Past Promises by Jill Marie Landis

Author:Jill Marie Landis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks Inc.
Published: 2017-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

THE MORNING OF the Fourth of July dawned as bright and hot as the last few days had been. True to his promise, Rory Burnett hadn’t shown his face at the ranch house for the past two days, and although Jessica didn’t like to admit it, she found herself listening for his voice and went to the window each time she heard a horse gallop into the yard.

As long as Rory was gone, she felt comfortable enough to leave her room, visit with Myra, and take her meals with the others. That morning at breakfast, Fred Hench had asked if she could take over feeding a motherless calf from a bottle while he set up the trestle tables that would be used for the covered-dish dinner. Jessica found herself laughing with the first real abandon she’d known in days when the greedy creature nearly pulled the bottle out of her hands as it nursed. It gave her an odd sense of longing to witness something so small and helpless and dependent. When the calf followed her around the barnyard on its knobby legs, she let it trail her to the house so that Myra could watch. Myra was convinced that Methuselah was a far better pet.

Midmorning the wagons began to arrive. Jessica stood in the shade of the wide overhang and watched as the women, most dressed in simple though colorful gowns, climbed down off of buckboards and offered their covered dishes to Scratchy.

Myra, standing beside Jessica, mumbled, “No wonder they didn’t call this off. It will be the first good meal we’ve all had in days.”

Indian men arrived on horseback. Ute women and children crowded into wagons driven by the older boys. Their clothing was much as Jess remembered from her brief time on the reservation, a jumble of styles. She openly admired the silver work and turquoise jewelry some of them wore. As local farmers and ranchers mingled with the Utes, Myra left the porch to join them.

“Come, Jessica. Let’s see what it is those men gathered around that wagon bed are all bartering for, shall we?” She used the crutch to balance herself as she carefully stepped off the wooden porch.

Afraid she would run into Rory, Jess denied herself the experience. She’d heard Barney Tinsley call out to someone that Burnett was back and had cut a particularly ornery bull named Arthur out of the herd. She’d listened in on their talk of the upcoming rodeo enough to know the rudiments of what was about to take place that afternoon. The men had bragged about Rory when he wasn’t there to stop them and said he was an accomplished bull rider, but that last year he’d been thrown, knocked out, and remained unconscious for three days. Wheelbarrow announced with a belly laugh that Rory had finally come around, “fit as a fiddle,” and that he intended to teach that danged bull a lesson this year.

Beside bull riding there was calf roping, something called bronc busting, a

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