he fired you today?”
“A dozen.” The laconic answer accompanied a wry grin.
“How many times have you threatened to vamoose, leaving South Carolina in the dust on your way back to Arizona?”
Jesse Lee’s mouth widened, rippling the mass of wrinkles scoring his weathered face. “’Bout the same, I reckon.”
“If it isn’t Gus, then why the hurry?”
Slapping a pocket, Jesse drew out a packet he handed to Lincoln. “The postmaster in Belle Terre sent this special ’cause it was marked urgent by a postmaster in Oregon. I figgered it could wait till you came to the house for supper. But Miz Corey said not. And when Miz Corey says git, any man in his right mind gits.
“When he hired the lady to keep house at Belle Reve, I doubt Gus counted on getting a ramrod for the plantation and him, too. Anyway, she said pronto, and I hightailed it down here.”
The wrangler’s look strayed to the packet. Lincoln didn’t notice. He was hardly aware of anything but the postmark.
“Seems odd, don’t it?”
As the horse nuzzled at his shoulder, Jesse’s comment penetrated Lincoln’s distraction. “Odd?” he asked. “Why?”
“I dunno.” Jesse grumbled. “Just strikes me as peculiar coming from an Oregon postmaster. Hope it ain’t bad news. Bad news is terrible enough. Gittin’ it by mail is worse.”
Lincoln gripped the packet. “You think it’s bad?”
Jesse’s bleak look met Lincoln’s. “I don’t know who you know in Oregon, but I got a feelin’. The minute Miz Corey handed it to me, I felt the chill of it skittering down my spine.”
Oregon. Lincoln hadn’t thought of Oregon in a long time. He hadn’t let himself think of it. Until now.
He tried for a smile, remembering the old cowboy was obsessively superstitious. An obsession that went beyond black cats and ladders, and had nothing to do with the grief settling in his own chest. “I don’t feel anything, Jesse,” he lied. “So maybe everything’s all right.”
“There’s one way to find out.” The older man waited in a mix of worry and curiosity. “Ain’t you gonna open it?”
“When I’m done here.” Sliding the packet into his back pocket, wondering if Jesse’s dire prediction prompted a reluctance to open it in his presence, Lincoln took up the hammer he’d yet to use. “I’ll read it then.”
“In other words, good news or bad, you’ll read it alone.”
“Yes,” Lincoln admitted. “Good news or bad. And whoever.”
“Tarnation, why didn’t you say so?” Wheeling the horse around, Jesse set his hat more securely. “Ain’t none of this my business. Anyway, who do I know in Oregon?”
“I don’t know, Jesse,” Lincoln said mildly. “Who do you know in Oregon?”
Tapping the horse’s flank, Jesse set it into a run. Nearly lost in hoofbeats, one word drifted back, “Nobody.”
Horse and rider were beyond sight when Lincoln laid the hammer aside again and took the mail from his pocket. Head down, face shaded by the brim of his hat, he stared at the official cachet. Then, catching a breath, he broke the seal.
A form letter with an added hand-printed message, then two small envelopes banded with red string tumbled into his hand. Reining in clamoring concern, laying the banded letters on a fence post, Lincoln attended the official letter first.
“Dear Mr. Cade,” he read aloud, his gaze racing over the paper. “As acting postmaster, I offer my apologies for the delayed delivery of these letters. Due to the ill health of the former postmaster, unfortunately some pieces of mail were put aside and never processed. Among them, these bearing your address. I sincerely hope the delay causes no difficulties. Please be confident steps have been taken to assure…”
Lincoln stared at the envelopes with the absurd bit of string catching the light, gleaming against the creamy squares like a rivulet of scarlet. Bearing the postmark of the same tiny Oregon village, but two weeks apart, one was addressed in the scrawl of a man he’d known all his life, the second in the less familiar hand of a woman. A woman, despite the lies he told himself, he hadn’t forgotten in six long years.
Folding the apologetic form, he tucked it away before retrieving the mysterious lost letters. Untying the band of scarlet, letting it drift to the ground, he weighed his choices.
His hands were shaking as he traced the feminine script of one, but steadied again as he shuffled it aside. His decision was made—he would read them in the order of their postmarks.
With an ache in his heart, he lifted the flap of the first envelope and took out a single sheet of paper. When it was finished, he read the second as he had the first—slowly, his lips a sad, grim line. When he was done, his gaze lifted to the horizon, not seeing the sky in its shifting moods.
Time crept by with little variation in the long summer day. Yet for Lincoln it seemed to fly, too fast, too irrevocably. As life had with its changes, leaving things unsettled and things undone. Until it was too late.
Rousing, he gathered his tools, wrapped them, and tied them behind his saddle. The fence could wait. Tugging his horse’s reins from a nearby shrub, he stepped into the saddle. Out of habit the horse turned toward home. Toward Belle Reve. “Not yet, Diablo,” Lincoln muttered. “We have a stop to make first.”
Setting the stallion into a canter, he guided the massive animal over the pasture fence and onto a little-used path. Then, giving Diablo his head, trusting the old horse to recognize the land and remember the way to their destination, Lincoln let his mind wander to times past…and friends lost.
The passage from the west pasture of Belle Reve to the end of his journey was not long. But when horse and rider emerged from the wooded trail into a clearing, the sun had dipped below the trees, spangling leaves and limbs with dusty gold. This was Stuart land. The bane of land-hungry Cades, a haven for others.
With an eye for beauty and convenience, the first Stuart had set the farmhouse at the edge of a clearing by a narrow creek. A creek that marked Stuart-Cade boundaries as it meandered to the river and finally the sea.
Once there was hardly a day that Lincoln hadn’t spent a stolen hour or two in this forbidden place. Now, drawing Diablo to a halt as he surveyed the grounds bathed in the splendor of sunset, he realized years had passed since he’d sought its refuge.
Beyond a crop of weeds threading through volunteer flowers, herbs and vegetables still thriving in rich soil, the farm hadn’t changed. If one didn’t count the absence of life and laughter a change, he thought somberly, while dismounting by the steps. As he climbed the stairs, a rotting board broke beneath his weight, shattering the myth, reminding Lincoln that more than six years had passed since Frannie Stuart lived and died here. More than six years since she’d filled the house with love and laughter.
How many times had he raced across the west field as a boy, hurrying from a cold, forbidding plantation to the warmth and love that abounded in this small farm? How often had he envied his best friend the wonderful lady who was his mother?
But
