Firestick. William W. Johnstone

many cattlemen hereabouts.”

      “Bronc stompers?”

      “Men who will ride a horse to death in their hurry to break it, rather than take a little extra time and allow the animal the chance to adjust to what is going on, what is being asked of it.”

      Jesus scowled. “Breaking a horse by riding it to death accomplishes nothing.”

      “Least of all for the horse,” said Beartooth.

      Jesus turned his head and looked at the black. Their eyes locked and held for a long moment—until Jesus said, in a low voice, “Tomorrow.”

      The black chuffed and dug at the ground with one of its front hooves.

      Miguel smiled. “He says he will be waiting and is looking forward to it.”

      Beartooth straightened back up. “Tomorrow it is, then. I’ll go ahead and unsaddle the black, then turn him out with the others. When Jesus’s rattled bones have finished settlin’ back into place, you two go on to the bunkhouse and get cleaned up for supper. Take it easy for a while, until Miss Victoria rings the bell to come eat.”

      * * *

      After he’d seen to the black and put away the saddle and bridle Jesus had been using, Beartooth left the corral area and headed for the main house of the Double M Ranch headquarters. The house was a two-story, wood-frame structure, something a bit uncommon to the area. It was built straight and true and solid, always with a fresh coat of whitewash, trimmed in bright green. When Beartooth and his companions had made the decision to quit being mountain men and settle into more conventional lives, they had agreed that wherever they put down roots, they would build and maintain a fine, substantial home. The main house at the Double M was the result, and each man took pride and worked hard to make sure it always lived up to their goal.

      The sinking sun of late afternoon cast a long shadow ahead of Beartooth as he strode along. By his reckoning, he had endured fifty winters in his lifetime, give or take a couple either way. He was a sliver under six feet tall, square-shouldered, lean and solid. Unlike Firestick, there was no gray in his reddish-brown hair. His clean-shaven face was too narrow and his green eyes too intense and probing for him to be considered classically handsome. But he had an easy grin, with a slightly roguish slant to it, that made men want to be pals with him, and certain kinds of women—especially given how the grin came combined with a deeply dimpled chin—want to learn more about what was behind that roguish slant.

      As he stepped up onto the front porch, Beartooth was met by a wave of delicious-smelling cooking coming from inside the house. He detected roast pork, cabbage, fresh-baked bread, and some kind of pie. Peach, he thought. He was sure of the first three; the pie might have been more a case of wishful thinking as far as exactly what kind it would turn out to be. In any case, he knew it was sure to taste great thanks to the kitchen talents of Victoria Kingsley, the Double M’s cook and housekeeper.

      Entering the house and passing through the parlor, Beartooth paused in the kitchen doorway to breathe in more of the delightful aromas and at the same time drink in the equally pleasing sight of Victoria. She wore a short-sleeved brown blouse buttoned at the throat, a full-length flower-patterned skirt, and a white apron tied at the waist. Beartooth preferred seeing her in this kind of apron rather than the bib-style ones, with shoulder straps that muted her mature, all-over-womanly curves. Victoria was nearing thirty and no longer willowy, but to Beartooth’s eyes—and to those of any red-blooded male with a lick of sense—she was still a mighty fine-looking gal. Her chestnut hair was thick and rich, her face was unlined and finely sculpted, and she had eyes as blue and sparkling as the deepest, purest mountain pool Beartooth had ever looked into.

      Sensing his presence in the doorway after she had placed two loaves of bread in the warmer, she turned her head and glanced back over her shoulder. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

      “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

      Victoria gave a faint shake of her head. “You didn’t. I think I’ve finally gotten used to how quietly you, Firestick, and Moosejaw move . . . especially for such large men. Whenever I turn around, I’m prepared to find that one of you has entered the room while I was looking away.”

      She spoke with an English accent, at times stronger than others, as befitting the land of her birth before coming to America and eventually to the West with a spirited cousin who was a dreamer and a hopeless romantic. That cousin—her name was Estelle, and she’d been closer than a sister ever since childhood—had convinced Victoria without a great deal of difficulty that the arranged marriage her parents were pushing her into with a man for whom she felt no love would be a tragedy she’d regret for the rest of her life. So the pair had fled together to the hopes and thrills and promises of a new country.

      On the way west, to a wildly expanding world of cattle empires and endless opportunities such as Estelle had read about in books, she contracted pneumonia and died. This left Victoria jarringly alone and needing to fend for herself on the Texas frontier. Her pride refused to let her contact her family back in England for aid. She vowed to forge on in pursuit of all that she and Estelle had set out after. With her looks, she could have easily succumbed to any number of marriage proposals, but she wanted something more than to settle for an arrangement of convenience—the very thing she had escaped—as a means to simply be taken care of by someone.

      So instead she sought whatever socially acceptable “woman’s work” she could find—washing, mending, cleaning, cooking—in order to get by independently. Eventually this led to her hiring on as cook and housekeeper for the men of the Double M. It wasn’t the culmination of her dreams, to be sure, but it was a safe, acceptable position, one she often had to remind herself not to become too complacent with.

      “Hope you understand we don’t move the way we do to unnerve you,” Beartooth was explaining. “It’s just that, the way we lived out in the wild and up in the mountains for all those years, we learned to move silently or we might sudden-like quit livin’ at all.”

      “I understand,” Victoria said. “I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why anyone would want to pursue that extreme lifestyle, but I understand how you had to adapt in order to survive.”

      Beartooth smiled. “Nobody can ever appreciate that lifestyle unless they’ve felt the urge and gone on to live it. It ain’t something you can sit down and reason out as a good idea or a smart way to live. It’s something that’s either in you or it ain’t.”

      “And to this day it remains in all three of you, doesn’t it?” Victoria said with a faint smile of her own. “The love for that life and those times, I mean.”

      “Yeah, I reckon it does,” Beartooth admitted, somewhat surprised to hear himself say so. “But, barrin’ something drastic, I don’t see any of us ever returnin’ to it. There are plenty of old-timers still walkin’ the mountain paths and trappin’ the streams, but it’s really a young man’s game. Me and my pards, we decided we were a little long in the tooth to keep after it.”

      “Nonsense. The passage of years means little to hardy men like you three.”

      “Maybe not. But there are other ways to prove it.” Beartooth shrugged. “You’re right, though, about the love for that life—the savorin’ of it, I guess you could say—still bein’ in all of us. I’m pretty sure Firestick and Moosejaw feel the same way. Only, like I said, barrin’ something drastic, I don’t see any of us returnin’ to it.”

      “Let’s hope not,” Victoria said. “Surely you must know there are many in these parts who would hate to see you leave.”

      Her words left Beartooth at a loss for how to respond. Since settling here in the Buffalo Peak area, Firestick and Moosejaw had each found romantic interests in town. To them, Victoria was a welcome addition to their ranch life—competent and eye-pleasing in her role—but that was as far as it went. Beartooth’s feelings toward her, however, had grown into something more. And there’d been indications she might have similar feelings toward him, but as of yet, neither had gotten around to expressing anything