Guns of the Canyonlands (11 page)

Fowler nodded toward Will. “How is he?”

“His shoulder is bad,” Lorena said. “I think the bullet is still in there. I’ve done all I can, but he needs a doctor.”

“He’ll see one tomorrow,” Boyd said. “At first light I’m leaving with him for Crooked Creek.”

“And I’m coming with you,” Fowler said.

Tyree looked at the man, his face alarmed. “Owen, do you think that’s wise? Quirt Laytham means to kill you, and Sheriff Tobin won’t lift a finger to save you. Those two are in cahoots, tighter than Dick’s hatband.” Ignoring Lorena’s annoyed frown, he added, “Owen, you stay here. I’ll ride into town with Luke.”

Fowler shook his head. “No, Chance, this has been going on for too long and it’s got to stop. Tobin is a sorry excuse for a lawman, I admit, but I’m going to demand he bring in the United States Marshal. Let the marshal investigate Laytham’s claim that I’m rustling his cattle.”

“Owen,” Lorena said quickly, “I’ll talk to Quirt. I’ll get this whole sorry mess cleared up. I’m still sure there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.”

Fowler’s smile was slight. “Thanks for the offer, Lorena, but I still think I’ll put my trust in the U.S. marshal.”

Tyree was about to object again, but Boyd cut him off. “Chance, I’ll be with Owen in Crooked Creek. People know me in town; they’ve known me for years. Nothing will happen to Owen so long so I’m with him.”

Despite his misgivings, Tyree conceded to himself that Boyd had a point. He’d been in the canyon country for over twenty years and by Fowler’s account was well liked and respected. It was unlikely Laytham would try to kill Owen while Luke was with him.

“Besides, Chance,” Boyd was saying, “if Lorena is wrong about Laytham and everything you and Owen have been telling me is a natural fact, you’re a marked man your ownself.”

“I’m not wrong, Pa,” Lorena flared. “I just know I’m not wrong about Quirt.”

“Well, anyhow, it’s settled,” Boyd said. “Come first light, Owen and me will ride this bull-stealing varmint to Sheriff Tobin and have him telegraph the marshal.”

“What are we going to do with him until then, Pa?” Lorena asked. “He’s in bad shape.”

Boyd drew his gun. “I’ll take him to the barn and tie him up good. He’ll be comfortable enough.”

Roy Will, who had been sitting through all this in a hurting silence, stood and turned to Lorena. He gestured at his bandaged shoulder and with the Western man’s inherent respect for decent women said, “I’m much obliged to you, ma’am.”

As Boyd prodded the rustler toward the door, Will’s eyes slanted to Tyree and flashed him a look of implacable, burning hatred. Then he was gone.

Tyree followed Boyd outside, glanced at the night sky and what he saw stopped him dead in his tracks.

The moon was covered in blood.

Boyd and Fowler rode out with their prisoner at first light. For the rest of the morning Tyree kept himself busy with chores that badly needed to be done around the ranch.

He spent a couple of hours cutting hay against the coming winter. He had just straightened up and hammered in place a sagging partition between two of the stalls in the barn when Lorena stepped inside.

Despite the heat of the day she looked cool and lovely in a green velvet riding skirt topped by a butterfly yellow shirt, her hair drawn back from her face with a ribbon of the same color.

Tyree, feeling sweaty and dirty, tossed his hammer into the tool chest and smiled. “You look wonderful today, like a meadow of wild flowers.”

Lorena dropped a little curtsy. “Well, thank you, kind sir.” She turned and nodded to her saddled horse, a basket tied behind the saddle. “I wondered if you would like to join me for a picnic.”

“I’d love to,” Tyree said, delighted at the prospect. “Just as soon as I wash up some.”

He stepped outside to a barrel topped up by water from the creek, loosened the red bandana around his neck, then splashed his face and neck. He ran wet fingers through his thick, unruly hair and combed it into place as best he could, then did the same for his mustache. That done he retied the bandana and settled his hat on his head.

“You look very handsome,” Lorena said, smiling. “Quite the dashing gentleman.”

Tyree felt himself flush under Lorena’s amused scrutiny. He mumbled a hasty thank-you, then glad to make his escape, said, “I’ll go saddle the steeldust.”

