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  She looked at his hand and then into his eyes. He released his hold. ‘I’m so sorry miss, I didn’t mean no harm. You have to believe me . . . what happened wasn’t like the papers said . . . your brother got it all wrong.’

  Emilia weighed the fact that she had seen this man save the life of her brother with the dark reputation that smeared the name he had spoken from inside the wrath of his fever. He looked so weak, so dependent on her, that she nodded and agreed. ‘Fine. I’ll say nothing, Cal Roney. But you have to see that I’ve been trusting in my brother Ben’s words for a very long time.’

  He raved some more and then slept, though fitfully. As he lay still for a while, the woman looked closely at the stranger and her mind was tormented with the feelings her promise had made in her. He looked good, and that was nonsense, as she knew. But Emilia Stile believed in instinct, and she had faith in her convictions. He did look good. Here was a man who had risked his neck for a stranger, and had acted with a heroism rare as a sober tramp. She owed him the benefit of the doubt, and when Doc Heath arrived as the morning light told her that it was time to eat or wash or both, he asked about the patient.

  As she answered, her words were confirming the lie she had agreed upon. ‘Mr Boldwood has been through the worst of the fever. I’ve been real worried, Doc.’

  Doc Heath had a close look at Cal and then managed a slight smile. ‘There are reasons to be optimistic, Emilia. You’ve done a good job, as I knew you would. Now go and get some rest yourself. Macky’s fixing you some grub.’ He could see that she was in urgent need of sleep, and he insisted that she go.

  As Emilia paused at the door, the stranger’s eyes opened again and he sat up as if waking from a bad dream. Doc Heath held him and told him to rest some more. But before Emilia walked out, Cal shouted out, ‘Get the infantry out of there now . . . get ’em out. They’ll be dead meat!’

  He fell down again and Doc Heath said, ‘Easy, mister, easy. You’re in good hands.’

  He might or might not be a good man, Emilia thought, but he’s seen some things that scar a man’s soul. For the time being at least, his secret was safe with her. Cal buried his head in the pillow, still forcing out some words and some nonsense in his delirium. He hadn’t planned it, but this was the most effective way of hiding his real appearance. Nobody took much interest in a man raving and raging. He had Emilia on his side, too, and so far, he had stayed anonymous.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lerade in Laramie was still plagued by doubts about the Blood Creek job. Could Roney handle that by himself? Maybe he should have sent an experienced man with him? He was having these doubts as he sat in his office, sitting back and forwards in his massive armchair, and looking through the maps and papers collected on the robbery concerning the man now at Blood Creek. The robber had been young, fearless, quite prepared to put a gun barrel in a bank teller’s face. Could Roney deal with this?

  Maybe he had miscalculated, he thought, and he might even be putting Agent Roney’s life at risk. He pondered on the main points of his information on the area, and he recalled that the power around there was in the hands of the Kenny ranch. They had been garnering steers from here, there and everywhere, building up a very large herd. Reports noted that they were employing more and more hands as well, mopping up plenty of the rovers and rustlers created by the end of the war.

  Lerade got to his feet and paced around the room. He almost laughed at himself, fretting so much about one fairly routine mission – at least on paper. But it was the apparently manageable ones that turned out to be big trouble, in his experience. After half an hour of this deliberating and worrying, he decided to call in Matt Calero, his most perceptive and battle-hardened agent.

  Calero was there by the time Lerade had brewed up some strong coffee, and when his man sat down, his leathery face lined and mobile with every word spoken, Lerade had an immediate sense of comfort and reassurance. Calero knew Texas and New Mexico best as he had served around the Pecos when younger, and had seemed to know about Roney when the job at Blood Creek was first mentioned. He was short but wiry, and knew horses better than any man in Pinkerton’s northern operations. His hair was like a porcupine, brushed back and oiled; his clothes were always immaculate when he was in town and not working, and his only flaw was a fondness for the tables and indulging in too much faro with too little cash and too much bravado.

  ‘So I’m just a little concerned about Roney. Matt, please confirm: can he do this job?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have given you my recommendation if I thought he couldn’t. He’s tougher than vaquero leather, though not so polished! What’s eatin’ you, Lerade?’

