He encountered no one that long lonely trip, a lawman ghosting along, trying not to be seen. Once when a lone rider approached, Blue slipped easily into a willow thicket and waited. It was no one he knew, white haired, probably a half-pensioned old cowboy.
A mile or so from the ranch, Blue cut into a thick stand of timber that rose gradually into the foothills. It was slow going. He worked his way over deadfall, around giant boulders resting darkly in the shade, broke off branches that would have whipped his face, steered into and out of sudden crevasses choked with brush, but always he headed upslope in cover so deep no prying eye would ever see him. He could not say that no ear would never hear him; working two horses through heavy pine forest was a noisy business. After endless riding, he struck a flat area with aspen, some springs, and tiny parks where deer scat lay thick. With the passage of an hour he reckoned he had climbed five hundred feet and traversed a couple of miles. He was heading for a certain headland overlooking Tammy’s ranch, a place to lie down in thick grass and see without being seen.
And there he would guard her, and maybe deliver Jack Castle a surprise.
A while later, while working through dense brush, the ranch horse nickered softly. Dammit!
Blue quit moving. No horse nickered back, and he could only thank the wind for that. Ahead and upwind was some sort of horse.
Blue retreated fifty yards, found a dell where he could picket his horses, and left them there. He edged ahead, careful not step on a stick, edging closer and closer to that headland with its majestic view over much of the Cooper ranch. He was cautious now. If someone was up there, he wanted to know who.
The forest thinned into brush and grass, and Blue eased ahead, straight into wind, which helped him. Then as he rounded a boulder, he saw the man. Someone was staring from that headland, someone with a good brass field glass. Someone wearing new ranch clothing, a blue shirt that still had creases where it had been folded, jeans so dark that they had never seen soap and water, a hat still bright and shiny.
Whoever it was stared outward, sitting cross-legged, his back to Blue. Castle, maybe. Castle in new duds, after years in the pen. Castle with that glass, studying the ranch. Castle with a rifle lying in the grass, one with a shiny black barrel and glowing stock. Blue eased his revolver from his holster and checked the loads. He had Jack Castle this time, had him good. But Blue was no fool, and spent the next minutes looking for a confederate, checking the brush to either side, seeing what Castle was doing, trying to get the what and why of it. He also wanted a gander at Castle’s horse; where it was tied, whether there were two. But time ran out. The man stood.
“Lift your hands, don’t turn, if you do I’ll kill you,” Blue snapped. The man jerked, and Blue almost shot him. “Up with your hands! This is the law. Don’t touch that rifle.” The man obeyed. “Don’t you move, damn you.”
Blue slipped closer, puzzled. This one was too thin for Jack Castle, and vaguely familiar. Blue moved closer, thirty feet, twenty. Enough.
“Turn around slowly. No fancy moves, if you want to stay alive.”
Slowly the man turned around and faced Blue. Blue felt a jolt run clear through him.
“Absalom, what the hell...”
His son stood still, hands in the air, waiting gravely.
“You just keep your hands up!” Blue snapped.
Blue circled him, found nothing that bothered him.
“Talk,” he snapped.
“Is this how you greet your son?”
“Damn right.”
“Let me drop my hands?”
“I’ll think about it,” Blue said, and then nodded.
“I have nothing to say,” Absalom said.
Chapter 15
Absalom stood there, hands up.
“I said talk,” Blue snapped. He was rattled. He had almost shot his son.
Absalom stood silently.
“What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
Absalom lowered his arms without invitation. Blue let him. The boy, hell, he was a man now, pale from the want of sun and weather, stared at his father. He had spent money on an outfit. That was a new beaver hat, new boots, new flannel shirt. And resting in the grass was a shining new Winchester Model ‘73 lever-action repeating rifle. Hanging on a leather cord from the boy’s neck were field glasses so big and powerful that the boy could see anything a mile away. Better field glasses than Blue had ever owned, or the county had ever paid for.
