Glory came back with squat, thick glasses, each with a finger of amber liquid in it. When she saw Luke looking at the weapons hanging on the wall, she said, “My husband’s father fought with Sam Houston during the revolution against Mexico. He was an officer and carried those during the battle of San Jacinto.”
“For somebody who’s not from Texas, you seem to know something about the place’s history,” Luke said.
“Sam wasn’t your typical closemouthed, tightfisted Scotsman,” she said with a smile. “He liked to talk, and he was generous to a fault. That’s how he inspired such loyalty among his friends and the men who worked for him. We spent many hours with him telling me all about his family and how they came from Tennessee to Texas back in the days when it was still a Mexican colony. I thought all the history was fascinating.”
“I would have expected most women to find it boring.”
“I’m not like most women.” She lifted her glass. “To absent friends.”
Luke clinked his glass against hers and nodded. When he sipped the whiskey, he found that it was as good as she had said it would be.
He told her as much, and she said, “You have an appreciation for fine liquor beyond the sort of rotgut flavored with gunpowder and rattlesnake heads you usually find around here?”
“I’d like to think I have an appreciation for all sorts of fine things in life.”
She gave him an appraising look, too, but it was different from the one Verne Finn had directed at him. Then she said, “You’re not the saddle tramp you appear to be, Mr. Jensen.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” Luke said. Glory cocked her head to the side quizzically, but he didn’t elaborate. Instead, he said, “I hope you don’t think I’m trying to stir up unpleasant emotions, but if you’ll forgive my curiosity . . . how did your husband die?”
Her fingers tightened slightly on the glass. She had already taken a couple of sips of the liquor, but now she threw back the rest of the whiskey. As she lowered the glass, she said, “You really must be just passing through, as you said. If you’d been around these parts for very long, you would have heard the rumors.”
“Rumors?” Luke repeated.
“About my husband’s death. And I can tell you, Mr. Jensen, they’re more than just rumors. They’re true.” She paused. “Sam MacCrae was murdered.”
CHAPTER 5
Luke had plenty of practice at concealing his emotions. With nothing showing on his face except mild surprise, he said, “I’m sorry to hear that. It must’ve been pretty hard on you.”
“Losing Sam would have been hard no matter how it happened. To have him stolen away like that . . .” Her voice trailed off as she shook her head.
“What happened? That is, if you don’t mind talking about it.”
Luke was curious what her story was going to be. He was sure she wasn’t going to come right out and admit that she had killed her husband, although he had little doubt that was what had happened. Such a crime fit her pattern, after all.
“Sam liked to ride out on the range early every morning,” Glory said. “For years he was up well before the crack of dawn every day, and he put in just as many hours in the saddle as any of the men who worked for him. But he was getting on in age, you understand, and I’d convinced him it would be all right for him to take it a little easier.” She smiled. “I admit, I had a selfish motive. I wanted him to spend more time with me.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Luke said.
“But I still couldn’t break him of the habit of spending a couple of hours every morning checking on things around the ranch. He had to make sure everything was running smoothly, even though he had a perfectly good crew to take care of things.”
“Something happened to him while he was out on one of those rides?” Luke guessed.
“He wasn’t back by the time he normally came in,” Glory said, “so I went out to look for him.”
“By yourself?”
“I didn’t really think anything had happened to him,” she said with a slightly impatient shake of her head. “It was just hard to conceive of anything bad happening to Sam. He always seemed so big and . . . invulnerable.”
“Nobody’s invulnerable,” Luke said quietly.
“I know, but some people seem like they are. You can almost believe it of them. Sam was like that. I just thought he’d gotten delayed somehow. Maybe his horse had thrown a shoe or come up lame. At the very worst I thought maybe a rattlesnake spooked the horse and Sam was thrown, so that he was having to walk back in. But I wasn’t really that worried.”
“You didn’t take any of the hands with you when you went to look for him?”
