Chapter 15
“Belle, honey, I might need you to shoot a man.”
“Now, Silas? Or can it wait until after lunch?” She cocked her head at Silas as they stood outside their house.
“After lunch is probably soon enough. The Jessups are sending three men over. They’ll sleep in the barn and watch over Cassie and the children. I need a couple of sharpshooters, though. Can Emma come too?”
“I want to go. I’m a good shot.” Cassie smiled eagerly.
Suppressing a groan, Red went to his newly bloodthirsty wife’s side and slid an arm around her waist. “You are a good shot. But someone’s gotta stay here with the young’uns.”
“We can take the children.”
Silas shook his head and scrubbed his face with his gloved hands. “No babies allowed in our posse. That’s final. Belle, tell her. I’m going to get something to eat.” He marched inside.
“You go eat, too, Red,” Belle ordered. “We can’t leave until the Jessups get here, so there’s time.”
Cassie turned, her hands fisted and plunked on her hips, as Red, recognizing a will stronger than his own, obeyed Belle. As he went in the house, he heard Cassie say, “Don’t you tell me what to do, Belle Tanner.”
“It’s Harden,” Silas yelled from inside the house. “Try and remember her name, Cassie.”
The Jessups showed up, three of the six brothers, who batched with their pa on a nearby ranch.
They were a rough bunch, with no female influences to soften their manly ways, but decent men and the Dawsons’ closest neighbors.
They often rode over to share church services when the weather wasn’t fit for them to all get to Divide.
Red was pretty sure they were believers, but he didn’t kid himself that they were coming for his sermons. They liked looking at his pretty wife and two little children. The men were as fascinated by the young’uns as they were by Cassie…well, almost. Close enough Red hadn’t had to punch anyone yet.
Despite her nagging, Red, Silas, Belle, and Emma left Cassie behind.
Red and the group made good time closing the distance to the gap. It had been slow going to keep up with the faint trail before, but now they knew where they were headed.
“I can’t thank you enough for teaching Cassie to stand up for herself more.” Red considered Belle to be an uncommonly intelligent woman. No chance she missed the sarcasm.
Belle worked the lever on her Winchester as her horse galloped smoothly along, the four riders abreast. “You may not like her standing up to you?—”
“She’s never had much trouble standing up to me, anyway. Maybe a little bit at first, but it didn’t last.”
“But she needs to stand on her own two feet. What if something happened to you? You want her to be trapped like she was last time, when that worthless Lester Griffin died? Forced into a marriage she doesn’t want?
The next time, she might not get as lucky as to have a kindhearted man at the ready to save her. ”
“What do you want us to do, Pa?” Emma slipped her rifle into the boot on her saddle and settled in to take the long ride to the gap.
“Red’s idea. Let him explain.” Silas rode with Belle on his left and Emma on his right. Red was beside Belle, probably so she was handy to protect them both, trusting Emma to take care of herself.
Remembering how Belle had taught Cassie to sass him, Red couldn’t bring himself to break the news of what Belle’s part of this plan entailed.
“You want me to scale that mountain?” Belle stared at the sheer rock. “Emma too?”
“This is the steepest part.” Red pointed to his left. “There’s an easy place to climb farther down that way.” Relatively easy.
Silas pointed right. “And Emma, you can climb that tree. It’ll take you up to that rock shelf.
” He raised his hand, his finger pointing almost straight upward.
“From there, you can get a clear view of the canyon inside. Be mighty careful when you get up there. Keep your head down. We think there are two men in there, and they’re wily.
They most likely are watching the gap, but they could see some movement on the rim too. ”
“They had to be wily to find that gap.” Belle studied the almost invisible fissure in the sheer rock wall.
A low rumble turned them around in their saddles. “And here comes the rest of my plan.” Red settled his hat firmly on his head and turned to see cattle of all colors, but mostly brown with dust, tromping up the trail.
Jessups, the three sons who weren’t staying to protect Cassie, herded twenty head of cattle up the trail.
“You think they’ll find that gap?” Emma reined her horse aside to make way for the oncoming cattle and to help funnel them toward the rocky gap. The girl knew more about horses, cattle, and ranching than Red ever would.
“Get to climbing, girls. We’ll hold the herd till you give us a signal.” Silas rode with Belle to make sure her horse got tied up tight when Belle started upward. Red followed Emma, though the Harden horses were so well trained, doubtless they’d both stand untied and riderless for hours.
As Emma stood on her horse’s back and reached for the nearest branch on the twisted pine tree growing out of the rock, she said to Red, “How’d you come up with this plan, anyway?”
