Chapter Eight
Sam sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the wall and tried to make sense of what he'd seen. Or what he thought he'd seen. What his mind had decided to show him, which might not amount to the same thing at all.
He'd gone to town for nails. That covered the practical reason.
The barn roof needed more work, and he'd run short yesterday.
The ride into town had given him something to do with his hands and his horse, that didn't involve sitting in a warm kitchen with a woman who'd put her hand on his shoulder last night and made him forget how to think straight. So. Nails.
He'd tied up outside Harlow's. Gone in. Bought the nails, a pound of eight-pennies and a half-pound of roofing tacks.
Harlow had talked at him about the weather and the price of flour and some dispute between two ranchers south of town over a fence line, and Sam had listened the way he always listened to Harlow, which amounted to standing in the general vicinity of the words and letting them pass through him on their way to somewhere else.
He'd stepped back out onto the boardwalk, and then…
A man on the far side of the street. Walking past the livery, heading toward the saloon, hands in his coat pockets.
Medium height, lean, wearing a dark hat pulled low.
Something about the walk—the stride, the way the shoulders moved, a looseness in the hips that suggested a man comfortable covering ground without being noticed—had caught Sam's eye the way a bent twig caught his eye on a trail. Wrong. Something wrong about it.
The man had turned his head, just slightly, at the corner of the saloon, and Sam had gotten maybe two seconds of his profile.
Angular jaw. A nose that had been broken at least once.
Dark eyes under the hat brim, quick and scanning the street the way a man scanned a street when he expected to find something he didn't want.
Amos Wilkes?
Or not. That was the problem, because Sam had seen Amos Wilkes before.
Had seen him plenty in crowds, on trails, in the faces of strangers in towns he'd passed through over the last twenty years.
He'd seen Wilkes in a cattle drover outside Abilene.
In a card player in Helena. In a drifter he'd passed on the road near Bozeman who'd turned out to be a sixty-year-old prospector with a limp and no teeth.
Every time, his gut had clenched, and his hand had gone for his gun, and his blood had run hot, and every time it had turned out to be nobody.
Just his own mind playing the same trick it had played since he'd stood in the ashes of his parents' homestead at ten years old, and sworn he'd find the man who'd done it.
That had been twenty years ago. He'd been a boy.
He'd seen Wilkes once, maybe twice, in the chaos of that night, a face lit by firelight, a voice giving orders, a figure moving through smoke.
The memory had worn thin from handling, rubbed down to a sketch, a collection of features that could belong to half the men in any territory west of the Mississippi.
Angular jaw. Broken nose. Dark eyes. How many men fit that picture? A hundred? A thousand?
And yet his gut had clenched today the same way it always clenched.
His hand had moved toward the Colt the same way it always moved.
And for about ten seconds he'd stood on that boardwalk outside Harlow's with a pound of eight-penny nails in one hand and his other hand on his gun and his heart beating like he'd run a mile, watching a stranger walk into a saloon.
He'd gone to the saloon after. Looked around. The man had vanished, or had never been the man Sam thought he'd been, or had walked out the back while Sam came in the front. The barkeep hadn't noticed anyone fitting the description. Nobody had.
So either Amos Wilkes had appeared in a small Montana town twenty years after murdering Sam's parents and then disappeared into thin air, or Sam Cooper had gone crazy again.
He rubbed his face with both hands and pressed his palms against his eyes until colors bloomed in the dark.
He should talk to the sheriff. Foster would know if any strangers had come through recently, if anyone had asked questions, or if anything had turned up on any wanted circulars.
Foster kept track of that kind of thing because that covered his job, and because Foster took his job seriously in a way Sam respected even when it irritated him.
He'd ride to the sheriff's office tomorrow.
Ask around. Get an answer that didn't come from inside his own skull, because the answers inside his own skull had not proven reliable on this particular subject.
Twenty years. Twenty years of chasing a ghost through every stranger's face. At what point did a man admit that the ghost had won?
A knock on the door.
Sam lifted his head. He'd been sitting here… how long? The light through the window had shifted, gone orange and low. Late afternoon tipping into evening.
Another knock. Quiet. Almost apologetic.
