Wolf Shadow (Wind River Book 3)

by James Reasoner

  "I'm sure you'll make a go of it," Simone told her encouragingly.

  Polly nodded and said, "Thank you, Mrs. McKay. Now, if you'll sign the deed and tell me where to find our land, we'll pick up a few more supplies and head on out there."

  Simone frowned. "You intend to settle the land now?"

  "Of course," Polly said, sounding surprised. "Wasn't that what I just said? We need to get a cabin built and begin preparing the ground for planting."

  Cole pushed himself away from the wall. "I think what Mrs. McKay means, Mrs. Dillon, is that it might be better to wait until spring to do all that. It's the middle of winter, and out here that's a rough season."

  "We had bad winters back in Illinois, too, Marshal." Polly's chin lifted. "I'm sure they can't be much worse here in Wyoming Territory."

  Cole wasn't so certain of that. He said, "Don't let this mild spell fool you. We'll have more snow, probably some worse blizzards than the one that came through here last week."

  "If we wait until spring to even get started," Polly said stubbornly, "the planting will be done late. We'd run the risk of not having a good crop our first year. That could ruin us, Marshal. Besides, if we don't go ahead and settle on the land, where would we stay until spring?"

  "We could find a place for you at the hotel or at a boardinghouse," Simone said.

  "And what would we use to pay for the room?"

  "Something could be arranged—"

  Polly shook her head. "I thank you for the offer, Mrs. McKay, but I won't be beholden any more than I already am. My boy Andrew is a hard worker, as am I. We can put up a cabin, and until we do, we'll live in our wagon like we have been for the past couple of months."

  Cole saw there wasn't going to be any arguing with this woman. Once she had her head set on something, she wasn't going to be talked out of it. Besides, it was her right to do as she saw fit for her and her family.

  Simone didn't look convinced, but Cole caught her eye and lifted his shoulders in a minuscule shrug. She knew him well enough by now to read the message in the gesture. With a sigh, she said to Polly, "Very well. I'll have one of my assistants take you out to the land. And I wish you the very best of luck, Mrs. Dillon."

  She didn't add, You're going to need it, but Cole could read it in her eyes anyway.

  Polly stood up, shook hands with Simone again, and tucked away the land deed that Simone gave her. Cole said, "I'll walk you back to the store."

  "Thank you, Marshal. You and Mrs. McKay have both been very helpful."

  Cole didn't know how grateful she would be once she realized what a demanding task lay in front of her. But for now he just nodded and escorted her out of the building and back down the street to the emporium.

  Yancy Rowlett had been waiting on the boardwalk, trying to look inconspicuous and failing miserably. He followed them as they walked along Grenville Avenue, prompting more nervous glances from Polly.

  Cole didn't figure he could blame her. She had already been through a great deal, from what he had heard about the family's journey west, and by now she was probably expecting trouble.

  To ease her mind, he said his farewells quickly, then strode over to Rowlett and said, "Come on, Yancy. Stop staring at the lady."

  "Hell, Cole, she's just about the finest figure of a woman I've seen in a long time. Man's got a right to look, don't he? 'Specially when the lady's a widow woman."

  "Not if he's a gentleman."

  Rowlett snorted. "Now, that's something nobody's ever accused me of." He allowed Cole to steer him away from the general store, however. When they had gone a block or so, he asked, "What's she doing here in Wind River?"

  "Her husband had a land deal with Mrs. McKay. Mrs. Dillon and her kids are going to farm the land anyway, even though her husband got himself killed coming out here."

  Rowlett gave a low whistle of admiration. "Determined woman, ain't she?"

  "Downright stubborn, I'd call it." Cole explained Polly's plan to go ahead and build a cabin and start preparing for the spring planting. "It's going to be a tough row for them to hoe, I reckon," he concluded.

  Rowlett rubbed at his bearded jaw. "Maybe . . . maybe not."

  Cole looked at him sharply and asked, "What've you got in mind?"

  "Oh, nothing. I just figure that if anybody can do what she's set out to do, it's that there woman."

