Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(24)



The back of her hands rubbing her eyes, Romy stumbled sleepily through. “Wh-what?” she mumbled at his angry imprecation.

He took one look – at her disheveled hair, tumbled past her shoulders and glowing like knee-high goldenrods in the early morning’s pale half-light, at her elf’s body engulfed in his old, worn-out plaid shirt, at her childlike knees, and toes, bare of nail polish – and got even angrier.

This was the first he had seen her without that dirty doily of a hat or his faded red neckerchief hiding her hair, and the transformation was eye-blinking.

He flourished his razor blade before her startled face. “For centuries, these have been called cut-throat razors. Goddamnit, use mine again – or anything of mine – without asking first, and I swear I’ll cut your pretty little throat.”

She blinked awake. “Pretty?” She grinned. “Ye think I am pretty?”

God help him. “You are missing my point.”

She yawned, stretching her skinny arms with tiny knobs for fists over her head. His shirt tugged slightly upward and across small but ruched mounds that were clearly not childlike. “Yuir point being about cutting my throat or about being pretty?”

He sighed in resigned forbearance. “There are none so blind, as – ”

“ – as Helen Keller,” she chipped in, her nose wrinkling, making its freckles dance. She padded off toward the kitchen, throwing over her shoulder, “I’ll get the coffee started, Duke.”

So, it was back to Duke?

Later that mild autumn morning, trailing the herd up to the north pasture, he could not help but chuckle. Despite his exasperation at being saddled with the NYA’s incompetent cook, she did provide diversion. Disastrous diversion – which he did not need. Nor did he need a fetching filly, stirring up the ranch hands.

He needed luck. Good weather. Higher beef prices. He needed to be able to meet payroll. His ranch hands depended on him.

Once he had gotten his head on straight, knowing that one day he would return to claim what rightfully was his, he had frugally put back every penny from those years at sea. His meager savings had not been enough then – and each month he still ran dangerously close to his ledger books’ thin red line.

When he had taken ownership of the ranch three years before, he had planted improved varieties of grasses such as King Ranch Bluestem, Buffalo grass, and Coastal Bermuda. He had fenced off pastures to allow grazing rotation, and he had begun reconstruction of the ranch’s dilapidated buildings.

Hell, just paying for plumbing – not to mention anteing up for Congressman Johnson’s rural electrification project to reach the S&S last year – had set operating funds back by a good two years. Before that, he had expanded and updated the kitchen, framing it out and laying its flagstone flooring himself.

He braced worn-soft rawhide gloved hands on the pommel and watched Bud, up ahead. The kid was in pursuit of a mosshorn steer that had strayed off. On the small side at fourteen, he did not know that the stringy steer would tucker out of its own accord and wander back – or that it was grazing on sparse grass better meant for the more marketable cattle. Duke thought he should probably have plugged the steer last year and put it out of its misery.

And he probably should have hired some saddle tramp better fit to ride herd than the kid with his peach-fuzzed face. Duke had chanced across Bud, sleeping with a tennis racquet, of all things, beneath a sheltering chute of an Austin railroad stockyard.

The kid from New York’s Five Points had been riding the rails, as many of the Depression’s youth were doing and had seen his fill of tent and tar paper hobo jungles.

Dust flurried as Bud, astride his gelding, loped the steer back into the herd with shouts of, “Get along, get along!”

Arturo skidded his roan up alongside the gelding and with a cocky grin quipped something at Bud.

Of the S&S ranch hands, all Depression derelicts, only old bow-legged Jock was a true range rider, having worked on the King Ranch for a spell before the Scotsman’s drinking got the better of him. He could still brand a cowhide quicker than spit.

The Yankees, Glen and Skinny Henry, were good with the lariat, and the colored man Micah had handled a horse plow growing up. But Arturo was the natural when it came to horses.

At the thought of horses, Duke let out an audible groan and shifted restlessly in the saddle, its leather creaking. Tomorrow night horsewoman Sally Kirtley would come face to face with Gypsy girl Romy Sonnenschein – unless he could perform a feat of magic and ship the matchmaking Gypsy back to Galveston in the next twenty-four hours.

He gigged his bay into a gallop, as if he could outrun his fate.





§ CHAPTER SEVEN §




All that morning, Duke straddled the barn’s rafters, replacing sagging and missing beams. As an olive branch – well, more like a bribe – to appease him, Romy took his lunch to him, slightly singed hamburger patties. Well, maybe, overly cooked patties. All right, she conceded charred patties.

Gazing up at his shirtless body, browned over the years by both South Texas and South Seas suns, she could only gape. So much, he reminded her of the brawny Gypsy males with all their attendant high voltage machismo.

“I, uh, have yuir lunch,” she shouted up at him, her hand tented over her eyes against the autumn sunlight drilling through the gaping portion of the barn’s roof.

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