“Let’s get this over with.” The sheriff touched his spurs to his horse and flicked the reins lightly. Howard did the same. At the gate to the main road, they turned left and headed toward Repton and the X-Bar-L ranch.
Tucker seamed his mouth shut. Axel wasn’t going to like this.
CHAPTER
5
Chief Black Otter listened to his young son, sitting with him before a fire in his lodge. A ragged ribbon of scar slashed a crescent from eyebrow to chin, a souvenir from a war party many years before, when a tough old Sioux warrior split Black Otter’s cheek open to the bone.
The soft white elk skin he wore was beaded with intricate designs, the leather fringe hanging from his sleeves nearly a foot long, a mark of status. Both moccasins and shirt glistened with embroidery of shiny red and yellow porcupine quills.
He’d been chief for twenty years, a fighting chief, and when he chose to wear it, his war bonnet hung below his hips. Black Otter stroked his upper lip thoughtfully, listening to Two Leggings telling him about the school, about Bart Axel’s argument with Sullivan on Christmas Day, and his threat to close New Hope.
“Who this Light Eyes you call Sullivan?” Black Otter asked in Crow.
“He live at New Hope. Miss Molly likes him. He work all day. Where he came from, they say he was like law. He hang men who steal horses.”
Black Otter stiffened. “He hang Indians?”
Two Leggings shook his head. “No, Father. He hang white men.”
“Good.”
Crow were the best horse thieves in the world. Or used to be. But times were changing for them. The buffalo were disappearing, the great herds cut in two by the railroad. The last time Black Otter took a hunting party out, they’d ridden for half a moon without seeing a single herd. Instead, they found piles of buffalo hides stacked high as a man beside the tracks, killed by white buffalo hunters. Sickened by the slaughter of the great herds – a slaughter undertaken to drive the Indians out – B lack Otter ordered every pile they found set afire.
Fifteen years before, on the saddest day of his life, he’d made his mark on the treaty paper – a paper he could not read – and gave his solemn word the Crow would stay within boundaries drawn by the white man. But twice the blue soldiers came with their wagons and moved his people. Twice Black Otter had led a line of Crows that stretched behind him. Weeping women rode horses dragging travois loaded with tipis and household goods. Sullen braves and husbands rode silently alongside.
The government promised him the move to the Agency near Repton and bordering New Hope would be the last. They gave him another piece of paper. But from the very beginning, Black Otter knew the boundaries on the paper were wrong. Part of the land the orphanage claimed as theirs belonged to the Crow Nation. Five square miles on New Hope’s northern border was Crow land, a chimney-shaped tract, over three thousand acres of holy land.
Miss Molly read the treaty and said he was right. Twice she sent him with his paper to Fort Keogh. And each time he came back with promises that confused him and more papers with writing on it that meant nothing to him.
The morning after his last trip to Fort Keogh, the chief showed up at New Hope. Beside him stood his two little sons, Red Cloud and Two Leggings, all three of them wearing buckskins. Knowing not one word of English, both boys crowded next to their father, big eyed and silent.
“You teach them read and write you language?” Black Otter asked Miss Molly, his lips tight with embarrassment.
“Of course I will. And they are very welcome.” Molly had smiled and taken the boys and their father inside.
Now, in Black Otter’s lodge, Two Leggings continued speaking, pulling his father back to the present.
“Iron Hair no like Sullivan. No like Crow,” Two Leggings said in English. “Iron Hair say we bad. He tell Miss Molly stop teaching us or he close school.”
Two Leggings’s small face clouded. His dark eyes met his father’s. “What ‘red scum’ mean?”
A muscle flicked in Black Otter’s cheek. “Iron Hair call you that?”
The boy nodded. “And Sullivan throw him out.”
“What then?”
The boy shrugged. “Iron Hair say Sullivan is dead man. Why he say that? Sullivan not dead.”
Not yet, Black Otter thought.
He rose and pulled a heavy buffalo robe around his shoulders. Ruffling his son’s hair, he walked Two Leggings to the door of the lodge. With a faint smile he said, “Send Little Turtle to me.”
The chief went back to the fire and waited for his best warrior.
