The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1)

by Brad Dennison

  She chuckled. “Whoever told you that?”

  “Zack. One time with the Rangers, a long time ago.”

  “I’ll have to speak to him about that. You have to be one of the most intelligent men I have ever met.”

  “No, don’t say anything to him. He didn’t mean anything bad. He was just commenting, that’s all.

  “You know, I’ve been in a lot of battles over the years, and I’ve seen some bravery. And I’ve seen some cowardice. And I don’t really think there’s much difference. Just extreme reactions to extreme situations. On one hand you have men who can just seem to rise up and do what has to be done, regardless of the danger or their own fear, to make sure as many of the men with them as possible can return home alive. And on the other hand you have men who are just paralyzed by fear. Most men, though, fall somewhere in between. I guess, for some reason, I’ve always seemed to fall into the first category. Like that time I shot those five Comanches - I didn’t even think about the danger. I just pulled my pistol and began shooting, like those Comanches were just tin cans setting on a fence rail and it was target practice.”

  “You know,” Aunt Ginny said, “being able to look yourself in the face and see yourself objectively takes strength in itself. Especially when so much is made of your exploits, when you’re talked about in saloons and around campfires. It would be so easy to form a larger-than-life image of yourself.”

  Pa said nothing. Josh imagined he was taking another draw on his pipe and staring into the fire.

  Finally, Pa said, “I don’t know. All I hope for is a summer without trouble. Then an uneventful fall round-up. Then, an easy winter. And then, in the spring, I’ll be leaving Josh in charge, and riding to California. He’s a man, now, and can handle things. I’ll probably be back by first snow.”

  “You’re going to visit Lura’s grave?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got to go.”

  There was then a long silence. Josh would normally have felt proud, very proud, to hear his father refer to him as a man, and saying he trusted him to run the ranch for an entire summer. But something about that silence, and a feeling in the air, made him uncomfortable. He was waiting for something more to be said, and he found he was holding his breath.

  Finally, Aunt Ginny asked, “Will you really be coming back?”

  Pa said quietly, “I don’t know.”

  SIXTEEN

  Johnny finally rose to his feet, held his pipe over the dying fire and tapped the mouth of the bowl with the flat of his free hand to empty the ashes, then returned the pipe to the glass ash tray on the arm of his chair. “Well, I guess I’ll be turning in, Ginny.”

  “I think I might stay up a while longer, maybe have another cup of tea.”

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night. Oh, and John?”

  He had started for the stairs, but turned back to her.

  She said, “It’s good to have you home.”

  He nodded with a half smile. “Good night.”

  She listened to his footfalls on the stairs as he climbed them. Remarkably soft, his foot steps were. Even in hard soled riding boots, he seemed to glide along rather than simply walk.

  These were some of her favorite times, when she was the only one awake in the house. It seemed to somehow make the noises of the night come alive with more clarity. The ceiling creaked for a moment, the house settling. Even the rocking of her chair on the braided rug atop the wooden floor seemed more noticeable.

  The dying fire crackled a little, just to let Ginny know a bit of life still remained. A tiny blaze danced atop the remains of one log. Ginny sipped her tea, watching the remaining lick of flame flicker, grow smaller, then come back a bit, flicker one more time, and then disappear entirely. She finished her tea, and went to the kitchen. The pot was still hot, and she poured another cup.

  Rather than returning to her rocker, she walked the length of the parlor, and stepped out onto the porch. The air was refreshingly cooler now that night was upon the land and crickets chirped in the tall grass beyond the ranch yard. She heard an owl call in the distance.

  She cast one nervous glance to the ridges at the far end of the valley, hoping not to see the glow of a campfire, and did not. Maybe the riders were finally gone.

  She kept an old rocker on the porch, and it was this that she lowered herself into, not spilling a drop of tea. With the saucer in once hand she lifted the cup with the other and took a sip.

