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  “That’s right.”

  The old ranger shrugged.

  “I read the report he turned in about the troubles you’re havin’ around here. I’ve got a copy of his notes, been studyin’ ’em.” Menlo tapped his shirt pocket, and there was the crinkly sound of folded paper from inside. “That’s how I already know quite a few details and associated names when it comes to what’s been going on.”

  “In that case,” Tolliver said, “as far as anything learned from observations made by Peck, you’ve got me at a disadvantage. For whatever reason, young Peck didn’t see fit to share a blasted thing with me. It didn’t help that he got called away so suddenly and urgently, but still . . .”

  “Are you saying you’ve been sent to take over where Peck left off?” Pamela asked.

  “That’s the general idea, ma’am.”

  “Why didn’t Peck come back himself?”

  Menlo’s expression went flat.

  “He couldn’t, ma’am. That piece of urgent business he got called away on didn’t turn out so good for him. He’s dead.”

  Pamela averted her eyes and her expression saddened. She said, “I . . . I never really got to know him. None of us did. But I’m truly sorry to hear about his passing.”

  “Appreciate you saying so, ma’am. He was a good kid. Well on his way to bein’ a fine man. But everybody dies. It was his time.”

  Tolliver cleared his throat and said to Menlo, “We can go over to my office now, if you’re ready.”

  The old ranger made no reply, merely nodded. He and Tolliver excused themselves and started away. Scanlon plodded after them. After a couple steps, however, Menlo stopped and turned back to face the table where Pamela and Buckhorn still sat.

  Menlo’s eyes came to rest on Buckhorn.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “I’ve read through Peck’s notes two or three times now and I don’t recall seeing a mention of your name anywhere.”

  “Not surprising,” Buckhorn responded. “I wasn’t around back then.”

  Menlo considered this for a moment. Then he gave another curt nod and turned away again.

  CHAPTER 10

  Later that night, Joe Buckhorn lay on the bed of his second-floor hotel room, rolling the details of the Danvers job around in his head. It was even more complex than the first impressions he’d gotten from the telegrams exchanged when he was back in Forbes. And that was without the added complication presented by the unexpected arrival of Lyle Menlo, the Texas Ranger.

  When Buckhorn had tried to suggest to Pamela Danvers—after Menlo and the local lawmen left the pair of them alone in the hotel dining room—that the ranger’s involvement might negate further need of his services, she had refused to listen to any such notion.

  As far as the rustling, she’d said, she would welcome Menlo going ahead and trying to bring that to a stop. That was the kind of thing the rangers could get to the bottom of better than almost anybody.

  But she was adamant that the matter of her missing son, the details of which had barely been discussed up to that point, was something she still wanted Buckhorn to take the point on.

  “Jeff is my youngest. He’s twenty-two,” she had told him. “He’s tall and strong, an excellent horseman, can work cattle with the best—all the things you’d expect for a young man born to a big ranching operation. But there is also a gentle side to him that is far less common. There is sparse evidence of same, I daresay, in his older brother Micah. Nor was Jeff’s father, my late husband Gus, known for his compassion and gentle ways . . . although I alone can attest that he did have his moments of tenderness.”

  At the last, Pamela had paused briefly to smile a fleeting, faraway smile before continuing.

  “Most others, however, saw only the hard, stern, driven side of Gus. Something he cultivated to a certain extent, often saying that you didn’t build a ranch like the Circle D wearing kid gloves.”

  “Did Jeff make any attempt to try and hide his contrasting nature?” Buckhorn had asked, using a little gentleness of his own to nudge the conversation back on track.

  Pamela shook her head.

  “No. Not at all. Nor, as far as I know—other than frequent jabs from his brother, who took delight in ribbing Jeff about his gentle nature—did he suffer any consequences for it. In fact, I think most people, even the other ranch hands, genuinely liked Jeff just the way he was.”

