Chapter 10
Lucy Thornhill rode to the Ralston place alone, before her mother was up, with six months of held breath sitting heavily in her chest.
She’d argued herself out of it a dozen times on the way.
A girl who told the wrong man what she knew was a girl who got herself killed, and her mother with her, and the ranch sold for back taxes within the year.
She had carried the thing alone since the spring because alone was safe, because the only mouth she trusted was her own.
Her whole life men had looked past her to whatever man stood nearest and asked him the question they ought to have asked her, and she’d learned to keep her own counsel and trust her own hands and need no one, and it had kept her standing where softer girls had folded.
Needing a person was a door you left unlocked.
She knew that as surely as she knew the weather.
But she’d watched this Boston man for weeks now from a distance, watched him take his beating in Denver and come home and keep right on, watched him mend his dead father’s fences with his bare hands and bury whatever it cost him. Somewhere in the watching, the scale had tipped.
He didn’t talk over her. He didn’t grin at her the way the town boys did, like she was a colt that wanted breaking.
He listened, and he waited, and he’d stood up on a train for two women who were nothing to him.
That was a rarer thing in a man than courage, and she’d seen enough courage spent stupidly to know the difference.
She found him in the side yard, sleeves rolled to the elbow, splitting stove wood, the axe rising and falling in a clean, hard rhythm.
He didn’t waste a stroke. Each round stood, split cleanly, and he set the next without breaking time.
The morning sun laid the lean muscle of his forearms bare where the dock years had built them.
She sat on her mare at the gate a moment and watched him before he knew she was there, and was honest enough with herself to admit she liked the look of a man who worked like he meant it. Then she put the thought away where it belonged.
The bruises on his face had faded to old-bread yellow. He set the axe down when he saw her and wiped his hands on his thighs and waited, as he always did, letting her come to it. He never rushed a person. It was, she’d decided, the most unusual thing about him.
“I’ve decided you’re the right man,” she said before she could lose the nerve. “The thing I told you I knew. I’m ready to say it.”
He didn’t crow about it or ask her why now. He just nodded once and said, “Come up on the porch. Josh is mending tack in the barn. It’ll be the two of us.”
She didn’t sit. She stood at the rail with her back to the yard and her arms crossed because the words came easier if she didn’t have to look at his face while she said them.
“Six months back, the spring gather. Chambers drives his beef south through the river bottoms, and the trail cuts the corner of our land, and there’s an old-line shack and a hay barn down there we don’t much use.” She kept her voice flat, reciting, the only way she could get through it.
“I was after a stray heifer. Got caught by the weather and holed up in the barn loft to wait out a squall. And while I was up there in the hay, two riders came in out of the rain to wait it out, same as me.” Her jaw tightened.
“Chambers. And that snake Cooley. They didn’t know a soul was above them.
Why would they? And Chambers had a bottle in him, the loud kind of drunk, the kind that likes the sound of his own wickedness. ”
The yard was quiet behind her. The axe lay where he’d dropped it.
“He got to bragging. As a man will, to one who already knows the worst of him. About the old days, building the empire.” She closed her eyes, and she was back up in that dark loft, the rain hammering the shingles a foot above her head.
The smell of wet wool and horse rising from below, holding so still her legs went dead under her, terrified the hay would rustle and give her away.
“And then he said.” She had to stop and start again.
“He said, ‘You remember the Ralston business, Edwin.’ Said it like a fond memory. A funny old story. Said the stubborn fool found color up Clear Creek and wouldn’t sell and wouldn’t tell, and so he’d ridden out there one night and settled it himself.
Those were his words. Settled it himself. ”
Her nails bit her own arms. “And Cooley put in a word about the woman, low and ugly, and Chambers laughed, an awful fat laugh, and said the best part was nobody ever came looking. Fourteen years, he said, and not one soul came asking. The secret died with the fool and his wife, he said, and the gold’s still up there in the rock waiting on him to find it.
Then the rain let up and they rode out, and I lay in that hay another hour because I couldn’t make my legs work. ” She made herself turn around then.
Nate had gone very still, the stillness she’d marked in him from the first, but underneath it, his face had bled white beneath the fading bruises and his hands had closed slowly into fists at his sides. He didn’t speak.
She’d expected shouting, maybe, or tears, or the wild grief of a man hearing his parents’ murder laughed about. She hadn’t expected this terrible quiet, and it moved her more than any noise could have.
