Ralph Compton Tucker's Reckoning (9781101607770)

by Compton, Ralph; Mayo, Matthew P.

  Emma smiled. “Arliss, I have no idea what that means, but I’ll let it drop, at least until Uncle gets back. I just hope he hasn’t done anything to jeopardize the place.”

  “You ought to know better than that. Why, he loves this spread more than you and me combined. ’Bout the only one who liked it more was your pap.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing him up, Arliss.”

  The old man rasped a hand over his stubbled face. “Naw, you don’t. It’s good, you know. Got to keep him alive in us. He’s the reason we’re all here anyway. Besides, I miss him too. I knowed him a long time, you know. Met ’em all on the trail headin’ out here. We parted, and I went off, set to digging in the rocks for more rocks. Why, if there ever was a worse way for a man to spend his days, I ain’t done it. I—”

  “Arliss.”

  “What? I was fixin’ to tell just how I come to be here and you go and run my train of conversation into the ditch—”

  “Arliss!” Emma held up a hand, held her other over her eyes theatrically. “I know how you ended up here. I happen to have heard it a time or two. From you and Daddy and Uncle Payton. And you again. Now . . . ” She headed for the barn door. “I for one am hungry enough to eat a small bear. I’m not going to wait on Uncle. You want beans and biscuits or biscuits and beans?”

  Arliss held his scowl, his old chin jutting forward like a ship’s prow. Then his cheeks rose and his entire face grinned. He pushed his old holey hat back on his head. “With all them choices, I reckon I could eat some of each and a little more of the other. When do we eat?”

  “As soon as I make the biscuits and heat the beans.” As she said it, she saw Arliss’s face lose its broad smile. His brows pulled tight and he looked past her into the twilight behind the barn door. “What’s wrong?” she said, and turned.

  Her uncle’s buckskin gelding stood in the midst of the yard, head down and reins trailing, looking left and right as if confused.

  “Jasper, what are you doing here?” Emma scooped up the reins and looked around the yard. “Uncle Payton! Uncle Payton?”

  Arliss came up beside the horse. “Oh no.”

  “What is it?”

  He looked at Emma, his mouth set in a grim line, as he held up two fingers, the tips swiped with blood.

  “Arliss, what’s that?” But she knew.

  “It ain’t good, girl. The work wagon’s rigged. Put that horse in a stall. I’ll get Julep hitched. And grab a couple of lanterns. We’re losing daylight.”

  He headed to the barn, then shouted back over his shoulder, “And bring his rifle. I’ll get shells and my shotgun.”

  “What do you think happened, Arliss?” Emma fought to push down a cold snake of fear.

  “I don’t know, girl, but we can jaw about it later.”

  The old man led Julep the mule pulling the short work wagon, back out the rear door of the barn and around to the front. The mule stood, despite the jostling of the small wagon behind her. She was used to quieter commotion where Arliss was concerned, but she took it in stride. He slid the iron bar, post maul, and rolls of wire onto the ground beside the barn. “Emma! We got to go!”

  She came out of the barn on her strawberry roan, Cinda, the wire bails of two lanterns gripped in one hand. She leaned down and handed them to Arliss. “Let’s go.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “We can cover more ground this way, Arliss. Now let’s go!” She booted the roan into a gallop.

  Arliss climbed up onto the wagon seat and snapped the lines on Julep’s back, the lanterns rattling in the box beneath his feet. He didn’t know what they would find, but he knew it was bound to be bad. A man didn’t just bleed for no reason. The reason must have been a big one to unseat a man like Payton Farraday. This family has been through too much, he thought. Lord, don’t let it be anything like that. But somehow Arliss knew the night would not end well.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Emma reached the north meadow and slowed, searching the tall grasses trailside. Payton must have been headed home, since Jasper would have turned up at the ranch sooner had something happened earlier, on their way to town. She hoped she’d find him leaned against a rock, nursing a knock to the head. But that wouldn’t explain blood on his saddle.

