Whirlwind - Janet Dailey Page 0,14

her out of her musings.

“What? Where?”

“Down there. Outside.”

Lexie might have looked, but she was negotiating the last switchback turn on the road down to the ranch. “What do you see?” she asked.

“People in the yard. Nobody working.”

Lexie felt her stomach clench. Was it more bad news for the family? Maybe something had happened to Val, her middle sister. Val had left home at seventeen and never been back to the ranch, not even for funerals. She’d sent a lavish floral piece for Jack’s service, nothing for her father’s.

Or maybe something had happened to Tess, or to Callie.

“Can you see who’s there?” she asked Ruben.

He paused a moment to study the scene below. “Your sister and Callie. And those two boys you hired. Both the dogs. And Mr. Frye’s truck just drove in.”

All present or accounted for. So maybe it was Val after all. Wild, beautiful, laughing Val, who’d never wanted to stay on the ranch. Death tended to strike in threes—another old superstition Lexie refused to believe. But she’d known it to happen.

Sick with impending dread, she drove into the yard and pulled the trailer up to the loading chute. No matter what else was happening, the welfare of the bulls had to come first.

As Lexie climbed wearily out of the truck, Tess came striding toward her. Whip-lean and long-legged, she was nearing thirty, her loose-blowing dark hair already threaded with silver. Nine years ago, her fiancé had died in Afghanistan. It was as if part of her had died with him, leaving nothing behind but strength, toughness, and a sense of responsibility that had driven her like a lash after her father’s death.

Pausing on her way to the truck, Tess barked an order at Chet and Ryder, the two hired boys. “Put some food out for those bulls and check their water. Then you can help Ruben unload and get to work cleaning the trailer.”

The teens hurried to do as they’d been told. They were good kids, high school rodeo riders with PRCA dreams. For them, working on a bull ranch was a dream job, even if it involved a lot of manure shoveling. Next year, after they graduated, they’d be paying their dues and trying their luck on the circuit.

The two border collies, old dogs, lolling on the porch, got up and followed the boys to the corral. They knew where the action would be, and they still enjoyed being part of it.

Inside the trailer, the bulls were snorting, lowing, and pushing at the gates of their stalls. They recognized the smells and sounds of home, and they were impatient for the freedom of the pasture.

Tess beckoned to Lexie. “Come on. We can talk over breakfast. You, too, Ruben, as soon as the bulls are unloaded. We’ve got a problem on our hands.”

Lexie fell into step beside her sister. “What’s wrong? Did you get some bad news?”

“Not news. Just bad. A few of those two-year-old bulls in the upper pasture got out through an open gate in the night. We rounded up four of them up by moonlight. But we lost one.”

At least no more family members were dead, as Lexie had feared. But the loss of an animal was disaster enough. “Which one?” Lexie asked.

“The red one,” Tess said. “The best one.”

Lexie groaned, remembering the young bull that had shown so much spunk and promise the first time he was bucked in the corral with a weighted dummy on his back.

“He stumbled over the edge of that big dry arroyo.” Tess’s voice was emotionless, as if she’d chosen not to feel. “It looked like he broke at least one front leg and went down. Then the coyotes moved in.”

“Oh, no . . .” Lexie shuddered, helpless to blot out the images that flooded her mind.

“At least the coyotes made enough noise to scare the other bulls. They stuck together and stayed away from the edge. Aaron heard the racket from his place and called me. I put the red bull out of its misery. Aaron and the boys helped me round up the rest.”

Glancing into the blinding blue sky, Lexie saw vultures flocking above the arroyo. Without heavy equipment, there’d be no way to remove the bull’s carcass or even to bury it in the arroyo’s rocky bottom, and the meat would be too far gone to butcher. There was nothing to do but leave it for the scavengers. What an awful waste of a promising animal.

“The bull’s gone. There’s nothing to be done about that,” Tess