Willa shook her head, offered up a sad smile. “No. He was pointed out to me in town, on the street. He was a handsome lad. I’m very sorry.”
No grief whatsoever showed on the beautiful face. “The circumstances were . . . unfortunate.”
Willa nodded. “It adds a bitterness to the passing. I lost my father last year, to violence. He lies here in this same ground.”
“A rather desolate resting place, don’t you think?”
Wind rustled the mesquite’s leaves. Tumbleweed tumbled.
“It is that,” Willa granted. She gestured toward the cliffs. “But there’s beauty on the horizon.”
The Hammond woman nodded, just a little. “Poetically put. And I’m glad to finally meet you, Miss Cullen, since we do have business.”
“Yes. But, of course, this is not the time or place . . .”
“Fifty cents an acre.”
“. . . Pardon?”
The big dark eyes fixed upon her. Stared, really.
“For your land,” the woman said, “and the stock on it. You may keep the house and its outbuildings, barn, corrals, and such.” She tossed a black-gloved hand. “Call it half an acre.”
Willa backed up a step, almost as if she’d been slapped. “Mrs. Hammond, please don’t make me respond in these circumstances.”
“Why not?”
The younger son was smiling. The older one seemed not to be listening.
Willa frowned at the woman. “You know very well that your offer is outrageously low.”
The owner of the Circle G held up a gloved palm. “Your stock are skin and bones and their numbers greatly reduced. Without access to clean water, they will certainly die. Bloated carcasses will again pepper your range, even without another season of snow.”
Spine stiffening, chin rising, Willa said, “I have no desire to sell, Mrs. Hammond. We Cullens have been on the Bar-O since—”
“Your father stole the land from the Indians?”
Willa felt her cheeks reddening. “He did no such thing. He bought it from the Mexican government.”
“Ah. With money he made killing the buffalo and starving the savages out. In any case, they needed clearing out. Such men built this country, Miss Cullen. You should be proud.... It’s a good offer.”
“It’s an insulting offer.”
Victoria Hammond touched her bosom with splayed fingers. “Please. I’d rather not squabble with my boy lying so freshly dead in his grave.”
Tamping down her irritation, Willa said, “You are buying up the small ranches. Soon you’ll have a spread almost as large as the Bar-O. We need not be adversaries. You will require access to the Purgatory, where it runs through my land. There’s no reason for us not to be good neighbors.”
Now the dark eyes were lidded. “Without access to Sugar Creek, you will soon be bankrupt. It’s not my fault that you are a bad businesswoman.”
This time Willa didn’t rise to the bait.
“I apologize for getting into this at such a delicate time,” she said. “I understand you’re distressed.”
But Willa knew this woman wasn’t distressed in the least.
Willa turned away, looking back over her shoulder to say, “We’ll meet later, under more appropriate circumstances.”
As Willa neared the road at the cemetery’s edge, the mourning mother called out, “I note that your friend Caleb York did not honor us with his presence, despite having made this gathering today possible! At least you, my dear, have a sense of propriety.”
Willa wheeled to speak, but could find no words, and then Bill Jackson was helping her up into the carriage and they were heading back to the Bar-O with the foreman on the whip. But Willa was unnerved by the encounter, and especially by what she’d seen when she’d looked back to almost make one last remark to the woman.
Victoria Hammond had been smiling, even as the Mexicans with shovels were heading toward her son’s grave.
* * *
In the library of the Circle G ranch house, at the opposite end of the room from Victoria Hammond’s desk, mutton-chopped Andrew Hammond seemed to glower down in judgment from the imposing oil painting on the wall. Below was a love seat in the Spanish style, warm dark wood with red velvet and gold-embroidered upholstery, in which sat the late William Hammond’s mother. In matching armchairs opposite, against respective walls, were her sons.
They were dressed in the same somber black as at the cemetery. Coffee had been served by the help and three untouched cups were growing cold on a low-slung table. The older son, Hugh, was looking straight ahead, at nothing. The younger son, Pierce, her middle boy, was gazing at his mother, his expression twitchy, expectant. Her arms were extended along the upper back of the settee.
