The Bloody Spur

Chapter Seven

Early morning sun fell on Willa Cullen’s pillow and, when she rolled into it, awoke her from a dream about Caleb York, which vanished, as if scurrying off in embarrassment. She slipped from the comfortable bed, her bare feet kissing the cool wood floor, and went to the dresser to pour water into a basin and wash up.

The bedroom had plenty of windows for sunshine to creep in around the red-and-cream-striped curtains, which were all that remained from her childhood here. Back when her late mother was in charge, this space had been all sweetness and light, ruffles and frills and light colors. What remained was a metal-post double bedstead with a faintly floral spread, a small corner dresser with a water pitcher and lavatory bowl, a hard chair to its left, and a framed desert picture hanging above the bed.

She traded her nightgown for a chemise with drawers, over which her jeans and a green plaid shirt fitted nicely, then — still barefoot — padded out into the kitchen to start breakfast.

Normally, by now, her father would be up and dressed and fixing his own coffee — his blindness had come on gradually enough that certain routines of daily life had carried over without strain. Such things gave Papa a much-needed, if not entirely real, sense of independence. He would be at the small wooden table they usually shared for the morning meal. Today she had in mind eggs and potatoes and bacon and, making use of the cornmeal picked up yesterday at the Mercantile, corn bread.

But there was no sign of him.

She thought perhaps he’d gone off somewhere with Uncle Burt, but their houseguest was still asleep in the extra bedroom. Straw-colored hair loose at her shoulders, she tugged on some boots and went out into the crisp, nearly cold morning air, where she found Whit Murphy sitting on the steps outside the bunkhouse, having a smoke.

On her approach, the lanky foreman got to his feet, tossed his cigarette, and came down to meet her. As he so often did in her presence, Whit took off his hat.

She tried not to be irritable at the man’s usual nervousness with her, though she was very tired of it. “Have you seen Papa this morning?”

“Sure did. Saddled up his chestnut and went out ridin’ round sunup.”

“By himself?”

The droopy-mustached face lengthened. “I know you don’t like it when he does that, Miss Willa, but I learned a long time ago not to argue with your daddy about such things. He does have his pride.”

“You call it pride, Whit, but I call it stubbornness.” She drew a deep breath in, let it out slow. “Don’t suppose he told you where he was off to...?”

Murphy shook his head. “Just said he cottoned a ride. But they’s only a few places he goes off to alone. You know that, Miss Willa. Uh... you need my help?”

“No. No. I’ll have a little breakfast, and if he isn’t back by then, I’ll saddle Daisy up and go out for a ride myself.”

She did all that, and when her father still hadn’t returned, she set out to find him. Whit was right that there were only a few spots that Papa went off to when he wanted to think and be alone. For a blind man, Papa could take care of himself well enough, but she couldn’t countenance his riding off alone.

The banks of the Purgatory River, a tributary of the Pecos, were bordered with lush conifers, and though Papa could no longer see the cold, clear water flowing down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, he could surely hear it and smell it and feel it. This was perhaps the most likely place that she would find him.

She hadn’t been out this way since she and her late fiancé last picnicked here, and she worried that perhaps her recent reluctance to revisit the spot had encouraged Papa to come out here on his own. But the grassy slope above the sandy, rocky shore where he so often paused on horseback to take the river in showed no signs of him. She rode away from the bittersweet memories as quickly as she could.

The grassy mesas and valleys of the Bar-O were not friendly to a sightless man, even one who owned them. So her next thought was to try the less rolling land where a lone Patriarch Tree ruled, a ways away from a stand of cottonwoods bordering the stream that gave them life.

This magnificent, lonely monarch, its trunk five feet across, nearly one hundred feet tall, had always been a marvel her father relished taking in. He’d been known to dismount and sit beneath the wide branches — as gnarled and reaching as a witch’s grasp in winter, yet wearing an autumn shimmer of gold now — and contemplate.

She saw the chestnut first, milling around the tree, nibbling grass, staying in the cooling shade of the cottonwood’s spreading crown of bristlecone pine.

As she brought Daisy around, Willa finally spotted her father, sitting as he had so often done with his back to the tree’s thick trunk, sitting peacefully, chin on his chest, napping apparently. But as she rode toward him, easily at first, then picking up speed, she realized this was something else.

Something terrible.