  Every few minutes she’d glance back over her shoulder to make sure Arliss was coming. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop her mind from replaying how she’d found her father, shot dead while seeding that same field. It was to be the first of many such pastures and hay fields, he’d told her. Then they would be able to feed their horses top feed. It was a hardy seed he’d ordered special. He’d been mocked at local rancher meetings, but when the grass grew in, year after year, fuller and more lush with each passing season, others had come around, asking how they might order themselves some of the same seed. But it had turned out to be the only such field he would establish.

  She remembered that September day two years before. My, she thought, two years ago this week. She’d ridden out to bring him lunch. Arliss and Uncle Payton had been on the south end of the spread rounding up strays, getting a head count. Her father had been scything great swaths of tall, rich grass. But as she’d ridden up, she saw nothing of him and wondered if he was taking a nap just into the trees at the south end of the field. She’d skirted the edge, not wanting to trample any uncut grass, and glanced in toward the field. Then she saw the section he’d been working, great wide, even cuts, the grass laid low in long rows. And there in the midst of it lay her father on his back. She dismounted and led her horse through the field toward him. While she was well away from him, she smiled, lifted down the tin lunch pail, slung the canteen over her shoulder, and crept forward. He didn’t move. She’d catch him napping, a rare treat since he never did anything like that. Called it lazy work.

  But as she drew closer, she saw flies clustering over him in a circling swarm, rising and falling, saw some on his face. Soon she saw his sweaty shirt, but it was dark with more than sweat. It had been blood, multiple gunshots in his chest and belly, one in his arm, as if he’d been defending himself.

  “Emma!”

  Arliss’s voice snapped her from her reverie. She glanced back from the edge of the field where the lane from their place met the lane to town.

  “Emma! He’s here!”

  She saw Arliss turn Julep hard right into the field. Beyond them she saw a big rock. Then she realized it was her uncle Payton’s coat. She spun Cinda hard and booted her into a run.

  By the time she got to them, Arliss was on his knees, hunched over the big man. He’d laid him out flat on his back, the great coat spread wide, her uncle’s chest and belly rank and black with wet blood. There was a smell, the pungency of death, clouding her senses.

  On the other side of her big uncle’s body, Arliss alternately smacked the big man’s face and bent low to hug him, then rose again to adjust the man’s arms, cursing and smoothing Payton’s hair, pushing it back beyond the sun line from his hatband. Arliss babbled that Payton must wake up, had to wake up, damn it.

  She knew she should try to track whoever had shot him, but this new, sudden grief and confusion overwhelmed her. Dark descended and Cinda and Julep grazed in the fine, succulent green grasses of her father’s prized field. Emma knelt beside Arliss, as close to her as an uncle, and leaned over her dead uncle, unbidden tears trailing down her dirt-smudged face, her uncle’s coat sleeves gripped tight in her callused, work-hard hands. She knew that the nightmare was happening all over again, and maybe this time it would never end.

  How long they sat like that, she didn’t know. With her eyes closed, Emma no longer heard Arliss trying to revive her uncle. Instead, he had subsided into quiet sobs, a low, pitiful sound that gripped her guts tight in its bony hand. She felt grief that she recognized as the same vile ache from two years before. Emma kept her eyes closed and pulled in
a long, deep breath. She let it out slowly, forcing it through clenched teeth, then opened her eyes.

  Julep raised her head as Emma retrieved a lantern from the wagon. She dragged a match on the strap steel seat brace and lit the lantern.

  “We should get Uncle Payton home. Take care of him right.”

  Arliss nodded. “I’ll lay him out on the table, wash him, dress him in his finest.”

  “We both will.”

  Arliss looked at her with alarm, shook his head. “Oh no, no, girly. That wouldn’t do at all.”

  “But he was my uncle.”

  “Yes, and next to your pappy, he was my best friend. But he was a man, and a modest one at that. He’d have been embarrassed to high heaven if you saw him . . . well, you know.”

  Emma looked down at her uncle and sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Let’s get him into the wagon.”

