Chapter Twenty-Seven
The letter came with the sunrise.
Sam had been at the kitchen table since maybe four, or maybe he hadn't slept at all.
His leg hurt in a way that had gone past pain and turned into weather, something he'd stopped trying to fix and started trying to live inside.
The whiskey helped some. Not much, just enough to keep the ankle from taking the whole of his attention while his brain worked on things that mattered.
A boy of maybe ten or eleven, on a chestnut mare that didn't belong to any homestead Sam recognized, rode into the yard at first light and dropped a folded paper on the porch step, then turned that mare around and lit out before Sam got the door open.
Sam hopped out on the porch on one leg, holding to the frame, and by then the boy was already past the cottonwoods.
He looked down at cheap paper folded once, his name across the front in a hand he'd never seen before. Cooper.
Just that.
He picked it up. He stood there on the porch on his good leg with the cold coming up through his sock because he hadn't gotten his boot on the bad foot yet, and he read it standing.
Cooper.
I got your girl. She is alive. That won't hold if you play a fool’s hand.
You bring three hundred dollars to the old Marley claim above the north fork of Willow Creek by sundown tomorrow. You know the place. I know you know it.
You come alone. You bring the sheriff or one deputy or one saddle bum you paid two bits to ride behind you, and I will know it before you get within a mile of the claim, and she will be dead before you tie your horse. I want you to hear me on this. I have been at this a while. I will know.
Three hundred. Sundown tomorrow. Alone.
You leave that gun belt on if it suits you. It won't help you none.
A. Wilkes
Sam read it twice.
Then he read it a third time, because the first time his hands had been shaking too badly to hold the paper level, and the second time he'd been trying to find the lie in it, and the third time he made himself just read what the man had put down.
She was alive.
That was the piece. Everything else was noise.
Wilkes wanted a meeting, Wilkes wanted money, Wilkes wanted Sam standing where Wilkes could see him.
All that could be worked. What couldn't be worked was dead, and she wasn't dead.
She was alive. As of whenever Wilkes had sat down and put pen to paper, she'd been alive.
He hopped back into the kitchen and dropped the paper on the table.
Sarah came out of the back room in her wrapper with her hair still braided from the night before. She took one look at his face, then one look at the paper, and she was across the kitchen and picking it up before he'd got himself back into the chair.
She read it, then read it a second time, and set it down flat.
"Sundown tomorrow."
"Yeah."
"Three hundred dollars."
"Yeah."
"Sam."
"I know it."
"Sam, we have got to fetch the sheriff."
He'd been figuring how long it'd take her to get there. He'd figured about forty seconds. She'd made it in maybe twenty.
"No."
"Sam Cooper—"
"No, Sarah."
"You listen to me—"
"I am listenin'. I heard you the first go. The answer is no."
"He'll help you. Foster'll help you, he'll bring men, he'll—"
"He'll get her killed."
"You don't know that."
"I do know it. That letter says it plain.
It says it as plain as anything's ever been said to me in my life.
I bring one man with me, one, and she is dead before I lay eyes on her.
And Wilkes ain't blowin' smoke, Sarah. He has been camped in that timber a fortnight.
He knows every road in and out of the north fork.
He'll see us comin' six ways from Sunday. "
"So you ride out to that claim alone and he shoots you off your horse."
"Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"Maybe he does. But maybe he don't, on account of he wants somethin' from me first. He wants the money, and he wants to look me in the face while he takes it. He wants that whole thing. He ain't gonna shoot me till he's had it, and that gives me a window."
"A window."
"A window's all a man needs, Sarah."
"A window is what a body throws itself out of when the house is burnin', Sam, don't you sit there and—"
"Sarah."
"Don't you Sarah me. Don't you dare. You are fixin' to ride out there on a broke leg with three hundred dollars we ain't got and get yourself put in the ground, and I have already buried two people in this family and I ain't buryin' a third. Do you hear me?"
She was up and pacing. She'd put her hand on the back of a chair, gripping it hard enough that her knuckles had gone white, and she didn't know it.
He waited her out.
She turned around and looked at him.
"Sam."
"Yeah."
"If I go to Foster behind your back."
"Then Evelyn dies."
She looked at him a long spell.
"You mean that."
"I mean every word of it. If Foster comes at that claim with men, Wilkes puts her down before we clear the tree line. You go behind my back, and it's her blood."
Sarah sat down slowly, as if her legs had decided for her, and she put both hands flat on the table and looked at the letter between them.
"You'll go alone."
"I'll go alone."
"With that leg."
"With this leg."
"Sam, that leg won't hold you off a horse."
"It'll hold me long enough."
She didn't argue with that one. She just looked at the letter.
Then she got up and went to the back room and came back with a tin box and set it on the table between them.
"The property money."
"Yeah."
"How much you reckon we got?"
He'd counted it the day Sarah brought it home. He'd counted it again the night before when he couldn't sleep, his ankle was screaming, and he had to give his hands a job.
"Sixty-five from the property. Fourteen from what we made at the fair after the debt got settled. Bounty money from the Dutton job, what was left of it after the winter supplies, that's another eighty and change. My last quarterly from Foster for the Henshaw pickup, thirty."
"That's a hundred and eighty-nine."
"A hundred and eighty-nine and change."
Sarah opened the tin. She counted it out on the table in stacks, coin and bill both.
Her hands were steady. He watched them and thought about how a Cooper's hands went steady when the rest of them was falling apart, and how that had come down from their mother and not their father, because their father had shaken when he was angry.
Their mother had gone quiet, and her hands had gone steady, and Sarah had that same trait.
