Bobby Lee moved over to sniff the body of young Tye, yipping softly, voicing his own sorrow. He walked over to circle Shep, Angus, Hunter, and Annabelle several times, howling faintly, wailing.
Then the coyote sat in the very middle of the yard and sent a long mournful howl rocketing toward the heavens.
* * *
“Come on, Pa,” Hunter said after a time, placing his hand on the old man’s quivering back. “We gotta get you inside, see to that wound.”
Angus shook his head. “Leave me here. Leave me with my boys.”
“Pa, you’ll bleed out.”
Angus ground his forehead against Shep’s bloody chest. “I don’t care!”
“Pa!” Hunter jerked his father up by his lone arm. “I’m your son too. I’m alive. You are too. Shep and Tye are dead”—his voice quaked with emotion—“an’ there’s nothin’ we can do for ’em now except bury ’em. But I need you to stay alive. For me.”
Angus stared back at him. For nearly a minute, it was as if the old, grief-stricken ex-Confederate wasn’t sure who he was looking at. His son’s blood stained his forehead, like a tribal tattoo. His tear-flooded eyes clarified somewhat, and he gave a slow dip of his chin. He ran his big, arthritic hand down his face and glanced at Shep once more.
“All . . . all right.”
Annabelle hunkered down close to old Angus, and she and Hunter gently pulled the old man to his feet. They turned him toward the house, each supporting one side. Angus hadn’t taken more than three steps before he gave a ragged sigh. His head went back, his eyes rolled up in their sockets, and his knees buckled.
“I got him,” Hunter said, stooping low and picking the old man up in his arms. Angus was as light as a scarecrow. Frighteningly light. “Let’s get him inside.”
“I’ll heat some water!” Annabelle ran toward the cabin ahead of Hunter, swerving wide around Tye and taking the lodge’s veranda steps two at a time.
Hunter carried Angus inside and laid him down on the leather sofa in the parlor, which was just inside the front door and off the main entrance hall, to the left of the kitchen. The halved-log stairs to the second story were straight down the hall, ten feet from the door.
Hunter ran upstairs for cleaning rags and bandages and then hurried back down to find Angus looking ghostly pale and quiet on the parlor’s sofa, beneath the old Rebel flag they’d brought with them from Georgia and tacked on the wall with countless animal skins and Hunter’s mother’s watercolors of idyllic Georgia farm scenes from before the war.
Bobby Lee sat on the braided rope rug in the middle of the room, holding his own brand of coyote vigil.
Hunter stopped halfway across the room, near Angus’s handmade chair carved from native Black Hills wood, cow hide, and deer antlers. Angus lay so still that he didn’t appear to be breathing.
“Pa?” To Hunter’s own ears, his voice sounded like that of a little boy. A frightened little boy. “Pa . . . ?”
Angus didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
Hunter moved forward, feet heavy with dread.
He dropped to one knee before his father, placed a hand on Angus’s bony chest, over his heart. “Don’t you die on me, you old Rebel!”
He pressed his hand down harder on Angus’s chest, desperately wanting to feel a heartbeat. But then Angus opened one eye half-wide and snarled, “Don’t you worry.” He coughed a little and drew a reedy breath. “I’m too mean to die!”
“You old sod,” Hunter said in relief. “You had me goin’.”
“I’m not gonna die ’til I see whoever sent those bushwhacking hardtails hanging from one o’ them long, tall pines in the bluffs over yonder.” Angus pointed a crooked finger. “I ain’t gonna die ’til we throw a necktie party in that devil’s honor!”
Bobby Lee yipped as though in agreement.
“That would likely be my father.”
Hunter and Angus looked over to see Annabelle standing in the doorway to the hall, holding a small tin tray in one hand and a whiskey bottle and a bone-handled knife in the other.
Annabelle glanced down, sheepish, then moved forward to kneel beside old Angus.
“What beef would Ludlow have with me?” Angus looked at Hunter. “I thought it was Stillwell . . .”
“It’s a long story, Mr. Buchanon. I’ll tell you all about it in due time. At the moment, we have to tend this wound, get the bleeding stopped.”
