Only 05 - Autumn Lover

“But the men will have to work cattle, too.”
    Hunter nodded. The brush moved in long strokes over Bugle Boy’s bloodred hide.
    “The kind of men I’m looking for won’t mind pushing cows,” Hunter said.
    “There is a problem.”
    “Just one?”
    “Until this one is solved, the rest can’t be,” Elyssa retorted.
    “I’m listening.”
    “Another moment to treasure,” she muttered.
    Hunter’s head came up.
    Elyssa started talking. Fast.
    “The Culpeppers are scaring away the men who would normally look for work here,” she said.
    “So I’ve heard.”
    “Even the Turner clan off to the south is staying away, and Turners have worked autumn and spring roundups on the Ladder S for years.”
    Hunter nodded.
    “That doesn’t worry you?” she asked tartly.
    He shrugged.
    “But how will the men get through the Culpepper gang to be hired by the Ladder S?” Elyssa demanded.
    “Same way I did. By using their heads. Or in a group, using their guns. Either way, they’ll come.”
    “You sound very certain.”
    “Cash jobs are hard to come by out here. A man can make more money in a month at fighting wages than he can in a season of pushing cows.”
    Elyssa sighed and rubbed her arms, feeling the night chill through the heavy silk shawl. She wished she had the shawl’s cost in plain old homespun wool.
    But she didn’t. There was no money for more suitable clothes for her or paint for the house or for anything else that wasn’t essential for the ranch’s survival. The Ladder S was all she had in the world.
    And she was very much afraid she had already lost it.
    “I wish Mac were still here,” Elyssa said unhappily. “He liked women even less than you do, but—”
    “Smart man.”
    “—nobody knew the Ladder S the way he did,” she said, ignoring Hunter’s interruption. “Every ravine, every spring, where the grass was good and in which season, even the marsh. He knew all of it.”
    “Didn’t do him much good against the Culpeppers, did it?”
    Hunter lifted one of Bugle Boy’s big hooves and began cleaning it with swift movements of a hoof-pick.
    Slowly Elyssa shook her head, blinking against the tears that burned at the back of her eyes.
    “I tried to find Mac,” she said in a husky, ragged voice. “As soon as I heard shooting, I grabbed the shotgun and rode Leopard out of here at a dead run.”
    “Don’t blame yourself,” Hunter said. “It probably was all over before you even tightened Leopard’s cinch.”
    “I didn’t bother.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “With a saddle,” Elyssa explained. “Or a bridle.”
    “Girl, only an idiot would ride—”
    “I didn’t even find where Mac had fallen,” Elyssa said, not hearing any words but her own. “I searched until a thunderstorm broke and washed away the tracks. Then I quartered the land until it was too dark to tell trees from rocks.”
    “You are a fool! What if the Culpeppers had found you?”
    “I was afraid Mac was lying injured out in the storm, maybe even dying,” Elyssa said tautly. “I couldn’t just turn my back and leave him to the cold rain.”
    “Getting grabbed by the Culpeppers wouldn’t have helped Mac one damned bit. But you didn’t think of that, did you? All you thought of was tearing around in the rain like the heroine of some fool dime novel.”
    Elyssa’s mouth turned down at the corners. She watched as Hunter went to work cleaning another of Bugle Boy’s hooves.
    “You’re going to love Penny,” Elyssa said wryly. “She said the same thing, and more besides.”
    “Who is Penny?” Hunter asked, though he already knew.
    But it was the sort of question that a man new to the area would be expected to ask.
    Hunter wanted Elyssa to go on thinking he was just one more gun-handling drifter looking for work. If she knew he gave a damn only about tracking down Culpeppers, not about the fate of the Ladder S, Elyssa would likely fire him before he even started.
    Then there would be merry hell to pay getting within rifle range of the Culpeppers.
    Hunter had learned in the past two years that the Culpeppers left men watching their back trail. The only way to get close to the gang was to blend into the landscape.
    The ramrod of the Ladder S would be invisible.
    “Penelope Miller is kind of an aunt,” Elyssa explained, “like Mac was kind of an uncle. And Bill, too.”
    “Kind of?”
    “Penny was my mother’s…companion, I guess. She cooked and sewed and cleaned, but she was always more