Mrs. Ford was not pioneer stock, someone who had stood at a man’s side and built this ranch up from nothing. Pioneer stock didn’t spend this money on a house, didn’t have servants to respond to tinkles. Pioneer stock was too afraid of the next drought or grassfire or long winter to spend profits this freely.
Maybe — and it was an unkind thought — with her face and figure Mrs. Ford had married into Eastern money. She was here, I speculated, because she’d have no choice if she wanted to stay attached to that money. As a prisoner of that money, doing her best to create an oasis of civilization around her, she would have little idea of the day-to-day operations of the ranch.
“Has this Clayton Barnes done something wrong, Marshal?”
“No, Ma’am. It appears he did something right. Turned in a saddlebag full of bank notes.”
Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t heard.”
“More to it than that, Ma’am. Two men were found dead in the First National.”
If it were possible, her eyes widened more. Her hand started moving toward her throat, but she stopped herself and her voice came out as a gasp. “Two men? First National?”
“It’s sad news, and what takes me out to the Rocking N,” I tried to keep the words soft, as if that would lessen the brutal truth. “Bob Nichols. Lorne Calhoun.”
She became more rigid.
“Did you know him?” I asked. “Bob Nichols?”
“Not possible,” she breathed. “He can’t, it isn’t…”
“Afraid so. A couple of nights back. Appears as if they shot each other.”
“I…I’ll see what’s taking the cook.”
She rose abruptly, and left me in the wake of her perfume. It felt like I was missing something about our conversation, but I couldn’t pin exactly what.
She returned on the heels of the cook, a matronly woman with a grim face who served the tea from a bone-white china pot, cups and saucers to match. The cook gave me a final glare and departed. I hid a smile of amusement to be drinking from an object that would take me a month of marshaling to pay for should I drop it.
“It feels like I’m stumbling in the dark, Ma’am.” I raised my eyes to Mrs. Ford’s face, now more composed, but still white. “Got no idea what questions to ask or where to start. Now if you know anything about why Bob Nichols might be in a bank vault after midnight…”
She shook her head. Took another sip of tea. Her cup clattered slightly as she set it down.
“Was he close as a neighbor?” I asked. “You knew him well?”
“Actually, only by sight, Marshal.” Those were the first words she’d spoken in a few minutes. “And in terms of hearsay, well, I keep pretty much to myself.”
I reflected on how that would make these wide open plains even lonelier.
“Perhaps your husband, Ma’am. Or the ranch foreman. Would I be able to find them nearby?”
I was wasting my time here in the house, but maybe a half hour’s extra time on the Bar X Bar might give me something, anything to point where next to look.
Again, she shook her head. “The foreman is out…” she waved her hand vaguely “…somewhere on fall roundup. Along with most of the men.”
That left me thousands of acres to cover.
“Your husband out there too?”
“Sometimes.” That surprised me. I had a picture of another Easterner, wiping his hands with a silk handkerchief as he totaled another column of numbers on his ledger. “Today, however, Cyrus is in Cheyenne. He…he travels frequently on business.”
I nodded politely. “Perhaps, Ma’am, I’ll return another day.”
“Certainly.” She seemed to be holding something back, and I waited. It became a strained silence, and at last, I gulped back my tea and smiled.
“Thanks for your hospitality, Ma’am.”
“Yes. Of course.”
She accompanied me to the veranda.
As I turned my horse to ride away, she called out.
“Marshal Keaton?”
I turned back to her. She looked even smaller, seen from the height of my saddle.
“Mrs. Ford.”
“Lorne Calhoun. Did he…” She had a handkerchief in her hands, and she squeezed and twisted it as she spoke. “Was his death…did he…” She took a breath, one that seemed to heave her entire small body. “Did he suffer?”
I thought of the pillow pressed against his chest and how Lorne Calhoun would have looked into the killer’s eyes as they both knew the trigger would be squeezed in a cold-blooded execution.
