His father’s blue eyes appeared to focus briefly on the spoon before growing soft and distant once again
. Enveloped in an old wool blanket, the old man nodded, eyelids drooping like a pair of setting suns.
“Papa, please, you have to eat.” Horace hated begging
. How he wished that Laurel would come back. She had always been so much more patient, and their father seemed to listen more attentively to her. But a week earlier, his sister’s husband had grown impatient at her long absences. Fearing that her three-year marriage would unravel, she’d finally returned home to their ranch, two days’ ride from here.
Horace felt a small surge of victory as Papa reluctantly accepted the spoon
. Until a moment later, when his eyes closed once again and the contents dribbled from the old man’s mouth.
“Please stay awake so we can do this!” Horace shouted in frustration.
The old man’s eyes shot open with an expression of clear terror. “Sorry . . . sorry . . . sorry . . .” he began. Tears rolled unchecked down his hollow cheeks.
“Oh, Papa, no.” Horace used a worn kerchief to blot the moisture on his father’s face
. The skin felt more like paper than the flesh Horace remembered. It seemed as if, since he’d lost his land, the old man had withered into weightless shadow, a fragile husk of the giant he’d once been.
Watching Papa’s slow decline was pure hell
. Horace felt impotent against it, as powerless as he had been a thousand miles away at college. More than anything, Horace hated his father’s now-frequent tears. They reminded him too sharply of how proud Papa had been. And they made Horace feel so guilty that he nearly wept himself.
He should be more patient
. And he should have done something to stop Judge Cameron years before.
It took another half-hour’s effort to feed his father half the bowl of lukewarm bean and ham soup
. Afterward, Horace threw two more split logs into the bunkhouse stove and rubbed his own cold hands amid the sparks. A chill wind whistled through the gaps between loose boards.
He supposed they had been lucky that Judge Cameron had left them this
. An old bunkhouse on the nearest section of what once had been their ranch. The rest had been sold for back-taxes two years after the attack. So close to Copper Ridge, the land’s value had risen. Horace shouldn’t have been shocked when Judge Cameron bought it, shouldn’t have been outraged when Cameron tore down the comfortable house where he and Laurel had been raised and replaced it with a newer, grander residence. The only vestige the judge kept of the old place was the ranch house’s name, The Pines.
Yet Horace couldn’t help but think about how neatly it had worked out for the bastard
. How after Hamby’s raiders had come and beaten his father, then driven off the herd, Judge Cameron had been so harsh about the tax bill. How suddenly, the bank ─ even family friends ─ wouldn’t loan Papa so much as a Yankee dime. How amazingly, when the ranch at last came up for auction, the judge had been the only bidder.
Not surprisingly, he had bought it for a song.
All this had occurred while Horace had been away, working on his education. He’d had to return home, his degree unfinished, but not his long-held dream.
Oh, no
. Never his dream. If he couldn’t find work with one of the big newspapers in the States, as he had planned, then he would start one of his own. And with it, Horace would ruin Judge Ward Cameron, for all the neat coincidences that had worked like deadly poison against Papa’s will to live.
* * *
Ward Cameron nearly choked on the
cuernito
his housekeeper had baked when the realization struck him.
Anna Bennett
. There was a damned good reason that name stuck in his craw. Already, it had prompted him to take out Singletary’s letter more times than he cared to admit, even to himself.
He brushed off his hands, showering the gleaming walnut desktop with crumbs of sugary cinnamon
. Not noticing the mess, he scooted back his chair and reached pulled out a journal, one hidden in his desk’s bottom drawer. Unlike the dime novels that currently popularized an outlandish version of the west, his writings told the true tales, stories he could not afford to share. Yet he documented them religiously, for the pure joy of seeing his true exploits on paper, the feeling of power that it gave him to read of how he’d gone from nothing to a position where he decided whether men should live and die.
Guessing at the year it happened, Cameron flipped through his journal to the section written in 1878
. He chuckled in appreciation of his cunning as he revisited the story of how he’d fined a drunken rancher into ruin as a result of a spree in Three Cow Crossing. When the man grew sufficiently desperate to sell his ranch, Cameron had stepped in as the “sympathetic” buyer – and then resold the property at a terrific profit. In another case, he’d shown mercy to a copper miner’s son accused of stealing horses. In exchange, the grateful father had cut him in as a part-owner of that mine. And then there’d been that larcenous blond singer who’d been brought to him for justice. What was it she’d gone by? There it was. It had been Annie Faith, but later he’d learned her real name was Anna Bennett.
He smiled, recalling how the sheriff caught her mere steps out of Mud Wasp
. Riding a stolen horse, she’d been carrying a reticule of gold coins. The little fool.
She’d made a half-hearted attempt to seduce him out of hanging her, but her shoulders slumped in defeat, as if she knew she’d swing
. Damned eager sheriff had made it difficult to do otherwise. Ward had had to do some fancy footwork to make it look like she’d escaped and taken off with the gold as well.
That gold had helped Cameron build this house, and the gift of the woman and the horse had helped establish his relationship with Ned Hamby
. He could take her, Cameron told Ned, provided that she never again turned up alive to talk.
Remembering Hamby’s reputation, Cameron could barely imagine how the blonde had managed to escape alive
. But she must have. There couldn’t be two women in these parts by that name.
God help him if she reappeared and met up with Singletary and the real story ever saw the light of day.
He sighed and tried to take some comfort in the memory of his recent request that Hamby kill her. This time, they’d both better pray that Anna Bennett would
stay
dead.
