Only one thing kept bothering him, and would not go away no matter how hard he tried to look forward to the challenge of the Widow Dunn. He had finally succeeded in locating the missing horses of the dead soldiers. Other than the one Todd had run across and taken home, Longarm had found the five others on Vernon Castle’s range. Now that in itself wasn’t unexpected considering how much land Vernon Castle owned. But that didn’t explain who had unsaddled and taken the bridles off the horses and penned them in a small corral at the very southern edge of the Castle property. It also didn’t explain who had brought feed to the animals and who had decorated the horses with paint and feathers in the Comanche custom. Maybe Vernon Castle hadn’t seen the horses himself, and maybe neither of his other sons had run across the little horse trap, but he was damned if he’d believe that such a strange circumstance had escaped all of Castle’s line riders and that Castle hadn’t been told about it.
Yes, he was convinced that Vernon Castle had known all along, had maybe known since the first soldier had been killed. And had done nothing about it, had not even taken steps to prevent it from happening again by privately locking his crazy son away somehow. But Longarm had not pursued the matter. It would have been impossible to prove. The last words he’d said to Vernon Castle had been: “Mister Castle, you are just as guilty of murder as Virgil. Maybe more so. And one of these days I’m going to have the pleasure of proving that. But for the time being you can just spend your time, until that time, walking as thin a line as you can. And you better keep looking over your shoulder, because you never know when I might be back here coming hard.”
It had been all he could do. It had left him unsatisfied, but there had been no help for it. The evidence was too flimsy.
But that was past, and he stepped out into the Denver sunshine with a determination to doing something about another unsatisfied feeling he had—one that had been caused by Mrs. Shirley Dunn.
