The Devil You Know (7 page)

“Don't you have chores to do?” he asked, resuming his meal.

“Done. Or mostly done. I have things to do when you finish your breakfast. I already made my bed, washed the morning dishes, blackened the stove, swept the kitchen and front room, collected eggs and fed the chickens, and took out your pot. Now I'm keeping you company.”

“That's a chore?”

“Today it is.”

“Hmm.” He swallowed a spoonful of congealed oatmeal made slightly more palatable by the dollop of strawberry preserves that had been stirred into it. “I already guessed you blackened something this morning. I thought it might have been your shoes, but they could still use a good polishing.”

Annalea pressed her lips together, thinking. “Do I have a smut on my nose?”

“Those are freckles. You have a smut on your cheek.” He shook his head when she knuckled her right cheek. “Other one. You got it.”

“You have the kind of smuts that don't come off when you rub them.”

“I'm sure. Do you suppose you can find a mirror for me? I'd like to look.”

“Not while you're eating.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

He nodded. “It feels worse.”

“I am supposed to ask about your knee.”

Israel flexed it under the table. It hurt, but he had been
able to put weight on it when he answered nature's call and when he dressed. The clothes that had been left for him were well-worn but clean, and they fit reasonably well. The faded chambray shirt was loose and the trousers rested low on his hips, but he had no cause for complaint.

“The knee's better than it was yesterday,” he told her.

“What about your head?”

“Let's say that I know it's there and leave it at that.”

“All right. I'm supposed to get you to walk outside. Not far, Willa says, just enough for you to stretch. She says you'll seize up otherwise.”

“Willa says a lot, doesn't she?”

“Not really.” Her mien turned thoughtful. “Not as much as me.”

“I think that's probably true.” He finished off the tea and set the cup back on the tray. “I didn't thank you yesterday. So thank you.”

She snorted. “You told me to go away yesterday.”

“I did, and you didn't listen.”

“That's right, and here you are.” She waggled her pursed lips back and forth as if she were swishing water in her mouth. When she stopped, she asked, “What should I call you? Mr. McKenna? Israel? Augustus Horatio Roundbottom?”

“Don't you dare, brat. Call me Israel.”

She grinned at him and dropped her hands away from her face. She folded her forearms on the table. “You can call me Annalea. I should probably address you as Mr. McKenna when Willa is around. She is one for manners, mostly because our mama's gone and she thinks it's her duty to raise me not to be a heathen. Plus, she went to an academy in Saint Louis for young women when she wasn't much older than I am, so she learned some things that she feels compelled to pass on. I have to take it all in or she says she'll send me there.”

“You believe her?”

“I do.”

He nodded solemnly. “Then you better call me Mr. McKenna, though I can't promise that I'll always answer to it. Now about that mirror? I bet Cutter or Zach have one in their shaving kits.”

Annalea went to Cutter's bunk because it was the closest. She rummaged around the small trunk at the foot of his bed and found a framed mirror about the size of man's palm. She held it behind her back while she gave him the benefit of her thinking. “You should sit back on the bunk in case you faint. I won't be able to get you up off the floor on my own.”

“Noted.” He scooted back a few inches and held out his hand. She presented the mirror to him with the kind of gravity usually reserved for conferring a diploma or a knighthood. He took it and held it up to his face, and then he blanched. Or at least he thought he did. It was difficult to see any change in his pallor given the artist's palette of color that was now his complexion. “You did warn me.”

“I did.”

His features were so distorted by swelling that he was unrecognizable to himself. It was not only that the left eye was closed, but also that it resembled a pig's bladder—if the pig had drunk from a trough of port wine and absinthe. He gave his head a quarter turn and surveyed the line of his nose. It appeared to be unbroken with the familiar bump on the bridge exactly where he remembered it and not slanted to one side the way the rest of his face seemed to be.

His mouth was dominated by an upper lip that rested like an overstuffed bolster pillow on the lower one. He tried to smile. The effect was grotesque. He should be living under a bridge in a child's fairy tale, collecting tolls from billy goats. He thrust his chin forward and examined it from all sides. It was scraped so raw that he might as well have plowed the lower forty with it, and then again, that was a fair description of what had happened. There were also abrasions on both cheeks and across his brow and quite possibly more silver threads at his temples. The short version of what he saw was that he was a mess.

He turned the mirror over, set it down on the table, and pushed it toward Annalea. “You can put it back.”

She took it but did not leave her chair. She tilted her head to one side and studied him, a small crease appearing between her brows.

“What?” he asked. “Something I missed? Am I growing another lump?”

She shook her head. “I've been wondering what you will look like when all the clutter is gone. I asked Willa if she thought you might be handsome, but she said she didn't know and that it was not important.”

“It's a little bit important.”

“That's what I thought. No one wants to be ugly, although if it turns out that you are, I am sorry for saying so. I do like your eye. The color, I mean.”

“This one?” He pointed to the pig bladder.

Annalea curled her lip. “No. The one you can see out of.”

“Huh.” He envied her the shrug she gave him. Thus far this morning, he had managed to avoid that response. Thinking about it made him adjust his sling.

Annalea's chair scraped the floor when she pushed back from the table. She hopped up and returned the mirror to Cutter's kit. “I'm going to take the tray to the house and then I'll be back for you.”

“Back for me? For what?”

“Our walk. So you don't seize up, remember?”

“Oh, that walk.” He looked around at the floor. “I don't see my shoes anywhere.”

“Willa told Zach to put them outside last night so it'd give you pause in case you wanted to leave.”

“Leave? I don't even know where I am.”

“Guess Willa didn't think of that.” She retrieved the shoes from just outside the door and gave them to him. “I could help you put them on.”

“I can manage.”

“I'll clean them up tonight.”

