Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Patterson unlocked a drawer and pulled out a stack of bills. Caleb waited to feel the hook set. There had to be a catch.
As the man counted out the money, Caleb was thinking of that snake of a sheriff. Horner knew this outside. His fists were itching to knock a few of the sheriff’s teeth loose. Maybe Caleb would pay him a visit before leaving town. If he could find the woodpile Horner slithered into.
But even as the thought crossed his mind, he reminded himself that a man could spend his whole life settling scores and still wake up empty the next morning.
The cash slid across the desk. A hundred dollars was a hundred dollars. He stuffed the money inside his coat, snugging it up against the dead rustler’s letter to his mother. Caleb wondered if he was one who had a bounty on his head.
Money like this meant fencing wire, lumber, feed, supplies. Another piece of the ranch finished. Another step toward building something lasting instead of drifting from one hard trail to the next. Another step toward something solid.
“Where do you hail from, Mr. Marlowe?” The judge leaned back in his seat.
“Here and there. Been everywhere.” Caleb pushed to his feet. “My weapons?”
Patterson gestured to a table in the corner, and Caleb strode across the room, picked up his belt with the twin Colts, and strapped them on.
The familiar weight settled against his hips like an old habit he’d never quite managed to shake off.
“No. Originally, I mean. Where were you born? Who were your folks? What did your father do?”
No one in Elkhorn knew the answers to those questions and never would. Everywhere he’d been, folks asked the same thing, but Caleb felt no need to satisfy idle curiosity.
“Born under a rock and raised by wolves, they tell me.”
The older man’s face hardened for a moment, and then his features relaxed somewhat. “Ha! Well, a fellow has a right to keep his history to himself.”
“My knife?” Caleb asked, picking up his rifle.
The judge watched him approach before taking the knife out of a drawer and laying it on the desk in front of him.
“It’s a beauty. I was hoping you’d forget about it.”
“Not likely.”
“It belonged to Jacob Bell, didn’t it?” Almost reverently, Patterson picked up the massive wood-handled hunting knife, its twelve-inch blade sheathed in buffalo leather.
Caleb wondered how he knew.
“I’ve heard so much about this weapon. I’d hoped to see it for myself one day.”
“Well, now you have.”
“In these parts, Jacob Bell is more legend than man. But you should know that better than anyone.”
“I know the man. Legends are just made-up stories mostly, I’ve found.”
Mountain man, trapper, wilderness guide, Jake was sixty years old when he found a half-frozen nineteen-year-old on the snowy banks of the Keya Paha River up in the Dakota Territory.
Beaten, robbed, and left for dead, Caleb had reached the bitter end.
Looking back, he had nothing much to be proud of in those early years. They were times better off forgotten.
But he didn’t die on that riverbank. The old man picked him up and tucked him under his wing. In their time traveling together, the two of them crossed the frontier from Missouri to the Wind River and from the Big Horn Mountains to the Calabasas.
Old Jake taught him how to survive blizzards, track wounded game, and read danger before it showed its face. But more than that, he taught Caleb that a man could choose what sort of life he wanted to build.
“Is it true that you rode with Jacob Bell when he opened the new route to the Montana gold fields?”
Caleb was fine sharing that piece of his history. “I was with him.”
“And you were with him up north during the Indian Wars? They say you saved more men’s lives with your scouting than you can count. Is that legend or true?”
It seemed to Caleb that the judge had done a little more scratching into the past than was called for. And he didn’t particularly like it.
What was true was that his time traveling with Old Jake had made a man of him.
Jake taught Caleb to hunt and track and shoot as well as any man alive.
By the time they were done, he could find a lamb in a Montana blizzard or follow a rattlesnake across solid rock.
Together, they guided expeditions, worked in the gold fields, traded amicably with different native peoples, and got conscripted into scouting for the army.
Jake had been married to a Shoshone woman when he was a young man, and through him, Caleb learned to understand the character, peculiarities, superstitions, and beliefs of many tribes.
And he found out along the way that those stories in the papers back East only told one side of things.
And he’d learned something else too. Violence always left scars, no matter which side claimed victory afterward.
All that aside, Caleb didn’t feel too comfortable singing his own praises. “You know what you know, Judge.”
And he wanted to know exactly what the man was after. Caleb was pretty good at reading fellas, and Patterson didn’t strike him as one to waste his own time.
“How is it you’ve come to have Old Jake’s knife?”
“A parting gift when he went back to his farm in Missouri.” The frontier life had gotten to be too much for his creaky, old bones. This knife had been lucky for him for over thirty years, he said, and he wanted Caleb to have it.
“I’ll pay you five hundred dollars for it.”
He took the sheathed knife out of the judge’s hand and slid it into his boot.
“It ain’t for sale.”
The judge shrugged. “Pretty much what I expected. You strike me as a man who knows the value of what he’s got.”
That gave Caleb pause, because lately he’d begun realizing the ranch might be the first thing in years he truly valued enough to fight for.
And right now, he had a ranch to get back to. “Are we done here?”
“Almost.”
Patterson sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his waistcoat. “I heard you wore a badge up by Greeley.”
He’d read the man right after all. The knife wasn’t what interested him. It was Caleb himself.
Whatever Elkhorn’s snake of a sheriff had told the judge about Caleb, it looked like it had backfired.
“I’m a mite surprised Horner shared that with you.”
“He didn’t. I have other sources of information.”
Of course he would.
From what Caleb had seen since he bought his land, the judge ran everything in Elkhorn.
He and a few men who followed his lead. This was nothing new or different.
He’d seen the same thing across the frontier.
