Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“What the hell?” Caleb muttered, eyeing the body across the clearing.
He’d seen his share of dead men left by a trail in his time, but he never encountered one like this.
Pirate stamped his foot, not entirely happy to be reined in within sight of the creek ahead. They’d been covering ground quickly for a while, and he was thirsty.
Caleb held him, though, and unfastened the thongs on his twin Colts.
When you found a dead body looking like this one, you didn’t want to rush into anything. The last thing you wanted was to walk right into an ambush. He’d had quite enough of that lately.
He scanned the area carefully, looking in every direction. The clearing around the creek and the pool of water by the trail was empty, and he had no sense of anyone lurking nearby. But it didn’t hurt to exercise a little more caution than usual.
Caleb sat still, listening intently for anything above the sounds of the creek, the falling water, and the nearby river. Nothing looked or sounded unusual.
Of course, there was nothing unusual about a corpse laid out, miles and miles from anywhere, looking like he was waiting for mourners to file by and pay their respects. The guest of honor was even sporting a handsome bouquet of fresh flowers.
And them flowers were fresh. They looked like they hadn’t been picked more than a couple of hours ago. He searched around him again. Still nothing out of the ordinary.
Whoever had done this had taken time they could ill afford. That said something. Not about the dead man, maybe, but about the living soul who’d left him this way.
“What do you think, Pirate?”
The buckskin snorted, conveying his lack of interest.
“All right, boy.” He dismounted. “Go get yourself a drink.”
As Pirate wandered off toward the creek, Caleb studied the ground.
It wasn’t difficult to read the signs. The riders had entered the clearing from the direction he’d come.
They were the same seven horses he’d been tracking since he spotted the first cut branch, including the one with the gash in the shoe.
They all stopped here, leaving evidence of their presence in the soft ground.
As Caleb moved about the clearing, it all made sense to him. By the creek, the men dismounted, watered the horses. He didn’t need to cross the shallows to know they rode out along the trail that way afterward, still moving north along the river.
Caleb stopped by the edge of the creek. A water flask was floating in an eddy.
Not far away, the dirt was discolored. He glanced at the body.
This was blood from the dead man’s severed jugular.
More signs of a scuffle. Not that it was much of one.
From the marks by the water and the location of blood, he judged the man just finished filling the flask when he was cut down from behind.
He’d fallen here, and then someone dragged him to his present location and fussed some, making him presentable.
The killing was ugly enough. Caleb didn’t need to dwell on the particulars. The ground had already told him what kind of coward had done it.
As he turned to take a closer look at the body, Pirate brushed by him and helped himself to the dead man’s flowers.
“That ain’t right, Pirate.” He pushed him out of the way.
Crouching down, he studied the face. Caleb had a good memory for people he’d seen before.
This fella was definitely not someone he’d run into in Elkhorn or anywhere else.
The throat had been slashed with a single rip of a blade.
To cut through all that took a sharp knife and a fairly strong hand.
The killer had even wiped the blade off on the victim’s coat. Very tidy of him.
There was no sign of any fight that went with the killing. No bloodied knuckles, no mashed nose or bruises of any kind on the sharp features. Everything told Caleb some low-down dog had attacked the fella from behind, and he guessed it was someone he knew.
He once again stared at the way the body was so carefully and respectfully arranged.
Caleb couldn’t imagine some outlaw bothering to do such a thing after murdering the man. Unless he wasn’t right in the head.
He looked carefully at the drag marks between the creek edge and here. It was among all the men’s boots and the marks left by the horses.
“A woman’s boot. What do you know!”
Pirate raised his head from the pool where he was drinking but kept his opinion to himself.
The woman wearing those boots was not all that big either. He looked around the area.
“Here,” he muttered to himself. “Here is where she dismounted, and she stood talking to someone right here.”
He measured the length of the boot print of the man she talked to and went back and compared it with the dead man’s boots. It was the same.
“The two of them stood in front of each other.” He followed her track toward the river. They led down a dry stream bed right into the river. After scouting along the bank, he saw where she came back out of the river, waited a bit, and then went back to the clearing.
He went back to the body and studied how neatly was arranged.
“Only a woman would do this.”
He thought of Sheila Burnett and all her complaining about the dead men at Caleb’s ranch. She would do something like this.
The notion struck him so hard that his chest tightened. Sheila, with her city manners and fierce little chin, arranging flowers on the body of a dead outlaw because some part of her still believed a man deserved to meet his Maker looking decent.
“No,” he said aloud. She was back in Elkhorn. As impulsive as she was, she wouldn’t come this far away from the town in the company of a total stranger.
Would she?
Another thought occurred to him. Whoever this woman was, she was riding with the first group. So was this dead fella. She was off by the river when these other riders showed up and did the killing.
On a hunch, Caleb crossed the shallow creek and studied the tracks on the far side.
There they were, clear as bear paws in fresh snow. Those boot prints led north after the other riders.
He whistled for his horse and mounted up. “Damn me, Pirate, if she ain’t following those killers on foot.”
And whether that woman was Sheila Burnett or some other poor soul with more courage than sense, Caleb meant to find her before night did.