A Tale Out of Luck (28 page)

He looked away from Poli’s grave, only to see Emilie’s headstone. He sank deeper into grief, remembering the sad day he had put her to rest. He wished he had some fresh flowers to place on her grave right now.

“Daddy,” Jay Blue said.

“Yeah?”

“The ladies mention a brand. A ‘Rafter T’ brand.”

He looked at his son. “And?” He could tell that Jay Blue was uneasy.

“Well, what
is
it? The rafter, I mean.”

Hank smirked. “Son, there’s no shame in askin’ a simple question. Nobody expects you to know everything at birth. The rafter is like an upside-down V. It usually goes over a letter, like a rocker goes under a W on a Rockin’ W brand. The rafter always goes over something else, like the rafter in a barn.”

Jay Blue’s eyes lit up. “Oh, it goes
over
the T.” He smoothed some fresh dirt with his boot and began making marks in it with the blade of a shovel.

Hank let the words sink in. “Did you say ‘Rafter T’?”

“Yes, sir,” Jay Blue muttered as he continued to draw brands in the mud.

“
Rafter T
sounds a lot like
Rafferty
. That was Black Cloud’s white name. John Rafferty.”

Briefly, Jay Blue looked up from his mud scrawlings, then went back to work. About that time, Hank noticed Americo Limón trudging from his guard post to the ranch’s cemetery plot for his turn at digging.

“It’s your shift on guard duty, son,” Hank ordered.

Jay Blue threw the shovel down. “Yes, sir.”

“Jay Blue, let me see that letter.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got it memorized anyway.” He handed his father the folded paper.

As Jay Blue took Americo’s rifle and walked away, Hank tried to read the letter. He found concentration hard to come by. He looked at the moist dirt where his son had been making shapes with the shovel blade. For some reason, the boy had drawn Wes James’s brand in the mud.

Beto had cleared the table and lit another lantern in the cook shack. All the boys save Long Tom Merrick, who was on guard duty, were gathered around the long dining table, having feasted on beef, beans, pickled okra, corn tortillas, and peach cobbler. Now they were slurping black coffee and listening to the Tomlinsons trying to solve the mystery of Wes James’s murder.

“Go over that again, son. I don’t follow,” Hank picked his teeth with a splinter he had pulled from the rough-sawn tabletop.

“Look,” Jay Blue said. He pulled a knife from a belt scabbard. “You start with our brand, the Broken Arrow.” He used the sharp point of his blade to carve the brand in the pine plank upon which he had just dined.

“It’s a good brand,” Hank boasted. “If you don’t have a Broken Arrow branding iron with you, you can burn it into the hide with two touches of a simple bar brand. Hell, you can even use a runnin’ iron or a hot saddle buckle held between two green tree branches if you have to.”

“Yes, sir, it’s a fine brand,” Jay Blue agreed, having heard the merits of the Broken Arrow many times before. “But here’s my theory. John Rafferty . . . Black Cloud—whoever he is—starts rustlin’ your stock. You’ve said yourself for years that you suspected somebody was thinnin’ your herd. If Rafferty is the owner of the Rafter T brand, he could easily change the Broken Arrow to a Rafter T using a bar brand, a runnin’ iron, or a buckle, like you just said.”

With his knife tip, Jay Blue joined the upper tips of the Broken Arrow, creating a rafter. Then he added a T below.

“The son of a bitch!” Hank said. One thing he could not abide was a stock thief.

“So, let’s assume that Rafferty’s been doctorin’ our brand to a Rafter T, holdin’ the rustled cattle on the free range up around Brown County, and then trailin’ ’em north to sell at the railheads in Kansas.”

“The bastard!”

“Wait,” Jay Blue said. “You’ll like this part even better. John Rafferty hires some saddle bum to help him with the rustlin’. But this saddle bum is thinking way ahead of Rafferty. Before he moves onto our ranges, he assumes an alias—Wes James. There’s a good reason for the alias. Before he even comes to work for Rafferty, he registers his own brand way up in Jack County—the WJ.”

“This is where you lost me last time,” Hank said. “But I think I follow so far.”

“I’ll go slow. After workin’ for Rafferty for a while, doctorin’ our brand to a Rafter T, this so-called Wes James decides it’s time for him to have a bigger slice of the pie. So, he starts doctorin’ the Rafter T to his WJ.”

Again, Jay Blue illustrated with cold steel on soft pine, changing the rafter to a W, and the T to a J.

“I’ll be damned,” Hank said. “He’s doctorin’ a doctored brand.”

“Rustlin’ from the rustlers,” said Tonk.

“No wonder he wound up dead,” Americo Limón observed.

Jay Blue was getting excited about the acceptance of his breakthrough. “With his WJ brand, Wes can rustle Broken Arrow
and
Rafter T beeves. But now Rafferty sees his profits drop off and gets suspicious. He trails Wes, catches him in the act, and shoots him full of Black Cloud arrows. Maybe as a warning to you that you’re next, Daddy. Or maybe to pin it on you if folks still believe you were Black Cloud all along. Or maybe to pin it on the Indians so the army will run them clean out of Texas.”

