She and Lonnie jerked worried looks at each other.
Lonnie leaped to his feet and went running to the cabin. He tripped the latch and nearly tore the door off its frame, lunging inside, and stopped just over the threshold, breathing hard. Relief lightened the load of worry that had been pressing on his shoulders.
The saddlebags still sat against the front wall, near the chair Casey had occupied last night. When he’d crouched down to inspect each bag, making certain that none of the money had been removed, Lonnie walked back out to where Casey faced him on her knees, concern showing in her eyes.
“I’ll be hanged if it ain’t all still there,” Lonnie said.
“And he didn’t shoot you or knife you,” Casey said, only half-ironically, staring downstream toward where the old Confederate had disappeared. “All he done to me was tend my foot, and it feels better already. Maybe he’s not who I thought he was at all.”
“Maybe not.”
“I know that’s the name I saw on the Wanted circular, though. I got a good memory.”
“Well, maybe some zebras can change their stripes.”
“Maybe,” Casey said. “I wonder where he’s goin’.”
“I don’t know, but I’m gonna ride back and check out the mouth of this canyon.” Lonnie lifted his saddle and tied bedroll onto his shoulder. “Not that I don’t believe what he said about it bein’ hard to find, but I reckon it’s best if we don’t over trust nobody. Especially when we got Dupree and his boys shadowin’ us.”
“You’re not gonna leave me here alone, are you, Lonnie?”
Casey turned to the girl. She looked so plump-faced and morning pretty, with a splash of freckles across her nose and the nubs of her cheeks, her hair still tangled around her ears, that Lonnie couldn’t help himself.
He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth.
Her lips were warm and pliant. When he pulled away, Casey wrapped her arms around the boy’s neck, drew him to her once more, and kissed him, long and deep.
Lonnie could feel the passion in the girl’s body.
He could feel it in his own, as well. It made the tips of his ears burn hot as a skillet over a stoked fire.
They released each other at the same time. Casey smiled warmly at him. Lonnie didn’t know what to say. It was as though every word in the English language he’d learned over the past thirteen years had suddenly left him, until he finally managed to sputter, “I won’t be gone long. Give a holler if you get scared. I’ll hear and come runnin’.”
He started walking over to the corral, his mind still foggy from the kiss. He paused to whistle for General Sherman, who was now grazing on the near side of the stream with Casey’s chestnut.
When he’d saddled the horse, Lonnie rode upstream, in the opposite direction from which Calhoun had ridden. As he left the sunlit yard and gained the shadows of the forest he turned back to Casey, who was bathing both her feet in the stream now. She’d turned to look after Lonnie. She was smiling.
Her mouth opened and closed, and Lonnie heard her yell barely loudly enough to be heard above the thudding of the General’s hooves: “I love you Lonnie Gentry!”
At least, that’s what Lonnie thought she’d yelled.
He turned his head forward as the General stretched his stride into a lope. Lonnie’s brows hooded his eyes. The boy was in deep thought.
At least … that’s what he thought she’d said.
“Nah, couldn’t be,” he muttered as the General picked up a faint game trail twisting amongst the pines. He’d just heard what he’d wanted to hear. No town girl as wonderful as Casey Stoveville could love a raggedy-heeled mountain kid like Lonnie Gentry …
CHAPTER 49
Lonnie followed the game trail up a low grade through the forest, occasionally skirting the creek, for what he figured was a good mile or so. When the game path appeared to dead-end in a stand of piñon pines and juniper, near the base of a craggy, gray stone wall leaning back against the southwestern sky that bore not a single cloud, Lonnie reined the General to a halt and swung down from the saddle.
He dropped the stallion’s reins, slid his rifle from its scabbard, racked a round into the chamber, just in case, and then off-cocked the hammer. He followed the game trail, littered here and there with deer and elk scat, up into the trees.
Continuing to follow the trail through the trees, Lonnie saw that it did not end at all. It meandered between junipers and pines that were not as closely spaced as they’d appeared from where Lonnie had left the General, and continued through a broad gap in the mountain wall.
