Chapter 24

Jacob Baylor, accompanied by Cowboy and six well-armed riders from the ranch, drove the ranch’s blue supply wagon to Halfway Wash on Friday afternoon. The group camped there Friday night. They rose early the next morning and arrived at the store well before eight o’clock. Cowboy had slipped into town even earlier, just before the sky started to brighten.

They’d decided to push on home that night, so when the crew returned to the ranch, it was a few minutes after ten o’clock. They brought with them a Railway Messenger envelope from Lester Toomey, at the Smoky Valley ranch, addressed to Gabriela. Malik and Gabriela were still up, talking and making plans by the courtyard fountain, generally enjoying one another’s company. Baylor brought her the envelope.

She took it inside, near a lamp in the front room, and sat in a cushioned arm chair. Leaning slightly toward the lamp on the table next to her, she opened the envelope and pulled out a single page with scrawled pencil handwriting both front and back. Malik had followed her and stood, leaning on the door frame, watching her. He could see the distress cloud her face as she read what Toomey had written. She looked up at Malik and held the letter toward him. He left the doorway and walked to her side.

Gabriela said, “Les says that Jim Johnson rode out this past Tuesday morning headed west, toward the mountains. He didn’t say anything to anyone, but no one remarked on it because Les said he’d been quiet and moody for several days. Anyway, Les says he just saddled up and rode out.

“The next morning, Jim’s horse, without saddle or bridle, was standing outside the corral gate. They couldn’t find Jim at his house, or at my house, or in any of the outbuildings. His saddle wasn’t in the tack room, either. So Les, who’s a fair tracker, saddled up, took his bed roll and some pack food, and set out, leading Jim’s horse, on the horse’s back trail. Darkness overtook him in the mountains.

“At daylight, he set out once more on the back trail, but he soon lost it on the bare rock fields along the south slope of Snow King. He spent the rest of the morning trying to pick up the trail again, but there was nothing he could find. He’d call Jim’s name and fire his gun in the air at intervals, but heard no response.

“By noon, he was searching along the rim of Mellon Canyon. It was there, near a prominent overlook, that he found Jim’s saddle and tack.” She paused for a long moment, staring at the ornate glass shade on the lamp. Then she looked at Malik. “Have you ever been up there?”

Malik looked at her quizzically. Then, watching her facial expression, he said, “Mellon Canyon? Years ago. Cowboy and I rode in there when I was about sixteen. It’s certainly memorable.”

She looked back toward the lamp. “Jim once told me it was his favorite spot. Sometimes he’d take a few days off and go up there to camp. He’d gone up there with Brandon, Anna, and me, one time. I remember feeling a terrible dread that Anna would fall off the rim, down that terrible sheer drop, past all those rock layers. I just couldn’t rid myself of that awful vision. I know it’s a beautiful area, but it spoiled the experience for me. Silly, too, as Anna was more cautious than any of us. A mother’s nightmare, I suppose. But that’s neither here nor there.” She sighed, though it ended more as a shudder.

Looking again at Malik, she said, “In any event, Lester found no other sign, so he returned to the ranch. He talked it over with the other hands and none of them thought there’d be any value in continuing the search. Considering everything, they thought it likely that Jim turned the horse loose purposely and, well ... killed himself.”

She crumpled the letter and began crying. Still in her chair, she wrapped her arms around Malik’s waist and pressed her face into his side, where his shirt absorbed her tears. He moved within her arms, so that he could embrace her shoulders with his left arm and stroke her head with his right hand. He said nothing.

Christina, in her night dress, came into the front room from the courtyard; she was eating a cookie.

“Gabriela, what’s wrong? Emil?”

Gabriela just reached her hand out, offering the crumpled letter to Christina, who took it near the lamp to read it.

“Oh! ... Oh, my ... Oh, Gabriela, how awful. Oh, you poor dear.” She knelt next to the chair and added her arms to Malik’s embrace.

Gabriela sniffed loudly and looked up at Malik. “I have to go home.”

