Jack knew he should feel grateful for the opportunities. Not only his ability to easily comprehend what he read, but to retain it so easily. As such, he had done much reading and had gotten so he could read words on a page with even more ease than Pa could read tracks in the dirt.
Jack had also read the book by Dickens, but he hadn’t labored over it. He had read it on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on his bed with a glass of Kentucky bourbon beside him. He had found the book relatively easy reading. Admittedly, Dickens could be a little poetic in his phrasings, but Jack had found the entire thing to be little more than an intellectual exercise.
Jack had little interest in literature. Something that, until he had confessed this to Nina, he had told no one but Darby. Would Dickens one day take his place among the literary giants, or simply be forgotten as a hack? Jack didn’t know, and neither did he care.
And yet, knowing he had Dusty’s envy did nothing to resolve the restlessness in his own heart.
The Brewster’s camp was quiet. They were in the tent and the fire was burning low. Jack added some wood to the fire. Best to keep the fire burning. Kept coyotes and wolves away, though he doubted any would be near because of that rabid carcass lying out there in the darkness.
He took a sip of coffee and moseyed on to the Harding camp, where he found Nina’s father still awake. He was kneeling by the fire, adding a chunk of wood.
Jack said, “It’s getting late. We’ll be starting early in the morning.”
“I’ll be ready,” Harding said, not looking up at him.
Jack decided to reach out a little. After all, he recognized the sign of troubled thoughts that can keep you awake. He had enough of them himself over the years. Many a time at school he would lie awake, thinking of the life he wanted but was somehow being denied him.
Jack said, “Trouble sleeping?”
Harding looked up at him with annoyance. “I thought I asked you to stay away from my daughter. She snuck out to be with you tonight. She might’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that wolf.”
“Look, Mister Harding. I mean no disrespect. I really don’t. But isn’t she at an age when she should be making her own decisions?”
“Not when it comes to the likes of you. You and your kind. She has no experience with the likes of you. And if you had any of decency, you would leave her alone.”
Jack couldn’t help but chuckle. “Most people who look at me and see a scholar. They see Harvard. But not you.”
Harding rose to his feet. He was indeed tall. Jack rose not much higher than his shoulder.
He said, “You speak well. The fact that you’re educated is obvious. But when I look at you, I see the gun at your side, and that you wear it as though you were born to it. On the surface you might seem like a well mannered college boy. But I can tell the way you carry that gun, and the look in your eye, that beneath the surface you’re your father’s son.”
Harding had meant it as an insult, but ironically Jack thought it was one of the greatest compliments he had ever been given. Not that it excused Harding’s belligerence.
Jack decided to change tactics. Sometimes the best defense is a strong offense.
He said, “Ever hear of Harlan Carter?”
This caught Harding by surprise. He simply stood and stared at Jack, trying to hide his surprise but failing to do so.
“Good night,” Jack said, and walked on.
23
The following day the small wagon train continued along. The oxen pulled against their loads, and the men walked beside them, urging them along. The land now rose and fell in great hills, and pine covered ridges rose up at either side of the trail. Pa figured they were now only maybe three days out of McCabe Gap.
Duty pulled in another deer while he was scouting ahead, and once again the settlers set up camp and began roasting venison for their evening meal.
Once they had eaten, Dusty grabbed his rifle and headed out into the darkness to stand guard for a while. Just in case. It had been days since Jack’s encounter with Vic Falcone and his men, and there had been no sign of them being followed.
“I’ll be back in a while,” Dusty said, and disappeared into the night.
Johnny knew he would see Dusty when he saw him. Could be half an hour. Could be hours. Dusty would roam about and satisfy himself they weren’t being followed, and all was right out there.
Jack then said, a little too innocently, “I’m gonna go stretch my legs a bit. Been a long day in the saddle.”
