Angel Creek, Page 2

  George had died early in the winter, and during the long, cold months Dee had grieved and pondered her situation. She owned this fertile little valley now; it was too small to support a large-scale ranching operation, but too large for her to work herself. On the other hand, the soil was lush, fed by crystal-clear Angel Creek as it poured out of Prosper Canyon and ran right down the middle of the valley. She could never remember deciding on any exact day what she was going to do with the rest of her life; she had just done what she had to as each day presented itself.

  First and foremost had been the necessity of learning how to protect herself. With dogged determination each day she set out her father’s weapons: a Colt .36 handgun, an old Sharps rifle, and a shiny, year-old double-barreled shotgun. The handgun was rusty with disuse, as George hadn’t gotten it out of the holster where it had been hanging on a peg since they’d settled on Angel Creek. He hadn’t been any good with a handgun, he’d often joked; just give him a shotgun, so all he had to do was aim in the general direction of something.

  Dee had felt much the same way, but she cleaned and oiled all three of the weapons, something she had often seen her father do, and practiced loading and unloading each weapon in turn, hour after hour, until she could do it automatically, without thinking. Only then did she begin practicing with targets. She began with the handgun, because she thought it would be the easiest, and immediately she saw why George hadn’t much liked it. Over any distance at all it just wasn’t accurate enough to count on. She experimented until she knew the distance from which she could reasonably expect to hit within the circle of the target she’d painted on a big tree trunk. With the rifle it was much easier to hit what she aimed at, and from a much greater distance. But, like her father, she liked the shotgun best. A man up to no good might reason she wouldn’t be able to hit him with a pistol, or even a rifle, and take his chances, but no man with a brain between his ears was going to figure she was likely to miss with a shotgun.

  She didn’t waste her time trying to build up any speed with the pistol; that was for fast draws, gunslicks looking to make a reputation, and wasn’t what she needed. Accuracy was her goal, and she worked on it day after day until she felt satisfied that she was competent enough to defend herself with whichever weapon was at hand. She would never be more than competent, but as competency was what she wanted, that was enough.

  The garden was something that had seemed necessary, too. She and her mother had always planted a garden and worked long hours every summer canning the vegetables for use during the winter. Dee liked working in the garden, liked the rhythm of it and the way she could actually see the fruits of her labor. Losing both of her parents so close together had stunned her with the realization that human life was temporary, and she had needed something permanent to get her through the desolation of grief. She had found it in the land, for it continued, and the seasons marched on. A garden was a productive thing, returning a bounty for the most elemental care. It eased her grief to see life coming out of the ground, and the physical labor provided its own kind of relief. The land had given her a reason to live and thus had given her life.

  By early spring it was known in town that George Swann had died during the winter, and she had had to weather the storm of questions. People with no more than a nodding acquaintance would ask her outright what her plans were, if she had any folks to take her in, when she’d be going back East. She had cousins in Virginia, where she’d been born, but no one close, even if she had been inclined to go back, which she wasn’t. Nor did she consider it anyone’s business except her own. The townfolk’s nosiness had been almost intolerable for her, for she had always been a private person, and that part of her personality had grown stronger during the past months. Those same people were scandalized when she’d made it plain she had no intention of leaving the homestead. She was only a girl, not yet even nineteen years old, and in the opinion of the townsfolk she had no business living out there all by herself. A respectable woman wouldn’t do such a thing.

  Some of the young cowhands from the area ranches, as well as others who hadn’t the excuse of youth, thought she might be pining for what a man could give her and took it upon themselves to relieve her loneliness. They found their way, singly and sometimes in pairs, to her cabin during the summer nights. With the shotgun in hand Dee had seen to it that they had even more quickly found their way off her property, and gradually the word had gotten around that the Swann girl wasn’t interested. A few of them had had to have their britches dusted with shot before they saw the light, but once they realized that she wasn’t shy about pulling the trigger they hadn’t come back. At least not in the guise of generous swains.

  That first spring she had, by habit, planted a garden meant to provide enough for two, as that was what she had planted before, and the crops had been on the verge of bearing before she realized she would have a large surplus. She began taking what she couldn’t use into town to sell it off her wagon. But that meant that she had to stay in town all day long herself, so finally she arranged with Mr. Winches that he would buy her vegetables, sometimes for cash and sometimes for credit on his books, and resell them in his general store. It was an arrangement that worked out for both of them, as Dee was able to spend more time in the garden and Mr. Winches could sell the vegetables to the townspeople—the ones who didn’t have their own small garden plots—for a neat little profit.

  The next year, this time deliberately, Dee planted a huge garden and soon found that she couldn’t properly take care of it. The weeds outstripped her efforts to destroy them, and the vegetables suffered. Still, she made a nice profit through Mr. Winches and put up more than enough to feed herself over the winter.

  The next spring, as Dee planted her third garden, a new rancher moved into the area south of Prosper. Kyle Bellamy was young, only in his late twenties, and too handsome for his own good. Dee had disliked him on sight; he was overly aggressive, riding roughshod over other people’s conversations and opinions. He intended to build a great ranch and made no secret of it as he began acquiring land, though he was careful to avoid stepping on Ellery Cochran’s toes.

