He’d give his ma a nice place to grow old in, keep her mind off men that hurt her and Lonnie. Give her enough so that she wouldn’t need any such man to make her happy. Because her son would make her happy.
Make her and the baby she was carrying happy. Maybelline Gentry would be wealthy and happy in her old age. If she was still alive, that was.
If Shannon Dupree hadn’t killed her …
Lonnie was starting to breathe hard, as though he’d run a long way up a steep hill.
If his mother was gone, Lonnie would be alone. Maybe he had Casey, maybe he didn’t. If he did, they’d need a nest egg to make a fresh start for themselves …
Maybe Calhoun was right. Maybe he should take the money. He’d never had a dime, and he at only thirteen years old worked himself to the bone, rolled into his bed every night feeling as beaten-down as an old man. Hell, none of his three pairs of socks didn’t have holes in them!
Who if not Lonnie Gentry deserved such wealth that had suddenly fallen into his lap?
The door hinges squawked. Casey had left the door partway open to let the stove heat out while she’d washed the dishes at the creek. Now she nudged it wide and stood in the open doorway, holding the freshly washed plates and cooking pans, with silverware and tin cups propped on top. She was staring at Lonnie from beneath rumpled brows. She turned her head partly to one side, and narrowed her eyes reprovingly.
“Don’t you listen to him, Lonnie. Don’t you dare!”
CHAPTER 51
“Now, you look here, little miss—!”
“You look here, you old train robber,” Casey said, slamming the dishes and silverware down on the end of the table and casting Calhoun one of her spine-melting glares, her smooth, suntanned cheeks flushing with fury. “How dare you try putting evil thoughts in Lonnie’s head!”
Before Calhoun could interrupt her, she swung toward the boy. “Don’t you listen to a word of his blarney. He’s an old train robber and a killer. He killed his own wife! Shot her in the back! Is this the kind of man you want to be, Lonnie?”
Lonnie sat back in his chair, feeling his lower jaw becoming unhinged. Both Calhoun’s words as well as Casey’s had taken manic fight between his ears. He wasn’t sure what to think about it all, much less what to say.
Calhoun answered for him. “He’ll make up his own mind. Where I come from, a boy big as him’s a man. Hell, I had friends as well as kin who fought for the Confederacy when they was no bigger’n Master Gentry there. I’m tellin’ it the way this old world works, and you oughta listen, too, little miss!”
Casey stomped her good foot down hard on the floor. “Stop calling me ‘little miss!’ Why, you’re nothing but a common outlaw. A ne’er-do-well and a scoundrel. You’re an old rogue wolf hidin’ up here from them tryin’ to exterminate you. My pa worked hard to run your ilk to ground so the West could grow and become a civilized place—a place folks who lived here could feel proud calling their home!”
“Yeah, well, how’d that work out for your pa? What’d it get him ’cept an early grave?” Calhoun slapped a big hand down hard on the table. “I’m tellin’ it right—you two best take that money and carve a life out of this miserable rock while you can. Laws and whatnot—why they’re written by the scared and the weak. Them laws’re meant to be broken by them strong enough to carve a life for themselves without workin’ themselves to the bone to do it! Only the weak follow the laws, cause only they have to!”
“You old fool!” Casey screamed, slapping her own hand down hard on the table. “How dare you spew your evil blather to an innocent boy?”
“He ain’t so innocent. He might be young, but he’s being hunted like a full-grown man. That grows a child up right fast— shows him what the world’s really all about! And fool am I?”
Calhoun rose, kicking his chair back and wobbling a little, drunkenly, on his feet. For a second, Lonnie thought he was going to fall into the table. “You don’t know nothin’ about me, little miss! I fought hard in that war, and what did it get me? Nothin’ more than graves to visit when I finally got back home with so much Yankee metal in my back—bedsprings an’ screws an’ nails—that I jingled when I walked. And when I finally did get home, I learned my wife hadn’t been pinin’ away for me half as much as she was tellin’ me in the letters she wrote. Ah, hell, no—she weren’t pinin’ at all. In fact, she was makin’ time with a rich man from town—Virgil Boatwright, the town banker’s son. One afternoon I come back early from sellin’ eggs and I caught ’em together!”
