Desert Angel by Pamela K Forrest Page A

louder, she didn’t stop to talk, simply nodding in greeting and hurrying toward the house.
    As March nursed Jamie, she thought about the adobe house. She knew that it must belong to Jim, and wondered why he had ever built this place. Oh, it was grand, filled with lovely treasures, but it wasn’t a home. It didn’t invite you to kick off your shoes and relax.
    Placing Jamie in his crib for a nap, March stretched out on her own bed, her tired sigh drifted through the silence. Tomorrow, she decided, she’d take a rag and a broom over to the adobe house, and chase away some of the cobwebs and dust. Her eyes closed as she thought of the many things she’d have to do to get the house livable; beat the dust out of the furniture and curtains, wash the bedding, mop the brick floors …
     
     
    Jim totaled the figures one final time, then nodded with satisfaction. The head count on the cattle was better than he had hoped for, and he’d easily make his quota with the federal government. With this shipment the ranch would finally start paying its own way.
    For the last three years he’d been supplying beef to the forts, now with most of the Indians settled on reservations, his contract had increased to include not only the forts but also the reservations. There were whispers at the monthly Ranchers’ Association meetings that some of the forts were to be closed, now that the hostilities between red man and white had ceased to exist.
    As far as Jim was concerned, until Geronimo was captured — and held so that he couldn’t escape again — hostilities were far from over. He had a grudging respect for the wily Chiricahua Apache medicine man. It amazed him how one man could constantly evade an entire army. He had been apprehended several times, but Jim wondered if Geronimo had ever truly been cap-
    tured or if he had willingly let himself be found. He always managed to escape, sometimes with no more effort than simply walking off of the reservation with his small band of followers.
    Even if the forts did close, Jim didn’t worry about finding buyers for his beef, there was a big market back East. The local ranchers had recently gotten together to form a consortium to find not only a demand for their cattle, but the most economic way to handle shipping.
    Jim held a firm belief that the smaller ranchers needed to work together, if they were to survive. Already some of the larger spreads up north had been sold out to conglomerates, even some foreign investors, who never set foot on the ranch and yet ran it with iron-fisted control.
    Money was one worry Jim didn’t have, having inherited a healthy sum from both his parents and grandparents, but he knew that most ranches survived from one roundup to the next, scrabbling to hold their own at the best of times, suffering deeply at the worst.
    “Coffee?”
    Jim looked up with surprise to find March holding a cup of steaming coffee out to him.
    “Thanks.” He took the cup from her and sipped cautiously. It was still weak, but a considerable improvement over her previous efforts. He bit back a grin when he remembered taking a big swallow of the first pot of coffee she had made for him a couple of mornings earlier. Not only was it so weak that he could see the bottom of the cup, but he’d had the unpleasant experience of biting down on a coffee bean. After he’d rinsed the acid taste from his mouth, he’d shown her how to grind the beans and add them to the boiling water. He still got an occasional mouthful of grounds, but even that was improving.
    “Stay around long enough, and you’ll make a decent cup of coffee yet,” he teased.
    Shaking her head, March wrinkled her nose in distaste. “That stuff isn’t coffee. I’m sure it has many uses that we should investigate, such as killing the smell in the necessary on a warm summer afternoon, but it isn’t something a body would want to put in her mouth.”
    Jim smiled at her quick mind. He had discovered that she usually had a