Chapter Nine.

Luke pulled on his hat and followed Angie out the door into the bright sunlight. Catching the screen door, he eased it shut then turned to find Angie waiting for him.

"I meant to ask," he said, "can you ride?"

"You mean . . . horses? Yes." She cocked her head. "Why?"

He looked off to the west. "It's about two miles to the spot where your grandfather's remains were found. If we take the pickup, we can get close, but we'll have to walk the last hundred yards or so. Or, I can saddle up a couple horses and we can ride straight to it."

"Let's ride then." She didn't have to think about her decision. "I'd like to get the feel of this country from horseback."

"That can be done."

As they went down the steps with Angie in the lead, her glance was drawn to the fire-blackened ruins that she had seen when she first entered the ranch yard with Tobe. "Is that where the ranch house once stood?"

"Yep." He never so much as glanced in the direction of the charred rubble.

Unconsciously she slowed her steps, knowing that fire often destroyed more than wood walls and furnishings. It consumed family mementos, irreplaceable photographs, and items of purely sentimental value.

"Were you able to save anything?" Angie wondered.

"By the time I arrived, it was in full flame." He was ahead of her now, on a course to the barn and adjacent corral.

Tarrying a little, she noticed the tall weeds growing right up to the edges of the gray-black square where the house had stood. Their presence indicated the fire hadn't been a recent one.

"When was the fire? This past winter?" she guessed.

"Four years ago."

"What?" Angie came to a complete stop. "If it's been that long, why haven't you cleaned the mess up?"

He swung back to face her. "I don't think that's any of your business." He said it with an easy smile, but there was an underlying determination that made it clear he didn't intend to discuss his reasons with her.

She started to argue the point, then clamped her mouth shut and smiled ruefully. "Sorry. I didn't mean to meddle in your affairs. It just . . . came out."

His wide shoulders lifted, indicating he took no offense. "It happens, especially if you spend much time around Ima Jane."

"Maybe." But Angie suspected her curiosity was a bit more personal. She came abreast of him and together they walked toward the massive barn. "All the same, Ima Jane seems like a good-hearted woman."

"A good-hearted woman with a very long nose," he added dryly.

She smiled in spite of herself. "I wouldn't say that."

"You haven't known her as long as I have," Luke countered, then gestured to her purse. "Were you planning on taking that along with you?"

Angie touched the shoulder strap as if suddenly realizing it was there. "I'm so used to carrying it, I guess I forgot I had it. Is there someplace I can stash it in the barn?"

"There's a cupboard in the tack room. You can leave it there," he suggested.

"That will work fine."

From the trailer's kitchen window, Fargo watched the pair making their way toward the barn, their faces turned in conversation, giving him a view of their profiles. One-handed, he held another plate under the water gushing from the sink faucet, rinsing it off before setting it aside to be loaded in the dishwasher.

The whole time he replayed in his mind the discussion at the dinner table regarding the hidden cache of stolen money and the outlaw's letter. Yet, no matter how many times he mulled over the long list of unknowns, he always came to the same conclusion: that letter was bound to hold answers for most of them.

"I sure would like to get my hands on that letter." Fargo gave voice to the wish without realizing it.

"Me, too," Tobe chimed in as he tore off a long strip of cellophane wrap and stretched it over the bowl of leftover potatoes. "Regardless of what she said about it maybe not meanin' anything, I still think there's something in that letter that will lead you right to the gold." He cleared a section of shelf in the refrigerator and pushed the bowl onto it. "You think that way the same as me, don't you?"

"It's got to be that way." Fargo stepped to one side, giving Dulcie room to empty the water glasses from the table into the sink. "Nothin' anybody could say will convince me that her granddad came all the way out here on a possible-maybe."

"Yeah, but he didn't find it." Bending, Tobe took a plastic storage container from a lower cupboard shelf and set it on the kitchen counter next to the serving bowl with a portion of green beans in it.

"How do we know that?" Fargo challenged, inwardly studying over it.

"How do we know?" Tobe's eyes widened in an incredulous stare. "The man's dead."

"Yup, he's dead," Fargo agreed, sliding the last dirty plate under the faucet. "But not of natural causes, I'd wager."

"Are you saying he was killed?" Tobe forgot all about putting the beans away and walked blindly to the sink, bumping into Dulcie on her way back from the table with another pair of glasses.

"That's exactly what I'm sayin'." Through the window, he saw Luke swinging a saddle onto the back of a flea-bitten gray gelding, a calm and quiet mount, not known for being excitable or contrary.

