The Vigilante's Bride (20 page)
When Luke was safely out of earshot, Tom turned to Scully. “I didn’t mean nothing. What’d I say to make him so mad?”
“Not a thing, boy. Not a thing. The man’s in love.”
Scully studied the man on the gray horse riding up ahead. For someone as worried as Luke was about missing cattle, he’d seemed mighty cheerful all morning. Scully wondered if all that whistling and happiness had anything to do with the walk he’d seen Luke and Emily take last night. For the first time, Luke had his arm all comfortable around her waist, as if he didn’t care who saw.
Scully kept his head down and hid a smile from Tom. “Right now he’s like a bull that ain’t been branded before. Most likely, he’s trying to sort out his own feelings about the little lady.”
“You mean he ain’t made up his mind yet?”
Scully’s weather-beaten face crinkled around the eyes. “Oh, I reckon he’s done that all right,” he said, chuckling. “He just don’t like it none. I got a feeling that young bull’s trotting himself over to the fire right now, and he knows it.”
A sly grin stole across Tom’s face. “Well, he better get a move on, ’cause I just might ask Miss Emily to go for a walk with me after supper tonight.”
“Then you ain’t got a lick of sense,” Scully said softly. He pointed to the man in the black leather jacket sitting stiffly on his horse ahead of them. “That’s your boss up there, boy. He’s twice your size, can ride anything with hair on it, and handles a gun like no man I’ve ever seen. What happened back there ain’t like him. He don’t get mad easy, but right now I’d say you got him riled right down to his saddle. If I was you, I’d back off till you see which way the wind blows.”
Tom studied the back of Luke’s jacket for a minute, then looked at Scully and shrugged. “I like her, too. She sure is pretty.”
Scully snorted. “So’s heaven, I hear. Get between him and his lady, I reckon you might find out.”
Emily selected a dark green skirt with side pockets from a rack and took it over to Bobbins’s main window. She held it up to the light and examined it. It had to do for a day and a half on the train.
Just right
.
Molly wanted something to wear on the trip tomorrow that wouldn’t wrinkle too much or show the dirt.
Emily walked back to the rack and flipped through the garments hanging there until she found a large-size pale green sweater to go with the skirt.
“Miss McCarthy, you find what you’re looking for?” Mr. Bobbins called from the back of the store.
“Yes, thank you.”
“I’ve got the perfect hat to go with that,” he said.
She smiled across the rack of sweaters. Repton, Montana, was a thousand miles from nowhere and yet Bobbins knew merchandising and sales appeal. Like the big department stores in Chicago, he displayed his clothes on hangers. The other merchants in town still stacked garments in piles on tables.
The bell on the front door jangled, and Luke came in. He’d used the telephone at the express office.
With Molly’s new outfit over her arm, Emily hurried to him. “How’s her brother? What’d the doctor say?”
“He’s going to be fine. Says he’s in some pain, but that’s common with broken bones. He agrees with you and Molly. Thinks it’s a good idea for her to go stay with him until he’s off the crutches.”
“And you don’t?”
Luke took the skirt and sweater from her and handed them to Bobbins to ring up. “Until Molly gets back, you’ll have to run New Hope by yourself. It’s a lot on you.”
“Not a problem.”
Emily forced a confident smile on her face, hiding how she really felt. Twenty-four kids. Could she do it?
She had to. It was a family emergency for Molly.
She’d answered the front door at New Hope yesterday, and the Western Union man from Repton had handed her a telegram from Molly’s brother. The Reverend Eli Ebenezer of Dickinson, North Dakota, had been in a stagecoach accident. The coach he was riding in plunged down a ravine and overturned. Eli, who’d been on his way to New Hope to visit Molly, now had a broken arm and a broken leg.
“She has no choice,” Emily said quietly to Luke. “He’s all the family she has. But I admit I hate to see her go. She’s the disciplinarian, not me.”
“Let’s hire someone to help you,” Luke said.
Emily shook her head. “Our budget’s not big enough as it is. Money’s tight, and the board will deduct anything else from our allowance. It’ll only be a month. We’ll be all right.”
But what if they weren’t all right? she wondered the next morning on the porch, watching as Luke drove Molly down the lane for Repton and the stage to Billings, where she’d take the afternoon train to Dickinson. Molly waved good-bye again to Emily and the collected children, and the buggy turned onto the main road.
Emily let out a sigh. That morning her insides felt squeezed and jumpy. She could feel herself trembling inside.
Dear Lord, help me.
Just the thought that she wouldn’t be able to run both the school and the orphanage made her stomach hurt. Molly, bless her heart, had been so calm about it.
“You love children, and it shows,” she’d said.