Israel supposed that meant the plan was to put them out of his reach again. It was a wholly unnecessary precaution, but it seemed Willa was going to have to come to that conclusion on her own. He might have brought her around to believing he was Israel McKenna, but here was proof that she did not trust him.

Well, good for her. He did not trust himself either.

*   *   *

Willa waited until Mal and Eli Barber were over the ridge before she set Felicity on their path. She did not put it past them to circle back so they could watch her. If they were out of her sight when she reached the rise, she would know that's what they were up to. If they were headed back to Big Bar by a direct route, she would still be able to see them.

She dismounted just before she reached the crest and left Felicity behind a rocky alcove while she carefully climbed to the top of it. She stretched out flat and pulled herself by the elbows to the edge. When she was reasonably confident that she could see and not be seen, she raised her head and shoulders to look down the other side of the ridge.

It seemed that Mal and Eli were in no particular hurry to return to Big Bar. Not only were they still visible, but they had traveled only a little more than half the distance that she had estimated. She swore softly. Malcolm Barber wanted to make sure she saw them. He was deliberately provoking her, taking his time leaving her land. She would not have been surprised if he had taken a piss somewhere to mark the territory he thought was his.

The dispute over the land had originated between her grandfather and Malcolm's father, Ezra Barber. When it was open range and ranchers were driving cattle long distances to market, property boundaries were more of a gentlemen's agreement than a hard line. The railroad, barbed wire, and an influx of homesteaders changed that. Ezra put up his fence first, claiming the herds were mingling and he was tired of cutting out his branded cattle from Obie's. Since Obie was of the opinion that Ezra had never done much in the way of separating the two herds, and that he was essentially a rustler posing as a respectable rancher, Obie was initially in favor of the fence. That lasted until he learned Ezra was not going to let him through to take his cattle to market, and as the route was the most direct, Obie could either pay for the right to travel over Ezra's land or he could go around. It was never a real choice for her grandfather.

He went around Ezra's land, and then he went around Ezra.

The plan for the Union Pacific spur from Denver had been to lay track to Wheaton. That would have been another advantage to Ezra, but Obie got to the surveyors first and made a convincing case for Jupiter. They accepted his proposal—in no small part because it came with a substantial bribe—and set the rails to Jupiter. It was then that Ezra tried to move his fence line, though the attempt was made more out of sheer cussedness than for any substantial benefit.

The government surveyors sided with Obadiah. The ones that Ezra hired studied the same land grants and had an opposing view. They determined that when Ezra set his fence, he created a boundary that was well inside the property he owned. Whether it had occurred because Ezra did not know how to properly read a map or because of his need for expediency did not matter. It had no bearing on the result. The law did not recognize ignorance as an excuse and looked on expediency as proof of greed. In effect, Ezra had turned over acres of grazing land, and Obie's subsequent use of it year after year made it Pancake land in the eyes of the law, if not in Ezra's.

By Willa's reckoning, it was two years ago in August that Ezra Barber died. She did not precisely regret that she had not visited Big Bar for the viewing and burial, but it would have made it more settled in her mind that he was dead. Perhaps if the dispute had died with him, it would be different, but Ezra made sure it lived on in Malcolm, and Malcolm stoked the fires in Eli.

These days it was about the water. She had the source for this area of land, and they did not. She had seen evidence that someone was trying to divert the flow from the mountain lake, but she had no proof that the Barbers were responsible. Several years before Ezra died, after two unusually warm winters were followed by drought and the lake receded, Willa proposed temporarily sharing access to the water. She did this over Happy's strenuous objections and his prediction that her grandfather would rise from his grave to throttle her.

It did not come to that because Ezra turned down her offer. The old man was convinced that she must have poisoned the lake and meant to kill off the herd that grazed in his southwest pasture. Malcolm finally convinced him otherwise, but then
he balked again, demanding to know why
he
should share what rightfully belonged to him. That put them at an impasse but apparently saved her from a throttling.

Willa had been satisfied with the outcome because there was no Christian charity in her heart when she made the offer, no nobility of reason. She did it because she needed to prove that she was better. Better than the Barbers. Better than she had hoped she could be. Just better.

Willa shivered, as much from the cold as the tenor of her thinking, but she stayed where she was until Eli and his father disappeared into a knot of limber pine, and waited another ten minutes to be certain they would not show themselves elsewhere.

When they did not, she mounted Felicity again and took her down the slope by an alternate route. She reconnected with the wider trail Israel McKenna's tormentors had taken before they tied him up and followed it until she couldn't. If the men had come from Big Bar, she was not going to be able to prove it. It looked as if Malcolm and Eli had tramped around and through the same area, although she had no way of knowing if they were trying to hide evidence or uncover it.

Reluctantly she halted her search, but since she was out, and the lake was not a hard ride for Felicity, she made the decision to go there and satisfy herself that Malcolm and Eli had not gone before her.

*   *   *

Israel had Annalea's shoulder for a crutch but was careful not to rest too much weight on it. He ignored her encouragement to do otherwise and used her primarily for balance when they paused.

So far, they had stopped at the chicken coop, where he politely admired the mottled, single-combed Java hens as Annalea named them one by one. The Leghorns were particularly spritely, shaking their wattles so they snapped like small red flags in a brisk wind.

Zach was bringing Miss Dolly out of the barn when Israel and Annalea were going in. He touched his forefinger to the brim of his hat in greeting. “So she got you up.”

“Was it ever a question?” Israel asked dryly. He looked down at Annalea and saw she appeared affronted that the outcome might have been in doubt.

Zach chuckled and tapped Annalea on the head. “No, it wasn't. You hear, Annalea? I don't bet against you. Ever.”

That raised her broad smile, and she nodded, satisfied. “I was bringing him to see the horses, but most especially Miss Dolly. You have them all out.”