Jack sat by the Brewster fire and chewed on some jerky he had purchased in town. And then, with the sun fully set and the sky overhead now a canopy of stars, he pulled his rifle from his saddle.
“I’m going to scout about a bit,” he said to Brewster, and stepped away from the firelight and into the night.
Brewster stood watching, amazed at how well the boy seemed to handle moving about in the darkness. With his rifle held ready in both hands, he seemed to simply step away into the darkness and blend into it. Like an Indian, Brewster thought. Not that he knew much about how an Indian moved in the night.
Brewster poured a cup of coffee.
Mildred said, “You drink too much of that and you won’t sleep. And you need your sleep. We’ll be wanting an early start in the morning.”
Brewster smiled. “I’ll be all right. Young McCabe has gone off to scout, and I’m going to wait up for him.”
“This time of night?”
Brewster shrugged.
Mildred returned to their tent, and Brewster sat on a barrel he had fetched from the wagon to serve as an impromptu chair.
Harding approached. Tall and seeming to always be brooding, he was one of these men who was thin and yet somehow surprisingly strong.
“I saw your fire still going,” Harding said.
Brewster nodded. “McCabe has gone out to do some scouting. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I want to talk to him. I’m going to wait up until he’s back.”
“You don’t much like that boy, do you?” Harding spoke through tight lips.
“It’s not that I don’t like him, exactly. It’s that I don’t quite understand him. He’s like a bit of one thing and a bit of another, all kind of rolled into one. On one hand he speaks like a highly educated young man. And you can see in his manner that he has some refinement. And yet the way he wears his gun, and the look in his eye - a times he seems not much different from the men we rescued Jessica from.”
Harding said, “I don’t like him at all. Not one bit. I think it’s a bad idea to have him along.”
“Well, Ford seems to like him well enough. Said he feels a lot better going off into new territory now that he has someone along who knows the way. Especially with men like that Cade out there.”
“You’re caught betwixt and between.”
“I guess that about sums it up.”
“I’ll sit up with you. Got another cup?”
And so they waited, Brewster sitting on a barrel, and Harding pacing about.
Nina Harding felt a little uncomfortable, stepping past her sleeping mother and out through the tent flap to the darkness beyond. After all, this was just the kind of thing Jessica Brewster would do. And while Jessica was not quite a harlot, she seemed to have aspirations in that direction.
And yet, Nina found she couldn’t sleep. Her back hurt from sitting on the wagon seat all day. Her body was desperately tired, but sometimes it was possible to simply be too tired to sleep.
She thought she might walk about the camp a bit. With her father and Mister Brewster still awake – she could hear their voices coming from the Brewster camp – she felt she would be safe enough.
The wagons were spaced apart in a rough line with the creek on one side. The tents were set up each beside a wagon. As Nina stepped from the Harding tent, she could see her father pacing about the Brewster fire.
A woman spoke from the darkness behind her. “Lovely night, isn’t it?”
Nina jumped at the sound of the voice. She then saw, in the light of the crescent moon, a form sitting on something to one side.
It was Jessica Brewster.
“Jessica,” Nina said, in a loud whisper. “You nearly scared me to death.”
Nina walked over to Jessica, who was sitting on a small stool.
“What are you doing out here?” Nina asked.
“I could ask the same of you.”
“Haven’t you gotten into enough trouble?”
“Is that what you’re looking for?” Jessica asked playfully. “Trouble?”
“No. I just couldn’t sleep, is all.”
Jessica leaned forward, placing her elbows on her knees and resting her chin in her hands. “I just feel like I’m going crazy inside. It’s like I have all these wants and desires, and they’re all bottled up inside me and I feel like I’m about to burst wide open.”
“I think you’re insane. Running off to that campfire, the way you did. With those men.”
“Those men aren’t why I did it.”
“No? I saw the way that one called Cade was looking at you. And you can say different, but I know you liked it.”
“I liked being looked at like that, sure. But not from him specifically. It’s just...I don’t know... don’t you sometimes wonder if what you have will ever be enough? I mean - the life of a farmer. Working from sun-up to sundown, doing the same work, day after day for the rest of your life?”
“It’s the life I’ve always known. I haven’t thought about it much.”
“Well, I have. Sitting on a farm for all of my days is just not enough. Life is something that has to be sought after, that has to be grabbed. So much is out there, and I want to experience it. I want to taste life. To savor it. When I’m old and gray and looking back, I want to know I've lived.”
“I think maybe it’s that you don’t know what you want.”
“Are you really going to tell me what you have is enough for you?”
Their fathers’ voices suddenly got a little louder.
Brewster said, “You’re back. Is everything all right?”
And there was the voice of Jack McCabe. “Seems to be.”
Jessica shot to her feet. “Jack’s back.”
“I wonder where he was off to?”
Jessica shot her a wicked smile. “Let’s go find out. Come on.”
“They’ll hear us.”
“Not if we’re quiet. Come on.”
Jessica crept closer to the Brewster fire, stopping behind the wagon and then peered around the corner of a wagon. Nina joined her, wanting to say that they were being foolish, that they would be caught eaves-dropping. But she dared not even venture a whisper this near to the Brewsters’ camp.
