Free Coming Home to Wyoming (Peaceful Valley Series Book 1) by April Hill Page B

convinced that he was completely out of the woods just yet, though, and a moment later, he realized that once again, Eileen a ‘Roon had followed him from the house, silent, but clearly still angry.
    He saddled Jack quickly, hoping to say a quick goodbye and make a dignified departure before something else went wrong. She watched his preparations without saying anything, until he touched her shoulder and tried to say goodbye—and used entirely the wrong words.
    “You take care of yourself, Eileen a’Roon. I’ll miss you, but maybe we’ll meet up again, someday, when you’ve all grown up.”
    “You just better hope we don’t,” she snarled. “If you’re so hell-bent on goin’, just go, damn it. And don’t never come back neither. See if I care!”
    So, Griff rode away, feeling a little better because she appeared to be more angry than sad about his leaving. He knew instinctively that he should just keep riding, and not look back, but when he did, she was sitting on a bale of hay, sobbing.
    * * *
    Six weeks after leaving Rainbow Water, Griff rode down into a wide green valley he’d never seen before, and knew in an instant that he’d finally found what he wanted. Two days later, he walked out of the county land office holding the deed to a hundred and fifty acres of softly rolling pastureland with a wide, meandering creek that ran right down the middle, and another twenty-five acres of straight, standing timber. There was a level three acres to build a house and a couple of barns, and just behind where the house would be, a tiny grove of gnarled trees heavy with small green crabapples. He didn’t have to think twice before deciding to call the place Crabapple Valley.
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER NINE
     
    Four years later, the ranch in Crabapple Valley was up and running, and even turning a small profit. Griff had hired several cowhands the first year, one of whom took off with one of the ranch’s best mares two days after he showed up for work, and three of whom were still there, and Griff hoped they would stay on forever. His first year, he’d taken in a stray mongrel he called Amos, the ugliest dog he’d even seen, and the best cattle dog he’d ever had. It took another week to discover that Amos’s idea of entertainment after a twenty-hour work day was to spend the remaining four hours running the local coyotes ragged. Within one short week, they began scouting the place to be sure he wasn’t around before making a try at the hen house, or stalking a wandering calf.
    Over the first three years after he left Eileen a ‘Roon in the care of the Goodspeeds, he’d sent money every month to help with her keep, and written fairly regularly to her as well. In her first letter to him , though, she had made no secret of the fact that she still hadn’t forgiven him for dumping her there, that she would never forgive him even if she lived to be two hundred years old, and that she now wanted to be called Elyn, because it was her pa’s pet name for her, and because she was getting damned sick and tired of telling people how to spell Eeileen a’Roon . In the next few letters, though, “Elyn” began to concede—one small step at a time—that Martha and Abner were treating her wonderfully, and were beginning to feel almost like her real parents.
    Before long, she was writing to him about how much she enjoyed being in school, even though she was the oldest one there, and all the boys were puny little runts with pimples who didn’t even shave yet. The most agreeable surprise to Griff was how rapidly she was continuing to change, from a half-literate foul-mouthed tomboy, to a well-spoken young woman—though not quite all the way to becoming that female creature she had always claimed to detest—“ a proper lady.”
    Somewhere in the early summer of his fourth year as a cattleman, when the round-up was done and the cattle shipped, he decided to make a buying trip, to have a look at some young Hereford bulls he’d