Bloody Sunday (4 page)

The gray-haired woman came closer. She said to Glory, “You should go inside, señora. Let Gabe deal with Señor Elston.”

Her lined face was nut brown, her eyes dark and piercing. Luke couldn't tell for sure how old she was. She could have been anywhere from fifty to eighty.

“I'm not going to let Harry Elston make me hide in the house, Teresa,” Glory said. “Whatever he wants, he can deal with me.”

“Señor MacCrae would not want you doing this, señora.”

“I think I'm a better judge of what Sam would want,” Glory snapped. “After all, I was his wife.”

Luke saw the older woman's already grim mouth draw down into an even thinner line, but Teresa didn't say anything else. Luke had a hunch that she had been Sam MacCrae's cook, housekeeper, something like that, quite possibly for many years, ever since MacCrae's first wife passed away.

It wouldn't surprise him if Teresa had been in love with MacCrae, too, although as a servant she'd probably kept that emotion to herself. She was bound to resent Glory for coming in and first marrying MacCrae, then taking over the ranch after his death.

Glory turned away dismissively from the older woman and strode across the ranch yard toward the approaching buggy with its trailing riders. The buggy was close enough now for Luke to see that a thickset man in a gray tweed suit and narrow-brimmed dark brown hat was handling the reins. That would be Harry Elston, he thought, owner of the Lazy EO.

The men on horseback behind the buggy rode with easy, arrogant slouches. They wore range clothes, but they were all armed with holstered handguns, which meant they weren't regular cowboys. A man who worked with cows all day from horseback generally didn't pack an iron, just a rifle for shooting snakes or coyotes.

Luke glanced over at Gabe Pendleton, who looked pretty tense.

“Is this fixing to be trouble?” Luke asked quietly.

“Don't know.” Pendleton bit out the words with his jaw clenched. “See that lean fella with the sandy hair?”

Luke knew Pendleton was referring to one of the riders following Elston's buggy. He said, “I see him.”

“That's Verne Finn. You know the name?”

“Vaguely,” Luke said. “He's a gunman, isn't he?”

“Hired killer,” Pendleton said. “He's a backshooter and a bushwhacker, but the law's never been able to prove it. All of his face-to-face killings have come in fair fights. He's fast enough to have lived this long.”

Actually, Verne Finn was a rather mild-looking hombre, Luke thought. But that didn't mean anything. Some of the most dangerous men he'd come across in his career as a bounty hunter hadn't looked all that threatening.

“If you want to,” Pendleton went on, “drift on into the barn. You'll be safe enough there if any trouble starts.”

“I never said I was worried about it,” Luke drawled. “Just curious, that's all. Reckon I'm fine where I am.”

Pendleton grunted, and when he glanced over at Luke there was a little more respect in his eyes.

“All right,” he said. “But don't say I didn't warn you.”

Elston brought the buggy to a halt. Glory was about fifteen feet away and slightly to one side. She said, “What are you doing here, Mr. Elston?”

“That's not a very friendly greeting, Mrs. MacCrae,” Elston said. He was in his forties, with a beefy face and short, grizzled hair under his hat.

“It wasn't intended to be,” Glory said. “Actually, though, I'm glad you're here.”

Elston looked a little surprised by that comment. He said, “Oh? Why is that?”

Glory pointed to the corpse still draped over the saddle a few yards away.

“You can take the body of one of your rustlers to the undertaker and save my men the trouble of having to do it.”

Luke had seen the glances the horsemen had thrown toward the corpse and taken note of the way some of them stiffened in their saddles. That told him they recognized the horse or the dead man or both. That was all the proof he needed that the rustlers had been working for Elston, although it was hardly the sort of evidence that would stand up in a court of law.

Elston's already florid face flushed an even deeper shade of red as he scowled angrily. He said, “I don't know what you're talking about. I came over to pay a friendly visit, not to be accused of something.”

“Since when are we friends?” Glory demanded.

