Author: Michael

Chapter 1

Tyler Portman drove the wagon up to the front of the livery and before it had come to a complete stop jumped out and tossed the reins to his sister Kate who was still seated.
“I’m going to try out the new roulette wheel.  If you have any trouble come and get me.”  He ran off toward the saloon without waiting for a reply.  
Tyler was the oldest of the Portman twins, by thirteen minutes, and his curse was that he and his sister looked so much alike.  She was a beautiful girl, more of a woman now, and in looking like her it made him too pretty.   Time and trouble would take care of that, but at twenty-three it was sometimes difficult.  Still, other than a minor irritation when strangers saw them together, he dealt with it all right, after all the Portman spread was the biggest and most prosperous of all the ranches in the Brasada.  
They had come into town to tell O’Malley, the owner of the livery, that they wanted him to come out to the ranch and see to the new horses since most of the hands were gone on the trail drive.  They had been putting it off and would probably have continued to if it were not for that new roulette wheel at the saloon.  Kate could talk to O’Malley if he wasn’t drunk and if he was she could shop while Tyler lost his money.  
She climbed off the wagon and turned around to face a man she had never seen before.  He wasn’t young, maybe mid-thirties, about six feet tall and ruggedly good looking even though he had a half a weeks stubble and was sweating profusely.  His light brown hair was tied behind his head and he was holding a large file, and as he approached she was instantly attracted to his light green eyes and the smile that came easy to his face while at the same time she noticed he had a slight limp.  Damaged goods or a character builder she wondered, and smiled outwardly as she thought how terribly unfair were her secret judgments.  She decided to flirt with him to make up for it if he was half way civil.  
May I help you, ma’am?”  This was not the demeanor of a hired hand.  
“I’m looking for O’Malley.”
“He’s indisposed at the moment,” he said, “perhaps I can help.”
“He’s drunk again most likely; well, no matter, we need a farrier to come out to the ranch and see to the new horses.  Can you help with that?”
“Yes, ma’am.  I have to finish repairing a wagon and then I can see to your horses.  First thing in the morning OK?”  
“O’Malley puts us ahead of the others; we give him quite a bit of work.”  She said, testing him.
“You must be one of the Portmans.  O’Malley said you were his best customer.”
“Kate.  Kate Portman.”  
He nodded his head and stuck out his hand, looked at how dirty it was, and quickly pulled it back.  “Pleased to make your acquaintance.  Like I said, I should be done first thing in the morning and I’ll get right to it.  There will be someone out there who will tell me what they want done?”
“Ask for Gus, or my brother Tyler.  Are you sure it’s all right with O’Malley?”
“Yes, ma’am.  I hope to be taking O’Malley’s place.”
“We didn’t know he was planning to get out of the business.  I would have thought he would have said something.”
“Don’t know about that, ma’am.”
“And what should we call you?”
“Kellor, ma’am.”
“Kellor?  Is that a first or last name?”
“Just Kellor, ma’am.”
“How does a man get named Just Kellor?”  He laughed and she liked it that he seemed to do it so easily.  
“From my days at sea I suppose.  Everyone has one name when you’re busy.” 
“You’re a sailor then?” 
 He could sense her interest.  “Not out here, ma’am.”
“Call me Kate.  Tell me, how many different places have you been to?  All over the world I bet.”
“I should be getting back to work, ma’am.”  He turned to go back to the forge.  
“Oh, yes, yes, go ahead.  You can talk while you work can’t you?  I mean if we’re to be your best customer you should get used to us.”
“It’s very dirty back where I’m working.”  To his surprise the woman followed him.  He shrugged it off and returned to filing the rough edges off the brake link he had been working on; he had seen much stranger things than that.
She jumped up on the heavy fence rail by where he was working without apparently giving a thought to the fact that she had on a dress with several petticoats.  “I wish I could be a sailor, imagine all the different things you could see, the places you could visit.”
There was a loud pop from the forge and a shower of sparks reigned down on them, catching the fine fringe on the bottom of her dress on fire.  In one swift movement he grabbed her and plunged her knee deep into the water trough.  When she got over the surprise she slapped him hard across the face.  
“If I were a man I’d whip you sure!”  She said.  
“If you were a man, you wouldn’t have caught your dress on fire.” He said as he lifted her out of the trough and set her down on the dirt floor.  
“Oh!  Oh! I’m so sorry.  I thought …”
He laughed his easy laugh.  “It’s OK.  Can’t have my best customer burning up right here in my livery.”  To his surprise she jumped back up on the rail.  
“I sort of promised my father I would wear a dress when next I came to town.  He thinks I’m not lady-like enough to sell to a rancher.  Wait until I show him this one.”  She sat quietly for a while.  “Is there a Mrs. Kellor?”
He shook his head to indicate no and then resumed his filing. 
“No, I guess you wouldn’t have time for a courtship if you were at sea all the time—unless—can you take a wife aboard your ship?”
He looked at her and smiled.  She was attractive and he had to wonder if she used that smile of hers as currency.  “Sometimes—on some voyages—the captain takes his family.  I haven’t seen it happen very much; most owners don’t care for it.”  
“But none of the sailors?”
“No, ma’am, not any of the crew.  Generally you ship out for a certain voyage—when it’s over you find another ship.”
“You don’t stay with the same ship?  How curious.”
“Only the officers, ma’am—and sometimes the owners change them.”
“Quit calling me ma’am.  My name is Kate and you may use it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he smiled, “hard habit to break.”

