During the ride around the perimeters of the property, Buddy did what he did best: running with his nose to the ground to sniff out cattle. Into copses, over rocks, into gullies, the dog maintained an easy lope, never seeming to tire of the hunt. By noon, when Joseph took a break for lunch, the shepherd had routed out ten of Rachel’s eighteen head.
“Good boy.” Joseph made over the dog for a few seconds. “It’s been a spell since we worked. But you haven’t lost your knack for it.”
Buddy happily growled in reply.
The dog kept a sharp eye out for treats as Joseph lifted the flap of his saddlebag. “Yes, Rachel sent you lunch. Same as she sent for me. Spoiling you, isn’t she?” Joseph sat in the shade of a tree to eat. After laying out Buddy’s food on the grass, he tucked hungrily into his own, appreciating every bite. “Damn, but that girl has the magic touch. No bread for sandwiches, so instead we get biscuits. But mine’s still good enough that I could go for seconds.”
Joseph unfolded another cloth and gave a satisfied sigh when he saw turnovers, fried golden and still slightly warm from the skillet. He sank his teeth into the gooey peach center and closed his eyes in pure pleasure.
Buddy barked and pranced with his front feet, his lolling tongue dripping drool as he eyed the dessert.
“This is people food,” Joseph protested. “Besides, she only sent two.”
The dog pranced again and licked his chops. Ruff!
Joseph groaned and handed over the second turnover. “All I know is, you’d better work for it this afternoon. We’ve got a lot more fence to ride and eight more cows to find.”
Joseph reached the creek around two in the afternoon. He’d ridden through there several times since Darby had been shot, but never without an eerie sensation crawling up his spine. Jeb Pritchard’s place wasn’t far away as a crow flew—or as a horse walked, for that matter—and Joseph couldn’t turn his back to the mountain of rocks without half expecting to take a slug in the back.
Today was no exception, which was why, when Buddy suddenly started to bark, Joseph leaped from his horse and hit the dirt with his weapon drawn. Joseph squinted to see into the deep shadows cast by the projections of stone that reached toward the sky like gigantic arrowheads.
“Buddy!” he yelled.
But the red-gold dog was already gone up the steep hill. Joseph could hear him up in the rocks barking excitedly. Then came a shrill yelp and silence. Joseph was on his feet and running before common sense could make him think better of it.
“You rotten old son of a bitch!” he yelled as he charged for the rocks. “If you hurt that dog, I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands.” Joseph took cover behind a boulder. “Buddy?” he called.
He heard nothing but the wind. His heart squeezed with fear for his dog. He wanted to race up there with no thought for his own safety, but with the ebb of that first rush of rage, he knew how stupid it would be. So he went slowly, darting from one rock to another, trying to shield himself as he ascended the hill.
After Darby’s shooting, he and David had scoured this area and found the place where they believed the sniper had hidden to take aim. It was an opening of about forty feet across, encircled by boulders, which offered a broad view of the flat and creek below. When Joseph reached it, he searched the ground for any sign of disturbance to indicate that a man had recently been hiding there, but he saw nothing, not even a turned blade of grass.
Believing that they’d found what they sought, Joseph and David hadn’t climbed any higher that other afternoon, so Joseph was surprised as he pressed upward to find that the mountain wasn’t all rock as it appeared to be from below. There were grassy openings aplenty between the clusters of stone.
Joseph was about halfway to the top when he heard the thundering tattoo of a horse’s hooves. At the sound, he almost ran back down the hill to jump on Obie and give chase. But Buddy was above him somewhere, and Joseph strongly suspected that the shepherd might be badly hurt. He had to find his dog. He could track the horse later.
Joseph found Buddy lying before what looked like the opening of a cave. As Joseph approached, he had eyes only for his dog, searching for blood, dreading what he might find. To his relief, Joseph saw that the shepherd was still breathing. He holstered his gun, dropped to his knees, and gently ran his hands over red-gold fur to check for wounds. No blood that he could see.
