It was the middle of the following afternoon by the time Damian reached Bucky Alcott’s farmhouse outside Sanderson. To reach that town so quickly, he’d gone with very little sleep. The house was located about a mile out of town, just where Bencher had said it was.
There was the possibility that Alcott would recognize him right off, despite the bruises he was wearing on his face and his having one eye nearly swollen shut. But Damian didn’t care.
Smoke coming out of the chimney indicated Alcott was home, so he simply rode up to the narrow front porch, dismounted, and knocked sharply on the door. If Bucky had seen him coming and fetched a gun, well, he guessed they’d be having a shoot-out. Damian would just have to make sure he didn’t kill the man until he had his answers.
The door opened. The man standing there wasn’t holding a gun. He was middle-aged, not very tall, but exceptionally thin. Brown hair that was fading and brown eyes went with a weathered face. And he had the peculiar bowed legs that some people developed from spending too much of their lives on the back of a horse.
He didn’t recognize Damian either, at least not right off. Damian must have caught him cooking, because he was wearing a full-length chef’s apron, seriously stained, and had smudges of flour on one cheek. He was also wiping flour from his hands on the lower half of the apron.
What Bucky did recognize, however, was an aggressively held rifle. He was frowning as he said, “It’s bad manners to go knockin’ on someone’s door with a weapon in hand, mister. Gives the wrong impression in most cases.”
“Not in this case,” Damian replied, then asked, just to be sure, “Bucky Alcott?”
Bucky nodded, but his frown got much deeper as he inquired in turn, “Do I know you?”
“Since you tried to kill me a few days ago, I guess that qualifies as a yes, you do. Now, you tell me what happened to the kid before I—”
“Whoa, there!” Bucky exclaimed. “Someone’s led you up the wrong creek. I got no idea—”
Damian backhanded the man, sending him sideways to trip over a crate of rubbish parked by the door. He moved into the room to stand over him, in no mood to deal with denials again before he got at the truth.
“My knuckles are sore from beating your name and address out of Elroy Bencher,” he said, rubbing the scabs on those knuckles. “I really don’t want to have to do the same with you—but I will if you insist.”
“Now hold on there, mister,” Bucky said, raising his hands defensively. “I don’t know no Elroy Bencher. Whoever he is, sounds like he lied to you about me, just to tell you what you wanted to hear so you’d leave him alone. If you think about it, why would he tell you anythin’, let alone the truth? Just ’cause you beat him up a bit?”
It sounded logical, too logical, and, dammit, too sincere as well. Damian was beginning to have some real doubts now. A harmless-looking middle-aged man like this, a hired killer? A man who was apparently very serious about his cooking, a hired killer?
The man was a farmer, for crying out loud. Damian had seen the barn as he rode up, the chicken coop next to it, the pigpens, though no nearby crops, but this was a farm. And Bencher, that belligerent bear, he could have lied there at the end, said anything just to get Damian to leave his house—and his broken ribs—alone.
Damian took a step back. If he’d been led wrong, and it looked like he had been, then he was seriously out of line here, having just accosted someone who appeared to be an innocent man.
He was about to apologize, and profusely at that, when he happened to glance down at that old crate of rubbish next to Bucky—and noticed a blue denim pant leg, splattered with blood, hanging out over the edge of the crate.
Casey’s denim jeans…
His rifle came up immediately and aimed at Bucky’s head. It was all he could do to keep from pulling the trigger right then and there, he was that furious over how easily he’d been gulled.
“Those are her clothes in that pile of rubbish you just fell over,” he told the now cowering man. “You’ve got five seconds to tell me what the hell you were doing taking off her clothes. And then you’ll tell me exactly where she is. If you even think about lying again, you’ll be left here to rot—quite dead. One…”
“Wait! Wait! Okay, mister, I give up. It won’t be the first time I didn’t finish a job I got paid for. And considerin’ I lost two good friends on this one, I don’t feel a bit obliged to return the blood money.”
“Two…”
“I didn’t take her clothes off! Hell’s fire, what kinda fella do you think I am?”
“Three…”
“Will you stop with the countin’? I’ll tell you everything I know. I helped her, for cryin’ out loud. I didn’t want to kill no young un, even when I thought she was a he. I certainly don’t kill no women.”
Damian didn’t lower his rifle yet. “And just how did you find out he was a she?” he asked doubtfully. “It’s not something she goes around mentioning.”
“The heck she didn’t. She told me, and she was plumb indignant about it, too, for me callin’ her a boy. That purely ticked her off.”
“You’re lying again…”
“I’m not, I tell you! It was like this. She got shot in the head. The wound wasn’t all that bad, but because of it, her memory went fishin’. She couldn’t rightly recall nothin’ ’bout herself, and I guess that included why she was pretendin’ to be a boy.”
Damian sighed at that point, his own suspicions confirmed. He lowered the rifle, then said, “She’s really lost her memory?”
Bucky nodded, adding, “She was a mite upset about it, too. Understandable, though. Think I’d go crazy myself if I couldn’t remember my own name.”
“You said you helped her. How?”
“I was gonna try and talk her into leaving the area; that’s why I brought her here. But when I figured out she didn’t know why she’d been shot, well, I fetched her some clean clothes, helped her get all the blood off her head, and put her on the train headin’ back east.”
“What?!” Damian exclaimed incredulously. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“’Cause it ain’t safe for her around here. And ’cause she wanted to find out who she is.”
Damian was about ready to shoot the man again, this time for his idiocy. “And how is she supposed to find out who she is on a damn train, not knowing where to go or who to talk to to ask?”
“Sheese, mister, I didn’t send her off blind,” Bucky said indignantly. “She’s headin’ over Waco way, to the K.C. Ranch. Her horse comes from there, leastways that’s where it got its brand from. Figured someone there might remember her, or at least remember the horse, fine-lookin’ as it is, and they’d be able to tell her who she is.”
Very well, so the man wasn’t a complete idiot, but still…
“It didn’t occur to you that I could do that? After all, we were traveling together.”
“Mister, with the kind of men that are after your head, I didn’t figure you’d be alive long enough to help anyone. And I didn’t want that little lady involved in the hornet’s nest you stirred up. So I sent her lookin’ for answers where she might find them and not get shot at in the process. And hopefully, if she gets her memory back, she’ll be smart enough not to come back here.”
Damian sighed. There was no point in berating the man further, when all he’d done was try to help her in the end. He couldn’t have known that Casey’s father had given her that horse, nor would she have had the memory to point that out. And there was no telling whom her father had bought the animal from, or how many owners it had passed through before that. Casey was off chasing needles in a haystack.
And all Damian could do was follow…