Chapter 12
Nate sat his gelding on the rise above the burned barn the morning after, looking down at the black bones of it steaming in the cold, and did the sum the way Josh had taught him to read sign, slowly and honestly, leaving nothing out because it pained him.
Chambers had men, money, the sheriff, and the patience of a spider.
Nate had one old rancher, one girl with a firm handshake, four spooked horses, and a held card the other man didn’t know about. It’d never be enough, not three people and a secret. He needed hands. So, he saddled up and went to find them.
He rode Lucy home first, the long way around by the ridgelines with the Winchester across his saddlebow and his eyes never still, Josh trailing a quarter mile back to watch their dust. He left her safe in her mother’s yard with Celia’s arms hard around her, and then he turned the gelding north and began to knock on doors.
The first was a sheep outfit in the high pasture, a lean Scotsman named Dunmore who heard Nate out on his own porch with his arms folded and his jaw working.
Nate laid it plainly. The murders. The gold.
The beating and the brand. The fire. He didn’t preach, and he didn’t beg.
He told it like a ledger and let the figures speak.
“I know what Chambers is,” Dunmore said when he’d finished.
“Knew it before you was born, son. He dried up my spring two summers back till I sold him my bottom forty for a song.” His eyes went to the rifle, the bruise shadow still under Nate’s eye, the smell of smoke that hadn’t yet washed out of his coat.
“And I know what happens to men who stand up to him. I’ve a wife and three girls in that house.
I’ll not make widows and orphans to feed your fight. ”
He wasn’t unkind about it. That was the worst of it. “Go home, Ralston. Or go back east. There’s no shame in living.”
The second door opened. The man who answered was Gant, a dry-land farmer Nate recognized from the feed store. He heard Nate out without speaking and stood for a moment with his hand on the doorframe. He almost stepped out.
The yes was plain in him: the forward lean, his weight coming off his back foot. Then Gant’s eyes went past him to the window where two small faces watched from inside, and the lean died. He let out a slow breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. He shut the door.
The third door didn’t open at all. An old man named Petrie appeared at the window, looked out at Nate, and drew the curtain.
By noon, Nate had been refused three times, and his belly had gone sour with it. He ate a cold biscuit in the saddle between ranches and tasted nothing but the ash that still clung to everything he owned. He made himself understand the men who’d turned him away rather than hate them for it.
Every one of them had a house full of people to bury if they guessed wrong. Fear had done Chambers’s work for him so thoroughly that the man scarcely needed guns anymore, and Nate began to grasp how his father could have stood alone against it and lost.
The fourth was different. The Halloran place lay east, a tidy small spread run by a stooped couple gone gray in the harness. Nate knew the story before he told it. Lucy had given it to him on the ride home.
Their boy Tom had spoken up at a stock auction two years back, called Chambers a thief to his face over a disputed brand, and a week later, three masked men had caught the boy on the road and broken both his hands with a wagon spoke and told him to go be brave somewhere else.
He’d gone to Cheyenne and not come back.
The old man, Sean Halloran, listened with his hat in his hands and his wife’s fingers tight on his sleeve, and when Nate finished, the old woman spoke first.
“They ruined my son’s hands,” she said. “He was going to be a fiddler. Did you know that? He had a gift.” Her chin came up, and in that motion, Nate saw a thing he’d seen in Lucy.
“I have been waiting two years for one soul in this county to say enough where I could hear it. We’re in. Whatever it costs.”
“It could cost a great deal.”
“It already has,” she said.
Halloran walked Nate to his horse and gripped his hand.
“I’ll talk quiet to the ones who’ve got cause and a spine,” he said.
“There’s more than you’d think. They only want to know they won’t be standing alone.
You’ve give them that, maybe. A man at the front of the line.
” He squinted up. “You mind you don’t end up like your daddy did. ”
Two families, then, out of five. The Thornhills and the Hallorans, and the promise of a quiet word passed along to others.
It wasn’t an army. But it was no longer three people and a secret, and Nate rode east with two families at his back instead of none, and for the first time, the arithmetic ran his way.
* * *
They gathered around Celia’s kitchen table at dusk, the four of them and Halloran’s promise hanging in the room like the lamp smoke, and that was where Lucy put her finger on the hard truth of it.
“Say you raise twenty men,” she said. She had her elbows on the scrubbed pine and her green eyes hard on him.
“Say you face Chambers down in the road with all of them at your back. What then? You shoot it out, and the ones of you left standing get to hang because the only law in this county is Budd Trisler, and Budd Trisler is Chambers’s dog.
