The Founding Father
“A watering trough might be a better proposition, Miss Colby,” John drawled from the doorway.
His voice shocked her. She jerked her head in his direction and loosened the hold she had on the dog. In the few seconds that followed, the animal gave a yelp of pure joy, leaped out of the pan, off the table, and scattered the rugs as it clawed its way to the freedom of the parlor.
“Oh, my goodness!” Ellen yelled. “Catch her, Lizzie, before she gets to the bedroom! She’ll go right up on Papa’s bed, like she usually does!”
“Yes, ma’am!”
The maid ran for all she was worth. Ellen Colby put her soapy hands on her hips and glared daggers at the tall green-eyed man in the doorway.
“Now see what you’ve done!” Ellen raged at John.
“Me?” John’s eyebrows arched. “I assure you, I meant only to say goodbye.”
“You diverted my attention at a critical moment!”
He smiled slowly, liking the way her blue eyes flashed in anger. He liked the thickness of her hair. It looked very long. He wondered if she let it down at bedtime.
That thought disturbed him. He straightened. “If your entire social life consists of bathing the dog, miss, you are missing out.”
“I have a social life!”
“Falling into mud puddles?”
She grabbed up the soaking brush they’d used on the dog and considered heaving it.
John threw back his head and laughed uproariously.
“Do be quiet!” she muttered.
“You have hidden fires,” he commented with delight. “Your father has asked me to keep an eye on you, Miss Colby, while he’s off on his hunting trip. I find the prospect delightful.”
“I can think of nothing I would enjoy less!”
“I’m quite a good companion,” he assured her. “I know where birds’ nests are and where flowers grow, and I can even sing and play the guitar if asked.”
She hesitated, wet splotches all over her lacy dress and soap in her upswept hair. She looked at him with open curiosity. “You are wearing a gun,” she pointed out. “Do you shoot people with it?”
“Only the worst sort of people,” he told her. “And I have yet to shoot a woman.”
“I am reassured.”
“I have a cattle ranch not too far a ride from here,” he continued. “In the past, I have had infrequently to help defend my cattle from Comanche raiding parties.”
“Indians!”
He laughed at her expression. “Yes. Indians. They have long since gone to live in the Indian Territory. But there are still rustlers and raiders from across the Mexican border, as well as deserting soldiers and layabouts from town hoping to steal my cattle and make a quick profit by selling them to the army.”
“How do you stop them?”
“With vigilance,” he said simply. “I have men who work for me on shares.”
“Shares?” She frowned. “Not for wages?”
He could have bitten his tongue. He hadn’t meant to let that slip out.
She knew that he’d let his guard down. She found him mysterious and charming and shrewd. But he had attractions. He was the first man she’d met who made her want to know more about him.
“I might take you for a ride in my buggy,” he mused.
“I might go,” she replied.
He chuckled, liking her pert response. She wasn’t much to look at, truly, but she had qualities he’d yet to find in other women.
He turned to go. “I won’t take the dog along,” he said.
“Papa’s dog goes with me everywhere,” she lied, wanting to be contrary.
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “You were alone in the mud puddle, as I recall.”
She glared at him.
He gave her a long, curious scrutiny. He smiled slowly. “We can discuss it at a later date. I will see you again in a day or two.” He lifted his hat respectfully. “Good day, Miss Colby.”
“Good day, Mr….?” It only then occurred to her that she didn’t even know his name.
“John,” he replied. “John Jackson Jacobs. But most people just call me ‘Big John.’”
“You are rather large,” she had to agree.
He grinned. “And you are rather small. But I like your spirit, Miss Colby. I like it a lot.”
She sighed and her eyes began to glow faintly as they met his green ones.
He winked at her and she blushed scarlet. But before he could say anything, the maid passed him with the struggling wet dog.
“Excuse me, sir, this parcel is quite maddeningly wet,” the maid grumbled as she headed toward the bowl on the table.
“So I see. Good day, ladies.” He tipped his hat again, and he was gone in a jingle of spurs.
Ellen Colby looked after him with curiosity and an odd feeling of loss. Strange that a man she’d only just met could be so familiar to her, and that she could feel such joy in his presence.
Her life had been a lonely one, a life of service, helping to act as a hostess for her father and care for her grandmother. But with her grandmother off traveling, Ellen was now more of a hindrance than a help to her family, and it was no secret that her father wanted badly to see her married and off his hands.
But chance would be a fine thing, she thought. She turned back to the dog with faint sadness, wishing she were prettier.
CHAPTER TWO
JOHN RODE BACK to his ranch, past the newfangled barbed wire which contained his prize longhorn bull, past the second fence that held his Hereford bull and his small herd of Hereford cows with their spring calves, to the cabin where he and his foremen’s families lived together. He had hundreds of head of beef steers, but they ranged widely, free of fences, identified only by his 3J brand, burned into their thick coats. The calves had been branded in the spring.
Mary Brown was at the door, watching him approach. It was early June, and hot in south Texas. Her sweaty black hair was contained under a kerchief, and her brown eyes smiled at him. “Me and Juana washed your old clothes, Mister John,” she said. “Isaac and Luis went fishing with the boys down to the river for supper, and the girls are making bread.”
“Good,” he said. “Do I have anything dry and pressed to put on?” he added.
Mary nodded her head. “Such as it is, Mister John. A few more holes, and no amount of sewing is gonna save you a red face in company.”
