Chapter 8
The clerk, a young man with sleeve garters, took a long time finding it and longer making himself set it on the counter, and when he did, he wouldn’t meet Nate’s eye.
It was a thin folder. Pitifully thin for two human lives.
Nate read it standing at the counter. A coroner’s note: two persons deceased of gunshot wounds, a man and his wife, on their property west of the city.
A line of dates. A line giving the names.
A single sentence stating that the premises had been searched and showed signs of robbery.
And at the bottom, in a different hand: No witnesses.
No suspect identified. Case closed, and a date eight days after the first.
Eight days. They’d buried his mother and father and shut the book on them, and the whole of the law’s interest in the matter fit on one page with room to spare.
There were no statements. No list of who’d been questioned.
No mention of a son, as if the boy in the trunk had never existed at all, which suited everyone, he supposed; the dead being so much tidier than the living.
He read it twice. A real investigation left a trail of paper a foot thick: who found them, who they’d quarreled with, where every neighbor had been that night. This wasn’t an investigation. This was a lid set quietly over a hole.
Someone had wanted the matter closed quickly and quietly, and someone with the power to make a sheriff comply had gotten exactly that. The file couldn’t tell him who. A file held facts and dates, and not one ounce of the truth behind them. But the shape of the silence told him plenty.
He copied the few facts into his head and handed the folder back. The clerk took it with visible relief.
“Who closed it?” Nate asked. “Whose name’s on the bottom there?”
“That’d be the sheriff at the time, sir.” The young man swallowed. “Same as the sheriff now. Mr. Trisler.”
The saloon was next because Josh said a man learned more over a glass than a counter. The room off Larimer Street smelled of sawdust and spilled beer, low-ceilinged, half-dark at midday, a few drinkers nursing what they couldn’t afford.
Nate bought a beer he didn’t want and got to talking with an old-timer at the end of the bar, a stove-up cowhand with white stubble and a tremor in his hands who’d been in the county, he said, since before the war.
“Ralston.” The old man’s rheumy eyes sharpened.
“You’d be kin? You got the look.” He glanced down the bar and lowered his voice.
“Bad business, that. Real bad. Folks talked plenty at the time, quiet-like. Said it weren’t no robber.
Said a robber don’t ride twenty miles past richer houses to rob a dirt rancher.
Said there was a man wanted that exact piece of ground awful bad, and not a month after, he had it leased and the family in the?—”
He stopped.
A drinker two stools down had turned his head, idly, just to signal the barkeep for another.
The old-timer saw it and the words dried in his throat like a creek in August. He pulled his hat brim down and stared into his glass and wouldn’t say one syllable more, not for friendliness, not for the dollar Nate slid quietly across the wood.
Whatever the fear was, it went deep, and it was old.
“Forget I spoke,” the old man muttered. “Go home, son. There’s nothing in this town for you but a hole in the ground.”
Nate let him be. There was no use pushing a frightened man. Push him and he only dug deeper into his silence. But he marked the half-sentence and turned it over on the ride to the sheriff’s, fitting it against Josh’s account and Lucy’s and the thin file.
A man who wanted the ground. The ground leased within a month.
Every road in this thing ran to the same gate, and the gate had a name, and the whole county knew it, and not one soul would say it where it could be written.
Fear had built Chambers a wall no court could climb.
Nate would have to find a way over it, or under it, or he’d have to bring the wall down whole.
The sheriff’s office stood on a corner with a flag out front and a row of cells visible through the back door. Budd Trisler was a narrow man with a drooping mustache and eyes gone red at the rims, and he came around his desk with both hands out and a smile so wide it looked like it pained him.
“Ralston! Eldon’s boy. Word travels, son, word travels. Sit, sit.” He pumped Nate’s hand. “I knew your daddy. Fine man. Terrible thing, what happened. Just terrible. Robbers, you know, wild times back then, the war and all. Different county now. Tamed down.”
“I read the file.” Nate kept his voice mild and sat where he was put. “It’s a thin one. I wondered if you recalled anything that didn’t make it onto the page.”
“Oh, now.” Trisler spread his hands, rueful. “Fourteen years, son. An old lawman’s memory. I’d not want to send you chasing ghosts on a thing I misremembered.”
The smile never wavered, but his red eyes had begun their work, sliding to the window, the door, back to Nate’s face, never quite resting.
