The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1)

by Brad Dennison

  Josh said, “I did, Pa. I guess I didn’t tell him good enough.”

  Dusty swung from the horse’s back, and stood to face Josh. “You may not want to accept me as family, and maybe it’s unfair of me to ask. But I’m your brother, like it or not, and nothing can change that. And here, defending this place, is where I belong. After this is over, I’ll ride on if you want, but not until then.”

  “How do we know you can be trusted?” Josh said. “How do we know you wouldn’t shoot us all in the back if the raiders attack?”

  “Because if I was scouting for the raiders, I wouldn’t have been here with Hunter and Fred, ready to defend the place before you got back. I would have ridden out to the raiders’ camp, told them the situation, and they would have struck that night.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because of how short handed we were that night. Raiders aren’t fools, and they’re not in this for the thrill of a contest. Their goal is to take as much as they can, with as little harm to themselves as possible.”

  Josh was silent. He stared at Dusty for a moment, then turned to the porch, and to Pa.

  Pa and Zack were both looking at Dusty silently. They both knew more about warfare and raiding than Josh would ever know. They had seen more men killed, some of them by their own hand, than they would ever be able to count. Josh saw it in their eyes sometimes, when they were sitting by a fire, sharing a glass of whiskey. There would be a mention of the old days, and their gazes would meet for an instant, and then they would be silent and there would be a sort of heaviness in the air, and the lines on Pa’s face would seem deeper than ever, and the dance in Zack’s eyes would fade. Josh saw it now, and felt that strange heaviness in the air, as Pa and Zack looked at Dusty. They were seeing him as if for the first time, seeing something in him that they understood. They were seeing a kindred spirit, Josh knew, and realizing he was no outlaw. Suddenly, Josh felt small and impossibly young.

  Pa nodded at Dusty with understanding, and said, “I was wrong, Dusty. I was short-sighted. Welcome back. We’ll be pleased to have you fight alongside us, if it comes to that.”

  Josh nodded, and turned back to his brother. “Pa speaks for me too.”

  And he pulled the Peacemaker from his belt and handed it to Dusty.

  Dusty gave his brother a small grin, and tucked the pistol into his holster. “Come on. Let’s see if Aunt Ginny can rustle us up some grub. It’s gonna be a long night.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  That evening, preparations began for the defense of the McCabe house, because Johnny was starting to feel this might be the night the raiders would strike. Dusty felt it, too.

  “How do you know?” Bree asked.

  “They came back for a reason,” Johnny said. “And now that they’re back, they’re not going to wait any longer than they need to. The longer they’re out there in the mountains, the longer we’ll have to prepare.”

  “Not only that,” Dusty said. “There’s a feeling in the air.”

  Josh nodded. Though he didn’t have the experience at this sort of thing Pa and Zack had, and apparently Dusty had too, and maybe he would never be able to fully wear the label of gunhawk himself, he had to agree. There was some sort of intangible feeling in the air. Almost an eerie sort of stillness. A sort of hush had fallen on the land.

  Johnny McCabe went to the porch, looking off toward the darkness of the valley floor before him. The sun had now fully set, but the moon had not yet risen, though he knew it would soon. And that would be when they could expect trouble. It would take a foolhardy rider to try to cross the valley floor in darkness this thick. A horse could trip over an uneven clump of grass and send its rider sprawling. The sky was heavily laden with stars, which cast off their own meager light, in which Johnny could make out a dark formless mass to his left, which he knew was the barn. But you wouldn’t want to ride a horse in this.

  He had positioned Zack and some men in a small stand of trees in a low spot, off beyond the corral. Occasionally spring run-off caused a small pond to form there, and a stand of alders stood at its rim. The night was cold, so he had told Zack to dig a fire pit and build a small fire for warmth, but to make certain the flames didn’t rise above the edge of the pit. Otherwise they would be visible from a distance.

