A Lone Star Christmas Read online

  “What is it? What does the paper say?” McDill asked.

  Red slid the paper across the table to him. “Read it for yourself.”

  “I can’t read, Red, you know that,” McDill said.

  “It says the name of the man who rousted us from the train was Smoke Jensen.”

  “Smoke Jensen? Yeah, I’ve heard of him. He is one tough hombre.”

  “Is he now?” Red asked.

  “Yeah, he is. You mean you ain’t never heard of him?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Red said. “It’s just that this is the first time I’ve ever run across him.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “It won’t be my last time,” Red said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fort Worth, May 17

  The Texas Cattlemen’s Association held a dance in Fort Worth, and because there was no single building large enough to hold the event, carpenters had constructed a wooden dance floor near the stockyard in Sundance Square. A band had been hired just for the occasion, coming all the way from San Antonio and arriving by train earlier in the day.

  Though most of the other cowboys from Live Oaks were already in town, Tom, Dusty, and Mo waited to ride in alongside the surrey. Clay would be driving the trap, and his wife Maria was already in the surrey, sitting beside him as it waited in front of the big house for Rebecca to join them. Rebecca would ride into town in the back seat.

  Like the others, Tom had put on a clean pair of denims and a shirt but then he had second thoughts. While the others were outside with the surrey waiting for Rebecca, Tom went back into the bunkhouse to change clothes. When he came back outside, instead of the denims, Tom was wearing one of the suits he had brought West with him. He chose a dark blue suit with a light blue silk vest and a white shirt. At his collar, he wore a crimson cravat, and as he knew it would, his attire grabbed the attention of all the others when he went outside.

  “Whoowee, Tom I’ll say this for you. You do know how to turn out,” Mo teased.

  “Yes, sir, but Tom ain’t the only one all fancied up,” Dusty said. “Look over there.”

  The object of Tom’s notice was Rebecca. Rebecca, who was walking toward the surrey from the big house, was wearing a bright blue dress trimmed in white faille. A wide white sash was around her waist, beautifully accenting her figure. Tom took in a sharp breath of admiration when he saw her.

  Rebecca returned Tom’s look with her own appraising stare. She knew that if anyone else had attempted to dress as Tom was dressed, they would have been considered vain and a dandy. But Tom could bring it off because he was handsome enough to do justice to the clothes. In addition, he had already proven to the others by his willingness to work, as well as his brute strength, that any charge of dandyism would be falsely placed.

  While Rebecca made her critical appraisal of Tom, she felt a slow-building heat in her body, and she wondered what it would be like to be kissed by him. Embarrassed by what she was thinking, she felt a flushing in her cheeks and she put the thought away as quickly as she could, absolutely certain that someone could read it in her face.

  By dusk, the excitement which had been growing for the entire day was full-blown. Several had gathered around to watch the dance, including those who were too young, too old, too uncoordinated, or simply unable to get a partner. Now, as the band warmed up, their music could be heard all over the north end of Fort Worth, adding to the excitement that was already in the air.

  Before the dance even began, the band did a few numbers just to warm up the crowd. The dance not being limited to cattlemen only, men and women from the town streamed along the boardwalks toward the dance floor, the women in colorful ginghams, the men in clean blue denims and brightly decorated vests.

  To one side of the dance floor a large punch bowl and several glass cups were set on a table, and Rebecca watched as one of the cowboys walked over to the punch bowl to unobtrusively add whiskey from a bottle he had concealed beneath his vest. A moment later another cowboy did the same thing, and Rebecca smiled as she thought of the growing potency of the punch.

  The music was playing, but as yet no one was dancing. Then the music stopped, and the caller lifted a megaphone.

  “Choose up your squares!” the caller shouted.

  The cowboys started toward the young women who, giggling and turning their faces away shyly, accepted their invitations. In a moment there were three squares formed and waiting. As she had hoped he would, Tom asked Rebecca for the first dance, and they were in the square nearest the band.

  The music began, with the fiddles loud and clear, the guitars carrying the rhythm, the accordion providing the counterpoint, and a twanging jew’s harp heard over everything. The caller began to shout, and he stomped his feet and danced around on the platform in compliance with his own calls. He was the center of fascinated attention from those who weren’t dancing, as the caller bowed and whirled just as if he had a girl and was in one of the squares himself. The dancers moved and swirled to the caller’s commands.

  Around the dance floor sat those who were without partners, looking on wistfully. At the punch bowl table, cowboys continued to add their own ingredients, and though many drank from the punch bowl, the contents of the punch bowl never seemed to diminish.

  “Tell me, Tom,” Rebecca said after about the fourth dance. “Would an Eastern girl ever ask a man to take her for a walk? Or is that something only a Western girl would do?”

  “A gentleman would welcome the invitation whether it came from an Eastern girl or a Western girl,” Tom replied. He offered her his arm.

  “Thank you for that considerate response, sir,” she answered with a smile, putting her hand through his arm.

  Leaving the dance floor, they stepped up onto the boardwalk, then walked, arm in arm, south down North Main Street.

  Behind them, the lights around the dance floor glittered brightly. The rest of the town was dark, or nearly so. Overhead there was just the barest sliver of a moon, but the sky was filled with stars.

