“He’d like that, too.” I stood as the horse nickered again, this time more persistently. I carefully lifted my leg over the guardrail, moved to the right, and adjusted my crutches under my arms. “If you don’t mind grabbing that Henry, I think there’s somebody back here that wants to see you.” Second smile, possibly even brighter than the first. Wahoo Sue stamped her hooves, banged against the sides of the trailer, and whiffled in full voice. “I had the veterinarian, Mike Pilch, check her out, and he said she was in surprisingly good shape, considering all she had been through.”
Mary’s hands went up to the openings in the side of the trailer like leaves attempting to find sunshine. The big mare stamped again and began running the sides of her head against the long fingers that now twined their way into the trailer. I could still see the pulsing, blue blood of the woman’s temples as it coursed its way back to her heart. Her voice was soft. “So-o-o girl, good girl.”
I rested the rifle in my lap and gave them a little while. “So-”
She turned to look at me. “So what?”
“What are you going to do with the ranch?”
There was no hesitation. “Rebuild it.” She continued to stroke Wahoo Sue. “It was always my dream, my place-not his.” She glanced over her shoulder toward Absalom. “It’s a good little town; it just had a few bad characters in it.”
The bandita leaned against the trailer and looked at me. “There’s just one thing I can’t figure out.”
Leave it to the associate degree.
“What’s that?” I ran my hands over the old repeater and adjusted my hat.
“Why did Wade try to kidnap Benjamin?”
“Wade couldn’t afford to have very many of those kites around, but it was the only insurance he had for when he resurfaced again-and with his track record he would have. Without it, the mob would’ve eventually killed him, so he had to stick around till it turned up. Even drugged, Mary knew that list was important and took it and then passed it off to Hershel, but as near as I can figure there must’ve been a witness. Wade couldn’t get at Mary, Hershel wouldn’t tell him, so that left only one person who might know where the information was.”
I studied the boy as I wrestled my pocketknife from the front of my jeans and laid the historic, lever-action carbine in my lap. “Or maybe Benjamin here knew something.” I smiled at the boy. He ducked his head and started chewing on the stampede strings. “Am I right?”
He looked at all of us. “I’m not supposed to say.”
“Because you promised?” He nodded, looking more serious than I’d ever seen him. “But the man who made you promise is gone, right?” He nodded some more but didn’t say anything. “Now, as a sworn deputy of Absaroka County, you’re not supposed to keep secrets from your boss.”
He finally spoke. “Yes, but a promise to el hombre muerto is a sacred trust.”
I put up a hand. “That’s okay, you don’t have to say anything. I wouldn’t want you to betray him.” They all watched as I placed the point of my knife in the slot of one of the tiny screws that attached the commemorative brass plate to the stock of the. 44 Yellow Boy. “One of the things a man holds very dear is his fortune.” I looked into the dark eyes of the boy. “Right?”
He nodded. “Right.”
I loosened the one screw, handed it to Benjamin, and started on another as I looked at the name on the brass plaque. “The fellow who originally had this rifle didn’t fare too well in the end, but your fortune is your fortune.”
The boy watched as I unscrewed another and handed it to him. “The next fellow that had it didn’t end up too well, either, but he was a heck of a guy while he was here, wasn’t he?”
Benjamin nodded solemnly.
“And when he used to say that his fortune was in this rifle, he meant more than the amount of money it’s worth, didn’t he?”
The boy continued to nod as I handed him the last two screws and used a fingernail to delicately pry up the small brass plaque. There, embedded in a carefully routed groove, was one of the tiny scrolls that Hershel used to pick up from the checkout line at Kmart.
I used the point of my knife to lift the end of the plastic encapsulated fortune and pulled it out into my hand. I put the knife on the surface of the horse trailer’s fender, carefully slid the tiny roll of paper from the cellophane sleeve, and unrolled it from end to end, holding it with my fingertips.
The writing, so small you could barely make it out with the naked eye, stretched from end to end, front and back.
I glanced up at them and then carefully rolled Wade Barsad’s kite and slipped it back in the clear plastic sleeve.
Mary backed up the Escalade and guided the hitch to my horse trailer. Juana watched as I carefully placed the paper fortune into my shirt pocket and then reattached the plaque onto the repeater that had first belonged to a buffalo soldier and then to a cowboy. “How long have you known about the rifle?”
“Since we camped on the mesa. He kept repeating that line about his fortune being in this Henry, and I think that was his way of telling me without telling me.”
She looked stymied. “Why didn’t he just tell you?”
I thought about it as I lifted the Yellow Boy and propped it on my knee. “I don’t know. He was careful, and he didn’t know me, at least not well enough to actually tell me, I guess.”
She looked at Benjamin, who was playing with Dog in the dry lot across the road. “But he knew you were a sheriff.”
“That didn’t count for much in the old cowpuncher’s worldview.” She still looked confused. “Hershel was like a lot of the old boys from this part of the country-he didn’t trust a title. With him, you had to earn it.”
She smiled the perfectly formed smile. “Well, you did that.”
I looked toward the hills east, and to the Battlement at Twentymile Butte rising above the Powder River plain. “No… if I’d really earned it, he’d be here with us.” Before she could say anything else, I continued, “So, any of those bureau types giving you a hard time about being illegal?”
She glanced over her shoulder as Mary got out to hook up the trailer electricals to the Cadillac. “No, I’ve got a protectress, and she has lawyers who are working for my citizenship.”
I nodded. “So what are you and Benjamin going to do?”
“Benjamin is going to go to school, and I’m going to work for Mary and get my degree. Then I think I’ll go down to Laramie and finish up-maybe work for the FBI someday.” I didn’t say anything, waiting for her to throw the signature fist to her hip just as she had on the first day I’d met her. “What?”
I shrugged in the face of Latin attitude. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
As Juana went to collect Benjamin and Dog, Mary came back to open the upper hatch of the trailer’s Dutch door so that Wahoo Sue could hang her head out. Mary stepped up on the railing at the fender, and I watched as the horse stuck her muzzle out to her as she exhaled. I smiled to myself as Mary gently slipped her arms around the big mare’s neck. Sue, in turn, dropped her head and pulled the woman against the side of the trailer in a sort of armless hug.
“Hell of a horse.”
She turned to look at me. “Yes, she is.”
Her eyes stayed with me, even as I studied the brass plaque on the heavy rifle. “Mary, I’ve got a question about the list. I think Hershel got it from you.”
It was quiet for a moment, and the only sound was the mare’s hard shoes on the wooden surface of the trailer floor. “Me?”
“I can’t be sure, but I’m pretty positive. You were the only one who knew what that list was other than Wade, and I doubt he gave it to Hershel.” I could tell she was thinking. “You might’ve done a lot of things you weren’t aware of under the influence of those sedatives.”
She didn’t move, and even her slender hands, which were still entwined in the horse’s mane, were still. “Including kill a man?”
I took a breath and felt tired. “Nope, not that. I’ll tell you what I think happened, and then you can decide about it and see if it finally falls into place.” I swallowed and started in. “I think Wade drugged his brother and shot him, then brought you in there and had you shoot a dead man, a man who looked remarkably like Wade and a man, deep down, you wanted to be rid of.”