  Arliss guided Julep and the wagon closer to Payton Farraday’s body, then made sure the bed of the wagon was free of any last bits of junk from the day’s work. He shoved far forward under the seat a knot of rope, a tin of bent and broken nails, and a too-thin fence post. “I didn’t think to bring a blanket. It’s a hard old wagon.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to care, Arliss.” As soon as she said it, Emma didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did a little of both. It had sounded so much like something her uncle would have said.

  It seemed to help the old man too. He shook his head and said, “I swear, girl, with that tongue of yours, if you ain’t a Farraday. . . . Now.” Arliss cleared his throat. “You lift him by the boots. I’ll get him under the shoulders. You set his boots in the bed. Then you can help me slide him in there.”

  It took them a couple of minutes of grunting, but they got Payton loaded, got the tailgate chained in place.

  “I don’t expect I’ll need the lantern,” said Arliss. “Old Julep knows her way home.”

  They moved along, Emma walking her horse beside the wagon, looking at her uncle’s body, his big hat pulled down over his face just as when they’d found him. Soon they reached the spot where the lane toward the ranch T’d off the main trail to Klinkhorn. Emma reined up and Arliss drew Julep to a stop. “Whoa, now. Whoa. What’s wrong, Emma?”

  “I’m going on to town, Arliss.”

  “What? No, no, no, that won’t do at all.”

  “You can’t keep telling me that, Arliss. I have to see the marshal. One of us has to.”

  “Then I’ll go,” he said, making to climb down from the wagon.

  “How? How are you going to do that, Arliss? You can’t ride horseback anymore, and besides, who’s going to tend to Uncle Payton?”

  He sat back in the wagon seat. “We’ll go in the morning, Emma. Now is not the time. I can’t let you risk your neck. Lord knows who’s out there in the dark.” He leaned forward. “Your pap and uncle would never forgive me if something happened to you.”

  “I’m not a little girl, Arliss. And it’s something I need to do. Something I am going to do, no matter what you say.” She looked down at her uncle once more in the wagon, then said, “I have to go. I’ll see you at home later.”

  As she wheeled the horse around and headed toward town, Arliss shouted after her, “Who’s going to help me get your uncle in the house?”

  But she didn’t even turn in the saddle. Despite the cold silver light of a nearly full moon, he lost sight of her. Soon even the drumming of her horse’s hooves was swallowed by the dark. Arliss pictured her, riding in the night, crying, angry, confused, a true orphan now and barely twenty-two years old, but a young girl in so many ways. Her father and uncle had worried so much about her not growing up into a lady, but they were wrong. She was very much a lady, but a ranch lady. A lady of her own devising, and a stronger woman you’d not find, thought Arliss.

  And then he froze in the seat as he remembered that she had her uncle’s rifle with her. He didn’t think she’d remembered to take along a holster gun, but he’d told her to grab her uncle’s rifle. Even as he remembered seeing it in the sheath on Cinda’s saddle on their way out to look for Payton, Arliss felt in vain beneath his boots for the thing, hoping against hope that she’d stuck it in the wagon before she left. No such luck. His hand fell on nothing but the rattling lanterns.

  “Oh, Payton, Payton. That girl is too much of a firebrand. I hope she doesn’t do something foolish, but as a Farraday, I just know she will. You went and got yourself all shot up, just like your brother. Now how will we manage? Ranch was on shaky ground before, but now? I hope you made that deposit before you got jumped. I reckon I’ll be the next one going to town, see what I can see at the bank. I don’t reckon they’ll make time for an old wreck of a miner with bum knees and no kin relation to the girl. But I smell a rat. And it goes by the name of Grissom.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The night was cool and a breeze kicked up as Emma rode toward Klinkhorn. She had a good idea who had killed her uncle, the same man she knew had had her father killed. But it had been so difficult then, and her uncle had told her not to worry about it, that he would take care of it, that he would find out who had done it and make them pay. And she had believed he would. But as time wore on, as the weeks became months, and the months became a year, then two, she realized that either he knew who had done it but was powerless to prove it, or it had truly been as their friend Marshal Hart had said, a vicious murder by somebody drifting through. But that had never made sense to her—who’d drift way up here? And why kill a man working in a field? Did they really think they’d find his pockets stuffed with money?

