“Dare’s waiting at his house.”
Vince stopped short. “I’ve got to see to Lana. Stoke the fire, get her some breakfast.”
“Dare already did both of those. He filled me in on your ma and your move to Asa’s. Dare’s got coffee brewing at his place.” Luke strode away, not waiting for Vince to say yes, no, or maybe.
“What’s going on?” Vince buttoned up his shirt while he walked and hooked on his gun belt. He didn’t bother pulling on his coat, even though the morning air was sharp. They’d be inside again about the time he got it on. He’d lace up his boots once he could quit jogging to keep up with Luke.
“I’m only telling this one time.” Luke picked up the pace and jerked Dare’s door open without knocking. Glynna wasn’t there, nor were her children. No Tina.
They were all busy running the diner. No one to help Melissa with Mother.
“Did you bring your wife along?” Ruthy didn’t like being left behind.
“She’s in the diner. I hope she’s not helping cook. We didn’t get much sleep the last two nights, and I don’t like seeing her get worn out in her condition.”
“Glynna convinced Ruthy to go abovestairs at the diner.” Dare gestured them in, then went into his kitchen. “Come on back. I’ve got coffee ready.”
Jonas was already there.
Dare shoved a cup into Luke’s hands. “Ruthy hasn’t come back down. Glynna checked on her and she’s asleep. Ruthy must’ve been plumb tuckered out.”
“Thanks.” Luke settled into a chair. “Glad to hear Ruthy’s resting. Doubt it’ll last long.”
Dare poured coffee, then handed a tin cup to Vince. “I got Lana’s breakfast, too.”
“Thanks, Dare.” Vince took a long sip of the coffee, hoping it would get his brain started.
“Tell us what happened, Luke.” Vince set his cup aside and crouched to tie his boots.
Dare paced. Jonas sat down and held his cup in two hands, drawing the heat from it.
Luke tipped his chair onto its back legs. “Someone took a shot at me two nights ago.”
Vince finished with his boots, rose from his crouch, retrieved his coffee, and took up a position by the door. Mostly there wasn’t a thing to watch for. Broken Wheel had gotten purely peaceable lately, not counting mothers who were tetched in the head and runaway fathers and unexpected full-grown sisters and pretty little spitfire neighbors.
But there hadn’t been much shootin’ trouble for quite a while. Until now. Vince looked at Luke. The man looked as grim as the Reaper.
Not purely peaceable anymore.
“Who was it?” Dare quit pacing to pay attention, though he never stood still for long.
“One of my hired men said he saw an Indian,” Luke began.
The coffee steamed in Vince’s cup, but he felt so cold that none of the warmth reached his insides. He knew Luke considered some of the Kiowa people as personal friends, and he’d never had much trouble with them. No one wanted that to change.
“He might be tellin’ the truth,” Luke continued, “but he has reason to lie, too. Whoever did it, those gunshots could’ve hit Ruthy. They came within inches of hitting me and Dodger. I’ve got to get to the bottom of it and quick. I spent yesterday tracking, figured I could get to the truth myself, but now I’m asking for help.”
“We’ll help.” As he said it, Vince thought of Mother. How could he help Luke when his life was chock-full of problems already?
Luke had probably barely heard that Vince’s life had gotten so complicated, and he wasn’t paying much attention right now. Luke surged to his feet, strode out of the room, and returned with a burlap bag. The bag made a sharp clinking sound.
“After my cowhand told me he saw an Indian, I went tracking. I found what might be a boot track in one spot. It’s rocky, and not much sign is left of a man passing through on foot, even less if that man was wearing moccasins. I just can’t be sure of what I saw. There was definitely someone out there, but then I knew that from the bullets. What trail I could pick up led me to a small canyon where I found this.” Luke upended the bag, dumped its contents onto the floor. Whiskey bottles tumbled out. Too many to count at a glance.
Jonas set his coffee cup down on the table and leaned forward to take a look.
Frowning, Vince stared at the bottles. “Some are caked with old dirt. Whoever dropped them out there has been drinking for a while.”
