The Cowboys - Chet Part 25

Blade left that sentence unfinished as he took another swallow of whiskey. He sank deep into thought again. It was clear something was bothering him, and Luke had the feeling it wasn't Melody's supposed plan to get herself back in Lantz's good graces.

"It was a trick." Blade said that almost defiantly, as though he was trying to convince himself.

Quite suddenly Luke was certain that Blade knew something about the rustlers. He wondered if Blade could be the insider who kept the rustlers informed. But that didn't make sense. Blade wouldn't help people steal from his own father. That would take money out of his own pocket. Besides, stampeding the herd, even if Lantz's men recaptured every animal, would cost Lantz thousands of dollars in lost weight. Still, Blade knew something. Luke took a sip from his own whiskey and settled back to wait. Blade would soon be drunk enough to tell anything he knew. Luke got up to stretch his legs. He knew how to play the waiting gamehis job required itbut he occasionally got impatient. He walked over to the window and looked out. Clouds obscured the moon for the third night in a row. He expected rain soon. All the buildings were quiet and dark. Lantz had every available hand out rounding up the scattered herd. That left no explanation as to why Luke saw a pinpoint of light on the far side of one of the buildings. Nor did it explain why the light moved and then disappeared. One of the hands must have come back. But they never used lanterns. There was always enough light to see once your eyes adjusted to the dark.

Luke's hand instinctively reached for the gun at his side. He turned, walked quickly to the gun rack, and took down a rifle. He checked it to make certain it was loaded.

Blade peered at Luke. "What are you doing?"

"Someone's outside."

Blade snorted. "Pa's got nearly thirty hands on the place. Someone's always outside."

"I saw a light."

"It's darker than the bowels of h.e.l.l out tonight," Blade said.

"Has it occurred to you that those rustlers may have run off the cows to get the hands away from the house?"

"What for?"

"Your pa's convinced Melody's foreman is out to kill you. If she arranged the stampede to get back into his good graces, couldn't he also be using it to draw the men away from the house so he'd have a better chance to kill you?"

"Is that how you get work?" Blade demanded scornfully. "Scaring old men with sons to protect?"

"How do you explain that fire?"

The disdainful look wiped from his face, Blade lurched to his feet and staggered across the room. He propped himself up against the window frame and peered into the night.

"I don't see any fire," he said.

"They're two of them now," Luke said. "Look over there, beyond the small corral."

Two small pinpoints of flickering light grew in size.

"It's the haystacks," Blade said, puzzled.

"It's not the haystacks I'm worried about," Luke said. "It's the barn."

Small tongues of flame could be seen lapping at the edges of the roof. Luke backed away from the window so he'd be out of the line of any potential gunfire. "Get down."

"Get down, h.e.l.l!" Blade said. "I'm going to see if I can put it out."

Luke jerked Blade off balance and into a chair. "You're not going anywhere."

"Are you too good to put out a fire, or do you charge more for manual labor? That's our hay, our barn. What'll we do this winter without them?"

"Let the cows fend for themselves. You and I are staying right here."

The scornful look was back. "You're a coward," Blade said. "You're afraid someone might shoot at you if you go outside." Blade lurched to his feet. "I'm not frightened by any cowardly barn-burner. I'll put enough lead in him to sink him all the way to h.e.l.l."

Luke pushed Blade back into the chair. "You aren't going anywhere. What reason could anybody have for setting a fire unless they're trying to get at you?"

"You're making this up, trying to hide your cowardice."

"If you go out there, anybody could shoot you from ambush, and you'd never even know they were there. If I go outside, they can rush this place and fill you full of enough lead to sink you a lot deeper than h.e.l.l. That stampede may not have been a setup, but I'm sure this is. And killing you is what they're hoping to do."

As if to underscore Luke's statement, two bullets shattered the gla.s.s in one of the windows. Luke shoved Blade to the floor, put out both the lanterns in the room, and took a position next to the window. Several shots followed, but they were all fired through the same window, probably to keep Luke and Blade pinned down. Meanwhile, the fires gained a strong hold on the haystacks and the barn. Unless the rain came quickly, it would be a total loss.

"Why should anyone want to kill me?" Blade asked.

Luke heard honest wonder in his voice. The boy really didn't understand. "You killed Belle Jordan's foreman and tried to kill her son. That seems like more than enough reason to me."

The rain started, but too late to save the barn.

"Would you want to kill me?" Blade asked.

"If you'd shot me, you'd have been dead within an hour."

Blade looked hard at Luke. Something he saw in his gaze seemed to give him the understanding he'd lacked until now. Luke doubted it would change anything, but at least Blade knew the stakes were a lot higher than he'd thought. He was no longer a kid. He was playing a man's game. If caught, he would receive a man's penalty.

