The Rustler (26 page)

Rowdy, busy with his coffee-brewing before, stopped and looked so deep into Wyatt that he'd have sworn he felt his brother's gaze clear to his backbone. “I guess that depends on whether or not the cattle in question were still on the land where they belonged, and if anybody got shot trying to stop the rustlers.”

Wyatt said nothing. He was dizzy with relief. They'd rounded up the cattle on an apparently deserted ranch owned by a family named Donagher. No one had come forward to prevent the rustling, and as far as he knew, nobody had been hurt, either.

“But what if a man
intended
to steal cattle?”

“There's no law against intending to do something,” Rowdy said. Wyatt could almost see wheels turning behind those Yarbro-blue eyes. “It's the following through that matters.”

Wyatt let out his breath.

“Are you telling me that you were with the Justice gang when they went after the Donagher herd and riled up the neighboring ranchers?”

“What if I am?”

“If you are, Billy Justice probably
will
come after you. I'll stand with you if he does.”

“He'll come,” Wyatt said.

“We'll be ready,” Rowdy replied.

Wyatt unpinned his badge, laid it on the table. He was surprised by the regret he felt, letting it go. For a little while, he'd stood for the same values as the nickel-plated star, much as he'd botched things.

“Thanks,” he said. And he wasn't just talking about his brief stint as a deputy.

Rowdy nodded. “I guess you'll be heading out to Sam's now.”

“Yep,” Wyatt said, walking to the door, taking his hat down off the peg.

The coffee was beginning to perk, but he was too restless to stay around swilling the stuff. He wanted a look at Stone Creek Ranch, needed to map out his duties in his mind.

Owen was still at the livery stable when he went to claim Sugarfoot. He'd finagled himself a quarter's worth of work by offering to muck out stalls.

“I'm going to buy a couple of dime novels with this money,” he told Wyatt proudly.

Wyatt grinned as he went into Sugarfoot's stall and set about saddling him up. “Seems like a waste to me,” he said, “but I guess it's better than rock candy to rot your teeth.”

Some of the shine had gone off Owen when he realized what Wyatt was doing. “You leavin'?” he asked. He was already picking up the Western vernacular, for better or worse, dropping his
g's
and shortening sentences to pertinent words. “For good?”

Wyatt swung up into the saddle. “No,” he said.

“Where's your badge?”

“Gave it back to Rowdy.”

Owen sagged a little. “Oh.”

Wyatt rode past the kid, out into the sunlight.

“Where you headed?” Owen called after him. “Can I go along?”

Wyatt reined in, turned Sugarfoot, and looked the boy in the eye. “You've got to earn that quarter you told me about,” he said. “I'm going to Stone Creek Ranch, to see about a job.”

Owen looked relieved. “Can I go some other time?”

“Some other time,” Wyatt agreed.

Parts of his heart were light as he turned his horse back in the direction of Sam O'Ballivan's ranch, but parts of it were heavy, too.

S
AM
O'B
ALLIVAN'S SPREAD WAS
something to behold, sprawling across a broad and shallow valley the way it did, with a creek running through so the cattle would have fresh water all year long. There were two houses, both sizable and some distance apart, and one good barn, with what looked like a bunkhouse behind it, and a small cabin beyond that.

Wyatt felt his spirits rise at this reminder of what a man could do, could build and sustain, if he worked hard and played the cards he'd been dealt. He began to see his own hardscrabble little place as it might be, one day.

To the east, he saw Sam's herd, grazing in a high meadow. There must have been a thousand cattle, and he counted five wranglers on horseback, driving strays back to the main bunch.

For the length of a heartbeat, Wyatt was back on the Donagher place, outside Haven, with the storm coming on and the stampede still in his future, and even though the sky was clear and china-blue, he felt the same inexorable sense of dread he had then.

He shook it off. That had been a different time and a different place.

Seeing Sam come out of the barn, Wyatt rode down off the rise toward him.

O'Ballivan, wearing work clothes, with his sleeves rolled up, and manure-caked boots, greeted him with a half smile.

“Only five men tending a herd that big?” Wyatt asked, without meaning to. He swung down off Sugarfoot's sweaty back, and he and Sam shook hands.

“Bunch of yahoos,” Sam allowed. “All of them still green as the first corn crop. I don't think one of them is over seventeen. Most of my hands quit on me to go mining for copper down around Bisbee.”

The youth, inexperience and limited number of the crew explained, at least partially, why a man like Sam would hire somebody he didn't really know for a foreman, even on the word of a good friend like Rowdy. Wyatt's own experience with cattle was pretty much limited to stealing them—he'd done that when he was young, given the uncertain pecuniary nature of the train-robbing business—but it was work any halfway competent man could do, long as he had some stamina and could sit a horse.

