Chapter 8 #2
Caleb gave each of them a job to do and showed them what he wanted done.
Gabe was tasked with squaring off logs with small axe.
Meanwhile, Paddy would work on chiseling out notches at the ends.
While they did that, Caleb would haul more logs for the barn walls into position using the team of draught horses he’d gotten from Gabe’s father.
Sheila took charge of sorting pegs and tools with the brisk certainty of a woman who had no intention of being decorative. Caleb should have found that irritating. Instead, he found himself watching her when he ought to have been watching the team.
They dove in, applying themselves to their jobs. They were good at following directions.
For a while, the work settled into a rhythm. The boys chopped and chiseled. Bear sprawled in the shade, waiting for someone to become careless with the fish. Caleb brought the team around and hauled another log into place.
Sheila stepped aside as he bent to lift one end of the timber.
As he straightened, he happened to glance her way and found her staring at him.
The look lasted only a moment before she turned her attention elsewhere.
Caleb found himself wondering what she'd been thinking.
He immediately decided it was none of his business.
The fact that he kept wondering anyway was another matter.
“You’re always working on the ranch, Mr. Marlowe. Where is your partner, anyways? Why don’t he carry his weight?” Gabe asked a little while later, when they paused to take a drink from a bucket of water Caleb had brought up.
Sheila looked up from the pegs she had been sorting. Caleb had the distinct impression she was interested in the answer too.
“Henry Jordan will do his share when he gets here.”
“When would that be?” Paddy asked.
“End of summer, maybe sooner.” Caleb hoped.
“Why so late? You’re building now.”
“Where is he?” Paddy dropped his chisel and mallet and sat down next to Bear.
Sheila said nothing, but Caleb noticed she was watching him now. Waiting for answers too.
Caleb could have made something up, but he knew from Doc that rumors had already been circulating in Elkhorn. And it was best if they knew the truth.
“He’s in jail in Denver.”
Both boys’ eyes rounded. Bear was momentarily forgotten.
Sheila’s eyebrows rose, as well.
“What’s he done?” Gabe wanted to know.
Caleb tried to decide how much to say. He himself had nobody he could consider a good role model when he was their age.
That only came later, when he’d spent six years following Jacob Bell around the frontier.
And the old scout believed that a man’s life was about learning from mistakes and changing and learning again. If he survived the mistakes, that is.
“When he sees something that’s wrong, Henry Jordan has a hair-trigger temper. He flares up hot as a prairie fire. So, his fists sometimes get him into trouble. He got into a fight in a Denver saloon. That’s why he’s in jail.”
Caleb expected a remark from Sheila about men settling their differences with their fists. Instead, she merely nodded, as though filing the information away. For some reason, that made him wonder what conclusions she was drawing about Henry—and about Caleb’s way of choosing friends.
“What do you mean, something wrong?” Gabe was curious.
“Suppose you see Bear getting kicked. What would you do?”
“Stop it.”
“That’s Henry.” Caleb put a booted foot up on a log. “He is as fine a man as I know.”
Sheila was still eyeing him, and Caleb felt the weight of that look. No judgment in it. Something quieter. As if she had heard more in his answer than he had meant to say.
Gabe’s face was creased in a thoughtful frown. “You ever been in jail?”
Caleb decided he wasn’t asking about the occasional times in his youth after some heavy drinking. Nor was he talking about the night the last snake of a sheriff had put him in a cell just to be a sonovabitch. “Never after going in front of a judge.”
Luck had some role in keeping him out of jail. But Caleb wasn’t about to go into it.
“How do you know Henry Jordan? You kin?” Paddy asked before going back to stirring up the dog. Wrestling with Bear was a favorite pastime for him. And that yellow monster didn’t seem to mind at all.
“Not kin.” Caleb didn’t like talking about his past, but now that Henry’s name was out, he felt he needed to say more. “We met up north in Lakota territory. He was in a unit I was scouting for.”
Nearly as tall and broad-shouldered as Caleb, Henry liked to say he had “three true loves—poker, whiskey, and women—and I’ll be faithful to all of them or the devil take me.”
Caleb believed that would probably be the case, either way. But he also knew that Henry could always be counted on in a tight spot.
