I didn’t see Tom Willocks ever come out of that cabin.
Boon I didn’t see until dawn. I slept out under the stars. I guessed she’d slept in the cabin, with Franklin Merrick, if she slept at all. I was eating peaches out of a can and wishing hard for some coffee when she came out and said, “We’re going west.”
“West Texas?” I said.
“More west than that,” she said.
She crammed her hat down on her head with the little red feather bouncing in the breeze and she stepped up into the palomino’s saddle. Franklin appeared in the doorway, watching her. She touched the brim of her hat in his general direction as she reared the horse around. Franklin nodded.
I tossed the can into the grass and hurried to my mount.
“What about Willocks?” I said, jabbing the beast to catch up with Boon.
“He talked some.”
“What’d he say?”
She didn’t answer for a while. I turned in the saddle to look back at the cabin. The door was already shut, Franklin’s breakfast cookfire putting smoke up the chimney. A short while later, we rode down into an arroyo and I couldn’t see the cabin anymore. We followed the arroyo up into some hill country a ways where we crossed over to a trail that wasn’t much more than some muddy wagon ruts. I hadn’t really bothered to check my mount’s shoes when we bought her, and I was hoping to Christ the mud didn’t suck them right off her hooves.
“California is what he said,” Boon said, some time after I’d asked her about it.
“San Francisco?” I said.
“Thereabouts.”
“Where you’re from.”
“I’m from Siam.”
“Where you grew up, then.”
“After Connecticut,” she said.
“Right back to where you started out,” I said. “One big damn circle.”
“I wasn’t really following her trail before. I was after him.”
“Your pa.”
Boon nodded.
“You think he’s still somewhere in Texas?”
Boon shrugged.
“Willocks dead?”
Boon shook her head. “Not when I left him he wasn’t.”
“Your friend going to kill him?”
“Not my business,” she said. “Franklin sure don’t cotton to lawmen, though.”
“I gathered that,” I said. “Can’t say as I blame him. California, then.”
“California,” Boon said.
She was holding the dead cowboy’s pocket watch in one hand and staring hard, straight ahead.