“Maybe all three. But where do you reckon Policarpo figured into it?”

“Maybe Poli saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. Maybe Black Cloud just wanted to make you hurt, and knew killin’ Poli would do it. Hell, maybe I’m his next target. Or Skeeter! Or any of us.”

Hank nodded grimly and tapped the brand on the table with his trigger finger. “That’s good work, son. It all makes sense. Except for one thing. Just who the hell
is
John Rafferty? Where is he? Do we even know him?”

“I think it’s Jack Brennan.”

Hank shook his head. “No, son, it can’t be him.”

“But everything points to him, Daddy. He conveniently found Wes’s body. He started the trouble with the Comanches at Flat Rock Creek. He busted your nose so Kenyon could arrest you. And, worst of all, he’s got Skeeter workin’ for him and against us now. Why can’t you see he’s the prime suspect?”

“Simple. He’s been our neighbor for almost twenty years. I can’t say he’s been the best neighbor, but he hasn’t killed me, has he? If he came here for revenge on me, he’s had plenty of opportunities. Why would he wait till now?”

“It’s because of me.”

The voice had come from the only door to the cook shack. Every man at the table flinched at the intrusion, and every eye swept up from the brand carved into the tabletop to the armed cowboy standing in the doorway, pointing two cocked Colt revolvers at the whole Broken Arrow crew.

“Skeeter!” Jay Blue said. “What are you doin’ now?”

“Just shut up, Jay Blue. For once in your life, just shut up and listen.”

“Easy, Skeeter,” said Hank. “Why would any of this be because of you?”

Skeeter stepped inside the doorway, and a second armed man emerged from the dark. It was Matt Kenyon, and he had a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun covering the table, with both hammers pinned back like the ears of an angry horse. “Nobody move,” he said. “Just listen to young Mr. Rodriguez here.”

“How the hell did you get past my guard?” Hank demanded. “Where’s Long Tom?”

“Don’t fly off the handle, Captain.” Long Tom Merrick followed his own drawl into the cook shack. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” He stepped out of the doorway to allow Flora and Jane to follow him in.

“Hank, you’ve got to listen,” Flora said.

Jay Blue could not contain himself. “Skeeter, what the hell is this? First you join the Double Horn bunch, now you bring
him
here?” He pointed a damning finger at the State Policeman.

“I didn’t join the Double Horn bunch,” Skeeter said, a knowing sneer on his face. “It’s called
infiltrating
the outlaw gang. Ain’t that right, Mr. Kenyon?”

“That’s precisely what it’s called, Skeeter.” Now Kenyon pointed the muzzles of the scatter gun at the ceiling to ease the tension in the shack. “Everybody just stay calm and listen to Mr. Skeeter Rodriguez and you’ll all understand.”

Skeeter let his pistols point at the floor as if they were the heaviest things he had ever held in his life. “It’s because of me that Jack Brennan hasn’t killed you yet, Captain Tomlinson.”

“What are you sayin’, Skeeter?”

“He offered me a job. He told me to meet him at his ranch, and said he knew who my daddy was. I got mad at Jay Blue, so I went to talk to Brennan. He told me
he
was my father. He
is
my father. That’s why he’s waited to kill you. He wanted you to raise me first, Captain. He knew you’d do a better job than he would. Now that I’m grown, he’s ready to get his revenge on you.”

“He told you all that?”

“No! I figured it out myself! He only told me that he was my daddy. He said he had taken up with a Mexican woman, and they had me. But she died, along with the rest of my family—I guess they took sick. He didn’t say what happened, only said he didn’t know how I survived when no one else did. I guess he didn’t want to raise me, so he left me with an old man he knew to raise—the man I thought was my grandfather. Then my
abuelo
died, and you took me in, Captain. Now Brennan says he wants me back.”

Jay Blue shook his head. “Skeeter, Jack Brennan is likely to tell you all kinds of bunk.”

“Can’t you see,
hermano
? All these years, you told me he’s always asking, ‘How’s that kid, Skinner?’ or ‘How’s Skipper doin’?’ or ‘Where the hell is Scooter?’ You thought it was funny because he never got my name right. Don’t you get it? Where do you think I got these blue eyes!”

“Skeeter,” Jay Blue implored. “Have you joined his outfit or not?”

“I thought about it. I thought—I could be a rancher’s son, just like you, Jay Blue. I could be somebody. But then I noticed some things.”

“What things?” Hank said.

“Go ahead, tell ’em.” Matt Kenyon put his hand on Skeeter’s shoulder, urging him to continue.

“He was showing me around the Double Horn Ranch headquarters, telling me it could all be mine someday. But, in the barn, I saw a big roll of wire. It looked like that wire they use on the telegraph poles. So, I got a hunch. I didn’t say nothin’, but I thought maybe he was the one who tore the wire down so you couldn’t investigate the Wes James murder,
Capitán
.”