North of Forsaken Read online

  I knew what was coming even before I had the opportunity to talk myself out of it. “No. No, you don’t.” I set my battered hat gently on my head. “How much did you pay for my freedom?”

  “Pardon?” He ignored the question and turned this and that way, straightening his cuffs and smoothing his black sleeves.

  “I said, how much?” and pulled my coin pouch from around my neck where it hung, tucked under my layers of shirts and buckskin. It was limp, much like my spirit. So, I’d been robbed, to boot. I gritted my teeth and vowed, after I dealt with Thomas, to brace the marshal. Fat lot of good it would do me, I knew, but a man is nothing if he doesn’t try in life.

  “Scorfano. I don’t want your money,” said Thomas, showing me his pink palms.

  “That’s good, because it appears I am now penniless.” I glanced at the bemused lawman. “Now, how much do I owe you? I’ll raise it soon enough.”

  He sighed. “I’d rather have your ear for a few minutes. I have a proposition for you.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. I figured I had more reason to do so than he, considering my head felt like the inside of an exploding cannon barrel. “Thomas. It’s been nice to see you, but I have to leave. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not wanted in this town and the feeling’s mutual.”

  Before Thomas could reply, I turned my attention to what passed for the law in Forsaken. “Where’s my money, Marshal?” I jiggled the limp coin purse. As I suspected, that rat-faced law-dog was as useful as tits on a bull.

  “I got no idea what you’re on about, mister. But I’m tired of listenin’. If you keep it up, you’ll be wasting a length of new rope before nightfall.” He jacked a shell into a carbine and bounced a stream of soppy brown spit off the side of a filthy brass spittoon on the floor. I bet his aim with the gun was better. At least at this range.

  “I won’t forget this, Marshal,” I said, staring him down. I’ve often found that small men are big on attitude, and he was no exception. As he withered into his chair I told him I’m long on memory, if not on funds.

  The loss of the coin purse’s contents didn’t alarm me much. I have a few gold pieces secreted here and there about my gear, for times such as these. It would more than cover my livery bill. But I don’t like to be robbed any more than the next man. And especially after an unjustified clubbing, itself the result of some shady deal I hoped to get to the bottom of. And, like it or not, it was becoming obvious that Thomas played some part, unwittingly or no—I’d yet to determine that—in this odd game in the midst of which I found myself.

  Of course I still wanted Thomas to go away and leave me alone, but as someone with a knack for pointing out the obvious once stated, “Beggars can’t afford to be choosy.” I sighed and followed the little whelp out the door, each step rattling my aching head like cannonfire.

  On the boardwalk out front, Thomas folded his arms and for a moment, with him standing there in a pouting pose, I was back in childhood and he was trying to coerce me into filching a pie from Mimsy’s sideboard.

  “All right, Scorfano. I understand. I am only too glad to know I was able to help my friend when he needed help most. It was my pleasure. Perhaps we’ll meet again someday.”

  I made it as far as the livery office, intending to retrieve my horse and gear. I could tell by his shadow in the street that Thomas had followed. I stopped, my hand on the door latch. “What is it you need from me, Thomas?”

  Not for the last time did I think I should have kept walking.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Some time later, I had finished my meager shopping and was busy squirreling away my purchases in the oversize saddlebags I’d made myself some months before. They are commodious affairs, smooth on the inside and hair-on hides on the outside, made from the skins of longhorns I’d helped wrangle. When all my gear’s loaded, there is still room for more, the way I want it. It’s also the way I try to end a meal, be it around a campfire or a table in a roadhouse.

  It’s a habit I adopted years back, when a wise man once told me, “Always leave the table thinking you could eat more.” He was a tidy old gent who, though he had little in the way of possessions and even less food, nonetheless shared a fine meal with me when I was a stripling on my way West. His thinking, I believe, was that a man would do well to always leave room in life for the unexpected. I also think his slice of folksy wisdom had as much to do with humility as it did with a decided lack of fare. All I recall of him was his name, Walter. He seemed ancient to me then, and that was a good many years ago. I expect he’s dead now.

