Ground-tying his big Ovaro stallion, Fargo grabbed his canteen from his saddle and walked through buffalo grass until he came to the narrow, winding creek. The water was clean. He hunched down next to it, opening his canteen. A jay cried. Fargo looked over to see what the hell was wrong with the damn bird.
And that was when he saw, sticking out from behind a ponderosa pine to his right, a pair of boots. Easy to assume that attached to those boots was a body.
He finished filling his canteen before getting up and walking through the smoky air to stand over the remains of what appeared to be a teenager of maybe sixteen, seventeen years. From the denim shirt and Levi’s and chaps, Fargo figured that the kid had been a drover. Cattle were getting to be a big business around here.
The birds had already been at him pretty good. The cheeks reminded Fargo of a leper he’d once seen. One of the eyes had been pecked in half. Dried blood spread over the front of the kid’s shirt. Hard to tell how long the kid had been here. Fargo figured a long day at least. The three bullets had done their job.
He found papers in the kid’s back pocket identifying him as Clete Byrnes, an employee of the Bar DD and a member of the Cawthorne, Colorado, Lutheran church. Cawthorne was a good-sized town a mile north of here. That was where Fargo had been headed.
He stood up, his knees cracking, and rolled himself a smoke. He’d seen his share of death over the years, and by now he was able to see it without letting it shake him. The West was a dangerous place, and if bullets weren’t killing people, then diseases were. But the young ones got to him sometimes. All their lives ahead of them, cut down so soon.
The cigarette tasted good, the aroma killing some of the stench of the kid’s body.
Not far away was a soddie. He walked toward it and called out. Then he went to the door, but there was no answer.
He went back to his Ovaro then, untying his blanket and carrying it back to the corpse. He spread the blanket out on the grass and then started the process of rolling the body on it. Something sparkled in the grass. He leaned over and picked it up. A small silver button with a heart stamped on it. Something from a woman’s coat. He dropped it into his pocket.
When the blanket was wrapped tight, he hefted the body up on his shoulder and carried it over to the stallion. He slung it across the animal’s back and then grabbed the rope. A few minutes later the kid was cinched tight and Fargo was swinging up in the saddle.
Two minutes later he was on his way to Cawthorne.
Karen Byrnes had no more than opened the door and stepped inside when she saw the frown on Sheriff Tom Cain’s face. She knew she was a nuisance and she really didn’t give a damn.
A regional newspaper had once called Sheriff Cain “the handsomest lawman in the region.” Much as she disliked the man, she had to give him his bearing and looks. Sitting now behind his desk in his usual black suit, white shirt, and black string tie, the gray-haired man had the noble appearance of a Roman senator. It was said that he’d always looked this age, fifty or so, even when he was only thirty. It was also said that many gunfighters had mistaken the man’s premature gray for a slowing of his abilities. He’d killed well over two dozen men in his time.
The office was orderly: a desk, gun racks on the east wall, wanted posters on the right. The windows were clean, the brass spittoon gleamed and the wood stacked next to the potbellied stove fit precisely into the wooden box. Tom Cain was famous for keeping things neat. People kidded him about it all the time.
The hard blue eyes assessed Karen now. She tried to dismiss their effect on her. Somehow even a glance from Cain made her feel like a stupid child who was wasting his time.
“There’s no news, Karen.”
“Been two days, Tom.”
“I realize it’s been two days, Karen.”
“They found the other two right away.”
“Pure luck. That’s how things work out sometimes.”
She had planned to let her anger go this time. She would confront him with the fact that if her brother Clete was dead that would make three young men who had been murdered in Cawthorne within the past month. And the legendary town tamer Tom Cain hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. The father of one of the victims had stood up at a town council meeting and accused Cain of not being up to the task of finding the killer. He had immediately been dragged out of the meeting. In Cawthorne nobody insulted Tom Cain. When he’d come here four years ago, nobody had been safe. Two warring gangs of outlaws held the town for ransom. Many of the citizens had started to pack up their things and leave. To the shock and pleasure of everybody, Cain had needed only five months to set the gangs to running. Eleven of them were buried in the local cemetery. It was downright sacrilegious to insult Tom Cain.
“My mother’s dying, Tom. You know that. Her heart’s bad enough—if we don’t find Clete—”
He stood up, straightened his suit coat and came around the desk. Just as he reached her, she began to cry —something she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do. He gathered her up and took her to him, her pretty face reaching well below his neck. He let her cry and she resented it and appreciated it at the same time.
“We’re all just so scared, Tom. Especially my mother.”
His massive hand cupped the back of the small blond head and pressed it to him.
“I’m going to find him, Karen. I promise you that. And I’m going to find out who killed the other ones, too. I haven’t had any luck yet but I think that’s going to change.”
She leaned away from him, looked up into the handsome face. “Did you find out something?”
“I don’t want to say anything just yet, Karen. I don’t want to have bad luck by talking about it.”
Despite the situation, she smiled. That was another thing they always said about Tom Cain. Him and his damn superstitions.
“Excuse me,” said the slim older deputy Pete Rule, coming through the door that separated the four cells in back from the front office. Rule wore a faded work shirt. A star was pinned to one of the pockets. There was a melancholy about Rule that Karen had always wondered about. Cain’s other deputies were basically gunslingers. She wondered why somebody as quiet and often gentle as Rule would have signed on. “Afternoon, Karen.”
“Hello, Pete,” she said, slipping from Cain’s arms. She’d liked Rule ever since she’d seen him jump into a rushing river and pluck out a two-year-old girl who’d wandered into it.
“We’ll find him, Karen,” Rule said. “That’s a promise.”
Karen nodded, a bit embarrassed now that she’d been so angry.
“You tell your mother she’s in my prayers,” Cain said.
“Thanks for helping us. If you weren’t here—” She felt tears dampen her eyes again.
“You better go get yourself one of those pieces of apple pie that Mrs. Gunderson’s serving over to the cafe for dinner tonight,” Cain said. “She snuck me a slice, and I’ll tell you, I felt better about things right away. And I suspect she’d let you take a piece home for your mother, too.”
At the door, she said, “If you hear anything—”
“We’ll be at your door ten seconds after we get any kind of word at all.”
She nodded to each of them and then left.
“I know one thing,” Rule said. “He ain’t alive. He’s just like them other two.”
“Yeah,” Cain said, almost bitterly. “And when we find him, I’ll be the one who has to tell her.”
A little girl in a dress made of feed sacks was the first resident of Cawthorne to see the body of Clete Byrnes. She had just finished shooing her little brother inside for supper when she turned at the sound of a horse and there, passing right by her tiny front yard, was a big man on a stallion just now entering the town limits. She knew that there was a man in the blanket tied across the horse because she could see his boots. She wondered if this was Clete Byrnes. Her dad knew Byrnes from the days when he’d worked out at the Bar DD. Byrnes was all her dad talked about at the supper table the past two nights. He said he figured Byrnes was dead but then her mother got mad and shushed him for saying that in front of the four children.
She waved at the big man on the horse and he waved back. Then she ran inside to share her news.
Cawthorne had once been nothing more than a cattle town, but these days it was a commercial hub for ranchers and farmers from all around. Fargo started seeing small, inexpensive houses right after he waved to the little girl. He traveled the main road from there into town. At indigo dusk, the stars already fierce, the mountain chill
