Chapter 5
The Dark Sister had a fitting name. From afar, the peak resembled a giant fist thrust skyward. A dark fist, due to a mantle of forest that covered the mountain from the crown to the base.
A rutted track led toward it across the grassland. The buckboard rattled and creaked without cease. I never had liked riding in a wagon; I liked it even less by the time the buckboard clattered up an emerald foothill to its grassy crest. There, I brought the team to a stop.
According to the directions Calista had given me, I had miles to go yet to reach the Butcher homestead. It would take most of the morning. I started to reach under my jacket to ensure my short-barreled Remington was snug in my shoulder holster, then elected not to. Some of the Butchers might be watching. I must not do anything to kindle suspicion.
On the seat beside me was the Bible. I picked it up and held it in plain sight and thumbed the pages as if searching for a particular passage. When I stopped thumbing, I moved my lips to give the impression I was reading. Then I set the Bible on the seat and creaked and clattered on.
I was alert for not only the Butchers, but for signs of cattle. All the hoofprints I had seen so far were of shod horses. Nor did I come across cow droppings. But that did not necessarily mean the Butchers were innocent. They could easily hide the rustled critters in any of the many ravines and canyons that poked outward from Dark Sister like the spokes on a wagon wheel.
Hours went by. Then a bend appeared, flanked by thick forest. I don’t know what I expected to see when I went around it, but it certainly wasn’t a sprightly girl of fifteen or sixteen skipping along with the sun playing off her straw hair and her bare feet. She heard the buckboard and turned. I figured she would run off, but she stood there as bold as brass with a smile that would warm harder hearts than mine.
I stopped next to her and smiled my friendliest smile. “Should I pinch myself or are you real?”
“I’m real, and you can pinch me instead.” She had a voice like honey and eyes that brought to mind a high country lake.
“That’s no way to talk to a parson, young lady.”
She giggled and brazenly devoured me with those blue eyes. “You’re no minister, mister.”
I was speechless.
“At least, you’re not like any minister I’ve ever seen. Usually they’re fat or bald or both. You have all your hair and you’re right handsome.”
Pure delight pulsed through me. But I was supposed to be a parson, so I said jokingly, “I am going to tell your ma on you, young lady.”
At that, she outright laughed. “Why, Parson, would you have me dragged out to the woodshed and switched until my backside is black and blue? My ma would blister me so bad, I couldn’t sit for a month of Sundays.” To stress her point, she rubbed her backside, then laughed louder.
“Might you be a Butcher?” I doubted she was a town girl up here on a lark, but with females you never know.
“Daisy Mae. But most folks just call me Daisy.” She arched a fine eyebrow. “You’re fixing to visit my ma, I take it?”
“If she is to home, yes.”
“She’s nearly always there,” Daisy said. “Except for once a month or so when she goes into town for her medicine and whatnot.” She gripped the edge of the seat. “Mind if I ride along? My feet are tired.”
I did not believe that for a second, but I moved over to make room and in a lithe bound she planted herself next to me. A flick of the reins and we were in motion. “Is it safe for you to be traipsing about by your lonesome?”
“Why wouldn’t it be? I can outrun most anyone or anything hereabouts. And I know this mountain like you know the back of your hand.”
“Just the same, I gather there’s a lot of ill will toward your family. You should take precautions. Never go anywhere without a revolver or a rifle.” Now why in God’s name was I telling her that? When she was on the list?
“I’ve never shot another living thing and I don’t reckon to start,” Daisy informed me.
“But you’re a country girl, aren’t you?”
“Oh. I get it. That means I must kill rabbits for breakfast and squirrels for dinner and deer for supper.”
“And chipmunks to nibble on between meals and elk for special occasions,” I bantered.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Parson, but my brothers do all the hunting. Me, I like to plant flowers and heal things.”
Daisy had such an honest face, it made me wince inside to look at her. “Do your brothers kill the cattle they steal?”
I nearly lost an eye. She swiped her nails at me and would have clawed my eye to ribbons had I not caught her wrist.
“You’ve been talking to that mean Gertrude Tanner, haven’t you? She’s wrong, Parson. My ma doesn’t have any truck with stealing.” Daisy crooked her neck to study me. “Is that why you’re paying us a visit?”
I let go and clucked to the team. “I’m making it a point to get to know everyone in these parts.”
“You’re saving Ma a trip. She was fixing to come see you.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I should let her tell you.”
I glanced up and down the track. We had it to ourselves. My palms itched, but I could not shake the feeling that other Butchers might be watching. Better, I thought, to continue to playact.
“So tell me, preacher man,” Daisy said, “are you married to the Good Book or are you like the rest of us?”
Her frankness was unsettling in more ways than one. “That’s not the kind of question a girl asks a man of the cloth.”
In typical female fashion, she ignored me. “Most preachers are so attached to it, they won’t look at a gal unless she wears the Bible around her neck as proof she has virtue.”
I could not stop myself. I laughed.
“Do you always turn the other cheek, Parson?”
“It’s what the Bible says to do,” I hedged, thinking of my wife and the night I came home to find her in bed with another man. I didn’t turn the other cheek then. I used a shotgun on him and my bare hands on her, and I’ve never been more ashamed of anything in my life.
“So my ma keeps reminding us. But we can’t let that awful woman go on accusing us of things we didn’t do. My brothers Ty and Clell and Jordy are for paying the LT a visit, but Ma won’t hear of it.”
“Your mother is wise.” Several hundred yards ahead the track ended at a broad clearing. I saw a cabin but no sign of life except for half a dozen horses and a dog. “Is that your place?”
Daisy poked me with her elbow. “Whose else would it be? No one but us dares live up here. They’re too afraid.”
“Of your family?”
“No, silly. Of Injuns and outlaws and such. But we haven’t had a lick of trouble except for the Tanners.”
I glimpsed movement in the trees to my right and then to my left. A young man with a rifle appeared. He grinned as if he were playing a game. My instincts told me he had been shadowing the buckboard for some time. He had the shoulders of a bull and a sloping forehead, and pointed a Henry rifle at me, saying, “Bang. You’re dead.”
“That’s Jordy.” Daisy grinned. “He sure is a caution.”
I brought the buckboard into the clearing in a half circle so that the team was pointed toward the track in case I had to get out of there in a hurry. The dog, a large speckled mongrel, barked its fool head off until Daisy yelled at it to shut up. It contented itself with baring its fangs and growling at me.
More Butchers came out of the woods. Carson and Sam, I recognized. Another young man about the same age I took to be Kip.
