Chapter 2
By the time the Kansas Pacific made its last long climb toward Denver, the light had gone gold and slanting, and Nate had given up trying to get the man on the platform out of his mind.
He went forward to the dining car to put something other than worry into his stomach. It was a narrow, swaying box of a room, white cloths on a dozen small tables, the smell of fried steak and burnt coffee riding the rattle of the wheels.
He took a table near the rear and ordered the cheapest thing on the card and watched the mountains slide past the windows, closer now, no longer a blue rumor but rock and timber and snow.
Two tables ahead, a woman and her daughter were eating in the quiet way of people who didn’t want to be noticed.
The daughter had auburn hair pinned up under a wide-brimmed hat she hadn’t taken off, even at the table, and a sun-browned face with a scatter of freckles across the nose.
The mother was stout and gray and dignified; her hands folded when they weren’t busy.
They spoke low to each other and bothered no one.
The trouble came in from the smoking car, two of them, loud before the door even opened. They were cowhands by their dress, young, and the loose roll of their walk said they’d been at a bottle since noon.
The taller one steadied himself on the backs of chairs as he came, grinning at nothing. His friend laughed too hard at a joke neither of them had made.
The tall one’s grin found the auburn-haired girl and stuck there. “Well now.” He pulled out the empty chair across from her without asking and dropped into it. “What’s a thing like you doing way out here all alone?”
“I’m not alone.” Her voice was even. “I’m with my mother. And that’s our chair.”
“Plenty of room.” He reached across the cloth and put his hand over hers, where it lay by her plate.
The mother said, “Sir, please,” in a voice gone thin with fear, and the second cowhand laughed and leaned on the back of the girl’s seat, so she was penned between them.
The girl pulled her hand free and lifted her chin.
Her green eyes hardened rather than frightened.
There were two of them, and they were big and drunk, and the car had gone the careful quiet of people who had remembered their meals.
Nate set down his fork. He crossed the swaying floor and stopped a pace off, where they could both see him, and neither could pretend they hadn’t. “Afternoon,” he said. Easy. Unhurried. “These ladies were having their supper. Be a kindness to let them finish it.”
The tall one tipped his head back to look up at him. “Who in blazes are you?”
“Nobody you’ve got business with. I’m asking polite. Leave them be and go on back to your car.”
“Or what, dock boy?” The cowhand’s eyes went down Nate’s plain coat and up again. “You’ll write me a letter?”
“I’d rather not do anything at all.” Nate held his hands loosely at his sides. “Stand up and walk away, and there’s no trouble for anybody.”
For a breath, he thought the man might take it. Then the cowhand shoved up out of the chair, both palms flat against Nate’s chest, hard, meaning to put him on the floor of the dining car for the whole train to laugh at.
Nate had been shoved by bigger men on the Boston wharves, men who did it for a living. He let the push turn him a quarter-step on his heel and came back with his right hand before the cowhand had finished grinning.
It caught the man flush on the jaw with the whole weight of a winter spent hauling crates behind it. The grin went out like a snuffed wick. The cowhand folded over a table and slid to the floor and stayed.
The second one came off the seatback cursing, swinging wildly.
Nate stepped inside the swing, took the blow on his shoulder, and hit him twice low in the body, short and heavy, so that the air left the man in a whoop and his knees gave out.
He sat down hard in the aisle with both arms wrapped around his middle, trying to remember how to breathe.
The dining car had gone so still that the clatter of the wheels seemed loud as gunfire.
Then a drummer in a checked suit began to clap, and a rancher near the front took it up, and in a moment, the whole car was cheering and stamping while the conductor came shouldering through to haul the two cowhands toward the door by their collars.
Nate flexed his hand. The knuckles would swell. They always did. He felt little beyond a flat tiredness that this was still the way the world settled its arguments. Here, as in Boston, out at the raw edge of the country, the same as in its oldest streets.
A man asked nicely and got laughed at, and then he used his hands and strangers clapped as though he’d done a clever trick. None of it brought a dead man up a flight of stairs.
He’d been good with his fists since he was thirteen. He had begun to think it might be the only useful thing the docks had given him, and out here, he suspected, fists wouldn’t be enough for what he’d come to do.
“You can sit,” the auburn-haired girl said, “if you’re done putting on a show.”
He looked at her. Her eyes came up to his, and his breath caught.
She hadn’t stood, hadn’t so much as risen from her chair through the whole of it, and she held his gaze now, chin up, her eyes cool as a woman appraising a horse she hadn’t decided to buy.
