Pamela Morsi by Sweetwood Bride Page A

sure-enough hurry.
    But that was the way of things, at least as far as Rans had observed. Men would do just about anything to please a pretty girl. Of course, his sister Eulie was not what Rans would describe as a pretty girl. However, he suspected a fellow could never judge fairly concerning his own sister.
    As long as she suited Moss Collier, then, Eulie had a chance of making a home here for herself and the girls. Rans was not convinced that a home here would suit him at all.
    Once the animals were watered, Collier walked them back up to the corral. Rans followed and watched the man feed the saddle horse and pen him before turning his attention to the jenny.
    “You ain’t going to work the horse in the fields?”
    The man looked up then, his expression disbelieving.
    “The mule pulls the plow,” he answered, almost angrily. “Red Tex is a saddle animal.”
    Rans was genuinely curious.
    “You mean the horse don’t work at all?” he asked.
    “He works cattle,” Collier answered.
    “Cattle?”
    Rans was genuinely surprised. The only cattle he was at all familiar with were Jersey milk cows. But he knew enough about the animals to realize that they required open space and acres of grass. Nobody raised cattle on steep, wooded upland farm.
    “You’ve got cattle?” he asked.
    “Not yet,” Moss Collier replied. There was bitterness in his tone. “Not yet, but someday I will.”
    Rans in no way understood the man’s meaning.
    “Well, if I were you,” he told Collier in a superior and advisory tone. “I’d get rid of a horse that eats that good and don’t work a lick.”
    It was tried and true advice. Rans knew that nearly every man in the Sweetwood would agree with him.
    From his stony expression, Moss Collier apparently did not.
    “You don’t need to concern yourself with my animals,” he said. “I don’t suspect you’ve had that much experience with livestock.”
    Rans felt as if he’d been slapped. To say he was unfamiliar with animals was to say that Rans was no man at all. Every farmer he’d ever worked for had mules. His father, of course, had never owned any animals. Moss Collier was obviously referring to that. His father had basically never owned anything. The clothes on his back were most likely from charity and the food on his table a gift from his wife and children.
    Eulie had always tried to make it out that Virgil Toby was sickly and delicate. That he was troubled and infirm. That was why he didn’t work much.
    That was true as far as it went, but Rans was very aware that most of his father’s sickliness came out of a corn liquor jug. His inability to work was more from pure laziness than a frailty of health. He sent his children out into the fields with hunger still gnawing at their bellies while he lay around the shack sucking up strong drink and whining about not having more. He’d watched his wife work herself into an early grave, and then he’d moaned and wept in grief at losing her.
    It was Eulie’s contention that their father had pined away for love of his wife. It was Rans’s belief that too much whiskey had killed him. And his father’s swollen gut and yellow-tinged eyeballs suggested that he was right.
    A son could not respect a father like that. And Rans had no respect for Virgil Toby. When he thought about it, and that was more often than was good for him, he thought he despised Virgil Toby. He hated him.
    What was so repellent in his father was even more so in himself.
    Like father, like son.
    That was the old saying. Rans feared that there was truth in it. Even if there was not, he knew that when men looked at him, they didn’t see a hardworking, determined young fellow. They saw the boy of that lazy, worthless Virgil Toby. Rans wanted to be treated like a man, he wanted to be treated like his own man.
    Moss Collier didn’t treat him like a man at all.
    After the mistake about the saddle horse, Ranskept his distance, waiting for a task of which he was more