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Keeping to a swale in the plains and deliberately avoiding sky-lining himself on higher ground, Culley took a roundabout track toward a fence gate. He had yet to decide if he would make use of it or angle off in another direction. It would probably be the latter. Culley had never been one to travel along roads, and there was one on the other side of the fence gate.
The brown gelding pricked its ears, its nose lifting to scent the air. Culley had ridden the horse for too many years not to have learned to correctly read its body language. Something was nearby. By reading the horse’s slight variations, Culley could tell if that thing was a cow, a coyote, or a horse. This time the gelding was reacting to one of its own kind. In this particular area of the Triple C, Culley knew that if there was a horse in the area, ninety percent of the time there would be a rider, too.
Obeying his initial impulse, Culley reined in his mount. It wasn’t that he disliked other people. He simply wasn’t comfortable around them. The small talk that came so easily to others was awkward for him, almost painful.
But to avoid such situations, he had to know the rider’s location and destination so he could head in the opposite direction. It was that desire which prompted him to rein his horse up the sloping rise in the plains. He pulled up when he could see over the top of it.
A pickup and horse trailer were parked along the edge of the dirt ranch road a quarter mile distant. Near the rear of it, a rider swung out of the saddle. The sun’s bright rays glinted on the blond lights in the long tail of hair that hung below the rider’s hat, making it easy for Culley to recognize Jessy Calder.
Culley watched as she unlatched the tailgate to load her horse into the trailer. The more he thought about it the more unusual it seemed for Jessy to be out here alone. There was a time before she married Ty when she had worked for the Triple C as an ordinary cowhand, but with Calder dead, she was running things now.
Knowing that, Culley couldn’t help wondering what she was doing so far from headquarters. That curiosity coupled with the fact that Jessy was one of the few people he felt comfortable around, mostly because she didn’t care whether he talked or not, pushed him forward.
By the time he reached the fence line, Jessy had loaded her horse and fastened the trailer gate. Moving with long, purposeful strides, she headed for the driver’s side of the pickup, so wrapped up in her thoughts that she failed to notice him.
Loathe as he was to be the one making the opening gambit, Culley called out, “Sure didn’t figure on seein’ you out this way.”
Jessy halted with an almost guilty start. An instant later her wide mouth curved in a smile. “Hello, Culley. As for being out here—you know how it goes. I got tired of being cooped up inside and decided I wanted to feel a horse under me again. Now it’s back to work. See ya.” She sketched him a wave and climbed into the truck.
Culley lifted a hand in return and watched the rig pull away. “Her reasons seem sound enough,” he commented to his mount. “But they sure don’t explain why she’d drive an hour from headquarters to go a-ridin’.”
There were times when Culley couldn’t help being nosy, although he never thought of it as snooping. He just wanted that old curiosity to stop nagging him.
As fresh as her tracks were, they were easy to follow. Reading sign, as the old-timers called the ability to identify a person or animal by the track it left, was a self-taught skill for Culley, something he had picked up over the years. One of the first things he had learned was how to tell whether a horse or a cow had left a trail through the grass. It was a difference that was easy to spot, since a cow left the grass stalks bent in the direction it had just come from and a horse laid it down in the direction it was going.
Culley didn’t have to backtrail Jessy very far before he realized that she hadn’t been out for an aimless ride. She’d had a destination, and she had taken the straight route to reach it.
The trail led him directly to the north boundary fence. His sharp eyes noticed a place where the top wire had been mended. He rode closer to it and bent sideways in the saddle to examine it. The bright marks on the metal told him that the wire had been first snipped, then twisted back together again—very recently.
The saddle leather creaked as he straightened to sit erect, puzzled by his discovery. “I gotta tell ya, Brownie,” he muttered to the horse, “it’s one thing to ride all the way out here to fix a break in the fence, an’ it’s a horse of a different color to ride all the way out here, cut the wire, an’ then fix it. Why’d she want’a do that?”
The gelding snorted and swung its nose at a pesky fly nibbling on its shoulder. Absorbed with solving this puzzle, Culley stared blankly at a tuft of brown thread hooked on a barb along the middle wire a long time before he actually noticed it.
“Well now, what’s this?” He swung to the ground and picked it off the wire. There was another piece of thread snubbed on a barb next to the first. Only this one was more like a bit of lint. While Culley pondered the meaning of them, the gelding took advantage of the break to chomp on some grass.
“If I remember right,” he said, thinking back, “there was a brown saddle blanket tied behind the cantle of her saddle.” An answer began to form. “Now a horse ain’t likely to jump what it can’t see—like a single strand of wire. But if a body was to throw a blanket across it, he can see what he needs to clear. ’Course, why would she want’a jump that fence an’ go traipsin’ around the Dugan range?”
Before he concluded that was what Jessy had done, Cully studied the ground on the other side of the fence. As clear as the sky overhead, a pair of fresh gouge marks was visible, revealing the place where her horse had landed.
While he had never been one to respect a boundary fence, Culley would have sworn that Jessy would. One thing was certain—he hadn’t come this far to stop now.
After leading his horse well clear of the fence, he retrieved a pair of wire cutters from his saddlebag. “None of that fence jumpin’ stuff for us,” he said and proceeded to cut through all three wires, careful to avoid their back whip.
Again Jessy’s trail led him in more or less a straight line. It struck him that only one place lay in this direction, and he couldn’t figure out why Jessy would go there.
Short of the old cemetery, Culley found the place where Jessy had left her horse. A pile of horse droppings and short-cropped grass told him that the horse had been left for a time.
Dismounting, he dropped the reins, ground-tying his gelding. Following her foot trail wasn’t as easy as following the horse tracks. But the occasional plain ones he found took him to some brush.
Well-flattened grass showed him where she had stood for a while. It was a place that would have concealed her from sight. It set him to wondering if she had been spying on somebody, or waiting for somebody. Which also made him wonder if Jessy was more of a Calder than he thought.
With no more to learn here, he started to retrace his steps. He was nearly to the thick clump of brush when his conscience prodded him.
Close by was the O’Rourke family plot. It had been such a long time since Culley had been there that he had trouble locating the slab headstones that marked the graves of his parents. Finally he found them, nearly hidden among the tall weeds. He tugged away the taller clumps in front of them and brushed away some of the dirt embedded in the carved lettering.
Straightening, he stepped back and removed his hat. There were no fancy sayings on his mother’s marker, and nothing to identify her as either wife or mother. There was only her name, MARY FRANCES ELIZABETH O’ROURKE, followed by the date of her birth and death. Culley hadn’t been much more than fourteen when she died, but he could still feel the gentle touch of her palm cupped to his cheek.
A smile touched his mouth in remembrance, but it faded when his attention shifted to the grave of his father. The stone was just as plain, with only the name spelled out: ANGUS O’ROURKE. As always, Culley’s strongest memory of his father was that of his death. Some of the old bitterness resurfaced.
