Something More (10 page)

Luke stepped out of the trailer in white-stockinged feet, his hair uncombed, his shirt unbuttoned and hanging loose over his jeans. He glowered at Tobe. “Will you lay off that—” He broke off the ill-tempered growl when he saw Angie climbing out of the passenger side.

“There's no need to get upset with Tobe,” Angie said, her voice all warm and breezy. “He was only trying to warn you that he was bringing company.”

Dulcie could have told her that Luke wasn't upset. Not really. It was simply that his head always hurt in the mornings, and loud noises made it hurt worse. Luke had explained it all to her a long time ago. He'd said that he didn't want her to think he was mad if he happened to snap at her; it was only the pounding in his head that made him do it.

“I thought you weren't coming until one.” Luke's eyes narrowed on her, a vague confusion clouding them, thanks to the dullness in his head.

“It was my idea,” Tobe spoke up, as he swung down from the pickup. “As rough as that lane is, I was afraid she might damage her camper, so I suggested she ride with me.”

She cocked her head to one side, a suggestion of amusement around the corners of her mouth. “Do you have a problem with my being early?”

He looked at her for a long second. She stood at the base of the steps, her hands casually perched on her hips, the bill of her baseball cap flipped up, and her long hair pulled through the hole at the back of it to hang in fiery dark waves. All sunny and fresh faced, she looked exactly what she claimed to be—a farm girl.

It was an easy step to imagine her sprawled on a bed of hay all kissable and willing. Too easy.

“No, it's no problem,” he lied. “Fargo's about to put dinner on the table. You're welcome to join us. Knowing the way he cooks, there's always enough food for two or three more people.”

“I'll pass on the dinner, thanks. I'm still full from the huge breakfast Ima Jane fed me.” Her glance paused on the cup in his hand. “But I'll drink some coffee if you have it.”

“We always have a full pot at the Ten Bar.” He pushed the screen door open wider, inviting her inside.

“Something told me you would.” She came trotting up the steps.

When he shifted to the side to let her precede him into the trailer, Luke caught the sparkle of amusement in her eyes. The sight of it aroused his suspicions and prompted him to ask, “What do you mean by that?”

There was something teasing in the sidelong look she gave him. “You look like you still need a couple more cups.”

“Why?” He frowned, then realized how grouchy he sounded.

“Your eyes.” She discreetly pointed to them with the tip of a finger. “They're still a little bloodshot, a sure sign you're still struggling with a hangover.”

He stiffened, but the expected denial didn't come. Instead, his mouth stretched in a faintly sheepish grin that was potently attractive. “Guilty as charged, ma'am,” he admitted, with a little mock bow.

His response made her laugh and broke the tension that had so briefly begun to flutter in her stomach. She continued past him, sweeping into the mobile home. The trailer's layout was typical, with the living room opening directly into a large kitchen and dining area. Standing by the table, a one-armed Fargo glanced around when she approached.

“Saw you comin',” he said. “I already got a place set for you at the table.”

“You can put it away again,” Luke spoke from behind her. “The lady only wants coffee.”

“Might have known I went to all that trouble for nothin',” he grumbled and scooped up the silverware, dumped it on the plate, and carried them back to the kitchen counter.

“Have a seat.” Luke waved her toward a chair.

Angie smiled her thanks, noticing that somewhere between the front door and the kitchen he had managed to tuck his shirt in and button three of the buttons. He was working on a fourth.

“How do you take your coffee?” Fargo asked as he poured some in a cup.

“With sugar,” Luke answered for her, then smiled at her slightly startled glance. “I wasn't
that
drunk last night.”

“It was early, though, wasn't it?” she jested in fun. But it both pleased and unsettled her that Luke had remembered the way she liked her coffee. Most people didn't notice such details about others.

“The sugar bowl's on the table. Help yourself.” Fargo placed the cup in front of her, then sat down in his usual chair, the one closest to the kitchen. He shot an impatient glance at Tobe and Dulcie. “The food's gettin' cold. You'd better hurry up.”

