Jake Walker's Wife (26 page)

In the years he'd been 'heading for sundown',
Jake had been forced to hole up and hide more times than he could count. Blending into the landscape was, by now, second nature to him. Being a fugitive all these years had taught him two things: Never stray far from water and, if you're lucky enough to have a horse, treat her like a best friend, 'cause that's exactly what she is. He was ever more grateful for Micah's generous Christmas gift....

He moved slowly and carefully, never stepping too far from the protective shadows of the trees, always scanning the high rim that ran alongside the woods, whacking at the grass with his big bowie knife...one of the few things
Jake had managed to keep with him over the years.

He'd come by the weapon passing through Arkansas during his first year on the dodge. He'd stumbled onto the campsite of a hide rustler who'd been on the run
even longer than Jake. Equally startled by the surprise meeting, the high-strung men unholstered their weapons in a heartbeat. The two of them had stood in frozen fear for half a minute before Jake said, using the six-shooter he'd taken from the Lubbock deputy as a pointer, "I got five beans in the wheel...how 'bout you?"

"Same," the rustler answered.

"Don't rightly know which chamber's empty," Jake admitted.

"Me neither." Shrugging, the man reholstered his gun. "You look a might stoved up." Nodding toward the campfire, he added, "Ain't much, but you're welcome to a bite of that rabbit on the spit...."

It had been the scent of roasting meat that had drawn Jake toward the cookfire in the first place. Licking his lips, he put his weapon away, too. "I'm down to my last chip," he'd admitted, tearing a thigh from the carcass above the fire. Seated now, he said around a mouthful of the tender meat, "Much obliged."

The stranger shrugged and tore off the other thigh. "What you doin' prowlin' about in the dark?"

Jakes were fair to middlin' that his host and Jake were in the same fix, so he told the truth: "Had me a run-in with the law back in Lubbock."

Nodding, the man said, "Abilene for me." Grinning a bit, he added, "Little matter of whose cows those was that I took to market." He inspected the bone for last shreds of meat. "How 'bout you?"

"They say I killed a man." He'd made the mistake soon after his escape of telling a gang that he'd been wrongly accused of murder. They'd called him everything
but
a human being, and threatened to string him up by his short hairs for whining like a woman. It hadn't taken long to figure out that, if he got any help along the trail, it would come by way of men who, like himself, were just one step ahead of the law; men who, unlike Jake, were guilty murder, robbery, rape....

Without looking up, the stranger continued to gnaw on the small bone. "What'd you kill him for?"

"They say I did it for his pocket watch."

His narrow, glinting dark eyes met
Jake's. "You kilt a feller for his timepiece?" Clucking his tongue, he licked grease from his fingers, wiped them on his shirt. Flapping his saddle blanket over his dusty trousers, he lay back and rested his grizzled head on his bedroll. "Maybe I'll just sleep with one eye open tonight," he said chuckling. Grunting, he turned his back on Jake. "He'p yourself to what's left of the huckeydummies...."

Jake
would have a sweetened biscuit, maybe two. But he had no intention of hanging around long enough to fall asleep in this old man's camp. With his bad luck of late, the fire and the scent of rabbit had also alerted whatever lawmen were hot on the rustler's trail. He didn't wish the man any bad luck, but he didn't care to become a souvenir of the lawmen's hunt, either. So once he'd eaten his fill of rabbit and raisin biscuits, Jake would head out, find someplace else to slumber.

He'd almost downed his second cup of coffee when the first soft notes filled the air:

Oh, you'll be soup for Uncle Sam's Injuns;

It's 'beef, heap beef,' I hear them say.

Get along, git along little dogies,

You're going to be beef steers by and by.

Whoopee, tiyiyo, git along little dogies,

It's your misfortune and none of my own.

Whoopee, tiyiyo, git along little dogies,

For you know Wyomin' will be your new home....

The stranger's song, sung sad and low, hung in the wind like the mists that hovered over the Rio Grande in the early-morning hours.