Jessica’s father was saying, “You really think we might be in danger, don’t you?”
Jack hesitated a moment. He held his rifle in one hand, and in the other was a tin cup filled with coffee. He said, “Yes, sir. I don’t want to scare anyone, but I believe we could be in trouble.”
He told them about his conversation with Marshal Kincaid. He told them about Two-Finger Walker, and how Walker acquired the name and that he was apparently in town to see Vic Falcone.
“I was against this from the start,” Harding said to Brewster. “I told you there would be trouble, that we would be better off just trusting to our own judgment. We got this far without any help.”
Jack said, “Yes, it might be partly my fault. It might be my partly presence that is putting us all in danger. Both Falcone and Walker have a beef with my family. But these men have do have reason to follow you, even if I wasn’t here.”
“Jessica,” Brewster said.
“Yes. Women out here are rare. Young women of marrying age, even moreso. A young woman who is not a saloon whore, even moreso again.”
“You think that man, what’s his name? Cade? You think he has set his sights on Jessica?”
Jack nodded and took a sip of coffee. “Most likely. The marshal certainly thinks so.”
Brewster said, “So, what did you find when you went out scouting?”
“A campfire. Maybe five miles back.”
“That isn’t necessarily those outlaws,” Harding said. “It could be anyone back there. This trail is traveled a lot. It’s the only trail between Cheyenne and Bozeman.”
“It could be. But my gut feeling says it isn’t. Besides, when dealing with men like this, it’s best to err on the side of caution.”
Harding finished his coffee, then excused himself
and headed back to his own tent.
Jessica, growing bored with the situation, and maybe wanting to get back to the family tent before her father discovered her missing, mouthed a good night to Nina and hurried away into the darkness.
Nina was about to leave, also. After all, her father, though not a cruel man, was strict and would not approve of his daughter wandering about the camp alone at this late hour.
However, she paused a moment, allowing herself one last look at Jack McCabe.
He stood by the fire, his tin coffee cup in one hand, looking off into the night.
He was not overly tall, but he carried himself in a tall way. Not arrogant, but confident. He seemed strong, not in a burly blacksmith sort of way, but in a lithe way. Like a horse, more than a bear.
Her father saw him as somehow evil. He had used the word gunhawk, spitting it out as though it were somehow vulgar.
And yet, as Jack stood in the night, the firelight dancing about his face and with his gun strapped to his side and his rifle in one hand, he struck her as a latter day knight.
She tore her gaze from him and made her way back to her family’s tent before her father could realize she was missing and begin bellowing out her name.
10
The days passed. The settlers moved along at a walking pace, the oxen pulling the wagon slowly along. The trail was sometimes little more than two ruts cut into the sod, and other times was more of a stretch of gravel that ran along into the distance. The days were hot, the countryside about them dry and gravely, sometimes with outcroppings of bedrock. Sage and small bushes dotted the landscape, and the grass grew in some places thick and tall, and in others thin and sparse. There were ridges that would rise up, usually to the west. Some were a dark green with pine, but most were rocky and gravely with only sparse growth.
Jack would sometimes ride with the wagons, but other times ride along their back trail, searching for any signs of pursuit. Sometimes at night, he would see a campfire in the distance, but other times all he would see behind them was the empty blackness of night.
On their eighth morning since leaving Cheyenne, Jack hung back a mile or so behind the wagons, watching for any sign of riders in the distance behind them. He turned his horse away from the trail and rode to the crest of a low hill maybe a mile in the distance. There, he swung out of the saddle and loosened the cinch to let his horse rest a moment while he surveyed their back trail.
From the crest of the hill, he could see five miles into any direction. The day was three hours old, and the wagons had been moving at a pace of maybe three miles per hour. With their slow-moving teams of oxen, that was about the best that could be expected. This would put their previous night’s camp approximately nine miles behind them, and the campfire Jack had seen in the distance the night before, closer to fourteen.
He could wait here, he thought. He would prefer to find a good spot with adequate cover, but this was open grassland and there wasn’t a tree within miles.
While he waited, he tossed over in his mind all he knew about Falcone and the men with him. When he and Kincaid had taken Jessica from Falcone’s camp a few nights earlier, he had taken a quick count of the men present. Jack had seen three other than Falcone himself. He decided he was going to assume Two-Finger Walker was with them until he learned otherwise. Better to be prepared, Pa had said more than once. And Walker was probably better with a gun than anyone else in Falcone’s camp.
Jack decided if it came to a gun battle, he would make sure his first bullet found Walker. This man had fought Pa twice, intending to kill him both times, and though the battles had cost an eye and three fingers, he was still alive. A man who could survive a toe-to-toe fight with Pa was not one to be taken lightly.
Jack pulled his canteen from his saddle horn and took a swig of water while he waited. He looked about him – miles of arid land in any direction. Gravel underfoot, with strands of grass sprouting. Good enough to feed a longhorn, and Jack’s horse was grazing contentedly, and maybe someday with proper irrigation it could be farmed. But the science of irrigation was still developing, and he figured it would be awhile before this land was turned into cornfields. If ever.