  And now Uncle Payton was dead, also by gunshots, and in the same place, almost in the same spot in the field. And that was all too coincidental to her.

  She didn’t know what she hoped to do in town, but she had to do something. Had to tell the marshal. He was bound to round up a posse. Unless she could convince him that it had been Grissom.

  She made the eight miles faster than she had expected, clouds sliding away to reveal a moon offering cold comfort from above. All about her the familiar landscape lay cloaked in a steely glow. She topped the rise, the other side of which led straight down into town, and paused there, puzzled by the light from the long main street and the outlying grid of lanes leading to the expanding homes. She had often wondered how anyone could live so close to others, and had long vowed to herself to never find out. But on this grim night, Emma’s first thought on seeing the town was that it looked as if it were on fire, so many lights glowed.

  Cinda nickered and Emma responded with a neck pat. She’d long ago taken up the family habit of talking to her horse. She urged the roan into a trot down the slope to the main road snaking into town. “I know, girl. Looks like torches down there. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  And as she drew closer, she realized she was right; they were torches carried by more people on the street in the dark of this September night than she’d ever seen milling in town, even during the Fourth of July celebrations. Men, women, even the kids were out.

  “Emma Farraday, is that you, dear?” From her right, from between two buildings and carrying a swinging lantern, emerged Louisa Penny, a woman several years older than Emma but who had become a good friend, and someone she’d been able to talk with as she had reluctantly grown into a young woman.

  “Oh, Louisa.” Emma found herself swinging down out of the saddle and hugging her friend. For long minutes they stood, holding each other, Emma crying long, near-silent sobs, her friend gripping her tight, patting her back and not needing to say a thing.

  Angry shouts from far down the street pulled them apart, and Emma dried her red eyes with the hankie Louisa handed her.

  “You probably don’t even know why I’m here, why I’m crying.”

  “I had hoped the marshal wasn’t correct, but now, seeing you . . . It’s Payton, isn’t it?�
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  Emma nodded, her throat hard, her mouth set tight. “But how did you . . . Is that what all this is about?” Emma pointed at the growing cluster of townsfolk down the street, in front of the marshal’s office.

  “Oh, Emma,” said the older woman, holding the girl’s wrists. “Nearly every woman in town thought the world of Payton Farraday. But you knew that. You also knew Payton nearly as well as anyone, and you know what he could be like. Slow to anger, slow to smile, but always thoughtful. Slow to . . .”

  She turned away, wiped at her eyes. “Now you’ll think I’m silly. Just this afternoon . . . he . . . he kissed me, Emma. Like a schoolboy, so kind and gentle. I haven’t felt so happy in a long time, Emma. He said he was going home to give you the good news. About the loan. He was so happy.”

  “What loan?” Emma looked hard at her friend, her eyes sharp and hard. “What loan, Louisa?”

  “Why, the loan he took out last spring to help pay . . . Don’t tell me he never told you? Don’t worry, though, now, because it’s all paid off. You’ll at least have that small comfort in knowing you’re not beholden to that nasty Bentley Grissom.”

  Emma nodded, more confused than she’d ever felt in her life. What else could possibly happen to make this day the worst she was sure she would ever have?

  “Why are they down there, Louisa?”

  “Then you don’t know. Of course, how could you? The marshal said he was shorthanded. His deputy, Peter Orton, is out on the drive to Ogallala, I think it was. So Marshal Hart probably hasn’t had time to ride out to see you. He would want to tell you himself.”

  “I already know Payton’s dead, Louisa. Honestly, sometimes you remind me of Arliss. . . .”

  “The marshal caught the man who did it.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, some drifter, a drunk, apparently. The marshal obviously wants a fair trial, but half the town is howling for blood. They want to hang the man tonight from the peak of the livery barn.”