Peggy Nicholson - The Wildcatter

“How did you see him without a— Ben will shoot you, you goose, if you’ve been hanging around the haying crew. It’s dangerous.” And Risa didn’t mean just the machinery. The haying crew weren’t regular Suntop men but temporary workers, hired only till the fields were cut. Unknown factors, unlike the cowboys, who were all dependable, hand-picked men, who knew their boss too well to flirt with the boss’s daughters.

“I haven’t been hanging around. But this new guy, Risa, you’ve gotta see him. He has a chest and arms like a—like a comic-book hero!”

“You haven’t been peeking through the bunkhouse windows! Tess?” Risa prodded her in the ribs till the girl giggled and shook her head. “Hiding in the hayloft, you little lech?”

“Uh-uh! No, stop, don’t do that! I w-watched him through my binocs yesterday, okay? When I rode out to look for b-bluebirds. He was stacking bales, then they took a break and he took off his s-shirt and dumped water over his head!”

“Oh, well, binoculars, of course,” Risa said dryly. Add one Hunk, genus American Male, to the Life List in the back of her little sister’s Peterson’s Field Guide. And just because Miguel Heydt sprang to her own mind, his muscles shining with sweat and water, didn’t mean that he was the object of Tess’s admiration. Half the men on the haying crew were probably in their twenties.

“Anyway, if you won’t marry a cowboy, why don’t you marry somebody like that?” Tess muttered as she scrambled to her feet.

“Eric’s got a nice chest. A perfectly wonderful chest.”

“Ooooh, and how do you know that?”

BY LATE AFTERNOON the crew had cut, raked, then turned as much grass as could be baled on the morrow. Since the weather promised to hold hot and dry, they’d be working straight through the weekend. So the hay boss had given them the rest of this day off.

Half the men were taking siestas in the bunkhouse. The rest had crammed themselves into two pickups and set off, whooping and jostling, for the Lone Star. They wouldn’t come staggering back until closing time.

Miguel put all thoughts of blissful naps and ice-cold bottles of cerveza firmly from mind. Today, at last, he’d make it to the Badwater—no, the Sweetwater—Flats.

Well, he’d thought he would. But when he and Jackhammer came to the bridge over the river, he noticed the trace of a path heading south along the base of the cliffs. Any cut in the earth was a siren song and this one had been singing to him for days, each time he rode the hay wagon past this point. “We’ll go only as far as that first bend,” he assured Jackhammer.

What a lie. Once a man reached a bend, there was always an obligation to peer around it. Who knew that heaven didn’t lie just beyond?

Miguel didn’t find heaven, but he found enough to lure him on. The sedimentary strata through which the ancient river had carved its winding course lay level where the bridge made its crossing. But as he rode south, gradually it began to dip. Good, that was very good; he lived for folds in the earth. He glanced wistfully over his shoulder, since the sediments apparently were rising to the north, but still he continued south. It was just as important to find a marker bed, an identifiable stratum, so he could orient himself. In Texas it would have taken only a glance or two to know where he was, but this was virgin territory.

And he the eager bridegroom. His eyes roved lovingly over the striated cliffs—a layer of dark gray shale lensed out between two layers of limestone—Mancos shale, possibly? He twisted around and dug his rock hammer out of the saddlebag, then sidled his horse in next to the wall of stone. “Be still, you. This will take only a minute.”

The steel spike chopped into the chunk he wanted—a chip ricocheted—Jackhammer’s ears flattened to his head.

“Whoa!” The gelding spun on a dime, took two stiff-legged, jolting hops as his head swung down to his hooves. “So I’m sorry, I didn’t—hey!”

The next thing Miguel knew, he was flying in a magnificent arc, hammer firmly grasped in one hand, mouth rounding to an outraged “Oh.” Off to his left, Jackhammer kicked up his back heels—who knew the brown bastard could move like that?—then shot off toward the—

Miguel hit the water headfirst and forgot about horses. There was a moment of cold confusion, frantic splashing—air, where was the damn air?—then he surfaced, cursing and coughing. “¡Hijo de—!” He burst out laughing.

So a horse wasn’t an unfeeling machine. The sooner he learned that, the better. He glanced around and grimaced. Jack hadn’t waited for an apology. By now he’d be halfway to the barn, blasted brute.

Miguel swiped a forearm across his brow, wiping the hair from his eyes, shrugged and turned back to the cliff. From this low angle he could see details he’d missed looking down from a saddle. And there in the shale, not a foot above ground level—he narrowed his eyes and waded closer—yes, por Dios, there where it had been waiting patiently for millions of years for a man to be thrown from his horse… “You were right, Harry.” Whatever the misfortune, there was always a balancing compensation. Hadn’t he held on to his hammer?

Miguel scrambled out, knelt, commenced delicately to chip stone.

Once he’d pocketed his prize he wandered on, his boots squelching softly. The beds continued to dip southward, layers of shale, limestone and sandstone striping the cliffs in diagonal alternations of gray and cream and gritty pink. He took samples, loading his jeans pockets with rocks, regretting that he couldn’t make notes and sketches of what he found. But Jackhammer had run off with his notebook. Miguel frowned. Wouldn’t want anybody at the barn to look into his saddlebags. He ought to go back.

But there was another bend up ahead. “Just this last one,” he promised himself, and, turning his face to the cliff—the trail had become only a narrow ledge some four feet above the river—he edged sideways along it. As he rounded a bulge of water-smoothed limestone, as luscious to the hands as a woman’s hips, he heard laughter and stopped short. Glanced ahead.

To where two mermaids, astride two sea horses, cavorted and wrestled in the river. Cielo, indeed! Giggling breathlessly, each was trying to shove the other off her swimming steed. Long arms flashing, pale legs twisting, the small, dark one toppled with a hapless screech and a resounding splash. The other mermaid raised her beautiful arms, arching her back as she shook her fists at the sky. “Yes!”

Miguel turned around on his ledge, leaned against the rock and devoured her with his eyes. Tankersly’s daughter. For an instant he hadn’t recognized her. Her hair was so much darker, wet, curling in coppery ribbons over her high, apple-sized breasts. Manzanitas deliciosas. She wore a drenched white T-shirt, which clung to her slender curves like a mermaid’s pearly scales. And below that—he swallowed audibly—only a scrap of turquoise, above legs so long she might have wrapped them twice around his waist with inches to spare.

The little one scrambled up the side of her mount, then froze, propped on her locked arms, her eyes rounding as they met Miguel’s across the pool. “It’s him! Risa, it’s—” She dropped from view behind her pony.

“What?” She—Miguel was beginning to think of her simply as she—spun so fast her hair whirled out around her, chains of copper dripping diamonds.

He laughed softly—how could anything be this perfect?

Her dark eyebrows—surprisingly dark, given her hair—drew together; her golden eyes speared him. She’d taken offense.

He couldn’t blame her. Clearly he’d stumbled into Women’s Magic here. But there was no going back. No way he could unsee what he’d seen. And whatever penalty he must pay in exchange for this vision, he’d pay it gladly. A man was the sum of what he’d witnessed, and he was richer for this sight.