Return to Sundown Valley

by Cole Shelton

  He kept riding.

  He was thinking about Honani. By now the Navajo would be heading deeper into the high country, following Muskrat Creek. The thin, little-used track climbed through Whispering Pass, a cleft between the two towering peaks Luke could see glistening in the moonlight through the tall pines. Once through that pass, Honani would make the long journey right down to Na Dené Canyon. The Indian needed answers and Luke knew he wouldn’t sleep until he had them.

  The trail became steeper suddenly, rising to Old Wolf Ridge.

  Luke’s bay gelding was tiring, occasionally stumbling. Both horse and rider needed a good night’s rest at the Bar LD. In fact, Luke decided that he’d let his horse have a well-earned spell for a month or more. Caleb would have other horses on the spread.

  He topped the long rise. Old Wolf Ridge was a large, timbered shelf of clay and rock overlooking Sundown Valley. It stretched west for ten miles, finally dropping to a vast grassy plain that was crossed by the wagon trail used by the early Mormon pioneers. Riding across the ridge, Luke saw the distant lamps of Spanish Wells. They blinked in the night, small pinpricks of light, and even from this distance he knew the one that burned on Sierra’s front porch. The memory of their parting was raw, like an open wound as he headed towards his destination. She was a damn fool to be marrying Zimmer but there was nothing he could do about it now.

  He saw the Bar LD fence ahead, stretching beyond three towering pines that made arrowheads against the moon.

  This was trail’s end.

  He was home at last!

  By now the big weary bay gelding had slowed to a walk, but Luke didn’t push him. He let his trusty horse just drift to the fence. He frowned when he saw some strands of wire coiled in the grass and one fence post uprooted. Riding along the fence line he came to the gate that was wide open on rusted hinges. He felt annoyed because he’d trusted Caleb to keep the spread in good order. Luke remembered his brother had been fond of the redeye whiskey and he hoped he hadn’t surrendered to alcohol once again. After all, he had a lovely wife and at least one child. Frowning now, Luke told himself Bar LD mustangs could easily escape into the wild through fence gaps and open gates. Just as he rode through onto his land, clouds edged across the face of the moon, affording him only the light from a few stars to see by.

  He kept on the track that led from the gate to where he’d built the log cabin overlooking Sundown Valley. He’d sweated chopping down trees and hauling them to the site he’d chosen. One long week of hard work had gone into raising his cabin. Tall stalks of crabgrass weeds were littering the track. He found the bleached skeleton of a horse with foxtail growing between its bones. Growing anger at Caleb’s apparent failure to upkeep the fence turned into concern for his brother’s well-being as he rode further into the darkness. Caleb’s health had never been the best. Maybe he hadn’t become drink-sozzled. A decade ago he’d nearly succumbed to a frontier fever. If Caleb had become ill, Susan would never have been able to take care of a horse ranch.

  In fact, Luke saw no horses.

  He passed the first of their breaking-in corrals. It was empty, more crabgrass forming a tangled carpet over the dusty earth. This corral hadn’t been used for well over a year, maybe longer.

  Something was wrong, terribly wrong.

  Then a shaft of moonlight broke through the clouds and showed him heaps of blackened timber where once his cabin had stood.

  For a long moment he simply stared at the crumbled, burned remains of the home he’d built for himself and which Caleb and Susan would have lived in while he was away at the war. He saw slithers of glass, a broken window frame, and a potbelly still standing amidst the ruins. He glanced at where the stables had been built. He saw only charred logs. Luke felt mounting anger. The Bar LD horse ranch that was once a thriving spread had been completely destroyed. Maybe Caleb and Susan had abandoned the cabin and ranch and gone elsewhere. After all, it wasn’t exactly an easy life catching and breaking in mustangs and there may have been problems with her baby.

  If only his brother had written to him!

  But then, moments later, he saw the stones.

  They were a few paces from the cabin’s charred remains and Luke Dawson’s heart was heavy as lead as he dismounted and walked over to them. There were two smooth stones, each planted at the head of some raised earth.

  The simple words ‘CALEB DAWSON, WITH THE LORD’ had been carved crudely on the first one. ‘SUSAN DAWSON, HIS WIFE’ was the inscription on the second one.

  Luke stood like a statue, lean and gaunt, carved against the ghostly moon. It was one helluva homecoming, he told himself.

