Crazy Woman Creek

by Welch, Virginia

  But then, he hadn’t tried.

  “Well?” said Sheriff Morris.

  “What I can’t figure is who she’s protecting, herself or her husband.”

  “Her husband,” said Sheriff Morris. “We been over this ground before.”

  “I know. But I can’t get her to talk about what happened before he took off. Either he left on his own, with no plan to come back, or he left on his own and something has happened to him and he can’t come back.”

  “I told you he’s a hothead.”

  Luke nodded. “Yeah, you told me. But have you thought about this: maybe he never left his house.”

  “You think she killed him? That little girl? She didn’t kill nobody. Rose just ran off and got his fool head broke on some rock. Probably his horse fell in the dark. He’s probably lying on the prairie right now, half froze to death with a busted leg and a cracked skull. Stupid kid. No one can tell him nothin’.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Luke. “No one knows for sure what happened to James Rose.” Except perhaps his weeping wife. “And there’s the Sioux. Or the Cheyenne.”

  “Indians don’t take prisoners,” said the sheriff, sounding disgusted. “And if the Sioux or Cheyenne had him, they would split his head open and run off with his horse.”

  Luke was embarrassed. He should have come to that obvious conclusion on his own. “Any woman can kill a man. I hear Belle Starr carries two pistols and is never far from her rifle. Even a woman can pull a trigger.”

  “Lenora Rose ain’t no Belle Starr.”

  “Maybe.” said Luke. “But Mrs. Rose is clever enough to weave her story in a way that suits herself.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If he ran off because he wanted to, she doesn’t want us to know. And I’m of a mind to believe that’s the case,” said Luke.

  “Finally you come around. What made you change your mind?”

  “I didn’t change it. I’m not sure what I believe, not even about that. But a sane man doesn’t risk his neck and his horse by riding into the prairie in the dark unless he’s got a good reason.”

  “Yep.” Sheriff Morris spat again.

  “He’s running to something or he’s running away from something.”

  “I follow you,” said Sheriff Morris as they ambled along, eyes to the ground, looking for any sign of the missing rider or his horse. High above them a hawk floated soundlessly on an air current, circling slowly, lazily, as it eyed the thin grass below for a warm-blooded lunch.

  “Everything around that ranch had something to say,” said Luke, mulling aloud.

  “Such as?”

  Luke turned around to see how far back the other two members of the search party were. Satisfied that they were still within sight, he turned back to Sheriff Morris. “I went inside everything ‘cept the house. The barn, the shed, the chicken house, the smokehouse, even the privy. Everything was good quality and in good order. James Rose is a man who cares about his stuff.”

  “So?”

  “So Rose may have left his ranch on his own power, but he didn’t abandon it. He had enough money to stock it right. Keep it repaired. It didn’t look to me like he was fixing to leave and not come back.”

  “Then he left, like I said, and he’s injured,” said Sheriff Morris.

  “Mrs. Rose insists that’s not possible. Says her husband is too smart for that.”

  Sheriff Morris shook his head in disgust and spat on the ground again.

  Luke pulled his broad-brimmed hat down a little farther on his forehead. The sun was higher in the sky now, and though its warmth was welcomed by the riders after the cold snap they’d shivered through the last few days, he was sweating under his heavy coat, and they were all thirsty. They’d been scouting for several hours on the far eastern reaches of the Rose ranch and had found no sign of James Rose or his horse. The ground had been soft enough for his horse to make impressions the night he disappeared, but the hours of rain after he had ridden away from his ranch had obliterated any clues to his movements.

  “We’re not far from the North-East Creek,” said Sheriff Morris, halting his horse. “You can see the cottonwoods,” he said, pointing to the gray smudge at the eastern border of the Roses’ property. “Let’s rest a bit, water the horses.”

  Luke nodded. He halted his horse too, turned around in his saddle, and motioned with his arm to the two other men to catch up with him and the sheriff.