“Wasn’t a show,” he said and sat.
“No?” A corner of her mouth twitched. “You let the first one push you before you hit him. A man in a hurry doesn’t do that.”
It was so near the truth that he had no answer ready.
“Lucy,” she said, and put out her hand across the cloth. Her eyes dropped to his knuckles a moment before she met his. Her grip when he took it was firm and dry and unbothered. “Lucy Thornhill. This is my mother, Celia.”
“Nate Ralston.”
The mother’s folded hands had come undone. “Bless you, Mr. Ralston. There’s not a man in this car would have stood up but you.”
“There’s not a man in this car who’s met many drunks, then.” He nodded at the food cooling in front of them. “Eat. They won’t be back.”
They made him take the empty chair and wouldn’t hear otherwise, and so he passed the last hour of the climb to Denver with the Thornhill women, and somewhere past Limon he caught himself laughing aloud, a sound rusty enough that Lucy raised an eyebrow at it.
They ranched, Celia told him, a half-day east of Denver, the two of them since Lucy’s father passed, cattle mostly and a little hay.
Lucy did the talking that mattered. She had opinions about beef prices and the railroad and the weather, sharing each one whether asked or not, and a dry way of cutting a thing down to its bones that made him want to keep her talking just to hear what she’d say next.
“You don’t say much,” she told him somewhere past the second cup of coffee.
“Never had much call to.”
“Boston men I’ve read about talk a blue streak.”
“Then I’m a poor sort of Boston man.” He turned the coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer. “Mostly I worked. A man hauling fish at five in the morning doesn’t have a deal to discuss.”
That earned him a real look from her, the cool appraisal thawing by a degree, as if a hauler of fish were a more interesting thing than a gentleman come west to play at ranching. He found he didn’t mind being looked at that way.
On the docks, the women he’d known had looked at him to measure his pay or his temper. This one looked at him as if she were taking down notes for later.
Once, when the lamp swayed through a long curve, his eyes went to the dark window and didn’t come back right away. Lucy said his name, and he returned to the table.
He told them little about himself. A ranch he’d inherited west of the city. Family gone. Come out of Boston to take up the land. He didn’t say murdered. He didn’t say he’d spent the entire train ride with a sealed map against his chest and a dead man’s face behind his eyes.
It was Celia who said the name, lowering her voice, though the cowhands were long gone. “West of Denver. You’ll want to mind a man called Chambers, then. Cisco Chambers. He’s bought up half that county with money and the other half with fear, and what he can’t buy he takes.”
Lucy’s face had changed. The dry humor went out of it and left something flat and hard beneath. “He’s a thief and worse than a thief,” she said, low. “Don’t sell to him. Don’t drink with him. Don’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth.”
“Lucy,” her mother said.
“It’s true and you know it’s true.” But she let it go and looked out the window instead, and the name sat at the table between them like a third guest no one had invited.
Nate filed it away with a jabbing finger and the gold chain. Chambers. It was nothing yet. It might be everything.
The whistle blew. Denver came up out of the dusk, lamps already lit, a sprawl of brick and plank and smoke under the dark wall of the mountains, and the train slowed into the depot with a long sigh of steam.
On the platform, the Thornhills’ way and his parted. Celia took his hand again and made him promise to look after himself. Lucy stood a moment, then reached into her glove and brought out a folded scrap of paper and pressed it into his palm, closing his fingers over it.
“Our place,” she said. “If Chambers gives you grief, or if you just want a meal that nobody had to be punched over. You come.”
“I might.”
“You will.” She said it as if she’d already settled the matter, then turned and went after her mother into the crowd.
He stood a moment in the noise and steam; the paper folded tightly in his fist and let himself almost smile. Then, across the swirl of the platform: the long, dust-colored coat.
The same man. Tall, rangy, the long coat, the flat pale eyes that found Nate and didn’t let go. He stood at the edge of the crowd with his shoulder against a freight post, and he wasn’t waiting for anyone or going anywhere. He was looking at Nate.
When Nate’s eyes found him, the man pushed off the post, unhurried, and let the crowd fold around him and carry him out of sight toward the street.
The almost-smile died. He had ridden the same train. He had stepped off at the same platform. And now he was ahead of Nate in a city Nate had never set foot in, melting into a crowd that swallowed him whole.
Nate’s hand dropped to his side out of old habit and found nothing there to hold. He closed it instead around the folded paper Lucy had given him, the one kindness he owned in all of Colorado, and walked off the platform into the dark with the certain knowledge that he was being hunted.