“I'll show you to your quarters,” Sam said, starting off toward the cabin. “You'll take your meals in the bunkhouse, or with Maddie and me if she's of a mind to cook on any given day.” He spared another smile at this, gone as quick as it came. Sam O'Ballivan, Wyatt concluded, wasn't the effusive type. “You'll have a string of six horses to choose from, Sundays off unless there's a need to stay on here for some reason, and you'll get extra wages for that. Your job is to ride herd over the cowpokes, more than the cattle. If you can round up any spare help, I'd be glad to hire them on, too. In a month or so, we'll have some culling to do, and we'll drive the critters to the railway, a few miles east of Stone Creek, and load them into cattle cars. They'll be sold in Phoenix, and after that, you can take a week or two off if you're so inclined. Winter's mostly taken up keeping the bulls and heifers and calves alive. The wolves get hungry around that time of year, so we'll be on the lookout for them. Job involves some ice-breaking, too, when the creek freezes, and driving wagonloads of hay out to the pastures. We use dray horses and flatbed sleighs when the snow gets deep. It's cold, hard work, but there's a lot of free time for sitting around the stove, too.”

Wyatt took all this in, surprised by none of it. He was thinking of his own little spread, and how he'd spend his Sundays there, driving nails and digging out the well.

A smile touched his mouth. His ma surely wouldn't have approved of his working on the Sabbath Day, but to Wyatt's way of thinking, it would be a holy labor. Where he'd fit Sarah into all this, he didn't know.

They reached the cabin, a sturdy-looking little house, obviously new, with glass and even curtains at the windows. Inside, Wyatt found the accommodations more than satisfactory. There was a sink with a hand-pump, a big freestanding copper bathtub, a stove so new the chrome fenders still gleamed, a table with two chairs, and a wide bed with what looked like a decent mattress. The floor wasn't plain, hard-packed dirt, like it would be in many such places, but smoothly planed planks. There was even a private outhouse, newly built, and a lean-to for firewood. The shelves were stocked with canned goods, should the foreman choose to eat alone, and pots and pans were provided, along with a blue enamel coffeepot and some mismatched cups and plates. Quilts and good sheets lay neatly folded at the foot of the bed.

The place was a palace to a man who'd slept on the ground or on a prison cot so many nights. But Sarah would find it only slightly more habitable than the shack on his land, most probably.

“You can move your gear in tonight, if you'd like, and start work tomorrow morning. There'll be coffee and hot grub in the bunkhouse at five-thirty.”

Wyatt nodded, figuring Sam O'Ballivan had probably said more words in the last twenty minutes than in the better part of a year, if he was right in his assessment of the man's character. “What I rightfully own,” Wyatt told Sam, “is in my saddlebags. I'll bring it inside and ride out for a look at the herd, if you don't object.”

Sam nodded, the matter settled in his mind. He might have been pleased that Wyatt meant to start work immediately, but it was hard to tell. Sam offered to advance a month's wages if Wyatt could use it.

Wyatt refused. He still had most of the money Rowdy had given him, and that chafed at him plenty. What with the mortgage, he owed enough.

Sam went to the doorway, stood in a shaft of sunlight peppered with fine golden dust. “You might have a little trouble with the hands,” he said. “They're young, like I said, and most of them are knotheads.”

Kids, Wyatt thought. They were the least of his worries.

Sam took his leave, saying he had paperwork to do back at the main house.

Wyatt brought in his saddlebags and put his few belongings in likely places, and they were so few that they hardly changed the look of the place at all. He found a tin of peaches on the shelf, opened it with his pocket-knife, and drank the juice before spearing the sweet slices of fruit and devouring them.

Thus restored, he went back outside, mounted Sugarfoot, and rode toward the herd, with his hopes high and that feeling of impending disaster still nettling the pit of his stomach.

 

W
HEN
T
HOMAS RUSHED IN
after meeting the morning train, as he always did, Sarah was briefly alarmed, certain he was about to tell her that Charles had returned. With her father so ill, she'd have no hope of convincing him things were fine at the bank, and worse, seeing that Owen had become attached to her and Ephriam, he might take him away immediately. Or send the boy back East alone, while he stayed to destroy Sarah's means of livelihood.

Of course it wasn't the
only
means. She could marry Wyatt, take in boarders—or fill Kitty's place at the Spit Bucket Saloon.

A shiver went through her.

“Rowdy and Sam are back,” Thomas announced, instead. He looked so profoundly relieved that Sarah forgot her worrisome prospects and stared at him. “Mother says we could have been murdered in our beds, with a criminal in charge of the town.”

Sarah bristled immediately. “A
criminal?
” she repeated. “Are you referring to Wyatt Yarbro?”

Thomas seemed taken aback by her reaction. Maybe he'd expected her to agree—and earlier, before she'd gotten to know Wyatt, she would have. “Well,” he said nervously, mopping his broad forehead with an oversize handkerchief, “he freely
admits
that he used to rob trains. Mother said if he'd gone forward at the altar call, when Brother Hickey was here, she'd take a more charitable view of his character.”