"But," Tobe began in a dazed voice, "if somebody killed him to get the gold, then-"

"The gold or the letter," Fargo inserted, as he turned off the tap, shutting off the flow of water from the faucet. "It could have been either one."

"What difference does it make?" He stared at Fargo with eyes bereft of hope. "The letter would have led him to the gold. Either way it's gone."

"Maybe. Then again, maybe not. It might still be there, waiting to be found," he reasoned, then sighed heavily. "It's the not knowin' for sure that gnaws at you. On one hand, a man would be a champion fool to look for something that isn't there. But on the other, what if it is, and he just sits on his duff? It strikes me that fella is dumber than the first."

"Yeah," Tobe murmured absently, mulling over the problem.

"Which brings us right back where we were," Fargo stated. "There's only one answer to this."

Tobe came to the same conclusion. "The letter."

"Yup." There was the scrape of plate against plate as Fargo took the top one off the stack and set it in the dishwasher.

"I wish I could see it. Read it." The longing was like an ache inside Tobe. Frustration knotted his hands into fists. "If there are any places on the Ten Bar described in it, I know I'd recognize them. I hinted as much to her on the way here."

Fargo turned with a jerk, his sharpened gaze pinning Tobe. "What did she say?"

His shoulders hunched in a shrug. "Nothin'. Somehow or other, the subject got changed and I didn't have a chance to bring it up again."

"Figures," he snorted in disgust. "My guess is she changed the subject deliberately. You could probably talk 'til your hair turns blue and she wouldn't show it to you."

"You're probably right," Tobe agreed reluctantly. Then he mused to himself, "I wonder where she keeps it."

The same thought had crossed Fargo's mind more than once since he'd learned of the letter's existence.

Outside, Luke snubbed the bay tight, pulling its nose back toward the saddle before he stepped aboard. As always, the stockinged bay put up a token fight, crow hopping a dozen feet across the yard before flattening the hump in its back and dropping into a trot.

"Fargo"-Dulcie paused in the act of carefully turning the water glasses upside down in the top rack of the dishwasher-"if you found that gold, would you be rich?"

"Whoo-eee," he barked the laugh. "I hope to shout I'd be rich."

She tipped her head back, her eyes all round and serious. "What would you buy with it?"

"Buy?" He hadn't given that much thought. "I don't know. I guess I'd get me a new pickup-I've never had me a brand-spanking new one-then probably some nice clothes." He looked down at the stub of his left arm, then unconsciously massaged the atrophied muscles leading to it. "I might even look into getting one of those mechanical limbs. Not like the one I got, but one that looks like a real arm and hand."

"Would there be enough to buy a house?" she wondered.

"Sure, with money left over."

But the possessions that could be acquired meant little to him. He had never cared about such things. He hungered for something else entirely. Security.

He had already passed the sixty-year mark. Every time that fact slipped his mind, the ache in his bones reminded him of it. Arthritis, the doctors said. Sometimes he was so stoved up with it he could hardly get out of a chair. With only one arm, he didn't know how many useful years he had left.

He'd cowboyed his whole life and didn't have a dollar in the bank to show for it. He had no home and no family, save for Luke. And he couldn't know for sure how much longer Luke would keep him on. The pittance he'd get from Social Security wouldn't amount to enough to support himself. The thought of being stuck in some nursing home, a government charity case, galled his pride.

Old, broke, and crippled, he stood smack-dab on the doorstep of his so-called golden years, and it scared the hell out of him.

But if he could find that outlaw gold.... Need gripped his heart and squeezed hard.

That letter. If only he could get a look at that letter.

The barn and corrals were left behind as Angie rode alongside Luke, their horses traveling at a slow rocking canter. Overhead a puffy white cloud drifted across a high blue sky, and the sun was a big, yellow blaze of light right in the middle of it.

Away from all evidence of civilization, she was again struck by the wildness of this country, a wildness that excited the imagination of a girl raised on Hollywood Westerns. Massive boulders and the occasional tree-studded land that climbed and dipped and tumbled and curled. There were no stunning vistas, no majestic peaks to awe her, just rough, rugged terrain, the kind that laughed at a plow. The urge was there to explore it, to ride and ride and ride until she reached the barrier of those distant peaks. An impossible wish, but one to savor all the same.

Luke reined his horse down to a fast walk and turned it onto a narrow cow path that circled below a tall outcropping of rocks. Angie swung the gray behind him and listened to the companionable creak of saddle leather and the intermittent click of horseshoe striking stone, sounds that seemed to suit the landscape.