Malik reached into his pocket and withdrew one of the white handkerchiefs and handed it to her. “I know. I’ll go with you.”

“Emil, no, your ribs.”

“They’re better. Don’t worry about it.”

“She’s right, Emil. It was three weeks before Andy could ride after what those deputies did to him.”

“I know. Don’t worry.” He continued to hold Gabriela.

There was a drummer in coat and tie, with a top hat resting on his knee, sitting on the bench along the front of the depot, his large sample case and a smaller valise next to him. Otherwise, Malik and Gabriela were the only passengers waiting for the eleven fifteen southbound the next morning. The train was running about twenty minutes late when it left Texas Bend, according to stationmaster Joshua Trent, who was busy behind the ticket desk.

The night before, Malik had asked Cowboy to find a piece of soft leather large enough to fit around his torso. Cowboy brought a piece of buckskin from the commissary stores. He trimmed it short of being able to fully wrap around Malik’s ribcage. Then Malik punched holes at the edges where it almost met while cowboy cut narrow strips from the offcut, which strips he soaked in water.

Before riding out the next morning, Malik wrapped the buckskin around his ribcage and Cowboy used the wet strips to lace it up in back. Afterwards, he gave Malik a leg up into the saddle of one of the remuda horses. Then Malik, Gabriela, and Cowboy had set off for town. Malik took two small doses of laudanum during the journey. Meanwhile, the wide buckskin band slowly tightened around his torso as the drying laces shrunk. By the time they reached Halfway Wash, it had become snug enough for him to transfer some of the supportive tension from his abdominal, chest, and shoulder muscles to the engirdling buckskin.

At the railroad station, Cowboy pulled the saddles, bridles, saddle packs, the long guns, and their scabbards from the horses and left the tack and their trail gear on the platform for loading in the baggage car, to take along with them. Then Cowboy bid them good-bye and took their horses and headed into the barrio, east of the K&ASR right of way. There he had remained, watching them from a concealed position amid the small adobe houses and wooden shacks that were on the “wrong” side of the tracks.

Gabriela was dressed in men’s trail clothing. Both wore broad-brimmed “straw” hats, a tightly woven, broad-leaf grass product with extra-wide brims and intended for summer use. The ranch bought them in wholesales lots from a manufacturer in Mexico. Malik and Gabriela wore sidearms in the army-style, flapped holsters, worn on the front of the left hip, for cross-draw retrieval.

The train had made up five minutes of time by its arrival in Waypoint. Malik tipped one of the brakemen to load their saddle gear in the baggage and messenger car, then boarded the train, which made up three more minutes by its quick departure.

Looking back toward the depot, Malik saw a sheriff’s deputy run up onto the station platform just as the last car of the departing train cleared the station. The deputy’s late arrival probably saved his life, because, at the same time, from where he lay on the roof of a low adobe shed, Cowboy lowered his carbine, thus removing the deputy from its sights. Cowboy rolled off the rear of the shed, slid into Niyol’s saddle, slipped the long gun into its scabbard, took up the leads of the other two horses, and headed east, back to the Malik ranch.

As Malik and Gabriela disembarked from the train, a Sonora County sheriff’s deputy stood up from the bench near the depot’s door, where he’d been eating his lunch. He stuffed the wadded-up wrapper in his pocket and pulled off his hat as he approached.

“Missus Lestly, Mister Malik, Sheriff Ulney sent me to wait for the train. He wanted you to see this telegram.” The deputy handed Malik a telegraph message form. Malik held it so Gabriela could read it, too.

Sheriff Sonora County

Emil Malik arriving 12:19 train. Hold for questioning.

BR Banks, Sheriff Jackson County

“Sheriff wanted you to see what his reply will be, once you’re out a’ town.”

Sheriff Jackson County

Out of office. Recd message late. Missed train.

Nathan Ulney, Sheriff Sonora County

“Sheriff Ulney said that fat bast—uh, that Sheriff Banks can cook his own goose.”

