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“What’s the matter, Ty?” Jessy asked in challenge. “Are you worried my knife might slip and end up cutting a two-legged critter? Well, don’t. I’ve cut more calves than you’ve got whiskers.”
He threw her an angry look, then ordered, “Jobe, put her on the iron.”
Jobe Garvey hesitated. “She’s clean and quick with a knife.”
His lips came together in a tight line. Jobe was head of the ground team, and it wasn’t Ty’s place to be changing assignments. He could only pull rank on the basis of being a Calder, and he wouldn’t do that. There was no choice but to leave the matter to Jobe’s judgment.
“I guess if she draws a man’s pay, she can do a man’s work,” Ty declared roughly.
The calf was up and gone, and Jessy had discarded the testes and was on her feet, standing beside his constantly shifting horse. At his statement, the others moved off, considering the matter closed, but Jessy remained. There was an angry blaze in her hazel eyes.
“Which is it that bothers you most, Ty?” she demanded in a low voice that couldn’t be heard by anyone else. “That I’m doing a man’s work, getting a man’s pay, or doing the job better than you?”
“Maybe I resent the way you keep showing off how good you are,” he snapped.
“Dammit, I am good! And I’m not going to hide or pretend I’m not good just to please some man!”
“I suppose you’re like some of those bra burners that want to be treated as equals.” There was a derisive curl in his voice.
“If that means equal respect, yes!” she shot back.
“All right.” Ty was hot, breathing deep and rough. Her accusations had stung him, hitting a little too close to the truth. He seemed to instinctively know just how to get even. “For a girl, you make a damned good man.”
He saw her stiffen as he reined his horse to one side and booted it forward. Jessy glared after him, hurt by his insult. She had taunted him with her role in a man’s world to remind him she was a woman. This summer she’d turned nineteen. She had all the needs, desires, and longings of a woman. And he was too blind to see it.
A drop of rain fell on her cheek and splattered; then another came. Jessy lifted her eyes to the Broken Buttes, but their jagged outline was shrouded in a gray mist. The rain was on its way.
“Break out the slickers!” someone shouted.
Chase and Maggie sat astride their horses on a rise of the grassy plains to observe the branding process. He nodded an order to Maggie. “Better get Cathleen and head for the
cook tent. There’s no need in you two getting wet.” He reached behind him to untie the yellow slicker from his saddle.
In the distance, there was a low hum that became steadily louder. Maggie had turned her horse to ride around the herd and take shelter at the mess tent before the scattered raindrops became a downpour, but the sound became a low roar. Chase looked up almost at the same moment she did.
A twin-engine aircraft came out of the south, flying just below the low clouds. It wagged its wings as it thundered by them on the left.
“That’s Dyson’s plane.” Chase recognized it.
“Were you expecting him?”
“No.” He watched the plane dip a wing toward the ground and make a swinging turn, leveling out in the direction of The Homestead.
“He’s awfully low.” The plane seemed to skim above the tops of the rolling hills.
“He’s probably flying over the gas wells,” Chase guessed. “It looks like we’d better head home and meet our company.”
The plane raced ahead of the rain, so close to the ground that all its undulations were apparent, belying its flat look. From the window, the land below seemed to slide by slowly for inspection.
“Look. There’s a herd of cattle . . . and some riders.” Tara pressed closer to the window, trying to see more clearly. She wondered if Ty was down there among them.
“It looks like they’re in the middle of spring branding,” E. J. Dyson observed. Their view of the scene was broken as the pilot made a slow wigwag of the plane’s wings. When they leveled out again, Tara had lost sight of the gathering of animals, but she continued to look out the window.
“All this land,” she murmured in a marveling tone.
“And we’ve only flown over half of it—not even that.” It was difficult for him to look at it without thinking of the possible wealth lying beneath that grass, waiting to be exploited. It was not the potential for profit that excited him, but the thrilling challenge of putting a project of that magnitude together and making it work. It was the sheer adventure of it, high-stakes gambling at its highest. “The breadth of it is staggering.”
“It is,” she agreed. “And the Calders own every inch of it?”