He squatted on his heels and idly pulled a blade of grass to chew on, and he kept his eye on the back trail.
The sun grew warm while he waited. Further ahead on the trail, the wagons made their way along slowly. At this distance, it looked like they weren’t moving at all.
Jack chewed on some jerky and he checked the loads in his pistol. Of course, he had checked them this morning, as well as the night before, but you could never be too careful. There were five cartridges in the cylinder, with one chamber empty. He gave the cylinder a quick spin to make sure it could spin unencumbered, that there was no dust that might have worked its way into the mechanism. Then he realigned the cylinder so the empty chamber would be in front of the firing pin, so the gun wouldn’t fire if accidentally jostled, and he slapped the gun back into his holster.
It became apparent to him the riders following them were hanging back. They had camped five miles behind the wagons and they should have come into view long ago if they were indeed following the wagons.
He tightened the cinch and swung back into the saddle, and took one more long look toward the back trail. Nothing was moving, other than a hawk circling about in the distant sky. Jack turned his horse back to the trial.
The trail was little more than two wheel ruts with a hump of grass running down the middle, and from this point on the trail the wagons were no longer in sight. At the rate the wagons were going, they had made maybe three miles since Jack had last seen them. His horse liked to run, but he held it to a shambling trot as he didn’t want the animal to wear itself out. Within a half hour he caught up with them.
The fourth wagon in line belonged to the Fords. Ford’s wife was in the wagon seat, a baby in her arms. Jack had little experience with babies, and as such wouldn’t venture a guess as to the child’s age, but it was not yet walking.
Ford was fifty-ish, but his wife was not much older than Jack. A boy of twelve or thirteen was helping Ford with the oxen. Jack was not about to ask questions, as that was not the way on the frontier, but even though Ford referred to the boy as his son, the boy was too old to be the child of Ford’s wife.
Ford looked up as Jack rode up alongside the wagon and slowed his horse to a walk.
“How do?” Ford said.
“Well enough, I suppose,” Jack said. “Been scouting the back trail.”
“Any sign of anyone?” Even tough Ford had not been at the campfire the night before, the details had apparently been related to him by Brewster or Harding.
“No visible pursuit, if that’s what you mean. How have things been here?”
“Harding has a bad axle. Got a crack running half the length of it. But he’s been able to keep moving.”
Jack touched his heels to the ribs of his horse and it quickened its gait and brought him to the Harding wagon.
Jack said, “I’m told you have a bad axle.”
Harding was leading along his team of oxen. “I’ll take care of it. None of your concern.”
“Begging your pardon, Mister Harding. Maybe I was a little rude to all of you at first, but I offered my apologies for that. There are some things going on in my life and they had me in a foul mood. But we’re all out here on this trail together. It seems to me a bad axle on a wagon is a concern for all of us.”
Harding shot a dark glance at Jack. “I don’t object to any rudeness. I object to who you are. I never wanted you along. You see, McCabe, I don’t look at you as being all that much different than those men you think might be following us. But I got voted down by Brewster and Ford. As far as I’m concerned, you scout for them, not me.”
“And what are we supposed to do if that axle fully breaks out here? Just ride on and leave you behind?”
“I don’t really care what you do, as long as you leave me and mine alone.”
With exasp
eration, Jack clicked his horse ahead.
Nina and Jessica were out walking a little ways ahead of the wagons. Jack reined up beside them.
“Good afternoon, ladies” he said.
Nina glanced up at him and for a moment he saw a smile forming, then she shyly shot her gaze down and away. Jessica, however, looked him in the eye with a beaming smile.
Jessica said, “Good afternoon, Mister McCabe. Where have you been all day?”
“Scouting the back trail. And please, both of you, call me Jack.”
“Keeping us safe from outlaws?” Jessica asked with a smile that was flirtatious and bold, and struck Jack was maybe a little taunting.
“Those men were much more dangerous than you realize. We’ve talked about this before, Miss Brewster.”
Jessica’s smile disappeared, replaced by a flash of anger. “And I think you and the marshal maybe were more worried than you need to be. You have as much faith in my ability to take care of myself as my father has.”
He shook his head. “Your attitude is going to be the death of you.”
As he spoke, he could see up ahead a wooden sign nailed to a post.
Jessica said, “You sound like an old man. Like my father. You’re not much older than I am. Don’t you know how to have a little fun?”
“It’s just that when I was being raised, I saw more than one man like them. I know what they’re capable of.”
Jessica shook her head. “You were raised among gunfighters, but that doesn’t give you the right to dictate what’s best for me. When you pulled me out of that camp, you treated me like a child. And for that I can’t forgive you.”
Jack found his temper heating up. “I was rescuing you, and if you weren’t acting like a child you’d realize it. I pulled you out of that camp like a child because that’s the way you were acting.”
Jessica said to Nina, “The company out here has suddenly got a little stuffy and haughty. I’m going back to the wagons. Are you coming?”
One Man's Shadow (The McCabes Book 2) Page 7
