The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (34 page)

Boz leaned on his saddle-horn, eyes raking the ground and Trace with dispassionate interest. “Anything?”

There was, a little. Like a vibration, or a scent, very faint. “Just the horse, here…” He could see the animal, edgy but not alarmed, flicking its ears back in the knowledge that something was close. “Doesn’t seem too shook up.”

The attack came without warning, and Trace recoiled from it; he seldom felt anything so violent in the spirit world, where sensations were blunted and everything had a dreamlike quality. He couldn’t get a look at the attacker, but he felt the poignancy of its rage, the hopelessness in its blood-lust. It had enough self-awareness to hate what it did, and hate itself for relishing the task.

Trace shook himself out of the trance and found all his muscles knotted with that frenzied fury. He looked at his hands and was almost surprised to find them muddy, rather than slick with blood.

“Well?” Boz said.

“Still can’t get a look at it. But it was plenty mad.”

“At the horse? For wanderin into its territory?”

“I don’t think it’s an animal.”

Boz sucked his teeth. “A man, then. Tearin up the wounds to make ’em look like claws.”

“Could be.” Trace squatted to wash his hands at the edge of the pool.

“It ain’t wolves, for damn sure.” Boz swung down from Nate’s saddle and paced carefully around the blood-spatter. “Wolves don’t cut the hind legs like people say. Too much risk of gettin kicked. Whoever did this prob’ly
heard
that’s what wolves do, and don’t know any better … Look.” Boz planted himself like a tree, pointing to the ground on either side of himself, where there was a gap in the blood-spray. “Horse was facin this way, first gusher of blood came
whsst.
” He drew a line in the air across his chest. “Killer was standin here, got splattered.”

“Standing?” Trace repeated. “Taller than a wolf?”

“Have to be. Man-sized. Also explain why the horse didn’t bolt.”

Trace nodded. All of Miller’s horses, even the unbroken ones, were well used to men and not shy around them. “Well, Hanky
did
say it looked like a man. Could be an Indian renegade, slipped off the Agency.”

“Or somebody’s got a beef with Miller,” Boz said, which was more likely. Water and grazing rights were a constant bone of contention these days, and Miller had fired his last foreman, not long after Trace showed up to take his place.

Trace combed through the bruised foliage along the edge of the pool, and found a pair of tracks, deep and skewed, as if something big had pushed off in a leap toward the top of the waterfall. “Look at this.”

Boz came and looked. He hunkered over the tracks a long time, and then stood up and nudged his hat back, scratched under the band with one thumb.

“Just say it,” Trace taunted. “You don’t know what it is, either.”

“Looks like a cat, to me.”

“With five toes?”

“I ain’t sure that last one is a toe.” Boz eyed the rock face above the pool. “You gonna go up there and check, or am I?”

So Trace scrambled up the slippery rocks on the downhill edge, until he was standing at the top and looking at some muddy smears where the killer had landed—on two feet. “Looks like Hanky was tellin the truth.”

“Tracks any clearer?”

“Nope. Too wet.”

“Can you see where it went?”

“Into the creek.” Trace stood there a moment longer, measuring the distance by eye. Hanky had not exaggerated for once: it had to be twenty feet from where the thing had pushed off. “You remember those bloodsuckers on the train?”

“Aw, for the love o’—I
knew
you were gonna say that.”

“You ever seen a
man
make a jump like that?”

“Those things were pack hunters,” Boz argued. “And they weren’t shy of men
or
guns. If Hanky ran up on one of those things, you think he’d be alive to tell us about it?”

“Probably not,” Trace conceded. He climbed back down the rise, mounted up, and turned Blackjack’s head toward home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It was a cool, clear, bright morning, promising a gorgeous summer day. Today was the twentieth, Trace reminded himself, mentally going over all the chores that needed parceling out. They’d been up to Evanston on the Fourth of July—that was the summer’s big horse-fair, with races and exhibitions and prizes, and the ranch had acquitted itself nicely—but Miller wanted another batch of animals ready for the first of August, and that meant ferrying, exercising, training checks on some of the four-year-olds. Plus there was fence and tack to be mended, the chicken coop to be moved, repairs done on the bunk-house roof … Seemed like there was something else he was supposed to remember, about today. Something unpleasant.

