Hell's Jaw Pass

by Max O'Hara

  “I’m gonna ride on up to the pass.” Stockburn swung into the leather. “I’ve already done a little sniffing around Wild Horse. Now I’ll give Hell’s Jaw a try. You never know what you’ll turn up in a mountain mining town.”

  “Not much up there, but good luck.”

  Wolf touched two fingers to his hat brim, said, “Good-bye, Daniel,” and booted Smoke into a gallop, heading toward the ranch portal.

  * * *

  Daniel watched the big rail detective gallop out of the Tin Cup headquarters, dust churning behind the big horse and the tall rider.

  Footsteps sounded behind Daniel. He turned to see his sister-in-law, Grace, step out onto the porch, still wearing her duster over her nightgown, her pale blond hair hanging loose and unkempt about her shoulders. She was barefoot, as usual, and, just as usual, she was smoking a cigarette.

  Now she stepped to the right side of the door, shook her hair from her eyes, and leaned back against the house’s front wall. She lifted the cigarette to her lips and took a deep drag.

  Blowing the smoke out in a long, slender plume, she said, “I put your son down for his nap, Daniel.” That none too subtle mocking tone of hers.

  Daniel snapped his head forward and gazed out toward where Stockburn’s jostling figure grew smaller and smaller behind the screen of his wafting dust. “Shut your damn mouth, Grace, will you? Just shut your damn mouth!”

  CHAPTER 21

  Lori McCrae ate the last small bite of her steak.

  She swabbed her plate with a slice of her mother’s grainy bread, and ate that, too. She set her fork and knife down and waited for comment.

  During the meal, she’d felt all eyes on her—her father’s and mother’s eyes from where they sat at their age-old stations at opposite ends of the long, cloth-covered eating table in the dining room of the Triangle ranch house; and the eyes of her brothers, Lawton and Hy, sitting across the table from Lori.

  On the heels of one of her “spells,” as her prolonged emotional eruptions had long been called, her parents and brothers always watched her closely, fawningly, skeptically—looking for signs of improvement or deterioration. Signs of improvement were always celebrated quite vocally, sort of like the whoops and hollers of the men hazing the cattle into the right chutes for shipping, voicing a buoyant hybrid of relief and commendation.

  As Lori had known it would be, it was Lawton who spoke first, exclaiming, “Well, lookee there—look at the way she cleaned her plate! Cleaner’n a dog-licked bowl! Li’l sis must be getting her pluck back!”

  “Gosh, Lori,” said the sweetly simple Hy, five years her senior though because of his intellectual age she’d always seen him as younger. “You musta been hungry!”

  “Nicely done, Lori. Nicely done,” said their father, smiling at her from his end of the table as he finished his own steak.

  Her mother, the soft-spoken but iron-hearted Elizabeth, didn’t usually make a comment but usually only dipped her chin and blinked slowly in approval. Tonight, however, she must have felt relieved enough at spying evidence of her daughter’s emotional mending to mutter, “Hmmm, yes . . . always best to feed an aching heart.”

  She looked at Lori, chewing and smiling though the expression never looked entirely natural on her craggy face.

  Elizabeth swallowed and said, “Feeling more settled now, dear?”

  “More . . . rational?” added her father, one eyebrow raised.

  He studied her as though she were a prisoner under interrogation. If she answered correctly, certain restraints might be loosened, privileges bestowed. She might even be set free of the solitary confinement of her upstairs bedroom. If her recovery continued, she might soon be allowed to roam freely around the ranch yard.

  Eventually, if no signs of backsliding were exhibited, meaning if she had no more outbursts of “high” emotion and treated everyone, especially her mother and father, “respectfully,” she would be given the freedom to ride her horse out on Triangle range as long as she stayed within view of the headquarters.

  Lori managed to pull off a smile. She could see her reflection in the looking glass attached to the sideboard flanking her brothers and abutting the far wall; she was amazed by how authentic the expression looked. Affable, demure, even chagrined.

  “Yes, all better now,” she said.

  “Whew!” said Hy, pretending to brush sweat from his brown with his shirtsleeve.

