Beautiful Bad Man (20 page)

The cattle were closer than he expected when the first of the dynamite-packed trenches he’d dug exploded, and dirt fountained into the air under the noses of the herd leaders. His calculations had been good. The other traps exploded only seconds later. Fire shot across the grass, stopped at the plowed firebreak, but didn’t stop burning toward the herd.

The leaders whirled, panicked. For a moment the front of the herd turned into a milling, confused mess, a few head broke free, running as if pursued by wolves. The rest followed, stampeding back the way they had come. Men yelled. Shadows danced against the flames.

He’d planned to watch and enjoy the sight. Instead he took off at a run. Once he knew Norah was safe, he’d come back and make sure the herd had run so far and scattered so thoroughly no one would be gathering them again in a hurry.

V
ICTORY CELEBRATIONS WITH
a female partner had a lot to recommend them. The problem seemed to be finding the strength of mind to untangle from the female partner before daylight and go assess what they’d done.

Cal slid a leg out from under one of Norah’s, moved her arm from his stomach to her side, dressed, and left with Early at his heels. He tied the dog to a corral post and rubbed behind his ears a moment.

“Sorry. You can’t come, and I don’t want you whining and waking her. She’ll be out and get you soon enough.”

The fire had burned no more than half a mile back onto the V Bar C. Forced to choose, the cowhands had let the herd run and worked to stop the fire. The moisture still in the grass this early in the season would have helped. He heard voices calling back and forth, men searching for something — or someone.

Cal had studied the land long and hard before deciding this had to be the easiest route for anyone aiming to bring cattle onto his land from the herd’s starting point. He’d also noted the rough terrain most likely to cause problems for crazed animals running in a stampede. That’s where he found what the searchers were looking for, or what was left of him.

He lashed the body across his saddle and in the last hour of darkness wove his way undiscovered through Van Cleve’s men. The body could spend the day under the tarp with the best of the lumber he’d salvaged from the burned farmsteads, a place Norah would never look.

Van Cleve’s men would find it tomorrow, but they wouldn’t find it where they were looking. They’d find it when and where he wanted them to find it.

E
ARLY’S PERFORMANCE OVER
Preston’s foray in the night had convinced Cal that Josiah Quist knew what he was talking about when it came to dogs. When the dog abandoned his constant hunt for field mice, ran a short way toward the town road, and stopped stiff-legged and growling, Cal didn’t second guess him.

“Norah, hide!”

She dropped the cultivator and curled down in the corn without a word, untying her new blue bonnet and tucking it under her skirt. For once Cal appreciated the washed out old dress she wore. She wasn’t invisible, but someone would have to get closer than he had any intention of letting them get to see her.

Wearing the gun belt while working the fields was wearisome. So was constantly moving the rifle to keep it close. Times like this proved the caution necessary.

Cal bellied down in a low spot at the edge of the field and waited. A lone rider. He watched the man stop at the house and knock. He didn’t go in. Good sign. He left the house and rode into the field, riding along the edge. Another good sign. The closer the rider came, the less he resembled trouble, at least the expected kind of trouble.

Rising, Cal whistled Early close and cut across the field toward the man. The farther from Norah strangers stayed the better.

Although the rider sure didn’t look like one of Van Cleve’s men, Cal was hard put to decide what he was or why he’d be out here. He wore a derby, the narrow brim little protection against the sun. An embroidered satin vest hung open over an unbuttoned shirt and collar. Some equally expensive jacket was probably tied behind the saddle, one more concession to the rising heat of the late May day.

The rider reined to a stop a polite distance away. Cal kept the rifle trained on him. “Lost, are you?”

The man smiled the way a coyote would, or a weasel. “I suppose it’s no surprise you don’t recognize me, Caleb.”

Close up he looked much younger than from a distance, barely old enough to grow so much facial hair. Dark sideburns turned into a short pointy beard that hid the lower half of his face, but something was familiar around the dark brown eyes, and no one but Norah called Cal Caleb.

“Eli?”

“Micah.”

Cal didn’t lower the rifle. “No it’s not a surprise. I heard you ran not long after I did. What are you doing here?”

