by Janet Dailey
The shock of the macabre sight drove out any lingering effects from both the fall and the hangover. With an alacrity that was laughable, Luke sprang from the skull, cursing a blue streak, his face almost as pale as the partially exposed skeleton protruding from the eroded bank.
Tobe gaped in astonishment. “Would you look at that?” he murmured and swung out of the saddle. Luke stared at the remains in shaky silence, waiting for his heart to stop pounding like some Sioux war drum. Emerging from the stand of cottonwoods, Saddlebags Smith shouted to them, “Whatcha lookin’ at?”
A glint of devilment flashed in Tobe’s eyes. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he yelled back.
Smiling wanly, Luke muttered, “You’re an ornery son of a buck, Tobe.”
The cowboy chuckled. But Saddlebags Smith wasn’t laughing. In a frenzy, he charged toward them, traveling as fast as his ancient body would carry him.
“It’s mine!” he screamed again and again, his false teeth clattering with the vehemence of his claim. “That gold’s mine! You can’t have it! It’s mine by rights!”
Still grinning broadly, Tobe glanced at Luke. “Shall we let him have it, or not?”
But Luke was beyond seeing the humor in stringing the old man along. Before he could call a halt to it, the sharp-eyed treasure hunter saw the skeleton’s bones and came to an abrupt stop. For a furious instant, dark eyes glowered at the two of them from beneath white tufting brows. As quickly as he’d left the shelter of the trees, Saddlebags scurried back to them.
Reaching down, Luke scooped up his hat and scraped the worst of the mud off of it before pushing it onto his head. The misty rain fell a little harder as he stepped closer to examine the skeleton, feeling more sober than he had in years.
“I wonder who it is,” he wondered idly.
“An Indian probably,” Tobe guessed indifferently.
Luke doubted that. “Most of them didn’t bury their dead in the ground.” Another chunk of soil crumbled loose, exposing a bony hand and a glint of metal. Crouching down, Luke brushed off some more, then straightened. “Indians didn’t wear class rings, either.”
“A class ring?” The cowboy frowned in surprise.
“That’s what it looks like to me.” Luke gestured at the gold ring, glistening now in the soft rain. He sighed, knowing he was in for a long and wet day. “Come on. Let’s get those cattle headed for the gate before they scatter all over the place.”
He headed down the slope to catch his idly grazing horse. Tobe glanced uncertainly at the skeleton. “What about him?”
“What about him?” Reins in hand, Luke walked the horse a few steps, watching for any sign of injury and seeing none.
“You aren’t going to just leave him here, are you?” While not clear what should be done next, Tobe was sure that wasn’t it.
“Why not?” Luke countered with a mocking smile and stepped a foot in the stirrup to swing into the saddle. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” Tobe declared in frustration. “There’s a dead body here.”
“Your powers of observation are astonishing, Tobe,” he mocked dryly.
“But . . . we have to do something. Call somebody,” Tobe insisted earnestly.
Taking pity on him, Luke nodded. “As soon as we get back to the ranch, I’ll call John Beauchamp and let him know about our very dead friend here. After that, it’s his business, not mine. Are you coming?” He stopped his horse next to Tobe. “Or are you going to stay here and hold services?”
“I’m coming.” Tobe climbed back on his horse and followed Luke up the slope after the cattle.
At the top, he threw one last glance over his shoulder. He saw a glimpse of pale bone against the darker soil; then his eye was caught by a furtive movement in the draw. It was Saddlebags Smith, hurrying to cross the open ground, a big sack bouncing on his back.
“Saddlebags is lightin’ out,” he said to Luke.
“He probably figures it’s going to get too crowded around here when the sheriff shows up.” But Luke didn’t bother to look back. Right now, he was more interested in a good long swig of one-hundred proof.
Chapter Two
A stock trailer loaded with saddled horses clattered behind the pickup as it bounced along the muddy track through the winter pasture. Luke sat hunched against the cab’s passenger door, carefully balancing the last cup of coffee from the thermos, his hat pitched forward, shadowing his eyes.