  First he’d learned Sierra was about to marry Zimmer, then he’d shared his Navajo friend’s personal disappointment that his people had apparently moved on, and now this shattering discovery of two family graves.

  Why hadn’t Uriah Kemp, the undertaker, said something to him in Spanish Wells? Or even Sierra? Surely she would have known. He would at least have been prepared for what awaited him on the Bar LD.

  Then again, maybe neither of them knew.

  Maybe Caleb and Susan had both died of cholera or a fever and were quietly buried by neighbours. That often happened out here on the western frontier. He remembered hearing of outbreaks of black cholera close to here. But what if they’d had a child? There was no smaller stone, no other mound of earth. If a child had been born and likewise succumbed to a fever, maybe whoever buried Caleb and Susan had interred their child with them. Or maybe such a child was still alive, being cared for by neighbours.

  There was no way of knowing right now.

  He raised his eyes northwards. There was a forest on the other side of the Bar LD fence and he knew two families who lived there, both good neighbours. He could even see a tiny light blinking in the distant darkness. That light was coming from Wishbone Whitehead’s place. He needed to pay the old timer a visit. Hopefully he could provide some answers.

  Full of bitterness and grief, he remounted Buck and started a lonely ride back across his land. Once on the trail again, he found the track that threaded through the pines towards two cabins, one lived in by Wishbone and his daughter Annie, then deeper into the forest, a second one built by Isaiah and Rose Finlayson. Luke rode that track, forded a murmuring creek and startled a deer that fled into the undergrowth. Finally, he reached the verge of the clearing where Wishbone’s log cabin fronted a vegetable garden.

  Wishbone’s mangy old dog began barking a warning from inside the cabin as Luke headed his horse across the clearing. A single lamp flickered from behind the curtain of Wishbone’s parlour window. Even before Luke reached the hitching post by the water trough, the front door eased open to a thin slit and a rifle protruded.

  ‘Freeze, mister, freeze! I mean it, freeze!’ It was Annie’s voice, high-pitched, trembling, echoing in the night. ‘Yeah, stay right where you are, or I’ll blast you out of your saddle.’

  ‘Annie,’ Luke called to her, halting his horse. ‘Annie, it’s Luke Dawson.’

  The door burst wide open and she stepped outside.

  ‘Well, I’ll be doggoned! It sure is!’ Annie exclaimed as she lowered her hunting rifle. Her face was glowing as she cried out excitedly, ‘Welcome home. Get down from that hoss and come inside, Mr Dawson.’

  Annie stood there grinning as Luke eased his tired frame from the bay. The old trapper’s daughter wore a deerskin blouse and pants, just like he remembered.

  He’d always regarded her as a bit of a tomboy and he’d never seen her in a dress. However, he had to concede, she sure filled out her deerskins to perfection. Now after four years, her hair was much longer, flowing like golden honey to the curve of her breasts. The day before he’d ridden off to war, he’d been invited here for a glass of Wishbone’s potent, home-brewed moonshine and he’d remarked then that Annie would surely be hitched by the time he came home. But right now a quick glance told him she wasn’t wearing a ring. He looped his horse’s reins around Wishbone’s tie-rail.

&n
bsp; ‘Is Wishbone awake?’

  ‘Pa will be playing cards with the widow-woman.’

  He blinked. ‘What widow-woman?’

  She replied, ‘Widow Rose.’

  ‘You’re saying Isaiah Finlayson died?’

  ‘He sure did,’ Annie said in a sad tone, ushering him inside. She walked over to the potbelly stove and checked the new coffee pot her father had bought her last Thanksgiving. She’d had it warming on the cooking plate for some time. ‘Shooting accident, so folks said, although Rose told us her husband had lived with guns since he was knee-high to a toad. Reckon it happened two years ago, about the same time as—’

  ‘As Caleb and Susan?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, Mr Dawson?’ Annie invited. ‘Please make yourself at home.’ When he’d straddled a chair at the table, she asked, ‘Could you use some coffee?’

  ‘I sure could,’ Luke said. ‘However, I’m here looking for answers.’

  ‘Which means you need to talk to my pa,’ Annie said hastily, pouring coffee into a large china cup. ‘I’ll make sure he leaves his card playing, or whatever else he and the widow are up to, and comes a-running.’