“I’d have told the law,” she said, gentler now, “if there was a law to tell. But I overheard it. There’s no paper, no witness but me, and Budd Trisler would have me in a cell for slander and a message off to Chambers before the ink dried. So, I kept it. Six months. And it’s been eating me alive.”
“It’s the same,” he said at last, low and rough. “It matches. The gold, the cave, the claim. You’ve put words to a thing I’ve only ever had in pieces.” He looked at her. “You’re sure of every part of that? You’d swear to it? Word for word?”
“On my father’s grave. I’ve gone over it in my head every night since. I could say it in my sleep.”
“Then that’s the spine of it.” He came up onto the porch, and the deadness in his face had begun to give way to something harder and more alive.
“A man’s own admission. It won’t hang him by itself, a thing one woman overheard.
But put it beside proof the gold is real, proof of his motive, and the brand on the men who beat me, and his men’s mark on whatever comes next, and lay the whole of it in front of a federal marshal who doesn’t take Chambers’s money.
” His voice steadied as the plan built under it. “It starts to be a noose.”
“A federal marshal.” She studied him a moment and revised her estimate of him upward, yet again.
“You’ve thought past tomorrow. Good. Most men out here can’t see past their own anger, and Chambers buries those men in the spring and plants oats on them by fall.
The graveyards are full of brave fools who went at him head-on. ”
“Anger’s no use spent all at once.” He turned and looked east, toward the foothills and the long blue notch where the canyon would be, and she could nearly watch the pieces lock together behind his eyes.
“He knows I’ve got a map. What he doesn’t know is whether I can read it, or whether there’s anything left to find up there.
That’s the edge we’ve got, and it’s thin.
” He came back to her. “The day he’s sure I can walk to that cave and put my hand on the gold is the day he must kill me to keep it. So, we move quiet. We don’t tip it.”
“And me?” She lifted her chin. “I didn’t ride out here to be told to stay home and knit.”
“No.” A short, real, almost-laugh. “No, I’d not waste my breath.
” He held out his hand to her then, plain and direct.
“I’ve been doing this alone, Lucy, me and one old man.
You know this county and the people in it, and you’ve got the nerve God gave a wolverine.
You feed me what your contacts hear, I’ll chase the proof.
We do it together. Partners. Yes, or no? ”
She looked at the offered hand, at the man behind it, and at six months of carrying a killing secret all by herself, and she took it. Her grip was firm, as her father had taught her, no lady’s limp fingers, and she met the pressure of his and matched it.
It registered on him, the strength of it. His eyebrows lifted a fraction, and the ghost of a smile eased the hard line of his mouth. “Firm as any man’s,” he said.
“Firmer than most.” But she didn’t let go right away, and neither did he, and in that held grip more passed between them than either had put into words. “You’re not in this by yourself anymore, Nate Ralston,” she said. “Whatever else. You’re not alone.”
“No.” He let the word out like a man setting down a weight he’d carried so long he’d forgotten it was heavy. “No, I don’t believe I am. First time I can say that since I stepped off the train.”
It went through her, that. She had ridden out here to give a man a weapon against his enemy. She hadn’t expected to feel, standing on this porch with her hand in his, that she’d put down a stone of her own.
She made herself step back before the moment could turn into a thing she wasn’t ready for, gathered her hat, and went down the steps to where her gray mare stood hipshot at the rail.
Her fingers still held the pressure of his grip.
She’d shaken plenty of hands in her life.
This one she kept noticing. “I’ll send word when I hear anything,” she said, putting her boot in the stirrup.
“Mother’s got ears in three counties, and not one soul thinks twice about two ranch women gossiping at the?—”
The rifle shot cracked across the yard.
It came from the treeline to the east, flat and vicious, and the top of the fence post not a hand’s width from her head burst into splinters that stung her cheek like buckshot.
The gray mare screamed and reared, jerking the reins through Lucy’s fingers, and for one frozen instant, she stood exposed in the open yard with her boot still in the stirrup and nowhere on God’s earth to hide.
Her heart slammed into her throat. The whole world narrowed to the thin blue ribbon of powder smoke drifting from the gap in the trees and the cold certain knowledge that the shot had been meant to put a hole clean through her skull.
Whoever held that rifle was already working the lever for a second try at her.
She heard Nate shout her name. It was raw and urgent, and it cracked on the last syllable, and she knew that sound for what it was: not a lawman’s shout. He was afraid for her. She couldn’t make her legs move at all.