by Rusty Davis
“He show up often?”
“He was the foreman, and I own the place now. He showed up now and then. Not often, but it was not unusual.”
The hands said Ferguson had ridden off from the west pasture a day ago without explanation. With the cattle split in two pastures, one on either side of the ranch house, he would go from one to the other often without much notice or conversation. Kane would have to check the men in the other pasture, but it sounded like what folks on a ranch would do.
Kane looked at Ferguson’s body. The man’s gun was in his holster. Tied down, the way a man’s gun would be if he was going to be around children. No way to tell if he was reaching for it, not with him stone dead. No way to know he was shot from inside or out. House didn’t smell like gun smoke, but with the window open and the heat working on a dead man on the floor surrounded by his blood, a smell would have been long gone. There was no obvious bullet hole in the wall, but if the shooter didn’t miss, there would not be. The only clear thing was that the man was dead.
Maybe this sheriff thing was a worse mistake than he had been thinking all day. Whatever a clue might have looked like, no one left one.
“Let’s get him out of there,” Kane grumbled, having no idea what he was supposed to do or how a man did it.
The hands carried Ferguson out to the bunkhouse. Some of the men cleaned up the spot where Ferguson fell. If anything, it looked worse when they were through.
Rachel went to get her kids so they would all be back by dark. He hoped that in the time she was gone he could get some information.
None of the men had much of a bone to pick with Ferguson. Every foreman made men mad from time to time, but Ferguson seemed to be even-handed, and when something went wrong, he faced it. If a hand was in trouble, he knew it.
About as delicately as he could, he tried to find out if Ferguson and Rachel were more than merely the owner’s wife and the foreman. Best he could figure was that if they were carrying on, they were the best he’d ever known at finding places in the middle of the night to ride out to where no one saw anything.
The men agreed Ferguson thought Rachel was a very special lady, and a few wondered in time with her man dead if she might think about him as a husband, because a ranch needed a man at the top. He idly wondered if they’d shared that conclusion with her. Would have been a thing to see, he thought.
They talked about Rachel the way so many hands on so many spreads idealized the lady of the ranch. They all agreed her coffee was so strong it could raise the dead, but they all drank it because she made it for them. They could no more picture her shooting a man than they could riding a wild horse.
The picture of Rachel that emerged was that she ran the house, cared for the kids—loved ’em, not merely fed ’em—and if she had anything to say about anything or anyone, she said it to Wilkins in private and maybe to Ferguson as well. Most of the hands were hard-pressed to recall more than a hello, but none of them ever thought she was rude. She was quiet.
What was it the old Mexican woman in San Antonio said? “It is always the quiet ones.”
The arrival of Rachel and the children brought an end to questions. Young Jeremiah was interested in the shiny badge. Libby, like her mother, spoke more with her dark, all-seeing eyes. She kept watching him.
Rachel insisted he stay, as if he would have found his way in the dark. He could sense the strain. She chattered. Libby shot her a look a few times; a child knowing something was off but not why.
“Got time to show me this garden I keep hearing about?” he asked the girl. “Not much at growing things myself.”
At first, she acted as though she did not want to. She did, explaining distantly but properly what was planted where. He asked about her arm, because she seemed to favor the left. She brushed off the question. He wondered again when he realized that her dress was buttoned tightly on the arms, while everyone else had sleeves pulled up against the heat of the day. He hoped that when he accidentally brushed against her left arm and saw her wince that he was a better actor than she was.
When he asked about the care of various crops, the names of which he was making up as they went along, she at first gave him serious answers, then entered the spirit of the game by telling him she planted some on the moon and others in the trees.
“You know what I am?”
“A cowboy. Mama calls you other things.” A little smirk.
“And the sheriff.” A shrug. “That means I have to find out what happened when things go wrong.”
He wished he knew what her eyes were hiding. He let the silence go until she felt forced to speak.
“You didn’t learn who shot my father.”
“Not yet. Happened before I got here. Long before. That’s why I need your help, because I made a promise that I would find out the truth.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Everybody knows kids on a farm are up all hours, hear everything, see everything, sneak out places. I did. You saw something. Heard something. All inside you, screaming to get out. Tell me.”
She was silent. He could feel it—judgment. Risk speaking or carry the burden.
“They were fighting.”
“Adults do that.”
“They never did. Until lately. They argued a lot. I didn’t understand it. I would go there,” she pointed to a spot by the creek “where the water flows over the stones, and I would hear less of what they said. I don’t know what happened or what I did, but I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Libby. Tell me. I can keep a secret real good.”
She didn’t answer right away.
“They yelled a lot. He . . . I didn’t want him to see me. I was very careful. Once . . .” She touched her arm, then blinked, then looked him very full in the eyes. “I do not want to talk about that.”
“Tell me about the night your dad was shot.”
“I was in bed when I heard the shot. I wasn’t there a really long time, but I was sleepy. I heard the shot, and I heard Mommy scream from her room,” she said.