  She brought his coffee and a plate of home-baked cookies to the table, picked up her rifle and reopened the door. Taking two steps outside into the night, she aimed the rifle at the stars and squeezed the trigger. The explosion ripped the night silence apart and echoed over the forest.

  ‘That’ll fetch him,’ she said.

  Then she stood there waiting as Luke sipped his coffee.

  Caleb, Susan, the McPhersons and now Isaiah Finlayson had all died since he’d been away. Even now he was wondering about Harbinger, whose derelict cabin he’d passed soon after taking the Old Wolf Ridge trail.

  Annie obviously didn’t want to say much, preferring to leave it to her father. Luke remembered Wishbone well. After five years stint in jail at the age of eighteen for his part in a bank robbery in Texas, Wishbone latched onto a slim, lively woman who once worked as a saloon whore. Wishbone and Delia rode together to Utah to start a new life. Luke had always given Wishbone credit for this. Once here, on Old Wolf Ridge, Wishbone became a trapper and Delia gave birth to and brought up Annie in this cabin. Sadly, ten years ago when Annie was in her mid teens, Delia was bitten by a fat rattler sunning itself by a nearby creek. Father and daughter did their best to save her but Delia died right here in this cabin and was buried out the back, just past the horse stable.

  Luke heard the sound of heavy boots crunching clay.

  Moments later Wishbone, puffing and blowing, burst into the clearing.

  ‘Annie! Annie! Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine, Pa,’ she called out. ‘We have a visitor.’

  ‘Visitor! Who in tarnation—’

  ‘Mr Dawson’s back.’

  ‘By all that’s holy,’ Wishbone responded, still running.

  Panting, he brushed past his daughter and stumbled inside where Luke had almost finished Annie’s coffee. These last four years had not been kind to Wishbone. Unlike his daughter who’d most certainly blossomed, Wishbone had aged considerably since Luke had last set eyes on him. He looked ten years older than his sixty-two years. His hair was white, his beard even whiter and his face was already wrinkled.

  ‘Welcome home, soldier-boy,’ Wishbone greeted warmly. ‘So glad you’re back safe and sound.’

  The two men shook hands. Luke noticed that Wishbone’s right hand had its thumb missing and his grip wasn’t as firm as he once knew it to be. The old woodsman was still panting too, wheezing loudly. When he’d heard the gunshot, which he’d known would have come from their cabin, he’d thought the worst and belted out of the widow’s cabin to get here as soon as he could. He was relieved all was well but he knew immediately what would be on Luke Dawson’s mind.

  ‘Reckon you’ve been to your place.’

  ‘What happened to my kin, Wishbone?’

  Wishbone slumped into his chair. ‘Coffee for me too, Annie.’

  ‘Sure, Pa.’

  Luke waited but Wishbone said nothing more until he had a few quick sips of his daughter’s coffee.

  ‘We were away when it happened,’ Wishbone said, shaking his head. ‘There was a gold strike south of here, just over Pioneer River. Nuggets as big as a man’s fist, so the stories went. Because you were away fighting those Johnny Rebs, you wouldn’t have heard of it.’

  ‘I heard nothing.’

  ‘I pulled up stakes and Annie came along with me,’ Wishbone recalled. ‘We registered a claim, panned for gold in the river, same as hundreds of others, but all we found were a couple of real small gritty pieces we were paid seven lousy bucks for. After that, we rode home so I could take up trapping again.’ He added, ‘That’s when we saw them.’

  ‘We thought to pay our respects to Caleb and Susan so we went calling,’ Annie said miserably.

  ‘We found the charred remains of the cabin and two fresh graves,’ Wishbone told him in a grim tone. ‘It didn’t seem right to dig them up to check who they were, but when we rode to Spanish Wells to stock up supplies, our worst fears were confirmed. I paid a visit to the Lucky Deuce and heard the saloon talk. Apparently, your brother Caleb was hanged.’

  ‘Hanged!’ Luke echoed. ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘According to Blundell the bartender and others, Caleb was strung up for rustling some of Dallas Zimmer’s steers.’

  ‘My brother would never—’

  ‘I’m not saying I believe it, I’m just saying what was told to me,’ Wishbone said hastily. ‘Saloon talk said Caleb was seen cutting out half a dozen Triple Z steers and driving them to your Bar LD spread. Zimmer and a bunch of his men rode up to Old Wolf Ridge and found them. It was like Caleb was caught red-handed. They hanged him from that big arrowhead pine that’s right on the edge of your spread, overlooking Sundown Valley. I checked the rope marks on the lowest branch. He was hanged there sure enough.’

