“How does Hazel feel about it?”
He flinched, took another deep draw on the smoke. “She’s, uh... not happy. She likes her house in Denver. She likes her creature comforts. Our son and his daughters live there, you know.”
“Hell, I didn’t mean to bust up your happy home.”
Wade shook his head. “She’ll get over it. One of these days, the stage’ll pull up and she’ll step off. Mark my words. She was beautiful once, but now she’s old and fat like me. She knows I’m the only man on God’s good earth who looks at her with eyes that still see beauty. She’ll show.”
York twitched half a frown. “I hope you’re right. I don’t need that on my conscience.”
Wade’s laugh exhaled smoke. “Since when does Caleb York have a conscience? How many men you put down, anyways?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
Wade’s mustached grin filled a bunch of his face. “Sure you do, son. Only the crazy ones don’t keep track. You’re hard, but you ain’t crazy. How many?”
“...Twenty-seven.”
“Countin’ the war?”
“Not counting the war, Ben. You never really know in war how many you put down.”
“How do you sleep at night?”
“Fine.”
“Bad dreams?”
“Only if I got a fever.”
“Good. So I guess I can risk troubling your damn conscience. I got the job I want — this is how I want to spend my last working years. With a badge and a gun and a desk and a chair... and a hundred a month. More than that, with my cut of the taxes I collect.”
“Much more. It’s a good-paying job. I’m glad you’re pleased. I hope Hazel comes around.”
Wade was nodding. “She’ll come around. She’ll step off that stage. You’ll see.”
“Speaking of stages,” York said, and stood. “I have one to catch, in about an hour.”
Wade gave York another face-splitting grin. “I have a bottle in this desk, if it ain’t too early for you. You can spend the rest of your time in Trinidad tellin’ me how sorry you are you got me this job I so dearly wanted.”
York grinned back, snugging on his hat. “No, I have an early lunch date.”
“Certain pretty gal?”
“Certain pretty gal.”
“And I reckon she’s not real happy with you, is she, son?”
“No. Not happy at all.”
“Well, then that’s a knack we share.”
“What is?”
“Disappointin’ our womenfolk.”
York gave his old friend a smile and a nod, then went back out into the pleasant morning. Last night, however, had not been so pleasant. That was when he’d told Willa Cullen that he would be leaving at noon today.
Both Willa and her father had been seated at the big carved Spanish-style dining-room table in the rustic ranch house of the Bar-O. They were having coffee in china cups.
Willa, typically, wore a red-plaid shirt and denims, her straw-yellow hair up and braided in back. Her mother had been Swedish and that came through in pretty features and an hourglass figure. Tall, sturdy of frame, Willa was feminine, but in a Viking kind of way. And right now she looked like she’d be pleased to send him to Valhalla.
Or maybe someplace more southern-ward.
Seated across from York, she met his news with cold eyes and flaming cheeks. At the head of the table sat her father, George Cullen, his white hair thin as desert grass, his eyes milky with blindness.
A big man made smaller by time, Cullen wore a white shirt and a black string tie, his strong, white-mustached face undercut by sunken cheeks, his flesh gray from too much time of late spent indoors. Blind men did not ride the range with their cowhands, no matter how much they might want to.
The old man was first to respond. “I’m disappointed, my boy. I reckoned you and Willa here... I’d hoped...”
York said nothing, looking away from the man’s milky gaze.
Cullen stuck out his hand, still rough from work, despite how little of it he’d been able to do these last few years. York shook the man’s hand. Across from him, Willa was a pretty stick of dynamite trying not to explode.
“Won’t be the same around here,” Cullen said. “We’ve come to think of you as part of the family. Be that as it may, we remain in your debt. Without you, this ranch would be lost to us. That cur Harry Gauge might well be sitting here, where I am... and I would be under the ground.”
“Hard to say,” York said. “Your men were there, backing you. In a pinch, the townspeople came through. But I’m happy to have pitched in.”
Willa’s hands were clenched into small, trembling fists, held before her on the table like those of a child about to throw a tantrum. The red was fading from her cheeks, but her chin was crinkling and trembling and her eyes were tearing up.
Cullen was smiling, his blank eyes looking past York. “You know, my boy, I thought perhaps I might make a rancher out of you. With no son of my own...”
“You have Willa. She can run this ranch. She’d be better at it than most men. Maybe any man... because you raised her, Mr. Cullen.”
Tears were rolling down the young woman’s cheeks, but she made no effort to wipe them away, her hands still fists.
“You may be right,” Cullen said. “But it’s a hard road for a woman to travel alone. I won’t be here forever. She’d be better with a man at her side. And perhaps one day she’ll find herself one.”
Willa got up, her chair scraping on the floor like a wheel coming off a wagon, startling her father, who bounced in his chair some.
Cullen said, “Girl!”
But she was already out of the room.
York said, “She’s upset with me.”
Cullen smiled. “Well, I don’t need eyes to see that, son. Let her cool off some. Are you heading to San Diego? To that Pinkerton position you meant to fill, afore you got sidetracked in Trinidad?”
“That’s right, sir. I’d be number two man in the office, but I won’t be abandoned behind a desk. I’d be leading investigations. I’d be out on manhunts.”
“I hope you know I wish you the best of luck. Should you get out there and it don’t suit you, come back here to us. You’ll always have a place at this table, and in our hearts.”
York rose and rested a hand on the old man’s shoulder and squeezed. Cullen put his hand on York’s and squeezed back.
“Don’t you go forgetting us now,” the old man said.
“Not hardly.”
She was on the porch in the moonlight. The ivory of it suited her. She’d wiped away the tears now, but her lush full lips were trembling.
“I’m sorry to just spring it on you,” York said. “But you knew that I was just taking the sheriff post temporary.”
She nodded. Swallowed. She either didn’t want to speak to him or couldn’t.
He risked a tiny smile. “Would you do a thoughtless lout a small favor?”
She glared at him.
“See me off tomorrow? The stage leaves at noon. Maybe we could have a late breakfast or early lunch — around eleven, there at the hotel?”
She said nothing.
“Would you do that for me, sweetheart?”
She turned toward him, eyes and nostrils flaring like a rearing horse. He might have slapped her, judging by the reaction.
But then she’d done something truly surprising: she nodded, and rushed back inside the ranch house.
When he exited the sheriff’s office, York almost bumped into a familiar figure, standing there waiting like an eager puppy dog: that old desert rat Tulley, skinny and white-bearded, but that beard barbered now, and the baggy canvas pants washed in recent memory and under blue suspenders a clean BVD top. The bowlegged town character had dried out, at York’s encouragement.