Lost Trails Read online

  Wes wanted to retort that smacking his son to the ground for such a minor offense might also be considered less than Christlike, but he had gotten off without an actual whipping and hoped to keep it that way.

  School beckoned, but instead of going there, Wes tucked his father’s Colt in the waistband of his pants and lit off into the woods outside Bonham. He had hanged a dummy of the hated President Lincoln from the limb of an oak tree, and on days like this, when he thought his rage would swallow him whole, he liked to stand different distances away—sometimes with trees blocking the best angles—and shoot at it. Every time a ball struck the effigy, he imagined he could see Lincoln’s blood fountaining from it. Wes both loved and hated John Wilkes Booth—loved him for having the courage to assassinate the traitor Lincoln, hated him for doing it before Wes was old enough to do it himself.

  He had fired five shots, missing twice, when he became aware of movement behind him. A cloud of bitter smoke hung in the still air. He didn’t know if it was a sound that tipped him off, or the frenzied flight of flushed birds, but he stopped himself from pulling the trigger and spun around with the weapon still held in his hand. A man stepped into view from behind a tree trunk, light through the leaves glittering about his head like thrown gold coins. The man smiled and showed his empty palms. “You must hate that fellow,” the man said. Wes knew at once that he came from the North; his accent and clothing made it as obvious as if he’d been carrying a carpetbag. A Reconstructionist, maybe even someone sent to arrest anyone shooting at their precious dead president.

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Many people,” the man said. He kept the grin glued to his face, but Wes could see it was as phony as anything. The man’s long brown hair curled around his ears. He kept his chin clean-shaven. Wes hated him right from the start. “Some hold onto their hatred, but the war’s been over for three years, son. You know that, right?”

  “In the North maybe,” Wes replied. “Not so much down here.”

  The man started forward, lowering his hands as he did. “I hate to see you bound by that feeling, boy.”

  “Don’t you move!” Wes ordered.

  The man froze, hands held chest-high. “Easy, there,” he said. “Let’s not do anything rash.”

  Rash, however, was exactly what Wes had in mind. All the anger and fear, the frustration, the unnamed and inexpressible emotions that stewed in his gut and made him want to run blindly across the landscape trampling everything and everyone in his path, bubbled up. The stranger represented the things he hated—the North, respectability, established authority, probably religion and government as well. Rash? Nothing rash about it, Wes decided, silently amending his earlier thought. It had to come to this, sooner or later.

  The man took another hesitant step forward, his smile fading and then awkwardly returning, and Wes bit down on his lower lip and held his breath and squeezed the Colt’s trigger.

  For reasons he didn’t understand, this shot sounded louder than the others, a thousand times louder. People must have heard it as far away as Austin, he believed. Stupidly, he wondered if it had hurt the man’s ears, but then he realized that the man’s throat had been torn away. Eyes wide with surprise, the man dropped to his knees, hands flailing uselessly, mouth falling open. Blood spattered the ground like water from a pump.

  Panic gripped Wes. What have I done? he thought. What do I do now? Why did he . . .

  But the man hadn’t done anything. He had simply been, and now, flopping forward onto his face, blood burbling into the dirt, he no longer was.

  Wes had imagined killing, had dreamed of it, sometimes longed to do it. Not like this, though. In his imagination it was always someone like Abraham Lincoln, an enemy of the South, or else some owlhoot bushwhacking him, and to save his own life or avenge his people he had to shoot. This man might have had a gun under his coat, but Wes hadn’t seen one. He’d been mad at his father, mad at the world, and this unfortunate soul had simply walked into the wrong woods on the wrong day.

  He made himself approach the man. He touched the man’s shoulder, rolled him over. The blood didn’t shoot out as far as it had before—reminding him of his imagined Lincoln wounds—but bubbled from the jagged pink wound like an underground spring emerging at the surface. His eyes remained open. He would never see anything again, never open his mouth to speak Yankee platitudes, never startle another innocent Southern boy in the woods. As he looked at him, the panic left Wes and a sensation of pride replaced it. Pride and power and well-being, as if the simmering cauldron in Wes’s gut had been silenced for a spell.