Johnny figured Jack was probably going to rendezvous somewhere out there with Nina Harding. Not that he blamed him. Nina was a fetching young girl. Had Johnny been Jack’s age, she probably would have had his attention. And something about the way she and Jack looked at each other sort of set him to mind of himself and Lura, years ago. That kind of love doesn’t come along often. When you do see it, it kind of stands out.
Johnny slapped his pipe to the palm of his hand to knock burnt tobacco out, then stuffed the pipe into a vest pocket. He knelt by the fire and added a couple more pieces. A stand of aspen grew not far from here, and they had been able to take enough for the night’s fires. This far along the trail, finding wood for fires was no longer a problem.
About him, all was dark. The ridges that stood tall at either side of the trail were now lost to the blackness of night. The air was cool and crisp. From somewhere off in the night, a coyote howled. Johnny smiled. It was the sound of the mountains at night. He was home.
He saw motion from off by the wagons, and saw a man stirring about. No, he was walking. Toward Johnny’s fire. It was too dark to see who he was, but he was long and narrow and sort of loped along when he walked. Only one man like that among the settlers.
“Evening, Harding,” Johnny said as the man approached. Johnny rose back to his feet.
Harding stepped into the firelight, and with his deep baritone he mumbled an, “Evenin’.”
Harding was not wearing a hat. He was in a gray shirt and suspenders. His pistol was buckled about his waist. One of the gunbelts Jack had taken from Falcone and his men. Harding didn’t wear it hanging low or tied down. He wore it high on his hip. But this didn’t mean he was a stranger to using one. Johnny had seen more than one gunhawk wear his pistol like this. John Selman, for one.
“Where are your boys?” Harding said.
“Out and about.” Johnny wasn’t going to tell Harding that Jack was probably meeting secretly with Nina. Though, he wondered how much of a secret it could be when the entire camp knew how Jack and Nina felt about each other.
Johnny said, “We’re almost at the end of the trail. I figure at this rate, day after tomorrow we’ll be swinging north, off of this trail. Following a stage route that will take us into the little town they’re naming after my family.”
“Lookin’ forward to it. Seems like we been traveling forever. Left Vermont nigh onto four months ago. Been livin’ out of a wagon since.”
They stood in awkward silence for a moment. Then Harding said, “I figure you know who I am.”
“Out here, we go by whatever name a man gives.”
“Last night, your boy Jack asked me if I knew the name Harlan Carter.”
Johnny chuckled. Jack had told Johnny and Dusty about that conversation. He said, “Comes right to the point, doesn’t he? That’s always been his way. Doesn’t waste much time on subtleties or small talk.”
“Harlan Carter died a long time ago, along with everything he was.”
Johnny drew a breath of the clear night air. He could smell the grass that was becoming wet with dew, and there was a hint of balsam on the breeze. “I don’t put a lot of thought into who a man was. I’m more interested in who he is, now.”
“I had a price on my head. My name was on reward posters. If I was to have any kind of life, Harlan Carter had to stop existing. But I wondered, what kind of life could a man like me have?”
Johnny decided not to be polite, but to get right down to the brass tacks. “They
say you killed because you liked killing.”
He drew a breath and was silent a moment. “That wasn’t why I killed. I killed because I needed to, to stay alive. Bounty hunters. Lawmen. I never shot a man in cold blood. And I never shot a man what didn’t need killing, either. Not really. Some of them lawmen were little better than gunhawks themselves.”
Johnny nodded. “Often the case.”
“But I liked it. God, I liked it. When the bullets were flying. That was the only time I really felt alive. What kind of life can a man like that make for himself?”
Johnny looked off into the night. This was something he didn’t like to talk about. “I know what you mean. When the gunfire starts, some men find their legs just turn to rubber. But for some of us, we come really alive. I know the feeling. I felt bad about killing, but never at the time it was happening. But it was always a sort of after-the-fact thing. When the guns are going off and it’s either kill or be killed, I always found I could just pull the trigger without hesitating.”
