“How should I know?”
He hung up the towel, studying her face. She grinned at him. He couldn’t guess what she was thinking, but he felt a chill inside. Where Elena rode, trouble rode not far behind. He’d seen men fight over her like beasts. He still carried a ridge of scar tissue under his jaw from the fight.
“How’d you find me?”
“We’ve known where you were for three months. Ed passed through San Miguel one day. He sees a man loading supplies on an old, spraddle-wheeled wagon. Who’s that, he asks a bystander, and the fellow says, ‘Name of Ledbetter,’ and Ed says, ‘Ledbetter?’ and rides on.”
Brad went into the kitchen, ladled beans into a dish, added jerky, broke a chunk from a pone of bread, and sat down to eat. Elena sat across the table from him. She watched him eat, smiling every time their eyes met.
“I still like you,” she said, directly.
“And I like you — as long as we keep the distance of the table between us.”
She pouted; then laughed. “Don’t prod me, Brad. I’m one of those women who hankers after anything she can’t have.”
He got up and poured himself a cup of scalding coffee, which Elena had heated and left on the sheetiron stove. “Quit talking around the point,” he said. “What brought you here?”
“Maybe just didn’t have anyplace to go.”
“What about Jeffers?”
Elena curled her arms on the table, rested her face against them for a moment before looking up again. Her eyes and face suddenly looked older — no less beautiful, but tired. “They bit off more than they could chew, Brad. The lot of them. They tried to rob a bank in Three Corners. Jeffers shot the cashier, and when they stepped outside, the town was a hornet’s nest. Your brother Ed got pretty bad shot up. Clem Hathaway killed the man that did it.”
She had omitted mention of old Cos. Brad set his coffee mug down. “And Pa?”
She licked her lips. “He was killed, Brad. I guess the townspeople of Three Corners put him in their boothill.”
He rested his hands on the window sill after he turned from her, and let his head drop. He’d known it was bound to happen somewhere, some time. He was glad his ma didn’t have to live through this day.
He raised his head, saw the sun sinking redly, and a fleeting moment passed during which he felt strange and alien to this earth.
“Brad,” Elena said behind him, “I’m sorry. It’ll be rough when word filters down here about the robbery — folks knowing you’re a Pickens, I mean.”
“Nobody knows.”
“How about that girl, the one who was here?”
“It won’t make any difference to her. She’ll not tell until I’m ready.”
“You trust her a lot.”
“I’d bet my life on her.”
“Not much like me, huh, Brad?” Elena laughed. “Or maybe a lot like me. I’d fight the devil for the man I loved.” She stood up. “I just wanted to be sure, Brad. About your being safe, I mean — and, well, able to go on living your kind of life no matter what your pa and Ed have done.”
He eyed her narrowly. She wrinkled her nose at him. “Maybe I’m just tired. Let me sleep in the barn tonight and help me find some kind of work in town tomorrow — you must know people here. Your word would mean something. I’ll make good, Brad. I won’t bring shame on you so long as I know you’re safe and respectable here.”
“So far, I am.” On sudden impulse he said, “All right, Elena, I’ll see if I can help. You take the house. I’ll bunk in the barn tonight.”
“Thanks, Brad. Now scoot to one side and let me at those dishes.”
As he moved from the kitchen, he turned and looked at her stacking dishes in the tin pan. She looked like a kid playing house. Soft, trusting, innocent. That’s the way she looked.
Jeffers’s woman.
Saffron lamplight etched the lace curtains against the windows of the Hammer ranch house as Brad dismounted and stepped on the porch.
His nostrils caught the odor of rank pipe tobacco, and a shadow down the porch spoke, “Evening, Brad.”
“Hello, Mr. Simmons. Laura around?”
“And where else would she be?” Mike Simmons asked. He shifted his chair; a tinge of lamplight touched his face. He was a gnarled, weathered old man with a square face and iron-gray hair. He had come here forty years ago and built the Hammer with nothing but a good horse and determination. Some said his loop had been long and his branding iron quick in those early days. But times had been different then, and so had practices.
Now he was old, and rheumatism kept him off his horse, and a quick pain bored through his heart sometimes. Brad knew the old man’s major thought nowadays was of Laura and her heritage, the Hammer. It would take a man with a lot of assets to handle the two properly, and so far old man Simmons had given no indication that he felt Brad to be such a man.
Brad was always aware of this feeling when he was in Simmons’s presence. It was almost as if Simmons suspected his inner secret, his uncertainty and hesitation.
Mike Simmons spoke of the recent rains, and then Laura came to the porch.
“I thought I heard familiar voices out here,” she said. “How is the heifer, Brad?”
“All right, I guess.”
Mike Simmons cleared his throat in the silence that descended. He knocked his pipe out and got painfully to his feet. An offer to help him would have been considered an insult.
“Need to go over some figures in my tally books,” he excused himself. “Don’t be too long, Laura.”
“All right, Pa.”
The old man shuffled inside. Laura sat down beside Brad on the porch swing. He thought of Cos, a renegade, blasted by the bullets of decent people, and he felt the quiet security of the Hammer about him and wondered if he would ever feel at home in a world like this.
Laura touched his hand. “What’s troubling you, Brad?”
“Elena told me my father was killed, my brother hurt not long ago.”
“Oh, Brad! I’m sorry!”
“Nothing could have stopped it. It’s the end of the Pickens gang. Maybe in a few years folks will think of the old man less harshly. He just had a devil inside of him that wouldn’t let him be satisfied.” He worried his hat in his hands. “It may be that I’ll have to find Ed, my brother, and give him what help I can. Elena says he hit a long trail with Jeffers and a man named Clem Hathaway. Meantime — well, the girl needs help too, Laura.”
Again he felt her withdrawal. She said, “You were in love with her once, weren’t you?”
“I thought I was,” he said honestly.
“Are you now?”
“No.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Put in a word for her if you hear of work in town. Give her some of your old clothes, maybe. She’s a pretty destitute little animal.”
“With claws.”
Despite the weight on his spirit, Brad grinned. “I’ll see that her claws stay away from me.”
“They’d better.”
Brad stood up. Laura stood with him. He gripped her shoulders, brushed her lips with his. It was like tasting sweet wine. He held her close.
“Brad, let’s tell Pa who you really are. Now. Right now. Then let’s get a license and stand up before a marrying parson.”
Laura was voicing his wish, his deepest hope. He was lost in the thought of her in the cabin on the B Bar L, rising with him each morning with her hair loose about her shoulders, her voice ringing out to him as he came each evening. Then his mind did an about-face, toward reality. “Old Mike would run me off the Hammer if he knew right now.”