  Johnny stepped down from the porch, his pipe smoldering in his right hand his pistols riding at his hips, He walked to the edge of the ranch yard, which by day gave you the best view of that stand of alders. He could catch an occasional draft of wood smoke as the breeze turned his way, but he could see no sign of fire. Good.

  He returned to the house, hearing the hinges squeak a bit as he did so, and found Aunt Ginny waiting for him on the porch. He climbed the steps to stand beside her in the cold.

  “It’s cold tonight,” she said. “I have a shawl wrapped about me, and I’m still cold.”

  In the darkness Johnny could barely make out her form. He had known it was her because of her height, and the scent of her perfume. A sort of lilac fragrance she had shipped in from ‘Frisco every spring, once the snows had receded and the stage routes were again passable.

  Johnny stood in his shirt and vest only. He wore no jacket. The cold was indeed penetrating his shirt, sending its biting fingers into his flesh, but he did not shiver. He forced himself to simply relax, and experience the cold of the evening as it reached out to him. He sometimes did this, even on a mid-winter day, stepping onto the porch with no coat for a few minutes, simply to better experience the power of nature. It somehow made him feel a little more connected to it.

  “Back where I grew up,” he said, “in Pennsylvania, the summer air is heavy with humidity, so on a day as warm as this was, sweat would be dripping from you after even the easiest of chores. And the heat would last into the night. You’d be more than comfortable in shirtsleeves only, and the humidity would give a dampness to the night that would even be felt on your bedsheets or pillow.”

  “I have never been east. Do you miss Pennsylvania? Your parents’ farm?”

  His shoulders rose in a shrug, though he knew she would not be able to see the motion in the darkness. “I do to an extent, I suppose. We had a good family, a lot of love in that little farm house. But at seventeen, my father had advised me to join either the Army or the Navy, and see some of the world before I made any decisions that might affect my future. He told me that he would have been more than satisfied for his four sons to settle nearby and farm, but we had to each do what was right for us. And such a decision couldn’t be made objectively when we I had ever seen of the world was our seven-hundred acre farm, and maybe a twenty-mile area beyond it.”

  “A wise man.”

  “Indeed he was. And since I was already a good horseman, and I had an uncle who was at one time a Texas Ranger and had given me my first set of pistols, and I had become fairly good with them, I decided to go west and join the Army. One thing led to another, and I wound up with the Texas Rangers. And I fell in love with this land. That little farm in Pennsylvania was where my roots are, but I knew this land was where my heart would always belong.

  “When I first saw the Rockies, it was like I had really come home for the first time. And that first winter I spent in this valley, even moreso. When Lura and I starting building our first ranch, I would stand outside the door at night, and I could almost feel these mountains calling to me.”

  Ginny actually already knew most of this story, but she was silent, letting Johnny tell it, as though he needed to say the words again. Besides, she never got tired of hearing it.

  His three brothers were, she knew, Matthew, Josiah and Nathan. Matthew was two years older than John, and had married and was ranching about a day’s ride south of Stockton. Ginny had met him, and found him to be surprisingly sophisticated for a Pennsylvania farm boy. He had an almost theatrical way of moving, and was well-versed in the classics. He read Shakespeare for relaxation. Unlike John, he managed his ranch from a desk, generally was more comfortable in a white shirt and tie,
and he knew his wines. A man of thought, and a good man, but not a man of action. Josiah was often called the silent one because he was a man of such few words. He was two years younger than John. He resembled John strongly, though his chestnut hair was devoid of the hint of amber John’s had had when he was younger, and he stood maybe an inch taller and had a slightly heavier frame. Josiah, who seemed to have an even stronger affinity for the wilderness than did John, and whose eyes had always seemed distant. A year after Lura’s death, after helping John and Zack Johnson bring the entire family and all of the livestock north to this valley, Josiah had simply announced it was time to move on, and rode out. John had said he always expected that day would come sooner or later, as Josiah was a wandering spirit. He was surprised Josiah had remained as long as he had. But what surprised him even more was Josiah had never been heard from again. A lot of things can happen to a man riding alone in this land. Many a man died alone in the mountains, or the desert. His bones might be happened upon in later years, but his identity would never be known. And there was Nathan, the youngest, who had joined the Navy in following his father’s advice, but was the only one of his four sons to return to Pennsylvania. Though he and John corresponded by mail, they had not seen each other in more than twenty years, and he was the one brother Ginny had never met.

