A Wanted Man: A Stone Creek Novel

“Drink this,” he ordered, holding out the squat glass. “And calm down. Otherwise, you’re likely to bust a blood vessel or something.”

Payton clutched the glass, and his hand shook a little as he raised it to his lips, closing his eyes almost reverently, like a man taking a sacrament. He swallowed, shuddered, opened his eyes again.

“You bring the rangers down on me, boy,” Payton said, when he’d recovered enough to speak, “and I’ll die in a jail cell. It’ll be on your head.”

“I came here to warn you,” Rowdy replied, hooking his thumbs under his gun belt. “That’s more than you would have done for me. From here on out, you’re on your own—Pappy.”

With that, Rowdy figured his business was concluded. He turned and made for the door. Took his hat from the fancy three-legged table, held it in one hand.

Payton hoisted himself out of his chair and turned to face Rowdy. “You don’t owe me any favors, boy. I won’t argue that you do. But if you have an honorable bone in your body, you’ll ride out of here and keep on going, without a parting word to Sam O’Ballivan or anybody else.”

Rowdy put his hat on, laid a hand on the fancy glass doorknob. “You’re right, Pa. I don’t owe you any favors. And I’m not going anyplace until I’ve heard Sam out. If you don’t want him coming after you, don’t rob any more trains.”

“I gave that up a long time ago.”

All of a sudden, the backs of Rowdy’s eyes burned, and his throat drew in tight. He didn’t know what he’d expected—it had been five years since he’d ridden with his pa’s gang—but it wasn’t this, whatever this was. “For your sake, I hope that’s the gospel truth. At the same time, your word and two cents would buy me a cheap cigar.”

“I guess we understand each other then.”

Rowdy nodded glumly. “One more thing,” he said, his voice coming out hoarse. He oughtn’t to linger, he knew that, but he did it just the same. “Is Gideon all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“You haven’t brought him into the family business, then?”

“He’s only sixteen, Rob.”

“I was fourteen, the first time I rode with you.”

“I’m a different man than I was then,” Payton said. Now that the whiskey had hit his bloodstream, he was his familiar, cocky self. “Older. Wiser. And one hell of a lot sadder.”

Rowdy didn’t reply to that. He simply nodded, opened the door and went out. He looked neither to the right nor the left as he strode through the saloon beyond. The swinging doors crashed against the outside walls when he struck them hard with the palms of both hands.

* * *

GIDEON PAYTON CROUCHED beside the small grave outside the picket fence surrounding the churchyard. The monument was white marble, the finest to be had, and there were no dates, no Bible verses or lines of mournful poetry—only two plain words, chiseled into Gideon’s heart as well as the stone.

“Our Rose.”

In the ten years since his sister had died, Gideon had visited this spot under the spreading limbs of an oak tree on all but a handful of days. He’d been a child himself when Rose was killed, only six, but the memory was as vivid as the town surrounding him now, the people coming and going in wagons and on horseback out there in the street, the bell tolling in the little steeple of yonder church.

In spring and summer he brought her flowers, usually stolen from someone’s garden. In the fall the leaves of the great oak blanketed the long-since-sunken mound in glorious shades of crimson and russet and yellow and gold. In winter he offered trinkets—a bright bottle cap, a woman’s ear bob found on a sidewalk, a colorful stone from the banks of Oak Creek. Sometimes he read to her out loud from a storybook.

Rose had loved stories, but he hadn’t known how to read yet when she was living.

He supposed he ought to have gotten over the loss of her by now, since he was sixteen and almost a man, but some wounds never heal, no matter what the preachers said.

Today Gideon laid a letter at the base of Rose’s headstone.

“It’s from a college back east,” he told her quietly. “Pa went and signed me up for it.” He paused, frowned. “I don’t even like school that much, but I guess I’m good at it. Pa and Ruby say nothing worthwhile can come of my staying here, once I finish up my lesson-work this spring.”