Finally she spoke.
“Hugh,” she said, turning her eyes on her older son.
He looked at her. His expression seemed less than loving, but stopped short of insolence.
“You were raised on two ranches,” she said.
He said nothing. This of course was not news to him.
“Wyoming as a boy,” she continued, “Colorado as a young man. You did well enough, but your father and I sensed other things for you. So we sent you east for schooling, and you excelled. You returned and soon evidenced a real talent for business. And you have done well as the president of the Trinidad bank.”
That was the Trinidad, Colorado, bank.
“I am proud,” she went on. “But due to no fault on your part, the bank is failing. As was the case with so many businesses, the winter did us in.”
He said nothing. This younger version of the man looming in the oil painting seemed bored by such a pointless recitation of the obvious.
“It is my intention,” she said, “to install you here at my right hand. My bookkeeper, Byers, has done well enough, in the interim . . . but he is not family. He is not blood. And he does not possess your acumen, Hugh.”
Her older son again said nothing.
She continued to level her gaze at him. “We have acquired almost all of the smaller ranches. And as you saw, this afternoon, we are moving forward with our expansion efforts.”
And now the older boy spoke: “That young woman—who owns the Bar-O?”
“Willa Cullen. Yes?”
“Don’t underestimate her.”
Victoria laughed lightly. “She’s just a child. Snip of a thing.”
Her older son shook his head. Slowly. He had his father’s gray eyes. “No. She’s strong. Men underestimate you, Mother, because you’re a beautiful woman. Don’t make the same mistake about the Cullen girl.”
Victoria rose and began to pace slowly in front of the towering portrait. “I have already taken steps to deal with her and her ragtag troops. You’ll meet my foreman, Clay Colman, soon. He has experience in such things.”
“You mean he’s a rustler and a gunfighter.”
She stopped in front of her older boy. “Yes. He’ll be vital in our efforts to restock. To rebuild. There’s much to do. This spread, and all of the little ones we’ve swallowed up, were hit almost as hard by the Die-Up as were we, north of here. The answer lies to the south.”
Behind her, the younger son, Pierce, said, “Mexico?”
She turned to him, cast a fond smile on the son she loved most, but knew was the least. “Mexico. You will ride with Mr. Colman. You will be his right hand.”
Pierce’s face tightened, almost crinkled, as if tears were coming; but that wasn’t the case—he just often seemed to look as if about to cry. “He should be my right hand, Mother! I’ll be the Hammond on these drives!”
She glided to him, touched his cheek with a black lace–gloved hand. “Yes, dear one, but he is older and more experienced, and you have much to learn. Your time will come. It will come.”
“You always say that, Mother, but . . .”
“It. Will. Come.”
Left unsaid was something all three of them knew, although Pierce did not like to admit it to himself: Though he, too, had been r
aised on their ranches, and he could follow orders, he had no real leadership skills. Nor had there been any thought of sending him east to college. Or west, for that matter.
The youngest brother, William, had been a natural when it came to ranching—he could cowboy with the best of them. And he was liked, and got listened to. But he had inherited his father’s drinking ways and certain other less than noble habits—like the randy inclinations that had gotten him killed—and her ambitions for William, her hopes, her dreams, were buried with him now.
Victoria began to slowly pace again, gesturing gently as she spoke. “The day will come, my sons, when you, Hugh, will be at the helm of businesses and banks and more, as we grow and prosper. And you, Pierce, will one day take over this ranch. Together you boys will become everything your father once was. . . .”
Everything, that is (she desperately hoped), except those dark qualities her dead youngest son had inherited.
“I won’t disappoint you, Mother,” Pierce said, on the edge of the beautiful, uncomfortable chair.
“I know you won’t, dear,” she said offhandedly.
Victoria turned to face her oldest son, who looked so much like his father had on their first meeting so many years ago. She approached him.
