Chapter 9
Four days after the beating, with his ribs still grinding and his right eye gone from black to a sickly yellow-green, Nate stood on his own porch and watched three riders come up the track in the noon sun.
He’d known they’d come. A man who sends two others to do his persuading likes, eventually, to come and admire the work himself.
The man in the middle rode a tall blood bay and sat it like a throne.
Big through the shoulders and going soft in the middle, a fine pale coat brushed clean, silver hair swept back under an expensive hat, and across the vest beneath the coat a gold watch chain that caught the sun with every sway of the horse.
On his right rode the rangy man in the long coat, the pitted jaw, the same cold stare Nate had last seen melting into a Denver crowd. On his left, a heavyset man with a cropped red beard and small, still eyes that went over the ranch like a tax man counting windows.
He’d put the Circle C horse in the back of the barn that first night and thrown a blanket over the brand and said nothing of it to anyone but Josh. Let Chambers wonder what had become of the animal his men had abandoned.
A card held close is worth two laid down. So, Nate stood empty-handed and open-faced on the porch with one good eye and one bad, and let the three of them come on.
Behind Nate, the screen door creaked. Josh came out with the Sharps across his folded arms, not pointed at anyone, just there, and lowered himself into the cane chair by the wall, where all three men’s hands stayed in plain sight. He said nothing. He didn’t need to.
The old man had the gift of stillness, and a stillness with a long rifle in it spoke plainer than any threat.
Cooley marked it and went motionless himself, his sneer fixed, his two cross-draw pistols riding easy at his belt, and the two of them took each other’s measure across the yard without a word passing.
“Mr. Ralston.” The big man drew rein at the steps and beamed down at him.
“Cisco Chambers. I’ve been meaning to ride over and welcome you proper since I heard Eldon’s boy had come home.
I knew your father. Fine man. Fine man.” He clucked his tongue, all good cheer, a banker’s smile and a deacon’s eyes.
“Lord, son, what happened to your face?”
“Fell off my horse,” Nate said.
“Rough country.” The smile held. “A man ought to have friends to look out for him in rough country. Which brings me to my errand.” He folded his gloved hands on the saddle horn.
“I’ll be plain, the way I like to be. This is hard land for a young man alone, and you’ve got no stock to speak of, and a house held up by spit and hope.
I’ll buy it from you. Top dollar. More than top dollar, for old Eldon’s sake.
You take the money, see the world, and never sweat through another summer like the one ahead of you. What do you say?”
The gold chain tugged at Nate even before the man spoke a dozen words, a snag in the smooth cloth of his thoughts that he couldn’t work loose.
He pushed it down and made himself study the whole man instead: the expensive coat, the soft sun-spared hands, the blue eyes cold as creek ice under all the good cheer.
He paid other men to do his sweating. This was the man the whole county feared. He didn’t look like a wolf. He looked like a prosperous deacon. Maybe that was the most frightening thing about him.
“That’s generous.” Nate kept his voice easy, leaning his shoulder against the post, ignoring the grind of the cracked rib the motion cost him. “Can I ask you a thing first, Mr. Chambers?”
“Ask me ten.”
“Did you ever come out here? Before. When my father was alive.”
The smallest pause. The red-bearded man’s eyes flicked toward Chambers and back.
“Can’t say I did. Busy man, son. We weren’t close.”
“Only I’ve been reading up on how my folks died.
” Nate held his gaze and wouldn’t let it go.
“Robbers, the file says. Fourteen years and nobody ever caught ‘em. You wouldn’t have heard anything, all these years, neighbor to neighbor? About who’d have ridden twenty miles out here to rob a poor rancher and shoot his wife on her own steps? ”
The smile held, but he let it go cold, all the friendliness gone out of it. “Terrible thing,” Chambers said. “Wild times.”
“You’d think a man who built so much would know who built so little and why they died for it.” Nate let the words sit.
Beside Chambers, the red-bearded Hart had gone very still, his small eyes flicking from his employer to Nate and back, a man watching a fuse he hadn’t lit and couldn’t put out.
“I only ask because it’s mine to ask. They were my mother and father.
A son’s got a right to know who put them in the ground.
Why do you want this land so bad?” Nate pushed, gentle, relentless.
“It’s poor grass. You’ve got twenty thousand acres of better.
What’s out here worth top dollar to a man like you? ”
And there it was. Chambers’s jaw set. His face hardened, the good cheer gone in an instant, and the hand came off the saddle horn and stabbed at the air, one thick finger driving toward Nate to punctuate his words.
“Now you listen to me, son. I came out here to do you a kindness, and I’ll not sit my horse and be cross-examined by a?—”
Nate didn’t hear the rest. The finger. The jab. One, and again, keeping time with the angry words, that exact motion, and the ground tipped under his boots, and the noon sun went cold as well water.