A flicker of motion at the edge of Gideon’s vision interrupted his speech before he could get to the part that sorrowed him most—he knew he’d have to go, and that would mean he couldn’t pay Rose any visits for a long time.

A rider sat watching him from the road. His horse was a gelded pinto, and his boots were good, probably handmade in Mexico. He wore a hat pulled down low over his brow, and a pistol, butt forward, showed where he’d pushed back one side of his long black coat, so it caught behind the holster.

Gideon took in all those things in the space of an instant, but they weren’t what caught his attention. Something in the stranger’s countenance sent a thrill through Gideon, made him rise slowly to his full height.

The man resettled his hat, briefly revealing a head of straw-colored hair. Then he nudged the horse into motion with the heels of his boots and rode along the length of the picket fence.

“Strange place for a grave,” he said, drawing up close to where Gideon stood. His eyes were almost the same shade of blue as Pa’s were, Gideon noted, and his mouth was like his ma’s had been—still, but ready to smile. Not that Gideon rightly recollected his mother; she’d died when he was born, and he’d only seen one likeness of her, a faded old picture tucked between the pages of a Bible.

Gideon stiffened, gestured toward the cemetery flanking the small church. “Nobody in there’s got a better marker than my sister, Rose,” he told the rider. His heart was beating fast and, cold as it was, sweat tickled the skin between his shoulder blades.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” the stranger said quietly.

Gideon straightened his spine. He wasn’t afraid of the man. Standing on the ground, not sitting a horse, he’d be no taller than Gideon, but he was older, and seasoned, if the easy way he wore his gun was any indication. “I reckon there’s a lot you don’t know about me, mister,” he said, intrigued.

The rider grinned. “I know a little more than you probably think I do,” he said, shifting in the saddle, standing briefly in the stirrups as if to stretch his legs. “Your name is Gideon...Payton. You’re sixteen years old. Ponder it a bit, and you’ll realize that you’ve seen me before.”

That little hesitation before he said “Payton”—what did that mean?

And Gideon did recall a previous encounter, a shadowy glimpse that teased at the edges of his memory but wouldn’t show itself.

“Who are you?” he asked bluntly.

“I call myself Rowdy Rhodes,” the man answered. “And I’m your brother.”

Gideon had known he had brothers, but he hadn’t been able to get much more than that out of his pa. They were all older than he was, but he couldn’t have said how many of them there were, or recited their names with any certainty. Now one of them was sitting right in front of him.

“You call yourself Rowdy Rhodes? If you’re my brother, you ought to be a Payton, not a Rhodes. And what the hell kind of name is Rowdy, anyhow?”

Rhodes chuckled and leaned forward in the saddle, resting one forearm on the pommel. “One that suits me just fine,” he said. “Are you still in school, Gideon?”

Gideon glanced at the letter lying in front of Rose’s gravestone, and wished he hadn’t. Rhodes made him uneasy, with his watchful, knowing eyes, and yet Gideon wanted to know all about him. “I’ll be going away to college, come autumn.” He swallowed. “I mean to be an engineer. Maybe work for the railroad.”

“Now, that’s ironic,” Rhodes said wryly.

Gideon was affronted, though he didn’t know why. Felt like a rooster with its feathers ruffled. “I’m smart,” he said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Rhodes replied. He looked down at Rose’s grave, maybe noticed the letter, and the bottle caps, some of them rusting now, and the ear bobs and bits of frayed ribbon, with all the color weathered out of them. “How come they buried your sister out here, instead of in the churchyard, with the others?”

An old rage, all the worse for being helpless, surged up inside Gideon, stung the back of his throat like gall. “Because Ruby Hollister is her mother,” he said.

Again, Rhodes adjusted his hat. “But not yours.”

Gideon shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. And he waited. If Rhodes was his brother, like he claimed, let him prove it. Let him say Ma’s name.

He did, just as surely as if Gideon had demanded it of him aloud. “Your mother was Miranda Wyatt...Payton.”