A few minutes later he and Lorena rode away from the cabin, then turned east in the direction of Hatch Wash.

“Where are we headed?” Tyree asked.

“It’s a secret place of mine,” Lorena answered. “I found it when I was a little girl and I used to go there when I wanted to be alone.” She looked at Tyree from under the dark fans of her eyelashes. “I still do sometimes.”

Lorena seemed to have forgotten the events of last night, making polite small talk as they splashed across the wash. They saw plenty of Laytham cattle, then quartered to the northeast. The girl’s paint set a good pace as she led the way in the direction of looming Abajo Peak, a dome-shaped mountain rising more than eleven thousand feet above the level, its slopes covered in fir, maple and aspen.

Just when Tyree was convinced they were riding all the way to the mountain, Lorena turned into a narrow side canyon that opened up gradually around a massive boulder three times the height of a man on horseback. The huge rock had toppled from the canyon rim in ancient times and a third of its bulk was now buried in sand. They rounded the obstacle and rode through patches of sagebrush and mesquite, the ground under them rising steeply until, after a mile, it leveled off at a clear and beautiful lake.

Tyree reined up beside Lorena and smiled. “You must have been a brave little girl to have found this place by yourself.”

“I was.” She smiled in return. “I guess it was the way Pa raised me after my mother died. He always wanted a son, but when I came along he made do and turned me into a tomboy.” Lorena laughed, a small, lovely sound in the silence of the canyon. “I explored everywhere by myself, as far north as Moab and all the way south to Black Mesa.” She turned and patted the basket behind her. “Shall we?”

Lorena had packed roast beef sandwiches, a yellow cake dotted with poppy seeds, and a bottle of wine. They sat in the shade of a willow that trailed branches into the lake and ate in silence for a while, enjoying the play of the sun on the water and the small sound made by crickets in the bushes.

“Why did you bring me here, Lorena?” Tyree finally asked the question he’d been turning over in his mind since they’d left the ranch. “Last night you did everything but accuse me of being a cold-blooded killer, and now we’re having a picnic together.”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to share my secret place with you. The lake is small, but it is lovely, isn’t it?”

Tyree nodded. “It sure is, but the lake isn’t the reason you brought me here.”

Lorena turned to him, her troubled eyes finding his. “You’re right. It’s not the reason. Chance, I wanted to talk to you about Quirt Laytham.”

Tyree stiffened. “What about him?”

“I want you and Quirt to be friends.” She held up her hand. “I know, I know, mistakes were made, but nothing that can’t be undone.”

A small anger flared in Tyree. “You’re blinded by him, aren’t you, Lorena? You can’t see past the good looks and flashy clothes to the man underneath. I was a stranger passing through, but I was hung by men acting on Laytham’s orders. I’d have strangled to death if Owen hadn’t found me. And what about him? What about Owen? Laytham wants him dead so he can claim his few acres of grass. Tell me, what kind of a man thinks that way? How can greed and the desire for power possess a man so badly that he’ll kill everybody in his path to get what he wants?”

Tyree dropped the piece of cake he’d been eating and wiped his fingers on his jeans. “How many must he kill to get you, Lorena?”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” the girl snapped, color flooding into her cheeks. “The trouble is you’re jealous of Quirt because he’s rich and successful, and you’ll stop at nothing to discredit him.”

The day that had begun so full of promise was going downhill fast, the shadows once again gathering between them.

“I’m not jealous of Quirt Laytham, Lorena,” Tyree said. “In my entire life I’ve never wanted anything badly enough to envy the man that had it.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “That is, until I met you.”

“No one has me.”

“Does that include Laytham?”

“Quirt asked me to marry him, and he believes we’ve reached an understanding. For right now at least, I’m content to let matters rest where they are.”

“Laytham isn’t the man for you, Lorena,” Tyree said.

“And you are?”

Tyree nodded. “Yes, Lorena, I am.”

Maybe it was the sincerity in Tyree’s voice that made the girl hesitate. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again and for a few moments sat lost in thought. Finally she turned to Tyree. “Chance, no matter what, I won’t be the wife of a gunfighter. I’d sit at home, dreading the knock on the door. And, sooner or later, it would come. I couldn’t live like that.”

