kept up with an effort. She’d learned from a boy at school, a transfer student from New York with a Latino background. He’d said she was good. But Grier was totally out of her class. She watched his feet and followed with a natural flair. By the time they were halfway into the song, she was keeping up and adding steps and movements of her own. As the band slowly wound down, the audience was actually clapping to the beat.
Grier whirled her against him and looped her over one arm for a finish. Everybody applauded. He pulled her back up, whirled her beside him, and they both took a bow. She was breathless. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
He led her back to their seats, chuckling. “Let Caldwell top that,” he muttered.
She laughed, almost panting from the exertion. “I’m out of shape,” she murmured. “I’ll have to get out of the house more.”
“Gosh, you guys were great!” the waitress said as she paused briefly at their table. “Refills?”
“Thanks. You bet,” Grier said, handing her his empty bottle.
“Me, too,” Christabel added, pushing her cup to the edge of the table.
“Back in a jiffy,” the girl said with a grin.
“Does Judd dance?” Grier asked her.
“Only if somebody shoots at his feet,” she returned, tongue-in-cheek.
“That’ll be the day.”
“That reminds me,” she said, and leaned forward. “I need your advice. I’m almost positive that somebody poisoned one of our young bulls. Judd won’t believe me, but I’m sure I’m right.”
He was all business. “Tell me about it.”
“We bought a young Salers bull in early September. The Harts have a two-year-old Salers bull, and Leo Hart was going to buy Fred Brewster’s young Salers bull, that came from the same batch ours did up in Victoria. But they found Fred’s bull dead in a pasture just recently, because Leo Hart called Judd about ours. Ours died before Fred’s, so we dragged ours out to the pasture behind the tractor and buried him with a borrowed backhoe.”
“You didn’t have him autopsied?” he asked.
She grimaced. “Cash, we were sitting pretty last year. But we had a drought in the spring and summer and cattle prices fell. Right now, it takes all Judd can make to keep me in school and pay his rent on his apartment in Victoria. We sell off cattle to pay for incidentals, and buy feed for the cattle when we don’t have enough grass for graze. He even works extra jobs just so we can make ends meet.” Her eyes were cloudy. “We’re having hard times. Once I graduate, I’m going straight to work to help out. I was a computer whiz already and I didn’t want to go on to vo-tech school in the first place. But Judd said I needed expertise in spreadsheet programs so that we could keep better records. He was right. It’s just hard to manage, that’s all. I imagine you know how that is.”
He didn’t. Nobody knew how much money he had in foreign banks from the early days in his profession, when he was doing highly skilled black ops jobs for various governments. He didn’t advertise it. But he could have retired any time he felt like it. Holding a conventional job kept his skills honed and people in the dark about his true financial situation. And his true skills.
“Anyway,” she continued, “he says that I didn’t check the pasture before I put the bulls in it, and they binged on clover and got bloat. Since we don’t use antibiotics as a preventative—and we certainly can’t afford to use vegetable oils for that, either—Judd said the tannins in the clover caused the bloat.” She sighed impatiently. “Listen, I know pasture management as well as he does, and I’m not stupid enough to stick susceptible young bulls in a pasture without feeding them hay or grass first. And the Hereford bulls were in there at the same time, all four of them. They didn’t get bloat!”
“Didn’t you tell Judd that?”
She nodded. “I guess he thinks there’s a special Salers gene that attracts bloat,” she muttered irritably.
He tried not to laugh and failed.
“Anyway, it happened right after we fired that Clark man,” she added. “Jack Clark. He’s got a brother, John. They’re unsavory characters and they get fired a lot, I hear. We fired Jack for stealing on purchase orders. I suppose he didn’t realize we check purchase orders to make sure they’re not being abused. He bought himself a two-hundred-dollar pair of boots at the Western Shop and charged it to us with a photocopied purchase order. He gave back the boots, and we returned them, so we didn’t press charges. But we fired him, just the same.”
“He’s working for Duke Wright now,” he told her. “Driving a cattle truck.”
“Duke had better watch him” was all she said. “One of our new cowboys said that the Clark boys had been suspected of poisoning cattle someplace that one of them was fired from a couple of years ago. Our guy was working with them at the time.”
Grier was watching her closely. “This is serious. Are you sure Judd didn’t believe you?”
“I didn’t tell him all I’ve just told you, because I didn’t find out about the Clarks being suspected of poisoning cattle until a few days ago,” she said. “I didn’t tell him that we found a cut in the fence there, either.”
“You should tell him about that, and the other information. A man who’ll poison helpless bulls will poison people, given a chance.”
She nodded with a sigh. “I’ve told the boys to keep a close eye on our other stock, and I ride the fence lines myself when I get home from school.”
“Alone?”
She stared at him blankly. “Of course, alone,” she said shortly. “I’m a grown woman. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he replied. “I don’t like the idea of anybody going out to distant pastures alone and unarmed. You don’t pack a gun, do you?”
She grimaced. “I guess I should, shouldn’t I?” She laughed self-consciously. “I have this crazy nightmare sometimes, that I’ve been shot and I’m trying to get to Judd and tell him, but he can’t hear me.”
“Take somebody with you next time you ride fence,” he coaxed. “Don’t take chances.”
“I won’t,” she promised, but without agreeing to take along an escort. She did have that .28 gauge shotgun that Judd had given her. She could take that with her when she rode fence, she supposed. Cash made sense. If a man wouldn’t hesitate to poison a helpless bull, he might not stop at trying to kill a young woman. Fortunately, the waitress came back with coffee and beer in time to divert him, and they waited until she left before they resumed their conversation.
“Do you want me to talk to Judd about the bull?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It won’t do any good. He makes up his mind, and that’s it.” She touched her cup and noticed that it was blazing hot. She pulled her fingers back. “He’s distracted lately, anyway. Those film people are coming this weekend, including the stars.” She glanced at him. “I guess everybody’s heard of Tippy Moore.”
“The
