The guttering lamp sent shadows chasing across McBride’s face, and the regular rattle of rain on the roof lulled him. He closed his eyes, blinked and tried to stay awake. He had thinking to do.
Why had Clare shot him when only a week before she had saved his life? Did she suspect that he’d killed her father? No, that was impossible. The girl had left him lying unconscious on the ground. She knew that he was not fit to ride, let alone bushwhack an old man at the door to his cabin.
Then why had she wanted to kill him?
McBride’s thoughts chased their tails around his head, going nowhere. Far-off thunder rumbled and water dripped from the top of the barn door and ticked into the mud. He closed his eyes again. And this time he slept.
A soaked coyote trotted toward the barn, attracted by the light. It looked inside but caught the man smell and backed away. Near the cabin the animal sat and yipped to its mate. It waited for the answering yip and then faded into the night.
McBride stirred in his sleep, his lips moving, tormented by phantoms as pain entered his subconscious and invaded a dream.
The little calico kitten, thin, bedraggled, walking on silent feet, made its tentative way into the stall where the big man slept. It sniffed his cheek, was stirred by a memory of a soft voice and gentle hands and curled up on his chest.
McBride slept on.
Sunlight bladed through the barn door and cast a rectangle of yellow light into the stall where McBride slept. He woke to see the kitten staring intently into his face.
‘‘Where have you been, Sammy?’’ he asked, smiling. He stroked the little cat’s matted fur and felt its ribs just under the skin. ‘‘Seems you haven’t been eating well lately. Well, that makes two of us.’’
It took McBride a considerable effort to get to his feet, a terrible weakness in him. The pain in his belly was much less, but it still gnawed like a bad tooth-ache and he felt light-headed and sick. He shoved the battered Colt into the hip pocket of his pants where it would be handy, then forked the mustang hay. His shirt was stiff with blood and he let it flap open as he stepped to the barn door, the kitten in his arms.
The black skies of the night were gone, replaced by an arch of deep violet where drifted a few puffy white clouds. The rising sun reached out to the mountains, deepening the shadows in the crevasses and ridges even as it splashed the flat rock faces with dazzling light. In homage to the newborn day the air smelled fresh, of pines and wildflowers, and came at McBride clean on the wind.
It was a day to make a man feel glad to be alive, and wounded, battered and bleeding though he was, McBride turned his face to the sun and let its warmth embrace him like a woman’s arms. He felt like a man just raised from the dead.
McBride had not liked the idea of sleeping in the cabin, but he had no such qualms about raiding the pantry.
He found eggs, bacon, butter and a round loaf of sourdough bread, dusted with flour, that showed patches of green mold in places. But these he scraped off with a knife and declared to the interested and unblinking Sammy that as far as he was concerned the bread was now edible.
There was firewood enough in the kitchen and some torn-up newspaper. Even in New York McBride could light a stove and he soon had a fire going. He filled the coffeepot at the sink pump and threw in a handful of Arbuckle. When the pot started to boil he scrambled eggs for the kitten, reserving the shells to settle the coffee grounds. As Sammy ate hungrily, McBride sliced a mound of bacon into the fry pan and beat up half a dozen eggs for himself.
Only after he’d eaten did the thought come to McBride that he should check Clare’s bedroom. Perhaps there he could find some clue to her behavior.
The girl’s room was what he expected, frilly, feminine, the scent of her perfume still lingering in the air. But the patchwork quilt on her bed was threadbare, the top of her dresser scarred with age. The furniture, a worn, overstuffed sofa, a couple of rickety chairs and a frayed rug, spoke to McBride of genteel poverty and a history of making do. He remembered Clare’s shabby dress in the restaurant the night he first saw her, in such stark contrast to Lance Josephine’s expensive gambler’s finery. He was not an expert on female fixings, but he had the feeling that the girl had been wearing a hand-me-down.
Clare’s closet was empty. She’d taken everything except for a pair of elastic-sided boots that seemed to be too down-at-heel and scuffed to be worth packing.
Much like my own, McBride thought, shaking his head.
The dresser was also empty, but for a few hairpins and a tortoiseshell comb with most of its teeth missing. Suddenly McBride was embarrassed. The woman had tried to kill him, yet he felt he was invading her privacy.
He went back to the kitchen and poured himself more coffee as the pure light of the aborning day flooded through the window as though it was trying to make everything that was wrong right again.
McBride slept in the barn again that night, and made his way to the cabin at sunup, Sammy running after him.
He fed the kitten and thirty minutes later, as he drank his fourth cup of coffee, a rifle bullet smashed a front window and rattled through the cabin . . . followed by another.
Chapter 17
From his hiding place in the parlor McBride saw two riders tracking back and forth across the front of the cabin, their eyes fixed on the door as though they expected someone to suddenly appear. Both men held their rifles upright, the brass butt plates on their thighs, and they looked tough and ready, hard-faced men who had ridden many a moonlit trail.
‘‘Hell, Boone, he ain’t here,’’ one of the men said, loud enough for McBride to hear. He was tall and thin with sad, hound dog eyes and a knife scar on his left cheek. ‘‘The girl said she gut-shot him. He probably crawled away into the brush an’ died.’’
‘‘Probably,’’ the man called Boone allowed. ‘‘But them ladies told me they want us to kick his body and make sure it don’t come alive again. They don’t trust McBride to die or stay dead.’’ He turned to his companion. ‘‘If you find him still breathing, scatter his brains and then we’re done. Now go check the barn, Russ. I’ll try the cabin.’’
‘‘He isn’t here,’’ Russ said stubbornly.
‘‘Yeah? Well, if he ain’t, you’ll earn the easiest fifty dollars of your life, won’t you? Now, go do like I told you.’’
As Russ muttered his way toward the barn, Boone swung out of the saddle. His eyes wary, he slanted his rifle across his chest and walked to the front door. Boone was a tall man with long, black hair cascading over his shoulders under a flat-brimmed hat. He affected the flamboyant dress of the frontier gambler/ gunfighter and he moved gracefully, with the arrogant self-confidence of a named man.
McBride knew he was up against it.
He moved quickly and silently into the hallway and took up the shooting position he’d been taught by his police instructors. His right arm was straight out, revolver held hammer back, at eye level, the arch of the left foot behind the heel of his right.