“That ought to have told you he wasn’t Peter.”
“It might, if he hadn’t been even more kind and thoughtful than Peter. He told me I was beautiful. He said he was proud to be married to me. He let me buy anything I wanted. He gave me this ring.” She held out her hand to show Dolores.
“I know. You show it to me at least a dozen times a day.”
“He never forced me to come to him. That very first night he said we ought to take some time to get to know each other.”
“You mean you never—”
“Not until the night I spent at the roundup.”
“Where on earth could you—”
“In a grove of cottonwoods down by the creek.”
“You didn’t?”
Anne nodded.
“On the ground?”
She nodded again.
Dolores tried to hold it back, but a giggle broke out. Anne was angry at first, then she saw the humor. Both women started to laugh.
“But you were always so proper,” Dolores said as she wiped her eyes. “I can’t imagine you doing that.”
“At the time I wanted it more than anything else in the world.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. The sheriff won’t let me see Pete. They’re holding a hearing tomorrow. Bill Mason is determined to prove Pete killed Peter and Belser.”
“What about Eddie?”
“Pete thinks Mason killed him.”
“What!”
The exclamation startled Anne, but not half as much as the look in Dolores’s eyes. The older woman seized Anne by the arms in a grip so tight, it drove her fingernails into the soft flesh of Anne’s shoulders.
“You won’t like it,” Anne said.
“Tell me.”
The sharp pain in Dolores’s voice made Anne hesitate. “It’s only a theory.”
Dolores shook Anne. “Somebody killed Eddie. I’ve got to know who.”
“Pete thinks Mason has always wanted Uncle Carl’s ranch, that he started the rustling right after Uncle Carl’s accident. In fact, he thinks Mason might even be responsible for that.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. He thinks Mason approached Belser first. Belser wouldn’t cooperate because he wanted the ranch for himself, so Mason used me to find out when Peter was arriving so he could arrange to have him killed.”
“But who killed Belser?”
“This is the part you’re not going to like. Pete thinks Eddie killed Belser, then Mason had to kill Eddie to keep him quiet.”
Dolores pulled away from Anne, her eyes cold and angry.
“Pete thinks Mason told Eddie that Peter would lose the ranch and Eddie would lose his job,” Anne continued. “He already knew Belser would fire him the moment he got control. Maybe Mason promised Eddie he could be foreman of the combined ranches.”
“He’s lying.”
“Is he? Neither you nor I killed Belser. Pete had no reason to because he always meant to tell me what happened.” Dolores started to object. “He didn’t have to tell me the truth when Mason showed up. I would have defended him.” The two women faced each other. “It had to be Eddie,” Anne said softly. “Pete had never set foot in the kitchen. He wouldn’t have known where to find your knives.” Dolores turned away, but Anne moved to intercept her gaze. “You suspected something, didn’t you?”
Dolores didn’t respond. Anne waited.
“No,” Dolores said. “I never did. Eddie had talked about leaving. He said he wouldn’t have a job no matter who got the ranch. Then he started talking about the future, like he was going to have a say in it. But why should he agree to kill Belser? Pete didn’t want to fire him.”
“Pete thinks Mason offered him a partnership.”
Dolores seemed to collapse, to shrink inward. “Eddie would have done anything for that.” Even her voice sounded defeated. “He wanted his own ranch more than anything, but I don’t see how knowing this can help Pete.”
“I’m hoping it can help us find the men who killed Peter.”
“How?”
“Mason must have told Eddie something. He talked to you all the time. Think. Can you remember anything that might help us?”
“No.”
“Any strange people, new hands, names he mentioned, cowhands in unusual places, horses disappear—”
“Yes!” Dolores seemed excited. “I heard him tell one of the hands that two men would be coming by. That he was to take them to one of the line cabins.”
“Which one? Where is it?”
“It’s the cabin off Clear Creek, but I don’t know where it is or how to get there.”
“It’ll be on the map Eddie made for Pete.”
“You’ll need somebody to take you there.”
“No, I won’t. I read the map once. I can do it again. You and I can go there today.”
“Me!”
“I’ll need help if those men are still there.”
“What can two women do?”
“I’ll get Ray to go with us.”
It took Anne some time to convince Dolores, but everything came apart when Mrs. Dean barred their way until they confessed what they intended to do.
“You can’t do anything like that,” she said. “Leave it to the sheriff.”
“The sheriff thinks Pete murdered Peter,” Anne said, “and Mason has hired a lawyer to prove it. I can’t sit around and do nothing.”
“Well, you can’t go alone,” Mrs. Dean said. “You don’t know how to get there.”
“I can read the map,” Anne said. “That’s how I found the roundup.”
“You know nothing about firearms or capturing criminals.”
“Ray is going with us.”
“He’s a cowhand,” Mrs. Dean said in disgust. “He doesn’t know any more than you do.”
“We’ll manage. Now you’ve got to get out of my way. I’m going to find those men.”
Mrs. Dean opened her mouth to continue her objections.
“Nothing you say will change my mind,” Anne said. “Nobody believes in Pete’s innocence but me. No one else will try to save him.”
“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” Mrs. Dean asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“I don’t know.”
