Once a Ranger (4 page)

She leaned against him. “I love being married to you. If I don't please you, tell me, and I'll try to do better. I don't have any experience except what I've learned in the past six weeks with you.”

He hugged her head to his chest and closed his eyes. “You are wonderfully honest. I am so proud of our relationship. You and I learn more and more about ourselves, about what we like and what we enjoy. I
am
pleased—more pleased than I guess I can tell you.”

“I was afraid you would think me wanton if I said it's wonderful—to be in bed with you.”

“No, no, that's our part of this deal.”

“Thanks.”

He squeezed her hard. “We have a great, powerful marriage.”

“Good. Sit down and we'll eat lunch. Then—we're alone so we can do what we want to do.”

He chuckled. “And we will.”

“Good.”

He clasped his hand on top of hers. “You are a real winner.”

They didn't get much of a nap that afternoon, but they damn sure learned lots about the power of love between them. He couldn't believe what all they did and his back ached along with his brains—whew!

FOUR

T
HEY GOT A
late start for the schoolhouse but made it before everything really began. Cally gathered some women to help her get the food she'd fixed on the serving table. Guthrey put up a wall tent and several teenage boys came to his aid.

Cally came back out of breath and put her butt against the wagon wheel to catch up. “We made it.”

He laughed, then whispered in her ear, “It was worth coming late for both of us.”

She smiled, proud as a kitten, and they went inside arm in arm. They ate off their own tin plates piled high with food, sitting over in a corner of the schoolhouse among other ranch folks they knew. Everyone was in a good mood. They bragged on Guthrey's fast enforcement of the law since his election and how many were going or had gone to prison.

Mike Newton, a rancher, said, “The judge gave Slegal ten years for his rapes and for night-raiding ranches to make people run away. He won't ever live for that long in Yuma Prison. He can sure rot there for my money.”

Heads bobbed. The worst one of the lot was going to sweat out his life in that hell. Guthrey picked through all the food on his plate; he'd taken more than he could eat. Oh well, it wasn't the first time in his life he'd done that. He'd do the best he could.

Cally must have noticed. “Did you save a place for some desert?”

“Lord, Cally, I can't eat any more,” he whispered.

“No problem. Give me your plate. There's strawberry pie and pecan.”

“Cut me a sliver of each.”

She shared a smile and took off with both plates. In a few minutes she was back with both kinds of pie on a clean plate for him.

He shook his head at her delivery. But he enjoyed it, like he did her.

She asked Thomas and Ruth Nelson, who owned the Mount Graham cabin, about that property while Guthrey was outside talking to other folks, and they told her that anytime she and Guthrey wanted to use it, just give them the word. Cally told Guthrey this while they waltzed to a fiddle song across the floor.

“Wonderful.” He gave her a tight hug and then whirled her around. She laughed and they were off again.

They went to their tent around midnight. On the cot, they took another turn at wife and husband activity and fell asleep in each other's arms. He awoke a few hours before dawn. Someone was calling his name.

“Sheriff Guthrey. Sheriff Guthrey?”

He stepped into his pants as Cally got up, wrapped herself in a blanket to hide her nakedness, and swept up his pistol. “Here, take this. You don't know, it might be a trick.”

“Thanks.” He kissed her quickly and stuck it in his waistband. Then, bareheaded, he ducked outside in the predawn buttoning his shirt.

“Who's calling my name?”

“Me,” a woman said, coming back. Tears wet her face under the starlight. “They've murdered the Carlson family. I have been riding for hours to find you. They said you'd be here.”

She fell into his arms, and he dropped to his knees to set her on the ground.

“Anyone know these folks?” he asked as other half-dressed men and women poured out of tents to see what was going on.

“Who is it, Guthrey?”

The woman was huddled and crying her eyes out.

Dressed, Cally joined them, sat down beside the woman, and forced her to sit up with her. “Where is their place?”

“In Gregory Canyon. I hadn't seen them in two days so I went up there after dark—they're all dead. Murdered—” She broke down and cried some more.

“I want someone to loan me a horse and someone to show me their place.” Guthrey rose and looked over the crowd in the starlight for a volunteer.

“What should I do to help you?” his wife asked him privately.

“Cally, they'll help you take down the tent. I'll be back to the ranch when I solve this matter.”

