the table. Jenny, one of the young women who worked the bar, was with him.
“Logan, Madison, and Jernigan,” Prew said contemptuously. “Those are three of the biggest polecats in the entire county. There can’t any of them hold a job anywhere. It stands to reason they would become friends with someone like Poke Terrell.”
“You’re just mad because Terrell ran you away from the table the first night he was here,” Jenny said.
“He didn’t run me away,” Prew insisted. “You did. I would have fought him for it.”
“I know you would have,” Jenny said. She smiled at him. “But I didn’t want to see you get your face bruised.” She put her hand up to his face and rubbed her fingers, lightly, across his cheek. “It’s such a handsome face.”
Prew, who’s real name was Jason Prewitt, was a ranch hand at Coventry on the Snake, a huge, 20,000-acre horse ranch that belonged to Kitty Wellington. The ranch was approximately five miles south of Medbury, and it was nearly midnight by the time Prew arrived back at the ranch. Most of the others ranch hands were already asleep when he sat down on his bunk to pull off his boots, and the cacophony of their snores filled the room.
When he first came to work at the ranch, the snoring sometimes kept him awake. Now it was just a part of the background, a part of his life on the range.
“Prew?” Tyrone called, quietly from his private room at the end of the bunk house. Tyrone Canfield was the ranch foreman.
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to make sure it was you. Better get to sleep as early as you can. The field where the Arabians are being kept is getting grazed out and first thing tomorrow we are going to move them to fresh grass.”
“How’m I goin’ to get to sleep with you yapping at me?” Prew teased.
By any means of measurement, Kitty Wellington was a beautiful woman. Tall and statuesque, she had blond hair and blue eyes, naturally long lashes, high cheekbones and full lips. She was a widow, still young, because when she married, she had been thirty years younger than her husband.
After her husband died, Kitty inherited the ranch, a parcel of land that was bordered on the north by the Snake River and Castle Creek, on the east by the Bruneau, and on the west and south by a network of interconnecting creeks; the Blue, the Bottle, and the Mill. It was this ready availability of water as well as a plentiful supply of good grass that made Coventry on the Snake so valuable.
It was not by mere coincidence that the name of the ranch, Coventry on the Snake, had an Old World flavor. Kitty’s husband, Sir Thomas Denbigh Wellington, the Seventh Earl of Buckinghamshire, had named it after his ancestral home, Coventry on the Wye, in Buckinghamshire, England.
But Kitty was not just a beautiful woman who happened to inherit a lot of land. She had turned Coventry on the Snake into one of the finest horse ranches in the country, and she had done it all since the death of her husband.
This morning Kitty was sitting in her study working on the books when someone knocked lightly on the door frame. The door to her study being open, when Kitty turned in her chair, she saw Tyrone Canfield standing there, holding his hat in his hand.
“Yes, Tyrone,” Kitty said, greeting her foreman with a smile. “Did you want to see me?”
Tyrone rolled his hat in his hand and cleared his throat, obviously not wanting to say what he had to say. The expression of concern on Tyrone’s face caused Kitty to give up her smile.
“What is it, Tyrone?” she asked. “What is wrong?”
“I hate to tell you this, Mrs. Wellington, but we’re missin’ seventy-five head of Arabians,” he said.
“What? Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m positive. We’ve been keepin’ a real good count of the Arabians, especially since they are the ones you are sellin’ to the army. Last count we had eight hundred and eighty-five. This mornin’ we only had eight hundred and ten. And we counted them twice, just to make sure.”
“This is a big ranch, with a lot of range land,” Kitty said. “Maybe they just got out of the field where we were holding them.”
“No, ma’am, we’ve looked all over the range,” Tyrone said. “The horses are gone.”
“Stolen?”
“Yes, ma’am. There’s no doubt in my mind, but that they were stolen.”
“Seventy five horses?” Kitty sighed, and leaned back in her chair. “Oh, Tyrone, that seven thousand five hundred dollars,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, I know it is. Mrs. Wellington, if you don’t mind, I think I’m going to put out night riders to keep watch from now on.”
“No, I don’t mind at all. I think that’s a very good idea,” Kitty replied.
Chapter Five
A colt whinnied anxiously and a horse responded with a whicker. An owl hooted, while the night insects filled the air with their songs. There was no moon, but the night was alive with stars—from the brightest orbs in the heavens, all the way down to those stars which weren’t visible as individual bodies at all, but whose distant presence added to the ambient glow in the velvet vault of sky.
Three young men rode around the milling shapes and shadows that made up the herd. It had been a week now since the seventy-five horses were stolen, and since that time, Tyrone had put out riders every night to keep watch over the horses. Though it would have been more efficient for them to separate, the boring aspects of the task caused the three nighthawks to ride together so they could visit. Prew was one of the riders, and he and another rider were teasing the youngest one.
