But I vowed that responsibility would end come morning. They would have to make their own way as I would have to make mine, or else I’d have no chance of catching up with Lafe Wingo and saving the SP Connected from ruin.
Though, as I opened the door of the dugout and stepped inside, the unbidden thought came to me that my chances of getting back the thirty thousand dollars were mighty thin—and all the time getting thinner.
To my surprise, the inside of the dugout was clean and well kept. The dirt floor had been recently swept and the blankets on the three bunks had been pulled up and squared away.
A rusty potbellied stove, long gone cold, stood at one end of the dugout and there was a table with a couple of roughly made benches drawn up to it.
The Apaches must have taken what supplies Shorty and the others had, because the place had been picked clean. Only a scattering of tin cups and a small wooden box remained on the table. When I opened the box I found a couple of dollars in nickels and dimes, a timetable for the Katy Flier and a page torn from a tally book with a sketch of a steep grade where Shorty and the others had hoped to stop the train.
It seemed the outlaws had planned to graduate from robbing banks to robbing trains—that is, until the Apaches had put the final period on the last sentence of the last chapter of their lives.
Looking around me at the cramped, spare cabin, I figured the hunted, wretched existence of the three men lay about me like an open book. The only thing was, there wasn’t much to read. Like so many others who rode the owlhoot trail, the three had died too young and too violently and the greater part of the story of their lives must forever remain unwritten.
Oddly depressed, rainwater dripping from my slicker onto the dirt floor, I stood for a few moments in a joyless silence that whispered of other men’s lives, then opened the door and stepped outside.
Lila stood beside the wagon and I motioned her into the cabin. But she hesitated at the doorway and asked: “Dusty, what about Pa? We can’t leave him in the wagon.”
Oh yes, we can, I thought, but said: “I’ll help him inside.” I felt the soaking wet shoulders of her cloak. “You better get out of those wet clothes and later I’ll build a fire to dry them.”
Lila took a step back from me, her eyes shocked. “You want me to sit there stark naked?”
“Wrap yourself in a blanket,” I said. Then, lying through my teeth, trying to make myself sound a lot more worldly than I was, I added: “Hell, I’ve seen a naked woman before.”
“Have you now, Mr. Hannah?” Lila asked, her left eyebrow arching. “Well, you haven’t seen this one.” She thought things over for a spell, then said: “I suppose you’re talking about that Sally Coleman person.”
“Maybe,” I said, defiant as all get out, but beginning to wish fervently I’d never mentioned naked women in the first place.
“You’re quite the rake, aren’t you, Mr. Hannah?” Lila asked, frosting over like a corral post in winter.
I had no answer for that, so I retreated into confusion, mumbling: “I’ll go see to the livestock.”
As I walked away, I felt Lila’s eyes burning into my back. She was very young, little more than a girl, yet she had an assurance and poise that constantly kept me off balance. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand a woman, and this was one of those times.
Was Lila jealous of Sally Coleman?
I shook my head, dismissing the thought. Lila was pretty enough to have her pick of men. Why would she be interested in a forty-a-month puncher like me who couldn’t even grow a man’s mustache? It just didn’t make any sense.
Besides, I would wed Sally very soon. Sally, born and bred on the range, knew and accepted the narrow limitations of the puncher’s life, so the whole thing just wasn’t worth thinking about.
But as I stepped to the wagon, the face I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was Lila’s, not Sally’s, and that bothered me considerable.
Ned Tryon was sound asleep in the back of the wagon, his mouth open, trickling saliva, the whiskey fumes vile on his breath. I let him stay where he was and unhitched the oxen.
I didn’t have much experience with oxen, but when I turned them loose, the big animals immediately started to graze, so I figured they weren’t much bothered by the rain and I let them be.
The black I led into the barn, which was small but dry and warm. I unsaddled him and rubbed him down with a piece of sacking. The droppings told me there had been three horses there, no doubt taken by the Apaches, and the saddles were gone, too.
There was no hay but I found a sack of oats and I poured a generous amount into a bucket.
After that, I spent some time pulling up grass for the horse and laid an armful in front of him and only then did I go back to the wagon for Ned.
The man was still unconscious and I half dragged, half carried him into the cabin. I dropped him, none too gently, onto one of the bunks, then turned my attention to Lila.
Her clothes hung on a string the outlaws had tied from one of the cabin walls to the other, probably for this very purpose, and Lila sat at the table, a blanket drawn around her.
I figured she’d planned to do this all along, but had made all that fuss about being naked just to see me suffer.
She rose from the table and said: “I’ll take Pa’s boots off.”
Lila stepped to the bunk and pulled off one of her pa’s boots, then the other. But not before the blanket slipped from her shoulders and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a small, firm breast, creamy white, tipped with pink.
My breath catching in my throat, blood rising to my cheeks, I suddenly felt shabby and awkward in my faded blue shirt and down-at-the-heel boots and stepped quickly to the stove, muttering over my shoulder: “I’ll see about lighting a fire.”
“Yes, you do that, Dusty.”
The husky tone of Lila’s voice surprised me and made me turn. She was standing there, the blanket once again firmly in place, smiling at me, a bemused expression on her face I couldn’t read.
“Getting cold in here,” I said, the breath once again balling up in my throat. Had she let the blanket slip on purpose?
No, that couldn’t be. And yet . . .
“We have some bacon and flour in the wagon,” Lila said, interrupting my thoughts, and her smile was gone.
I nodded. “I’ll get it after I get the fire going.”
“What about the Apaches?”
“I figure they’ve moved on,” I replied. “I’ll keep the fire small and trust to the rain and wind to scatter the smoke.”
“You’re so wise, Dusty,” Lila said, smiling again, just a faint tugging at the corners of her beautiful mouth.
“I try to be,” I said, trying to regain control of the situation. “Now there’s got to be wood around here somewheres.”
There was a small stack of oak and cottonwood branches beside the stove and with them some pages torn from a woman’s corset catalog.
I fed paper and wood into the stove and within a few minutes had a fair blaze growing. Thankfully the wood was very dry and didn’t send up much smoke.
I’d told Lila that the Apaches were gone, but with Indians there were no certainties, just guesses. They were mighty notional by times and might just decide to ride back this way.
I filled the coffeepot at the creek and later fried up some bacon, adding thin strips of my own salt pork. I made a batch of pan bread, stirring flour and salt into the fat, then dished up the meal.
Lila crossed the room and tried to wake up her pa, but the man just thrashed and groaned in his stupor, and waved her away.
She came back to the table and I poured coffee for us both, my hand unsteady on the pot, the scented, woman closeness of her and the sight of her dark loveliness filling my reeling brain like a growing thing.
After we ate, Lila talked and I listened. Mostly, she spun sugarcoated dreams about how she and her pa would make their farm a success and how he would give up his drinking.
“All he needs is another chance in life, Dusty,” she said, touching the back of my hand with her fingertips, her