  With that dour thought, I tied off the last of the bags’ rawhide thongs and ran a hand along Tiny Boy’s massive muscled neck. He gave me a slight nod and one casual glance from his near eye. The big Percheron had been with me a long while and I hoped that would not change for some time to come. A man such as myself has to work hard in this life to turn up as good a companion as a smart horse.

  I seldom spoke to him, but we communicated plenty. Nods, glances, the vague but comfortable habits of camp. The quiet reassurance of the familiar is enough. At least it is for me. Tiny Boy has yet to complain. I’ve told him he’s free to leave but he goes where I go, and vice versa.

  My old chum, Maple Jack, is forever haranguing me about taking on a pack animal. I tried it once and found I accumulated possessions just because I had the space in the panniers to fit them. But it never felt right and flew in the face of the simple, straightforward manner I endeavor to live my days. The less I have the more I am.

  I say such things in Jack’s presence in part to rile the old goat. It works, every time.

  “You mean to tell me you wouldn’t like more room for books and such?” He’s dumb like a fox, is Jack.

  The man knows my armor chinks. But he’ll have to work harder to convince me I need another mule or a horse to lug my gear. Tiny Boy is anything but what his name implies. He’s built for steady, determined effort, and his broad, muscled back can hold a sight more than I load him with. Even when it’s me he’s toting.

  But in the spirit of fairness and equality among trail chums, I keep my gear to a minimum and walk whenever it’s possible for me to do so. It’s good for me and good for the horse. A shared smiling temperament makes life on the trail a more pleasant undertaking.

  I glanced up the steps toward the mercantile. Thomas had been in there since we parted on the street before the livery. He was set on “outfitting” himself, as he kept referring to it. You’d think he was planning a trek to the deepest reaches of the Dark Continent instead of a week’s ride northward to visit what he had told me was a “prime ranchland property” purchased by his father. That his father was also mine—something of which he was unaware—and that Thomas believed himself the sole heir to any and all fortunes the pater had left in his scurvy wake was not lost on me. Nor did it impress me.

  As I have said, I care little for owning property, and even less for the leavings of a man of our father’s distinct lack of worth. Harsh words? Yes. Earned by him? I choose to think so. I would never utter them to Thomas, though. To him the man was, however flawed, his father, his own papa. It is not my place, nor will it ever be, to dissuade him from those beliefs.

  Since he never received anything resembling a guiding presence in his life from his father, and since he considers me to be like an older brother (the boy has never been more correct in his life), I feel beholden to him in this respect. Enough so that I begrudgingly agreed to help him find this mysterious ranch.

  I asked him for details but he pulled that annoying smirky smile, the one he straps on once he has received what he wants, and told me all would be revealed in good time. Each of his numerous anger-inducing traits as a child flitted back to me like early-season biting midges in the high, wet country of the northwestern coast.

  He has no idea how close I came to reneging on my offer. But I am a man of my word, so I suppressed a growl and told him I would meet him in front of the mercantile in thirty minutes. That was—I looked to the
sky fruitlessly, but clouds obscured the sun, appropriate for such a foul burg—coming on toward an hour and a half ago. I wanted to get out of town, knowing the marshal wasn’t keen on me, a mutual feeling. I wasn’t certain I could trust myself if I saw him. He had, after all, filched my cash while I was out cold.

  Mostly, though, I wanted to get shed of Forsaken because it was like every other town I’ve ever been in—filled with people who look at me as if I had gutted their favorite dog with a wooden spoon. I sighed once more and clomped on up the steps to the mercantile. I gave one last look up and down the street for sign of the woman and two men from the day before, but saw nothing of them. I had not expected to, but that didn’t mean they were gone from my mind.

  The springing brass bell tinkled above my head as I opened the door. The weather was well into autumn, it being September 20, and no one was particularly happy to heat the outdoors, as Jack says when you open his cabin door for any reason at all between September and May (no matter if he does spend most of his time crouched around his outdoor fire pit, cooking, brewing coffee, and holding forth on every subject and then some).