Elston fiddled with the reins and said, “We're neighbors—”

“That doesn't make us friends.”

“Blast it, woman, you've got me all wrong!” Elston burst out. “You act like I'm trying to cause trouble for you, when all I wanted to do was make sure you're all right over here. It hasn't been that long since you lost poor Sam—”

“I'll thank you not to mention my husband,” Glory said coldly.

Elston tried to defend himself by saying, “Sam and I were friends—”

Glory interrupted him again.

“That's funny. There you go again with that friend business. I never heard my husband refer to you as anything except a no-good range hog.”

One of the men with Elston—but not Verne Finn, Luke noted, Finn stayed calm and apparently emotionless—prodded his horse forward and said hotly, “That's just about damned well enough from a—”

Gabe Pendleton took a step and said, “You'd better think long and hard about what you're gonna say next, Carter.”

The gunman sneered at him.

“If I didn't know better, I'd say you're actin' like you're fast on the draw, cow nurse. If you think you can beat me, you're welcome to try your luck.”

“I don't have to outdraw you,” Pendleton said. “There are a dozen rifles trained on the whole sorry lot of you right now.”

Luke had spotted four or five rifle barrels poking from the barn and the bunkhouse. Maybe Pendleton was bluffing about there being a dozen, or maybe Luke just couldn't see them from where he was. Either way, the tension in the air ratcheted up a few notches. Luke could almost smell the blood that was about to be spilled.

“Carter, stop it!” Elston's voice held a note of desperation as it lashed out. If bullets started to fly, he'd be right in the middle of them. “Back off, you hear me? Now!”

Clearly, Carter didn't appreciate being ordered around like that, nor did he like the idea of backing off from the confrontation with Pendleton. But he rode for the Lazy EO brand, and Harry Elston was the boss.

“Another day,” he growled at Pendleton.

“You call it,” the MC foreman said.

Carter backed his horse until he was behind the buggy again. Then Glory said, “If you don't have any real business here, Mr. Elston, I'll bid you good day.”

“Hold on a minute,” Elston said. He was going to try to save a little face by refusing to be dismissed that easily, Luke thought. The rancher went on: “What did you mean by accusing me of rustling that way? And who's that dead man?”

“Gabe,” Glory said as she inclined her head toward the corpse.

Pendleton stepped over to the mount, took hold of its reins, and turned it so the dead man's head was toward the visitors. Grasping the corpse's hair, Pendleton lifted the head so the face was visible.

“That's Dave Randall,” Elston said. “I fired him last week. So whatever mischief he was up to today, you can hardly blame me for it.”

“I suppose the rest of your men will vouch for the fact that you fired Randall?” Glory asked.

“I don't see why not. That's the way it happened.”

Glory's contemptuous snort made it clear she didn't believe a word Elston was saying. The man's face flushed again, but he kept a visibly tight rein on his temper.

“You can take the body to Painted Post anyway,” Glory said. “Since he
used
to work for you.”

Curtly, Elston jerked his head toward the body. One of his men rode forward and took the reins from Pendleton, then led the horse as he went back to join the others.

“I'm sorry for the hard feelings between us, Mrs. MacCrae,” Elston said. “It doesn't have to be this way, you know.”

“Yes,” Glory said, “I'm afraid it does.”

Elston lifted the buggy horse's reins. He clucked to the animal and turned it, then slapped the reins against its rump and drove out of the yard. The man who had taken charge of Randall's horse rode southeast, toward Painted Post. The other gunmen followed Elston as he headed back northwest, presumably toward his ranch.

Verne Finn was a little slower about turning his horse than the others were. As he lingered slightly, his hooded gaze studied Luke, seeming to appraise him. Obviously, Finn was curious about this newcomer to the MacCrae ranch.

Luke returned the gunman's regard with a cool, level look of his own. After a moment, the corners of Finn's mouth quirked in an almost invisible smile. He lifted his left hand, touched a finger to the brim of his hat in a mocking salute, then wheeled his horse and rode after the others.