  ‘Ah, it’s probably nothing . . . it’s only that he’s new . . . and there’s that Blood Creek story . . . bad luck and such.’

  ‘You don’t believe all that surely? Tales like that are spread around when some folk don’t want settlers and drifters coming their way . . . you do know that, boss?’

  ‘Sure. Drink some coffee and tell me I’m a fool.’

  He did just that. But before he left, as he was walking to the door, Lerade said, ‘Matt, to be sure, keep in touch with someone at Long Corral, hey? The hotel maybe. There’s the Heath brothers there. They know me.’

  Calero cracked his face with a smile of amusement and took his orders with an assurance that there was nothing to fret about. Cal Roney was a sound man, dependable. He was more than dependable, he knew, but said nothing. In fact, he owed his life to Cal Roney.

  In the log house out at Blood Creek, Sedge Gulley was putting the finishing touches to breakfast. His movements could be heard beyond the kitchen, as his wooden leg rumbled and dragged along the planks, and he sang. In fact he couldn’t help singing. The habit had grown in his days as cook for the drives down on the Western Trail. He was a fine advert for rich, wholesome food, as he was as broad as he was high, over sixty years carried in his frame, and his head was bald as a coot.

  He had relished playing cook, stand-in grandpa and general servant to the young couple he had met on the road the other side of Cheyenne. They had been part of a line of wagons following the Platte all the way from the Mississippi, but by the time they reached Cheyenne, it was breaking up and most had dug in somewhere. They had been as lost as Sedge himself, and they naturally fell in as friends. He had taken enough of the life on the drives, but even settled there at Blood Creek, his old habits died hard. What he did when organizing his buckboard he did now in the lean-to: everything was in its place, and he could knead the bread on a drop-down board, brew up coffee strong as mud, and bake biscuits and puddings to his heart’s content. Cy had told him he would have made a good mother, and Sedge said what he had said a thousand times on the trails: ‘A cook and his cowhands are a mother hen and her chicks . . . but the cook does all the cluckin’, you follow?’

  This morning he looked around at the beauty of the place: the sweep of water and the hills beyond, and the little island in the centre of the water, a place known to locals as Cary Island after the old hunter who lived in there, a recluse. It was an assembly of huge rocks, with dense vegetation around and in between: a perfect natural fortress, and old Cary was reputed to have fallen out of love with all mankind, shut himself in there, and turned miserable as a Montana winter.

  ‘Get in here! Grub up . . . get in here!’ He yelled in the doorway, looking out to the shack where Cy and Lizzy were mending the old door. Lizzy, no more than a gangly girl, was holding the edge of the door while Cy hammered in some nails. They had settled in the place six months back, newly wed, after looking for somewhere away from any sort of crowd and from the law. The young wife was fair-haired, rake-thin and bronzed. She was short, but strong and tough. There had been no illusions about what she was getting into. Cy Felder had been on the wrong side of the law since she first met him, when they were both no higher than a yearling’s mane.

  Cy lifted the door away and propped it against the shack wall. ‘Yeah . . . come on, Lizzy. Let’s eat.’ He put his arm around
her, and she felt that strength in him that had always drawn her to his side. He was strong as a bull and over six feet. He had earned his living by anything from bare-fist fighting to stage robbing, and this was catching up with him: before they even arrived at Blood Creek, he had known that the law was on his trail. He now deeply regretted what he had done, and he had crossed the line into crime in extreme need. The money kept those around him from starvation. But the law would only see the case as a bold and dangerous robbery.

  They sat around the old table in the shack, close to the lean-to where Sedge kept his food supplies and cooking materials. Lizzy did what she always did when they sat down: she complimented Sedge on the dinner. ‘It’s real tasty, Sedge, as usual. I reckon them cow punchers never had empty bellies when you worked the trails.’

  ‘Well, you keep a good supply of sourdough, bacon fat and coffee, and you got the basis of fine eatin’ – though of course, a man’s gotta bake bread every day, keep a jug of syrup handy and be a little enterprisin’ with the basic stuff.’

