Black Wind Pass Read online

  “All that don’t really matter, Miss Reb.” He had no idea what to tell her in place of the truth. At the end, he was welcome anywhere on Bar C except that old house. As for the war and what came after, that was not a story to share—at least not yet. Probably not ever. “Ancient history and family history are chimney smoke in the wind. There’s stuff nobody wants to hear and I don’t want to say. Land has more memories for me than the house, if you need to know. What matters is that you got nobody else and I’m here. And nobody is gonna hurt you while I’m here because that’s plain simple and true the way it is! I’ll protect you and I’ll protect your Aunt Jess. I’m not good at much, but I been in tight places and I came away alive. Like I told you: Nobody is going to get to you while I’m in the way.” He leaned over the space between their horses and enfolded the trembling girl in his arms. At first he could feel the tension; the instinctive reaction of a wild thing to struggle and break free. Then she jammed her head on his shoulder, and he could feel her small body shaking with sobs.

  Late afternoon was fading as they approached the white house, now guarded by a very suspicious woman with a rifle. Carrick had lifted Reb onto Beast—she was small enough the weight wouldn’t much matter. They had ridden slowly until the tears had stopped. Carrick had seen it before—folks who fought like lions in a battle and then were scared of what they had done. He guessed Reb had threatened more than fought. Now she knew what it was like. She would learn. She would live.

  They still rode together on Beast with Arthur being led by the reins looped around Beast’s saddle. Jessie Lewis inspected the sight of her niece in an unfamiliar posture as she held the rifle by the barrel and leaned against it.

  “Will I get a satisfactory explanation from either of you?” she asked as they approached in silence, the arch in her voice fueled by anger and fear.

  Reb hopped down and led the horses away in silence. Jess followed her niece with her eyes, concerned.

  “What did you do?” she gritted.

  Carrick boiled it down to the big issues and assured Jess that no one was hurt. “I know you got troubles, Jess, but Reb maybe isn’t used to goin’ places where folks are itchin’ to kill you and you stand a few feet away and dare them to give it a try,” he finished lamely. “I tried to warn her but until you know what it’s like, you don’t know.”

  “And you know?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Lot I don’t know. That much, I know real well, Jessie. What matters most, Jess, is that Jackson Jones knows he’s not going to walk all over your range. Maybe he’ll have that there talk with you folks; maybe not. Your niece opened his eyes, Jess. You ought to be proud of her. Real proud. I’ll help Reb stable the horses.”

  Dinner was the remains of the stew and some hard bread. Nobody talked. Jess slapped food on the plate hard enough to break it. Reb looked by turns defiant and shaken. The women had clearly had something happen that shook them. Carrick could feel the change. He wondered if maybe they wanted him to ride on. To him it was simple: Meet violence with more violence. Maybe that was more than they were prepared to do. Nothing ever works out the way it should. He ate as fast as possible and got up to leave when it was done.

  “Carrick?” He already had his hat on to go.

  “Miss Reb.”

  “Is Jackson Jones afraid of you?”

  “A bit.”

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  “Silly not to be.”

  “Can we beat him?”

  “Depends on how much he wants to lose; how much you want to risk. If you take him on, girl, straight up, it’s likely to be a fight to the last ranch standing. Go in knowin’ that. Can he wipe you out if he attacks one fine day and throws everything at you? He can. He’s that big and that strong. But he can’t do that without losing something it’s taken him years to build. The more he realizes how high that price is gonna be, the more he might think twice about pushing too hard. Wouldn’t think too much about it.”

  “Can we hold out?” Reb insisted.

  “Maybe, depends on what happens next. You’re safer tonight than you were yesterday. Not many folks stand up to Jackson Jones. He’s going to think that out a while. Only a fool fights someone not afraid to fight back. He’s no fool. You bought time, girl, if nothing else.”

  “Did you mean it? What you said back there?”

  “I did.”

  “Men lie a lot to women.”

  “They do.”

  “Do you?”

