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“I guess it isn’t.
” He looked at her again, recognizing a maturity in her attitude that he hadn’t suspected.
There was a classic purity to her profile: the strong chin, the clean jawline, and the prominent ridge of her cheekbone. Her hair, the color of spun-dark caramel, hung in loose, thick waves to her shoulders. Leo Grayson found himself admiring and respecting the girl he saw. Her features contained a strength that seemed a match for the land, and she came on with a confidence that could face its challenge. Pretty she wasn’t, but pretty wouldn’t last out here, he realized.
“You are a handsome girl, Jessy.” No other adjective suited her strong looks, yet it didn’t diminish her potential womanliness in Grayson’s eyes.
“Me? I’m as plain as a potato.” She dismissed the compliment.
“No, you’re not.”
“Look.” She sounded very patient with him for being so blind to her faults. “I’m too tall—I’m taller than most of the guys in my class.” But Leo noticed she didn’t slouch to disguise her height. “I’m too thin, and it doesn’t matter how much I eat, I can’t get any curves. And in the bosom department, I laid an egg—a pair of them.”
The few times he’d encountered her frankness, it had always amused him, but he had to struggle to keep from laughing aloud at this candid assessment of her female attributes.
“What are you going to do when you graduate from high school?” he asked to change the subject.
“Stay here and work. That’s one of the benefits that go with being born and raised on Calder land. All you have to do is go to the boss and ask him for a job. On a ranch this size, there’s always a lot of work,” she said.
“What will you do?” He frowned.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged that it was too far in the future to decide. “I might stick with range work, or help at the day school, or maybe work in the commissary.” There were any number of choices, although she preferred the first.
But she also knew that even though some of the wives, especially the younger ones, pitched in during the calving season or on a roundup when they were short of cowboys, no female on horseback was drawing regular cowhand wages. There was a silent prejudice against women holding that male-reserved job on the ranch. Nothing had ever been said about her getting paid for a cowboy’s work in the summer.
Jessy switched the subject, transferring the focus from herself to his work. “What’s the verdict on all the tests you’ve been doing? Are the drilling rigs going to be shifting to our part of the ranch?”
“No. It’s going to be my recommendation that it’s too iffy here.” Since his decision was a negative one, Leo didn’t regard it as secret information. “I think we’ve exhausted all the possibilities of future oil or gas discoveries on the Triple C.”
His gaze went to the side window of the truck, the glass steamed over at the corners. The contours of the rough land resembled rigidly flexed muscles, bulging biceps covered with hairy grass. To his eye, it looked worthless, too damned arid and barren. It required a hundred acres to support one cow with a calf. It seemed so unproductive, such a waste of so much land.
“It’s a crime,” he murmured aloud.
“What?” Jessy didn’t quite catch what he said.
Leo roused himself. “I was just looking out the window and thinking of such a valuable resource sitting idle.”
“You mean the grass?” The parched and freeze-dried grass was all she could see, definitely a resource in her experience.
“I’m talking about all the coal that’s underneath it, so close to the surface.” A huge deposit of low-sulfur coal underlay this whole region of eastern Montana. “All a man would need to do is scrape away that worthless soil and there it would be.”
“You don’t even have to scrape the ground away.” Jessy smiled as if knowing a secret and let up on the accelerator, looking around to get her bearings on how far they’d come. “Do you want me to show you?”
“Do you mean there’s a place where the vein of coal has been exposed?” he asked with growing interest, and she gave him an affirmative nod. “Yes, I’d like to see it—if it won’t take us too much out of our way.”
“It won’t,” she assured him and turned the truck onto a trail that was little more than two rutted tracks running through the grass. “But you’ll have to hold on. It’ll be a bumpy ride.”
The warning was an understatement. Leo Grayson ended up with one hand braced overhead and one jammed against the dashboard as the pickup bounced over the rough trail. Jessy gripped the steering wheel with both hands to keep it from being jerked out of her grasp. Conversation was impossible on the teeth-jolting ride. The trail crested a rise and fell steeply into a hollow. Jessy braked the truck to a stop at the bottom where it leveled out.
“There it is.” She gestured with her hand to a cutbank.
Except for a thin layer of sod matted with dead grass atop it, the exposed section was solidly black. There were plenty of indications that its enlargement was man-made.
“Most of the older homes on the ranch are heated with coal furnaces,” Jessy explained. “There’s a couple-three areas like this scattered around. We just come and get our own fuel. It doesn’t cost anything but the labor.”
Giving in to his professional curiosity, Leo braved the cold temperature and climbed out of the pickup to take a closer look. It was one thing to know the coal was under the ground and another to see the large exposed seam. He wrapped the scarf more tightly around his head and neck and walked forward to investigate the high black bank.
Jessy watched him from the warmth of the truck’s cab, faintly amused by his fascination over something so common. Getting the winter supply of coal was not a chore anyone on the ranch fancied. It was dusty, dirty, hard work, and constantly having to stoke the furnace was another inconvenience. Which was why most of the homes had converted to more modern sources, usually oil or propane. Coal wasn’t practical anymore, even if it was cheap.
