The saloons had muted themselves for the funeral. No piano jangled off-key as he walked back down Rakeheart’s main street. Death did that. Give it an hour, though, once the dust from the graveyard was off their shoes and the image of the coffin was out of their minds, and they would be louder than ever.
He strolled along, devoid of purpose for the moment. He needed to find out more about the Company Riders. He needed to learn more about all of it. Tomorrow. His missions for Sherman were one thing. There was always the chance he would be discovered. Real life seemed like something other people lived. Now he was living it, and it seemed like he was still an onlooker.
“Sheriff!”
It was Gallagher, the saddle-maker who had wanted him to know more about the Company Riders but had quickly been shushed.
“Mr. Gallagher.”
“Gordon,” the man said. “No need to be formal. Is it true the Wilkins woman may have murdered another man?”
Kane started to get angry, then realized that would do no good. The men of Rakeheart were what they were.
“Could be, but I don’t think so,” he replied. “She’s not that good a shot to have killed Clem, and it seems hard to believe two different people used rifles to kill men out there.”
“Who then?”
“Trying to figure that. Never met a man who didn’t step on somebody’s toes, but everybody tells me that’s who Ferguson was.”
“That’s because the one he stepped on is dead,” said Gallagher. “Come in the shop and we’ll talk.”
A saddle shop had a wonderful smell of leather. There was about enough room for three people in the place what with all the saddles and other leather goods propped on wooden stands.
Kane inspected the work as Gallagher excused himself, went into the back, and emerged moments later in less formal clothes than he wore to the funeral.
“You are a craftsman, Gordon,” Kane said. It was true. The workmanship was as good as anything Kane had seen anywhere, even in San Antonio.
Gordon happily brushed aside the compliment.
“Don’t like talking on the street,” he said. “Always someone listening.”
Kane waited.
“Wilkins was as quiet a man as a man could be until, oh, sometime around snowfall last year. I don’t know why, but he started pushing hard to become part of the town council we have. Now, we like to listen to everyone, but when a man suddenly starts thinking the whole town should listen to him, that’s not right. He had some different ideas, and he did not like it when anyone disagreed with him.”
Gallagher stopped. Footsteps came close, then receded as the figure of a man passed the window of the shop.
“Ferguson and he started drifting apart. No secret Ferguson thought Rachel Wilkins was some kind of queen; maybe that was it. In spring, they all but had a fist fight in the shop here. Wilkins had ordered a fancy, expensive saddle—cost too much even if I say so, but if he wanted it, I was going to make it—and Ferguson was in the shop while we were talking about it. He was mad at Wilkins for spending money and time on things other than the ranch. There was something in their talk, like a threat. They got right up chest to chest arguing, and I was sure it was going to get worse, but then Wilkins came to his senses and realized they weren’t alone and stormed out.”
“What happened then?”
“Ferguson said something about some man and told me to be sure I forgot the whole thing. Don’t think I saw him more than once or twice after. Wilkins, next time he saw me, tried to pass it off that Ferguson was interested in his wife. He was, of course, but not in any wrong way. He was too good a man. He could have made that place hum.”
“Was Wilkins a good rancher?”
“Fair,” said the saddle-maker. “Did a good job of building the spread, but he didn’t seem to be—oh, I don’t know the word—didn’t seem to care as much about it moving up and growing lately. He acted angry at the world, as though something didn’t come out right for him, but he never said what. I know he made the rest think he was going to sell one month, then take it all back the next. No one really knew what he was thinking. The widow? There was no point in even trying to ask her! It could be that he stopped running it properly because he knew he was going to sell. Wish I knew.”
The door opened. A lean man, gray in his beard with measuring eyes, walked in the shop. He scanned Kane with particular interest.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Washburn,” Gallagher said in his customer-pleasing tone.
“Not sure I’ve met your friend.”
“Sheriff Kane. Link Washburn.”
Kane could see Washburn had no intention of offering his hand. The name. The name.
“Chad’s pa.”
“I am that. You shot at my son.”
Gallagher moved away.
“Killed his boot dead. I did that. Boy was a bit full of spirits and bein’ young, sir, and it seemed like the best and fastest way to end it before he got himself in trouble. There were four fellas, all a little drunk and all a little wild, sir, and a woman and her kids. Nobody got hurt worth talking about. ’Spose I could have arrested them for being stupid, but ain’t a jail big enough to hold everyone charged with that, and I’d be in the cell with them. Bein’ a sheriff, that would be embarrassin’. Everybody said he’s a good boy who gets too wild. Usually life’s the cure for that.”
