Page 3 of Texas Glory
Amelia lifted her gaze to his. She had the prettiest green eyes he’d ever seen. He remembered a time when he’d thought he could easily fall in love with those eyes. Perhaps he had.
“I don’t think it’s as bad as when Houston got shot,” she said quietly.
“I’d feel a hell of a lot better if he’d wake up.”
She returned to her task of running the cloth over Austin’s brow. “He’d only feel the pain then.”
Better the pain than death. Dallas glanced at Houston who sat in a nearby chair, holding his own silent vigil, his daughter curled in his lap, asleep.
“I guess you think I should have handled this differently,” Dallas said.
“It makes no sense to me to build a town, hire a sheriff, and thennotuse him when you’ve got trouble.”
“I hired him to protect the citizens. I can handle my own trouble.”
“You can’t have it both ways, Dallas. If you bring the law out here, then you can’t be your own law.”
“I can be anything I damn well want to be. It’s my land. McQueen is going to learn to stay the hell off it, and I’ll teach him the lesson myself.”
“But at what cost?”
The words rang out loudly with concern. Dallas turned his attention back to his wounded brother. “Why don’t you tuck your daughter into my bed?” he suggested quietly to Houston.
“I’ll do that,” Houston replied as he easily brought himself to his feet, without waking Maggie. He walked from the room.
Dallas wrapped his hand tightly around the bedpost, searching for answers to his unfortunate dilemma. The McQueens had moved to the area three years ago, thinking they had purchased the land that ran along both sides of the river. Dallas suspected that the person who had sold them the land had been a land grabber. Land grabbing had been a common practice following the war. A man would buy a parcel of land and extend the boundaries as far as he wanted, often posting a notice in a newspaper to validate his claim. Although the practice usually worked, the notice was not legally binding. Dallas had filed claims with the land office for every acre of land he owned. Unfortunately, the McQueens seemed to believe—as many ranchers did—that a gun spoke louder than the law. They had refused to acknowledge Dallas’s deed to the acreage and had blatantly prodded their inferior stock into grazing over Dallas’s spread.
He wouldn’t have minded sharing his water or his grass if he didn’t need to control the breeding of his cattle so he could improve the quality of beef his cows produced.
He’d begun to put up his barbed-wire fence. If the McQueens had accepted that, Dallas would have left a portion of the river open to them. But they had torn down the fence before Dallas’s men had completed it. Irritating, but harmless. Dallas had paid a visit to Angus McQueen and demanded that he keep his sons tethered. Then Dallas had ordered his men to finish building the fence and to carry it beyond the river.
Two months ago, Angus McQueen’s sons had again destroyed a section of the fence, cutting the wire, burning the posts, and killing almost forty head of cattle, most on the verge of calving. Dallas had given Angus McQueen a bill for the damages that the man had refused to pay because Dallas couldn’t prove his sons had torn down the fence and murdered the cattle.
Dallas could certainly prove McQueens had cut his wire tonight, but as Houston had stated—at what cost?
Dallas held his thoughts and his silence when Houston returned to the room and took up his vigil in the chair beside the bed.
Dallas swung around as soft footfalls sounded along the hallway. Relief washed over him when Dr. Freeman shuffled into the room. The tall, thin man looked as though he were hovering on death’s doorstep himself. His bones creaked as he crossed the room without a word. He set his black bag on the bedside table and began to examine Austin’s wound.
“Where in the hell have you been?” Dallas demanded.
“Had to set Boyd McQueen’s arm.” Dr. Freeman glanced over his shoulder at Dallas and raised a thinning white brow, his steely gray eyes accusing. “Boyd said you broke it.”
Twin emotions twisted through Dallas’s gut: rage because McQueen had selfishly had the doctor tend to his needs, knowing all along that his bullet had slammed into Austin; and guilt because he hadn’t realized he’d broken Boyd’s arm when he’d dragged him through the river.
“Did McQueen tell you that he shot Austin?”
Dr. Freeman sighed. “No, I didn’t learn that bit of information until I returned home and found your foreman waiting for me.” Shaking his head, he began poking his fingers around Austin’s ravaged flesh. “You and the McQueens need to settle your differences before this whole area erupts into a range war.”
“Is Mr. McQueen going to be all right?” Amelia asked.
“Yes, ma’am. It was a clean break, and I left him in his sister’s care.”
Dallas stared at the doctor as though he’d just spoken in a foreign language. “Sister? Boyd McQueen has a sister?”
“Yep. Shy little thing,” Dr. Freeman said absently as he opened his black bag. “Hear tell, she spent most of her growing-up years tending to her ailing mother. Reckon she spent so much time being forced to stay at home that she never thinks to leave now that she’s grown.
“How grown?” Dallas asked.