“No Ma’am,” I said, “it hit him fast, hard and out of nowhere. A man couldn’t have died easier.”
And as I rode, I realized this brief sidetrip might well have been worthwhile. Her disbelief at the news of the two dead men had not been over the murder of Bob Nichols, but Lorne Calhoun. Had I not stopped here at the Bar X Bar, I would not have seen how she squeezed and twisted that handkerchief in grief over a quiet and gentle man who had died for figures that wouldn’t add up.
Chapter 14
Unlike Mrs. Ford, Helen Nichols was pioneer stock. She fixed me with eyes red and swollen from tears and stood with her arms crossed over a massive bosum.
“Marshal, say a single word against my man, and I’ll skin every strip of hide offen your body.”
I didn’t disbelieve her intentions nor her ability to deliver on the threat.
Her bosom matched the rest of her thick body. Her formless red dress was short-sleeved, and while those crossed arms didn’t ripple with muscle, each was solid and thick. I sat on my horse ten feet away from her but from that distance could easily see the nicks and cuts on her fingers, damage done to hands that never ceased work.
The scowl that darkened her face seemed capable of turning away an unarmed man, and considering her bulk, I did feel better that my Colt rested in plain sight on my hip.
“You hear me? I’ll strip every inch of hide. And I’ll do it slow, too.”
“Mrs. Nichols, I ain’t even down from my horse.”
“You might as well set right there and turn around if you’re here to throw dirt on a good man.”
“Wasn’t my intention Ma’am.”
“Didn’t take you long to inform me about your badge.”
“It does seem curious, that he’d be found in a bank vault, Ma’am. You can’t blame a lawman for the need to ask questions in this sort of situation.”
“That sounds awful lot like an accusation, Marshal.”
Now what? I’d have a better chance of moving a mountain range than this woman.
I noticed that three small boys stood behind her, huddled in the doorway of their soddie as they stared at me with bewilderment. I reminded myself that, despite the bulldog set to her face, her eyes were swollen from grief. I realized with sudden shared sorrow that this woman’s anger was not directed at me.
“Mrs. Nichols, I’m here because I have a good idea your husband did no wrong. And if I can, I’d like for him to be able to leave his boys a good name.”
Her scowl broke into a grimace of anguish. As if something inside her had busted, tears rolled across her leathery face. She tried to maintain the toughness of her widespread stance and the crossed arms, but she buckled to her pain and hid her face in her hands.
I rode past her and found a place to tie my horse. I doubted her fierce dignity would allow comfort from any source, especially a lawman, and it seemed a good time to let her find her previous composure.
“Howdy, boys,” I said to the three in the doorway as I walked toward them. Their faces were troubled as they watched their mother behind me shake with silent tears, head bowed in her hands. “Boys, did you catch a peek at the bear I was chasing this way?”
They looked away from their mother to me, and their mouths dropped.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “’Bout as big as a buffalo. You’re funnin’ me, right? About not seeing him? He must have come stampeding through here faster than a horse in a tornado.”
They shook thei
r heads in grave unison. I didn’t know much about kids, but I guessed the oldest to be less than eight. Give them a few years, and the soddie they shared would be shaking dirt every time they stretched.
“How about the snortin’?” I asked. “Surely you boys heard him bellerin’ and snortin’ as he passed by.”
Again, grave denial.
I jingled the coins in my pocket. “I can’t understand that boys, because old mister bear was some kind of mad. We’d been wrestling about a half hour before I finally got his mouth open.”
“You fought a b’ar?” the oldest said. His chunky face and dark hair showed he took after his maw.
“I peeled from my clothes to go for a swim in the river. Soon as I turned my back, he began to snuffle in my pants,” I said. “Weren’t right, him taking my money.”
The three took small steps away from the protection of the shade of the soddie, unable to resist my story.
“Money?” the oldest asked, wanting to believe.
