In Bed With My Ex's Brother-in-Law novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Storm Call

The Jessup foreman came at six in the morning.

He drove himself, in an old flatbed with a dog box on the back and no Jessup brand on the door.

Then he walked the rest of the way with his hat in his hand.

I met him at the round pen.

"You saw the warning," he said.

"I saw it."

"Snow tomorrow night. Four thousand head up on Owl Creek." He turned the hat a quarter turn in his fingers. "We put six boys on horses yesterday to try. Two got bucked off in the corral. One's in Lander with his collarbone pinned."

Rance came out on the porch with two cups of coffee.

He didn't come down. He set one on the rail for the foreman and stood there drinking the other.

"I'm not here for Coy," the foreman said. "I'm not here for her, either. Noreen doesn't know I came."

"Then who are you here for?"

"Four thousand cows that never did anything to anybody." He looked at me straight. "And the old man. Those are his cows. He built that herd."

I looked at the high country.

"When I rode lead," I said, "your horses carried anybody I put on them. They followed my horse, and the rider just had to sit there and keep his wolf down."

"I know it."

"I'll lead your gather. I'll bring Bridger riders. Four of them, and him." I tipped my head at the porch. "I'll take every Jessup rider who'll do what I say without arguing."

"That's fair."

"That's not the price."

He waited.

"Coy hands me back my thirteen mares," I said. "In the hall. In front of your whole pack. He says they're mine, out loud, and he signs the bill of sale where everybody can see him do it."

The foreman stood very still.

Then he put his hat on.

"I'll tell him," he said. "Two o'clock."

The Jessup hall was full by quarter to two.

Seventy wolves, and every one of them had looked at the sky that morning.

Noreen stood at the fireplace in her cream jacket.

Coy stood beside her with a paper in his hand.

He'd shaved. He'd tucked his shirt. His eyes were red.

Rance stood at the door with his four hands and Gran behind him.

The foreman cleared his throat.

"Go ahead, son."

Coy looked at his mother.

She didn't help him.

"The thirteen Red Desert mares in the north pen," Coy said. His voice came out flat. "I'm giving them back."

"To who?" I said.

He looked at me with real hate.

"To Shiloh Rawlins," he said. "They're hers. They were her mother's."

"Louder," said the old woman in the second row, the one with the half-blood grandson. "We can't hear you in the back."

Somebody laughed.

Coy's ears went red.

"They're hers!"

He slapped the paper down on the front bench, signed it with Noreen's own pen, and threw the pen on the floor.

I picked it up and handed it back to Noreen.

"Thank you," I said. "It writes nice."

Her nostrils went white.

Nobody said the word forfeit.

Nobody said it ever again.

I led all thirteen mares out of the north pen at three o'clock.

They came off the far rail the second they saw me.

They crowded the gate, shoving their noses into my hands and my pockets and my hair.

I didn't let anybody see me cry.

Kacey saw anyway, in her clinic scrubs. She walked up beside me and held the gate and didn't say a word.

We trailered sixty head of Jessup horses up the logging road on Sunday morning, four loads.

The line camp sat at the top of the road where the timber opened, eight thousand feet up.

A log bunkhouse for the riders. A barn and a set of pole corrals.

And off by itself under the spruce, a one-room cabin with a tin chimney.

The old Alpha used to sleep there when he rode gather himself.

"You two take the boss cabin," the foreman said.

"That's the old man's."

"The old man would want somebody using it who could sit a horse."

Twelve Jessup riders had come, the foreman among them.

I'd watched each of them get on, one by one, in the line camp corral, while I sat Tonka beside them and talked them down.

Not one of them had ever asked me a thing in eight years.

Now they kept looking at me between every step.

The four Bridger boys rode like they'd been dropped on the horses from a plane.

By dark the sky had gone the color of a dirty sheep.

The wind came down off the peaks with the smell of snow in it.

I checked every horse in the corrals twice, and then a third time, until Rance came out and took the flashlight out of my hand.

"They're fine," he said.

"Tonka's off his water."

"Tonka's drunk half the trough. I watched him." He turned the light off. "Come inside."

The cabin was one room.

A woodstove with the fire going, a table, two chairs, a kerosene lamp.

An iron bed in the corner with a wool blanket and a sleeping bag on top of it.

The old Alpha's cribbage board was nailed to the wall over the table.

I stood looking at it.

"Thursdays at the Elks," Rance said behind me. "Kacey told me."

"He'd want to be up here."

"We'll tell him we were."

I turned around.

He'd hung his hat on a nail. His hair was flattened from it, and the lamp was on the scar on his jaw.

He was going to ride drag tomorrow, in a blizzard, on a horse he'd only been sitting for six days.

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