Tobe was behind the wheel. For once his mind wasn’t wandering all over the place, the way it usually did, daydreaming about all the things he was going to do and have someday.
Working on the Ten Bar was only part of his dream, though it was a big part of it. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t a better outfit in the whole state of Wyoming. Sure there were bigger ones, even richer ones, but none that were better.
On the Ten Bar, work was still done, more or less, the same way it had been done a hundred years ago. Come roundup time, no noisy helicopters swooped into canyons, beating the brush to chase out cattle; men on horseback did that. There were no calving sheds; the cows gave birth on the open range. On the Ten Bar, calves were still roped and dragged to branding fires, instead of being herded into squeeze chutes.
Even the hay for winter feed was cut, windrowed, and stacked using horse-drawn machinery. It took longer with horses, but, like Luke said, he didn’t have a bunch of money tied up in tractors, mowers, and mechanical balers—machinery that was both expensive to purchase and maintain, and tended to break down at inopportune moments.
At today’s prices, cattle ranching offered a marginal profit at best. It behooved a man, Luke said, to cut operational costs where he could. On the Ten Bar, just about everything was done the tried-and-true cowboy way.
And Tobe ate up every minute of it, determined he would have a ranch of his own someday and run it the same way. He was convinced beyond a doubt that he couldn’t have a better teacher than Luke McCallister.
Admittedly, the wages were skimpy even with room and board factored into them. And the vagaries of Wyoming weather made working conditions far from ideal most of the time—winter’s blizzards and freezing temperatures, spring’s rain and mud, summer’s heat and sudden thunderstorms, and autumn’s mix of all three.
In some ways, the life hadn’t turned out to be as romantic as he had pictured it. At times it was downright monotonous and never ending.
Tobe had said as much to Luke one time. Luke had just grinned and clamped a companionable hand on his back. “You’re right, Tobe,” he’d said. “Weeks like this one should have more Saturday nights in it.”
Not that Saturday nights were all that exciting, considering there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in Glory except for Ima Jane’s Rimrock Bar & Grill. In fact, life in this part of Wyoming tended to be pretty boring.
At least it had been until this morning when Luke had discovered that body. It had to be the most exciting thing that had happened in the area in a hundred years. A body. An honest-to-God body. Not the half-gnawed bones of some animal. A body.
Tobe stole another glance at Luke. It wasn’t like him to be this quiet. He decided it must have been the shock of finding himself eyeball to eye socket with that skull.
“It must have been kinda grisly looking,” Tobe blurted.
“What?” Luke’s side glance held only blankness.
“The skull,” he replied as his imagination took off on a new track. “Was there still”—he searched for the right word—“meat on it?”
“Nope.” Casual as could be, Luke lifted the thermos cup to his mouth.
“How long do you suppose it takes for flesh to rot off the bones once a corpse has been buried?” Tobe wondered thoughtfully.
“The experts at the state crime lab could probably tell you,” Luke ventured.
“More than likely,” Tobe agreed. “And if they know that, then they can probably give a rough idea of when he got put in the grou
nd, too.” He cocked his head to one side and frowned. “Who do you think it could be, Luke?”
“Some guy wearing a 1938 class ring.” Luke shrugged and took another quick sip of lukewarm coffee between jolts of the bouncing pickup.
“How do you know for sure it was a guy?” Tobe challenged that assumption, warming to the thought of solving a mystery.
“It seems a safe bet,” Luke replied. “The ring was man sized.”
“But a girl wears a guy’s class ring when she’s going steady with him.” But Tobe wasn’t sure girls did that way back in 1938. “How did he die?”
“I didn’t think to ask him,” Luke answered, grinning crookedly. “And as I recall, he wasn’t doing much talking.”
“Very funny,” Tobe muttered, unamused. “I meant—was there a bullet hole in the skull? Or had it been bashed in?” he questioned, wishing he’d taken a closer look at it. “You know, if he was murdered—”
“I think you’d better rein in that imagination of yours, Tobe,” Luke suggested dryly. “For all we know, the man could have died of natural causes.”