  “Not lately. You’d shoot me.” He nodded, said good-night to Jessie and walked out through the doorway into the blackness beyond. A falling-down cabin was a refuge for a man on a day like this.

  Reb watched him go. “I still might,” she said softly to herself, pursing her lips as the door closed. She realized he never said he would never lie to her. “I still might!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  By morning, Carrick was convinced he had made the biggest mistake of his life setting foot on the old Bar C range. Rebecca Lewis refused to leave his thoughts, and yet when he added it all up, it wasn’t even certain the girl liked anyone, let alone him. There was no good reason to stay but he was committed to staying. Fool!

  Probably Jackson Jones was keeping him here more than anything else. There was something grand and noble in the man, and yet he was also dangerous because greed and ambition were so intertwined, Jones himself would never know when his dream of an empire turned into a nightmare for everyone else.

  He’d made a promise to Reb he probably couldn’t keep. The last one he made he kept, no matter what it cost. For a moment, he wondered what this one might cost him. Too late now.

  Nothing had changed from when he was young. People. Nope, he never could quite figure them out. The land, though. He recalled the kid he grew up with—half Cheyenne, half white. He talked a lot about the connection between the land and man. Without it, men wandered forever in search of their home. There were certainly enough people wandering. He looked at the splendid ruggedness of the landscape from Uncle Charlie’s shack. There wasn’t any Double J or Bar C or Lazy F—only land, sun, and wind. Carrick never figured out much about religion, for all that he’d listened to preachers. They found God in churches and books and arguments and such. He found Him out on the badlands or up in the mountains when the loudest sound was the wind in the trees.

  Something moved. Way out there. There was a reflection of sun on metal. He scanned the edge of the woods across the way. Gone now, if it was really there. Could be nothing. Could be someone seeing how tough he really was, waiting and watching. Something to remember.

  His reverie shattered, he rode south, where the cattle were supposed to be. If the Lewis women had one good, trusted hand who didn’t leave them when others panicked, maybe the hand would know Carrick and he could get a better sense of the range. If nothing else, anyone who could work for Rebecca Lewis was worth meeting.

  He stayed to the open plains. He didn’t want any mistakes about his intentions. The range was on edge. When that happened, shooting accidents followed—even intentional accidents. There was a pasture with some rough rail fences to keep cattle from heading down into the rocky lands to the west. He rode for it.

  A rider on a white horse, wearing a floppy hat and carrying a rifle, riding so loosely in the saddle he seemed half-asleep, came down a hill behind Carrick, acting ready to shoot, talk, chase, or run as need be. Carrick stopped. His hands stayed on the pommel. His eyes probed the shadow under the hat brim. One corner of his mouth twitched. The rider drew nigh.

  “What’s your business here, friend?”

  Now he was home.

  “Hello, Bad Weather.”

  Randolph Morgan was his white name. No one knew where it came from any more than they knew his real home or family. Most likely he was a soldier’s child by an Indian woman. They guessed he was the product of some raid where a white soldier or rancher couldn’t kill a child after killing the parents. Since, as a boy, he was the best liar on the range, no one would ever know.
Carrick had known him since he was twelve. As a boy, he had always been full of stories about making the clouds rain. Carrick named him after that.

  “Clawing Wolf.” Randy had been obliged to give a name back, and Carrick’s notorious temper had made it simple. If he was surprised at Carrick’s materialization on the range, it did not show. “I heard that you were dead. Until this moment I thought I was the last of the old Bar C.”

  “Tried gettin’ dead but it didn’t work.”

  “Surviving in spite of yourself was always one of your talents. Why are you here? You get lost riding home? Didn’t you know they were gone?”

  “Unfinished war business.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Bad Weather had always understood Carrick. Carrick nodded.

  “Are you here to claim all this? Do the ladies know?”

  Carrick shook his head. “Not takin’ anything. Wouldn’t know what to do with it. Ran out of places to go and reasons to put off coming back.”