“Ever raise a boy without a mother, Kane?”
“Nope, but from what I see, it’s like riding a wild horse with your hands tied—a lot of falls and a lot of surprises. Can’t be easy, or it would come out right more than it does.”
“A fact. Chad’s mother passed when he was nine. Boy was never the same after.”
“Sorry there, sir. Nothing personal. Nothing mean in him; he’s wild. He comes to town, I have no quarrel with him. Sometimes a man grows up better when he lets all his stupid out when he’s young. Maybe your boy is one of those men. Hope for him that’s so; only a boy, sir, and I am sorry he lost his mom. A woman does things a man never figures out he was supposed to do.”
Kane extended a hand. Washburn took it.
“Now, Sheriff, I might see you later, but this man keeps taking longer to make me a saddle than it did for the cows to live that provided the leather, and I got business to attend to. So, if you will excuse us?”
A visibly relieved Gallagher emerged from wherever he had fled as Kane left the shop to return to the blazing sun of a Wyoming afternoon in Rakeheart.
“Hope you don’t mind eggs,” Mary Ellen Pierce said as he sat at the Last Chance for supper. “We had a stash of ’em because the chickens went wild laying, and they were going to go bad soon.”
Kane waved off her concern. He was eating every day, more than once a day, and sleeping indoors. Some men had a lot more. Lots of nights he had experienced a lot less. He asked the woman about the two dead men at the Wilkins ranch.
She did not have much sense of Wilkins and Ferguson. Ferguson almost never ate there, and Wilkins came only a few times when he had his wife and children with him.
“I think they had troubles,” she said. “I know that Rachel didn’t like town. Being an Indian, I guess I can see that because people shot her looks as though she was one of the wild ones, but they tried to be happy with their children. The girl they have, the dark one, she never smiled. In my experience, children like that come from a home where there is nothing to smile about. Tom and I always feed all the ranchers’ children when their families come to town. We enjoy the children, and we do not have any of our own. The Wilkins children were well-behaved, Sheriff. There was a shadow on the older girl, though. We could not get her to talk. I expected that she would change with time, but she only came in a few times, and then she stopped coming to town at all. Shame.”
When he asked her about the Company Riders, she came closer and spoke with quiet urgency.
“Sheriff, you look like a nice man, and I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s something I don’t ever talk about, and I would thank you never to mention it here again, because there is nothing good that happens to people who make loose talk about those people.”
She stepped back, forced a smile, and walked through a doorway to where the cooking was done.
Supper was most clearly over. Kane walked around the street a while to show the town he was as alert as any town could want its sheriff to be, then once the sun was tucked away behind the jagged edge of the far-distant mountains to the west, he went to the stable. He needed a few minutes away from people.
Tecumseh was alone. He saddled the stallion and rode up to the flat-topped hill where he had sat on the day he rode into Rakeheart.
He could see the trail east toward where the Company Riders were supposedly holed up. It was dim enough that he could not see the broken country that would be down that way, but men who lived the way he was told they did always found it. To the southeast was the railroad. There must be badlands between the rails and the flatlands where a gang could hide. He’d have to find them someday, if for no other reason than to get to them before they got to him. If they were everything he was told, that day would come sooner or later.
He looked north toward where the Wilkins ranch sat, far out of sight. Flat enough ground for a long ways if a man wanted to build a railroad or one of those macadamized roads they had back East. To the distant east and far-off west, the ground was broken into hills that would lead to real mountains. Then there was Rakeheart.
The town looked insubstantial on the plains, as though if it blew away in a north wind, the prairie would roll on and never know it had been there. Yet all those folks were willing to put everything they had into that purely because it was the place where they stopped for this reason or that and now invested their hopes and dreams in this little place. Funny thing, towns. Tecumseh’s head moved. He’d been speaking out loud to the horse again. Funny thing, people.
He lingered. Land to him had always been a place to stand on. Nothing more. Here, he had a sense of it as something vaster, deeper. Not his; not worth dying for; but bigger and wider and able to fill a man with something that felt like hope.
A gun fired from town. Enough dreaming. He waited. No answering shot. Most likely nothing, but it was time to go.
The tendrils of responsibility were closing in on him, and he admitted the reluctant truth to Tecumseh as—with a glance back at where a long streak of orange was starting to outline the horizon—they rode back to the world where men fumbled and broke all they held dear, bemoaned the loss, and rose the next day to do it again.
Kane was not overly fond of thinking. He’d survived by instinct, reacting to what took place around him. Plans were like fog—they never lasted. But as he walked up and down the streets of Rakeheart upon his return, he knew he needed to map out a strategy that would deal with the two murders he now had to solve.
