“You supposed to be the marshal o’ this dirt hole?”
Kase hadn’t heard anyone approach, nor had he heard the door open. The fact that he could have been a dead man by now did little to reassure him that the owner of the gruff voice did not mean to kill him. Sprawled out in his chair, his hands locked behind his head, Kase had his back to both the door and the intruder. His feet were propped up on the windowsill. There was no way he could reach for the Colt strapped to his thigh without the man in the doorway noticing, so he left his hands right where they were.
Resigned to the fact that his next move might just be his last, Kase drew a long, deep breath, lowered both feet slowly to the floor, and swiveled his chair, none too swiftly, toward the unexpected caller. As he turned, Kase became all too aware of the slow, steady beat of his heart, the breath that filled his lungs, and the still, hot July air that pressed down on him in the confined space of his office.
But when he recognized the unexpected caller, he relaxed and remained sprawled in the chair. “Yeah, I’m the marshal of this ‘dirt hole.’ What I want to know is what you’re doing here?”
The one-eyed man stepped forward and closed the door behind him with a sun-stained brown hand.
“You might say I was just passin’ through and heard this place had some young, two-bit marshal that couldn’t tell a skunk from a house cat, so I came to have me a look-see.”
“Or I might say that you were sent up here to find me. Mightn’t I?” A frown marred Kase’s strong features.
The old man looked around, searching for a place to spit, and then thought better of it. “Ya might,” he agreed with a nod.
Kase stood and walked around the table. He extended a hand in greeting. “It’s been a long time, Zach.”
Zach Elliot reached out and pumped Kase’s hand with a firm, steady handshake. “The last time I seen you, you was thirteen.”
“How come you don’t look any older?” Kase asked.
“Hell, boy, I was born old.”
“I believe you were.” Kase nodded in agreement as he assessed his old friend’s appearance. Zach looked much the same as he’d been twenty years ago; even then, his strawlike hair had been snow white. The thick, shaggy mustache that hid his upper lip was the same shade except for the tobacco stains near the corners of his mouth. Where Zach’s left eye should have been there was a patch of scar tissue. The trail of a knife wound traced a path through the wrinkles of his weather-beaten skin to the underside of his jawline. As Kase took in the beaked nose that twisted slightly to the left and the face shadowed by stubble, he fought against his feelings of hostility toward his old mentor. He was sure Caleb had sent Zach Elliot to talk him into going home.
Zach pulled his hand out of Kase’s firm grip and pushed his turned-up shirtsleeves toward his elbows. Kase turned away, returned to his own side of the desk, and pulled open the bottom drawer. “I was just about to eat,” Kase said as he fished through the drawer. He pulled out a can of beans and straightened up again. “Want to join me?”
“Cold beans?”
“You getting picky in your old age?” Kase wanted to know.
“Not me. An’ sixty-five ain’t nobody’s old age. I was jes’ thinkin’ ‘bout the kind of grub you must o’ had livin’ up there in Caleb’s mansion.” Zach walked to the corner of the room where he spit into the trash can, then lifted a bentwood chair and pulled it up to the front of the desk. Avoiding any comment on Boston, Kase sat down opposite him and shuffled through the top drawer for a can opener.
The marshal tossed a handful of papers out of the drawer, adding them to the confusion on top of the desk.
“This what you’re a rootin’ for?” Zach slipped his hand beneath the pile closest to him and withdrew a wickedly sharp blade Kase used to open his daily ration of cold beans.
“Thanks.” Realizing he would need another bowl, Kase set down the can and started to rise.
“I’ll eat outta the can,” Zach volunteered, guessing the younger man’s intentions.
Kase sat back down. The drawer was opened again, and this time Kase pulled out a bowl and two spoons.
“Ain’t this the limit?” Zach watched while Kase unceremoniously dumped cold beans into the bowl.
“You want to eat or not?”
“I ain’t sure at this point.” Zach shook his head.
The meal was soon divided, and Kase eased back in his chair. They ate in silence until Kase set his empty bowl on the edge of the desk and looked across at Zach.
“If Caleb sent you to talk me into going back, you can let him know I’m not interested.”
