The Ranch Next Door and Other Stories
by Elisabeth Grace Foley
Cover art by J. Simmons | www.jsimmonsillustration.com
Cover photo © Denise Lett | Dreamstime.com
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Copyright © 2011 Elisabeth Grace Foley
To my mother
who taught me to read and write, and more importantly, to love reading and writing
and to whom I have always planned to dedicate my first book
The Ranch Next Door
The Spencers and the Ryans were next-door neighbors, although they had not met, at least in a formal sense, for years. That is to say, their properties adjoined, though the epicenter of each sprawling ranch lay far from the common boundary. The dividing line was a sharp barbed-wire fence, miles long, and a prejudice even sharper and of longer standing than the fence. For the Spencers were cattlemen, and the Ryans, sheepherders.
No bloody battles were fought along the steely line. Violence between the sheep and cattle factions was a thing of the past in this county. They lived side by side in peace—or at least in silence; for they would have nothing to do with each other. Whenever a Spencer rider passed a Ryan rider on the other side of the fence, they did not exchange any greeting, but each tilted his hat forward on his head—which is a very good way of conveying that one is looking down one’s nose—and contemplated the horizon.
Such was the state of affairs when young Roy Spencer went to work as a cowhand on his father’s range. Prejudice among the hands ran as deep as it did among their employers—perhaps even more so—and Roy imbibed his fair share of it. His sole ambition in life was to follow his father in the management of the family ranch, and it was a great day for him when he was allowed to leave school at sixteen and begin spending all his time on the range. Love for the windswept prairie was in his blood even more than it was in his father’s, for he had been born in this country and grew up a part of it. Chase Spencer put his son to work on the same footing as the hired cowpunchers, and in the three years since, Roy had won their respect and liking and satisfied his own enthusiasm for the work, becoming an integral part of the outfit in every respect—including their disdain for sheepherders.
It was spring—real spring, the gloriously sunny, windy days following the messy transition from late winter. The blue sky shone vibrantly overhead and beneath it stretched the rippling prairie grass, drying out from winter wet in the whipping, bracing wind and growing greener with every day. The sight and the wind stirred a subdued excitement in Roy Spencer as he rode across the western pasture. He did not often ride out this far, but checking the fence line was a springtime job and he enjoyed the excuse it gave him to explore and revel in the beauty of the ranch.
The wind lifted the grass and his pony’s forelock, and Roy’s spirits rose too, so he could not resist urging the pony into a run. They swept across the field and something of the spring excitement got into the pony too, so that by the time they drew near the line of barbed-wire fencing Roy had to haul him in. The pony highly objected to this measure, snorting and tossing his head up and down indignantly. It was not until he had got him calm that Roy saw the other rider, initially blocked from his view by a scraggly wind-twisted young tree that leaned over the fence.
He saw a girl about a year or two younger than himself, with wisps of windblown auburn hair blowing about her face. She was mounted on a smart-looking pinto pony and handled the reins like she knew how, and she was on the Ryan side of the fence.
Roy did not tilt his hat forward. He pushed it up on his forehead to get a better look, unwittingly giving the girl a chance to take a good look at him. And it was well worth doing so, for his was a clean, bright, handsome young face, alive with energy and good spirits. It is not entirely certain that her cheeks did not flush slightly as she looked at it. But then they were already a trifle sunburned.
Roy looked at her as though he had never seen her before. In a way, he had not, though they had been at school together. In those days he had not been the least bit interested in girls, and certainly would not have remembered just another one of the flock in braids and calico. The only time Ella Ryan had been brought to his notice was the occasion when she “spelled him down” because he had spent his study time calculating in his copybook how many acres it took to feed thirty head of Herefords for a month.
He adjusted his hat again, pleased and wondering expressions chasing each other around his face, and broke the age-old precedent: “Good morning!”
“Good morning!” said Ella, responding with a quick friendly smile. “Marvelous day, isn’t it?”
It would seem no one had ever told either of them that the weather is a cliché.
Roy agreed heartily. “Swell. Say, that’s a beautiful little horse you’ve got there.”
