Shotgun Bride (22 page)

T
he sun dipped in the western sky, blazing with pink, purple, and orange light, and though the tracks of the outlaws’ horses had vanished long before, there was plenty of sign to follow. Holt finally insisted that they stop and make camp for the night; given his choice, Kade would have ridden through till dawn.

While Holt built a fire, Kade shot a couple of rabbits for supper, skinning them next to a footwide creek. Now that the day was ending, and he had the time, he had to think about John Lewis being gone for good, whether he chose to or not. He felt diminished by the loss, as though his friend had carried a part of him away when he went. And then there was Rafe and Emmeline’s baby, never living to see the light. The last time he’d glimpsed that kind of rendering sorrow in his elder brother had been when their mother died.

And there was another thorny matter. Kade blamed himself for Georgia McKettrick’s passing, at least in part, though he’d never confided that to a living soul. She’d been riding after strays when she was thrown into the creek and caught the chill that bore her away within twenty-four hours. Rounding up those wandering cattle had been his chore, but he’d been late getting home from town, where he’d talked himself into a poker game, and his mother had stepped in to keep him from catching hell from Angus.

Now, beside the narrow creek, Kade washed the rabbit carcasses and then his hands before heading back to camp. Too bad he couldn’t wash away his regrets as easily.

Holt had a good, hot fire going by the time Kade returned, and he’d rigged up a spit for roasting the rabbits. Kade longed hopelessly for hot, fresh coffee and eyed the hard ground where he’d be spreading out his bedroll. He was grimly amused to find himself hankering mightily for the cot back at the jailhouse, with its thin, lumpy, and none-too-clean mattress. Mandy’s bed would have been better, of course, but after the scene in front of the jailhouse that morning, he didn’t reckon he’d be welcome there.

He put the rabbits on the spit and stood beside the fire awhile, warming his hands against the high-country chill. Holt sat nearby, one leg bent at the knee, the other stretched out straight. He stared into the blaze, thinking his own thoughts.

As a general rule, Kade was no conversationalist, but that night, sadder and wiser, with the ranch in danger and one of his best friends dead, he felt the need to talk. “You remember your mother?” he heard himself ask.

It was a mighty personal question, and Holt couldn’t be blamed if he chose not to reply, but after a long while spent watching the fire, he shook his head. “She died when I was a baby. Pa rode out soon after that, so I don’t have any recollections of him, either.”

“Who raised you?” Kade shivered as a cold wind blew down off the distant, snowcapped peaks. His bones felt brittle, and he yearned for Mandy’s singular warmth.

“Some kin of my mother’s,” Holt answered flatly.

“The Cavanaghs?”

Holt sighed and threw Kade an irritated glance, but he finally shook his head in response. “No. I took that name from the first rancher I worked for—started as a stable hand. He was a good man. It was because of him that I joined up with the Rangers.”

Kade was quiet, absorbing this revelation. He was powerfully curious about this half brother of his, and he hoped he wouldn’t be forced to admit as much. He didn’t know how to frame the words without sounding like he gave a damn. “You never called yourself McKettrick?”

“No reason to,” Holt said, watching the campfire again. Kade wondered what he saw in there—something, for sure, if the solemn expression on his face was anything to go by.

“You came up tough, I guess.”

Holt pondered that, then nodded. “I reckon I did.”

“What was it like, riding with the Rangers?”

“You planning on starting up your own newspaper or something?”

Kade allowed himself a weary grin. “A man lives his whole life never knowing he’s got a third brother out there someplace, and then meets the fella face-to-face. It makes for curiosity.”

Holt kept his eyes on the flames, and their reflections flickered across the rugged lines of his face. Being fairly certain that he wouldn’t be flattered to hear how much he resembled Angus, Kade didn’t remark on the fact, though it struck him square in the gut. “I knew about you and Rafe and Jeb,” Holt said, “and I still had plenty of questions.”

Kade crouched, raising his collar against the wind and hoping it wouldn’t snow during the night. He waited, knowing his brother had more words in him, and somewhere in the near distance, a wolf howled plaintively, perhaps calling back the vanished moon.