He'd never noticed it before this morning.
"A hundred and eighty-nine and forty cents."
"That's what I reckoned."
"That's shy of three hundred by a hair over a hundred dollars, Sam."
"I know it."
"Where do you aim to come by another hundred and eleven dollars between now and sundown tomorrow?"
He'd been chewing on that since he'd read the letter.
He had ideas. None of them were good. He could ride to Foster and ask for a loan against the next bounty, but Foster would want to know what for, and lying to Foster wasn't a road he could walk.
He could ride to Harlow's and see about credit against the homestead, but Harlow didn't extend credit in that kind of coin and never had.
He could sell the mare, but the mare was how he was getting to the claim in the first place, and a man selling the horse he needed to ride out on wasn't much of a man to begin with.
He was still chewing when Sarah pushed her chair back and left the kitchen again.
She came back with something small in her fist.
She sat back down and laid it on the pile of money without a word.
It was gold, a ring—a thin band, thin as a wedding ring got in those days, with a little bit of scrollwork worn nearly smooth on the top.
He knew it before he'd looked twice. He'd watched their mother's hand a thousand times when he was small, and that ring had lived on the third finger of her left hand.
After their folks were gone, Sarah had worn it on a bit of leather cord under her dress for about a year, and then she'd started keeping it in a box.
He hadn't seen it out of the box in fifteen years.
"Sarah."
"Take it."
"Sarah, I ain't—"
"Sam Cooper. You take it."
"That's Mama's ring."
"I know whose ring it is."
"That's the only thing—"
"I know what it is, brother. I know it better'n you do, on account of I'm the one that kept it. I'm the one that put it in the box, and I'm the one that took it out just now, and I am tellin' you to take it. If it saves that girl's life, Mama would put it in your hand herself."
He looked at the ring on the pile of money.
"I ain't givin' it to him for nothin'."
"Sam—"
"I ain't. If I hand him that ring, it's because it bought her back. That's the only way it changes hands. You understand me?"
"I understand."
"If I can get her out with just the money, the ring comes home."
"Sam, the ring don't—"
"The ring comes home, Sarah. That's my word on it."
She looked at him. Her eyes had gone shiny, but she wasn't crying. She'd cried the night before, plenty, and she'd got it out of her system, and now she was doing the Cooper thing with the hands and the quiet.
"All right. The ring comes home."
He gathered it all up. Coin in one pouch, bills in another, ring wrapped in a bit of clean cloth and tucked separately into an inside pocket where it wouldn't jingle against the rest.
He worked on the guns at the table.
He started with the Winchester. He broke it down and cleaned it, though it didn't need cleaning, and he ran a patch through the barrel and oiled the action and worked the lever six or seven times to feel for grit.
There wasn't any. He loaded it, fifteen in the tube and one in the chamber, and set it beside the door.
The Colt got the same treatment—broken down, oiled, reloaded, six in the cylinder—and he slid it back into the belt holster.
The Sharps carbine, which he'd hardly used since '78, he took down too, and loaded a handful of the .50–70 cartridges into a belt pouch. If it came to distance, if Wilkes had put her somewhere he could see her from a rise, the Sharps would do work the Winchester couldn't.
He worked slow because he'd been working on guns since he was twelve years old and the motions did something for him that whiskey couldn't do.
His hands stopped shaking around the second time he oiled the Colt.
Around the third time he checked the loading gate on the Winchester, his breathing had settled to where he could hear the stove ticking again.
Sarah watched him from the other chair. She didn't try to talk to him while he worked. That was another thing she'd got from their mother. Their mother had known when to leave a man to his own devices.
He wrapped the money and the ring inside his coat lining, in a pocket he'd sewn there himself years ago for exactly this kind of use, though he'd never had to use it for exactly this kind of use before.
He put the coat on. He got his boot on the good foot easily.
Getting it on the bad foot was another business entirely, and he was sweating and cursing by the time it was done, and Sarah had turned her face to the window to give him some dignity.
He stood up. The leg took his weight—not well, but it took it.
She followed him out to the barn.
He saddled the mare one-handed mostly, with his bad leg braced against a post. Sarah tightened the cinch for him because his shoulder wouldn't let him pull it hard enough. Neither of them talked about that.
He fitted the Winchester into the saddle scabbard, slung the Sharps across his back on its strap, and checked the Colt at his hip one more time out of pure habit.
He led the mare out to the yard.
The sun was up proper now. The snow from the day before had crusted overnight and there was a hard blue sky above the ridges, the kind of Montana morning that had no business being that pretty on a day like this one. He'd have appreciated it once. He didn't have the room for it today.
Sarah stood on the porch, wrapper still on, hair still braided. She looked about twelve years old to him again, standing there, and he didn't know why — just something about the light and her hands.
"Sam."
"Yeah."
"I'm fixin' to pray for you."
"Go on and pray."
"You want me to do it out loud?"
"I want you to do it however you do it."
She bowed her head. Her lips moved. He couldn't hear the words and he didn't try to.
He looked at the top of his sister's head with the light coming through the loose bits of her hair, and he thought about how she'd been four years old when he'd pulled her out that window, and how she'd weighed about as much as a sack of feed, and how he'd carried her a quarter mile in her nightdress before he'd let himself set her down.
Sarah lifted her head.
"You come back, Sam Cooper."
"I'm comin' back."
"Say it proper."
"I'm comin' back, Sarah."
"And Evelyn."
"And her."
"Say her name."
"Evelyn's comin' back with me. Both of us. You'll see us ride into this yard, the both of us, before sundown day after tomorrow. That's my word."