  Buckhorn couldn’t help noticing that Pamela’s references to Jeff seemed to slip back and forth between present and past tense. The always on-guard part of him wondered if this was merely due to stress or if it was an indicator of something more. But, for the time being, he wasn’t ready to let his thoughts go very far down that trail. First, he wanted to hear the rest of what Pamela had to present about how Jeff had gone missing and what she figured Buckhorn could do about it.

  Toward that end, he again nudged her along by saying, “Do you think Jeff’s gentler ways somehow figures in to him being missing?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. There’s no doubt about it,” Pamela had responded flatly. “More accurately, the overall romantic outlook that his gentleness is a part of was the key factor. You see—and this is something I’ve revealed to no one else save for a very close inner circle—Jeff initially left of his own accord. He ran away to be with a young woman he’d fallen in love with . . . Eve Riley, the daughter of Dan Riley, the thieving, rustling, back-stabbing scoundrel I loathe above any other!”

  This revelation had surprised Buckhorn nearly as much as the sight of a Texas Ranger marching into the hotel dining room earlier.

  “And you know this how?” he’d asked.

  “He left me a note.” Pamela had squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and then recited from memory: “Mother . . . I’ve gone to be with Eve. We are in love and plan to marry. We know that neither you nor her father will understand and so to avoid the added strain our love would put on an already ugly situation we are going away together. Try not to worry. I will contact you shortly to let you know I am safe. Love . . . Jeff.”

  After opening her eyes again and expelling a breath to regain composure, Pamela had continued, “That was almost two weeks ago. I haven’t heard a peep from him since. Three days after he’d been gone was when I asked Thad to circulate word that I was seeking you or someone in your line of work.”

  “How was he fixed for money? Do you know if he took any with him?”

  “Jeff has his own bank account. He made a substantial withdrawal two days before he left. He did not close the account, however; it still has some money left in it.”

  “That seems like a promising sign.”

  “I chose to believe so.”

  “Since he had money, maybe Jeff and the Riley girl got on board a stagecoach or train to put some quick distance between themselves and this area.”

  “It’s possible,” Pamela conceded with reluctance.

  “How about things from Eve Riley’s end? I’m guessing her father wouldn’t like the pairing of his daughter with your son any better than you do?”

  “Who knows how someone like Dan Riley is likely to feel? On one hand, I can’t imagine he would be in favor of it. On the other, knowing how upsetting it would be to me, the evil bastard might relish the idea.”

  “According to Jeff’s note, it doesn’t sound like either him or Eve expected approval from her father,” Buckhorn had pointed out. “And that’s your biggest concern, ain’t it? You’re thinking that Riley might somehow have got wind of what the two lovebirds were planning and clamped down to stop them from running off. If that’s the case, then Jeff possibly got hurt or is maybe just being held captive. That about the size of it?”

  Anguish gripping her lovely features, Pamela had said, “It is my deepest fear. I can imagine no other reason why Jeff hasn’t contacted me by now. Much as I dread it, being injured or restrained are the only possibilities I can think of.”

  “How about a ransom note?”

  “Nothing. But, more than a money demand, it
would be like Dan Riley to find greater satisfaction knowing I was left twisting in the wind, agonizing helplessly with no way of being certain.”

  “Has anyone at least confronted Riley? Asked him if he’s seen anything of Jeff, made some kind of inquiry about his daughter?”

  “I wouldn’t give the brute the pleasure of seeing my distress firsthand,” Pamela had replied, a flash of fire once more blazing in her eyes. “Sheriff Tolliver rode out to Milt Riley’s place—that’s Dan’s brother and where Dan and Eve now live since the passing of Celeste, Dan’s late wife and Eve’s mother. No one actually sees Dan around there very much, though. The standard story is that he’s gone on cattle-buying trips or other business. Everybody knows that’s just another way of saying he and his group of hardcases are off on another rustling raid or some other piece of outlawry—like that stage robbery the other day.”

  Buckhorn recalled Tolliver mentioning a stagecoach robbery in passing. He said, “You figure that was the work of Riley’s bunch?”

  “None other. And I’m not the only one who thinks that way. It all points toward them expanding in their activities and boldness.”