Now she was looking Kane very directly in the eye as she repeated the story clearly and succinctly, over and over. He understood she was very intentionally giving her mother an alibi that she would insist was the truth whether it was or not.
Family. The way it worked.
Rachel had said she was asleep. She had said she found Jared the next morning. Did she lie, or did she and Libby never figure out how to make sure they got their stories straight?
Libby was struggling to say something else.
“Is Mommy in trouble?”
“No.” A lie? Why not? Everyone else told ’em. “You helped me a lot. A whole lot. And I will keep your secret. And I will come to the moon with you to harvest your garden when it is time.”
“Mommy told me that riders come by at night to take Indian girls. She got real mad the last time she caught me hiding.”
“I won’t tell. Honest. Here.” He stuck out his right hand. She took it. A promise he could not keep? He’d made a lot of them. Time would tell. The girl had suffered enough in life. No one bought eyes like hers without paying a high price.
Kane minded his manners through the meal. There was meat in the stew, and the bread was soft. A man could go days with less. Jeremiah and Libby had the chore of cleaning up.
“Will you walk with me, Kane?” said Rachel, who threw a dark-green shawl over the pale-blue dress she was wearing.
“Don’t forget my story!” Jeremiah called.
“I will not,” Rachel replied. “I will also remember to look to see if you took away whatever it was that was in your room that your sister denies putting there. We do not leave dead animals in the house.”
As they walked away from the house, the sound of a sibling debate carried forth.
“They have been through a lot,” she said. “I do not know what normal is for children, for white children, but Jared did. They learn some other things, too.”
“Love ’em, feed ’em, it usually comes out fine,” Kane said. There was probably more to it, but that’s all he knew. “Libby. Good girl.”
He got a look.
“She seems to respond to your childish ways.”
Kane smiled at the comment. Rachel shook her head and exhaled loudly at his reaction.
They walked a while in silence. The evening breeze picked up. She lifted her face to it as they walked into the dipping sun. She turned.
“They will come for me. If you are the sheriff, you are obligated by the law to protect my family.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Rakeheart men.”
“Should they?”
He might as well have slapped her.
“You have no mercy in you.” She started to walk away. He touched an arm that jerked back.
“Not much of that in this world, Rachel. Not much. Tell me.”
“They want the land. Men always want what someone else has. These Rakeheart people have no heart. They have no souls. They are like the rest of them.”
“Rest of who?”
“All of those little towns. You don’t understand, do you?”
He admitted it.
“The butte behind the house runs for miles, but there is a space of about three miles in our west pasture where the ground is level. The next gap is twenty or thirty miles east. If these people want their railroad, it needs to run through that gap. Sometimes Jared talked about selling that part of the ranch. Sometimes all of it. Then he would say he was never going to sell.”
She shook her head. “I never interfered. It was his world, not mine. I trusted him.”
She said that Wilkins had recently encouraged a bidding war for the land.
“He said if they paid enough, it would be worth it. The Rakeheart people came here. Other people came here. I do not know who they were. Soldiers came once. The railroad is their god. They would talk and drink and smoke and glare at me as though I had Red Cloud and a thousand warriors in the barn. I hated them. I told Jared never to sell. This is not dirt, not land. This is home. My home, now. If they come to take it, because whites take land from Indians, I will fight.”
She meant it. He was certain. Not his problem. He figured by the time they came, he would be gone. He also felt like he should speak.
“I’m what law there is, and if they break the law trying to take it, they got to deal with me, Rachel. Land’s not only yours, it is for your daughter and your boy, there. Like to see your boy run his daddy’s ranch.”
It was not too dark to see that she was weighing his words.
“Jeremiah is not mine.”
He had wondered. More or less assumed, without trying to worry on it too much. Admitted as much.
“It is not just that. He is not Jared’s either.”
Now she had Kane’s full attention.
“I was hurt . . . you only need to know that after Libby I could not have another child. We had to run . . . You do not need to know it all. Jared did not care at first. The longer we were married, the older he got, the more he wanted a son. Men want sons. It is the way of the world. We were living in Dakota when it happened. He came home with the boy one day. He told me Jeremiah was an orphan and that he was about two years old. We gave him a birthday—I think it was Jared’s mother’s birthday—and we made him our son. Jared said when he brought him home that we had to leave right away, but I was happy to go because it was not a good place to be an Indian. This was true. I did not think then that we left because of where the boy came from,” she said.
Her hands tried to shape what came next.
“Here they do not like me, but they leave me alone. I did not ask about him. The boy made him happy, and he was good to me. The boy has been a good boy. I cannot make him my blood, but he is mine to protect. What is in the past does not matter. His story is like mine. Do you understand?”
He did. Sometimes family was made, not born.
“Ferguson got family?”
“He had a brother in the East somewhere. Iowa, I think, or Ohio. I do not know, but there might be letters in his things. You can look.”
“You want him buried here?”
She shook her head quickly.
“White people want to be buried together by the church. I went there for Jared, and I will not go again. I will not leave this land for them to take.”
He could feel the promise welling up. Fools make promises. That they do.