Bewildered, Joseph made a second pass over the dog’s body, this time parting the animal’s coat, thinking that perhaps a puncture wound might not bleed heavily enough at first to soak through the thick fur. Nothing. Turning his attention to Buddy’s head, Joseph soon found what he was seeking: a small gash along the dog’s temple.
“Bastard,” Joseph muttered. “I don’t know what he hit you with, partner, but he flat snuffed your wick.”
Buddy whimpered and shuddered. Joseph’s temper soared. The dog didn’t have a mean bone. How could anyone do this?
And why?
When Buddy’s eyes came open and Joseph felt confident the dog was going to be all right, he turned a more observant eye to his surroundings. Not just a cave, after all. A long wooden box lay nearby, and it was still wet. A portable mining sluice?
Buddy pushed up on his haunches. Joseph ran his hands over the animal’s fur. “Sorry about that, my friend. I didn’t know anyone was up here. Next time I call you back, maybe you’ll think smart and do as I tell you, huh?” Joseph carefully scratched behind the dog’s ears, avoiding the small gash. “You did good, though. Damned good. It looks to me like you’ve sniffed out more than cows today.”
Joseph pushed to his feet and approached the mouth of the cave. He couldn’t see very far inside, but what he did see confirmed his suspicions. Tracks and an ore cart. This was a mine—a gold mine, if Joseph guessed right. Only whoever had been doing the digging had taken great pains to keep his activities hidden. At day’s end, Joseph suspected even the portable sluice would vanish inside the cave. To the eye of a casual passerby—if anyone ever happened to have reason to come up here, which was doubtful—they would see only an opening in the rock.
Joseph stepped deeper into the cave. After his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw a lantern, a miner’s light, and all manner of other paraphernalia lying about. Joseph grabbed the miner’s light, struck a match to illuminate it, and tossed away his Stetson to don the headgear.
“Just what do we have here?” he mused aloud. His voice bounced back at him, echoing and reechoing. That told him that the cave ran deep. “Well, well, well. Suddenly it all makes sense.”
Joseph’s excitement grew apace with his footsteps. Gold. Who would have thought it? But it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. No Name itself was a mining town that had gone bust so quickly that the folks who’d swarmed there hoping to get rich left for better digs before giving the community a name. But then there was Black Jack, Colorado, where fortunes had been made in the foothills of the Rockies, a fellow named Luke Taggart topping them all. Joseph had heard stories that the man had more gold in just one bank than Midas could ever conceive of.
But that was the stuff dreams were made of. Years ago, folks around No Name had settled down to a more grueling reality, scratching out a living on the land, very few of them doing well. Ace’s railroad spur had changed that immensely, making it easier and far more profitable for cattle ranchers to get their stock to auction in bustling Denver. Even so, the mind-set of folks had remained the same. To put bacon on one’s plate, nobody looked at the dirt hoping to find gold. They prayed to see sprouts of grass hay or alfalfa if they had water, and wheat or oats if they didn’t.
The light that blazed from Joseph’s headlamp played over the rock walls of the tunnel. He could see where someone had chipped at the rock until it played out, and then had moved deeper. Occasionally he saw traces of gold, but nothing to shout about. Then he rounded a corner and saw where someone had blasted with dynamite. Now he was in business. Tresses had been built to support the tunnel, and as he moved deeper into the
bowels of the mine, the air became ever colder and thinner.
Someone had been chipping away at this rock for a spell, Joseph decided. One man, possibly two, all under cover of secrecy. His boots slid on the obliterated pieces of stone, left behind by a weary digger who had exhaustively removed possibly tons of rock to some other location to hide the goings-on here. Years, Joseph concluded. Small extractions of gold, over time, had occurred here. In a regular mine, countless men swung picks to break out the ore, and dynamite was used whenever they needed to go deeper, ever in search of the mother lode. But this person or persons hadn’t been able to search for the precious metal aggressively for fear of discovery. A little here, a little there, day in and day out, week after week, and year after year.
Joseph rounded a corner in the tunnel. “Sweet Christ.”
The miner’s light played over a wall of solid rock that was ribboned with gold, some of the veins thicker than Joseph’s wrist. The sight fairly boggled his mind. He couldn’t recall how much an ounce of pure ore was selling for right then. A lot. Enough that a greedy man or men might kill to keep a rich vein like this a secret.
