She Got the Chuck Wagon as a Punishment — One Roundup Later the Trail Bosses Fought Over Her

Chapter 7

By the fifth week, five outfits had thrown their herds together on the Brazos flats for the joint working. A city of cattle under a bowl of dust. Hundreds of men. A ring of chuck wagons around the edge like watch fires.

And that’s when Eleanor’s reputation got away from her like a grass fire in August.

It started with reps from the other outfits eating at the Twin Creek wagon out of courtesy and coming back out of devotion.

Then whole crews began finding reasons to drift by at meal time.

Somebody—nobody ever owned up—told the story of how she’d gotten the wagon.

And the name went around the flats inside two days.

The punishment wagon.

Men said it grinning.

“Best grub between here and Kansas is at the punishment wagon.”

What had been built as her humiliation was turning, plate by plate, into her banner.

And Colt Brennan watched his joke become her legend, and decided it was time to end it.

He rode to town. He came back with a buggy.

In the buggy sat Caroline Ashford in dove-gray silk, her father the banker beside her, and behind them a hired cook’s cart loaded with a catered spread from the Cedar Bend Hotel. White linen. Roast fowl. Town bread.

Colt announced, smooth as churned butter, that the Twin Creek would be hosting the tally dinner for all the bosses—properly.

And then, with every hat within fifty feet turned his way, he decided to settle things for good.

“You’ve all been enjoying the lady’s biscuits,” he said, pleasant as a snake in the sun. “You might enjoy knowing how she got here.”

He paused.

“She thinks Benjamin Hollister sent for her. He didn’t. I wrote those letters. Me. As a joke, to see what the catalog would send.”

The laugh he expected didn’t come.

But the silence that did was worse.

Eleanor stood at her tailgate with flour on her hands and felt the whole world tilt.

The letters. The careful hand. I see what’s in front of me.

The ember she’d carried in her chest for a thousand miles.

A joke.

And Benjamin was two miles out at the count, and there was no one to say otherwise, and thirty strangers were looking at her with pity—which of all the things people had ever aimed at her was the one she could bear least.

She did not cry.

She said, “Gentlemen, supper is at six.”

And she turned back to her fire.

Because a fire doesn’t care if your heart is broken. It only cares if you feed it.