  This was not the usual blend of black tea that one expected to find in this country. Ginny bought her tea from a Chinese merchant in San Francisco. Green tea, it was called. Much more subtle in flavor, but it warmed you nicely from the inside out. Very meditative, the merchant had called it, and she found it was. Now that she no longer lived in San Francisco – the house she had inherited from her father had been closed up since Lura died – she had a friend purchase the tea and ship it to her. She kept a tin of black tea for guests, but when she was the only one indulging in a cup, she brewed green tea.

  It was late. She and Johnny had stayed up much longer than usual. On a working ranch, the men are usually up before daybreak to fit as much work into the day as possible, and she was up with them. This ranch had no cook, which was unusual, as much so as Johnny’s policy regarding the position of wrangler. Lura had originally done the cooking at the ranch in California as a cost-savings measure; it was a much smaller operation in those days. After her death, Ginny took over the cooking duties, and continued when Johnny moved them all here to the wilderness of Montana. So, when Johnny, Josh and the men were rising in the early morning, so was Ginny, cooking breakfast for them all.

  Tonight, however, Johnny had been too restless, too filled with missing Lura, to sleep. And Ginny was worried about him.

  She sat on the porch, her cup and saucer in hand replaying the conversation with him, listening to his words again in her head.

  It was indeed true that when a loved one dies, you never truly recover. Ginny had never known her mother, who had died delivering Ginny’s younger sister Sabrina, Lura’s mother, when Ginny was but three. Ginny had been raised primarily by a nanny as her father was at sea much of the time, but she loved her father dearly and treasured her time with him, and when he died, it was a loss she bore to this day. And she had come to love her nanny as a mother, and mourned her passing as well.

  Ginny believed death was not an end, but a transition, and so, she talked to the spirits of her father and her nanny sometimes, believing fully they could hear her. This was a practice she picked up, she supposed, from hanging about the docks when her father’s ship was anchored in the harbor, and listening to Chinese elders talking about their beliefs.

  Ginny also knew about loss from one other, though she talked of this to no one but her father and her nanny. Even her sister didn’t know about the one man who had been the love of Ginny’s life, but who had lost his life in a shipwreck.

  Most people thought of Ginny as an old, eccentric spinster, without ever realizing, she was sure, that she had once been a young girl so hopelessly in love she could scarcely think straight. And when she thought of her young man, his body never even recovered from the wreck, to this day she could feel tears welling. No, you never really recovered.

  There was one who didn’t think of her only as an eccentric spinster, and he was the man Lura had taken to be her husband. Somehow, John was able to see her more three-dimensionally. When she fixed him with the Gaze for the first time, which she often used on people only because she found it amusing (her quirky sense of humor, her father used to say), John simply shot it right back at her.

  And when Lura passed onward, so tragically young, and Ginny had told John she knew what he was going through, he didn’t ask about how. He simply accepted it.

  We each deal with loss in our own way. John would ride off into the mountains when the hurt became too unbearable, and scream to the heavens or whatever he did. Sometimes Ginny would lie in bed at night and think of her young man, seeing his face stil
l so vividly when she closed her eyes, still seeing his shining eyes and his broad smile. And sometimes, this old woman so many were afraid of, would cry herself to sleep.

  She took another sip of tea. Everyone had always been so afraid of her. Everyone except her father and her young man. And Lura and John.

  Johnny McCabe had stepped into Ginny’s life as a young cowboy who was too good with a gun, but who had backbone and a heart of gold. Ginny remembered the first time she had turned the Gaze on him. She had learned how to do this from her father, a man with a deeply lined face from all of his years at sea, and a heavy, bushy brow. He would drop that brow into a fearsome looking frown and fix his almost gunmetal gray eyes on you, and you would feel the resolve just drain out of you.