“What you mean is, he hasn’t asked you.”
“How could he when I thought he was a killer, when I wouldn’t listen when he tried to tell me Mason was behind everything?”
“But you want to marry him?”
“More than anything in the world.”
Mrs. Dean sighed. “Well, there’s no help for it. Horace and I will have to go with you.”
Anne felt as though she was leading a parade of clowns. Here she was attempting to capture two desperate killers, and she was accompanied by a cook, a beardless cowboy, a domineering dowager, and her dotty husband. She kept reminding herself that Mr. Dean had been a colonel in the United States Army, that Mrs. Dean was a crack shot, that Ray was young and strong, and that she and Dolores were attractive enough to lure the killers out of their hiding place. That ought to be enough to capture two men, but she was afraid their attack would never succeed. If they could decide on a method of attack. Mrs. Dean and her husband had been arguing since they left the ranch.
“It’ll never do to launch a frontal attack,” Horace Dean was saying. “You’ve got to outflank them, attack them where they least expect it. Destroy their fortifications with your big guns, wear them down with your infantry, and clean up with your cavalry.”
“Don’t be a fool,” his wife said. “All you have is a few rifles, a cart horse, and three women.”
“I think our best approach,” Anne said, “is to pretend Mr. and Mrs. Dean got lost and we’re looking for them.”
“What would they be doing out here?” Dolores asked.
“You could say we’re looking for Custer’s battlefield,” Mr. Dean said. “It’s a very famous
attraction.”
“That makes about as much sense as saying we’re hunting for elk,” his wife said.
“If Mrs. Dean had a parasol, we could say they went for a walk and got lost,” Dolores volunteered.
“It’s too far to walk,” Anne pointed out.
“I think we oughta say two dotty old people got lost, and we’ve come looking for them,” Ray said.
“I think I know how we can do it,” Anne said quickly, before Mrs. Dean could blister Ray with her retort.
“My dear—” Horace began.
“Let her speak,” Mrs. Dean commanded. “You’ve forgotten more military strategy than you remember.”
“I think Dolores and I ought to approach the cabin from the front,” Anne said.
“My child, you can’t put yourself in the line of fire,” Horace said.
“They don’t have any reason to hurt us,” Anne explained. “How could two women threaten them? Anyway, while we’re talking to them, Ray could come up from behind the cabin and catch them while they’re not looking.”
“That’s not a bad plan,” Horace said.
“It’s better than anything you’ve come up with,” Mrs. Dean said. There followed a long discussion as to what Ray should do. It ended with Horace and Mrs. Dean deciding to accompany Ray.
“Horace will get confused and blunder right into the cabin,” Mrs. Dean said. “He’d give the whole thing away.”
Anne tried to explain that Mrs. Dean was an even more illogical person to accompany Ray.
“I’m an expert shot with a rifle,” Mrs. Dean said. “There were plenty of hostile Indians out here when Horace commanded his first post. All of us women learned to shoot.”
Anne advanced several counterarguments to no avail. When tactfully reminded that it wasn’t easy for someone of Mrs. Dean’s age to climb over boulders and fallen trees, she said she’d walk around them. Anne decided that she and Dolores should have waited until the dead of night and climbed out the window. There was no hope of their capturing even the most incompetent killer with this contentious army of five.
Anne even considered abandoning the scheme. She would go back to the ranch, maybe back to town. Tell the sheriff. Hire some men to come with her. No matter what she had to do, she couldn’t abandon Pete. If she couldn’t prove these men killed Peter Warren, Pete would surely hang. Other schemes might offer a better chance for success, but it would be impossible to keep them secret from Mason. Slim as it was, this was her only chance.
She tried to think what Pete would have done. He had been faced with one unexpected challenge after another, and he’d always come up with a plausible explanation. He kept calm, said as little as possible, and let others do the talking. Pete said she was smart. Well, this was her chance to prove it. She just wished the consequences of failure weren’t so grave.
Ray drove the wagon as close as he dared to the line of junipers that formed a woodland at the base of one of the foothills.
“We should be in place by the time you reach the front of the cabin,” Mrs. Dean said. “Have you decided what you’re going to say to them?”
“No,” Anne replied. “I’ll have to improvise. Get as close to the cabin as possible so you can hear what I’m saying.” She drove away before Mrs. Dean could start offering more suggestions.
“What are you going to say?” Dolores asked.
“I really don’t know. Do you have any suggestions?”
“No.”
Anne couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound stupid. During the hour it took her to circle the butte and approach the cabin from the front, she racked her brain searching for new ideas, going over old ones, but nothing brilliant occurred to her.
“Do you think they’ll shoot us?” Dolores asked as they neared the cabin.
“We don’t even know they’re in there,” Anne said. She didn’t know why the men would have stayed around this long unless Mason had told Eddie to keep them around in case he needed them again. Her skin crawled at the thought that she might have been the need he was talking about.
“Somebody’s in there. I can smell smoke.”
But as they approached the cabin, they saw no sign it was occupied.
“They probably hid their horses in the trees,” Dolores said.
That didn’t make Anne feel any better. It made the killers appear all the more determined not to be found. How far would they go to keep from being captured?
