Excerpt
Up until this point in the conversation Joel had been tolerant
of Buck Smith, but now his tolerance was starting to wane. If
there was one thing Joel knew, it was how to spot a bully. Joel was
not about to be bullied into any agreement. Not by anyone.
In his lifetime there had been a lot of battles that Joel knew he
should have fought that he hadn’t. And each time he failed to rise
to the battle he lost even more of who he really was and what it
meant to be a man. But right here and right now, with a newfound
power rising from somewhere deep within him, Joel
decided he was going to start fighting back.
And Joel was curious about the comments Smith made about
how he and his dad had “it all arranged,” so he asked the next logical
question: “All arranged? What do you mean?”
“Well, we never really had it in a signed agreement or anything
like that, but we always had an understanding. A gentleman’s
agreement, they would call it. I helped your dad by buying the
other parcels of land over the years, and we both knew that eventually
one of my boys would move over here.”
From the look on his face Joel could see that Smith had wished
he hadn’t said that. There really wasn’t an agreement, and as
Harry had suggested earlier that morning, Smith had definite
plans for the ranch, to have one of his grown boys move onto the
place.
“Well, leave it with me and I’ll think about it,” came Joel’s
reply.
Buck Smith climbed back into the big black beast of a truck,
maneuvred the vehicle a little too quickly in the loose gravel of
the yard, and sped back down the road. As he skidded out of the
yard, Buck promised, or perhaps threatened, to call in a day or so
to see what Joel had decided.
As Buck retraced his route back to the headquarters of the
Buck Smith Ranch Corporation, he couldn’t figure out what had
gone wrong. He knew that he would have to come up with something
else. This Joel Hooper was definitely a different sort.
Libros Libertad 