  “I am rather tired, though.” Lori shifted her gaze from her father on her right to her mother on her left. “May I be excused? I know it’s only six o’clock, but I think I’d like to retire to my room and read. I’d like to turn in early.”

  “Yes, I understand you had quite a trip home,” Elizabeth said. She said no more, but her meaning was clear: Her daughter had been extremely foolhardy in traveling alone, a fact proven by the attack on the train—and on Lori herself, no less—by Riley Hennessey’s gang of notorious misfits.

  Lori shaped another demure smile, wiped her mouth with her napkin, placed the napkin on her plate, and rose from her chair.

  “Good-night, everybody,” she said.

  “Good-night, Lori!” said Hy. “Sure am glad to see you feelin’ better. I was worried!”

  “Good-night, darlin’,” said her fatherly older brother, Lawton.

  Her mother did not say good-night but merely stared down at her plate. Elizabeth was still angry, and her silence was her way of communicating that fact. No one defied Elizabeth McCrae without paying a very high price, most of which was tendered in the good old-fashioned but very effective currency of the cold shoulder.

  Norman McCrae, however, bestowed upon his daughter a warm smile over the rim of the china coffee cup he held in both hands in front of his chin. “Good-night, honey.”

  “Good-night, Papa,” Lori said, placing her hand on his arm and giving it an affectionate squeeze. She looked at his cheek, hesitating.

  Should she kiss it? Might the gesture, so close on the heels of her “high emotion,” betray the lie to her sudden display of equanimity?

  Possibly. But she knew her father as well as she did her mother. She could pull it off.

  She went ahead and pressed her soft lips to his rough cheek, prickly from beard stubble this late in the day.

  Did it work?

  McCrae smiled, removing one hand from his cup and patting Lori’s hand with genuine approbation. “Sleep well, honey,” he said as Lori strode toward the dining room door. She could feel her mother’s cold eyes on her, but Lori didn’t dare look back at her.

  Her father’s reaction was enough. It filled her with relief. It also emboldened her to go through with her plan . . .

  Holding the skirts of her dress above her shoes, she climbed the house’s broad staircase. She gained the second floor and strode toward her bedroom door.

  As she did, she passed the door of her mother’s room. Norman and Elizabeth McCrae hadn’t slept in the same bed for years. Elizabeth had made the excuse that Norman snored and kicked all night, but Lori knew, from having overheard a clandestine argument late one night in her father’s office, that Elizabeth had learned of an affair Lori’s father had carried on for several years with a whorehouse madam in Laramie.

  She stopped.

  She turned to stare back at the varnished walnut door. Her heart quickened. Her palms grew warm.

  When she’d been a little girl much younger than her brothers, she’d often found herself alone on the house’s second floor. Her mother, a splendid rider, often helped Lori’s father and brothers out on the range, especially when they were short-handed either late or early in the year, before the summer hirings. Yellow Feather was usually working downstairs or in the wash house flanking the main lodge.

  At those times, Lori, being a curious and precocious child, would sometimes go on snooping missions through the bedrooms. Her parents’ bedroom, especially, held a strong attraction for her.

  Once, while going through her mother’s closet, Lori had discovered an old steamer tru
nk her mother had hauled over here from Scotland. Lori had opened the trunk, finding her mother’s wedding dress, which had been Elizabeth’s mother’s before her, as well as family photos and family jewelry. At the very bottom, Lori had found a small packet, secured with a silk ribbon, of love letters that had been written to Elizabeth McCrae from a former lover from the East.

  The young man had obviously been very much in love with Lori’s mother, and his long, flowery, and sometimes even sexually explicit letters had betrayed the young man’s heartbreak at Elizabeth’s decision to follow her family’s wishes to marry a wealthy Texas rancher who’d been in business with Elizabeth’s father.

  Lori, a devout reader of romantic poetry and the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare, had not found the letters particularly jarring. Her mother had been a beautiful young woman; it wasn’t surprising she’d known love before she’d married her father when she’d been nearly thirty.