“You, ah, you ain’t maybe
seen
somethin out there, nights?” Boz ventured after a while.

Trace had confessed some weeks ago about his nighttime meditations. He had been careful to give Boz credit for his idea about the Indians and their spirit quests.

Boz had been equally careful to take the news with equanimity. “I figured it was somethin like that,” he’d said, after Trace explained why he still took a turn on the night watch, two or three times a week, and how he’d learned to meditate in the saddle. “You been a lot more even-keel since we been out here. I just thought maybe there weren’t so many spirits around these parts.”

There were a few—murdered Indians, lost soldiers, a family of settlers who’d been slaughtered down by the creek—but Trace was keeping the power at a low enough ebb that none of them made trouble. And so far he’d seen no demons loitering about, no visits from sinister Russians. He was starting to think he’d dodged that bullet.

“Nothin out of the ordinary,” Trace said thoughtfully. “I guess I could take a turn tonight, see if there’s anything new in the area.”

“How much
do
you see? In the dark?”

“A lot,” Trace admitted.

“Like what?”

“Like every live thing from here to the bunk-house.” He nodded at the horizon, where the smoke from the cook-shack was just visible. “In the spirit world everything is sort of gray and still and quiet—like bein in the woods during a snow. All the live things show up like fireflies, but white. Every mouse, every screech-owl. I can tell every horse at a distance, tell you each one by name and where it is. The men, too.”

“Is that how you caught Droopy asleep on his watch last week?”

“Yup,” Trace said, smugly.

“Hunh. So how come you ain’t seen this thing killin the horses? Or if it’s a man, why ain’t you noticed somebody where they ain’t supposed to be?”

“Don’t know. Maybe didn’t look in the right place. Maybe happened while I was asleep and not payin attention. I ain’t God, you know.”

“I was wonderin when you’d notice,” Boz said amiably.

They dismounted in the remuda corral and stripped down Nate and Blackjack to turn them loose for the day. The ranch was beginning to bustle with early-morning activities—cows lowing in the dairy barn, hands rattling milk pails and crooning to their charges. Chickens clucking over their feed, and Mrs. Miller clucking right back at them. Trace and Boz said, “Ma’am,” to her as they passed by, and she smiled and asked Trace how he was enjoying that volume of Shakespeare she had loaned him; Trace said he was enjoying it mightily. Mrs. Miller had been a schoolteacher for twenty years before she’d married Miller. She liked children, but she had none of her own, so she mothered the ranch hands as best she could.

Meals, during the summer months, were cooked in an open-sided shack outside of the main bunk-house. The hands had constructed a fire-pit there, surrounded by rough benches, and during all but the wettest weather this was the hub of ranch social life. Hanky was there now, with his regular posse. By the sound of things, he had already spilled the beans about the savage horse-killer in their midst, and in typical cowboy fashion, his audience was raking him over the coals as a liar, a fool, and a tenderfoot.

“No, no!” Hanky insisted, pointing an accusing finger at Red. “
You’re
the one who don’t know from bears. What about that night you fell outta the saddle cuz you rode up on that tree stump and thought it was a bear?”

“That wasn’t me,” Red countered. “Hey Droopy! ’Member that time you fell asleep in the saddle and rode up on that old stump afore you knew what it was?”

“I didn’t fall asleep,” Droopy protested, and the boys all laughed, because Droopy was
named
for his ability to catch a nap wherever he sat. “Least I make it into the saddle. Unlike
some
people.”

There was a brief, accusatory silence, such that even Trace looked up from pouring his coffee to see who they were staring at.

The Kid, as usual, sat a little away from the others, head down over his Bible—the Book of Mormon, to be strictly accurate—and it took a few seconds for the stares to penetrate his isolated attention. “I beg your pardon?”

“Surprised
you
didn’t come runnin when I shot at that critter last night,” Hanky said.

“I didn’t hear any shot,” the Kid said.

“Where was you?”

“I was out on the east boundary, where I was supposed to be.” The Kid looked at Hanky coolly through his spectacles. “How do I know you fired a shot? How do we even know
you
rode your shift last night? Maybe you got up at dawn and used your story of finding the horse to cover your sloth.”

