Chapter Twelve
Larabee lit up a thin black cheroot and contemplated the bottle before him. It was three quarters empty. It had been full when Buck had liberated it from the bar only an hour or so before, but he was not drunk. –Quite the opposite, in fact. He sat there in the empty taproom absorbing the tobacco smoke and the sounds of the night around him with total clarity. The slow, intermittent squeak of the rocking chair filtered down through the floorboards from Ezra's room above and Vin, Buck and JD's voices mingled softly from below as they finished restocking the beer in the spring to cool. From the open doorway, he could hear the fading crunch of footsteps in the street as Josiah and Nathan departed for a well earned rest.
"I thought we were going to lose him back there…"
Nathan's softly spoken confession had carried easily on the wind to their leader's ears, causing him to push away the drink he had just poured and reach for a smoke instead. Truth told, he had thought so too.
He had never really had time to think about it before –the possibility of losing one of his men. Somehow, even in the midst of their closest calls there had never been time. They were always fighting, moving, going after the enemy –whoever it happened to be at that moment—and trusting in Nathan to pick up the pieces and patch them back together into a living breathing comrade when it was all over.
But tonight, there had been no one to chase after, no one to fight. Tonight there had been time to think about it, and he hadn't much cared for the luxury of thought that time had provided. Ezra had damned near died on them and there hadn't been a thing he could do about it except to help them haul his carcass up and down the stairs and then crawl into this bottle with Buck while they waited for word. While they had waited, he had made the mistake of thinking. He had thought about what it would really mean to lose the Southerner –to lose any of them—and he didn't like the answers he came up with. It would weaken them, somehow. Make them less than what they were, and not simply in manpower, but spirit.
He could hear Buck's booming voice rise above the other two as the trio climbed the cellar stairs. After all these years, losing Buck would damned near kill him –not to mention what it would do to the kid. He doubted either one of them would be here if it weren't for the boisterous ladies man. In the hellish years after Sarah and Adam's deaths, Buck had kept him from completely self-destructing more times than he could count. As for JD –Larabee smiled grimly—the kid wouldn't have survived the first week if Buck hadn't taken him under his wing. The end of Buck Wilmington would be the end of three men, and well he knew it.
JD scowled and made some retort to Buck's joshing as they reached the top of the stair and entered the taproom. It wouldn't do to lose the kid, either. There was no telling who Buck was gonna take it into his head to care about, but once he did, his loyalty was complete and unswerving. He would ride into hell on Sunday for that kid, just as he would do for Larabee himself. Chris doubted that Buck would ever quite forgive himself if something happened to JD Dunne. All things considered, they'd both been damned lucky last night.
The two walked past him, each sparing a nod in his direction as they shoved their way out of the saloon doors and into the street. Their argument continued as they parted company and disappeared out into the night. Just as Nathan and Josiah had departed in mutual introspection, so had Buck and JD returned to their good natured banter, each secure in the knowledge that the danger had passed. This left Vin standing before him, thoughtfully contemplating the diminished contents of the whiskey bottle.
Tanner nodded to the glass of whiskey, sitting forgotten by his hand. "You gonna drink that, or watch it evaporate?"
Larabee grinned and slid the glass over to Tanner, who dropped into the chair opposite him and put the languishing drink out of its misery. Chris contemplated the lean taciturn man for a moment. Losing Buck might kill him, but losing Tanner would damned near eviscerate him. There was a level of connection between himself and the scout that was deep, unspoken and instantaneous. He had felt it from the moment their eyes had met, that first day in the street as they'd watched the Texas cattle crew drag Nathan up the hill towards an imminent death. They'd barely spoken more than a handful of words between them as they'd strolled together up the street into what could well have been both their deaths. Buck had been his friend for years, and yet they managed to get on each others nerves more often than not. Even in their more peaceable moments, they still played hell trying to reconcile themselves to the other's way of thinking. Not so with Tanner. It rarely took more than the briefest glance to know the Texan's thoughts. Whereas Buck could rarely spend more than five minutes without feeling the need to open his trap on some subject or another, Tanner barely spoke at all. In fact, they had passed entire days in the saddle without speaking, and yet Larabee felt as if entire volumes of conversation had passed between them in their silence.
Such a silence had fallen upon them now. Vin uncorked the bottle and refilled the glass. He seemed to have as little need of conversation as Larabee, and they sat there in the vast emptiness of the taproom, each immersed in their own thoughts.
The floorboards creaked gently above them and Larabee's mind wandered back to the man lying insensible in the room upstairs. To the casual observer, Standish might seem like the most expendable, the least one likely to be missed. He was the outsider, not bound too closely to any one of them. There was Josiah and Nathan, their rock and their river, the calm voices of reason who centered them in the most trying times. The healer and the preacher had a natural affinity for each other to the point one was sometimes useless without the other to translate for him. It was likewise with Buck and JD, and even himself and Vin. Ezra, by contrast, was the loner. –Always circling at the periphery, never allowing anyone too close. And yet, he was the constant thread that ran through all of their lives, drawing them more tightly together.
