“Yes.” She nodded. “He’d taken a cigar and told my husband to include it on his bill. Arthur said your father was in the back room only a few minutes when he heard a loud noise—like something had fallen. When he went back to see what had happened, your father was lying on the floor by his desk. Arthur immediately sent someone for the doctor, but of course it was too late.”
“Did he say anything about Judd Boston?” There was a cold cynicism in the question.
Clara Pearce showed a trace of unease at the question. “It wasn’t until later that we learned Mr. Boston’s bank had instructed the sheriff to serve a foreclosure notice on your father’s ranch … for nonpayment of notes that were due.”
“And Pa didn’t mention anything about it to your husband?” The ridgeline of his jaw stood out sharply.
“I …” She hesitated
, then reluctantly said, “I believe my husband did make a comment about the amount of ammunition your father wanted. He jokingly asked if he intended to start a war. Your father smiled and said only a small one.”
Turning his face from her, Benteen swore savagely under his breath. He’d known the day was coming when his father’s situation would come to a head, but this wasn’t the way he had expected it to end.
“Please sit down and drink your coffee, Benteen,” Mrs. Pearce urged. “It’s getting cold. You’re probably hungry, too. Let me fix you something to eat.”
“No.” Impatience thinned the hard line of his mouth. He was irritated with her female belief that food could solve things and provide solace to something that was inconsolable.
An inner rage made him leave the kitchen and the feminine attempts to comfort him. He didn’t want a soothing hand to ease the hot grief burning away his numbness. A seed of anger was growing inside him, and he wanted to feel it. Again he walked past Lorna as if she wasn’t there, and kept going until he reached the parlor.
Lorna had expected Benteen to be upset, but not like this. She would have been shocked if he had cried, yet she thought he would show more emotion than that cold anger. Instead he’d built a wall around himself that shut her out. It hurt to think he didn’t want her, and that’s the impression he was giving. They were to be married. She was to be his wife. It was her duty to be at his side during times like these, to try to ease his pain.
“What’s wrong, Mother?” Her bewildered voice was quietly pitched. “He looks right through me and he was rude to you.”
“Do you remember the puppy you had when you were little?” The understanding that came from experience and maturity was in her mother’s gentle expression. “It was kicked by a horse, and when you tried to help it, the puppy was in so much pain that it bit you. The puppy didn’t mean to hurt you but it didn’t know what it was doing.”
“Are you trying to say that Benteen is like a wounded animal?” Lorna was taken aback by the suggestion.
“I’m trying to say that his pain runs very deep,” her mother explained. “Men seem to think they have to hide such feelings—that we’ll think less of them if we see they can be vulnerable, too. Benteen doesn’t want to admit it, but he needs you, Lorna.” She silently encouraged her daughter to go to him.
Lorna hesitated and finally accepted the risk of being rebuffed again. She didn’t have her mother’s insight into a man’s thinking, but it was something her mother had probably obtained after years of living with her father.
When she entered the parlor, she saw Benteen standing next to the boxes of personal belongings that she and her mother had taken from his ranch. Judd Boston had given them permission to remove the personal articles from the house. They had kept them here for Benteen’s return.
Lorna was struck by how old Benteen appeared. His sun-browned features looked haggard and drawn, showing an age that came from brutal experience rather than the accumulation of years. Even when the dirt and dust from the trail were washed away, it would still be there.
Lorna felt dreadfully innocent and naive. How foolish she had been to think she knew the words that would comfort him, when Benteen had seen so much more than she had. What did she know about death and hardship? It had all happened on the periphery of her life.
His dusty, lowcrowned hat was held at his side. The tight hold of his gloved fingers was curling the stained brim. He reached down to pick up the framed daguerreotype lying on top of the folded clothes and various other articles that had belonged to his father. Lorna crossed the room to stand slightly behind him. Her tenderly compassionate gaze wandered over the jacket, stretched tautly across the wide set of his shoulders. The air was almost electrified with his tension.
“We tried to find you when your father died,” she told him, and was cut by his hard glance. “Mr. Boston sent out a couple of his men, but they weren’t able to locate you.”
“I don’t imagine he tried too hard.” Benteen’s voice was stiffly dry as he continued to stare at the tintype.
“Daddy said it would be hard to find anybody in that rough country,” Lorna murmured, and glanced at the picture of the woman in the frame, barely visible from her angle. “That’s your mother, isn’t it?” Lorna remembered one of his neighbors mentioning it. So many had come to the funeral and offered their sympathy that she didn’t recall which one. “She was very beautiful.”
“Yes.” It was a clipped answer.
In an effort to understand what Benteen was feeling, Lorna tried to put herself in his place, imagining what it would have been like to be raised without a mother, then losing the one parent that remained. She had been so loved by both her mother and father that she couldn’t imagine a life without them.
“Your mother died when you were very young, didn’t she?” she commented, in the hope he might talk about his mother and eventually release some of the grief for his father bottled inside him.
When Benteen swiveled to look at her, Lorna was shocked at the bitter hate in his dark eyes. “She isn’t dead.” His mouth curled over the words like a snarling animal. “She ran off with another man and left us.”
“I didn’t know.” Lorna recoiled a little from this frightening side of him, so utterly ruthless and unforgiving.
That look was finally directed at the daguerreotype. “Pa kept waiting for her to come back, but she never did.” The pitch of his voice was absolutely flat, containing no emotion. “He never heard from her once in all these years, but he waited anyway.” There was a slight tremble in the gloved hand holding the picture. It was in his low voice, too, when Benteen spoke again—a tremble of anger. “He doesn’t have to wait anymore.”
A small fire was burning in the fireplace to take the nip out of the springtime air. With a sudden turn, Benteen hurled the daguerreotype and carved wood frame into the fireplace. Glass splintered and broke as it crashed against the andirons holding the smoldering embers of a burning log. Lorna flinched in shock, and recovered immediately to grab for the iron poker and rescue the picture before it caught fire.