Thomas's mother, one of those who went forward for a new allotment of salvation every year and kept strict tabs of those who didn't, had probably never taken a charitable view of anyone.

“That's ridiculous,” Sarah said. “People change, Thomas. Rowdy used to be a wanted man, and everyone trusts
him.
”

Before Thomas could reply to that, Owen burst through the door behind him, nearly startling the poor teller right into next week. He waved two books with yellow covers over his head.

“I earned the money to buy these!” he crowed. “Mucking out stalls!”

Sarah eyed his manure-stained dungarees. “In your new clothes, Owen?” she asked, but she couldn't bring herself to actually scold him.

“They'll wash,” Owen said, beaming, almost breathless with excitement. “Wyatt's in these books! In one, he's a train robber. In the other, he holds up a bank—”

Thomas raised his eyebrows.

Sarah blushed a little.

“I'm going to read them to Grandfather,” Owen rushed on.

Sarah took the books from her son's grubby hand and surveyed the lurid covers. Sure enough, the first, entitled,
Wyatt Yarbro, Terror of the Nation's Railways,
showed a rider lying in wait for an unsuspecting train, rifle in hand, bandanna covering his face. The second,
Wyatt Yarbro, Robbing the Rich to Save the Poor,
depicted a man with blazing six-guns in both hands, and bags of money at his feet. Behind him, a woman cowered, one hand over her mouth.

“Good heavens,” Sarah said. “Wyatt ought to sue these people.”

“Where there's smoke,” Thomas muttered righteously, taking his normal place behind the counter, “there's fire.”

Sarah glared at him until he wilted.

Owen, most of the conversation having gone right over his head, waited anxiously for the return of the dime novels. Perhaps, Sarah thought, he'd already read them, since he seemed to know so much about the stories. If so, he was bright for his age; short as the books were, they were geared toward an adult audience.

She returned the pulp-bound volumes, though reluctantly. She was not one to discourage reading, whatever the contents of the books in question. And, because the wild yarns were supposedly about Wyatt, she secretly yearned to read them herself.

“Are you coming home to make us lunch, Aunt Sarah?” Owen's face changed. “What am I supposed to call you now that I know you're—”

“‘Sarah' will be fine for the time being,” she broke in hastily, aware of Thomas's renewed and very avid interest. The secret was out, but she didn't want Thomas's mother to be among the first to have it confirmed.

Owen pondered that solemnly, and Sarah wished she hadn't intervened. Did the child think she didn't want him calling her Mother or Mama? The matter would have to be taken up in private.

“I'll be home in an hour,” Sarah said.

“Can we have bread and bologna again?”

“I made soup,” Sarah answered, smiling. “But you may have bologna if you want.”

Owen dashed out of the bank, the two dime novels clutched tightly in his right hand.

“Mother says books like that will destroy civilization as we know it,” Thomas pontificated, puffed up like an overfed rooster.

“Thomas,” Sarah said crisply, “I have heard enough of your mother's sage opinions for one day. Now, please sort today's receipts if you don't mind.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Thomas said, red to the ears.

They closed for lunch five minutes earlier than usual. Sarah had already balanced the ledgers, recorded deposits and withdrawals, and cashed Charles's voucher, too.

Although Sarah set a place for Wyatt, he didn't appear for the midday meal. Kitty joined her and Owen, though, while Doc sat with Ephriam upstairs.

Owen ate quickly and went up to ask Doc if he could read the “Wyatt books” to his grandfather. Sarah excused him, keeping her eyes on her bowl of soup. This time, she hadn't scorched it.

“I'm thankful to you, Sarah,” Kitty said quietly. “This is a fine chance you're giving me, and I won't disappoint you.”

Sarah swallowed, nodded. “When do you suppose Davina will arrive?”

Kitty sighed, laid down her soup spoon. “Probably tomorrow. School takes up on Monday, and she'll need a day or two to settle in.”

After Lark married Rowdy and stopped teaching classes, the town council had scraped up the funds to build a small house, hardly larger than Sarah's garden shed, as an abode for future teachers. Fiona had lived there quite happily, or at least without complaint, but now she was heading East to take care of her aunt. It hurt Sarah's feelings that she'd heard about this secondhand; she and Fiona had been friends.

“I guess we'll have to close down the Poker Society, now that you aren't working at the Spit Bucket anymore,” Sarah said distractedly.

“We could play right here,” Kitty said, with the merest flicker of mischief in her tired eyes, “in your front parlor.”

“We could at that,” Sarah agreed. They'd have to replace Fiona. Perhaps Davina would be willing to sit in.

“Will you come with me tomorrow, Sarah?” Kitty asked. “To meet Davina's train? Doc said he'd sit with your father.”