“I’m working on that, Mary,” he told her, chuckling. He bent to lift her youngest son, Joe, a toddler, up into his arms. “You get to growing fast, young feller, you got to help me herd cattle.”
The little boy gurgled at him. John grinned at him and set him back down.
Isaac came in the back door just then, with a string of fish. “You back?” He grinned. “Any luck?”
“A lot, all of it unexpected,” he told the tall, lithe black man. He glanced at Luis Rodriguez, his head vaquero, who was short and stout and also carrying a string of fish. He took Isaac’s and handed both to the young boys. “You boys go clean these fish for Mary, you hear?”
“Yes, Papa,” the taller black boy said. His shorter Latino companion grinned and followed him out the door.
“We have another calf missing, señor,” Luis said irritably. “Isaac and I only came to bring the boys and the fish to the house.” He pulled out his pistol and checked it. “We will go and track the calf.”
“I’ll go with you,” John said. “Give me a minute to change.”
He carried his clothing to the single room that had a makeshift door and got out of his best clothes, leaving them hanging over a handmade chair he’d provided for Mary. He whipped his gunbelt back around his lean hips and checked his pistol. Rustlers were the bane of any rancher, but in these hard times, when a single calf meant the difference between keeping his land or losing it, he couldn’t afford to let it slide.
He went back out to the men, grim-faced. “Let’s do some tracking.”
* * *
THEY FOUND THE CALF, butchered. Signs around it told them it wasn’t rustlers, but a couple of Indians—Comanches, in fact, judging from the broken arrow shaft and footprints they found nearby.
“Damn the luck!” John growled. “What are Comanches doing this far south? And if they’re hungry, why can’t they hunt rabbits or quail?”
“They all prefer buffalo, señor, but the herds have long gone, and game is even scarce here. That is why we had to fish for supper.”
“They could go the hell back to the Indian Territory, couldn’t they, instead of riding around here, harassing us poor people!” John pursed his lips thoughtfully, remembering what he’d heard in Sutherland Springs. “I wonder,” he mused aloud, “if these could be the two renegades from Indian Territory being chased by the army?”
“What?” Isaac asked.
“Nothing,” John said, clapping him on the shoulder affectionately. “Just thinking to myself. Let’s get back to work.”
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, he put on his good suit and went back to the Springs to check on Ellen Colby. He expected to find her reclining in her suite, or playing with her father’s dog. What he did find was vaguely shocking.
Far from being in her room, Ellen was on the sidewalk with one arm around a frightened young black boy who’d apparently been knocked down by an angry man.
“…he got in my way. He’s got no business walking on the sidewalk anyway. He should be in the street. He should be dead. They should all be dead! We lost everything because of them, and then they got protected by the very army that burned down our homes! You get away from him, lady, he’s not going anywhere until I teach him a lesson!”
She stuck out her chin. “I have no intention of moving, sir. If you strike him, you must strike me, also!”
John moved up onto the sidewalk. He didn’t look at Ellen. His eyes were on the angry man, and they didn’t waver. He didn’t say a word. He simply flipped back the lapel of his jacket to disclose the holstered pistol he was carrying.
“Another one!” the angry man railed. “You damned Yankees should get the hell out of Texas and go back up north where you belong!”
“I’m from Georgia,” John drawled. “But this is where I belong now.”
The man was taken aback. He straightened and glared at John, his fists clenched. “You’d draw on a fellow Southerner?” he exclaimed.
“I’m partial to brown skin,” John told him with a honeyed drawl. His tall, lithe figure bent just enough to make an older man nearby catch his breath. “But you do what you think you have to,” he added deliberately.
“There,” Ellen Colby said haughtily, helping the young man to his feet. “See what you get when you act out of ignoble motives?” she lashed at the threatening man. “A child is a child, regardless of his heritage, sir!”
“That is no child,” the man said. “It is an abomination….”
“I beg to disagree.” The voice came from a newcomer, wearing a star on his shirt, just making his way through the small crowd. It was Deputy Marshal James Graham, well known locally because he was impartially fair. “Is there a problem, madam?” he asked Ellen, tipping his hat to her.
“That man kicked this young man off the sidewalk and attacked him,” Ellen said, glaring daggers at the antagonist. “I interfered and Mr. Jacobs came along in time to prevent any further violence.”
“Are you all right, son?” the marshal asked the young boy, who was openmouthed at his unexpected defense.
“Uh, yes, sir. I ain’t hurt,” he stammered.
Ellen Colby took a coin from her purse and placed it in the young man’s hand. “You go get yourself a stick of peppermint,” she told him.
He looked at the coin and grinned. “Thank you kindly, miss, but I’ll buy my mama a sack of flour instead. Thank you, too,” he told the marshal and John Jacobs, before he cut his losses and rushed down the sidewalk.
Graham turned to the man who’d started the trouble. “I don’t like troublemakers,” he said in a voice curt with command. “If I see you again, in a similar situation, I’ll lock you up. That’s a promise.”
The man spat onto the ground and gave all three of the boy’s defenders a cold glare before he turned and stomped off in the opposite direction.
“I’m obliged to both of you,” Ellen Colby told them.
John shrugged. “It was no bother.”
The deputy marshal chuckled. “A Georgian defending a black boy.” He shook his head. “I am astonished.”
John laughed. “I have a former slave family working with me,” he explained. His face tautened. “If you could see the scars they carry, even the children, you might understand my position even better.”
The deputy nodded. “I do understand. If you have any further trouble,” he told Ellen, “I am at your service.” He tipped his hat and went back to his horse.
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