* * *
As if he sensed her tears, Padre Joaquín nuzzled against Anna’s leg. She scratched the shaggy brown and white head and wondered once again what had possessed Señora Valdez to name a randy billy goat for a Catholic priest the old woman had once known. The moment Anna quit scratching to stroke Canto’s thin neck, the goat butted her leg for more attention.
“Ow!” Anna jerked away from the sharp horns and glared at Padre, who stood on his hind legs as if to meet her gaze
. “Do that again and you’re
cabrito
dinner.”
Despite her threat, she could neither resist another scratch nor think of anything much tougher than old goat
. One of the nannies wandered out of the open shed for her share of attention, but Anna instead led Canto from the pen. She needed to ride, to check her traps, but more importantly, she wished to get away from what Quinn Ryan had told her.
Two days . .
.
Had they really led to weeks in jail, then to years to replace what she had stolen? Maybe he’d been lying to punish her. Maybe it hadn’t been as bad as he’d made out.
She was a fool if she believed that
. No, he hadn’t lied. She had only to recall the anguish in his voice to know his words had been the truth, or part of it. She didn’t think she could bear to hear the rest.
She led Canto by his rope halter
. The speckled horse followed quietly, swatting his tail at thick snowflakes as if they were fat flies. After closing the gate, she stopped by the feed shed and saddled the old gelding.
If it makes you feel any better, I was punished for my crimes
.
She couldn’t imagine why she’d tried to tell that to Quinn Ryan, why she’d thought the little mound of red gravel might make a difference to him. Did she really think her suffering would somehow diminish what he’d endured because of her?
She lowered herself slowly onto Canto’s sunken back and touched his side with gentle heels
. Heaven alone knew how old the poor beast had been when he’d stumbled into the clearing two years back and started munching on her beans. Anna thought light work and good care kept him going. Señora Valdez swore it was the howling of coyotes, the black silhouettes of buzzards against the brittle winter sky. The fear of dying, she claimed, proved a powerful incentive for those of her age to continue. Not the being dead part, but the painful crossing over into the next life.
Anna imagined that was true, for she’d experienced the pain part the day that slack-eyed demon had plunged a long steel blade into her gut
. She’d surprised him by fighting harder than he imagined any saloon slut should against his attempts to rip her clothes off, and he’d lost his temper with her. Not that it mattered much. If she hadn’t fought, the filthy beast and his drunken friends all would have taken their turns, perhaps for days on end, and then they would have tried to kill her all the same.
Thankfully, her memories of the incident were fragmented and few
. Sometimes, the crack of her ax blade against wood brought back the blows of fists. Sometimes, the sun glinting off the summer creek returned her to the flashing knife. Now and then, the ache of her right knee sent her mind reeling, tumbling down the rock-strewn hillside where she’d been thrown to die.
She swiped tears from her eyes and nudged Canto’s sides once more
. Talking to Quinn had brought back far too much at once, and she sensed more bitter memories looming just beyond her consciousness.
The gelding shuffled through the accumulating snowfall, his broad hooves sending sprays of white ahead
. With indignant snorts, he shook his head from time to time at the thick flakes that alighted on his ears.
Gradually, she let the quiet sounds of creaking leather and muffled hoof beats loosen the tension in her chest
. As she rode toward the trail where she had set her snares, her worries faded into the whiteness falling all around her. She imagined snowfall blanketing old pain with thick and frozen layers.
All too soon, her peace was punctuated by an intermittent patter
. A shower of icy raindrops plummeted past the feathery snowflakes. Anna shrugged deeper into her leather coat and pulled the hat further down over her ears. Her breath and the horse’s formed plumes in the still air. Surely, it was far too cold to rain.
Apparently, no one told the raindrops, for they continued to drill small, icy holes through the snow’s surface
. Gradually, their rhythm grew staccato as the frigid shower pelted both Anna and the horse. Despite both hat and coat, the moisture quickly found her flesh and chilled her, making her wish for the shelter of the cabin.
She shivered
. Snow was one thing, but this was dangerous weather for walking and especially for riding. The rain that punctured the new snow would quickly freeze against the cold ground, creating a treacherous layer of hidden ice.
She nearly turned the horse’s head before the possibility of a jackrabbit or a fat grouse
gave her pause. Something other than beans and bacon with cornbread sounded too tempting to leave to hungry scavengers. She would quickly check the snares, and then she’d turn around.
The first snare hung, an empty wire loop beneath a low tree branch
. She picked it up, not wanting to kill an animal that the weather would prevent her from retrieving.
She had barely dismounted to check the second trap when a strange noise startled her, the sound of a heavy step on underbrush
. The nearest pine tree shuddered and its branches spilled a mist of snow, but she couldn’t see past the thick boughs. Her heart thumped hard against her chest wall, and her right hand shot instinctively toward the knife she carried in her pocket. Meant to gut and skin small prey, its blade was also sharp enough to wound, perhaps to kill, a larger beast.
Even if that beast turned out to be a man.
* * *
The dog rose from his place beside Quinn Ryan and padded toward the door
. He scratched, then turned to gaze at Quinn with a sorrowful expression.
“We’re both going to have to wait ‘til she comes back,” Quinn said
.
He was feeling pretty sorrowful himself
. Though the tea had eased his parched throat, he could barely move without setting his shoulder to throbbing mercilessly. That was just as well, however, for his ordeal had left him weak.
He’d expected worse as soon as he had realized he’d been shot
. He’d seen shot folks before, and those who hadn’t been hit in some appendage the local sawbones could lop off mostly died. Most of those who didn’t cash in quickly burned like kerosene-soaked haystacks with the fevers of infection. Others rotted like apples going bad from the core out. Back when he’d been a young pup, he’d thought the ones that died fast lucky, but now the Bard’s words sang in his memory, “Fight ‘til the last gasp.”