“Angus wrote me, once I was old enough to read,” Holt said. “By that time, I’d been adopted by my ma’s sister and her husband, Dill, but I guess the old man thought I’d want to know all about his new family, so he turned newsy every other year, around my birthday. Christ, I used to hate getting those letters.”

Kade sighed. “It would be a hard thing, growing up that way. Pa should have brought you home to the Triple M.”

“He’d have had to hog-tie me.”

“But you’re here now.”

Holt engaged in a bitter smile. “I never planned to stay.”

“Then why’d you buy the Chandler place and bring in that herd of cattle?”

Their gazes met across the dancing fire, and locked. “I knew Angus wanted that land. Seemed like a good way to piss him off.”

Kade laughed, but the sound was raw in his throat, and no joy was in it. “You did that, all right. You still trying to get under his skin, or are you serious about ranching?”

“A little of both, I figure.”

The rabbit meat began to sizzle and the smell made Kade’s empty stomach growl. He went to unsaddle and hobble his horse, and took care of Holt’s mount as well, while he was at it. When he returned to the fire, supper was ready.

Kade had used up his store of words for the day, so he laid out his bedroll, took his share of the food from the spit, as did Holt, and ate in silence.

“I’ll take the first watch,” Holt said. They both knew that Davy and the men he rode with might double back at any time, and it wouldn’t serve to be taken unawares.

Kade didn’t expect to sleep, weary as he was, given the hardness of the ground and the thoughts churning in his head, but the next thing he knew, Holt was shaking him awake to stand lookout, and his blanket was covered by a light dusting of the snow he’d dreaded earlier.

The rest of the night was long, dull, and cold, and Kade was relieved when dawn finally broke. Breakfast was jerky from their saddlebags, and he and Holt were soon mounted and on their way.

The snow had covered the trail they’d been following, and they were about to turn around and head back when they saw the blood.

T
he murdered man lay belly-up in the red snow, with half his chest blown away and his scalp neatly separated from his skull. The carcass was gruesome, awash in crimson gore, a fresh kill as savage as the leavings of any wild animal.

“Sweet Jesus,” Holt said, scanning the surrounding area quickly, gun in hand, as Kade did the same. No one was in sight. The stillness of that high and lonesome place resounded through Kade, an echo of nothing.

Bile surged into the back of his throat, and he spat before getting down from the horse and approaching the body. If people kept dying at the rate they had been lately, he reckoned Indian Rock would be a ghost town in no time at all.

Kade recognized the corpse right away, though he and Kincaid hadn’t been acquainted.

“That him?” Holt asked, standing in his stirrups to peer at the dead man. “Pappy’s boy?”

Kade glanced back at him over one snow-dusted shoulder, nodded. “Reckon so.”

Holt dismounted, too, glanced once at what was left of Kincaid, and crouched to examine one of several sets of hoofprints in the snow.

Kade got to his feet, doing his best to keep down the jerky he’d eaten on the trail. He straightened his hat and made a wide circle, searching for anything that would indicate where the killers had gone from there.

“What now?” he muttered, talking more to himself than Holt.

“We take the poor bastard home to his father and brother.”

“We have to keep going.”

“The tracks lead nowhere, Kade. Whoever these people are, they’ve had a lot of experience at eluding posses. They killed Kincaid to make sure he wouldn’t talk and deliberately left him here for us to find, which means they know we’re after them. By now, they’re miles from here.”

Kade cursed. “You’re probably right,” he said, grudgingly.

Holt was unfastening his bedroll from behind his saddle. “I sure as hell am,” he replied flatly. “Let’s get young Davy home to his kinfolks, such as they are. If they’ve gone on to the Circle C with Charlie and Pete, we’ll head there.”

They wrapped Kincaid’s remains in the blanket, rigged up a litter with tree branches and rope, and dragged him back down to Pappy’s cabin. When they arrived, there was no sign of the two men Holt had sent back to protect the old man and Avery.

Once again, Pappy came out to meet them, but this time, he wasn’t shooting. It was a small consolation but, at the moment, Kade was willing to take what he could get. “That Davy in there?” the old man asked cautiously, peering around Kade’s horse at the travois, and the bloody bundle it carried.

