CHAPTER SEVEN

Caleb Wheeler waved me over to the sorting pen as soon as I stepped out of the truck. He was horseback and I couldn’t help but notice the well-worn stock of a lever-action carbine tucked inside a leather saddle scabbard that hung beside his leg.

“Problem?” I asked.

“Could be,” he said. His eyes moved past me and squinted into the sun. “Looks like Dub Naylor’s gone missing. Your dog showed up alone about half an hour ago. He was drifting about a dozen heifers in all by himself.”

Jordan Powell and Samuel Griffin knelt in the loose dirt on the other side of the rail fence, turning their faces away from the ball of dust kicked up by the calf they had just branded and released. He bawled and kicked the air before he found his footing and ran through the chute into the paddock with the others.

“I’d wager Naylor’s afoot,” Powell shouted. “’Cause his horse committed suicide.”

“I’ll go,” I said to Wheeler. “I could use some fresh air anyway.”

Griffin dusted off his chaps, hopped the top rail and wandered in our direction.

“If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Wheeler,” Griffin said. “I’ll go along with Mr. Dawson just in case he needs a hand.”

Caleb looked from Griffin’s face to mine. Whatever he was thinking, he was keeping it to himself.

“It might be wise to have another man along if you can spare him,” I told Wheeler.

He glanced at his wristwatch and craned his neck to have a look at whatever progress was being made by the rest of the crew.

“I can set with that,” he said and stepped out of the saddle. “You better sparkle up quick, though. You only got another three or four hours of daylight.”

The first hour went by in a silence defined at first by small talk punctuated by long, companionable silences. I spoke of the ranch’s long history, and Griffin told me about his football career and his pursuit of a college degree in husbandry.

“I heard one of the men call you ‘Captain,’” he said as we topped a rise that looked out over the rolling hills to the north.

“Only Powell calls me that,” I said. “Don’t you start doing it.”

He nodded and took off the sunglasses he had been wearing and slipped them into the breast pocket of the denim jacket he wore.

“You mind if I ask why he does that?”

I scanned his face for a moment and recognized no motive or artifice, so I answered him.

“Force of habit,” I said. “I was in the army once. So was Powell.”

We had shared the experience fighting wars where nobody won but the losers numbered beyond counting.

“I was in the Crotch myself.” His eyes skimmed the folds of the landscape where rock-strewn ravines were falling into shadow and appeared to lose himself for a moment. “Sorry, sir, I mean the marine corps.”

“No need to apologize. Some marines can be fine men too.”

He smiled at my tired jest and seemed to come back into himself.

“Vietnam?” I asked him.

“I volunteered. One tour was enough for me.”

“One tour of any war is more than enough for anybody.”

The windmill at the edge of the wide pasture we referred to as the North Camp was laboring slowly in a halting late afternoon breeze and the trees cast long shadows in the grass. I came down off my horse and pulled the lever on the pipe and released some fresh water into the trough to water our mounts.

There was no immediate sign of Dub Naylor, nor had we seen any on the way up the trail, and our companionable silence had given way to anxiety. We split up, and I rode the fence line while Griffin disappeared into the trees. A flight of geese flew high overhead and their shapes disappeared behind a distant stand of old growth timber.

I found Dub Naylor about half an hour later.

I was kneeling beside his prone body, half hidden by the bunchgrass that grew near a spring-fed pond at the far edge of the pasture, when I whistled for Griffin to join me. I checked for the pulse that I knew would not be there and studied the neat hole that had been punched through the center of Naylor’s throat. His eyes were open, wide with surprise, and I drew down the lids with the tips of my fingers.

“He’s cold,” I said. “This happened hours ago.”

“Looks like a high-velocity round,” Griffin said as he knelt down beside me. “Check out the size of that exit wound.”

I scanned the landscape in every direction, knowing full well that the shooter had long since disappeared.

“He was dragged here, but no telling from where.”

I watched Griffin use his thumb to trace the sign of the cross on Dub Naylor’s forehead, as I had seen it done by chaplains in the battlefield.

“I ain’t a priest,” he said softly. “But we all deserve something at the end.”

We stood and led the horses some distance away, careful to walk in a line to minimize any damage we’d make to the long grass, but we both knew it was futile. Any trail left behind by the shooter was long gone by the time we had arrived, but we hobbled the horses anyway and set out on foot in a perimeter pattern, in search of neither of us knew what.

“You see that?” I asked.

“Fence is busted down.”

Three heavy posts still attached to the strands of barbed wire that separated my ranch from the BLM range had been laid over in the brush. The bases felt spongy to the touch, decimated by wet rot.

“Looks like the cows pushed ’em over. They’re leaning that direction.”

“Let’s grab our horses and see if Dub had tried to track them over the other side.”

Fifteen minutes later we spotted his blue roan grazing the bottom of a dry creek bed, the reins of the bridle hanging limp and strung across the horn. It nickered when it caught the scent of our horses, and crow-hopped nervously as I approached on foot. I calmed him, caught hold of the reins and trailed him behind me while Sam Griffin and I rode in overlapping circles across the area. We maneuvered through thickets of timber and undergrowths of live oak runners, finding no sign of a struggle or anything else in the dry grass that had grown tall enough to brush the bottoms of our stirrups.

We worked our way back to my side of the fence, careful to avoid snags on the tangle of fallen wire and wood. The surface of the pond was still in the failing light, strung with bunchgrass along the edges and clotted with blooms of algae and moss. Swirling gray clouds of lacewings and gnats, and the sweet green odor of stagnating water floated in the air as we lifted Dub’s body and placed it gently across the saddle of his horse. I unfurled my rain slicker and covered him with it, and secured him with his own reata.

It was a different kind of silence that accompanied us down the hill, mournful and angry and not at all unlike the sensation I had long associated with the loss of a companion in battle. But this was murder, without purpose or explanation, and I carried the weight of Dub Naylor’s death where it rested: squarely on my shoulders.

We picked our way down the trail in full dark. Insects buzzed in the tree line and would go suddenly still as we passed.

“This isn’t on you, Mr. Dawson,” Griffin offered.

His voice had the muted quality of a man speaking more to himself than another. It seemed we hadn’t uttered a single word in quite some time.

“The hell it isn’t,” I said.

We topped the last hill of open pasture, and I climbed down to unhook the gate. I held it in place as Griffin rode past me, trailing the blue roan that carried Dub. He pulled up to a stop and waited for me while I looped the gate chain back into place.

I expected Griffin to move on ahead once I had remounted but he turned in his saddle instead.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he asked.

“Go ahead.”

“What is it like to own all of this?”

His question was one I had not been expecting. The ranch was one of the largest in this part of the state, in terms of deeded acreage, but I never truly thought of it as my own. It is not characterized by extravagant structures; the house Jesse and I lived in had not changed much in three generations. The barns and outbuildings had been constructed for service, not luxury, and it was the ranch and the cattle that always came first. I had been taught early and often that you sacrificed whatever you had to for the land, because God wasn’t making any more of it. You never used debt, so you owned what you owned, and legacy was something your great-great-grandchildren might talk about.

I looked into the night sky and found the thumbnail scratch of a waning crescent hovering low on the horizon, and shook my head.

“I truly have no idea,” I said.

He nodded, and I believe he understood what I meant.