Free Vengeance Trail by Bill Brooks Page A

his Stetson and dipped a hand down in the water, bringing up enough to splash on his face and neck and head.
    Turning back to the house where the woman stillstood in the doorway, he gave idle thought to what it would be like to have his own spread, a few hundred cattle; quiet, steady
     work laid before him that did not call for dealing with bandits, horse thieves, rustlers or killers. It was difficult to imagine.
    There was still no sign of a man around the place.
    He stopped within easy distance of the woman. She had the stark suspicious
     gaze of a woman alone on the plains.
    “Your husband, is he about, ma’am?”
    “He’s off checking the herds, him and the other hands.”
    “You reckon when he might be back?”
    “Hard saying. Depends on where the cattle are at.”
    The lawman stood staring out at the vast flat sweep of land, at the long
     straight horizon where the faded blue sky and the brown earth were seamed together. He stood there listening to the wind,
     and listening to the silence that was left whenever the wind stopped.
    “You hungry mister?”
    He was. Hungry and near wore out after a ride that had begun before sunup.
    “Yes, ma’am. I surely am.”
    “Then come on in the house, wipe your feet if you don’t mind.”
    He scraped the soles of his boots on the bottom of the door frame and stepped inside.
    The warm scent of fresh baked bread caused his hunger to instantly increase. She pointed to one of the four chairs around
     a square, scarred oak table that would have taken two men to lift.
    He hung his Stetson on the back of the chair and sat down.
    She glanced disapprovingly at his spurs. He started to remove them.
    “No, that’s okay,” she said. “Do you drink tea, Mr. Dollar?” He didn’t, normally.
    “Yes ma’am, tea is fine.”
    “Good. It’s hard to find a man that drinks tea. Hard to find anybody that drinks tea out here.” She sat a copper tea kettle
     on a big iron stove that had ornate nickel plating along its edges and porcelain handles. Several fresh-baked loaves of bread
     sat in pans along the window sill.
    He studied her as she prepared the tea, taking it from a tin can and placing the leaves into a small metal basket: A large
     woman. Rawboned hands, reddened knuckles. The hair, brown and faded, streaks of silver. The eyes, tired.
    It seemed a great effort to do so, but when she turned to bring him the tea in a china cup, she smiled. The lines around her
     mouth creased deeply—Texas sun was no good for a woman’s skin.
    She took one of the loaves of bread out of a pan and cut it in two. She reached on a shelf and took down a jar of apricot
     preserves. She laid both in front of him. A pot of stew was simmering on the stove. She ladled him a tin plate full and put
     that in front of him as well. He thought for a moment that he might faint from hunger.
    “You go ahead and eat, I already have earlier,” she said.
    She sat across from him and drank her tea while he did his best to restrain himself from simply shoveling the food in as fast
     as he could.
    “You are a handsome man,” she said after several long minutes of watching him eat.
    He was not sure what to say to such a comment.
    “How about some more?” she said when he finished sopping the last of the stew’s gravy from the plate with the partial loaf
     of bread he held onto the whole time.
    He nodded his head and remained silent.
    The second plate tasted as good as the first and was chasing all the hungry wolves out of the cellar of his stomach.
    “Where’d you say you come from?” she asked. He swallowed a potato and said: “Originally from Pecos, but most lately from Mobeetie.”
    “You have law business over there as well?”
    “Not there exactly—but over in Big River.”
    “Mobeetie ain’t much of a town,” she said, renewing the tea in her cup. “Bought a dress there once. It was a pretty dress.”
    He wasn’t sure if she was speaking directly to him or not; her eyes were looking up at the