“No, it didn’t seem necessary. I’m an excellent rider, and I had my carbine if I ran into any wild animals. I headed up into the hills, because that was the way Sam had gone when he left that morning.”
Luke didn’t hear anything except sincerity in her words. But she’d had several months to practice the story, he reminded himself. She should have been good at telling it by now.
“I hadn’t been searching for very long when I heard a shot,” Glory went on. “As soon as I heard it, I knew somehow that something terrible had happened. I headed in the direction of the shot, and a few minutes later when I came over a rise, I saw Sam’s horse down at the bottom of the slope. The horse moved aside, and I . . . I saw him lying there.”
She was really good at those little hesitations, Luke thought. They made what she was saying sound even more believable. She had to be telling the truth, people would think, because look how emotional it made her.
“You heard just one shot?” he asked.
“Just one. But it was enough. Sam was dead when I reached him. He’d been shot in the back.”
“I’m sorry,” Luke said. “What did you do then?”
“I got my carbine and fired three shots in the air. I knew that would bring any of the hands who were close enough to hear them.”
It was true that three shots, fired at regular, fairly close intervals, was a universal signal for trouble on the frontier. That was an understandable reaction for a woman who had just found her husband gunned down.
But it was also a good excuse for her to fire her carbine, so it would smell of burnt gunpowder. She could have thumbed an extra cartridge through the loading gate, too, so that only three rounds would be gone from the carbine’s magazine in case anybody checked.
Luke suddenly seemed to hear Gabe Pendleton’s words in his head again. Pendleton had said that Verne Finn was “a backshooter and a bushwhacker.” If there was trouble between the two spreads, wasn’t it possible that Finn or another of Harry Elston’s hired guns had ambushed Sam MacCrae? Because of Glory’s true background, he had jumped to the conclusion that she was responsible for her husband’s death, but that didn’t necessarily have to be the case, did it?
Those thoughts raced through Luke’s head. He still leaned toward Glory MacCrae being the killer, but he asked, “How long has the trouble with Elston been going on?”
“Longer than I’ve been here. More than a year, according to the things Sam told me. But it’s only really started to boil over since . . . since Sam’s been gone. I’m sure that Elston thinks I’m just a defenseless, hysterical woman and he can bully me into doing whatever he wants.” She turned to the sideboard, splashed more whiskey into her glass, and downed it. “He’s going to find out just how wrong he is.”
“You think one of Elston’s men murdered your husband?”
“What other reasonable explanation is there?” Glory asked.
Luke could have answered that. He could have pointed out how convenient an excuse this range-war-in-the-making was for a woman who wanted to get rid of her wealthy husband and inherit everything he owned.
But for the time being, until he could figure out a way to get Glory off the ranch and into the nearest jail without having to fight his way through Gabe Pendleton and the rest of the crew in order to do it, he had to act like he b
elieved her. He had to act like he sympathized with her.
It wasn’t that much of a stretch. She was convincing, no doubt about that.
“Have you thought about hiring some gunmen of your own?” he asked.
“Gabe and his men are pretty tough.”
“They might not be a match for Elston’s gun-wolves.”
“Are you applying for a job, Mr. Jensen?” Glory asked with a faint, sardonic smile.
“What makes you think I’m a hired gun?”
“You carry two Remingtons and a knife, and I saw a Winchester on your saddle. Your hands don’t have the same sort of calluses they would if you worked with a rope all the time. You obviously know your way around firearms, or you wouldn’t have been able to shoot that rustler out of his saddle.”
“That doesn’t mean my gun’s for hire,” he said. A harsh note crept into his voice, and he didn’t try to stop it.
“I meant no offense,” she said with a shake of her head. “It was rude of me to say such a thing to a guest. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Luke said. “I’m sorry if I seemed thin-skinned. Why don’t we start again?”
She smiled.
“That sounds like a good idea to me. And we can start by putting some more whiskey in your glass.”
“An excellent beginning,” Luke said.