The pair took their seats, leaving the chair at the head of the table for Luke. By the time he sat down, he had his shirt buttoned and his hair showed the tracks of a quick finger combing that had smoothed much of its previous sleep-tousled look. Tobe nodded to Dulcie. “It's your turn to give the blessing,” he said matter-of-factly.

She darted a self-conscious glance at Angie, then bowed her head and clasped her hands in a prayerful pose. “Dear Lord, bless this food and those who eat it. Amen.” Her voice was small and anxious.

“Now, that's what I like,” Fargo announced, smiling across the table in approval. “A grace that's quick and to the point.”

The tiniest glow of gratitude lit Dulcie's eyes. Luke killed it with a cynically dry, “If we've got that over with, how about passing the roast beef down here?”

Angie had a good mind to hit him. Instead she tried to undo the damage his thoughtlessness had done. “Fargo was right, Dulcie. That was very well done. Simple prayers are often the best kind.”

Mollified a bit by Angie's warm praise, Dulcie managed a faint smile. Then the business of passing food dishes and filling plates occupied her attention, and that of everyone seated at the table except Angie.

For a time, the conversation was centered around it, with requests for butter, salt and pepper, or gravy. Once they actually settled to the task of eating, the talk quickly turned to the subject of the lost outlaw gold, with Tobe volunteering the information that Angie had brought with her a copy of the letter Ike Wilson had written. Fargo was quick with his questions about it, asking many of the same ones that Tobe had. Tobe supplied most of the answers, repeating what Angie had told him. Luke listened, but he didn't show much interest in the discussion except for an occasional wry smile.

It was Tobe who finally dragged him into the conversation. “If you saw that letter, Luke, don't you think you'd recognize if it had clues to the hiding place?”

“Why ask
him?
” Fargo took umbrage with that. “I was on the Ten Bar long before he was even a gleam in his father's eye.”

“I know that, but—” Tobe looked to Luke for help.

It came, but not in the form he expected. “Letters. Clues,” Luke mocked in sardonic humor. “You both talk as if the gold's still there.”

Startled, Tobe lowered his forkful of green beans. “It has to be.”

“Why?” Luke fired the question, amusement glinting in his eyes.

“Because . . .” Suddenly uncertain, Tobe glanced first at Angie, then at Fargo before finally turning a worried look on Luke. “Nobody's found it.”

“And how do you know that?” Luke countered.

This time Angie spoke up, confident and calm. “I think it's safe to say that if it had been found, we would have heard about it long before now.”

He made a sound in his throat, one coated with suppressed laughter. “You're assuming an honest person found it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked even as her mind raced to consider this new possibility.

“There's only one way the discovery of the gold would have become common knowledge: the person who found it also turned it in to collect the reward.”

“And only an honest person would do that,” she said, following his logic.

“Why settle for just the reward when you could keep the whole thing with no one the wiser?” Luke reasoned. “And if you kept it, you certainly wouldn't broadcast the fact that you'd found it. More likely, you'd take off and live the high life somewhere far from here.”

“And you think that's what happened,” Tobe concluded glumly.

Luke nodded. “Probably within months or even days after the outlaws were caught. You can bet there were plenty of people scouring their back trail looking for it when the gold wasn't found with them.”

A heavy sigh spilled from Fargo. “I guess it would have been easy enough for someone skilled at readin' signs to backtrack them and find the spot where they buried it.”

“No,” Angie stated without hesitation. “There were heavy rains in the area when Ike was captured. It would have washed away their tracks.”

The certainty in her voice brought looks of surprise and doubt. “Was that in the letter?” Fargo frowned.

“No. One of the newspapers mentioned it in conjunction with an article about the damage done by the rains. A road or a bridge or something like that was washed out. I don't remember exactly now.”

Unimpressed, Luke stated, “Just the same, the gold was probably found years ago.” To back up his belief, he added, “Most experts will tell you that the majority of these so-called lost or buried treasures in the West were actually found within the same era. Only their legends lived on.”

