A Tale Out of Luck (27 page)

Kenyon just shrugged, grinned, and walked out of the crude little jail.

36

J
AY BLUE
was sure the temperature was near freezing in the little lean-to jail room. The heat from the woodstove in the store didn’t seem to reach the cell at all. He had sat shivering for hours with his unconscious father, shifting his rear end on the iron straps bolted in several places to the wood floor. He was worried about his father. He should have come to by now, but Kenyon had refused his request for a visit by Doc Zuber.

A worse day in his life Jay Blue could not remember. Poli was dead. Jane had rejected him. His father was out cold and accused of multiple murders. He was shivering in a cold jail cell. And then there was Skeeter. Sitting there for hours, Jay Blue had tried to figure out what had driven Skeeter to take a job with Jack Brennan at the Double Horn Ranch.

Stripped now of his weapons, his swagger, and his bold talk, Jay Blue began to hear the things he had said to Skeeter over the past days and weeks. Hell—months and years! He asked himself if he would have let someone talk to him that way all this time. Hell, no. Then there was that one particularly mean thing he had said out there in the hills this morning while they were searching for Poli.

Jay Blue knew Skeeter fretted over nothing more than the fact that he was an orphan, and he had cruelly attacked that vulnerable spot in his friend’s heart. He realized now that when Skeeter had ridden to the other side of that canyon this morning—staying gone for hours, making Jay Blue furious—that he had actually trotted over to the Double Horn Ranch. Wasn’t Skeeter standing with Jack Brennan at the bar last night while Jay Blue picked the banjo and flirted with the girl who wanted nothing to do with him? He should have seen it then, but it was hard to recognize the obvious with one’s head up one’s ass. He felt almost sick to his stomach with shame as he listened to the memories in his head, over and over, of the things he had said to his best friend. His
former
best friend, that is. He disgusted himself. He deserved to shiver in jail.

The worst memory was that of Skeeter taking his gun from his holster in the bar. There was a hurt look on Skeeter’s face when he did it, but also the determined look of someone who had taken a bellyful of being pushed around. And Jay Blue knew that he was the one who had done the pushing.

The whole afternoon, Kenyon had been conducting interviews with townsfolk in the store, sending Sam Collins out into the cold to drag in witnesses who could testify that they had seen the old arrow fall out of the fiddle case and heard Gotch Dunnsworth declare that the fiddle and case had been given to him years ago by Captain Tomlinson.

Right now Gotch Dunnsworth himself was in the early stages of his interrogation by that relentless State Policeman. Jay Blue could not tell exactly what all was being said, but the tone of the discussion indicated that Gotch was not being as cooperative as Kenyon would have liked.

Suddenly, his father groaned. Jay Blue shifted to see his eyes fluttering open. He scooted to a crouch, and held his father in an upright sitting position. The captain blinked, then reached for his nose. Touching the swollen protuberance in the middle of his face, he winced, looked around at the cell, then focused on his son.

“Thank God you’re alive,” he said.

Jay Blue put a finger to his lips and pointed into the store.

His father nodded. “Is anybody else dead?” he whispered.

Jay Blue shook his head.

“Then what the hell happened?”

Jay Blue told the story as briefly as he could, keeping his voice below the sound of rain on the leaky cedar shake roof and the whistle of icy wind through the board-and-batten walls.

When he was finished, his father shook his head. “I don’t think I heard you right, son.
Skeeter
took your gun?”

Jay Blue nodded in shame. “He says he’s taken a job with Jack Brennan.”

Hank reached up for his son’s shoulder. “Help me up on that bunk.” Sitting upright under his own power, the Ranger continued his questions. “Why the hell would Skeeter do a thing like that?”

Jay Blue hung his head. “I said something stupid to Skeeter, Daddy. I said something really bad.”

Hank shrugged. “Well, then you’ll have to fix it. Apologize to him.”

He gestured to the cell around him. “It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late to save a friendship,” he hissed. He was blinking his eyes hard and trying to shake the cobwebs out of his head.

“Even if we could get out of here, I don’t know if he’d listen to me anymore.”

“Bullshit. Fix it. You got that Thoroughbred mare back, didn’t you? You fixed that.”