  Lori had found the letters as sad in places as Mr. Byron’s poetry and Mr. Shakespeare’s sonnets. At the same time, Lori had thrilled to the idea of her mother living a life of love and adventure before marrying her somewhat dowdy father, who was Elizabeth’s senior by twelve years.

  The point of the memory of Lori having discovered those letters so many years ago now was not the letters themselves but the hiding place. Lori could think of no better place in the house to hide something as possibly volatile as love letters. Especially letters expressing forbidden love.

  Something told Lori that Elizabeth wouldn’t have destroyed the letters. That would have been going too far. She’d confiscated them in a most duplicitous way. That would be as far as Elizbeth would dare go.

  At least, Lori hoped so.

  She was taking a big gamble, but, chewing her lip outside her mother’s door, her right hand on the knob, her heart thudding in her chest, Lori looked up and down the hall. Finding herself alone, she turned the knob and stepped quickly into the proscribed chamber.

  Chewing her lip again, wincing, she closed the door.

  She turned and looked around.

  Elizabeth had left a lamp burning, the wick turned low, casting thin, watery light and shadows around the large, immaculate room furnished with a canopied four-poster bed, a chest of drawers, an armoire, a dressing table, and a large porcelain bathing tub half-hidden by an Oriental room divider.

  The closet lay behind the tub and the divider.

  Lori turned up the lamp then strode to the door quickly. If she was caught in here, going through her mother’s most private possessions, she’d likely be sent to a convent to live out the rest of her days in chaste captivity, whipped daily by evil nuns with wet ropes. Lori chuckled at the thought, but the laugh was evoked more by acute anxiety than from any humor in the notion, which she didn’t think was all that far from what would actually happen to her.

  She opened the closet door. She found the steamer trunk under several quilts. It had been a long time since she’d seen it. It was like finding a relic from her ancient past.

  She pulled it into the light, tripped the double hasps, and opened it. Old, pent-up air wafted up. When she was a young girl, Lori had imagined it was the air of Scotland rising into her face. It smelled of ancient leather and of the cedar the trunk was lined with.

  The contents hadn’t appeared to have changed much over the years. It was possible that Elizabeth hadn’t opened it over the past decade. Lori rummaged beneath the wedding dress and the pasteboard boxes of old photographs, trinkets, jewelry, old Christmas decorations, and other heirlooms, until her hand reached the very bottom.

  She felt around, closing her hand around the packet of old love letters.

  She pulled the packet out of the trunk. She looked at it. It appeared the same as she remembered. She turned it over to inspect the bottom of the packet and frowned.

  The envelopes on the bottom looked newer than the ones on top.

  Quickly, her heart still thumping anxiously, Lori glanced over her shoulder, toward the bedroom door, then slipped the silk ribbon from around the envelopes. She peeled the last several envelopes off the bottom of the packet.

  Now, her heart almost stopped. She was looking down at an address written in her own hand. She shuffled through the eight or nine envelopes under the first one. They were all addressed in her own hand, from the Miss Lydia Hastings Academy for Young Women in Poughkeepsie, New York.

  She looked at the last envelope.

  Again, her heart almost stopped. That envelope had been addressed to her, “Miss Lorelei McCrae in care of the Miss Lydia Hastings Academy for Young Women in Poughkeepsie, New York.”

  The handwriting was decidedly masculine, the letters uncertain, as though written by a slightly shaky, masculine hand. Lori had never seen this envelope. Someone, however, had opened it.

  Of course, she knew who that someone was.

  Lori’s chest rose and fell sharply as she breathed. She took a deep breath, trying desperately to tamp down the rage flaming inside her.

  “How dare she,” she said tightly, through gritted teeth. “How dare she, how dare she, how dare—”

  She stopped as her shaking fingers managed to pull the leaf of cream-colored paper from the envelope. In her haste to unfold it, she dropped it. She picked it back up, almost ripped it as she unfolded it and held it, turning her shoulders slightly, where the light settled over it.

  Her eyes rushed over the words, which were as heart-breakingly honest, sad, and beseeching as they were inelegant. In fact, their inelegance made them all the more poignant.