The thought was clearly deflating. Tobe frowned over it for a minute. “But if he did, then how did he get buried out there?”
Nodding, Luke released a puzzled sigh. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? To my knowledge, there was never anyone buried on the Ten Bar in the last eighty years or so.”
“See, that’s just it,” Tobe declared, warming again to his mystery. “It isn’t logical for him to be buried out in the middle of the Ten Bar unless”—he paused for effect—“some kind of foul play was involved. Otherwise he’d be buried in a cemetery like everybody else.”
The wipers slashed back and forth across the windshield, smearing the falling mist across the glass. Their rhythmic thwack-thwack temporarily filled the silence that followed Tobe’s remark.
On the other side of the rise lay the headquarters of the Ten Bar Ranch, tucked back in a fold of the rocky hills. A creek made a wide swing around it before wandering off across the valley. The steady drizzle threw a gray veil over the collection of corrals and buildings. Only the century-old barn stood out, the rain darkening its heavy timbers, giving it solidness and bulk.
No other structure vied with it for prominence. A double row of pine trees, planted years ago as a windbreak, marked the former location of the ranch house. Now they were silent sentinels, protecting the blackened rubble and charred ruins that remained.
Never once did Luke’s glance stray to the old house site. Home for him was now a single-wide trailer parked on the other side of it. In the falling rain, the nondescript beige of the trailer’s metal siding merged into the surrounding landscape.
The only spot of bright color in the scene came from the yellow school bus as it rolled away from the ranch yard, heading down the lane that would take it to the main road five miles distant. Luke’s glance paused on it.
“It looks like Dulcie’s home from school already,” he remarked idly. “I hadn’t realized it was so late.”
But he didn’t wonder where the time had gone. His thoughts were on the fast-approaching nighttime hours to be faced—and somehow filled. But he knew he’d fill them the same way he always had—with the help of a bottle. It was a fact that no longer troubled him, if it ever had.
Tobe, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less that his kid sister was home from school. It was something to be expected, therefore unimportant. The hour of the day, though; that raised other questions.
“Do you think Beauchamp will come out yet today to collect the body?” He had visions of the skeleton being disinterred as night fell, with lights strategically placed around the sight, blackness swirling around the edges of the scene.
“It’s hard to say,” Luke replied with indifference. “As long as the body’s been in the ground already, I don’t know what the rush would be to dig him up. It probably would be easiest just to wait until morning.”
“Yeah.” Tobe sighed his disappointment and slowed the truck as they approached the pasture gate.
When the pickup rolled to a stop, Luke climbed out of the cab and went to open the gate, taking the thermos cup of laced coffee with him. One-handed, he dragged the gate through the mud and waited for both pickups with trailers in tow to drive through, then drained the last fortifying swallow of the tepid liquid. As soon as the gate was closed and latched, Luke trotted to the waiting pickup and climbed back into the dry cab.
“Do you want me to drop you off at the trailer?” Tobe lifted his voice to make himself heard above the rumble of the pickup over the wood-planked bridge that spanned the creek.
Luke thought about the question for a full minute. “Might as well,” he agreed finally. The phone call had to be made. Postponing it accomplished nothing. “Let the boys know I’ve got their checks ready and waiting for them.”
“Will do.” Tobe stopped the pickup thirty feet from the trailer.
Head down, Luke crossed the sloppy ground to the metal steps, conscious of the smell of wood smoke the rain resurrected from the fire-charred rubble. He paused long enough to scrape the worst of the mud from his boots, then mounted the steps.
The aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies greeted him when he walked inside. Turning, he shrugged out of his slicker and hung it on a hook by the door.
“Aren’t the others coming?” The voice belonged to eight-year-old Dulcie West, a slender waif of a girl with long blond hair the pale color of moonlight.
“They’ll be along directly,” Luke told her, his mouth curving in an automatic smile.
“Fargo baked a batch of cookies for them,” she said, as if it were news.
