gesture. “Hup!”
“Seven-fifty. Do I hear eight-hunerd?”
He looked back at the party we couldn’t see to the right, and the spotter rang out again. “Hup!”
“Eight-hunerd. Eight-hunerd. Do I hear eight-fifty?”
Mike Niall raised the brim of his sweat-stained straw Resistol and spat on the sand-covered floor.
“Hup!”
“I got eight-fifty.” Brannian looked toward the mystery bidder, and his spotter cried out again. “Hup!”
“Nine-hunerd, nine-hunerd! Now we’re talkin’! Rubber mats, padded walls, hay manger, and a tuck-under saddle rack!” The spotter swung back toward Niall, but you could see the rancher’s will was rightly weakening.
I watched Hershel and Benjamin, cowpokes separated by a good sixty years but joined in a brotherhood of horseback and by a thing we all shared, the want of a journey to a mystical place.
“Nine-hunerd once!”
There was a lesson my mother had instilled in me at an early age, which had been reinforced by my experience in Vietnam and by my twenty-four years as sheriff of Absaroka County. She said that I should protect and cherish the young, the old, and the infirm, because at some point I would be all of these things before my own journey ended.
“Nine-hunerd twice!”
So far, I was two for three.
I raised my hand above the crowd.
“Hup!”
I left it there as a tall, handsome Cheyenne man peeked around to see who he was bidding against now. The young woman and the two cowboys looked up at me in surprise. Henry Standing Bear glanced at our little group and shrugged. Hired on faith, one is obliged to be more than expected.
7
October 28, 3:17 P.M.
It looked like UPS with all the boxes in the kitchen of the old Nolan ranch house, and it was all I could do to find a place to sit down. I chose a foldout stool, which was leaning against the wall, and sipped my can of iced tea. I turned down a slug from the bottle of rye whiskey that Bill had offered before he spilled himself a double shot into a tumbler-it was his second since I’d arrived. I wondered what it was that caused old cowboys from around here to resort so readily to drink. He alternately sipped and wrapped plates, stacking them in cardboard boxes.
“I tell you, if you ever want to talk yourself out of buying anything ever again, just be forced to pack up everything you’ve already got.” He held up a dish for my inspection. “You need any dishes, Mr. Boss?”
I shook my head no and thought about all the boxes still in my own life that were lined up against the walls of my cabin. “Where you headed?”
“Believe it or not I bought a condo in Denver, down in LoDo.” He stopped packing for a moment and toasted the Queen City. “Thought I’d try urban life; see if it agreed with me. Eat in restaurants, drink five-dollar cups of coffee, and see if the Rockies can ever win the big one.” He smiled.
I felt a little guilty about raising the next subject. “Being neighbors with Wade Barsad turn you against ranching?”
He thought about it. “Oh, there wasn’t much of the ranch left after I sold the majority to him. All I had was this old place, two hundred and sixty acres, and the new house.” He glanced around. “I got it all listed in Gillette and Sheridan, and it’ll probably be sold by next week.”
I sipped my tea. “You ever think about buying the other part back instead?”
The look on his face hardened, but it was having a difficult time combating the liquor. “Not really. My family had this and an old gas station up on the east side of the Powder River forever, but it always seemed like they were working three jobs just to make ends meet.” There was a resignation in his voice I recognized. “I guess I’m just tired of it.”
“No family?”
“Nope, I’m the last one stupid enough to stay. I had a wife.” He looked around as if she might be in one of the boxes. “But I must’a misplaced her somewhere.” His eyes finally rested on the tumbler of rye, with more than a little meaning.
“Kids?”
“Yeah, but it appears they went the way of their mother.”
I studied him. “Footloose and fancy-free.”
“That’s the way of it.” He continued to gaze at the amber liquid intermixed with the ice cubes for a while longer, then rattled the tumbler, sat it down, and began wrapping more dishes. “You don’t have to dance around it; you can ask me about Wade, I don’t mind. I got nothing to hide.”
“General consensus was that he needed killing.”
He breathed a short laugh. “I’ve heard that from more than one source.”
“You don’t seem overly bitter toward the man.”
He folded the flaps on the box, pulled up another one from the floor, and glanced at the large and mismatched stack of dishes on the counter. “Hey, you sure you don’t need any dishes?”
“Yep, I’m sure.” I continued to look at him.
He picked up the bottle from the counter, refilled his glass, and took another swig for emphasis. “I got my money out of him.”
“Meaning?”
He shrugged. “Most of the people around here who hated his guts, hated him because he cheated ’em in one way or another. I got my money up front, when he bought the ranch. Maybe I just caught him at the head of the curve, while he was still flush.”
“Lost it quick?”
He sat the bottle back on the counter and gazed at the unwanted dishes, but his enthusiasm for packing seemed to be waning-mine would have. As he ruminated, he reached up, unplugged, and plucked from the wall one of the ugliest metal sunburst clocks from the fifties that I’d ever seen. “Oh, yeah.”
“He didn’t know a lot about ranching?”
He looked at the clock, greasy from years of ticking above the range, its cord dangling to the floor, and it was like time had died. “You need a clock?”
“Nope.”
He looked disappointed. “You don’t start taking some stuff, I’m going to stop talking to you.”
I held out a hand for the clock-it was even uglier on closer examination.
He smiled, satisfied that there was at least something in the kitchen he wasn’t going to have to pack. “He didn’t know heifer from steer as near as I could tell, but he came rolling up in that big, black Cadillac of his at a time when it didn’t seem like anybody else was doing anything but leaving.”
I rested the clock on a box and hoped he wouldn’t notice if I left it. “He wanted your place?”
“Hey, he was a godsend to me. The bank was getting ready to foreclose; damn right I was glad to see him.”
“Where did the money come from?”
“Out of state, both times.”
“Both times?”
“He bought half of my ranch about four years ago, and the other half about a year or so back.” He sipped his refreshed whiskey, set it on the counter with the bottle, and began packing dishes again. “But you know all this stuff.” He glanced up at me. ”I mean, you insured him, right?”
I didn’t answer the question. “Did he ever say where the money came from?”
He reached for the packing tape. “There was a lot of talk about that. Some folks puzzled over the fact of how such a lousy rancher could keep coming up with money.”
“What’d they say?”
