This Calder Sky (Calder Saga 3)

“I didn’t hit him, did I?” Culley asked hoarsely.

“No.” He shook his head, quite definite about that. “He was lying in the ditch beside the road, but you put his pickup out of commission.”

“Any damage to the rig?” Tucker questioned the driver.

“He put a hole in two tires, but I can make it,” he said and gave the big man a hand in fastening the truck gate.

They had stopped at a fork in the back road, the semi pointed down one and the pickup truck and horse trailer headed down the other. Culley dismounted to help his father load the horses. They finished as the semi pulled away, heading down its road with a night’s drive yet to be made. Their job was done and they took the other road that led home.

Unable to sleep, Maggie finally gave up trying. She got up and dressed, went to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, even though she didn’t need the stimulant to keep her awake during the long vigil.

The pot was almost empty when she heard the rattle of the pickup and horse trailer drive into the ranch yard. A shudder of relief went through her that they had made it back safely. She pushed open the front door and walked outside. She didn’t immediately see her father in the darkness of the yard, but Culley was backing the horses out of the trailer.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“No thanks to you.” Her father came around the far side of the trailer to take the reins of the horse. “Why didn’t you tell us Calder had put out patrols?”

“Oh, no.” It wasn’t any comfort to realize she’d had cause to worry. “I didn’t know about them.” Chase hadn’t mentioned it. If he had, she would have tried harder to keep them from going. “What happened?”

“They damned near caught us—that’s what happened!” her father retorted.

“Did they see you? Did they recognize you?” Her questions were like more rifle fire as she fell in step with her father and brother as they went to unsaddle the horses and turn them loose in the corral. Her glance kept skittering to Culley, who had not made a single comment, but she couldn’t read what was in his shadowed expression.

“No. They never got close enough to us to get a good look, not with all the shooting going on.” It was her father again who answered.

“Shooting? Was anybody hurt?” She thought immediately of Chase.

“No. Nobody got a scratch,” her father boasted. “They tried to surprise us, but it didn’t work. We got away—and with the cattle. Two minutes, if we’d just had two minutes, we could have been loaded up and gone without them even knowing we’d been there. We could have been, too, if you’d come along, Maggie. If anything would have happened to us tonight, it would have been your fault for not coming with us and giving us that edge of having a third rider.”

He had already found a justification for the narrowness of their escape. He was blaming Maggie. She resisted the guilt he tried to place on her, recognizing the attempt for what it was—another one of his excuses for failure—but it wasn’t easy.

When they reached the corral, Angus handed Maggie the reins to his horse. “Unsaddle him for me,” he ordered. “I’m going to unhitch the trailer.”

She didn’t argue. As her father walked away, she glanced at Culley, who was quietly unsaddling his horse.

“What happens now, Culley?” Maggie deliberately hadn’t asked her father that question. Coming from her, he would have regarded it as a challenge. “Is he finally going to call it quits?”

“We’ll lie low for a while—until the heat’s off.”

“You were lucky tonight,” she reminded him. “Next time you might be recognized.”

“Then, again, maybe we won’t.” Culley shrugged and lifted the saddle off his horse to set it on the ground.

Once the horses were turned loose in the corral, they carried the saddles and gear into the barn. Maggie was adjusting her father’s saddle on the wooden saddle rest when she noticed Culley staring at his saddle.

“What’s wrong?” She moved over to see what he was looking at.

“A rosette’s missing.” He pointed to the round patch of unweathered leather where the ornamental tie had been. “It must have gotten ripped off when my horse scraped up against the fence post. What if they find it, Maggie?”

She knew what he was thinking. It was evidence that he’d been on the scene. “I’ll get it for you,” she promised.

The road in front of the gate to the Broken Butte was crowded with parked vehicles the next morning. All of them belonged to the Triple C, except for the sheriff’s car. Out in the fenced range, riders were rounding up the remaining herd to make a tally of the loss. Elsewhere, a chain was being attached to the truck that had been shot up the night before so it could be towed to the ranch garage for repairs. Sheriff Potter, a harried-looking man in a crisply starched uniform, was off to one side talking to Slim Bevins, the man who had surprised the rustlers. The grim trio standing in the shade of one of the horse trailers was made up of Webb Calder, Nate Moore, and Virg Haskell.

“We nearly had them,” Virg grumbled. “If Slim could only have held them another fifteen minutes, your plan would have worked.”

“Close doesn’t count, Virg,” Webb replied.

“Whoever these rustlers are, they know this country,” Nate observed. “They either did some damned thorough scouting, or they’re local. This road isn’t on any maps. And it doesn’t look like any more