Mildred managed to quiet the despairing teenager, even persuading him to eat a little chicken soup with some barley. But in half an hour or so, he stood and announced he was going to his own room to go to bed.
“Get some sleep,” Krysty suggested.
“Sleep’s no good,” he replied. “Sleep changes nothing that happened today.”
“Come on.” She put her arm around him, but he pulled away from her. “There isn’t a thing that can change what happened today, Michael.”
“Of course. I might be a useless coward, Krysty, but I’m not a stupe.”
In the immense stillness of the New Mexico desert, the moon rose and sailed serenely across the diamond-speckled sky. Ryan woke once, a couple of hours before dawn, and listened to the faint sound of Michael weeping.
“I can hear it, too,” Krysty whispered. “And I can feel his pain and loneliness. He hates himself, you know? Really loathes himself for what happened and what he did. What he didn’t do. I pity him, lover.”
“So do I. But he has to see it through himself. We can help him some, but he has to live with himself.”
Chapter Ten
“I knocked on Michael’s door, but he didn’t answer. I thought it best to leave him.”
“All right, Dean. Thanks anyway.” Ryan looked at his son, aware that the young boy was considering saying something, something that he wasn’t sure about. “Yeah?”
“When we go after the General and his gang, will we have to take Michael with us?”
“Why?”
He shuffled his feet, staring past his father, out through the window that faced south.
“I don’t want to be with him.”
Krysty was sitting next to Ryan, buttering some slices of wholewheat toast. “Because you think he behaved like a coward yesterday?”
“Guess so.”
Doc sat across the table, leaning back and rubbing his fingers over the white stubble on his chin. “I should shave before we leave on this chase. If I am to meet my Maker, then I would wish to be presentable.” He looked at Dean. “You think that Michael failed to show courage, do you?”
“Yeah, Doc, I do.”
“Depends what you mean by courage, son.”
“I mean not hiding in the straw when a woman and a baby are getting murdered, Doc.”
The old man nodded. “Sure, I can see that, Dean. Of course I can. But I don’t quite see how anyone would have been helped by Michael getting himself murdered as well. And, let there be no doubt that he would have been murdered within moments of appearing to these men.” He looked across at J.B. and Jak. “Is that not so, gentlemen?”
The Armorer nodded, but Jak ignored the question.
“Still, a man should try or die trying, Doc.” Dean wasn’t convinced.
“If we had found all three dead, then there would have been no way at all for us to have learned what had happened, who the killers were. How many and how were they armed. What were the Indians doing here. So many questions and no answers to any of them. At least you should credit Michael with providing us with that information, Dean.”
Mildred wiped her mouth and pushed her chair back. “Someone should go and wake Michael up. Sleep is probably good for him, but you can have too much of even a good thing. Dean, can you go and try again?”
For a moment Ryan thought that his son’s unease over Michael’s behavior was going to make him refuse to go. But Dean nodded and walked across the room.
They all heard him knocking, then calling out the teenager’s name, knocking one more time.
“Just go in,” Jak shouted. “No bolt on door.”
Dean was back in a dozen beats of the heart.
“Gone,” he said.
Nobody had heard the teenager leave the farmhouse, though he’d unlocked and bolted the back door. There were the marks of bare feet outside, fresh in the dew-damp earth, but they merged and blurred with the trampled trail of boots and horses and the wags, vanishing close by the trim vegetable garden.
“Perhaps he has gone into the hills from whence cometh all help,” Doc suggested.
“What do you feel, lover?” Ryan asked.
Krysty closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t feel a thing. Nothing. If he’s left the spread, then he must have made good time and gone a long way off.”
They split up to quarter the land around the homestead, hoping to pick up Michael’s trail.
Dean and Doc stayed closer to home, thoroughly searching the house and then the outbuildings. The young boy was checking the large barn.
Doc was walking toward the smaller barn when Dean reemerged almost at once.
“In here,” he called. “I found him, Doc.”
Dean was crying.
Chapter Eleven
Dean ran to fetch the others. By the time they all gathered in the dusty shadows of the barn, Doc had dragged a sawhorse alongside the dangling body and managed to clamber unsteadily onto it, his sword stick drawn.
“Perhaps you can steady him while I cut through the rope,” he said.
“Poor Michael.” Jak sighed. “No need for this. Doesn’t do no good.”
Ryan and J.B. positioned themselves under the feet, ready to take the weight. There was a three-legged stool kicked to one side that Michael must have used to stand on, the rawhide rope thrown over one of the main beams. An end had been knotted to the side of a horse’s stall, the other around his throat.
He must have measured it carefully before stepping off into eternity. Allowing for the stretching of the rope under his deadweight, the calculation had been about right. Michael’s bare feet were less than three inches from the chaff-covered floor of the large, echoing barn.
“Broke his neck clean,” J.B. said.
“Looks that way,” Ryan agreed.
Mildred had been staring up into the dead youth’s face with a dispassionate, professional interest. She heard their comments and nodded. “I think that’s so. At least, I devoutly hope that it’s so.”
“By the Three Kennedys! This is like trying to slice through a bar of iron. Can you take his weight, or I fear that I’ll never cut the rope.”
Ryan and J.B. did as Doc asked them. There was a drying damp patch across the front of Michael’s silver-threaded black jeans, where his bladder had relaxed at his passing. Ryan wrinkled his nose as he held the dead boy by the thighs, aware that he had also fouled himself.
“Ah, now it’s going. Hold him Now.”
There was a sound like a bowstring breaking, and the full one-forty pounds that had been Michael Brother dropped into J.B.’s and Ryan’s arms.
The head hung limply on the neck, the eyes milky and blank. His mouth was open, showing a tiny smear of blood across the lower lip. The rope had bitten deeply into the teenager’s throat, almost invisible in the swollen flesh. Ryan noticed as they lowered the body carefully to the floor that Michael had made an efficient job of speeding his own passing from life. There was a thick double knot, positioned precisely beneath the left ear, designed to force the head to one side and snap the neck in the drop.
“Didn’t have to do this,” Jak repeated. “It don’t do anyone any good.”
Dean stood by the heavy double doors of the barn, leaning against the wall of one of the stalls, his face buried in his hands.
Doc wobbled and nearly fell as he hopped clumsily off the sawhorse, resheathing his sword stick. “The inscription on the Toledo steel says that the blade should never be sheathed without honor,” he said. “I do not feel there is a great deal of honor in cutting down the stiffening body of a dear young friend who found that life was too much for him.”
Mildred had dropped to her knees alongside the corpse, shaking her head sadly.
“Why like this, Michael?” she whispered. “We could have helped you. All of us.”
“Was it fast?” Jak asked.
Her strong doctor’s fingers were probing at Michael’s neck, moving the head gently from side to side. “Can someone lend me a knife to cut the rope away?”
Ryan was the quickest, offering his slender-bladed flensing knife.
“Good.” She slid the needle point beneath the cord, managing to avoid slicing into the cold waxen flesh. “The boy certainly knew what he was doing,” she said, confirming what Ryan himself had already noticed.
“Would he have suffered for very long?” Doc asked. “I had a close friend who once, perforce, witnessed a hanging in some frontier township. I believe it was the sheriff of the place. Could it have been Bannock? I disremember. Though I do recall that he said it was snowing and bitterly cold. But his account of the wretched victim’s choking and kicking as he slowly strangled to death over fifteen minutes or more has always remained with me. I hope it was not so.”