  The man wore a vest beneath his jacket, and a gold chain extended between two small pockets. Wes leaned closer, resting one hand casually on the corpse’s chest, and tugged the watch free. A hunting scene decorated the case, looking like something out of England, Wes thought, with dogs and something up a tree that might have been a fox. He opened it with a low whistle, admiring its glow, the way it caught the sun’s rays and threw them back like tiny daggers of light. He had never held anything so valuable. Tucking it in his pocket, he returned his attention to the problem of making sure no one ever found the body, or if they did, making it impossible to blame him.

  Which was when the rustle of leaves and the snap of a dry branch alerted him to another intruder in his woods, no doubt this man’s traveling companion. He brought the Colt up quickly, like a seasoned gunfighter. “Seems as if the woods’re crawlin’ with carpetbaggers today,” he said, aiming the weapon at the dark-eyed, bearded man who emerged from the shadows. “You fixin’ t’join your friend here?”

  “You’ve got it wrong, boy,” the newcomer said. “I’m no carpetbagger, but a Texan, same as you. I come here from Arkansas as a sprout.”

  Wes knew, when he heard those words again, that he was once more face-to-face with the man who had helped him bury the body of the first man he’d ever killed. No one knew about that victim, not his parents or the cousins whose ranch he’d been visiting when he’d fought Mage, the former slave who most people believed had been his first killing. He didn’t think the man recognized him, certainly hadn’t come here looking for him. Texas was a big state but not that crowded, after all. People ran into each other now and again. Wes had hoped never to see this man as long as he lived, because the man reminded him of that first murder—and murder it was, not self-defense, there was no way he could twist it into self-defense—and because the man knew a secret that Wes had hoped always to keep.

  The man—he’d said his name was John as well, John Selman—had helped Wes bury the corpse. Wes had shown him the watch, and the man had searched the body until he’d found some coins, of which he gave Wes one and kept the rest for himself. He had only been passing through the area, he had said, when he’d heard the shot and come to investigate. After the body was buried, he shook Wes’s hand as if they had become partners in some unholy enterprise, then continued on his way.

  Wes realized he was staring at Selman, and the force of the man’s gaze on him made him uncomfortable. He decided not to let on that he recognized the man. Five years had passed. He’d been the age of the man’s children then (he’d thought both were boys until the man called one “Anna”), maybe just a little younger. Now he was a married man of twenty, hardened by life and responsibility. He knew his face had matured in the interim, filled out. His shoulders had broadened and he had grown into his height, no longer the gangly stripling he had been. Maybe the man had forgotten all about that day. Even if not, he might not connect Wes to the boy who had told him only that his name was John.

  “Feel free to stay,” Wes said, breaking the uncomfortable silence that had built. “Ain’t much room inside, but I don’t need it during the day. I been thinking maybe it’s time to move on anyhow.”

  “Don’t go on our account,” the man said. “Soon’s the sun sets we’ll be out of your way.”

  “We’ll see,” Wes said. “Meantime, I reckon I’ll be around today, so if it looks like someone’s fixing to walk
in on you I’ll raise a warning.”

  The man touched the brim of his hat. “Appreciate that,” he said. “I’m John Selman, by the way.” He nodded toward the taller of the kids. “That’s Anna, like I said. And John Junior.”

  “Pleased,” Wes said, happy to have his hunch confirmed. “I’m Wes Hardin.”

  John Selman and his children tethered their mounts to a hitching post outside the cabin. Wes still had not made it down the cliff to the creek—if there was more than a spit’s worth of water in it, he’d haul some up for the horses as well as for himself and the Selmans.

  By the time the sun broke for California, Wes had scared up a couple of scrawny rabbits too stupid to move someplace where they could get their bellies filled, skinned them, and started them cooking on a makeshift spit. The rabbits wouldn’t gorge anyone, but he’d be able to make a meal for four out of them, and then John Selman and his boy and his girl who looked like a boy would head on down the trail, leaving him alone. Which was the way he liked it, when on the run. He missed his wife Jane, wished he could lie with her again, but knew that would have to wait until the Brackettville law had stopped hunting him.