  “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” Rebecca asked.

  “No,” Tom replied. “I haven’t.”

  There was something in the tone of Tom’s voice that caused Rebecca to look back at him and when she did, she saw that he was staring at her.

  “I mean the sky,” she said, self consciously.

  Tom looked up. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That too.”

  Rebecca smiled. “Maybe we should get back to the dance,” she suggested.

  “All right. I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.”

  Rebecca did feel uncomfortable, but not for the reason Tom was suggesting. She was uncomfortable with herself. She felt a very strong attraction to him, and she knew that it could only lead to a dead end.

  When they returned to the dance floor, the dancing had stopped because of some sort of disturbance.

  “I wonder what’s going on?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know, I—oh dear, it’s Dalton.”

  Dalton, Rebecca’s younger brother, was her half-brother, actually, since they shared the same father but different mothers.

  There were several cowboys gathered around Dalton, and they were yelling at him.

  “What we ought to do is take you over to the stock barn and string you up,” one of the cowboys said.

  “What’s wrong? What did my brother do?” Rebecca said, stepping into the middle of them, putting herself between the angry cowboys and Dalton.

  “He, uh, well, I don’t want to say it,” one of the cowboys said.

  “Ask him what he done,” one of the other cowboys said. “See if he’s man enough to tell you.”

  Rebecca turned toward Dalton, who was standing there rather sheepishly. “What did you do, Dalton?” she asked.

  “It was a joke,” Dalton said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a joke, that’s all.”

  “What did you do?” Rebecca asked again.

  “I—uh—peed in the punchbowl.”


  “You did what?” Rebecca shouted at him.

  “It was a joke,” Dalton said again.

  “Dalton, you’re my brother, so I’m bound to take your side,” Rebecca said. She pointed to the angry cowboys. “But if they beat you to within an inch of your life, I wouldn’t blame them one bit. That was a despicable thing to do!”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Dalton said again.

  “Dusty?”

  “Yes, ma’am?” Dusty replied. Dusty was the oldest of all the cowboys who worked at Live Oaks.

  “Please take my brother home.”

  “I ain’t ready to go home yet,” Dalton said.

  “You aren’t ready?”

  “No, I’m not. And you can’t make me go home.”

  “I guess you’re right. I can’t make you go home,” Rebecca said. “But I can’t protect you either. So if these gentlemen feel they have a score to settle with you, there is nothing I can do to stop them.” She turned toward the angry cowboys. “Go ahead, gentlemen,” she said. “I’m sorry I interrupted.”

  “No! Sis! Wait!” Dalton shouted. “No need for that. I’ll go home with Dusty.”

  “I thought you might feel that way,” Rebecca said. By now it wasn’t just the cowboys, but everyone at the dance who had gathered around to watch the drama play out before them.

  “Go on back to enjoy the dance,” Rebecca said to the others. “I’ll get a new punch bowl and replace the punch.”

  “Miss Rebecca, how are you goin’ to replace the punch? There must’ve been ten bottles of whiskey in it,” one of the others asked.

  His question was greeted with laughter which, fortunately, broke the tension.

  “Dalton does find ways to get himself into trouble, doesn’t he?” Dusty commented that night after they had all returned to the bunkhouse and were getting ready for bed.

  “He’s a good man,” Mo said.

  “How can you say that?” One of the other cowboys asked. “Like you say, he’s always into first one thing and then another.”

  “I mean when you consider that me ’n him are good friends, what with him bein’ rich and me bein’ nothin’ but a cowboy.”

  “Good men don’t pee into a punch bowl,” Tom said.

  “He just needs a little discipline is all,” Dusty said. “But I think Mo is right. I think that deep down, he is a good kid. What I don’t understand is why he is like he is. I mean, he’s got everything anyone his age could possibly want, but somehow it don’t seem to be enough for him.”

  “It isn’t a condition that is entirely unheard of,” Tom said.

  Tom didn’t elaborate, but he could have. He had seen many a young man, and woman, children of the very wealthy, who for some inexplicable reason were spoiled rotten. Dalton was proof that this particular syndrome was not limited to Boston.

  After Tom got to bed he lay there far into the night, thinking of Rebecca. He was sure that if he had wanted to, he could have kissed her that night.

  What was he talking about? He did want to kiss her. He wanted to very much. But he knew that if he had, it could open up a can of worms that he wouldn’t be able to close again. He was not ready for love—not yet—maybe never again. Not after what happened to Martha. Tom was beginning to think that he should not have gotten off the train in Fort Worth.

  Live Oaks, June 1

  “Look at that,” Mo said, pointing to a broken spoke on the right rear wheel of one of the three heavy freight wagons that belonged to the ranch. “That wheel is going to have to be replaced.”

  “I’ll help you,” Tom said.

  “Well, the first thing we have to do is get it up on a stand,” Mo said. “I’ll get the stand and the lever.”

  A moment later, Mo came back from the barn with a stand, a long lever, and a block. Putting the block and lever in place, Mo picked up the jack stand.