Lonnie had been riveted to every word both Calhoun and Casey had said. Now, staring up numbly at the old Confederate, sensing the anguish in the old Rebel’s heart, he said, “That … that when you killed her?”
Tears dribbled down the old man’s cheeks, soaking his beard. “No.” His voice cracked on that, and he turned away, giving Lonnie and Casey his back.
He lifted his head and ran a hand back over the nearly bald top of his head. “I didn’t kill her, though I might as well have. June’s dead on account o’ me. It was a mistake. I loved her. I still love her. I shot Boatwright! I reckon I only clipped him though I heard he died later, but before he expired he grabbed his old LeMat off the dresser … and … June moved between us … and he shot her in the back.”
The old Confederate sobbed as he lowered his head, staggered toward the other end of the cabin, and took his face in his hands. His shoulders jerked as he cried. “There wasn’t nothin’ I could do for her, an’ I heard a neighbor yellin’ from his field, and I went crazy with shame an’ fear, an’ I ran. And, oh, Lord, I’m still runnin’.”
Calhoun turned back toward Lonnie and Casey.
“That was the end of civilized life for me. I reckon I missed it more than I thought. Leastways, the family part of that life. Been nice havin’ you two young’uns here … to cook for … to listen to you talkin’ out by the creek, sparkin’ each other, fallin’ in love, like me and June … back before the war.”
Lonnie flushed. He glanced at Casey. The girl stared stony-faced at Calhoun though Lonnie could tell by a slight softening in her eyes that the man’s story had reached through her anger.
“Hell,” Calhoun said, chuckling though tears continued to dribble down his cheek and into his beard, “I went out and stole grub for you, didn’t I?” He chuckled again.
There was a short, heavy silence, then Casey said tonelessly, “What?”
“Helkatoot,” Calhoun exclaimed. “I never did no prospectors any favors. I stole that food you ate tonight. There’s a little shotgun settlement, three cabins and some stables down along Eagle Creek, and I raided their garden and keeper shed, took a chicken out of their coop.” The old Confederate’s tone was buoyant with mockery. “Pretty darn good vittles even if they was stolen, wasn’t they? Hell, those rock breakers ain’t gonna miss none of it. They got more than they can eat, anyways, and a man’d be a fool to go hungry up here when he’s got their chickens and gardens down there!”
He turned to Lonnie. “You see what I mean, boy? Why work like a dog when you don’t have to? We’re savages! All of us.” He leaned forward and tapped his temple. “It’s the smart savages that know how to make the plows pull for them!”
Lonnie couldn’t move from his chair. He didn’t know what to make of all he’d heard, but he knew one thing—Calhoun’s story, however horrible, had been fascinating. And Lonnie wasn’t sure he didn’t agree with the old Confederate’s life philosophy, either …
Why shouldn’t he do what Calhoun had recommended—take the money and make a good life for himself? Why should he struggle when he didn’t have to? Casey obviously didn’t agree with Calhoun, but she was still under the influence of her father, the town marshal of Arapaho Creek.
Calhoun had been right: Marshal Stoveville’s efforts at holding the lawbreakers at bay had been rewarded by only a premature death and an orphaned daughter.
“You go ahead and sit here and listen to this scoundrel as long as you want, Lonnie,” Casey said
in that same disdainfully toneless voice. “But I’m goin’ to bed.” She picked up the saddlebags, drew them over her shoulder with a grunt. “And I’ll be pullin’ out with the money first thing in the morning.”
She stopped at the door to glare once more at Calhoun. “I’ll be takin’ it back to where it rightly belongs.”
She opened the door and headed out, stepping around Cherokee who sat beyond the doorway, mewling his discomfort at the raised voices and the tension.
“Casey, hold on!” Lonnie said, rising from his chair but getting his boot hung up on a corner of the table, and tripping. He was drunk on the possibilities of a new, rich life. He made his way through the door and swerved around Cherokee. He caught up to Casey easily, as she was still hobbling on her injured ankle.