She nodded her head. “Be careful. I'll be fine.”

He went to the tent and dressed. He strapped on his gun belt and holstered his six-gun and, with his hat on, he went outside to put a saddle on the big horse that rancher Ervin Ralston had brought up for him to ride.

“Your wife'll be fine,” Ralston said to him. “My teenage boys will take her home. That place is north and it will take a few hours for us to get up there.”

“You know them?” Guthrey asked, trying to think who the victims were. He didn't recall meeting them.

“I've been there before,” the man said.

“What did they do?”

“George worked for people, did odd jobs. They were pretty poor, and folks around there fed them for him doing some work when they were out of money. That's being too poor to move on, but they never hurt anyone. It could be Apaches done it.”

“Before we get everyone in a lynching mood, let's not share any ideas like that. I'm not holding up for them, but so far as we know, they've only stolen horses going back and forth to Mexico. There were some killings a few years ago south of this county, and the Apaches were blamed. But I don't want an uncalled-for war started.”

“I savvy and you're right. We're all too vulnerable to attacks by them if we stir them up.”

“We need the killers, and I want to see the murder area as undisturbed as I can. Maybe they left some sign for us, Erv.”

The big rancher agreed.

“Who is the lady came to tell me?”

“Claudia Haynes. Her husband is Ralph Haynes. They're good folks, have a spread up there close by to the Carlsons.”

“I will stop by their place and explain what we find when we get through.”

Erv agreed.

They pushed on hard northward in the night under a thousand stars. Their saddle leather complained and horseshoes struck rocks exposed on the road surface as they kept their course. Desert owls hooted in the night, bats swooped in the sky, and coyotes lent their voices to the sounds of the night.

The trip proved long and dawn was pinking the New Mexico horizon far in the east. They entered a deep chasm and the dry wash was the only way up the deep, shadowy gorge. Erv led the way in on his good horse, and up on a small shelf, a dark hovel sat backed to a huge sandstone bluff wall behind it.

“I want this area as untouched as can be so we can search it in the daylight. Criminals drop things. Once, we found an old letter from his girlfriend that a killer dropped at the scene. He denied doing the murder. But we had the letter with his name on it that could not have gotten up there except it fell out of his pocket.”

Erv looked serious enough peering inside the house in the dim light. He nodded. “I never thought about that but I do see what you mean.”

“Since we have no suspects so far, any evidence we can find will help us arrest the guilty ones.”

“I guess being a lawman all your life makes that job easier.”

Guthrey shook his head. “You need to be lucky too.”

Erv agreed and they both squatted down on their heels at the open doorway.

“Is there any other way in or out of this canyon?” Guthrey looked around at the still-dark surrounding bluffs.

“You could, if you were part goat, go out over that back range. Some men and kids have done it just to say they had.”

“It gets to be daylight, you search that dry wash we rode in on. See if we and the nice lady who came to get us did not wipe out their tracks and try to learn which way they went when they came out of the canyon, if you can.”

“Oh yes. That might be hard.”

“Look close where they went out at the opening.”

Erv said, “I can do that. Are the bodies inside?”

“Let's go peek.” Guthrey had a knot behind his tongue to swallow. He'd seen lots of dead folks. None were ever pretty to look at. With just enough light to see by, they peered in from the doorway. A naked body, perhaps that of a teenager, was on the bed.

“That was their daughter, Casey. My God, she never harmed anyone. She's tied there, ain't she?”

“Looks that way. Don't step in the dirt inside the door. Move to the left so we can see if there are any footprints.”

“There's George's body.” Erv pointed to the corpse of a man in old overalls lying on his back on the floor beside the back door, increasingly visible as more of the morning light gained access.

Guthrey nodded. He was more shaken by the sight of the naked teenage girl's corpse tied by the wrists and ankles to the bed. The only reason for that was to rape or torture her. He'd never seen such a sight, but had been at trials where men were tried for doing such crimes and the judge excused all the women in the courtroom when the prosecution got set to produce a drawing of what that looked like.

“I see a perfect boot print right there.”

“Find some newspaper. We need a tracing of that boot. It's a large one.”

“The old man don't own any boots like that either.”

They found George's wife facedown on the ground outside. Her head was bloody black from being beaten to death.

