It was cold in the big old house, and the rooms were dark and shadowed. A little of the last light of evening filtered through the heavy shutters. The house was dusty, and the air was stale and old. When a woman had to stand guard all day little time was left for housekeeping. She who had kept the neatest house in the Cumberland hills now had only a kitchen in which she dared live.
Talon had been a builder, as his family had been. He had come down from French Canada to build a steamboat for river traffic. The first of his line to live west of the Atlantic had been a shipwright, and since then they had all been shipwrights, millwrights, bridge-builders and workers with timber.
Pa had built keel boats, several steamboats, a dozen mills and bridges, and finally this house. He built with his own hands and he built to last. He had felled the timber, seasoned it, and shaped each piece with cunning hands. He dug the cellar himself and walled it with native stone, and he had prepared for every eventuality he could think of.
Looking out now Em saw the men huddled under their tarp, lashed by wind and rain. In each flash of lightning she could see something else. Every rock—a dozen at least—was painted white with black numerals on the side facing the house. The numerals represented the range, the number of yards from the door to that particular rock. Pa was a thoughtful man, and he preferred his shooting to be accurate.
Yet now pa was gone and she was alone, and her sons did not know how desperately she needed them.
She was exhausted. Her bones ached, and when she sat down she only managed to get up with an effort. Even making tea was a struggle, and sometimes when she eased her tired body into a chair she thought how easy it would be just to stay, to never make the effort to rise again.
It would be easy, too easy, and nothing had ever been easy for her.
She had nursed three children with a rifle across her knees. She had driven two cowhands back to the ranch, both of them gut-shot and moaning.
The first man she killed had been a renegade Kiowa, the last man a follower of Jake Planner. There had been several in between, but she never counted.
They were going to win. She could not last forever, and Jake Planner could hire more men. He could keep them out there until exhaustion destroyed her and her will to resist
So far she had managed catnaps, which had been enough since the old often require less sleep than the young. Yet one day she would nap a little too long and they would come up the trail and put an end to her.
They would fire the house. That was the simplest way for them. They could then say the house caught fire and that she died with it. The explanation would be plausible enough, and whoever came to investigate—if anyone came—would be anxious to get the job over with and go home.
The nearest law was miles away, and the trails were rough.
Emily Talon had but one hope. That the boys would come home. It was for that she lived, it was for that she fought.
“Hold the ranch for the boys,” pa had always said. Had he any idea how long it would be?
Of their six sons, only two were living when pa died. The oldest died at sixteen when a horse fell on him, and the second had been killed by Indians on the plains of western Nebraska. A third had died only four weeks after birth, and the fourth had died in a gun battle with rustlers right here on the Empty.
The two who remained were far apart in years as well as their thinking. Barnabas had wanted to go away to Canada to school, and had done so. When his school was nearly completed he had gone off to France to finish and had lived there with relatives. He had served in the French army, or something of the kind.
Milo was younger by eight years. Where Barnabas was cool, thoughtful and studious, Milo was impetuous, energetic, and quick-tempered. At fifteen he had hunted down and killed the rustler who killed his brother on the Empty. A year later he killed a would-be herd-cutter in the Texas Panhandle. At seventeen he had gone off to join the Confederate army, had become a sergeant, then a lieutenant. The war ended and they heard no more of him.
Nor had they heard from Barnabas. His last letter had come from France several years before.
Em Talon added sticks to the fire, then shuffled into the front hall to peer through the shutters. There were intermittent flashes of heat lightning, and she saw no movement, heard no sound other than the rain.
She feared rain, for during a heavy rain storm she could not hear or see nearly so well. And her watchers were snug in their holes under the rocks.
Planner and his men were not yet aware of the part played by her watchers. Inside the gate, yet near it, there were piles of rocks gathered from the prairie and adopted as homes by several families of marmots. Quick to whistle when anything strange moved near, they had warned her on more than one occasion, and her ears were tuned to their sound.
Returning to her chair she eased herself down and leaned back with a sigh. There had been a time when she had ridden free as the wind across these same plains, ridden beside Talon, feeling the wind in her hair and the sun warm upon her back.
During those first hard years she had worked with rope and horse like any cowhand. She hunted meat for the table, helped to stretch the first wire brought on the place, and helped pa at the windlass when he dug his well.
She was old now, and tired. The long, wakeful nights left her trembling, yet she was not afraid. When they came after her in the end she hoped but for one thing, that she would awaken in time to get off a shot.
Nothing had frightened her in the old days, but then pa had always been close by, and now pa was gone.
Slowly her tired muscles relaxed. Thunder rumbled out there, and the heat lightning showed brief flashes through the cracks of the shutters. She must take another look soon. In a little while.
Her eyes closed … only for a minute, she told herself, only for one brief, wonderful minute.
2
Nobody needed to tell me what I needed was a place out of the rain and a good, hot meal. Maybe a drink. The long-geared, raw-boned roan I was riding had run himself into the ground and was starting to flounder. We’d come a far piece together, and we’d come fast. It began to look like I’d outrun trouble for the time, but then I wasn’t going to make any bets until I’d seen the cards.
Lightning flashed and there looked to be rain-wet roofs off there. A cold drop of rain slipped down the back of my neck and down my spine, and I swore.
I’d no idea whose slicker I was wearing, but I was surely pleased to have it instead of leaving it with him. Anyway, he would be nursing a headache for the next few days and should ought to stay in bed.
It was a town off there, sure enough. Or what passed for a town in this country.
There were six or eight buildings that might be stores or saloons and a scattering of shacks folks might live in. Lights shone from a set of four windows. There was a “Hotel” sign over two of them, so I turned in at the livery stable.
Seemed to be nobody around so I found myself an empty stall, stripped the gear from the roan, rubbed him dry with a few handfuls of hay, and then taking rifle and saddlebags I walked up front.
Of a sudden there was a pounding of hoofs and a team came tearing around the corner and into the street, coming at a belly-to-the-ground dead run. Me, I’d started for the saloon in that hotel building and I jumped clear just in time to keep from being run over.
The driver pulled up in front of the hotel and got down, a wisp of a girl in a rain-wet dress that clung to a mighty cute shape. She tied the team and went inside.
When I fetched open the door and came in quiet she was the center of attention, all wet and bedraggled in the middle of the floor.
There weren’t more than five or six men in the place. A big, blond man wearing a red shirt and a nasty kind of smile stood at the bar.