by Rusty Davis
A race to town that by some happenstance she won put a smile back on her face. He left her smiling at the stable. It was an image to think on as he walked toward the church to bury a good man whose death was a mystery.
Rachel was not there, but about a dozen Wilkins hands had ridden in. More than a few of the townsfolk joined them. Ferguson had been well liked.
The service was simple. Kane had heard a lot of the words before. They had tried to bury the men they lost when he first worked for Sherman with a group of other men. As the remaining few grew fewer, the words grew fewer as well. When Sonny Carpenter was shot down, there were no words at all, but there were four men left as lumps on top of the ground as payback for one who had been put under it.
Kane was wondering if God understood the way it was for men like him who could only fight the rights and wrongs of this world with the weapons they had around them, when he realized it was silent around him and men were looking his way.
The preacher repeated his question.
Yes, Kane replied, there would be a stone. Noonan had volunteered to pay a man to carve one, something that baffled him when Noonan made the offer.
The hands took turns filling in the grave. One came to Kane with a small, carved, wooden box.
“This was all the papers he had, Sheriff,” Ed Jackson said. Jackson, an older man than Ferguson, was foreman for now until the ranch settled itself. “Thought you might see something here we didn’t.”
There was nothing. Two letters from a year ago from a friend in Colorado. Bills of sale for his horse and saddle. A loop of rawhide. Something . . . he handed the papers to Jackson and dug his finger in the gap between the side and bottom of the box. Jackson dug out his pocket knife and handed it to Kane, who pried out the object.
A flattened, misshapen lump of metal fell to the ground. Kane picked it up. It wasn’t a bullet; it was part of one, or something that could have been one.
“He ever get shot?”
“Not on our ranch.”
“Mind if I keep this?” he asked, frowning.
“Suit yourself,” said Jackson. “Boys and I aren’t staying in town. Miz Rachel isn’t easy out there with half a crew.”
Kane was happy to hear that. Riders nursing their emotions after a burial sounded like nothing but trouble for a sheriff who had other things he wanted to do.
“Tell her I said hello, and I am sorry for her troubles out there.”
“She had a message for you,” Jackson said. “She said if they send you, she understands. Don’t know what it means, but nothing means nothing these days. Me and the boys will be waitin’ to hear from you about who gets to pay for killin’ Clem and killin’ Jared. Sooner or later, a ranch has to take care of its own.”
On that note, Jackson collected the rest of the hands, and they were soon riding out. Kane could feel himself relax. It was normal to figure that whoever was threatening the ranch was someone who was an outsider. What he wondered was whether or not that was also true.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The saloons had muted themselves for the funeral. No piano jangled off-key as he walked back down Rakeheart’s main street. Death did that. Give it an hour, though, once the dust from the graveyard was off their shoes and the image of the coffin was out of their minds, and they would be louder than ever.
He strolled along, devoid of purpose for the moment. He needed to find out more about the Company Riders. He needed to learn more about all of it. Tomorrow. His missions for Sherman were one thing. There was always the chance he would be discovered. Real life seemed like something other people lived. Now he was living it, and it seemed like he was still an onlooker.
“Sheriff!”
It was Gallagher, the saddle-maker who had wanted him to know more about the Company Riders but had quickly been shushed.
“Mr. Gallagher.”
“Gordon,” the man said. “No need to be formal. Is it true the Wilkins woman may have murdered another man?”
Kane started to get angry, then realized that would do no good. The men of Rakeheart were what they were.
“Could be, but I don’t think so,” he replied. “She’s not that good a shot to have killed Clem, and it seems hard to believe two different people used rifles to kill men out there.”
“Who then?”
“Trying to figure that. Never met a man who didn’t step on somebody’s toes, but everybody tells me that’s who Ferguson was.”
“That’s because the one he stepped on is dead,” said Gallagher. “Come in the shop and we’ll talk.”