“But they were all girls, all second or third graders. I haven’t had much experience with older kids,” Emily replied, omitting that she had no experience at all with boys, old or young.
And two of the boys at New Hope were taller than her.
Thirteen-year-old Pete Brewster herded all the boys together in the hall before their morning history class.
“We got orders,” he muttered, and repeated Luke’s lecture to him earlier, a combination of threats and bribes to guarantee good behavior for Miz McCarthy.
A wide-eyed fifth grader interrupted. “That’s for girls. I ain’t gonna take no sewing class.”
“You cause any trouble, we both do. You, for causing it – me, for not stopping you,” Pete said. “And I guarantee you’ll be sorry.” None too gently, he shoved the boy into the classroom ahead of him and flopped down beside him on the bench.
Chalk in hand, Emily turned around from the blackboard where she’d sketched a picture of an animal with a row of pointed plates along its back.
“Let’s start today’s lesson on prehistoric animals by comparing it with something we already know. Teddy, did you bring your tortoise today?”
Later that morning, when the horses were inside the barn, Emily led the students up to the pastures behind. They tramped over several acres, looking for dinosaur eggs in the grass and under every bush. With a straight face she told them a discovery like that was most unlikely. In class she’d told them about a Chicago scientist who’d recently discovered dinosaur fossils in nearby Dakota Territory. Right then her students clamored to look behind New Hope.
They found only arrowheads, which Two Leggings and Red Cloud assured them, importantly, were not made by the Crow.
An hour later she led them back down the hill to the house. Walking toward them were four men she recognized, members of New Hope’s Board of Directors.
“And what are you kids out digging for?” John Armstrong, the newspaper editor, gestured to the spoons and trowels the children carried.
“Dinosaur eggs,” croaked Teddy.
Armstrong laughed and said, “That’s great. How many did you find?”
Emily filled them in on the morning’s fruitless search. “Only arrowheads and a few rocks in that pasture, nothing more.”
“No dinosaurs here, I’m afraid,” Mr. Bobbins added.
“But they used to be next door in North Dakota and just possibly were in Montana,” Emily said, aware of the disappointed faces on the children. “There was an article in the Chicago paper last week about recent discoveries. We’re reading up on them.”
She turned to the children. “Run along so the grown-ups can talk,” she said, and shooed them around to the back of New Hope to go in through the washroom.
“Let’s go inside and sit down. I’m sorry we weren’t here when you first came. What can I help you with?” she asked.
The editor spoke up first. “We were concerned with your having to run the classes by yourself and wondered if you needed anything, if we could help.”
“Besides dinosaur hunting, what classes have they had today, Miss McCarthy?” Bernard Stanton, the local banker cut in, his tone implying she was neglecting their education.
Emily gazed at him a moment and decided she didn’t like the man.
“Reading and arithmetic before the egg hunt,” she said, and smiled. “After lunch we’ll do geography and English, if we can squeeze it in. Today is art class, and sometimes English comes in second to art and music.”
Stanton cleared his throat and stepped forward. “The dinosaur hunt was ridiculous, if you don’t mind my opinion. English is important, my dear. I insist you shelve the art and music and teach them about the world they live in.”
Emily weighed her answer before she spoke. “I agree E nglish is important, but so is art and music. We’ll fit it all in.”
He pulled a paper from his pocket. “And this request of yours for free tickets to the Repton Music Festival next month is over the line. As long as I’ve been here, no one ever asked for that before.”
“Repton never had a music festival before, Bernard,” Mr. Bobbins said quietly.
Mr. Bolton, one of the ranchers who used the same range that New Hope did, smiled to the others and said, “I’m glad we stopped out. Miss McCarthy has everything under control.” He paused. “How many tickets do you need?”
Emily swallowed. “We have twenty-four children, if I can bring them all.”
“Twenty-four it is. You’ll have them. Plan on it.”
Scully said it was a bad omen.
High overhead a red-tailed hawk screamed, hunting its breakfast. It wheeled and soared in the updrafts in the early morning sunlight, then dived and sped a foot above the ground. Legs outstretched, it struck. Powerful wingbeats climbed for altitude, a small rabbit clenched in its talons.
Scully reached back and slipped his rifle from the scabbard.
Luke followed the bird with his eyes. It had carried its prey to ground and was now feeding a short distance away.
“Ah, don’t shoot him, Scully,” he said softly. “It’s not an omen, good or bad. It’s just nature for both of them.”
Every morning he and the New Hope crew were out by seven, cutting calves and branding. Another couple of days and they’d be finished. Everything should ease up a little then. Maybe things would go right after all.
Axel had taken the closing of the rangeland with a strange silence. He hadn’t said a word to him, just sent a crew in the next day and turned his cattle back.
