must be some sort of tale that they would have told out loud without Emma there to hear it.
Coffee and firelight spun a nice web around the four of them and created one of those moments a man wanted to pluck out of time to savor again later. But the air had begun to smell damp and no magic could last forever.
Matt poured another cup of coffee, then closed his eyes to listen to the night sounds. Crickets chirruped close at hand and far off a steer bellowed. The wind picked up and set the prairie grass whispering.
Over the crackle and sparking of the flames he imagined he heard the gentle rise and fall of Emma’s breathing and the slip of her needle through his shirt.
“If it was me, I’d have shot him clean off his horse.” Red’s whisper carried across the fire. Emma’s needle stopped midstitch.
“That’s because you don’t have the sense that God gave a buffalo chip,” Cousin Billy said.
“He had it coming, pointing the gun at Emma like that. Matt could have sent him along to hell, and he should have.”
Sometimes Red scared the boots right off Matt. Red was almost an echo of himself at that age. He had the look of a man, but inside he was as green as the saplings Emma had planted down near the creek.
“You shouldn’t talk about a man’s life with such disregard, son,” Matt said.
“He wasn’t showing any regard for Emma and Lucy this afternoon. Any man who tries to shoot a helpless woman and child is no better than a cow pile. He doesn’t deserve to walk the earth.”
Matt dumped the rest of his coffee into the fire. All of a sudden it didn’t set well in his belly.
“I’d have to agree with the cow-pile part, but it’s not for you to decide who deserves to walk the earth.”
“Someone needs to make sure criminals get their due.”
“Unless you’re planning to take the marshal’s job, it’s not you. Until you can recognize whether a man is out to do murder or just mischief, you keep that gun of yours in its leather.”
“I saw what I saw.”
“You saw a mean-spirited threat and nothing more. Even though Sam Tucker is lower than a maggot on a carcass, it’s not for you to decide his fate.”
“Billy the Kid wouldn’t have let him go.”
“Billy the Kid is dead.”
Red shot to his feet. He’d always had a foolish hero image of the killer that Matt had never been able to dissuade him from.
“You made that up!”
“Pat Garrett gunned him down one night last week. It came in over the wire last time I was in town.”
Red stomped off with anger and rebellion in his stride. A bolt of lightning split the sky overhead and a fat warm drop of water hit Matt on the nose. He jumped up and caught up with Red in a few long strides.
“Red.” He grasped the boy’s arm and spun him around. “Any man who chooses to live by the gun finds an early grave. I’ve seen it happen time and again. I’ll be damned if I’m going to see it happen to you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me.” All at once the rain crashed down. Red dashed for the dugout and vanished in a blur of water.
* * *
The realization that the nervous lowing of cattle and the snap of a cowboy’s whip was not a dream came to Matt like fog gradually lifting off the land. A shrill whistle made him bolt up from his pallet on the floor
The distant noise was so muffled by rain that Matt believed he was the only one to have noticed it—until he glanced at Emma’s bed. Although the darkness inside was nearly complete, the open dugout door let in enough illumination for him to make out a single tiny form beneath the covers of his wife’s bed.
“Damnation, woman,” he muttered under his breath.
With a penny’s worth of luck she’d only made a trip to the outhouse, but more than likely she’d gone to investigate the sounds of cattle roaming where they shouldn’t.
Matt jammed his feet into his boots, thanking his stars that he’d decided to sleep in his clothes the way he did on the nights spent under the open sky. On the way out the door he grabbed his gun belt. He fastened it around his hips on a run toward the stir of unsettled cattle.
The land between the house and the creek sloped gently downward. It gave him