“Nae, I dinna think you would. Would you be tellin’ me where I might find my deputy?”
“Malcolm is dead.”
“Aye, I thought as much. Killed him, did ye?”
“Aye—it seemed to be the thing to do.”
“There is an old adage: if you want something done right, do it yourself. I should have come after you a long time ago, instead of getting my sons and my deputies killed.”
“That night on Donuum Road, I was coming to give myself up,” Duff said. “None of this need have happened. Your sons would still be alive, Skye would still be alive. But you were too blinded by hate.”
“We’ve talked enough, Duff MacCallister,” Somerled said. He cocked the pistol and Duff steeled himself.
Suddenly the room filled with the roar of a gunshot—but it wasn’t Somerled’s pistol. It was a shotgun in the hands of Elmer Gleason. Gleason had shot him through the window, and the double load of 12-gauge shot knocked Somerled halfway across the room.
“Are you all right, Mr. MacCallister?” Gleason shouted through the open window. Smoke was still curling up from the two barrels.
“Aye, I’m fine,” Duff said. “My gratitude to ye, Mr. Gleason.”
Gleason came around to the front of the cabin and stepped in through the front door.
“Seein’ as how I saved your life, don’t you think me ’n you might start callin’ each other by our Christian names?”
“Aye, Elmer. Your point is well taken.”
“Sorry ’bout tellin’ you he was your friend. But that’s what he told me, and I believed him.”
“And yet, you were waiting outside the window with a loaded shotgun.”
“Yes, sir. Well, considerin’ that the fella you went to meet in Chugwater was from Scotland, and wasn’t your friend, I just got to figurin’ maybe I ought to stand by, just in case.”
“Aye. I’m glad you did.”
Gleason leaned the shotgun against the wall and looked at the blood that was on the floor of the cabin.
“I reckon I’d better get this mess cleaned up for you,” he said.
“Elmer, I’m sure you don’t realize it, but you just did,” Duff said.
Chapter One
Duff Tavish MacCallister was a tall man with golden hair, wide shoulders and muscular arms. At the moment, he was sitting in the swing on the front porch of his ranch house in the Chugwater Valley of southeastern Wyoming. This particular vantage point afforded him a view of the rolling grassland, the swiftly moving stream of Bear Creek, and steep, red escarpments to the south. He had title to twelve thousand acres; but even beyond that, he had free use of tens of thousands more acres, the perimeters limited only by the sage-covered mountains whose peaks were snowcapped ten months of the year.
He had once owned a cattle ranch in Scotland, but it wasn’t called a ranch, it was called a farm, and he had only three hundred acres of land. He was a Highlander, meaning that he was from the Highlands of Scotland, but compared to the magnificent mountains in the American West, the Highlands were but hills.
In the corral, his horse Sky felt a need to exercise, and he began running around the outside edge of the corral at nearly top speed. His sudden burst of energy sent a handful of chickens scurrying away in fear. High overhead, a hawk was making a series of ever-widening circles, his eyes alert for the rabbit, squirrel, or rat that would be his next meal.
“I was talking to Guthrie yesterday,” Duff said. “He said if I wanted to build a machine shed he could get the plans and all the material together for me, but I’m not so sure I need another building now. What do you think, Elmer?”
Elmer Gleason was Duff’s foreman and, at the moment, he was sitting on the top level of the steps that led up to the porch. Elmer was wiry and rawboned. He had a full head of white hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He leaned over to expectorate a quid of tobacco before he replied.
“’Peers to me, Duff, like you near ’bout got ever’thing done that needs doin’ in order to get this ranch a-goin’,” Elmer said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t see no need for you to be buildin’ a machine shed till you get yourself some cows.”
“I expect you are right,” Duff replied.
“I’ll say this,” Elmer said. “Once you get them critters here, there won’t be a cow in Wyomin’ livin’ in a finer place than Sky Meadow.”
Duff’s house, which was no more than a cabin a year ago, was now as fine a structure as could be found anywhere on the Wyoming range. Made of debarked logs fit together and then chinked with mortar, it was sixty feet wide and forty feet deep, with a porch that stretched all the way across the front.
Duff’s ranch was set between Bear and Little Bear Creeks, both streams year-round sources of good water. In an area where good water was scarce, the creeks were worth as much as the gold mine that was on the extreme western end of his property. Duff gazed thoughtfully across the rolling green pastureland to Bear Creek, a meandering ribbon of silver. He followed it with his eyes as far as he could see.
The insulating mountains not only made for beautiful scenery, but they tempered the winter winds and throughout the spring and summer sent down streams of water to make the grass grow green. Over the past year he had come to love this piece of ground, and had put in long hours of each day getting it ready to become the ranch he knew it could be.
He had named his ranch Sky Meadow, not only because the elevation of the valley was at five thousand feet,