Zach held the empty bean can in one hand as he licked the spoon clean, then laid it on the desk. He leaned back, crossed a moccasined foot over his knee, and folded his arms across his chest. Zach stared at Kase with his faded brown eye.
“You growed taller, boy. Nastier, too. But I could still knock you from here to Sunday, kid.”
“You think so?” Kase stared across the desk at the man who had taught him to ride when he was six and how to shoot a gun when he was not much older. Zach had a devil of a time convincing Analisa Storm that a ten-year-old needed to learn to handle a gun. “If the boy’s gonna live out west he ought to know how not to blow his damn-fool head off,” Zach had argued. By the time the Storms moved back to Boston, Kase was more proficient with a Colt than most grown men.
Pulling a wad of tobacco out of the pocket of his dust-coated Levi’s, Zach tore off a plug and wedged it between his cheek and gum.
“Your ma’s a might worried about ya, boy.” The only sign of a change in Zach’s expression was a crook of his brow. He seemed determined to take Kase’s sullenness seriously.
Kase’s gaze was drawn once more to the wood-framed window set akilter in the right wall of the jail. His stomach tensed. An expert at slipping into stubborn silence, he still could not control his inner turmoil. He could do without this.
“It wouldn’t harm you none to write to her, let her know you’re still alive.”
Kase could not hide the resentment in his tone. “How’d you find me?”
Zach shifted the tobacco and spit into the bean tin. “Didn’t even have to look. The Rawlins fella that hired ya wrote and tol’ your pa that he was as happy as a flea in a doghouse that he’d run into you in Kansas City. Then”—he spat again— “your pa sent a letter out to me, askin’ quite politely,
if
it was convenient, and
if
I was between jobs, would I just happen on by a no-account town called Busted Heel and see how his boy was makin’ out as marshal?”
His boy.
Kase crossed his arms over his rib cage. He felt as if he’d just taken a punch to the gut. He wondered if Zach had known the truth all these years.
A fly buzzed in the stillness. While neither of them spoke, the hot air in the small room seemed to close in around them.
“You got trouble you can’t handle, Kase?” Zach met his stare straight on.
“Nothing anyone can help me with, Zach.”
Used to keeping his own council, Kase hesitated to open up to Zach, even though he knew the man as well as he did anyone. Zachariah Weston Elliot had been a scout for the army at Fort Sully in the Dakotas when Caleb Storm, then an undercover agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, moved Kase and Analisa there in 1871. But Kase knew the longer he kept silent, the more tension and anger would roil inside him. There was only one way to find out.
“Did you know who my real father was?”
Zach’s answer was swift, his expression one of unveiled surprise. “No. I always thought it was Caleb.”
Unable to sit any longer, Kase stood and began to slowly pace the confines of the small office. “My real father,” he began, trailing his splayed fingers through his hair, “was a renegade Sioux who knifed and raped my mother when she was sixteen.”
“Shit.” Zach worked his tobacco plug and squinted up at Kase. “How’d you find that out?”
“Caleb told me.” Kase shrugged and turned toward the window.
“What in the hell for?” Zach shook his head and asked the question more to himself than to Kase.
But Kase had heard, and turned on the old man with a vengeance. “Because I forced him to. I prodded and pried until he told me.” He turned away again, unable to meet the old man’s questioning stare, and wished to God he had never heard the truth.
Zach shook his head. “You and Caleb was always two peas in a pod. It was your ma I could never quite figure into the picture.”
From the window where he stood, Kase watched a man cross the far end of the street, the image wavering like a specter in the heat waves that rose from the dry ground. Like the heat, the knot in his chest would not ease.
When they finally came, his words were soft-spoken. “My mother’s family had just immigrated from Holland and were attacked as they crossed the plains. Her younger brother and sister were taken captive. Only Opa, my grandfather, and my mother survived. I still remember Opa, and living with him and Mother in a soddie in Iowa. I can even remember the day Caleb married my mother.”
“Then you knew he wasn’t your real pa.”
As he recalled the years gone by, Kase smiled wistfully. “Sure, I knew. After they were married I always called him Papa. I remember wishing it to be true, but like any kid, I was always asking questions.” His words brought little G.W. to mind. “Where’s my real pa? What kind of an Indian is he? What happened to him?”
