Chapter Sixteen

He watched the house from the cover of the barn. The windows were dark, the street silent. Even the ruckus down by the jail had tapered off to a grumbling echo. After half an hour, he left his roost to glide stealthily across the rear yard. When he knocked at the door, a voice answered immediately, demanding identification.

“Ethan Wilder.”

The lock turned and the door swung inward. “Come in,” Doc said tersely.

Ethan entered the dimly lit room, and Carver shut and locked the door. There was a lamp on the desk, its wick turned so low it barely illuminated the room, and heavy drapes on the windows had been drawn closed.

“What happened out there?” he asked.

Ethan told him some of it—his attempt to talk Ira into closing the Bullshead, his visit to the hunters’ camp, followed by his encounter at the jail with Charlie Kestler—but left out the parts about threatening Nate Kestler in Doc’s barn, and smacking Ralph Finch upside his head with a rifle butt.

There was a rustle of satin at the parlor door and Claudia came into the office, her expression grave. “Was anyone hurt?” she asked, leading Ethan to believe she had been listening from the other room.

“Jeff took a hard rap to the top of his head.”

“Does he need help?” Doc asked.

“I reckon if he does, he’ll know where to find it.”

“Ethan is right,” Claudia said. “You should stay here. This will be where they will bring anyone who needs your assistance.”

She made sense, Ethan thought, but he could tell Doc was torn. He wanted to go where he was needed; he just wasn’t sure where that was at the moment.

“I’ll stay for a while,” he said finally.

“How’s Vic?” Ethan asked.

Doc exchanged a strained look with his wife, then sighed. “I’m afraid Vic relapsed this evening.”

“Relapsed? What does . . . is he dying?”

“You knew how seriously injured Vic was,” Doc replied almost defensively. “Most men wouldn’t have survived the ride into town.”

“But you said he was getting better.”

“No, I didn’t. Vic rallied briefly this afternoon, but he never fully regained consciousness. Not even when you were speaking with him.” Doc walked over to a wing-back leather chair and seemed to collapse within its embrace. There was a bottle of bourbon and a tumbler on the little table beside him, the tumbler containing maybe a quarter inch of liquor. He drained it swiftly, then grimaced and set the glass aside. Shaking his head at his helplessness, he said: “There’s nothing I can do. I don’t have the skills to attempt the kind of operation your brother needs.”

Ethan glanced at the bottle. Doc made a dismissing gesture in its direction. “It’s not that. It’s . . . I’m not a young man any more. My hands aren’t as steady as they used to be, and my vision isn’t as sharp. With the location of the bullet, and especially the bone fragments, even a twitch on my part during surgery could kill him.”

“Mister Carver seldom drinks,” Claudia said in her husband’s behalf. “He’s had that same bottle of bourbon since last Christmas.”

Ethan lumbered over to a chair in front of Doc’s desk and sat down heavily. He felt suddenly exhausted, as if everything that had happened since his return from the mountains had caught up with him in that instant. “Is there anyone who can operate on him?”

“Perhaps in Bismarck or Saint Paul. Most certainly there would be qualified surgeons in Chicago. But the risk in transporting Vic there would negate the odds of success to practically zero, and I frankly doubt if a younger, more skilled physician would come here. Especially in light of your brother’s current condition. The odds that he’d live long enough for help to arrive are slim.”

“But there is a chance?”

Doc hesitated, then shook his head. “No. I’m sorry.”

Ethan tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep, to cry; he wanted to rip and tear and bellow his rage. But he did none of that. He forced himself to remain seated, to keep his mouth shut, palms flat on his knees.

“You can sit with him if you’d like,” Doc said.

“No, maybe later.” Slowly, as if carrying a hundred-pound sack of grain on each shoulder, Ethan stood and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Gerard Turcotte pointed out that I might be in trouble with the law for busting Joel and Ben out of jail. They figure I ought to head for the mountains for a while, wait until things cool off.”

“No,” Claudia protested.

Doc, though, was more pragmatic. “It’s possible, dear. Ethan did break the law, no matter how worthwhile the cause.”

She stared at her husband in disbelief. “And there is nothing we can do?”

“At the moment, I don’t think so. Tomorrow, when things have calmed down, I’ll talk to the sheriff. Jeff is a reasonable man.”

“I’d appreciate that, Doc,” Ethan said.

“You have food and bedding?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“I’ll talk to Gerard after I’ve talked to Jeff,” Doc promised. “He can let you know what I find out.”