“Durn rights,” I said. “Money. Slipped all my coins under his tongue and tried running off. But I grabbed his tail and swung him back right smart. Then after a lot of huffin’ and puffin’, I finally pried his mouth apart. And I’m here to tell you that few things smell worse than a bear’s breath.”
Shy grins.
I held out my hand. “Got all my money back from him, too.”
I opened my hand and showed them the coins. They peered in earnestness. “You think you’re smarter than a dumb old bear?”
They nodded.
“Meaner?”
They shrugged.
“We’ll see,” I said. “You take a coin each. Don’t be placing it in your mouth, though, not after the bear had his licks at them. Go round back the house and hide yourselves. If I can’t find you, I guess you keep what you got. If I do find you, well, we’ll see if you can wrestle better than that old bear.”
They were gone with the money in a heated footrace before I managed to place myself on a crooked wooden stool in front of the soddie.
Mrs. Nichols still hadn’t moved.
I surveyed the homestead: this sod house, and two bunkhouses made of sawed lumber. One small corral. Windmill.
A thousand head of cattle, Crawford had told me; Nichols would be paying off his note on the sale of a thousand head. No man by himself runs that much cattle, and those two bunkhouses showed me where the hired men stayed.
Most times, a cowboy’s biggest complaint was the bunkhouse, except more often than not, they called them lice cages. I worked one ranch where any man who picked one of them gray-backs from his blankets or clothes and threw it to the floor without first killing it was fined ten cents for each offense. Iron clad rule. Bunkhouses were cold and drafty in the winter, sweltering in the summer, and they stank of boots crusted with cow manure, unwashed bodies and clothes that hadn’t seen soap or river for months.
It said something to the cowboys that Bob Nichols would first spend cash on the sawed lumber for their bunkhouses before replacing the sod structure where he kept his family. Soddies — and this one was no exception — were made of thick bricks of sod, maybe a foot wide and two feet long, stacked to form walls that were sturdy enough to last six or seven years against any weather, even a tornado. Soddies were fire-proof, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, easy to build, and unless a man spent five dollars on the luxury of glass windows and a wood door, they were free for the taking.
But soddies leaked in any rain, drizzled earth crumbs when dry, and more than once I’ve heard about folks who woke to snakes that had slipped off the roof and fallen into their beds. Helen Nichols was a good woman if she supported her husband’s decision to save their new house for later.
I waited for Helen Nichols to compose herself.
Ahead of me, in the dirt just ahead of my feet, blue-bottle flies collected in a frenzy around blood that had dripped from recently butchered chickens. I snorted in irony at my keen sense of observation. Scattered feathers ground into the soil. Blackened clumps of clotted blood. And a lone chicken claw. I was quite the marshall, able to put something like that together.
If only this double murder would fall into place so easily.
What did I have for certain? The what, where and when. Two men dead in a bank vault, killed sometime during the early hours of the morning.
Even those facts led to questions, for each man had died in a stranger manner than I’d first suspected, their deaths disguised for reasons I couldn’t even begin to guess.
What did I have to add to those uncertainties? Who had killed them. And why.
All I could know about the killer was that he had joined the men he intended to kill sometime after Nichols had knocked on Calhoun’s door at the boarding house.
As for why, again I floundered. There was no apparent link between the Calhoun and Nichols, other than both had ties to the First National Bank. The only third party I could find who had something in common with both was Crawford, and my instinct told me he was not the man. Against all likelihood, if Crawford was the murderer, I still did not know why. Without that, I doubted I could prove anything that would stick in a trial.
Finally, there was the returned money. All I could decide was that the killer had hoped the double murder would appear as a shootout between the two men — that it had been an expensive gamble, then, to make it seem as if the horse had wandered away before Nichols could return.
Knowing I had so little, and seeing this widow in her grief, made my waiting all that much more miserable.