  "Maybe you're right," Cole said. "I hope so."

  Polly and her children had disappeared inside the general store. Rowlett stood there a block away on the boardwalk, staring back at the emporium, a frown of thought on his face. The big man had something on his mind, Cole knew.

  He just hoped that when Rowlett got around to whatever he was planning, he wouldn't scare Polly Dillon right out of her wits.

  Chapter 8

  Lon Rogers leaned on the corral fence and cast a wary eye to the north. He didn't much like the look of the clouds there, a low, gray line that hugged the horizon, squatting like a beast getting ready to pounce. The image reminded him of that wolf pack, and a shudder ran through him.

  For the past week, he had been staying pretty close to home, giving his injured leg time to rest and heal along with the wounds he had suffered when the wolves attacked him.

  After the doctor checked him over, Lon had moved back into the bunkhouse. Work had been out of the question at first, but now he was feeling better, and he was starting to get a little restless. He wasn't up to sitting in a saddle all day, of course, but there had to be something around here he could do.

  This afternoon he had hobbled over to the corral, supporting his weight on a cane as he walked, just so he could watch Frenchy taking some of the rough edges off a couple of broncs. The wiry Cajun handled the half-wild horses with ease, clinging to the saddle like a burr and talking all the time to the broncs as they twisted under him. Somehow, the soft-voiced mixture of French and English seemed to penetrate the brains of the mustangs and calm them. Some men broke horses; Frenchy won them over.

  As the foreman trotted around the corral on the horse he had been working, he angled toward Lon and brought the animal to a halt on the other side of the high pole fence. "What's that frown on your face about?" he asked. "You figure I'm doing something wrong?"

  Lon shook his head, a little surprised by the question. Memories had been distracting him. "I was just thinking about something," he told Frenchy. "And looking at those clouds, too. Have you noticed them?"

  Frenchy glanced toward the north. "I saw 'em. Doesn't have to mean anything."

  "They look to me like they've got snow in them," Lon said dubiously.

  "Like you saw enough snowstorms down there in Texas to be an expert on 'em," Frenchy said with a laugh.

  "It snows in Texas sometimes!"

  "Yeah, but not like up here." Frenchy shrugged. "Still, you might be right. I don't know enough about this Wyoming weather to predict it, either. Reckon all we can do is wait and see."

  Lon nodded reluctantly. "You're right." He kept looking at the clouds anyway.

  It was a foregone conclusion that there would be more storms, blizzards to rival the previous one or even dwarf it. But that didn't mean Lon had to like it.

  For the first time since starting up here to Wyoming Territory many long months earlier, he started giving some thought to heading back to Texas when spring came. He would hate to leave Kermit Sawyer, whom he had come to think of almost like a father, but Lon was beginning to feel homesick . . .

  This was wild country, Sawyer had said before the drive from the Colorado ever started. And, Lon thought, he had sure been right about that.

  * * *

  Polly Dillon watched the clouds, too, as she sat on the seat of the wagon and hauled on the lines to wrestle the team of horses around a bend in the trail. It wasn’t much of a trail, and Polly was sure she would not have been able to follow it if Marshal Tyler hadn’t been with them, showing them the way to the land that would be their new home.

  “Are we going to be there soon, Mama?” F
rancie asked from behind Polly. The six-year-old stuck her blond head out of the wagon and looked around excitedly.

  Polly replied, “I hope so, dear. We’ve already come several miles from Wind River, so it shouldn’t be too much farther.”

  Nine-year-old Martha joined her sister in leaning forward from the wagon bed. “I hope there aren’t any Indians,” she said in a loud, worried voice.

  Cole Tyler swung his big golden sorrel closer to the wagon and grinned at the little girls sticking their heads through the flap in the vehicle’s canvas cover. “You don’t have to worry about Indians,” he assured them. “The only ones around here right now are a band of Shoshones led by a chief called Two Ponies. He’s a friend of mine, and he’s right peaceable as long as folks leave him and his people alone and don’t try to cause trouble for them. It wasn’t always like that, mind you. Back in the old days—“

  The marshal paused, and Polly held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t fill the heads of the children with a lot of horrible stories about settlers being killed and scalped. She didn’t want them being upset by the gruesome details of past Indian raids. For that matter, Polly herself didn’t much want to hear about it, either.

