Gordon Jenkins shook it and shrugged. He’d been working for outfits around the Bench for as long as Talbot could remember. He was one of those men you always saw on horses among others just like him but didn’t think much about. They were professional cowboys living their lives on the open range, brush-popping steers from sunup to sunset, and spending the winters holed up in brothels and bunkhouses from Bismarck to Abilene.
“Pretty much the same, Mark. How ’bout you?”
“I’ve been better.”
“What happened to your lip?” Jacy asked.
Talbot probed the swelling with his tongue. “Had a little homecoming party in town last night.”
“This isn’t the same country you left, Mark,” Jacy said darkly. “Dave was killed five years ago. I’m so sorry.”
Talbot looked off and squinted. “I heard. Thought I’d ride out here and look for his grave.”
“Did you find it?”
Talbot shook his head.
“Get your horse and follow me.” Jacy turned and started walking around the pole barn for her horse.
Talbot was mounting up when he heard horses blowing and turned to see Gordon driving a spring wagon loaded with supplies.
“Came from town,” he explained, driving past.
Jacy rode her line-back dun through the coulee south of the ranch, following a cattle trail in the snow. They rode single file, Talbot following Jacy, Gordon bringing the wagon up behind Talbot.
The wind was still blowing, shepherding shadows across the snow, which shone in gray, wind-drifted patches here and there along the coulee. Small flocks of redpolls wheeled above the weed-tips. A coyote spooked from a frozen seep and disappeared up a crease in the ridge. The only sounds were the wind and the horses crunching snow.
It was a grim ride; no one said anything.
After ten minutes, the coulee fanned out on both sides, revealing a line of big cottonwoods standing along Crow Creek. The creek bottom was about a quarter mile wide, and dense with willows, chokecherry, hawthorn, and occasional box elders.
It was a haven for whitetails, Talbot remembered. But you had to beat the brush for them, and you had to get them before they dashed up the opposite ridge and were gone across the prairie.
“I remembered how you and Dave liked it down here,” Jacy said, as if reading his thoughts. “I couldn’t think of a more fitting place to bury him.”
Talbot kept his eyes focused on the corduroy ridge on the other side of the creek, not wanting to lower them, wanting to stay with his memories of old deer hunts and Dave whooping and hollering in the willows while Talbot sat in a declivity on the ridge, waiting for the hazed deer that would bound over the natural levee only a few yards away.
Finally Talbot dropped his eyes to the homemade cross beneath the cottonwoods. Its thin gray shadow angled over the rock-mounded grave beneath it.
Dave.
Talbot dismounted, handed his reins to Jacy, and studied the grave. Fallen leaves clung to the nooks and crannies between the rocks. Tracks of coyote and racoon made light impressions in the snowy grass. A weasel had been poking about.
Talbot studied the grave for a long time, remembering his big, blond, grinning brother who could toss a hundred-pound feed sack into the haymow like it was straw. Finally he looked up at Jacy, blinking away the film of tears from his eyes.
“You … you buried him here?”
“Dad and Gordon dug the grave. I thought it was fitting,” she said matter-of Factly.
He lowered his eyes again to the grave. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry. What a thing to come home to.”
Talbot gave a dry laugh. “I figured maybe Dave had got married, had him a youngun or two, maybe built one of those nice big clapboard houses. I sure never expected this.”
“It was a horrible thing, what happened here,” Jacy said thinly. “Frank Thompson, Paul Goodnough—hanged on their own ranges. There were five cabins burned, and Hutt Mills was taken naked from his lean-to and forced to walk back through knee-deep snow. He lost both his feet and nearly all his fingers to frostbite.”
“Any idea who shot Dave?”
Jacy looked at Gordon, who sat the wagon seat, elbows on knees, sucking a tooth to distraction, his eyes wide and distant. A scuttling breeze toyed with the brim of his sombrero.
Jacy said, “Gordon said he saw Randall Magnusson and another man crossing our range one morning a few days before he and Dad found Dave’s body. They were heading toward your place.”