“Unlike you, I visit family every now and then, see how they’re doing. Jason told me you were back. Since you haven’t seen fit to visit him, he’ll be here sooner or later. He’ll figure it’s his duty to make sure you’re all right and fix things if you’re not.”

Cal said nothing. He barely remembered Henry Sutton’s youngest son and didn’t like what he saw now.

“Any chance of a drink around here?” Micah asked.

“Water. You don’t look like you drink much of that.”

Micah threw his head back and laughed the kind of laugh that was all for show and had neither joy nor humor in it. Even so, if Micah Sutton was dangerous, Cal couldn’t see it and figured he could handle it. He lowered the rifle, and Micah dismounted.

“Norah,” Cal called, “you can come out now.”

Her head popped up from amid the young corn plants, and she came toward them, stepping through the rows like an old hand. The thin fabric of her dress clung to her in a way Cal would appreciate if he were the only one watching.

One of those ugly big aprons wrapped right around her would be better at the moment. Then again shooting Micah, even a cousinly little shot in the foot, would stop the avid way he was watching what he had no right to watch.

Micah showed no awareness of his own jeopardy. “So you have a woman now.”

“Wife,” Cal said, low and hard. “You call her Mrs. Sutton, and you call me Cal.”

The young man’s eyes jerked back to Cal. “So it’s like that. Jason’s got a wife now too, you know. He’d been eying her for years, but he waited until the old man was safely dead. You know about that I guess.”

“Broke my heart.”

Micah laughed again. Genuine this time. “You’ve never been to a funeral with so many dry eyes.”

Cal had never been to any funeral, but he didn’t say so. He introduced Micah to Norah and afterward said to her, “We got enough done today. I’ll finish up myself.”

If they were alone, she’d argue. The blue eyes met his, assessed Micah, and she smiled. “It’s nice to meet one of Caleb’s cousins, Micah, but if I neglect the house any longer, the dust will choke us in the night.”

Cal watched the gentle sway of her skirt as she walked away, the blue bonnet swinging in her hand emphasizing the motion.

Micah was watching too, damn him. Cal ground out, “Don’t. Unless you want a fist in the face, don’t. What the hell are you here for anyway? Don’t give me any malarkey about family feeling.”

Whatever else he was, Micah wasn’t a fool. He turned away from the sight of Norah’s receding figure. “I came to ask you a favor, not for me, for Jason.”

“He’s old enough to ask for his own favors.” Jason was also the only Sutton who would get any.

“He can’t ask for this one because he doesn’t know he needs it, and if he did know, he wouldn’t come to you. He’d try to fix things himself and get killed or arrested.”

Hearing it put like that, out in the open, was a relief. Micah’s dark Sutton eyes widened at Cal’s sudden grin. “So you want me to get killed or arrested instead.”

“You won’t,” Micah said. “I’m not like you, but I spend enough time in the kind of places you do I’ve heard your name. Men sometimes ask if we’re related.”

“You look like a card sharp.”

“I make my living gambling. A good living. Better than you’ll make scratching in the dirt. I’d have bet no one could force you to follow a plow — or walk inside a soddy.”

“So you’re not as good a gambler as you think you are.”

Micah’s confident air slipped, and for a moment youthful uncertainty slackened the lines of his face. He went to the saddlebags on his horse, pulled out a letter, and handed it to Cal. The letter was addressed to Jason but had not been through the mail. It had been opened.

“I was at the house, visiting like I said. So I was the one who got this when some fellow stopped by and dropped it off.”

Cal turned the paper over in his hand. “I suppose this fellow got the impression you were Jason.”

“He might have.”

“And you opened it and read it.”

“I was alone at the house and was bored. It’s from Grace. She was the one two years older than me, you know. Pa married the girls off to men like him. The others are doing well enough, no worse than Ma anyway, but Grace.... He’s a preacher over by Fischer, and he might just be meaner than Pa. She was dying when she wrote that. Even without the letter, Jason will try to get Grace’s daughters when he finds out she’s gone.”

Cal gave in, opened the letter and read. When he got to the end, bile climbed up into the back of his throat. He swallowed fast, used every trick he knew to keep from giving way to the nausea in front of Micah.