“What was that about?” Pendleton asked.

“Just taking stock,” Luke said.

“You sure you and Finn aren't acquainted?”

“I never laid eyes on the man until today.”

Pendleton still looked a little doubtful, but he didn't press the issue. Instead, he turned to Glory and said, “I can ride to Painted Post and tell the deputy sheriff who's usually around there about the brand-blotting.”

“What good would it do?” Glory asked, and for the first time in the admittedly short period Luke had known her, he thought she sounded tired. She went on: “Be careful for the next few days. This is the first time we've killed one of them. They may strike back at us.”

“We didn't actually kill that fella,” Pendleton pointed out as he looked at Luke.

“It happened on our range, and Mr. Jensen is our guest. I don't think that'll make any difference to Elston's bunch of hired killers.”

“Probably not,” Pendleton admitted.

Glory summoned up a smile for Luke and invited, “Come on in the house.”

She led him through an arched gateway and a little garden to the big wooden door. The old woman, Teresa, had already vanished back into the house. Luke and Glory stepped into the shady interior where the air held a welcome hint of coolness behind thick adobe walls.

“Would you like a drink?” Glory asked as she loosened her hat's chin strap and took it off. She placed the hat on a heavy table that gleamed with polish.

“That sounds good.”

“Being a proper Scotsman, my late husband had an ample supply of fine Scotch.”

Luke smiled and said, “Even better.”

He looked around the room while Glory went to a massive sideboard to pour the drinks. The furnishings appeared comfortable without being ostentatious. Heavy, overstuffed chairs, big tables, woven rugs on the floor, a fireplace that dominated one side of the room. A long-barreled flintlock rifle and a saber hung on pegs over the fireplace, flanked by a pair of flintlock pistols.

Glory came back with squat, thick glasses, each with a finger of amber liquid in it. When she saw Luke looking at the weapons hanging on the wall, she said, “My husband's father fought with Sam Houston during the revolution against Mexico. He was an officer and carried those during the battle of San Jacinto.”

“For somebody who's not from Texas, you seem to know something about the place's history,” Luke said.

“Sam wasn't your typical closemouthed, tightfisted Scotsman,” she said with a smile. “He liked to talk, and he was generous to a fault. That's how he inspired such loyalty among his friends and the men who worked for him. We spent many hours with him telling me all about his family and how they came from Tennessee to Texas back in the days when it was still a Mexican colony. I thought all the history was fascinating.”

“I would have expected most women to find it boring.”

“I'm not like most women.” She lifted her glass. “To absent friends.”

Luke clinked his glass against hers and nodded. When he sipped the whiskey, he found that it was as good as she had said it would be.

He told her as much, and she said, “You have an appreciation for fine liquor beyond the sort of rotgut flavored with gunpowder and rattlesnake heads you usually find around here?”

“I'd like to think I have an appreciation for all sorts of fine things in life.”

She gave him an appraising look, too, but it was different from the one Verne Finn had directed at him. Then she said, “You're not the saddle tramp you appear to be, Mr. Jensen.”

“There's a lot of that going around,” Luke said. Glory cocked her head to the side quizzically, but he didn't elaborate. Instead, he said, “I hope you don't think I'm trying to stir up unpleasant emotions, but if you'll forgive my curiosity . . . how did your husband die?”

Her fingers tightened slightly on the glass. She had already taken a couple of sips of the liquor, but now she threw back the rest of the whiskey. As she lowered the glass, she said, “You really must be just passing through, as you said. If you'd been around these parts for very long, you would have heard the rumors.”

“Rumors?” Luke repeated.

“About my husband's death. And I can tell you, Mr. Jensen, they're more than just rumors. They're true.” She paused. “Sam MacCrae was murdered.”

Luke had plenty of practice at concealing his emotions. With nothing showing on his face except mild surprise, he said, “I'm sorry to hear that. It must've been pretty hard on you.”

“Losing Sam would have been hard no matter how it happened. To have him stolen away like that . . .” Her voice trailed off as she shook her head.