  He sat back on his haunches to keep his face out of the greasy smoke, turning the rabbits to keep them cooking evenly. A boot scuffed the dry earth behind him—from the direction of the cabin—and he patted his ribs. He didn’t wear a traditional rig, but kept his twin six-guns holstered inside his vest, where he could cross-draw with both hands and fire before most men could clear leather. He had left his vest in the cabin this morning, though, and hadn’t gone back in because the Selmans were sleeping there. He had left the Henry in the dry grass, a couple of feet back from the fire.

  “Mr. Hardin?”

  The girl, what was her name? “You’re Anna, right?” he said, remembering. He eyed her over his right shoulder. She carried her hat now, and he could see that she, or maybe John Selman himself, had cut her brown hair just like a boy’s, and from the looks of her had used the dull edge of a bowie knife to do it. Since she had no curves to speak of and was wearing a boy’s clothing, he wasn’t surprised he’d mistaken her for one.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “The menfolk still sleeping?”

  “Like wore-out hounds. That’s what menfolk do best,” she said. “Not meanin’ any offense.”

  Wes shrugged. In general, he didn’t like men, with a few exceptions. But then he didn’t care a lot for most women either. “None taken.”

  Anna walked around the fire, squatting on the other side. “Rabbit. Smells good.”

  “Can’t promise that,” Wes said. “But it’ll fill your gut just the same.”

  “It’s for us? I’m sure Pa didn’t mean for you to feed us.”

  “This ain’t exactly my place and I ain’t exactly a host, but I gotta eat so you might’s well do the same.”

  “Well, that’s downright neighborly,” Anna said. “You are a Southern gentleman.”

  “I’m a Southerner,” Wes said. “That says it.”

  “Almost makes me feel bad I went rootin’ through your personals,” Anna said. A ghost of a smile flitted across her face and for a moment she looked female after all. Wes stared at her. Even after the smile had fled, a mischievous glint lingered about her eyes.

  “You did?”

  A shrug. “I’m that way,” she said, as if that excused it. “Southern, but no gentleman.”

  Anger filled Wes’s lungs like smoke from the fire. “Your pa oughta whack some manners into you.”

  “Ought to,” she said. “But me bein’ a girl and all, I guess he just can’t bring hisself.” She dug in a pocket of her jacket and pulled out Wes’s gold watch. “Anyhow, I found this. Funny thing too—Pa used to tell me a story about one just like it.” She dangled it on its chain, letting it sway like a young tree in a stiff wind. “And he told me about the tall, blue-eyed, dark-haired boy who took it off a stranger he’d just murdered. A Texan, the boy was, and the dead man was a Northerner, so Pa didn’t much mind, but he figured as how he could buy the boy a passel of trouble it ever crossed his mind to.”

  “Say I didn’t take it from that boy,” Wes said, wanting to see what the girl drove at. He felt a familiar rage well up from his gut, tried to bite it back. “What would that mean to you?”

  “I ain’t decided on that yet,” Anna said. “I might want the watch. I might want the boy, especially if he’d growed up to be a handsome sort of man with big broad shoulders and strong hands. I may not look too girlish to you, Mr. Hardin, but that don’t keep me from havin’ a woman’s thoughts and wants.”

  All Wes had ever desired from life was for people to be straight with him, to not tell him lies and feed him full of false hopes and promises, and not to threaten him. Trouble always came when people meant to cause him injury, and he had to act in his own defense. As he looked at this girl dangling his own watch like she was some kind of mesmerist and he a willing victim, a red scrim clouded his vision and the fury that always accompanied such moments returned in force. He pictured her falling forward onto the fire with a hole between her eyes, blood leaking from it and sizzling in the flames like the rabbit grease.

