the same old questions in town after town, saloon after saloon, gambling den after gambling den. More often than not, he would lead up to it in a roundabout way. “Next round’s on me, fellows. Lady Luck was with me last night. Oh, and by the way—” Here he’d offer a conspiratorial smile. “If you happen to see a gentleman with a streak of white hair to the left of a center part, don’t be too quick to get into a game with him, he’ll be out for revenge.”
As often as not, it did the trick. Someone would remember seeing a man who fit the description. A few even recalled a name—Chips. Deuce. John Smith. Nothing a man could put much stock in. After a few more casual questions, Chandler would be off again.
Another town, another game, another lead.
But God, it grew old. Sometimes to his shame, he was tempted to let go. To take root and start building himself a brand-new future, with no ties to the past.
The Bar J wouldn’t be a bad place to settle. It was a long way from Crow Fly, out in the Oklahoma Territory, but maybe that was good. There was nothing back there for him—nothing but an old barn and a few thousand acres of barren land. By now, the squatters would have moved in.
“Good luck,” he bade them under his breath. He stood and stretched, breathing deeply of the soft spring air. Removing his worn black Stetson, he rubbed his scalp vigorously, leaving his thick straw-colored hair standing on end. Replacing the hat, he stood at the office window and watched a couple of hired hands pitch horseshoes. They were supposed to be replacing the hinges on the paddock gate, but what the hell. It was spring.
He had half a mind to join them. How long had it been since he’d taken time out for something as unproductive as a game of horseshoes? The last time he could recall taking a full day off for purely pleasurable reasons had been when he’d ridden three miles out of town to take Abbie on a picnic at a riverside park.
Ironic, he mused, that after nearly two years of following the man who had kidnapped his fiancée, a woman he barely even knew, he’d ended up back in the East again, only a few hundred miles from where he’d left his best friend, his true love…and his fortune.
The mental image of a small, dark-haired woman tugged at the edges of his mind. Before it could fully take shape, the door behind him burst open.
“You ready to check out the new men, boss?”
Reluctantly, Elias Chandler reined in his wandering mind and nodded. “I don’t suppose one of them has a streak of white over his left eyebrow?” When he’d hired on as manager of the Bar J nearly seven months ago, he’d let it be known that he was looking to catch up with a gambler with a polecat streak. The general assumption was that it had to do with a gambling debt.
“No, sir, that they don’t. Sorry.” Shem, the old man he’d replaced as manager, still liked to keep his hand in by working a couple of hours each day.
“Send ’em in, then. One at a time. How many showed up?”
“Four. Three of ’em might do, but t’other one’s no good.”
Eli didn’t ask why, he merely nodded. There was little Shem didn’t know about men and ranching after working for Burke Jackson’s Bar J for nearly forty-five years. Here in the East it was called a cattle farm. In the West, it would be called a ranch.
The interviews took up less than an hour. Once the usual questions were asked and answered, Eli managed to slip in a few random remarks, skillfully framed so as to elicit the particular information he sought. After tracking a man halfway across the country, often following leads so thin a shadow would pass through them, he’d learned not to pass up any opportunity to garner information.
Today that information wasn’t to be found, but because they were shorthanded, he ended up hiring three of the men and sending the fourth man on his way.
Shem was waiting outside the office when the last man emerged. “I’ll show you fellers where you can stow your gear.”
It would be up to Streak, a gaunt giant of a man with a quiet voice and a gentle heart, to decide which men could be trusted to work cattle and which ones would be assigned other tasks. When Shem had been promoted to manager, Streak had replaced him as herd boss. What both men didn’t know about cattle wasn’t worth knowing.
“Jackson ain’t lookin’ too good,” Shem confided later that evening as the three men headed for the cook-shack.
“You implying he ever looked good?” Eli asked. Both Streak and Eli deliberately shortened their steps so that the older man could keep pace.
“Must’ve looked some better,” Streak offered. “Got hisself a wife. They had ’em a daughter.”
Eli had heard plenty about the daughter, none of it good. She was reputed to be big as a grizzly bear and twice as tough. They said she could peel the bark off a hickory tree with her tongue, and God help the man who tried to get into her bloomers.
He wondered why any man in his right mind would even try.
“Worser’n usual, is what I mean. No color to ’im. Lips blue, though. Reckon that’s color.” Shem nodded decisively.
Eli hid his grin. There were times when a man had to ask questions, but it had been his experience that far more could be learned from priming the pump and waiting to see what flowed out.
As the new general manager, he’d been invited to take his meals at the house with Jackson and his housekeeper, but after the first few days he’d made some excuse to take all his meals with the men. Jackson might be rich as cream, but regardless of his health—or perhaps because of it—he was about as disagreeable as any man Eli had ever had the displeasure of meeting. That went twice for his housekeeper, Pearly May, a prune-faced beanstalk of a woman who was no better at cooking than she was at keeping house.
To his credit, however, Jackson didn’t meddle in the day-to-day operations. Once he’d satisfied himself that Eli could do the job, he’d left him strictly alone, which suited both men just fine. Unless something came up that required the owner’s attention, Eli reported to his employer once a week.
Supper tonight featured pig stew, beans, greens and cornbread. For a farm that ran thousands of head of cattle, they ate an awful lot of pig meat. Eli had remarked on it once and been told about the time when Jackson’s little girl had been about seven or eight years old. She had pitched a fit when she’d come home from school to discover that her pet calf had just been slaughtered.
Shem, who’d been herd boss at the time, had taken it upon himself to change the dietary habits of the entire company, from the main house on down to the chuck wagon. As the crew cook could easily perform miracles with nothing but pork, a sack of onions, a sack of potatoes and a handful of salt, no one had ever complained. Why, Shem had reasoned, eat up the profits when hogs were cheap and Chicago paid top dollar for Jackson beef?
The cookshack was as noisy as ever, with the exception of the new men, who were mostly listening and getting their bearings. Seldom a week went by without at least one new man at the table. At a pittance a day plus room and board, which was all Jackson offered, most quickly moved on to better-paying jobs.
Eli ate silently, too, watching. Listening. A quiet man by nature, he had honed the skill of silent observation over the past two years. It paid off occasionally, but there were times when he came close to losing hope that Rosemary was still alive. It had been almost two years since she’d been kidnapped and the Chandler homestead burned to
