TALBOT WENT UP the street to Zimmermann’s Hotel, which had added another story and a coat of paint since he had last seen it, and asked for a room furnished with heat and extra quilts.
In the small room consisting of a bed, a chair, a dilapidated wardrobe, and a coal-oil heater, he sat and smoked a cigarette and wished he hadn’t come home.
The wind howled beneath the eaves and blew snow against the windows. Someone in the room above him was scuffing around in his boots and hacking phlegm from his throat. Somewhere a baby was crying. Out in the silent street a cat mewed.
From somewhere out of the blue, Talbot remembered the old spotted horse he and Dave used to ride to their swimming hole, hot July afternoons. Then a twelve-year-old, Dave was jumping from the barn loft, tucking his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around his legs and careening through shafts of afternoon light into a mountain of sweet-smelling hay.
“I bet you can’t do this, Mark!”
Talbot walked to the window and peered out without seeing anything. With Dave dead and only memories left, Talbot had no idea what to do, but he felt the need to see his old home place again and to visit Dave’s grave. He’d hang around
the country for a month or so. Maybe at the end of that time he’d know whether he still belonged here or somewhere else.
He plucked the quirley from between his lips and studied the ash grimly. He lifted his war bag onto the bed and opened it. Dipping a hand inside, he rummaged around on the bottom, then pulled out his six-shot revolver, an old model Colt he’d worn in a covered holster during the Apache campaigns. He hadn’t worn a gun since Mexico, and he’d lost his government-issue holster in a poker game aboard the Bat McCaffrey. He regretted the loss; in self-defense, he supposed he’d have to wear the hog leg on his hip.
Welcome home, he thought, dropping the iron back in the bag and stowing the bag under the bed. He stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray and headed for the door.
“Where’d be the best place to find new duds around here?” he asked the old woman who ran the place. She was watering a half-dead plant hanging in the window downstairs. Talbot didn’t remember her and assumed she was a recent arrival, as were most of the people he’d seen so far.
“Check McDonald’s up the street,” she said.
“McDonald’s? You mean McCracken’s.”
“McCracken’s burned two years ago. McDonald rebuilt.”
“Much obliged,” Talbot said, feeling as though time had left him in its wake.
Talbot found the mercantile sandwiched between a clapboard establishment advertising hardware and tinware and a wholesale tobacco shop. The proprietor stood behind the counter in a derby hat and wool vest, one fist on his hip, the other on the countertop. He watched Talbot with silent suspicion, and Talbot found himself thinking he was liable to get shot in the back in his own hometown.
“At case, friend. I’m one of the good guys,” he said, resenting his outsider status among these newbies. People sure
seemed quick to label and reject around here. That wasn’t how Talbot remembered this town.
The man said nothing. His expression did not change.
With the proprietor watching but offering no assistance, Talbot picked out a sheepskin coat, a union suit, heavy denim jeans, a flannel jersey shirt with leather ties, a black Stetson hat, wool-lined leather gloves, wool socks, and fur-lined knee-length moccasins.
After he’d picked out a soft leather holster, a cartridge belt, and a .44-caliber lever-action Winchester, which he’d heard were all the craze among cowboys these days, and three boxes of shells, he got the grim proprietor to throw in a scarf and a sack of tobacco, and paid the man.
“Nice doing business with you,” he said dryly, hefting the parcels onto his shoulder. “I’ll be sure and hurry back.”
He hauled the merchandise two doors down, to Gustaffsen’s Tonsorial Parlor for a shave, a haircut, and a long, hot bath.
When he’d finally hauled himself out of the steaming iron tub an hour and a half later, he felt like a stranger. The face that peered back at him from the proprietor’s handheld mirror bore little resemblance to his more youthful conception of himself.
Cut to half its former length, his wavy auburn hair was. combed straight back behind his ears, and his face, minus the beard, was big and hard-lined and ruddy. An Apache arrow had left a healed-over dent to the left of his right eye.
With the beard gone, he saw age in the spokes around his eyes and in the leathery skin pulled taut over his high, chiseled cheeks. Several gray hairs appeared in the two-inch sideburns. His eyes lacked their youthful luster and his lips were sullen.
In seven years he had grown from reckless youth to wry middle age, though he was only twenty-seven.
“You like?” Gustaffsen asked in a Swedish accent heavy
enough to sink a clipper ship. His sharp eyes glanced from the mirror to Talbot and back again.
“No.”
“Huh?”
“I mean … it’s fine,” Talbot said, handing the man his glass. “What’s the charge?”
