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He was pulling his way out of the morass of debt, but one year of profit was a long way from being home free. He needed the mortgage paid off, he needed an expanded herd and the money to hire cowhands to work that herd. When he could expand his capital into other areas so he wasn’t entirely dependent on the weather and the market for beef, then he would feel more secure about their future.
The next few years wouldn’t be easy. Madelyn wasn’t pregnant yet, but as soon as she was they would have medical bills to consider, as well as the cost of providing for a growing baby. Maybe he should take Robert’s offer despite his disinclination to allow anyone else any authority over the ranch. It would give him a financial cushion, the means of putting his plans into operation sooner, as well as taking care of Madelyn and their child, or children.
But he had been through too much, fought too hard and too long, to change his mind now. The ranch was his, as much a part of him as bone and blood.
He could easier lose his own life than the ranch. He loved every foot of it with the same fierce, independent possessiveness that had kept his ancestors there despite Indian attacks, weather and disease. Reese had grown up with the sun on his face and the scent of cattle in his nostrils, as much a part of this land as the purple-tinged mountains and enormous sky.
“I’ll make it yet,” he said aloud to the white, silent land. It wasn’t in him to give up, but the land had required men like him from the beginning. It had broken weaker men, and the ones who had survived were tougher and stronger than most. The land had needed strong women, too, and if Madelyn wasn’t quite what he’d planned on, he was too satisfied to care.
CHAPTER NINE
AT THE END of January another big weather system began moving in from the Arctic, and this one looked bad. They had a couple of days’ warning, and they worked together to do everything they could to safeguard the herd. The cold front moved in during the night, and they woke the next morning to steady snow and a temperature that was ten below zero, but at least the wind wasn’t as bad as it had been before.
Reese made a couple of forays out to break the ice in the troughs and stock ponds so the cattle could drink, and Madelyn was terrified every time he went out. This kind of cold was the killing kind, and the weather reports said it would get worse.
It did. The temperature dropped all that day, and by nightfall it was twenty-three below zero.
When morning came it was forty-one degrees below zero, and the wind was blowing.
If Reese had been restless before, he was like a caged animal now. They wore layers of clothing even in the house, and he kept a fire in the fireplace even though the electricity was still on. They constantly drank hot coffee or chocolate to keep their temperatures up, and they moved down to the living room to sleep before the fire.
The third day he just sat, his eyes black with inner rage. His cattle were dying out there, and he was helpless to do a damn thing about it; the blowing snow kept him from getting to them. The killing temperatures would kill him even faster than they would the cattle. The wind chill was seventy below zero.
Lying before the fire that night, Madelyn put her hand on his chest and felt the tautness of his body. His eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling. She rose up on her elbow. “No matter what happens,” she said quietly, “we’ll make it.”
His voice was harsh. “We can’t make it without the cattle.”
“Then you’re just giving up?”
The look he gave her was violent. He didn’t know how to give up; the words were obscene to him.
“We’ll work harder,” she said. “Last spring you didn’t have me here to help you. We’ll be able to do more.”
His face softened, and he lifted her hand in his, holding it up in the firelight and studying it, slim and femininely graceful. She was willing to turn her hands to any job, no matter how rough or dirty, so he didn’t have the heart to tell her that whenever she was with him, he was so concerned for her safety that he spent most of his time watching after her. She wouldn’t understand it; they had been married for seven months, and she hadn’t backed down from anything that had been thrown at her. She certainly hadn’t backed down from him. Remembering some of their fights made him smile, and remembering others made him get hard. It hadn’t been a dull seven months.
“You’re right,” he said, holding her hand to his face. “We’ll just work harder.”
It was the fourth day before they could get out. The wind had died, and the sky was a clear blue bowl, making a mockery of the bitter cold. They had to wrap their faces to eve
n breathe, it was so cold, and it taxed their endurance just to get to the barn to care for the animals there. The cow was in abject misery, her udder so swollen and sore she kicked every time Reese tried to milk her. It took over an hour of starts and stops before she would stand still and let him finish the job. Madelyn took care of the horses while he attended to the milking, carrying water and feed, and then shoveling out the stalls and putting down fresh straw.
The animals seemed nervous and glad to see them; tears stung her eyes as she rubbed Reese’s favorite mount on the forehead. These animals had had the protection of the barn; she couldn’t bear to even think about the cattle.
Reese got the truck started and loaded it and a small trailer with hay. Madelyn climbed into the cab and gave him a steady look when he frowned at her. There was no way she would let him go out on the range by himself in such bitter cold; if anything happened to him, if he fell and couldn’t get back to the truck or lost consciousness, he would die in a short while.
He drove carefully to the protected area where he had herded the cattle and stopped, his face bleak. There was nothing there, just a blank white landscape. The sun glittered on the snow, and he reached for his sunglasses. Without a word Madelyn followed suit.
He began driving, looking for any sign of the herd, if indeed any of them had survived. That white blanket could be covering their frozen carcasses.
Finally it was the pitiful bawling that led them to some of the cattle. They had gone in search of food, or perhaps more shelter, but they were in a stand of trees where the snow had blown an enormous snowbank up against the tree trunks, blocking some of the wind and perhaps saving them.
Reese’s face was still shuttered as he got out to toss some bales of hay down from the trailer, and Madelyn knew how he felt. He was afraid to hope, afraid that only a few head had survived. He cut the twine on the bales and loosened the hay, then took a shovel and dug an opening in the snowbank. The anxious cattle crowded out of what had become a pen to them and headed for the hay. Reese counted them, and his face tightened. Madelyn could tell that this was only a fraction of the number there should have been.
He got back into the truck and sat with his gloved hands clenched on the steering wheel.
“If these survived, there could be more,” Madelyn said. “We have to keep looking.”
By a frozen pond they found more, but these were lying on their sides in pathetic, snow-covered humps. Reese counted again. Thirty-six were dead, and there could be calves too small to find under all the snow.