“I forced myself to turn away from it. I walked away. I just up and rode out. I had a small group of men. We were hiding in a small cabin in a canyon down in west Texas. I said I was riding out to do some hunting, and I just kept going. Changed my name.”
“Why Vermont?”
“Why not Vermont?”
Johnny shrugged.
Harding said, “I had never been to that part of the world. I come from a small farm in the Michigan woods. I had nothing left in Michigan, so I headed east, going almost as far as I could go. Staked out a section of woods no one had claimed. Started farming it. I was maybe twenty miles from the nearest town. Never planned on having a family, but then I met Emily.”
“She knows who you are.”
Harding nodded. “She knows everything.”
“But then you decided to leave Vermont and come west again?”
“Someone there figured out who I might be. I have no idea how. It was Emily’s idea to pack up and head west. I figured it maybe had been enough years. We could maybe find some remote place and settle in and farm.”
“Not a bad plan.”
Harding looked at him curiously. “You didn’t give it up. The lifestyle. You know it’s wrong to kill, and you feel bad when you have to. But you kept your name and you still wear a gun.”
Johnny nodded. “We each made different decisions. Maybe it was easier for me. I never actually robbed anyone.”
“I seen a reward poster for you and your brothers, years ago. For murder and theft.”
Johnny nodded. “We did steal that one time, yes. A general store, in Missouri. We hadn’t eaten in almost two days, and the marshal ran us out of town. We were there trying to find a job. We went back that night to take some canned goods from the general store. A cousin of ours was riding with us. Thaddeus, his name was. He shot and killed the marshal. It wasn’t necessary, either. He just did it almost for the thrill of it. I thought I knew Thad. We had grown up together. But I hadn’t seen him in three years, and when I did, he was in a lot of ways like a stranger. The reward poster was for all of us.
“But we got our names cleared of that killing. And we paid back every cent to the owner of that store.”
“You never hit a stagecoach or a train? Or a bank?”
Johnny shook his head. Harding raised his brows and looked away. He hadn’t been expecting that answer. Then he said, “Well, maybe you don’t have as much to run from as I did. The kind of things I was running from can eat away at you after a time.”
“It’s been my experience that you can’t run from yourself. You can try. You hid behind a plow for a number of years. But eventually the part of you you’re running from sort of catches up with you.”
Harding shuffled his feet and looked off into the night. Johnny was sure it was hard for Harding to hear this, but it was Harding who had opened this particular can of worms.
Harding said, “Nina doesn’t know. We never told her. I don’t want her to ever know.”
Johnny looked down at the fire. The two chunks of wood he had tossed on were catching. Another chunk he had put on earlier was nearly burned through and had broken in two, and one of the fresh pieces slid down a bit.
Johnny said, “My son Jack and your daughter have taken a liking to each other. He’s a good boy. All three of my sons are.”
Harding turned his gaze from the darkness beyond the firelight back to Johnny. Harding’s eyes were like two lumps of coal beneath a heavy brow.
Harding said, “You chose to raise your boys in the path you’re walking. Taught them to survive out here. How to shoot. How to kill a man. A good thing for them to know, considering the trouble having your name will bring them.”
Johnny hadn’t raised Dusty, but if he had, he wouldn’t want Dusty to be any different than he was.
Harding said, “But me, I chose to raise my daughter away from what I am. What I was. I kept her safe, removed from the life your boys lead.”
“I respect that decision.”
“She has never heard the name Harlan Carter, and if I have my say, she never will. She had never seen one man shoot at another until we came west, and that was because of your son. He brings that life, the life of a gunfighter, right to her. I can’t keep her shielded from it with Jack in her life.”
“We’re not bad people, Harding. We’re law-abiding citizens. We run a cattle ranch. Sort of like farming, but we have to tend the livestock from the back of a horse.”
“And yet you have a past. And a name that goes with that past. You never know when some young gunhawk might hunt you down, wanting to make a name for himself. And look at the trouble with Vic Falcone. I know who he is. Never met him, but I know the name. Just like I’m sure he knows mine. If your boy hadn’t been with us, we wouldn’t have had any trouble with them. But he has a grudge against your family. Jack being here brought Falcone down on us, and now Brewster’s daughter is gone.”