Ella beamed at the compliment to her mount. “Thank you! We’ve been pals ever since I was big enough to ride. She practically taught me how,” she said, leaning forward to pat the pony’s neck fondly.
She looked up with a smile as Roy’s pony snorted and jerked at the bit again. “Feeling his oats, isn’t he?”
Roy laughed. “Hard to hold him in on a day like today. Last time it was this windy he went at a three-rail gate he’d usually balk at and took it like it was three feet. Can you figure that?”
They talked of horses, an easy conversation in which they discovered much common ground, and Roy’s gaze centered in the meantime on Ella’s face. Within minutes he decided she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen—a rather irrelevant conclusion, since he had never really looked at other girls enough to make an intelligent comparison. But logic seldom enters into a decision of that sort. Beyond that, she was intelligent and friendly, and he enjoyed talking with her so much that he never noticed where the half-hour went or when the conversation stopped being about horses. When at last they exchanged good-byes and Ella wheeled the pinto away from the fence, it was as if they had been friends for years and expected to see each other again at any time.
Neither one of them said a word on that score, but that was the way it was.
Roy spent a good deal of time in the west pasture that spring. Every once in a while he would see Ella, who liked a gallop through the fields and often wound up somewhere near the borders of her father’s ranch. First, of course, it was entirely by chance that they met. And then they pretended it was. And finally as spring rolled into summer it was by appointment—a word at parting about when they would both have the chance to stop by the fence again. The sun overhead traveled across the prairie, and they spent many half-hours and hours talking to each other across the fence on horseback. Summer went on, and sometimes they would dismount and stand close to the wire fence. Always with the wire between them, though neither of them paid any attention to it.
Roy never said a word about these meetings at home, and he presumed Ella did not either. He never asked her. He could see no harm in it, but still sensed that his parents would not take it kindly that he had struck up a friendship with a Ryan. As for himself, his views on sheep and sheepherders had not changed at all, another circumstance which defied logic, since he knew very well Ella came of a sheepherding family and it never bothered him. It simply did not make any difference to him. Really his life had changed very little since meeting Ella—the hours spent in the west pasture were a separate phase of existence added to the old one without altering it. He still did his work with his usual energy; in the evenings he spent time with his parents and played with his younger brothers and sisters; and they saw no change in him.
Perhaps he did not yet see any change in himself. For weeks, when alone out on the range he lived in a dream where he saw nothing but sunshine and green prairie and an auburn-haired girl whose smile made him dizzy with happiness—without quite knowing why. And then one day he came down to earth with a crash that hurt worse than the descent from any cowpony that ever threw him.
The sight of a sheep did it for him.
The meeting-place by the fence was a lonely spot, unfrequented by animals as well as humans, and he had never so much as laid eyes on a head of Ryan stock while meeting Ella. But one afternoon while Roy was riding fence further south, sitting with a loose rein and thinking of Ella as usual, a rude bleat cut in on his thoughts and he found himself staring at a shaggy and very glum-looking ram through the wire. His reaction was something more than the usual brief registering of dislike common to the cattleman. Why did he feel like the world had been suddenly pulled out from under him?
He realized that he was in love with Ella Ryan, and that the Ryans and the Spencers were supposed to tilt their hats at one another.
Let those whose closest contact with cow or sheep has been their proximity to a dinner plate laugh if they will, but to Roy Spencer it was no laughing matter. For the first time his feelings had run smack up against a set of concepts that had been drilled into him through years of being a cattleman’s son and associating with the outspoken punchers, until they were simple facts: that the Spencers were cattlemen and cattlemen were always to be at odds with sheepherders, the Ryans were sheepherders and sheepherders were unfit to associate with cattlemen except to be at odds with them, and any attempt to bridge the barbed-wire barrier between them was doomed from the start. And it was that last fact that chilled him from within as he sat and stared miserably at the harbinger of doom in sheep’s clothing that looked back at him from the other side of the fence.
* * *
Rafe Wilkes, foreman on the Spencer spread, leaned back in his chair. The little saloon was empty except for two or three men who were talking at a nearby table. Rafe, off duty for the afternoon, settled back to enjoy a few moments of solitary relaxation, lulled by the warm breeze coming through the open window and the whisper of the bartender’s broom scratching over the floorboards.
