by Rusty Davis
Then he felt the present return. Moving only his eyes, he scanned the horizon. Across the way, there was a man on horseback who had emerged from the tree line. Watching. It had been ten years, but he knew the limits. That had been Bar C land; they had grazed horses almost a mile beyond that ridge. Whatever the women called their spread, the land should have been theirs now. He could picture it from what Jessie said. Double J and Lazy F like a pair of jaws clamping together, chewing up the old Bar C until it was gone.
He stood up, and for the first time since before Texas, he felt a flash of purpose. Maybe they would gobble it up. Maybe not.
Rebecca Lewis was trying to make sense of things as she watched Aunt Jess bustle to make stew. “Aunt Jess, I don’t like this.”
“The stew?”
“No, Aunt Jess! This Carrick rider. I feel sorry for him that his home is gone but how do you know he won’t want it back and throw us off? Why did you tell him you didn’t have some piece of paper? You don’t even know if he is who he says he is. Did he seem to want to even look around the house? No! Trouble. That’s all we’ve had the last year or two.” She veered into a train of thought she always rejected. “Maybe we should sell and go someplace else, Aunt Jess. I never thought of this as somebody else’s home before us and I guess it will be somebody else’s after us. I thought this was ours forever, Aunt Jess. I know we can’t hold off Double J forever without something that breaks our way for once instead of Jackson Jones winning all the time. Things are coming to a boil, Aunt Jess, and I don’t know how it will end anymore. I don’t want to end like that Carrick man with no home and no place and nobody cares. I guess I’m scared. Everything I feel inside is all mixed up, bumping into each other. Carrick. What do you think about him?”
Jessie Lewis paused. She had not recalled Reb ever showing much interest in a man past the moment of telling him to go away. Then again, Carrick’s arrival was hardly normal.
“I won’t tell you not to worry, child, because I worry, too. Some folks, child, are born to attract trouble. I think this Carrick man is one of them. Man’s got a lot of marks on his face, arms, and hands like he was in a lot of fights. Busted nose, too. Most of the men here have been cowed by those Crowleys, let alone stand up to them and kill a couple. Double J won’t let that rest.” She sighed and brushed a strand of gray hair from her brow. “That man’s been drifting six years. If he wanted to be here when the war ended, he’d have come home. There’s a lot to the story we don’t know. He could be on the run; he could be anything. The best we can hope for, child, is that he will drift on by. And, girl, I brought you up to be honest. You can’t pretend to own a ranch you don’t own when someone turns up who does. As for sellin’, I don’t know, girl. Double J offered hardly anything; Lazy F offers more, but there’s something up with Francis Oliver. Something sly, I think. What we need is a couple of hands that won’t run at the first sign of a storm. You really want to sell, Reb? You?”
The girl shook her head. “Think Carrick might stay on and work? We could use a man like him.”
“I thought you didn’t like him?”
Reb blushed. “I didn’t say that, Aunt Jess. We need . . . I think . . . I don’t know!”
She did not see her Aunt Jess’s smile. “I don’t think he’s likely to stay long, girl. I think the work that one does is with a gun. I suppose we can see what happens. My Good Book says the Lord works in very mysterious ways, child, but never to lose faith. Maybe we should trust that somehow the Lord will bring us through this, and get back to making dinner.”
Reb could not help but smile. Since she was a child, Aunt Jess’s answer to everything that was wrong had been the Good Book and a dose of hard work. She admitted she didn’t have much to complain about, and a look at the world around her told her that everybody else’s ways were not that much better.
