Spirit of the Wolf (31 page)

"Same," the rustler answered.

"Don't rightly know which chamber's empty,"
Chance
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
Chance
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?"

Chances were fair to middlin' that his host and
Chance
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
Chance
, 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
Chance
'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
Chance
. "He'p yourself to what's left of the huckeydummies...."

Chance
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,
Chance
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, ti yi yo, git along little dogies,

It's your misfortune and none of my own.

Whoopee, ti yi yo, 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;
Chance
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.

Chance
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
. M
aybe he'd gone to scare up another rabbit....

He'd no sooner had the thought than
Chance
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
Chance
would be able to read what he'd written.

Shaking his head in wonderment,
Chance
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. H
e dropped
an arm
load near her front hooves
and, b
ecause she'd always been a f
inicky
eater,
Chance
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."

Chance
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 s
leek 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 h
er 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,
Chance
relived his last moments with her.

Other women had said they loved him, had begged him not to go
—often
times
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,
Chance
stood to get it for her. As his bowie knife hacked at the yellowing stalks,
Chance
wondered if Bess had read his final farewell yet, and if she had, how she'd reacted to it.
H
er 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....
Chance
thanked God for
it, because
it told him she'd be as miserable without him as he'd be without her.

Chance
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 t
he 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
,”
kn
owing 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 har
d
.
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 dampen
ed
the dusty earth.