A dark suspicion flared through Blue. “Where’s your horse?”
Absalom nodded toward the left.
“Show me.”
“Look for yourself.”
“I asked what you’re doing here.”
“Fine greeting I get from my own father.”
Blue was tired of this. “Walk in front of me. We’re going to the ranch.”
“If you’re arresting me, name the crime I’m charged with. If not, don’t push me around.”
“I said march.”
But Absalom didn’t. Blue itched to lay into the boy, but didn’t. This man enraged him, and he didn’t know why. His son wasn’t doing anything illegal, not that Blue could see. But it was suspicious. Yes, that was it: suspicious. And that made it Blue’s business.
“Tammy know you’re here?”
“Ask her.”
“I asked you a question.”
“And I didn’t answer.”
Blue could see the pain in his son’s eyes. Pain and something more: rage. He deserved to have the hell beaten out of him, sassing his old man like that. But Absalom was twenty-nine, not some boy. “If you’re done with me, then leave me alone.”
“Tammy said you were coming and you didn’t want your mother or father to know about it.”
Absalom was plainly annoyed, but he didn’t reply. Blue circled around this whole thing, itching to get at this. “You know that Steve’s dead?”
Absalom nodded.
“How come you know?”
“I watched the funeral.”
“Watched the funeral!”
“With these.” He pointed to his powerful field glasses.
“So you’re sneaking around here, not even letting your sister know you’re here. You’re seven hundred miles from Denver. What the hell?”
Absalom said nothing. “I ought to run you in.” Blue stared at his son. “You watching over her, is that your notion? You, of all people?”
Absalom didn’t reply. Instead, he turned away from his father, settled himself at his place on the headland, turning his back to Blue, and resumed his vigil.
Blue was so mixed up he couldn’t sort out his feelings. He was mad. And frustrated. This wasn’t a boy he could command, but a man he had not seen in a decade. “I’m going to use this place. You can go somewhere else,” Blue said. “I have business here; you don’t.”
Surprisingly, Absalom picked up his shining rifle and walked past Blue. The look in his son’s eyes was so dark, so hurt, that Blue recoiled from it. There was something terrible happening here, something Blue couldn’t deal with. Blue followed Absalom to his horse, a gray ranch gelding picketed in a dell a hundred yards back. Blue wondered what he expected to see: a copper colored bay, perhaps? That only made Blue feel worse.
He hated mysteries. After a decade away, his estranged son shows up just when Jack Castle is sprung from the pen. “Where are you going?” Blue asked.
“I never had a home to go to,” his son replied. “And I don’t have one now.”
Absalom released the horse, slid his Winchester into a new saddle sheath and climbed easily into the new saddle. Then his son rode away, deep into the forested slope until he could no longer be seen.
Blue had rarely known a worse moment.
He walked back to the headland and settled in the exact spot his son had occupied. Down below, Tammy was conversing with a man, probably Cletus. Smoke rose from the bunkhouse where the hired man was s
taying. Blue itched to have those field glasses so he could see what the hell was going on down there. Why the hell the county didn’t give its sheriff some good glasses he didn’t know. How the hell could a man enforce the law without a first-rate spyglass? Where the hell did Absalom get enough money to buy lenses like that? Lenses, hell, horse, rifle, saddle, outdoor clothing?
He knew the answer and hated it. The boy was a first-rate artist and engraver, and commanded a good price for all that art stuff he did sitting in some warm office in Denver working with his fingers. Which irritated Blue. Why the hell didn’t he have a son like any other son? A son who could swing an axe?
Well, Absalom would hightail it down to the ranch, greet his sister, settle for some comfortable quarters. Meanwhile there was a killer prowling, a killer whose intent was to destroy Blue’s family. Blue settled into the grasses where he could keep an eye on that ranch house far below. Maybe from those hills across the valley Jack Castle was watching and waiting. Blue wished he had those field glasses so he could see. Age was playing hell on his eyesight.
