Honest, Falcon was used to that tone and didn’t mind it overly. “Then let’s pick up the pace.”
They were a long time reaching that section of the map. There was plenty of rough ground to ride through, but Cheyenne knew this one mountain rose up by itself, right on the boundary of the RHR and the Hawkins Ranch.
Slowing to a walk again, she said, “If Percy Ralston made some kind of land grab, he was slick about it. I’ve never heard him speak of land of his own. Not that I’ve spoken much to him in my life. But he lives and works on the Hawkins Ranch. A man who owns his own land would live there, wouldn’t he?”
“Unless he likes his job and intends to keep it until he’s ready to settle into a rockin’ chair. He could be providing for his old age,” Falcon suggested.
The mountain grew in front of them. It was a mountain that could be ridden up on a winding trail that went for a long ways, curving all the way around, snaking back and forth on the steeper stretches.
But that’s about all it amounted to. A nice trail to ride for a day’s outing. Grandpa had liked such things, but Cheyenne, well, she’d kept busy at the ranch.
“I’m not sure what we’re looking for,” Cheyenne said as they wound up the mountain. “All of this is ours. I’m sure I have the deeds to prove it, but where to search now? And if the Sidewinder stole them, where would he have taken them?”
Cheyenne skirted along a trail that went crossways of the mountain for a stretch. She saw signs that it’d been ridden from time to time, but that didn’t prove much.
“Hold up,” Falcon called.
She reined in her mount and twisted in the saddle to watch Falcon study the ground along a stack of boulders. Not huge ones, but good-sized. In fact, she realized they were all too much the same size.
Swinging down, Falcon landed with the grace of a big cat. She couldn’t help but admire the way he moved.
She’d never even met him before he’d lost his memory. Wyatt had barely spoken to him, either—he may not have spoken to him at all. Kevin and Win, as well as Molly and Andy, had exchanged a few words with him, but very few.
How could anyone judge his character?
“We tried to kill you in Independence, Missouri,” Tuttle had said before Cheyenne shot the gun out of his hand. “You’re a hard man to kill, Falcon Hunt. You not only got past us, you stole our horses, guns, money, and supplies and headed on west. You’re a thief.”
Falcon, with no memory, had said it sounded like justice. At the time, that had amused her.
Cheyenne alit as she watched Falcon study the stack of rocks, each about the size of his head.
Then he looked up the hill with sudden alert attention.
Cheyenne remembered how good he was with a trail and was sure he’d seen something.
She ground-hitched her well-trained horse and came to his side.
A whine drew her head up. “Look at that.”
Falcon was already looking, his hand on his pistol. A dog. A black, long-haired dog with a white streak angling down its face, giving it one black eye and one white.
“It’s hurt. Any wounded animal can be dangerous.” Falcon lifted his hand from his weapon and spent a few seconds moving rocks aside, then took his first step on a trail that had been very carefully covered.
Cheyenne thought of Percy Ralston. Pretty badly stove-up, and he had been for years, with one leg that barely worked, leaving him with a limp that made hard work impossible. And yet she could see that about ten boulders, maybe twenty—some might be fifty pounds—blocked this trail. Hard work lifting them aside. She’d just about swear the chore was impossible for a man with Percy’s struggles.
Had he been faking his injuries all these years? Of course, she’d rarely seen him. If he’d been around her, she might’ve noticed a phony limp.
The dog’s ears folded back. It bared its teeth but stayed lying on its belly. A low growl rumbled. The dog’s shoulder was soaked in blood.
“Let me go first.”
Falcon was closest, so it figured he was going first, but she still said, “Why? Do you have a way with animals?”
Falcon looked over his shoulder at her, glaring. “I don’t know.”
He turned to face the dog again. Cheyenne kept forgetting he had forgotten everything. Which was a strange thing to realize. Forgetting he’d forgotten.
But he was able to do most everything. Handle whatever came along. She had a hard time thinking of him as less than fully healthy.
Falcon moved forward slowly. He lowered himself into a crouch and spoke quietly to the dog in a voice that almost crooned. The dog was about twenty feet up the trail.