Glory told Teresa, who turned out to be both cook and housekeeper, that there would be a guest for dinner. Luke asked where he could wash up before the meal, and she directed him to the pump next to the bunkhouse. He thanked her and left the house.
He had a clean shirt in his saddlebags he wanted to put on, so he headed for the barn where he had seen the young man called Vince lead his horse earlier. He figured his gear was in there somewhere.
When he came into the barn, he saw the other young wrangler, the redhead Glory had addressed as Ernie. He was in one of the stalls using a currycomb on the big white horse Glory had been riding. Ernie appeared to be the only person in the barn.
He turned to look over his shoulder when he heard Luke come in and said, “Oh, hey, mister. Are you looking for your horse?”
“My saddlebags, actually, Ernie. My name is Luke, by the way.”
“Yeah, I know. Mr. Pendleton told me.” Ernie put the comb aside and came out of the stall with an eager expression on his freckled face. He held out his hand and introduced himself. “I’m Ernie Frazier.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ernie,” Luke said as he shook hands with the young man.
“Mr. Pendleton also said you’re the one who shot that rustler.”
“Only because someone in his bunch had been shooting at me.”
“I’m not surprised. That crew of Elston’s is no good.”
“Have you been here on the MC for a while, Ernie?” Luke asked. A talkative youngster was often a good source of information.
“About a year and a half, sir.”
“Then it was Mr. MacCrae who hired you.”
“Actually, it was Mr. Pendleton who hired me on, but I reckon he cleared it with Mr. MacCrae.”
“How do you feel about working for Mrs. MacCrae?”
Just the mention of Glory’s name was enough to put that brilliant smile back on Ernie’s face. He said, “Why, it’s just fine. She’s the boss now, Gabe—Mr. Pendleton—says, so we’ve got to do what she tells us same as if Mr. MacCrae was still alive. Of course, I’d do that anyway, no matter what Mr. Pendleton said.”
“It’s a shame about Mr. MacCrae being killed,” Luke said.
That was enough to make the smile disappear from Ernie’s face. He said, “You’ve heard about that?”
“Mrs. MacCrae told me.”
“Yeah, it was awful.” Ernie thumbed his hat back. “That was sure a sad day. When we had the buryin’, I mean. You never saw anybody braver than Mrs. MacCrae. I could tell she wanted to cry, but she never did. Not one tear.”
That was a little surprising to Luke. He would figured that Glory could summon up at least one tear for the occasion, just to make it look good.
“Who do you think shot Mr. MacCrae?” Luke asked.
“My money’s on that fella Verne Finn. He’s a snake-blooded hombre if there ever was one. It gives me the fantods just lookin’ at him. But if it wasn’t Finn, it was one of Elston’s other men. I’d stake my life on it.”
Luke changed the subject by saying, “How did Mr. MacCrae come to marry a woman like Mrs. MacCrae? I understand that he was a widower for a long time.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I heard it, too.” Ernie was so open and unsuspecting that the words came out of him without any hesitation at all. “They met in town a while back.”
“In Painted Post, you mean.”
“Yeah. Mrs. MacCrae—well, her name was Miss Jenkins then, I guess—she’d come out here to Texas from somewhere back East. For her health, you understand. Something about the climate bein’ better here. You sure wouldn’t think she’d ever been sick a day in her life to look at her, would you? She looks like the picture of health.”
“She does,” Luke agreed dryly. He was sure it wasn’t any sort of medical condition that had prompted Gloria Jennings to get off the train in Painted Post and call herself Glory Jenkins. She had probably thought the little cow town looked like a good place to lie low for a while until any pursuit that was behind her cooled off. Then she had stumbled upon another target for her wiles in Sam MacCrae and had been unable to withstand the temptation.
He wondered what her real name was. She might have had so many aliases that she would have a hard time herself remembering the name she’d been born with.