  In about twenty minutes the foursome was near enough to the creek to see that another rider had stopped for a drink. A handsome brown Morgan stood just feet from the rushing waters, which flowed icy cold and fast from spring runoff. The horse’s lead was looped tightly to a leafless red ash. Its head drooped unnaturally, and it acted as though it was sleeping, because it did not lift its head as the four riders approached. A nearby stand of cottonwoods, naked from the ravages of winter, provided no camouflage for whoever had tied up the Morgan, neither did the low scrub pine that grew along the prairie’s edge that led to the drop-off to the creek. Yet the horse’s owner was nowhere in sight.

  “Hullo!” called Sheriff Morris as he halted his horse some twenty feet away.

  Instantly the Morgan became alert, jerking its head and snorting. It yanked at the lead, frantically trying to free itself. It jerked violently, again and again, raising its front legs high into the air for added leverage, all the while whinnying piteously.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Luke, and without waiting for Cyrus’ opinion, he goaded his horse closer to the creek bank. Luke’s heart beat rapidly as he approached; he dreaded what gruesome thing he might see in or near the rushing water. The drop from the bank was straight down—this part of the creek was no good for wading. But the drop was only about two feet. A man could lie on his belly and easily scoop water into his mouth without fear of falling in. But if he fell, he would be sent on a one-way ride to eternity, especially if he fell at night, when no one was around to hear him yell for help. The shimmering water was swift, deep, and cold enough to squeeze the breath out of a man. Luke looked downstream and wondered if that was what happened to the horse’s owner.

  “Help us with this animal!” yelled Cyrus.

  Luke broke from his morbid reverie, tied his horse securely to a cottonwood, and joined the others as they tried to get control of the Morgan. It took several minutes of false starts and many soothing words, but finally the exhausted Morgan was calm enough to be led to the creek. Its eyes were cloudy and it trembled. Luke filled his hat with the refreshing water to make drinking easier for the horse. It drank like it hadn’t put its mouth to water in days.

  “It’s his, isn’t it?” said Luke as he watched, amazed, as Beauty slurped noisily from his hat. He bent down and filled his hat again from the creek and lifted it to the horse’s mouth.

  “It’s his alright. I’d know that Morgan anywhere. James Rose always had to have the best of everything,” said Cyrus.

  And that’s why he had the prettiest wife in the Territory. The memory of Lenora, waiting alone at the ranch for her James to come home, pained him. Someone would have to tell her. “Sad to see such a beautiful animal go three days without water,” said Luke, steering the conversation away from his true thoughts.

  After the search team’s horses had drank all the water they wanted, the four men sat on the ground, their horses and the Morgan tethered nearby, munching quietly what little spring grass they could forage. The men needed to rest a while before handling the depressing tasks ahead of them. Most urgent, James Rose’s body must be found and returned to his widow. His horse must be returned too.

  “His body is probably mighty far downstream by now,” said Sheriff Morris, reaching into his pocket for his tobacco pouch. “We got more searching to do, but at least now we won’t waste time looking where he ain’t.”

  “Wherever his body is, it’s well preserved,” said one of the volunteers with a grin. Ben Slocomb was a slender young man, hardly out of his teens, with sandy hair and eyes that tw
inkled with mischief. His attempt at humor in this dark circumstance provoked chuckles.

  But Luke barely nodded in agreement. He was thinking. “How do you suppose he fell in?” he said.

  None of the men answered.

  “Even in the dark the creek wouldn’t surprise him,” Luke surmised aloud. “He’d hear it before he saw it, and it’s his land. A man knows his own land.”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” said Sheriff Morris, gazing downstream, his chewing tobacco temporarily forgotten.

  “And he tied up his horse,” said Luke, motioning toward the red ash, “as if he had stopped for a drink. He didn’t stumble onto the creek in the dark. He came here on purpose.”

  “Maybe he leaned over too far.” Jed Whitehall, a plainspoken, plain-faced rancher of about thirty, idly tugged at a dry bit of straw still clinging to the soil since fall. He put the clean part of the creamy-white reed in his mouth and started to chew. “Accidents happen. People lose their footing. It happens to the best of us one time or another. It probably happened very fast.”