Cheyenne couldn’t make out what had made the wound. A wolf attack maybe?
Falcon reached another row of boulders. Rather than take time lifting them aside, as Cheyenne saw had been done many times before, he stepped over the rocks, then went on talking, inching forward. The growling stopped, and the dog went back to whining.
Falcon, making no sudden moves, reached into the fur pack he always had along and pulled a strip of jerky out. He extended his hand to offer the meat to the dog with a crooning voice.
The whining stopped. The dog leaned forward, drawn to Falcon and that gentle voice. Falcon closed in on it.
When the meat almost touched the dog’s muzzle, it lurched forward to a small extent, accented by a deeper whine of pain, then snatched the meat away and dropped to its belly, chewing and swallowing fast, as if it was starved. And Cheyenne suspected it was.
It was too badly hurt to use that leg without terrible pain. She’d seen that with the dog’s unsteady movements.
Falcon eased forward again, producing another stick of jerky. He broke this one into four pieces. In the gentle talk, Falcon said, “I’m afraid it’ll choke.”
Cheyenne realized he was talking to her. Maybe he’d been talking to her the whole time, and she’d assumed it was all for the dog.
When he was close enough to touch the dog, he didn’t. He set one of the small chunks of jerky on the ground so the dog could reach it without moving. The jerky went straight down its throat.
“What’s your name?” Falcon set another piece of meat down and inched forward again, keeping low.
Cheyenne saw those fangs bare, the ears lie flat on the dog’s head.
Another chunk of meat, gobbled down, then a fourth.
When the dog was swallowing the meat whole, Falcon reached out and rested one of his big, callused, competent hands gently on the dog’s head.
The dog whined, flattened itself even lower on the ground, then Falcon had his knife out with an almost silent swish of steel against leather.
Was he thinking the dog needed to be put out of its misery? Cheyenne had to fight the reflex to launch herself at Falcon and stop him. Before she could do it, Falcon’s hand slid toward the bleeding spot. His knife came forward, and with a single swipe, he cut something his hand was resting on.
Cheyenne saw a wire. Barbed wire. She hated the stuff. Her eyes followed the line of wire, and she saw more, rusted and twisted up with the rocks and dirt, barely visible.
The dog leapt to its feet. Only three of them. It stumbled backward. It had obviously been trapped, held down by that wire. It let out two loud barks that sounded like “thank you.” Then it turned tail and ran, limping up the trail.
“Did you see that?” Falcon rose to his feet and turned as Cheyenne did the same. She’d kept as low as he had.
“See what?”
“That dog is a nursing mother. I was angled enough to see when she jumped up. And she looks like she’s been pinned down here a long time, kept away from her pups.” Falcon turned and strode uphill. Calling over his shoulder, he said, “Let’s see where she’s going.”
Cheyenne hurried to keep up, following what she could now see was a clear trail.
The lines of small boulders crossing the trail had covered up that it was even a passable stretch. With the boulders gone, they could’ve ridden their horses up�
��if the barbed wire didn’t get them.
They walked it, and it took them right to the top of the mountain. When Falcon crested the mountainside, he gasped quietly. Cheyenne was two paces behind him and caught up when he froze in place.
She looked down at something she’d never seen nor suspected was here.
A mountain valley.
It looked to spread out for a few hundred acres. But that wasn’t why Falcon had gasped. At least she didn’t think so. It was the herd of cattle. Some black, some Hereford. But mostly black cows with white faces. Hundreds of them, grazing on lush grass.
“Where did they come from?” she asked.
“They have to be Ralston’s cattle, if he owns this land.”
A sharp bark drew Cheyenne’s attention to the dog. She limped with near frantic speed painfully across the side of this beautiful grassy bowl. She tumbled once, and Cheyenne took two steps, afraid the dog was going to fall to the bottom of the bowl, but the mama caught herself and dragged herself into a fissure in the rocks. Cheyenne wouldn’t have noticed it, nor recognized it as a cave, if she hadn’t seen the dog vanish into it.