  And there was Thomas, decked out in crisp new duds more appropriate to the local farmer’s sensibilities and wages than what I imagine he hoped he looked like—a trail-hardened drifter. At least he’d gotten rid of those dandy togs he’d been wearing. Though they weren’t far—a hint of blue and black caught my eye and I saw his fancy clothes folded in a stack, that god-awful hat atop, down the counter past stacks of goods.

  He turned to me, a wide smile on his face. “Look,” he said, gesturing with a pink, soft hand at the new goods as if he’d carved each and every box, tin, and sack out of raw rock.

  I nodded. The shopkeep eyed me over half-moon spectacles jammed tight on the long fleshy bridge of a nose that ended in a knob of warts. At least I wasn’t alone where hard looks were concerned. He went back to licking his pencil nub and tallying the motherlode of a purchase. Crimson spots on his veined cheeks told me he was determined to squeeze every last drop out of Thomas’s wallet.

  I walked to the counter, looked over the goods. “Thomas, some of this”—I nodded toward the laden counter—“won’t be useful to you, especially on the trail.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, dismissing me as if I were an annoying fly. Why even ask me for help if he knew what to bring? I held my tongue, not wanting to endure another of his pouts.

  “Have you procured suitable mounts for us?”

  “Not sure about us,” I said, “since I have my own horse. But yes, I did as you requested and bought a decent horse for you, a fine buckskin—”

  “Yes, yes, but a second beast as well?”

  “I was getting to that, Thomas.” The tightness in my voice made them both, Thomas and the shopkeep, look at me. My voice can be as big as I am, though I try to keep it reined.

  “It’s a solid pack animal, a Morgan cross, I’d guess. Sure-footed.”

  “Two saddles?”

  Now I was plain confused. “No, well a riding saddle for you, yes, and a pack rig for the little horse.”

  Thomas sighed, looked at the shopkeep as if to say, “Look what I must endure.” Both men shook their heads and surveyed me, the apparent simp.

  Thomas went back to primping his collar, then plopping one hat after another on his head as he looked in a small clouded mirror. “Didn’t I mention? There will be three of us all told. You, me and . . .” He did not meet my eyes in the mirror and certainly did not turn when he said, “The girl.”

  “What girl?” My witty response for the day.

  “Why . . . Scorfano, didn’t I mention it? Ah.” He smiled and turned back to the mirror. “Must have slipped from my mind. But yes, her name is Carla, ah, something or other. We met on the stagecoach to here from Green River, I believe. Seems she is traveling alone, poor little sparrow, to her father’s ranch. Her escort went and got himself arrested in some unpleasant place, and she had no choice but to trend forth into this brutal wilderness all on her own.”

  “What’s her father’s name?” I asked, knowing the answer before he shrugged. “Did she tell you the name of the ranch?”

  Another shrug.

  “Okay then, where is this little lady now?”

  “She’s at the hotel, of course. Her escort, the cad, the scoundrel, stole all the traveling money her father had wired her to make the journey.”

  I nodded, suppressing yet another sigh. I had a feeling I would be doing so a whole lot in the coming days. “I take it you are her new escort.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Something about this Carla girl seemed familiar. But it wasn’t the girl herself I recalled, rather the type of person she was—a grubber. I knew as soon as I saw her eyes, pretty green eyes, to be sure, but no smile in them. There was at once so much more and so much less to her than Thomas supposed.

  The boy’s obvious wealth, which he took no pains to disguise, made him an instant target for scoundrels. And I’ve learned over the years that those in society who ply the swindling trade come in all varieties and can be men, women, young, old, it doesn’t matter.

  As for the rest of her, she was the sort of woman who rarely has to rely on her wits, as her pretty face, atop a body to match, would make that pursuit unnecessary. She wore a smile that was as false as the hard edge in her eyes was true. Her gold hair, streaked throughout with chestnut as if painted in, sat coiled atop her head and pinned neatly beneath a tidy feathered red appurtenance doing little to earn its worth as a hat.