  Bellamy decided that he needed another good water source for his growing empire, and he offered to buy the Angel Creek valley from Dee. She had almost laughed aloud at the ridiculously low offer but managed to decline politely.

  His next offer was much higher. Her refusal remained polite.

  The third offer was even higher, and he was clearly angry when he made it. He warned her that he wasn’t going to go any higher, and Dee decided that he didn’t quite understand her position.

  “Mr. Bellamy, it isn’t the money. I don’t want to sell to anyone, for any price. I don’t want to leave here; this is my home.”

  In Bellamy’s experience, he could buy anything he wanted; it was just a question of how much he was willing to spend to get it. It came as a shock to him to read the truth in Dee’s steady green eyes. No matter how much he offered, she wasn’t going to sell.

  But he wanted that land.

  His next offer was for marriage. Dee would have been amused if it hadn’t been for the abrupt shock of realization that she was as disinclined to marry anyone as she was to sell her land. Whenever she had thought of the future she had always vaguely assumed that she would someday get married and have children, so she herself was surprised to learn that that wasn’t what she wanted at all. Her two and a half years of complete independence had taught her how entirely suited she was to solitude and being her own mistress, answerable to no one but herself. In a split second her view of life was shattered and rearranged, as if she had been looking at herself through a distorted mirror that had abruptly righted itself, leaving her staring frankly at the real woman rather than the false image.

  So instead of laughing, she looked up at Kyle Bellamy with an oddly remote expression and said, “Thank you, Mr. Bellamy, but I don’t intend ever to marry.”

  It was after her refusal that some of the cowhands began to t
hink it would be fun to ride through her vegetable garden, firing their pistols into the air to frighten the animals, laughing and shouting to themselves. If they expected her to be hiding under her bed, they soon found out, as had her erstwhile swains, how dangerous it was to underestimate her. That vegetable garden was her livelihood, and she protected it with her booming double-barreled shotgun. She never doubted that most of the cowhands were from Bellamy’s ranch, but more and more small ranches were springing up, bringing in strangers who had to be taught to leave the Swann woman alone. During the growing season she learned to sleep with one eye open and the shotgun at hand, to ward off the occasional band of hoorahing cowboys who saw nothing wrong with harassing a nester. She got along just fine except for that, and she felt she could handle the hoorahing. If they ever became more than a nuisance, if she felt threatened herself, she’d start doing more than dusting them with buckshot.

  It was six years since her father had died. Dee looked around the small cabin and was satisfied with what she saw, with her life. She had everything she needed and a few small luxuries besides; she had a slowly growing nest egg in the bank, credit at Mr. Winches’s store, and a fertile little valley in which to grow her vegetables every year. There were two cows in the barn for milk, and a bull to make certain that she always had a yearling to provide beef. Eventually the bull and cows would be replaced by those yearlings, and life would go on. She had one horse, a sturdy animal who pulled the plow and the wagon and occasionally bore her on his back. A small flock of chickens kept her in eggs and provided a change from beef. It was all hers, and she had done it all herself.

  When a woman married, whatever she owned automatically became her husband’s property, subject to his will rather than hers, just as the woman herself did. Dee saw no reason ever to give up control of herself and her land. If that meant she would be an old maid, well, there were worse things in life. She was truly independent, as few women were, working her own land and supporting herself. The people in Prosper might think she was a little odd, but she was respected as a hard worker and an honest businesswoman. She was satisfied with that.

  2

  THE TREES ON THE DOUBLE C WERE FINALLY SHOWING new growth, a sure sign of spring. Despite the lingering chill in the air, borne on the winds sweeping down from the mountains that still wore their white winter caps, Lucas Cochran could smell the indefinable fragrance of new life, fresh and green. He had spent ten long years away from the land he loved, and now that he was back he felt as if he couldn’t get enough of it, as if a part of himself that had been lost was now restored.

  He had been born on this land in a mud dugout only a scant five months after his father had brought his small family west from Tennessee and settled on the broad valley that became the center of the Double C. He sometimes wondered at the courage it had taken for his mother to come out there with one baby just barely a year old and another one on the way, to leave her comfortable house and live in a hole in the ground, and all of that a time when they were the only whites for hundreds of square miles. Those early days had been the safest, however, because the Indians hadn’t yet been alarmed by the strange people moving into their territory.

  Looking back, he thought that probably the ’49 gold rush in California had been the beginning of the real hostilities between Indian and white. Thousands of people had poured west, and after the gold rush had ended few of them had gone home. The number of white men wandering west of the Mississippi so increased, and the tension between the two peoples had naturally increased as well. Then the Colorado Territory had had its own gold rush in ’58, and the second big increase in the population of whites had pushed the situation into open warfare.

  By then the Double C had grown to its present size and employed almost a hundred men, and the mud dugout had long since given way to a rough-hewn cabin. Ellery Cochran was in the process of building a big, ambitious house for his wife and family. Lucas had been fourteen that year, already pushing six feet in height and with a man’s strength from a lifetime of hard work. His older brother Matthew had been almost sixteen, with all the wild impetuosity of any young male on the verge of adulthood. The two boys had been inseparable all their lives, with Matt’s cheerfulness balancing Lucas’s darker nature, and Lucas’s levelheadedness reining in the worst of Matt’s adventurousness.