A long silence followed his statement, one weighted with thought. Then Fargo conceded grimly, “You might be right, Luke. That gold might be long gone. But there's only one way we'll ever know for sure, and that's to find where it was hidden and see if it's still there.”

Angie sipped her coffee and said nothing. There really wasn't anything to say. Fargo had said it all.

L
uke pulled on his hat and followed Angie out the door into the bright sunlight. Catching the screen door, he eased it shut then turned to find Angie waiting for him.

“I meant to ask,” he said, “can you ride?”

“You mean . . . horses? Yes.” She cocked her head. “Why?”

He looked off to the west. “It's about two miles to the spot where your grandfather's remains were found. If we take the pickup, we can get close, but we'll have to walk the last hundred yards or so. Or, I can saddle up a couple horses and we can ride straight to it.”

“Let's ride then.” She didn't have to think about her decision. “I'd like to get the feel of this country from horseback.”

“That can be done.”

As they went down the steps with Angie in the lead, her glance was drawn to the fire-blackened ruins that she had seen when she first entered the ranch yard with Tobe. “Is that where the ranch house once stood?”

“Yep.” He never so much as glanced in the direction of the charred rubble.

Unconsciously she slowed her steps, knowing that fire often destroyed more than wood walls and furnishings. It consumed family mementos, irreplaceable photographs, and items of purely sentimental value.

“Were you able to save anything?” Angie wondered.

“By the time I arrived, it was in full flame.” He was ahead of her now, on a course to the barn and adjacent corral.

Tarrying a little, she noticed the tall weeds growing right up to the edges of the gray-black square where the house had stood. Their presence indicated the fire hadn't been a recent one.

“When was the fire? This past winter?” she guessed.

“Four years ago.”

“What?” Angie came to a complete stop. “If it's been that long, why haven't you cleaned the mess up?”

He swung back to face her. “I don't think that's any of your business.” He said it with an easy smile, but there was an underlying determination that made it clear he didn't intend to discuss his reasons with her.

She started to argue the point, then clamped her mouth shut and smiled ruefully. “Sorry. I didn't mean to meddle in your affairs. It just . . . came out.”

His wide shoulders lifted, indicating he took no offense. “It happens, especially if you spend much time around Ima Jane.”

“Maybe.” But Angie suspected her curiosity was a bit more personal. She came abreast of him and together they walked toward the massive barn. “All the same, Ima Jane seems like a good-hearted woman.”

“A good-hearted woman with a very long nose,” he added dryly.

She smiled in spite of herself. “I wouldn't say that.”

“You haven't known her as long as I have,” Luke countered, then gestured to her purse. “Were you planning on taking that along with you?”

Angie touched the shoulder strap as if suddenly realizing it was there. “I'm so used to carrying it, I guess I forgot I had it. Is there someplace I can stash it in the barn?”

“There's a cupboard in the tack room. You can leave it there,” he suggested.

“That will work fine.”

 

 

From the trailer's kitchen window, Fargo watched the pair making their way toward the barn, their faces turned in conversation, giving him a view of their profiles. One-handed, he held another plate under the water gushing from the sink faucet, rinsing it off before setting it aside to be loaded in the dishwasher.

The whole time he replayed in his mind the discussion at the dinner table regarding the hidden cache of stolen money and the outlaw's letter. Yet, no matter how many times he mulled over the long list of unknowns, he always came to the same conclusion: that letter was bound to hold answers for most of them.

“I sure would like to get my hands on that letter.” Fargo gave voice to the wish without realizing it.

“Me, too,” Tobe chimed in as he tore off a long strip of cellophane wrap and stretched it over the bowl of leftover potatoes. “Regardless of what she said about it maybe not meanin' anything, I still think there's something in that letter that will lead you right to the gold.” He cleared a section of shelf in the refrigerator and pushed the bowl onto it. “You think that way the same as me, don't you?”