He hadn't seen the river or her mists
—or anything else Texan—in a long, long time. The man had been right; Jake
was
bone tired. Tired of hiding, tired of walking, tired of wondering where his next meal would come from, tired of worrying if, next time he lay down to sleep, the law would find him.

Jake
drifted off to sleep as the rustler sang the next verse in his ode to the cattle, and dreamed of his stint as a cowboy. He'd been born on a ranch, had lived his first twelve years riding the range. Working the ponies and punching cows came as naturally and as easily to him as counting money to a banker. He'd participated in a dry drive or two before the fire took his parents and destroyed the ranch. His pa and the ranch hands often passed the long, lonely nights singing sweet and low to keep the cattle calm...and the cowboys awake....

When he woke, the stranger and his horse were nowhere in sight. But he'd left a few of his belongings behind
. Maybe he'd gone to scare up another rabbit....

He'd no sooner had the thought than
Jake spied a piece of wrinkled brown paper poking out from between the knife and its leather sheath. "Had me two of these," was all the gritty, printed message said. The old fellow hadn't seemed the type who'd know how to write...or the type who would have known Jake would be able to read what he'd written.

Shaking his head in wonderment,
Jake lifted the heavy-handled knife and turned it over and over in his hands. Hopefully, he wouldn’t have call to use it. But he said a silent thank you to the rustler for the generous and unexpected gift.

Now, he whacked at the knee-high grasses that he hoped would fill Mamie's belly.
He’d take as much as he could carry in his saddlebags, too, because there was no telling where he next meal would come from. Or when. He dropped an armload near her front hooves and, because she'd always been a finicky eater, Jake watched...and hoped. She preferred barley, wheat, and hay to wild grass, and he wasn't at all sure she'd accept his paltry offering. Using her nose, Mamie shoved the grass to and fro, as if searching for something more appetizing beneath it.

"Don't rightly know what I'll do if you decide to get all persnickety on me," he said when she lifted her head to nuzzle his cheek. "Tell you what," he said, scratching her nose, "if you eat that mess, I promise to buy you the biggest bag of oats I can find
, first chance I get."

She snorted, then dipped her head.
Almost immediately, her pliable lips brought the grass into her mouth, and she chopped it into pieces with her hard incisors. Nostrils flaring, her thick pink tongue tossed the food to the back of her mouth, where it was ground down by her powerful molars.

He wanted to unsaddle her, give her a
much-needed brushing, let her roll around on her back as horses are wont to do after a long, hard ride. But he couldn't chance it. And though Mamie surely wanted her rider's seat removed even more than the rider wanted to remove it, she continued to chew the grass he'd brought her. "You're a bone-seasoned filly, I'll give you that."

Jake
plucked a few ripe blackberries from the nearby shrub and popped them into his mouth. Chuckling, he said under his breath, "Bess would wail me good if she could read my mind right now...."

He'd been standing there, one hand on his horse's rump, the other acting like a bowl for the blackberries, thinking how much Bess and Mamie had in common: Strong, hard-working, willing to go the extra mile for anyone they'd taken a liking to.
Both were sleek and hard-muscled, too. "I love you, W.C. Atwood," she'd said the last time they were alone, "and I always will." It must have taken all the willpower she could muster not to press him for all the gory details, and he loved her all the more for that. Someday, maybe he'd have the chance to sit her down and spell it all out.

It wouldn't be easy, moving farther and farther from the warmth of love like that, but he had
to do it, and now, it was more for her sake than his own. Maybe in a year or two, God would have pity on him, show him where he might find the proof he needed to clear his name. Then he could go back to Foggy Bottom, where she'd likely be rocking on the big covered porch, watching the horizon. When she spotted him riding toward her, she'd run like the wind until she reached him. And he'd stand beside Mamie, holding the reins in his hands, waiting, waiting....