  Thankfully, Cole didn’t continue with whatever he had been about to say. Instead, he told them, “Let’s just say that things have settled down a mite around here.”

  “Mrs. McKay assured my husband this would be a fine place to start a farm and raise a family,” Polly said. “Now that I’ve met her, I’m sure she wouldn’t mislead anyone. She seems like a fine woman.”

  “She is,” Cole agreed, and Polly thought he sounded like a man who might be a bit smitten with Mrs. McKay. As Polly understood things, Simone was a widow, too. It might be nice to think that someday she and Simone would be friends, since they had that much in common. It was probably all they had in common, though, because Simone McKay was a well-to-do businesswoman and Polly . . . well, she was a far cry from that, she told herself. A far cry indeed.

  Worry gnawed at Polly, just as it had ever since the family had left Illinois. But it had been much worse since Jason’s death, of course. Now she was the one responsible for the safety and well-being of the three children. The family would stand or fall according to her efforts.

  She tried to put those concerns aside and concentrated instead on the landscape around her. The rolling terrain could not be called beautiful, especially not at this time of year when so much of the vegetation was dead. In some places, the growth was sparse to begin with. To the north were foothills that jutted up starkly from the plains, their slopes dotted with evergreens, and even farther north, beyond the foothills, were the mountains, gray, distant, and majestic. Clouds hung over those mountains today, and Polly found her gaze drawn toward them again and again. She asked herself if those clouds could be harbingers of another snowstorm like the one that had stalled them in Rawlins for several days.

  A tiny shudder went through her at the thought of being stuck out here miles from town in a blizzard, with only the wagon and its flimsy canvas cover for shelter. They would all freeze to death, she told herself. It had been a mistake not to accept Simone McKays suggestion of finding winter lodging in the settlement. If not for her foolish pride and determination to carry on as Jason would have, Polly knew she and the children would be back in Wind River right now, getting settled in whatever room they might have found.

  Besides, carrying on as Jason would have might not be the smartest idea, either, Polly mused. Even though she experienced a twinge of shame at the disloyal thought, she knew her late husband had made mistakes—plenty of them.

  But it was too late to turn back, because Cole Tyler was reining in, and as Polly followed his example and pulled back on the team’s reins, the lawman lifted his arm and pointed. “I reckon that’s your place right there,” he said as he indicated a broad, open stretch of land that sloped up gradually toward the nearby foothills. Polly saw a spring bubbling from a cleft in the base of a bluff to the west, and the spring turned into a small stream that meandered across the land. Cole grinned and added, “I’d say that was a mighty fine piece of ground—if I was the type to settle down and do some farming, anyway. It’s level enough, and there’s plenty of water.”

  Polly managed to nod. “Yes, it’s very nice,” she said. “Jason told me it was prime real estate.”

  Cole chuckled and said, “Well, most folks out here don’t talk about land that way, but I reckon you’re right. It’ll make a good home for you and your youngsters, come spring and summer.”

  “And during the winter?” Polly couldn’t stop herself from asking the question.

  Cole’s smile faded away as he shrugged his shoulders. “If you’ve got a nice tight cabin, it might not be too bad.”

  “We’ll have a cabin very soon,” Polly said, a hint of stubbornness in her voice. “You’ll see.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m sure I will.” Cole cuffed back the flat-crowned brown hat he wore. “You want me to stay around for a while, maybe give you a hand setting up camp?”

  “I’m sure we can take care of that. We’ve been living out of this wagon for quite some time now.” Polly straightened her back and lifted the reins. “I’ll just drive over there by the stream—“

  She stopped short as the sound of a shout came to her. Turning on the seat, she peered back through the wagon, past the piled-high trunks and boxes that held all their earthly belongings. It was difficult to see, but she spotted several more wagons and a group of men on horseback coming along the same trail that had brought them here.