When it came to Nathan, Standish was the proverbial thorn in the Lion's paw. He was the black sheep that Josiah never tired of trying to herd back into the fold. He was the prankster and playmate of Buck, JD and even Vin. Without fail, he was also the regular pain in Larabee's ass. But when things were tight, and the deck stacked against them, they could always count on the enigmatic Southerner to reshuffle the cards in their favor. He smiled grimly to himself, remembering Nathan's words upon their first encounter with the gambler who'd been hustling drinks and cash from the saloon's patrons with his seemingly impressive marksmanship skills. The only skill Larabee had been impressed with at the time was the man's ability to pull of such a cheap parlor trick in a room full of men so heavily armed and sorely tempted to blow his head off.
"What do we need a cheater for?" Nathan had asked him, clearly unimpressed.
Larabee had answered him with a wolfish grin.
"We might need one."
And they had. He didn't like to think of how things might have ended up had there been no Ezra Standish to scheme their way out of a tight spot. They'd have ended up as fodder for that crazy confederate's cannon if the gambler hadn't decided to turn around and come riding back. Mary Travis's son would likely be dead and her husband's killers would have remained unpunished had it not been for Ezra and Maude doing what they did best. Hell, even Mary herself would not be alive if Standish hadn't been there to push her down and take the bullet –right in the very large wad of money he had been preparing to abscond with. Whether he was pulling an ace out of his sleeve, or a slingshot and a stick of dynamite out of his pocket, the Southerner had an undeniable knack for evening the odds when they most desperately needed it. No, Larabee decided, he did not much care for the thought of what might happen if they lost the man he'd come to regard as their own personal ace in the hole.
He stubbed out the cheroot. The tobacco suddenly tasted stale and bitter in his mouth. Reaching for the other glass that Buck had left behind, he poured another drink. –The last drink, he saw as he tipped the bottle and waited for the dregs of the amber liquid to drain from it.
Vin slouched easily in his chair, staring blankly at the Regulator clock on the wall behind the bar. It was somewhere near to three in the morning. Tanner looked as if he could sit there for an hour or a hundred years and not feel the need to speak. It was a trait that Larabee often admired. Tonight, however, it seemed to pull at him, impelling him to voice at least a little of the thoughts that were on his mind.
"You ever think about what might happen if we lost somebody?"
"All the time," the tracker said honestly. He shot Chris a sideways look. "--You?"
"Yeah," Chris replied, "but maybe not in the way that I should have."
Vin said nothing, but Chris could feel the Texan's blue eyes trained upon him, bidding him to elaborate.
"I always figured that if we ever came up short a man, it would be because Standish had snuck out in the middle of the night with all the valuables he could carry off from some swindle. It never occurred to me the fool might get himself killed standing for us when he should have had the sense to run."
Vin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Ezra wasn't the only one with a history of running out on Larabee in the middle of a crisis. It was a mark of their friendship that he and Chris had managed to put the incident behind them. Still, it had taken time after their return from the Wagon Train before things between him and the gunman had returned to an even keel. He sensed this particular indiscretion was something Larabee did not easily forgive.
"It's bound to happen someday," he said. "Considering the amount of lead we've dodged the last couple years, we've all been luckier than any one of us has a right to be."
He glanced at Chris out of the corner of his eye. The gunman was staring moodily into the shot he had poured for himself, but as yet had made no move to drink it. He studied the older man carefully, reading his body language as easily as deer tracks in fresh snow, skillfully threading around the words that had been spoken to divine what was really weighing on the his friend's mind. Sometimes with Larabee, it was all in what he didn't say.
"You're not sure we can stop them," Vin guessed.
Chris reached suddenly for the drink, tossing it down quickly, and the Texan knew that his observation had struck to the heart of the matter.
"No," Larabee said at last. His voice was slightly rough from the alcohol. He swiveled his gray-green gaze upon Vin. "You ever hunt wolves?"
The tracker felt a small chill race through him at the sudden, unexpected question. It reminded him somehow of another conversation in another saloon about another enemy that Larabee had been uncertain he could best.
"Back when I was ranchin' a mountain lion got after my stock…"
Leave it to Larabee, Vin thought, to go hunting after things like mountain lions and wolves. Aside from his brief and unsuccessful attempt at bounty hunting, he had preferred to stalk creatures that weren't so likely to be stalking him. He slowly shook his head.
"Can't say as I have," he admitted.
Chris set his empty glass carefully back down on the table, his gaze fixed on the play of the lamplight sparking through the cut glass as he spun it between his fingers.