“Now,” she said, “as to the matter of the man who murdered your brother. Caleb York.”
Hugh’s eyebrows went up, slightly. “Murdered?”
She frowned. “Could it be called anything else?”
He shrugged. “A lawman performing his duty?”
“How can you say that!”
“My understanding, Mother, is that our rash brother raped and thrashed some poor Mexican girl, and was hiding behind another muchacha when this sheriff came round to arrest him.”
“Yes. And?”
He frowned. “There is no ‘and’ . . . York stopped William, who it very much sounds like needed stopping.”
Her nostrils flared. “Did you not hear me? I agreed it was just some Mexican girl!”
“Yes, and a puta at that. You know—like your mother once was . . . our dear departed grandmother?”
She shook a forefinger at him, as so many before her had done with a child who sassed. “You need to watch what you say to me, Hugh Hammond!”
His manner was infuriatingly casual. “I don’t much care whether our brother had his way with some tramp and beat her half to death, either. But, drunk, he was stupid. He was careless. And it’s a streak that’s in you, too, Mother dear.” His eyes landed hard on his sibling across the way. “And you, brother.”
Pierce’s mouth came open, but no words found their way out.
“That ‘streak’ you talk about,” Victoria said, leaning toward her seated older son, “is in the Hammond blood! It’s what made your father a force to be reckoned with in the cattle trade!”
Hugh looked up at her, his expression blasé. “No. That was another kind of streak—call it a talent for larceny. A gift for doing whatever ruthless damn thing it takes to get ahead. A knack for putting knives in the backs of business associates and friends. That was the streak that made him a cattle baron, Mother. It’s that other streak of his that brought Papa down—his recklessness. His arrogant thinking that he could do anything he liked, take whatever he wanted, and get away with it . . . while not getting himself killed. But of course someone managed it, nonetheless.” His eyes rose to the portrait dominating them all. “We never knew who was responsible, did we?”
Her chin lifted. “No. Whoever murdered your father was never identified.”
Hugh flipped a hand. “Well, of course, I was away at school when it happened. But I heard rumors. I heard stories.”
“Did you.”
He nodded. “I did. Whoever it was, though, I don’t blame them. Papa used to beat Pierce, you know. And he beat his women, too, when he tired of them. So the world suffered no great loss when Andrew Hammond . . . shuffled off this mortal coil, as John Wilkes Booth once said.”
“Edwin,” Pierce corrected quietly.
Victoria’s words came soft but screamed somehow. “William was just a boy.”
“Ah,” Hugh said, “but what a boy. He had Papa’s streak, all right. And you know which one.”
She spoke through her teeth. “You would let Caleb York get away with . . . with killing your own brother? However justified the law of little men might find it?”
Nodding several times, he said, “Yes, Mother. I would. I definitely would.”
Wearing a small but distinct sneer, she said, “Well, then, leave it to me. You don’t need to soil yourself with vengeance. I will handle things myself.”
Hugh gave up half a smirk. “You mean, you will, with the help of your latest . . . ramrod? I’m sure you will, Mother. As for me, I have other things to do. Other than more cattle rustling and helping you build another ‘empire. ’ ”
Her chin went back and her eyes came down. “Why did you even bother to come home then?”
He rose. “Is that what this is? Home? First time I’ve seen it, yet it’s so, so familiar. Mother, I came home to say good-bye to my sad little got-himself-killed baby brother. I loved the rascal. He didn’t deserve my affection, but, as you say, it’s blood. And Pierce . . . I’ve always had a soft spot for him, too. He’s gentle underneath, he just doesn’t know it.”
“Stop this.” She bit off the words. “I’ll hear no more of it.”
“Oh, I’m done. Really done. But I came home to say good-bye to you, too, Mother . . . and to him.” He nodded up at the painting. “Of course, I have to see his damn face in the mirror every time I shave. It’s enough to make a man grow a full-face beard.”
“You’ll come back. Crawling.”
