Chapter Thirty-One
She lay against his chest, and he wasn't letting go.
That was the whole of it. That was the entire arrangement he'd made with the world in the last two minutes.
His good arm was around her back, her face was tucked into his neck where his collar had opened, and if the whole of Foster's posse and Amos Wilkes and every last deputy in the territory wanted his attention, they could wait their turn.
They mostly did.
He could see over the top of her head. Foster had Wilkes face-down in the snow now with a knee in the small of his back, and Peale had the man's wrists yanked up hard behind him.
Peale's brother, the tracker Foster had spoken of, was working a length of rope around Wilkes’ wrists with the kind of quick, tight practice a man got from tying steers.
Not iron cuffs but rope. Foster'd have cuffs back in town.
Out here it was rope, and rope worked, if the man doing the tying knew his knots. Peale's brother knew his knots.
"Get his boots off. Check for a blade in the boot."
That was Foster. Sam approved of that. A man like Wilkes carried more knives than a man had places to hide them, and boots were the first place a smart lawman looked.
Peale's brother went to work on the boots.
Sure enough, there was a little folding pig-sticker in the right boot top and a bigger one in a sheath sewn inside the left boot.
Both came out and got tossed in a growing pile beside the flat rock with the money.
Wilkes had gone quiet.
Sam didn't trust the quiet. Sam had watched a lot of men go quiet after they'd been taken, and he'd learned that quiet meant one of two things. Either the man was done, or the man was waiting.
Wilkes was waiting.
They got him up on his knees, then his feet. He swayed there a second between two deputies, coat torn open, his mouth bloody where somebody's boot had connected during the tackle, that gray in the beard along his jaw darker now with the mess coming out of his nose.
He looked straight at Sam across twenty feet of snow, past Foster's shoulder.
His mouth moved. Sam couldn't hear the words. He didn't need to.
Then Wilkes lunged, his whole body, throwing himself forward against the two deputies holding him, teeth bared. He made it maybe half a step before Peale's brother clubbed him behind the ear with the butt end of a Colt, and Wilkes went to his knees again, and then all the way down.
"Alright. Alright, that's enough, Peale. Don't kill the man. We still gotta walk him—"
"He's fine, Sheriff, he's just havin' a little rest—"
"Get him up. Get him walkin'. Put him on the mule, tie his feet under the belly, tie his hands to the horn, and do not let that rope get loose."
"Foster."
Sam hollered it across the snow before they could get the mule moving.
"Hold up. He's got somethin' of mine on him. A gold ring, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. Right coat pocket. It was my mama's, and I ain't lettin' it ride off to town in that son of a bitch's coat."
Foster crossed to the mule and dug in Wilkes's pocket with no gentleness at all. His gloved hand came out with the little cloth bundle, and he unwrapped it right there, and his eyebrows went up.
"Well, I'll be."
He walked it over. The gold ring sat on his palm, small and worn and exactly where it should be.
"This it?"
Sam had to work his throat some before words came.
"That's it. Much obliged, Sheriff."
"Sarah know you took it out with you?"
"She's the one what fetched it out of the box."
Foster laid the ring in Sam's coat pocket himself, because Sam's good hand was busy holding Evelyn and Sam's other arm couldn't do much. Then Foster's hand landed on Sam's good shoulder, firm, one squeeze, and he moved off to see about the mule and the getting-Wilkes-out-of-the-woods business.
Evelyn had lifted her head to watch the ring go into the pocket.
"That's your mother's."
"Yeah."
"You brought your mother's ring?"
"I brought all we had. The ring was the last of it."
She looked up at his face for a long second.
Her cheek was starting to turn purple where Wilkes had hit her on the road.
Her lip was split in one corner, and her hair had come out of the braid every which way.
It had pine needles in it. She looked at him like he'd said the strangest thing anybody'd ever said to her in her life.
"Sam Cooper."
"Yeah."
"I'm gonna sit down on this rock a minute."
"You do that."
He helped her over to the flat rock, the one Wilkes had counted the money on.
He kicked the loose coins to one side with his good boot so she wouldn't sit on them, and he lowered her down onto it.
She sat, and her legs went out, and one of them started shaking in a way she wasn't going to be able to stop.
She pressed a palm down on her thigh to still it. It didn't still.
"That's just the shakes." Sam kept his hand on her back. "That's normal. Body's been holdin' on tight, now it's lettin' go. Just ride it out."