  Cole was looking behind them, too, and he wore a frown on his face. “What in blazes . . . ?” he muttered, then caught himself. He wheeled his horse around and said to Polly, “I’ll go see what this is all about.”

  She set the brake and looped the reins around it, then climbed down from the wagon. Andrew, Martha, and Francie started to scramble out as well, but Polly said sharply, “You children just stay put until the marshal finds out what’s going on. Perhaps someone else has decided to settle on this land.”

  If that was the case, she thought, then those people in the other wagons would just be out of luck. This was her land now, hers and the children’s. And they would not be forced off it.

  The other wagons didn’t look like immigrant wagons, though. They were buckboards, lacking the arched canvas covers over the wagon beds. And some of them looked like they were empty, too, while others held what appeared to be lumber of some sort. As Polly watched, Cole Tyler reached the lead wagon and motioned for its driver to halt. The man on the seat hauled back on the reins, and Polly lifted a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp as she recognized him. He was that big dangerous-looking man in the bearskin coat she had seen back in Wind River. And he had seen her in town, too, had stared at her until she felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  What was a man like that doing out here?

  * * *

  "Yancy, what the hell are you up to?"

  Grinning, Yancy Rowlett looked up at Cole from the seat of the lead wagon, which was loaded with planks. He said, "I heard that widow lady and her young'uns plan to move out here right away instead of waiting for spring, so I knew they'd need some help." He gestured with a big hand at the other wagons and the riders. "That's why we're here."

  Cole recognized another familiar face on the second wagon. Jeremiah Newton, Wind River's blacksmith and lay preacher who was even larger than Rowlett, waved at the marshal and called, "Howdy, Brother Tyler."

  Cole nodded to Jeremiah, then looked at Rowlett again. "Just what did you have in mind?"

  "Why, an old-fashioned cabin raisin', of course. By nightfall, we ought to have a place for these folks to stay snug out of the weather."

  "And you organized this?"

  "Just lending a helping hand."

  Cole gestured at the lumber in Rowlett's wagon, then at the kegs of nails, the hammers and saws and axes in the back of the vehicle driven by Jeremiah. "Who paid for all this?"

  "I
told you I'd been doing some prospecting up Montana way."

  "You must've struck it rich," Cole said dryly.

  Rowlett shrugged his brawny shoulders. "Miz McKay told the fellas at the mercantile to give us a good price on the nails and loan us the tools when she found out what we had in mind. And the gents at the lumberyard didn't gouge us none, neither."

  That came as no surprise to Cole. Simone still owned a half-interest in the lumberyard, and she had obviously decided to help out the Dillon family any way she could, just like Rowlett. Simone's generosity had a different motive, though, Cole was sure of that. Rowlett was out here only because he was attracted to the Widow Dillon.

  Of course, there was nothing wrong with that, reflected Cole. Polly seemed like a nice enough woman with good kids, from what little Cole had seen of them. And it wasn't like Rowlett couldn't use a little civilizing. Polly might be a good influence on him. If she wasn't so foolish and stiff-necked as to refuse the offer of help, that is.

  "All right, go ahead," Cole told Rowlett as he waved the group of good Samaritans forward. "I'll tell Mrs. Dillon what's going on."

  He turned Ulysses back toward the immigrant wagon and heeled the big sorrel into a trot. Polly was waiting anxiously as he rode up to her a moment later. "What do those men want?" she asked.

  Cole swung down from the saddle. "They came to build you a cabin," he said.

  Polly's eyes widened in surprise. "What?"

  "Yancy got some folks together for a cabin-raising. Yancy Rowlett, that's the big fella there on the first wagon. The one who spooked you a mite back in Wind River."

  "I see," Polly said stiffly. "And why would Mr. Rowlett do such a thing for a perfect stranger?"

  Cole shrugged. "Out of the goodness of his heart?"

  The sharp glance Polly gave him told him just how much she believed that.