But as an hour slid by, and another, Blue saw nothing more of Absalom. What the hell was all this about? Sneaking around, telling no one. Surveillance was hard dull work, but Blue was going to keep Tammy safe no matter what, and by God he’d just suffer the boredom and whittle away the hours until he was sure Castle wasn’t anywhere around. Or until Castle was manacled or dead.
So Blue sat, letting the summer breezes toy with his hair, studying the slopes, looking for the serpent in that Eden. He shoved Absalom out of mind; he had the power to do that. Back to Denver, that’s where that boy belonged. He had known plenty of boredom in his days. The badge brought with it a few moments of wild trouble, and month after month of sheer boredom, checking doors to see whether they were locked, peering into mercantiles for burglars, writing up reports, feeding drunks after they had slept it off. At dusk his stomach told him it was time to lay off for a while. The horses needed water. He needed a break. He squinted sharply into the fading light, seeing nothing suspect, and then eased back from the headland and plunged into the deep shadows of the forest. The horses weren’t there. He cursed, peered about, wondered if they had busted loose of their pickets and drifted, and then he saw Tammy’s hat, tied by its pink ribbons to the limb where the horses had been, and he knew the horses hadn’t drifted. That hat had been tied to his saddle and now it wasn’t. Steve Cooper’s horses, Blue’s saddle and cook pot and slicker and gear, all gone. And the calling card was Jack Castle’s. Blue felt a volcanic rage build in him. He growled, cursed, waved the old Springfield, raged, and clenched his fists.
But there was worse coming. He would have to hike down the long slope, through the darkling woods, out onto the foothill slopes, and then hike across lonely fields to Tammy’s ranch house, where he would sheepishly ask for still another horse, some chow, and whatever else he needed to outfit himself again.
And then he would stay awake all night, rifle in hand, waiting for that son of a gun to make his move.
Blue started down the slope, stumbling and sliding, and emerged at last upon the lonely meadows. He continued to drop down a long slope, following a coulee, and emerged at last on the valley floor. He hoisted himself over the pole fence and into the big horse paddock, and continued toward Tammy’s ranch house. He found the gate, and was headed into the ranch yard when he felt cold steel stab his back.
“Stop where you are, mister,” said a voice behind him.
“Put that thing down,” Blue snarled.
“Hands up. Walk ahead of me.”
“I’m the sheriff. Who the hell are you?”
“If you’re the sheriff, what are you doing sneaking up on this place?”
“Damn you, put that thing down. I’m going to turn around and show you my star. And then you’re going to take me to see my daughter, Tammy. Mrs. Steven Cooper. And if you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”
“Pretty respectable bellerin’ and cussin’,” the man said.
“You Cletus?”
The man laughed. “You’re her old man, I reckon. All right, I’ll put this iron back in its nest.”
Blue turned slowly. A lank, rawboned ranch hand contemplated him.
“You want to fix me up with a horse and tack and chow? Real quiet? I want to get out of here unseen.”
“I ain’t got the right to do that. All I’m doing is feeding stock and shooting strangers.” He laughed. Defeated, Blue headed for the ranch house, wondering what the hell to tell Tammy, and how the hell he could ask for another horse and a saddle too. Everything had gone wrong that could possibly go wrong.
Chapter 16
She was wearing widow’s weeds. How strange Tammy looked in the dim yellow lamp light, all in black, her face ethereally sweet and pale and drawn, the grosgrain tight about her neck, framing her face. His daughter was a widow in her twenties, her home a bleak refuge tossed by a thousand dangers. He looked around for the children but didn’t see them.
Absalom stood there too, his face shadowed, and Blue wondered how the hell his son had arrived unobserved. Hadn’t Blue been watching over that house from the headland? Damned boy, sneaking around like that as soon as it got dark.
“What are you doing here?” he asked Absalom, setting the rifle next to the door and tossing Tammy’s pink-ribboned hat into a chair.
