The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1)

by Brad Dennison

  Dusty blinked with amazement. “Huh? What do you mean, you know my father? I never even told you who he is.”

  Hunter chuckled. “Dusty, you’ve got McCabe written all over you’re face. The way you walk, the set of your shoulders. I knew there was something familiar about you when you first walked in. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first, but after a few minutes, it became clear.

  “That’s why I offered you the job, to keep you here until you had the chance to meet him, and because I’d never turn away a child of his. I owe him my life a dozen times over. The fact that you can cook was a bonus.

  “Your father gave me a job when I was having some hard times, a time when I just needed to lay low for a while and be left alone. He gave me that job, let his bunkhouse be home for me. And like I said, I owe him my life many times over. He took a bullet for me once. And even to this day, he never asked any questions. Just took me in. Him and me, we’ve fought Indians and outlaws, droughts, blizzards and even a grizzly once. He and Josh helped me build this place.

  “You owe me nothing for anything I’ve done for you. I’ll never take money from him or one of his kids. This place will always be open to you, anytime you need it. Anything I can do, you just let me know.

  “I think Aunt Ginny’s pretty much figured out who you are, too. You can’t slip much past her.

  “Ride on out to the ranch. Tell him who you are. Go meet your father.”

  “You think I should?”

  Hunter nodded. “Absolutely.”

  Dusty shrugged. “Well, I guess my horse is already saddled..,”

  “Would you like me to saddle up and ride out with you?”

  Dusty took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as he tossed Hunter’s offer about in his head. “No. I think this is something I’ve got to do for my own self. But thanks. Thanks for everything.”

  Dusty extended his hand. Hunter took it in a firm grasp and said, “Good luck,”

  Dusty nodded, and headed for the door. He stepped out into the growing night. He felt a little uneasy with apprehension, but no longer afraid.

  He swung into the saddle, and turned his horse toward the trail that led to the McCabe ranch.

  PART FIVE

  THE SIEGE

  EIGHTEEN

  Dusty reined up in front of the porch.

  Well, this is it, he thought, finding the odd combination of anticipation, hesitance, and just a touch of fear that had filled him outside his mother’s room back in Baker’s Crossing filling him once again.

  It was now fully dark. The parlor windows were alive with the low, undulating glow of a fire in the hearth. And he knew they knew he was out here, or at least that a rider was. A man like Johnny McCabe could hardly be unaware. He had taken the small horse trail behind Hunter’s that came out at the woods a quarter mile or so from the house. Even so, the sound of an iron shod hoof on the sod makes a little sound, and Dusty had no doubt his father knew a rider had approached the house. Dusty would have known.

  He sat in the saddle, looking at the house. The light of the quarter moon gave the log-built walls a kind of dark grayish color. He thought about calling out, “Hello, the house!” Then, thought better of it. Even though it was considered the accepted way to approach a stranger’s house, he had met Miss Brackston, a civilized woman, and doubted she would consider such a greeting appropriate.

  He decided the civilized thing to do would be to knock on the door.

  He swung out of the saddle, gave the rein a couple turns about the hitching rail, then climbed the steps to the porch.

  He felt suddenly so inadequately prepared. Here he was, still in his buckskin shirt, his Peacemaker riding low at his right side. Three days worth of whiskers were on his jaw. He should have been freshly bathed and shaved, and in a clean, broad cloth shirt. He looked like a scout, fresh from the mountains.

  And he really had no idea what to say. Hello, I’m you’re son? Or, hello, Mister McCabe. I bet you can’t guess who I am. Or, I understand we have a mutual acquaintance, a certain Rose Callahan, from Nevada.

  No, he decided he would just have to play-it-by-ear.

  Oh, God. This is it. This was the home of the family he belonged to, yet didn’t. This was the place he wanted to call home. What if they didn’t believe him? What if they did, but didn’t want him here? What if..?

  He forced away the questions, clearing his mind before he talked himself into turning around, hopping on his horse and getting the hell out of here.

  He raised a fist and knocked.

