Bruce had been like the others, she thought. He was handsomer and smarter, but just as reckless and just as willing to risk something a little unscrupulous if he thought there was a good chance of its paying off. He would have killed to protect his sister, but merely laughed if she tried to caution him or questioned whether what he was doing was really all right. For Rosa Jean had been doubtful sometimes. She was in the habit of accepting what Bruce said and did, because he had been her only guardian and companion—all the family she had—for so long a time. But she had enough conscience and enough common sense to see that he was not infallible, and to worry for him sometimes.
Still he had been a good brother. He had provided for her, looked out for her, teased and cheered her, and when he was around Rosa Jean never found the mountain ranch lonely or dull. She was quite content with their lot.
Afterwards, Rosa Jean had fruitlessly searched for ways to blame herself. Had she been too naïve? Had she not known enough to warn Bruce sooner, or at least more earnestly, before the Kennedy determination to carry a thing through had locked in like an anchor? Blaming herself would have made more sense, almost, than the raging injustice of what had really happened—but looking back, she was forced to admit there was nothing else she could have done.
Bruce had met Ralph Dugan in a Gorham Gulch saloon—although that was not the name Dugan was using at the time. Dugan was already well-known at twenty-four—some said twenty-two—as having killed five men, and was strongly suspected of having been involved in several notable bank and stage robberies across the territory. They said he enjoyed killing. Some who had escaped with their lives swore they saw him smile before he pulled the trigger.
His face was not known as far out as a place like Gorham Gulch; a good likeness had not yet been produced for the wanted posters in circulation—but alias notwithstanding, Bruce Kennedy had guessed at his identity almost at once. The word-of-mouth description fit, of a lean, dark young man—his hanging about the Gulch without visible occupation, the few men who hung about with him and seemed to take their tune from him, and some things dropped casually in his conversation with Bruce all confirmed the notion. Bruce had given no hint of his recognition. They met several times when he was down at the Gulch for supplies, and the end result was an agreement for Bruce and his partners to sell Dugan eight horses, unbranded mustangs broken to saddle—ostensibly to be used in a relay race that he and his friends were planning to enter.
Bruce told Rosa Jean about it at home the next night, when the deal had already been struck. He seemed highly satisfied with his bargaining, and even with the fun involved in carrying the transaction through without betraying that he knew its real purport. Far from having scruples over dealing with an outlaw, he seemed to enjoy the idea that his guess at Dugan’s identity gave him a kind of upper hand, even if he had no intention of using it. How much he told Wirt and Charlie Rosa Jean did not know, but she was fairly sure all three of them knew exactly who was buying the horses, and that there was small chance of their ever being used in a relay race.
Then, a few days before the horses were to be delivered, they had foregathered with Dugan and his friends in the saloon again one night—a low-roofed, smoke-filled, ill-lit establishment that was still the best Gorham Gulch had to offer. Charlie told Rosa Jean later what happened that night. Lined up along the bar, the seven of them, they stood each other to a few rounds of drinks, joked and talked for a while. Finally the conversation came around to the horses. The exact price had not been agreed on yet; Bruce and Dugan had arrived at a general figure, give or take a dollar or so per head, to be finally fixed nearer the time for handing over payment. Charlie had not known what Bruce was planning to do, and none of them ever knew for sure why he acted the way he did that night—whether he had intended it all along, or whether the drinks and the atmosphere had affected him. When the question was finally put, he named a price slightly but noticeably steeper than what the buyers had been led to expect.
Ralph Dugan slid a glance at him, but did not answer right away. He had his elbows on the bar, his lean shoulders hunched forward a little, and he fingered the rim of his whisky glass as if he had nothing better to do. Finally he looked at Bruce Kennedy again. “That’s a little more than we agreed on.”
“Not by much,” said Bruce. “Anyway we’ve put a lot of work into breaking them. I think they’re worth more than we agreed on.”
“Maybe,” said Dugan, still toying with the glass, “but are they worth it to me to pay that steep for them?”
“I think so,” said Bruce. “You might not get horses like this anywhere else. Fact is, you might not get any horses at all—anywhere else.”
There was plenty of noise around them, but among those at the bar there was a pause which might as well have been a dead silence. It might have been no longer than a typical break in conversation, but every man in the group knew what it meant. Even Charlie Conlan, standing beyond Bruce Kennedy, could not help but see the strange, speculative gleam that came into Ralph Dugan’s black eyes as he turned his head slightly to look at Bruce. In that one unguarded speech and moment Bruce had let Dugan see what he had maintained a pretense of not knowing for weeks—had as good as admitted the fact that it was a pretense.
But Ralph Dugan let it pass. Had it not been for that pause, that look, one would have thought he did not suspect. He spoke to the bartender and ordered another round of drinks, and then very casually he allowed that maybe Bruce was right about the horses being worth a little more. But he couldn’t swallow paying that much more without thinking it over. Bruce, who now felt secure in his upper hand, shook his head and said he didn’t think he could come down from that price.
Dugan seemed to think about it for a moment, in a cool, detached way—and more than one man in that group waited with tight nerves. But then, quite easily—too easily—he capitulated.
