It was impossible.
It couldn’t be true.
Cole was always so full of life. And they had plans, big plans for the future, starting tonight.
Conn was going to give up his wayward habits and join his brother, help him and Mary prove up their homestead and file on ground of his own, a hundred and sixty acres that would become more than just ground or even a homestead, a hundred and sixty acres that would eventually, after he met the right woman, become his home, his home next to his twin brother, Cole, the two of them formed side by side in the womb coming together again to share the best life had to offer.
But now Cole was dead.
Someone had murdered him.
Someone had beaten him severely. Conn winced at the broken nose and split lips and brows. Then they had put a rope around Cole’s neck and hoisted him into this tree and let him hang there till he was dead.
Who?
Who did this thing to his brother?
Rage leapt up inside him, as red and hot and hungry as an inferno, and spread rapidly, filling him and burning away his hopes and dreams, leaving him with the dark and desperate need to avenge his twin.
“I’ll find them, Cole,” Conn said aloud, his voice thick with emotion.
He did not allow tears. He had to stay strong for Cole, had to stay focused on the job at hand. Maybe someday after he’d done what he needed to do, maybe then he would cry for his twin.
But for now, there was only rage.
Rage and a hallowed vow, which he spoke aloud, making a covenant with his dear, departed brother, “I’ll find the men who did this, Cole. I will track them down and kill them all. They can shoot me right between the eyes, and I won’t stop. Not until the last of them is dead. I promise you that, brother. I promise.”
Cole, of course, was silent.
He lay with an open mouth and open eyes on the cold hard ground where Conn kneeled.
Conn stared at him in further disbelief for several seconds and reached down and closed his brother’s eyelids.
He would need burying.
But not yet.
First, Conn needed to follow these tracks.
Because men such as these likely wouldn’t hang around this country. He needed to get after them.
If he could catch even one of them, he would do anything he had to do to learn the names and whereabouts of the others.
Anything.
Reluctantly, he stood.
Getting up, moving like that, looking down at his stiff, cold brother, was a painful experience, because it somehow made it official, as if by moving away from Cole, he had solidified the fact of his brother’s demise.
That thought gutted him all over again.
He stood there for half a minute just staring down at Cole, his throat choked with emotion that he wrangled into submission.
First,he told himself,you kill them all.
But then, sobered and steeled by this command, he realized that another task was even more pressing than vengeance.
He circled the tree, peering up into the darkness, fearing what he would find.
