She progressed slowly, fearfully, and fell again before she reached the side of the chuck wagon. “Will you help me sit down, please?”
He eased her to the ground and placed the crutch beside her. Then he joined her, sitting with his long legs folded Indian fashion. “It’ll get easier as time passes and your left leg gets stronger. I know you don’t want to hear this, but you need to walk with the crutch as often as you can until it feels secure, until it’s second nature.”
The enormity of what she had done washed over her, swamping her with a mixture of dismay and elation. “I walked,” she whispered, staring at him.
He nodded and smiled. “Don’t be afraid of it.”
She straightened her skirts on the ground then rubbed the leg stretched out in front of her. “I’m not afraid of the crutch, Mr. Frisco.”
“Then why are you resisting so hard?”
She lowered her head and spoke in a low voice of anguish. “I’m afraid I won’t want to give it up.”
Chapter 6
The days turned into a week, then another week and another, and Dal drove the women hard. He knew they were stiff, sore, and hurting, but he didn’t have time to waste accommodating aching muscles. By the end of the third week, the road branding was finished and the brush poppers had increased the size of the herd by an additional two hundred head. In the fourth week it rained, and he knew time was growing short.
“Except the women aren’t ready,” he said to Grady Cole, his wrangler and longtime friend. They stood beneath the barn eaves, watching rain pelt the ground. In another two weeks, like a miracle occurring before their eyes, new grass would blanket the range, and herds all over Texas would head out, moving north.
“Them women ain’t never going to be ready.” Pulling back his lips, Grady spit a stream of tobacco juice toward a rain-slick rock. “Women weren’t meant to cowboy. I’ve known you most of your life, and I gotta say this is the damnedest thing you ever did agree to.”
Dal jammed his hands in the pockets of his slicker and gazed out at the rain. “You know the reasons.”
“Reckon I do.” Grady removed his hat and scratched his scalp, digging his fingers into a thatch of iron grey hair. “If you wait until them women is ready, you ain’t going nowhere.”
Dal nodded. “They’re making progress. It just isn’t enough.”
Yesterday Grady had put Freddy and Les up on cutting horses with disastrous results. Both of them had spent more time picking their bruised selves off the ground than sitting in the saddle. Before the day’s session ended, Grady had been red-faced and apoplectic, and both women had been aching, black-and-blue, and crying.
But both of them kept getting back on the horses. Dal watched the rain and remembered how it felt to climb back on a mustang who had just tossed you on your butt. As competent hands, neither Freddy nor Les was worth crap and most likely never would be. But he was developing a reluctant respect for their determination.
He was developing the same grudging respect for Alex. She could move from chair to crutch now without falling, and she could use the crutch smoothly. He’d watched her take down all the utensils from the side of the chuck wagon, build a fire from start to coffeepot hanging above it. A pile of rocks was fluffier than her biscuits, but she insisted that she was working on the problem and making progress.
He couldn’t fault them for trying.
Still, they kept him awake nights worrying about their state of readiness, trying to think of quick ways to turn them into something nature had never intended them to be. “Les would quit in an instant if the other two did.” Les was the weakest of the three, the most fearful, and, in his opinion, the most likely to get herself into serious trouble on the drive.
Grady leaned against the barn wall. “If she don’t get herself killed before we ride into Abilene, I’ll eat my socks. And if I don’t kill her ass of a fiancé before then, I’ll eat your socks.”
Dal was still burning about Luther Moreland’s decision to allow Ward Hamm to accompany the drive. What the hell was this anyway, a spectator event? It was bad enough that he’d have Moreland and Lola’s representative looking over his shoulder.
Frowning, he lit a cigar and blew smoke into the rain. “Alex will need a lot of help from you. Even up on a crutch, there’s a lot she can’t manage.”
Grady squirted tobacco juice through the gap in his front teeth. “That woman don’t know how to make a decent cuppa coffee to save her life.”
“Unless the coffee can float a horseshoe, you don’t think it’s worth drinking.”