“All right, then,” he said, “since it looks like I haven’t got any other choice…”
Two nights later, the last of a cloudless sunset was washing rock and canyon and corrals with its fair, clear light, and Rosa Jean was in the kitchen doing the last of the supper dishes. Wirt and Charlie were away, and Bruce was somewhere down in the pasture beyond the barn. Rosa Jean was in the act of hanging her damp dishtowel to dry when she heard horses. Not very near, but she could tell they were coming swiftly. Then suddenly they were close outside, and the sound was a rumble that shook the little house. Rosa Jean dropped the dishtowel—she remembered it slipped limply from the edge of the table to the floor—and ran from the kitchen toward the open front door.
It must have happened very quickly, for all through it, when she relived it in her mind, she seemed to be just arriving at the door. She did not think any of them saw her. Four riders swept by the house, thundering through dust, got the corral gate open, and drove the horses out—the mustangs plunged and swerved and collided with each other and broke into a gallop as each one passed the gate. Rosa Jean caught a glimpse of one man—even in that half-second she knew he matched Bruce’s description of Ralph Dugan. They were running the horses off. Bruce came running up the slope by the barn with an infuriated yell—he knew he was beaten—he was not wearing a gun. The horses were already streaming down the trail, but Ralph Dugan pulled up and turned his horse around and shot Bruce Kennedy through the heart. The arm lifted straight, the angle of the hat brim above the dark face, the puff of smoke and kick of the revolver, all would remain printed on Rosa Jean’s memory for ages afterward. She saw Bruce spin around and plunge to the ground, and somehow she knew that he was already dead.
He was dead when Rosa Jean reached him, before the yells of the outlaws had faded out of hearing and before the thundering horses were even out of sight down the canyon trail. Her brother lay dead in the dust, with his face turned up toward the pale sunset-washed sky, and Rosa Jean—kneeling there in front of the open corral, her fingers touching his still chest as if in a faint, fruitless plea for the life to come back—was alone in the
strange dislocated silence that followed, which was not just of the empty ranch with the dust settling over it, but of her whole empty world.
She was too devastated to cry. She sat there motionless in the dust, looking at his face, until the sunset had faded and the shadows of dusk stole along the rock walls and between the buildings and blotted the yard, until Charlie and Wirt came home and found her there. All the rest of that night, to speak, to think, to walk, was mere mechanical effort.
But next morning, with white face and heavy eyes, she knew what needed to be done. She knew enough to insist on going down to Gorham Gulch, and the other two, though showing the first signs of a reluctance Rosa Jean did not then understand, had to go with her, bringing Bruce’s body with them. And at the end of that afternoon, after she had seen her brother buried in the mining camp graveyard on a hill outside town, she went to the sheriff and told him the whole story.
But contrary to what she had expected, the sheriff only seemed ill at ease on hearing it and rumpled up his untidy gray hair with one hand. “Well,” he said, “yes, but… Miss Kennedy, did you ever meet this fellow you say is Dugan? How do you know it was him?”
“I saw him,” said Rosa Jean, staring into the sheriff’s uneasy, unshaven face. “I was in the door, and I saw him shoot my brother—and it was the man he’d told me about, I’m absolutely certain. It couldn’t be anyone else.”
The sheriff scratched behind his ear, and looked unpleasantly cornered again. “But you can’t say for certain that fellow was really Ralph Dugan. None of us can. We don’t know him by sight here, so we got no proof it was him. I can’t make out a warrant on that kind of hearsay.”
“But Bruce knew it was him. He didn’t have any doubt about it—he told me himself. And that’s why Dugan killed him! Ask Charlie—and Wirt—they were there; they met him; they can tell you all about it.”
But Bruce’s two partners, when put on the spot, displayed a now very definite reluctance to commit themselves. They hemmed, and hedged, and grew vaguer with every answer. They’d met the fellow, and he did look kind of like that, but they couldn’t say for sure he was Dugan. Nobody had called him by that name. Bruce hadn’t said anything positive about it to them; he might have suspected, but they couldn’t say whether he had any real proof. They’d known Bruce was going to sell some horses, but they didn’t know to who—the deal hadn’t been finally settled yet. Rosa Jean, listening through a fog of unexpressed grief and utter weariness, realized with a dull, dead feeling what was happening. They were backing out. They wanted no more to do with Ralph Dugan and his gang than the sheriff did—they wanted only to put as much distance between themselves and the murder as possible.
In the end, the sheriff, after saying several condoling and inadequate things, would not issue a warrant. He promised to be on the lookout for the stolen horses, a promise which meant exactly nothing, and Rosa Jean left his office, moving as if walking in her sleep. On a corner of the boardwalk, she got in Charlie’s way and confronted him with dark, weary eyes and a voice low with hate.
“Why did you do that?” she said. “You could have convinced him if the two of you insisted. You know it was Dugan.”
Charlie was fidgety and defensive. “Use your head, Rosa Jean. What d’you think Dugan and his gang wanted those horses for? Next thing we’ll hear they held up and robbed a bank or a train someplace, and if we let on we sold ‘em horses—knowing who Dugan was and knowing he was probably buying ‘em with stolen money—what’s the odds they’ll haul us into jail? If they can’t catch Dugan—and nobody ever does—they’ll want somebody else to be mad at.”
