26

IT FELT FUNNY, coming back to the M Bar C like this. It wasn’t coming home anymore. Familiar though it was it felt . . . strange. Different. He didn’t like it. Not even a little bit.

Had to be done though. He still had gear in the bunkhouse. Lord, he’d lived there enough years. It was going to seem strange to gather it all up now and take it . . . where? He didn’t know.

He rode in slowly, almost reluctantly. The outfit was already back from the Siding. Jug still didn’t know exactly how long he’d been at Hansen’s place, but it was long enough for the M Bar C boys to get home ahead of him. He could tell because the chuck wagon was parked inside the equipment shed and the horses from the remuda were grazing loose in the big trap. Coosie’s mules were lodged in the smaller trap, and the corral behind the barn where the day’s mounts were brought in to be roped and saddled was empty.

That meant the bunkhouse would be empty, too. Jug was kinda pleased that everybody would be out working in the middle of the day. He wasn’t sure quite how to face all the fellows he’d been riding with now that he was laid off and no longer one of them. They would work all that out, of course. But better later on at the Bullhorn than here and now when none of them, Jug included, had had time enough to take it all in.

The foreman might’ve been in the big house doing whatever it was he did in there. Or he might’ve been off sniffing after Evie Goodrun’s skirts. Jug didn’t care which. He had no intention of asking Poole anything. That would only lead to Poole telling lies and the two of them having words.

Jug tied the horse—his horse now, not the outfit’s—to a rail outside the bunkhouse and went inside. It was a long, dark, low-roofed structure with few windows, bunks lined up along both of the long-side walls and a slightly rank, slightly sour smell of sweat and wool, leather and saddle soap. To Jug it smelled of home, and the truth was that he regretted hell out of having to leave it.

Still, leave it he must. He went down the length of the place to the far back corner that he’d favored for so long.

The pegs over his bunk were empty. So was the striped mattress ticking that he’d filled with fresh hay not three weeks earlier while he was cooped up with that bum leg. The ticking had been emptied, folded, and placed neat as a pin at the head of the bunk, leaving the boards bare.

There wasn’t a sign of any of Jug’s things. Not so much as a sock tossed in the corner nor a smear of mud on the floor.

It was like he’d never lived there.

With an empty feeling in his belly, Jug left the bunkhouse and headed for Coosie’s domain, which he figured was the most likely place he could find some answers. Well, short of going over and asking Eli Poole anyway.

“Foreman sent the Polack into town with your stuff,” Coosie told him. “You can claim it at the Bullhorn. And he said you can’t have that horse you’re riding. It belongs to the outfit. Said if you came by here we’re to tell you to leave it with John Weiss. Somebody will pick it up later.”

“Jesse said . . .” Jug clamped his mouth shut. It didn’t matter what Jesse said. And he for damn sure didn’t want Coosie or anybody else to think he was whining.

“If you’re hungry I can fix you up a poke to carry with you.”

It was about dinnertime and common courtesy ruled that no man should ever ride away from an outfit hungry. Any guest, visitor, or passerby was always welcome to belly up to the table and help himself to whatever was there.