  Lizzy was talkative, but they could both see that Cy was brooding on something. Sedge asked what was eating him.

  ‘Truth is, Sedge, it’s been a few months now since we settled in here, and the fact is, the Pinkertons don’t give up. I’m expectin’ them any day now.’

  Sedge was keen to keep things peaceful. ‘Look, son, you know I’ve had some good luck along the way in my travels . . . except for this damned leg at that fool-headed scrap at Palmito. I mean dammit, the war was all signed off and done with, and that Teddy Barrett had to get some battle in him afore we was all bound for home. . . .’

  ‘Yes. You said once that you nearly drowned, Sedge?’ Lizzy asked.

  ‘Sure. A number of us drowned in the Rio Grande . . . I saw two men go under. That was four years back. Now here we are, close to a new decade, and that day’s as fresh as new-picked fruit . . . I made it to the bank and then got the bullet that put a stop to my runnin’ days. I been walkin’ ever since. But what I’m saying, Cy, is that even the Pinks get bored. Just take it easy. We’re on the side of a lonesome creek, a day’s ride from Laramie, and there’s not a soul knows about us. If we go on shootin’ most of the meat for the table, we’re fine.’

  ‘Yes, but we still need provisions from Long Corral, Sedge,’ put in Lizzy. ‘Folk know us there. If strangers come and ask questions . . . well, we’ll have the wrong kind of visitors here. Cy’s right. We’re an easy target. Maybe we should move on soon. You could be right about the time. I mean when 1870 comes along, we could all have a fresh start.’

  ‘Aw, to hell with movin’ on. Look, I’m too long in the tooth to go shiftin’ on again. I been a soldier, a cowboy, a cook, and now I’m everybody’s grandpa. Of course, you two are all I got. You’re my whole family! I just need some roots dug in here. Now eat that soup and wind down some . . .’

  ‘Another month, Sedge. If that’s still quiet, I’ll accept that the law’s forgotten me.’ Cy said. ‘Course, I robbed a bank. The idle rich don’t forget that. Then there’s the Pinkerton pride. They never give up. The whole frontier knows that!’

  ‘You didn’t harm nobody, Cy, and God knows you did it to keep us in food and pay some rent. You were on the edge that time. You’re not a bad man, Cy,’ Lizzy said.

  ‘No, but I walked away with five hundred bucks and I put the fear of God in a few old men in fancy suits.’

  ‘Well, who’s liable to look twice at an old-timer like me, ugly as a mud fence and with a brain addled by too much paintin’ my tonsils? Just keep your beautiful wife out of sight and we’ll be fine. She’s the honey that might bring in the drifters.’

  ‘Drifters we can handle, Sedge. But it’s the lawmen that bother me. Yes, we got water and we got wood here. Over on the plains some folk might kill for these, but here, well, for me, it might be called Blood Creek, but it’s only a spit away from Paradise.’ Cy gave Lizzy a hug, and she kissed his cheek. ‘Try not to worry, darlin’ . . . it’ll be all right.’

  They ate and talked, and then Sedge sang a few songs from his days on the drives. He told a few tales he had told a dozen times before, but they didn’t mind and they still listened like children by the fire on a winter’s evening. When the young folk went off to bed, he went outside to stare at the moon and whisper a prayer to whatever guardian angel had seen him through the War and through the cattle drives. Sedge was too old a warrior to believe in the power of blind faith. He knew that Cy was right: that any night now, there would be someone out there in the cottonwood trees and the scrub who wanted Cy Felder in a jailhouse.

  In the office that joined Octavius Gibbs’s home on the edge of Long Corral, the stars in that late night had another pair of eyes looking up and contemplating the future. This was Gibbs himself, newspaperman, owner and manager of the Long Corral Informer and long-time aspirant to a certain level of celebrity in the literary world.

  Gibbs was known as ‘Sonny’ because once, way back before life kicked him down, he was a man with a hearty disposition and a light-hearted tendency to tell entertaining tales of the frontier from the days when the real hard cases took on the elements and the natives and never felt a tremble of fear. He was thin, hollow-cheeked and long-legged, stretching to over six feet; he was self-regarding, likely to lecture folk or even preach, and a touch lyrical, as when younger he was branded with poetry, men said, deep in him as any steer with a Double T imprint.