"You can't track 'em," he said darkly. "They're like ghosts. One minute they're there. The next, they've just …vanished. But you can feel them all around you. You can feel their eyes watching you from somewhere just beyond your fire. And at night, if the moon's full, you can hear them." He shook his head, just barely suppressing a shiver. "It'd make the blood freeze in your veins if the cold hadn't done it already."
"They hunt in packs," he said, remembering. "They're ruthless and damned efficient. Each one has a job and they work as a team. They close you in, wear you out and pull you down before you even know what hit you. –Hell, you never even see it coming."
His smile faded and he looked directly at Vin, the green of his eyes shifting to storm gray. "I got a feeling these guys are like that. You can track 'em for days and never catch so much as a glimpse of 'em. But the minute you turn your back, they'll jump out and bite you in the ass."
"Sounds like you've been up close and personal," Vin said, shooting Larabee searching look.
Chris cocked his head slightly and flashed the Texan a feral grin. "Too damned close," he admitted.
His gaze returned to the empty glass, spinning restlessly between his fingers. "It was the second winter after I came out here, before I met Sarah, --not long after I'd first hooked up with Buck. We were ridin' the grub line, and we took a job hunting wolves that had gotten after some of the ranchers' cattle."
Larabee smiled absently, but there was obviously no real humor in the memory. His gaze was vacant and already staring back to that long ago time. "Buck and I rode out with some old dried up piece of saddle leather named Cheyenne Jack. We were pushin' about a dozen head of the oldest, scrawniest cows we could find for bait. …It was along about dusk and I had just moved a few of the cows out in the clear to graze. Buck and Jack were up in the hills on either side with rifles, just lying quiet and waiting. I was riding back to join them."
He shook his head. "It was just pure luck I happened to spot the ripples in the grass. I figured I could make it. I had a good horse, a nice blood bay stud I'd brought with me from Indiana. He was built lean and leggy –kinda like your Peso horse." The older man paused, regret shading his features. "They hamstrung him before we got a hundred and fifty yards. We went down shootin' and I don't remember much but fightin' off fur and teeth until Buck and Jack opened up with the rifles."
"The horse and the cows were a total loss. I walked away from it with four pelts and this…" He flashed a humorless grin and pushed back his shirt cuff to reveal a bit of a long scar that Vin had always assumed he'd earned at the end of somebody's knife. "So I suppose it wasn't a complete failure."
Vin studied him with wry amusement. "You ever get any better at it?"
Larabee's grin broadened. "Don't know as that I'd go that far, but at least the wolves didn't either. We rode out of there come spring with sixty pelts."
Vin's blue eyes twinkled with humor, and then sobered as he circled his mind back to the original point of the conversation. "Well," he said at last, "at least you have an idea of how to go about the job. –What do you reckon they're after?"
Larabee rolled the glass between his palms. "Mary happened to look at a map and noticed there's a pattern to the attacks on the homesteaders. She's got a theory that this might be part of a land grab for a new spur line the railroad is talking about building from Ridge City to Eagle Bend." Chris raised his eyes to meet Vin's. "I think she may be on to something."
Vin nodded. "Stands to reason," he agreed. "If the railroad goes through, that land will be worth a lot of money. A body goes about offerin' to buy it up a forehand then people will start to wonder why. –And black homesteaders are easy pickings. Nobody concerns themselves overmuch with their troubles."
"Not like they would with white folks," Larabee agreed. "Burn out a few blacks and Mexicans, everybody looks the other way. Attack a couple of white families and the whole damned territory would be in an uproar."
It was an ugly truth, but the truth nonetheless.
Vin studied the scuffed and dusty toe of his boot. "What are you plannin' to use as bait?" He was fairly certain he didn't really want to know the answer to this particular question, but there it was.
Larabee's fingers stilled on the glass they had been twirling. "Josiah's riding out to the Seminole Village tomorrow."
He let the suggestion hang unspoken between them. His face was impassive, but Vin detected the faintest note of uncertainty in Larabee's voice, and knew that the older man was not entirely reconciled with the course of action he had identified. –Frankly, neither was he.
"Nathan will be pissed," Vin observed.
"Yeah," Chris agreed quietly.
"Think they'll help?"
Larabee shook his head. "I don't know."
It was late. Too late, Vin thought, to try to think about the consequences of what Chris was contemplating. He rose to his feet and stretched, then stared down at the other man with a mixture of amusement and foreboding.
Christ. Mountain lions and wolves …what would he decide to take on next?
"Chris?"
Larabee looked up, his expression questioning.
Tanner grinned at him. "Do me a favor?"
"What?"
"Next time we go hunting, let me pick the game."
The gunman's face was implacable, but Vin could see the spark of Irish deviltry burning in the green of his eyes. "What do you wanna shoot, cowboy?"
"Bunny rabbits," Vin deadpanned.
Larabee shook his head regretfully. "They'll eat you alive."