“Casey, stop!” Lonnie pleaded, grabbing the girl’s arm.
She stopped and swung toward him, her eyes ablaze with anger.
“What’re you gonna do when you go back to Arapaho Creek?” Lonnie asked her. “You gonna go back to work for that mercantile? You know how much you’re gonna have to work to keep your house? And what if you lose it? Then, what’re you gonna do?”
Lonnie knew that the frontier was a harsh, cruel place for young women without families. Casey knew it, too. Lonnie could see the fear in her eyes. Her gaze grew less angry and more pensive, and then, as though ashamed by what she was thinking, Casey swung around again and continued favoring her sprained ankle as she strode toward where the fire by the creek had burned down to faint, umber ashes.
She sat down and, keeping the saddlebags draped over her shoulder, raised a knee and wrapped her arms around it. She studied the darkness straight out across the murmuring creek for a time, and then she said softly, “So, what are you thinkin’, Lonnie? What’re you thinking we should do with this money?”
Lonnie sat down beside her. His mind was swimming with possibilities. He could hardly catch his breath. “We could take it back home. I could build up the ranch, and we could—”
“Get married?”
Lonnie hiked his shoulder. “Why not?You don’t have nobody, and ...and Ma ...she might or might not be at the ranch when I get back.” The horror of that possibility struck the boy like a blow. So much had happened, and he’d been so distracted trying to stay ahead of Dupree, of trying to keep himself and Casey alive, that he really hadn’t allowed himself to consider what life would be like for him if his mother was dead.
If both his parents were dead, and, like Casey, he had no one.
Suddenly, he realized that Casey was staring at him sympathetically, as though she knew what he was thinking. She sighed, shook her head. “Damn you, Lonnie, for listening to that old train robber … and for making me actually consider doing such a low-down dirty thing.”
She set the saddlebags aside, gently pulled off her boots, and rolled up in her bedroll. She turned her back to Lonnie.
Lonnie wandered off and tended nature, then he came back to the fire, built the flames up a little with pine branches. Then, he, too, curled up in his blankets. But he was too distracted with swirling thoughts about the money to fall asleep right away. Money and shame, money and shame—he was caught in a cyclone of those two conflicting ideas.
He could hear Casey over on the other side of the fire, rolling and thrashing this way and that, for a long, long time, before sleep finally claimed him.
He woke abruptly, lifting his head from his saddle. He blinked and looked around, heart pumping.
Something had awakened him. Then he realized what it had been, because he heard it again—Casey screaming from a long ways away: “Lonnie! Help me!” There was a slight pause as the girl’s cries echoed around the canyon touched with the pearl light of dawn.
Then Casey screamed something Lonnie couldn’t hear, because it was muffled with distance and partly drowned by the morning chirping of birds.
And then she screamed something Lonnie could hear:
“Dupreeeee!”
CHAPTER 52
Two hours later, after the sun had cleared the horizon but the valley in which the boy found himself was still cloaked in cool shadows, Lonnie abruptly stopped the General on the side of a sparsely wooded ridge.
He stared straight ahead, his eyes wide. His pulse hammered in his ears as he stared at something pale in the ferns and small spruce saplings growing around a deadfall tree about thirty yards away.
Lonnie couldn’t move. His boots were glued to his stirrups. He could not bring himself to dismount and walk over and take a look at the pale object obscured by the brush.
He knew what he would find there if he did.
Dupree, Fuego, and Childress had killed Casey and thrown her body there like trash.
Finally, knowing that he had to confirm his suspicions, the boy climbed slowly, heavily down from General Sherman’s back. He dropped the horse’s reins and walked slowly forward, setting each spurred boot down slowly, the lighthearted ringing of the spurs seeming to mock the boy’s growing dread.
The long, pale object that he knew would be Casey, killed by Dupree, grew gradually larger before him. The boy’s stomach felt as though someone had rammed a railroad spike through it. Tears were oozing over his eyes. He blinked them away, rubbed his cheek with a gloved hand, swallowed hard to keep the vomit down.