  “I sometimes wonder,” Johnny said, “if I was right to bring you and the children here. I mean, with the riders up there in the ridges, and that party of renegade Sioux that attacked a few years ago. Life out here can be so cheap, sometimes. Some of the men are hard, so empty of compassion. They can cut a throat as easily as you might cut up a chicken for frying. I wonder if maybe I should have taken the children back to Pennsylvania, and made a living farming.”

  “I cannot even imagine you behind a plow. And God forbid,” she said with a chuckle, “you actually working afoot.”

  He smiled. Cowboy machismo made a man of the west shudder with revulsion at the thought of working afoot. Setting up fence poles, or digging potatoes out of the earth.

  “Not that I haven’t done that kind of work with my father and brothers,” he said. “And we have to lay fence here on the ranch once in a while. But maybe you’re right. Maybe such a life wouldn’t be right for me. But maybe it would have been safer for the children.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, “but consider this. Jackson is where he would have been, anyway. In school. And Joshua would never have been happy on a farm back east.” It felt unnatural to call him Josh, but she was trying to be a little less stuffy. “He would have wound up heading west and falling in love with the land much as you did, and could very well have found himself in a situation like this, anyway. But he would have been much less prepared for it. And think about Dusty. He would still have been conceived, but he would have had even less opportunity to find his father.”

  “What about Bree? My own daughter is in a life-and-death situation she wouldn’t have been in, had it not been for my decision to raise her here, and not back east.”

  “John, how did you father die?” She knew fully well the answer. He had been killed by a desperate man, who had robbed a store at gunpoint and was attempting to escape.

  Johnny and his brothers had been in the Pennsylvania forest cutting fire wood with their father, when the robber happened upon them by chance. He had just robbed a store in the nearby town, and in his desperation, fired a pistol into the elder McCabe’s chest. The robber fled while the life blood of Thomas McCabe drained onto the earth in front of his sons. And all of this had happened in the woods of Pennsylvania, not a mile from the McCabe farm house.

  “Point taken,” Johnny said.

  “Even if we all die here tonight, I would still have no regrets. It’s not the quantity of years, it’s the quality of them.”

  They stood in silence for a while. Johnny took another draw from his pipe, discovered it had gone out, as pipes do frequently, but decided not to strike a match out here in the open. The glow of the match might be visible from a distance.

  The breeze kicked up, and Ginny shuddered at its coldness, and pulled her shawl more tightly about here.

  “To revert back to a conversation of a few nights ago,” she said. “are you still thinking of riding to California in the spring?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You know, John, she isn’t actually there. Only her earthly remains are.”

  He nodded, though again knowing she could not see the motion in the darkness. “Ever since my first winter in this valley, with the Shoshones, I have believed the body dies away, but the spirit continues. Kind of similar in some ways to the teachings I got in my mother’s Methodist church, when I was growing up. Really, I guess all religions are pointing in the same direction. The words may be different, from one culture to another, but the goal is always the same.”

  “Heaven? Eternal reward?”

  “No. There is no reward. And no punishment either, for that matter. Except in our own hearts. It’s all about the spirit, Ginny. The old shaman I talked a lot with, the ‘medicine man’ I guess most white men would call him, said that heaven and hell begin here on earth, in a person’s heart, and continue onward even after the body dies. He said two men can be standing side-by-side, but one can be in hell and the other in heaven.”

  “For a supposedly ignorant people, their beliefs and philosophies run quite deeply.”

  “That night you and I talked, I was feeling the loss of Lura so strong. But now, as we stand here on the porch, I don’t really feel the loss much at all. I feel almost like she’s standing here beside us.”

