Despair made her stomach cramp. “The estate could be distributed, then Alex and I could quietly give Les a share. No one would have to know, just us.”
“Ward will never accept a verbal agreement from you and Alex, you know that.” Sympathy vied with anger across his expression. His jaw clenched when he looked at Les. “This goes on until she dies or recovers.”
Freddy covered her face in her hands.
They both watched Les’s slumped figure in front of them. “I’m starting to worry about you, Freddy. You were up most of last night sitting with Les, and spent the other half chasing a stampede. Tired cowboys make stupid mistakes.”
“It was dark and raining. That’s why I ran into Charlie’s horse.”
“You ran into Charlie because you were too exhausted to pay attention, and you didn’t react fast enough. Because you’ve only had about three hours’ sleep in the last four days. If you want to kill yourself like Les is doing, fine, but you’re not entitled to endanger my other drovers.”
She was exhausted enough that she only half listened to what he was saying. Her attention strayed to his mouth, and she surrendered to the fascination of watching how he formed words. She thought she knew every detail about him—Lord knew she watched every move he made—but she hadn’t noticed the way he pushed some words out, caressed others. A ball of heat uncurled in her stomach, and she wet her lips. If she didn’t stop thinking about him, wondering and speculating, she would lose her mind.
“How many beeves have we lost?” she asked, fixing her thoughts in a different direction. Once she had believed the worst thing that could happen to her was never to act onstage again. Now she understood the worst thing would be to endure this ordeal, then discover at the end that it had been for nothing.
“We lost two steers last night.” For the first time, Freddy saw weariness in the tanned lines that gave strength to his face. “That brings us to fifty-nine lost.”
“And cuts our margin to 153,” she said slowly.
Blinking hard, she told herself fiercely that they would win. Fate wouldn’t put them through this then snatch away the prize at the end. Please God, she thought, looking at Les through a film of tears, help her. And let us win.
Dal leaned against the wheel of the chuck wagon, smoking, listening to the night sounds of a sleeping camp. Caleb and his brother sat beside the fire, drinking coffee and talking quietly, waiting to take their turn at night watch. Freddy and Alex were still in Les’s tent. Along about midnight, the steers had pushed to their feet as they usually did about that time, had done a little soft blowing and grazing, then settled down again.
Tonight there wouldn’t be a stampede, he had made sure of it, at least as sure as he could be that a stampede wouldn’t start by human design. Dal had kept an eye on the observers’ camp until midnight; now Grady was out there in the darkness and would stay until dawn, watching to make certain that Caldwell didn’t approach the bedding grounds.
Dal should have crawled into his bedroll and gotten some sleep, but he kept running events through his mind. Last night a spectacular lightning storm had terrifled the steers, had brought them to their feet and started them running. But the night before, there had been no apparent reason for a stampede.
His gut told him Caldwell was behind the unusual number of stampedes occurring on this drive. There was nothing he would have liked better than to catch the son of a bitch red-handed, but it didn’t look like that would happen tonight. Tonight Caldwell was apparently giving himself an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
An hour later, still not sleepy, he poured a cup of coffee and sat beside the embers to warm himself. The Webster boys were riding the herd, and he was alone, not fit company for anyone. Smoking he watched Alex crawl out of Les’s tent, drag herself into her wheelchair, rest a moment, then roll through the darkness to fetch something from the chuck wagon. On her way back, half-blind with fatigue, she ran a wheel into someone’s boot. A man rose out of his bedroll, muttered a curse at her, then sank back down. Alex whispered an apology then touched a hand to her eyelids before she maneuvered around the bedroll and returned to Les’s tent.
Alex puzzled him. She used the crutch as skillfully and confidently now as if she’d used a crutch from the beginning. But the instant she didn’t absolutely need to be upright, she returned to the chair, which was unwieldy, slow, and agonizingly hard to push through high grass and over rough ground. He’d given up trying to understand why she made it so hard for herself.