He stood up. Opened the door.
Evelyn stood in the hallway holding a plate with a slice of pie on it.
The crust had gone golden brown, the edges crimped in a pattern that looked like someone had actually given a damn about how it turned out, and the smell coming off it—cinnamon and warm apple and butter—cut through everything in his head like a blade through fog.
"I don't aim to trouble you." She held the plate out. "But you ain't eaten since this mornin'. I made this, and it's just gonna sit there if somebody don't have a piece."
He looked at the pie, then looked at her.
She had flour on her sleeve, a faint dusting of it near the cuff, and her hair had loosened from its pins the way it did by late afternoon.
Wisps of chestnut brown fell around her face.
Her expression sat somewhere between concern and the particular stubbornness he'd come to associate with her.
It was the kind that meant she'd stand in this hallway holding this plate until the Second Coming if that's what the situation required.
He took the plate.
"I reckon I could eat."
He sat back down on the edge of the bed. She leaned against the door frame. He picked up the fork, cut a bite, and put it in his mouth.
Lord.
The crust crumbled on his tongue, light, flaky, and buttery in a way that made the word "pie" seem insufficient for what had just happened in his mouth.
The apple filling hit next, sweet and tart and spiced with cinnamon, and the whole thing melted into something so far removed from anything he'd ever eaten in this kitchen that, for a second, he just sat there, chewing, and staring at the plate as if it had personally insulted everything he'd ever cooked.
"Well?"
He took another bite. Then another. He ate half the slice before he answered, because the pie deserved his attention more than conversation did.
"Where'd you learn to make pie like that?"
"A German woman in Springfield. Mrs. Krauss." She crossed her arms and leaned her shoulder against the frame. "She taught me that pie crust needs cold hands and a bad temper. I've got both."
His mouth did the thing it had started doing around her, the thing where the corner went up before he could catch it. He didn't try to catch it this time.
"I reckon that's about the finest pie I've ever put in my mouth. And I'll thank you not to tell Sarah I said that, on account of her taking it personal."
"Your secret's safe, Mr. Cooper."
He finished the slice and set the plate on the bed beside him.
The thing in his chest that had been wound tightly since town—since the man on the street, since the saloon, since the ride home with Wilkes's ghost sitting behind him on the mare like a second rider—had loosened. Not gone. Just loosened.
Evelyn watched him set the plate down, and something in her face eased too, like she'd been holding her breath waiting to see if he'd eat.
"You know, for two people who started out with a skillet and a Colt between 'em, I reckon we manage well enough together."
He looked at her, leaning against the doorframe with flour on her sleeve and pie crumbs on the plate, and at the half-smile she wore when she said something she meant but wanted to play off as casual.
And the hell of it—she had a point. A week ago he'd pulled a gun on this woman.
Now she stood in his doorway feeding him pie and checking on him like she'd been doing it for years.
"I reckon we do, at that."
"You all right, though?" She tilted her head against the frame. "You came home lookin' like you'd seen a spirit."
Close enough. He almost said so.
"I got a lot on my mind, is all. Nothin' you need to worry on."
"That's what people say when there's plenty to worry on."
He looked at her. She looked back. And he recognized, in that steady, unhurried way she had of holding his gaze, something he hadn't encountered much in his life.
Patience. Real patience, not the kind people performed while they waited for their turn to talk, but the kind that meant she'd wait as long as it took and wouldn't fill the space with noise.
"Come sit with me a spell," she said. "I'll fix us some tea. You can tell me or not tell me, I don't much care which, but you shouldn't sit in here alone starin' at the wall."
He shouldn't. She had a point about that. He'd spent twenty years staring at walls after seeing Wilkes's face in strangers, and it had never once produced anything useful.
He followed her out to the main room. She made tea, moving around the kitchen on her bad ankle with a limp she tried to hide and couldn't, heating water on the stove and spooning tea leaves into two cups.
He sat in the chair by the fire and watched her do it and didn't offer to help because she'd have refused.
He knew that about her now. She brought him a cup and settled into the other chair with her own.
She pulled the quilt over her lap, and they sat there with the fire between them, and the tea too hot to drink, but warm in their hands.
