Chapter 5
Cisco Chambers took his breakfast as he took everything in the county: at his leisure, and the best of all that was to be had. The dining room of the Chambers house ran forty feet, under a chandelier freighted from St. Louis, and the long table could seat twenty, though this morning it seated one.
He sat at the head of it in a brocade dressing gown, a gold watch chain looped across the vest beneath, and worked through eggs and ham and good coffee while Cleve Hart stood at his shoulder with a ledger and waited to be useful.
He liked the mornings best. A man could survey his holdings in the morning light and find the day’s prospects good. From the tall windows, the Chambers ranch ran clear to the foothills, twenty thousand acres and more, dotted with his cattle and stitched together out of other men’s ruin.
Every section had a story he could tell with relish: the widow Garrett’s quarter, signed over for a song after her well went bad; the Doyle brothers’ bottomland, theirs until a grass fire of mysterious origin persuaded them Kansas might suit them better.
Chambers didn’t think of himself as a cruel man. He thought of himself as a patient one. The country was wide and the weak couldn’t hold it, and what they couldn’t hold would go to someone, and it might as well go to a man who knew what to do with it. That man was he.
“The Pell place,” Chambers said, dabbing his mouth. “Where do we stand?”
“He’s stubborn.” Hart’s small eyes never lifted from the ledger. He was a heavyset man, thick through the neck, and he thought in columns. “Turned down the second offer flat. Says the land was his father’s.”
“Land is always somebody’s father’s. That’s what makes them weep so when they sign.” Chambers buttered a biscuit. “His water comes through the north draw, doesn’t it? Through my range.”
“It does.”
“Then I expect his water will have trouble finding him this summer. A dam, a slide, an act of God. Cattle die thirsty, Cleve. Stubborn men grow reasonable at the sight of it.” He bit the biscuit. “Have Cooley’s boys see to it. Quietly. I won’t have the man able to point a finger he can prove.”
“Pell’s got a brother in Golden who talks loud,” Hart said, turning a page. “If the cattle die hard, the brother makes noise.”
“Then we’ll buy the brother, or we’ll quiet him, whichever comes cheaper.” Chambers waved his fork. “You worry like an old maid, Cleve. That’s why I keep you. But don’t bring me trouble before it’s hatched. One thing at a time, and all of them in their season.”
It was a fine word, prove. Chambers had built an empire on the soft ground between what men believed and what they could prove. Half the county knew what he was. Not one of them could stand in a court and say so because the witnesses were bought or buried and the sheriff was his own.
Boots in the hall. Edwin Cooley came in without knocking, trail dust on his long coat, his pale eyes flat and his mouth set in the sour line he wore. He had been out all night and looked the better for it. Cooley was a man who came alive in the dark. “Mr. Chambers.”
“You’ve the look of news, Edwin. Sit. Have you eaten?”
“Two things.” Cooley didn’t sit. “The Ralston whelp’s come back.
That clerk you keep at the Denver land office earned his pay.
Sent word a month past, a Boston lawyer’d filed to claim the old parcel.
I put a man on the line to watch the cars for him.
Came in off the Kansas Pacific two days back, out from Boston.
Took up at the old place west of the creek. Old Bodine’s thrown in with him.”
Chambers chewed and went on chewing and let nothing reach his face. “The boy. Eldon’s boy.” A small thing, that. A grown stranger came to look at a ruin. “He’s fourteen years and a thousand miles from anything that matters. Let him plant turnips. What’s the second?”
Cooley’s flat eyes didn’t blink. “My man laid up under their window all last night. Heard ‘em talking.” A pause, Cooley stretched out. “They got a map. Bodine and the boy. Of a gold cave. Up Clear Creek Canyon.”
The biscuit stopped halfway to Chambers’s mouth.
For the space of three heartbeats, the long room was very quiet, the chandelier tinkling faintly in a draft, and Cisco Chambers wasn’t in it at all. He was fourteen years gone on a porch in the dark, a finger jabbing the night air as he shouted at a man too proud to live.
You’ll learn to give a man what he asks for.
Then the gun, and the woman screaming, and the long, fruitless hours afterward tearing a dead man’s house to splinters and finding nothing, nothing, no map, no claim, no word of where the color lay. He had ridden home that night, certain he’d missed it in the dark.
He had gone back twice more. It was never there. The secret had died with the fool and his wife, or so he’d cursed himself believing for fourteen long years.
A map. Sent east, then. Of course. Sent east where his hands couldn’t reach and now carried home in a dead man’s son’s coat pocket.
And under the alarm stirred the old dread he never looked at squarely: the boy.