DECEMBER 27, 1884
When Luke started out the next morning, the sky was a hazy, milky gray, deepening to a dirty lead color at the horizon.
Cold air sifted in around his collar, around his wrists, and up his sleeves. Snow coming. He could smell it. The fullness in the air filled his nostrils and coated the back of his throat. Six to ten inches by morning, for sure.
Riding loose and free in the saddle, he headed out to the open range. He could ride like this for hours, then swing off easily without so much as a kink in a muscle and get on with whatever he’d come to do.
He wasn’t more than a mile from the house when he caught a quick darting from the corner of his eye, like the flash of a deer in the woods, a blur of movement, there and gone almost before it registered in his mind. And then later, as he waded Bugle across a half-frozen stream, the soft crunch of a pinecone sounded behind him. He slipped his Winchester rifle from the saddle sling and cocked it. Tense, alert, he hipped around, scanning the line of cottonwoods and underbrush along the bank.
Fox? Bear?
Or Indian? The little hairs lifted on the back of his neck.
Luke sat motionless, scarcely breathing, straining to listen. Nothing but the quiet gurgle of water on the rocks at his feet. Yet the eerie feeling of watching eyes persisted. Whatever or whoever was out there was as still as he. A few minutes later, Luke clucked his tongue and took Bugle into the stream.
New Hope’s range began a mile from the house, stretching south to the foothills of the Red Lion Mountains, the boundary they shared with the Crow reservation. To the west, toward Billings, the land was open pasture, a snowy, empty plain that stretched for miles. In the spring it would be belt-high with sweet blue grama grass, stretching as far as he could see, waving in the wind like a wheat field.
Half a dozen small streams crisscrossed it. As far back as he could remember, New Hope had got low on water only once. The other herds seemed to know it and kept drifting down. Years before, New Hope had fenced it off to keep out the other brands – mainly Axel’s. If they hadn’t, X-Bar-L steers would have grazed New Hope’s grass to the roots.
Overhead, a couple of buzzards spiraled lazily. His eyes skimmed the empty pastures. New Hope’s herd was smaller than he ever remembered, which meant he had to sit down with Molly and the books. In the summer, the herd ran around fifteen hundred head, she’d told him, and said they sold five hundred steers annually in good times. He’d thought he’d find maybe six or seven hundred cows being wintered, but he saw nothing like that many out here. Could be reasons for that, he told himself, like winter kill or disease. He hoped so, but deep down, something seemed wrong. It niggled at him, wouldn’t let him alone – the same feeling he’d had in Lewistown when he discovered three percent of Granville Stuart’s herd had been stolen.
Luke flicked the reins and rode forward slowly, his eyes soaking in every detail. Under Bugle’s hooves, the frozen grass rustled like dry straw, and the farther he rode, the deeper the lines dug into his forehead. In several places, the fence was down, the wire trampled into the snow.
Near an outcropping of rock, Luke spotted another leaning post and a break in the wire. He wound the reins around the saddle horn and swung off. Squatting on his haunches, he picked up the strands of wire and shook his head. The fence wasn’t broken. It was cut.
Two more hours of fence riding disclosed nothing new. Oddly, despite the cut fence, he found n
ot one X-Bar-L cow on New Hope land. Was it possible Axel wasn’t involved? He headed home, his brain calculating, sorting the facts. If there was a thread of logic tying it all together somewhere, he hadn’t found it yet.
Before he was halfway home, snow began falling, big, thick flakes sticking immediately to everything they touched. Luke turned up the sheepskin collar on his jacket and tucked his chin in. He needed to talk to Scully Anders.
The barn, a big two-story structure with a gambrel roof and weather vanes, sat at the foot of a small slope, enclosed by a small corral and a fenced five-acre pasture. Scully was inside the barn mending a harness in one of the tack rooms.
Good man, Luke thought. New Hope was lucky to have him. Until Luke came back, he’d practically run the place, overseeing the help, keeping track of the cattle. It was he who bought the bulls, did the branding, ran the roundups. And it was Scully who told Molly when and how many boys he needed to help.