When she reached the edge of the golden umbrella of shade, she hopped off Daisy and ran to her father’s side and knelt there. She took his hand and squeezed it and said to him, “Papa, Papa, oh, Papa,” but her father had nothing to say to his daughter, because he was gone, leaving behind only this small, somewhat sunken version of the big man he’d once been.

He was slumped forward enough that she could see the back of his head, crushed in, a bloody mess, a jagged, irregular window on a brain that no longer thought. On the wood two or three feet above her broken father was a smear of red.

Had the chestnut thrown him?

Had Papa been tossed against the broad multiple trunk of the tree by the animal, spooked possibly by a rattler or some other creature? Possible. But at this moment, the horse seemed docile, munching idly on the grass, unconcerned about the fate of its rider.

She let go of the stiff, cold hand.

Got to her feet.

Did not cry.

She would not do that in front of her father — he had wanted a son and had settled for a strong daughter, and she would not let him down at this late date. Crying could wait till she was home and shut inside her room, the room where she had slept from childhood on, where one of the few times she had previously cried there had been when her mother passed.

Now her father, too, had passed. George Cullen, who had carved out the Bar-O in the face of Indian attacks, bad weather, smallpox, cowpox, and predatory animals of all stripes, including rustlers and marauders. He had taken all that head-on and had triumphed over it, displaying the kind of courage and determination that weren’t seen much these days.

Pounding hoofbeats announced that she and her father would not be alone much longer.

In a way that a much younger man might have envied, Burt O’Malley — blue shirt, red bandana, Levi’s, Boss of the Plains hat — brought his borrowed dun quarter horse to an abrupt stop and leapt off, then came at Willa at a run, which he brought to just as abrupt a stop upon seeing his dead friend.

“Sweet Jesus, no,” O’Malley said as he came up next to Willa and slipped an arm around her shoulder, then hugged her side to his, turning her face away from a sight she had already seen and was seared into her soul.

“Uncle Burt,” she said, looking up at him, confused. “However did you find me here?”

He stroked blond tendrils from her face. “Whit told me you’d gone out looking for your papa. Said this was one of a couple places he’d likely be. Do we know what happened here?”

She nodded toward the nibbling chestnut. “Maybe got thrown somehow?”

O’Malley frowned. “Maybe.”

He let go of her and went over for a closer look at his dead partner, pushing his Stetson back, bending down. He glanced up at the smear of red. Shook his head.

“Maybe not,” he said.

Coming back over to her, O’Malley said, “One of us should go and get that sheriff friend of yours. I can do it, if you’d rather not stay here with... with him.”

She squeezed his arm. “No! I want to stay. I’ll stay with him, all right. You go get Caleb.”

He studied her for a few seconds, then nodded, snugged his hat back in place, and remounted the quarter horse. He reined the animal up, then gave her a hard look. “Sure about this?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

And he nodded and rode off as hard as if it mattered.

Hat off, jacket off, vest over a gray badge-pinned shirt, Caleb York was seated in his office, going through the latest “wanted” circulars, when Burt O’Malley blew in like a twister. The big man, usually so at ease with himself, leaned both hands against the desktop, breathing hard, shaking.

“George Cullen is dead,” he said, choking something back.

York sat forward. “Hell you say? How? When?”

O’Malley gestured vaguely. “Went out ridin’ about sunup, foreman says. Daughter found him propped up against a big old cottonwood out on the range. Place he liked to go and sit and think, I gather. But he sure as hell ain’t thinkin’ now.”

“How’d it happen?”

The big man shook his head. “Don’t rightly know. Maybe he was throwed. Not sure. Don’t quite smell right. Best you take a look.”

York got his holstered gun from where it was coiled in a desk drawer. He rose and started buckling it on. “Where’s Willa now?”

“With her daddy. That’s where she wanted to be.” His eyebrows rose. “Why, you know a way of keepin’ that girl from doin’ what she’s a mind to?”

“No, sir.”

York checked the gun’s cylinder — five bullets, an empty chamber under the hammer. Leaving the holster tie-down loose, he went back to the cell where his deputy was sleeping and kicked the cot. Tulley woke like a startled chicken and went for the scattergun propped next to him, but York yanked it away.

York said, “Fetch Doc Miller.”

“Can I use the privy first?”

“Yeah, but nothing fancy.”

The deputy, who slept in his clothes, started climbing into his boots. York left him there to complete the procedure.

Back in the office, York found O’Malley seated at the rough-hewn table that was generally the deputy’s domain; looming over him were wanted posters and a rifle rack, and next to him was the wood-burning stove. The big man seemed small suddenly, hunkered over the table, with his hands folded damn near prayerfully.