Angus cursed and looked at Annabelle, scowling. “How many times I told you, girl, you’re not to call me Mister!” He gave a weak laugh and lay his head back against the sofa. “Do I look like a ‘mister’ to you?” His smile broadened. “I’m a nasty ole Rebel from the hills of north Georgia.” He exaggerated his Southern accent, pronouncing the last two words “Nothe Joj-ahhh.”
Annabelle was cutting the old man’s shirt away from the wound. She paused to uncork the whiskey bottle and offer it to him.
“Best have you a sip, Mister . . . I mean, Angus . . .” Annabelle smiled.
Angus wrapped his hand around the bottle. “And here it ain’t even noon.” He winked up at Hunter. “You’d best marry this girl soon, boy. Yankee or no Yankee, I’m liable to snatch her away from you.”
“I’m working on it, Pa.” Hunter cut a lopsided smile at his girl, who returned it.
Angus took several long pulls from the bottle. As Annabelle began to dab a dry towel at the bloody wound, tears came to his eyes once more, and he sobbed. “Oh . . . my boys. My dear dead boys!”
He glared up at Hunter kneeling beside him, holding the bloody shirt while Annabelle cut it away with the knife. “We got us a reckoning, boy! We got us some revenge to serve up colder’n a Dakota snowstorm in January!”
CHAPTER 18
When Hunter and Annabelle had finished cleaning the wound and sterilizing it with the little whiskey Angus left in the bottle before he passed out, Hunter picked his father up in his arms and carried him back to his room behind the kitchen. They undressed him down to his red cotton balbriggans, which too many washings in stout lye soap, cooked with wood ash from the Buchanon stove grates, had turned a sickly shade of pink, and tucked him into his bed.
An ambrotype photo of Angus and his wife, Hunter’s mother, taken in Chattanooga on their wedding day, kept watch from a bedside table. The two young faces, bearing expressions of customary formality for the times, seemed to mock and jeer the unconscious old, one-armed former soldier lying passed out and snoring on the large, lumpy bed that fairly swallowed his spindly body.
“You think the bullet went all the way through?” Hunter asked Annabelle as she tucked the covers up close around Angus’s chin.
The old man’s deep snores resounded throughout the room.
“I think so. At least, that wound in his back looks like an exit wound to me.”
Being the only woman out at the Broken Heart, Annabelle had often assisted the cook in administering to the medical needs of her father’s injured men over the years—even those who’d taken rustlers’ bullets and needed faster attention than waiting for the doctor in Tigerville would allow. “I think we’ve done all we can for him. We cleaned the wound, got the bleeding stopped, and sutured it.”
She glanced at Hunter standing beside her staring down at his father. “Now we just have to try to keep his fever down. If it gets up too high, we’re probably going to need Dahl to look at him.”
Hunter turned to the door. “I’ll fetch him now.”
Annabelle grabbed his arm. “Hunter, if you ride into town now, you’ll ride into an ambush.”
“I know how to ride in without bein’ seen. I can ride out the same—”
“Dahl’s likely got his hands full. You said you think you wounded Max Chaney and sent another four or five of his men back to town in the same condition.” Annabelle shook her head, her eyes grave. “You’ll never even reach Dahl, Hunter. I think Angus will be all right if we can keep his fever down. If not, you can fetch the doctor tomorrow.”
Hunter stared worriedly dow
n at Angus.
Annabelle squeezed his arm. “I’m sorry, Hunter. I should have known my father would send his men here. After what happened at the ranch . . .”
Hunter looked at her. “I didn’t see any Broken Heart men in that pack, Anna. Those men were led by Chaney and his two sons. I don’t think your pa had anything to do with it.”
“He may have not sent any of his ranch hands, Hunt,” Annabelle said, “but my father was part of what happened out there. He and Chaney head up the ore guards. They were sent here because of both Chaney and my father. He would have sent his own men, but he probably didn’t because he and Chaney had already decided to send the ore guards, and likely men in town loyal to the Chaneys.”
