A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [1]
A fragment of a Bible verse strayed across his brain. The cattle on a thousand hills…
There were considerably fewer than a thousand hills on the Triple M, big as it was, but the cattle were legion.
To his granddad’s way of thinking, those hills and the land they anchored might have been on loan from the Almighty, but everything else—cows, cousins, mineral deposits and timber included—belonged to Angus McKettrick, his four sons and his daughter, Katie.
Clay shrugged into the long coat and put on his hat. His holster and pistol were stowed in his trunk in the baggage compartment, and his paint gelding, Outlaw, rode all alone in the car reserved for livestock.
The only other passenger on board, an angular woman with severe features and no noticeable inclination toward small talk, remained seated, with the biggest Bible Clay had ever seen resting open on her lap. She seemed poised to leap right into the pages at the first hint of sin and disappear into all those apocalyptic threats and grand promises. According to the conductor, a fitful little fellow bearing the pitted scars of a long-ago case of smallpox, the lady had come all the way from Cincinnati with the express purpose of saving the heathen.
Clay—bone-tired, homesick for the ranch and for his kinfolks, and wryly amused, all of a piece—nodded a respectful farewell to the woman as he passed her seat, resisting the temptation to stop and inquire about the apparent shortage of heathens in Cincinnati.
Most likely, he decided, reaching the door, she’d already converted the bunch of them, and now she was out to wrestle the devil for the whole state of Texas. He wouldn’t have given two cents for old Scratch’s chances.
A chill wind, laced with tiny flakes of snow, buffeted Clay as he stepped down onto the small platform, where all three members of the town council, each one stuffed into his Sunday best and half-strangled by a celluloid collar, waited to greet the new marshal.
Mayor Wilson Ponder spoke for the group. “Welcome to Blue River, Mr. McKettrick,” the fat man boomed, a blustery old cuss with white muttonchop whiskers and piano-key teeth that seemed to operate independently of his gums.
Clay, still in his late twenties and among the youngest of the McKettrick cousins, wasn’t accustomed to being addressed as “mister”—around home, he answered to “hey, you”—and he sort of liked the novelty of it. “Call me Clay,” he said.
There were handshakes all around.
The conductor lugged Clay’s trunk out of the baggage car and plunked it down on the platform, then busily consulted his pocket watch.
“Better unload that horse of yours,” he told Clay, in the officious tone so often adopted by short men who didn’t weigh a hundred pounds sopping wet, “if you don’t want him going right on to Fort Worth. This train pulls out in five minutes.”
Clay nodded, figuring Outlaw would be ready by now for fresh air and a chance to stretch his legs, since he’d been cooped up in a rolling box ever since Flagstaff.
Taking his leave from the welcoming committee with a touch to the brim of his hat and a promise to meet them later at the marshal’s office, he crossed the small platform, descended the rough-hewn steps and walked through cinders and lingering wisps of steam to the open door of the livestock car. He lowered the heavy ramp himself and climbed into the dim, horse-scented enclosure.
Outlaw nickered a greeting, and Clay smiled and patted the horse’s long neck before picking up his saddle and other gear and tossing the lot of it to the ground beside the tracks.
That done, he loosed the knot in Outlaw’s halter rope and led the animal toward the ramp.
Some horses balked at the unfamiliar, but not Outlaw. He and Clay had been sidekicks for more than a decade, and they trusted each other in all circumstances.
Outside, in the brisk, snow-dappled wind, having traversed the slanted iron plate with no difficulty, Outlaw blinked, adjusting his unusual blue eyes to the light of midafternoon.