Luke had seen three of the older boys riding with Scully and the other men almost every day since he’d been back.
Growing up, he’d done the same, but it was more like training then, a part of their schooling. There had always been a cowboy around, someone to teach a gangly kid how to rope and shoot and break a horse. When they left there, every one of them could get a job on any ranch in the territory. But from what Luke had seen, most of the boys were cleaning barns and shoveling manure, mending fences. Nothing wrong with that, except it wasn’t training. That was yardman’s work. Molly wanted better for her boys.
He swung down and led Bugle inside the barn. In the dusky light, the pungent odor of manure and hay and animals clung, sweet-sour, in his nostrils. Head high, the big gray stood patiently while Luke unfastened the cinch, lifted off the heavy saddle, and threw it across a partition between two stalls. When he pulled the blanket off, a slight steam rose from the horse’s back.
“Mighty fine animal you got there,” Scully said, watching Luke rub the sweat and mud off the deep chest with a gunnysack. “What do you call him?”
“Bugle. He was part of my remuda at Stuart’s. Grant let me buy him when I left. I wasn’t about to leave him up there.” Luke grinned self-consciously, embarrassed to admit how much he liked his horse. Affectionately, he smoothed his hand down Bugle’s flank. The horse’s muscles rippled in response.
“He’s a big one – stallion, too – so how come you ain’t wearing spurs?” Scully asked.
“I don’t with him. He’s a sweet horse. Sometimes I think this critter reads my mind. Move over there.” Luke thumped the heavy shoulder out of the way.
Bugle swung his head around and glanced inquiringly at Luke, then did as he was told and hoofed sideways.
“Get him around a mare in season, and I bet you’ll wish you had spurs. Sure is a big one. If he was mine, I’d geld him, ’specially one that size.”
“I will if I have to, but I’d like a colt out of him first. I’ve been riding horses all my life, and he’s the smartest one I’ve ever had – the only one I’d ever trust. Twice one winter up at Stuart’s, we got caught in a blizzard and had to lie in the snow together. Bugle lay on his side, his back to the wind. I crawled between his legs against his belly, and threw a blanket over us. We kept each other warm until the storm passed.”
Scully’s eyebrows raised. “I never had one I’d do that with – never. Weren’t you afraid he’d roll on you?”
Luke shook his head. “I was more afraid of freezing to death.”
With long, brisk strokes, Luke began rubbing down the stallion’s powerful front legs, and Bugle came as close to purring as a horse ever could. “Where’s all the help gone to around here?” he asked.
“Ain’t but six cowhands here anymore,” Scully said. “Others kind of drifted off this past year. Most of them stayed long as they could, but the board’s cutting back on the money.”
“Who’s on the board this year?”
“Same ones as always: businessmen in Repton, the bank president, a preacher, and other stockmen who use this range, including Axel. They all donate to keep this place running.”
Under a battered brown cowboy hat, Scully’s face was wind-burned and roughened, his cheeks showing a stubble of beard beginning to gray. Forty-odd years of squinting into the sun had etched permanent crow’s-feet around his eyes. He held a black bridle rein, straightening it, smoothing it with the heel of his hand.
“I won’t leave, though. Food’s good and Molly needs me. New Hope’s as good as the next place, I reckon.”
“I’ve been riding fences. Some of them are down.” Luke watched Scully’s face closely for a reaction. “One of them was cut. You know anything about that?”
Scully’s eyes widened. “I don’t like that at all,” he said.
Luke continued to brush the horse. “After breakfast tomorrow, I’m going out to restring those lines. Can you give me a hand?”
“Sure, but there ain’t much bob wire left. I used most of it up in the fall.”
“Don’t need it. Got enough fixing to do with what’s already down. I want N-Bar-H cows off the range and back on New Hope property, where we can get a decent count of how many we got. Tell the others I’ll need them to work on cutting ours out next week.”
When he finished wiping Bugle down, he led him into a stall and threw in extra straw on the floor. “That burns me up,” he grunted, kicking the straw around. “Who you suppose cut our fence, anyway?”
“Hard to say. Three different stockmen besides Axel use the range now.” Scully raised his voice over the sound of Luke’s boots scuffing straw. “To tell you the truth, I wish you’d stick around.”
