SOMETHING FLASHED in Gordon’s eyes, like a shaft of sun striking ice. Not fear. Anger, yes, but also some kind of approbation. Could that be?
“Here’s another truth for you,” he said. “I’m God. On the Splendid Sky, any man who forgets that is in a world of hurt.”
Blue had a sudden remembrance of his little-boy daydreams about meeting his father. None of them went anything like this.
Gordon turned his back on Blue and rode away. Naturally. So he’d have the last word.
Blue watched him go while the dust-devil of turmoil in his gut grew into a tornado.
He turned his own horse away from the sight and looked to see if he could tell which way Shane had taken the colt. The bay would make a good horse if he didn’t get away with too much. But if he had very much time to run over Shane and take advantage of him, he’d be ruined.
Blue tried, but he couldn’t turn his thoughts.
How did Gordon know he’d been in prison? Of course, that could be a guess. Micah had told him where he picked Blue up, probably. And they had both rightly assumed that a man on foot not a half mile down the road from the gates—a man who, when offered a job, had no other place to go—had just been released.
That would only be logical thinking.
It didn’t mean that Gordon knew who Blue was.
What had that been in Gordon’s eyes?
Surely not approval. But for a split second that’s what he’d seen.
Blue didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to slam his mind shut and think about something else. Because…he had to admit that he wanted it to be.
That shocked him. How could he care what Gordon thought of him?
It was a horrible knowledge. The worst feeling in the world—worse, even, than regret. Which, come to think of it, was nothing but helplessness of the past.
The helpless little boy still lived in him. The little boy who’d wanted a daddy more than anything else in the world. This weird feeling was nothing but the natural desire of any child to please a parent.
He dismissed the thought and tried to concentrate on the beauty around him but the encounter with Gordon filled his mind. Gordon Campbell didn’t deserve to smell this fresh grass scent on the wind or see the mountains white-topped against the sky.
Blue had to get control again. He had to find Shane.
He clucked to the paint and headed toward the hills that rose along the edge of the road west of Micah’s pastures. To get completely out of sight this fast, the kid must’ve headed for the trees. He’d probably let the bay scrape him off on a low-hanging limb somewhere and the colt would try to do that to every rider from now on.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about what Gordon had said to him. Really, it was stupid of him to be surprised.
If he’d thought about it, he would’ve realized that Micah had assumed all along that he was just out of prison because Micah had asked him no questions at all. Of course, Micah was one of the old-timers who considered it rude and dangerous to ask a man about his past, but still, the natural thing would’ve been to have asked him if he needed to go pick up some clothes or anything when Blue accepted the job and they headed out to the ranch.
Micah must’ve known. That’s why he’d made that remark about Blue’s conscience this morning.
So, if Micah and Gordon knew Blue was just out of the pen, did they know what he’d been in for? Did they know who he was?
He doubted that. Gordon would’ve had to be the one to look into it and Blue wasn’t that important in his life. Yet.
Wake up, Bowman. Remember every human and every horse is an unpredictable individual. Don’t take anything for a fact until you know that for sure.
He’d keep that in mind, but he was pretty sure that on the Splendid Sky he was nothing but an ex-convict horse wrangler.
Blue turned in the saddle and looked down along the bountiful sweep of the river valley, warming in the sunlight. That valley was like a little heaven in itself.
And beyond it, the mountains. Medicine mountains.
To look at them every day of his life would heal a man’s soul.
If he’d grown up here looking at these mountains, he wouldn’t be carrying all this anguish in his heart.
Blindly, Blue rode past the round pen and up along the fence line of the pasture. How much time had passed since the kid and the bay had been gone? Not long. It couldn’t have been very long but it seemed forever.
Fresh hoofprints in the dust showed where Shane rode up the side of the hill. He saw them but he couldn’t quite think about them.
He hadn’t heard a thing since he’d been here about Gordon’s son. Where was he? Rose had said he had a son, which was the main reason he wouldn’t divorce his wife and marry her.
Blue headed the paint toward the hoofprints. One more hard pitch from the bay, and that little pissant would be on the ground, maybe with his head knocked against a tree or a rock.
Serve him right for going against everything Blue told him. It might knock some sense into him.
Lawrence ought to lock him up down at the Center and make him scrub pots and pans in the kitchen. Anything more than that, Shane would mess up.