Gordon moved his head slowly from side to side. “I sure wish I woulda looked into it at the time, but I was just so thrilled to see ‘em riding away from me, I didn’t give much thought to where they were goin’.”
The cowboy’s slow voice betrayed a high, Ozark twang. “That Magnusson kid—he was only about sixteen, seventeen at the time—is the ornriest little bastard I seen outside of Blackfeet country. A coward and a cold-blooded killer with more than a few screws loose to boot.”
“Did you tell the sheriff?”
“Sure I did.”
“And?”
“And Jed Gibbon just crawled all the deeper into his bottle. Wasn’t about to fool with the likes of the kid or the kid’s father, King Magnusson.”
Talbot sighed and bit his lip. “Christ.”
“Yep,” Jacy said, drawing out the word darkly.
Talbot mounted his horse, a thoughtful look wrinkling his brow. “King Magnusson,” he muttered. “I can’t imagine a killer like that raising a girl like his daughter.”
Jacy frowned. “You know Suzanne?”
“Met her on the train.”
Jacy and Gordon shared a sneer. “Was she comin’ from back east or out west?” Jacy asked snidely.
“West.”
“You never know with little Miss Queen of England. When she gets tired of the smell of cowshit, her daddy sends her to New York for a new wardrobe.”
“I take it you and her aren’t close,” Talbot said ironically.
“It’s not so much her I hate as her family—a bunch of highfalutin scalawags, getting rich off the land they steal from others.” She watched Talbot; his eyes were cast in thought. “You taken with her?”
His eyes rose to hers, his mind racing to reconcile the vivacious, cultivated young woman from the train with the family Jacy had just described.
Changing the subject, he said, “I heard your pa died.”
Jacy nodded matter-of-factly. “Had a heart attack in bed, but it was King Magnusson that killed him. All the worry about the ranch and what would happen to me if night riders came …” Her voice trailed off.
“Your ma?”
“She married Harold Offerdahl last spring. Harold took her off to Mandan to open a harness shop, and I was glad he did. This battlefield is no place for a nervous lady like Ma.” She smiled. “She writes me twice a month and sends me cookies and pies.”
“Maybe you should have gone with her.”
Jacy tilted her head. Her eyes were sharp. “Why’s that?”
Talbot shrugged. “Well, because you’re …”
“A girl?”
He shrugged again.
“Girl or no girl, I wasn’t about to let King Magnusson take everything my pa had worked so hard for,” Jacy snapped.
Talbot smiled, admiring the girl’s spine but thinking her foolhardy just the same.
“Well …” he said, and reined his horse around and started along the creek. Jacy caught up with him and rode parallel, several yards to his left. Gordon brought up the rear in the clattering wagon.
Several white-faced cattle appeared at the mouth of a draw, chewing cud in the gold sun, breath puffing around their heads. Snow and dirty ice clung to their coats.
“I’ve been wintering some older stock on your range,” Jacy explained. “I’ll get them out in the spring, and me and Gordon will help you get your cabin back in shape.”
“I’m not sure I’m gonna stay,” Talbot said, “but I appreciate the offer.”
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“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is your home.”
Talbot forced a chuckle. “That’s funny. It sure doesn’t feel like it.”
He was craning his neck around to watch Gordon, who had broken off the trail and now directed the shaggy draft horses toward the cattle. The old cowboy leaned out from his wagon perch, inspecting the brand on a Hereford within a loose pack of seven beeves.
“Hey, Jacy,” he called. “There’s a Double X brand over here.”
Jacy turned to look toward the cowboy and the milling cattle. “Good,” she said angrily. “Coyotes got the rest of that steer you butchered last week.”
“Whatever you say,” Gordon said, drawing his pistol.
To Jacy, Talbot said, “You’re gonna shoot that Double X stray?”
The young woman shrugged and pursed her lips. “You know what they say—nothin’ tastes better than the neighbor’s beef.”
Her sentence was punctuated by the flat report of Gordon’s Colt. The first was followed closely by a second. The herd bounded into an awkward run up the draw. The one Gordon had shot remained behind—lying on its side, its legs kicking spasmodically.