She shook her head slowly, dreadfully. “I’ll go to my grave knowing that . . . knowing that your brothers were killed . . . your father wounded . . . because Luke Chaney got some crazy idea in his head that I—”
“Don’t even say it, Anna.” Hunter grabbed both of her arms and turned her toward him. “For the final time, none of this is your fault. It’s the fault of the men who killed Shep and Tye.”
Hunter stared at her levelly. “If one of those men is your father . . .”
He knew he didn’t need to finish the sentence.
Annabelle tightened her jaws as she stared back at him, her eyes as hard as his. “My father deserves what he gets.”
“Even if it comes to lead?”
Keeping her eyes on Hunter’s, Annabelle dipped her chin. “Even if it comes to lead . . . or a hang rope.”
“All right, then,” Hunter said, pressing his lips to her forehead and moving to the door. “You keep an eye on Pa, will you? I’m going to go tend my brothers.”
“Leave old Angus to me.” Annabelle gave a weak but genuine smile, turning to where the old man snored beneath the covers. “I’ll take good care of this old Confederate.” She turned to Hunter again, and the smile stretched her lips a little more. “Just as I intend to take care of his son.”
* * *
The next morning, at dawn, Hunter sunk a spade into the sandy ground at the bottom of the freshly dug grave.
With a grunt, he pulled up the shovelful of earth and gravel, and tossed it up and over the wall of the grave. He heard the flecking thuds of the dirt hitting the side of one of the two coffins he’d hauled up here to this hill southwest of the ranch yard in the supply wagon.
One of the coffins serving as the final resting place of one of his two dead brothers . . .
Dead brothers.
He still hadn’t gotten his mind wrapped around the notion yet. His heart knew it. Maybe it didn’t understand it. But it knew it. It had been torn in two by the knowledge.
His mind, on the other hand, felt as dull as wood and heavy as stone. At times, he felt drunk. At other times, he felt so sober he thought he would go mad. That’s why he’d been up here for the past two hours, slowly, methodically, thoroughly digging the graves. To distract himself from the hard, cold facts of the recent events, and to bleed off some of the sap of his rage so his head wouldn’t explode.
Bobby Lee sat beside the grave, yipping softly from time to time, mincing his delicate front feet. Bobby occasionally looked at Hunter working in the grave, his yellow eyes soft with sadness. The coyote mewled softly as though sympathizing with Hunter’s sorrow, offering comfort and moral support.
Hunter had started on the graves just after midnight, after spending the several previous hours building the coffins from lumber old Angus had intended to use for a new workbench in his brewing shed. Hunter and Shep had whipsawed the one-by-twelve-inch boards from a giant fir at the edge of the ranch yard that the wind had toppled earlier that summer. Last night, Hunter had used a crosscut saw to adjust the lumber to the lengths he’d needed for the coffins. He’d planed the boards, nailed them together, and built lids that fit snugly enough to keep out predators.
Around midnight, by the light of a single, guttering lantern hanging in the barn, he’d laid the bodies, wrapped in animal skins from Shep’s and Tye’s own beds, into the coffins. He’d taken one last, long, lingering look at his brothers and then nailed the lids down tight. He would have liked to give his father another chance to say good-bye, but he didn’t have time. He sensed a storm brewing in the form of more men coming.
He had to bury his dead and make plans for a possible war. A battle for sure, but possibly war.
Another damned war. Out here where he and his father and brothers had come to start a new life, far away from their last war.
As during the last one, there was no time for funerals.
Breathing hard from the digging, Hunter looked around at the grave. It was a good five feet deep, edging toward six, its bottom relatively level. He stooped to pluck a stone protruding from one corner, and tossed it out. Satisfied the grave was to his liking, he tossed the shovel out of the grave and placed his hands on its edge, intending to hoist himself out.
Bobby Lee hunkered low on his belly and peered down at the grave’s bottom, which the gradually growing light of dawn had not yet found. The coyote looked up at Hunter standing over him, Hunter’s feet still in the grave.
Bobby Lee gave a quiet, mournful howl, then scuttled closer to Hunter, rose onto his hind feet, and licked his master’s cheek, the tongue small and rough but warm with shared sadness and kinship.