Anne was still a hundred yards away when she saw the barrel of a rifle appear through one of the windows.
“Turn around,” Dolores said. “They’re going to kill us.”
Anne’s heart was in her throat, but she couldn’t turn back. There was a chance she would get hurt, but Pete would surely hang if she backed down. She had no choice but to keep going. “I’ll let you down,” she said to Dolores, “but I can’t stop.”
“Go on,” Dolores said. “I can’t let you be the only fool out here.”
As they drew closer to the cabin, Anne searched frantically for some explanation of her presence, but nothing came to mind. How could anyone possibly explain two women in a wagon miles away from any ranch?
A bullet kicked up dust in front of her horse just as the sound of a rifle split the silence. “Go away, or I’ll kill you,” a man shouted.
“Don’t shoot,” Anne called out, doing her best to act like a silly, harmless female flustered by the rifle shot. She knew it was dangerous to keep going, but she had to get closer. “We’re not carrying any guns.” She kept the wagon moving. She was the bait to draw the killers outside so Ray and the Deans could capture them.
“What do you want?” the man asked.
“I’m looking for my parents,” Anne said. “They came out hunting elk, but their horses came back without them.” It was a silly story, but it was the best she could do.
“There’s nobody around here. We heard no gunshots.”
“My father’s hunting with a sword,” Anne said, remember the sword Mr. Dean insisted upon bringing.
“He must be a complete fool!” the outlaw said.
“My parents are from Illinois. They don’t understand Wyoming.”
The gun barrel disappeared from the window, and a man appeared at the doorway holding a rifle. Anne had imagined killers would look mean and ugly. She was right. The man had several days’ growth of beard and oily hair, and his clothes looked as if they hadn’t been changed in several days.
“My parents are rather old,” Anne said, “and Father doesn’t see very well, but they wanted a set of elk antlers to take back with them. Are you sure you haven’t seen them?”
“Look, lady, when I say I haven’t seen anybody, I mean I haven’t—”
“You’ve got to help us find them,” Anne said. “It’ll soon be dark. My mother will start to scream if she’s caught out in the dark.”
“Mrs. Dean will kill you,” Dolores whispered, giggling softly. “She prides herself on being able to handle any situation.”
A second man had come out of the cabin. He looked just as unkempt as his partner, but he had cold, cruel eyes. Anne was relieved to see he hadn’t brought a gun, but she didn’t like the way he looked at her and Dolores. She didn’t know much about killers, but she didn’t want to learn by becoming their next victim.
“I don’t know how she’s going to handle this situation,” Anne whispered. “Look at those men. They’re big and healthy.”
“Why did you come here?” the second man asked, clearly suspicious.
“Because of your cabin. You must have horses somewhere. My parents would want to buy them so they could return home.”
“We ain’t selling our horses to nobody,” the first man said.
“But we might consider it, if the price is right,” the second man said. “Why don’t you get down and come inside? We can talk it over. Who knows—your parents might show up before we settle on a price.”
“We ought to start looking for them right now,” Anne said. “Mother,”
she called as loudly as she could, “can you hear me?”
Dolores made a sound that Anne could only compare to a coyote’s wail. “They’ll hear that a lot better,” she said.
“Here, stop that!” the first outlaw said. “You’ll have every four-legged animal within five miles coming this way.”
“Mother!” Anne called again. “Please come if you can hear me. She’s frightened of four-legged animals,” she told the outlaws.
“Then what the hell is she doing out here looking for elk?” the outlaw asked.
“She wants Papa to have his antlers,” Anne explained, “but she doesn’t realize they must first be attached to an elk.”
The outlaws approached the wagon as she pulled to a stop in front of the cabin.
“You’ll have to get down,” the second one said. “You’ll never find them sitting up there screeching like a prairie chicken.”
Anne didn’t want to get down. She knew what that outlaw had in mind, but she couldn’t figure out how she was going to do anything sitting in the wagon either. She handed the reins to Dolores. “You hold the horse,” she said, “while these men help me look for Mama.”
“I’m going with you,” Dolores said.
“No,” Anne said.
“She ought to get down, too,” the second outlaw said.
“Why?” Anne asked.
“We can split up. We’ll find them a lot faster that way.”
Anne didn’t want to split up. That would make it virtually impossible to capture both men. She and Dolores got down from the wagon and started walking quickly toward the trees that came up to the back of the cabin.
“Wait,” the second outlaw said, clearly angry that things weren’t going according to his plan.
Anne didn’t slow down. “If my parents are lost in those trees, Mother will be so frightened she won’t be able to move. It’ll take both of us to coax her out”
The outlaws hurried after them. “Wait up,” the second outlaw called. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you ladies to go into them woods.” He took hold of Anne’s arm with a grip that didn’t allow for argument. “Now let’s go inside and talk about this.”
Just then Mrs. Dean came stumbling out of the trees, her hair flying in all directions, her clothes looking as though she’d come through a briar patch backward. “Praise be to the saints,” she cried out as she sank to her knees. “Horace, we’re saved. Our daughter has found us at last.”
Pete (The Cowboys) Page 29