  Bad Weather nodded. He knew all the Carrick family’s troubles. Carrick’s final years had been troubled by it all. That was what Bad Weather had long suspected kept Carrick from coming back. Carrick had either never understood that half-breed children were a lower class than everyone else, or didn’t care. They had been inseparable as boys throughout the final years before Carrick left.

  “Welcome to the old Bar C, which is what everyone calls it. The new owners use the old brand, but they never really named it or registered a new brand. So it has been the old Bar C for a while, now. Have you met the ladies?”

  Bad Weather’s laugh screeched and rolled as he looked at Carrick’s face. “You have met Reb!”

  “I have.”

  “She threaten to shoot you?”

  “That’s what she was doin’ when I met her.”

  Bad Weather laughed again, like the crazy shrill barking of a wild dog. “She likes to do that. Threaten. Far as I know she never actually shot anyone. But she knows how to shoot. I taught her, and then she would shoot for hours. Her Aunt Jess is a gem, Carrick. When your family died from the sickness, she kept the ranch going. I sometimes thought she took it over for them more than for herself. She takes care of anything and everything. She should have sold out years ago when they first died. I think she saw this as a gift from your family. Now, Reb would never let her sell, even though they could be comfortable for many years with what Double J is offering. What do you plan to do? How can I help?”

  On the pretense of coming up with an answer, Carrick studied his friend. Bad Weather’s face was lined from wind, but there was serenity about him as though he was doing what he was born to do and would do until the day he died. He had a rifle in his scabbard, but no pistol. The half-Cheyenne’s long black hair reached halfway down the back in a braid. He looked little different than the seventeen-year-old Carrick had left—maybe a little bigger in the body, but the same smile and the same loyalty.

  “Bad Weather, answer is I don’t know. Never knew they were gone until the other day when I come back. Tryin’ to take all of this in—Double J, this Lazy F fella. The land looks the same, but everything on it has changed. I feel like I belong; like the land is mine, but when I deal with the people it all goes wrong.”

  “The changes have only started, Carrick,” said Bad Weather, who at a fairly young age had been a servant to a passing preacher who thought an Indian slave was a bonus for attempting to convert the heathen Cheyenne. Bad Weather had slipped away one night. He was the most imaginative story teller Carrick had ever met. Carrick assumed most of the legends Bad Weather told him were stories created out of his head. “The army comes out here more and more each year to guard the settlers. That means more horses for the cavalry. The railroad runs more trains every year. More trains mean more people and more demand for horses and beef. A few more settlers stop every year on their way to somewhere else, or end up here when they’ve been run out of Kansas. Lincoln Springs gets bigger and bigger. Have you met Jackson Jones?”

  Carrick nodded.

  “An interesting man. I met him in town. It’s hard not to like him, unless you work for an outfit that is in his way. He hasn’t bothered me down here very much, but ever since there was a fight between cowboys that had more to do with liquor than anything else, he has grown stronger at the women’s expense. I’d like to work for him and ride for him, from what I know of the man, but the Lewis women were here first. Jess Lewis is the kind of person you stick by no matter what.”

  “What about Lazy F and this Francis Oliver?”

  “He bought the old MacRorie place, and grew it. He and Jones hate each other. They have been competing with each other since the day they arrived. Oliver is a clever man, and he survives by outsmarting Jones. He was the first to get a railroad contract Jones wanted. He has two problems, and they both relate to the land. Sooner or later, Jones will want what he has, of course. Oliver is also almost at his limit of what he can raise on the land he has—and especially at the limit of the water he has. With me here pretty much all the time he can’t move out onto Bar C range, but he’d like to be able to water his stock at the creek. He pushes at the edges. If I was not here, he’d be here taking this in a minute. That said, he hasn’t pushed very hard. He’s more like a vulture than a hawk. I can’t say the man has ever done anything to me, or really anything to the Lewis women except pester them to sell, but there is still something I don’t like about him, Carrick. He had a partner when they first moved out here, but the partner died. There was talk that there was something shady about the man’s death, but there’s always talk. A lot of the people who came out since the war ended want to be rich, and are not too concerned with who they step on along the way.”