  His hand closed into a fist. “You ain’t gonna hurt me,” Anna said, not asking a question. “Not over somethin’ like this.”

  Wes glanced toward the cabin. John Selman and John Junior hadn’t shown themselves yet, but if he grabbed the rifle and fired it they would. “Course not,” he said. He thought about reaching across the flames and just snatching the watch, saw himself doing it, but as he stood and actually leaned toward her, he caught the amused light dancing in her brown eyes and he changed his target. Instead of taking the watch, he closed his fist and hit her in the head.

  Anna fell over sideways, then sat up with a frown, rubbing her temple where he had struck her. “My pa ain’t gonna like that one little bit,” she said.

  “Your pa’s never gonna know about it,” Wes replied, the rage having fully engulfed him now. He burned as surely as the dry weeds would if a ring of rocks hadn’t contained his little cooking fire, if he’d kicked the sparks in every direction. Anna saw something change in him and tried to scurry away, moving like an injured crab, but he caught her in two steps. The big strong hands she had admired so recently closed on her throat. She tried to scream, to fight, to kick. Wes preferred to kill with a firearm, but her throat was slender and soft and squeezing it was just like squeezing butter. He lost track of time, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two before she stopped fighting him, and then she gave a shudder and stopped moving at all.

  A panic similar to that which had overtaken Wes the first time he had met John Selman came back to him. If Selman or the boy came looking for Anna, he would have to kill the two of them too. Someone might be waiting for them—for all he knew, Selman might be an important person now. This lousy, stinking line shack was supposed to be a hideout, not a killing ground.

  He lifted the girl’s body off the ground—she felt almost weightless somehow, like a bird—and turned in a slow circle, regarding his surroundings. The answer came to him almost at once. He carried her to the cliff and tossed her over, into the nearly dry creek. Climbing down, he caught her by the ankles, and dragged her to the base of the cliff, where it overhung slightly. From above no one could see her—looking down, you thought you could see the whole face of the cliff wall, and only by standing right here could you see the indentation.

  He checked from above, just to be sure, and then ran toward the shack, screaming Selman’s name. The man threw back the door and came out, John Junior crowding him from behind.

  “What is it, Hardin?”

  “It’s your girl!” Wes said. His rage had left him the moment the girl died, and as soon as he’d tossed her empty husk off the cliff his near-panic had faded, but now he remembered both and the memory tightened his voice, lending veracity to his performance. “She shagged out! Made me promise not to say anything, but I just waited until she was
out of sight. You can still catch her easy, with the horses.”

  “Shagged out?” Selman echoed. “Why would she do that?”

  “I ain’t her pa,” Wes said. “How would I know? Kids are that way sometime, just can’t wait to be shut of everyone and everything. We were talking by the fire a few minutes; then she said she had to light a shuck, made me swear to silence, and vamoosed.”

  Selman stared at him like he wanted to say something else. When nothing occurred to him, he swatted John Junior. “Saddle up,” he said. “We’ve got to find that damn girl. Child was born on the prod and she ain’t settled down yet.”

  While the boy did as his father said, Selman asked Wes a few more questions. Lies slipped easily from Wes’s mouth and Selman’s gaze burned holes in him. He didn’t believe Wes, but didn’t have any grounds to call him on it, and Wes began to believe that Anna had maybe run off a time or three before.

  As the rabbits burned and the black smoke coiled into the sky, John Selman and John Junior rode off in the direction Wes had shown them, leading Anna’s mule along with them. A short while later, Wes heard them calling her name.

  He went back into the shack and packed his own few possessions. By the time Selman figured out he wouldn’t find her, Wes would be miles in the other direction, riding fast.

  Before he mounted up, he did two more things. He went back to the fire pit and found the watch where Anna had dropped it. Pocketing that, he kicked over the rocks that contained the blaze. If the flames spread, they would cover his tracks all the better, and smoke and darkness would screen him from Selman’s eyes.

  That done, he climbed up into the saddle. As he started off, he hoped that he would never encounter John Selman again as long as he lived.