She realized she could hear a faint mewling sound from inside the cave. Within seconds of the dog entering, the mewling stopped.
“Puppies finding a meal.” Cheyenne’s throat felt a little thick to think of that mama dog hurting herself in her fight to escape that barbed wire. Knowing her babies were hungry.
“How long do you think she was there?”
Falcon shook his head slowly. “Judging by that cut on her shoulder and that there was dried blood under the newer, deeper cut, I’d say she’s been trapped away from her babies for days.”
“I hope they all survived.”
“We’ll give them time to get their bellies full.”
“Ralston’s dog?”
Falcon shrugged. “More’n likely. For now, let’s talk about these cows.” Falcon turned to the herd. “What are the chances a hired man at the Hawkins Ranch owns this slice of property between the two ranches, has a herd of cows—some of ’em with a powerful look of your herd—and ain’t never mentioned it to nobody?”
“I suppose it’s possible Hawkins knows.”
“And Hawkins ain’t never talked about it? Seems the kinda thing that’d be known. Mostly folks know who owns land around them, don’t they?”
“They for sure do. But how would I ever wonder who owns this land when I know I own it?”
“Did your grandpa know about this valley?”
Cheyenne looked at the land. “I don’t think so. He’d’ve run cattle on it. And this is a big old mountain. Grandpa could have wandered awhile and never seen it.”
“I wonder how Ralston found it.”
“Happenstance, maybe. He saw a deer or elk go bounding up a trail no man would normally notice.”
“Then he worked mighty hard hauling rocks to hide the trail.”
A man who could barely walk, Cheyenne thought. “As for this land and herd coming to Ralston in some honorable way, the chances are somewhere between slim and none. Hawkins has Herefords, the red ones with the white faces. We have Angus, the all-black ones. And if you crossbreed the two kinds of cattle, you get cows that look just like these.”
“I wonder if he rustled your cattle at first, along with Hawkins’s. Then, once his herd got big enough to grow on its own, he quit adding from other herds. You said he’s been out here a long time, and Spellman said Ralston already owned this mountain when he came to the land office. Ralston could’ve been doing this for years. Letting his herd grow. Maybe even slipping a few head out to sell.”
“From what I can see, they’re mostly all branded with that stick with two loops: a P facing back, an R facing front, sharing a center stick. PR—Percival Ralston. I’ll bet it’s a registered brand. But not on the few Herefords and Angus.” Cheyenne gave a snort of disgust and pointed to a majestic black bull standing apart from the cattle and above the cave where the dog had gone. He stood sideways to them, his head swung around to keep an eye on the newcomers. He had an RHR branded on his hip and a second brand beside it. “Especially not on that one.”
Cheyenne’s voice took on a snap. “I recognize those two brands. One’s ours. The other is the brand of the man we bought the bull from. The bull had a real official name, Texas Midnight. He was a yearling calf when we brought him home, bred to be a prize bull. We lost him his first winter, years ago. He cost a lot of money, and he just up and vanished. We figured he fell afoul of that stream or maybe wolves, but wolves would’ve left a sign, and believe me, we hunted. Searched for that young bull, or at least his carcass, for a full growing season before we gave up and accepted he was gone.”
“Looks like you didn’t hunt hard enough.”
“No, we didn’t, and that’s a fact. If we had, we’d’ve caught on to the rustling. It was after Grandpa died. Right after, because Grandpa bought Texas Midnight midsummer. Then Grandpa died that fall, and for a while, we weren’t doing a good job of tending the cattle out of grief.”
Cheyenne felt a spark of rage. “He used our grief to steal from us.”
“I’d say we’ve got some cattle to herd home,” Falcon said dryly. “One at least, but I say we take the whole herd.”
Cheyenne looked at him with a furrowed brow. “Isn’t that how you handled the men who attacked you in Independence?”
“That’s what that varmint Tuttle said.”