“Anyway, it didn’t take any time at all for Mr. MacCrae to fall for her,” Ernie continued. “Shoot, I can understand that. All you’ve got to do is look at her. It’s not just that she’s so pretty, though. She’s kind, too, and sweet. And she’ll talk to you straight out, no beatin’ around the bush like some gals do. To tell you the truth, Mr. Jensen, I wasn’t sure at first about a woman runnin’ a ranch, but now there’s no doubt in my mind that she can do it.”
From the door of the barn, Gabe Pendleton said, “Well, I’m sure we’re all glad to know you think Mrs. MacCrae’s got a right to run her own ranch, Ernie.” His voice was sharp enough to make the garrulous young wrangler jump a little.
“I, ah, didn’t see you there, Mr. Pendleton,” he said.
“I reckon you didn’t, or you would have been tending to your chores instead of flapping your gums.”
Luke said, “I’m afraid I’m the one who made Ernie here neglect his work. I was asking him some questions.”
“Is that what you came in here for, Jensen? Seems to me you’re a mite curious about the workings of this spread.”
Luke saw the suspicion on Pendleton’s face and heard it in his voice. Keeping his own response casual, Luke said, “Not at all. Ernie and I just got to talking, that’s all. I came in to get a clean shirt from my saddlebags before I wash up for dinner.”
“That’s right, you’re having dinner in the big house.” Pendleton hooked his thumbs in his gun belt. “But after dinner, you’ll be coming back out to the bunkhouse to sleep.”
“I never thought otherwise,” Luke said.
Pendleton gave him a curt nod, then said to Ernie, “There are other horses that needed tending to, not just Mrs. MacCrae’s saddle mount.”
“Sure,” Ernie said. “I’ll get right to ’em.”
“See that you do.”
With that, Pendleton turned and walked away from the barn.
“He’s a mite touchy, isn’t he?” Luke said.
“I don’t reckon I’d better talk anymore, Mr. Jensen. Like Gabe said, I’ve got work to do.”
“Of course. Do you happen to know where my saddlebags are?”
Ernie pointed and said, “All your gear’s in the tack room, right over there.”
“Thanks.”
Luke found his saddlebags and got out the clean shirt. He said so long
to Ernie and walked out to find the pump Glory had told him about.
As he did so, he thought about Pendleton’s reaction. The foreman didn’t want Ernie running his mouth about Glory MacCrae. Maybe that was just a ramrod being normally protective of his employer, especially since that boss was a woman.
Luke couldn’t help but wonder, though, if it was more than that. When Gabe Pendleton looked at Glory, did he see just his boss . . . or something else?
Like a beautiful woman he was a little bit in love with. Maybe more than a little bit.
CHAPTER 6
Luke beat as much of the dust from his hat and trousers as he could, then got a rag wet at the pump and used it to clean off his boots. He took off his shirt, stuck his head under the stream of water, and sluiced more dust from his hair and bare torso. It felt good to be at least a little bit clean again, he thought as he pulled on the fresh shirt. It stuck to his damp skin in places.
When he turned toward the house, he thought he saw one of the curtains move slightly as it fell back into place.
Had Glory been watching him wash up?
Luke didn’t have any false modesty. He knew that many women found him attractive, despite the fact that he wasn’t what anyone would call handsome. And he certainly enjoyed the company of women in return.
But even if Glory MacCrae was drawn to him, he wasn’t going to try to take advantage of that to capture her and turn her in for the reward on her head. Such behavior just wouldn’t be honorable as far as he was concerned. He might be just a no-account bounty hunter with more blood on his hands than he liked to think about, but he had his limits.
When he went back inside the house, Glory greeted him by saying, “Why don’t you hang your gun belt there on that peg beside the door?” When Luke hesitated, she added, “Surely you don’t intend to sit down to dinner armed to the teeth?”
“That would interfere with eating, now wouldn’t it?” he said with a smile. He didn’t like taking off his Remingtons, but he didn’t want to make Glory suspicious, either. So he unbuckled his gun belt and hung it on the peg she had pointed out.
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