Rosa Jean’s voice quivered slightly for the first time, but her eyes pierced into him. “Is that all you care about? Don’t you even care that Bruce is dead—and you want to let the man that murdered him go free?”
“There’s nothing gonna bring him back,” said Charlie determinedly. “We all got to look out for ourselves. And you saw what happened to Bruce. If we try an’ have Dugan hauled in on a murder charge, and they don’t catch him, he’s just as liable to come after us for spite.”
Rosa Jean stood very still, looking at Charlie. He could not bear up under the look for long and looked away. Wirt was sitting down on the edge of the boardwalk, fumbling with the ends of his horse’s reins. Rosa Jean realized that she stood completely alone—that no one else in Gorham Gulch, or anywhere else in the world, cared that Bruce Kennedy was dead, or had the smallest interest in seeing his murderer brought to justice. His death made a difference to no one, except that it left her alone in a hollow world.
Two weeks later, news came through that Ralph Dugan and his gang had held up and robbed a bank forty miles away, killing two men in the process, and then vanished from the ken of posses on their trail. Rosa Jean was still alone at the mountain ranch, living in a kind of suspended state—she had no idea yet where to go or what to do—and when she heard it, she set her straight lips in a quiet, peculiar way. At the end of the month, the Dugan gang accounted for another wrecked stagecoach and stolen strong-box and once again defied pursuit—and after that Rosa Jean never said a word to anyone about leaving the mountain. No one cared to dispute her claim to her brother’s property. She sold Bruce’s two saddle-horses and used the money to lay in supplies that allowed her to cook for passing prospectors. She had the chickens she had raised and a small vegetable garden. If Wirt and Charlie had any opinion about her staying, they had no right to say anything to her now.
A year and a half went by. In that time, the Dugan gang periodically reappeared to rob at will, and always vanished again into some secure, untraceable hideout. They had become the scourge and scandal of the territory. While newspaper editors demanded to know why Dugan was not caught, sheriffs protested they were doing the best they could, and bank managers pounded their fists on desks for better protection, no one knew that Rosa Jean Kennedy was lying awake at night in her solitary little house on the side of the mountain, plotting her revenge.
She put the pieces together, from a more personal viewpoint than any harassed sheriff or apoplectic editor could show. All the robberies took place within a certain radius of the spot where Dugan had struck the fatal bargain for the horses. And looming over Gorham Gulch was a mountain range full of undiscovered clefts where a band of outlaws could hide out.
The real reason for Bruce’s murder was now clear to her. Ralph Dugan would not have bothered so much about merely being recognized, but it would not do to be pegged by someone who lived close by where Dugan and his gang planned to establish a base of operations. If Bruce was sharp enough to guess his identity so soon, he might be sharp enough to deduce other things, too. And so Dugan had to get rid of him. But he had been too quick in one respect: he had not seen Bruce’s sister in the door.
So for a year and a half Rosa Jean stayed silent—listened to every scrap of gossip from Charlie Conlan, from every prospector, mustanger, or hunter who set foot in her house or dooryard—sorted and reviewed every bit of knowledge she possessed about the mountains and the trails through them. It was there, she knew, that the Dugan gang must disappear after their depredations. No one else seemed to share her theory, and this suited her. Someday she and she alone would be the one to uncover Ralph Dugan’s secret, and she would be the one to exact vengeance for her brother.
Lying awake in the darkness, Rosa Jean drew a restless sigh and moved her head uncomfortably on her pillow. She had lost count of all the wakeful nights she had spent—some in steady planning and reasoning, but others, like tonight, when she simply could not rest. Ever since Bruce’s death there had seemed to be some restless, thwarted source of energy inside her, something that did not want to let her sleep, or let her haunted thoughts cease.
She had never been able to cry. Her grief was a restless burning in her heart and brain, a thing she felt she must do something to subdue. But tonight, for the first time, she wondered if that feeling would be assuaged if Ralph Dugan were dead—by her own hand, even. Would that give her r
est? Was there anything for her on the other side of revenge but more emptiness—the same emptiness as when she had returned to the lonesome and silent ranch after burying her brother?
The moonlight around the curtains was falling at a different angle now. Rosa Jean wondered if half the pain of her grief was simply the loneliness. What could revenge against Ralph Dugan do for that? After it was accomplished, she would still be left to make her own way in a world where no one cared, where sheriffs scratched their heads and made excuses because they did not want to take risks, where men would see a partner buried and wriggle away from testifying against his killer because all they cared about was their own interest. They all looked out for themselves and they had left her to do the same.
Rosa Jean twisted under the blankets and flung her arms above her head. Why did it hurt so badly tonight? Why had that brief quarrel with Quincy Burnett upset her so much? It was not just because he had been right, or because she could not tell him that the risks she took in this lonely life were calculated ones. Was she actually allowing herself to wonder whether it was all worth it?
Not just the risks—but the loneliness.
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