Chapter Fourteen
The tracks ran along the eastern fence, boot prints in the crusted snow, heading north toward the tree line.
Sam crouched beside them in the early morning cold, studying the depth and the spacing.
A man on foot, moving steadily, taking his time about it.
The stride said average height. The tread said worn boots—heels ground down on the outside edge the way a man's boots wore when he spent more time walking than riding.
Sam had tracked enough men to read a boot print the way Evelyn read a seam, pulling information from details most people walked right over.
These prints belonged to somebody comfortable in rough country, somebody who'd walked this fence line with purpose.
They followed the fence for about forty yards before cutting east into the pines, where the snow thinned under the branches and the trail dissolved into frozen needles and shadow.
A man could disappear into that timber in about thirty seconds and stay disappeared as long as he pleased, which made it exactly the kind of country a man chose when he wanted to watch a homestead without being watched back.
He backtracked along the fence to the south gate. The latch hung open.
He'd secured that gate himself last night.
He remembered doing it because he remembered everything about his nightly rounds, every latch and every lock and every window check, the same way he remembered every campsite and every trail marker on a hunt.
Routine kept a man alive. Routine kept a man's mind from wandering to places it had no business going, which, given where Sam's mind had been wandering lately, made routine more necessary than ever.
The latch showed no damage. Somebody had lifted it clean, opened the gate, left it standing wide. Whether they'd come through or just wanted Sam to know they could, he couldn't tell. The distinction mattered less than the fact itself.
He closed the gate, reinforced the latch with a length of wire from the barn, and pulled it hard to test the hold.
***
Old Haskell's place sat about two miles south.
Sam rode down after breakfast because Haskell kept a sharp eye on the country between their properties, the kind of neighbor who noticed a strange horse on the road or an unfamiliar column of smoke and filed it away without being asked.
Useful man, though he made terrible coffee.
He found Haskell mending fence along his south pasture, working a pair of pliers on a strand of wire while his dog, a half-blind cattle mutt named Bishop, dozed in a patch of sun nearby.
"Mornin', Haskell."
"Sam Cooper. Ain't seen you in a dog's age." Haskell straightened up and squinted against the morning light, the pliers still working between his fingers. "What brings you ridin' down my way?"
"I come across tracks along my eastern fence this mornin'. Boot prints. Somebody afoot, headin' north through the pines. You seen any strangers hereabouts, here lately?"
Haskell spat tobacco juice into the snow and wiped his mouth with the back of his glove.
"Now you put it to me, I did see a fella, two days back, maybe three.
Walkin' the road past my north pasture. I hollered at him, asked if he needed directions or water or what have you, on account of a man afoot in this country generally means a man what's in some kind of fix. "
"What'd he have to say for himself?"
"Asked me a whole passel of questions, is what he done.
Who owned the land north of here, how many homesteads up the valley, whether any of 'em had menfolk in residence.
I told him I didn't make no habit of cataloguin' my neighbors' business for strangers and he'd best move along right quick.
" Haskell turned the pliers over in his hand.
"Medium-built fella in a dark coat and a dark hat.
Had a look about him, Sam. You know the look I'm speakin' of.
The kind where a man's eyes are workin' faster'n the rest of him. "
Sam knew the look. He'd worn it himself often enough on the hunt, that constant scanning, cataloging exits and angles and the distance to the nearest cover.
"He give you a name?"
"I didn't ask, and he didn't volunteer one. Figured the less I knew about the fella the better off I'd be, and I still figure that way. He moved on north after I told him to clear out. Ain't laid eyes on him since."
"Much obliged, Haskell. You spot him again, I'd take it right kindly if you'd send word."
"I'll do that very thing. You watch yourself out there, Sam. Old Bishop here didn't take to the fella one bit, and that dog's a sharper judge of character than most preachers I ever crossed paths with."
***
Sam rode back at a pace the mare objected to, because Sam preferred speed when his blood ran hot.
He checked the full perimeter on the way in, riding the fence line from the south gate all the way around to the north, dismounting twice to examine the ground where the timber pressed close.
There were more tracks near the northeast corner, though they were fainter, older, and partially filled with drifted snow.
A man had been circling this property more than once, and that fact sat in Sam's gut the way a bad meal sat, heavy and wrong and refusing to settle.
Medium build. Dark coat, dark hat. Eyes working faster than the rest of him.
Asking about homesteads. About residents.
About menfolk. The description could fit a land speculator scouting property, or a drifter casing homesteads for easy robbery.
Could fit a dozen men Sam had never met and had no reason to fear.
But it could also fit the man he'd followed through the flea-market crowd last week.
The man who'd turned the corner at the assayer's office and vanished into that empty side street.
The man he'd spotted near the livery before that—the one with the angular jaw and the broken nose, who'd scanned the street the way a hunted animal scanned a clearing before crossing it.
Three sightings now, if he counted them all, each one lining up with the next in a way that either meant Amos Wilkes had found his way to this valley or Sam Cooper had finally lost his grip on the line between vigilance and delusion.
Twenty years he'd been walking that line. Twenty years of following leads that went cold, chasing descriptions that matched and then didn't, standing in empty streets staring at corners where men had vanished.
The obsession had cost him things he'd stopped counting.
Jobs he'd walked away from because a sighting pulled him off the trail.
Friendships he'd let rot because explaining why you chased a dead man's ghost through every territory west of the Mississippi tended to end conversations rather than start them.
Sarah had never called it an obsession to his face because Sarah loved him too much for that particular brand of honesty, but he'd caught her looking at him sometimes after one of his false leads, wearing that expression she wore when she worried about things she couldn't fix.
Now, Evelyn sat in his kitchen sewing scarves for a fair while a man who might or might not be Amos Wilkes circled the property in the dark.
Sam couldn't tell her because telling her would mean explaining the whole of it—the obsession, the ghosts, the twenty years of maybe-madness—and he'd sooner chew glass than watch her face change the way faces changed when people realized the man in front of them had been chasing shadows since boyhood.
He unsaddled the mare and went straight to the house for the Winchester, checking the action and the load before leaning it beside the front door.
He moved the Colt from the table to his hip because a gun on a table required crossing a room and a gun on your hip required crossing about three inches, then checked every window latch in the house.
All six of them. Front door, back door, cellar hatch.
He locked the front door at four o'clock, a full two hours before he normally secured the house.
The pacing started after that, a circuit through the main room that took him past every window, checking sight lines and angles the way he would have checked a campsite on the trail, looking for blind spots, for approaches, for places where a man could get close without being seen.
He forced himself to sit down at the table with the pretense of sharpening his knife.
The blade didn't need sharpening. He sharpened it anyway because his hands needed occupation and because the rhythmic scrape of steel on whetstone gave his thoughts a tempo they could follow instead of scattering in every direction.
The trouble—the real trouble underneath all the rest of it—came down to the fact that if Wilkes had found the homestead, he hadn't found just Sam.
He'd found Evelyn. She was a woman alone on the frontier who had no part in the bad blood between Sam and Wilkes.
A woman who'd come to Montana to mind chickens and escape gossip and had instead landed herself in the middle of a twenty-year hunt she didn't even know existed.
Sam had brought this danger to her doorstep simply by being here, simply by existing, simply by being the son of the people Wilkes had killed.
Every day she stayed in this house, she sat inside the radius of whatever Wilkes intended, and she did it without knowing it, stitching scarves, making pie, and putting her hand on Sam's shoulder while he carried her up the stairs.
He made his rounds again at five, carrying the Winchester with him for the whole circuit, which he hadn't done since the first year on this property when the nearest neighbor had reported a mountain lion taking calves. He locked the front door when he came back in.