“Yep, and if it’s one of my men, he’s been drinking steady while he’s working my cattle and riding my horses. He’s going around armed doing dangerous chores, and he’s supposed to be ready for trouble.”
“No man who’s a steady drinker can say he’s thinking right.” Dare stopped pacing and crouched down beside the bottles. He picked them up and studied them.
“Which might explain a gun going off accidentally, or a man taking a shot at a house without considering why that was a mighty bad idea.” Luke sat back down and took a long swallow of his coffee.
It occurred to Vince that a lawman ought to be studying the evidence, so he left his position by the door and came up to look at the bottles.
Vince knew his friend Luke real well. He took a deep breath, thinking to learn all he could from a man who could read sign like the written word.
At that moment the door swung open in the other room, and Janny, Dare’s eight-year-old stepdaughter, came running in. She skidded to a stop in the kitchen doorway. “I took breakfast over to Missy and Vince’s ma. There’s trouble. Not serious, but Missy asked if someone could come lend a hand.”
Vince wheeled to head out.
“Wait.” Jonas’s voice stopped Vince in his tracks.
Vince turned impatiently and saw those bottles again. He needed to go to his mother. He needed to help his friend.
“I’ll go.” Jonas rose from the table and went for the back door, so Vince didn’t even have to get out of the way. “Luke’s trouble is a job for a lawman. I can be of more help with your ma, Vince. I’ll come a-runnin’ if it’s something I can’t handle.”
The door opened and closed so fast that Vince didn’t have time to stop Jonas. Caring for Mother was Vince’s responsibility. But for now, Vince turned back to Luke.
“Dare said your ma came to Texas, Vince, and that she’s not well. I’m sorry to bother you right now while she’s visiting. I don’t think this can wait, but I’ll understand if you don’t—”
“Waiting won’t help. Mother’s not here for a visit; she’s here to stay. I’ll help unless Jonas comes for me. But he oughta be able to do whatever Melissa needs.”
“Who’s Melissa?” Luke paused from scowling at the bottles.
“She’s my sister.”
“You have a sister?”
“She’s an adult woman, and the first I ever heard of her was two days ago. My father had a child he kept hidden, but he brought her along on his trip to see me.”
“Your pa’s here, too?”
“Nope, he’s long gone now. He dropped Mother and Melissa off, waited until we weren’t looking and took off.” Vince decided maybe Luke didn’t want to think about his own problems, so he was questioning Vince about his. He explained quickly what had happened.
Luke immediately jumped in to offer his help. “Ruthy and I can come in and see to your ma if you need us. All you’ve gotta do is ask. I won’t soon forget you took a bullet for me fighting to get my ranch back.”
“All I remember about that fight is I let myself get bushwhacked and wasn’t there to help you in the final fight.”
Luke gave a humorless laugh. “Not surprised you’d see getting shot as a failure to your friends. You ask a lot of yourself, Vince. Just remember I’d be proud to help out, and you know Ruthy. She’ll probably be in here organizing things. I doubt I can stop her.” Luke smiled, but the smile didn’t last. “She might be safer in town until I get to the bottom of who’s behind this shooting out at my place.”
That turned Vince’s attention back to why Luke had come. Vince could be h
is usual calm-in-the-face-of-trouble self when it was someone else with the problem.
“It’s unlikely that whiskey came from somewhere other than here in Broken Wheel.” Vince’s head cleared from his family woes as he thought about how to track down whoever had fired the shots at Luke’s place.
“Duffy sells it,” Luke said. “That’s the only place in town you can get a drink.”
“It’s gotta have come from his saloon.” Vince straightened and set his empty coffee cup down on Dare’s kitchen table with a sharp click. “Let’s go talk to Duffy. We’ll get a list of every man who buys whiskey by the bottle. Then we’ll have a long talk with each of them.”
“Shouldn’t take long,” Dare said. “It might not even be a list. Not too many hombres around here who buy this much whiskey. They’re a lot more likely to have a drink or two in the saloon and have done with it.”