The heat of the day was fading as she saw his silhouette approaching in the distance. He rode loosely in the saddle, as though it had been his home for many years. Reb pushed the glossy black hair back off of her shoulders and let it blow in the early evening breeze off of the distant mountains. She’d spent more time avoiding men than talking to them. Aunt Jess went through a spell when Reb was nineteen or so where she fussed over Reb’s appearance and seemed determined to bump into every cowboy on the range in an effort to get Reb married. Some were interested. Reb wasn’t. She’d lived a very free life with Aunt Jess, away from all the strictures society—even frontier society—put on women. She understood that in every family somebody had to cook, but could not imagine a life without roping and riding—let alone living all the time in pounds of heavy material that they called proper dresses that weighed down a body. Give her a horse and gun any day. Men didn’t give her the respect she thought she deserved, but she was as good a shot as any of them—better because she was always sober and too many men were drunks. Pistols were a little heavy for her, but she was fast and accurate with a rifle. Carrick was one of the few who seemed to recognize that, although, truth be told, he all but laughed at her when she pointed the gun at him. For some reason that made her smile.
For a moment, she wondered how all of this appeared to him. It would be like her going back to Tennessee after all her time away and trying to set up life in the house that someone else had been living in since they fled back in 1861. Nothing as it should be. For a fleeting second she wondered what he thought of her. She wasn’t really sure why it mattered, but it did. She understood she was not what the boys called pretty, although some of the boys called anything female that very word. Her eyebrows were strong and full; her face reflected a strong character more than sweetness. She had a small nose Jess used to call a button that still managed to get broken when she fell off the roof chasing that cat. Her nose never set straight. One cowboy teased her about it. Only one. When he got up, and could talk, he said something about a kick like a mule.
Reb and the world had been fighting each other so long it seemed like the way it was. She didn’t ask for mercy and didn’t give it, either. In Wyoming, the strong survived. She might have been small, but she was strong.
While she was lost in thought, Carrick had ridden close. He tipped his hat and dismounted, watching her face look past him. “Them biscuits out ridin’ the range somewhere?” There looked to be a smile on his face; he seemed different, relaxed. The rough edges had been sanded down. “C’mon, Miss Reb, let’s eat this dinner you been cookin’ while watching the wind blow.”
As they walked into the house, she sized him up. Medium height, lean like all cowboys. There were lines in his tanned face from the weather, the war, and something more. Sadness underlaid toughness. He was trail-rough and shaggy with brown hair that curled out from under the battered black flat-topped hat and a beard to match, raggedy cut like a man on his own. There were a couple of white marks on his face like scars that never healed. She guessed he was maybe somewhere around ten years older than she was, maybe less. Hard to tell. Unlike horses, men didn’t let you check their teeth to see how old they were. Whatever road he came up on, it was a hard one.
“Wondered if I was going to have to eat all this myself,” Aunt Jess scolded as they entered.
“Long time away, ma’am. You can recall what the range looked like, but not how it feels. Wind don’t blow like this anywhere else. Hot or cold, sometimes both together, but always wild. Gets inside you and it scrubs you clean. Appreciate you waitin’ for me.”
“You had better eat. Your food’s getting cold,” Reb interrupted gruffly. She, too, loved the wildness of the wind and knew what he meant. It got inside her soul until whatever had been wrong in the world was put back into its proper perspective. She didn’t know anyone else felt it.
They hadn’t had much like dinner in a while. There were always chores and food was something to hurry up and chew before the next thing went wrong.
They sat down. Reb looked over at Carrick. “Uh, in this house, it’s a rule and it’s the way we live, we always pray before we eat, um, that is
, when we actually sit down and eat.” Challenge flared in her face. “You want to say it?”
Facing armed men was nothing like the panic racing through Carrick. He had last seen church years back. He could not imagine what would be appropriate. Words said while buryin’ folks was one thing. They’d done it enough in the war. This was a world of different. He had no idea what God would be saying to him after the last two years and what happened in Texas. Then the girl looked up at him as the silence started to get embarrassing.
“Um,” he stammered. “Um, God, it’s been, uh, a long time since I been here and along the trail maybe we forgot to think much about You, and all, and probably the way it came out we wouldn’t be here if You didn’t think about us. Um, I know You got my kin with You and I guess that’s best even if it don’t feel that way right now. And thank You for keeping Reb and her Aunt Jess here safe ’cuz things like that only happen if You say so, and hold all these folks in Your hand—and thank You for lettin’ us have food this day. When you don’t always have it you miss it. And keep Beast safe. Horses don’t deserve to ever suffer. Amen.”
