On the third day, arriving in Gainesville in the early afternoon, Neal asked a postman on his rounds if he knew the location of the Barrows farm. Sure do, the man said, and gave him directions. Neal considered stopping to make discreet inquiries about the Holloways at the general store he passed near the edge of town, one the family most likely would patronize for its convenience. He’d experienced that people couldn’t resist an opportunity to gossip about their neighbors, and sometimes spilling their opinions to a stranger made it easier. From people who’d probably known them all their lives, Neal would learn soon enough what sort of folks the Holloways were and get an answer to the question of whether Leon Holloway was still alive.
But he preferred to draw his own conclusion of what to make of people, so he rode on by the general store, following the postman’s directions until he came upon a threshing crew at work in a wheat field, and steered his paint to the fence. In the windblown chaff dust, a man who looked to be in charge saw him, lifted his cap, and took out a handkerchief the size of a tea towel to wipe his brow before starting toward him. A farmer, true as rain, Neal opined. It wasn’t only the cloth cap and overalls that distinguished him from a rancher, but the bent of his body and particular gait that marked him a man who worked with hoe and plow rather than horse and rope.
“Excuse me,” Neal called, raising his voice to be heard over the noisy whir of the threshing machine. “I don’t mean to interfere with your labor, but I’m looking for the Barrows farm.”
“You’re lookin’ at it, stranger,” the man said, elevating his voice above the din as well, “but if you were lookin’ to buy the place, you’ve made a trip for nothin’. The farm sold back in April.”
“That quick?” Neal said, his note of disappointment implying that the purchase of the farm was exactly why he’d come.
The man neared the fence and nodded. “ ’Fraid so.”
“And the people who owned it… I suppose they’re gone, too?”
“Moved the first of June.”
“Mind telling me where?”
“Well, now, I’d have to ask who’s askin’.”
“Neal Gordon. I ranch about five miles from Fort Worth.” Neal removed his hat to wipe his brow as well. The day had grown warm. “You the new owner?”
The man stepped close to the fence, scrutinizing Neal with the gaze of a man who thought they may have met before. “I’m the seller, or rather, my wife is. I’m finishin’ up the last of our harvest. Name’s Leon Holloway.”
Neal hoped he’d caught his expression before it gave away his shock. God have mercy! He was staring into the eyes of Samantha’s father! He put his hat back on. “That so?” he said lamely, unprepared for what to do or say next. “Pleased to meet you.”
Leon acknowledged the introduction with a nod and a squint at Neal. “I believe I met your daughter a while back. She came on behalf of her father in answer to the FOR SALE ad my wife put in a Fort Worth paper. She and my wife made an appointment to meet, but somehow they missed each other. Samantha, she said her name was. She rode out here with her maid and spoke to me when she and Millicent failed to hook up. I was working in the field.”
Neal passed his tongue quickly over lips that felt dry as day-old toast. For a second the oxygen left his head. Samantha had almost met her mother. “Yes, that was my daughter. Did… you introduce yourself?”
“Can’t say as I did. I believe she took me for a hired hand. What made you come inquire about the place again, Mr. Gordon?”
Neal improvised quickly. “It was a long shot, but I thought maybe the sale might have fallen through and your farm still be on the market. I own the La Paloma cattle camp south of here and was interested in buying your land as a thoroughfare to the river. No harm in checking to see if it might still be available, since I was coming this way anyhow, I thought, and the editor of the paper gave me the name of your wife.”
“No harm sure enough,” Leon said. He took off his hat and scratched his head. “Well now, since you’ve come this far—from Fort Worth, is it?—you’re welcome to come by the house and sit a spell.” Leon pointed to a group of rooftops in the distance that Neal could see through the yellow haze. “The well water’s cold and the peaches ripe. The new owners haven’t moved in yet, and there are a couple of porch chairs left that my wife reckoned not fit for our new house. Pick up the road at the end of the fence, and it’ll lead you right to it. I’ll meet you there.”
Neal wanted to say no. He was a savvy judge of men, and even from their short acquaintance, he could tell Leon Holloway was a good and decent man. An honest, open face, a friendly, sincere manner—how could they hide the heart of a father who would willingly part with his newborn daughter unless forced to do so? Did Neal really want to “sit a spell” with a man who might take from him the joy of his life?
