Salvation in the Rancher's Arms. Kelly Boyce

from his supper. The scent of the bacon made the knots in his stomach twist tighter. Hunger gnawed at his backbone.

      Sheriff Donovan scooped a helping onto his plate. “You hungry?” He didn’t sound enamored of the prospect of sharing his breakfast.

      Caleb lied and shook his head. He wasn’t sure breaking bread with a lawman would start his day off on the right foot, and given the run of bad luck he’d had of late, he didn’t want to do anything to keep the string going.

      The sheriff appeared relieved. He walked back to his scarred oak desk and dropped down into the chair behind it, motioning for Caleb to take an empty seat in front. Then he reached inside his desk drawer and produced a basket covered with a checkered napkin. Beneath it, the comforting smell of freshly baked biscuits rose up and assaulted Caleb’s senses.

      Donovan shrugged. “Minnie from the bakery brings these over every mornin’, but if I leave them out my deputy makes short work of them. You sure you don’t want one?”

      Caleb shook his head, clenching his back teeth. He wondered what the penalty was for knocking a sheriff out cold and stealing his meal. “You want something in particular?”

      Donovan tucked the cloth napkin into his collar and glanced across the desk. “Got your name off the hotel register,” he said, explaining how he knew Caleb’s name. “Signed it yourself, so I take it you can read and write?”

      “You takin’ a survey?”

      The sheriff shrugged and spoke around a mouthful of beans. “I find it a bit curious, is all. Not many drifters can.”

      “What makes you so sure I’m a drifter?”

      Donovan glanced up from plate. “Got that look about you.”

      “That a fact?” Caleb couldn’t fault the sheriff for his powers of observation, though they hardly told the whole story. But looking at the surface of a man rarely did. Most of what he was lived deeper than that, hiding out in the places people couldn’t see.

      “I believe so. But given you can read and write, I’m guessin’ there’s more to you than meets the eye.”

      “Glad to have satisfied your curiosity.” Caleb’s grandfather had made sure he could read and write. He wanted his grandson to be able to recite verbatim every passage in the Bible pertaining to sin and damnation. All these years later, and Caleb was still trying to scour the words from his mind. He pushed his chair back. “If that’s all...?”

      The sheriff held out a hand and motioned for him to stay put. “Not quite. You’ll forgive me, Mr. Beckett, but it isn’t every day we get a stranger riding into town with a body in the back of his buckboard. Rachel’s important to us. We want to make sure there’s nothing we need to worry about.”

      We. As if the town as a collective had decided to take her under their wing, and he as the outsider was considered a threat. But where were these people when Sutter was gambling his family out of house and home? Where were they when Kirkpatrick started pressuring Sutter in the hopes of getting his land?

      The threat to Rachel didn’t come from an outsider like him, it came from the inside.

      “Do we need to worry?” the sheriff asked outright.

      Caleb gave his head a slow shake, his eyes never leaving the sheriff, who returned the silent perusal, his beans and bacon forgotten.

      “Then I expect you’re on your way out of town, Mr. Beckett?”

      “Currently I’m on my way to the end of the street. Beyond that, I can’t say it’s anyone’s business but my own where I go or when I get there.”

      The hard look on the sheriff’s face indicated he was not satisfied with the answer, but the man’s satisfaction, or lack thereof, was the least of Caleb’s concerns this morning.

      “What were you doing in Laramie, Mr. Beckett?”

      Caution invaded Caleb’s veins.

      “Just passing through,” he said, searching the sheriff’s face for clues as to what the man was fishing for.

      “How’d it be you came to bring Robert’s body home?”

      “I was there when he was killed.” He kept his tone even, gave nothing more away.

      “Who killed him?”

      “Man by the name of Sinjin Drake.”

      Something in the lawman’s face altered. “Sinjin Drake?”

      “You know him?”

      “By reputation only. Not a lawman north of Tucson who doesn’t, I expect. Man’s said to be one of the fastest draws in the west with a body count to prove it.”

      “That so?”

      “Did you meet the man?”

      “We sat at the same table. Can’t say we shared much conversation.”

      “Did they arrest him?”

      “Drake? No. The law said it was self-defense. Sutter went for his gun.”

      The sheriff’s gaze sharpened. “His guns weren’t on the body.”

      “I said he went for his guns. I didn’t say he was wearing them at the time.”

      Shock registered on Sheriff Donovan’s face. “What do you mean he wasn’t wearing them?”

      “A man needed at least fifty dollars to sit at the table. Word was Sutter sold everything but the clothes on his back to raise the capital.”

      “And Drake shot him anyway?”

      Caleb didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Robert Sutter had come home in the back of a wagon with a hole through his heart. That was all the confirmation needed as far as he was concerned.

      “We done here?”

      “For now.”

      Caleb headed for the door but the sheriff’s voice stopped him cold.

      “You won’t mind if I wire out to Laramie and verify your story?”

      Every fiber in Caleb’s body stilled. He glanced at the sheriff out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t matter none to me.”

      Chances were he’d be nothing more than a fading memory in the minds of Salvation Falls residents by the time the sheriff got news back from Laramie. And that suited him just fine.

      * * *

      After Rachel managed to get the boys fed and Freedom tracked down, she arranged to send them back home in the wagon. She’d get back on her own after she conducted her business with Mr. Beckett and figured out where things stood. She would need the time to formulate a plan, determine what to do.

      Did the man plan on kicking them off their land—his land, now? A sick sense of displacement filled her, followed by burning frustration. Her entire world had been pulled out from under her and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

      Rachel took a deep breath and smoothed a hand over her skirt. She still wore her widow’s weeds, but she didn’t plan on making it a habit. She didn’t have time to dye her meager wardrobe black to mourn a man who didn’t deserve her tears.

      She made her way down Main Street. When she’d inquired about Mr. Beckett this morning, Cletus at the front desk told her he’d left for the livery thirty minutes earlier. She picked up her skirts and hurried her steps. The last thing she needed was him showing up at the ranch ahead of her, announcing his ownership before she had a chance to explain it to her family herself.

      She needed to talk to him, to settle this thing. She couldn’t live in a sickening limbo land wondering what would happen. She had to keeping moving. If she stopped...

      Well, if she stopped everything would catch up with her and she’d end up passing out again from the weight