  The door opened. It was the boy. His brother, Josh. Josh wasn’t not wearing a hat, and his long yellow hair seemed to shine almost white in the firelight. He was still wearing his gunbelt.

  “Good evening’,” Dusty said.

  “Oh,” Josh said with surprise. “The guy who works for Hunter. Dusty, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, don’t just stand out there in the night. Come on in.”

  Dusty stepped in, feeling suddenly very awkward, conscious of a sudden clumsiness in his feet as the heels of his boots clumped along on the floor. He pulled the hat from his head.

  “Pa,” Josh said, looking over to the hearth.

  A man stood up and walked over. It was he. Johnny McCabe. Maybe two inches taller than Josh, his shoulders a bit wider. As he stepped forward, even though the lighting was dim, furnished only by the fire, Dusty could see the square jaw. And the way he moved, the set of his shoulders. It was how he himself might look at forty.

  “Pa, this is Dusty. He helped Hunter out here that night, before I got back from the line shack.”

  “Dusty. Good to meet you.” McCabe said, extending his hand. Firm grip. “Thanks for all you did.

  “So, what brings you out?” Josh said.

  “Uh..,” Dusty wasn’t sure where to begin. “I know it’s late. I’m sorry about ridin’ out here at this hour.”

  Then, Miss Brackston rose from a rocker by the hearth. The spectacles resting on her nose caught a shard of firelight like prisms. “Josh, for God’s sake, light a lamp, will you? We cannot entertain company in a darkened room like this.”

  “Yes’m.” Josh returned to the hearth where two lamps stood on the mantel. He lifted the globe of each lamp and touched the match to the wick. Soon they were each glowing a pale yellow, sending shadows retreating to the far corners of the room.

  Again, for the lack of nothing else to say in his sudden discomfort and awkwardness, but feeling compelled to say something, anything, Dusty said, “Sorry to be ridin’ out at this hour.”

  “Think nothing of it,” she said. “In fact, I was expecting you within the next few days.”

  Johnny McCabe looked at her questioningly, but she ignored him, refusing to meet his gaze. “Please, come and sit down.”

  Josh was standing by the hearth, his arms folded, watching as Dusty walked across the floor to the sofa. The dark-haired girl who was his sister, Bree, was sitting at the far end of the sofa.

  “Good evening, Miss Bree,” he said.

  “Hi, Dusty.”

  Miss Brackston returned to her rocking chair. McCabe returned to the chair he had risen from, but he was now looking with curiosity from the woman to Dusty.

  Aunt Ginny said, “Would you like some coffee? I’m sure some of that brackish mud you men call coffee remains from this evening’s pot.”

  She knew, Dusty realized. Hunter was right. Somehow, she knew. He could tell by a certain look in her eye. A look that was knowing, and at the same time he saw a twinkle of amusement.

  “Yes’m,” he said uneasily, no longer as concerned about how he might say what he had to say, but feeling that the situation was somehow beyond his control.

  “Josh, go get our guest a cup of coffee.”

  Josh gave a slow huffing sigh, obviously displeased at being suddenly reduced to an errand boy, and left for the kitchen.

  “So,” McCabe said. “Dusty, is it? Is there something we can do for you?”

&nb
sp; “John,” Miss Brackston said, before Dusty could answer. “Does he remind you of someone?”

  “No, not really. Well, maybe. A little, I guess, now that you mention it.”

  “Who?”

  “Dusty, I didn’t really notice at first, but you look a lot like my brother, Josiah.”

  Miss Brackston let out a spontaneous cackle. John and his brother Josiah did indeed bear some resemblance to each other. “Well, I suppose he does, at that. But that’s not who I meant.”

  McCabe continued. “I haven’t seen Josiah in years. In fact, twelve years now, I suppose.”

  Then he realized what she had said, and looked at her. “Who’d you mean, then?”

  Dusty was also looking at her in amazement. “How could you know? I mean, I didn’t tell anyone. Hunter, he figured it out, but..,”

  “We all figured it out,” she said. “You look something like your Uncle Josiah, yes, but you’re the spitting image of your father.”

