Spirit Wolf Read Online Free Page B

said with a grin. “Isn’t anything made better looking at it through the bottom of a bottle.”

2
    The country was beginning to break up into sharp, pine-fringed coulees outlined by sandstone rimrocks. Sage and yucca poked through the snow, and prickly pear huddled beneath. On ridges exposed to the wind, bunch-grass long since dried into hay tempted the horses to snatch at it in passing.
    Here and there man had left his mark on the land; a straggling corral made of lodgepole pine nailed to living trees, an old trapper’s soddy caving in under the weight of the land and the years, and now and then a homestead shack with wide-eyed kids watching the two horsemen pass.
    The day was bright and clear and the sun gave the illusion of warmth although it was cold enough to numb the hands and feet. Nash and Uriah stopped around the middle of the day and climbed off the horses. Nash was more than a little grateful. He felt stiff and sore, his muscles and bones not yet content with the saddle.
    â€œWon’t be long now. We’re on the Lazy KT,” Uriah said. “Not more than a couple of miles.”
    Not long, but it seemed like hours to Nash before they came to the corner post, cut from a giant cottonwood and branded KT, which marked the entrance to the ranch. They rode up a neat barbed wire lane to the ranch house a mile deeper into the hills.
    It was a good spread. Anyone who had ever worked the land could see that. Corrals were put into the ground to stay. Stacks of hay put up by men who knew what they were doing poked out of the hay-ground down by the creek, and the barn was one of the biggest structures Nash had seen. It was built of lumber, rough-cut, like most everything else in that country, but it had a real mortar and stone foundation and it put most homes to shame. The other ranch buildings—the tack shed, bunkhouse, and even the sturdy outhouses—lent an air of prosperity to the scene.
    As the two pulled into the yard, Katie Jeffries called from the kitchen door of the ranch house.
    â€œUriah! Nash! Come have a cup of coffee and warm up. Suppose you came here for the hunt. I’ll tell you where the doings are.”
    Uriah and Nash climbed down, loosened the cinches on their saddles, and walked up to the front door.
    Katie’s mother had died when the girl was ten years old, and she grew wild, like the cattle on the ranch. Women were rare in the territory then, and cowhands were more comfortable with the ladies who spent their evenings in the Stockman’s Bar in Billings—and the rooms above—than they were with the boss’s daughter. So they treated her like one of the boys, and she came to accept the solitude. She considered herself happy, those years when she was a man-child, happy until her father took her and a load of cattle to Chicago one year. The streets of the Windy City were a rude awakening for the wild girl from Montana. Ladies swirled around the city like animated bouquets of flowers. She watched the other patrons of restaurants and learned how inadequate her bunkhouse manners were. She listened to the lilt of conversations in hotel lobbies and realized how little she knew outside the world of cattle and men and Montana.
    And on her return to the ranch she became a voracious reader, reaching out to the world beyond. She worked to improve herself as hard as she worked on the ranch, filling her spare hours with study.
    And then she met Ulysses Jeffries. He was a remittance man, profligate son of a rich English family, sent to the American West to save his family from embarrassment. Ulysses Jeffries stood out on the frontier like a daisy in a cactus patch. He was an oddity, a man who talked funny and dressed like a dude. But the stockmen’s association recognized that Jeffries was more than that, and sent the Englishman to Helena to lobby the legislature. He held the rough-cut Montanans in thrall with his bearing and clarion voice.
    He was on