  “Yet nobody’s ever been able to prove anything by catching them red-handed.”

  The fire was still in Pamela’s eyes when she said, “Not yet. But I’m holding out renewed hope for Ranger Menlo to have some success on that front.”

  “When Tolliver went out to Milt Riley’s place, I take it he got the usual runaround about brother Dan being away on business?”

  “Precisely.”

  “How about the daughter Eve? Was she present?”

  “Conveniently, she was traveling with her father on this occasion.”

  “Any other attempts to try and figure out which way Jeff might’ve gone or to try and spot any fishy shenanigans around the Riley ranch?” Buckhorn wanted to know.

  “My son Micah sent men out on various pretenses to scour the countryside in every direction for some sign of Jeff. Nothing. Also, since we have amongst our crew two men who formerly scouted for the army, Micah assigned them on two or three different nights to watch the Riley ranch. Again, unfortunately, they came back with nothing to report.”

  Pushing on persistently, Buckhorn had said, “Going back to the possibility that the two runaways might have boarded a stagecoach or train . . . did Tolliver check the passenger lists for any of the lines running out of surrounding towns?”

  “Really, Mr. Buckhorn,” Pamela had responded with a heavy sigh of annoyance. “I’m beginning to think that you’re working nearly as hard to avoid the obvious as I accused Thad of doing. The answers to what happened to my son lie no further than with that devil’s spawn, Dan Riley. I insist you concentrate there, at least at the start, if you’re going to undertake this job for me.”

  Buckhorn neither liked nor responded well to ultimatums. But the woman’s very clear, very deep anguish touched him. Just as the plaintive tone of the final words in the telegram from her that he’d gotten in Forbes—“My son’s life may hang in the balance”—had played such a big part in drawing him here to begin with. Plus, he admitted to himself grudgingly, it sounded like she probably had it right in believing that her son’s prolonged disappearance was tied in some way to Dan Riley.

  So he’d taken her advance payment and agreed to stick with the job, to sleep on it overnight in order to see if he could come up with some fresh plan for finding and exploiting a chink in the shield surrounding Riley.

  All of which brought him to the point he was at now . . . alone in his room, not yet having discerned any kind of chink and therefore not yet having any kind of plan, and feeling too restless to settle into sleep.

  Not the worst start to a job he’d ever experienced, he told himself, but hardly the most promising, either . . .

  CHAPTER 11

  Eventually, Buckhorn drifted into a fitful slumber.

  As it turned out, that was a good thing. Maybe a lifesaving thing.

  He was always a light sleeper, attuned on some instinctive level for the slightest out-of-place sound, quick to react when such triggered his inner alarm. That probably would have kicked in again tonight as it had a number of times in the past.

  But on this occasion it wasn’t necessary because he happened to be more or less awake between bouts of tossing and pillow-mangling when he heard the scuff of a boot on the bare hallway floor outside his door.

  In an instant, he was fully awake and in that same heartbeat of time his .45 was snatched from the bedside nightstand and clamped firmly in his right fist. He raised himself on his left elbow and locked his gaze on the narrow, horizontal sliver of light that leaked in under the door from a lantern out in the hall.

  The shape of the straight-backed wooden chair he had hooked under the knob was murky and somewhat grotesque looking. The door was locked, but there was always the chance that some varmint with a confiscated passkey might be prepared for that.

  As Buckhorn watched, two smudges of shadow interrupted the bar of light under the door—at a distance apart matching approximately where a man’s feet would be planted. A floorboard creaked. Ever so slowly, the knob soundlessly turned partway in one direction until it met resistance, then did the same in the other direction. A floorboard creaked again and the smudges of shadow disappeared as whoever was out there took a step back.

  Everything turned very quiet.

  Buckhorn held his breath. He could feel the slightly accelerated thump of his heart.