  Lori looked at the date on the letter.

  “Last year,” she whispered, dumbfounded. “That’s why I didn’t hear from him all summer. I’d sent him letters from school . . . one after the other . . . but received no response. He wrote me, wondering why I hadn’t written him!”

  Tears rolled down Lori’s cheeks. “But I did . . . I did send letters. They were intercepted before they reached Daniel.” She drew a deep breath, hardened her voice, had to try very hard not to scream her next words: “Damn her! Damn that mean, nasty, cold-hearted woman straight to hell!”

  Breathing heavily, Lori climbed to her feet.

  Clutching the letters—her nine notes and his one, the one he’d written Lori asking why she hadn’t written to him (but she had!)—she strode stiffly to the door. She stopped before she reached it. She drew a heavy breath, held it for a few seconds, then let it out.

  She felt a burning, almost overpowering need to confront her mother about the letters. Elizabeth had obviously used her influence to coerce the postmaster in Wild Horse to intercept any letters from or to her daughter in New York. Lori wanted to throw the letters in Elizabeth’s face. She wanted to do far more than that. If she went downstairs right now, she would likely get herself into even more trouble than she was already in.

  She had to calm down and think clearly, strategically.

  Earlier in the day, she’d secretly sent a note to Daniel. She’d convinced Hy—poor, kind Hy, her hapless unwitting brother—to take a note to the one hand in the bunkhouse she knew she could trust, Randy MacDonald.

  Randy had once vied for Lori’s affections himself but, knowing who her heart really belonged to, had settled for her friendship instead.

  She trusted that Randy, using another intermediary—a young man who cut hay near Dutch Joe Creek for the Tin Cup ranch—would get her note to Daniel. And that Daniel would meet her tonight, at midnight, at their old meeting place.

  Lori put the trunk back in order in her mother’s closet, turned down the lamp, then returned to her own room to wait until everyone had gone to bed. Then she’d slip outside, saddle a horse, and ride out to meet her lover at long last.

  CHAPTER 22

  Stockburn took a deep drag off his Indian Kid cigar and blew a smoke plume into the cold, dark night.

  He followed up the smoke with a couple sips of his strong, black coffee, first blowing ripples on the surface to cool it. Only a few minutes ago, he’d poured
himself a fresh cup. Some gray ash from the fire snapping and crackling behind him had drifted into the coffee. He slurped it down with the hot liquid itself.

  He didn’t mind the flavor of wood ash in his coffee. In fact, he liked it. It gave the mud an extra toasty edge, sometimes even adding a little aspen or pine tang to the brew. He was at home out here in the big open. He liked the sight, sound, smell, and even taste of it.

  He believed himself to be somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the Triangle and Tin Cup ranges. He was likely on open range though he was well aware that both spreads contested the government graze, each having claimed it as their own.

  After leaving the Stoleberg headquarters several hours ago, he’d quartered northwest, moving slowly, studying the ground for signs of a large group of horseback riders. A dozen or so men were believed to have attacked the rail crew. He’d counted twelve men leaving the Stoleberg yard earlier in the day. There was a good chance they were the same men who’d killed the track layers. There was a chance they were not, as well. If he could find the tracks of a large group of horses and riders, and track them to their source, he’d be ahead of the game.

  Of course, Wolf couldn’t be sure the killers were still in the area. Possibly, the men or men who’d hired them to kill the track layers had simply paid them off and bid them adieu.

  On the other hand, maybe that hadn’t been the only killing job the killers’ boss or bosses had in mind for the hired guns. Whoever had ordered the massacre might have wanted to keep the killers in the area in case the Stewarts brought in a new work train and formed another crew to repair the ruined rails and to lay more. To continue with their plan to build the railroad all the way to Hell’s Jaw Pass. The culprits likely had no way of knowing just how hard it would be to break the Stewarts and send them and their rail line packing.

  It wasn’t easy to gather a dozen killers. At least, not inconspicuously. Once you had them, you’d most likely want to hold onto them until you were sure you didn’t need them anymore. And you’d likely want to keep them out of sight.