“Why aren’t you doing something?” he said.

“I told you. I’m not like you. I’d get killed or arrested as fast as Jason.”

“But I’m supposed to risk it. I don’t remember anything about Grace except she had as big a mouth as the rest of you.”

“I’m not asking for her or for me or for her girls. I know you wouldn’t lift a finger for any of us, and I don’t blame you. I’m asking for Jason.”

“You’ve got no right to ask for him. Get out of here. Get off my land and don’t come back, and don’t even think of pulling some lady’s gun out of your sleeve and pointing it at me.”

Cal let the letter flutter to the ground, pivoted, and went back to where they’d left the cultivator among the corn rows. He heard the horse leaving but didn’t look up until Micah was a dark spot in the distance.

The sun was low on the horizon when he quit for the day and headed for the house and Norah. On the way he stopped where the letter had fallen and pocketed it, feeling the poison of it every step to the house.

Norah had been cooking over the outdoor fire for weeks now. He yanked open the door on the cold stove and threw the letter in anyway. Let it be tinder for the next fire.

“I know he’s your cousin, but I didn’t like him,” Norah said as she dished up supper. “That vest would be in poor taste on a woman.”

“He’s a gambler. He’s showing the world he wins more than he loses.”

“What did he want?”

“He wants me to kill someone.”

Norah put down her fork with the beans on it still untasted. “And you’re going to do it for him.”

“No, I wouldn’t do anything for him, but I’d do it for Jason. I owe Jason like I owe you.”

“He helped you get away?”

Cal nodded.

“I would never ask anyone to kill someone, and from what I know of Jason Sutton he wouldn’t either.”

Cal shoved his plate away, rubbed his forehead even though the pain was too deep to reach, went and retrieved the letter from the stove.

“You should know it all, I guess. If I don’t do it, Jason will try. He’ll find out sooner or later, and when he does, he’ll talk to the law and try to do it right, and that won’t work. No one’s going to help him take children from their natural father. In the end, he’ll get himself killed or jailed.”

Cal handed the letter to her. Smoothing it out on the table, she held it close to the lamp, turning the paper one way and the other. Reading the spidery, penciled words had been hard enough in bright sunlight. Cal didn’t envy her puzzling it out, but he didn’t offer to read it, knew he couldn’t read those words again.

Grace had written to Jason five days after the birth of her third daughter, knowing she was dying of childbed fever. The neighbor woman who had helped her through the birth and was helping her die had promised that the letter would go to Jason without Reverend Abel Whales ever finding out.

She rambled, full of apologies for not writing, but her husband forbid it, for not visiting, but her husband forbid it, for being cold and unwelcoming the times Jason and Eli had visited, but her husband demanded it.

She always wished she could leave the husband she disappointed and live with Jason. She would keep house for him. She wouldn’t be a burden. She wished her daughters could live there. They would work hard. She wanted Jason to come get her daughters, although Whales would never let them go.

Some parts of the letter were more legible than others, a testament to Grace’s struggle with the fever. Toward the end, the scrawl skipped words, the lines wavered, maybe the fever, more likely what Grace had been determined to confess. For she wrote it as a confession, as if what she had glimpsed from her deathbed was her sin, not her husband’s. Even at that bitter end, she was her father’s daughter, the blame hers.

“Does ‘interfering with’ mean what I think it does?” Norah asked, folding the letter.

“Yes.”

He expected her to tell him what he should do or what he shouldn’t do. She reached across the table and put a hand over his, and they sat in silence.

“We just defended this place with everything we had,” he said. “I don’t want to walk away and leave it.”

“I know, but maybe it will be a while before Mr. Van Cleve decides what to do next. Maybe he won’t realize we’re not here.”

“More likely he will.” Which made no difference in what he had to do. “I’ll leave you with your friend in town.”

“No, you won’t. I’m coming with you.”

He jerked his hand away, started to squash that idea, but she spoke over him. “How are you going to get three little girls, one of them a baby, from Fischer to here by yourself? Even if their father hands them over, they’ll be afraid.”

“I’ll tie them up and throw them in the wagon.”