“It's got to be that way.” Fargo stepped to one side, giving Dulcie room to empty the water glasses from the table into the sink. “Nothin' anybody could say will convince me that her granddad came all the way out here on a possible-maybe.”

“Yeah, but he didn't find it.” Bending, Tobe took a plastic storage container from a lower cupboard shelf and set it on the kitchen counter next to the serving bowl with a portion of green beans in it.

“How do we know that?” Fargo challenged, inwardly studying over it.

“How do we know?” Tobe's eyes widened in an incredulous stare. “The man's dead.”

“Yup, he's dead,” Fargo agreed, sliding the last dirty plate under the faucet. “But not of natural causes, I'd wager.”

“Are you saying he was killed?” Tobe forgot all about putting the beans away and walked blindly to the sink, bumping into Dulcie on her way back from the table with another pair of glasses.

“That's exactly what I'm sayin'.” Through the window, he saw Luke swinging a saddle onto the back of a flea-bitten gray gelding, a calm and quiet mount, not known for being excitable or contrary.

“But,” Tobe began in a dazed voice, “if somebody killed him to get the gold, then—”

“The gold or the letter,” Fargo inserted, as he turned off the tap, shutting off the flow of water from the faucet. “It could have been either one.”

“What difference does it make?” He stared at Fargo with eyes bereft of hope. “The letter would have led him to the gold. Either way it's gone.”

“Maybe. Then again, maybe not. It might still be there, waiting to be found,” he reasoned, then sighed heavily. “It's the not knowin' for sure that gnaws at you. On one hand, a man would be a champion fool to look for something that isn't there. But on the other, what if it is, and he just sits on his duff? It strikes me that fella is dumber than the first.”

“Yeah,” Tobe murmured absently, mulling over the problem.

“Which brings us right back where we were,” Fargo stated. “There's only one answer to this.”

Tobe came to the same conclusion. “The letter.”

“Yup.” There was the scrape of plate against plate as Fargo took the top one off the stack and set it in the dishwasher.

“I wish I could see it. Read it.” The longing was like an ache inside Tobe. Frustration knotted his hands into fists. “If there are any places on the Ten Bar described in it, I know I'd recognize them. I hinted as much to her on the way here.”

Fargo turned with a jerk, his sharpened gaze pinning Tobe. “What did she say?”

His shoulders hunched in a shrug. “Nothin'. Somehow or other, the subject got changed and I didn't have a chance to bring it up again.”

“Figures,” he snorted in disgust. “My guess is she changed the subject deliberately. You could probably talk 'til your hair turns blue and she wouldn't show it to you.”

“You're probably right,” Tobe agreed reluctantly. Then he mused to himself, “I wonder where she keeps it.”

The same thought had crossed Fargo's mind more than once since he'd learned of the letter's existence.

Outside, Luke snubbed the bay tight, pulling its nose back toward the saddle before he stepped aboard. As always, the stockinged bay put up a token fight, crow hopping a dozen feet across the yard before flattening the hump in its back and dropping into a trot.

“Fargo”—Dulcie paused in the act of carefully turning the water glasses upside down in the top rack of the dishwasher—“if you found that gold, would you be rich?”

“Whoo-eee,” he barked the laugh. “I hope to shout I'd be rich.”

She tipped her head back, her eyes all round and serious. “What would you buy with it?”

“Buy?” He hadn't given that much thought. “I don't know. I guess I'd get me a new pickup—I've never had me a brand-spanking new one—then probably some nice clothes.” He looked down at the stub of his left arm, then unconsciously massaged the atrophied muscles leading to it. “I might even look into getting one of those mechanical limbs. Not like the one I got, but one that looks like a real arm and hand.”

“Would there be enough to buy a house?” she wondered.

“Sure, with money left over.”

But the possessions that could be acquired meant little to him. He had never cared about such things. He hungered for something else entirely. Security.

He had already passed the sixty-year mark. Every time that fact slipped his mind, the ache in his bones reminded him of it. Arthritis, the doctors said. Sometimes he was so stoved up with it he could hardly get out of a chair. With only one arm, he didn't know how many useful years he had left.

