Page 23 of Runaway Hucow

Peyton turned and looked at his brother, confused.

“One for me,” Spike said. “One for you. One for old Roscoe too. One for all three of us.”

It took Peyton a moment to understand what his brother was getting at, but when he did, he couldn’t help grinning from ear to ear.

“Brother, you have to be the craziest damn buffalo who’s ever lived.” And that was saying a lot, considering he had old Roscoe to compete with for the title.

CHAPTER 13

Tess was beginning to think this secluded valley was a truly magical place. The giant herd of buffalo had been a surprise, but the inside of the cottage house was equally amazing. Partly it was the scale of everything. The walls were extra high, so the bisonmen who lived there wouldn’t have to worry about scraping their horns on the ceiling, and all the furniture had been built large to accommodate their huge size and weight. There was even an oversized cast iron stove in the corner, upon which an enormous pot of vegetable soup was currently simmering, filling the air with a delicious aroma that made Tess’s mouth water.

The most amazing thing, however, was how she was able to see all that stuff.

When the sun had started going down outside, she’d expected the bisonmen to light a few oil lamps. Instead, Peyton had simply turned a knob on the wall, and the room had instantly filled with light. The glow was coming from something hanging down from the ceiling above the dinner table. Something that looked like an onion made of glass with a bright filament inside.

A light bulb!

Tess had heard of light bulbs, of course, and she knew from reading the papers that Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Joseph Coppelius were all in an epic race to develop their own electrical power grids back east. Some neighborhoods in the big cities like New York and Philadelphia even had electric street lamps, but such systems required steam-driven power stations to operate, and the technology was still limited out west, where everything was much more spread out.

So how did the bisonmen manage to have electricity here in their secluded valley?

“The windmill,” Peyton had explained.

As it turned out, that box Tess had seen attached to the top of the windmill contained a small generator, and those rubber tubes snaking down like vines were actually insulated copper wires. The bigger box at the bottom was a battery that stored up the energy produced by the generator, so it could be used later.

“I didn’t know you could make generators that small,” Tess said, amazed.

She was sitting at the dinner table in a chair so big her feet didn’t touch the floor. It made her feel like a little girl again. Meanwhile, the two bisonmen were preparing supper. Peyton was working on the soup, while Spike was slicing up a giant watermelon for dessert. It was going to be a simple meal, but after the past several days of eating bland hardtack and bitter grass, Tess considered it a feast. She’d offered to help with the preparations, but the bisonmen had insisted on doing everything themselves. She was their guest, they’d said.

“Oh sure,” Peyton replied as he stirred the soup with a big wooden spoon. “You can make a generator just about any size. The problem with most small generators is they don’t produce a lot of energy, but I figured out a way to improve their output. Instead of using ordinary copper coils, I used an alloy of copper blended with firestone dust. It produces a lot more current that way.”

“You mean you built that generator from scratch yourself?” Tess asked, surprised.

“Yes’m.”

It was hard to tell from the bisonman’s dark complexion, but Tess thought it looked like he was blushing.

Spike finished slicing up the watermelon and gestured toward his brother with the knife. “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, ma’am, but Peyton here is the Coppelius of the West.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Peyton said as he lifted the pot of soup off the stove and set it on a trivet in the center of the table. “For one thing, I don’t have as much money as old Joe Coppelius, that’s for sure.”

“No,” Spike said, “but he’s got just as many brains.”

Peyton chuckled. “Maybe you’d have some brains left too if you weren’t always butting heads with Roscoe.”

Tess had heard them mention the name Roscoe a few times since she’d arrived. Apparently he was the third member of their little trio, and the eldest. For some reason, he wasn’t home right now, but the brothers assured her she’d be meeting him soon enough. Tess hoped he was as friendly and gentle as Spike and Peyton were, though that comment about butting heads gave her some doubts. But surely Peyton hadn’t meant that literally.

Despite the brothers’ protests, Tess helped them set the table. They had handmade stoneware bowls glazed on the inside, and simple metal silverware with wooden handles. In addition to the soup and the watermelon, there was also half a loaf of real bread. When Tess saw that, she nearly fainted from excitement.

And to complete the spread, there was also one great big serving bowl filled with… grass.

“Don’t worry,” Spike said when he saw her eyeing the grass warily. “You don’t have to eat any of that if you don’t want to. It’s just that me and Peyton, well… we sort of have a taste for the stuff.”

“Oh,” Tess said, feeling a bit relieved she wouldn’t have to eat any more grass. “Thank you.”

She was a little nervous this evening. More than a little, actually. Being in the presence of not one but two muscular bisonmen was playing havoc with her hormones. She almost wished they would put some shirts on, but then, it wasn’t her place to tell them how to dress in their own home. They were wearing britches at least, although those were so tight, they left little to the imagination. She’d tried not to stare while the bisonmen were preparing supper, but those big, powerful thighs just had a way of drawing a woman’s attention—not to mention the prominent bulges both of them were sporting in front.

It was obvious Peyton was just as well endowed as his brother. Tess felt incredibly naughty for even thinking about that, but it really was impossible not to notice.