“Two hours,” Ralph Cory said. “No more.” He pointed to one particular set of tracks. “These.” Then he pointed to the other, original two. “These are older. Yesterday.”
“I agree,” Colon said.
James was still mounted, twisted around in his saddle so he could look behind them.
Cory and Colon stood and turned to face him.
“Anything?” Cory asked.
“I see some dust…I think.”
“Berto?” Cory asked.
Colon mounted his horse so he could take advantage of the same vantage point James had.
“Anything?” Cory asked again.
“I see nothing,” Colon said.
James looked disappointed. “I thought I saw…”
Cory mounted, touched James on the shoulder. “He’ll catch up. Don’t worry.”
“It’s just been too soon,” James said. “I don’t want to lose another brother…you know?”
“No,” Cory said, “I don’t…but I think I can imagine.”
“It would be better to keep moving,” Colon said.
“James?” Cory said.
Reluctantly, James dragged his eyes from the horizon behind them. “Yes,” he said. “Okay, let’s go.”
Thomas was back on the trail, only this time he was tracking his own brother. The trail was fresh, though, and he was moving much faster than they were. He expected to catch up to them in a matter of hours, even if he had to keep riding after they camped, or if they reached the town of Blue Mesa.
Alone with his thoughts during his ride, he couldn’t help but wonder about his father. To this day they still had not talked about what had happened between Thomas and Ethan Langer. He knew his father was disappointed that he hadn’t killed Langer—rather than crippling him and sending him to prison—and sometimes, when he caught Dan Shaye looking at him, he felt guilty. He’d told his father that he thought killing Ethan Langer would have been too easy, and would have put the man out of his misery. That way, Langer was a cripple, was in prison, and was still haunted in his dreams by Mary Shaye. But either he hadn’t done a good job explaining or his father didn’t want to listen, or both. Now, if they could talk again, maybe he’d be able to get his father to understand.
Thomas thought he’d been doing too much drinking on the wrong side of town. When this was all over, he was going to try to
Daniel Shaye was questioning whether upholding the law was something he still wanted to do. It had already cost him a wife and one son. Now he had sent two more sons out wearing badges like targets on their chests. Plus, he himself had been shot two years in a row.
What else was he fit to do? In his entire life he’d been on one side of the law or the other. He was over fifty. Could he settle down someplace and be a storekeeper? A rancher? He didn’t know anything about either.
But what about his sons? James was smart—very smart. If he went back to school, Shaye thought he had the makings of a good lawyer. Maybe a doctor. He had potential, he just needed seasoning for it to blossom.
Thomas was different. He had talent with a gun, and he’d already used it to kill men. Shaye saw the raw talent in his oldest son too. Thomas had the potential to be a better gunman and better lawman, he thought, than he himself had ever been.
Shaye shifted in his saddle. His wound was throbbing, but he didn’t think it was bleeding. He knew that for the past year he hadn’t been a very good father to Thomas. What happened in Oklahoma City with Ethan Langer stuck in his craw. The whole point of the hunt was to find Langer and kill him. What Thomas had done was allow the man to live—crippled, and in prison, but still alive. He had not been able to come to terms with that, but maybe it was time. After this was all over, he told himself, he would talk to both Thomas and James about what had happened and what was going to happen.
All they had to do was all come back from this hunt alive.
48
Sean Davis lost the trail as he entered Blue Mesa. There was just too much traffic on the main street, so the tracks he’d been following were trampled into obscurity. However, he knew if Cardwell and Jacks had stayed in town overnight, they would have put their horses up at the livery stable, of which there was only one.
At the stable, he faced a good news/bad news situation. The good news was that the liveryman—an older man named Hackett—told him he’d just missed Cardwell and Simon Jacks, after a few dollars changed hands.
“Left this mornin’,” the man said. “Few hours ago, actually. I knew they looked dodgy. You a lawman?”
Davis didn’t answer. He was too busy worrying about the bad news. Of all the places to take a bad step, his horse had done it right in the middle of the main street. The animal almost went down and he had to get off it and walk it to the stable.
“How bad is it?” he asked the liveryman.
“Sprained,” the man said. “Not gonna ride this fella for a while.”
“I need a horse,” Davis said. “You got any for sale?”
“Not me,” the older man said, letting the horse’s leg drop and brushing his hands off on his pants. “I know where you can get one, but it won’t be cheap.”
“Where?”
“End of the street you’ll see a corral,” the man said. “Ask for a man named Ian.”
“Ian?”
“Yeah, he’s Irish, or Scottish, or somethin’. Foreigner, anyway. Sells horses.”
“Okay,” Davis said. “Thanks.”
“So you ain’t a lawman?”
Davis stopped on his way out, turned and said, “No, I ain’t a lawman. Take care of my horse and rig for me, I’ll be back. Maybe you’ll wanna buy the horse?”
“Naw,” Hackett said, “I don’t buy horses. Better talk to Ian about that too.”
“Yeah, okay,” Davis said, and left.
“’Nother one on the dodge,” Hackett said when he was gone, and began unsaddling the horse.
Davis found that Ian was a Scotsman in his sixties with about half a dozen horses available for sale in his corral. The man had the scarred hands of a longtime horse trader, and Davis knew he was going to get outhaggled no matter what. He could see this was going to take a while, because he recognized that there were no shortcuts with this man.
“I got a jug in the back,” Ian said. “We can pass it back and forth while we haggle.”
“Get it,” Davis said, “and let’s get started.”
The three riders stopped when they came within sight of Blue Mesa.
“Not a big town,” James said.
“We ride in together, word’s gonna get around,” Ralph Cory said.
“If the men we seek are in town, they will hear,” Colon said. “They will be forewarned.”
“What do we do, then?” James asked.
The two older men looked at him. James knew what they were thinking. He was the one wearing the badge. He wished Thomas was there.
“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s ride in separately. I’ll go first, then you fellas follow me every fifteen minutes.”
“Might help if we ride in from different directions too,” Cory suggested.
“Good idea, Ralph,” James said.
“Where do we meet?” Colon asked.
“At the livery,” James said. “Doesn’t look like this town would have more than one, and our horses won’t be so obvious there.”
