Amanda had to agree. “I guess not.”
Over at the feed store, several of the old men who congregated around the old pot-bellied stove in the back turned in greeting.
“You that friend of Lee’s, right?”
Amanda smiled. “Jake’s fine. Surly as a cat in a roomful of rockers, but fine.”
They all laughed. “A good boy,” one of them acknowledged. “But he sure can’t stand bein’ away from his horses.”
Another nodded. “It’s his way.”
Jake’s way. Amanda heard it again and again as townfolk asked after him and shared little Jakeisms with her. How he handled all his business in cash, how everyone wished the government’s word was as good as his, how Jake had always shown an uncanny knack with horses, even back when he was a little one and his daddy ran the ranch for cattle.
Amanda heard how tough things had been when he’d been a child, heard it in the careful choice of euphemisms his father’s old friends used, how his father had struggled against weather and economic conditions and his own inability with animals until it had killed him. She heard how little Jake had always been wise beyond his years, a serious boy who had grown into a tough, respected young man.
His neighbors spoke of him like their adopted child, and accepted Amanda on sight because of her connection with the family. There were only a few looks that betrayed a curiosity over the single, young lady friend of Lee’s baby-sitting handsome, eligible Jake Kendall, but evidently Betty’s edict had already settled that score. In Los Angeles or Boston or New York, Amanda would have spent the day skirting lewd suggestions. In Lost Ridge she was safely protected behind the Kendall connection and Betty’s recommendation.
By the time she made it back to the cabin, tired and stiff and satisfactorily full of the most delicious steak and French fries she’d ever had, Amanda found herself wondering how the town would view her continued presence. Would they be as neighborly, as hospitable, when the outsider actually moved in? Would they understand if she bought land and returned to their little town every time she had free time to write? Or would they consider that presumptuous? Visitors were one thing, she knew. Interlopers quite another.
Amanda caught herself toying with another scenario, one with more permanence, one that addressed much more than her homesickness. Stepping out of her car, she saw herself riding up to the cabin on a spring morning, to write—knowing that she’d be going home in time to cook supper for Jake. Knowing that the place she could call home was more than a house or a piece of property.
Filling her arms with bags of groceries, she shook off the thought, fought the stab of hunger it provoked, and walked on up to the porch to let herself in. She had a good three days’ worth of material she had to get down. She had more research to do, more material from the early Kendall ranch to go over. She had to stay away from the ranch house for a while to get her perspective back.
And that’s just what she did. For the next two days, Amanda holed herself up in the cabin, clad in nothing but a flannel nightgown or the new denim-and-flannel wardrobe she’d bought in town, and pounded on the keys. She sat on the porch when the weather warmed to an unseasonable sixty and watched the ice break off and tumble down the stream. She sat at the little handmade oak table in the kitchen and listened to the coyotes serenade the moon at night. And slowly, surely, she began to regain her focus on the book. She strayed into the territory of the Old West and didn’t try so hard to find her way out. She channeled the fire and steel of a modern man into the cattle drover who actually made his dream come true and bought a little piece of scrub and mountain in Wyoming. Singing the old cow lullabies and retelling the tall tales that had been swapped by the camp fires, she almost forgot the rest of the world around her. That is, she did until the blizzard hit.
At first the weather didn’t concern her at all. She awoke the third morning to hear the wind moaning around the cabin like a woman in labor. The snow hadn’t started yet, but the sky was heavy with it, a dark, gunmetal gray that completely ate away the tops of the mountains. The world shrank into that single meadow. The trees around the cabin bent to the wind and the grass whistled.
Amanda got dressed and sat down to work, sorry that the warm respite was over. It would have been nice to sit out on the porch and watch the mule deer edge across to the stream. But bad weather was a blessing to an author. You didn’t pay as much attention to the world around you as to the one inside. So, for a while, Amanda escaped there and was happy.
About noon, she noticed she was getting cold. The light was getting bad, so she figured it was time to turn the lights on. She probably needed to change batteries in the computer, too. When she got up from the table, she was surprised to see that the wind carried snow. Lots of snow, so thick and big that it was hard to make out the stream. The mountains were gone completely. Amanda smiled. So this was what it was like to be really alone in this cabin. It would be good to recreate the feelings Hattie Kendall had written of.
Amanda was glad that she had no place to go today. The cabin would be cozy enough, and she certainly had enough food on hand for a good couple of weeks. The road would probably be horrible for the next few hours until the snow settled down a little.
It did occur to Amanda, not for the first time, that she should have brought a radio out with her to keep abreast of things. But considering her background and the minimal scope of her demands, there wasn’t much she couldn’t handle. Stretching out the kinks she’d accumulated from riding a chair all morning, she walked over to turn on the lights, impatient to be back to work.
Nothing happened. Amanda took a look down to the battery charger she’d left plugged in. The red charging light was off.
“Fine,” she said with a sigh. “My batteries are shot.”
The temperature was dropping fast, and the small furnace that served the cabin was electric. And it looked like the electricity had just been lost to the storm. Amanda decided that she’d talk to Jake about investing in some propane. In the meantime, she’d settle for a big fire in the fireplace. Apparently, she was really meant to rough it. It had been a very long time since she’d written anything longhand by firelight.
She took the time to turn off her computer and pack it away before facing the task of building a good fire. Not one of those wimpy fires for a romantic evening that petered out in about an hour. She needed a real log burner that would see her through the worst of the snow. Luckily she had one pile of wood inside and another protected beneath an overhang outside. Nothing to worry about.
Taking the precaution of adding a few more layers of clothing against the quickly dropping temperature, Amanda went to work on the fire. This had been something her Uncle Mick had taught her to do. He’d kept a fire lit twenty-four hours a day in his wood stove back home that cooked his food and heated his house. A big stone fireplace, in comparison, was child’s play.
It took her thirty-eight verses of “The Old Chisum Trail” to lay the fire just the way she wanted, and another four to find matches. By that time she was not only cranky, but chilly. It would have been nice if she’d remembered to bring her gloves. She’d left them on her hall table back home when she’d run for the airport.
“ ‘Cum-a ti yi yippy, yippy ay...’ Come on, damn it, you’re not supposed to smoke like that... where’s the flue? ‘Cum-a ti yi yippy, I, yippy ay...’ No, no, don’t do that! No!”
Amanda had started a great fire. A jim-cracker of a fire, as Uncle Mick would have said. It flared with impressive heat and deep orange flame that any other time would have been deeply satisfying. The only problem was that evidently somebody hadn’t cleared last year’s nests out of the chimney yet, because all the smoke Amanda generated poured right back into the room.
“Now you’re in trouble, Kendall,” she cursed, coughing and spitting as the thick black smoke surrounded her.
Amanda ran right for the window and threw it open. Snow blew in and the temperature fell another ten degrees. She threw open the door and realized that she was really in trouble now. She couldn’t even see the stream. The cabin was frigid, she had no heat, and the fireplace wasn’t working. And there was no way she was going to be able to find her way back out to a road in this snow.
Well, she thought, she had a full tank of gas. She was just going to have to crawl into the Jeep and hope the heater would keep working until the snow stopped.
That was when she saw it. Or she thought she saw it, a shadow in the snow. She thought she heard a faint breath of sound through the howling that sounded like a whinny.