  She wore a dapper red wool riding outfit, pleated skirt and jacket, beneath which poked ruffled lace cuffs and collar. Her boots were not meant for riding, but square-toe button-ups, black, with squat heels of little use in a raw mountain landscape.

  Pointing out to Thomas that she was a digger of gold, namely his, would be impossible. I took small comfort in the fact that at least I would be along to keep an eye on the smitten fool and the pretty woman who, I bet myself a penny, was out for his dollars and little else.

  “Carla, Thomas tells me you are the daughter of a rancher from north of here.” I patted Tiny Boy’s neck. He flicked an ear, moved little otherwise. “Good lad,” I said, then looked again to the girl. “Whereabouts is the ranch? I’ve spent quite a lot of time roaming this range and never tire of finding new folks.”

  She didn’t respond right away. I waited, and, forgive me for saying so, but a smidgen of myself enjoyed watching the war between truth and lie in her veiled eyes, enjoyed watching the slight twitches on her cheeks. She knew then that I was on to her fraudulence, but as soon as Thomas piped up, a catlike smile emerged on her pretty pink lips.

  “See here, Scorfano, there’s no need to pester poor Carla. Can’t you see you’re making her uncomfortable? How would you like it if—”

  But I had already walked away, headed for the livery. “Come if you’re coming,” I said, leading Tiny Boy. “Your horses are waiting.”

  “But my purchases!” shouted Thomas, his yelping stopping a few folks on the wooden boardwalk fronting the scattering of buildings that made up the downtown of Forsaken.

  “Bring them along,” I shouted back, smiling to myself. I really can be an ass sometimes. But only when I’ve been hoodwinked and lied to.

  It took another half an hour to wrangle with the livery owner to take his old packsaddle back in trade for a riding saddle suitable for the girl.

  “No sidesaddle business here,” he said, before splattering his own boot toes with a sloppy stream of chaw spittle.

  “No matter,” said the girl, showing off a split skirt for riding. Her method of doing so was bold enough to widen the old man’s rheumy eyes.

  “Yes’m,” was all he said as he bent to the task of rerigging the little horse.

  It took far too long to load the foolish amount of near-useless gear Thomas had purchased, which included duplicates of the few vital cooking accoutrements I already told him I had—a fry pan, a coffeepot, two tin cups—his set of four would at l
east be useful for the girl, and on and on.

  Well past the noon mark, our sorry little pack train, of which I was reluctant leader, trudged out of town. I think Tiny Boy was embarrassed. “You and me both, boy,” I said, patting his girthy neck.

  “What’s that you say, Scorfano?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all, Thomas. Let’s make time while the horses are fat and happy, eh?” I tried a smile as I looked over my shoulder at them, but the girl’s eyes may as well have been daggers. And from the way Thomas bounced and jounced in the saddle, it had been some time since he had ridden a steed under the watchful eye of someone who knew of such matters.

  I was about to offer him words of advice regarding sitting a saddle when it occurred to me he would likely end his day in bowlegged pain, his privileged backside aching something fierce. As I said, I can be a stinker when I’ve been crossed.

  We rode for many hours. The waxing moon, pinned high and bright, cast light enough for us to follow the established wagon trail well into that curious time between day and night. A half hour after we cut to our right, headed northward off the trail, I halted Tiny Boy in a pleasant glade of rattle-leaved aspens not far from a rushing brook.

  I turned once more to check on the progress of my companions and was surprised to see Carla not ten yards behind, and though I could not make out the look on her face, I bet it was a smirk of satisfaction. Of Thomas, there was no visible sign, though I was not alarmed as he made noise aplenty. His moans, which hours before he had abandoned any hope of disguising, were piteous and shameful.

  I faced forward once more, indulged in a full-on smile, and toyed with telling them that we were but two hours from our intended camp site. I did not scratch that itch. Best to parcel out one’s pleasures as one may in life, no matter how petty or paltry.

  “We’ll make camp here. Give the horses a good rubdown, feed, and watering, then tend to our own needs.” That was greeted with a mixture of relief and moan from Thomas, who slid from his horse and stood sagged against it, spraddle-legged and whimpering.