Chapter 15
Five minutes passed before she walked back to me. Tears had softened her face, and much to my surprise, I noticed she was a young woman, and that, without the twisted anger on her features, she carried her own kind of beauty.
“Marshal, you’ll forgive me? It’s just that already I heard folks say it served Bob right for his transgression. And I know he didn’t do it. No matter what it looks like, I know he didn’t do it.”
“I believe there’s more to it than what meets the eye, Ma’am. That’s why I’m here.”
“Helen. No need to be fancy.” She tried a smile and sniffled. Watch a woman that big sniffle, and you’ll know it’s not a funny sight, but one that can break your heart.
“Helen, then. Most call me Samuel. Unless they’ve taken a dislike to me.”
She sniffled again and wiped a large forearm across her eyes.
“My boys,” she said. “How’d you get them out? The sight of strangers tends to send them packing right back inside.”
“Lied to ’em. Then bribed ’em.”
“And you wear a badge.” A throaty chuckle. “Let me fetch you some water. You’ve been riding a while.”
The water did clear the dust that dried my mouth. She refilled my mug from a pitcher of water, and offered me late lunch. I protested, but not strongly, and within minutes, she returned with thick ham sandwiches, slathered with mustard.
She lowered herself onto a stool beside mine, and I tore into the first sandwich. This woman knew how to bake bread.
“Bob liked these,” she said. “I was standing there just now as I cut the ham, thinking how much he liked these. Seems that everything I do now reminds me of him. Lord, I miss that man.”
She bit her lower lip. “Don’t worry, Marshal. I won’t cry no more whilst you’re here. I know how tears bother a man.”
I took my time swallowing the food, then more water. I had no idea how to proceed.
“Marshal,” she said, refilling my mug again. “I expect you got a whole slew of questions, what with you thinking you can clear my man’s name. You jest get started, and I’ll answer best as possible.”
I looked straight into her square face. “Do you have any guesses as to why he’d be in that bank vault?”
She did not flinch. “Since they brought me news of it yesterday, I’ve worked my brain into knots over that. Bob was a good man, a fair man. No matter how bad it’s been, he’d never consider taking a penny offen an
other man.”
I must have waited too long to speak, for her voice took on some fierceness again.
“Marshal, you can think what you like. So can the rest. But one thing for sure, and no woman would disagree, when you live close with a man and you rise with him in the morning and hold him at night and you listen to his fears and share what good comes along, you learn a man inside and out; and even if you cain’t put it into words, your heart knows him. Bob Nichols was as good a man as could be found on God’s green earth.”
She stopped for breath. “If you found Bob Nichols in that bank vault, someone must have forced him there. That’s all I can say as to why he was there.”
It was not the time to mention that a witness had seen him knock on the door of Lorne Calhoun. Nor to mention that I believed Doc Harper when he spoke for Calhoun, making it unlikely that Calhoun had been the one forcing the two of them in that vault.
Fortunately, Helen had given me something else to establish.
“Things been bad?”
Helen lowered her eyes and dusted imaginary crumbs off her lap. “Cash-wise, yes sir.” She lifted her head, and her chin was stubborn with pride. “We arrived with what we hauled in a wagon, and established this homestead by the Land grant Act. Lots of folks done the same and quit halfway through. Not Bob.”
Live five years on the land, government said, and you owned it clear title. If I remembered right from what Crawford had told me, they had only a year left.
“In four years, Helen, you built up your herd to a thousand head?”
She gave me that sharp, fierce scowl. “Who told you?”
“Crawford. Like I said, ma’am, I wanted to start somewhere to find the truth behind all of this.”
She spat. “Crawford.”
I waited.
“Sweet as pie when things looked good,” she told me. “That’s how we built the herd. Bob borrowed some each year, sold cattle in the fall, and borrowed more the next year. Worked good too. We only claimed this quarter, but all the rest of the wide open land fattened our cattle.”
Silver Moon Page 9
