He allowed himself one final look at the house. The moon overhead was peaking briefly through an opening in the clouds, allowing him a view of the structure. A large, rectangular house shaped like a cape. Pa had said this was a common design back east, but it was one Josh saw seldom in the west. The walls were made of pine logs, and a stone chimney stood tall.
He then swung into the saddle, and started Rabbit away at a quick walk. He left the ranch behind him.
The following morning, Aunt Ginny took her customary place at the table, with her back to the stove. This had become her chair for practical reasons, so she could jump up and tend to things on the stove as need arose. Bree sat at Ginny’s side. Dusty, freshly shaven and wearing a white shirt, and with his Colt Peacemaker holstered at his side, poured a cup of coffee and walked around the table to take the chair opposite Aunt Ginny
“I just noticed something,” Aunt Ginny said. “I haven’t seen Josh this morning. Would someone go upstairs and ask him if he is going to grace us with his presence for breakfast?”
“I’ll go,” Bree said, and hurried from the kitchen. Dusty and Aunt Ginny could hear her light footsteps as she scurried up the stairs.
“It’s not like him to sleep in,” Ginny said. “He’s usually the first to rise.”
“He might need a little more rest. He’s still banged up from that fall he took from the roof.” Dusty took a sip of coffee. “I think it’s going to be a while before life settles back to something close to normal around here.”
“It’s too bad you and Josh gave each other such bad first impressions. He can be headstrong, but when you get to know him, I think you’ll find your brother’s a good sort. And right now, we’re all going to have to be strong for each other, and there will be no place for dissension.”
Dusty didn’t want to admit he did not quite know what dissension meant. Patterson had taught him to read and write, but his education never went much past the basics. But he thought he got the general drift of what she was saying. “Yes’m. I’ll do my part.”
“You know, Dusty, the impression I get is that you generally do.”
Bree ran down the stairs, and into the kitchen, eyes wide. “Aunt Ginny! Dusty! Josh is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Aunt Ginny asked.
“He’s not in his room. His bed hasn’t been slept in. and his bedroll and saddle bags are gone.”
He glanced to Aunt Ginny. “I’ll go to the stable and see if his saddle is still here.”
Ginny and Bree followed him out the back door. Beyond them was the meadow where the herd of horses that made up the McCabe remuda lounged, some grazing contentedly, others running about. None of them gave any indication that, just a few nights earlier, the night had exploded in gunfire and death.
At the sight of Dusty and the McCabe women, Pa’s chocolate colored stallion reared up with his front hooves kicking at the wind, then he was down on all fours, pacing about, kicking at imaginary targets, letting everyone know he was king. What a magnificent animal, Dusty thought. Pa and Josh were the only two who could ride him, Dusty had been told.
But one horse was not there. Dusty said, “Rabbit’s gone.”
Aunt Ginny said, “Where could that boy have gone to?”
“I have an idea,” Dusty muttered to himself. Indeed he did. He had been having similar thoughts himself.
“What’s going on?” Bree asked. “He didn’t go after those raiders, did he?”
Dusty nodded. “I think he did.”
Aunt Ginny brought a hand to her mouth to stifle the alarm she felt. “He’ll be killed.”
“No he won’t,” Dusty said. “I’ll go after him.”
“But he has a head start,” Bree pointed out. “A good one. Maybe six or eight hours.”
“Doesn’t matter. His trail will be fresh, and easy to follow.”
“What if he catches up to the raiders before you catch up to him?”
“He won’t. I’ll catch up to him first. There are very few men who could leave a trail I couldn’t follow. Pa might be one of them, and Zack another. But Josh isn’t. I’ll catch up to him.”
“Dusty,” Aunt Ginny said. “You may know more about those sort of men than Josh does, but one of their bullets could kill you just as easily as him. Be careful. I want both of you to return safely.”
Dusty gave her a half smile, not knowing quite how to react to concern about his well-being. “I’d best saddle up.”
That night, Josh picketed his horse toward the edge of the circle of light cast by his small fire. A kettle rested in the coals, and inside was brewing some trail coffee. He had laid his saddle bags and bedroll near the fire, and from one saddle bag had produced a skillet and a can of beans, and a can opener. He had hoped to have roasted rabbit for supper, but had seen only two during his day of riding. He had fired at one with his revolver, and missed. When he saw the second one a few hours later, it was maybe five hundred feet away. He decided to go with the rifle as it would be more accurate at that distance, but when he reached for the it, the rabbit darted away.
Josh dumped the beans into the skillet. His horse had been grazing quietly, but then suddenly looked up toward the darkness beyond the glow of the fire. Josh had lived on the frontier long enough to know not to ignore a warning sign like that from a horse. Josh casually loosened the pistol in its holster, while continuing to work on his supper.
“Hello, the fire!” a man’s voice called from the darkness, in the accepted manner of approaching another’s campfire.
Josh recognized the voice. But what would he be going out here? Josh figured he had put eighteen miles between himself and the ranch today.
“Come on in,” Josh called back.