He looked up at her quickly to see if the prayer—as bad as it was—was acceptable. Her eyes were closed. She opened them, looked over at him, and smiled. “Eat,” she said. He did.
Jessie Lewis tried to remember the things Josh Carrick had said about the man at her table. Wild and headstrong. Something more. There was some kind of family problem, but she could not remember it. So much had happened and it was so long ago that she could remember pieces of memories, echoes of emotions, but not what actually had happened. It could come in its own time. She found herself watching the man less and Reb more. Her niece covertly watched the man throughout the meal, averting her eyes when he looked her way. Reb was a combination of the daughter and sister she never had. Never would, she told herself, now that she was near to forty and men only looked at younger women. The girl had the stoutest defenses of anyone she ever met when it came to people. Reb had brought home an endless array of wild animals to heal. Some made it; some were in the land next to Carrick’s kin. She could ride horses five times her size; never met one she didn’t like. But men? Jessie Lewis had been fifteen when she was married. Reb was now 21, more than of age, but nowhere near ready to settle down. Rich, poor, tall, short—she had no interest in any of them, and barely noticed them. Oddly enough, this stray rider seemed to have gotten closer to her in a couple of hours than probably all the suitors combined over all their years in the territory. They looked to her like flint and tinder, but she could hope. She wasn’t going to live forever, and she knew that world could be lonely—and that for all the wild cowboys drifting through Wyoming, not many were men she wanted Reb to be seen with, let alone close to. She would keep an eye on them and see—and try to remember.
CHAPTER FOUR
Carrick spent the night by the fireplace on the floor. When the women had gone to the room they shared, he stayed up. He could not have slept. There was only one thing remaining from anything that had been inside the house when he was a kid—a horse he had carved for his uncle’s birthday. It wasn’t finished. He had been forced to leave for Omaha to join his regiment before it was fully completed, but he had given it to Uncle Josh anyhow even though the old man’s birthday had been weeks away. At least he knew his uncle had kept it.
Though the woman had rearranged the furniture, he could picture the way it had looked. Then there was the way it really was. The picture wasn’t one serene still image. It talked. It argued and fought and screamed secrets, and even before Carrick left, Uncle Josh was barely speaking to his brother, Sam, Carrick’s father. Carrick knew he was part of the trouble, but everyone had insisted it was nothing he had done.
His uncle had come the closest to telling him when he had arranged with Colonel Thayer for Carrick to march off with the First Nebraska Volunteers when they were mustered out to head East to fight in the Civil War. “Got to learn to make your own way in the world, son. I think of you as my son, like my own child. Understand, boy, it’s not who you come from that makes you what you are; it’s what you do. Make me proud, son!”
In the middle of vague ranch gossip that Uncle Josh had children before he was married, and since that gossip was usually connected with Carrick, Carrick left wondering the truth of the matter. It was not something he could have asked in a letter. Now, he would never know.
When dawn came, after Carrick’s sleepless night, the women were by turns horrified and downright angry at his plans, but Carrick had always lived straight up when he took on the world. He wasn’t changing now.
“Your family cemetery is full,” Reb had spat out. “You’ll get buried on the range.”
“Good a place as any,” he had replied placidly, wondering how a girl like that ever expected to find a husband if all she did was argue. Then again, she was awfully pretty when she did; really came alive. Of course, it could have been concern, but it sure didn’t sound that way. “Don’t you worry, none, Miss Reb. Too fine a day for buryin’ folks and I reckon I know what I’m doing. If I got to worry about some Double J back-shooter while I’m still trying to figure out my own self, it’s more than my poor head can handle. Heard too much. I want to have a talk with this Jackson Jones man everybody makes sound like a huge and all-mighty king.”
