Page 29 of Wyoming Heart

“There was Sally...” she began.

“Married a Norwegian tourist and went home with him.”

She furrowed her brow. “Agatha.”

“Moved to California and said we’d see her on television one day.” His eyes twinkled. “And we did, I guess, when she got mixed up with that married actor who went on the news and said it was Agatha’s fault, that she seduced him against his will. I laughed so hard I almost busted a rib.”

“Poor Agatha,” she agreed. “No film studio would touch her after that.”

“She went to New York and got a job modeling,” he recalled.

“She was in a magazine I thumbed through just the other day at the drugstore. She looks very pretty. She wasn’t, you know,” she reminded him. “She was just average looking. It’s amazing what they can do with makeup.”

“Tell me about it.”

“She might come back here one day,” she said.

He sighed. “She might. But she said she didn’t want to spend her life on a ranch, smelling cow poop and alfalfa from dawn to dusk.” He glanced at her. “I like the smell of alfalfa.”

“Me, too, Bart.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe we should form a club. And only people with lost loves could join.”

“Lost loves, huh?” he mused. “And where’s yours?”

She frowned. “That’s right. I don’t have one.”

“Yet,” he said, just as Cort Grier came riding up on the bay horse he’d appropriated for the length of his visit with his cousin.

“Did you find what killed the cow?” Bart asked.

Cort nodded, leaning forward with his hands crossed over the pommel, holding the reins. “A wolf.”

“We need to track it...”

“No, we don’t.” Cort dismounted gracefully and joined them, with the reins threaded through his fingers. “The wolf was dead as well.”

Bart and Mina both stared at him.

“What?” He read the expressions well. “No, I didn’t do it,” he said. “Somebody with a high-powered rifle took him out. The shot blew out part of his rib cage. Had to be a hollow point, to do that much damage.”

“Who?” Bart wondered.

Cort shook his head. “No idea.”

“You’re sure it was the wolf that killed Bart’s cow?” she asked.

He nodded. “Still had blood on his muzzle. Probably separated from his pack, and too old and disabled to hunt anything that could run fast. He had a bad belly wound, almost as long as he was, and not healed. He was probably in terrible pain. The cow had just given birth and she was weak.”

Mina sighed. “Nature is cruel,” she said. “But that’s the way of things around a ranch. Some animals kill, some die.” She looked up. “God’s will.”

Cort chuckled.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

“I had a college professor in history who used to say that all the time. He’d been lecturing about deism in the past. He tried to put up a map on the blackboard to point out where deism had its beginnings. It kept falling down. Finally, the last time, it hit him right on the head. He turned to the class and said, ‘God’s will,’ with the straightest face you’ve ever seen. We all roared.”

She cocked her head, curious about him. “You went to college?”

“Just a couple of courses, when I was out of high school,” he lied. “I used to love history.”