York went over to him. Leaned a hand against the table. “Hard to imagine this world without George Cullen in it.”

“He was just a blind old man,” O’Malley said, looking nowhere. “Past his prime. Good days far behind him.”

Then he began to weep.

Ill at ease, York went out onto the boardwalk just in time to see Tulley scurry out from around back, his privy trip over, to head clattering down the boardwalk to Doc Miller’s office over the bank.

“Tulley!” York called.

The deputy came to so quick a stop, he practically tumbled over himself. He turned and said, “Yes, Sheriff?”

“Tell Doc to bring his buckboard.”

“Somethin’ to haul?”

“Somethin’ to haul.”

Tulley resumed his noisy run.

York leaned against a post. He stood there, looking out at Trinidad, wondering if it was cold enough to merit his jacket. This time of day, the town was as peaceful as a Mexican village at siesta. Even the Victory was quiet. Only the occasional random rumble of a wagon or the occasional rhythmic clop of hoofs broke the silence. It was almost as if the town sensed George Cullen’s passing and was paying its respects.

The door behind him creaked open, and then O’Malley was beside him.

“An old jailbird like me,” the man said, smiling embarrassedly, “shouldn’t be so damn sentimental.”

York shrugged. “You two went way back. And I understand he treated you right.”

O’Malley nodded. “He was a good man. Hell of a man. Could have turned his back on me but instead kept me a partner in his place. Socked money away for me when he never had to. His kind won’t pass this way again. The kind that built something out of a wilderness. Kind that made the way for civilization.”

Even, York thought, if he had stood in the way of civilization coming to Trinidad by way of the Santa Fe.

York asked, “You still staying out at the Bar-O?”

O’Malley nodded. “The old boy wouldn’t have it any other way.” He frowned. “Think I should move out? Would folks talk, a man stayin’ out there with that good-lookin’ girl?”

York shook his head. “I think you should stick. She’ll need the support. How much emotion did she show?”

“Not as much as me,” O’Malley said with a wry chuckle. “Willa’s as strong as her old man.”

“No,” York said, “she isn’t. She grew up a daughter living up to her papa’s idea of a son. But she’s no pioneer. She grew up in a ranch house. Oh, she’s strong, all right... but she’ll still need a shoulder.”

O’Malley gave him a long, careful look. “I, uh, somehow gather that maybe you might be the shoulder she’d druther lean on.”

“At one time.” York shrugged. “But I got on her bad side.”

The big man looked at him curiously. “How’d you manage that?”

“Shot and killed her fiancé.”

O’Malley’s eyebrows rose. “That’ll do it,” he admitted.

Offering no further explanation, York said, “I know the spot you’re talking about, that big old Patriarch Tree. You head back to the Bar-O and hold down the fort there... Here’s the Doc now! We can all ride together till you make the turn.”

Caleb arrived riding alongside the town doctor, who was at the reins of a rattling buckboard drawn by a single horse, a Missouri Fox Trotter. Half a length ahead of the buckboard, and in much the same way as Uncle Burt had, Caleb brought his gelding to a quick stop and was off the horse in a flash. He went directly to Willa and held her out by the arms and looked at her hard and careful.

His eyes asked her if she was all right, and she nodded. Meanwhile, the pear-shaped doc in the rumpled brown suit got the Gladstone bag off the seat next to him and climbed down from the buckboard in no hurry to make his way to a patient who would never be cured.

Jerking a thumb at the calmly waiting Daisy, Caleb said to Willa, “Maybe you should ride back to the Bar-O. Mr. O’Malley is waitin’ there.”

She shook her head, and the untended hair was all over the place; she brushed it from her face. “No. I’d like to hear what your thoughts are. And Dr. Miller’s.”

“Might be a hard thing for you to hear.”

Her chin came up. “I have a right. It’s my land, and he’s my father.”

He nodded just a little. “It is. He is. But stay back here a ways. We need to look around a bit. All right?”

“All right.”

She went over and stood with Daisy, stroking the horse’s snout, while Caleb joined the doctor. They spoke softly, but the breeze carried their voices as the men leaned, one on each side, over her father’s remains.

The doctor’s voice was gentle, but his words were not. “Rigor mortis has set in. That means two hours, anyway, since he died.”

“Could he have been thrown?”

