The riders behind them were coming in a rush and, as Gwen had said, there was murderous intent in the way they carried their rifles and spurred their ponies on. Who were they?
Men from the town intent on tracking down the killer of Caleb Hornblower? That seemed a good guess but also an unlikely one. No one there would have known or cared about Hornblower who was down from the Vasquez country looking for Gwen, and no one had shown any interest in their leaving as they rode out of Drovers’ Springs. If the marshal there was the least bit observant, there was ample evidence that Hornblower had done his share of the shooting.
Could it be Austin Szabo? That was possible, Sage knew, but did Szabo have the necessary anger in him to ride this far chasing a runaway woman no matter that he had claimed Gwen as his own? There must be dozens more acquiescent women in the outlaw town of Barlow.
They hadn’t seen Szabo back in Drovers’ Springs, but that was where he would have made his play, it seemed to Sage. Szabo could have abducted Gwen there without even a fight or having to watch his back trail. Sage would not reverse course and ride back toward the Vasquez again pursuing them.
Sage had one other thought that was even less palatable: they were now nearer to Trinity than to Drovers’ Springs. These men could have come from that direction, circled and come up behind them. Suppose Beryl had let something slip, or been angry enough to shout out a threat of Sage’s wish to exact revenge on Brian Paxton. Suppose these men were a group sent out from Trinity to watch the trail for the returning brother of Marshal Paxton? If Brian did not mean to have it out face to face with Sage, the open country would be a good place to end it for good and all with him not even having to take a hand in things.
‘See any badges on them?’ Sage asked Gwen.
‘No I don’t—not at this distance,’ she answered. ‘They’re still closing ground very quickly. What are we going to do, Sage?’
‘Ride like hell,’ Sage answered, yanking his own Winchester from its scabbard, for that was all that he could think of doing as the riflemen closed on them.
He slapped spurs to his big gray, glancing at Gwen to make sure she was doing the same, and then they were riding wild across the rough country. Sage looked around as they drove ahead, looking for some familiar landmark. He had, after all, lived his entire life or that which he could remember, in and around Trinity, at times riding far and wide, but the terrain all seemed unfamiliar. Had the passing of the years erased all memory of the land?
The men behind them had still not opened up with their guns. They seemed content to chase Sage toward Trinity town to encounter Brian wearing his new marshal’s badge surrounded by a group of responsible citizens. There Sage’s accusations would fall on deaf ears—a madman carrying mad tales.
Then any gunplay would certainly bring about Sage’s death, whether under the guns of his brother and the townspeople or, if he were victorious, at the hands of the gentlemen of the jury. Sage’s anger seemed no longer strong enough to support the sort of reckless fury that urged him madly on his way. The town must be avoided for the time being.
There was time to plan his face-off with Brian Paxton more fully later.
Sage dipped his horse into a ravine, and watched as Gwen plunged her bay pony down the sandy bank to join him. His gray horse was now limping under him again after the rigors of the run and the effort of scrambling down to the creek floor. Could it make it up the opposite bank? Sage thought it might not have to. He looked at Gwen, who sat her weary bay, her eyes wide with fear and doubt, looking up at the ravine’s sandy opposite bluff.
‘Are we going up there?’ she asked.
‘No. I don’t think my horse can make it. There’s another way to do this, and we might lose those men altogether if we take it.’
‘What then?’ Gwen asked and it seemed she was close to frustrated, weary tears.
‘We’re riding south,’ Sage said grimly. ‘I’m going home.’
They followed the meandering creek bed southward through sparse willow brush. There was only a trickle of running water; the rain that had fallen must have been diverted in a different direction. That was for the best. The travel on a weary, injured pony was difficult enough without the rush of a creek. Sage paused on two different occasions after they had rounded a bend in the wash, listening, but there was no sound as of onrushing horses. The loudest sound in the wash just then was an unhappy mockingbird scolding them as they passed disturbing his peaceful sunny morning.
They rounded another bend in the sinuous stream bed, passed under the low limb of a close-growing sycamore tree and found the land ahead widened and became flatter grassland. A single white-faced steer stood alone on a distant hillock displaying only bovine indifference to the two approaching humans.
Sage again halted his horse. His face now had a different expression, almost dreamy, Gwen thought. She waited patiently for a minute or two and then asked, ‘What is it, Sage?’
‘Home—I’m home again,’ he told her.
To him that obviously meant a lot, but was it the healthy, natural pleasure of returning to home after long traveling, or the unbalanced pleasure of a half-crazed man nearing his desire: a killing ground?
‘I think I can just see the house,’ Gwen said, pointing in that direction.
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘A lovely setting,’ Gwen said, admiring the view, the rolling land, the far mountains.
‘Lovely setting for a murder,’ Sage muttered. He had obviously done very little thinking about the points she had raised earlier—the possibility that Beryl had something to do with things, playing one brother against the other. Maybe he just refused to consider that.