Presently the voices of the men at the other table intruded upon him, and he glanced impatiently in their direction, wishing they were not so loud. But in a moment he realized that it was a particular phrase one of them had just used that had pricked up his ears, and not so much the voices.
“Fence lines,” Dent Millison was saying, “are int’resting things. Don’t ever let anyone tell you riding fence is dull work. I’ve come upon some sights worth seeing ’long fence lines in my time.”
Dent Millison was the foreman of Ryan’s sheep ranch. He had his elbows on the table and his sun-bleached fair hair fell over into his eyes. He had been known as a fast man with a gun in years past, possessed of a dangerously quick temper that he nevertheless controlled well—with exceptions. Now he shot an apparently careless glance around the room after speaking.
One of his companions launched into a meandering story that had only a tenuous connection to riding fence, concerning a case of rustling which took place when he was doing that sort of work down in the Rio Grande country—a little lacking in effect since most of it was second-hand and he had never found out exactly how it ended. The others had their own comments and anecdotes to add, each going a little further afield, and Dent Millison listened, but with a detachment that indicated he had but one certain thing on his mind.
“Sure,” he said when the last man finished, “sure, that’s what I mean. But it don’t take all that to make fence-riding int’resting, especially in this kind of country here.” His voice rose a trifle louder at the end of the sentence.
Rafe Wilkes abruptly got up out of his chair, tossed a coin on the bar and went out. No one else paid attention to his departure, but Dent Millison knew better than to suppose it incidental. He made no move to go himself, but lingered a quarter of an hour until the conversation dragged itself out and then arose leisurely and took his leave.
He turned into the livery stable behind the saloon, went halfway down the center aisle and stopped. “All right, come on out.”
Rafe Wilkes emerged from the stall of Millison’s horse. “Figured on finding me here?”
“Sure. I knew you’d know I was trying to get your attention, if I’d guessed right about a certain thing. ’Cause you know me, Rafe.”
“Used to know you, before you turned sheepman,” retorted Rafe. “What’s on your mind?”
Dent became cunning. “Oh, nothing. Only I know you, or used to, and as I recall you used to be a pretty sharp tracker. I don’t suppose there’s much happening on a spread you manage that you don’t know about.”
“Not much,” agreed Rafe, cautiously. He narrowed his eyes. He knew what Dent was after. “All right. Since I’m supposed to be so smart, how’s about me laying it all out for you?”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, it goes something like this: A sight of miles out from Spencer’s ranch house there’s a section of the west pasture we haven’t been using much this spring. Slaps up against Ryan range. But there’s a trail of sorts you can follow over it, leading to a spot by the fence where the grass is flattened out like a horse has been standing there pretty frequently. And with my being such a superior tracker it’s not hard to conclude it’s been the same horse. And, being fairly well acquainted with the Spencer outfit, it’s not hard to guess who that horse belongs to, either.” He paused a moment to observe the effect on Dent, who, however, betrayed little. “And what’s more, Dent, I can see far enough through a barbed-wire fence to notice there’s been a horse standing about on the other side too.”
“Our conclusions’ve run into parallels, looks like,” said Dent.
“You looking to make something more of ’em?” said Rafe shortly.
Dent scowled. “I’m not looking for trouble. But let me tell you this, I’ve known little Miss Ella since she was a baby, almost, and I’m not hankering to see any high-and-mighty cattleman’s son messing with her. You’ve seen her, ain’t you, Rafe?”
“Sure I have. She’s the sweetest-looking little thing in the county, no argument there. But look here, Dent—Roy Spencer’s worked in my outfit for three years running, and I’ll stake my horse and saddle he’s one fine straight-arrow kid. Your little Miss Ella won’t come to any harm with him—and if you ask me she couldn’t do any better,” Rafe finished.
“I don’t doubt that,” said Dent unexpectedly, “if what you say about the kid is right. I’ll take your word for it, Rafe. I guess that’s all I wanted to make sure of.” He was silent a minute, then sighed and scratched his ear. “Well, there’s nothing you or I can do then. Better let ’em alone. Them kids’ll find out soon enough that it won’t fly.”