“Thanks, Bobby Lee,” Hunter said, running his hand down the lean coyote’s thick-furred body. “I appreciate that.”
The coyote gave a moan, then padded over and lay down beneath the wagon.
Hunter hoisted himself out of the grave—one of two sitting side by side on the crest of this hill that now so early in the morning was all blurred edges and misty shadows. He turned to the coffins and felt the perpetual lump in his throat tighten. He glanced at each wooden box in turn, smelling the pine resin from the freshly cut wood.
His brothers were in those boxes. They shouldn’t be. They’d both been young men, with long lives ahead of them. Taken away by Max Chaney and probably Graham Ludlow, as well, in response to Hunter’s having killed Luke Chaney in self-defense.
And because an ex-Confederate had fallen in love with Ludlow’s daughter.
Hunter drew a breath, brushed a tear from his cheek.
“All right,” he said, prodding himself into action. He couldn’t dally up here. He had a long day ahead.
He’d tied ropes around the coffins. Now he used those ropes to lower the boxes into the graves, dropping to his knees, grunting with the effort, the muscles in his sculpted forearms bulging, the ropes burning his well-calloused hands. When he had the coffins settled into their respective resting places, he straightened, mopped sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, grabbed the spade, and began tossing dirt into the holes.
A grim damn job, burying your brothers. He’d buried plenty of men during the war—men to whom he’d felt as close as brothers. But never an actual brother.
Sorrow mixed with the rage inside him, but he kept it on a tight leash.
For now . . .
He filled in the graves and mounded each with rocks. Later, he’d erect stones at the head of each.
He’d just finished arranging the stones tightly enough that he didn’t think the wolves or wildcats could dig through them, when he heard the whine of door hinges from the direction of the cabin. He looked down the hill to the northeast to see a slender figure step out of the cabin’s back door, thick red hair spilling down over Annabelle’s slender shoulders.
She walked out away from the cabin and angled up the face of the hill. When she was a hundred yards away, Hunter could see that she was holding something in each hand. As she came nearer, he saw the steam from the two stone mugs rising in the pale air.
She came around a twisted cedar and stopped. She stared down at the two graves, the dawn breeze gently rippling the long strands of her hair that were beginning to glow now as the sun peeked its head over the eastern horizon.
Still staring at the graves, she said in
a voice thick with emotion, “You’ve had a long night.”
“Wish it was longer,” Hunter said, toeing a stone. “I feel like I’m racing the clock.”
“You think more men will come.”
Hunter nodded.
Annabelle came forward, extending one of the two chipped stone mugs in her hands. “Take time for some coffee. I’m frying some eggs and bacon and cooking some beans. You have to eat.”
Hunter took the mug.
“Pa?” he asked her.
“He made it through the night,” Annabelle said. “I’ve been keeping the fever down with cool cloths. I changed his bandages a few minutes ago. It didn’t look like his wound had bled during the night. So far, so good.”
“You’ve had a long night too.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
Hunter blew on the surface of the coal-black coffee, then sipped and smacked his lips. “You cook good mud, Mrs. Buchanon.”
“That’s about the extent of my kitchen skills, I’m afraid. I think I burned the beans.”
Hunter walked up to her, kissed her cheek. “I’m glad you have a fault or two. I got a few myself.”
She reached up and slid a lock of his long, thick blond hair back behind his ear. “No, you don’t, Hunter. You’re perfect in every way.” Her eyes flickered, her gaze wavering. Brushing her fingers down the side of his face to his neck and then on down his broad chest, she said with a sadly pensive air, “I wish we could have been married. You know . . . before all this . . .”
Hunter took her hand, kissed it. “There’ll be time. Afterward.”
She looked up at him darkly. “Will there?”
“There will be, Annabelle.” He cleared his throat and tried to sound more certain than he actually was. “I promise. There will be.”
She tried a smile but it didn’t reach her eyes or even get close. She turned away as though not wanting him to sense the doubt she was feeling. He reached up, laid a finger against her chin, and turned her face back toward his.
“Annabelle, I want to get you an’ Pa to a safe place. Safer than this.”
The Black Hills Page 14