“I saw you traveling home with two women and two children.”
“One of the women was close enough to hear voices, one unusually high-pitched, and see a face. She says it was done by white men.”
Trace heard Adam heading back down the trail.
“I go. I do not want to see more white men.”
“No, wait, you should meet him, and you should feel free to come to the ranch.” Trace looked in the direction Adam walked. “We could—” He looked back. Tavibo was gone, slipped away into the night.
Trace walked back to the trail and whistled. No sense making an armed man nervous. Adam came back from where he’d passed Trace on the trail. Adam was a good tracker, but in the dark he’d never seen Trace turn off.
“What’s going on?” Adam asked.
“I found out who Wolf went after. It’s a Paiute named Tavibo.”
“I’ve heard you talk of him, but he’s never wanted to meet me.”
“He fights shy of white folks, and Native folks too if they’re not of his tribe. I have known him since about the time you hired on, Adam. I’ve done some trading with his village. He told me he saw the wagon massacre site and wanted to make sure I knew it wasn’t his people who did that.”
“The varmints who done it wanted Paiutes to be blamed?”
“Yep.” That was one of the reasons Trace had immediately suspected the same men who’d killed his pa. They’d done the same.
They headed down the mountainside together, single file because the trail they followed was so narrow that branches brushed at their shoulders and tore at their pants.
“I knew those killers had left false signs. But others might read it different. Tavibo doesn’t want the cavalry to decide they need to force Native people out of the area.”
Adam said, “You sure enough run like the wind, Trace.”
“I learned to be fast and how to run a long time.”
“We need to clean up a little at the bunkhouse,” Adam said. “But that’s all we’ll do for the night. We got a good day in and helped the women settle in a bit more to the new cabin.”
“The women! We’d better hustle back. They might be scared. I’m gonna run to cut their worryin’ time short.”
“You’d best do that. Deb sure does seem to enjoy fretting over you.” Adam chuckled.
Trace was glad for an excuse to run away from the teasing. He took off like a bullet, charging down the hill. “Utah, we’re back!” Trace hollered. Another man with a handy gun, and Trace didn’t want to startle anyone with a twitchy trigger finger.
Utah swung the door open.
“There’s no danger. It was a Paiute man I call friend. I’ll tell you about it later. Adam’s just behind me, headed for the bunkhouse to pack up for the night. I’ll be out as soon as I talk with Deb and Gwen.”
Utah gave one hard nod of his head and swept past Trace without a word, holstering his gun as he walked away.
Deb faced him, wide-eyed. Gwen sat in her rocking chair in front of the fire. They both had their guns out and ready but were setting them aside as he came in.
“It was an Indian, an old friend of mine. He doesn’t trust the whites, but he tolerates me on rare occasions. He’s worried about that massacre being blamed on his people.”
Both women nodded and visibly relaxed. “I’m gonna be gone a long while tomorrow, maybe even overnight, and maybe more than one night. So don’t fret about me if I don’t get home for a while.”
“Where are you going?” Deb seemed overly curious. Trace wondered if that was the way of newspaper reporters.
“Today I went along the west side of Lake Tahoe, following the trail the killers took, but tomorrow I’m going up the east side. I’ll stop in those settlements and in Carson City. I need to find any wagon trains still traveling and warn them, ask if anyone’s seen those stolen horses and cattle. If there aren’t any more trains, there still might be late travelers. I can tell the sheriff to put them on alert. Then I’ll ride on around the north end of the lake and down the west side. There were a few settlements I missed today.”
“And you think that might take days?” Deb asked. There was a funny note to her voice that Trace didn’t recognize. Almost like she’d miss him. Well, if that wasn’t what her tone meant, he decided he’d just believe it anyway, because he’d miss her, too.
“I want others watching for the outlaws, and I want to make sure folks know the danger that’s out there. However long it takes, I’m going to stick with it until I make these low-down rats sorry they came back out of their hole.”
Deb took a few long strides and grabbed his arm. “Came back out? You mean you think you know who they are? You mean they’ve done this before?”
“I know they’ve done this before. All the signs I read say they’re the men who killed my pa.”
“They’ve been killing all this time? Didn’t you say your pa died ten years ago?”
“Yep. And no, they didn’t keep killing. The attacks broke off, and I started to believe the men who’d done ’em were all dead.”
“What made you believe that?” Deb asked.
Trace decided she needed to know the truth. If he was going to think of a future with her, she’d best know everything . . . or most everything. “I believed it because I found another burned-out wagon train in the spring after my pa was killed. I recognized it as being attacked by the same men. And after that, I guarded that trail in secret, watching for them to strike again. And when they did—” he gathered all his strength and shoved the words out, and they came laced with all his anger and pain and grief—“I personally killed