Talbot regarded Jacy with heat. “Isn’t that the sort of thing the Old Trouble was about?”
“Magnusson started it.”
“That’s no defense, Jacy.”
She jerked a sharp look at him. “Several of Magnusson’s cowboys rode through Jamison Gulch last week on their way to town, and drove four of my best steers over a butte. Gordon was out riding the line and saw it. Wasn’t much he could do and not get himself killed. That wasn’t the first time Magnusson killed my stock. I found three heifers shot last fall. He kills mine, I kill his. It’s the only defense I have.”
“Are the other small operators having the same trouble?”
“In spades.”
Talbot shook his head. “You’re gonna get yourself killed, pulling stunts like that.”
Jacy grunted. “I only wish they’d try pulling something on me like they did over at the Homer Rinski place last week. Then it’d be more than their cows dyin’!”
Talbot remembered what Gibbon had told him. “It was Rinski’s hired hand they shot?”
Nodding, Jacy added, “And whose daughter they savaged like animals. Mattie’s in a bad way, and her father doesn’t know what to do with her.”
“Does she know who they were?”
Jacy gave her head a shake and sighed. “Don’t know—she won’t talk about it. She tries to act like nothing happened, only she can’t settle down. She works like a butcher all day and can’t sleep at night. She’s not in a good way.”
Talbot paused, watching Gordon begin to dress out the dead steer. “My God, what’s become of this country?” he said weakly.
Jacy turned her sea-green eyes from Gordon to Talbot and brushed a stray lock of tawny hair from her cheek with a gloved hand.
“My place ain’t the cheeriest these days, but it’s good for a hot meal or two.” Her lips cracked a smile. “Her teats might be bigger than mine, and she may walk a little straighter, but I bet Miss Magnusson has nothing on me in that department. If you’re squeamish about stolen beef, I can boil you up a porcupine.”
Talbot’s face warmed at the girl’s salt. He had to laugh. “You know, I bet you’re right, Jacy Kincaid.”
“Is it a date?”
If I had any sense, Talbot thought, I’d take the sheriff’s advice and head east, keep riding until I was a safe distance from here. Maybe Minnesota or Iowa, possibly Wisconsin. This country, like so many other places from which he’d fled—the desert Southwest, Mexico during the gold boom—was a powder keg sitting only a few feet from a lit fuse.
But this was home.
“It’s a date,” he said with a slow nod, returning Jacy’s smile, then cutting his eyes down the coulee toward his brother’s grave.
CHAPTER 10
JOSÉ LUÍS DEL Toro quietly levered a shell into the breech of his rifle and waited for a rift in the wind. If there was such a thing up here. With snow on the ground, there was practically what the gringos called a whiteout every time the wind blew—which was nearly all the fucking time.
It was blowing now, and even though the sky was clear as crystal, each gust caused a whiteout. There was no snow falling, only blowing, and during a gust you could hardly see your fucking hand before your face. A ground blizzard. That’s another word the gunman hadn’t heard before coming north.
No wonder gringos were such a chilly race of people.
Del Toro’s rifle was a Sharps .50-caliber, factory engraved with a horseback rider shooting buffalo, and inlaid with gold. It had a silver finish and butt plate, and its smooth black walnut stock felt firm and familiar against the gunman’s cheek.
The Big Fifty fired a two-and-a-half-inch-long case loaded with ninety grains of black powder that could blow a dollar-sized hole in a man at six hundred yards. That kind of distance didn’t come into play here, however. If all went as planned, the first man on Magnusson’s list would pass within seventy-five feet below him, on the meandering cow path at the bottom of the draw.
If it hadn’t been for all the snowy brush covering the hillside on which Del Toro sat, rifle on his knees, it would have been a chip shot. But with the winter dead foliage limned with hoarfrost between him and the trail below, he’d need a steady hand not to clip a dump of frozen berries or a hawthorn twig, and nudge the slug wild.
