Miss Murray On The Cattle Trail. Lynna Banning

could he know that I’m thinking?

      She wanted to ask him how long this would last.

      She wanted to thank him for protecting her.

      She wanted to stay alive!

      Zach could feel her shaking, sending little tremors against his chest, but instead of making him feel protective it made him mad. Damn mad. She was scared? She shouldn’t be out here in the first place. Newspaper reporter or not, she had no business on a cattle drive. It put his men at risk. It put his cattle at risk. And, goddammit, it put him at risk!

      Well, now, Strickland, just how do you figure it puts you at risk?

      He tried to shut his mind down and concentrate instead on the wind. And the dust. And the...

      Oh, hell and damn, it was hard not to think about Dusty when he could feel every little hitch in her breathing and every shudder traveling along her spine.

      He had to admit she didn’t complain. She didn’t cry. She didn’t shirk her share of the work. She didn’t ask for special treatment because she was female. Dusty was maddeningly agreeable. He hated to admit it, but she was good company.

      And, oh, God, she smelled good.

      He could feel grit and sand sifting through his shirt and into his jeans, making his sticky skin itch. He heard the wind pick up. A dust storm could blow for half a day or longer, and this one showed no sign of letting up.

      One of the horses tossed its head, but it didn’t move. He tried to keep his mind on the animal, but his thoughts kept coming back to Dusty. What was it about her that he found so maddening?

      And how much longer can you stand here with her trim little butt snugged into your groin?

      Guess he had a bad case of Dusty getting under his skin.

      Suddenly she pulled away from the horse she was leaning against and with a half sob turned into his arms.

      “Zach, I’m scared.”

      Well, maybe she did cry sometimes. He pressed her head against his neck and wrapped his arm around her.

      “H-how long will this last?”

      “Don’t know. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes a day.”

      She gave a little jerk. “A day? A whole day?”

      “Sometimes. Forget about the dust storm. Just standing here in one spot for twenty-four hours will probably kill us.”

      “Oh, but—It couldn’t really go on for a whole day, could it? What if I have to, um, relieve myself?”

      That made him laugh out loud. He pressed her face back against his neck. “Dusty, stop talking. It takes air.”

      He let ten minutes go by while the wind screamed across the plain and threw dirt in their faces. After another ten minutes she raised her head and wasted some more air.

      “I can’t wait to write down some notes about this windstorm!”

      Zach just shook his head. She was either crazy or she was a great newspaper reporter. Maybe both.

      The storm finally moved off to the north, and Zach heaved a sigh of relief. Their ordeal was over. He took a step away from her, and she moved out of his arms and began brushing dirt off her clothes. Yeah, he was relieved it was over, but maybe he was the crazy one, because part of him was sorry.

      Everyone gathered around, and they decided to set up camp for the night. Dusty immediately began scribbling away in her notebook and Zach took stock of the damage. The storm had left his hands gritty but uninjured and his herd of cattle was still intact. Cherry assured him the remuda was restless but untouched, and he was already brushing the animals down.

      The men were all filthy and the chuck wagon was gritty with sand and dirt. Roberto was beside himself.

      “Señor Boss, I cannot cook with dirt in pans, and the wagon—ay de mi—it must be scrubbed before supper.”

      Dusty looked up from her writing. Her face was dirty, and when she stood up, grit sifted from her jeans. “Roberto, give me a bucket of water and a scrub brush. I’ll help you clean up.”

      Zach grinned all the way out to check on the herd, and when he’d ridden twice around the subdued steers, he was still smiling.

      She might be green and scared and a little bit crazy, but maybe she was worth riding the trail with.

      That night Alex interviewed the scout, Wally. He told her some of his adventures over his considerable years “on the drover’s trail,” as he termed it.

      “Kinda hard to get used to it at first, scoutin’ for a cattle outfit. Gotta ride ahead of ever’body, and it kin get mighty lonesome with nobody to talk to ’cept my horse. Got to be purty good friends with my horse after a while, but...aw, heck, Miss Alex, you don’t want to hear about this stuff.”

      “But I do, Wally. Honestly I do. And just think, thousands of readers back East will want to hear about ‘all this stuff,’ too. You’ll be famous!”

      “Aw, heck, Miss Alex. I don’t want to be famous. Somebody might come after me for money I owed in a poker game somewhere. Golly, I remember one time down in Texas...” And he was off again.

      When Wally stopped regaling her with his wild tales, the hands began to spin their own yarns. Nothing was too outlandish or unbelievable. Skip recalled one cattle drive when they ate “nothin’ but oatmeal and bugs” for four days straight. Curly told about riding two days on a spring roundup with a broken foot; it had happened when his horse stepped on his boot, but he’d wanted to stick it out because one of the riders was “a pretty little filly” from a neighboring ranch.

      “Aw, that’s nuthin’,” Jase challenged. “One time I was night-herdin’ during a blizzard and my fingers froze up. Had to chop ’em off myself the next morning. Had to, or they’d a got the gangrene.”

      Alex didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but when she noticed his middle two fingers on one hand were missing, she decided he was telling the truth. She dug out her notepad again. This was wonderful human-interest material about the type of people who worked these cattle drives. She could see a whole series of pieces about the men on the trail; maybe she should get to know them better.

      After an hour of after-supper talk, she acknowledged she was certainly getting a good education about life on a cattle drive. And it wasn’t just about the men. Cherry was constantly instructing her about the horses in his remuda.

      “Don’t never walk up to a hoss what’s pullin’ yer rope tight, Miss Alex. Good way to git stomped. Why, I remember one time...” And, like Wally, the wrangler talked nonstop for half an hour.

       Chapter Seven

      Night after night she watched the men around the campfire, how they teased one another and played practical jokes and sang and told stories about other cattle drives they had been on. Sometimes one of them would start to talk about a girl “back home,” or a woman of questionable reputation, and then Alex noticed the men would tip their heads in her direction and quickly shush the speaker. She guessed they didn’t want to offend her.