“Maybe I come soon.”
“Come when you will, Olson. There’s good farmland further west where a man like you could make it pay. Get you away from this river riff-raff.”
“Aye, I t’ink I come.”
With a fast mile behind them, Mac slowed the pace. “Can you make it, Dal?”
“I’ve been thrown off, Mac, but I never fell off. You just keep a-goin’. All I want is to get home. I want to see the folks again. I want to put my feet under ma’s table. I just want to be there!”
“Me, too, Dal. Let’s go.” They walked their horses into the night, but Mac knew they could not go far. The big gray was a splendid horse, but he was used up. They would have to find a place to rest and hide.
They rode past rail fences and muddy lanes, old log barns and patches of forest. In the distance, they saw a lighted window. “Somebody sick,” Mac commented. At that hour there’d be no reason for a farmer to be up. They remembered such times from their own home.
“You heard from the folks?” Mac asked.
“They think I’m dead.”
“How’s that?”
“My outfit was cut off, almost wiped out. Took us six weeks, travellin’ by night to get back to our own people. I’d been reported killed in action.”
“I had no mail,” Mac said. “There wasn’t much chance, south to north.”
Behind some woods he found an old log barn. Inside it was dry and clean, smelling of new-mown hay, although at this time of year that was unlikely. Tying their horses in two of the stalls, Mac put hay into the mangers, and scrounging around, found some corn in a bin, which he also gave the horses.
Dal had stretched out in the hay and was asleep almost at once.
Mac Traven went to the door and peered outside. It was still raining, but risk or no risk, Dal must have rest, and so must their horses. All was quiet but the falling rain. He waited at the door, listening, then walked back and lay down in the hay.
Four years … he was just past thirty and pa would be pushing sixty-five, and ma was a good ten years younger. He was a poor hand at remembering ages and had only the vaguest idea of how old his sister was. Girls changed so fast once they started to grow up.
When the War broke out he fled Texas in the night, determined to fight to preserve the Union. He felt, as old Sam Houston had, that their first loyalty was to the nation. Dal had felt otherwise and joined a Texas cavalry outfit.
Mac lay back on the hay, hands clasped behind his head, ears tuned for the slightest sound. The sound of rain on the roof was pleasant and he was very tired, yet if he slept their enemies might come upon them unheard.
Before the War he had served four years with the Texas Rangers, four years of almost continual warfare with Comanches, Kiowas, and border bandits. Upon his arrival in Ohio his skills were discovered, and among men who knew nothing of actual combat his advancement was rapid.
At last, he was going home. Four years as a Ranger and now four years in the Army with no visits at all.
It was he who had located their original ranch, seeing it first when on patrol with the Rangers, and buying it from old Sandoval, who wanted to live his last years in San Antonio. Twenty-three thousand acres of Spanish land grant. Then he had ridden alone into Comanche country to see old Rising Water.
The old Comanche had studied him shrewdly as they sat cross-legged in his lodge, knowing all the while who he was and that he had been a Ranger. “Are you a friend to the Comanche?” Rising Water had asked.
“I have fought the Comanche and found them great warriors. I was honored by their courage. If the Comanche come to me in peace, there shall be peace between us. If they come to me in war, who am I to refuse them?” Mac indicated things he placed upon the ground. “I have bought this land from Sandoval. In addition I would give this to you who are Comanches. Twenty new skinning knives, twenty new blankets, three sacks of sugar, and five fat steers, and there shall be five fat steers each year for five years.”
Suddenly Dal’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Mac? It was bushwhackers tried to kill me. It was them who wounded me and left me for dead, and they knew me, Mac, they knew who they were shooting at.”
Mac waited, listening. They knew Dal? What could that mean?
“I heard them, Mac. One of them said, ‘That’s Dal Traven. That’s one more of them we don’t have to worry about.’ ”
Mac raised up on one elbow. “Are you sure? This is a long way from Texas.”
“I’m sure. The man who shot me was riding Ranch Baby.”
Ranch Baby? Pa’s sorrel gelding, the colt born shortly after they moved on the place.
Suddenly, Mac was scared. Had something gone wrong back home? Or was it simply a case of a stolen horse?
No … everything would be all right. Pa was there, and Jesse. Jesse would be a man now.
Two
When morning showed its light through the cracks in the barn door, Mac Traven brushed the hay and straw away from a place on the dirt floor and built a fire there. Then he got out the Swede’s coffee-pot and made coffee. There was a chunk of bread in the pack and some dried beef and venison.
Dal opened his eyes to the fire and lay quiet, looking at it and feeling better than he had in weeks.
“Coffee smells good,” he said, “and there’s warmth in the fire.”
“That’s stored-up sunlight, boy,” Mac said, smiling. “Through all its long years that tree was catching sunlight and storin’ it away for this moment. What you see in that fire is something captured from the sun.”
Carefully, Dal sat up, reaching for his boots. “I remember the fires back home when you or pa started them up of a morning. I never enjoyed them quite as much after I had to do the starting myself. I used to scrunch down in my blankets until the fire warmed up the room.
“I remember how we used to stand at the loop-holes peekin’ out to see if there was Injun sign before we opened the door. And then we’d stand waitin’ a bit and watchin’ color come into the sky.
“Ol’ Tennessee hound would scout the barn and corrals for us, and if there was an Injun around he’d let us know soon enough.
“By that time ma would have some bacon on, if we had any, or beef if we hadn’t, an’ by the time we got back to the house our breakfast was on an’ ready. Man, I’ve thought of those breakfasts many a time durin’ this war.”
Mac saddled their horses and then returned to the fire for bread and jerked beef. They sat in silence, chewing, and then Mac said, “At least you’ve Kate to wait for you.”
“She’s waitin’, I guess. We sort of taken it for granted, the two of us. I don’t recall ever sayin’ much about it, but we had it in mind.”
“You’ve got to ask them, Dal. Women like to be asked. It never pays to take anything for granted.”
They drank the last of the coffee, and Mac put out the fire, covering it with dirt from the floor. Then he offered a hand to Dal.
Dal said, “You mount up. I’m not as fit as I might be, but I can still climb into a saddle.” Dal put a foot in the stirrup, hesitated, and then heaved himself into the saddle, but when he sat solid with his feet in the stirrups his face was white and sick.
Mac said, “As long as you’re up there, you ride out first, but keep your rifle handy. I’ll close the door behind us. Somebody else might need a dry place to sleep.”
Mac Traven led the way, avoiding the road and trouble that might be waiting. If the man he’d killed had kin-folk they might be scouting the country by now. He led the way down a wooded lane where two wagon tracks were, and around the base of a hill and across a field into a stone-dotted pasture where thin grass grew over the roll of the hills. There were patches of blackjack brush and occasionally a cow.
By the time the noon sun was high they had a winding twelve miles behind them, and Mac was breathing easier. He glanced back at Dal, who was slumping in the saddle, riding more from instinct than knowledge of what he was about. Ahead there was a place where the trail dipped down into trees, and Mac could see the sparkle of running water.