A saddle shop had a wonderful smell of leather. There was about enough room for three people in the place what with all the saddles and other leather goods propped on wooden stands.
Kane inspected the work as Gallagher excused himself, went into the back, and emerged moments later in less formal clothes than he wore to the funeral.
“You are a craftsman, Gordon,” Kane said. It was true. The workmanship was as good as anything Kane had seen anywhere, even in San Antonio.
Gordon happily brushed aside the compliment.
“Don’t like talking on the street,” he said. “Always someone listening.”
Kane waited.
“Wilkins was as quiet a man as a man could be until, oh, sometime around snowfall last year. I don’t know why, but he started pushing hard to become part of the town council we have. Now, we like to listen to everyone, but when a man suddenly starts thinking the whole town should listen to him, that’s not right. He had some different ideas, and he did not like it when anyone disagreed with him.”
Gallagher stopped. Footsteps came close, then receded as the figure of a man passed the window of the shop.
“Ferguson and he started drifting apart. No secret Ferguson thought Rachel Wilkins was some kind of queen; maybe that was it. In spring, they all but had a fist fight in the shop here. Wilkins had ordered a fancy, expensive saddle—cost too much even if I say so, but if he wanted it, I was going to make it—and Ferguson was in the shop while we were talking about it. He was mad at Wilkins for spending money and time on things other than the ranch. There was something in their talk, like a threat. They got right up chest to chest arguing, and I was sure it was going to get worse, but then Wilkins came to his senses and realized they weren’t alone and stormed out.”
“What happened then?”
“Ferguson said something about some man and told me to be sure I forgot the whole thing. Don’t think I saw him more than once or twice after. Wilkins, next time he saw me, tried to pass it off that Ferguson was interested in his wife. He was, of course, but not in any wrong way. He was too good a man. He could have made that place hum.”
“Was Wilkins a good rancher?”
“Fair,” said the saddle-maker. “Did a good job of building the spread, but he didn’t seem to be—oh, I don’t know the word—didn’t seem to care as much about it moving up and growing lately. He acted angry at the world, as though something didn’t come out right for him, but he never said what. I know he made the rest think he was going to sell one month, then take it all back the next. No one really knew what he was thinking. The widow? There was no point in even trying to ask her! It could be that he stopped running it properly because he knew he was going to sell. Wish I knew.”
The door opened. A lean man, gray in his beard with measuring eyes, walked in the shop. He scanned Kane with particular interest.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Washburn,” Gallagher said in his customer-pleasing tone.
“Not sure I’ve met your friend.”
“Sheriff Kane. Link Washburn.”
Kane could see Washburn had no intention of offering his hand. The name. The name.
“Chad’s pa.”
“I am that. You shot at my son.”
Gallagher moved away.
“Killed his boot dead. I did that. Boy was a bit full of spirits and bein’ young, sir, and it seemed like the best and fastest way to end it before he got himself in trouble. Ther
e were four fellas, all a little drunk and all a little wild, sir, and a woman and her kids. Nobody got hurt worth talking about. ’Spose I could have arrested them for being stupid, but ain’t a jail big enough to hold everyone charged with that, and I’d be in the cell with them. Bein’ a sheriff, that would be embarrassin’. Everybody said he’s a good boy who gets too wild. Usually life’s the cure for that.”
“Ever raise a boy without a mother, Kane?”
“Nope, but from what I see, it’s like riding a wild horse with your hands tied—a lot of falls and a lot of surprises. Can’t be easy, or it would come out right more than it does.”
“A fact. Chad’s mother passed when he was nine. Boy was never the same after.”
“Sorry there, sir. Nothing personal. Nothing mean in him; he’s wild. He comes to town, I have no quarrel with him. Sometimes a man grows up better when he lets all his stupid out when he’s young. Maybe your boy is one of those men. Hope for him that’s so; only a boy, sir, and I am sorry he lost his mom. A woman does things a man never figures out he was supposed to do.”