Luke nodded. “I am. For a while, at least. Molly asked me to stay.”
Scully laid the bridle aside and walked to the stall. He stood in the doorway, his face serious. “I’m glad to hear it.” Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Yesterday when I went up there, someone took a shot at me.”
Luke’s head snapped up in surprise. “Shot at you? Any idea why?”
“Trying to run me off, I guess.”
“Think they mistook you for me?”
Scully looked over sharply but didn’t answer.
Luke knew from his expression that the same thought had occurred to him, as well. “Don’t tell Molly till we find out what’s going on. She’s got enough on her mind right now.”
“Luke, I don’t mean to pry – and it makes no difference to me one way or the other – but some folks around here . . . well, they’re a little leery about you. They say you’re still part of Stuart’s group and you came down here hunting someone.”
Luke’s leg stopped mid-swing. Hands on his hips, he stared at Scully. “They think wrong. I work for New Hope now, no one else,” he said flatly. Inside, the cold feeling in his chest thawed a little more. That was someone else’s job now.
“Like I said – don’t matter to me either way.”
Luke slammed the door to Bugle’s stall and latched it. Anger gave way to uneasiness. A little despondent, he shook his head. No matter what he said or what he did, people made up their own minds about things. It was the same in Lewistown. People ask you to do things, and then they’re afraid of you when you do. Stiffly, he walked out of the barn and into the yard.
A loose shutter rapped against the side of the house in the wind. The storm must be moving in fast. A curtain of snow swirled across the corral, obliterating everything for a moment.
From the barn door, Scully watched the dark figure of his new boss fade, then reappear from the white whirlpool and track for the house. He heaved a sigh of relief. Whatever was wrong, that man would fix it.
A smile tugged at his lips. As a little boy, Luke had a mind of his own, always fighting, stuttering and fighting. Until he was twelve, he stuttered every time he got upset. Scully used to watch him barrel across the yard on those skinny legs of his and dive into a fistfight on the side of the loser just to even up the odds a bit.
On more than one occasion, Molly had caught him
out in the barn sneaking a smoke when he should’ve been in school. She’d marched him back to the classroom, stuttering and jumping, his ear pinched in her hand. But the next day, he’d be back out there again like it never happened. And so would she.
He outgrew the stuttering, but evidently nothing else.
Scully watched him cross the yard. New Hope needed someone hardheaded and tough enough to draw a little blood, if need be. A vigilante would fit every one of those. But was he or wasn’t he?
Scully turned and went back inside the barn, hoping he was.
Crossing the yard to the house, Luke ducked his head against the snow needling his face. In the three days he’d been back, he’d seen too many things he didn’t like. And now someone had taken a shot at Scully. His jaw tightened.
From inside the house came the shrill voice of one of the little girls.
Several times that afternoon, another girl, a bigger girl, had invaded his thoughts. A creamy cameo face and ginger hair swam through his imagination. Impatiently, he forced it away again. He wouldn’t waste his time with her. She wasn’t his type.
Sticking around New Hope had absolutely nothing to do with her, he told himself. Emily McCarthy was spoiled and stubborn and mouthy. Besides, she didn’t like him – and he didn’t like her, either.
He fumed to himself, remembering breakfast Christmas morning and yesterday morning and again this morning. Emily McCarthy had taken to acting like she was his big sister, cool and superior. Snooty. And she refused to look at him, absolutely would not meet his eyes. He couldn’t fight with her because she ignored him. A line of muscle pulsed in his jaw. He was a grown man, a ranch foreman; she was hardly more than a child. Despite the cold, the back of his neck warmed under his fur collar. Well, old Luke Sullivan gave as good as he got.
Right then and there he decided to treat Miss Emily Mc-Carthy with a brotherly indifference anytime he had to be around her – which was entirely too often to suit him.
Two at time, Luke took the steps to the back porch and crossed to the kitchen door. Stomping his feet, he batted his hat against his thigh to knock off the snow and then went on inside. The big kitchen was steamy and warm and bustling with the women getting supper on the table.
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