  When he had first come west, Gibbs had been brimming with ideas about taking some kind of fine living out there: making places where folk could talk about reading and writing, plays and concerts. He still fooled himself that he was promoting such things, but in truth he was having to fill the paper with paragraphs on diseases of cattle, projects about new stage-lines, mining up the territory and then even reports on ladies’ meetings, church suppers and the box parties of the young unmarried maidens of Long Corral. He had filled in the cultural and literary space with pieces written by him in various pen-names, and he enjoyed being ‘Lawrence Delany, poet’ or ‘Constantine Doughty, tragic actor.’

  It was the Double T that kept a dark cloud over Sonny Gibbs. That was the outfit run by the Kenny brothers, who since their pa died a year back, had acted like they owned every inch of land between Laramie and the Platte to the west of town. That domain included Long Corral, but it was not theirs yet, and in their way stood Sonny and the Heath brothers, backed by Stile. Gibbs prayed every night that the lawman would stay on the side of the town, and that the Heaths would stay and resist. Weaker men would have caved in and run out north, high-tailing it to Casper maybe.

  On this night, though, his thoughts were of his dead wife, Ellen, gone now ten years, and the anniversary of that fateful date was coming up soon. Again, for the thousandth time, the events of that day ran through his mind as he looked up to the heavens and tried to think of stars, not the melancholy of loss down here on this planet where men have to struggle and time eats away everything.

  He saw the rider coming into town and shouting for Cal Roney to come out and face him. It had been a day so hot that hands could be browned just pressing on boards or leather, and the stranger riding into town was known to all the townsfolk. He was the hellcat father of the Kenny boys, Nathan Kenny, a man familiar with the Devil and all his works, and that night he shot his rifle into the jail door and yelled again for Roney, and then for Stile, to come out and fight. It had been Roney who walked out. At that time he fancied himself as a gunslinger, and men were coming to take him on after he dealt with the Segram twins in Laramie. He had rubbed out the best guns between Cheyenne and the Medicine Bow range. Kenny wanted him.

  He had walked out into the dusk, the tall and rugged figure of Cal Roney, and his hands hovered over his two pistols, ready to respond if Kenny pressed him too far. That was exactly what had happened. Kenny lifted his carbine around, and Roney pulled out both guns. Bullets could have riddled Kenny’s chest and put him down dead, but Roney had purposely shot wide and low, accepting the pleasure
of terrifying his opponent rather than killing him. But behind him, Ellen Gibbs was walking, carrying a basket of cakes for her wives’ meeting, where they were sewing a quilt. She never made another stitch. She died so fast, by the time Sonny Gibbs was across the road and kneeling over her, she was gone.

  He had lowered his head to her chest and his sobs came through him in waves of sorrow before he screamed out her name to the sky. Then he turned to Roney, who was standing behind him with Ben Stile and a gathering crowd, and as Doc Heath crouched and listened for any sign of breath, Roney had groped for words to express his feelings, but all Gibbs could do was rush at him and crack him on the jaw. Roney had taken a rain of punches and not retaliated.

  Then came the inquest and the verdict of accidental death. His Ellen had lain there, on a table, to be identified, and Roney, standing at the back, had left town, and had not been seen since. Even Nathan Kenny, rat that he was, had been spared that day – but his wife had died.

  Gibbs was sensing tears on his cheeks, as he saw that death again, running through his mind, and he was interrupted by his neighbour, Mary Collin, who had brought him some dinner earlier. It was still there, on the sideboard.

  ‘Why, Mr Octavius. . . you’ve not touched the pie. It’s my special mix. You need to eat!’

  Gibbs turned and looked at Mary, who carried seventy years light as a bag of feathers, standing there with her fraying old apron and her hair in a high bun, seeing just how much she tried to care for him. A twinge of guilt ran through him, and on his face Mary saw the story of what had been shaking his thin frame like a storm.

  ‘Mr Octavius . . . you don’t have to explain. I know what date it is, and I know that in two days it’s going to be ten years since we lost her . . .’