Kane extended a hand. Washburn took it.
“Now, Sheriff, I might see you later, but this man keeps taking longer to make me a saddle than it did for the cows to live that provided the leather, and I got business to attend to. So, if you will excuse us?”
A visibly relieved Gallagher emerged from wherever he had fled as Kane left the shop to return to the blazing sun of a Wyoming afternoon in Rakeheart.
“Hope you don’t mind eggs,” Mary Ellen Pierce said as he sat at the Last Chance for supper. “We had a stash of ’em because the chickens went wild laying, and they were going to go bad soon.”
Kane waved off her concern. He was eating every day, more than once a day, and sleeping indoors. Some men had a lot more. Lots of nights he had experienced a lot less. He asked the woman about the two dead men at the Wilkins ranch.
She did not have much sense of Wilkins and Ferguson. Ferguson almost never ate there, and Wilkins came only a few times when he had his wife and children with him.
“I think they had troubles,” she said. “I know that Rachel didn’t like town. Being an Indian, I guess I can see that because people shot her looks as though she was one of the wild ones, but they tried to be happy with their children. The girl they have, the dark one, she never smiled. In my experience, children like that come from a home where there is nothing to smile about. Tom and I always feed all the ranchers’ children when their families come to town. We enjoy the children, and we do not have any of our own. The Wilkins children were well-behaved, Sheriff. There was a shadow on the older girl, though. We could not get her to talk. I expected that she would change with time, but she only came in a few times, and then she stopped coming to town at all. Shame.”
When he asked her about the Company Riders, she came closer and spoke with quiet urgency.
“Sheriff, you look like a nice man, and I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s something I don’t ever talk about, and I would thank you never to mention it here again, because there is nothing good that happens to people who make loose talk about those people.”
She stepped back, forced a smile, and walked through a doorway to where the cooking was done.
Supper was most clearly over. Kane walked around the street a while to show the town he was as alert as any town could want its sheriff to be, then once the sun was tucked away behind the jagged edge of the far-distant mountains to the west, he went to the stable. He needed a few minutes away from people.
Tecumseh was alone. He saddled the stallion and rode up to the flat-topped hill where he had sat on the day he rode into Rakeheart.
He could see the trail east toward where the Company Riders were supposedly holed up. It was dim enough that he could not see the broken country that would be down that way, but men who lived the way he was told they did always found it. To the southeast was the railroad. There must be badlands between the rails and the flatlands where a gang could hide. He’d have to find them someday, if for no other reason than to get to them before they got to him. If they were everything he was told, that day would come sooner or later.
He looked north toward where the Wilkins ranch sat, far out of sight. Flat enough ground for a long ways if a man wanted to build a railroad or one of those macadamized roads they had back East. To the distant east and far-off west, the ground was broken into hills that would lead to real mountains. Then there was Rakeheart.
The town looked insubstantial on the plains, as though if it blew away in a north wind, the prairie would roll on and never know it had been there. Yet all those folks were willing to put everything they had into that purely because it was the place where they stopped for this reason or that and now invested their hopes and dreams in this little place. Funny thing, towns. Tecumseh’s head moved. He’d been speaking out loud to the horse again. Funny thing, people.
He lingered. Land to him had always been a place to stand on. Nothing more. Here, he had a sense of it as something vaster, deeper. Not his; not worth dying for; but bigger and wider and able to fill a man with something that felt like hope.
A gun fired from town. Enough dreaming. He waited. No answering shot. Most likely nothing, but it was time to go.
The tendrils of responsibility were closing in on him, and he admitted the reluctant truth to Tecumseh as—with a glance back at where a long streak of orange was starting to outline the horizon—they rode back to the world where men fumbled and broke all they held dear, bemoaned the loss, and rose the next day to do it again.
