stables.”
The tone of his voice angered her. “You don't have to clean stables,” she replied cuttingly. “Your uncle was good enough to teach you a trade.”
He grew rigid, high color flushing his cheeks. “I don't want to talk about the Sewells! I don't want to hear their name mentioned!”
They rode in stiff, uncomfortable silence for several minutes. At last he said, “Amy, I didn't mean to bark at you. I'm sorry.”
But it was not the same after that. Amy was angry with herself for coming with him; doubly angry because she knew that she would do it all over again if he asked her. She tilted her chin haughtily and refused to speak to him or look in his direction.
“Well, there it is,” Jeff said flatly when they reached the ridge. There was a broad valley on the western side of the scrubby slope. The land was a thick carpet of grass, dotted here and there with cottonwoods and willows that grew along a shallow creek. Jeff was surprised at the lush-ness of his new holdings. Amy saw a boyish excitement in his face as he dismounted from the buggy and stood looking down at the spread of grass. Despite her determination to stay angry, she felt herself thawing.
“Look at that!” he said huskily. “Grass belly-high on a four-year-old steer, and that nester was trying to farm it!”
He handed Amy down from the buggy and both of them stood on the edge of the ridge gazing down in amazement. Amy pointed toward the opposite slope. “Isn't that a house over there?”
“The nester's shack, I guess. Already falling down.”
“It doesn't look as if it had been farmed,” Amy said, puzzled.
“That's why the nester was willing to gamble it. Too lazy to make enough improvements to hold it.”
“And now it's yours?” she asked, as though she was trying to get used to the idea.
It was then that they saw the lone horseman streaking across the flatland to the west. Both of them watched the trail of dust kick up over the prairie and slowly drift away with the wind. The rider's strong gray covered ground fast and soon disappeared in the afternoon sun behind the ridge.
Jeff glanced at Amy and shrugged. “A poor way to treat horseflesh in this kind of heat. Well, I guess we've seen all there is to see.” They returned to the buggy, turned around on the rocky slope and headed slowly back to Plainsville.
Out of curiosity, Amy looked back over her shoulder as they neared the stage road, but there was no sign of the lone rider. She dismissed the incident from her mind and turned her imagination to that valley of grass that now belonged to Jeff. She could close her eyes and almost see a neat, white painted house there on the green slope, and cattle rolling in fat grazing contentedly in the deep grass along the creek. She visualized the beginning of a new brand in Texas—the Blaine brand.
“Jeff, what are you going to do with that land?”
He snapped the lines over the horse's back and clucked his tongue. “I don't know yet. Sell it, maybe. Two sections of land's not good for anything but farming, and I'm not a sodbuster.”
“I didn't expect anything,” she said, but Jeff could see that she had. They rode for a while in silence, and when Jeff tried to take her hand, she pulled away from him. Angrily, Jeff kept his eyes on the road ahead. He wished that he could forget Amy Wintworth. He could never please her. She always wanted the impossible.
But he no longer denied that he liked being with her. She was not easy to get along with, but she was always there when he needed her, which was more than he could say for anybody else. Even his pa.
Oh, she got mad at him sometimes, but she didn't stay mad. Like that affair with the Jorgensons, and the fight at the dance. She could cut like a whip when riled, but he didn't mind that so much because she always got over it.
Only recently had Jeff begun to realize that things between himself and Amy were not the same as they had always been. Not for several years had he thought up elaborate schemes to ignore her; now he found himself thinking up excuses to be with her. For a long while a thought had been growing in his mind. Despite the fact that they often fought and she was almost impossible to please, the feeling that he would never be able to forget her had grown stronger and stronger within him. At last he had admitted it to himself, grudgingly—he guessed that he was in love with Amy Wintworth.
It was not an easy thought to live with. For one thing, Ford Wintworth was against it—and Todd, too, who used to be Jeff's friend.
Sometimes when Jeff thought about it an emptiness grew inside him until he felt that he was nothing but a hollow shell, lost and desperate. Too much of his life had been spent in anger, there had been too many reasons for hate. Today he could walk the streets of Plainsville, up and down and across, and never meet a person he could call a friend.
They feared him because of his pa and because his name was Blaine, despised him for his shield of arrogance; some hated him for what they themselves had done to Nathan. Grizzled cattlemen would make room for him at a gambling table because of his gun and reputation; Bert Surratt would serve him at the bar for the same reason. But not one of them was his friend. Only Amy understood him.
At times he wanted to tell her the things he felt. He wanted to show her what right he had to hate this town and everybody in it; but if spoken, the words would never sound the way he heard them in his mind, so he kept his thoughts to himself.
Some day he would think of a way to settle with Beulah and Wirt Sewell. He would think of a plan to even the score with all the others who sneered at him. Some day his anger would spill over and he would be rid of it, and then perhaps he could tell Amy all the things he wanted her to know.
As the buggy jolted along the deep rutted stage road, Jeff was surprised to see a group of horsemen break out of a stand of brush and head toward them.
Amy looked at him. “Isn't that Elec Blasingame in front?”
“Looks like it,” Jeff said flatly.