At the gap in the wall, which was maybe thirty feet wide and which Lonnie vaguely remembered riding through the night before though it had looked much different in the moonlight than it did in the full light of the sun, Lonnie stopped and dropped to one knee. He saw why this mouth to the canyon in which Calhoun’s cabin sat would be so hard to find from the adjacent valley.
The game trail dropped down and away from him into the valley, quickly intersecting several other game trails. There were trees to the right and left, and a jumble of boulders inside the line of trees on the right. Shade was creeping over Lonnie from the towering rock walls on either side of him, and he could sense that this opening, which sat crookedly atop the slope he was on, probably looked like solid stone from only a few yards down the slope that dropped into the valley. He didn’t want to check it out and risk being seen or leaving tracks, but he was fairly certain this was so, that few people had ever gone beyond where Lonnie knelt.
It would take a man who’d spent a lot of time traveling around these mountains to happen upon such a gap as the one Lonnie was in. A former Confederate train robber, who had a lot of time for traveling remote mountains ranges as he stayed ahead of the law, would be such a person.
Feeling better, more secure, Lonnie walked back to where General Sherman stood ground-reined, and swung up into the saddle. He turned the horse around and loped back in the direction from which he’d come.
After he’d ridden fifty or so yards, he stopped, swung down, found an aspen branch with a few dead leaves on it, and used the branch to carefully, subtly scratch out his trail but leaving the deer and elk scat and a mound of what appeared coyote dung bristling with chokecherry seeds and rabbit fur.
Lonnie tossed away the branch, mounted the General once more, and returned to the cabin.
When he’d unsaddled the stallion, he rubbed him down and curried him thoroughly, and then he gave the same treatment to Casey’s chestnut. With her gimpy ankle, the girl couldn’t tend the horse herself, but Casey hobbled up from the creek and sat on a corral post, watching Lonnie work. She didn’t say anything more about love or anything even similar, if she ever had, but merely looked around and chewed a weed and watched Lonnie work with a warm, self-satisfied half smile on her face.
She seemed to be enjoying the day of rest from travel, as was Lonnie.
Occasionally, when they heard the breeze scrape branches together or they heard birds light from the trees, they turned to see if Calhoun was returning. When the old Confederate hadn’t returned by the time Lonnie was done tending both horses and rubbing some bear grease into his and Casey’s tack, the two stripped down to their underwear, and waded around in the creek, skipping stones and splashing each other playfully.
After a while, they swam in the cool, deep pool beneath the beaver dam, and then lay together on the bank, drying out in the sun.
They didn’t hear the thuds of a single rider until well after the sun had gone down, filling the canyon with deep-purple shadows. Lonnie and Casey, both dry now, had dressed and were gathering wood for a fire, when Calhoun returned with a croaker sack tied from his saddle horn and hanging down over his left stirrup fender. Cherokee followed him, tongue hanging but his ears up and eyes smiling. The dog was wet and dirty, as though he’d taken several swims in the stream.
The ex-Confederate cast a bright, toothy smile toward the youngsters gathering wood near the creek, and then, w
histling, stripped the tack from his horse and carried the croaker sack inside the cabin.
“What do you suppose he’s got in the sack?” Lonnie asked Casey, as the boy dug a shallow hole in which to build a fire against the canyon’s growing chill.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go in and fine out?” Casey nudged him with her hip.
“Why don’t you?”
“Chicken!”
The door to the shack opened then, and Calhoun asked Lonnie to fetch him some wood from a pile behind the cabin. Turning the outdoor fire-starting duties to Casey, Lonnie gave the girl a conspiratorial wink—he’d find out what was in the sack now—then strode around behind the cabin. He found a few pine logs under an old, moldy tarp that didn’t look too soft, and split them with a mallet. When he had an armful of relatively well-seasoned wood, he took it into the cabin, stopping inside the door in shock.
On the table was a fat, dead chicken, appearing freshly killed, and two potatoes, a handful of carrots, and a large turnip. All the vegetables appeared to have been freshly harvested, as they were all still wearing a moist skin of soil though the bright orange of the carrots couldn’t help but shine through the dirt. On the table was also a fresh-baked pie, a small stone crock filled with only the Lord knew what, and a loaf of crusty, dark-brown bread.