  Lura’s father was a doctor John had met Lura in a cowtown north of Stockton. Her father was the town doctor. John was working as a cowhand on a local ranch. He and Lura had fallen in love, much to the consternation of Sabrina and the good doctor. They had hoped to send Lura off to a finishing school, either in San Francisco or the doctor’s native Boston. A dusty cowboy who used “ain’t,” didn’t know the first thing about selecting wine, and wore his gun too low, was like a nightmare come true for Lura’s parents.

  When Lura found herself with child, Sabrina and her husband sent her east, to have the child with relatives of his, so as not to bring direct humiliation to them in front of their neighbors. Except, Lura hadn’t gone to Boston, as instructed. At sixteen, she was willful, and decided if she was old enough to have a baby, she was old enough to make her own decisions. She headed instead to San Francisco, and her Aunt Ginny. Ginny’s father was by then passed on, and Ginny still resided in the Brackston house.

  John had been spending a month with the line riders when Lura discovered her pregnancy, and her parents sent her away. So, Lura waited for him at Aunt Ginny’s, yet he never came for her. Lura swelled with pregnancy as she waited. One month rolled on into another, and eventually little Joshua was born.

  It turned Lura’s mother had written a note to John, copying Lura’s handwriting as best she could, stating Lura no longer wished to see him, and she was going away and did not wish him to follow. The forged handwriting was good enough to fool the young boy. Johnny was heart sick, and went on a drinking spree, something he was known for in his youth, and it was a bad one. As Zack had said once, when Johnny goes on a bender, he really goes on a bender. It was on this bender that the boy called Dusty was apparently conceived.

  Once John discovered alcohol can never truly remove your pain, he sobered up and he and Zack simply started riding. John wanted to get as far from that little cowtown in California as he could. Their ride brought them to this valley, where they wintered with the Shoshones. Then in the spring, he decided he wanted to find Lura and confront her about the letter. But he had no idea where she would have gone.

  Zack said, “You know her, Johnny. Where would she have gone?”

  Johnny thought about it, and said Lura had talked about an aunt in San Francisco who was more like a mother to her than her own mother. So, they saddled up and began the long ride from Montana Territory to San Francisco.

  What Johnny found was Lura, with their child in her arms. When each told their respective side of the story, all was forgiven and the lovers were once again united.

  Ginny decided to measure the backbone of this boy right off, and said to him, “Well, it took long enough for you to come looking for her, didn’t it?” And she aimed the Gaze at him, shooting with both barrels.

  And he fired it right back at her. Never flinching. Never looking away. It was then that Ginny was convinced Lura had found herself a good man.

  Lura wanted to be married aboard ship, as her grandfather had been a sea captain and by then owned a small fleet of merchant vessels. Even though the old man had passed away long ago, the business was still in operation, with Ginny as the primary owner, so she had the small wedding party of Lura, John, Zack Johnson, John’s brother Josiah, and herself rowed out to one of the ships. The captain, who had gotten his start working for Ginny’s father as a deck hand, performed the ceremony.

  The romance between John and Lura had been the stuff of storybooks. When they were in a room together, the bond of love was so strong between them you could almost taste it in the air. And then she was gone, a bullet meant for John but cutting through her instead. John’s wayward past from Texas had caught up with him.

  Lura was buried in the Brackston family plot in San Francisco. Johnny had talked to Lura for years about the little valley in Montana, and he wanted to someday relocate there, but as Ginny had become the only family Lura now had other than John and the children – Lura was no longer in contact with her parents, and to this day they had never met their grandchildren – Lura was reluctant to leave. And John loved her too much to ask her to.

  After Lura’s death, John decided that the time was right to return to that little valley, so he brought the family to Montana. Along with him came Zack Johnson and a small number of cowhands, and they brought the herd with them. One long cattle drive. And Ginny boarded up the house in San Francisco and went along, to help with the children. She had not seen San Francisco since.

  John had seemed to feel drawn to this valley ever since his first winter here. He had often said if only he had listened to his heart and insisted they move here after they were first married, maybe that bounty hunter would not have been able to find them. Maybe Lura would still be alive.