This was the second time Lantz had come by to see Melody in three days. She couldn't avoid seeing him because she and Chet were about to go riding. Lantz caught them at the corral. Mercifully, he was too occupied with the attacks on his herd and his ranch to press her to reconsider her refusal to marry him. He even talked to Chet without threatening to kill him.

"The posse didn't find a d.a.m.ned thing but the charred remains of a campfire," Lantz complained to Melody, "the one your foreman said he made a few days ago. They disappeared into thin air, like they always do."

"Chet thinks the gang must be made up of cowhands working at the various ranches," Melody said. "He says that would account for them disappearing so easily and for always knowing where everybody's going to be and what they're doing."

Lantz cast Chet an angry look. "Your foreman may be a fast draw, but he's a fool. Our own men couldn't be stealing from us without us knowing. Besides, where are they taking the cattle? They must have stolen two hundred head by now."

"They're holding them up the canyon," Chet said. "I found the place. It's got plenty of water and gra.s.s. n.o.body goes up that far except at roundup time. The walls are so steep, they're like a natural fortress."

"How are they getting out?"

"I found a narrow game trail," Chet said. "It would be slow work, but a man working steadily could move a lot of cows in a month. Once out of the canyon, they've got the whole northern half of Texas to hide in. I imagine they're working with some rancher who rebrands the cows, then runs them in with his herd."

"That's crazy," Lantz said. "I went all up and down that canyon just after Bob Jordan settled here. There's no way out."

Melody worried that Chet would be angry over Lantz's rude dismissal of his idea, but he didn't seem the least upset.

"It's in a side canyon," Chet said. "You wouldn't find it unless you were looking for it. I'm sure it's been worked on, but I'm just as sure it was there from the beginning. It's most likely discovering that trail that gave the rustlers the idea in the first place. That's another reason for suspecting our own cowhands. They're the only ones who can ride in and out of that canyon without causing suspicion."

"It's time you hired yourself a real foreman," Lantz said to Melody, "and let this man go back to his murdering ways. If he has his way, the whole county will soon be at each other's throats."

"Did the fire do much damage?" Melody wanted to get Lantz's mind off the rustlers.

"I lost a good barn and hay I'll find hard to replace."

"Do you know who did it?"

"No."

"Or why?"

"Luke thinks they started the fire to draw him out of the house so they could kill Blade." He directed an evil glance at Chet. "I thought of you first thing."

Chet's answering glance conveyed no emotion at all. "If I go after your son, I'll do it in public where I can get the credit. The added reputation will mean I can charge bigger fees."

Melody was grateful Chet hadn't pointed out that her men held a grudge against Blade for setting up the ambush.

"How is Blade doing?" Melody hoped he was recovering, but the less she heard about Lantz and his son, the happier she would be.

"The doctor says he'll be strong enough to be up and about in a few days. I don't think I'll be able to keep him inside after that. I've given Luke orders not to let Blade go one step out of the house without him being right there with him."

The feeling of uneasiness that seemed to be with her all the time, the certainty something terrible could so easily happen, grew stronger. Melody didn't like to have to think about Luke. She was certain Lantz meant to send the gunfighter after Chet as soon as he felt Blade was safe. Lantz was the kind of man who would never rest until he'd paid back every slight. That was one more thing Melody found hard to accept about the West. People seemed to live too much by the Old Testamentwhen they bothered to remember the Bible at all.

"Thank you for coming by," she said to Lantz. "Now if you'll excuse me, Chet and I have to be going. Belle says I'm to be back before it gets too hot."

"You shouldn't be up at all," Lantz said. "You must still be getting over that awful experience."

"We're not riding far. I needed something to do besides think about what happened to me. I can sympathize with Blade being shut up in the house."

"Why don't you get one of the regulars to ride with you? I don't trust a fella who'd shoot an innocent young man."

Melody knew it was useless to try to make Lantz see anything he didn't want to see. "Chet is my foreman, and I trust him to take good care of me."

"He didn't take good care of you when you were kidnapped."

"That was my fault."

"You wouldn't have been kidnapped if you were my wife."

"Maybe not, but I could have burned to death in my bed if whoever burned your barn had decided to set fire to the house instead."

"That won't ever happen again," Lantz said, embarra.s.sed and angry at having been proved vulnerable. He had enjoyed feeling so powerful that no one dared touch him. "I'm keeping men at the house all the time."

"That seems like a wise precaution. Now I must go." She turned her horse. She thought for a moment that Lantz would ride along anyway, but he left them to go on alone.

"I don't know how you put up with his insults without losing your temper," Melody said to Chet almost as soon as Lantz was out of earshot.

"If I shot it out with every man who thought he was better than I am, I'd have been dead or hanged years ago. Men like Lantz always hire somebody else to do their killing for them. All the advantages accrue to them while the onus of being a gunfighter stays with the men they hire." "Is that why he thinks Blade is entirely blameless in all of this?"