When he’d dressed in his new duds, he buckled the six-shooter and the new holster around his waist. The gun felt so foreign and looked so malign, hanging there on his hip, that he took it off in frustration and shoved it back in the war bag.
If they wanted to shoot him, let them shoot an unarmed man. He wasn’t ready to start killing again. Not even in self-defense.
When he’d wrapped his old clothes in a bundle for Gustaffsen to dispose of, he went over to the town’s only café for a supper of pork chops, sauerkraut, and fried potatoes.
He and the two drummers he’d gotten off the train with were the only customers, the cold weather apparently keeping everyone else home. The drummers’ idle banter across the room depressed him; instead of lingering over his coffee and dessert, he went back to his room and crawled into bed.
He lay awake for a long time, listening to dogs barking in the distance, staring at the ceiling, and pondering the notion that his brother was gone and that he’d been homeless for five years without knowing it.
Five years …
AFTER BREAKFAST EARLY the next morning, Talbot found a feed barn and a livery stable and picked out a saddle horse and tack. An hour later he was cantering a deep-chested speckled gray gelding along the mail road east of town.
Mid-morning, he left the road and followed a long, shallow
valley between low rimrocks. He remembered the way easily, noting landmarks and pausing occasionally to study eagles’ nests and wolf prints in the snow, feeling good to be back in the saddle and back in the country.
It was a cold, windy day, with low, fast-scudding clouds. Talbot snugged the strap under his chin to keep his hat in place.
When he came to the canyon in which lay the valley where the Talbot Circle T ranch was located, Talbot took the first ravine to the west. He rode for another hour, following the ravine’s devious course until it rose into a bowl surrounded on three sides by hogbacks spiked with tawny grass poking through the snow. In the distance sprawled a long, wedge-shaped mesa where Talbot and his brother used to trap rattlesnakes every summer.
Below the hogbacks, in a natural wedge that broke the wind, sat the Circle T—a two-story log cabin with a lean-to sloping off its east wall, a big gray barn with a connecting paddock, and several small corrals straggling down the ravine to a stock pond and windmill.
The place had a forlorn, abandoned look, and Talbot’s heart ached to see it like this—the cabin dark, with no smoke lifting from its chimney; the corrals barren of saddle stock; the weathered gray blacksmith shed looking as hollow as an old tree stump.
Three pigeons started from the barn loft. They flew around the yard, then settled again in the loft and watched between the planks of the closed doors. Behind the cabin, the outhouse door squeaked in the wind funneling through the draws. It sounded like a moan. The air was heavy with the smell of skunk.
Entering the compound, Talbot saw that one of the pole barns had lost a pole and its roof had partially fallen in. The snow around the compound was pocked by hooves and littered
with frozen discs of cow dung. A drift had formed on the cabin porch like a frozen wave. The old Talbot lease was apparently being used as winter range, and the cabin probably served as an occasional outpost for grubliners and bandits.
Talbot spurred his horse forward and dismounted before the cabin, looping the reins over the tie rail. He turned the knob and pushed the door open. He stood in the doorway and looked around the cabin, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows within.
When the living room swam into focus, he saw that the newspapers he and Dave had tacked to the walls had turned yellow. Torn strips curled toward the floor. Most of the furniture had been hauled off by other settlers, no doubt.
A few stools and a homemade chair remained near the fireplace. The floor planks were floury with dust, coated in grime and mouse shit. The few remaining lamps were chipped and smoke-blackened, and cobwebs hung from the ceiling joists.
Opening the door and walking down the short hall to the kitchen, Talbot saw that this part of the house was in the same state of disrepair. The two remaining chairs were broken, and the plank table sat askew, littered with dirty dishes, tins, cigarette stubs, and playing cards.
There were yellowed newspapers and magazines scattered about the cupboard tops. A mouse-chewed flapjack lay on the floor by the range. Two torn gray socks hung from a rafter. This room was an add-on, and Talbot recognized his own notches in the logs. It was a bittersweet recognition, shaping his nostalgia to a sharp point.
Talbot sucked his teeth, listening to the mice scuttling in the walls and thinking, It’s no more than a line shack.
Outside he looked around the yard for his brother’s grave but saw no sign of it. Surely someone had buried Dave on the premises—the sheriff or one of the neighbors. The wind had blown most of the snow against the buildings and corral
posts, nearly covering an old horse mower and a dump rake but clearing the open ground. A marker would have been evident.