You’d be murderers in the eyes of the only court that sits here.” She shook her head. “Courage isn’t the thing we’re short of. Proof is. Proof that’d stand up in front of a judge who never took Chambers’s money. Otherwise, we’re just one more grave he plants oats on.”
“She’s right,” Josh said heavily. “Thinking ain’t proving. I’ve believed Chambers killed Eldon for fourteen years, and my believing it never once put a rope near his neck.”
Nate was quiet for a moment, turning it.
He’d sworn to Josh that they would keep this from the Thornhills.
Sworn it the night the boot prints showed up under his window, told himself they had enough trouble without pulling Celia and Lucy deeper in.
But that was before Chambers’s men put a gun to this kitchen, before Lucy had laid out the evidence cleaner than a lawyer.
He reached inside his coat. “Then I’ll show you what I’ve told no one but Josh,” he said and laid the soft old sheet of paper on the table in the lamplight, the broken red wax still clinging to its edge.
“My grandfather kept this in Boston fourteen years. My father drew it the autumn before he died and mailed it east because he knew he was watched.” He smoothed it flat.
The creek, the canyon notch, and the split-rock mark shaped like a church steeple.
“It’s the gold. The actual cave, the real vein, the thing Chambers murdered my mother and father to get and never found. ”
Lucy leaned over it, her auburn hair falling loose across the lamplight, and her breath went out of her slowly.
Celia made a small sound and pressed her knuckles to her mouth.
Nobody touched the paper. It lay there between the coffee cups like a live coal, the thing a good man had died for, and a wicked one had hunted for fourteen years.
At last, the secret had a roof and four walls and friends around it.
“This is the why of all of it,” Nate said.
“He killed for what’s drawn on this paper.
If we find that cave, if we can put a piece of that gold in a federal marshal’s hand and say here is the thing a man committed murder to own, then your overhearing isn’t just one woman’s word anymore.
It’s a woman’s word and a motive and a beating and a brand and a burned barn, all pointing the same direction.
” He looked around the table. “We don’t beat Chambers with guns.
We beat him with the truth; laid in front of a man he can’t buy. And the truth starts in that canyon.”
“A federal marshal,” Celia said softly. “Colorado Springs, that’d be. Two days’ hard ride for him to come, if he comes at all.”
“Then we give him a reason he can’t ignore.” Nate folded the map and put it away. “We ride for the cave. Quiet. Before Chambers knows there’s anything left to find.”
Lucy looked at him across the table, and the corner of her mouth did the small thing he’d come to watch for. “You’ve gone and made it a plan,” she said. “I knew there was a use for you.”
* * *
He left for home under a thin moon, Josh beside him, both watching the dark.
They were two miles out when a horse came up behind them at a trot, and Nate had the Winchester half up before the rider called out that he was a friend and walked his horse into the moonlight with both hands showing.
A wiry man in a barkeep’s apron still tied under his coat. Nate knew the face from the dim room off Larimer Street where an old-timer had once started a sentence he couldn’t finish.
“Won’t keep you,” the barman said. “Rode out soon as I closed. You did me a kindness once and didn’t know it.
That old man was running his mouth about Chambers in front of the wrong ears, and you moved him outside before the room went sideways.
Kept my place standing, maybe more. So, I’ll do you one back.
” He glanced behind him at the empty road.
“Chambers put the word out in town this afternoon. Quiet, through the right mouths. There’s money on you now, Ralston. Five hundred dollars.” He let it sit. “Dead or alive is how it was said. Mostly they said dead.”
Five hundred dollars. A fortune. More than a cowhand made in three years of eating dust, dangled in front of every hard case and broke drifter and back-shooting coward from here to the territory line.
“He’s done sending his own men,” Josh said quietly. “Now he’s renting the whole county to do it.”
“I’d watch every stranger’s hands from here out,” the barman said and touched his hat, then turned his horse. “And I was never on this road.” He had gone into the dark before Nate could thank him.
Nate sat on his horse in the cold moonlight with a price on his head and a map in his coat and felt, strangely, no fear at all. Five hundred dollars meant Chambers had stopped being patient. Five hundred dollars meant the man was rattled, and a rattled man made mistakes a cautious one never did.
“Well, boy.” Josh gathered his reins. “You wanted him to come at you. Looks like you’ll get the whole county thrown in for free.”
“Let him,” Nate said and put the gelding toward home. “He’s just told every man with eyes that the Ralston boy is worth killing. A man’s only worth that much dead if he’s close to a thing the killer can’t afford him to find.”