The swirling snow wasn’t helping any, either. Visibility was only about thirty yards. About twenty yards beyond that now, the man was coming on a brown horse—just as he came every night from town, lit up with cheap liquor and singing like a stud lobo at the end of March.
Del Toro could hear the man’s voice, make out the words of the song he was singing—attempting to sing.
“Oh, Su-zanny, don’t you cry for me, I’ve gone from Ala-ba-my … with a banjo on my kneeeee.”
The voice was so high and ludicrous and off pitch and gringo cocky that it made Del Toro grate his teeth together. But his face remained expressionless, his jaw set in a hard line. He closed his left eye, stared through the sliding leaf sight, through the tunnel of motionless foliage.
It was about four-thirty, a still, cold night this far north in December. The sun had fallen into the prairie, but the sky remained blue. Amid the blowing snow, which swirled down the draw like some living thing, the brush was dark, a solid black shape against the opposite, boulder-strewn ridge.
Horse and rider were approaching now. When the wind died and the snow settled, Del Toro could see the horse and the dark shape of the man.
He lifted his head from the rifle stock, gave a high, short whistle, then returned his eye to the sight. The rider stopped suddenly, drawing back on the reins.
“Whoooa. What was that?” he said. His voice was thin and barely audible above the wind.
The horse had stopped, jerking its head against the bit pulled taut against its jaw.
The man opened his mouth, lifted his upper lip like a curious horse. He looked around, listening. “Who’s there?” he said after several seconds.
Del Toro was counting his heartbeats and staring through the sight at the vague shape in the snow. He waited for the present gust to break so he’d have a clear shot. The last thing he wanted was to wing the bastard and see him flee on his horse. That would be messy. Del Toro did not like messes.
The snow swirled like silk flags waving this way and that, catching and tearing on boulders and tree limbs. Gauzy forms assembled and scattered. The man waited, looking around. He did not have the animal’s keen nose, but he sensed the hunter’s presence just the same.
He was frozen there in his tracks, sensing death there on the hillside just a few yards away. “Who’s there?” he said again, quieter this time, voice thin with fear and suspicion.
A gust died for half a second; the snow thinned.
Del Toro cursed in Spanish. He should have t
aken the shot. It might have been the only one he’d have.
But just as the thought vanished, the wind settled again, and the man sat there clearly, both hands holding his reins, looking up the hill.
Del Toro squeezed off the shot just as the man turned up the trail and started to flick the reins. Fire spit from the end of the barrel and the report echoed like an immense drumbeat, circling before it died.
Del Toro lowered the smoking gun and stared down the hill, frowning. The wind and snow had closed in, thick as ever. He could see nothing but the irregular, free-forming shapes of the ground blizzard, but he heard the horse whinny loudly, heard the hooves stomping and the bridle chains jangling.
The man yelled out, cursed.
The horse pounded off. A pistol cracked once, twice, three times. Del Toro ducked low behind a tree and listened to the slugs thudding into the ground around him—the closest about ten feet away.
The reports echoed. When they died, Del Toro tipped his head to listen. Below rose the soft crunching of boots in the snow, nearly indiscernible above the wind.
The man was off his horse and was running away!
Cursing himself, the gunman stood, reloaded the single-shot rifle, and started down the hill. Gravity pushed him down the snowy slope at a breakneck pace. Sliding and stumbling, he broke the speed of his descent by grabbing branches and careening off boulders, holding the rifle out for balance.
Hurdling a deadfall, he came to the foot of the hill and stood in the horse’s tracks, looking around and catching his breath. His lungs were not used to air this cold. It was like breathing sand.
Sweeping his gaze along the ground, he saw the man’s horse had thrown him—there was a splash of blood in a broad, scuffed area where he’d fallen—then bolted up the trail. Boot prints showed the man running back the other way, in the direction from which he’d come.
Del Toro sighed, clutched his rifle in both hands, and followed the man’s tracks, walking. There was no reason to hurry. From the amount of spilled blood, the gunman knew the man wouldn’t get far without a horse. Also, the man could be lying in wait for him, pistol drawn. There was no reason to add injury to insult by getting bushwacked.
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