There was also a bottle on the table, with its cork resting on the table beside it. Wilbur Calhoun was crouched in front of the small stove, shoving bits of paper and kindling and feather sticks into the firebox.
“Holy moly, Mister Calhoun—where’d you get all that grub?”
Calhoun turned to Lonnie. He hesitated slightly, the nubs of his craggy, red-brown cheeks turning a tad darker, and said, “Oh, this stuff here? Oh ...well ... I ...uh ... I got me an old prospector friend living downstream a couple miles. I told him I had guests and needed some possibles, and he … uh … well, he obliged … seein’ as how he owed me a favor or two.”
The old Confederate took the wood from Lonnie and set it on the floor outside the stove’s open door. “Much obliged, young’un! Run along, now! I’ll call you and the pretty li’l gal when supper’s ready! Hope you’re hungry!”
He winked and saluted Lonnie with the bottle and took a long drink.
Lonnie headed back outside, his stomach already rumbling at the sight of all that food, and filled Casey in on the details. As it was getting colder the darker it got, they both hunkered down on either side of the fire Casey had built, and enjoyed how the fading light played on the stream, and how the smoke issuing from the cabin’s stovepipe grew more and more fragrant with the smell of cooking food.
About an hour later, Calhoun called them to supper, and Lonnie had a hard time holding himself back and not running ahead of Casey, whom he had to help hobble across the yard to the cabin. Once inside, they both stopped again in shock at what the table displayed—three battered tin plates covered in thick, light-tan chicken stew colored with the white of fresh potatoes and turnips and the bright orange of fresh carrots.
Tin cups of milk sat at the head of two plates. The bread sat in the middle of the table, near the stone crock that was no longer wearing its lid so that Lonnie could tell it was filled with fresh-whipped butter!
The pie sat at the far end of the table, fairly screaming to be cut into.
“Well, I never seen such polite children-folk—waitin’ to be asked to sit down to table,” Calhoun said, leaning over the table to cut the bread loaf into slices. Lonnie noticed that the level of the whiskey had gone down by about a third. Calhoun laughed and beckoned. “We don’t stand on form here at the Calhoun plantation, young’uns. Come on in, belly up to the bar, and get to shovelin’ before it gets cold!”
There were crunching sounds, and Lonnie looked under the table to see Cherokee under there, chowing down contentedly on a big heap of chicken bones.
The old Confederate laughed again, heartily, and took another deep pull from the bottle.
CHAPTER 50
Lonnie and Casey and Wilbur Calhoun made short work of the chicken stew and bread lathered in thick, fresh-whipped butter and the apple pie dessert, while Cherokee crunched bones beneath the table.
The old Confederate had slacked off on the whiskey bottle, switching to coffee for the meal, and Lonnie was glad he had. There was a certain untethered, hell-for-leather quality about the old man’s spirit, which, while charming when the man was sober, could possibly turn into something dark with too much skull pop under his belt. Lonnie didn’t think consciously about this, but, having been around drunk, mean men enough times in his short life, it did occur to him instinctively, and it caused an all-too-familiar apprehension in the boy.
Men were too darn big, physically, and they wielded too much power and were too well armed for Lonnie to feel safe around them when they were drinking.
He didn’t like it when, after the meal, Calhoun freshened his coffee with the stuff. Lonnie thanked the man for the wonderful meal and rose from the table, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and excusing himself.
“Hold on, boy.”
Lonnie inwardly cringed as he looked across the table at the old Confederate. Casey, having insisted her ankle was much better, was washing the dishes out at the creek. The dog, having taken to the two young strangers, had followed her out there, and Lonnie could hear her talking to the dog while she scrubbed the plates and cups and the dog scampered around the brush.
Calhoun had filled his pipe. He tamped the chopped tobacco down inside the bowl, and plucked a long stove match off the table between his thumb and index finger, so ingrained with dirt that both appeared nearly black, as did nearly all the deep-cut age lines in his skin.
“Yes, Mister Calhoun?” Lonnie said.