He'd cowboyed his whole life and didn't have a dollar in the bank to show for it. He had no home and no family, save for Luke. And he couldn't know for sure how much longer Luke would keep him on. The pittance he'd get from Social Security wouldn't amount to enough to support himself. The thought of being stuck in some nursing home, a government charity case, galled his pride.

Old, broke, and crippled, he stood smack-dab on the doorstep of his so-called golden years, and it scared the hell out of him.

But if he could find that outlaw gold.... Need gripped his heart and squeezed hard.

That letter. If only he could get a look at that letter.

 

 

The barn and corrals were left behind as Angie rode alongside Luke, their horses traveling at a slow rocking canter. Overhead a puffy white cloud drifted across a high blue sky, and the sun was a big, yellow blaze of light right in the middle of it.

Away from all evidence of civilization, she was again struck by the wildness of this country, a wildness that excited the imagination of a girl raised on Hollywood Westerns. Massive boulders and the occasional tree-studded land that climbed and dipped and tumbled and curled. There were no stunning vistas, no majestic peaks to awe her, just rough, rugged terrain, the kind that laughed at a plow. The urge was there to explore it, to ride and ride and ride until she reached the barrier of those distant peaks. An impossible wish, but one to savor all the same.

Luke reined his horse down to a fast walk and turned it onto a narrow cow path that circled below a tall outcropping of rocks. Angie swung the gray behind him and listened to the companionable creak of saddle leather and the intermittent click of horseshoe striking stone, sounds that seemed to suit the landscape.

The cow trail angled across the side of a hill, making a gradual and leisurely descent to the bottom of it. There it disappeared in a grassy fold of the hills that gradually widened into a kind of valley. A slender creek wound through it, its course marked by a stand of cottonwood trees.

“The body was found over there.” Luke pointed across the creek to a steep hill. Near the base of it a huge chunk had been gouged from its side, exposing bare earth.

The sight sobered her. It was like looking at an opened grave. “I see it,” she said quietly.

Cutting across the valley's narrow floor, they splashed through the stream and rode directly to the spot. When they reached it, Angie immediately dismounted. Holding on to one rein, she walked to the edge of the grave site. Luke came up and silently took the gray's rein from her, then led both horses to a section of grass and left them there to graze.

Her gaze traveled over the length of exposed ground, absently noting the new shoots that had sprung up, evidence that nature had already begun its work to cover the scar. She couldn't have explained why, but she crouched down and scooped up a handful of dirt. It was dry and crumbly between her fingers, without the loamy texture of Iowa's rich soil. She let it slide from her hand, then brushed off the grains that clung to her skin as she straightened to stand erect.

Somewhere a bird sang. Its song wasn't one Angie recognized, but its music was sweet and clear. Surrounded by stillness, she became acutely aware of the horses' loud chomping, the jingle of bridle chains, and the soft rustle of a breeze through the grass stems.

Turning, she located Luke standing a few feet away. With his cowboy hat pulled low, his face was in shadow. But she sensed he was watching her.

“It's very peaceful here,” she remarked.

“Yes.” He wandered closer, seeming to recognize her need to talk now.

She looked back at the spot that had been her grandfather's grave site for so many years. “I never knew him. But my grandmother talked about him so much that it feels like I did. I guess she made him come alive in my mind. At the same time, I suppose talking about him kept him alive for her.”

“Probably.”

“She said he was a good man, solid and dependable,” Angie recalled. “Someone you would want at your side if you were in trouble.”

His sideways glance was dry and skeptical. “That seems a strange thing for her to say, considering the way he left her to come out here and chase a dream.”

“It looks that way now,” she admitted. “But you have to remember that back then, this country was in the middle of the Great Depression. He had no home, no money, no work—and a baby on the way. It was sheer desperation that prompted him to look for that gold.”

“And you, of course, are here strictly out of a sense of family duty.” His mouth twisted in a smile, droll with mocking doubt.