“No one will push you off your land, Rachel. You want to sell, you can sell. You don’t, you don’t. Got my word.”
She moved her face close to his as she looked up into his eyes. She looked out at the last of the light.
“You do not lie. You are an odd white man. Why are you really here, Kane?”
“Told you. Sherman wanted me to find out who killed your husband. Gonna find that out.”
She went back into her shell. “Yes, you did tell me.”
The sun was fading fast. A large, dark cloud drifted to the north amid deep yellow that was turning to orange. Far to the east, where the cloudless sky was already dark, there was a star. He pointed to it.
“Way I recall, the Spirit Warrior was running from the Night Warrior, when he fell, wounded. The Night Warrior had chased him, because the Spirit Warrior had stolen a treasure, a vast treasure that the Night Warrior kept hid.”
“I have heard this story.”
“And the Spirit Warrior, lying wounded, opened the hand in which he had the treasure. And the dark of the sky was never dark again, for from his hand flew all the stars and the moon and all that glowed in the night, so that the People would know the Spirit Warrior would never die, and the Night Warrior would never hold them in darkness again. And in the lights across the sky, the Spirit Warrior lives to this day, watching his children from above and caring for them every day, even those so very far from home.”
For the first time since he had met Rachel Wilkins, her face softened.
“I was a little girl when my grandmother told me that story, but it had many voices in it, and it went on forever. The Sioux do not tell the tale this way of the birth of the stars. Only the Comanche.”
It was a question.
“There was a trading place not far, when I was a boy. Blind Comanche man would sit there about all day and tell these stories. Don’t remember half of ’em. Always liked that one. Thought about it the other night. Something about the sky here. Shouldn’t be any different than Texas, but it looked taller and wider.”
“You are a strange white man, Kane. You make a promise you don’t know if you can keep to someone you do not trust. You tell me a Comanche story to comfort me. My daughter said you played a silly game to make her laugh. Why?”
He shrugged.
“And you dislike being told you are a good man.”
“Only a man doing a job, Rachel.”
“Tell me, Kane. When you lie to yourself, do you do it better than when you lie to me?”
She laughed as his face registered the impact of her words.
“Let us go back, Kane. Libby does not like to be alone since . . . well, she is nervous without her mother.”
Kane did not push for answers but walked silently next to Rachel. Close. He thought about Jared Wilkins. Clem Ferguson. Had they walked next to her, too? Feeling close?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kane left in the morning. He laid Ferguson out in a wagon, told the hands he would probably be buried in a day, if they wanted to be there, then—with Tecumseh tied behind—they rolled away. Rachel busied herself in the house and did not see him off. Silent Libby watched. Her posture said relief. Her eyes looked a long time at the burden in the bed of the wagon. Her face said nothing.
Preacher Diedrich Siegel shook his head when Kane reached the small frame church with the small steeple that was neither high nor straight. The church bell was mounted on a couple of poles set in the ground.
“Another gunfight!”
“Nope. Someone
murdered him, Preacher.”
“Another one?”
“Told the Wilkins ranch people they could come by tomorrow to bury him. Hope that was not a mistake.”
Siegel waved his hand. “Of course. In Pennsylvania, everything was so formal. Here, there is not the time, and everything is so raw.”
The preacher promised to see to a grave and said they would bury him some time late in the day to be sure Wilkins’s riders had the chance to get there.
Kane was leading Tecumseh down the main street when Conroy braced him. “Who was that? Who did you bring in?”
“Clem Ferguson. Got murdered at the ranch house out there.”
Conroy seemed surprised. “Clem? Good man, not the kind anyone would hate enough to kill. Stayed out of trouble and was always respectful.”
“Not a gun fighter?”
“Oh, these riders! They all wear a sixgun, but I think half of them could not hit a barn with one. They all know how to shoot rifles, though.” Conroy looked in the direction of the church, where the Wilkins wagon was parked. “Do you know who killed him?”
“Not yet,” Kane replied. “I will.”
“Yes, yes,” said Conroy. “I will tell the others. Two people murdered on a property that . . . well, it should be in more stable hands for the welfare of the community, but we shall give it time. Two people killed is something that the town must investigate. The children must be given proper homes if needed.”
He thought about what Rachel said. The ranch. The railroad. Later. Conroy asked a few more questions. Kane gave a few answers; both shared very little. If Ferguson had enemies, or any close friends outside of the ranch, Conroy did not know who they were.
“Clem rode for them for three years. Saving to be a rancher in a few years himself. It’s a shame. That’s two dead men at one ranch, Sheriff. That woman!”
Kane thought. “Not sure.”
“He’d been here six months before she ever came into town with him. I’m not a man to pry in another man’s business, but I could never put my head on a pillow in the same house with a woman who might lift your hair. Lived here twenty years. The one thing I know is that you never know what they’re thinking.” Conroy shook his head. “Never knew of any wild ones coming there, but she could have snuck them in. We can pull a posse together if you need one. Army can send soldiers if you think she has a war band hiding out there.”