  The others nodded in silence, humor forgotten while each searched up and down the water for answers. As he searched Luke imagined the terror of James Rose as he slipped and fell into the icy water, all alone under the cloudy black darkness of a late spring rain. Luke studied every bush, every spindly, leafless sapling that rooted along the bank, but the creek wasn’t revealing its secret. James Rose may have called for help, panicked and frightened, but his cries would have been swallowed by the night. The knowledge that a man died on this spot seemed to hallow it for Luke.

  “Maybe he killed hisself,” said Ben. The other three stopped their search and looked at him.

  “Son, you’re too young to know how it was with James Rose,” said Sheriff Morris. “Suicide is for losers. James Rose wouldn’t take his own life. That’s not the way winners do. He had too much pride in him to just give up.”

  The older men nodded in sober agreement.

  “Besides, he had everything going for him,” said the sheriff. “Best piece of land in the county, prosperous ranch, pretty wife. No, James Rose didn’t take his life.”

  Luke and Jed nodded silently in agreement. Ben looked chastened and said no more.

  The men agreed they should notify Mrs. Rose of the loss of her husband as soon as possible, return Beauty to her stall on the Rose ranch, and then go back to town to assemble a new search party for the next day to retrieve the body. This second group of searchers would focus on the banks of the North-East Creek that marked the eastern edge of the Rose property, downstream from where they’d found Beauty.

  As the men rested and talked, Luke looked beyond them to the creek bank, imagining again James Rose’s last minutes on earth. With difficulty he tried to conjure a picture of Rose slipping and falling from the bank into the dark and frigid water, but he couldn’t. It was only a two-foot drop, hardly menacing by daylight or moonlight. The creek was fast and mercilessly cold, but Rose was young and strong, a man who performed by himself all the demanding physical chores of a small but thriving cattle ranch. Something wasn’t right. Luke stood up.

  “I’m going to take a look around,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Luke banged his hat on his thigh to smack excess water from it and then placed it on his head and approached the creek. He walked slowly up and down the flat bank, stepping on patches of snow interspersed among thickly packed, dry grasses blown nearly supine by unrelenting winter winds. He searched for anything that would put to bed his unease regarding James Rose’s accident. If his death had been anything other than accidental, surely some bit of evidence to indicate foul play would be here, where he died. Another set of footprints. A second set of horse tracks. A personal item dropped and left behind, unbeknownst to the owner. In particular he looked for any sign of struggle. He looked for blood.

  For a quarter of an hour Luke walked up and down the bank on the side of the creek where they found Beauty, about three hundred feet in both directions, canvassing the ground as he went. Finding nothing, he returned to the others, who were mounted and waiting. Beauty’s lead line was tied to Sheriff Morris’ saddle horn.

  “Seen enough?” said Sheriff Morris as Luke walked up to his horse to untie it.

  “Enough,” lied Luke. “The Rose Ranch is that way,” he said, pointing west.

  As the five horses and four riders turned toward the Rose ranch, Luke couldn’t shake an unsettling feeling that he had unfinished business here. Could someone have pushed James Rose into the water? Luke had not found a scrap of physical evidence around the death site to indicate homicide. But to voice his unfounded suspicion aloud to Cyrus, who evidently had already decided from the circumstances that James had slipped and fallen to his death, would make Luke look like an amateur. Luke’s suspicion was mostly a feeling, and how could he explain a feeling, especially to someone as cynical as Cyrus? To convince him, Luke could only put forth hard evidence, and he certainly had none of that.

  But like the scratching of a hairy burdock leaf that has burrowed into his sock, a niggling thought scratched at Luke’s mind: Could Mrs. Rose have pushed her husband to his death?

  Chapter Five

  Ulysses was the first to hear the sad procession, an elegy of four horsemen and a riderless horse. Perhaps it was the scent and not the sound of his master’s prized Morgan that the alert pet discerned on the late afternoon breeze, but whatever it was that aroused his canine senses, it triggered a predictable response in the most prominent part of his anatomy. His agitated barking sent Lenora scurrying from the kitchen to the front door to see what so disturbed her dog.