The cow trail angled across the side of a hill, making a gradual and leisurely descent to the bottom of it. There it disappeared in a grassy fold of the hills that gradually widened into a kind of valley. A slender creek wound through it, its course marked by a stand of cottonwood trees.

"The body was found over there." Luke pointed across the creek to a steep hill. Near the base of it a huge chunk had been gouged from its side, exposing bare earth.

The sight sobered her. It was like looking at an opened grave. "I see it," she said quietly.

Cutting across the valley's narrow floor, they splashed through the stream and rode directly to the spot. When they reached it, Angie immediately dismounted. Holding on to one rein, she walked to the edge of the grave site. Luke came up and silently took the gray's rein from her, then led both horses to a section of grass and left them there to graze.

Her gaze traveled over the length of exposed ground, absently noting the new shoots that had sprung up, evidence that nature had already begun its work to cover the scar. She couldn't have explained why, but she crouched down and scooped up a handful of dirt. It was dry and crumbly between her fingers, without the loamy texture of Iowa's rich soil. She let it slide from her hand, then brushed off the grains that clung to her skin as she straightened to stand erect.

Somewhere a bird sang. Its song wasn't one Angie recognized, but its music was sweet and clear. Surrounded by stillness, she became acutely aware of the horses' loud chomping, the jingle of bridle chains, and the soft rustle of a breeze through the grass stems.

Turning, she located Luke standing a few feet away. With his cowboy hat pulled low, his face was in shadow. But she sensed he was watching her.

"It's very peaceful here," she remarked.

"Yes." He wandered closer, seeming to recognize her need to talk now.

She looked back at the spot that had been her grandfather's grave site for so many years. "I never knew him. But my grandmother talked about him so much that it feels like I did. I guess she made him come alive in my mind. At the same time, I suppose talking about him kept him alive for her."

"Probably."

"She said he was a good man, solid and dependable," Angie recalled. "Someone you would want at your side if you were in trouble."

His sideways glance was dry and skeptical. "That seems a strange thing for her to say, considering the way he left her to come out here and chase a dream."

"It looks that way now," she admitted. "But you have to remember that back then, this country was in the middle of the Great Depression. He had no home, no money, no work-and a baby on the way. It was sheer desperation that prompted him to look for that gold."

"And you, of course, are here strictly out of a sense of family duty." His mouth twisted in a smile, droll with mocking doubt.

"I-" Angie began, then broke it off when a rock clicked and clattered, the striking bounce of it sharp in the afternoon's stillness. She glanced around in time to see a dark-clad figure in a floppy hat scuttling out of sight behind a boulder on the opposite hill. She saw Luke was staring in the same direction. "Who was that?"

"Your rival," Luke replied, amusement glinting in his blue-gray eyes.

"Rival? What do you mean?" she said, in genuine confusion.

He held her gaze. "You're here to look for the gold, aren't you?" It wasn't so much a question as a challenge.

"I-" Angie faltered, then tried again, hedging, "I never said that."

"No, you didn't say it. I did. But it's true, isn't it?"

She searched his face, but his expression indicated he was amused rather than contemptuous. She pulled in a long breath and expelled it in a rush, nodding. "It's not the only reason, but it is the main reason."

"I thought so."

"I know you think it's silly." Angie wasn't sure why his opinion mattered to her, but it did. "But you have to understand, I've dreamed about looking for the treasure ever since I was a kid in pigtails. Later, when I was older, I did some research; verified facts; and, basically, only toyed with the idea of looking. It was never really a goal until . . ."

"Until you were notified about the body being found," Luke guessed, still vaguely amused and aloof.

"Yes." The admission brought the return of a previous question. "What did you mean about that man in the rocks being a rival?"

Luke shifted his attention to the granite outcropping across the way. "That man was Amos Aloysius Smith, better known around here as Saddlebags Smith." He wasn't sure, but he thought he could see the rounded crown of a hat peeking from behind a boulder. "He's spent the better part of the last sixty years looking for that gold. He hasn't found it yet."

"Really." She studied the same area before turning curious eyes on Luke. "Where does he live?"

"Wherever his search takes him."

"But what about in the winter?" Angie protested. "Surely he doesn't camp out then."

"No. He usually disappears sometime in late fall and shows up again come spring. It's rumored that he goes to the homeless shelters in Cheyenne or Laramie."

Her brow furrowing, she redirected her glance to the empty grave. "You said Mr. Smith has been in the area for over sixty years?"