Friends and Lovers Read Online Free PDF Page A

leaned farther out the window. “This is Big John Durango’s ranch?” she persisted.
    John grinned slyly. “Heard of him?”
    “My goodness, yes! I retired from business this year, and I never miss my financial magazines. Why, when oil was making headlines, John Durango was a cover story! Imagine, a man that handsome being a tycoon as well!”
    John looked sickeningly modest. He tilted his hat back on his head. “What kind of business were you in, ma’am?” he asked with characteristic curiosity.
    “Corporate law,” the woman said, smiling.
    “Tough profession,” he said.
    “Not really. It just takes some study and a lot of practice.”
    Catching her breath, Madeline wondered at his charm. The blond woman was staring at him intently. “Do you suppose we might actually get a glimpse of Mr. Durango as we head back toward the highway?” she asked, wide-eyed.
    John pursed his lips. “Well, ma’am, he’s a hard man to hold still, if you know what I mean. Most likely he’s carousing in the pool with his women right now. He makes me do all the work while he lives up to his playboy reputation.”
    Madeline had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from giggling out loud. John’s face was deadpan, wearing a look of pure disgust.
    “You work here?” the blonde asked.
    “Yes, ma’am, like a mule, and that man won’t even pay me the back wages he owes me.”
    “You oughtn’t let him get away with it,” the woman told him. “I’d sue him.”
    “Well, if I didn’t owe him so much money, I might do that,” John agreed.
    “Owe…
him
money?” The tourist’s eyes widened. “For what?”
    “Oh, little ticky things. Like rent on this here horse.”
    The blonde looked horrified, and Madeline was digging her nails into her palms to keep from howling.
    “He makes his men pay rent on their horses—’his’ horses—to work ‘his’ cattle?” the tourist burst out.
    “Well, he don’t take in much money on the cattle, so he had to make it up somehow, I reckon,” John said with a shrug. “Of course, it’s not hard to see how he got so rich when you consider how much money we all owe him in gambling debts.”
    “You all owe him gambling debts?”
    “Well, yes, ma’am,” John continued in his slowest drawl. “You see, he gets us drunk every Friday night and suckers us into playing poker with him. I reckon I owe him less than the others, though. I’ve paid my bill down to where I only got twenty thousand dollars more to pay off.”
    “Oh, my God,” the tourist gasped.
    John shook his head good-naturedly. “Could be worse,” he assured her.
    “I don’t see how!”
    John was more than willing to tell her. “He could make me sleep in the bunkhouse with the boys. Got rattlers in there ten feet long, big around as my leg.” He slapped his broad, denim-encased thigh. “Never could find a gun powerful enough to kill them things, so what you have to do is make pets of them. But snakes just don’t take to me like they do to some of them other boys, so Big John lets me sleep in the big house.”
    The blonde was beginning to look suspicious. “Snakes ten feet long? Is that what they call a Texas tall tale?”
    “Oh, no, ma’am,” John assured her. “I only lie when Big John tells me to, like when the income tax people ask questions about his trips to Europe and the thirty dependents that he swears are his illegitimate children—youngest girl’s twenty, you know….”
    The blond woman started to laugh. She kept on until tears were rolling down her cheeks, and her companion was giggling audibly. Madeline let go of her own self-control at last, doubling over with laughter.
    “Thank you for the profile, Mr. Durango,” the tourist laughed at John, her eyes twinkling. “Next time I read a story about you in some magazine, I’ll be one of the privileged few who know what a scalawag you really are. Making your men rent their horses…!”
    He chuckled. “I’ve thought about it sometimes,” he