Jake scowled at him. “I could make you sorry for calling me an old man, but I wouldn’t want to mess up that pretty face for Katie.”
Lloyd grinned. “That’ll be the day.”
Jake held his gaze, the look in his eyes softening. “It’ll be okay, Son. We have good men working for us. We just have to be extra alert for a while. For all we know, Holt will want to stay out of trouble and he won’t show up at all.”
“Yeah, and fish don’t need water. Stay here with Mom,” he told Jake. “The other men and I will get these men buried. You go wielding a shovel and you’ll start that cut bleeding all over again.”
“Be sure to save all their belongings. We’ll have one of the men take them to Denver and report this.” He saw the worry in Lloyd’s eyes at the remark. Lloyd and pretty much everyone else in the family always feared something could happen to land Jake back in prison. “I was in the right, Lloyd. Cattle thieves are the same as horse thieves. If I hadn’t shot them, they would have been hanged. There won’t be any trouble over this.”
Lloyd nodded. “I know. It’s just—”
“The name. I know.”
Lloyd smiled sadly. “I’m glad we found you and Mom okay. I sure as hell know this was something you could handle, Pa, but there’s always that little worry that something could go wrong this time, and I didn’t like thinking Mom could be left out here alone.”
“So, you came back because of her, not me”
“Of course I did. I knew damn well you’d be okay on your own.” Lloyd grinned and Jake couldn’t help his own smile then.
“Well, you did right,” he told his son. “Let’s get these men buried and get home. There’s a lot of rounding up and branding to do.” Jake called out to the other men, “Any of you recognize any of those men? Did you find something with their names on it?”
“Got names off of five of them,” Cole answered, “but I don’t know any of them. Pepper doesn’t either.”
Jake watched Cole Decker limp over to his horse. He had an old leg wound from the war, and that was all Jake knew about his background. Cole was of slender build but strong as a horse, and he tended to drink too much, but he was a happy drinker, not a mean one, so that was okay with Jake. He suspected some pretty shady doings in the man’s past, not much different from Jake himself, but he knew by a man’s eyes if he could be trusted, and Cole could be trusted. All his men could be trusted, or he wouldn’t allow them anywhere near his family.
He turned and pulled Randy close again. “Okay, woman, you’re right. I don’t just love you. I adore you. I worship you.” He hugged her even tighter. “And I’m glad as hell you’re all right.”
“I will accept those words,” she answered, her face buried into his sheepskin jacket. She breathed deeply of his familiar scent, then looked up at him. “Let’s go home to the grandchildren. Suddenly I want very much to see them and get back to a normal routine. It helps me handle things like this.”
Jake leaned down to kiss her. Randy thought how few women could have a moment like this with their husbands while surrounded by six men he’d just shot dead. She hugged him tighter. “Oh, Jake, don’t let go for a while.”
“I never let go of you, even when we aren’t together.” Jake watched the other men start digging graves closer to the trees. “I suppose you’ll want to pray over those no-goods,” he told Randy.
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“If it was up to me, I’d strip them down and leave them for the buzzards.”
Randy laughed through her tears, needing the relief from the tense drama of what had just happened. His remark was so typical of Jake Harkner. “Oh, Jake, God is going to have a time with you when you get to heaven,” she teased, her ears still ringing from the boom of her husband’s guns.
“Yeah, well, I think he and I will have a whole lot to talk about. Let’s just hope that conversation takes place a good ten or twenty years from now.”
Randy hugged him tighter, unable to begin to imagine life without this man. Always there was the worry that the next gunfight would be his last. “I love you, Jake.”
He sighed, rocking her slightly in his arms. “We’ll go back to that cabin again before summer is out. I promise.”
“Can we stay even longer next time?”
“Sure we can.”
“Jake, I’m scared for Lloyd.”
“Nothing will happen to Lloyd or anybody else in this family. I won’t let it.”