“We became good friends up there.”
“We’re good friends, ain’t we, Gabe?” The twelve-year-old’s eyes were bright as he looked up.
“You are such a chucklehead.” The older boy cuffed the other on the head. “Come on. We got to get to work.”
Paddy reluctantly pushed the dog away and collected his tools. “Is your partner a gunhawk too?”
“He was a sergeant in the cavalry,” Caleb answered. “So he knows one end of a weapon from the other.”
“We heard the shooting in town yesterday. But by the time we got down Main Street, it was all over.”
“Except for the sheriff taking out the fella through the window,” Gabe corrected.
Paddy nodded, eyeing Caleb’s six-shooters, which were draped over the end of a nearby log. “When was it you started slinging your Colts, Mr. Marlowe?”
“When I had to.”
“When was that?”
Persistent little cuss, Caleb thought. He knew what lay at the bottom of the lad’s interest. He’d lost his brother in a shooting.
In addition, though, every frontier town had its stories of gunfights and the men who fought them.
He heard that back East, magazines and even novels were now being printed that were filled with tales of courage and cowardice, heroes and villains, all taking place out here.
When he was a boy, he’d read the myths and legends of King Arthur’s knights, Ivanhoe, Jason and the Argonauts, and Odysseus, the three musketeers, and the pirate-fighting lads of Coral Island.
Those stories had nowadays given way to make-believe tales of the Wild West, where a man’s worth was often determined by the steadiness of his nerve and the speed of his draw, and where the hero always won the day.
“I never shot a gun till I was sixteen,” he answered.
“Did you practice lots to get so good?”
Caleb shrugged. “Some.”
“When was the first time you killed a man?”
“That’s enough,” Sheila said. Her voice was not loud, but it carried.
Paddy blinked at her.
“Mr. Marlowe is not a dime novel hero put here for your entertainment.”
Caleb looked at her.
So did Gabe.
Paddy flushed. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said, gentler now. “But a man’s worst memories are not something to poke at simply because you’re curious.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
Caleb looked away first.
He was sixteen. The tightness in Caleb’s chest was old, painful, and too damn familiar. But it wasn’t the man he killed that caused it. It was the battered face of his mother that still burned a hole in his heart and in his brain.
“Stop asking questions,” Gabe ordered his friend. He was looking intently at Caleb’s face. “Let’s go, Paddy. We got work to do.”
But the red-haired boy wasn’t giving up. “Ever sorry about killing a man?”
“I done plenty of things that I ain’t proud of. But I don’t kill for no reason.” He said it to Paddy, but his eyes found Sheila.
“Yesterday, your dead aim and quick draw saved the judge’s life,” Paddy said. “You had reason.”
“Them fellas were guns for hire. They came to kill. But I was lucky too.”
“I wanna sling a gun when I get older,” Paddy said solemnly. “But not like no stone-cold killer or road agent or…or rustler. I wanna be like you.”
Caleb knew what the boy was referring to. He was talking about his dead brother.
“I’m a rancher, Paddy. I only fire my gun when I need to.
Too many fellas make the mistake of keeping an iron strapped to their hip.
It’s too easy to think you’re tougher and smarter than the next man.
But there’s always someone a little faster…
and looking to prove it. And it ain’t much of a life, always looking over your shoulder. ”
Paddy looked down at the dirt. “But folks respect you.”
“Some do. Some don’t. Fear and respect ain’t the same thing.”
“What should a man want, then?” Gabe asked.
Caleb looked toward the barn, then across the meadow where the cattle grazed in the high grass.
“A good roof. Honest work. People who trust him. A place he don’t have to run from.”
The words came out before he knew they were there.
Sheila’s expression changed. Only a little. But he saw it.
Then Bear barked, and all of them turned.
A rider had appeared near the base of the ridge, coming hard across the meadow.
Caleb reached for his gun belt without thinking.
Sheila saw the movement and went still.
The man rode a rawboned gray horse and sat it badly, swaying in the saddle as if anger alone kept him upright. Even from a distance, Caleb knew who it was before Gabe muttered the name.
“Frank Stubbs.”
Paddy took a step back.