  McCabe’s mouth fell open. “Wha..?” was all he could manage.

  In the kitchen doorway, a coffee cup fell and shattered.

  “Josh,” Miss Brackston called out calmly. “Clean that up, will you?”

  Johnny McCabe glanced from Ginny to the boy seated before him. Dusty did not know what to say. He had ridden out here not sure how to proceed once he got here, but he hadn’t expected the news to be announced this way. And Miss Brackston - she was simply sitting staring back at McCabe, her eyes twinkling with amusement.

  In the silence, every sound of the house was somehow magnified. A creak of an overhead timber. The monotonous clicking as a small ship’s clock on the mantel ticked off seconds to no one in particular. However, there were no sounds from the kitchen.

  “Joshua,” Miss Brackston called out. “I don’t hear the sounds of things being cleaned up out there!”

  Dusty then heard the clink of shards of glass being bumped together as they were swept up.

  The woman in the rocker looked to McCabe. “I’ve got to say, John, I’ve never seen you speechless. I’ll have to mark this down in my diary.”

  “How could this be?” he finally said. He glanced to Dusty, then back to her. “How?”

  “You tell us. You’re the only one in the room who was there.”

  She was enjoying herself. Dusty wasn’t sure what he thought about this, but he found himself having to suppress a smile.

  McCabe rose to his feet, and took a couple of paces toward the hearth. “It’s impossible. I was never unfaithful to Lura. And there’s been no one since.”

  “Think about Utah Territory,” she said. “Maybe twenty years ago. Its called Nevada now. You were drunk out of your mind.”

  Dusty looked at her incredulously. How could she know the details? He wasn’t surprised his father did not remember – it had been so long ago, and from what Dusty had been told by Lewis and Annie, McCabe had been about as drunk as a man can get. But Miss Brackston wasn’t there.

  She said to McCabe, “Think about a night a few weeks after you thought Lura had left you. Drunk out of your mind, in a little saloon, in a small mining town in Utah Territory.”

  McCabe shook his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Miss Brackston looked at him firmly, but the twinkle was still in her eye. She was enjoying having the upper hand on Dusty’s father, knowing something he did not.

  Dusty had the impression of a sort of rivalry between the two, possibly each trying to get one up on the other. Good-natured, but intense. And even though the situation was in itself not funny and certainly not a game, she was taking advantage of it to see McCabe twist in discomfort. And Dusty had the impression that, were the situation reversed, McCabe would be doing the same to her.

  “Let me set the stage,” she said, almost theatrically, “to jog your memory.”

  And she began to recount how his late wife, Lura, had been pregnant and whisked away by her parents, sent back east to have the child away from their friends and the patients and business associates of her father, the doctor, and that Lura’s mother had left a farewell note to him, forging Lura’s handwriting. “Not knowing she was in the family way, or where she was, you simply rode out.”

  Johnny drew a slow breath, and let his gaze drift upward to the darkened ceiling. “I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Oh, God, did I ever get drunk. And I stayed drunk for what must have been a week. It was my last bender. I was known for that sort of thing when I was younger, but that one was as bad as they got. It’s amazing I didn’t get myself killed.

  “My brother Josiah came along, which is probably how I managed to survive. It was on that ride that we met up with Zack Johnson – I hadn’t seen him since riding with the Texas Rangers, a couple years earlier. He rode along to help Josiah keep me out of trouble.”

  McCabe focused his gaze on Ginny. “I was so drunk, I wasn’t sure where we picked him up, but when I sobered up, he was there.”

  “So, you don’t remember her,” Dusty said.

  McCabe raised an index finger to point into the air, as if he were identifying a fragment of a memory that had just popped up. “Zack and Joe told me of a woman I spent a night with. It was in a little mining town. I don’t remember what it was called.”

  “Her name was Rose,” Dusty said. “Rose Callahan.”

  Josh charged from the kitchen. “Oh, come on, now!” his voice boomed. “Pa, we can’t just stand here and listen to this nonsense. He’s no more your son than, than...I don’t know. But he’s not your son.”