"How long does it last?"
"Long as it needs to."
He stood over her, one hand on her shoulder, one leg holding him up and one leg mostly not, and he watched Foster's men get Wilkes onto the mule.
It took three of them. Wilkes had come back to himself enough to try one more thing, and Peale hit him with the pistol butt again in almost the same spot.
After that, Wilkes hung slack between the deputies and let himself be tied on.
Then a horse came up the trail hard.
Sam turned. His hand tightened on the Colt he'd retrieved from the snow out of habit, and then his hand relaxed because the rider was Sarah.
It was Sarah on the mare he'd left in the yard, riding astride in her wrapper and her boots and her hair loose down her back.
She wore no hat or coat, and she was riding the way she'd ridden as a girl when they were out in Missouri, and nobody was looking.
She came off the mare before the animal had fully stopped and hit the ground running.
Her boots skidded in the snow, and she came at Sam like she meant to knock him over.
"Sam."
He caught her one-armed, and he almost did go over. She got both her arms around him and squeezed hard enough to hurt his shoulder and his ribs and his everything, and he didn't say a word about the hurt; he just let her hold on.
"I told you not to—"
"Hush."
"I told you I was comin' back, Sarah."
"You hush."
She was crying into his coat. She didn't cry often. She'd cried the night before at the kitchen table, and now here she was crying again, and that was two cries in two days, and Sam figured he probably owed her about eighty more before they were square.
"How'd you—"
"I rode for Foster the minute you cleared the yard.
I told him. I told him where you was headed, and I told him he'd best get his men on the north road and stay off the trail and come in through the back, and he done exactly that, and don't you dare be sore at me about it, Sam Cooper, don't you dare—"
"Sarah."
"—because if I'd let you ride out there alone, you'd be dead in that snow right now and Evelyn'd be dead beside you and I'd be settin' in that kitchen for the rest of my natural life without a soul left to me, and I wasn't gonna do that, brother. I wasn't—"
"Sarah. Hush now. I ain't sore."
She pulled back and looked up at him. Her face was blotchy from the cold ride and the crying, and her nose was running some.
"You ain't?"
"I ought to be. But I ain't."
"You said don't fetch the sheriff."
"I said a lot of fool things this mornin'."
She looked at him another second. Then she made a small noise that was half a laugh and half a sob. She thumped him on the good shoulder, twice, then turned and went to Evelyn.
Evelyn had gotten herself up off the rock somehow and was standing when Sarah reached her. The two women went to each other the way sisters do who thought they'd lost each other, both of them crying now. Sarah's hands moved over Evelyn's face and her hair and her arms, checking for hurt.
"Your face. Your poor face. Oh, honey—"
"I'm all right."
"Your poor face, what did he—"
"I'm all right, Sarah, truly. It's just—"
"Your lip is bleedin', Evelyn Granger, don't you tell me you're all right—"
Sam turned some to give them room. He looked past them at the rock where the money still sat, at the ring in his pocket, at Wilkes tied to the mule down the trail.
The doc came up the trail on a mule of his own about ten minutes later, Peale's brother having gone down to fetch him. Doc Merrick was a lean man with a beard down to his second shirt button, and he got off the mule, took one look at Sam, and shook his head.
"Cooper. I told you last time to stay off that leg."
"I stayed off it as best I could."
"You stayed off it not one damned bit. Sit down before you fall down."
Foster didn't wait on the doc. He put Peale and two others on the mule with Wilkes tied across it and sent them down the trail for town before the man could catch his wind, and the four of them went off through the pines and the sound of the hooves faded out and that was the end of Amos Wilkes in that clearing.
Foster stayed behind with Peale's brother to walk the ground and gather up the scattered money off the flat rock, because a lawman had his paperwork to think of even on a day like this one.
Sam sat down on the flat rock next to Evelyn. Doc Merrick worked on his shoulder first, opening the coat and shirt and clucking at what he found. While the doc worked, Evelyn's hand found his good one and stayed there, and he closed his fingers around hers and didn't let go.
Sam watched Sarah move. She fetched water.
She held Evelyn's other hand through the worst of the doc's cleaning and talked at her about nothing in particular the whole while, which was the only thing that would have helped and Sarah had known it without being told.
She got Sam's coat off him without jostling the shoulder.