“Kate?  Kate?”  It was Tyler.  He came into the forge area.  “There you are, I’ve been looking all over for you, have you got a couple of dollars you could loan me?”
Kate took some money out of a small pocket and gave it to him without comment, which immediately made him suspicious.  He now noticed that she was all wet on the bottom of her dress and that part of it was burned.  
“Say, what’s going on here?”  He looked hard at Kellor who was standing there waiting for an introduction.  
“This is Kellor, Ty.  He’s taking O’Malley’s place.  And he just saved me from burning up in my new dress.”  
Kellor started to say something but Tyler, satisfied that Kate was unhurt, turned and walked away.  
“Don’t pay him any mind.  Father put him in charge while he took the herd to market and Ty thinks he’s king of the universe.”   
“He looks like you.”  Kellor said. 
“We’re twins.  He’s the older one, as if you couldn’t tell; at least he never lets me forget it.  I think it’s a man thing.”  Kate said, trying to prod him a little.  
He walked over to her and gently lifted her up and off of the rail and set her down on the ground.  “You are, for a fact, a most magnificent distraction, Kate Portman, but I must get this brake link finished if I am to see to your horses in the morning.”   
She shook some of the soot off of the bottom of her dress, “do you know how to get out to the ranch?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Take the main road southwest out of town.  About three miles on, where it gets closest to the river, there’s a trail that heads due south.  Take that trail another three or so miles and you’re there.  It’s easy to find; we’ll be expecting you in the morning.”  She walked off without looking back.  
Kellor watched her walking away and, as was his habit from years of working aloft, he mumbled to himself.  “It’s a fair wind will carry her to port.”  He resumed repairing the wagon.

Her grandfather had named Kate Portman, but no one would call her Ekatrina except when they were mad at her, which was just often enough not to forget it.  She was said to be spoiled, which was an easy way of explaining her behavior, but there was more to it than that.  She was independent and headstrong with a wicked sense of humor and a restlessness born of an intelligence not favored among her peers.  Later ages would have called her gifted but in south Texas she was ‘uppity’ and ‘difficult’.  She was so good with numbers that she ended up doing most of the bookkeeping for the ranch in spite of her Father’s misgivings.  She seldom seemed to know exactly what she wanted, but always knew what she didn’t, and it was only recently that her twin brother was able to out ride and out shoot her.  
She was less of a tomboy now and had been courted by every eligible rancher’s son in two counties, but it seemed like no one man could hold her attention for long. When she turned eighteen her father sent her back East for a year of what was called ‘finishing school’.   It was supposed to be four years but they were finished with her after the first one.  At twenty-three she often joked about being an old maid but one never got the sense that it mattered that much to her except that it did vex her poor father.  Try as he might she would not conform to convention.  He took some comfort in the thought that being her father’s daughter no man could match up, but he did worry, especially when she did things like riding out by herself; and invariably when she returned they would fight.  He had helped carve a  “respectable place” out of that scrub country but was constantly reminding her of the dangers for a woman alone on the trail.  As she got older she stayed closer to the ranch but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that, so that he was all the time telling the drovers to watch out for her.  And when they fought he couldn’t let her forget about the two men he had to fire because of her flirtations.  She was more careful now but would remind him whenever he brought it up that she was only seventeen when that happened and how much she had grown up since.  This, of course, would make him howl.  
Such was the case the day she met Kellor.  On the way back to the ranch all she could talk about was the guy at the livery.  She told her brother he had been to sea and how she was sure he had been around the world.  
“That old dude?”  Tyler said.
“He’s not that old.”
“Yea.  Father’s age maybe?”
“No.  Not even close.”
“Give it a rest, Kate.  If the old man caught you so much as swishing a skirt in his direction he’d have him rolled in wire and run out of the county.”
“Well, anyway, imagine sailing on the ocean.  And seeing all those foreign places.”  
“Beats finishing school, huh?”
“You’re a pig.”
“Now that’s the Kate I know.”
 Tyler was used to Kate’s infatuation with anything new or different.  For his part he wanted two things, to prove to his old man that he could manage the ranch better than anyone else, and to gamble.  He would range far and wide in search of a new card or dice game.  He considered himself a gentleman, in the sense of the old landed gentry and he thought nothing of pulling a pair of needed drovers off of the job so that they could accompany him on one of his junkets.  The old man wasn’t so naive as to let him manage very much, but he turned a blind eye to his gambling.  Under the gentlemanly notion of “sowing his oats” he allowed him to take up to twice as much money as Kate got, and when she would get mad and remind her father of that his only reply was that it was still a man’s world and she had better get used to it, and by the way didn’t she have a husband of her own to find.  
She and Tyler had been very close growing up but as they were coming into adulthood there was more and more of a separation. They had recently had a violent argument about the disposition of the ranch should something happen to their father.  She had suggested that since she wasn’t married half of it was hers, more to chide him than to actually argue the point, and was taken aback at his vehement response.  They had made up but she noted that while she had apologized, he had not.