Kane was not overly fond of thinking. He’d survived by instinct, reacting to what took place around him. Plans were like fog—they never lasted. But as he walked up and down the streets of Rakeheart upon his return, he knew he needed to map out a strategy that would deal with the two murders he now had to solve.
The town leaders were like gamblers who always kept their hole card hid. Noonan was out for himself. Most of the people of Rakeheart were more focused on survival than anything else. And Rachel? That was a lake of a depth he could not measure. Whatever went on behind her eyes stayed there.
The Company Riders seemed to be the link connecting everything. Maybe when the moon was no longer bright enough to light up the night, it would be time to pay a call and see what there was to know. A little spying was good for a man—especially one who wanted to live.
“Sheriff!” The running barefoot boy burst through the door of the Last Chance, where Kane was having his first coffee of the day. “You got to come quick! It’s my ma and pa. He’s gonna kill her.”
Kane took one huge gulp, picked up his hat, and followed.
The boy ran toward one of the small shacks on the edge of the town. Kane could hear the sounds of the fight. Fight? Mostly a man yelling and a woman screaming.
“Stay here,” he told the boy, a thin blond kid of about ten, dressed in a pair of thin, home-made pants and a shirt he’d grow into someday.
The door was slightly ajar. The woman was at one end of the room, cowering behind a rough-hewn table that was on its side. He pushed the door wide.
A wild-haired man’s raving condemnation of the woman was checked by Kane’s presence.
“What do you want?” he screamed. The shack stunk of liquor; the man was flushed with his hair askew and a day or three’s growth of whiskers on his face.
“Sheriff. Got a complaint that someone was disturbing the peace,” Kane said, trying to keep his voice flat. “Got to come with me and explain this. Don’t mean to interrupt, but I got to do my job.”
“She call you?” he said throwing some earthenware object that shattered against the far wall of the shack.
“Nope. I heard you a mile away, and it sounded like a mule in pain,” said Kane, swiftly losing patience as the woman whimpered.
“She poured out my liquor!”
“Guess she missed some from the looks of you,” remarked Kane. “Sorry. No time to talk. Time to go.”
The man w
as not planning to comply with any suggestion. “She burned my food.”
“Well, friend, I burn mine all the time, and you don’t see me throwing things at me, now, do you?”
The drunken man was trying to comprehend that remark when Kane stepped fully into the house.
The man reached down and grabbed the shotgun that had been propped against the wall. “You’re her man friend, ain’t you? You sneak in when I’m not around. One more step and I’ll blow you both to pieces.”
“There are days when that might be a relief, friend, but for now I got work to do. Put it down and come along. I’ll find you a nice place to sleep, and when you wake up and your head stops hurtin’, we can talk about it.”
“William . . .”
The woman’s head briefly poked above the table. Kane had time to see the black puffy bruise on one side of her face before the fool fired.
As the pellets of bird shot rattled off the wall around the hole made by the bulk of the shot, Kane moved swiftly and mercilessly, pulling his gun and raking its barrel across the side of the man’s head as he lashed out viciously before the second blast erupted. The man looked more surprised than anything else until the second blow sent him staggering.
Kane knocked the weapon to the dirt floor and waited. Hate to beat up a man with his boy watching, Kane thought.
The man, who topped Kane by three inches and twenty pounds, was not done fighting. He shouted something incoherent as he lurched at Kane before one final blow from the heavy butt of Kane’s revolver sent him to the floor.
“Pa!” The boy was at his father’s side.
Kane went to the woman, gun still in hand. “Ma’am?”
The table had scars from the shotgun blast. The woman had two fingers hit by shot, but the shot only left small bruises. Her face was another matter. The blackened marks around her left eye were matched by red ones around her left cheek, which were swelling rapidly. Kane called the boy.
“You pa’s gonna hurt, but he ain’t dead,” he explained in between gasps. “Had to hit him hard quick to get this over before he got real hurt.” Turning back to the woman, who had told him her name was Mae, he asked, “There anything close to a doctor here?”