  A faint rustling of the curtain over the room’s only window—propped open in keeping with Buckhorn’s habit of letting in some fresh air whenever he slept indoors—drew his attention. He tried to recall what the front of the Hotel Alamo looked like, what he had seen outside the window when he propped it open earlier. There was no balcony out there like there’d been at the hotel in Forbes, he was sure of that.

  But there was a slanted, rough-shingled band of roofing that extended out over the boardwalk down at ground level. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough for somebody who was sure-footed and sufficiently determined to venture out upon it.

  Buckhorn continued to lie very still and listen intently. He didn’t sense any further movement from out in the hall or on the strip of roofing outside his window. But his internal alarm bells were nevertheless clanging loudly. He was convinced that whoever had so slyly tried his doorknob in the first place was still on the prowl somewhere close by. Failing at the door, the prowler might be considering a try at coming in through the window. Or, if there was more than one, they might try catching him between them.

  Buckhorn slipped silently from the bed. He knelt beside it long enough to fashion the blankets and wadded-up pillow into a long, lumpy shape that, in the heavily shadowed murkiness, would at a quick glance pass for a human form. It was an old trick that had probably failed as often as it worked, but it was worth a try all the same.

  Then, scooting on his butt and bare feet, he moved around to the foot of the bed and positioned himself there, back pressed to the wall. This placed him out of direct line with both the door and the window yet provided clear sight of each.

  After that, Buckhorn half sat/half squatted and waited with all the patience instilled in him by the Indian blood coursing through his veins.

  A quarter hour, maybe slightly less, passed before anything happened. When it did, it came with shattering suddenness.

  The twin roar of a double-barreled shotgun started the ball, the simultaneous discharges blasting out a pumpkin-sized pattern all around the doorknob. An eruption of lead and wood slivers and roiling blue gunsmoke exploded into the room. Had it not been for the chair lodged under the knob, the latter would have been torn away and the door would have slammed violently open.

  As it was, the knob clung precariously by a twisted bolt or two and the door continued to hang within its frame, though just barely, mostly propped by the chair whose vertical back struts were now reduced to shredded twigs.

  While the room was still shivering fr
om the shotgun blast, the outline of a second shooter appeared in the window. The sound of breaking glass announced a pistol barrel knocking out a higher, larger opening through which an arm was thrust with the pistol gripped menacingly at its end. The gun barked three times in rapid succession, the slugs screaming across the room and punching into the lumpy form on the bed.

  As the shooter in the window was getting off his third round, Buckhorn began firing back. He, too, triggered his Colt three times—the difference being that each of his slugs hit flesh and bone rather than merely wadded-up bedding. The man in the window emitted a thin yelp, his shape jerking with each impact, before he twisted away and toppled off the narrow strip of roof.

  In the meantime, the shotgunner was kicking and beating wildly against the riddled door, attempting to force his way into the room. A thick arm thrust through the opening made by the double-barreled blast, yanking and twisting to remove the remains of the wedged chair.

  Buckhorn could have easily emptied his Colt through the already destroyed door and put down this threat as well. In fact, his first inclination was to do just that. But then he remembered all the unanswered questions from the ambush earlier in the day, and he decided that trying to take the shotgunner alive might be a useful thing.

  Surging to his feet, he rushed around the end of the bed and charged the door. As the remaining shreds of the chair were swept away and what was left of the door started to swing inward, Buckhorn led with his shoulder and hurled his full weight and momentum against it, ramming it back against the would-be intruder. An enraged curse bellowed from the man.

  The abused door could no longer hold up. With a screech of twisting hinges and several sharp cracks as the slab of flimsy wood broke into pieces, the whole thing gave way and collapsed out into the hall from the force of Buckhorn’s charge. The former shotgunner was knocked off balance and fell underneath what was now little more than a pile of rubble. Buckhorn landed on top.

  What followed was a frantic, awkward struggle with Buckhorn fighting to maintain his balance atop the broken pieces of door and the man underneath thrashing wildly to try and fling him off. As the thick arm reaching through the hole in the door had indicated, the shotgunner was an oversized specimen, massive through the chest and gut and strong as an ox.