The town leaders were like gamblers who always kept their hole card hid. Noonan was out for himself. Most of the people of Rakeheart were more focused on survival than anything else. And Rachel? That was a lake of a depth he could not measure. Whatever went on behind her eyes stayed there.
The Company Riders seemed to be the link connecting everything. Maybe when the moon was no longer bright enough to light up the night, it would be time to pay a call and see what there was to know. A little spying was good for a man—especially one who wanted to live.
“Sheriff!” The running barefoot boy burst through the door of the Last Chance, where Kane was having his first coffee of the day. “You got to come quick! It’s my ma and pa. He’s gonna kill her.”
Kane took one huge gulp, picked up his hat, and followed.
The boy ran toward one of the small shacks on the edge of the town. Kane could hear the sounds of the fight. Fight? Mostly a man yelling and a woman screaming.
“Stay here,” he told the boy, a thin blond kid of about ten, dressed in a pair of thin, home-made pants and a shirt he’d grow into someday.
The door was slightly ajar. The woman was at one end of the room, cowering behind a rough-hewn table that was on its side. He pushed the door wide.
A wild-haired man’s raving condemnation of the woman was checked by Kane’s presence.
“What do you want?” he screamed. The shack stunk of liquor; the man was flushed with his hair askew and a day or three’s growth of whiskers on his face.
“Sheriff. Got a complaint that someone was disturbing the peace,” Kane said, trying to keep his voice flat. “Got to come with me and explain this. Don’t mean to interrupt, but I got to do my job.”
“She call you?” he said throwing some earthenware object that shattered against the far wall of the shack.
“Nope. I heard you a mile away, and it sounded like a mule in pain,” said Kane, swiftly losing patience as the woman whimpered.
“She poured out my liquor!”
“Guess she missed some from the looks of you,” remarked Kane. “Sorry. No time to talk. Time to go.”
The man was not planning to comply with any suggestion. “She burned my food.”
“Well, friend, I burn mine all the time, and you don’t see me throwing things at me, now, do you?”
The drunken man was trying to comprehend that remark when Kane stepped fully into the house.
The man reached down and grabbed the shotgun that had been propped against the wall. “You’re her man friend, ain’t you? You sneak in when I’m not around. One more step and I’ll blow you both to pieces.”
“There are days when that might be a relief, friend, but for now I got work to do. Put it down and come along. I’ll find you a nice place to sleep, and when you wake up and your head stops hurtin’, we can talk about it.”
“William . . .”
The woman’s head briefly poked above the table. Kane had time to see the black puffy bruise on one side of her face before the fool fired.
As the pellets of bird shot rattled off the wall around the hole made by the bulk of the shot, Kane moved swiftly and mercilessly, pulling his gun and raking its barrel across the side of the man’s head as he lashed out viciously before the second blast erupted. The man looked more surprised than anything else until the second blow sent him staggering.
Kane knocked the weapon to the dirt floor and waited. Hate to beat up a man with his boy watching, Kane thought.
The man, who topped Kane by three inches and twenty pounds, was not done fighting. He shouted something incoherent as he lurched at Kane before one final blow from the heavy butt of Kane’s revolver sent him to the floor.
“Pa!” The boy was at his father’s side.
Kane went to the woman, gun still in hand. “Ma’am?”
The table had scars from the shotgun blast. The woman had two fingers hit by shot, but the shot only left small bruises. Her face was another matter. The blackened marks around her left eye were matched by red ones around her left cheek, which were swelling rapidly. Kane called the boy.
“You pa’s gonna hurt, but he ain’t dead,” he explained in between gasps. “Had to hit him hard quick to get this over before he got real hurt.” Turning back to the woman, who had told him her name was Mae, he asked, “There anything close to a doctor here?”
“Mr. Pentle, the barber.”
“Get him,” he told the boy. “Tell him to find ice. Saloon might have it. Hurry.”
The boy was gone in a second.
Kane walked to where a knot of people had gathered.
“Nothin’ to see folks. Time to move on and let these folks get on with their lives. Bet everybody has somethin’ to do.”
“What happened, Sheriff?”
“Somebody’s life went off half-cocked. Now let’s give the folks some room here. Move along!”
Mae was still sitting where he had left her in the wreckage of her life.
“This been happening a lot, ma’am?”
She shook her head. “Bill was supposed to get a job with Frank Tully hauling freight. Frank gave it to his cousin or brother-in-law or something last week, and Bill’s been drinking ever since. He’s never . . . Donald’s ten, Sheriff, and Bill never did this before. He’s a good man. Don’t lock him up.”