“Yes,” Kade said.

“I warned him this would happen, he kept runnin’ with bad companions.” Pappy drew nigh the body, his movements tentative, as though he thought his son might spring up and take him by the throat. He made no move to touch Davy, but instead peered up at Kade. If he felt any grief at all, it wasn’t evident. “You get my three dollars and my bullets back?”

Kade ran the back of a gloved hand across his mouth and linked gazes with Holt. “No,” he said, after some hesitation.

“What about my cattle? You promised me them cattle.”

“You’ll have them,” Kade replied. There would be no mourning Davy Kincaid, it appeared, and even though the son of a bitch probably hadn’t been worth a pitcher of warm spit, it was still a pitiful thing to know. He got down off the horse, moved past Pappy to unhitch the travois.

“Where are my men?” Holt asked, looking around. His jawline had gone hard; plainly, he expected his orders to be obeyed. Just like Angus, Kade thought, and under any other circumstances, he would have been inclined to smile.

“Took Avery and left,” Pappy said. “I tolt ’em I wasn’t going nowheres.”

“We’ll need a couple of shovels,” Kade said, exhausted in a way that a month of sound sleep couldn’t cure. “Where do you want him buried?”

“Don’t give a damn, long as you don’t put him too close to the well.” With that, Pappy trotted off toward the cabin, leaving birdlike footprints in the melting snow.

“Angus McKettrick,” Holt observed, dismounting and coming to help Kade with Davy’s body, “is beginning to seem downright sweet-tempered.”

K
ade parted ways with Holt at the turnoff to the Circle C and rode wearily on to the Triple M, arriving there around three o’clock, just as Concepcion was laying out an early supper. Jeb and Angus were at the table, sleeves rolled up, preparing to dish up. Everybody was glum, and with good reason. Emmeline’s miscarriage had come as a blow to them all, and then there was John.

“Any luck picking up the trail?” Jeb asked as Kade hung up his coat and hat by the kitchen door.

“Davy Kincaid was part of the gang,” Kade said, with a shake of his head, unstrapping his gun belt and setting that aside, too. “They killed him.”

Angus winced. “Lordy,” he said, studying Kade closely, perhaps looking for signs of wear. “Was it bad?”

“Bad enough not to talk about while folks are fixing to eat.” Kade went to the sink and began washing his hands in the hot water Concepcion had ladled into a basin, making good use of the strong yellow soap she brewed in batches every fall after the butchering was done. “How about you?” he asked Jeb. “You turn up anything in your travels?”

“Nothing to speak of,” Jeb said. “Captain Harvey’s got his tail in a twist. He’s threatening to bring the whole cavalry in and go over every inch of ground between here and Utah.”

“That’s all right with me,” Kade replied, drying his hands. He looked at Angus, then at Concepcion. They were carrying on, but they both looked peaked. “You two holding up all right?”

Concepcion averted her gaze, sniffling, and Angus grumbled and shuffled around in his chair a bit. “It’s a damn shame about John, and Emmeline, too. You seen Rafe?”

Jeb and Kade exchanged glances. Evidently, Jeb hadn’t been holding forth on their elder brother’s state of mind.

“He’s taking it hard,” Kade said. He braced himself for a hide-stripping; since Rafe blamed him for what had happened, it might be that they did, too.

“Hope he doesn’t burn anything down,” Angus fretted.

Jeb grinned at that, though not with his usual spirit. “He’ll work it through in time.”

Kade paused to lean down and kiss Concepcion’s cheek on the way to his chair, and she offered him a fleeting smile. Thin as it was, that smile took some of the chill of the trail, and Davy Kincaid’s grisly murder, from his bones.

“If we’d gotten the chance,” Angus said out of the blue, “Concepcion and me would have made an announcement of our own at the dance the other night.”

Kade waited, bracing himself, with no idea what to expect.

“What?” Jeb wanted to know.

“We’ve been married awhile,” Angus imparted.

The silence was thunderous.

“I’ll be damned,” Jeb said, finally. It was something of a relief to have the conversational logjam broken, even if it did gall Kade that his younger brother had been the one to do it.

