Chapter 7
Conn cut and lowered his brother into his arms.
Cole was dead.
Conn knew it as soon as he saw his brother’s face. But now he felt it, too, sensed the absence of life in Cole’s cold and silent rigidity as he draped him across the gelding’s back then climbed down and lowered his poor, dead brother to the ground.
It was impossible.
It couldn’t be true.
Cole was always so full of life. And they had plans, big plans for the future, starting tonight.
Conn was going to give up his wayward habits and join his brother, help him and Mary prove up their homestead and file on ground of his own, a hundred and sixty acres that would become more than just ground or even a homestead, a hundred and sixty acres that would eventually, after he met the right woman, become his home, his home next to his twin brother, Cole, the two of them formed side by side in the womb coming together again to share the best life had to offer.
But now Cole was dead.
Someone had murdered him.
Someone had beaten him severely. Conn winced at the broken nose and split lips and brows. Then they had put a rope around Cole’s neck and hoisted him into this tree and let him hang there till he was dead.
Who?
Who did this thing to his brother?
Rage leapt up inside him, as red and hot and hungry as an inferno, and spread rapidly, filling him and burning away his hopes and dreams, leaving him with the dark and desperate need to avenge his twin.
“I’ll find them, Cole,” Conn said aloud, his voice thick with emotion.
He did not allow tears. He had to stay strong for Cole, had to stay focused on the job at hand. Maybe someday after he’d done what he needed to do, maybe then he would cry for his twin.
But for now, there was only rage.
Rage and a hallowed vow, which he spoke aloud, making a covenant with his dear, departed brother, “I’ll find the men who did this, Cole.
I will track them down and kill them all.
They can shoot me right between the eyes, and I won’t stop.
Not until the last of them is dead. I promise you that, brother. I promise.”
Cole, of course, was silent.
He lay with an open mouth and open eyes on the cold hard ground where Conn kneeled.
Conn stared at him in further disbelief for several seconds and reached down and closed his brother’s eyelids.
He would need burying.
But not yet.
First, Conn needed to follow these tracks.
Because men such as these likely wouldn’t hang around this country. He needed to get after them.
If he could catch even one of them, he would do anything he had to do to learn the names and whereabouts of the others.
Anything.
Reluctantly, he stood.
Getting up, moving like that, looking down at his stiff, cold brother, was a painful experience, because it somehow made it official, as if by moving away from Cole, he had solidified the fact of his brother’s demise.
That thought gutted him all over again.
He stood there for half a minute just staring down at Cole, his throat choked with emotion that he wrangled into submission.
First, he told himself, you kill them all.
But then, sobered and steeled by this command, he realized that another task was even more pressing than vengeance.
He circled the tree, peering up into the darkness, fearing what he would find.
But there was no sign of Mary.
Where was she?
Had they killed her and left her lying?
Had they taken her with them?
He hoped not. Because there was no telling what a band of men this savage would do to a female hostage.
Better death than that.
But then, he remembered when he and Cole were kids, how Cole used to describe the house he would build someday, describing not only the dwelling but also the escape tunnel he planned to include.
Had he done it? Had he dug an escape tunnel?
“Mary?” Conn called into the darkness. “Mary, are you out there?”
He walked to the back of the house and called up into the darkened hillside, where he figured Cole’s tunnel would have led. “Mary! Can you hear me?”
He kept walking toward where he reckoned she might have run, calling out again every minute or two until he came to what he had expected to find.
Under different circumstances, the sight of the shovel and plugged-up tunnel would have pleased him, the manifestation of his brother’s lifelong dream revealing itself after all these years.
But given the current state of things, all Conn could think was he could use the shovel to dig the grave.
Or graves.
Was Mary dead, too?
“Mary!” he called into the darkness.
He lit a match and scanned the ground near the mouth of the tunnel, where he saw small footprints in the loose dirt but no blood.
He sighed with relief.
So she hadn’t been killed or wounded, at least not before escaping the house.
She had hidden in the cellar then used the tunnel to avoid the raiders.
If she was half the woman Cole had said she was, those men would have had a hard time catching her after that.
She was hunkered down up this slope somewhere. Or maybe she’d found a ridge and kept running, heading for a neighbor or town and the law.
It was too dark to follow.
So he stood and called for a while, hoping she would answer.
Finally, when she failed to do so, he decided to leave her a note and head after these men.
But as he turned downhill, a woman’s voice finally answered from the darkness high above. “Conn?”