Chapter 2: WHEN THE RUMOR FOUND HIS NAME
Kalisa and her people departed before sunrise.
Caleb stood near the well and watched them disappear toward the west.
Two days later, six cattle vanished from Larson’s ranch.
Before the evening was over, someone reported finding tracks heading west.
By the following morning, six cattle had somehow become ten.
By that afternoon, ten had become twelve.
Four days later, the missing herd was no longer the story everyone in town wanted to discuss.
Caleb Whitlock was.
People said he had invited a war party onto his property.
They said he had supplied them.
They said he had revealed the location of the valley’s only dependable source of deep water.
In some versions of the story, Caleb had traded with them.
In others, he had shown them which ranches were vulnerable.
On the fifth morning, Caleb saddled his horse and rode into town.
Conversations stopped as he passed.
That told him fear had already accomplished most of what somebody wanted it to accomplish.
When he stepped inside the mercantile, Whit Farrar stood behind the counter folding a burlap sack far more carefully than necessary.
“Morning, Caleb.”
“Whit.”
Neither man smiled.
Farrar had sold Caleb flour, sugar, nails, seed, lamp oil, and rope for eight years. He had sat at church picnics and eaten Mary’s blackberry pie more than once.
Now he would not look Caleb directly in the eye.
Eventually, Farrar said, “Heard you had some visitors.”
“You heard correctly.”
“Apache.”
“People.”
Farrar’s hands stopped moving.
Caleb continued.
“They were dying of thirst.”
“Folks are saying something different.”
“Folks weren’t there.”
Farrar finally looked up.
For a second, Caleb saw shame in his face.
Then fear took its place.
“Larson’s cattle are gone.”
“I know.”
“The tracks point west.”
“Tracks can be made to point wherever somebody wants them to.”
“Caleb—”
“I watched those people leave my land. Half of them were barely strong enough to sit their horses.”
Farrar rubbed his jaw.
“You think someone deliberately moved the cattle?”
“I think cattle don’t turn into proof just because scared people need them to.”
The bell above the mercantile door rang.
Nobody had entered.
The door had been pushed open because people were gathering outside.
Then a voice drifted in from the street.
“Mr. Whitlock.”
Caleb turned.
Reeves Hargrove was walking toward him.
He was close to sixty, broad in the shoulders and silver at the temples, dressed too finely for any rancher with work to do before noon. His boots were polished, his coat perfectly fitted.
He looked exactly like the kind of authority frightened people wanted.
Controlled.
Respectable.
Certain.
“Colonel,” Farrar said behind Caleb.
Caleb noticed the title.
Hargrove smiled pleasantly.
“Awful business about Larson’s cattle.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“And particularly unfortunate timing.”
“Timing of what?”
Hargrove glanced toward the people watching them.
“Your recent guests.”
Caleb stepped into the street.
“I gave water to people who needed it.”
“I’m sure your motives were admirable.”
The word sounded strangely ugly in Hargrove’s voice.
“But intentions,” Hargrove said, “rarely travel beside consequences.”
Caleb watched him.
Hargrove gestured toward the valley.
“You own the only deep well for thirty miles.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“That makes you rather important.”
“I’ve survived being unimportant before.”
Several townspeople shifted.
Hargrove’s smile widened almost imperceptibly.
“I made you an offer last month.”
“And I turned it down.”
“It was a very generous offer.”
“And I still turned it down.”
“Circumstances have a way of changing.”
Caleb took a step closer.
“Are you threatening me?”
Hargrove opened his hands.
“Not in the slightest.”
His gaze moved toward the boarding house.
Mrs. Larson stood weakly behind a curtain upstairs.
“People are frightened,” Hargrove said. “And frightened people look for causes.”
“Convenient causes are easier to find than real ones.”
Something flickered in Hargrove’s eyes.
It disappeared immediately.
“I’ve purchased several lonely ranches from men who eventually realized there was dignity in beginning again somewhere else.”