Kade let out his breath, tossed a mischievous glance in Concepcion’s direction. “What I can’t fathom,” he said, taking his customary place next to Jeb and reaching for the platter of roast beef, carrots, and potatoes, “is what a fine woman like you would see in an old reprobate like my pa.” Concepcion was probably the only woman in the territory who could abide the old man, to Kade’s way of thinking, though in truth he felt a renewed affection for Angus, having noted the contrasts between him and Pappy Kincaid.

Angus laughed at that, a note of jovial relief in the sound. It touched Kade in a surprising way to realize how much Angus wanted his sons’ blessing on the marriage. Had he expected recriminations? Maybe so, given the way they’d reacted to the news of an extra son.

Jeb offered no further comment, for once; he just waited impatiently for the platter and then speared two good-sized slabs of beef and scraped half the spuds onto his plate for good measure.

“I promised Pappy Kincaid three head of cattle,” Kade announced presently, figuring that was as good a time to break the news as any. “Two heifers and a bull. I’ve already sent a couple of the hands up to his place with them.”

A heavy silence settled over the room. Jeb looked as if he were poised to duck under the table, and Concepcion wore a mighty serious expression as she tried to catch her husband’s eye.

“Why in blazes would you do that?” Angus demanded, his considerable ire trained on Kade alone. So much for matrimonial bliss.

“To pay a debt,” Kade said, meeting his father’s gaze and holding his ground. “Seems to me some of the things folks say about our dealings have a bit too much truth to them for my liking.”

Angus flushed, disgruntled. “He’s crazy as a wood tick, that old man. You go giving cattle to everybody who thinks they’ve got some claim against the McKettricks, we won’t have a herd left.”

“It’s done, Pa,” Kade said. Concepcion had gotten up to pour him a cup of her blessed coffee, and he took a mouthful, relishing the taste of the stuff. “Best leave it alone.”

It looked like Angus was bent on an argument, but a second glance from Concepcion subdued him, and after that small hitch, the talk turned to finding the money that would save the Triple M. That the task seemed more impossible with every passing day did nothing to diminish Kade’s private determination to do it.

“Will you stay the night?” Concepcion inquired half an hour later, while she and Kade stood side by side, washing and drying the supper dishes. Angus had retreated to his study and Jeb was off to the bunkhouse for a game of poker with some of the ranch hands.

The thought was inviting—Kade had missed his room, his bed, and his books—but he shook his head. He was still the town marshal, and that meant he was needed in Indian Rock. Besides, Mandy was there, and they had some things to square away between them.

“I have to get back,” he said, making no attempt to hide his regret. His eagerness to be near Mandy, in her bed or not, was too personal to share.

Concepcion nodded her understanding. “Angus and I will be heading that direction in the morning. We want to be there for John’s funeral and see what we can do for Rafe and Emmeline.”

Kade’s throat tightened. He dreaded the disappointment in Emmeline’s eyes, the furious grief in Rafe’s, and even more, he dreaded seeing John Lewis’s coffin lowered into the ground, but there was no question that he’d attend the service. “It won’t be an easy day,” he said with some difficulty.

Concepcion laid a hand on his arm and spoke frankly. “I know you feel a duty to see this job through, but you need to remember that this ranch is your home. It is in your blood, this place, and staying away is like denying yourself food and breath and water. It will shrivel your soul.” Her eyes gleamed with love and tears as she looked at him. “You belong right here, Kade.”

He’d come to realize that himself, over recent days, but he couldn’t take off the badge in good conscience until those killers had been rounded up and brought in and a new marshal had been found. And then there was the money. He nodded, set the last dish aside to be put away, and hung up the dish towel. He thought of Rafe and Emmeline’s sturdy house, across the creek, and wished he had a place like that to bring Mandy home to. In his mind, he was already making plans to build one, and he would do it with his own hands. He wanted his children and grandchildren to grow up there.

He gave Concepcion a nod as a belated answer, and peered out the window. It was still early, but town was a couple of hours away, and he didn’t much relish riding in the dark. “I’d better go,” he said with resignation.