Gideon laughed. “Okay, then, let me rephrase the question. How does a guy named Magnus Torkelsson come to be running a big cattle ranch in Hawaii?”
“Well, actually, that’s a long story,” John said. “But something new just came up on it—”
“Go ahead and tell me the long story. I’m at your mercy, and I don’t have anything else to do.”
In the early fifties, John told him, Magnus Torkelsson, along with his equally adventurous brothers Torkel and Andreas, had jumped ship off Kona, from a Swedish freighter that was picking up a shipment of beef cattle from the Parker Ranch, which was then the only cattle ranch of any size in Hawaii. Being quick learners, knowing a good thing when they saw it, and taking an immediate liking to the rolling Kohala hills, which reminded them of the Smaland highlands of their childhood, they used the nest egg they’d been building up to buy two hundred cattle from the Parkers and eight hundred acres from nearby landowners. In their thirties at the time, they called their ranch Hoaloha— “Beloved Friend” in Hawaiian—and their combination of hard work, dedication, and penny-pinching good sense turned it into a money-making proposition after relatively few years. By the time they died, the Hoaloha encompassed over thirty thousand acres and ran a herd of fifteen thousand cattle, mostly Herefords, but also Holsteins, Durhams, Charolais, even a few Angus and Brahmas—
“Well, see, there’s something you know more about than I do,” Gideon said. “If you asked me ten seconds ago to name five breeds of cattle, I don’t think I could have done it. I’m not sure I could do it now.”
“Well, remember,” John said, pleased, “I roomed with Axel at college and he used to talk about this stuff a lot. And I still see him every few years. And then I spent a couple of summer vacations working on the ranch.”
“No, I didn’t know that. So you must know quite a bit about ranching, then.”
“Well, I wouldn’t . . . that is, I’m not any kind of... well, yeah.” And then, as he often did with little or no reason, he burst into laughter. John had a wonderfully infectious laugh that crinkled up the skin around his eyes, made his eyes themselves gleam, and rarely failed to make Gideon laugh along with him, as he did now.
“They brought over their sister Dagmar a couple of years after they got here,” John went on, “and all four of them worked like dogs to make the ranch go. Andreas, the oldest one, he died before I met any of them, but I got to know old Torkel and Magnus and the rest of them pretty well. Real well, in fact.”
They had climbed to two thousand feet—never a switchback, just one long, steady rise along the flank of the range—and while John nodded to himself, remembering, Gideon gratefully took in the prospect around them. The afternoon shadows had lengthened, adding texture and depth to the rolling countryside. Trees were still sparse, but the duns and ochres of the lowlands had given way to green, healthy pasturelands. The temperature had gotten more comfortable still, and there were veils of mist in some of the hollows and around some of the peaks—if you could call these lovely, rounded, hummocky rises “peaks.” Over his right shoulder, he could look back down the slope and see the coastline all the way to Kona, as John had said. The whole scene was very beautiful. It surprised him that he’d zipped through it a few years ago, hardly noticing it.
John surfaced and went on. “The two brothers were kind of crotchety by then. You know, two old bachelors, living in the same house together with their old-maid sister, always carping at each other; not real easy to get along with, but they loved the ranch, they ran a tight ship—Jesus, did they—and somehow they kept it all together, until...”
He was still smiling, remembering days long past, but now he sobered. The smile faded. “Until Torkel got murdered—”
Gideon stared at him. “Murdered?”
“—and Magnus disappeared.”
“He
“Took off into the night in the ranch plane, never to be heard from again.”
“You mean they never found out what happened to him?”
“Not until just this week, as a matter of fact. Tuesday. A couple of skin-divers found the plane. Axel was telling me about it. It crashed in the lagoon of some rinky-dink island in the Pacific. They think he never got where he was going, that it went down the night he left.”
“Was there anything in it? Any remains, I mean?”
John nodded. “Yeah, some bones, apparently.”
“Are the Torkelssons having them brought back?”
“I don’t know. They’re gonna talk about it today—they get together for dinner once a month or so to hassle out any problems—and figure out what they want to do. Why, you want to volunteer your services?”
“Sure, if they want someone to look the bones over, see if maybe there’s something to confirm it really is Magnus. You know people appreciate that kind of closure.”
“They do, yeah, but my impression is they just want to put it all behind them. My guess is that if they bring the remains back they’ll just want to bury them. That’ll be all the closure they need.”
“Huh. Well, go on back to the story. What was it all about? Did Magnus kill his brother? Is that why he ran?”
“No, no, no. I wasn’t around anymore by then, but from everything anybody knows, it was some kind of vengeance thing...you know, retribution, payback.”
“For what?”
John shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. All they know is
“And nobody knows who did it?”
“Nope. There were plenty of candidates, more than they knew what to do with. See, these old guys weren’t that easy to get along with, and they drove a hard bargain besides. Shrewd, you know? There were a lot of people with grudges. Lemme see... oh, there was a neighboring ranch, part of a consortium, that wanted right-of-way access for a water line. When Torkel and Magnus said no way, the place went bust, wound up having to sell for next to nothing. And who do you think bought it? The Torkelssons, of course, who immediately laid in a water