  “Maybe she is.”

  “And I think maybe my place is here, not riding clear across the country just to visit a grave.”

  “Loss is like that. One day you feel it so profoundly it’s all you can do to even climb out of bed in the morning, and the next you don’t feel the loss at all, like the one you lost is not really gone. Like, as you said, the spirit continues, so there is no real loss, just a transition. A change. And life is forever changing.”

  “You’re speaking of the loss of your father?”

  “No. Well, him too. I don’t speak much of a young man who was in my life when I was about Josh’s age. And Dusty’s.”

  “Yes, that sailor. You’ve mentioned him.”

  “What I never have told you is that I was deeply in love with him. We were going to be married once he had saved enough money. But he was lost at sea on one of my father’s ships. I have never loved again. And there are times when I feel the loss so profoundly, even to this day,” her voice almost broke, and she paused, steadying herself, “and yet there are other times, when I, too, feel as though he is standing right here beside me.”

  “It isn’t fair, is it, to love so strongly, to want to build your whole life with someone, then to have that someone for only a short time, and have to go on the rest of your life alone?”

  “I don’t know, John. But I do know that I’m freezing to death out here. I’m going to go in and make a hot cup of tea, and put some coffee on for you men.” She gave his arm a squeeze, and stepped through the doorway.

  Johnny stood on the porch, not feeling alone. Feeling almost like Lura was beside him. Like he could reach out to touch her. Like he could almost smell her scent, a sort of peach-blossom cologne she used to wear. He realized he was half-consciously reaching out with one hand toward where he felt she might be standing.

  He smiled to himself. He didn’t know if her spirit was really there or not. But at least for the moment, he was having an easier time believing what the old Shoshone shaman had told him.

  The smell of coffee eventually lured Johnny to the kitchen, so Josh took his place on the front porch. The porch gave the best view of the valley floor, and the probable direction the raiders would be approaching from. The moon was now peeking over the horizon, and Josh knew within a short time, the meadow that stretched away across the valley would be alight with the sort of pale, eerie light the moon cast. And then,
they would begin expecting the raiders.

  There was one concern nagging at Josh. It was actually kind of obvious, and he did not know if Pa had overlooked it, or was just waiting to address it at a more opportune time. Yet, the concern continued to hammer at him – if Dusty didn’t create that lone set of tracks leading away from the ranch toward the mountains, then who did?

  As the tossed this over in his mind, he saw a long, angular frame ambling toward the porch in the moonlight. “Fred,” he said.

  “Hey, Josh. Is your Pa still awake?”

  “He’s inside having a cup of coffee. Why?”

  “Maybe it’s nothing. But..,”

  “At a time like this, the nothing should be overlooked. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Long. You know, that cowpoke you hired after you fired Reno and the boys?”

  “Yeah. What about him?”

  “Well, he’s missing. I know your Pa told us to grab sleep while we can, but to keep our rifles close. But I couldn’t seem to fall asleep, and I wanted to see if any of the boys were still awake to maybe play a round of cards. I found his bunk empty. I looked around, and I can’t find him anywhere.”

  Just maybe, Josh thought, he had found the answer to the question he was just thinking about. And boy did he feel like a fool.

  Josh decided to conduct a quick search himself for Long, and he thought it might be a good idea not to do this alone. Especially if Long was one of the raiders, then he might be good with a gun. Not that Josh was necessarily reluctant to face a gunman on his own, as he had done well against Whitey, but he did not want to take a chance on getting shot and causing Pa to have to face the raiders one man down. Josh didn’t want to bother Pa with this, as Pa had enough on his mind. And whether he wanted to admit it or not, one of the best gunhands he had ever seen was upstairs in the guest room, which overlooked the ranch yard.

  Josh needed to get Dusty’s attention without going into the house. He stepped down from the porch, and in the darkness, grasped along the earth in front of the hitching rail until he found a pebble large enough to travel, but small enough not to break a pane of glass, and let it fly toward the guest room window.