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

moments. Should he go downstairs and wait? Should he knock a third time? Should he simply stand out here like a fool?

He raised his knuckles for a third knock, but then thought better of it, and reached for the doorknob. This was wrong, Dusty thought. You don’t just go into someone’s bedroom uninvited. But he couldn’t bear to wait, either. He found himself almost tingling with anticipation, and maybe even just a touch of fear. His knees felt weak. Here I go, he thought, and he turned the knob and let the door swing open.

He leaned forward to peek past the edge of the door into the room. A single bed was against one wall, and there was a small bureau with a basin and pitcher atop it. A window overlooked the street below. The smell of whiskey was in the air.

Someone was lying in the bed. A woman.

“Hello?” Dusty said.

There was no response. Dusty did not want to be caught stepping in here like this. These were prudent times, and such a thing would be unseemly. Less than gentlemanly behavior toward a woman could land you in a rash of trouble. Dusty himself wouldn’t tolerate such an action by another man. Yet, she had not reacted when Dusty spoke. It wasn’t odd for one to take a light nap during the day, but this woman seemed to be out cold. He thought what-the-hell, and stepped in.

The woman was maybe sixty-ish, her face lined, the flesh sagging at her neck and puffy beneath each eye. It was not simply the skin of age, he realized, but of illness. Her cheekbones and jaw line were starkly pronounced, her eyes deeply set, almost sinking in, giving her face a skeletal look. Her skin bore a tinge of yellow. He became concerned; was she breathing at all? She was lying so still.

He moved to the side of the bed.

“Ma’am? I don’t mean to intrude, but the door was open,” a little lie, “and I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

No response at all, not even the flutter of eyelids, but at least from where he now stood he could see that she was indeed breathing. Lightly, almost silently.

He shifted a foot, and his toe touched something which rolled away. He reached down and under the bed, his fingers finding and curling around a glass bottle. He pulled it out, finding it bore a whiskey label.

There was no glass. She must have been drinking directly from the bottle. Drank herself into a drunken stupor, he realized. She might have finished the bottle, or it might have spilled when it fell. The floorboards were stained and discolored, and the smell of whiskey was strong.

He wondered if this could be the Rose Callahan who had been his mother. No, he decided. The name might be the same, the line of work might be also, but this woman was far too old. Her hair, flying wildly about the pillow, was salt-and-pepper in some places, snowy white in others. Her face was too deeply engraved with the lines of age. She must be sixty if she’s a day, he thought. That would have put her at forty-three when he was born. You didn’t see too many whores that old. The younger competition usually forced them out of a job long before they reached their forties. And you almost never heard of a woman giving birth at that age.

Dusty stood the bottle upright on a small stand by the bed, then turned and stepped out of the room. He closed the door behind him.

So, his journey was over. This woman, this Rose Callahan he had been pursuing, was not the one who was his mother.

He replaced his hat and stood outside the door, not quite sure how he felt. He had tried to find his mother, but had been unable to. Hell, it had been a long-shot from the start. And now he would return to the Cantrell spread and hopefully get his old job back. Now he could devote all of his attention to saving money and starting his own outfit, without his thoughts drifting any longer to his past. His unanswered questions would simply have to remain unanswered.

He supposed there should be some sort of feeling of completion. His journey was over. He should be glad. But he found he was not.

Was it so terribly wrong to want to know who your mother was? To know something of her background? Was it so wrong not to want to feel alone in the world? Sam Patterson had given him all that he could, been like a father to him, and because of Sam, Dusty thought he might know what it would like to have a family. A home. But it had not been enough.

He turned and started down the stairs. He suddenly felt weary. Not the bone-weariness he had been feeling because of all the riding, but a deep-down-to-the-soul exhaustion. He took one step after another, his feet feeling heavy. This ride, this goddamned long trail he had been following, had all been for nothing.

He stepped down onto the barroom floor. Ahead of him was the door, and out beyond, his horse waited. But then, he caught sight of the bar with his peripheral vision, and a second drink suddenly seemed appealing. Something a little stronger than beer.

A saloon woman was standing at the bar, alongside the barkeep. Her hair was lightly colored, her age difficult to guess because of all of the paint on her face. Dusty stepped up to the bar.

“I’ll have another drink,” he said to the barkeep. “Make it a whiskey this time.”

“I thought you were out of money,” he said.

Oh, yeah. Dusty had momentarily forgotten, in the wave of weariness and despair that had struck him outside the woman’s doorway upstairs. He had spent his last nickel on a beer before he had gone upstairs. “I don’t know...I’ll work it off, or something.”

“No, you don’t have to. This one’s on the