your brother missed a one.”
“Where is he?” Sarah asked.
“He took off around two, three o’clock this morning, Sarah,” Mac replied. “Said he was going to walk as far as he could and sleep till the coach came.”
“Was he okay?”
“His hand was mashed some. Swelled up three times its regular size. He was feeling no pain, but it’s going to hurt like hell when he comes to this morning. He’ll be all right. There’s nothing on this desert going to mess with your brother, the mood he was in. Mean enough to bite a snake.”
Sarah laid a hand on the old man’s arm. “I’m glad you were here, Mac.”
“What do you figure set him off like that?”
“Somebody get the door for me,” Matthew called, banging on it with his foot. His arms were full of wood.
Sarah opened the door for her son and picked up the trail of kindling sticks he left across the floor. “I don’t know, Mac. He used to get that way about Pa sometimes, when I was a girl.”
The Fort Bidwell stage arrived shortly after noon. While Liam and Beaner traded gossip with Ross and Leroy, Mac wandered out across the road to lean on the paddock fence. His dim eyes were on the bright alkali flats and the blue shadows of the Fox Range beyond. A breeze came to him over the sage, and he quivered his nostrils like an old dog reading the news on the wind.
“Hello, Mac. Sarah told me you’d come.”
Mac jerked, his half-blind eyes peering into the darkness of the barn. He took a sharp breath, and for a moment his eyes seemed to light up from inside. “Miss Grelznik…”
“It’s Karl Saunders, Mac.” Karl stepped partway into the light. His clothes were dust-streaked and the side of his face was scraped raw. He took Mac’s hand. The stumped fingers and knobby thumb had browned and twisted over the years into the likeness of a gnarled old root.
“Karl…” the old man repeated, squinting into the light. “I thought…”
“Karl Saunders.”
Mac shook his head. “You get old, your mind plays tricks on you. Good to see you, Karl. You get that deer you went after?”
“Never did, Mac.”
“Missed a hell of a show here. I expect Sarah told you all about it.”
“I haven’t talked with Sarah.”
“David find you?”
“He caught up with me a mile and a half from here. Those long legs of his really cover the ground.”
“Something between you two set him off?”
“He didn’t say anything to you?”
“No. Closemouthed as an old squaw.”
“I don’t know what it was, then.”
Mac nodded to himself and chewed thoughtfully on a splinter he’d levered off the fence rail with a fingernail. Karl studied the seamed face; darker spots, burned black by years in the weather, dotted the old man’s cheekbones like outsized freckles, snowy hair stood upright in the breeze. Karl smiled and dropped his hand gently on Mac’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, my old friend.”
Mac shivered. “Your voice…somebody steppin’ on my grave, I guess. Something’s give me the willies this morning.”
“Aayah!” Liam barked.
“Guess I’d better get a move on, or the coach’ll leave without me.” He spit over the rail, carefully downwind. Karl walked with him to the mudwagon and saw him off.
Karl didn’t return to the house, though Sarah motioned to him from the window. Instead he shouldered an ax and set to work.
The dull fall of the ax, chopping out a regular rhythm, stopped. Karl dragged another log across the woodcutting rack, settled it snug with a kick, and the beat started again, hollow-sounding in the west wind. Sweat was running down the sides of his face, and his arms trembled. His coat was unbuttoned, his face raw with the cold. He’d been at it for several hours. He wiped the perspiration from his eyes, wincing as he brushed the salt sweat into the broken flesh on his cheekbone.
The kitchen window opened with a screech. “Karl,” Sarah called. “You’ve been at that all afternoon and you were up all night. You’re being silly. Stop before you chop yourself.”
Karl grunted and swung the ax. It bit deep and he couldn’t pull it free.
“Answer me!” Nothing. Sarah banged the window shut.
He rocked the ax back and forth, then planted his foot near the head and jerked. The handle pulled free of the head and Karl stumbled back into the small figure of Matthew Ebbitt. The boy stood square-shouldered, feet wide apart, ready to take on the world. Karl blinked at him, unseeing for a moment, then let the ax handle slide to the ground.
“Momma was crying,” Matthew said accusingly. “Are you mad at her because she let Uncle David break the dishes?”
Karl pulled his kerchief from his hip pocket and mopped his face. “No, son, I’m not mad.”
“Momma said you won’t talk to her. She told me to come tell you she said you could tell me about Moss Face if you wanted to.”
“Sarah said that? That I was to tell you about Moss Face?”
“That’s what she said.”
Karl leaned the ax against the wood stand and upended a chunk of wood to sit on. He folded the damp kerchief into a neat square and stared out across the desert so long that Matthew began to fidget. “Come here,” Karl said at last, and his stepson came to stand between his knees. Karl pulled him up on his lap and wrapped his coat around him. “Last night I thought I heard something,” he began, “out by the chicken coop. When I went out to see what it was, I saw Moss Face. He was with a pretty lady coyote. They ran out toward those mountains together.” He pointed south to the blue Fox Range. “He grew up, Matthew, and had to go back to the wild to raise a family. Maybe we’ll see him again, come spring. Or maybe we’ll see puppies and they will be Moss Face all over again.”
Matthew buried his face against Karl’s shoulder, and Karl held him close.
41
MONTHS PASSED, A YEAR, THEN TWO. MATTHEW THRIVED AND GREW; on his tenth birthday he was five feet tall. “I’ll be taller than Uncle David,” he boasted. His Uncle had neither visited nor written since the night he’d gotten drunk and smashed every glass in the place. There was still a dent in the wall where he’d rammed his knuckles. Somebody had scratched DAVID TOLSTONADGE under it, and the date, with a pocket knife.
The stages ran less frequently, and even with the decreased service, there were fewer passengers on each mudwagon. David’s predictions of railroad supremacy were fast coming true, but still no rails were being laid across the Smoke Creek or Black Rock Deserts. Freighters and, ever increasingly, cattle became the mainstay of the Saunderses’ business. They had increased the size of their herd and now ran two hundred and fifty head of cattle on the rangeland.
Coby’s responsibilities grew with the cattle ranching, and though he had enough money saved to buy a rig and a team, he stayed on as the Saunderses’ foreman. Each spring he took the wagon into Standish and hired enough hands to help with the branding, and again in late summer, when the cattle were driven to the railroad to be sold.
Maturity settled on Sarah like a handsome cloak. Her features, soft and vaguely undefined throughout her early twenties, firmed and took on substance. When she spoke, it was with the easy assurance of a woman who knew her job and did it well. She had taken on the task of raising pigs as well as chickens, and east of the barn, downwind of the house, she had built a pigsty.
Early in the summer of 1885, Jerome Jannis rolled in from Standish. His cannonball head was grizzled and his