He fiddled with his hat brim and looked at his feet as he addressed Gabriela. “Uh, we all heard about Jim, ma’am. Hopin’ otherwise, but our condolences. Sad thing.”

“Thank you, deputy.”

“G’day, ma’am. G’day, Mister Malik.”

Malik reached to shake his hand. “Thanks, Deputy Bauer. Thank Sheriff Ulney for us, too, if you’d be so kind.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Do you need horses, Mister Malik?” a young boy from the Coates livery stable asked.

Malik, however, gave the boy a nickel to take a message to Long Hand or Streams-In-Winter instead.

Taking it easy, for the sake of Malik’s ribs, they arrived at the ranch just at sunset the following day, Monday. One of the hands saw them arrive and offered to take their horses, but Gabriela said he should just handle Malik’s, mentioning Malik’s injured ribs. Gabriela would see to her own horse, a hire from the Sonora brothers’ corral. She asked him first to let Toomey know they had arrived.

Toomey came back by himself and started on Malik’s horse. Malik thanked him, then Gabriela said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner, Les. I got your letter Saturday night. But mostly I’m sorry I wasn’t here for Jim.”

Toomey paused in the grooming and looked at her. “Miz Lestly, there was no helpin’ it. I told Jim, we all told him, he made no spark with you. But he just was sure that sooner or later you’d come around. He had it bad, ma’am. But Jim weren’t like Mister Brandon.”

He went back to brushing the horse while he talked. “Mister Brandon was easy goin’, friendly-like, cheerful, even kind, I reckon. Jim was real serious, not one given to good times or jokin’. Sometimes he was a mite bossy.” He paused the brushing, again. “Don’t get me wrong, I liked him well enough. He was most times pleasant and always fair. But if I had my choice of who to share a jail cell with, would a’ been your husband.”

He returned again to his task. “What I’m sayin’, ma’am, is that your husband and Jim was two diff’ernt kind a’ men and it was clear as day that your feelin’s weren’t of a mind for Jim like they’d been for your husband, if you’ll pardon me bein’ forward, ma’am.”

“Not at all, Les. I appreciate straight talk. Besides, it’s important for a foreman to be able to deliver bad news as well as good, and to make that news as clear as possible. So, you want your old job back?”

“Be honored to work for you, Missus Lestly. You and the Mister been the best bosses I ever had.”

“I know you’re capable of it,” Gabriela said. “I always felt a little bad we had to replace you, but...”

He shook his head, “Never resented that, ma’am. It was you and the Mister bein’ true to one a’ your men and a friend. Hard to argue with that. It was your ranch to do with as you felt best. Nope, no hard feelin’s.”

“I’ll pay you what I was paying Jim, but there’s something else we need to talk about. Let’s all get cleaned up, then you come up to the house. We’ll talk.”

Malik and Toomey went to clean up at the wash basins outside the bunkhouse. Malik unbuttoned his shirt, then shrugged it off. He asked Toomey to cut the thongs holding the buckskin supporting his chest. Then he leaned his back against the bunkhouse wall and scratched himself on the rough adobe.

Toomey looked up at him from where he was bent over a basin of soapy water. “Mister Malik, hope you don’t mind me sayin’ so, but since Miss Anna was found, even since her husband was killed, the Missus seems more ... uh, like she was before all the bad happened. She’s still sad, but, oh, I don’t know how to say it. But she’s better, seems since you been around. Buttin’ my nose in, again, but needed sayin’.”

“Not to worry, Les. I like straight talk, too. And no more a’ this ‘Mister Malik.’ I’m Emil, though in these valleys, they call me Shadow. You can, too, if you’d like.”

“Well, thank you, sir. Be honored. Heard you were called that, from over the Tsosie’s. Good name, I’ll like usin’ it, Shadow.”

Malik finished washing and put his shirt on. “Same for the other hands, if you’d let ‘em know. Either name’s fine, but drop the ‘misters’ and ‘sirs’.”