“Wilbur.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Sit down there, and call me Wilbur.”
Lonnie didn’t know what to say to that. It didn’t feel right, calling a man as old as Calhoun by his first name. It didn’t sound right at all. In fact, it sounded almost as bad as cursing. It sounded worse than cursing.
Calhoun struck the match to life atop the table. The flame chuffed and blossomed and then settled down against the end of the match, which the old Confederate held over the bowl of his pipe. “You really,” he said, sucking the flame down into the bowl and blowing the smoke out the side of his mouth, “you really … gonna take all that loot … back to the marshal in Camp Collins … ?”
He continued to suck at the flame and blow the smoke, his gaze focused on the pipe bowl.
“Yes, sir,” Lonnie said, frowning at the man, not sure what his point was. “It belongs to the bank over in Golden.”
“Bank money, boy,” Calhoun said, flipping the match onto the floor and turning his slightly watery, drink-bleary eyes to Lonnie over the smoldering bowl of his pipe, “is money meant to be taken by them it don’t belong to.”
Lonnie wasn’t quite sure he’d heard the man correctly. He felt the impulse to poke his fingers in his ears, to clean the wax out of them, but then he realized that he’d heard the man correctly, after all.
“I don’t know what you mean, Mister Calhoun,” was all that the boy could think of to say.
“I mean, son, that whoever belongs to that money has by now forgotten about it. Leastways, they’ve probably written it off their books, or the bank has made up for it. Most likely, rich people own that money. Rich Yankees. People who ain’t gonna miss it none.” He paused, let more smoke billow out the side of his mouth. “Folks that got enough money to lock up in a bank got enough money to lose, is what I’m sayin’.”
Calhoun stopped and regarded Lonnie levelly over the smoldering bowl of his pipe. Lonnie sat frozen, waiting for the man to continue though he really didn’t want him to.
“If I was you,” Calhoun continued, puffing his pipe, “I’d take that money, and I’d start a life for myself somewhere a long, long way from here. New Mexico, maybe. Or maybe Old Mexico. Son, the senoritas down there … why, they’ll �
��” His bearded face gained a sheepish look, and he let his voice trail off. He’d been about to gesture in the air with his hands, but he thought twice about that, too, sitting back in his chair and returning the pipe to his mouth. “Son, what I’m sayin’ is this is a dog-eat-dog world. We gotta get ahead any way we can. If that means bein’ stronger than the next fella, and takin’ what’s his and makin’ it yours—why, then, that’s what you gotta do.”
“That ain’t how I been taught it, Mister Calhoun.”
“No, of course not. They don’t teach you that.” The old Confederate lowered his pipe once more, squared his shoulders, and leaned forward on the table, his eyes growing large and passionate. “The so-called Good Book … our parents … school marms—they wanna keep you weak, keep you cowerin’ to everybody else. Cowerin’ to the ones who done figured it out and learned how to make this short life we have down here on this miserable scratch of dirt somethin’ worth livin’. All for the sake of bein’ civilized. But we ain’t civilized, boy. We’re savages. All of us is savage through an’ through, and hidin’ that fact is plain foolish and prideful.”
Calhoun laughed without humor. “It’s the toughest savage that survives. It’s the savviest savage that has an easy ride. Why, hell, I rode with Jesse James for a time … after the war. Him and me didn’t get along—we was both the same kinda savage, I reckon—so we parted ways. But Jesse—he knew what I done just told you. You see, the war was a good teacher in that regard to us Graybacks.”
Calhoun knocked the dottle from his pipe out onto the table. “No, no … you an’ that girl take that money. It’s yours now. You’d be fools not to take it and make a good life for yourselves.”
Lonnie stared at the old Southerner who sat blaze-eyed across from him. The old man’s words had grown wings and they were flying around between the boy’s ears. Lonnie’s palms were slick with sweat. He looked down at the overstuffed saddlebags leaning against the wall. Thousands of dollars in those two pouches. Enough so that he could go home and turn his cabin into a nice, big place, and decorate it nice, too, like he’d seen in the catalogs at the mercantile in Arapaho Creek.
Lonnie Gentry Page 20