Caleb’s jaw tightened.
“My ranch is not for sale.”
“Your ranch?”
Hargrove paused.
His gaze rested on Caleb with unusual interest.
“Or merely the well?”
A chill traveled up the back of Caleb’s neck.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing at all.”
But the words had been chosen too carefully.
Caleb remembered Kalisa counting stones at midnight.
You built the wall around it.
The well was already here.
Hargrove inclined his head.
“My offer remains available.”
He turned to leave.
Then stopped.
Without facing Caleb, he said, “Your wife had good judgment about certain things.”
Everything around Caleb seemed to disappear.
“What did you say?”
Hargrove looked back.
“I said I’m sorry about your wife.”
“No.”
Caleb moved toward him.
“You said she had good judgment.”
“Did I?”
“You knew Mary?”
Something changed in Hargrove’s face.
Almost nothing.
But Caleb saw it.
Hargrove smiled again.
“Everyone knew everyone back then.”
Caleb seized his sleeve.
Several people nearby gasped.
Hargrove looked down at Caleb’s hand.
Then he raised his eyes.
Very quietly, he said, “Take your hand off me.”
Caleb released him.
Hargrove brushed his sleeve as if removing a speck of dust.
“There are questions,” he said softly, “that become dangerous when a man waits too long to ask them.”
Then he walked away.
Caleb knew, with the same instinct that had once kept him alive through war, that he had just spoken to the man constructing the trap around him.
He rode home before sunset.
Halfway back, he left the main road.
The tracks left by Larson’s missing cattle crossed a dry wash.
Caleb dismounted and crouched.
At first glance, they looked exactly as people had described.
Cattle.
Several horses.
All moving west.
Then Caleb noticed one particular horse track.
The animal wore a damaged shoe.
A triangular piece was missing from the back edge.
The same distinctive print appeared farther ahead.
And again.
Caleb followed the trail for nearly two miles.
Then the tracks changed direction.
They went south.
Not west.
Somebody had dragged mesquite branches across the ground to conceal the turn.
Whoever had done it had not been thorough enough.
Caleb mounted again.
He followed the hidden route until darkness approached.
The trail ended beside an abandoned army supply road.
There, caught on a thorn, he found a torn piece of leather.
A symbol had been stamped into it.
A capital H enclosed by a circle.
Hargrove.
Caleb closed his fist around the leather.
The sound behind him came too late.
A branch snapped.
Caleb turned.
Three riders waited in the wash.
Their faces were covered.
One lifted a rifle.
Caleb threw himself behind a boulder as the shot struck rock.
His horse panicked and bolted.
Another shot cracked through the air.
Caleb crawled through the dust, reached a shallow gully, and ran.
The riders followed.
He had no weapon.
No horse.
And absolutely no chance of outrunning mounted men across open desert.
Then an arrow buried itself in the ground directly in front of the leading horse.
The animal reared.
A second arrow struck one of the riders’ saddlebags.
The masked men turned toward the ridge.
Figures had appeared along the top.
Kalisa rode down first.
The attackers fled.
She brought her horse to a stop beside Caleb.
“You look surprised.”
Caleb was still struggling for breath.
“I thought you had gone home.”
“I did.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Kalisa looked at the leather fragment in his hand.
“Because cattle tracks came toward us as well.”
Her eyes followed the three fleeing riders.
“And because someone wants our people and yours angry enough that nobody asks the right questions.”
Caleb rose to his feet.
“Your father.”
Kalisa frowned.
“What?”
“You said Mary knew him.”
Her face changed.
“Take me to him.”
She hesitated.
“Kalisa.”
“My father has kept something from you.”
“What?”
“I don’t know all of it.”
“You know enough.”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me.”
She looked toward the darkening horizon.
When she turned back, her voice was low.
“He was there on the night your home burned.”
Caleb forgot to breathe.
Kalisa continued.
“And he says the Apache were not the ones who started the fire.”
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