Now, that’d be a skill he could use in prison. Except that inside, he wouldn’t last a day.
Yes, if Shane didn’t watch out, some day soon he’d be trading good old, affable, educated, reasonable Lawrence for ugly Stud Dedmon, who’d slam him up against a cell wall just to make himself happy. And he’d be the screaming little girlfriend instead of dragging poor Lisa around at gunpoint.
At fifteen, fatherless and scratching to ride the bad broncs to prove his manhood, Blue had been just as ignorant as Shane but at least he’d grown up pretty rough and he’d been twenty-three when he went to prison. He’d been big and strong and tough enough to protect himself instead of being a wasted wimp like Shane.
But he did have to hand the kid one thing. He had stood up to Gordon as best he could. He never had let the spirit-killing words cut his legs out from under him. There was still a shred of self-respect somewhere down in that skinny frame of his.
And it wasn’t just that one time Gordon had been slashing at Shane, either, since he’d made himself the only visitor allowed all week down at the jail—and that after the public mortification he’d laid on him right before he went in. But in spite of that kind of a wearing down, today Shane hadn’t looked away from the arrogant old bastard once.
Behind Blue, Micah’s truck roared into the yard. Blue turned back and trotted to meet it. The horse wasn’t too happy to go toward that noise, but he did.
“Where’re you headed?” Micah yelled, climbing out and settling his hat again once he was on the ground.
Blue rode up to him.
“Looking for my good bay colt,” he said. “That damn Shane’s trying to ruin one of the best horses we’ve got.”
Micah squinted past him.
“What the hell is Shane doin’ on the bay colt?”
“Proving he doesn’t have to do what we tell him,” Blue said.
Micah squinted past Blue. “Looky yonder,” he said.
Sure enough. Shane was coming downhill out of the pine trees, afoot. He was limping and he was dusted up some, but he was walking.
“He’s all right,” Blue said, “and that colt had goddamn well better be just fine, too.”
“I’m takin’ him back to Lawrence right now,” Micah said. “We cain’t have him loose on the place. The boy ain’t strong enough yit in his mind to be foolin’ with horses.”
He pushed his hat to the back again. “Matter of fact, I’m beginnin’ to think his mind may never come back to him.”
Blue thought about Toby Clark hollering and yelling through the night, losing his mind from being locked up so many years. He wasn’t the only one. And for some of them, it didn’t take years, either. Micah didn’t know any more than Shane did about how easy life was on the Splendid Sky.
“The kid did do one thing right today,” Blue said. “He looked Gordon in the eye all the time he was putting him down.”
“Gordon? What’s he got to do with it?”
“He dropped by to give Shane a little advice about riding a bucking horse,” Blue said. “But he wasn’t real tactful about it.”
“Well, then,” Micah said happily. “No wonder the kid went haywire. We cain’t expect Shane to…”
“Shane was already mounted and the horse was pitching when Gordon rode up,” Blue said. “The little hardhead saddled and got horseback as soon as I let him out of my sight.”
Micah shook his head mournfully. “That’s twicet today he disobeyed a di-rect order about the horses,” he said. “He ain’t ready to work up here…”
“No,” Blue said.
“…yet,” Micah said.
Blue looked down at Micah and waited until he looked up at him again.
“I need to go find that colt.”
Shane was stumbling, clearly exhausted. It would take him a little while to make it into the yard. Micah would be fine alone with him.
“Serve Shane right if we made him go find him,” Micah said. “Except that it’d be teetotally im-possible for him to git within spittin’ distance. He’d spook the colt clear into Canady.”
“Hell, no,” Blue shot back. “I won’t put the colt through that. Besides, I’m done trying to clean up somebody else’s mistakes raising their kids. Shane’s Andie Lee’s deal. I’m out of it.”
Don’t know why I ever got in it. Looks like I’d have learned to say no, since trying to clean up after Gordon’s fatherly neglect got me sent to prison.
Micah thought about it for a minute, then shook his head sorrowfully. “Cain’t fault you there,” he said. “Go on and git the colt. I don’t need no help to haul that bony little carcass back where we got it—but man, I jist hate havin’ to tell Andie Lee and ruin her dream.”
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, the steady peal of a bell wove itself into Blue’s dream. It turned into the clanging of cell doors and took him from dreaming he was in the round pen with the bay to believing in his bones he was back inside.
