Smoke got it then. T. J. Duggan. “You have got to be kidding!”
“Quite the contrary, Mr. Jensen. We own the Double D ranch.”
Everybody gathered around, staring.
“Ah…this is my wife, Sally,” Smoke finally managed to say.
“Pleased, I’m sure,” the other twin said, and then dismissed Sally silently.
“Of the New Hampshire Reynolds,” Smoke said, before Sally could step forward and bust one of these ladies right in the chops.
“Oh, my!” the other twin said. “I didn’t realize. Of course! We’ve read about you, Sally. How wonderful to find some degree of breeding out here in this…” She looked around. “…bastion of coarseness and vulgarity.”
“What the hell did she say?” Denver whispered to Shorty.
“Don’t git me to lyin’,” Shorty told him. “But I don’t think it was no compliment.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“Where are your hands, Miss Duggan?” Smoke asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your hands? No. I don’t mean them. Not your hands. Your crew? Your cowboys?”
“Oh, we don’t have any yet.”
“You…don’t have any? Well, how in the he…heck are you going to handle these cattle without a crew?”
“Oh, we’ll leave that up to you,” Toni said brightly. “I mean, that’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“On my own ranch, yes. I don’t hire out to other people.”
“Well, I’m certain we can work something out,” Jeanne said. “Come now, time’s wasting. Let’s don’t dawdle. We have quite a distance to go.”
“Wait a minute!” Smoke said, exasperation in his voice. “Where is your ranch?”
“Twelve miles, that way,” Toni said, pointing. “We camped in the timber last night. We’ll pick up our equipment on the way back. We’re quite expert in the woods, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know,” Smoke said. “Camped in the woods,” he muttered. “Experts, no less. All right,” he said. “Get the cattle ready for the trail.”
Sally was laughing at his expression. “Don’t dawdle now, honey.”
Smoke was muttering low curses as he mounted up.
“Did we do something wrong?” Jeanne asked Sally. “We’ve been out here from Boston for several months and we seem to, well, anger all the people we’ve come in contact with.”
Sally climbed up on the wagon seat and took the reins. “I wonder why?” she said drily.
5
The ladies’ camp was equipped like an African safari. Smoke and the other hands had never seen so much junk in their lives.
“What’s that thing?” Rabbit asked, pointing to a canvas tent at the edge of the camp area. “It ain’t even got no top to it.”
“Don’t ask me,” Smoke said.
“One side is for bathing and the other side is a toilet,” Sally informed them.
“Do tell?” Rabbit muttered.
“We’re not going to make the ranch by nightfall,” Smoke told the twins. “We’ll be lucky to make two miles in this country. Best thing we can do is camp here for the night and leave early in the morning. You really have no one at the ranch?”
“Well, we have a cook and a nice young Spanish boy who takes care of the horses and does the lawn work,” Jeanne replied. “We just can’t get anyone else to work for us. We’re obviously doing something wrong but no one will tell us what it is.”
“You’re just new out here,” Smoke told them, putting on his diplomat’s hat and lying through his teeth. “Takes Western folks a while to size a person up.” He wanted to tell the twins that if they’d stop looking down their blue-blood noses at everybody, things might ease up a mite.
“Oh!” Toni said. “Well. I have an idea. We’ll give a party and that will break the ice. What is it called out here? A whigdig?”
“A shindig, ma’am,” Smoke corrected.
“Yes! That’s it. I don’t suppose there are any violinists close by?”
“I rather doubt it,” Smoke said.
“Oh, well. My sister and I will entertain. We’re very accomplished musicians.”
“Wonderful,” Smoke said.
“Yes. Jeanne is a flutist and I was trained as a classical pianist.”
“Ought to be a real entertaining evening,” Smoke said.
“Oh, quite! Are you familiar with Chopin?”
Smoke shook his head. He was getting a bad case of indigestion.
“Do you know the closest place where we might order caviar, Mr. Jensen?”
“No, ma’am,” Smoke said wearily. “I sure don’t.”
“You see,” Toni said during supper. “After our parents were killed, my sister and I came into quite a sizable inheritance. We have funds in other businesses, of course, but we felt it would be exciting to own a ranch.”
“Right,” Smoke said. “Have you met your neighbor yet, a Clint Black?”
“He came to call. He found something hysterically amusing. He laughed the entire time he visited. I found him quite boorish, to be truthful.”
“What’s boorish?” Ben whispered to Duke.
“Hell, I don’t know. But I bet it ain’t real nice.”
“Yes,” Jeanne said. “Mr. Black is a rather nice-looking man, in a rugged sort of way. But he’s terribly coarse. His table manners were an abomination. We fixed cucumber sandwiches for him and he said he wouldn’t feed those to his horse.”
“You have to understand,” Sally said, “that Western fare is simple, but filling and wholesome. Most out here grew up on beef and beans.”
From the expression on her face, that cuisine didn’t meet her approval. At all.
“Just where is the town of Blackstown?” Smoke asked.
“About twenty-five miles west of our location,” Toni said. “A rather quaint little town.”
The way she said it gave Smoke the idea that Blackstown appealed to her about as much as sticking her big toe into a fresh pile of cow droppings.
“Did Clint Black say anything, well, threatening to either of you?” Smoke asked the twins.
They exchanged glances. Toni replied. “Not…directly, Mr. Jensen. But we both feel there were some thinly veiled threats.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Well, he is an unmarried man and women are scarce out here. He made some rather crude advances at Jeanne, and then when she rebuffed him, he directed his attentions toward me. I told him that I was not interested. He said I’d come begging before all this was over. I asked what in the world he meant by that. He just laughed and walked away.”
Jeanne said, “Then I noticed that we were being watched and followed constantly. When we tried to hire people to work on our ranch, they would just shake their heads, mumble something and walk off. It’s obvious that Mister Black had ordered us boycotted, for some reason. We are able to shop in the town, for many of the merchants there don’t care for the man or his high-handed tactics. Mister Black’s brother, Harris, a thug if I ever saw one, is the Sheriff, and his deputies are just as bad as he is, if not worse. All in all, it is not a pleasant situation.”
“Who sold you this ranch?”
“It wasn’t sold directly to us,” Jeanne said. “Our attorneys are always looking for places to make our monies work, and when this property came on the market, they bought the ranch. However, they had no idea that we would personally come out here to run it.” She looked directly at Smoke. “You think that we are ill-suited to do so and that we were wrong to come out here, don’t you, Mr. Jensen?”
“Smoke. My name is Smoke. And in answer to your question, yes, I do think you’re out of place here. Clint Black is a dangerous, ruthless, and power-hungry man. From what I was able to learn about him, he’s about as easy to get along with as a rattlesnake.”
The twins smiled, Toni saying, “Our attorneys said much the same about you, Mr. Jensen.”
Smoke chuckled. “Have your attorneys ever been west of the Mississippi?”
“Heavens no!” Jeanne said. “But everyone they communicated with said you were a bad man.”