“What happened? That is, if you don't mind talking about it.”

Luke was curious what her story was going to be. He was sure she wasn't going to come right out and admit that she had killed her husband, although he had little doubt that was what had happened. Such a crime fit her pattern, after all.

“Sam liked to ride out on the range early every morning,” Glory said. “For years he was up well before the crack of dawn every day, and he put in just as many hours in the saddle as any of the men who worked for him. But he was getting on in age, you understand, and I'd convinced him it would be all right for him to take it a little easier.” She smiled. “I admit, I had a selfish motive. I wanted him to spend more time with me.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Luke said.

“But I still couldn't break him of the habit of spending a couple of hours every morning checking on things around the ranch. He had to make sure everything was running smoothly, even though he had a perfectly good crew to take care of things.”

“Something happened to him while he was out on one of those rides?” Luke guessed.

“He wasn't back by the time he normally came in,” Glory said, “so I went out to look for him.”

“By yourself?”

“I didn't really think anything had happened to him,” she said with a slightly impatient shake of her head. “It was just hard to conceive of anything bad happening to Sam. He always seemed so big and . . . invulnerable.”

“Nobody's invulnerable,” Luke said quietly.

“I know, but some people seem like they are. You can almost believe it of them. Sam was like that. I just thought he'd gotten delayed somehow. Maybe his horse had thrown a shoe or come up lame. At the very worst I thought maybe a rattlesnake spooked the horse and Sam was thrown, so that he was having to walk back in. But I wasn't really that worried.”

“You didn't take any of the hands with you when you went to look for him?”

“No, it didn't seem necessary. I'm an excellent rider, and I had my carbine if I ran into any wild animals. I headed up into the hills, because that was the way Sam had gone when he left that morning.”

Luke didn't hear anything except sincerity in her words. But she'd had several months to practice the story, he reminded himself. She should have been good at telling it by now.

“I hadn't been searching for very long when I heard a shot,” Glory went on. “As soon as I heard it, I knew somehow that something terrible had happened. I headed in the direction of the shot, and a few minutes later when I came over a rise, I saw Sam's horse down at the bottom of the slope. The horse moved aside, and I . . . I saw him lying there.”

She was really good at those little hesitations, Luke thought. They made what she was saying sound even more believable. She had to be telling the truth, people would think, because look how emotional it made her.

“You heard just one shot?” he asked.

“Just one. But it was enough. Sam was dead when I reached him. He'd been shot in the back.”

“I'm sorry,” Luke said. “What did you do then?”

“I got my carbine and fired three shots in the air. I knew that would bring any of the hands who were close enough to hear them.”

It was true that three shots, fired at regular, fairly close intervals, was a universal signal for trouble on the frontier. That was an understandable reaction for a woman who had just found her husband gunned down.

But it was also a good excuse for her to fire her carbine, so it would smell of burnt gunpowder. She could have thumbed an extra cartridge through the loading gate, too, so that only three rounds would be gone from the carbine's magazine in case anybody checked.

Luke suddenly seemed to hear Gabe Pendleton's words in his head again. Pendleton had said that Verne Finn was “a backshooter and a bushwhacker.” If there was trouble between the two spreads, wasn't it possible that Finn or another of Harry Elston's hired guns had ambushed Sam MacCrae? Because of Glory's true background, he had jumped to the conclusion that she was responsible for her husband's death, but that didn't necessarily have to be the case, did it?

Those thoughts raced through Luke's head. He still leaned toward Glory MacCrae being the killer, but he asked, “How long has the trouble with Elston been going on?”

“Longer than I've been here. More than a year, according to the things Sam told me. But it's only really started to boil over since . . . since Sam's been gone. I'm sure that Elston thinks I'm just a defenseless, hysterical woman and he can bully me into doing whatever he wants.” She turned to the sideboard, splashed more whiskey into her glass, and downed it. “He's going to find out just how wrong he is.”

“You think one of Elston's men murdered your husband?”