“My honest advice? Let it lie. Build up that ranch. Marry some pretty girl. You’ve got Mr. Chambers for a neighbor, and you’ll not find a better friend in this county.
Built our schoolhouse. Gives to the church. The finest man I know.”
He leaned in, confiding. “Folks tell tales about successful men. Jealousy, plain and simple. I’d not put stock in barroom gossip if I were you, son. It’s an unhealthy habit out here.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You do that.” Trisler walked him to the door, a hand warm and damp on his shoulder. He was still smiling; his eyes never stopped moving. “You do that, son. And give my regards to old Bodine. Tell him I said a young man ought to listen to his elders.”
There was a threat folded inside the kindness, neat as a knife in a napkin, and they both knew Nate had heard it.
Nate stepped out into the afternoon glare and crossed the street to where he’d tied the gelding but didn’t mount. He bent over the cinch instead, taking his time, watching the sheriff’s office out of the corner of his eye through the gap under the horse’s neck.
He didn’t have to wait long. A deputy came out the side at a half run, swung up on a painted horse, and put it straight out the north road at a lope.
That road ran, Nate had learned, toward the Chambers range.
Trisler stood a moment in his doorway, watching the man go, then went back inside and shut the door.
Bought and paid for and proud of the wage. Lucy hadn’t overstated it by a hair.
The ambush came eight miles out, where the road dropped through a stand of cottonwoods along a dry wash. He’d grown careless with the satisfaction of having confirmed what he already believed, and the land there was close, the brush high, and they were on him before the gelding’s ears even pricked.
A rope sang out of the cottonwoods and dropped over his shoulders and snatched him backward off the horse. He hit the road on his back with the wind gone and the sky wheeling, and then the boots were on him.
Two men. Bandanas to the eyes. They didn’t go for the Colt, which meant they didn’t mean to kill him, only to hurt him, and they were good at it.
A boot in the ribs that lifted him off the ground.
A fist that split his lip against his teeth.
He got a hand on one of them and dragged the bandana half down and saw a slab of unshaven jaw before a knee took him in the belly and folded him.
“Stop asking questions.” A kick punctuated each word.
“There ain’t no mystery, Ralston. Your folks died of being stubborn.
You catch the same sickness; you’ll go the same way.
Next man that comes asks won’t get a warning.
He’ll just get gone.” A last boot to the side of his head turned the world white.
He lay in the dust with his cheek against the road, tasting blood and grit, the cottonwood leaves turning silver-green far overhead. His stomach heaved once, and he held it down. Rage came behind it, hot and shaking, and he had to breathe through it until his eyes cleared.
In the ringing quiet, Lucy’s voice: They run this county. Yeah. He’d just gotten the proof kicked into his ribs. A cold, clear corner of his mind started taking notes. They hadn’t drawn iron. They’d let him keep his Colt. Someone wanted him scared off, not dead. Not yet. There was still time.
Hooves drummed and faded. By the time the ringing eased, and he could push up onto his hands and knees in the dust, spitting red, one tooth loose against his tongue and his right eye closing fast, the road was empty.
Empty, but for one horse.
In the scramble to get clear, one of them had let a led horse pull its picket and bolt, and it had run itself out and now stood blowing not thirty feet off, reins trailing.
Nate got his feet under him and limped to it, one eye already swelling shut, and ran a shaking hand along its sweated flank to gentle it.
His fingers found the brand burned into the hide of the left hip.
He knew it before he saw it clearly because Josh had pointed it out in his first week and told him to learn it well.
A C closed inside a ring. The Circle C. Cisco Chambers’s iron, plain as a signature, stood in the road where two men had just beaten him for asking the wrong questions.
He stood there a while, holding the bridle, breathing through the grind of a cracked rib, and the suspicion he’d carried fourteen years went hard and certain at last. Trisler had sent a rider north the moment Nate left his office.
Eight miles up the same road, two men had been waiting in the cottonwoods.
And here stood Chambers’s own horse to put the seal on it.
It wasn’t proof, not the kind that hangs a man, not the kind a court outside this county would so much as glance at. A brand could be claimed stolen. The thrashing in the cottonwoods had no witnesses but the men who gave it.
But Nate had stopped needing to be convinced. He gathered the trailing reins, swung up stiffly and bleeding onto his own gelding, and led the Circle C horse home behind him through the long gold evening, evidence enough for himself if not yet for the law.