The man stepped forward and into the glow of the fire. It was indeed Dusty, clad once again in his buckskin shirt, with his hat hanging against his back from its chin strap, and his Peacemaker at his side. He was afoot, leading his horse. Dusty’s Spencer rifle was in a scabbard, tied to the saddle.
“That coffee smells good,” Dusty said with a smile. “Mind sharin’ some?”
“Do you mind telling me what the hell you’re doing here?”
Dusty shrugged. “Probably the same thing you are.”
And he turned his back to Josh and began stripping the gear from his horse.
Josh said, “What I’m doing here is none of your business. You might as well climb back into that saddle and ride back the way you come.”
Dusty dropped his saddle to the ground, then approached the fire, holding his hands out to its warmth. “It’s gonna be cold tonight. Summer’s sure taking its time getting to these mountains.”
Josh gave Dusty a sidelong glance, and put the skillet on the fire. He drew his bowie knife and began stirring the beans to keep them from burning or sticking to the bottom of the skillet.
“The coffee smells good,” Dusty said again.
“Yeah, I heard you the first time. It’s almost ready.”
Dusty pulled a tin cup from his saddle bags. “You’re wrong, you know.”
“It’s not almost ready?”
“No, I mean you’re wrong about it not being any of my business.”
“Look, Dusty, I appreciate the help you gave back at the ranch. Not only your gun, but your knowledge too. And maybe you are my brother – I don’t know – but..,”
Dusty cut him off. “It’s not every day you have someone ride up and claim to be your brother. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical, I guess. If you weren’t, it would mean you’re touched in the head.”
“Aunt Ginny’s not skeptical.”
“But Aunt Ginny’s not the one who I’m claiming is my father. And I’m not claiming to be her brother. She might be able to see the situation a little more clearly because she’s not as close to it.”
Josh let out a sigh, his shoulders sagging a little. “I have to admit, I didn’t want to believe you at first. Maybe I still don’t – I don’t know. A brother I never knew about, because Pa got
drunk in a saloon one night.”
“How do you think I feel?”
Josh looked from the skillet to Dusty. He had never considered that.
Dusty said, “I never thought I’d find either of my parents. But when I learned my mother was a saloon woman,” Dusty could never quite get himself to say saloon whore, not when talking about his mother, “I felt anger at my father even though I didn’t know who he was. Anger that he could just ride in, whelp a child, and ride on without ever looking back. But then, I found out he never knew about me. And after I got to know him a little, I’ve come to really believe he would have come back for me, had he known about me.”
“That’s the kind of man Pa is.”
They were silent for a few moments. Josh continued to stir the beans. Dusty thought the coffee smelled ready, and poured a cup.
“Y’know,” Josh said, “I never really knew my mother, either. She was killed when I was only four. Pa said she was a good woman, though. A good mother, and a good wife.”
“I can’t imagine Pa with any other kind of woman.”
“Pa has grieved over her loss every day since. I guess he’s never really gotten over it.”
“Josh, Aunt Ginny asked me to ride out after you. She wanted me to bring you back.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“She asked me to bring you back, but that’s not what I’m going to try to do. I’ve been having similar ideas about going after them raiders. This ain’t only your problem, Josh. It’s ours. I mean to ride with you.”
Josh supposed it wouldn’t hurt to have a second gun along. And Dusty had proven his loyalty. “All right. As long as you don’t get in the way.”
“Thanks. I’ll try not to,” Dusty said, with a little sarcasm and a half-grin. He took another sip of his coffee. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to tell you. Something that’s been eating at me since the day after that gunfight. Something about them raiders I haven’t told anyone yet.”
Josh’s brows knit out of curiosity. “Like what?”
“I recognized three of them that we buried. They used to ride with the Sam Patterson gang.”
Josh asked slowly, “Just how do you know any members of the Patterson gang?”
“It’s a long story.”
“We’ve got a lot of time.” The beans were starting to burn, but Josh no longer cared.
And so, Dusty told him the story of how Sam Patterson had taken a small boy from a farm house he and his men had attacked and set on fire. Patterson had intention to deliver him somewhere, anywhere, that a child could be cared for, but never found the opportune moment. Maybe out of circumstance, and maybe out of choice. Maybe the old raider had always wanted a normal life, a family, and knew Dusty was the closest he would ever come to any of that. Either way, he raised the orphan boy, teaching him how to survive, how to shoot. How to trail a man when there was no outwardly visible sign. How to make a fire that would not be seen from a distance. How to find water. And most importantly, Patterson taught him values he himself had not been able to adhere to.
And now, Dusty had found some of the men who had ridden on the McCabe Ranch were Patterson’s men.
“Why didn’t you mention any of this earlier?” Josh asked.
“I was trying to win the trust of the family. I didn’t think it would be possible if you all knew I had been raised by an outlaw.”
“And you don’t think the best place to begin earning trust is by telling the whole truth?”
“I guess I was wrong.”
Josh nodded. This might explain the nagging feeling he had that there was more to Dusty than was readily apparent. He returned to stirring the beans. “The word making the rounds was that Sam Patterson has disappeared, maybe been killed, and that his gang had broken up. Does this mean they’re back together?”
“I don’t know what it means,” Dusty said. “But I intend to find out.”