Aunt Jess said nothing. Men did what they did and never said why. Reasoning with them was like talking to cattle. Carrick had told them he wanted to learn about Jackson Jones and Double J because they had been very clear that Double J was the biggest threat to their land. He would certainly learn.
The old Johnson place had changed so much Carrick did not recognize it. Morning dimness hid him as he watched the ranch wake up. Two bunkhouses meant size. Not many men around meant a lot out riding. He’d need to be more careful on the trails. The ranch had changed. Of course. The new red-painted house stood two stories tall and looked about twice as big as anything he’d ever seen before. He watched a man walk from it to the small one-room old house—not much more than cabin—that was older than Carrick’s memory. The size of the man, and his clear ownership of everything he examined on his walk—meant he could only be the fabled and feared Jackson Jones. Jones had visibly looked irritated upon leaving the house, but as he walked to the smaller house, his walk seemed stronger, more confident, as if leaving behind something bad and heading for something better. Carrick watched a while longer as the man walked to the smaller building, opened the front door, and let it shut with a slam. Men rode out. One stayed by the oak near the gate. Using the rough ground as his cover, Carrick walked Beast to a draw and tied him to a stunted oak. The horse didn’t like it.
“I’ll be back, horse,” Carrick said soothingly, the same tone he used on the long, slow trek from Kansas when the thunder rolled and the high winds blew. Beast quieted, but watched Carrick closely.
He’d grown up on the land. Memory served him well. All he needed was a little luck. Anyone going into a den when the snakes were wrathy needed it. He’d always assumed it would be there; if not, he’d not know very long that it wasn’t.
The back door showed signs of use. Somebody chewed and spit there. Worth a try. Powerful men don’t always worry about locks. With no idea if the other side held a gun, he pushed it open, pulling his own weapon and leveling it at the bear of a man sitting behind a massive desk plunked down in the center of the room. For a big man, he was fast. He was turning to see who intruded into his lair while reaching for a fancy shotgun that lay across the desk.
“I wouldn’t,” Carrick said calmly. “Both hands where I can see them.”
The man put two huge hands on the desk.
“S’pose you’re Jackson Jones.”
The giant of a man grunted derisively. “If you broke into my office here to tell me that, cowboy, you must have been kicked by a horse. You some gunslinger from Lazy F? Can’t believe that miserable old skinflint would have parted with a nickel to hire you, but it would be like him to let someone else do his dirty work.
You might kill me, but you’ll never get out of here alive.”
“Not here to kill you. Would have done it by now if I was. Understood? I’m only here to have us a conversation.”
Jones nodded. Carrick closed the door and moved into what had been the Johnsons’ house, which had been stripped of all furniture except for the desk, which Carrick saw allowed the man sitting there to see what happened outside, a couple of chairs near it, and a table and chair by the massive fireplace that filled up most of one wall. A crude map was across another wall by the main door. Across the way, a row of large, wide, curtainless, unshuttered windows looked over the land, giving the room its light. This was the den of a man who wanted nothing of the soft things of life cluttering up his mind or blocking his view of his empire. Whatever the big house was, this was the place where he was the master.
“Name’s Carrick.”
“I heard that name the other day for the first time. Not much good.”
“Your boys wanted to push things.”
“My men get paid to push things.”
“Like the Lewis women at the old Bar C?”
“They hire you? Get paid first, son, because they got nothin’.”
“Nope. Bar C was my family’s range before the war. I’m back now.”
Jones looked at Carrick with new interest, clearly surprised that the rider before him who had killed his men had a connection to the valley. While he studied Carrick, Carrick studied Jones. The rancher was well over six feet tall, muscle starting to soften but he was still a man who looked like he could break a tree in half. There was loose skin along the lines of rock-hard jutting jaw; maybe age and maybe sickness. Gray hair marked his temples. His eyes truly defined his face; they were gray. They flashed from underneath bushy eyebrows that danced in anger as his gravel voice boomed in the confines of the room. Jones finished his inspection before Carrick finished his.