Luke wondered if Sam Tucker had something to do with that. On the way back from Billings, Luke had stopped by the sheriff ’s office. Stuart had come inside with him and introduced himself as a friend and former employer.
Tucker had listened, growing increasingly quiet as Luke recounted Jupiter’s murder and described the gunman.
“Lots of men ride spotted horses around here, Mr. Sullivan,” Tucker had said. “You could be wrong about it being Haldane.”
“I don’t think so. He never took his hat off, but I’m sure it was Haldane.”
“Well, I’m going out there tomorrow to talk to Mr. Axel about something else. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Luke reined in and pulled Bugle up. Sitting astride the big gray, he watched the cows, his brain clicking along, making mental tallies of each group, filing it away in some side pocket of his mind to be pulled out and added in with the others later.
At first he thought the herd had just scattered more than usual, that the roundup had made them jittery, and they spread out. But by midmorning, the vague perception that something wasn’t quite right had jelled into the solid conviction something was quite wrong.
On the surface, things seemed little different from the day before: the heaving brown backs in front of him, the clouds of dust rising as Henry Bertel and Tom Cosgrove moved deeper into the herd. The weather was the same – clear and sunny and not a sign of rain in the sky – a twin of the day before, and the day before that.
Numbers flashed in his head again. They didn’t add up. The herd was smaller. He was sure of it. Fifty or sixty fewer, he guessed, maybe close to a hundred. Exact figures were hard to come by in a herd that size. Twenty head would never be missed. But fifty? Maybe. If you had good eyes.
He rode back to the branding area and slid down. Hand curled around the saddle horn, he waited until Scully and Tom Cosgrove straightened up over a calf. The young heifer scampered back to her mother, mooing at them from the edge of the herd. Luke stepped over to the fire.
Scully looked up. “Something wrong, boss?”
“I’m not sure,” Luke said, pushing his hat up with a finger, “but I think more of this herd is missing. I’m going up to the north section and take a look. They might’ve roamed up there yesterday.”
Scully shoved the cooling N-Bar-H iron back into the fire. He stood and dusted his pants. “I’m coming with you, then. I remember the last time you rode up there alone.”
Half an hour later, Luke pointed to a large herd spread like a mirage across the horizon in the distance. A breeze rippled over the rangeland, lifting and smoothing the ocean of grass ahead of them like wavelets. “Don’t see how they could’ve roamed that far,” he said to Scully.
“They probably ain’t ours, then. Axel’s, most likely.”
“Let’s go see.” Luke tapped his heels, and Bugle quickened his pace.
In a few minutes they were pushing into the mass of cattle, checking brands. Most were Axel’s X-Bar-L. There were only a few strays belonging to the Paxtons and the Ormons. Then, as they tunneled in deeper, they began to find N-Bar-H steers. And cows. And calves. Luke’s jaw took on a granite hardness. Axel wasn’t stupid. He didn’t need to rustle cattle. So what was this all about?
“What do you make of it?” Scully asked.
“About twice as many as I figured.”
“They could’ve been here all winter, you know.”
Luke shook his head. “That’s what I thought until I saw him.” He pointed to the spotted calf with a torn left ear.
“That critter was miles down range yesterday. Someone drove him here last night!” Scully snapped a look at Luke.
“What’s going on?”
“Looks like we got a thief out here,” Luke said.
A rush of sour thoughts filled his head. One man seemed to pull the strings in his life, jerking him around like a puppet.
Bart Axel.
The noon sun was warm on his back, but inside he felt cold. A slow procession of thoughts moved like ghosts across his mind. His parents . . . Mary Beth. He’d forgotten what they looked like. Sometime when he was around thirteen, he’d cut himself loose from old memories of a family he couldn’t remember and decided to make do with what he had. And Molly and New Hope was the family he had.
After that beating, it had been all he could do not to go gunning for Axel. No one knew how many nights he’d lain awake in his room, figuring how he’d do it. But he didn’t, because the law said there was no proof that Axel was involved and because Molly and Emily begged him not to. Then the barn . . . and now this.
Beneath the broad-brimmed hat, a glare of sunlight warmed his lower face. His jaw tightened.
Enough was enough.
Bart Axel leaned back in his chair. “Well, did he find his brand?”
“Just like you said he would,” Clete said, laughing. “Sullivan was out there checking our herd early this morning. Then he and Scully Anders took off for New Hope like their tails were on fire. You reckon they’ll be back?”
Bart stroked his cigar ashes into an empty glass. “I’m counting on it. But before he does, I want you to cut out two hundred of our own today and mix them in with theirs. Then Haldane and the men will drive them to Parker and put them on the train up there for Chicago.”