But this was the reason he’d come. With a feeling of impending doom, Neal said, “That’s awfully good of you. That well water and peach sound mighty nice.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Holy smokes! Leon thought, walking back across the pasture. Could the girl who’d stopped by the fence last April be Millicent’s daughter—Nathan’s twin!—and the rancher her father, or rather, the man who’d adopted her? Five miles from Fort Worth, he’d said his ranch was—information close enough to the tidbit Leon had gleaned from Dr. Tolman and never forgotten. That fact and the color of the girl’s hair were too much to be a coincidence. Why had the man really come? If the reason was as Leon expected, how had Neal Gordon gotten hold of the information that had led him here? From Bridget Mahoney? Dr. Tolman? And why was he showing up twenty years later?
Leon sent the threshing crew back to work, then climbed on his buckboard to cut across the pasture toward his old home. His horse and wagon sent up clouds of dust and wheat residue that obscured his vision, but he thought he could make out the ghostly crown of a Stetson skimming along the tops of the hedgerows in the direction of his house. The hat got there before he did. The rancher had dismounted and was watering his horse at the trough when the buckboard pulled up.
Leon went immediately to the well and drew up a bucket of water. He filled a tin dipper and handed it to Neal. “We’ve got a pump but no running water in the house,” Leon explained. “When we sold the place, my wife bought a house in Gainesville, and she’s happier’n a pig in mud now we’ve got inside plumbing.”
“That stuff from a tap can’t beat this,” Neal said, taking a long drink of the cold, pure-tasting water.
“How about a peach?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“Have a seat on the porch, and I’ll cut us a couple of Elbertas.” Leon walked a few yards to the orchard fence and clipped off two large, plump peaches from branches drooping with fruit. Carrying them up to the porch, he said, “The peach is a member of the rose family, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” Neal said.
“Yep. Cousin to apricots, plums, and almonds.”
“That so?”
“Who would have ever thought any of them were related?”
“Hard to imagine,” Neal agreed. He studied the farmer as he pulled up a rickety porch chair. Was there some hidden meaning behind this little lesson in horticulture? He glanced toward the orchard. “A shame for all those peaches to go to waste. Will the new owner take possession of your place before they rot?”
Leon held up the pocketknife questioningly in offer to Neal, who shook his head and withdrew his own. “Not likely. My family used to pick those trees clean. Wife could make the best peach pies you ever put in your mouth. We made ice cream out of ’em, canned a pantry full, gave the rest to neighbors. Every one of our Elbertas ended up in its proper place.” Leon sliced off a piece of the peach and popped it into his mouth. “Always good for everything and everybody to end up in their proper place.”
Neal felt an inner burble from an unidentified source. He couldn’t quite follow the philosophical thread of what the farmer was saying to him, what he was gett
ing at. It was almost as if he had guessed who he was and why he’d really come. Neal pulled out the blade of his knife. “You mentioned family. How many are there of you?”
“Four. Me and my wife and two children, a boy and a girl.”
“And their ages? Of your children, that is.” Neal set off the distinction with a small smile. “My wife would kill me if I told her age.”
Leon laughed. “Mine, too, believe me. Well, let’s see, my son Randolph is seventeen, and my daughter Lily is sixteen, going on twenty, she thinks. I try to keep her reined in. She’ll get there soon enough, too soon for me.”
Neal offered a chuckle to say he understood. “You’ve never had any more children?”
“Nope. Two are all the good Lord blessed my wife and me with, and we’ve been mighty pleased with them. I don’t mind sayin’ my daughter is a beautiful little thing. She and her mother hope she’ll snag a rich man and live happily ever after, and my son will be goin’ away to Columbia University in a few months. That’s in New York City. Goin’ to make himself a big-shot lawyer, he says, and I imagine he will, too.” Leon sucked on a peach slice. “He’s just graduated high school. Valedictorian of his class. Commencement exercises are day after tomorrow, Saturday. He’s thrilled about gettin’ to wear the gold mantle. His mother is pleased about that, too. She puts great stock in appearances of superiority.” The twinkle in his eye assumed Neal understood, women being women and all.