  ‘Hanged . . . without a trial?’

  ‘It was a necktie party, plain and simple.’

  ‘Bastards!’ Luke said hoarsely.

  ‘Yeah, bastards,’ Wishbone agreed.

  ‘Susan?’

  Wishbone was melancholy now. ‘Blundell told me he heard that while they were dragging her man from their cabin, Susan came at them with a rifle. At long last, after lots of trying, she was pregnant.’

  ‘Then one of them shot her dead, Mr Dawson,’ Annie repeated what her father had told her. ‘Yes, he killed a woman about to give birth.’

  ‘It was Heck Halliday,’ Wishbone recalled.

  ‘That goddamn deserter,’ Luke said slowly, brimming with fury.

  ‘Halliday must have killed Susan right before Caleb’s eyes,’ Wishbone said, shaking his head. ‘Then they executed him.’

  ‘They’ll pay, every last one of them,’ Luke vowed. His face was ashen, drained of blood as he thought about Caleb dancing rope with his heavily pregnant wife dead on the ground.

  Wishbone shrugged. ‘Blundell told me they shovelled clay over Caleb and Susan. When I rode over again, I used my hunting knife to carve their names on two pieces of rock. Figured it was the decent thing to do.’

  ‘I’m beholden to you, Wishbone,’ Luke said sincerely.

  ‘I . . . I just regret I was so far away when it happened,’ Wishbone said, downcast. ‘If I’d been around, I’d have stood up for Caleb.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Wishbone,’ Luke said quietly. ‘I was away too.’

  Luke had never been a man who harboured hate. Even during the bloodiest battles of the civil war he actually hadn’t hated the enemy. Sure, he’d despised a bunch of Southern soldiers for their brutal slaying of a couple of prisoners who’d attempted to escape, but he hadn’t actually hated them for their crime. But right now, having heard his brother Caleb was hanged and his wife shot down like a dog, he couldn’t help the hate smouldering inside him for the perpetrators.

  ‘What happened to the Navajos?’ Luke demanded.


  Wishbone drank more of his coffee. ‘All we know is that when we arrived back from Pioneer River, they weren’t here. Folks said they must have just abandoned their village and left.’

  ‘Maybe Lew Harbinger knows what happened,’ Luke said as Annie refilled his coffee mug.

  ‘Maybe he does, but he ain’t around to answer any questions,’ Wishbone Whitehead said. ‘You see, Lew’s in Glory Land, another one who died while we were away. His sister Venetta found him dead on his cabin floor when she came visiting. Must have been there for a while because he stank to high heaven. There was no way of telling how he died, Venetta said. She dug a grave out back, read a few verses from the Good Book and buried him. There’s a little wooden cross to mark the place. I must remember to carve his name on it when I’m passing next time.’

  Luke thought about the desolate, silent cabin he’d passed on his way up here. Harbinger’s place had been raised directly over the Indian village and the old man had often traded with them. There was talk he’d even considered taking an old Navajo widow squaw as his wife. Luke remembered her. She was an elderly but sprightly basket-weaver with greying hair.

  Old Wolf Ridge had become a rim of death.

  Harbinger, Caleb, Susan and Isaiah Finlayson, all dead, the Navajos moved on, all probably within days of each other. Too much of a coincidence, Luke told himself grimly. The dark, murky hand of suspicion shrouded every death on Old Wolf Ridge. And Luke Dawson vowed he wasn’t going to merely resume living as if nothing had happened. He had no home, no horses to break in, so he’d be poking around as soon as it was daylight.

  ‘Sorry you came back to this,’ Wishbone said despondently. He observed, ‘You look damn tired, Luke. Stay here tonight.’

  Luke thought about it. ‘That’s real neighbourly of you. I might just take up your offer.’

  Wishbone caught his daughter’s smile and noticed the speculative way Annie was glancing at the man who’d come home from the war. There was a certain look in her eyes, one he hadn’t noticed before. It was the kind of look a woman gives a man she’s attracted to. Wishbone reminded himself that she’d led a sheltered life up here in the forest. Maybe too sheltered.