He had described Beryl in almost saintly terms, as being loyal, fine, above perfidy. It was obvious that he was still in love with Beryl or her memory. It was equally obvious, to Gwen, that there was a very good chance that Beryl had gently prodded him into becoming a murderer for her sake. It seemed Beryl did not care which brother won, which was killed, so long as she got what she wanted. There was no point in bringing any of this up with Sage Paxton. He had painted his own image of Beryl based on his own wishes and desires. It was a portrait he would not allow to be criticized. He needed it to endure in his hall of memory for his own sake. Sage continued to show a tendency to cling to hastily made decisions. No, she thought, looking at his face as he leaned forward intently studying the land, there was no point in trying to get him to reconsider the few facts he had assembled into his jigsaw of reality.
To Sage there was only one way that the pieces fit. There was only the good: Beryl, who had cut her ties with Sage when he had not returned rich from his wandering merchant days, and the bad: Brian, who had murdered his own parents, stolen his woman and now must die for his crimes.
It was a brutal landscape Sage Paxton had assembled in his mind.
‘Let’s ride on down,’ Sage said, having satisfied himself that there were no pursuing men behind them. On the next rise he paused again and commented, ‘I don’t see many cattle. Wonder if Brian has been doing some selling-off.’
‘There’s someone you could ask,’ Gwen said, lifting a finger to point out an approaching horseman.
Coming nearer to them, Sage squinted at the man on the chestnut horse, trying to make him out.
‘He doesn’t seem to be carrying menace,’ Gwen commented.
‘He’s not showing it at least,’ said Sage, who now had recognized the rider.
‘Do you know him?’ Gwen asked.
‘It’s Charlie Cable, Judge Warren Cable’s son.’
‘The man Brian hired as ranch foreman?’
‘The same. Charlie’s all right—just a little frosty around the edges. He spent his growing-up years where crime and criminals were a constant topic. It seems to have given him an untrusting view of his fellow man.’
Charlie Cable’s expression was dry as he drew up facing them. His eyes shifted from Sage to Gwen and back again without changing expression. His eyes were a lawman’s eyes, skeptical, alert for shadows of trouble. Gwen wondered if the judge’s son wasn’t cut out for that sort of work, more so than Brian Paxton, who, by all accounts, was a rancher to the core. But perhaps Charlie, tired of the talks of lawlessness he heard daily at home, shunned the very thought. Perhaps Judge Cable had wanted to avoid the appearance of favoritism. Perhaps Brian had simply shouldered his way into the job, giving Charlie Cable the ranch foremanship as a sop.
‘I don’t see many cattle grazing,’ Sage said directly.
‘Not up this way,’ the sharp-featured judge’s son agreed, tilting his hat back a little from his forehead. ‘We’ve been slowly gathering the longhorns. We’re keeping them separate these days. Brian has it in mind to cull them and bring on more shorthorns to replace them. He says the day of the longhorn is gone, and I have to agree with him.’
Gwen watched Sage’s face, his eyes. She could see no reaction there, either of approval or disapproval.
‘Is Brian down to town?’ Sage asked.
‘He was, the last I knew,’ Charlie answered, his expression clouding.
‘I guess I’ll stop by the house before riding in there,’ Sage said. Now Gwen could read his expression, and it was not a nice expression at all.
‘As you like. This is the Paxton place after all. I got to see if we still haven’t a few stray holdouts farther down along the creek,’ Cable said, tugging his hat down lower again. He was obviously anxious to be away from Sage Paxton, back to his daily routine. Before walking his chestnut horse away, Charlie glanced once more at Gwen and then said, ‘She’s there, Sage. Beryl is down at the house.’
Then touching two fingers to his hat brim in a gesture of farewell to Gwen Mackay, the ranch foreman started his horse away from them. Gwen looked to Sage for an indication of what they were going to do now, but his expression was a glaze—not just his eyes, but his entire face seemed to be glazed over as if it had been dipped in lacquer and left to harden.
After another minute, Gwen prodded, ‘Sage? What are we going to do?’
His answer was nearly a growl. ‘What did I say we were going to do! Let’s make our way down to the house.’
The front door to the house stood open, presumably to air it out. Gwen detected no scent of smoke as they crossed the front yard between four stately old black oak trees and approached it. She thought she could faintly smell lye soap and still more subtly the scent of bleach. Someone had been cleaning up, obviously.
Maybe she had been wrong about Beryl, who, it seemed, must be the one who had volunteered to clean up after the fire. But then, it was Beryl who probably assumed that the house would be hers someday not now far away. Perhaps she was just making ready for ownership—no matter which brother should prevail in their duel. Brian Paxton had already proposed to her, and Sage, still carrying images of her in his mind, could be easily convinced that he was the only man she had ever loved.