When he stepped into the ferns and saw that what lay before him was not Casey, after all, but the pale carcass of a freshly killed mule deer fawn lying with its pale belly facing Lonnie, the brown eyes regarding him blandly, the boy’s knees nearly buckled with relief.
The fawn had likely been killed by a wolf or a mountain lion last night, partly eaten, and then dragged here to be chewed on later.
Lonnie turned and strode quickly back to his horse. His relief at not finding Casey dead was quickly obliterated by the growing possibility that he would still find her that way.
He looked down at the tracks of four horses. He’d cut the sign about a half a mile downstream from Calhoun’s cabin, in the opposite direction from which Lonnie, Calhoun, and Casey had first entered the canyon two days ago. The tracks continued through a small notch in the ridge wall and on down the eastern side of the mountain, following a faint trail that was probably an old game path as well as a trace once used by the Arapahos for traveling from one valley to another within the Never Summer range.
Lonnie hadn’t been on it long before he’d realized that it was probably an alternate route, probably an easier route than Storm Peak Pass, especially in bad weather, over the mountains to the eastern plains.
Earlier, it hadn’t taken Lonnie long, once he’d shaken off the cobwebs of sleep, to realize what had happened to Casey. She must have awakened well before dawn and, deciding that she had to take the money to the deputy US marshal in Camp Collins herself, because she thought she could no longer trust Lonnie to help her, she’d quietly saddled her chestnut and ridden out alone along the stream and, not long after leaving Calhoun’s cabin, into the hands of Dupree, Fuego, and Childress.
Lonnie had seen the tracks where the four horses had come together. Forming a group, they’d headed southeast. Two of the horses had been ridden close together, which told Lonnie that Casey’s horse was likely being led. The girl was now Dupree’s prisoner. For whatever reason, the outlaw and his two partners had taken her captive.
And, of course, they had the money, too.
Lonnie was vaguely surprised to discover that he was no longer concerned about the money. What made his heart pound until he thought it would crash through his breastbone was Casey.
As he rode down the slope and then followed a winding watercourse through a crease between heavily timbered ridges, he also reflected that as much as he might have wanted to, he couldn’t have taken the bank loot any more than he could have sprouted wings and flown.
That was all clear to him now, wedged in between thoughts of getting Casey back unharmed. He was no more like Wilbur Calhoun than Wilbur Calhoun was like Lonnie Gentry—a good kid on his way to becomin
g a man of integrity no matter what the cost.
Lonnie wished he would have realized that last night, because it might have saved Casey’s life as well as him a whole heap of trouble.
Better late than never.
Lonnie held the General to a fast pace as he followed the tracks of the four shod horses ahead of him. As he did, he looked around warily.
He wouldn’t put it past Dupree to set a trap for him, to try to blow him out of his saddle from ambush. Lonnie wished that Calhoun were riding with him. The old Confederate may have been many things, most of them bad things, but he was also good with a gun, and he was trail-savvy. Lonnie wasn’t too proud to admit that he could have used the old man’s help now, with Casey’s life on the line.
When Lonnie had raced into the cabin earlier, after he’d heard Casey’s scream, he’d tried to awaken the old Confederate, but there’d been no doing. Lonnie had found not only one but two empty bottles on the floor. Calhoun had stirred and mumbled and called for June, sobbing, then rolled over and cried himself back to sleep on his bunk.
Late in the day, when the sun was tumbling over the mountains jutting up behind Lonnie, several strands of wood smoke touched the boy’s nose. He checked the General down where two shallow washes intersected, and tied the horse to an old root angling out the northern bank.
He was out of the mountains now, on the north side of the Never Summers, in a relatively flat, dry area relieved by widely spaced bluffs and low mesas. The ground was thin and sandy and not able to grow much except for short, brown grass and clumps of prickly pear and yucca. There were few trees except a light peppering of scrub cedars, junipers, and piñons.
The sky above Lonnie was a velvety lime-green. He glanced toward the Never Summers towering darkly behind him to see the glowing, crimson sun being cleaved by a high, black peak shaped like an ax blade. The sun was falling quickly behind that blade toward the west side of the range.
Lonnie Gentry Page 21