  “Never got infected with that disease.”

  “From the way you look,” joked Bad Weather, “it is very easy to tell.”

  Carrick recounted what had happened since his arrival. Randy was not convinced Jones was the only one after their range.

  “That salt trick sounds more like something Oliver would do than Jones, but he would never ride through Double J land to get there or dare to hire a Double J rider. He hates Jones, but he’s afraid of him.”

  “What’s this about syndicates?” Carrick asked. “Jones asked me if I was with one and I never heard of one.”

  Bad Weather laughed. “Your knowledge has been neglected. Everyone knows there is money to be made out here. Cattle and horses, of course. Mines are popping up. There is coal here, and I don’t know what else. Ever since California, there are people who think there is gold everywhere. Syndicates are groups of business people in the East who buy up the land and then use it for whatever makes them the most money. There is a world of difference between them and Jones. Jackson Jones wants this to be his, but he really does care about it. A syndicate would buy it and not care about what they did. We keep hearing about syndicate men looking to buy up the valley, but we never actually see them. Of course, that could be because Jones shot the last one to come around publicly.”

  Carrick asked about the rail fence. “You turning homesteader?”

  “I’m trying to make sure the ladies’ cattle doesn’t become somebody else’s breakfast,” Randy replied. “If they get much past the fence, I have to chase them down right away or they never come back.”

  “Rustlers?”

  Bad Weather frowned and waited a minute, choosing his words. “Out west of the range there’s that heavy wooded country; you remember? That is where your old friend Colt Ramsay lives, along with a collection of people who don’t work as hard for their food as I do. I don’t know that they rustle as much as they take anything that they can claim might have been theirs. The women thought about asking Jones for help once in running them out, but in the end Jess Lewis got soft and let them stay. Lazy F tolerates them, and they are closest to their land. If there is anyone who would know about something going on that isn’t quite breaking the law but isn’t legal either, Colton Ramsay is your man.”

&n
bsp; Colton Ramsay had been in trouble from the day he was born. Carrick recalled the boy as having the best ideas to cause trouble of anyone he ever knew. Colt was range-smart. He’d come up with a lot of schemes that should have gotten them both somewhere between severely punished and more or less dead. They never got caught. The Ramsay land was west of Bar C, near where Buffalo Horn Creek emerged from Brown Break Rocks. There was a small rough cabin tucked way back in the trees. Lazy blue smoke filtered through the trees. Carrick rode slowly. There was an air about the cabin that strangers were unwelcome. He was pretty sure he’d been the object of curiosity for more than a mile. The click of the gun came as little surprise when he reached a clearing that was about ten yards from the cabin.

  “Hands up! Who are you and what do you want?”

  Carrick was smiling. Times change. Voices don’t. “Colt, you are getting sloppy in your old age. I could have killed you when you looked out from behind that pine tree a ways back. Bet you ain’t stole a pie off a window in years, slow as you move now.”

  “Get down! Who are you? Get down and turn around so I can see you.”

  Colton Ramsay was thin and bearded. The worn hat on his head matched the disrepair of the rest of his clothes. The new shotgun in his hand was steady. Carrick could hear noises from the cabin. A kid was being shushed.

  “You marry that Brown girl, Colt? The one kicked you in the mud right before the fair? Got kids now?”

  “Three. Who are you that you know me and I don’t know you? Turn this way.” Carrick turned. Colton Ramsay moved closer, never letting the gun shift its aim. “Carrick! Rory Carrick, home at last! When the rest of the men came back and said you stayed with Sherman we figured you were gone. When the war ended and you never wrote or came home, we figured you either had stayed or more likely were dead—I could never see a renegade like you settling down. Guess you know about your kin. Sorry. If it helps, the sickness that took them was quick. My folks went, too. How long you been back? Eileen! Eileen! Rory Carrick is back from the dead. Bring the kids and come out to say hello!”