“I noticed.” Rubbing his cold hands together, he headed toward the kitchen, the sound of his footsteps accompanied by the muted clink of his mud-caked spurs. “I hope he’s got hot coffee to go with them,” he murmured, though he knew at the Ten Bar there was always coffee in the pot.
“Did you fall down or something?” Dulcie stared pointedly at his wet and muddy clothes.
“I had to bail off when my horse took a tumble.” Luke continued into the kitchen, trailed by the big-eyed girl.
Over by the stove, Fargo Young took the last sheet of cookies from the oven and pushed the door closed with the stub of his left arm, the result of a car accident thirty years ago that had severed his arm below the elbow. But it wasn’t the loss of an arm that had turned him from cowboying to cooking and keeping house; crippling arthritis had forced him out of the saddle. On a good day, he could still ride and rope with the best of them. The good days were a rarity now.
Over the years Fargo Young had become something of a permanent fixture at the Ten Bar Ranch. Truthfully, Luke couldn’t remember a time when Fargo hadn’t been around. It had long been one of Fargo’s boasts that he had been there to pick Luke up when he’d been bucked off his first horse. For all Luke knew, that was true.
He had no idea how old the guy was. His sun-leathered face had more lines in it than a weather map. But the outdoors had a way of aging a man’s skin that had nothing to do with the accumulation of years. There was more gray than brown in the stubble of a beard that shadowed his cheeks. Fargo rarely bothered to shave but never let his whiskers grow long enough to qualify as a genuine beard.
When asked, Fargo always claimed to be fifty-something—the “something” always varied with his whim of the moment. The same held true for his place of birth. To one person, he would say he was from Texas, to another, Montana. Even if the state stayed the same, the town changed. It had gotten to the point where local folks had quit asking. Luke had stopped years ago, certain the man’s past was no big mystery. Fargo was simply the type who enjoyed spreading misinformation.
Fargo set the cookie sheet atop the range and ran a critical eye over Luke. “From the looks of you, you landed in a mud hole when you bailed off.”
Wryness brought a gleam to Luke’s eyes. “The bank was almost as wet as one.” He walked straig
ht to the coffeepot. “I’m soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone.”
“In that case, you’ll be needing some of this in your coffee.” Fargo retrieved a bottle of Wild Turkey from the cupboard and set it on the counter next to him.
“You got that right.” He twisted off the cap and poured a hefty shot of it into the coffee. After taking a hasty blowing sip of it, he crossed to the telephone, dragged out the slender directory, and flipped it open to the listing of emergency numbers.
“Who’re you calling?” Fargo arched a bushy eyebrow. After all the years he’d spent on the Ten Bar, he figured he had earned the right to be nosy.
“The sheriff.” Luke dialed the number.
“The sheriff? What for?” His curiosity piqued, Fargo motioned for the girl to take over the task of removing the cookies from the sheet.
Ignoring his questions, Luke spoke into the receiver’s mouthpiece. “This is Luke McCallister at the Ten Bar Ranch south of Glory. I’d like to speak to Beauchamp if he’s in.”
“Dang it, Luke—” Fargo began in cranky protest.
He held up a silencing hand as a familiar voice came on the line. “Hello, Luke. It’s been a while since I’ve heard from you. How have you been?”
“Fine. Just fine,” Luke lied with the ease of long practice. “I was calling to report that we came across some human remains while we were moving cattle today.”
Fargo’s mouth gaped at the announcement. “You found a body?!” he croaked in disbelief.
Big eyed, Dulcie swung away from the stove, a chocolate chip cookie flying off the spatula with the suddenness of her turn. “A body?” she breathed the words.
Similar questions came from the sheriff. Sticking to simple, hard facts, Luke explained about the accidental unearthing of the skeleton; the discovery of the class ring; and concluded with, “Once I saw the ring, I didn’t look any further. I figured you would want to check things out for yourself.”
“Besides the ring, there wasn’t any other identification?”
“Like I said, I didn’t look. I figured that was your job.”