Vince gave a nod at the empty bottles. “Bag ’em up and bring ’em along.”
Glass clinked as Luke put the bottles back in the sack.
“Duffy stays at the diner as long as possible,” Vince said, leading the way out of Dare’s house, “but he oughta be done with breakfast by now and be alone. Not much business at the saloon in the morning hours. I’d as soon not have this talk in front of a crowd, especially if someone there’s got something to hide.”
The three of them trooped out of the house and went around the row of buildings. That row on the east side of Main Street had the diner at the far south end, an empty shop, the general store, and Duffy’s Tavern. There was a matching row of buildings straight across on the west side that had five small buildings with shared walls, except for a thin alley midway down the row. An empty building anchored the north side. Then came the jailhouse, two more empty buildings separated by an alley, then Vince’s law office. There was a small bedroom upstairs, which had been his home in the months since he’d come to town to back Luke in his fight.
Now he had possession of the law office and the former boardinghouse. If you added in that he was the sheriff with the only set of keys to the jail, Vince figured he was the biggest landholder in town. Not sayin’ much.
Those buildings were about all Broken Wheel amounted to. The blacksmith had a big barn on the north end of town, set at an angle. The burned remnants of Dare’s old house sat straight across from the smithy.
There were scattered buildings behind the row of businesses on the east side, including the church, Jonas’s house, Dare’s, the house Duffy and Griss shared, and about a dozen others. The men who lived in them were trappers and hunters mostly, those who’d found a reason to live way out in the middle of nowhere.
Broken Wheel was in Indian Territory. There was almost no law here. Vince being sheriff for no pay and against his will was proof of that. And the folks who came and stayed were a scruffy, disreputable lot—barely civilized, most of them. Vince liked to think that his Regulator friends were the exception, but it sounded like Luke’s father was an old curmudgeon who fit in pretty well in this wild land. And because his pa had liked it here, Luke ended up out here, and that had brought Vince and his friends.
Indian Territory . . . had one of Luke’s hands really seen one of the native folks running from the shooting?
True or not, Luke had himself a problem, and there was no choice but that Vince would try to help him. Except Vince had so much trouble already that he honestly wondered if he could fit another crisis into his life.
Chapter 14
Tina was doing her best to feed her morning herd and keep up with all that was going on in town at the same time. And considering her only view was out the back window of the diner, she was doing pretty well.
She’d been the one to send Janny off to deliver breakfast to Mrs. Yates. She’d seen Janny come running, empty-handed, from the boardinghouse and head straight for Dare’s. She’d sprinted past the window in Glynna’s kitchen, gone into the home where she now lived with her new pa, Dare, then come right back out and returned to the diner. Glynna’s little daughter reported that Melissa had asked for help and Jonas had volunteered.
Tina saw Jonas striding toward the house the Yates family had just moved into. She wondered if her brother was taking a shift watching Mrs. Yates, or was something else going on? Janny didn’t have any answers.
Tina was too busy to think about it during the breakfast rush, but she had a good view of the stretch between Dare’s house and Vince’s. She never saw Jonas return and she began to worry something had happened that required a parson’s care.
It wasn’t much later that Vince, Dare, and Luke came out of Dare’s place and moved away from Vince’s house. They seemed to be heading for the north side of town. Maybe they were coming over for coffee and cobbler. Tina glanced at the pan left over from breakfast and was glad she had it to offer. She was also glad she’d been at this cooking business for a few months so she didn’t have to pay much attention to it. She could spend her time instead puzzling over what was going on.
It was far more interesting than cooking.
Vince swung open the batwing doors of the saloon. Stepping in, he was hit by the stench. Old whiskey, heavy tobacco, no interest in scrubbing. Those were all reason enough not to visit this saloon, though it was his not being a drinker that always kept him away.
Duffy Schuster stood behind the bar, leaning on his elbows, talking with his brother. Those two were a big part of the smell. It wasn’t just the floors that didn’t get scrubbed in this place. In fact, there were still smudges of mud on Duffy’s neck left from Tina’s picketing mud fight. Duffy needed to be careful or something might grow in all that dirt.
