The Cowboy by Joan Johnston Read Free Book Online

upon them. Like the one they would have to make now.
    “Your father has been telling me we can’t expect to recover the stolen fillies,” her mother said as Callie served herself a spoonful of scrambled eggs and two slices of bacon.
    “It’s doubtful,” Callie conceded. She saw FrecklesFancy in her mind’s eye, then thought of the playful filly cut up for steaks. Suddenly, she had no appetite.
    “What are we supposed to do now?” Luke asked. “I told you we should have gotten some insurance.”
    “We couldn’t afford insurance,” Callie reminded him. She heard the fear in Luke’s voice. At sixteen, her brother was old enough to understand the desperate nature of their financial situation, but still too young to be of any real help improving it. Callie took a deep breath and said, “We’ll just have to lease our pasture to hunters for the season.”
    “No,” her father said in a hard voice. “I won’t have those corporate bigwigs from Dallas and Houston tramping around my property pretending to be the Great White Hunter and mistaking my fence posts for turkeys, my trucks for wild boar, and my cows for deer!”
    Sam, Luke, and Eli laughed, and Callie couldn’t help smiling at the picture her father had painted. Actually, he wasn’t far off the mark. The corporate honchos from around the country who leased tracts of Texas pasture for hunting were likely to be novices. It was entirely possible they would lose a cow or two to a stray bullet or find one of their trucks peppered with buckshot pellets.
    But they could earn far more leasing the land for hunting than they could putting it to use merely as pasture for cattle, and the land would do double duty if it were leased, since they could still use it to graze their stock. Unlike the Blackthornes, they had no oil under their land to provide a financial cushion in hard times.
    “We need the money,” she said flatly.
    “How much can we realistically expect to get if we lease the land to hunters?” Sam asked.
    “The going rate is $10,000 per gun, per season, and that’s for a small pasture of ten thousand acres,” Callie said.
    Luke whistled, and his brown eyes lit up. “We could make a fortune, Dad. I could get a Harley!”
    “No motorcycle, Luke,” her mother said. “They’re too dangerous.”
    Her father’s features remained obdurate. “We’d have strangers all over the damned place.”
    “I think that’s a price we have to pay,” Callie said.
    “Never.”
    “What else can we do?” Callie asked.
    “I’ll borrow from the bank,” her father said.
    “They won’t loan us any more money. Three Oaks is mortgaged to the hilt. We’re in hock with every supplier we have. The market for beef is down, and without some form of income, now that the two-year-olds I planned to sell at the Futurity auction are gone, we’ll be lucky to make it past Christmas without going belly-up.”
    “Blackjack did this,” her father muttered. “He stole those fillies. I know he did.”
    “We don’t know that,” Callie said. “We certainly can’t prove it. Right now, we have to figure out how to replace our missing stock. And the best way to get some quick capital is to lease our pasture for hunting.”
    To Callie’s surprise, her mother took her side in the argument. “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices,” she said. “Do what’s best, even if it isn’t what we’d like.”
    The words were familiar to Callie, a refrain she’d heard all her life.
Sacrifices have to be made.
She had her mother as an example, who did without Vera Wang dresses or season tickets to the Houston Opera or a racylittle Mercedes Benz coupe or any of the other luxuries she might have expected from life on a ranch the size of Three Oaks—which was small only in comparison to an operation like the Bitter Creek Cattle Company—and never complained.
    She admired her mother and had tried hard all her life to emulate her. “Mom’s right, Dad,” she said. “We have to do