McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [117]
“I don’t want to buy any of the ones with horns,” she said resolutely, sitting up straight in her saddle. “Merciful heavens, some of them must measure six feet across!”
Holt, beside her on his fitful gelding, grinned through the shifting swell of dirt billowing up around the whole party. “You won’t have much of a herd,” he told her. “They all have horns.”
Lorelei blushed, and not only because she’d just betrayed her ignorance of livestock. Holt’s proposition, made the night before, had taken her over like a fever, with all the attendant aches and tensions. “Oh,” she said.
Holt watched her, resting a forearm on the saddlehorn. “Rivera wants ten dollars a head,” he told her. “I think it’s robbery, and I told him so, but in this case, he’s holding all the cards.”
Mentally, Lorelei counted her money. “I want two hundred head,” she decided, and then felt the sickening backlash of her pronouncement, like a punch in the stomach.
“Your place isn’t big enough to run that many cattle,” he said reasonably. “They need a lot of grass.”
Lorelei tried to look more confident, and more knowledgeable, than she felt. “How many are you taking?”
“Five hundred,” Holt answered matter-of-factly. “The Cavanagh spread amounts to almost twenty-five hundred acres.” He grinned again; evidently, he’d guessed by her expression that arithmetic wasn’t her subject. “You have about a hundred, give or take,” he told her. “That means you can run maybe fifty head.”
“How do you know how many acres I have?” Lorelei asked, raising a little dust of her own. Seesaw was getting impatient, like the gelding. Tired of standing still.
Holt’s grin didn’t falter, which only made it more irritating. “John’s had his eye on that patch of ground ever since I met him,” he said. His gaze glided over her, easy and smooth. “It makes sense to find out everything you can about what you want. You’re more likely to get it that way.”
Lorelei’s cheeks burned. She knew he wasn’t talking about land or cattle then, and she was both infuriated and intrigued. “Nobody gets everything they want, Mr. McKettrick,” she said tightly, and rode past him to join Rafe and the Captain at the base of the canyon. She thought she heard Holt laugh, but she couldn’t tell over the bawling of all those poor beasts.
An hour later, when the deal had been made and she’d parted with a considerable portion of her personal funds, it was time to head back to Reynosa.
Holt traveled at the front, like the head of some conquering army, with Rafe on his left and the Captain on his right. Kahill and another cowboy rode point, keeping the animals funneled into forward motion, with other riders behind them, on both sides, riding swing at the widest part of the herd. Still others took the flank position, bringing up the rear.
And even farther back, with a bandana over her mouth, lest she choke on the blinding dust, Lorelei and the least competent of the cowboy contingent served as drag riders. It was their job to chase any strays back into the herd.
Reynosa was only five miles from the Rancho Soledad, and they were the longest, loudest, dirtiest five miles Lorelei had ever traveled. The thought of driving those animals all the way to San Antonio, on the lookout for Comanches at every turn in the road, seemed almost impossible.
At last, the town came into view and, at Holt’s instructions, the wranglers contained the herd in a grassy clearing next to a stream. This took “some doing,” as John Cavanagh put it when he rode out on one of the wagon horses to look the animals over. The cowboys darted back and forth on their deft ponies, whistling and shouting at every stray, and finally the critters settled down to graze and quench their thirst.
Lorelei felt light-headed, as if she might topple out of the saddle at any moment, and clung to Seesaw with both legs and both hands. Rafe caught her by surprise when he rode up from behind, reining in next to her and the mule.
“Holt says you ought to go to the inn and get some