Chapter 6
Aweek of work had given the old place back its shape. Nate had blistered his hands raw and grown new calluses over the blisters. He and Josh had cleared the brush off the north wall, rehung the corral gate, mended a quarter mile of downed fence, and patched the porch roof where it sagged.
The work suited him. On the docks, a man labored to fill another man’s pockets and watched his own life run out in it.
Here, every nail he drove was his, every straightened rail a thing his father might have touched, and his back ached in a way that felt close to prayer.
He slept hard and woke before the sun and didn’t dream, most nights, of the trunk.
Every night, they drew the curtains now and spoke low, and Josh kept his rifle by the door. Twice, Nate had caught fresh boot signs at the treeline in the morning. The watcher hadn’t gone away. They simply gave him nothing worth carrying back.
Let Chambers’s man lie in the brush counting fence posts. A man who watched and learned nothing would eventually grow careless, and a careless watcher was a thing Nate meant to be ready for.
He was setting a new post in the west fence line, stripped to his shirtsleeves with the sun hot on his neck, when the buckboard came up the track. Two women on the seat, a stout gray one driving and a slim one beside her in a wide-brimmed hat with a covered dish in her lap.
Lucy Thornhill. He hadn’t let himself expect her, and the sight of her went through him cleaner than he liked.
She looked him up and down from the wagon seat, the post in his hands, the dirt to his elbows, the sweat dark on his shirt. “Well,” she said. “And here I had you marked for a parlor man who’d hire the hard part done.”
“Marked me wrong, then.”
“Seems I did.” Her mouth tipped. She handed the dish down to him, and it was warm through the cloth and smelled of cinnamon and baked apples. “Mother made it. Welcome to the county, and don’t let it go to your head. She’d have made one for a horse thief if he was new in the district.”
“Then I’ll try to rate a notch above the horse thief by the time the plate’s empty.”
“We’ll see.” She swung down from the wagon before he could offer a hand, landing easily in her riding skirt, and looked past him at the straightened fence line running off toward the creek, the cleared wall, the rehung gate.
She took stock of it as she had of him on the train, and whatever sum she came to she kept to herself, but her chin dipped a fraction, which from Lucy, he was beginning to understand, was no small thing.
“I wouldn’t,” said Celia, climbing down. “Mr. Ralston, you’ve done wonders. Eldon would weep to see it standing again.”
So, they knew the name. Of course they did; everyone for forty miles had known the Ralstons and how they died.
Nate set the pie aside and shook Celia’s hand and called Josh up from the creek.
The four of them took supper together at the same table where, a week before, a stranger had crouched outside and stolen their words.
Celia had brought more than pie. She’d brought talk, and Nate listened the way he’d learned to listen on the docks, saying little, letting it come.
“He started small,” Celia said, when the plates were cleared and the lamp lit. The cinnamon from the pie was still on the back of Nate’s tongue, the first sweet thing he’d tasted since Boston.
“Old Cisco. Ten years back, he was just another rancher with a mean streak and a fat wallet. Then the Garrett well went bad, and he bought the widow out cheap, and the Doyle place burned, and he bought that, and one by one, the families that wouldn’t sell found reasons to wish they had.
” She folded her hands. “He doesn’t fight you in the open.
He poisons a well. He fires a barn. He waits.
And the sheriff writes it down as bad luck and an act of God, and the next man sells quicker than the last.”
“And no one stands up to him.”
“To stand up, you need a neighbor who’ll stand with you, and Cisco’s seen to it that nobody dares.
Fear’s the cheapest fence he owns.” She said it without bitterness.
“He gives to the church. Did you know that? Built the new schoolhouse in Golden, paid for the bell. Stands up at the founders’ supper every spring, and they clap till their hands hurt.
The county’s benefactor.” Her mouth thinned.
“It’s how a man like that keeps his hands clean.
Buy enough goodwill in the daylight and folks will look away from the dark. ”
“My father wouldn’t sell either,” Nate said. The words came out before he’d decided to say them, and he steadied himself on the next ones. “I’ve gathered that much. That he wouldn’t sell, and then he was dead.”
Celia’s kind eyes went soft and sorrowful on him.
“No, child. He wouldn’t. And there’s not a soul in this county doesn’t know who profited by his dying, and not one of us could ever say it where it counts.
” She reached across the table and laid her lined hand briefly over his dirt-roughened one.
“You’ve come back to a hard place. I’d not blame you a bit if you sold the grass and took the next train east. But I don’t think you’re going to. ”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m not.”