Puzzled, Talbot started back to his horse. A rifle cracked nearby. Talbot and the horse jumped simultaneously. While the horse kicked and pawed the ground, Talbot crouched and looked around.
“Hold it right there, asshole!”
It was a female voice.
“Throw your gun down.”
Talbot shuttled his gaze from the barn to a figure standing on the other side of the corral, hunkered behind a post from which a rifle poked.
“I’m not wearing a gun,” he said, raising his hands to his shoulders.
“Gordon, check the son of a bitch for a gun!” the woman yelled.
Talbot heard boots crunching snow and turned to see a lanky, stoop-shouldered man walk out from behind the pole barn, a Navy Colt held before him. Appearing to be in his fifties or early sixties, he was swarthy with a bushy gray mustache with upswept ends, patched denim breeches, and a big sugarloaf sombrero pulled low over his eyebrows. His torn mackinaw was stretched taut across his broad chest, its frayed collar raised against the cold.
He scuttled toward Talbot sideways, his eyes wide and cautious. Chew stained the corner of his mouth.
“Easy, now,” the man growled as he approached Talbot sideways and gave him the twice-over with his watery-blue eyes. He patted the sides of Talbot’s coat with his free hand.
Finally he looked at him sharply and said, “Where in hell’s your gun?”
“In my saddle boot.”
“No hog leg?”
“In my war bag. Wasn’t inclined to wear it today.”
“Well … I’ll be.” Turning to the woman, he said, “He ain’t wearin’ no iron, Jacy.”
The woman said nothing for several seconds. Then the rifle went down, and she said, “Keep your eyes on him, Gordon. I’m comin’ over.”
She walked around the corral, and Talbot watched her, smiling, wondering if she’d recognize him. She hadn’t been more than fifteen when he’d left home—just a scrawny, freckle-faced girl. She’d turned into an attractive young woman.
She appeared about twenty or twenty-one, and tall for a woman, maybe five-eight or -nine. A bulky green-plaid coat concealed her figure, but from her legs and hips Talbot could tell she was slender.
Under the wide-brimmed, flat-crowned black hat, her face was fine-boned and smooth, with full lips and green eyes that slanted a little, betraying her Slavic heritage. Her skin was vanilla, like the remnant of a summer tan, reminding Talbot a little painfully of Pilar. Rabbit fur moccasins rose to the patched knees of her faded jeans, and the rifle she held was a Henry with a seasoned stock and an oiled barrel.
As she moved closer to Talbot, she cocked her head to the side and squinted one eye. Recognition growing slowly on her face, she stopped before him but said nothing. Her eyes regarded him with frank amusement.
He smiled.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” she said.
“Hi, Jacy.”
“Damn near got yourself shot.”
“Nice to see you, too.”
Turning to the older gent who stood regarding them quizzically, still holding the Colt, she said, “Remember Mark Talbot, Gordon? Dave’s brother? He’s finally come home.”
The man squinted at Talbot, nodding slowly. “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”
“I didn’t recognize you at first either, Gordon. How are things?” Talbot offered his hand to the old cowboy.
Gordon Jenkins shook it and shrugged. He’d been working for outfits around the Bench for as long as Talbot could remember. He was one of those men you always saw on horses among others just like him but didn’t think much about. They were professional cowboys living their lives on the open range, brush-popping steers from sunup to sunset, and spending the winters holed up in brothels and bunkhouses from Bismarck to Abilene.
“Pretty much the same, Mark. How ’bout you?”
“I’ve been better.”
“What happened to your lip?” Jacy asked.
Talbot probed the swelling with his tongue. “Had a little homecoming party in town last night.”
“This isn’t the same country you left, Mark,” Jacy said darkly. “Dave was killed five years ago. I’m so sorry.”
Talbot looked off and squinted. “I heard. Thought I’d ride out here and look for his grave.”
“Did you find it?”
Talbot shook his head.
“Get your horse and follow me.” Jacy turned and started walking around the pole barn for her horse.
Talbot was mounting up when he heard horses blowing and turned to see Gordon driving a spring wagon loaded with supplies.
“Came from town,” he explained, driving past.
Jacy rode her line-back dun through the coulee south of the ranch, following a cattle trail in the snow. They rode single file, Talbot following Jacy, Gordon bringing the wagon up behind Talbot.
The wind was still blowing, shepherding shadows across
the snow, which shone in gray, wind-drifted patches here and there along the coulee. Small flocks of redpolls wheeled above the weed-tips. A coyote spooked from a frozen seep and disappeared up a crease in the ridge. The only sounds were the wind and the horses crunching snow.