  Ginny respected him too much to offer such platitudes as, “you don’t know that for certain,” or “you shouldn’t blame yourself,” or “no one can know the future.” Instead she remained silent.

  And so, she and John raised the children here. An agreement was made – the house would be hers to run, including the furnishing. She would be responsible for the education of the children. He would oversee the operation of the ranch. The battle lines were not quite as clearly defined as that, and sometimes there was some overlap, but seldom.

  There was no school in McCabe Gap at that time. In fact there was no town there at all until two years ago. So, Ginny served as teacher to the children. She taught Joshua, Jackson and Sabrina the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic. The so-called “three R’s.” Then she took them into higher learning. History. Literature. She had books sent from her house in San Francisco, and the children were educated in the classics. And they were taught etiquette. Joshua and Jackson, especially, had to know how to conduct themselves when in the presence of ladies and other gentlemen. In this time, girls generally didn’t attend college, but Ginny firmly intended the boys to go to a fine school. For Jackson, it was clear early on that he had a gift for science, and a strong sense of empathy. It was obvious medical school would be in his future. However, Ginny couldn’t see Joshua as a doctor – his temperament wouldn’t allow for good bedside manner. But maybe he would want to pursue law. The world would be open for him.

  And Joshua and Jackson dressed like young gentlemen. A white shirt, a tie, a jacket. When they were very young, they wore the knickers and long stockings fashionable among boys his age in the more civilized regions, then grew into long trousers.

  However, while Jackson seemed to embrace concept of education, drinking in knowledge like the proverbial sponge, Joshua’s heart was never in any of this. He didn’t yearn for college. He yearned for working with horses and cattle. For open range, and branding season and drives to market.

  He had been a reluctant student, preferring to day dream than to delve into the education she was trying to offer him. Poetry? He found it foppish. She tried to introduce him to Ivanhoe, one of the greatest adventures in literature, hoping to capture his restless heart and imagination. But he found it dull.

  One day when he was twelve, she had left him at his father’s desk with a volume of Hawthorne, which he was to do a book report on. She went to the kitchen to prepare dinner, and when she glanced into the room a half hour later to check on his progress, she found him gone.
He was out back, leaning against the fence, watching a stallion his father had caught frolic in the corral.

  She was about to reprimand him, when she had a sudden change of heart. Calmly, she said, “What is it about that horse that has you mesmerized so?”

  “Someday, I want to catch horses just like him. I want to break ‘em like Pa does, and I want to ride ‘em.”

  She was silent for a moment, observing the look in his eye, the intensity with which he watched the horse, and realized she had seen the same in look in his father.

  “Joshua, what do you want to do with your life? When you are grown?”

  “I want to be just like Pa,” he said without hesitation. “I want to ride like him. I want to know all there is about cattle and horses. I want to build a ranch like this. I want to work sun-up to sundown in the saddle, and when the day is done, to be able to look at my home and know I did a little more that day toward building it. I want to know any ache in my body from all that hard work counts for somethin’.”

  That night, after the children were in bed, Ginny sat with John by the fire, as they often did, and she told him of what the boy had said.

  “He does not belong at law school or some such place,” she said. “That was my dream for him, but it’s not his dream for himself. What he wants is to be riding alongside you. His future is not law school. This land is his future. And so, I’m turning the responsibility for his education over to you. Teach him, John. He needs to know how to survive if he is to stand as a man among those who make their home out here. And there is no better teacher.”

  John said, “I wanted so much more for him than fifteen hours a day of back-breaking work in a saddle. I wanted him to make something of himself.”

  “I wouldn’t say you have not made something of yourself. You’re a good father, and you were a good husband to Lura. Your hair is at least a foot too long ..,” she said this with a twinkle of fun in her eye, and he chuckled, “but you work hard to make a home for us out here. And you have to admit, though the work is hard, you like it. You find it fulfilling. There is no other work in the world for you.”