Tyree slid the Colt from the holster and held it in the palm of his hand. “Lorena, this is the Colt Frontier revolver, model of 1873, and a long time ago I accepted its ways and I’ve lived by its code most all of my adult life. But a man can change. Recently I’ve been thinking that it’s time to put this away and never pick it up again.” He shoved the gun back into the leather. “I’m thirty years old and it’s time I was moving on.”

“What would you do?” Lorena asked.

Tyree looked at the woman, at the sunlight tangled in her hair and the green fire in her eyes, and he thought her achingly lovely. “Ranch maybe,” he said after he’d collected his thoughts. “I’ve always had a yen to raise Percheron horses. Percherons are fine animals and they have a long history. Back in the Middle Ages, they carried armored knights into battle, and today they can drag a plow across rough land that would bring oxen to their knees. One time in Denver I even saw a team pull a carriage and look mighty good doing it. It seems to me that just about every farm and ranch in the country needs a pair of Percherons, so the market is there.”

Lorena smiled. “Chance, your whole face lights up when you talk about those horses.”

Tyree nodded. “I was fourteen when I went up the trail to Kansas for the first time. The chuck wagon was pulled by a Percheron team, grays they were, standing over sixteen hands, and I never forgot them.”

A frown gathered between Lorena’s eyebrows. “Raising horses takes money. I know Pa wants you to stay on and help him. He couldn’t pay much, but it might help.”

“I’ll work it out,” Tyree said, sidestepping the girl’s suggestion. “There’s always a way.”

“There is a way,” Lorena said uneasily, as though she was wary of widening the already yawning gulf between them.

Tyree smiled. “And what’s that?”

“You could make your peace with Quirt. He’d be willing to help you get started. I know he would.”

It took a few moments for the full impact of what the girl had said to hit Tyree. And when it came, it was like a punch in the gut.

“Lorena,” he said, rising to his feet, “the only thing I want from Quirt Laytham is six feet of ground between us and a gun in my hand.” It had been direct, almost brutal, and Tyree felt the hurt of it as much as Lorena.

The girl looked like she’d been slapped. She slammed the lid shut on the picnic basket, the noise adding the final period to their conversation.

“Let’s go,” she said. Her face looked like it was carved from pale marble. “It’s getting late.”

 

As the light began to fade, they rode home in silence under a lemon sky, tinged with thin brush-strokes of crimson.

Lorena went directly into the cabin, her head held high, while Tyree led the horses to the barn. He rubbed both animals down with a piece of sacking, then tossed them some hay and a bait of oats.

When he stepped outside again into a pale blue twilight, a single, sentinel star glimmered high over his head. Tyree was reluctant to enter the cabin, so he sat on the tree trunk that served as a seat beside the barn door and built a smoke.

The chasm between him and Lorena had widened so much that it could well nigh be impossible to bridge. She could not understand the depth of his hatred and bitterness toward Laytham, the wrong he felt had been done him. Tyree knew that only the man’s complete destruction could loose the bonds of revenge that gripped his heart, an emotion Lorena found alien and disturbing.

The pain in his side and the rope burn that was still red and raw on his neck were constant reminders that he had yet to bring about the reckoning. Defeated and baffled though he was, he knew there was no other way.

He could not walk away from Laytham—not now, not ever. If he did, he’d be spitting on every principle that made him what he was.

But in gaining his revenge he would lose Lorena. That was the price that had to be paid and there would be no bargaining.

A deep sense of loss in him, Tyree ground the butt of his cigarette under his heel and began to build another. But his hands stilled on papers and tobacco as the clarion clang of a cowbell echoed its clamor among the canyons, a mournful tolling that was growing closer.

Had Boyd belled one of his cows?

Tyree rose to his feet, puzzled, and listened as the ringing became louder. A couple of minutes passed and a rider trailing a horse emerged through the gathering dusk at the other side of the creek. The bell in the rider’s right hand clanged constantly, and he was yelling the same unintelligible words over and over again.

Tyree was aware of the cabin door opening, then Lorena was at his side. “It’s Pa,” she said. “And he’s leading Owen’s buckskin.”

Luke Boyd splashed across the creek, his horse stepping high, throwing tall sprays of water into the air. He kept right on ringing the cowbell, yelling something above its insistent clangor.