It was a grim ride; no one said anything.
After ten minutes, the coulee fanned out on both sides, revealing a line of big cottonwoods standing along Crow Creek. The creek bottom was about a quarter mile wide, and dense with willows, chokecherry, hawthorn, and occasional box elders.
It was a haven for whitetails, Talbot remembered. But you had to beat the brush for them, and you had to get them before they dashed up the opposite ridge and were gone across the prairie.
“I remembered how you and Dave liked it down here,” Jacy said, as if reading his thoughts. “I couldn’t think of a more fitting place to bury him.”
Talbot kept his eyes focused on the corduroy ridge on the other side of the creek, not wanting to lower them, wanting to stay with his memories of old deer hunts and Dave whooping and hollering in the willows while Talbot sat in a declivity on the ridge, waiting for the hazed deer that would bound over the natural levee only a few yards away.
Finally Talbot dropped his eyes to the homemade cross beneath the cottonwoods. Its thin gray shadow angled over the rock-mounded grave beneath it.
Dave.
Talbot dismounted, handed his reins to Jacy, and studied the grave. Fallen leaves clung to the nooks and crannies between the rocks. Tracks of coyote and racoon made light impressions in the snowy grass. A weasel had been poking about.
Talbot studied the grave for a long time, remembering his big, blond, grinning brother who could toss a hundred-pound
feed sack into the haymow like it was straw. Finally he looked up at Jacy, blinking away the film of tears from his eyes.
“You … you buried him here?”
“Dad and Gordon dug the grave. I thought it was fitting,” she said matter-of Factly.
He lowered his eyes again to the grave. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry. What a thing to come home to.”
Talbot gave a dry laugh. “I figured maybe Dave had got married, had him a youngun or two, maybe built one of those nice big clapboard houses. I sure never expected this.”
“It was a horrible thing, what happened here,” Jacy said thinly. “Frank Thompson, Paul Goodnough—hanged on their own ranges. There were five cabins burned, and Hutt Mills was taken naked from his lean-to and forced to walk back through knee-deep snow. He lost both his feet and nearly all his fingers to frostbite.”
“Any idea who shot Dave?”
Jacy looked at Gordon, who sat the wagon seat, elbows on knees, sucking a tooth to distraction, his eyes wide and distant. A scuttling breeze toyed with the brim of his sombrero.
Jacy said, “Gordon said he saw Randall Magnusson and another man crossing our range one morning a few days before he and Dad found Dave’s body. They were heading toward your place.”
Gordon moved his head slowly from side to side. “I sure wish I woulda looked into it at the time, but I was just so thrilled to see ‘em riding away from me, I didn’t give much thought to where they were goin’.”
The cowboy’s slow voice betrayed a high, Ozark twang. “That Magnusson kid—he was only about sixteen, seventeen at the time—is the ornriest little bastard I seen outside of Blackfeet country. A coward and a cold-blooded killer with more than a few screws loose to boot.”
“Did you tell the sheriff?”
“Sure I did.”
“And?”
“And Jed Gibbon just crawled all the deeper into his bottle. Wasn’t about to fool with the likes of the kid or the kid’s father, King Magnusson.”
Talbot sighed and bit his lip. “Christ.”
“Yep,” Jacy said, drawing out the word darkly.
Talbot mounted his horse, a thoughtful look wrinkling his brow. “King Magnusson,” he muttered. “I can’t imagine a killer like that raising a girl like his daughter.”
Jacy frowned. “You know Suzanne?”
“Met her on the train.”
Jacy and Gordon shared a sneer. “Was she comin’ from back east or out west?” Jacy asked snidely.
“West.”
“You never know with little Miss Queen of England. When she gets tired of the smell of cowshit, her daddy sends her to New York for a new wardrobe.”
“I take it you and her aren’t close,” Talbot said ironically.
“It’s not so much her I hate as her family—a bunch of highfalutin scalawags, getting rich off the land they steal from others.” She watched Talbot; his eyes were cast in thought. “You taken with her?”
His eyes rose to hers, his mind racing to reconcile the vivacious, cultivated young woman from the train with the family Jacy had just described.
Changing the subject, he said, “I heard your pa died.”
Jacy nodded matter-of-factly. “Had a heart attack in bed, but it was King Magnusson that killed him. All the worry about the ranch and what would happen to me if night riders came …” Her voice trailed off.
“Your ma?”
“She married Harold Offerdahl last spring. Harold took her off to Mandan to open a harness shop, and I was glad he
did. This battlefield is no place for a nervous lady like Ma.” She smiled. “She writes me twice a month and sends me cookies and pies.”
