Dorothy Garlock Read Free

the night he had had dreams of the rolling, muddy river and had awakened sweating and thrashing. Oliver Eastwood was standing over him and behind him was the figure of Billy Whiskers.
    “You’re all right, Smith. You’re safe here. Billy will be close by. I came out to see how you were doing and heard you cry out. Go back to sleep. You’re not out there in the night alone.”
    He had gone back to sleep and slept soundly the rest of the night, but when morning came the dream was still with him when Oliver came to take him to the house.
    Smith would never forget standing beside the kitchen door and listening to Mrs. Eastwood’s shrill, angry voice and Oliver Eastwood’s quiet one trying to persuade his wife to let him be a part of the family.
    “Get that little bastard out of my house. I’ll not have him here.”
    “The boy has no place to go, Maud.”
    “This ain’t no catch-all for every stray that comes down the pike.”
    “His folks were drowned—”
    “What the hell do I care about that? Lots of folks drown. Get him out!”
    “Maud—”
    “Is this my house or not?”
    “Of course, it’s your house.”
    “I don’t want him here.”
    “All right, Maud. He can stay in the bunkhouse with Billy.”
    “Why do you want him? Ain’t me and Fanny good enough?”
    “What a ridiculous thing to say. You’re my wife. Fanny is your daughter—mine now. The boy being here won’t change that.”
    “He’d better not be hanging around Fanny. I’ll take a horsewhip to him.”
    “He’ll not bother Fanny,” Oliver said firmly. “And he’ll not bother you. But I’ll tell you this, Maud. That boy will have a home here as long as he wants to stay. You’d better understand that.”
    Tears had blinded him as he had listened to this unseen woman reject him. He hadn’t seen that Oliver had returned until the big man had put his arm about his shoulders.
    “I’m sorry you had to hear that, boy. Women folk get crazy notions sometimes.”
    As time went by, Smith and Oliver became constant companions. Oliver spent more and more time outside the house. Smith grew to be a man at Oliver’s side, neither wanting norneeding anyone but Oliver and Billy Whiskers and the magical world that was Eastwood Ranch.
    Smith had been at Eastwood a week before he even saw Fanny, Oliver’s stepdaughter. The men in the bunkhouse had talked about her and Mrs. Eastwood, but the first sight of her was one he would never forget. She was about the age of his little sister. He thought she was the prettiest thing he had ever seen.
    Fanny had been dressed in white with a pink sash tied about her waist, reddish-brown curls falling down about her shoulders and a face so white it looked as if it had never known sunshine. Fanny stood with her arm wrapped around a porch pillar, gazing off toward the mountains. When he passed near, as he had to do to pick up a shovel he had left behind, he raised the brim of the old felt hat Billy Whiskers had found for him. The girl stared at him with hostile eyes and poked out her tongue. Then she went back into the house and slammed the door.
    Mrs. Eastwood, according to snatches of talk he heard in the bunkhouse, had lived on a homestead with her first husband. When Oliver Eastwood came west, he was as green as grass. When he wandered out into the Bighorn Mountains, he was thrown from his horse one day and would have died if not for Maud’s husband, who found him and took him home. Maud set his broken leg and nursed him back to health. The nester died soon after and Oliver married Maud, who had no idea the greenhorn she married was a wealthy man.
    Oliver built a fine home on his land for his wife and stepdaughter. Then he began to concentrate on building a herd of Texas longhorn cattle. The animals were of a nervous temperament and had pugnacious dispositions. They would run away from a horseman with the speed of the wind, but if a person were unhorsed, they would attack him in an instant.
    Thinking back on it