Hanky was not a stupid young man, but to call him sophisticated would be a stretch. He might not completely understand the challenge that had been levied at him, but he knew it required answering, and he let the Kid have it with both barrels. “You sure talk fancy for one o’ them inbreds, four-eyes. How many Prophets did your momma marry, to make you so high-and-mighty?”

Trace was aware of glances darting his direction, wondering if the top screw was going to wade in before fists were thrown, but Trace knew better than to interfere in the pecking order, and he was curious to see how the Kid would handle himself. At sixteen, the Mormon kid was the youngest hand on the ranch, and the least experienced. He could ride well enough, and was neat about handling the horses and their tack, but he couldn’t herd worth a damn and he knew next to nothing about roping, doctoring, fence-building, or any of the myriad other skills a cowboy needed. He obviously had been raised to a different kind of life, and Trace wondered what had driven the boy to abandon Salt Lake in favor of this roughneck outfit that he clearly despised.

Beyond that, there was something about the Kid that nagged Trace’s psychic sense. It wasn’t the nerve-jangling alarm he got from demons, nor the sense of familiarity he’d felt from Ferris. The feeling was faint but off-putting, like a rank odor. The Kid just plain rubbed everybody the wrong way, with his watchful attitude and his scorn. And there was a streak of disquiet in him, which Trace and Boz had marked but the younger cowboys had not the experience to recognize: one of them was going to push the Kid too far one day, and end up with a broken nose or worse.

For a moment Trace thought today would be the day. The Kid’s head went down and his eyes were cold murder behind the spectacles. But he said flatly, “There’s only one Prophet, you ignorant Gentile.”

Hanky laughed. They all laughed, with varying degrees of meanness and sympathy. But the taunting had run into a box canyon—it was no fun tormenting a victim who didn’t fight back—so the boys returned to their grub, turning their backs on the Kid, who got to his feet and made as if to head for the bunks.

“Hanky,” Trace said, before the Kid was out of earshot, “you and Red drag that horse off like I told you?”

“You said after breakfast, Preacher,” Hanky said, holding his tin cup aloft.

“From the way you were jawin I figured you were done chewin,” Trace said. “The rest of y’all can move the chicken coop and the pens to a new patch of grass. And make sure you clean out all the boxes and put in new straw.”

Groans all around. Herding chickens was no one’s favorite chore.

“And after that,” Trace said, adding the coup de grace, “you can help Missus Miller with the weeding.”

Shrieks of agony this time. Protestations of unfairness. Negotiations of souls, future prospects, and firstborn sons.

Trace raised his voice. “Kid!”

The youngster stood poised on one foot. “Sir?”

“After you get your morning chores squared away come see me in the office.”

Voices dropped to a speculative murmur. Being called to the office, when it wasn’t payday, usually meant dismissal. The last time it had happened, Miller had called down his old foreman and told him to get his drunken ass off the property before noon.

The Kid’s jaw clenched, but he said, “Yes, sir,” before continuing on his way.

Trace took his plate of bacon and biscuits and seated himself across from Boz. The cowboys scarfed down their food, shooting wary glances in Trace’s direction, before scattering to the day’s work.

“You gonna fire him?” Boz asked, when they were alone.

“Prob’ly not today,” Trace said.

*   *   *

“C
OME IN,
”
TRACE
said, when the Kid appeared on his doorstep an hour later. “Sit down.”

The Kid sat. He was a good-looking boy—a tad on the short side but stocky, with broad, rosy cheeks and a shock of straw hair. Trace looked for a glare of defiance in him but couldn’t find it; just a wary control in his face and posture. The Mormon boy showed more respect to Trace than he did anyone else, and Trace guessed it was because of the moniker “Preacher” that Miller had laid on him, fourteen years ago when he was a greenhorn himself.

“Are you really a preacher?” the Kid had asked once.

“I was readin to be, when I was your age,” Trace told him.

“Why didn’t you finish?”

“Guess the Lord had other plans for me,” Trace answered, and the Kid had looked thoughtful at that, but said no more.

“Is there any truth to what Hanky said this mornin?” Trace asked the boy now. “About you skippin your turn on the watch last night?”