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“Yeah, probably got used to the company of humans an’ now he’s wonderin’ where his friends are,” Jessie suggested.
19
Bull Giles rode out at dawn the next mor
ning. Immediately after breakfast, the men began work on the ranch buildings. It was a hive of noisy activity with axes felling the cottonwood trees along the river and horses dragging the unhewn logs to the building sites, where more cowboys worked spading up the sod to make dirt floors. It was organized chaos. And the brindle steer, Captain, stood on the knoll overlooking the scene as if he was supervising it all.
Within two weeks the primitive buildings were standing. The green logs were chinked with moss and mud, and the roofs consisted of branches covered with dirt. Zeke Taylor was the closest to being the carpenter in the group of cowboys, so he had built the bunks, chairs, and tables. They were as rough and crude as the buildings that housed them.
Half of the men left when Ely and Mary pulled out to take up their claim on the land Barnie had showed them to the north. Their cabin and barn would be up in an equally short time. Lorna didn’t mind seeing them leave, because they would be neighbors even if they were thirty miles apart.
The covered wagon was partially dismantled to be converted for ranch use. Lorna took the white canvas top and hung it in the cabin to make a cloth wall partitioning off the sleeping area from the rest of the one room structure. As she set her personal possessions around their new home, she refused to compare its crudeness to the sod house of the farmer’s wife in Kansas.
In September Lorna realized she was definitely pregnant, even though she’d experienced no morning sickness and felt in the best of health. When she told Benteen the stork would be visiting them in the spring, he promptly informed her, with considerable pride, that it was going to be a boy.
A week later, Benteen left with the wagon and thirty head of horses. Rusty, Jessie Trumbo, and Bob Vernon stayed behind, as did Lorna. Benteen didn’t want to risk anything happening to her or their unborn baby by being jolted around on the wagon seat, completely ignoring the rough, nearly five-month-long journey she had just endured. So Lorna stayed home while he purchased their winter supplies, filed their homestead claim with the land office, and sold the extra horses. In addition to the supplies, he brought back yard goods so Lorna could make a few additions to their limited wardrobes and three hundred head of the so-called Western cattle. Texas horses were in demand by the northern ranches and brought top prices.
When he returned, he sent Jessie Trumbo, Rusty, Shorty Niles, and Vince Garvey back to Texas to gather another herd of wild stock to drive north in the spring. The brindle steer trotted after the chuck wagon, too anxious to get back on the trail. They took him along to lead the next herd north.
Barnie’s adjoining claim served as an outlying camp from which he worked, checking on the cattle in his area.
The first winter was cold and blustery, with subzero temperatures common and days of heavy snowfall, with the first flakes falling in early October. It wasn’t a severe winter by Montana standards. At Christmastime Mary and Ely came for a holiday dinner. Ely read the Bethlehem story from the Bible, then Woolie played Christmas carols on his harmonica and they all sang.
When Lorna’s time drew near the first of April, Mary came to stay at the cabin and serve as midwife. Despite all the frightening stories Lorna had heard about childbirth in the wilds, she had an easy time of it. Benteen held their newborn son, Webb Matthew Calder, that first day of his life, and on the next, Benteen rode off with the rest of the men to start the spring roundup.
Bridle chains clanked as the small group of riders approached the collection of crude buildings forming the ranch’s headquarters on an early May afternoon. They sat loosely in the saddle, swaying slightly with the rhythm of their trotting horses. The stirrups were long, so there was hardly any bend in the knee.
Haggard lines were drawn across Benteen’s bronzed features from the brutally long days of the roundup, but his eyes remained keen and restless. Both winter losses and calving losses had been minimal, less than he had expected.
When he saw Lorna standing in front of the cabin holding the baby in her arms and waving eagerly to him, the sight revived his acute hungers. Her hair gleamed rich brown in the sunlight, and her parted lips were even and red against her smooth complexion. It warmed him like a fire in the night or a spring flower pushing its way through the crust of melting snow. It was something in her eyes or her lips or the turn of her body that churned the depths of his emotions. The heat of something rash and timeless burned him, the kind of thing that would make a man kill if he had to.
He swung out of the saddle and dropped the reins. For the moment, his hands stayed at his side as Benteen faced her and his son. The faint scent of her hair lifted to him. Her dark eyes were shining as they returned his steady look. There was a powerful hint of fire in her slightly pursed lips, a sweetness in them for a man.
Her voice, when she spoke, did not address itself to him but to the nearly month-old boy-child with its mass of black-down hair. “Didn’t I tell you Daddy would come home today, Webb?”
All his muscles were drawn together, poised for movement. With her words, the needs Benteen held in check were released. His arm hooked itself around her waist, discovering its slimness through the heavy shawl, and drew her into him. He bent and kissed her. A fine sweat broke out on him as he felt the gathering insistence of her response.
Benteen knew the pressure of his arms and his mouth were too strong, too assertive of his rights to her. He broke it off, taking a step back, aware of the vibration all the way through him. There was something uncertain and questioning about the way she looked at him. Her lips were still parted and he looked to see if he’d left the print of his roughness on them. Maybe the impulses that drove him were dirt common.
He swung his attention to the baby and caught the little fist flailing the air. A smile edged his mouth as Benteen tried to curl the tiny fingers around his forefinger.
“How did it go?” Lorna asked, and he knew she meant the roundup.
“Good. He doesn’t look like the squawling red-faced baby I held.” Benteen took his son from her arms to hold him again.
“You have been gone awhile,” she reminded him.
Cradling the infant in one arm, Benteen turned and scooped up the reins to his horse, looping them over its neck. He stepped a foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle, all in one fluid motion. With his weight shifted to the back of the saddle, he set his baby son in front of him and spread his hand across Webb’s chest and stomach to hold him firmly in place.
“Benteen, what do you think you’re doing?” Lorna hurried to the side of his horse.
“I’m taking Webb for his first ride.”
“But he isn’t even a month old yet,” she protested.
“He has to start sometime if he’s going to make a living off a horse like his old man,” Benteen stated, and walked the horse out, aware that Lorna was following anxiously.
He kept the baby’s head supported with his body and held his mount at a slow walk. When he’d been three years old, he’d been riding a full-grown horse without the assistance of an adult, so his father told him. Benteen saw no harm in starting his own son out early.