“Maybe you should have gone with her.”
Jacy tilted her head. Her eyes were sharp. “Why’s that?”
Talbot shrugged. “Well, because you’re …”
“A girl?”
He shrugged again.
“Girl or no girl, I wasn’t about to let King Magnusson take everything my pa had worked so hard for,” Jacy snapped.
Talbot smiled, admiring the girl’s spine but thinking her foolhardy just the same.
“Well …” he said, and reined his horse around and started along the creek. Jacy caught up with him and rode parallel, several yards to his left. Gordon brought up the rear in the clattering wagon.
Several white-faced cattle appeared at the mouth of a draw, chewing cud in the gold sun, breath puffing around their heads. Snow and dirty ice clung to their coats.
“I’ve been wintering some older stock on your range,” Jacy explained. “I’ll get them out in the spring, and me and Gordon will help you get your cabin back in shape.”
“I’m not sure I’m gonna stay,” Talbot said, “but I appreciate the offer.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is your home.”
Talbot forced a chuckle. “That’s funny. It sure doesn’t feel like it.”
He was craning his neck around to watch Gordon, who had broken off the trail and now directed the shaggy draft horses toward the cattle. The old cowboy leaned out from his wagon perch, inspecting the brand on a Hereford within a loose pack of seven beeves.
“Hey, Jacy,” he called. “There’s a Double X brand over here.”
Jacy turned to look toward the cowboy and the milling cattle. “Good,” she said angrily. “Coyotes got the rest of that steer you butchered last week.”
“Whatever you say,” Gordon said, drawing his pistol.
To Jacy, Talbot said, “You’re gonna shoot that Double X stray?”
The young woman shrugged and pursed her lips. “You know what they say—nothin’ tastes better than the neighbor’s beef.”
Her sentence was punctuated by the flat report of Gordon’s Colt. The first was followed closely by a second. The herd bounded into an awkward run up the draw. The one Gordon had shot remained behind—lying on its side, its legs kicking spasmodically.
Talbot regarded Jacy with heat. “Isn’t that the sort of thing the Old Trouble was about?”
“Magnusson started it.”
“That’s no defense, Jacy.”
She jerked a sharp look at him. “Several of Magnusson’s cowboys rode through Jamison Gulch last week on their way to town, and drove four of my best steers over a butte. Gordon was out riding the line and saw it. Wasn’t much he could do and not get himself killed. That wasn’t the first time Magnusson killed my stock. I found three heifers shot last fall. He kills mine, I kill his. It’s the only defense I have.”
“Are the other small operators having the same trouble?”
“In spades.”
Talbot shook his head. “You’re gonna get yourself killed, pulling stunts like that.”
Jacy grunted. “I only wish they’d try pulling something on me like they did over at the Homer Rinski place last week. Then it’d be more than their cows dyin’!”
Talbot remembered what Gibbon had told him. “It was Rinski’s hired hand they shot?”
Nodding, Jacy added, “And whose daughter they savaged like animals. Mattie’s in a bad way, and her father doesn’t know what to do with her.”
“Does she know who they were?”
Jacy gave her head a shake and sighed. “Don’t know—she won’t talk about it. She tries to act like nothing happened, only she can’t settle down. She works like a butcher all day and can’t sleep at night. She’s not in a good way.”
Talbot paused, watching Gordon begin to dress out the dead steer. “My God, what’s become of this country?” he said weakly.
Jacy turned her sea-green eyes from Gordon to Talbot and brushed a stray lock of tawny hair from her cheek with a gloved hand.
“My place ain’t the cheeriest these days, but it’s good for a hot meal or two.” Her lips cracked a smile. “Her teats might be bigger than mine, and she may walk a little straighter, but I bet Miss Magnusson has nothing on me in that department. If you’re squeamish about stolen beef, I can boil you up a porcupine.”
Talbot’s face warmed at the girl’s salt. He had to laugh. “You know, I bet you’re right, Jacy Kincaid.”
“Is it a date?”
If I had any sense, Talbot thought, I’d take the sheriff’s advice and head east, keep riding until I was a safe distance from here. Maybe Minnesota or Iowa, possibly Wisconsin. This country, like so many other places from which he’d fled—the desert Southwest, Mexico during the gold boom—was a powder keg sitting only a few feet from a lit fuse.
But this was home.
“It’s a date,” he said with a slow nod, returning Jacy’s smile, then cutting his eyes down the coulee toward his brother’s grave.