Duffy straightened. Griss turned, leaning on one elbow as he watched Vince come in with Dare and Luke a step behind. None of them were customers, so Duffy knew there was another reason for the visit.
The familiar whap-whap of swinging doors told Vince his friends were now inside.
“Coffee on the stove, men. Pour yourself a cup if you’ve a mind. No charge.” Duffy was none too bright. Vince had always figured the man was doing good to keep his saloon in operation. But it took cunning to find an Indian tribe and then contract with them without getting into trouble. For many an Indian brave would fight to prevent the encroachment of firewater into his tribe. So maybe Vince had underestimated Duffy.
The man’s dull look and heavy Texas twang might be covering a sharp mind. Or maybe Duffy wasn’t selling liquor illegally, and someone had staged the trouble at Luke’s the other night to point at the native folks.
Vince glanced back at Luke, who carried the gunnysack of empty bottles. “We’d like to know if these came from your saloon.” Luke upended the bag, this time with a lot less care than he’d shown at Dare’s house, and a few of the bottles shattered when they fell to the floor. “And if this whiskey came from here, I want to know who bought it from you.”
Duffy looked from the mess on his floor to the anger in Luke’s eyes and got very quiet. He came around and bent down beside the bottles. Plenty of them were still unbroken, so the man could see they were the same brand of whiskey that stood in bottles behind the bar.
Shaking his head, Duffy said, “Hardly no one takes a full bottle out of here, let alone this many.” Duffy rose to face Luke head-on.
“Only someone did, Duffy,” Luke said, defiant. “I found these on my land, and I had a hail of bullets fired at my house the other day that barely missed me and my wife. I followed a trail to the bottles, all of ’em empty, and no one around here deals in this devil’s brew but you.”
Duffy’s eyes seemed to look past Luke, as if he were straining his brain to remember. “Looky here, Stone. I’m telling you, I don’t do that big a business in here. You can check with the mule skinner who brought in the last load of supplies. He’ll tell you he unloaded a case of bottles, nine in all. I’ve still got four of ’em under my bar. And that was going on two weeks ago, before New Year’s Eve night, and I served a heap of that case of whiskey then. One drink at a time.”
Dare strode over to the bar, and the sudden movement made Griss straighten. As Dare went around back, Vince noted that neither man wore a gun, though it was well known that Duffy kept a shotgun on a couple of hooks under the bar.
Reaching down, Dare pulled up four still-corked bottles, holding them by the necks, two in each hand. He set them on the bar with a loud clunk, then brought up a fifth bottle that was half full.
“And I’ve got the empties for the other four bottles on the lower shelf,” Duffy said. He acted like Dare was producing proof positive of his innocence by finding those bottles. “You see—all my order is accounted for.”
“The empties are down here, sure enough,” Dare said. “But just because these bottles are here doesn’t mean you didn’t buy more and sell ’em to someone. The word of a saloonkeeper isn’t worth much.”
“There’s no reason to go and talk that way about us,” Griss cut in. “We’ve always done an honest business here in Broken Wheel, and no one can say we don’t sell good liquor for a fair price.”
“How are we supposed to question a mule skinner who’s been gone for two weeks?” Vince asked, drawing Duffy’s attention away from Luke.
Duffy’s eyes were moving between Luke and Vince and Dare. He looked nervous enough to make a run for it.
No new orders came in, and as Tina did preparation for dinner and cleanup from breakfast, she wondered what the men were up to. Tina, who’d spent her life cooking for two while living with Aunt Iphigenia, was finding a talent for feeding a crowd.
With soft splashes she dropped the last of the peeled and cubed potatoes into the water. She’d started a huge rack of venison roasting for the noon meal before she’d cracked the first egg for breakfast. She lifted the heavy potato pot and set it on the hot stove. The potatoes would be tender and ready to mash shortly before the men came storming in for dinner. An apple brown Betty was ready to pop in the oven when the venison came out. Tina liked serving the dessert warm.
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