He was seven years old again in the dark with cedar in his nose, his heart slamming his ribs, watching through a crack as a thick finger stabbed the air at his father’s chest. You’ll learn to give a man what he asks for.
The same hand, the same three jabs to the rhythm of the same cruelty, the gold chain swinging below it.
His stomach heaved. The smell of cedar was in his throat as surely as if the trunk stood open at his feet, and for one reeling instant, the bright noon yard and the dark dead night ran together into a single image, one man, one gesture, fourteen years apart and no different at all.
The blood drained from his face. He held to the post and kept his expression flat because Josh had taught him the quiet man gets close and the loud man gets seen, and Nate wouldn’t be seen, not now, not with the truth standing on a horse in his own yard.
“Beg your pardon,” he said. His own voice surprised him: flat, easy, nothing in it. “Didn’t mean to give offense. A man wonders is all.”
Chambers studied him, the finger lowering.
Whatever he’d caught in Nate’s face, he put down to the bruises, by the look of him.
The smile came back on crooked. He gathered his reins.
“A man wonders himself right into trouble out here,” he said, soft now, and that was worse than the shouting.
“I’ll leave my offer open a while. Think on it.
And think on this, son, friendly, one neighbor to another. ”
He turned the bay, and over his shoulder, almost kindly, he said, “Colorado can be dangerous for a young man without friends, Mr. Ralston. You’d do well to make some. The right ones.”
He touched his hat brim, two fingers, and rode off down the track with his two men falling in behind, and his hand strayed once to the vest over his heart as he went, a small unthinking gesture, smoothing the cloth over whatever rode beneath it.
Josh let out a long breath and lowered the Sharps. “That’s him,” he said quietly. “In the flesh. You all right, boy? You went white as a sheet.”
“I’m fine.”
It was a lie, and Josh let it stand. But the old man’s eyes stayed on him a moment, shrewd under the gray brows. “You saw a thing just now,” Josh said. “Out there. I watched it cross your face. Don’t tell me different.”
“Later.” Nate’s mouth had gone dry as the road dust. “When I’m sure of it. You taught me to be sure before I move.”
Josh grunted, half pleased and half worried and let it go at that. He went to wipe down the Sharps and put the coffee on, and Nate stood at the rail until the dust of three horses had long settled, watching the empty track, his heart still going like a fist on a door.
He had looked into the face of the man who’d murdered his parents and shaken no hand and drawn no gun and given nothing away. Fourteen years he’d dreamed of that moment and imagined it to be loud. It had been the quietest thing in the world.
He thought of Lucy Thornhill. Don’t carry a single trouble of yours through Trisler’s door.
She’d said it easily, like advice from a friend, and he’d nodded and thought he understood and walked into Trisler’s office carrying fourteen years of trouble like a pack he’d never set down.
She’d been right, and he hadn’t known the half of it.
He’d like to tell her so. He didn’t know when he’d get the chance.
Nate didn’t sleep that night. He lay on his back in the dark of his old room, the room he’d had as a boy, and stared at the ceiling he couldn’t see and ran it again, the finger jabbing, the gold chain swinging, the heavy florid face.
He’d carried a half-glimpse for fourteen years, a jaw and a chain and a gesture in the moonlight and told himself a man couldn’t be sure on so little.
But the body remembered what the mind couldn’t prove. His body had gone cold on the porch before his thoughts had caught up, the way a horse had gathered to bolt before he’d ever smelled the snake.
And the chain. He’d carried it fourteen years as a bright swinging thing in the dark, burned into a child’s eye, without ever fixing it to a face.
Today it had hung across the same vest, catching the noon sun, and his body had known before his mind would let it.
He’d had the chain too, all along. He’d simply needed the man to stand in his yard and jab that finger one more time to set it all alight.
It crystallized somewhere past midnight, whole and certain and beyond any further doubt. The man who’d jabbed that finger on the porch this noon was the man who’d jabbed it in the lamplight fourteen years ago, on the night his mother and father died.
Cisco Chambers had stood in his yard today, smiled at his bruised face, offered him money for the ground, and never once known that the boy in the trunk had grown up, come home, and finally, finally seen him clearly.
That was the one card Nate held that the man couldn’t buy and couldn’t beat out of him.
Chambers didn’t know there’d been a witness.
Fourteen years he’d half feared it and never confirmed it, and now the proof of it lay awake in a dark room not ten miles from his own bed and had a name, and a rifle, and a long memory.
Nate lay still and let the certainty settle into his bones like cold, and somewhere before dawn, it stopped being grief and started being a plan.