The thought made Joseph sick. No face. Five years ago, a family had come here to picnic along a creek on their own land. Father, mother, sisters, and brother, they’d had no inkling that they were so close to a deadly fortune. Had Denver, Rachel’s beloved dog, run up here, much as Buddy had, with her little sister, Tansy, at his heels? Neither child nor dog would have understood the significance of this find if they had come upon it.
But greedy men often had no sense. With a fortune hanging in the balance, what might they do to protect their treasure from discovery? Even though Tansy probably hadn’t realized the significance, she would have seen enough to go back down to the creek where her family was picnicking and mention what she had seen to her father.
So they had slaughtered the Hollisters. All of them except Rachel, who, by some miracle, had lived. Joseph believed in God with all his heart, and in that moment of revelation he also believed with utter conviction that God had put the projectile of that one bullet slightly off, possibly by sheer divine will, so that it glanced off her skull. God, in all His wisdom, knew, even then, that Rachel Hollister would be the salvation of Joseph Paxton, a young man who didn’t want a wife, wasn’t looking for a wife, and believed he didn’t need a wife. Only he had, and somehow God had saved her—out of all the members of her family, he’d somehow saved Rachel, for Joseph.
Tears burned in his eyes. Tears of absolute, mindless rage. No face. His sweet Rachel had seen her mother’s face blown away while she danced over the grass on a sunny afternoon. Holy Mother of God. Marie Hollister, who’d read her Bible the night before she died and marked her place with a ribbon so she could live her life according to Scripture, observing every code of decency, had died a violent, senseless death right before her daughter’s eyes. And for what? For gold. So a selfish bastard could line his filthy pockets.
Joseph leaned against the cold rock. He’d never clapped eyes on any of Rachel’s family, but he’d seen that vacant look in her eyes and held her in his arms while she was overcome by the horror of their deaths. Jeb Pritchard. That stinking, immoral, hell-bent bastard. He’d killed his own wife. Why hesitate to spill more blood? Now Joseph knew how the fools could afford to buy whiskey and nap in drunken stupors on a spring afternoon. They’d done their labor, and it didn’t involve cows. Their whiskey money was a crow’s flight away, deep in the bowels of a cave.
Joseph didn’t need to see any more. He exited the dig, gathered his injured dog in his arms, and hurried down the hill. The circuit judge could hang up his hat. Jeb Pritchard was going to pay for what he’d done.
Chapter Seventeen
Darby was still lounging under the oak tree when Joseph returned to the Bar H. Joseph drew up near the tree to dismount and set his dog down. Buddy wasn’t his usual energetic self. He just sort of stood there, looking around.
“What’s the matter with him?” Darby asked.
“He got beaned a good one.”
“Beaned?”
Joseph quickly gave Darby a recounting of the afternoon.
“I’ll be damned. Gold, you say?” Darby shook his head. “I knew there was a cave up on that hill, but I paid it no nevermind. Nosin’ around in places like that’s a good way to get snake bit or come nose to nose with a badger.”
Joseph normally avoided caves himself for the same reasons. “Somebody went nosing around in there. Some time ago, if I’m any judge. Mining on the sly, you can’t move a lot of rock at once, and a considerable amount of digging has taken place up there.”
“And you reckon it was Pritchard?”
“Who else? Jeb’s been in a snit about that creek since way back in seventy-nine. He had reason to be down there, walking the property, trying to figure out how to alter the course of the stream back onto his land. At one point or another, he came across that cave, realized there was gold in there for the taking, and started helping himself. Chances are his boys have been aiding him in the endeavor.”
Darby narrowed his eyes. “And on the day of the killings, the Hollister family chose a picnic spot just a little too close to his treasure.”
“And one of the children wandered up into the rocks,” Joseph added. “My guess is that it was Tansy, the five-year-old. Pritchard knew the game would be up if the little girl realized the significance of what she’d seen and blabbed to her daddy.”