He sat bolt upright in a light sweat, eyes wide open. The sturdy old room in Micah’s house surrounded him.
“Git yer boots and britches on!” Micah yelled. “Somethin’s happened. Let’s go!”
In no time they were in the truck, bouncing out into the road, straining their eyes down toward headquarters where the bell was still ringing. Daylight filtered into the valley but the sun wasn’t up over the mountains yet. Lights were coming on all over the ranch, looking paler than they would have if the dark still ruled.
“The bell’s at the big house,” Micah said, grumbling. “Looks like Andie Lee coulda took time to call and tell us what’s goin’ on. See any smoke?”
“No,” Blue said, buttoning his shirt against the cold air on his bare skin. He was scanning the valley as best he could. “But with the mist in the low places, it’s not easy to tell.”
They were some of the first to get to the main house. Somebody was running on foot from a house across the road as they drove into the yard, and another man was heading there horseback from the big arena.
Everybody was looking at Andie Lee and Gordon. They were arguing toe-to-toe beneath the bell on its wrought-iron frame with the big SS on top that stood in the west end of the yard. Micah pulled up onto the grass and parked not far from it.
Andie Lee was dimly aware that the Splendid Sky hands were gathering but she couldn’t see them for Gordon, looming in her face, yelling at her as if she were deaf. He jerked the bell rope from her hands so fast it burned her palms.
“What the hell were you thinking? Andie Lee, goddammit, you’ve alarmed the whole ranch.”
She yelled right back at him.
“This is the emergency bell, Gordon. That’s its purpose.”
“We don’t have an emergency here.”
Her heart lurched. He was going to be really difficult. Shane had hurt Gordon’s ego, and that was going to be hard to face.
“Yes, we do,” she said, as calmly as she could. “We need to find them fast. Check all the trails, just in case Shane’s not headed for the Lininger. Look where there aren’t any trails. That horse could kill him, Gordon.”
“Too bad. He asked for it.”
“You could probably see him if you’d go up…”
“No. I’ll not take the Piper up to look for him. It’s not cheap to put a plane in the air. Do you know much it costs?”
Gordon was so angry he couldn’t even say more than a simple sentence without sucking in a fresh breath. He was even more furious than he looked.
“You fly around all the time spying to see if your men are working, looking for fence down, looking for cattle out, looking for elk and moose and wolves and coyotes and who knows what all else? My son isn’t as important as any of that?”
“I’ve spent a God’s plenty on your son. And it’s all been money down a rat hole. This is how he repays me and I’m mad as hell.”
“I’m embarrassed,” she said. “I’m mortified that Shane has invaded your house and stolen your gun. But, Gordon, we have to put all that aside until we find him.”
He gave her a glare of pure disgust and turned away to stride to the steps where he could be on a higher plane than the hired hands coming into his yard to wait for his orders.
When Gordon stomped off, Micah got out and limped toward Andie Lee. Blue went with him. Men on four-wheelers, in trucks, on horseback were gathering, all fully dressed and ready to roll. They’d obviously been up way before daylight, already starting their work. Gordon got his money’s worth and more than twelve hours a day out of them, that was for sure.
Blue had never been this close to the big house. It sat there, part of the earth, rising behind Gordon solid as a mountain, welcoming all comers with a porch lined with benches and chairs, potted plants blooming among them as if this were the most hospitable home on earth.
The difference between it and the rented houses Rose and her children had lived in was the difference between heaven and earth.
Micah took Andie Lee by the shoulders.
“What’s the matter, honey? What’s going on?”
“Shane,” Andie Lee snapped, her husky voice cooking with anger. “What else? He ran off and took the roan colt with him to prove to Gordon he could ride him.”
Blue stepped up, staring at her in disbelief.
“My roan colt?”
She fixed him with her direct gray eyes. “That’s the only one I know of on the place,” she said tartly.
Blue’s heart dropped. The roan colt. He had just started to whinny to him, calling to a friend, whenever he caught a glimpse of Blue.
“I’d like to get my hands on that little cokehead,” he said, from a jaw nearly too tight to move. “That’s a damn fine horse. He better not get him hurt.”
Andie Lee paled and her eyes widened as if he’d struck her. Watching her face, Blue realized it was because she couldn’t come back with, “and that’s a damn fine boy.”
And because Blue should be putting Shane’s safety ahead of the roan’s.