Lucy had been quiet through this, turning her cup. Now she set it down. “He came at us in the spring,” she said. “Wanted our south pasture, the good grass along the creek, the best we’ve got. Offered Mother a third what it’s worth and called it generous. She told him no.”
Her green eyes had gone hard and flat, the way they had on the train at Chambers’s name.
“A week to the day, we found eleven head dead in that pasture. Frothing. Poisoned at the water. Eleven good steers, and the vet from Golden couldn’t say what did it, and the sheriff said it was likely loco weed. ”
Her jaw set. “There’s no loco weed grows by our creek. I’ve walked that ground my whole life. Somebody fouled our water on purpose, and I know whose order it was, and I can’t prove a word of it.”
The room had gone still. Josh stared at his hands.
Nate kept his voice even. “This sheriff. Trisler. What’s your read on him?”
Lucy laughed once, short and without humor.
“My read on Budd Trisler is that he’d arrest his own mother if Cisco Chambers asked him to and apologize to Cisco for taking so long.
He’s bought, Nate. Bought and paid for by Cisco and proud of the wage.
Don’t carry a single trouble of yours through his door because it’ll be on Chambers’s desk before you’ve got your hat back on. ”
She leaned in. “If you mean to do anything in this county that Chambers wouldn’t like, you do it as if the law is his dog. Because it is.”
It squared with everything Josh had told him, everything he’d pieced together. He nodded slowly and said nothing of the boot prints, nothing of the map, nothing of the face turning half into the moon. Not yet. Not until he knew these two as more than a kind supper and a harsh warning.
Trust came dearly out here, Josh had told him, and a man spent it like the last coin in his pocket. He liked the Thornhills on the train, and he liked them more across this table, and that was exactly why he held his tongue. A man could get the people he liked killed by telling them too much.
But he marked Lucy as she spoke of the dead steer.
The steel under her plain words, the fact that she’d walked the poisoned ground herself and counted the bodies and gone looking for the cause when the sheriff couldn’t be bothered.
That wasn’t the daughter of a broken county. That was someone who meant to win.
The lamp burned down. Celia rose at last and said they’d best get home before full dark, that the road was no place to be after sundown lately, and Nate walked them out to the buckboard under a sky gone copper at the rim.
Lucy hung back as her mother climbed up. She stood close to him in the dusk, her hat off now and her auburn hair loose at the edges, and looked at him with that wary, weighing look she’d worn on the train.
“I’ll tell you a thing, Nate Ralston,” she said, low, so her mother wouldn’t catch it. “There’s a thing I know about Cisco Chambers. About your folks, maybe. A thing I’ve never told a living soul because telling the wrong man would get me killed and my mother with me.”
Her chin came up. “I don’t know yet if you’re the right man. But you stood up on that train when nobody else would, and you’re out here mending a dead man’s fences with your bare hands instead of running, and that counts for a great deal. When I’m sure, I’ll tell you. Until then, don’t ask.”
“I won’t ask,” he said. “But thank you for telling me there’s anything to wait for. Whatever it is, it’s a thing worth keeping close.”
“I’ve kept it close six months without your counsel,” she said, but there was no sting in it, only that quick lift at the corner of her mouth again, there and gone. For a breath, she studied him, and the hardness in her eased.
She looked south down the track, jaw loose, as if she’d made her decision. Then she put her hat back on and climbed up beside her mother and took the reins, and the buckboard creaked away down the track into the failing light.
Nate stood at the gate and watched them go because he couldn’t make himself go in. The wagon dwindled, two small figures and a horse, dust pale behind them.
And on the long ridge above the road, black against the last copper light in the west, a horseman sat his mount and didn’t move.
Not riding. Not crossing. Sitting, the way a man sits when his whole business is to watch, his hat brim a flat line and his horse’s head down, settled in for a while.
He held the high ground above the Thornhills’s road home, and the women rolled toward him in the dusk with no notion he was there.
Nate’s hand dropped to his side and closed on nothing.
The rented gun belt still hung empty on a peg by the door, twenty yards back, useless as a prayer.
He stood rooted at the gate with his heart going hard against his ribs, watching a shadow watch the only two friends he had in Colorado roll down a darkening road.
He understood, cold and clear, that a man out here who wouldn’t carry a gun was a man waiting to bury someone. The fists that had served him on the Boston wharves wouldn’t reach across a ridge. Tomorrow, he decided, the empty gun belt came down off its peg for good.