‘I wonder is she here,’ he said, as they approached the hitch rail and swung down from their ponies.
‘That’s what Charlie Cable said.’
‘No one’s stirring about. She might have finished for the day and gone away.’
‘Leaving the door open?’ Gwen answered. ‘You’re just afraid to meet her, Sage.’
Sage’s mouth tightened at Gwen’s taunt. ‘I hardly think that,’ Sage said, a little too loudly, and he stepped up on to the porch. ‘You’re a nuisance, Gwen, you know that?’
‘So I’ve been told,’ she replied.
Gwen had been measuring the house from the outside. Of white, sawn wood it had two stories and in front of it a porch supported by four round pillars. Hardly imposing, it was nevertheless quite substantial for this part of the country.
Sage had tramped into the living room and Gwen followed, holding her hat. Sage waved a hand around the comfortably furnished room, at the native stone fireplace. ‘Like it?’ he asked. There was a little evident pride in his voice. ‘It seems smaller than it did when I was a kid growing up here, but folks tell me that’s a general impression kids going home always have. Really it’s quite grand. I can still see my pa in shirtsleeves helping the carpenters with the rough framing, sawdust coating the entire house, Ma smiling as she tried to keep up with the sweeping.
‘Pa kept telling her that the men could saw faster than she could clean up after them, and Ma laughed, admitting it. Before we moved in here, you see, we had an extended log cabin a little nearer to town and Ma was sick of it. She had such pride in her new house being built that she never went back to the cabin after the day she stepped inside here. Just kept on sweeping, spending the nights here. Her and Pa—I don’t know where they slept; they hadn’t gotten the new bed from Santa Fe yet. We kids—Brian and me—stayed back in the cabin where everything was familiar until the job was done.’
Sage’s eyes remained reminiscent for long minutes. Well, after all, this was home to him and held a lot of memories, and no matter what he had said or hadn’t said, Gwen thought that he was fond of this house himself.
‘Sage!’ the voice from the top of the interior stairs exclaimed. It was a woman’s voice and Gwen looked that way to see the famous Beryl herself. Gwen watched her from a woman’s perspective while Sage simply rushed toward the foot of the stairs, whipping his hat from his head.
Beryl wore a pale-blue dress with a little lace around the neck and at the cuffs. She was a very pale blonde with beautiful skin, a full mouth and wide, medium-blue eyes, all of which Gwen took in no less than Sage, who had rushed halfway up the stairs to escort Beryl to the living room.
‘This is Beryl Courtney,’ Sage said, as if the short run up the stairs had left him breathless. He had his hat in his hands, standing beside Beryl like a bashful schoolboy. Gwen nodded.
‘Beryl, this is Gwen, my—’ He seemed to lose his voice suddenly. What was she?
‘Traveling companion,’ Gwen provided. Sage embraced the offered term.
‘My traveling companion. Gwen has come to Trinity to stay with her aunts.’ Beryl’s mouth which had tightened as she first saw Gwen now softened again. She was watching Sage with appraising eyes, but Gwen saw no love light shining there.
Beryl seated herself on the long leather couch, inviting Sage to sit beside her. She now adopted a lady of the manor expression, which she figured herself for. Beryl had done nothing, said nothing to antagonize Gwen, but Gwen found herself not liking and mistrusting the woman. She continued to stand.
‘I sure am happy to see you again,’ Sage was saying. ‘We should have a good long visit. Maybe after I get cleaned up I can take you out to dinner somewhere.’
‘Why go out?’ Beryl asked. Her smile seemed false to Gwen, but then she was already prejudiced against the beautiful blonde, and for no particular reason. ‘I can make supper right here. I have all the makings. Brian can come over as well and we can all have a nice long conversation.’
Sage started to say something, and Gwen could see the anger rising in him. Settling himself he answered, ‘All right, if it’s not too much trouble. We can just talk things out right here.’ Gwen glanced at his eyes, seeing in their depths that Sage wanted more than talk from his meeting with his brother. He seemed determined to ruin his own life, probably Beryl’s as well and end Brian Paxton’s. Surely Beryl Courtney must have had at least a notion of what Sage was up to, but she said nothing. Her smile was now a fixed expression.
This night might mean the end of all of her problems—one way or the other. Or was that only the way Gwen was reading her? But no matter how things worked out, tonight was set to be a savage one.
‘I want to see where it happened,’ Sage said, rising.
‘Have your look. You know the way.’ Beryl did not rise but sat, hands clasped, studying the floor. Gwen stood by while Sage, his face set, his eyes resolute, started down the hall toward where his father and mother had lived, presumably loved, and died.
He paused before the door, feelings of hatred, love, memory and death dueling within him. Taking a small breath, holding it, he entered the charnel room looking for something he might be able to recover, something that might convict a murderer.