“I’ve got something to show you,” Tyree said.
The firelight bronzing his face, he took the deed to Boyd’s ranch from his shirt pocket and wordlessly passed it to Sally. The girl read what the old man had written and looked at Tyree in surprise.
Tyree shrugged. “Luke wanted me to have the place. By rights, it belongs to Lorena. If she cares to claim it, then I’ll hand it back to her.”
For a few moments, Sally sat in silence. Then she said, “Lorena may not want the place, but Quirt Laytham surely does. And when he and Lorena get married, he can claim it legally through his new wife.”
“It seems he doesn’t want to wait that long,” Tyree said. “That’s why he had Darcy kill Luke.”
Sally shook her head. “But, Chance, that just doesn’t make any sense. Why would Laytham murder the father of the woman he intends to wed?” The girl looked at Tyree, red flames dancing in her dark eyes. “Chance, I think someone else has taken cards in this game—the same person who killed Steve Lassiter and then ordered Darcy to murder Luke. There’s another player, a mystery man who wants all the same things Laytham does, especially wealth, and the power that goes with it.”
“Who?” Tyree asked, skepticism heavy in his voice.
Sally shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Luther Darcy?”
“Maybe. But Darcy isn’t the kind to settle in one place for long. Whoever killed Steve Lassiter and Luke Boyd wants to put down roots, dig them deep and found a dynasty.”
“Describes Quirt Laytham to a tee,” Tyree said. “Seems to me your mystery man is no mystery.”
“No, Chance, it’s not him. It’s someone else, someone who shares all of Laytham’s ambitions.”
“Do you have a single shred of proof for all this, Sally?” Tyree asked.
Again the girl shook her head. “No.” She hesitated a few moments, then added, “Just call it woman’s intuition.”
Tyree laughed. “Well, does your woman’s intuition tell you it’s time we were heading for our blankets?”
“You’re making fun of me again, aren’t you?” Sally asked, her cheeks reddening.
“No, no, I’m not.” Tyree smiled. “I’ll think about what you said. But I doubt it will change my mind about Laytham. He was behind the killing of Owen Fowler, and now Steve and Luke. There’s no mystery man, Sally. It’s still only Quirt Laytham.”
“Think what you want, Chance Tyree,” the girl said, her back stiffening. “But I know I am right.”
They bedded down in the barn that night, but Tyree stayed awake for a long time, listening to Sally’s gentle breathing beside him. Could she be right about another player? Was he perhaps Tobin’s mysterious “party of the third” who had offered him a thousand dollars to leave the territory?
In the darkness Tyree shook his head. All the signs pointed to Laytham, no one else. Come morning he planned to make his first move against the big rancher, to let him know the reckoning was about to start.
After a while Tyree closed his eyes, lulled to sleep by the echoing cries of the calling coyotes and the warm closeness of the woman lying beside him.
Tyree and Sally were awake at first light. They shared a can of tomatoes for breakfast, Tyree grieving over the fact of having neither coffee nor tobacco and being fervently wishful for both.
After they’d eaten, Tyree said, “I plan on moving Laytham’s cows out of Owen Fowler’s canyon this morning. Then I aim to check on Mrs. Lassiter.”
“I’ll come with you,” Sally said. “I want to see how she’s holding up.”
“It might be safer if you stay here, Sally,” Tyree said. “Luther Darcy did what he came to do when he shot Luke. I doubt he’ll be back anytime soon.”
An eyebrow arched high on the girl’s forehead and an amused smile played around her lips. “Chance, think about it. When was the last time you punched cows?”
Tyree thought the question through and admitted to himself that he’d forgotten just about all he’d ever learned about cowboying over the years. Those skills had left him a long time before, round about the time he’d bought his first Colt, and his knowledge of the ways of cattle was blunted.
Sally saw the doubt in the young man’s face and she smiled. “I’ve worked cattle all my life, Chance, and did it until recently. Believe me, you’ll need my help to get Laytham’s herd out of the canyon.”
Tyree saw the logic in Sally’s suggestion and he grinned. “You’re right. Maybe it’s best you come along.”
Before they left, Tyree fashioned a sign from scraps of pine board he found in the barn. There was some leftover white paint from one of Boyd’s projects and he hurriedly blocked out some words using a discarded brush he’d also discovered.
Satisfied with his efforts, he carried the sign to his horse, ready to ride.
He and Sally mounted up and they traveled east through the brightening light of the early morning. After the shrouding darkness of night, the silent wilderness of rock around them was again touched with color, the pink, red and yellow of the mesas and ridges and the occasional green of grass and trees. Once they saw a small herd of bighorn sheep mount the almost vertical slope of a mesa, and behind them a flash of molten gold as a hunting cougar bounded with fluid grace from rock to rock.
They reached Fowler’s canyon without incident, seeing no sign of Tobin’s posses. Tyree told Sally she was now the boss since she knew much more about hazing cows out of a canyon than he did.
Sally shook out a loop and for the next couple of hours she and Tyree moved cattle off Fowler’s grass to the east bank of the wash. Sally was an excellent puncher who made the hot, dusty work look effortless. Tyree helped by turning back the occasional stubborn maverick that didn’t want to leave, at first showing more enthusiasm than skill, until the remembered ways slowly came back to him.
“You know, Sally, a man could get used to this again.” He grinned as they stopped in the shade for a while and shared a canteen. “Especially if he was working his own cattle on his own place.”
In the end they moved more than two hundred head, and when it was over Tyree stuck his sign into the ground at the mouth of the canyon.
KEEP OUT
PRIVATE PROPERTY
Sally sat her paint and looked down in amusement at Tyree’s handiwork. “Of course, it could be argued that Laytham has as much right to the canyon as Fowler did,” she said. “I doubt this is deeded land.”
Tyree nodded. “That’s true, except that Owen was here first. As far as I’m concerned he staked his claim to the place.”
“Do you think that sign will keep Laytham from moving his cows back?”
“No,” Tyree answered. “But it will tell him that he’s been notified.”
Sally looked around her. “Well, where do we go from here?”
“We ride north,” Tyree said. “I want to check on Mrs. Lassiter. I don’t want the same thing to happen to her as happened to Luke.”
The Lassiter ranch lay five miles northwest of the La Sal Mountains, a scattering of buildings and corrals alongside a winding, narrow creek with plentiful grazing on both banks. Cattle lay in the shade of the cottonwoods lining the banks or stood belly high in the cool creek water. A red sandstone cliff, all of eight hundred feet high, was an impassible barrier to the north. To the east and west, beyond the creek, the land stretched away level, tufted with sparse grass, in the distance a few dark junipers and after those the sheer, towering walls of flat-topped mesas and rawboned ridges of craggy rock. The wind blew steadily here, coming off the high mountains, carrying with it the smell of sagebrush and pine.
Tyree reined up in the shade of a cottonwood, his eyes scanning the Lassiter ranch and the wild, broken land around him. Nothing moved but the wind that got tangled up in Sally’s hair, blowing shining curls across her cheeks.