Laughing and crying at the same time, she'd throw her arms around him, kiss him
and—

Mamie snorted and shook her long-maned head, as if to say,
“You have more important things to worry about right now.”

He gave her an affectionate pat
, then sat with his back against the gnarled trunk of a yellow pine. No matter where this journey took him, no matter how long he stayed away from Foggy Bottom, he'd carry the farm and Bess’s love with him. Drawing up one knee, he hung his hat there and rested his head against the rough bark. Then, closing his eyes, Jake relived his last moments with her.

Other women had said they loved him, had begged him not to go
—oftentimes with tears in their eyes. But their words hadn't been any more honest than their accompanying sobs, and he'd known it. Still, he'd held them and dried their tears and echoed their empty promises. Then, without the slightest pang of guilt, he'd left them as easily and as quickly as their false tears had dried.

Not this time! This time, though Bess had confessed her love in every womanly way, she had not asked him to stay.
Odd, he thought now, that he'd written his goodbye on a single sheet of butcher's paper. That lone tear tracking down her cheek, he reckoned, had been
her
goodbye.

Mamie pawed at the loamy woodland soil, searching for more chow. Sighing,
Jake stood to get it for her. As his bowie knife hacked at the yellowing stalks, Jake wondered if Bess had read his final farewell yet, and if she had, how she'd reacted to it. Her beautiful face appeared in his mind. The vision moved...a mischievous wood sprite, a doting mother, a caring friend...a full-grown in-love woman. And that
look
, that courageous yet terrified look....Jake thanked God for it, because it told him she'd be as miserable without him as he'd be without her.

Jake
had experienced real fear before, of being orphaned, of being on the receiving end of his uncle's wrath, of being on the business end of a loaded pistol, of facing the hangman's noose. None of it had scared him like the thought that she wouldn't be waiting for him if—no,
when
—he returned.

Oh, how he loved her!
You should have told her,
he thought
.
Perhaps the words would have given them both some sort of comfort, some sort of guarantee....

But he knew better than most that l
ife doesn't come with guarantees, and the admission put him on his knees. There, on the sun-dappled forest floor, he bowed his head, knife hand hanging limp at side. He'd asked the question a thousand times since that jailer's wagon overturned on the dusty trail outside Lubbock:
Why, God; why
me
!
He ran down the litany of “ifs,” knowing even before he recited the first what a futile exercise it was, and yet he continued:

If
he'd left Lubbock a month earlier, as he'd planned, he wouldn't have been in town on the night Horace Pickett had been murdered.

If
his uncle hadn't harbored such a deep-seeded hatred for him, the testimony wouldn't have cinched the rope around his neck.

If
he'd been caught anywhere between Texas and Maryland, he'd never have met Bess. And if he hadn't met her, leaving Foggy Bottom wouldn't be so all-fired hard. He could only hope that Bess knew and understood why he’d left.

F
or the first time, putting a place behind him, his tears to dampened the dusty earth.

Bess had been out back, humming as she picked sheets and pillowslips from the clothesline, when the ruckus started.

"I seen 'im first, Carter; you got no right to him," shouted the first voice.

Bess rounded the corner as the second man bellowed, "I'll see
you
swing before I let you—“

In a single, sweeping glance, she took it all in: Matt's stunned expression and the fury
blazing between the man on the porch and the man still astride his horse. Hitching up her skirts, she ran up the porch steps and wrapped a protective arm around her brother. "What's going on here?" she'd demanded, scowling for all she was worth.

Her ire seemed to have temporarily quieted their wrath.

Matt spoke first, pointing a forefinger at the man on the porch. "He rode up, asked if a man by name of W.C. Atwood had been around these parts." Then, aiming the same digit at the man on horseback, he added, "Whilst I was tellin'
this
one I ain't never heard of any such person,
that
one rides up and starts barkin' orders, sayin' he'd followed that galoot's trail right to our door, and if I didn't tell him where I was hidin' that fella, he'd hog-tie me and—“