“On my hands and knees, you think? No, I’m quite capable of staying upright. You see, one of the reasons our bank is failing is that I’ve helped myself, some. Don’t bother looking for what I took, because it’s safely deposited in banks back East. That’s where you sent me for my learning, Mother. But, really, I learned quite a lot from you and Papa.... I’ll be taking a horse into town and checking into the hotel. I’ll leave it in the livery stable. You didn’t raise me to be a thief, after all.”
He went out, smiling, a lightness in his step.
Pierce was at her side. “Mother, I will never, would never do that. Never walk out on you. Never, ever let you down.”
“I know you won’t, darling.”
Of course, the boy had never done anything in his life but let her down. Still, why hurt his feelings? She was too good a mother for that.
“I’m all for killing Caleb York, Mother. All for it!”
At least, she thought, his heart’s in the right place.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Caleb York sat at his desk in his office working with a fountain pen on the ledger that recorded taxes collected and rewards paid (two separate sections of the big orange-black–spined book). He would fill the pen from time to time from an inkwell. Not yet proficient at it, he occasionally got ink on his hand, keeping a handkerchief handy, and now and then a black blob made the record book look like the work of a small child.
Keeping up with change wasn’t easy.
He was putting the ledger away in his middle desk drawer when Tulley rushed in, looking to burst.
“Sheriff!” the skinny, bandy-legged deputy said, louder than need be since the old boy was standing right in front of the desk now. “Trouble be stirrin’ out t’ Sugar Crick.”
Tulley, who had long since abandoned his desert-rat rags at the sheriff’s direction, was resplendent in navy flannel shirt, red suspenders, gray woolen pants, and work boots.
“What were you doing out that way, Tulley?”
“I weren’t out there! No sir! But it’s the God’s honest truth.”
York folded his hands, his right one sharing ink with his left. “How do you come by this?”
The deputy looked left and looked right, making sure no one in the empty office and the nearby vacant jail cell might overhear. He cl
osed one eye and opened the other, wide. “I were bellied up to the bar, partakin’ of nothin’ stronger than a sarsaparilly, I will have ye know—ain’t fell off the wagon yet, Caleb York.”
“I know, Tulley. Admirable.”
This time the deputy looked right, and looked left, checking for eavesdroppers again. Then he cackled. “I guess I needn’t tell ye I got ears like a fox! And I keeps ’em to the ground.”
Vivid as those words were, they failed to conjure any image in York’s mind.
“To the unschooled eye,” Tulley was saying, “all I be doin’ was jest chewin’ the fat with ol’ Hub, who is gettin’ a mite portly, I come to notice. Best lay off the gravy and taters, sez I.”
The deputy referred to Hub Wainright, the burly, sparsely mustached bouncer/bartender at the saloon.
“The point, Tulley.”
He pointed a gnarled finger at the outside. “Jest down the bar, some cowboys from this spread and that ’un was jawin’ over beer. Seems the widower Hammond hired herself some guns to keep them Bar-O cowpunchers from waterin’ their beeves over to Sugar Crick.”
“You mean her cowmen are armed.” York shrugged. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
Tulley shook his head and wisps of white danced. “No, no—these ain’t your ever’day cowhands, jes’ packin’ some lead. These is kill-fighters. Murder for money boys. Is what these fellers claimed, anyways. Over suds it be, but still.”
York opened the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk and got out his bullet-studded gun belt and Colt Single Action .44.
“Best I ride out and have a look,” York said. “The grapevine’s probably just picked up on those Arizona boys who signed on. Rough customers, but not hired guns.”
Tulley leaned in. “What I heered, Caleb York, it was jest that—gunhands hired for killin’! And that ain’t the worst of it.”
York was strapping on the gun belt. “What is, then?”
Tulley pointed to the outside again. “Miz Cullen, she follered suit. She’s got herseff some gunfighters that was hired on by that colored foreman of hern. If scuttlebutt’s to be believed, them gun-toters was rounded up, up Las Vegas way. Still a mean town, that. Parts of it, anyways.”
Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) Page 9