  “I’m smaller than you are, and I can get under the wagon easier,” he said. “You lever it up, and I’ll get the jack stand set in place.”

  “All right,” Tom agreed.

  A moment later, with the right-rear wheel of the wagon levered up from the ground, Mo crawled under the wagon and put the jack in place. Tom lowered the wagon onto the stand, which still kept the wheel clear of the ground.

  They pulled the wheel off, took it into the machine shed, and replaced the broken spoke. When they came back, Mo tried to put the wheel back onto the axle, but there was an obstruction underneath that prevented it.

  “I’ll crawl under there and clear that away,” Mo said. “As long as it is on the jack stand, it’ll be all right.”

  It would have been all right, but some of the obstruction was caught under the jack stand itself, and when Mo tried to move it, the jack stand started to fall over.

  “It’s falling on me!” Mo shouted at the top of his voice.

  Acting quickly, and without giving it a second thought, Tom caught the wagon as it was falling. With muscles in his arms and shoulders straining, Tom not only kept the wagon from falling on Mo, he actually lifted it high enough for Mo to get out from under.

  “Put the wheel on,” Tom said.

  “I’ll get the lever.”

  “Put the wheel on,” Tom repeated, and quickly Mo slipped the wheel hub back on to the axle. Only then did Tom put the wagon back down.

  “Sum’bitch!” Mo said. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that!”

  By now the story of Rebecca’s initial contact with the two cowboys the night she came back home had made the rounds. The two cowboys, Dutch and Pete, had ridden for several of the ranchers over the last few years, always as part-time riders. When they weren’t riding, they performed odd jobs around town. It was said Pete’s fingers were still misshapen from his run-in with Tom.

  “He may be an Eastern dude, but I tell you true, he ain’t someone you want on your bad side,” one of the cowboys said, and all the other riders of Live Oaks agreed.

  A few days after the incident with the wagon, Rebecca went out on a ride with no particular destination, but with a definite purpose. She needed to sort out her feelings about Tom Whitman. From the very first day, it was clear that Tom wasn’t like any cowboy she had ever known, and she had been raised around cowboys.

  In fact, Tom was not like any man she had ever known, and in the beginning, her interest in him was curiosity only. That was because she had discovered there was much more to him than met the eye. He was a gentleman of the first order, he could discuss anything, and he was not intimidated by wealth or position. The other cowboys of the ranch sensed the same thing about him, but they harbored no resentment toward him, nor did they ever tease him as they would any other tenderfoot.

  As she rode around the ranch that day, she realized that her feelings for Tom had grown beyond curiosity and fascination. She found herself staring at him sometimes, wondering what it would be like to be kissed by him, and more.

  She thought back to the dance last month, and the walk they had taken away from the dance. He had not kissed her, though she had the feeling that he very much wanted to kiss her. Why didn’t he kiss her? She was certainly letting him know in every way she knew, short of actually coming out and saying it, that she wanted to be kissed.

  That night, in bed, she had imagined what it would be like to have him there with her, in bed beside her. Though she was a virgin, she knew what men and women did, and as she lay there, she felt a tingling all over her body as she engaged in thoughts that she dare not share with anyone.

  Cresting a small rise in the ground, she saw someone working at a creek just ahead. Then, with a small twinge of excitement, she realized that it was Tom. He was clearing brush from the creek.

  She had known this!

  She remembered now, hearing her father tell Clay to have Tom clear the brush away from Wahite Creek. She had forgotten that. Or, had she? Had her subconscious mind remembered, and brought her here?

  She remained on top of the small hill, sitting her horse for a moment as she looked down at
him, wondering if she should turn and ride away before he saw her.

  It was too late. He did see her, and he took off his hat, then waved it over his head at her. She felt for a moment as if she were about to jump into a cold pool of water, but taking a deep breath she slapped her legs against the side of her horse and rode down toward him.

  “Hello,” Tom said cheerfully. “Are you enjoying your ride?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Are you enjoying your work?” she asked with a little laugh.

  “I am enjoying it more now than I was a moment earlier,” he said. “Swing down from your saddle and get some circulation going again.”

  Although she had been mounting and dismounting from the time she was a small girl, she did not decline his offer to help. And that proffer was more than a mere token effort. As she started down, Tom put his hands under her arms and lifted her easily. But he had made a slight miscalculation as he set her down on the ground. The gap between Tom and her horse was such that when he put her into that narrow space it brought their bodies into direct contact. To make matters worse, her horse, almost as if conspiring to do so, moved up against her, pushing her even closer to him. She felt the crush of his chest against her breasts, and the muscles of his legs against hers. She realized then that it was not a miscalculation, but a carefully calculated move.

  She shivered, as a thrill, unlike anything she had ever felt before, passed through her.

  “I’m on the ground,” she said.

  “Are you?” Tom asked, his eyes twinkling with great humor. “Because right now, I’m on a cloud.”

  “What?”

  Tom chuckled. “Nothing,” he said. “I was just being poetic.”

  He stepped away, and Rebecca found that she could breathe again. Wanting to change the subject, she walked down to the edge of the creek. “Did you have a lot of brush to clear away? It comes down every spring and starts to clog up the creeks in certain places.”