“What other reasonable explanation is there?” Glory asked.

Luke could have answered that. He could have pointed out how convenient an excuse this range-war-in-the-making was for a woman who wanted to get rid of her wealthy husband and inherit everything he owned.

But for the time being, until he could figure out a way to get Glory off the ranch and into the nearest jail without having to fight his way through Gabe Pendleton and the rest of the crew in order to do it, he had to act like he believed her. He had to act like he sympathized with her.

It wasn't that much of a stretch. She was convincing, no doubt about that.

“Have you thought about hiring some gunmen of your own?” he asked.

“Gabe and his men are pretty tough.”

“They might not be a match for Elston's gun-wolves.”

“Are you applying for a job, Mr. Jensen?” Glory asked with a faint, sardonic smile.

“What makes you think I'm a hired gun?”

“You carry two Remingtons and a knife, and I saw a Winchester on your saddle. Your hands don't have the same sort of calluses they would if you worked with a rope all the time. You obviously know your way around firearms, or you wouldn't have been able to shoot that rustler out of his saddle.”

“That doesn't mean my gun's for hire,” he said. A harsh note crept into his voice, and he didn't try to stop it.

“I meant no offense,” she said with a shake of her head. “It was rude of me to say such a thing to a guest. I hope you'll forgive me.”

“There's nothing to forgive,” Luke said. “I'm sorry if I seemed thin-skinned. Why don't we start again?”

She smiled.

“That sounds like a good idea to me. And we can start by putting some more whiskey in your glass.”

“An excellent beginning,” Luke said.

 

 

Glory told Teresa, who turned out to be both cook and housekeeper, that there would be a guest for dinner. Luke asked where he could wash up before the meal, and she directed him to the pump next to the bunkhouse. He thanked her and left the house.

He had a clean shirt in his saddlebags he wanted to put on, so he headed for the barn where he had seen the young man called Vince lead his horse earlier. He figured his gear was in there somewhere.

When he came into the barn, he saw the other young wrangler, the redhead Glory had addressed as Ernie. He was in one of the stalls using a currycomb on the big white horse Glory had been riding. Ernie appeared to be the only person in the barn.

He turned to look over his shoulder when he heard Luke come in and said, “Oh, hey, mister. Are you looking for your horse?”

“My saddlebags, actually, Ernie. My name is Luke, by the way.”

“Yeah, I know. Mr. Pendleton told me.” Ernie put the comb aside and came out of the stall with an eager expression on his freckled face. He held out his hand and introduced himself. “I'm Ernie Frazier.”

“Pleased to meet you, Ernie,” Luke said as he shook hands with the young man.

“Mr. Pendleton also said you're the one who shot that rustler.”

“Only because someone in his bunch had been shooting at me.”

“I'm not surprised. That crew of Elston's is no good.”

“Have you been here on the MC for a while, Ernie?” Luke asked. A talkative youngster was often a good source of information.

“About a year and a half, sir.”

“Then it was Mr. MacCrae who hired you.”

“Actually, it was Mr. Pendleton who hired me on, but I reckon he cleared it with Mr. MacCrae.”

“How do you feel about working for Mrs. MacCrae?”

Just the mention of Glory's name was enough to put that brilliant smile back on Ernie's face. He said, “Why, it's just fine. She's the boss now, Gabe—Mr. Pendleton—says, so we've got to do what she tells us same as if Mr. MacCrae was still alive. Of course, I'd do that anyway, no matter what Mr. Pendleton said.”

“It's a shame about Mr. MacCrae being killed,” Luke said.

That was enough to make the smile disappear from Ernie's face. He said, “You've heard about that?”

“Mrs. MacCrae told me.”

“Yeah, it was awful.” Ernie thumbed his hat back. “That was sure a sad day. When we had the buryin', I mean. You never saw anybody braver than Mrs. MacCrae. I could tell she wanted to cry, but she never did. Not one tear.”