  The youngest Cochran, Jonah, was six years younger than Lucas and had always been excluded from the close relationship between the two older boys, not from any maliciousness on their part, but because of the simple, unbridgeable distance of age. The closeness in their ages meant that Matt and Lucas had been together from babyhood, had always had each other as a playmate, had slept together under the same blanket. Those were things that Jonah could never share, and he was largely left to his own devices. He was a quiet, withdrawn boy, always standing on the fringes and watching his two older brothers but seldom included in their rough activities. It was odd, Lucas often thought, that as close as he had been to Matt, it was Jonah’s thin, solemn face that had remained clearest in his memory.

  The Indians had attacked the ranch house one day while most of the men were out on the range, something they had evidently known. Matt and Lucas had been there only by chance, having ridden in early only because Matt’s horse had thrown a shoe, and where one went, so did the other. Alice, their mother, had insisted that they eat lunch before riding back out. They had been sitting at the table with her and Jonah when they had heard the first shouts.

  The Indians hadn’t had any firearms, but they had outnumbered the few defenders by five to one, and it took time to reload the muzzle-loaders the Cochrans possessed. The speed of the attack, an Indian specialty, was dizzying. All Lucas could remember was a blur of noise and motion, the explosions of gunpowder in his ear, the panic as he tried to reload while keeping an eye on the Indians. He and Matt and Alice had each taken up a position at a window, and he remembered Alice’s sudden scream when she had seen eight-year-old Jonah standing at an unguarded window, bravely sighting down the barrel of a pistol so heavy it took both hands for him to hold it. Lucas, the closest, had tackled his baby brother and stuffed him behind an overturned table with orders to stay there. Then he had turned back just as the front door was kicked in and Matt met an Indian warrior in a chest-to-chest clash, muscles straining, hands locked together. The Indian had held a club in one hand, a glittering knife in the other. Lucas grabbed up the pistol Jonah had dropped and whirled on one knee, trying for a clear shot, when Matt went down under the warrior’s greater weight and the long knife buried itself in his chest. Lucas had shot then, his aim true, but too late for Matt.

  The attack was over as fast as it had started, perhaps because the Indians had known the men out on the range, alerted by the gunfire, would be riding hell for leather for the ranch house. The entire fight had lasted less than five minutes.

  Losing Matt had left Lucas like a wounded animal, unable to find comfort. His parents had comforted each other over the loss of their firstborn; Jonah, accustomed to being alone, had pulled even deeper inside himself. Lucas was the one who had been cast adrift, for he had always had Matt, and now his entire world had changed. He had truly grown up that year, for he had seen death, and he had killed, and without Matt to buffer those experiences the hard edges of his character had grown even harder.

  The Civil War had started in 1861, and the army had pulled out of Colorado Territory to fight it, in effect leaving the citizens of the Territory on their own to face the increasing Indian attacks. Only the few settled towns were safe; Prosper by then had been big enough to protect itself, but the wagon trains and outlying ranches had to defend themselves as best they could. The Double C was an armed camp, but then it had to be to survive. Alice Cochran hadn’t survived, but not because of the Indians; a cold had turned into pneumonia during the winter of ’63, and within a week of first taking sick she was put in her grave. The second mainstay of Lucas’s life was gone.

  The Indian wars were even worse in 1864. In Nove
mber of that year Colonel John Chivington led his Third Colorado troops against a group of Indians at Sand Creek and massacred hundreds of women and children, causing an explosion of violence that spread from Canada to Mexico, uniting the Plains tribes in the fury of revenge. Troops began returning after the end of the Civil War in ’65, but the Territory was already locked in its own war.

  Even with all the danger, settlers had poured west. Prosper had quickly become a busy little town, even hiring a schoolteacher, which was a sure sign of civilization. A community had to have a school as a means of attracting new settlers. Boulder had built the first schoolhouse in ’60, but the people of Prosper were proud of the fact that it only took them five more years to get one, too. Lucas and Matt had been taught at home by their mother, but Jonah’s schooling had been cut short by her death. For the first time in his life Jonah began attending a school at the age of fifteen, riding into Prosper every day.

  Jonah never said much; he just watched. As Lucas had grown older he had regretted the lack of closeness between himself and his remaining brother, but Jonah didn’t seem to want that kind of relationship. The boy lived within himself, keeping his dreams and thoughts private. Sometimes Lucas wondered what went on behind the boy’s somber blue eyes, so like his own in color. He never found out.

  Jonah’s horse brought him home from school one afternoon. The boy clung to the saddle, an arrow all the way through his chest. Lucas had been the first to reach him, and a look of acute embarrassment had crossed Jonah’s white face as he had fallen off the saddle into his brother’s arms. He had looked up at Lucas, and for the first time his blue eyes weren’t somber, but lit with a kind of fierce love, a joy. “I wish . . .” he had said, but what he wished had gone unsaid because he died on the next breath.