“The horse has good sense,” he said.
Micah interrupted. “Used up as the kid was yesterday, he must’ve got rested in a mighty hurry. Or maybe he got some of them uppers pills. He could’ve had ’em hid.”
“Yes,” Andie Lee said. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that turned out to be exactly what he did.”
Her eyes were bright with the anger that flushed a pink streak across her cheekbones. She was still beautiful. Even more so.
“I’m going to wring his ungrateful little neck, Micah,” she said. “I promise you. And Blue, I’m sorry about your horse. I’m mortified.”
“Where’d he go?” Blue asked. “Are you sure he even caught the colt?”
Her hot gaze flashed back and forth between him and Micah. “Was the horse there this morning?”
“Well, we didn’t hardly stop to count heads in the pens,” Micah drawled. “Not with you ringing the clapper outta this bell.”
Her hair was pulled up in a high ponytail that stretched the skin over her cheekbones and sent loose strands falling across her face. She was pacing around, constantly in motion, wearing tight leggings and a huge sweatshirt that hung off her slim frame and a long shirttail sticking out from under that.
Maybe that was her pajamas. They looked like they’d been slept in.
Even dressed like that, she still looked like the rich rancher’s daughter. One who wasn’t getting her way right then but intended to have it soon.
She stepped closer to talk to Blue and Micah, keeping her voice low just as if the rest of the men didn’t need to know why they’d been called out at the crack of dawn. The scent of her hair was still flowers but her skin smelled like sleep. Warm and cozy. Blue took an involuntary breath that pulled the smell to him again.
“Shane came in here last night and took Gordon’s daddy’s rifle down off the fireplace and some supplies out of the kitchen and left a note on the refrigerator that said he was going to get the roan. He vowed to prove Gordon wrong that he couldn’t ride that horse.”
Micah laughed. “I wisht I’d been a little mouse,” he said. “I bet seein’ that note put a double kink in ol’ Gordon’s tail.”
“He found it while I was out here ringing the bell,” she said. “I don’t know which made him more furious.”
“How come? This here’s an emergency,” Micah said.
Before she could answer, Gordon’s voice boomed across the yard.
“I’ll make this fast, men, so you can get on to work,” he shouted, and that put an end to all other conversation.
Gordon looked around to make sure of that, though.
“Andie Lee’s Shane has run off with the roan colt and some firearms and food,” he said. “Keep an eye out for them today as you go about your business.”
He waited for that to sink in.
“And do not blab about this on the radios and walkie-talkies.”
Somebody called, “What about notifying the other divisions?”
“I doubt he’ll get as far as any other division,” Gordon said, “considering the disposition of that colt. Shane’s no horseman. The fewer people who know, the better. This time we’re having no police, no highway patrol, no outsiders of any kind. Word of this is not to leave the ranch. Running your mouth when you oughtta keep it shut could mean your job.”
“So we’re getting up our own search parties, then, Mr. Campbell?”
The question came from one of the young men sitting on a four-wheeler, chomping at the bit to fire it up and run.
“No, Crockett. This may finally be the lesson that’ll straighten that boy out,” Gordon said. “I’m gonna let him take the consequences of his actions today.”
“What?”
Andie Lee turned on him like a mother bear. She ran to the steps and up them in a flash of long legs. She had on some kind of clog shoes, sort of cutoff boots, and they slammed on the wooden steps like blows from a hammer.
“What do you mean? It’s bad enough that you won’t take the airplane up. What are you thinking?”
He barely glanced at her as he said to the crowd, “Nothing else we’ve tried has made a bit of difference in Shane’s behavior. If nobody rescues him, he’ll learn enough today that he’ll be a different boy by dark tonight,” Gordon said.
“If that horse hurts him, he could be dead by dark,” she said.
Gordon said, “Just remember—we’re not calling in the authorities this time.”
That should be enough to satisfy you was the message in the look he gave her then.
She turned to look at the men who had come here for orders.
“I think Shane is headed up to the Lininger cabin where Jason used to take the kids for outings,” she said. “It’s the only trail on the ranch he knows.”
“Any of you working between here and there today, keep your eyes peeled,” Gordon commanded.
He was furious. Blue could see and hear that beneath the surface. The boy had got Gordon’s goat—he’d made him the subject of talk and the butt of many a joke that’d be told today on the ranch. A kid stealing his gun from him while Gordon was asleep in the house. That was an exploit bound to enter the legends of any ranch, much less one where the owner was not generally well-liked.
