All he got in response was a few disgruntled groans from the men whose names he had called.
“Come on get up, get up. This day is half over,” he called.
“Damn, Tyrone, don’t you ever sleep?” Crack asked, and a few of the others chuckled.
“Yeah, I sleep when it’s dark, and I’m awake when it’s light. If you hadn’t stayed up till midnight last night, you’d be all rested, and ready to go, now.”
“Midnight? We was all in bed by ten o’clock. You know that, you was right here with us.”
“As far as I’m concerned, ten o’clock is damn near midnight,” Tyrone said. “Now, come on, everybody get up. We have to feed the horses.”
“Can’t they eat grass like every other horse in the world does?” Prew asked, groggily.
“It’s your fault,” Tyrone replied.
“What do you mean, it’s my fault?”
“You’re the one that pointed out to me that there are too many of them put into too small a field.”
“Yeah, but you said there was enough grass for a few days.”
“There probably is, but I think we should get some hay out for them anyway, just in case.”
“Those damn horses live better than we do,” Jake said. “They get their breakfast in bed.”
“You want breakfast in bed?” Tyrone asked. “I’ll be glad to bring you breakfast in bed.”
“Really? Yeah, you do that, I might feel more like gettin’ up this morning.”
“All right, I’ll get you a handful of hay, right now,” Tyrone said, and the others in the bunkhouse laughed.
“Serve that hay with some bacon and eggs, and I might just take you up on it,” Jake said, sitting up and rolling out of bed.
“I have some coffee in the office,” Tyrone said, softening his tone a bit. “You boys can grab yourselves a cup before you come out to the barn. Then, soon as you get the hay out, you can come on back for breakfast.”
“That sure was nice of Miz Wellington to throw us that party last night,” Prew said.
“And to actually dance with us. Who would’a thought a lady like that would dance with regular hands like us?” Crack asked.
“I hear’d tell they was a time when she done more’n just dance with cowboys,” one of the newer hands said.
The laughing banter in the bunkhouse stopped as all the hands looked over toward the speaker.
“You need to watch that mouth of you’rn, Asa,” Prew said.
“What? What did I say? Are you boys sayin’ you don’t know that our boss lady used to be a whore?” Asa chuckled. “Folks say she was the best lookin’ whore in Ketchum.”
“Asa, there’s no need for you to help the boys this morning,” Tyrone said, his voice almost conversational.
“What do you mean, there’s no need?”
“I mean, you don’t work here any more,” Tyrone replied. “So, there’s no need for you to help out. In fact, why don’t you just gather your tack and get on out of here now?”
“You can’t fire me.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Believe me, Asa, Tyrone can fire you.”
Asa looked incredulous over the reaction of all the hands. “I can’t believe this. I tell the truth about something and you want to fire me?”
“Not just want to, Asa. I did fire you,” Tyrone said.
“How’m I goin’ to go? Shanks mare? You know I don’t have no horse of my own. The horse I’m a ridin’ belongs to the ranch.”
“You can ride your horse into town. Just leave it at the livery,” Tyrone said. “We’ll pick it up, later. And, Asa, if I go down to the livery and find out that you didn’t leave the horse, I’ll see that you are hunted down and tried as a horse thief.”
“All right, all right,” Asa said angrily. “I don’t want to work for no damn whore anyway.”
Crack stepped up to Asa then and, without another word, knocked Asa down.
“What the hell was that for?” Asa asked, lying on his back and rubbing his chin.
“I just didn’t want you to leave without somethin’ to remember us by,” Crack said, and the others laughed.
“And, Asa,” Prew said. “If word gets back to us that you’re talkin’ about Mrs. Wellington, I guarantee you, you’ll get a lot more than a punch on the chin.”
“I’ve never seen such a bunch of…”
“A bunch of what?” Jake asked.
Asa rubbed his chin and looked into the glaring faces of the other hands.
“Nothing,” Asa said. “I’m going.”
“Yeah, you do that. And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” Crack said.
Chapter Twenty-five
Awakening fairly early this morning, Matt got out of bed and went downstairs, then stepped out onto porch even as a rooster began crowing. To the east, the rising sun was an orange-red ball just clearing the rounded domes of the Bruneau Dunes and touching the Snake River to turn it into a flowing stream of molten gold. He watched as the hands hitched a team to a wagon, then began loading it with hay. It took about ten minutes to load the wagon, then he watched as Jake and Crack started driving down to the field where the saddle horses were gathered for shipment to the army.
He could smell the aroma of bacon and biscuits coming from the cook house, and recalling the season he had worked as a cowboy in Wyoming, he almost wished that he was staying in the bunkhouse with the other men, rather than in the too elegant and too soft bedroom upstairs.
From behind him, he heard Maria, the house cook at work, preparing breakfast. The aroma of brewing coffee drifted out onto the porch, and that caused him to go back inside and step into the kitchen.
“The coffee smells good,” Matt said.
“Señor, if you go into the dining room, I will bring you a cup of coffee,” the cook offered.
Matt chuckled. “Maria, you have a very good way of getting unwanted people out of your kitchen,” he said. “I will get out of your way and, thank you, yes, I would love a cup of coffee.”
“Oh, Señor, now you make me feel bad,” Maria said.
“Do you mean I make you feel bad because you actually do want me to stay in your kitchen?”
“No, Señor. I do want you out of my kitchen,” Maria answered. “But you make me feel bad because you know that I want you out.”
Matt laughed, then went into the dining room to wait for his cup of coffee.
Upstairs, the cock’s crow had awakened Kitty, but she had not yet gotten out of bed. She stretched, then looked at the patterns formed by the shadows cast on the wall by the morning sun as it peeped through the aspen tree that grew just outside her bedroom window. The tree limbs were moving gently in compliance with a soft early morning breeze, and she could track their movement across the wall.
Through the open window, she could hear the men talking, and even though it had been very late when she was finally able to go to sleep last night, she felt a sense of guilt knowing that she was still in bed while the men who worked for her were already at work.
It had now been a little over a month since the last rustlers had hit Coventry, and ten days since Poke Terrell was killed. Clearly, with that evil man gone, and with all shipment horses safely confined in one field, the worst was over. It had been a peaceful ten days, and now, for the first time, Kitty was beginning to feel confident that she was going to get her horses to market in Chicago. Nevertheless she wanted to keep Matt around until the horses had been safely delivered.
The question she had asked Matt last night had been interrupted, and the opportunity to ask it had never repeated itself. This morning, upon reflection, she was glad that she had not been able to ask it again. Deep down inside she knew what the answer would be, she knew that he would tell her that he was going to be moving on, and she didn’t want to actually hear it expressed. She knew inherently that no deeper relationship between them was ever going to happen. Matt Jensen was not the kind of man who could settle down, and it would be like caging a wild bird and if she tried. Besides, if he did settle down, it might very well kill that which she loved most about him.