Harding drew a breath. “And then, there’s your wife.”
Johnny felt a stab of anger. Like a red hot branding iron pushing into an old wound. But he said nothing, letting Harding continue.
Harding said, “The story is she died taking a bullet meant for you. I don’t want that for my daughter. I want her to marry a respectable man. Maybe a farmer or a shopkeeper. Not a man who wears death buckled around his hips. I want her to raise children and grow old happy, surrounded by grandchildren. I don’t want her in a grave because of a bullet meant for someone else. Or to be carried off by men like Falcone, the way Jessica Brewster was.”
Johnny wanted to reply, but found he could not.
Harding said, “I want you to keep your boy away. Both of them, for that matter. Keep them away from my daughter.”
“My boys are grown. They make up their own minds.”
“I’m not making a request. Keep them away from me and mine, or they’ll meet Harlan Carter. And they won’t like it. Do you catch my meaning?”
“I don’t take kindly to threats, Carter.”
“I ain’t making one. I’m just saying it like it is. I’m not someone you want to tangle with.”
“I hope you know the same could be said about me.”
“I came here to speak my piece.”
“Sounds like you done that. It’d be best for everyone here if you walked away.”
Harding nodded. “I’ll walk away. This time. But keep those boys away from my daughter.”
Harding backed away a few steps. Johnny was reminded of an animal in the wild, not wanting to turn its back on an adversary. Almost as though Harding might have suspected Johnny was going to go for his gun on the spot. Johnny thought this told him a lot about Harding. It told him Harding might have been drawing down on him, had the situation been reversed. Often you suspect people of what you are capable of yourself.
Harding then seemed satisfied Johnny was not going to go for his gun, and he turned and strode away, back toward his tent. Johnny watched him walk away.
From som
ewhere off on a ridge, a wolf let out a lonesome call. Distinctly different than a coyote. The howl trailed off and then was gone.
Johnny stood by his campfire and thought maybe he knew how the animal felt. And he knew Carter did, too.
INTERLUDE
The Cabin
24
The cabin was actually a dugout. The back wall and both side walls were simply where the shovels had stopped digging when the cabin was built. The roof was also made of earth. Roots hung down, and more than once a snake had dropped onto the floor. Spiders tended to creep their way in. The floor was of hard packed dirt, and Jessica tried to keep the dust and rocks out, but working at it with a broom tended to just sweep up more dust.
The front of the cabin was made of logs, though the mud was dried and falling from the chinks, leaving openings the wind could creep in through. There was no door, save an old, ratty blanket nailed to the doorway overhead. Jessica hated the thought of spending a winter in this cabin, in these mountains. She would freeze to death. Against the front wall was a small cast iron stove, but she doubted it would do much against the cold, if the cold was anything like what she experienced in Vermont.
The cabin had two bunk beds, and a bed against the back wall. She shared one of the bunks with Cade, and Two-Finger Walker got the other bunk, and Vic Falcone and Flossy shared the single bed.
Jessica had not seen a bath since she had left with these men back on the trail. There was a creek within walking distance and she had taken a dunk in it a couple of times, but the water was ice cold and she didn’t really feel any cleaner afterward than she had before. Her hair was filled with dust she couldn’t quite get out, her cheeks were smeared with dirt, and her dress was torn at one sleeve and the hem was becoming frayed.
In the center of the small cabin was a table. Vic Falcone sat there, a bottle in front of him. His gun rested on the table beside the bottle. He hadn’t shaved since leaving Cheyenne and now a wild looking beard was covering his jaw. He was in his undershirt with suspenders up and over each shoulder. His undershirt was stained with dirt and sweat. His hair was growing long and unkempt, and was sticking out in places.
One Man's Shadow (The McCabes Book 2) Page 19