As soon as news spread of gold or silver being discovered, men like Patterson arrived.
Ordinary fellas might pan or dig for it, but businessmen and politicians like the judge wanted to make sure they had a piece of every dollar.
And to make that happen, they needed control.
So they brought law and order where none had existed. Their own version of law and order.
“The town put the word out that we were looking for a sheriff. You didn’t apply.”
“Wasn’t interested then. Ain’t interested now.”
“You’ve been here four months, Mr. Marlowe. You’ve seen what’s happening in this town.”
He’d seen plenty, and he was happy to be three miles or so downriver.
“Elkhorn is growing. New streets are being laid out. We have a church and a schoolhouse now. Right here on Main Street, hardware and mercantile stores are busy all the time. The mail and freight businesses connect us to the outside world. As does the newspaper. We’ve got several butchers and green grocers, a general store, and even a new restaurant. ”
Caleb had tried out the restaurant that claimed to have the “best steaks in town.” He planned on selling his beef to them.
“We even received a letter just last week from an acting troupe in Denver. We’ll have our own opera house soon.”
Caleb figured the judge had been working hard on this speech, and there’d be no walking out of here until he was done delivering it.
“Yes, indeed, sir. Elkhorn is the city with a future. It is the place to be.”
So long as the silver held out, Caleb thought.
“But to keep what we have and to grow, we need the law.”
It was a long way around the barn, but Patterson finally got to it.
“You have a sheriff.”
Patterson sent him a look that let Caleb know exactly what he thought of the current lawman.
“I ain’t interested,” he repeated.
“But you haven’t heard my proposition, Mr. Marlowe.”
“Judge, I ain’t selling Jacob Bell’s knife, and I ain’t interested in being sheriff…in Elkhorn or anywhere else.”
Especially now, when he’d finally started building a place that felt more like home than any jail office or lawman’s desk ever could.
“I hear you loud and clear. My proposal for you is something far more important.” He leaned forward. “You help me, and I help you. Quid pro quo, as we say in the legal profession.”
There was sure as hell no way of cutting this conversation short.
“Don’t think I need any help, Judge.” Caleb shook his head. “Unless, while I was hanging about here this morning, a few more fellas decided to ride out to my ranch and help themselves to my cattle.”
“Don’t sell me short.” The civic leader spouting off was gone. Patterson was all business now, and the hard edge in his tone matched the look in his eyes. “I’m not a man to be used lightly.”
“Then how about if you tell me straight exactly how I can help you,” Caleb said coolly.
The judge slid open a drawer and placed a sheet of paper on the desk. It appeared to be a letter. Unsigned.
“First, I want to be sure you know I wield a certain amount of influence…power in this state. I can help my friends, Marlowe, when it suits me.”
“I’d be a fool to doubt it.”
The older man tapped the letter with his fingers.
“Your partner, Henry Jordan, is serving time right now in the Arapahoe County Jail for some difficulty he got involved in up there.”
Caleb was suddenly interested.
His partner had an unfortunate combination of good looks and a quick temper that had been the cause of trouble for him for as long as Caleb knew him.
Up north in the Indian Territories, Henry was a sergeant in a cavalry unit that Caleb was scouting for, and they became good friends then.
Henry loved poker, whiskey, and women—in no particular order—but he was as fierce and solid as Pike’s Peak when he needed to be.
The fight he’d won in a fancy saloon in Denver had landed him in the pokey for six months.
The timing was bad, considering their partnership and the purchase of the ranch and cattle, but he was due to be released in a couple of months.
Caleb was looking forward to him getting here and doing his part to make their investment pay.
Truth was, Henry had been the one who convinced Caleb to stop drifting and build something permanent for once.
“I understand that there were witnesses who testified Mr. Jordan was not the instigator, but I’ve learned recently that one of the men involved has been lingering for all this time,” the judge told him.
“If he doesn’t survive, your partner may be facing charges of manslaughter.
He could spend more time in jail than either of you expects. ”
Damn.
“What can you do for him?”
“I will send this letter to the governor. I can get your partner released.”
Buying a ranch and putting down roots—building something solid—had been Henry’s idea.
Elkhorn had been Caleb’s. His partner had liked the possibility of striking it rich with a silver claim on their own land.
That was their future, he’d said. Caleb liked the feeling of having a place of his own.
But if it weren’t for his friend, he was sure he would still be exploring new frontiers and wandering along new trails until he was too old to climb onto his horse.
For Henry’s sake—hell, for both of their sakes—this was worth listening to.
“What do you need from me?”
Patterson got up and went to the cabinet behind him. Taking out two glasses, he poured out some brandy and set one in front of Caleb before sitting again.
“The Wells Fargo Overland from Denver to Elkhorn has fallen prey of late to a band of vicious road agents. Six attacks since the beginning of the year. Over fifty thousand dollars in silver and currency has been lost. They struck again two days ago. They’re up in the hills, possibly somewhere around Devil’s Claw.
I want you to put on a tin star and go after them. ”
“You already have a sheriff.”
“I need him here where I can keep an eye on him.”
“How about your own men?” The judge had a spread, mines, and men at his disposal.
“They’re out there already. But they don’t have your expertise. No one around here has your tracking skills.”
Caleb stared at the glass of brandy for a moment, considering his options. He had no interest in this business, but if he refused, Henry’s future was looking grim.
And all he could think about was getting back to the ranch before the day was shot. Back to the quiet valley below the mountains where life had finally begun feeling almost steady.
“There’s something else you should know.”
“What’s that?”
“Your friend…Doctor Burnett.” The judge set down his empty glass with a resounding click. “They have him.”