“I don’t think this is gonna be that easy, Daddy. I can’t just throw a loop on Skeeter and drag him back. I haven’t been treatin’ him like a member of the family lately.”

Hank sighed. “Well, maybe neither of us have.”

Now Jay Blue watched in astonishment as his father stood up, jutted his jaw, took his broken nose between the fingertips of both hands, and shifted it back into place. He could hear the bone and cartilage grinding, and saw a new trickle of blood run down into his father’s mustache. He had always known his old man was tough. But
damn
.

“Oh . . .” Hank groaned under his breath as he rubbed his belly. “That always makes me a little queasy. Now, listen. One thing’s for sure. We’re not gonna pull Skeeter back into the fold shiverin’ our sorry asses off in this cell like a couple of town curs.”

“I forgot to tell you. Kenyon found the hidden key.”

“In the mattress?”

Jay Blue nodded.

“Good.”

“Why is that good?”

“I
wanted
him to find
that
key. Now he thinks he’s outsmarted me, and that puts me one step ahead of him. It’s a chess match, son.”

“Well, he’s captured two knights, so I hope you have another hideout key somewhere.”

“The match is quite often won with the early moves of the pawns.”

“Are you all here, Daddy?”

Jay Blue’s father began to look around the room beyond the iron cage. “Do you remember when you were just a little kid, and we realized this town needed a jail? You helped me build this lean-to on the back of Sam’s store.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

He looked up at the ceiling. “We cut these cedar beams down along the Pedernales. You and me, a couple of pawns chopping wood.”

“Right . . .”

“I searched a long time for this one particular tree.” He pointed to the beam directly over the cell. “Hard to find a cedar with a hollow in it at just the right place.” Putting his boots into the squares formed by the crossed iron bars, he climbed two feet up the cell wall as if it were a ladder, reached up through the grate above, and probed with his fingertips into a hidden indention in the natural growth of the cedar beam. It was the only place where he could have reached the beam, there where the slant of the lean-to roof was closest to the top of the cage. When his fingers came back into view, they pulled from the hollow a dusty key, along with a good supply of cobwebs.

Jay Blue grinned and looked through the door, into the general store. “How are we gonna get by Kenyon?”

Hank was slipping the key into the lock. “Like knights on a chessboard. Two steps forward and one step aside.” Reaching through the bars, he slowly turned the key, wincing at every little metallic clank. The bolt slid open, and he carefully swung the door ajar.

Over the heated conversation between Gotch and Kenyon in the store, Jay Blue heard the telegraph ticker start to tap.

Stepping out of the cell, Jay Blue tiptoed after his fellow escapee. His father headed straight for the back wall of the room, two steps away. He watched the captain crouch and push at the bottoms of two of the planks that helped form the wall. To his surprise, the boards swung open as if they were hinged at the top, which he figured they probably were, providing an escape route through which the erstwhile captives could crawl.

When he rolled out into the bitter cold of the winterlike evening, Jay Blue found his father urging him to follow through the alley behind the store and the other businesses on that stretch of Main Street. They ran a block, turned on a side street, crossed Main, and ducked into the alley behind Flora’s Saloon. Making no attempt to stay quiet now, Hank flung open the side door to Flora’s carriage house, revealing two Broken Arrow horses, already fitted with the Tomlinsons’ saddles.

Flora and Jane were sitting on the back of the three-spring buggy, wrapped in blankets. They both slid off as the pale cold light and the frigid wind burst in.

“It’s about time!” Flora said. “Hurry! The boys are waiting at the ford on the Pedernales.” She turned to open the carriage doors.

To Jay Blue’s astonishment, Jane came straight to him, catching his sleeve before he mounted. In her eyes he saw a new kind of twinkle. He’d have thought she almost liked him all of a sudden. She slipped an envelope into his grasp, her own palms feeling like furnaces as they wrapped around his cold knuckles and his wrist.

“This is what we know so far about the brands,” she said. “We’re still investigating.” Then, lo and behold, she kissed his cheek. “Go! Hurry!” she said.

Jay Blue saw that his father was already mounted, so he swung into his own saddle without bothering to put a foot in his stirrup. He was riding on air as he left the carriage house.

Hank waited for him to catch up as they turned away from Main to take the back streets. “What’s the most powerful piece on the chessboard?” he asked.