Ethan nodded and cracked open the door. Spying nothing out of the ordinary, he slipped through the door and crossed to the barn, where he’d left his borrowed horse. Backing it out of the same stall where he’d kept the Appaloosa, he was just stretching his toe for the stirrup when a voice stopped him cold.

“Going somewhere, Ethan?”

He lowered his foot, reins in one hand, cantle in the other. When he started to lower his arms, the voice said: “Uhn-uh, keep your hands where I can see them.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong, Jeff,” Ethan said. “Kestler and his boys were coming through the front door and you were flat on the floor.”

“So you killed my deputy and broke your brothers out of jail, and now you’re riding out after them.”

Ethan turned slowly. “What do you mean . . . killed your deputy?”

“I mean just what I said. You stuck a knife between Ralph Finch’s ribs, then set your brothers free.”

“I didn’t stick Ralph with a knife. He was still alive when I left the jail.”

“Then one of your brothers did it.”

Ethan thought back to the scene in the alley behind the jail. He’d been moving fast, exiting the rear door, gunfire from Kestler and his men still barking the quiet off the night. He remembered leaping Finch’s body, looking down as he passed over the deputy’s prostrate form. He didn’t remember a knife, yet supposed he could have missed it. As dark as it was, everything happening so fast, a knife buried hilt-deep in a man’s ribs would have been an easy thing to miss.

“What did it look like?” Ethan asked. “The knife, I mean.”

“You tell me.”

“Ben carries a camp knife with a Sheffield mark. Joel carries a folder with a three-inch blade. I’m guessing you still have both of them stowed away somewhere in your office.”

Jeff stepped out of an empty stall. “There’s a lantern hanging on a hook beside your head. Light it.”

Ethan did as he was told, then stepped away from his horse—another bay, he saw for the first time.

Jeff moved into the light with a cocked, double-barreled shotgun pointed at Ethan’s stomach. “Let me see your knife,” he said. “Slowly.”

Ethan pulled the short Bowie from its sheath and handed it over, butt first. Jeff took it, studied the blade a moment, then lifted it to his nose to sniff the hammered steel. Satisfied, he handed it back. “It wasn’t that one.”

“I already know that,” Ethan said, feeling a glimmer of hope. “You remember that it was Finch who cold-cocked you, don’t you?”

Jeff hesitated, then shook his head. “All I remember is Kestler and his men coming for your brothers. The next thing I know, I’m sitting in a locked cell with Charlie opening the door for me. He said you killed Ralph, then knocked me over the head so you could free Joel and Ben.”

“That’s not true. I broke Joel and Ben out, all right, but it was Finch who slugged you.”

“You saw him do it?”

“No, but I ran into him in the alley behind the jail and gave him a good smack with my rifle butt. Finch was double-crossing you, Jeff. That’s why I was there, to stop him.”

Jeff’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do you figure that?”

“Nate Kestler told me.”

“Nate? Nate Kestler just . . .”

“We had to worm it out of him,” Ethan explained.

“We?”

“Me.”

“Ethan, you’re in enough trouble right now. Don’t make it worse with lies.”

“I’m not looking to cause any more trouble than this town’s already got. I caught Nate behind the Bullshead and roughed him up a little to make him tell me what’s been going on around here lately. That’s when he told me he’d overheard his old man talking to Ralph, offering him money to get you out of the way.”

The shotgun’s muzzles came down partway. “That little weasel. He would’ve done it, too. But that doesn’t explain how he got a knife in his ribs.”

“It wasn’t me, and I doubt if it was Joel or Ben. We were all moving pretty fast.”

“Then you’re implying Kestler or one of his men did it?”

“I don’t know what happened to Finch, but if he did take that money so my brothers could hang, then I don’t really care.”

“You’d better care,” Jeff said. “Because right now, Kestler and his men are saying you did it, and I’m bound to believe them if I can’t find proof that says otherwise.”

“You might be bound to it, but I don’t think you do. You wouldn’t have given me my knife if you thought I’d killed your deputy with it.”

Exhaling loudly, Jeff lowered the shotgun the rest of the way. “No, I don’t think you did it, but I do wonder where you’re going now.”

“To find Joel and Ben.”

“You know where they are?”

Ethan shrugged vaguely. “I might.”

“All right, I’m not going to push it, but I want you to go get them, bring them back.”

“To hang?”

“To face the charges that were originally brought against them.” Jeff’s voice softened. “Bring ’em in, Ethan. Let’s get this mess straightened out before anyone else is killed.”

Ethan took up the reins to his horse. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”