Doc Miller nodded toward the nearby grazing horse. “That chestnut over there is no bronco, but it might be possible. An animal can get spooked. But the bruising on the body here says otherwise.”

“That right? Dead bodies talkin’ now?”

The doc chuckled grimly. “We’ve run into this before, Caleb. Look at the purple rising above his collar. I’ll wager when I get Mr. Cullen back to my surgery, we’ll find his back and backside and the rear of his legs all bruised where the blood settled. If he’d wound up here, sittin’ up like this, the blood would’ve settled only down below.”

“You’re saying he was moved.”

The doc shrugged. “If my assumptions are correct, yes. I don’t imagine you want me to strip this gentleman of his clothing and make an examination in the back of my buckboard, just to make sure... while his daughter’s still in sight.”

Caleb said nothing to that. He pointed to the tree trunk overhead. “What about the blood smear?”

“Well, with Mr. Cullen deceased, the blood wouldn’t have been flowing... but if the corpse was held upright and the head knocked against the tree, some blood would have got there, all right. And, Caleb, that wound does indicate the head took more than one blow.”

The doctor leaned her father’s head forward a bit for the sheriff to see.

“The death blow,” Caleb said, “and then another blow or two, to produce the blood smear?”

“That’s right. To make it appear that George Cullen died accidentally. And take a look around. See anything missing?”

“What am I looking for?”

“Pieces of bone. Chunks, even. That’s a mighty big hole in the back of that head, Caleb. Now, when I go to digging in my surgery, I’ll find shards and such... but that leaves a hell of a nasty jigsaw puzzle, one missin’ some big pieces.”

Caleb sighed. Rose. The flat leaves of the Patriarch were twisting in the breeze, rustling, fluttering, as if tiny birds were hiding in the gnarled branches under their golden covering. He had a look around on the ground where his own footsteps and those of Willa, O’Malley, and the doctor had broken twigs and left impressions.

But there were also signs of something having been dragged across the grass — consistent with the doctor’s thoughts on the body having been moved, brought here to this lonely place to provide an accidental explanation for what must have occurred...

“Murder, then,” Caleb said.

A chill went through Willa, far colder than the breeze riffling the leaves.

Pointing out the flattened area where the body might have been dragged to the tree and propped up, Caleb said, “It may have been brought in a wagon.”

He followed the path of the pressed-down grass and found the impressions of wagon wheels at the edge of the shaded area. The doctor came over and joined him.

“Murder,” Caleb said again.

“That’s my preliminary diagnosis, Sheriff,” Doc Miller said. “And it’s not like you’re gonna be shy of motives.”

Caleb shook his head. “Not hardly. Refusing to sell land to the railroad for their branchline as he did? Standing in the way of fortunes being made? George Cullen had no shortage of enemies.”

And with her father gone, Willa realized, that left her in charge of the Bar-O... and the decision making where accommodating the railroad was concerned.

Caleb came over to her, hat in hand. “You were listening, of course.”

“I was listening, of course.”

“Burt O’Malley and me are in agreement that it’s best he stay on at the Bar-O for now. You might need some help in the days ahead, and like they say, he’s the O in the Bar-O.”

“I’m the Bar-O,” she said.

His smile came gentle. “I know you are... now. But your father was the Bar-O till somebody killed him — probably somebody who wants to see that branchline go in, meaning you are going to get leaned on in ways you can’t begin to picture.”

Again, her chin came up. “I can take of myself.”

“Your father thought that, too, but he was wrong. People in this part of the country like to say they can stand alone. Take care of things all by themselves. But the truth of it is, we can’t. All of us need somebody.”

Was he saying he needed her?

“Anyway,” he said, snugging on the cavalry pinch hat, “it’s up to you. Your ranch, your land, hell, your cows. Throw the old boy out on his tail if you like.”

With a shrug, she said, “Uncle Burt can stay awhile.”

“Good. But you need to head back there long about now. The doc and I have to deal with your late father. He’s evidence now, and I need him and the doc’s help to find the bastard that did this to somebody we both loved.”

He tipped his hat, nodded, and went back to help the doctor. Framed by the massive tree trunk, the two men stood beside her seated father and waited for her to go so she didn’t have to see Papa hauled to the buckboard like a sack of grain and flung in.

She got on Daisy and rode at a good clip, but her mind was racing even faster, thinking about how she’d kept from her father how she really felt about the spur.

But whom had she shared it with?

And was she indirectly responsible for her father’s death?