  But before she left the house, she surreptitiously peeped through white lace curtains at the front room window into the yard. She saw nothing out of order, no four-legged critters hissing or pawing at Ulysses, no two-legged visitors either, but Ulysses’ barking was not to be ignored. Of one thing Lenora was certain: she had not imagined the stealthy steps of an intruder outside her bedroom window the last two nights. Ulysses hadn’t imagined them either, and she was grateful that his barking had scared him off.

  Had he returned?

  With the ominous sound of the trespasser’s boots uppermost in her mind, Lenora was taking no chances. She wiped the bits of floury biscuit dough still clinging to her fingers onto her calico apron and then reached above the front door for James’ Sharps rifle, where it was always stored, ready for use. But now, for the first time in her married life, Lenora, not James held the Sharps in defense of their ranch. The sobering significance of this act did not escape her, but this was no time to indulge in self-pity.

  Lenora acted quickly. She could tell by the change in his bark that Ulysses had run to the rear of the house. She moved to the bedroom where, from the tiny window, she could see not one but a group of men on horseback approaching from the East. She lifted the long arm into position and cocked the trigger, never taking her eyes off the riders.

  She watched, heart thumping like a drum, every muscle taut with anxiety, finger on the trigger, as Ulysses suddenly stopped his frantic barking and bounded out of the yard toward the horsemen, who by now were only a few hundred feet away. But Ulysses’ chain stopped his escape abruptly. After a few minutes Lenora watched as one of the riders halted his horse, dismounted, and bent down to greet her dog. The tall man scratched Ulysses behind his ears, rubbed his head, and then reached into his pocket and pulled something out, evidently a treat, because Ulysses began to exhibit all the familiar signs of a tail-wagging sentry just waiting to be bribed.

  Then Lenora saw the riderless horse following the mounted riders, and as slowly and silently as the dawn rises in the eastern sky, so was the dawning of truth in her mind. She realized who the tall man was, and more important, what that riderless horse meant.

  God oh God, let it not be so.

  She stared, transfixed with terror, as the tall man remounted his horse and joined the rest of them as they made their way to her front yard. Fin
ally she saw them round the corner of the house. She unhooked her finger from the trigger and eased the Sharps down to her hips.

  #

  Lenora did not wait for them to knock. She stepped into the doorway, Sharps still in hand, though she had the presence of mind to remove her apron, check for any stray bits of biscuit dough on her shirtwaister, and smooth her hair. A lady does not greet visitors with an apron on, even when her missing husband’s horse returns home without him.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Rose,” said Sheriff Morris, tipping his hat and dismounting from his horse. The others tipped their hats as well, but only Luke dismounted with the sheriff. Once Luke’s feet were on the ground, Ulysses walked up next to him and parked on his haunches, panting and slobbering, hoping to be thrown another dainty by the treat man.

  Lenora recognized the two men still on horseback. The elder was a local rancher she knew from church. The younger was the son of a neighboring rancher. She tried to be polite and return their greetings, but when she opened her mouth no words came out. Her breaths came in short, shallow puffs; she felt like she would faint. She reached for the door frame to steady herself. The air was fraught with the tension of the unspoken.

  “We found this horse tied up by the North-East Creek,” Sheriff Morris said, motioning toward Beauty and meeting Lenora’s eyes. “We think it’s Mr. Rose’s. We found no sign of the owner.”

  “It’s James’,” said Lenora, still gripping the door frame for support.

  “We searched the area where we found her,” Luke said. “She was tied a few feet from the creek. It looks as though Mr. Rose stopped there for water.”

  “And you didn’t find any sign of him?” asked Lenora. Hearing her husband’s name helped her come back to the moment. She took a few steps toward Beauty, pressed her face against the animal's head, and closed her eyes while she lovingly ran her hand down its smooth coat. The pungent smells of horse sweat and saddle leather sharpened her memory of Beauty’s missing owner. Where was James? What happened to him?