Tamara answered. “He’s come to visit me, just as I told you he would.”
“Oh yes? Then why was he up on the bluff, snooping around?”
Tammy and Absalom glanced at each other, as if there were something between them that maybe Blue shouldn’t know. The moment stretched on and on.
“I would like to show you what I do for my living,” Absalom said. He directed Blue’s attention to artwork and magazines spread over the kitchen table. Harper’s and Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, and a dozen others, plus watercolors, sketches, engravings, prints mounded high. Blue glanced that way, hating to admit that his son did all that stuff. He stared at superbly rendered images of magpies and hawks and eagles, engravings of moose and deer and elk, watercolors of wolves and big-horned sheep, otters and marmots, bold paintings of longhorns and cowboys herding them, sketches of gunmen holding up a bank, of cowboys being bucked off broncs, of fierce Indians raiding a lonely cabin. Blue grunted. Absalom stood expectantly, and then sagged, the old hurt in his face again. But Blue didn’t care. The boy wasn’t strong enough to live in a new land, and he was damned if he’d praise all this deskwork.
“Why’d you come now? Why not some other time?” Blue asked him, turning back to the only thing he considered important.
The boy exchanged glances with Tammy again. “The warden notified me,” he said slowly.
“Notified you about what?” Blue felt his bile rising again.
“Long ago I asked him to write me when Jack Castle was about to be released. He did.”
“So?”
“So I’m here.”
The boy glared at him, daring him to ask more questions. The curtain descended again, and Blue knew he wouldn’t get much more out of his son. But maybe Tammy would talk.
“You invited him?”
“Steve and I.”
“And now he roams around trying to protect you, as if he could stop Jack Castle.”
Tammy’s lips compressed. She turned to Absalom. “These are just beautiful, Ab. Would you spare any for me?”
“Any you want. I’m glad you like them. I tried to catch all the things I’ve seen here.”
Blue stood impatiently. They were shutting him out of their conversation. A killer tormenting this family was raging in the hills, and they were talking about that art.
“I need to requisition a horse and tack. Sheriff business,” he said.
“A horse? But Pa...”
“There’s a killer out there and I need a horse.”
“You had two.”
“He got them.”
“Jack Castle got them?”
“Who else? And right
here, up on the hill. He left your hat tied to a tree as a calling card, that hat right there, your hat. Is that enough for you? Do you want him to bust in here? Now do I get a horse for sheriff business?”
She stared at her hat, and at him. “And you let him?”
“What do you mean, I let him? I’d of shot him.”
“He came within a few yards of you and took two horses and you let him?”
Blue squirmed. “I didn’t hear it.”
“Yes, you didn’t hear it. Your hearing’s not very good, is it? And you need spectacles now, don’t you? And maybe he gets across country faster than you.”
“That doesn’t slow me down a bit. I’m better than ever.”
Tamara and Absalom exchanged glances. “You’ll see,” he said.
She stared into the night. “I don’t know... Steve was going to break more. We hardly have a saddle horse left. My mare... my side saddle. I think you should rent a horse in town.”
“I’ll take what I can get.” He turned to Absalom. “I need your outfit.”
Absalom shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s official business, I keep the peace, and I’m taking it.”
“Maybe Cletus will lend you his.”
“I’m taking yours. There’s a man out there that’s threatening this family, vowed to kill us, hurt us any way he can. Now stand aside.”
“No, you don’t have my permission.”
“I didn’t ask your permission.”
“Stop that!” Tammy snapped. “You treat your own son like dirt. I won’t have it in my house.”
Blue started to protest, but Tammy’s withering glare gave him pause. He stared malevolently at the citified brother she was protecting, the one with a fancy gray horse and creaking new tack and a shiny rifle bought with his finger-fiddling, the horse and tack and rifle that could catch a killer.
“I’ll have Cletus drive you to Centerville in the buckboard,” Tammy said. “You can deal with your problems there.”
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