”
He had been building up to this outburst all evening, she realized. Nothing she could say or do would silence his tirade, so she clamped her mouth tightly closed.
“Calder isn’t going to keep his mouth shut. No, he’s going to start bragging around about it, spreading ugly stories about Maggie,” he declared.
“If he opens his mouth, I’ll shut it for him,” Culley threatened.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” In spite of her resolve to stay out of this, her temper flared. “All this is nothing but a lot of boastful talk!”
“I’m going to do more than talk, little girl.” Angus O’Rourke stood up, weaving a little, his face white beneath its tan. “I’m going to have myself a talk with old man Calder. He thinks that him and his son can do anything, but I’m going to tell him that they can’t. They aren’t going to get away with what happened today. You just wait and see. I’ll put the fear of God into them.”
“Pa, stop saying things that you have no intention of doing.” Maggie turned away. She was tired of his empty words.
“I am going to see Calder!” he stated emphatically.