And it would be, she reminded herself. Hunched over the seat of a wagon all day would be terribly uncomfortable and lonely. He and Luther and Mr. Caldwell had agreed to share a camp near the main outfit’s site, but a man like Ward would never spend a minute in conversation with a low character like Jack Caldwell if he didn’t have to, and he considered Luther the most boring individual in Klees. He would need her company after the sun sank.
“Well,” he said, stepping into the gig and reaching for the reins, “tomorrow our destiny begins.” Occasionally he made grand statements like this one, and it always made her uncomfortable. “I hope the drive is successful. I’ll hold you responsible if it isn’t.”
He tossed out the last remark in a light voice as if he were joshing her. But Les suspected he meant it. Twisting her hands against her waist and chewing her bottom lip, she watched the road until the darkness swallowed his gig.
Slowly, she returned to the house, anticipating her last night in a real bed for a very long while. With all her heart she dreaded tomorrow.
“Grady tells me that you’ve been driving the chuck wagon around the ranch like some kind of hell cart, and making him eat five meals a day.”
Alex rolled her chair close to the wheel of the chuck wagon and touched the wooden spokes. “I’m taking your advice, Mr. Frisco. Trying to set my fears aside and do what I must.” She started every day with a lump of fear clogging her throat and went to bed at night with the same lump, only it felt larger.
Tilting his head back, he considered the stars shining in a black sky. “Going to be clear tomorrow.” He let a silence stretch between them while she fidgeted with the wheels of her chair. “This trip is going to be hard on you, harder yet on your pride.” She knew he referred to that nemesis of her life, the demeaning fire pit, and the crawling on the ground it necessitated. “Can you go the distance, Alex?”
Could she? Was there a point at which she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore? When she would give up?
“I don’t have a choice,” she said in a low voice. Remembering Ward Hamm’s gossip, she lifted her head. “Will you go the distance, Mr. Frisco?”
He laughed. “I don’t have any choice either. We’ve all got a lot riding on the success of this drive.”
“In your honest opinion, Mr. Frisco, what are our chances of success?” Her hands tightened in her lap. “I don’t wish to put myself through this ordeal if there’s no real possibility that we’ll succeed.”
She had been driving the wagon at breakneck speeds just as he’d said, practicing at handling her terror, and she was covered with bruises and small scrapes. Her fingers were burned from lifting hot pans and lids, her nails broken. Her leg ached and throbbed from standing and walking with the crutch. She was sore all over. Even her eyelids stung from worrying instead of sleeping at night. And all of this had happened before the drive even began.
“I can’t guarantee success,” he said finally. “Too many things can happen. We’re going to lose some beeves, that’s a given. I can’t promise that we’ll get two thousand steers from here to Abilene. But we’re going to try like hell.”
“I see.” She wanted ironclad promises, unbreakable guarantees. But they didn’t exist.
“Good night, Mr. Frisco,” she whispered, turning her chair toward the back door.
Freddy waited for him in front, rocking on the porch swing and listening to the deep-throated frog sounds of spring. The weather was still fickle, warm and sweet one day, wet and chilly the next, but the days were longer now.
As if her thoughts conjured him, she heard Dal’s boots on the porch steps and looked up as he sat in the swing beside her. Instantly she frowned. She had expected him to take one of the horn chairs. Edging slightly away from the muscled heat of his thigh and the scent of leather and cigars and that indefinable clean scent of a man who lived his life outdoors, she arranged her skirts and tried to decide if she should just blurt out the question, or wait for an opening.
“You worry me the most,” he said, not mincing words on a cordial beginning. “This cattle drive isn’t a theater production staged for your personal amusement or enjoyment. You’re not along to provide entertainment for the drovers, you’re there to work. And work well, not the half-hearted effort you’ve been putting in.”
Gasping, she shifted to face him. “I’m holding my own!”
He stared at her in the light falling through the window behind them. “You have the most potential, Freddy, but you aren’t using it. You let Les set the pace, and you keep up with her, but with your natural ability, you should be able to rope better, shoot better, and ride better.”
“Believe it or not, I don’t plan to make cowboying my life’s work! And I don’t need to rope better, shoot better, or ride better to portray those actions on the stage.”