“Well, my first idea was to dynamite the gap.”
Emma swung herself up to sit on a branch, then looked down at him. “That seems kinda mean hearted.”
“I s’pose. But in a way, it’s no different than putting those outlaws in jail. If we catch ’em, they’ll be hanged or end up in the territorial prison. They’d probably be happier in that canyon.”
“I didn’t say it was bad, just mean. I like it. If this doesn’t work, Ma and I can ride to Divide for the dynamite.”
Red sincerely hoped it did work, or chances were, he and Silas and the Jessup brothers wouldn’t live to tell the tale.
Belle and Emma would be all right, though.
No one was going to get them up on those rocks.
And between the two of them and Cassie, there would be three remaining Jessup men to marry.
The more Red thought about his own sweet Cassie married to one of the Jessups, the more determined he was to win this showdown.
Emma scrambled up the rock wall like a mountain goat and vanished over the rim.
Red turned to see Belle swing over the top with her rifle strapped on her back.
Red and Silas rode out to meet the Jessups. All three cut from the same cloth, dark hair windblown and too long for respectability. They were lean, running to skin and bones, with weathered skin and eyes, wise to the trail.
“Let’s get this over and done.” Red fell into a semicircle with the Jessups and Silas, urging the cattle forward, hoping that a sudden rush of cattle and gunfire from above would give them the seconds they needed to breach this outlaw fortress.
“We’re short a couple of men, Chester.” Outside the barn, Wade looked up from the list he’d made when he went over the ranch books late in the evening.
Chester slapped leather on a feisty black mustang Wade had always admired.
Chester was a steady hand, and with that bright-eyed little cutting horse under him, there was no cow that could best him.
“Boog’s at the line shack and Harv’s in at the doc’s.
Sid left him because he needed some care, and we don’t have time for it. ”
“Harv’s the one that came up on the rustlers, right?”
“Yep, caught a man kneeling over a calf, using a running iron. Leastways, that’s what Sid said. Harv wasn’t talkin’. The outlaw knocked him cold. Sid couldn’t get anything out of him—a description of the man or the horse.”
Wade stared at his notes for a long second. “I went in to the doctor’s office to talk to him, and he’s taken off. So that’s another hand we’ve lost. We’ve been losing cattle all winter, it sounds like.”
“Yep, nothing big, but more than can be explained by wolves and blizzards. And we’ve got more than two men missing.
Three of the hands you picked out yesterday as no-accounts were gone when I woke up this morning.
Payday was last week. They didn’t have cash coming, and they didn’t want to work, so why wait around? ”
Wade got their names and marked them off his list. “That leaves us shorthanded, but those men weren’t pulling their weight, anyway.
We’re no worse off. I don’t want to take the time to ride to Divide and hire more help.
We can get by until the roundup is finished. Who sent Boog out to the line shack?”
“Sid. Bad thinking, too, because Boog’s a top hand. Too fast with his gun, but he knows cattle. Did the work of two men. Harv wasn’t so good. Knew the job but didn’t push any harder’n he had to.”
“What was my pa thinking to hire Sid?”
Chester shrugged. “You want my opinion? Your pa wasn’t right in the head when he made that decision.
Sid rode in a couple of days after Mort was hurt.
He went in the house and came out with the foreman job.
I’d have accused him of lying about being hired except he went in that house every day, a couple of times a day, and did a lot of the heavy lifting work for Gertie. ”
“Pa must have just not cared after he fell. I think he’s coming out of the worst of that black mood and starting to show interest in the ranch again.” At least a little. Most of it rooted in anger. But that observation wasn’t likely to encourage Chester.
“Whatever Sid said, Mort must have agreed to hire him. I accepted that Mort was out of his head. First, because he was knocked cold. Then, when he realized his legs wouldn’t work, he was half crazy.
Sid knows cattle—I’ll give him that—but he did a poor excuse of hiring hands and a worse excuse for bossing them. He’s as lazy as the rest of this lot.”
“One hard week, Chester, and we’ll have the cattle branded and can start cutting out the stock for a drive. We’ll put them in the valley with the lush grass and let ’em fatten up, then drive ’em to Helena.”
“We’ll have to push it to give ’em any time at all on grass before market.
” Chester swung up on horseback. The mustang danced and crow-hopped a little, but it was just spirit, and Chester knew how to stick a saddle.
“There’ll be no break between roundup and cutting the herd like most years.
And even if we push, there won’t be as much time to fatten the cattle as we’d like. ”
“Sittin’ here talkin’ doesn’t add any more days to the year.” Wade finished saddling his own horse. “Let’s get on with it. We’re burning daylight.”