"Might I put a question to you?" She blew on her tea. "And you ain't obliged to answer if you'd rather not."
"Go ahead."
"How'd you come to bounty huntin'? Not the practical part, you told me that already. The sheriff, then takin' jobs on your own for the money. I mean the part before all that. What set you on that road in the first place?"
The fire crackled. A log shifted, sending up a scatter of sparks. Sam held his cup, looked at the flames, and considered giving her the short version. It was the one he gave everyone, that fit in two sentences, and covered the facts without uncovering anything underneath them.
He gave her something else instead. He couldn't have said why.
"My folks got killed when I was ten. Sarah was four.
" He kept his eyes on the fire. "Homestead in western Missouri.
A man came in the night with some others, outlaws, raiders, whatever you want to call 'em.
They wanted money. My father tried to stop 'em.
They set the barn ablaze, and the fire spread to the house and—"
He stopped and took a breath.
"My mother and father didn't make it out. I got Sarah out through a window. That part I remember real clear. The rest of it comes and goes."
Evelyn didn't say anything. Didn't gasp, didn't offer condolences, didn't make any of the sounds people made when you told them your parents burned to death. She just sat there with her tea, her quilt, and her silence, and let the words land where they landed.
"After that, it was just Sarah and me. Church folk took us in for a spell, then we moved west. I got work young.
Found out I could track. Found out I could find men other men couldn't find, and people would pay for that.
So I took it up as my trade." He turned the cup in his hands.
"But it ain't just a trade. It never has been.
The man who led that raid goes by the name of Amos Wilkes.
I know his name because I spent years trackin' it down through every lawman, every outlaw, and every drunk who'd talk to me between here and Missouri. And I ain't never found him."
He drank his tea. Still too hot. Burned his tongue. Didn't matter.
"That's what keeps me at it. Every bounty I take, part of me reckons the next one might lead to him.
Every man I track, I'm lookin' for the one I ain't caught yet.
It's been twenty years, and I'm still lookin'.
" He stared at the fire. "I reckon that makes me either dedicated or crazy, and most days I can't tell which. "
Evelyn leaned forward in her chair and set her tea on the table. She reached across the space between them and laid her hand over his, the one resting on his knee. Her fingers, still warm from the cup, closed over his knuckles.
"You ain't crazy, Sam."
It was the first time she'd used his name. His given name, rather than Mr. Cooper. Just Sam. It landed in a place he hadn't expected and settled there.
"But chasin' a ghost for twenty years gives the ghost power over you.
You know that, don't you? Every year you spend huntin' him is another year he's got hold of your life.
And justice don't come from runnin' after what's gone.
It comes from—" She paused and looked down at their hands.
"I don't know where it comes from, exactly. But I don't reckon it comes from that."
He looked down too. Her hand on his. Small, capable fingers over his scarred knuckles. Her skin was lighter than his, roughened at the fingertips from years of needlework. He studied the way their hands fit together. He didn't pull away or lean in. He just sat with it.
"This is gettin' to be a habit," he said. "You and me. Hands."
She pulled back an inch. Then stopped. "I'd like for us to be friends, Sam. Proper friends. I reckon we could manage that well enough, don't you?"
Friends. He turned the word over. It sat fine on the surface. Friends covered tea by the fire, stew in the kitchen, and pie on a plate. Friends covered all the parts that made sense.
Friends did not cover the way her hand on his knuckles made his chest tight, or the fact that he'd noticed the flour on her sleeve, or the way she'd said his name just now and the way it had landed somewhere below his ribs and stayed.
"I reckon we could."
He drew his hand back. Slowly. Not a retreat, exactly. More of a tactical withdrawal. There existed a difference.
She settled back into her chair. Picked up her tea. The fire crackled between them, warm and steady, and the room sat quiet and dark beyond the circle of light from the flames.
He should get up. Check the animals. Bank the fire. Go to his room. Put a door between himself and this woman and whatever had just happened with their hands on his knee, because friends didn't sit in firelight studying the flour on each other's sleeves and wondering what it would feel like to—
He stayed in the chair.
She stayed in hers.