Beckett's Birthright. Bronwyn Williams

Elias Chandler reined in his wandering mind and nodded. “I don’t suppose one of them has a streak of white over his left eyebrow?” When he’d hired on as manager of the Bar J nearly seven months ago, he’d let it be known that he was looking to catch up with a gambler with a polecat streak. The general assumption was that it had to do with a gambling debt.

      “No, sir, that they don’t. Sorry.” Shem, the old man he’d replaced as manager, still liked to keep his hand in by working a couple of hours each day.

      “Send ’em in, then. One at a time. How many showed up?”

      “Four. Three of ’em might do, but t’other one’s no good.”

      Eli didn’t ask why, he merely nodded. There was little Shem didn’t know about men and ranching after working for Burke Jackson’s Bar J for nearly forty-five years. Here in the East it was called a cattle farm. In the West, it would be called a ranch.

      The interviews took up less than an hour. Once the usual questions were asked and answered, Eli managed to slip in a few random remarks, skillfully framed so as to elicit the particular information he sought. After tracking a man halfway across the country, often following leads so thin a shadow would pass through them, he’d learned not to pass up any opportunity to garner information.

      Today that information wasn’t to be found, but because they were shorthanded, he ended up hiring three of the men and sending the fourth man on his way.

      Shem was waiting outside the office when the last man emerged. “I’ll show you fellers where you can stow your gear.”

      It would be up to Streak, a gaunt giant of a man with a quiet voice and a gentle heart, to decide which men could be trusted to work cattle and which ones would be assigned other tasks. When Shem had been promoted to manager, Streak had replaced him as herd boss. What both men didn’t know about cattle wasn’t worth knowing.

      “Jackson ain’t lookin’ too good,” Shem confided later that evening as the three men headed for the cook-shack.

      “You implying he ever looked good?” Eli asked. Both Streak and Eli deliberately shortened their steps so that the older man could keep pace.

      “Must’ve looked some better,” Streak offered. “Got hisself a wife. They had ’em a daughter.”

      Eli had heard plenty about the daughter, none of it good. She was reputed to be big as a grizzly bear and twice as tough. They said she could peel the bark off a hickory tree with her tongue, and God help the man who tried to get into her bloomers.

      He wondered why any man in his right mind would even try.

      “Worser’n usual, is what I mean. No color to ’im. Lips blue, though. Reckon that’s color.” Shem nodded decisively.

      Eli hid his grin. There were times when a man had to ask questions, but it had been his experience that far more could be learned from priming the pump and waiting to see what flowed out.

      As the new general manager, he’d been invited to take his meals at the house with Jackson and his housekeeper, but after the first few days he’d made some excuse to take all his meals with the men. Jackson might be rich as cream, but regardless of his health—or perhaps because of it—he was about as disagreeable as any man Eli had ever had the displeasure of meeting. That went twice for his housekeeper, Pearly May, a prune-faced beanstalk of a woman who was no better at cooking than she was at keeping house.

      To his credit, however, Jackson didn’t meddle in the day-to-day operations. Once he’d satisfied himself that Eli could do the job, he’d left him strictly alone, which suited both men just fine. Unless something came up that required the owner’s attention, Eli reported to his employer once a week.

      Supper tonight featured pig stew, beans, greens and cornbread. For a farm that ran thousands of head of cattle, they ate an awful lot of pig meat. Eli had remarked on it once and been told about the time when Jackson’s little girl had been about seven or eight years old. She had pitched a fit when she’d come home from school to discover that her pet calf had just been slaughtered.

      Shem, who’d been herd boss at the time, had taken it upon himself to change the dietary habits of the entire company, from the main house on down to the chuck wagon. As the crew cook could easily perform miracles with nothing but pork, a sack of onions, a sack of potatoes and a handful of salt, no one had ever complained. Why, Shem had reasoned, eat up the profits when hogs were cheap and Chicago paid top dollar for Jackson beef?

      The cookshack was as noisy as ever, with the exception of the new men, who were mostly listening and getting their bearings. Seldom a week went by without at least one new man at the table. At a pittance a day plus room and board, which was all Jackson offered, most quickly moved on to better-paying jobs.

      Eli ate silently, too, watching. Listening. A quiet man by nature, he had honed the skill of silent observation over the past two years. It paid off occasionally, but there were times when he came close to losing hope that Rosemary was still alive. It had been almost two years since she’d been kidnapped and the Chandler homestead burned to the ground. It still ate into his conscience that after promising to take care of her, he had failed. As long as there was any hope at all, he would go on searching.

      By the time the trail had led him to Durham, in the state of North Carolina, he’d been dead broke, flat out of leads and exhausted from months of tracking, being sometimes only hours behind. He’d been nursing a beer and helping himself to an occasional pickled egg, idly glancing over a local newspaper someone had left on the table when he’d happened to overhear a discussion about a man who evidently ran one of the biggest cattle operations in this part of the country. His ears had perked up, because working cattle was one of the things he was qualified to do.

      “I heard Jackson fired old Shem and he’s looking for a new manager.” The speaker polished off his beer and slid the tankard across the bar for a refill. Half a dozen men played poker at a nearby table, a few more lined up at the bar.

      One of the first things Eli had learned about the man he was hunting was that he could usually be found in bars and gambling dens, any place where men might gather to risk a week’s pay. So he’d leaned back in the scarred bench seat and watched a fly crawl across the table while he eavesdropped.

      “Burke Jackson? Stingy ol’ sumbitch, if he’d pay a decent wage, he might hold on to his crew.”

      “I worked there once. Didn’t last out a week. I heard ol’ Shem’s still there, he just can’t cut the mustard no more. Reckon Jackson’s meanness plumb wore him down.”

      There’d been a general agreement from the men gathered at the bar. “They say that daughter of his is cut from the same bolt o’ cloth,” another man had remarked.

      That had been the first time Eli had heard mention of the daughter. He remembered feeling relieved at the description. At least she didn’t sound like the fragile, feminine type. Being tall, tough and short on polish, Eli admitted to an unfortunate weakness for petite, delicate females that invariably landed him in trouble.

      Mean, though, he could handle. In all his off-and-on years of wearing a badge, he rarely had to resort to force. Unless a man was blind drunk or desperate, Eli’s size alone usually did the trick.

      The clincher had been when the bartender had said, “Sooner or later, I reckon half the men east o’ the Mississippi turn up lookin’ for work on the Bar J. Never stay more’n a few weeks, though.”

      “Can’t much blame ’em ,” one man had commented.

      There was a nodding of heads and a general agreement, then the bartender swiped a rag over the bar and said, “You gotta admit, though, some men jest don’t like to work for their money.”

      “I’ll drink to that,” said a grizzled farmer as he downed the last of his beer and wiped the foam from his bushy mustache with his sleeve.

      “It ain’t the piss-poor pay,” declared the man standing next to him, “It’s that daughter