Yep. That was the real reason Gordon was so determined to try to keep the story on the ranch. His own ego.
Blue watched Micah, knowing that he didn’t care how mad Gordon was.
“There’s a horse been stolen,” the old man said loudly. “That right there used to be a big deal around here. It’s worth a couple of search parties.”
Everybody turned to look at him.
“It’s not my horse,” Gordon said.
“It’s a dangerous horse with a sick boy,” Micah said. “Time was, that would’ve meant somethin’, too.”
“Time was that stealing a horse meant a man went to jail or to his own hanging,” Gordon snapped. “But this is a special case.”
He looked as if he thought it was generous of him not to hang Shane.
“I won’t throw good money after bad,” he said. “I’ve already invested a great deal in that boy with no return. I won’t pay wages for my men to hunt for him. This ranch won’t run itself.”
“Then I’ll go alone!” Andie Lee said. “I don’t need any help.”
But, of course, she did. Blue knew it and so did every other man there. An out-of-control kid with a gun and a horse with the rep of a budding outlaw made a combination that was way too much for any one person to corral.
A tenser silence fell over the yard for one short minute as the men fought their gallant impulses to volunteer to help a woman in distress. It deepened as they then thought about the value of their jobs, instead.
“I’ll go with you, honey,” Micah said.
He started toward her.
“Well, then,” Gordon said quickly. “That’s settled. Let’s get to work, men!”
The crowd started dispersing before the words were out of his mouth. Gordon’s men didn’t let any grass grow under their feet.
Blue turned and walked away.
This was one time he actually agreed with Gordon, much as he hated to admit it. Letting Shane take his lumps was the only way to get it through the kid’s head that horses and the land were bigger than any person and neither one could be fooled with lightly.
No telling what condition the roan would be in when he found him.
That colt was going to make the best horse ever to cross Blue’s path. Bar none. When he was old—if he lived to be old—the roan would be the horse he always held as special—as the best one in his life. He’d known that by instinct when he first saw him and he had a feeling the roan had felt it, too. Horses knew a lot more than most people thought.
He’d like to grab that worthless, trouble-making kid by the scruff of the neck right now and shake him until his teeth rattled. Roanie had come so far. If Shane got him badly hurt or killed, that boy had better be hunting a hole.
Drug addiction had taken everyone he loved, and now it had his horse. It was a hell of a thing. Why was it that only marijuana was called “weed”? All drugs should be called that because they were everywhere, sucking the good out of the soil.
Out of the people. People who turned and ran to hide inside a fake-happy, poison haze every time they had a little problem.
He probably should take one of Micah’s guns with him in case the roan was hopelessly down. The thought made his gut go tight. He’d never let him suffer and never leave him there alive. Best to go prepared.
If there was trouble, the sooner he found it, the sooner it’d be behind him.
Blue turned on his heel and kept walking, feeling his way with his feet while he held out his thumb to the truck coming up the hill from headquarters driven by one of Gordon’s good men, headed for work up in the hills. It slowed.
“Ride up to Micah’s?” he called.
“Hop on.”
Two men sat on the back of the flat bed. Blue jumped up to join them as the truck kept moving at a crawl.
“Tell me how to get to the Lininger place?” he said.
Both of them told him, one giving one detail, the other adding the next. They were young kids, probably hired for the summer. He wondered how they knew so much about it.
“Y’all been working up there?”
“Moving cattle,” one of them said. “Summer pasture’s on past that cabin.”
“Gonna help the old man and the lady hunt the kid?” the other one asked.
“No,” Blue said. “It’s my horse.”
They nodded and watched him, trying not to let him see the curious glances they threw at him, at his braid hanging out from under his hat and his face beneath the brim.
“It’s a red roan? Ain’t that what Mr. Campbell said?”
“Yeah. Two year old. Don’t try to catch him, though. If you see him, just drive him downhill towards home.”
The word stayed on his lips after the sound of it died away. It felt like a foreign language on his tongue. He hadn’t used that word in a long, long time.
He didn’t know why he’d said it.
No, he wasn’t going to hunt for that miserable addict of a kid any more than Gordon was. But be damned if he’d let the druggie little devil take the roan colt off into the mountains and ruin him.
What he was going after was his horse.