Miss Murray on the Cattle Trail(24)
“I see it,” the wrangler said, his voice quiet. “Let Zach deal with it.”
Alex stared at the dusty figure coming toward them. He’d pulled his hat down so his face was half hidden, but what was visible was his mouth, grim and unsmiling. He led the horse to the chuck wagon and dropped the reins.
“Roberto.”
“Si?”
Zach’s face was stony. “Get my revolver.”
No one spoke, and Alex’s heart constricted.
Cherry walked over to him. “You want me to do it?”
Zach shook his head once. Roberto held out the gun and Zach grasped the butt, then turned away and picked up the reins.
“Oh, no,” someone murmured. “My God, no.”
Zach led the beautiful black horse away across the meadow, moving slowly, as if his legs were made of lead. Alex’s eyes burned.
She watched him stop, loosen the cinch and lift off his saddle. All the time he seemed to be talking to the animal, running his hand over its neck, its flank. Finally he leaned his forehead against the muzzle for a long minute, and then he brought the gun up.
Alex covered her mouth with her hand.
The sharp retort of the revolver made her shoulders jerk, and Roberto stepped near. “Do not look, señorita.” But she couldn’t stand not to.
After a long moment, Cherry started forward to meet Zach. Without a word, Zach laid the gun in the wrangler’s hand, dropped the saddle at his feet and turned away.
Her throat aching, Alex watched him walk slowly toward the stand of cottonwoods half a mile away.
Cherry spoke over his shoulder. “Curly, Jase, get a shovel.”
Zach didn’t return for supper. Eventually the subdued hands dunked their plates in the wash bucket and sat around the campfire smoking in silence. No one felt like talking. And Roberto’s special raisin pie went untouched.
Curly made the night-herding assignments, then sat with his head bent, braiding a new rawhide lariat.
Alex stood it for as long as she could, then she rose, moved out of the firelight and walked across the meadow toward the cottonwood trees.
Chapter Fifteen
She found him sitting motionless, his back against a tree trunk with his long legs bent, his battered gray hat on the ground beside him. His hands hung loose across the tops of his knees. He didn’t look up.
She knew he had heard her approach, but he didn’t move. She stepped forward and stood in front of him without speaking, and then she moved between his splayed legs and dropped to her knees.
He reached for her. She pulled him forward, pressed his head against her breast and held him in silence.
An hour passed, maybe two; she didn’t know and she didn’t care. In all that time Zach said nothing. She didn’t know what else to do other than just hold him, be there with him. Some instinct warned her not to talk.
Finally he lifted his head, looked into her eyes and nodded tiredly. Slowly he smoothed one hand over her hair, then did it again. Then he reached to one side to pick up his hat and stood up.
She rose with him, stepped close beside him and took his hand. Without speaking, they turned toward camp. Her throat was so tight it ached.
* * *
In the morning, Alex balanced her tin plate of fried potatoes and bacon in one hand and accepted a brimming mug of coffee with the other.
“Boss not eat breakfast,” Roberto confided.
“Where is he?”
“Not know. Not sleep in camp last night.”
She looked up into Roberto’s worried face. “Where did Curly and Jase bury the horse?”
“Close by. Under big oak tree.”
“Then that is where he is,” Alex said. “I am sure of it. But...”
Roberto’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows rose. “But? But what, señorita?”
“Roberto, I think we should leave him alone. Right now he needs to be by himself.”
He gave her a long look. “You are correct, I think, señorita. Señor Strickland is much man.”
Much man? What did that mean?
She thought about Roberto’s description all morning and well into the afternoon as the herd plodded slowly through the hot, dry sagebrush-dotted desert.
When the sun burned directly overhead, a lone rider on a spirited paint swung in ahead of the herd. She knew it was Zach; she recognized the way he sat on his horse.
He made his way back to Juan, who was riding the flank position, and reined up beside him. They spoke together briefly, and then Zach touched his hat brim and rode up to Alex.
He thumbed back his Stetson and gave her a slow nod. “Dusty.” His voice sounded raw.
She fished in her shirt pocket and thrust two breakfast biscuits toward him. “Here.”
“What’s this?”