“And you said it sounded like justice.” Cheyenne slapped him on the arm. “I like the way you think. I expect the two of us would make a hash of driving them, especially because you probably don’t know what you’re doing. We’ll go home and fetch Wyatt and a few other hands and come back. I want it done before we talk to Ralston. If we’re making a mistake, Ralston’s gonna have to come over and explain how he came to have his name on a deed for land that’s mine.” Cheyenne had the thought flicker through her head again that the land wasn’t hers but the Hunt brothers’. But it was. In her heart it was. “And how he came to own a herd that looks like it’s mostly mine mixed with Hawkins’s, and why he neglects his dog.”
“Might be best to talk to him first, rustling being a hanging offense and all.”
“Horse thievin’ is a hanging offense, too, and you did that.”
“I can honestly say that I have no memory of doing any such thing.”
“Fair enough. We’ll leave them, though that bull is mine, and I can prove it.”
“We’ll prove it all—and soon. I’m mighty eager to hear how he explains all that.” Falcon stared awhile longer.
Cheyenne didn’t mind standing there gazing at her now fully grown, majestic bull. “Let’s go check on the dog.”
FOURTEEN
They went back for their horses and led them into the valley. The cattle seemed tame and uninterested in them. The bull only looking at them once in a while.
They hitched their horses and left ’em grazing, then walked to the little cave.
Mama was flat on her side with three skinny pups goin’ mad, eating like they’d been missing their mama for too long.
Mama didn’t like the company.
Falcon smiled at the poor critter. She’d had a hard few days.
He dropped to his knees to fit inside the small cave opening, and it wasn’t much bigger than just to fit a dog and her pups.
Falcon slid over to let Cheyenne in. When she got all the way in, she was a sight too close, but he couldn’t bring himself to object.
They sat shoulder to shoulder. Cheyenne crossed her legs at the ankles, and pulled her knees up nearly to her chin, then wrapped her arms around them.
Falcon copied her and rested his back against the cave wall, watching those babies fill their bellies.
Time passed. Crowded in like this, Falcon felt all the aches he’d been shuttin’ out of his thoughts. But they were healing. He’d be his own self soon.
Whoever that was.
The mama quit keeping an eagle eye on them and let he
r head drop to the ground as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Falcon leaned forward and rested a hand on the mama’s weary head. Her eyes blinked open. She watched but didn’t bite or run away. The puppies might not’ve let her loose. He caressed her and studied that nasty cut on her shoulder.
“She probably oughta have someone put some thread in that cut. Don’t know if she’d allow it.”
Cheyenne nodded, then rubbed the old girl on the forehead. The dog’s eyes closed again. She seemed to be getting used to her new cave mates.
The puppies fell asleep, one at a time. The mama had settled in and was snoring quietly. Worn out nearly beyond surviving by her terrible situation. Falcon saw no meanness in the dog. She might go for a throat to save a puppy, but he chanced it and slid a hand under the closest pup. They were all black with white markings, like their mama. This one had a straight blaze down the center of its face and four white paws.
It didn’t stir when he lifted it, nor did the mama. It worried him some. Just how exhausted were they? How close had they come to dying?
He pulled the puppy against his chest and cradled it there, then, thinking of Cheyenne, he handed it to her. She smiled at him. Her black eyes full of bright pleasure.
Once the baby was comfortable against her chest, nearly tucked under her chin, Falcon got another one. This one pure black except for one ear and the tip of its tail.
After a long spell, Cheyenne said quietly, “They usually have more puppies.” Cheyenne still sat shoulder to shoulder with him. Her only other choice was to get out, and she didn’t look like she had any plans for that.
“Let’s just sit here and be quiet until the babies wake up. They all need sleep and more to eat, I reckon. Mama included.”
A long time had passed when the one puppy still lying against its mama stirred and started suckling again. Figuring if that puppy had slept enough for hunger to again take charge, then these had, too, Falcon set his little white-eared pup down, and it flopped around and found food. Cheyenne added hers, and the mama woke up and licked her babies.
“How old do they look to you?” Falcon felt like he should be able to guess such a thing, maybe if his head was working right.
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