Kane considered the size of the man he would have to drag out. He’d need help. He’d need handcuffs he did not have and a jail cell that didn’t exist. Maybe instead of trying to lock up the man, the woman and the boy could find a place to stay, although sendin’ a woman away for not doing anything wrong sounded wrong.
“Got kin?”
“In Kansas. We have been on our own for years.”
Kane thought. Nothing lower than a man taking life out on someone who couldn’t hit back. As he looked at Mae, something looked familiar. He had never seen her before, but there was something about the appearance of her face. An inner voice was screaming at him, but he could not make out what it was saying. Later. Later.
“Tell you what, Mae. When Bill wakes up, he and I are gonna have a talk. Part of that talk is that he’s gonna see a lot of me the next few days. I see your face isn’t healing, he is gonna learn about things I don’t tolerate and reasons I think a man can be shot right down. If he’s a good man, nothin’ more gets said, and life goes on its own way. If you don’t think you are going to be safe, then I will find a place to lock him up.”
She nodded as Donald and Jim Pentle came in. Pentle made clucking noises as he tended to her face, having been told clearly by Kane that whatever was wrong with Bill Cartwright was the man’s problem.
Kane walked outside with the boy.
“Hard when stuff like this happens,” he told him. The boy was silent. “Good folks sometimes do bad things. Stupid things. Things to people they love because the world treated ’em so bad, and they feel so alone, and there is no one else there but the folks that love ’em. Understand?”
The boy nodded.
“Didn’t want to hurt your dad. Not gonna let your dad hurt your mom. He comes around, he understands he done wrong, he never hurts her again, I got no problem with him. But, son, if you ever see him hurt her, you got to tell me, because in some people it’s a sickness, a twisted thing that nobody knows is there until it pops up, and it’s not ever gonna get better. Hope that’s not what happened with your pa. But if it is, you got to protect your ma. Nobody else gonna do it.” The boy nodded again.
Kane stuck out a hand, wondering what was really going on inside. Settler kids had to grow up fast, like it or not. The boy took it.
“Now you sit with your ma when we go back in. I got to talk to your pa, and he’s gonna feel like a fool if he’s any good at all, so it’s best if you aren’t right there.”
The man who had been so full of rage a short time ago was now deflated as he sagged against the wall of his shack. He eyed Kane, not quite sober, and not quite recovered from some hard blows to the head, but close enough.
“Done bein’ stupid?” Kane began. The man colored deep red.
“Won’t make this long. I could take you and find a chain to put you some place where you won’t hurt anyone. Your wife don’t want that. She’s the only reason you don’t get chained up or locked up or shot right down dead. Hear this: I see a mark on your son or your woman, I will shoot you dead that minute.” He held up his hands as the man began to speak. “Don’t make a difference it was the only time or the hunnerth time. It’s the last time. One more thing. You find work tomorrow. I don’t see you going to every last store, every last place, I’ll shoot you dead tomorrow night. Man doesn’t hit women when it goes bad. Not her fault. Man acts like a man.”
Cartwright nodded.
“Today, you patch that wall. You patch your family. I will be walking by later to see that you did.”
He turned and left.
Mae Cartwright was waiting outside.
“Gonna stop later, make sure you are well, ma’am,” Kane said, lifting his hat and speaking softly so his words did not carry. “Won’t make a big noise about it, and, if everything seems fine, I will keep walking so them nosy neighbors don’t get no more entertainment than what’s good for them, but I’m gonna do it.”
“Thank you, Sheriff. For coming. For not arresting Bill.”
“Hope I don’t regret it, Mae. Take care of that boy. Kids don’t say much when life goes south on a family, but they feel it deeper than they let on.”
He kept walking. When folks’ lives became a mess and someone saw it, the best thing to do was give them space to fix it, if they could.
On his way back to the stable, he ducked into Conroy’s store to ask Conroy if Cartwright was always drunk.
“Good man,” said Conroy. “Hard luck lately. He a problem, Sheriff?”
“Nothin’ a job won’t cure.”
“If he comes by, I think I can find something. Hauling stock is getting too much for me anyhow.”
Kane nodded and left. He supposed he had done his job.
As he walked, he was trying to reassemble a thought that shattered like a dropped plate while he was watching the Cartwrights ruin their lives. Gone. It would come back. He hoped.
For a moment he had a stray thought of Rachel Wilkins, but there was no reason to ride out there. Maybe one would come.
But not yet.