“There is a way,” Lorena said uneasily, as though she was wary of widening the already yawning gulf between them.
Tyree smiled. “And what’s that?”
“You could make your peace with Quirt. He’d be willing to help you get started. I know he would.”
It took a few moments for the full impact of what the girl had said to hit Tyree. And when it came, it was like a punch in the gut.
“Lorena,” he said, rising to his feet, “the only thing I want from Quirt Laytham is six feet of ground between us and a gun in my hand.” It had been direct, almost brutal, and Tyree felt the hurt of it as much as Lorena.
The girl looked like she’d been slapped. She slammed the lid shut on the picnic basket, the noise adding the final period to their conversation.
“Let’s go,” she said. Her face looked like it was carved from pale marble. “It’s getting late.”
As the light began to fade, they rode home in silence under a lemon sky, tinged with thin brush-strokes of crimson.
Lorena went directly into the cabin, her head held high, while Tyree led the horses to the barn. He rubbed both animals down with a piece of sacking, then tossed them some hay and a bait of oats.
When he stepped outside again into a pale blue twilight, a single, sentinel star glimmered high over his head. Tyree was reluctant to enter the cabin, so he sat on the tree trunk that served as a seat beside the barn door and built a smoke.
The chasm between him and Lorena had widened so much that it could well nigh be impossible to bridge. She could not understand the depth of his hatred and bitterness toward Laytham, the wrong he felt had been done him. Tyree knew that only the man’s complete destruction could loose the bonds of revenge that gripped his heart, an emotion Lorena found alien and disturbing.
The pain in his side and the rope burn that was still red and raw on his neck were constant reminders that he had yet to bring about the reckoning. Defeated and baffled though he was, he knew there was no other way.
He could not walk away from Laytham—not now, not ever. If he did, he’d be spitting on every principle that made him what he was.
But in gaining his revenge he would lose Lorena. That was the price that had to be paid and there would be no bargaining.
A deep sense of loss in him, Tyree ground the butt of his cigarette under his heel and began to build another. But his hands stilled on papers and tobacco as the clarion clang of a cowbell echoed its clamor among the canyons, a mournful tolling that was growing closer.
Had Boyd belled one of his cows?
Tyree rose to his feet, puzzled, and listened as the ringing became louder. A couple of minutes passed and a rider trailing a horse emerged through the gathering dusk at the other side of the creek. The bell in the rider’s right hand clanged constantly, and he was yelling the same unintelligible words over and over again.
Tyree was aware of the cabin door opening, then Lorena was at his side. “It’s Pa,” she said. “And he’s leading Owen’s buckskin.”
Luke Boyd splashed across the creek, his horse stepping high, throwing tall sprays of water into the air. He kept right on ringing the cowbell, yelling something above its insistent clangor.
Behind him, a man was hanging facedown over the saddle of the buckskin, his falling hair moving with the motion of the horse.
Then both Tyree and Lorena heard the old rancher clearly.
“Owen is dead!” Boyd cried. “Shot down like a dog in the street!”
When he rode up to the cabin, Boyd reined up his horse and dropped the buckskin’s trailing reins. He rang his bell and called out again, “Owen Fowler is dead. . . . Owen Fowler is dead. . . .”
Tyree reached up and gently held Boyd’s arm, the bell clinking into silence. Boyd looked down at him with wounded eyes. “I bought this in town after Owen was killed. I rang it all the way here. I wanted everyone to hear me and know what had happened.”
As Lorena ran to help her father from the saddle, Tyree eased Fowler from the buckskin and laid him on his back on the ground. The front of the man’s shirt was covered in blood, but the two bullet holes in the center of his chest were easy to see.
Tyree looked up from the dead man. “Luke,” he asked, “who did this?”
“The Arapaho Kid,” Boyd answered. He stood close to Lorena, as though needing her strength and support. “He gunned Owen down in the street like a—”
“How did it happen?” Tyree interrupted, an ice-cold, killing rage building in him.
Boyd rubbed his hand across his face as though to erase a painful memory. “We couldn’t find Sheriff Tobin, so I dragged that no-good rustler into Bradley’s saloon to ask around for him. I told Owen to stay close, but he said he was crossing the street to talk to the gunsmith about repairing his rifle. Then somebody ran into the saloon and said the Arapaho Kid was outside, bracing Owen Fowler.
“I left the saloon to see what was happening, just in time to hear the Kid call Owen a back-shooting lowlife. Then the Kid said to Owen, ‘You’ve got a rifle. Use it.’ Owen tried to show the Kid that his Henry was damaged, but as soon as he done that, the Kid drew and fired.”
The old rancher shook his head. “I couldn’t stop it, Chance. I think the Kid would have killed me too. As Owen lay there dying, the Kid stood over him and grinned. He said now there was one less preacher killer in the territory.”
“Where was Tobin?” Tyree asked.
“He showed up later. Three men swore Owen had tried to level his rifle at the Kid and that the killing was self-defense. I told Tobin otherwise, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He said too many reliable witnesses stated that Owen Fowler tried to kill the Kid.” Boyd shrugged, his face haunted. “And that’s how it stands.” His baleful eyes sought Tyree’s. “Tobin locked up my prisoner and he says he plans to hang him directly.”
“Was Laytham there during all this?”
“No,” Boyd said. “I didn’t see him.”
“Quirt would have nothing to do with a cold-blooded murder,” Lorena snapped, sudden tears filling her eyes.
“The Arapaho Kid works for him, doesn’t he?” Tyree asked.
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “But if he does, Quirt will send him packing, I can promise you that.”
“Who were the three witnesses, Luke?” Tyree asked.
“Tobin’s deputies, Len Dawson and Clem Daley. The third was a gunfighter out of Missouri, dresses like a preacher his ownself. Calls himself . . .” Boyd shook his head. “Everything was happening so fast I don’t recollect his name.”
“Luther Darcy?” Tyree prompted.
“Yes. That was it. Luther Darcy. How did you know?”
“Owen told me about him,” Tyree said. His eye slanted to Lorena. “He said Darcy draws gun wages from Quirt Laytham.”
Tyree saw confusion in the girl’s face, but she made no attempt to defend Laytham again. Instead she kneeled by Fowler’s body and tenderly lifted a strand of hair off his forehead. “Poor Owen,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “You were a mild-mannered man, never cut out to live in the West. You should have gone back home to Boston and worked in a bank.” Her tearstained eyes lifted to her father. “Pa, we have a burying to do.”
“Not here,” Tyree said. “We’ll bury him in his own ground, at his canyon. He loved that place and that’s where he’d want to rest.”
Neither Lorena nor her father voiced an objection, understanding that Tyree had the right of the thing.
“Chance, let’s lay Owen in the barn for the night,” Boyd said. “We’ll move out at sunup.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind!” Lorena snapped, her eyes flaring. “Bring him inside and let me wash his poor body. I won’t send Owen to his Maker looking the way he does.”
For the first time, Tyree was aware of the steel in Lorena Boyd, the metal tempered by the hard men among whom she’d lived and by the land itself. She was no shallow, bustled belle reluctant to touch a bloody corpse. She was a woman of the frontier—she’d swallow her revulsion and do what had to be done without complaint.
“So be it, Lorena,” Tyree said. “And you’re right. A man should be buried decent.”
