The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1) by Brad Dennison (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Dusty took a room upstairs, and Lewis paid to have his clothes washed at a laundry a few buildings down the street, and Dusty scrubbed away the trail dust and the sweat in an iron tub out back. He also took a straight razor to the whiskers that had been growing on his chin and upper lip since he had left Arizona.

He insisted on working about the saloon every day to pay for his keep, sweeping the floor and scooping up empty glasses and bottles, and after a time, pouring beer.

He would check in on Rosie, hoping to find her awake, but she never was. The town doctor, a thin old man in a jacket that sort of bagged on his bony frame, and with a bowler perched atop his head, would visit twice daily, use a stethoscope to listen to her breathing and her rapid, shallow heartbeat, and stare at his watch as he checked the pace of her pulse. Then, he would simply shake his head sadly.

Four days after Dusty had ridden into town, his mother died, without having regained consciousness. Dusty never had the opportunity he had ridden so far to find. To talk to his mother, to get to know her.

During her final moments, her face now deeply yellowed and her abdomen swollen with liver disease, she would utter words he couldn’t make out, and her eyelids would occasionally flutter. The old doctor sat at one side of the bed, and Dusty at the other, holding her small, bony hand in his.

“I’m here, Ma,” he said. “It’s been a lot of years, but I’m here.”

Annie, standing behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “We’re all here, Rosie.”

Lewis stood by the foot of the bed saying nothing, his eyes glistening with wetness.

Finally, Rosie took one shuddering breath, then another, and then she breathed no more.

“She’s gone,” the doctor said.

Lewis and Dusty buried Rosie behind the saloon. There was a small cemetery outside of town. Nothing more than a few graves dug into the dirt, with wooden crosses or headmarkers. Lewis and Annie wanted her buried behind the only home Rosie had known since the cabin she had been raised in. Dusty had insisted on doing all of the shovel work himself, and then using an iron poker heated in the saloon’s wood stove, he burned his mother’s name into a wooden plank. Her exact birth date was unknown, so below her name he simply burned, D.1878.

“You’re welcome to remain with us as long as you like,” Lewis said that night, they shared a supper of beans and steak. “You’ll always have a home here with us.”

“Thanks,” Dusty said. “That means a lot to me. But in the morning, I think I’ll be riding on.”

“Will you be back?”

“Probably. Eventually.”

“Where are you headed? Back to Arizona?”

But Annie knew. She said, “Montana.”

Dusty nodded.

Lewis said, “Good luck, son. I hope you find him.”

The following morning, as the eastern sky lightened to a steel gray and the stars overhead faded away, Dusty led his horse from the livery stable. He swung into the saddle, thinking to turn his horse toward the edge of town, but on an impulse, he rode instead toward the saloon, and to the small grave behind it.

He sat in the saddle, his hat in one hand as he looked down at the plank, which struck him as seeming so small against a backdrop of a barren ridge that rose to a sharp-looking edge, maybe five miles in the distance. ROSE CALLAHAN. D.1878.

He wanted to say something. If nothing else, then at least goodbye. But a spoken word would somehow seem out of place. There was a sort of solemnity, almost a reverence, to the silence this morning. A silence that did not need to be broken.

He felt, somehow, she had known he was at her bedside, and she had known who he was. And she knew he was here now. Words did not need to be spoken.

He returned his hat to his head, turned his horse away, and left the town of Baker’s Crossing behind him.

FOUR

There was one stop Dusty wanted to make before he lit out for Montana. A little way station a few hours outside of Baker’s Crossing.

Dusty did not think he knew what love was. He thought maybe the word was used too much - by women who were lost in the romance of romance, waiting for their knight-in-shining-armor to come and save them from a life of loneliness, and by men who were simply trying to satisfy their needs in bed. Somehow, amazingly when you thought about it, despite the vast difference in the needs of men and women, many would find some sort of middle ground and make a life with each other.

Dusty had never used the word love simply to gain what he wanted. And he never intended to. Dusty knew what it felt like to be an unwanted child, a bastard with no name and no sense of identity. He would be damned if he would take a chance on bringing a child like that into the world. Sure, he had known more than one girl, and gotten intimate with some of them, but only when he cared about them. Never casually, and never with a saloon whore. Never to simply release animal passions.

He was finding he cared deeply about Haley Anderson. Moreso than had ever felt about any other girl before. He had last seen Haley five days earlier, and wanted to see her again before he lit out for Montana. He wanted to tell her of his background. Not only the information he had learned at Baker’s Crossing, but also of Sam Patterson. If she would still have him, the once he had returned from Montana, they could begin making some sort of plans. He could return to Arizona, work for Mr. Cantrell for a while and save his money, and then he could start his own spread, and he and Haley could build a life