“And?”
“They gave me answers that didn’t quite tally, so I kept it up. Why didn’t we live in town after the Indian went away? What was his name? Where did he go? They said he was dead, that he had been a Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation, that my mother never knew his Indian name. She called him
mijn man,
a Dutch term for husband. She never used the more familiar, more endearing
echtgenoot,
which means husband, too. I used to wonder how they met, how they even communicated, because my mother only spoke Dutch before I was born. Finally, all the questions must have upset her, because one day Caleb took me riding and he told me how sad it made my mother feel to remember the man, because he was dead. If I had any questions, I was to ask him, not Mother. So for a time I stopped asking. But it haunted me more and more.”
“And in Boston?”
“They sent me to school.” Unwilling to say more, unable to voice the bigotry and degradation he had faced, Kase returned to the chair behind his desk and stared at the scattered pages atop it.
But knowing the reception Kase would have met in the East, Zach quickly pieced together his own story. “So you got into a few scrapes?”
“It was more than a few. And the last one was in the law office where I worked.”
“So Caleb told you the truth.”
“Only after I forced him. I made him so damn mad he finally just blurted it all out.”
It all came back to him, the inner turmoil, the seething fury he had felt as he sat in the library and refused to look up at Caleb. He knew his life would never change until he learned the truth about himself. His anger was stoked by fear of not knowing who or what he was, how he came to exist. Why couldn’t he control himself?
In a rush of anger, Kase stood and faced Caleb toe to toe. “I’m not you, dammit! I never will be, because I’ll never know who I really am. How can I when I’ve never gotten the truth out of you or my mother?”
Caleb had blanched. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t see things the way you do. I don’t fit in here and I never will.”
“You don’t want to.”
“Not bad enough to be stepped on, to turn the other cheek time and time again,” Kase had shouted.
“Have you ever tried?” Caleb shouted back.
“Do you really think I could? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve never tried to see my side or what trying to fit into this life is doing to me.”
“Kase ...” Caleb had reached out to him, put a hand on his shoulder, but Kase hit it away.
“I’m not like you. Maybe, just maybe, I’m like him. I’m like the man you and my mother could never bring yourselves to explain. That’s what you think, isn’t it?” Kase stepped close, backing Caleb toward the fireplace.
Caleb’s expression became one of dark denial. “Never.”
“Who was he?” Kase pressed.
“Forget it.”
“Why? What are you hiding? Tell me!”
“I can’t.”
Kase reached out and grasped Caleb by the shoulders. “Who the hell was he? Who the hell am I?” he cried out.
Caleb shook him off. “All right,” his eyes flashed with fury, “you want to know? Your father was a renegade Sioux who raped your mother and left her for dead.”
As if he had taken a physical blow to the midsection, Kase tensed and stepped away. “Why didn’t you tell me before now? Were you
truly
afraid I was like him?” he whispered.
Caleb shook his head, his eyes awash with unshed tears. “Never. I never thought that of you. Does it really matter so much that we wanted to keep this from you?”
“Yes, dammit, it matters. It explains a hell of a lot. My father was a savage, a murderer. He is the reason my mother has been forced to live in shame all these years. And I am, too.”
Caleb’s sad expression then darkened with a hint of returning anger.
“What do you mean,
all these years
?”
“If it hadn’t been for me, her entire life could have been different. She could have lived a normal life, married a—” All too aware of what he had been about to say, Kase had become silent once again.
But in a tone as emotionless as a stone, Caleb had finished for him: “She could have married a white man. Is that what you were about to say?”
At the sound of a gasp from the open doorway, both men turned in unison and saw Analisa clinging to the door frame with one hand while she pressed the other against the base of her throat. Eyes wide with horror, she stood in stunned disbelief.
“Caleb? What is this?” Her gaze lingered on her husband an instant before she turned to Kase. “Kase?
Wat is er aan de hand?
What is going on?” Barely audible, her words reached him.
Kase turned away from Caleb, took a lingering look at his mother, and knew a blinding hurt that ached so badly, welled up from the depths of his soul with such ferocity, that he thought he might retch from the pain. He could not speak as he fought to control wave after wave of nausea.