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“When I was his age, I was bossing a crew. Ty is still taking orders.” The roughness in his voice was an attempt to control a smoldering anger. “He’ll be thirty before he gets any seasoning and experience at handling men.”
With a mother’s unerring eye, Maggie picked out her son among the riders roping calves and dragging them to the branding crews. His loop was running as straight and true as any man’s out there. Like the others, Ty worked without letup, never slacking off. Everyone was feeling the pressure of the gray, overcast sky, looming so darkly over the afternoon with its threat of cold rain-—or worse, snow.
“You talk as though Ty never thinks for himself,” she reproved. “Have you forgotten it was his idea to alternate steel fenceposts with wooden ones when you were running new fence lines last summer to replace the old ones?”
“I haven’t forgotten.” His hardness eased slightly in remembrance. “But it can’t be claimed as an original idea. It’s been used by a few ranchers to keep their fence lines intact in areas where prairie fires are a danger.”
In the event of a fire, wooden posts would burn, collapsing the fence and potentially allowing livestock to scatter. Using all steel posts prevented that, but it was also considerably more expensive. A combination of wood and steel, however, was a feasible alternative.
“But Ty did make the suggestion and ran all the cost projections beforehand,” Maggie reminded him.
“Maggie, I’m not criticizing the work he’s done or the way he’s done it,” Chase replied with a show of patience. “But I do know how much catching up he has to do, and that bothers me.”
Although Chase had not made the remark with the thought of the four years Ty had spent away from the
ranch at college, Maggie was sensitive to that issue and believed he was referring to that lost time. Ty had been back at the ranch for two full years, but Chase still wasn’t satisfied. She went quiet on him, letting the bawl of the cattle and the shouts of the branding teams take over.
“Cat is loving this, isn’t she?” There was a proud warmth in Chase’s voice that she seldom heard in connection with Ty. While Ty seldom did anything right in his eyes, his daughter could do no wrong. Maggie didn’t think it was fair, the amount of favoritism he showed their daughter. “It looks like riding herd got too tame for her. She’s chasing down the calves with the ground crew now.”
“I think she’s more of a hindrance than a help,” she retorted.
“She’s having fun.” And that justified it for him. “If she really starts to get in the way, the boys will boot her out.”
Even though that was true, Maggie also knew the cowboys spoiled her as much as Chase did. It was amazing how one girl could wrap so many grown men around her finger, considering that she had only recently celebrated her ninth birthday.
It was difficult to keep Cathleen in sight now that she had dismounted from her flashy black-and-white paint horse. It was tied to the picket line, the hand-tooled black leather saddle and matching bridle adorned with silver conchos still on the small-built horse in case Cathleen changed her mind. She always had to be in the thick of things.
At nine, Cathleen was just as beautiful as she’d been at any other age. Even when she was playing tomgirl, as now, she always seemed more girl than torn. Maggie suspected it was the reason she appealed so strongly to the men. She was the ideal, growing from a gorgeous child into a lovely young girl.
“Sit on his neck and hold him down, Cat!” Binky Ford instructed with a wide grin as he straddled the calf he’d flanked to the ground.
Laughing, Cat tried to sit sideways on the calf’s neck, but it was a hefty animal. Its struggles unbalanced her and she slid to the ground with a plop. Not that it mattered. It was all a game anyway. Her assistance wasn’t required to keep the calf down. The boys were just including her so she could be part of the action. And Cat knew how to play it to get their attention. The cowboys liked it when she mixed right in and got dirty—and they laughed when she wrinkled her nose at the stench of burning hide and hair, or when she flinched at the dehorning.
The heifer calf was branded, tagged, vaccinated, and released to go tearing back to the herd in search of its momma. Cat dusted off her stiff new jeans and headed toward the next melee of men converging on a roped calf. As she trotted to them, she recognized the whip-slim figure with a chunk of dusty tan hair hanging down the middle of her back.
“Hi, Jessy.” She stopped beside her and crouched down. “Can I watch how you castrate that calf?”
A chortle of surprise came from one of the crew working on the downed animal. “I swear you got the curiosity of a cat.”
“Why?” she asked in all innocence, but the man reddened slightly and didn’t answer.
Jessy bent her head to hide a smile and calmly passed a can of antiseptic to the girl. “You can squirt some of this on when I’m finished.”
It amused her that these husky men were uneasy over the prospect of the young girl watching a calf getting castrated. But Jessy had been younger than Cathleen when she got her first close-hand look at how ii was done. Besides, the girl was nine years old, so she knew what was done. The idea of it wasn’t new to her.
“Does it hurt a lot?” Cat asked, pulling her face together in anticipation of pain. There was a smear of dust on her cheek, which gave her a gaminlike charm.
“The trick is to do it so quick that by the time the calf feels the pain, it’s all over,” Jessy explained and cupped the scrotum in her hand to make the incision with her knife.
There was a hissing intake of breath from Cat at the first show of blood. Operating with the deftness of long practice, Jessy removed the male reproductive glands and nodded to the girl to apply the antiseptic. She started to rock back onto her feet away from the calf to toss the testes into the fire.
“Can I see them?” Cat asked, and Jessy heard one of the men muttering a protest at the child being subjected to such indelicacies. She wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Men didn’t mind females knowing such things, but they didn’t want to be around when they found out about them.
“Sure you can,” she replied and noticed, out of the corner of her eye, how quickly the men became absorbed in their work.
Another team nearby had just removed the rope from the neck of their calf. Ty began coiling it up as he turned his horse back to the herd to catch up another. The striped-nosed gelding under him was fresh and eager to work. It sidestepped impatiently at the checking bit in its mouth, chomping on it noisily. The gelding’s angling course brought Ty close to the second crew. He noticed his little sister among them and wouldn’t have thought twice about it except that she was peering very intently at something Jessy was holding. He caught a glimpse of the bloodied organs and seethed with a kind of outrage.
“Cat!” He barked her name, and his sister jumped with an almost guilty start. “Get back on your horse!” She eyed him with surprise, taken aback and made wary by the sharp tone of command in his voice. It seemed wise not to question his authority over her at this particular minute, so she did as she was told. Still ignoring Jessy, Ty swung his glaring look at the other men. “How come you’re letting her castrate the calves? That’s no job for a girl.”