Darby shook his head again. “So, to make sure that didn’t happen, Pritchard opened fire on the whole family.” His eyes glittered with anger as he met Joseph’s gaze. “Hangin’s too good for the bastard.”
“I totally agree,” Joseph replied. “But we’ve got to abide by the law, all the same. Otherwise, we’re no better than they are.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“I need to ride into town and talk with my brother. He’s wearing the badge. He needs to make the decisions about how to best handle it, I reckon.”
Darby drew his watch from his pocket. “How late you think you’ll be?”
“I should be back in a couple of hours. My guess is David won’t want to make a move tonight. Not enough daylight left to get organized and ride out there before dark. We’re going to need manpower this time around, if for no other reason than to help search the property. If Pritchard’s been filching gold from Bar H over the last several years, there’ll be evidence of it somewhere on his place.”
Darby closed his watch. “I promised Amanda I’d come see her tonight. If I run a little late, she’ll be sure to understand.”
Joseph caught hold of Obie’s reins and prepared to remount. “I appreciate you looking after my wife for me, Darby. If she should ask where I went, it might be best if you tell her I had business in town.”
“No details.” Darby nodded. “I gotcha. As for thankin’ me, son, there’s no need. I love Rachel, too. Watchin’ after her ain’t a chore.”
David rocked back on his office chair to prop his boots on the edge of his desk. Frowning pensively, he said, “So you were right all along. It was Pritchard.”
“It sure looks that way to me.” Joseph paced back and forth in front of the window. “I can’t think of anyone else who might have had reason to be in that area and come upon that cave. Can you?”
David sighed. “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Amanda Hollister knows about it. She worked on the Bar H for years.”
“Are you back on that again?”
David held up his hands. “Not really, no. I’m inclined to think you’re right about it being Pritchard. I’m just trying to look at it from all angles.”
“If we find nothing at Pritchard’s place to implicate him, we can consider other angles then.”
“Jeb isn’t gonna sit on his porch having a smoke while we search his place,” David pointed out. “He’ll raise holy hell and possibly start shooting at us again.”
“I’ve considered that,” Joseph said. “We’re g
oing to need reinforcements. A small army, if you can round one up.”
“Most men hereabouts are willing to stand in as deputies when I need them. I’ll send Billy Joe out to ride from house to house while I go knocking on doors here in town. What time in the morning do you want to join up with us?”
When Joseph got back to the Hollister place, Darby pushed to his feet and walked out to meet him.
“David’s rounding up a posse,” Joseph said. “I’ll meet up with them on Wolverine Road at ten tomorrow morning. We’ll descend on the Pritchard place en masse. If Jeb sees a huge group of riders, maybe it’ll discourage him from getting trigger-happy.”
“I hope so.” Darby hooked a thumb toward the house. “Don’t go makin’ a widow of that girl, son. You’ll flat mess up my plans.”
Joseph chuckled. “I have a few plans of my own that I don’t want messed up, so I’ll do my best to stay safe.”
Darby’s green eyes twinkled. “I just want to enjoy my last years with someone special. If you’re home to stay, I think I’ll go callin’ on her for a bit.” The old foreman returned to the tree to collect his rifle and a handful of wildflowers. “Just a little nonsense I picked while you was off gallivantin’.”
Joseph grinned. “A little nonsense, huh? Looks to me like you’re thinking sharp. Most ladies love flowers.”
Darby nodded. Then he squinted up at Joseph. “How long’s it been since you gave some to Rachel?”
“I gave her a whole courtyard full of flowers.”
“That don’t count. You gotta pick ’em, son. Makes a gal melt every time.”
An hour later, when Joseph finished the evening chores, he walked a wide circle around the house to collect any wildflowers that Darby had missed before he went indoors to greet his wife.
The following morning shortly after Joseph left to run some unspecified errands, Rachel went out in the courtyard to tend her garden. Each little task brought her joy: watering the roses and counting the tiny buds, carefully plucking weeds from around her violets, admiring the cheerful and showy blooms of the crocus, and feeding her three fish, which she could have sworn had already grown a bit. Though the air was crisp, requiring her to drape a blanket over her shoulders, she smelled spring on the breeze, and, oh, how wonderful that was.