“You didn’t have breakfast. You must be hungry because you skipped supper last night, too.”
He pinned her with clouded green eyes. “Yeah, I did. Thanks. You don’t miss much, do you?”
“I am a newspaper reporter, Zach. I have trained myself to notice things.”
The ghost of a smile touched his tight mouth. “I’m obliged to you, Dusty.” For just a moment the shadow lifted from his eyes. “For more than just the biscuits.”
He touched his hat and reined his horse away to join Curly and Skip, who were riding point. But he ate both biscuits and washed them down with the whiskey Roberto had poured into his canteen.
Zach tried to keep his mind busy thinking about the weather and finding water. And about his missing cattle. It would be simple enough to stampede a herd and in the confusion run off a hundred head of maddened steers. Hungry Indians would take maybe one or two beefs, not a hundred. Besides, they didn’t need to stampede a thousand head of cattle; they could sneak up on an animal, quiet as a shadow, and lead it away without a sound.
Cattle didn’t just escape or get lost in a stampede. When they started to run they pretty much kept together in one roiling mass. And nobody had seen or heard anything unusual that night, except for the sharp sound that had started them off. Zach figured it had been a gunshot. But who had fired it?
Orren Gibson’s cattle were missing, too, but Gibson’s herd hadn’t stampeded, and that told Zach it had to be rustlers. Made his head ache to think about it.
He slowed his mount to ride beside his point man. “Curly?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“You got any theories about our missing steers?”
“Could look for them in the canyons up ahead.”
“They could have been driven off anywhere. Why check the canyons ahead?”
“Because a canyon’s a good place to hide a hundred head of cattle?” Curly offered.
“Worth a look, maybe.”
“Yeah?” Curly said. “And then what?”
“Go after ’em?” Zach muttered.
“You crazy?”
“Not last time I looked, no. I don’t fancy ridin’ unarmed into a canyon, but I don’t fancy losin’ a hundred steers, either.”
Curly huffed out a laugh. “Didn’t figure you did, boss. But might be you wouldn’t be alone. We got plenty of guns stowed in the chuck wagon.”
Zach gave a short nod. “Right. Pass ’em out to the boys after supper tonight. And let’s keep a sharp lookout.”
That night Alex sat in front of the campfire with Jase and Skip, trying to keep her mind on the interview she was conducting. Idly, she twiddled a stubby pencil while Jase explained how he’d grown up in Boston and made his way out West when his folks died. He’d been married three times and divorced twice; his last wife had died in childbirth, along with the baby. She noticed that Jase rarely smiled.
Skip Billings, on the other hand, had an annoyingly sunny outlook. Nothing had bothered him since he’d mustered out of the union Army after the War and realized he was still alive and whole. He’d taught himself to read and write, carried a collection of dime novels in his saddlebag and spent his days singing the praises of the Lord and General William Tecumseh Sherman.
She listened with half an ear, forcing herself to ask pertinent questions and take notes, even though her mind was occupied elsewhere. Still, she had a job to do. She sat up and squared her shoulders. “And then what happened, Skip?”
Usually she enjoyed conducting interviews, but tonight she found talking to the men unusually draining. What she wouldn’t give to crawl into her blankets and close her dust-irritated eyes. But she’d stick it out until she had all the information she needed about both men carefully written down in her notebook. She stifled a yawn and straightened her spine.
Cassidy, she noted with relief, was not in camp. Maybe Zach had assigned him to night-herding; whatever the reason, it was a relief when he was gone.
Jase leaned close. “You look plumb tuckered, Miss Alex. You ’bout done with your questions?”
“Yes, we’re finished.” She wanted to learn why each of the men she interviewed had chosen the hard life of a cowhand. She was beginning to realize that the more they talked, the more they revealed about their real reasons, and she resolved to listen even harder as the men answered her questions. No one liked to admit their most private feelings. Especially the trail boss, Zach Strickland.
When she stood up both Jase and Skip rose. “’Night, Miss Alex.”
She arched her stiff back, stuffed her notebook in the back pocket of her jeans and circled the camp to work out the ache in her spine. Sleeping cowhands lay in a haphazard ring around the fire pit, and she took care not to scuff her boots and wake them.