That was a little surprising to Luke. He would figured that Glory could summon up at least one tear for the occasion, just to make it look good.

“Who do you think shot Mr. MacCrae?” Luke asked.

“My money's on that fella Verne Finn. He's a snake-blooded hombre if there ever was one. It gives me the fantods just lookin' at him. But if it wasn't Finn, it was one of Elston's other men. I'd stake my life on it.”

Luke changed the subject by saying, “How did Mr. MacCrae come to marry a woman like Mrs. MacCrae? I understand that he was a widower for a long time.”

“Yeah, that's the way I heard it, too.” Ernie was so open and unsuspecting that the words came out of him without any hesitation at all. “They met in town a while back.”

“In Painted Post, you mean.”

“Yeah. Mrs. MacCrae—well, her name was Miss Jenkins then, I guess—she'd come out here to Texas from somewhere back East. For her health, you understand. Something about the climate bein' better here. You sure wouldn't think she'd ever been sick a day in her life to look at her, would you? She looks like the picture of health.”

“She does,” Luke agreed dryly. He was sure it wasn't any sort of medical condition that had prompted Gloria Jennings to get off the train in Painted Post and call herself Glory Jenkins. She had probably thought the little cow town looked like a good place to lie low for a while until any pursuit that was behind her cooled off. Then she had stumbled upon another target for her wiles in Sam MacCrae and had been unable to withstand the temptation.

He wondered what her real name was. She might have had so many aliases that she would have a hard time herself remembering the name she'd been born with.

“Anyway, it didn't take any time at all for Mr. MacCrae to fall for her,” Ernie continued. “Shoot, I can understand that. All you've got to do is look at her. It's not just that she's so pretty, though. She's kind, too, and sweet. And she'll talk to you straight out, no beatin' around the bush like some gals do. To tell you the truth, Mr. Jensen, I wasn't sure at first about a woman runnin' a ranch, but now there's no doubt in my mind that she can do it.”

From the door of the barn, Gabe Pendleton said, “Well, I'm sure we're all glad to know you think Mrs. MacCrae's got a right to run her own ranch, Ernie.” His voice was sharp enough to make the garrulous young wrangler jump a little.

“I, ah, didn't see you there, Mr. Pendleton,” he said.

“I reckon you didn't, or you would have been tending to your chores instead of flapping your gums.”

Luke said, “I'm afraid I'm the one who made Ernie here neglect his work. I was asking him some questions.”

“Is that what you came in here for, Jensen? Seems to me you're a mite curious about the workings of this spread.”

Luke saw the suspicion on Pendleton's face and heard it in his voice. Keeping his own response casual, Luke said, “Not at all. Ernie and I just got to talking, that's all. I came in to get a clean shirt from my saddlebags before I wash up for dinner.”

“That's right, you're having dinner in the big house.” Pendleton hooked his thumbs in his gun belt. “But after dinner, you'll be coming back out to the bunkhouse to sleep.”

“I never thought otherwise,” Luke said.

Pendleton gave him a curt nod, then said to Ernie, “There are other horses that needed tending to, not just Mrs. MacCrae's saddle mount.”

“Sure,” Ernie said. “I'll get right to 'em.”

“See that you do.”

With that, Pendleton turned and walked away from the barn.

“He's a mite touchy, isn't he?” Luke said.

“I don't reckon I'd better talk anymore, Mr. Jensen. Like Gabe said, I've got work to do.”

“Of course. Do you happen to know where my saddlebags are?”

Ernie pointed and said, “All your gear's in the tack room, right over there.”

“Thanks.”

Luke found his saddlebags and got out the clean shirt. He said so long to Ernie and walked out to find the pump Glory had told him about.

As he did so, he thought about Pendleton's reaction. The foreman didn't want Ernie running his mouth about Glory MacCrae. Maybe that was just a ramrod being normally protective of his employer, especially since that boss was a woman.

Luke couldn't help but wonder, though, if it was more than that. When Gabe Pendleton looked at Glory, did he see just his boss . . . or something else?