“Takes more than fences to stop some things,” said Rafe sagely.
“There’s more’n fences waiting to stop it. Number One of which is plain, doggoned, ordinary stubbornness. I haven’t been a sheepman for nothing, you know,” said Dent. “This neighborly feuding still beats me.”
“Sometimes I think the old days of shooting it out were better,” said Rafe meditatively. “Back then you always knew what was important enough to feud over and what wasn’t.”
Dent surveyed him with a bright curious eye. “You may have something there, you know,” he said. “Anybody can stick their nose in the air as long as they’re not likely to get it punched, but there ain’t many who’d hang onto a ten-cent grudge with forty-five slugs flying round them. It’s mighty poor protection.” He nodded slowly. “It’s something to think of.”
* * *
Long stripes of sunset color stretched across the fields as Roy waited for Ella by the fence. He leaned his shoulder against the gnarled fencepost and gazed out across the glowing landscape with a sober face. The evening was only moderately cool, but he felt a chill in spite of the jacket he wore. He was very unhappy.
It was not his love for Ella that was called into question, newborn and inexperienced as it was. It was only that his preconceived vision saw no break in the invisible fence that separated them, and he was heroically determined to spare them both the heartache of looking for one and failing. Still, the prospect of long days ahead without seeing Ella was a dismal one, and he feared he would be unequal to the task of condemning himself to it. So when at last the pinto pony came at a canter across the field he hardly dared to look up.
Ella dismounted and came over to the fence. “I can only stay a few minutes,” she said with her usual sweet smile. “We’ve got company at home tonight.”
Roy hesitated. “Ella, I don’t think we should see each other like this any more,” he said abruptly.
Was there a quick look of understanding in her eyes? But her voice and question sounded innocent. “Why not?”
Roy shifted uncomfortably, wishing he did not have to explain. “It just won’t work. You know what I mean, Ella—your family, and my family…We can’t—we can’t just go on being friends over a fence forever.”
“There’s nothing that should stop us from being friends,” she said with sweet seriousness.
“But it won’t work, not if we go on…it’s—it’s not what I want.”
She stepped closer, resting her gloved hands lightly on the top wire. The breeze flicked the end of the red kerchief around her neck. “What do you want, Roy?”
He shook his head in growing desperation. “Not like this. Not with a fence between us.”
Ella said quietly, “Then why don’t I come over to your side?”
She ducked and stepped nimbly between the two wires, and came up facing him. Roy was at a loss for words.
Ella looked back at the fence, and meditatively touched the wire with her fingertips again. “It seems kind of silly, doesn’t it…when you see how easy it is to cross?”
That was all the provocation he needed. In a second he had his arms around her. “I love you, Ella.”
“I know,” she whispered. She laid her head against his shoulder, her cheek against the rough fabric of his jacket. “I thought you’d found it out…I almost wished you wouldn’t for a while yet, because I didn’t want anything to change…I had a feeling you would see things this way.”
Roy said nothing for a moment. He looked out across the sunset-colored Ryan acres beyond the fence, his chin resting against the top of Ella’s head.
He spoke at last in a slightly strangled voice. “What else can I do?”
Ella looked up at him. “Don’t be afraid, Roy. We don’t have to be. It’s not all that bad! It isn’t like we’re doing something wrong, or unwise, in—caring for each other. Oh, Roy, I know just how much my parents would like you if you could only get to know each other. That’s what makes it all so foolish.”
Roy looked down at her, slightly startled. He had never looked at it quite that way before.
Ella spoke earnestly. “That’s just what it is. Next-door neighbors who could be perfectly good friends, who won’t speak to each other because they raise different livestock! They don’t have any real reason to dislike each other; they’re just holding on to old grudges for things that happened years ago.” She paused. “Don’t you think it’s foolish, Roy?”
She looked straight into his eyes, and nineteen years as a cattleman’s son and three of those as a working cowpuncher went by the board in an instant.
“Yes,” said Roy.
Ella put her head down against his shoulder again and they stood silently for a few moments. Then she lifted her head and smiled at him. “I have to go now.”