  “Joshua,” Ginny said. “Is that mess in the kitchen cleaned up?”

  But he ignored her, continuing, “I’ve never heard such a cock-and-bull story in my life.”

  Dusty rose to his feet, feeling a touch of anger now rising within himself, as well. “It ain’t a lie. My Ma always believed he was my father. And those who knew her knew it to be true.”

  “Oh, come on, now! How could she know? She was a saloon whore, for God’s sake! There’s no way she could know.”

  “She did. Somehow, she knew.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. There’s no way she could have.”

  “Joshua,” Ginny said. “Sometimes, a woman knows.”

  “Ginny,” Johnny said to her. “You seem awfully ready to accept this.”

  “I’ve had some time to think about it. I met Dusty while you were away, and the resemblance struck me as too much to be coincidental. So I had a talk with Zack. He remembers this woman much more clearly than you, because he was not filling himself with enough whiskey to drown a horse. She was dark-haired, he said, and looked like she might have had some Indian heritage.”

  Dusty said, “She was part Ute.”

  “Pa!” Josh protested. “We can’t just accept this. It’s such a long shot. And who’s to say he’s even telling the truth?”

  “What’s his motivation?” Ginny asked. “It can’t be money. While this family is comfortable, due to years of hard work on the part of your father, and some of my holdings in San Francisco, we are by no means living in opulence.”

  Dusty didn’t know what opulence meant, but it sounded quite nice.

  McCabe held his hands up. “It’s too late to go any further with this. My head’s spinning. I need some time to let all of this settle.”

  “Agreed,” Ginny said.

  “Dusty,” McCabe said. “There are some empty bunks in the bunk house. Go grab one, and we’ll continue this in the morning.”

  Josh was glaring at Dusty. “You bet we will.”

  Dusty tried to let sleep take him, but found it wouldn’t cooperate. It was not that the bunkhouse was uncomfortable. It was fine, as bunks go. Dusty had slept in many a flea-ridden bunk house, and he had seen some so infested with lice the men preferred to sleep outside even during the winter, huddled by a fire. But the only other he had seen as clean as this was Ben Cantrell’s. The mattresses were free of bugs, and the floor neatly swept.

  After he had stared at the shad
owy rafters overhead for as long as he could tolerate, he climbed out of the bunk and pulled on his levis and buckskin shirt. He forced his feet into his riding boots, buckled on his gunbelt, and stepped down as quietly as possible on the sometimes squeaky floorboards so as not to awaken the other occupants. Fred Mitchum, a hand named Long, and another named Hardy. There were six other empty bunks.

  Once outside, Dusty strolled about in the night, crossing the yard between the bunk house and the corral. He stood for a while, leaning against the fence and enjoying the brisk night wind whisking down from the ridges. Then he strolled on.

  Before he really realized it, he was standing by the back door to the main house. The kitchen door. He tried the door knob and found it unlocked, which was no surprise. This was an age when the need to lock a door was a rarity. The knowledge than an uninvited guest might be shot on sight, with full approval of what little law actually existed on the frontier, was an effective deterrent.

  Dusty found a lamp mounted on one wall over the stove. He struck a match, touched the flame to the wick, and a soft golden glow filled the room.

  He found the stove warm, and a pot setting on it. He lifted the lid and found enough beef stew remaining to fill a couple of bowls. He hadn’t eaten since noon at Hunter’s, and found the sight and smell of the stew nearly set him to drooling.

  A quick search of the cupboards turned up a wooden bowl and a ladle, and from one drawer he took a spoon.

  He pulled a chair out from the table, dropped into it, set the bowl before him and commenced slurping.

  The bowl was emptied quickly. He took it back to the stove for a second helping, and as he returned to the table, he took a moment to glance about the room a second time. The stove stood beside the inner wall, the stove pipe plugged into the back of the stone chimney. Across the room from it was a row of cupboards and a long counter top. On the wall over the stove were two lamps, one of which was now burning. White curtains framed the windows.

  An atmosphere of home seemed to glow from this house, and Dusty found himself envious of those who belonged here.