forgiveness.”
“For you to forgive her?” Sally asked.
Smoke shook his head.
“No, Sally. I wish I had gotten there in time for her to forgive me.”
“Uncle Kirby, if you had asked Mama, she would tell you that you had done nothing that needed forgiveness. She loved you, I know that she did, I could tell by the way she spoke of you, with such pride, and such emotion.”
Smoke took Rebecca in his arms and held her tight. And, for the first time since he had buried his first wife, Nicole, and their baby, Art, he felt his eyes well with tears.
By suppertime, everyone on the trail drive knew that Smoke was Rebecca’s Uncle Kirby. Sally told the tale of the time Smoke tied the cow’s tails together, to the delight of all the others, and to Smoke’s embarrassment.
“How the hell did you do that?” Dusty asked. “I’ve been around those critters for most of my life and I ain’t never seen one with a tail you could tie. That would be like trying to tie two fingers together.”
“Look,” Smoke said. He took a handful of Sally’s hair. “This is the tuft at the end of a cow’s tail.” He took a hand full of Rebecca’s hair. “This is the tuft at the end of another cow’s tail.” He tied their tresses together.
“Ouch!” Sally said, as she and Rebecca struggled to get untangled.
“Let that be a lesson to the two of you,” Smoke said, laughing, “for telling secrets on me like that.”
Everyone laughed again.
“Rebecca,” Dusty said. “Would you sing for us?”
“What do you want?
“No,” Dusty said. “I want you to sing one of them real pretty songs I’ve heard you sing. I don’t know the names of any of them, but you know what I’m talking about.”
“Rebecca, sing
“Do you know the song, Dusty?” Rebecca asked.
“No, ma’am, but once you get into it, I reckon I can strum along.”
“I know it,” Duff said. “I’ll do the intro on the pipes.”
Rebecca nodded, and Duff retrieved his bagpipes from the hoodlum wagon, and started the intro, soft, soothing, and beautiful. Then Rebecca began to sing, her voice soaring to the heights and stirring the souls of all around the campfire.
Then, when Rebecca started through the second time, she was pleasantly shocked to see Tom step up beside her and sing along with her in perfect harmonious rounds.
“Oh, you were wonderful!” Rebecca said, spontaneously hugging Tom as the others applauded.
As Tom lay in his bedroll that night, the lyrics and melody of
And though nobody at the ranch, including Rebecca knew it, Tom had been exposed to such music before. The Harvard Men’s Choir, founded in 1858, was one of the best musical ensembles in America, and Tom had sung with the group as 1st tenor.
“Son, you’re going to have to make up your mind whether you want to sing or play football,” the coach told him. But the other players, having heard Tom sing, told the coach that if Tom couldn’t do both, they wouldn’t play. The coach acquiesced and a timely tackle by Tom in the 1879 Harvard Yale game preserved a 0-0 tie, the first time in three years that Harvard hadn’t been beaten by Yale.
Tom thought of his fellow graduates of the class of 1880. They were all lawyers, professors, politicians, and business leaders now, all of them prominent members of society in their respective home cities. He wondered what they would think about him if they knew he was working as a cowboy for forty dollars and found. The West was wild, there was no denying that. In the last two weeks he had seen twelve men killed by gunfire. Such a thing, he knew, would leave his former acquaintances shocked and mortified, but he had come through it with no damage at all to his psyche.
The next morning during breakfast, Dusty suddenly put his tin plate down and got up and walked several feet away from the wagons and the campfire. He stood there for a long moment looking toward the ragged top of a bluff marking the western boundary of the prairie. He sniffed.
“Say, what’s got into Dusty?” Dalton asked.
“I don’t know,” Clay replied. “But whatever it is, I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be good.”
After a few minutes Dusty came back to the others. “Boss,” he said to Clay. “We’ve got us a fire. I can smell it.”
“What? Where?” Clay asked.
“I think it’s on this side of the river. And it’s west of us, which means it’ll be comin’ this way.”
“He’s right,” Matt said. “Look.” Matt pointed to the west and there, faintly visible, was a cloud of light brown smoke mixed in with the haze.
“Maybe it’s just a morning fog,” Dalton suggested.
“It’s a fire,” Smoke said. “And it’s a big one. Look, you can see the smoke from there, all the way down to there.”
Smoke pointed out the parameters of the approaching fire.
“We’d better start a back-fire if we want to keep it away from the herd,” Falcon said.
Setting a back-fire big enough to stop the oncoming flames would be quite an effort. It might have been easier if everyone could do it, but Clay knew that he would have to hold at least two people back to keep an eye on the herd. He gave that assignment to Matt and Dalton, then told the others to come with him to fight the fire.
“I think we should keep Maria back with the wagons,” Sally said.
“No, Maria can do her part,” Clay said. “We are going to need every hand.”
“Clay, you, more than anyone, should understand why she must stay behind,” Sally said.
“Oh,” Clay replied, understanding now, what Sally was saying. “Yes, you are right. She should stay behind.”
“I will stay by the river,” Maria offered. “That way, I can keep some sacks wet for you.”
