To Ford Fargo,
in appreciation of his good humor
and cooperative spirit.
PROLOGUE
Three dead sons.
Just the thought caused Dan Shaye more pain than he felt he could endure—if it turned out to be true.
He’d already lost one son, and his wife, and it had only been a year. He’d barely survived the deaths of Matthew and Mary. If he lost Thomas and James as well, there’d be nothing left for him to live for.
He’d crossed into Colorado several days ago. The trail he was following was barely there. Luckily, he was as good a reader of sign as he had ever met. As long as there was a ghost of a trail, he’d be able to follow it. As long as there was a ghost of a trail, there was a chance he’d find his sons, alive and well.
He filled his canteen from the waterhole he’d camped next to and walked back to his horse. He’d already stomped out his campfire and stored his supplies back in his saddlebags. Traveling light, all he’d had for dinner and for breakfast had been coffee and beef jerky. He didn’t figure he deserved much more than that.
He never should have let them go. They weren’t experienced enough. He mounted up and sat there for a moment, head bowed. He was almost glad their mother was dead, just so he wouldn’t have to tell her how he had gotten their sons killed—all three sons.
1
Daniel Shaye wasn’t all that sure how he and his sons had come to settle in Vengeance Creek, Arizona. Maybe the name had appealed to them. After the Langer gang had robbed the bank in Epitaph, Texas—killing Shaye’s wife, the boys’ mother, during their escape—they had hunted them down and extracted their vengeance at a heavy cost. The man who had ridden his wife down with a horse had paid with his life, but not before he’d killed another member of the family, Shaye’s middle son, Matthew. Vengeance had cost them dearly, so maybe it made sense that they settled some months later in Vengeance Creek.
That had been over a year ago, and now Shaye was the sheriff of Vengeance and his two sons were his deputies. Odd how things happened. Shaye had left his job as sheriff of Epitaph behind, feeling that it had, in part, contributed to the deaths of his wife and son. Arriving in Vengeance Creek penniless and looking for work, he found that the lawman job was open. There had been no election because no one else wanted to run for the office. No one wanted the job. Vengeance Creek had a rowdy populace, and most of them liked the idea of having no lawman.
Shaye recalled discussing the situation with his sons.
“You want to pin on a badge again, Pa?” Thomas had asked. At twenty-six, he was the older of the two remaining sons.
“The way I see it,” Shaye had said, “we’ve got three options, given the skills we have to work with. We can hunt bounty, take up the owl-hoot trail…or pin on badges again.”
“Badges?” James, nineteen, asked. “You mean us too?”
“Well,” Shaye said, “if I’m the sheriff, you two will be my deputies. We’ll present ourselves to the town council as a package deal. Whataya say, boys?”
Thomas and James exchanged a glance, and then Thomas said, “Why not? What have we got to lose?”
Shaye made his presentation to the town council, and they went for it. He became sheriff, and his two sons became his deputies.
Now, roughly nine months after pinning on the badges for the first time, there was some law and order in town. The “rowdy” element had either straightened up or left. It seemed Shaye’s Texas reputation had preceded him, and after he and his boys had handled the first few altercations, the people got the message: You don’t step over the line in Dan Shaye’s town.
Shaye wondered what the people would think if they knew that in his youth he’d been a gunman named Shaye Daniels, with a reputation in Missouri, Kansas, and the Indian Territory. It was more than likely they wouldn’t even recognize the name. But his rep as a lawman—well, that had spread since the word got out that he hunted down not one, but both Langer brothers, and their whole gang.
Shaye got up from his desk and walked over to the window. He looked out at Vengeance Creek’s main street. His boys were out there, making their rounds. Had it been the right thing to do, making them pin badges on again? It had actually been Thomas who killed Ethan Langer, taking revenge for his mother’s and brother’s deaths. Shaye could see the changes in Thomas, changes that killing another man couldn’t help but make. James had changed too.
In fact, they’d all changed since leaving Epitaph to hunt down the Langers, and then leaving again, for good. Maybe, he thought, he should have allowed the boys to make up their own minds about what they wanted to do. Oh, he’d given them a choice, but they knew he wanted them to take this job with him, and they would have died before disappointing him. Perhaps it was time, now, to give them the push to make their own choices about their lives.
Then again, as a young man he’d made his own choice, and it had been the wrong one. Maybe if he’d had the strong hand of a father in his life, it would have been different. But both of his parents had died of a fever, leaving him to make his own way. His boys had lost their mother, but they still had a father around to help them.
It was coming up on a year since their mother and brother had been killed. Maybe it was time to sit down and have a family meeting. They were, after all, men, and men deserved the leeway to make up their own minds….
In another part of town, Thomas and James Shaye were peering into the bank through the front window. Well, James was looking inside. Thomas’s eyes were sweeping the street, watching for trouble.
“There she is,” James said suddenly.
“James, if you like this girl so much why don’t you go in and talk to her?”
“I have talked to her.”
“When?”
“Just yesterday.”
“You mean when you made a deposit?” Thomas asked. “What did you say, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’?”
James turned to look at his big brother. “I don’t want to rush into anything, Thomas.”
“Because you’re scared?”
“No,” James said patiently, “because I don’t want to scare her.”
Thomas took a moment to lean down and look into the bank through the window. “Which one is she?”
“The blonde.”
“The skinny one?”
“She’s not skinny,” James said defensively. “She’s just…kind of slender.”
Thomas straightened and looked at his brother. “Well, she’s a little too skinny for me. Come on, we’ve got to finish our rounds.”
Thomas started walking away, while James took one more peek through the window at Jenny Miller, his favorite bank teller, and then hurried to catch up.
Vengeance Creek had appealed to both of them because it was roughly the same size as Epitaph. During the hunt for the Langers, they’d been through small towns and larger places, like Oklahoma City, but both Thomas and James preferred something in between, a place not very small, with some growing left to do.
Lately, however, Thomas had been growing restless. He knew he’d changed since killing Ethan Langer, but he wasn’t all that sure how. He only knew that of late he’d been thinking of those nights on the trail with his father and his brothers. He’d learned a lot from his father during the months they’d been hunting the Langers. They all had. But it seemed to him it was all going to waste just being a deputy in a town like Vengeance Creek.
James was not quite as restless as his brother. He’d settled in a bit more, had made a few friends, and had spotted a girl he liked. But he was young—barely twenty—and none of those things appealed to Thomas very much.