“The queen,” Jay Blue replied.

“And don’t you ever forget it.”

They trotted to the edge of town, looking over their shoulders for trouble. When they hit the Fredericksburg Road, they struck a lope for the ford. Just before they dropped off the bluff into the Pedernales Valley, something spectacular caught Jay Blue’s eye. The sun had appeared in a narrow swath of clear sky between the horizon below and the clouds above—a glowing orange ball of distant fire announcing a coming end to the sleet and freezing rain.

“The sun will shine tomorrow,” Hank said.

“And the light moon will rise tomorrow night,” Jay Blue observed.

Hank nodded. “The Moon of the Wolf. Those Comanches are likely to raid the Double Horn.”

“If they do, Skeeter will be right in the middle of it.”

Hank gritted his teeth. “We’ve got a lot of fixin’ to do in a day’s time.” Now, for some reason, the captain started chuckling.

“What’s funny?”

“I’ve got half a mind to ride back to the jail room and peek in through a knothole, just to see the look on Kenyon’s face when he finds us gone.”

Ahead, on the near side of the ford, Jay Blue saw the Broken Arrow ranch hands waiting at the banks of the Pedernales. It was a welcome sight, but still it broke his heart to see no sign of Poli or Skeeter among the men.

The Original Wolf strolled along the river with Birdsong at his side, the warm sun and the cool breeze invigorating his flesh in a most pleasant way.

“The spirits are with me,” he said. “The pain of my wound is nothing now. It is less than nothing. The rains have made the earth soft, so our ponies can run far on sound feet. Farther than far. My raiding party has grown to almost ten times ten. Our revenge will be swift and sure. I have smoked and prayed. I have rested and feasted on good food. And . . .”

“Yes?” she said.

“I have loved a beautiful girl, and it was good.”

“Better than good,” she said.

“Better than any good thing I have ever known.” He strolled a while, glanced around for onlookers, then pulled Birdsong behind the trunk of a big cottonwood and penned her between his body and the tree. “How many horses must I bring to be sure your grandfather will give you up to be my bride?”

She smiled and pulled him close. “How many am I worth?”

“All the horses in the world. I had better capture many on this raid.”

“You had better come back well. That is all.”

He scoffed. “It is up to the spirits. You know that.”

Just then some children ran by, spotted them in their hidden embrace, and made loud noises about their lewd conduct.

Birdsong threw a rock at them and giggled. “Come,” she said to the Wolf. “We have a great war dance to prepare.”

37

R
EST A SPELL, SON
,” Hank said. He reached down into the hole, some five feet deep now, and helped Jay Blue climb out.

“My turn,” said a solemn George Powers. He dropped down into what would soon serve as Policarpo Losoya’s grave, and began chipping away at a slab of limestone with a pickax.

The men had arrived at the ranch last night and posted guards. Hank had ordered everyone besides the guards to get some rest. “Unless he’s a complete fool, Kenyon won’t try to take me here,” he reasoned. “He’ll ride back to Austin and gather up a posse. We’ll be safe here for a few days.”

At dawn, they had risen, eaten Beto’s breakfast, and rotated between the gravesite and guard duty. Beto Canales and Americo Limón had wept while digging. Knowing how sensitive Skeeter was, Hank figured he’d be blubbering right now, too, if he were here. It didn’t seem right that he wasn’t.

The rains had softened the earth, which facilitated the digging of soil with a spade or a shovel. But this bluff over the Pedernales harbored much rock beneath the surface, and there was no easy way through that. Accordingly, the deepening of the grave had progressed by inches.

Jay Blue dusted his hands as he caught his breath. He had gone at the task of digging the grave like he did everything else—all out. With dirty fingers, he reached into his pocket and produced the report from Jane that he had begun studying last night.

Hank had been too distracted to pore over the letter as of yet. He knew he had bought himself some time. Flora would send word once Kenyon had left town, and then he could collect Poli’s coffin and have him buried here. After that he could concentrate on the hunt for Black Cloud. Besides, Jay Blue was working on the case as if his life depended on it, which it might well have. Hank had come to trust his son’s hunches on this case and figured his fresh look at the evidence might be just what was needed.