“Congratulations to him,” Neal said. The peach forgotten, he drew in a deep breath. From his honest looks, manner, and speech, you’d never take this man for a liar—and about something as important as the children born to him, too. Unless Dr. Tolman had lied in his letter—and why would he?—Leon Holloway had fathered twins that he and his wife had given up for one reason or the other before his other children were born. What had happened to the twin boy? Had he ended up in a good and loving home like his sister? Did this man ever think of them? Neal almost felt like punching him in his pleased face. His pride in the children he’d kept was almost brazen, the son and daughter he and his wife had loved and nurtured and provided for right here on this farm, the recipients of their mother’s peach pies. Neal didn’t sense a smidgen of pain or regret in Leon for the firstborns they’d given away, and from the shallow sound of his wife, she hadn’t suffered, either.
“Too bad about only two being born to you,” Neal ventured. “This place looks like a great spot to raise children.”
“Two were all we wanted and could manage,” Leon said. “Any others, and I’m afraid my wife might have drowned them.” He grinned to indicate he was kidding, but the twinkle in his eyes had disappeared. “How about you? How many children do you have?”
“Just the one daughter,” Neal answered. “We were… given only one, and she is indeed a blessing, everything we could want in a child.”
“That you were given…” Leon repeated. “Now, that’s a nice way of puttin’ it. And how old is she?”
“She turned twenty in late March.” Neal snapped shut his pocketknife and got to his feet. He had not yet cut into the peach. “I believe I’ll take this with me,” he said, bouncing the fruit in his hand. “It will taste good on the road back to Fort Worth.”
“And the name of your ranch?”
“Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad. Means ‘the three hills of the Trinity,’ a river that forks by our place.”
Leon stood also. “Sounds like a fine place. Well, safe travel to you,” he said. “I’d shake hands, but mine’s a mess. I’ve enjoyed the company, but I’m sorry you had to find you wasted your time and came for nothin’.”
“Oh, I didn’t waste my time,” Neal said. “I got what I came for.”
Leon nodded. “Good to hear it.”
Neal thanked him for the water and peach and rode off down the road under the farmer’s watchful gaze from the porch. No, by damn, Neal thought. He hadn’t wasted his time and gone away with nothing. He’d gathered everything he’d come for, if not exactly how he’d planned to use it. He’d exercised his judgment and decided not to give that man back there the choice of whether he wished to reunite with his daughter. His answer would have been plain enough. There was no room for Samantha in his family. Leon and Millicent Holloway hadn’t wanted her or her brother when they were born, and they wouldn’t want them now. Their twins would be an embarrassment to them. It was indeed a wonder that as babies they hadn’t been drowned! The usual disgust boiled within him at the injustice of people like the Holloways to procreate more children than they wanted when he and Estelle, desperate for them, could conceive none.
At the fork in the road, out of sight of the house, Neal tossed the peach into a field. Let the buzzards have it. All that horticultural stuff about cousins and odd relationships and proper places had meant nothing. There was no double meaning to it. He heard the thud of the peach landing in the brush and paused in his review of the farmer’s remarks. Now that he reflected upon it, Neal found it odd that Leon Holloway had not questioned him about what it was that he had come for and found.
Leon went to the well and washed his hands of the peach juice. He hadn’t a lick of doubt that Samantha Gordon was Millicent’s daughter and that he’d just met the man who’d adopted her. A good man, Neal Gordon, hard as mesquite and just as rough, but he loved Samantha Gordon with all his heart. You could see it in the look that came over his face when he spoke of her. It took a heap of guessing, but Leon would lay odds that Samantha was at an age when she was curious about her birth parents—that is, if she’d been told she was adopted. Leon would guess she was. The young woman he’d met at the fence last April hadn’t a clue who he was, but Neal Gordon knew. For what other reason would he show up out of the blue except to determine for himself the sort of people who had given Samantha up for adoption? And why would he do that if not to clear the way for the girl to meet her real parents? I got what I came for, he’d said, and so he had. Leon Holloway, presumed father of Samantha Gordon, had been looked over and found wanting, just as Leon had intended. He’d given the rancher a pretty good idea of Millicent, too. Leon recognized a man who could love a child not his own, a father who would protect that child from knowledge that would only hurt. Neal Gordon would ride back to his ranch with the information he’d come for under his hat and there it would remain. Samantha would never know of his investigation. Of course Leon was only surmising, and it was possible that he might see her draw up to the fence one day soon, but he wouldn’t look for her.