Finding no other good footprints inside the doorway, Guthrey went back in the room and looked at the dead girl. From the look of her bluish face he felt certain they had smothered her to death, perhaps with an old pillow. He searched around the bed. Carefully he shook out each blanket that had been tossed on the floor. He watched a wadded up goatskin roping glove fall out of the last blanket he had shaken and he carefully picked it up. The room had the real bad odor of an unemptied nightjar or unwashed bodies—he didn't dare swallow much of the foul air.

Why was this glove in these blankets that were tossed aside? He pocketed it in his vest to examine later. The murderers must have raped her. But why? Lots of ladies of the night in town to use—the murderers must be some crazy, wicked animals. Normal folks would have no stomach for all this horrible violence.

Candles were melted to hard puddles of hard wax. He had no idea what time of day all this had happened. But it was a recent crime, happened maybe on Friday or even Saturday.

Guthrey found some butts of roll-your-own cigarettes outside the house. Also the large boot print they'd seen inside the house was there again near the woman's corpse. Some other ranchers came in about then and tethered their horses a ways from the house. Guthrey went to join them. He told them what they'd found.

“Have you found anything to use in court?” Hal Jones asked him, shaken by his description of the corpses.

Guthrey shook his head. “Nothing to point a finger. I would say more than one person did this. One was a large man; we have his boot print, not many features except being huge. But to run down three people and murder them like this took some help.”

Then recalling the glove, he removed it from his pocket and opened it up. “I found this in the blankets that were tossed off the bed.” It was an expensive handmade goatskin glove used by many for roping and thin enough a man could fire a six-gun wearing it. On the cuff there was a very accurate drawing of a star made by an indelible pencil.

“Anyone seen one of these?” he asked, handing the evidence around to the four grim-faced men standing outside, who were obviously shocked by the violence that had occurred there.

“This is an expensive glove,” one rancher said, handing it on.

“Anyone seen this star before?” another asked.

Heads shook in the circle. Erv told Guthrey that he had sent one of the men to go get some more horses to transport the corpses to Soda Springs.

“Guthrey, how will we ever catch these killers?” Joe Butler asked.

“Good question. But someone will slip up. Someone will have passed by the killers on the road. They may be transients, just going through the country, or people that they knew. I'll get the word out and offer a reward for information. This horrendous crime was not thought up and managed by normal people. They were crazy, wolflike animals. Let's not get people too upset; it could lead to innocent people being the subject of a lynch mob. I worry about that. We need a clear-cut trial for the ones who did this, despite the human emotions that will arise. Am I clear?”

The sober-faced men in the group were, all of them, community leaders—they all nodded. In another hour the bodies were wrapped and bound in blankets and the horses arrived. Two of the men agreed to deliver them to the undertaker in Soda Springs. Guthrey told them he needed to hold a justice of the peace hearing on these deaths—something that hadn't been done when Cally's father was shot in the canyon. Guthrey had found that killer; he hoped he could get these killers as well.

A quiet, somber party started out to leave the canyon with three corpses. Guthrey studied the towering walls. Erv told him he thought the killers had ridden out and headed north, but the tracks were ordinary enough it was hard to tell which ones belonged to who.

Guthrey and Erv stopped by to thank Mrs. Haynes. Red-eyed, she came out to greet them.

“I am sorry you had to discover them. It was a horrific scene. Did they have any enemies you know about?”

“No.” She wearily shook her head. “They were such gentle people. Always kind.”

“Mrs. Haynes, was the scene fresh when you found them?”

“Oh, it must have happened on Friday. They'd been dead awhile when I found 'em.”

“I think so too. Thanks. We will do all we can to find the killers. I'll put out a reward for information. You have any ideas?”

“Was it Apaches?” she whispered.

“No. It was someone else.”

“Thank God.”

“I've sent the bodies to Soda Springs. We'll hold an inquest. Can you come testify?”

“Yes.”

“I know this has been hard on you. I appreciate your concern. Thanks.”

“Tell your lovely wife, Cally, thanks. She was so kind to me.”

“Cally is a good woman, well beyond her years in her ability to help people.”

“Yes she is. I hope you find these vile people.”

“I'll try.”

“God bless you, sheriff.”