"It's part of it."

Melody sighed. "I'll never understand Texans."

"That has nothing to do with Texas," Chet said. "Powerful men all over the world use armies to do the same thing. They kill millions, declare it to be for the good of their country, and people believe them."

Melody wasn't prepared to discuss history or philosophy with Chet. Besides, he seemed to know a lot more about the world than she did. It occurred to her to wonder how a gunfighter would have become so well educated. She immediately felt guilty for a thought that came dangerously close to putting her in the same category as Lantz.

She was far more concerned with the fact that she and Chet were alone for the first time since the night they'd scattered Lantz's herd. Lying in her bed alone in her room for three days had given Melody plenty of time to become thoroughly acquainted with the radical changes that had occurred in her feelings. She didn't understand why she felt as she did, nor did she know how to justify some of her feelings. They just were, and that was the best she could do in the way of explaining them to herself. The real question, however, wasn't how she felt but what she was going to do about it.

And what Chet would do.

He hadn't acted surprised or pleased when she asked him to ride out with her. He seemed his usual easygoing self, and that was driving Melody crazy. After the way he'd kissed her, how could he possibly act as if nothing had happened? She'd spent hours thinking about it, remembering how it felt, wondering what he'd been thinking, torturing herself with the fear that his silence meant it hadn't been of any real importance to him. She knew men didn't feel the same way about kisses as women did. Any woman who scattered her kisses as thoughtlessly as most men did would soon be named a wanton.

Nor did men seem to consider marriage an integral part of any relationship between a man and a woman. As far as she could tell, many of them considered it an unfortunate necessity. Children, which practically every woman dreamed of having, were even further down on the list. In fact, as far as she was able to tell, men put marriage into that category of things a man did after he'd spent as many years as possible enjoying himself and was too old to do much of anything else.

In contrast, women were expected to marry in their teens, before they'd lost the bloom of youth and were considered too old and too independent to be of interest. These differences annoyed Melody. She found them frightening because she didn't understand them. She couldn't predict how Chet would feel about any of this, but she had to know. It was definitely not proper behavior for a gently bred Southern woman, but if she had to, she'd ask him.

Just thinking about it made her feel warm.

They had been riding for some time. Chet had kept up a steady flow of conversation about grazing, water, cows, roundups, market prices, cowhands, equipment, budgets, suppliesall the things Melody had been so anxious for Tom to teach her, none of which now interested her half as much as knowing what Chet meant when he kissed her. Stealing numerous glances at his profile offered no hint as to what he was thinking now.

"Can we find some place to rest?" Melody asked. "I'm not used to this much riding."

She'd learned one thing about this endless plain they called Central Texas. It wasn't flat. There were hundreds of places where people or cows could hide, and that didn't count the canyon. Chet chose a place where a bend in the creek that flowed out of the canyon was shaded by a grove of cottonwoods. Melody was relieved to slide out of the saddle. She was riding sidesaddle again, but she was out of practice.

"I didn't mean to wear you out," Chet said. "Maybe you shouldn't have come."

At last he showed a little emotion. "I'm all right. I probably need a rest from all the information you've given me as much as from being on horseback."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to bore you."

Didn't this man understand anything about women? How could he be so handsome, look at a woman as if he could eat her up, and understand so little of what she was feeling? She would never have come out here if she hadn't wanted to be with him. There was nothing he couldn't tell her later, or tell the new foreman when they found one. She could have stayed in her bed. She could have gone on talking to Lantz. She could have said she needed to help Belle. She could have said any one of a dozen things, but she'd come riding with him. Alone. Surely he must know that meant something. Surely women in Texas couldn't be that different from their sisters in other parts of the country. Chet was brighter than a lot of the men she knew. What made him so slow to figure out how she felt?

Maybe nice women avoided gunfighters. She would have avoided him if he hadn't practically been forced on her and then proved himself to be nothing like what she'd expected. Maybe rejection was what he expected, what he'd always received. Looking at Chet, she found that hard to believe, but she knew practically nothing about his past. He never talked about himself.

"I just need time to digest all that information," she explained. "I helped my aunt with her farm, but farming in Virginia is nothing like this. It's like having to unlearn everything I know."

"That's why you need a good foreman."

"We've been over that. I don't mean to be this ignorant ever again."

"There'll be no point in worrying about it if you go back to Virginia."

"I'm not going."

She paused. He said nothing, but she could see the reaction in his eyes. It was slight, an infinitesimal change in the iris, a slight increase of tension at the edges of his eyes. She was gradually learning to read the expressions behind his casual acceptance of nearly everything life handed him.

"Aren't you going to ask why I changed my mind?"

"It's none of my business. I doubt"

"Of course it's your business," she snapped, unable to contain herself any longer. "You kissed me, remember, or have you forgotten?"

"I'll never forget that."

"Neither will I. That's why I changed my mind."