“If Patterson is still alive, and has reformed his gang, where do you stand?”
“I stand where I am, alongside my brother.”
“You claimed that man raised you. You don’t feel any loyalty to him?”
“He didn’t really raise me. I raised myself. He fed me when I was too young to hunt my own supper, and gave me the tools I need to survive in life, and to live a better life than he did. But I was always aware I had come to be with him because he killed the family I had been living with, and burned their home, and he could have given me to a family to be raised properly, but had chosen not to. I never really considered him my father. A friend, maybe, who I am grateful to because of all he taught me, but never quite a father. When it came time to ride away, I was able to do it without looking back.”
“So, even if you have known that was Patterson up in the ridges, you still would have stood by us?”
Dusty nodded. “I might have ridden out to them to try and talk him out of hitting the ranch, but if push came to shove, I would have stood by my family, just like I did.”
“If Patterson was riding with them, then that means he was one of the ones who escaped. He may have been one of the ones who shot Pa. If that’s true, then I aim to shoot him. Where do you stand on that?”
“The reason I was planning to ride after them is because I’ve got to know if Patterson was indeed with them. And if he was, I’ll be the one to take care of him.”
THIRTY-THREE
“They didn’t put much care in hiding their tracks,” Josh said as he and Dusty rode along the side of a lazily sloping ridge, ponderosa pines standing tall about them. “These tracks are almost a week old, but still so easy to read you could almost do it with your eyes closed.”
“They had no reason to believe anyone would follow them,” Dusty said, his stetson pulled low to shade his eyes from the sunlight slipping through the bows overhead. “When they rode away from the ranch, we didn’t make any immediate attempts to come after them, so they probably figured we were hurt too bad.”
“This trail has been going south since I first picked it up, and they’ve been keeping a steady pace. Almost like they’re heading to someplace in particular.”
Dusty nodded. “It seems that way, doesn’t it?”
The trail took Dusty and Josh to a small rocky ravine, probably a stream bed in the spring, Dusty figured, and then onto a second ridge. The trail continued down from the ridge and into a small valley of tall mountain grass, with scattered birch and aspen.
They reined up at the rim of the valley, and Josh said, “Beautiful, ain’t it?”
Dusty nodded.
“There’s places like this all through the mountains. I figure I’ll one day take over the ranch from Pa, when he’s older. But there are times I’ve thought I might want to find me a good woman someday, white or Injun, it doesn’t matter as long as she’s got a lot of sand, and build me a cabin in a place like this little valley, and raise young’uns. I would pick a place deep enough into the mountains so the white man will be a long time in bringing his rules and laws that can tie a man down.”
Dusty said, “You’d be a long haul from any town.”
“That’d be fine. You wouldn’t need many supplies, because you could live off the land. There’s deer, elk, moose and bear that could last you a lifetime. And fish in the streams. You could put in a small patch of corn.
“A good woman to stand by me, and raise a family with me. Sometimes I think if I got me that and a place like this, I’d never look back.”
“Y’know, Josh? I’m starting to suspect there’s more to you than meets the eye.”
Josh snorted with disgust at his own sudden burst of sentimentalism, and started his horse down a game trail that led into the valley.
They found the remains of a camp near a small spring. The leaves that had fallen from the aspens in previous years and now covered the earth in a layer of mulch had been cleared away, and in their place were the charred remains of a campfire.
“They don’t seem worried about being followed at all,” Josh s
aid.
Dusty shook his head. “It’s like I said. And yet, they’re not wandering aimlessly. They’re definitely riding somewhere in particular.”
They dismounted to rest the horses, and filled their canteens from the spring.
“You’d think,” Josh said, “that they would ride north for Canada. Get beyond the reach of the law, in case a territorial marshal went after them.”
“It was never Patterson’s way. When I was with him, he kept his activities mostly to Texas and New Mexico Territory, and kept a hide-out in the Rockies. Patterson found a small canyon, with only a narrow pass for an entrance, and with steep rock walls all round it, and he built a cabin. The canyon was easy enough to find if you knew where to look, but it was high up in the mountains, and you needed a mountain horse to get there. Patterson kept a remuda of mountain horses only, just for that reason.
“He and his men would sit back drinking whiskey and eating steak taken from rustled steers while the law ran itself ragged trying to find him. He even invited a photographer to the hideout once to take a picture of him and the men, he was so cock-sure the law would never find him. One time he found out a journalist had come west from New York City to do a write-up on the Patterson Gang, and Sam met him in Denver and escorted him blind-folded to the hide-out, so he and the men could be interviewed.
“More than one outlaw rode south into Mexico for safety, just like up in this territory they ride north to Canada, but Patterson told me that kind of safety is never a sure thing. A U.S. Marshal would have no jurisdiction in Mexico or Canada, but an imaginary line like a border would never stop a bounty hunter, and the Texas Rangers have crossed into Mexico illegally more than once to bring back outlaws.
“If Patterson is the leader of this group we’re chasing, then I’d bet the law eventually forced him out of his hide-out, and he’s come north to set up his operations here. I’d bet he’s found another canyon or a small valley somewhere in these mountains.”
The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1) Page 32