And he could be surmising all the rest of it, too, and nothing of this afternoon might be as it appeared, but he hoped not. If things were as he perceived, he was satisfied that his daughter had ended up in good hands, better than those who would have raised her. He could live out his life in peace knowing she was where she belonged. He believed Neal Gordon could, too.
In Gainesville, Neal left his paint at a livery stable to be fed and groomed and rested for the night, then took off on foot to a Harvey House hotel where he, too, could get a room and wash off the dust of the trail and change into fresh clothes. After that, he had one more duty to see to before he could return to Las Tres Lomas with a clear conscience. The hotel manager helped him out with it, and later, bathed, shaven, and cleanly attired, Neal took a seat on a bench located in a small tree-shaded park across from the new home of the Leon Holloways. Bought one of the nicest houses in town, the hotel manager had told him, and it was indeed an impressive-looking place. The house was a pristine, two-story white clapboard with a row of dormer windows eyeing the park from above an expansive lawn enclosed by a white picket fence. Neal had brought along a newspaper to read, but his gaze stayed fastened on the mullioned windows and double doors of the residence for a glimpse of the residents. He was prepared to wait hours.
Eventually, his patience was rewarded. A lively horse and fringe-topped surrey appeared from the back of the house, a young man driving—the seventeen-year-old son? He directed the outfit around to the gate of the picket fence, and soon two wome
n wearing fluttery summer dresses stepped out through the double doors and came down the rose brick walk, laughing. The women, no doubt mother and daughter, were extraordinarily comely, their voices light and carefree. Neal saw his daughter’s resemblance to the mother immediately. Samantha’s hair was the same color as Millicent Holloway’s. The son, dressed nattily in a dark suit, was tall and slim and held himself on the surrey seat with a pompous dignity that almost made Neal laugh. No one would ever mistake him for a hardworking farmer’s son, nor the silly, stylish girl as his daughter. The woman, too, elegant from the top of her feathery hat and Gibson Girl hairdo to the tips of her white pointed shoes, did not fit the image of a farmer’s wife. Neal wondered if wife and children were ashamed of husband and father in his sod-stained overalls and faded cloth cap. Why the hell wasn’t that prissy son out helping his pa with the threshing? The answer didn’t matter. He’d seen enough. Even from this distance, without knowing them, Neal could tell they were a shallow bunch, unworthy to call his daughter kin. She was better off without them.
Neal rubbed his abdomen. He had not been hungry for days—actually, for a couple of months—but now his stomach was roaring for food. A good sign. He would eat himself a hearty supper, get a good night’s restful sleep, tomorrow stop in at La Paloma overnight, and then head home. He could hardly wait.
Chapter Forty-Six
It was the last week of June, and Samantha was in the library reconciling the ranch’s bank statements when Silbia appeared excitedly in the open doorway. “Miss Sam, I believe el patrón is home. When I was hanging out the wash, I saw a man the shape of your father on horseback in a cloud of dust heading this way from the north.”
Samantha threw down her pencil and jumped up from the desk. “Let’s hope so!” she said and ran for the back stairs that led up to the widow’s walk which gave a three-mile view of the ranch in all directions. She had been expecting her father any day now and was dressed for his return in a white silk blouse with puffy sleeves and a slim, ankle-length skirt. She had not wished to meet him in work clothes smelling like a barnyard. When he’d had a good wash and rest from the trail, she’d tell him the news that would send him over the moon, hoping it would clear some of the air of their misunderstanding. If it did not, she planned to go to Grizzly with the real cause of her father’s strange behavior the past months and ask permission to talk it out with him. It was asking a lot of the cook. He’d have to pin his faith on Neal Gordon’s fairness and compassion and regard for him when he heard the truth. It was all Samantha knew to do. She and her father could not go on the way they were.