Bart chuckled, a dry sound with no humor. “The yardmaster in Parker isn’t fussy about brands, except the ones on his whiskey. Couple bottles of the right stuff, a box of cigars, and he’ll load anything I want him to.”
“And Sullivan will come after what he thinks are his cattle, because of where we’re taking them – to Parker,” Clete said.
Bart ran a knuckle down one side of his mustache, then the other. “Don’t underestimate him,” he said. “He’s smart. He won’t come too close, and he won’t come in right away. He’ll hang back and follow for a day or so till he sees what we’re up to. Once he’s figured it out, then he’ll come in and try to take the herd – or what he thinks is his herd. And when he does” – Axel picked up the nickel-plated Schofield from the desk and aimed it at the hat rack across the room – “bang!
Nobody can blame us for looking after our own.”
Clete nodded. “Sullivan’s been asking for it for a long time.” He smacked his fist into the palm of his other hand.
“But not you,” Axel said quickly. “Sullivan is Haldane’s job. We stay out of it. You and me will be miles away when that happens. We split the New Hope cows off and take them south to Wyoming. A man I know down there will take them off our hands.”
At sunup the next morning, the horses snorted and stamped in place. Luke and the men led their mounts, already saddled, out through the double doors of the barn. Blanket rolls were tied behind the cantles of the saddle, the saddlebags loaded. Every horse had a rifle scabbard slung on its left. Together, the men swung up and settled themselves, taking off a moment later in a muffled clatter of hooves across the corral and through the gate. They pushed the horses at an easy, rolling canter for the North Quarter, intending to cut out their own before Axel’s crew got started. Luke had brought as many men as he dared, hoping that the small army from New Hope would make Wade or Wesley or Axel himself think twice before starting trouble. But he wasn’t counting on it.
“Make sure those rifles are loaded,” he reminded them again. Though each of them carried a pistol or revolver on his left, butt forward, they wouldn’t be close enough to use them. At least he hoped not. “Look sharp. We’re getting close,” he warned.
Ahead of them, the plain stretched endlessly for miles – empty. There was no herd. Instead, the pasture was a mud wallow. It looked as if the herd had panicked, tracks crisscrossing everywhere, the grass trampled deep into the dirt, clods of earth dug out by hundreds of running hooves. The men swung off and looked around blankly. Leading Bugle and frowning, Luke walked a wide circle and tried to fit the pieces together. It made no sense.
Scully pulled off his hat and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Looks like they took ’em out of here in a hurry, but why east? If they wanted to hide them, they should’ve gone south. There’s nothing east of here.”
Luke pulled himself into the saddle again. The horse shifted nervously. “Yeah, there is,” he said, his voice calm, deliberate. “Parker. They’re going to take them out by train. And they just might get away with it, too. Let’s go. We got a long ride ahead of us.”
They rode for more than an hour after dark, moving in closer – but not too close – to the herd they knew was up ahead. A few miles from the banks of the Bighorn River, they made camp in the open. Luke and Henry and Will Brown unsaddled the horses, picketed them, and turned them loose to graze while the Cosgrove boys helped Scully get a fire going. Supper was coffee, fried fatback, and the cold biscuits they’d brought with them. Lying around the campfire, eating and drinking, the men talked, speculating about the herd and why Axel had taken up rustling.
Legs outstretched, Luke folded his arms under his head, more aware of the sawing throb of crickets in the background than the drone of the men’s voices. He gazed into a sky bright with stars and, one by one, sifted the facts through the sieve of his consciousness, examining what he knew, guessing at the unknowns.
Why was Axel stealing his neighbor’s cows? He had thousands of his own. Anger welled up inside Luke again. Axel had to know they’d follow him, find him out. Did he really want the beef – or did he want Luke Sullivan?
Will Brown’s voice interrupted his thoughts.
“Luke, they ain’t more than five miles up ahead. Let’s go in and get them tomorrow.”
Luke shook his head. “Can’t. Not tomorrow or the day after, either. There’s nothing between Repton and Parker but prairie – sagebrush and a few scrub bushes for cover. If there’s one place we don’t want trouble, it’s there.”
“You looking for it?” It was Henry.
“Don’t know for sure, but let’s get ready just in case. Treasure Canyon is two days ahead. If we come in from the north end, we ought to be able to turn the herd and start them back this way before Haldane’s crew know what’s happening.”
Luke sat up and stirred the fire higher. A slab of pitch pine popped in a small explosion of sparks. “With any luck, they’ll be too busy trying to catch their cows and stay out of the way of the herd to worry about us. But I repeat: There’s apt to be some shooting, so if anyone wants to go home, the time to do it is now.”