She gave the doc room when he wanted room and passed him what he asked for when he asked for it.
Then she came and stood near Sam again with her hand on the back of his neck.
She was running a scene the way their mother used to run a scene, and Sam had never noticed how much of their mother had come down into her until today, and now he couldn't unnotice it.
Evelyn spoke up while the doc was still looking at Sam’s shoulder.
"Sheriff."
Foster came over.
"Yes, ma'am."
"He kept me in a place. A grain warehouse. Off the trail somewhere back east of here."
"You reckon you could point us to it, ma'am?"
"I reckon I could. He toted me in a wagon. But we come in from a different direction, so it'd take some workin' out." She thought about it a second. "I counted turns and I counted rises. And I recall a creek that ran on the right side of the wagon for a spell."
"That'd be Sixmile. That runs east of here."
"Then likely that."
Foster nodded. "We'll ride you out there tomorrow, ma'am, if you're up to it. Once the doc's said his piece about you. I'd like to see what all the man had cached, and if there's stolen goods we can return to folks, that'd suit me right down to the ground."
Evelyn nodded.
"There'll be goods there, Sheriff. He talked some. He's took plenty over the years."
"That don't surprise me none."
The next morning, with Sam propped in the back of a wagon Foster had brought up from town and Evelyn on the bench and Sarah driving, they went with Foster and Peale and two more deputies, and Evelyn walked them back to the warehouse by working out the wagon route in reverse.
She was right about the creek. She was right about the direction. She got them within a quarter mile, and they cast around and found the place, an old grain warehouse that had been abandoned when the mill up on the fork had failed back in seventy-three.
Inside, in the back, behind a false wall of stacked feed sacks, they found the cache.
Sam couldn't stand up long enough to look at all of it, but he sat in the wagon with the doors open and watched Foster's men bring things out and lay them on tarps in the yard.
There was a rack of stolen watches, two revolvers with fancy pearl grips, a woman's brooch with a green stone and another with a locket, money in three separate pouches—both coin and bill, a wedding band, a silver-topped cane with the initials H.R.M.
cut into the head, three saddle blankets, and a saddle.
In a stall in the back, tied up with fresh hay in front of him, was Henry.
Henry.
He was the bay gelding, Evelyn's horse. He turned his head toward her voice when she came in, and his ears came forward, and she went right up to him and put her face against his neck and stood there a long minute without saying a word.
Sam watched from the wagon.
Foster came over.
"Every last thing here's gonna go back to who it come from, Cooper. Every damn thing. Peale's gonna spend the next three weeks writin' letters, but everything here's got an owner and we'll turn up the owner."
"You'll do it too."
"I aim to."
"I know you will."
Foster looked at him.
"You get some rest, Sam. You get some real rest. That leg's gonna take weeks, and so is your shoulder, and the doc said if you push either of 'em he'll come out and shoot you hisself to save the trouble of watchin' you die slow."
"He said that?"
"His exact words."
"Sounds about right."
Foster clapped him on his good knee, gently, and moved off to see about the cataloging.
By late afternoon, they got back to the homestead.
Sarah drove the wagon into the yard, and the mare stood at the porch rail like she'd been waiting.
Everybody moved slowly and carefully. They got Sam down off the wagon and inside into a chair by the stove, and got Evelyn something warm to drink and eat.
Sarah moved around the kitchen the way Sarah moved around a kitchen when she had a job to do.
For a spell, nobody said much of anything, and it was the best not-much-of-anything Sam had known in a long, long time.
Evelyn sat in the chair across from him, a shawl of Sarah's around her shoulders, and her hands wrapped around a cup of tea.
She'd cleaned up some. The pine needles were out of her hair, and the bruise on her cheek had turned the yellow-purple color of a bruise that had made up its mind.
Her split lip had scabbed over. She looked at Sam over the rim of her cup, and he looked back at her.
"Evelyn."
"Yeah?"
"There's things I want to say to you."
"You've said a few."
"There's more."
"I figured."
"Not now, though. You're wore out. I'm wore out. The both of us have got about three days of sleep to catch up on, and I don't want to be sayin' the things I got to say with either of us listin' to one side. So I'm gonna say 'em later. When you're rested. When you're settled."
She looked at him a long moment over the cup.
"All right."
"All right?"
"All right, Sam. Later's fine. Later ain't goin' nowhere."
"No, ma'am. It ain't."