A house with a lamp burning. He’d thought the place empty but for the two.
He’d never been wholly sure. There had been a moment, riding out, when he’d glanced back at the dark windows and the skin on his neck had crawled, certain as sin that something behind that glass was watching him go.
He told himself it was the wind. A child’s fancy in a grown man. Fourteen years he’d told himself it was the wind, and fourteen years a small, bitter voice had answered back: there was a boy in that house, Cisco. They had a son. Did you count the bodies? Did you ever once stop to count?
He had not. He’d been too busy tearing the place apart for a map that wasn’t there.
By the time the question occurred to him, he was a mile gone in the dark and not fool enough to ride back.
By morning he’d convinced himself the boy had been sent east long before, or had never been, or had crawled off to die in the brush like a shot dog.
Easier to believe. Cleaner. He hadn’t let himself lie awake over it.
But the boy was off the train now. Grown. Home. And the small, cold voice had found its tongue again.
He set the biscuit down and smiled. “Well.” The smile was easy, expansive, the smile that opened church doors and bank vaults across the county. “The boy’s come home to a fortune he doesn’t even know how to spend. Isn’t that touching?”
He touched the vest over his heart, where the little double-barreled derringer rode warmly against him as it always did, a habit so old he no longer felt himself do it.
“Cleve, ride into town and have a word with Sheriff Trisler. I want the boy watched. Where he goes, who he sees, every step into Denver and out. Trisler reports to me daily.”
“Done,” said Hart.
Trisler would do it gladly and well. The sheriff was the cheapest thing Chambers had ever bought and the best value of the lot, a gaunt, frightened man who’d sell his own mother for the promise of keeping his badge and his hide.
Chambers had only to lift an eyebrow, and Trisler scurried. It was a fine arrangement.
The law in this county wore Cisco Chambers’s brand the same as his steers did, and a man with the law in his pocket need never raise his own voice above a Sunday murmur.
“Edwin.” Chambers turned the easy smile on the enforcer and let it cool by degrees as it crossed the table until what reached Cooley was no smile at all.
“Keep your man on that ranch. Every night. I want to know what they do with that map before they do it.” He picked up his coffee.
“And, Edwin. If the boy proves he’s his father’s son, if he starts asking the wrong questions in the wrong ears, then you’ll see to him.
Not loud. Not so the county talks. He’s to ride off some morning and simply not come back.
A young man alone in rough country. These things happen. ”
Cooley’s sneer deepened a fraction, which was as near as he came to pleasure. “Permanent.”
“Permanent.” Chambers’s thumb pressed against the rim of the cup and held there.
One breath. Two. Then he lifted it and drank.
“But not yet. A dead heir draws federal eyes. A live one drawing pictures in the dirt draws nothing. We’ll let him lead us to it first.” He waved the cup.
“Go on, both of you. Let an old man finish his breakfast.”
They went. The boots clattered down the hall.
When the house had gone still around him, Chambers rose and crossed alone to the study, shut the door, and stood a moment with his back against it. The smile was gone. His florid face had set hard and pale.
He went to the great oak desk where he worked the brass key from his watch chain and opened the bottom drawer. Under the deeds and the promissory notes lay a single folded sheet, gone soft and gray at the creases. His own hand.
A crude thing scratched out from memory in the months after the killings: a creek, a guess at a canyon, a dozen X marks where he’d sent men to dig and find nothing but rattlesnakes and disappointment. Fourteen years of hunting a thing he had held in his fist for one night and let slip.
He had nearly worn the thing through with handling it over the years. Every winter, when the canyon closed with snow and there was nothing to be done but wait, he would take it out and pore over it by lamplight and feel the old fury rise fresh.
He had paid the highest price a man could for the road to that gold, and the secret had laughed in his face for fourteen years from somewhere in those rocks, close enough to taste, lost as a coin down a well.
His thumb found the worthless paper and pressed it flat.
The hand had a tremor in it. His lip curled.
“You old fool,” he said to the dead man very softly.
“You made me wait fourteen years. But your boy’s going to draw me the road right to it.
And then there won’t be a Ralston left in Colorado to remember your name. ”
He locked the drawer and slid the key back onto its chain. His hand strayed once more to the small, hard shape beneath his vest, the way another man might touch a rosary. A man in his position couldn’t be too careful.
He hadn’t lived to fifty-two years and built all this by trusting the world to leave him be.
Let the boy come. Let him dig. Every shovelful would bring Cisco Chambers nearer the only thing he had ever truly wanted, and then the matter would close the way all his matters closed: quietly and in his favor.
He straightened his cuffs and went to dress for the day.