“That’s right, sonny. Blake’s got kin down there. Brothers. They got a little farm. He used to work it with them. Told me all about it different nights when he’d come home from the saloon in a melancholy mood, too sad to slap me, I guess. So he’d sit here and try to bore me to death instead, running his mouth about how him and his brothers had a nice little farm but how he was a free spirit and they couldn’t rein him in. What a bunch of hooey. Every word that ever progressed from Ben Blake’s mouth was a big old cow flop.”
21
Conn and Sheffield reunited with McKay and rode out of town, heading for Pepper’s Gulch.
Sheffield knew Pepper’s Gulch.
McKay did, too, and reckoned he knew where the Blake brothers’ farm was, too. He was a cattleman and had grazed that region.
“I remember some brothers running a farm down there at the mouth of the gulch. I think their name was Blake.”
It was a start, anyway.
So that’s where they rode. The trail passed Cole and Mary’s place.
Glancing in that direction, Conn felt a wave of deep sorrow that conjured the lump in his throat again.
As before, he pushed it down and rode on.
It took another three hours to reach Pepper’s Gulch. By that time, the sun was dipping to the west, and the mountains were casting long shadows across the basin.
Pepper’s Gulch was well within this shadowed stretch, and by the time McKay led them up to the remembered farm, premature dusk had overtaken the place.
Conn saw a lone figure walking from the house to the barn. A man. Average height with a short beard.
Might be Ben Blake himself.
But those similarities weren’t enough to shoot the man on sight. Most folks were, by definition, of average stature, and plenty of men had short beards and brown hair.
“You men spread out and hang back a little,” Conn said, unfastening the hammer loop on his Remington.
“All right,” Sheffield said. “What are you gonna do?”
Conn pulled the H&R from its short scabbard and rested it against his saddle horn. “I’m gonna ride over and talk to that man.”
“Anything happens, we’ll come running,” McKay said.
Conn approached from an angle, wanting to keep the barn between him and the man until he got right up on him.
Reaching the barn, he swung down from the gelding, landed lightly, and flattened himself against the barn wall.
A hundred feet away, the house was dark. He watched it for a moment, saw no movement, and started forward, meaning to surprise whoever was in the barn.
But then someone shouted from inside the house, “Look out, Ben! He’s right on the other side of the wall!”
Conn rushed forward. A second later, gunshots rang out inside the barn and bullets burst through the siding.
Conn came around the corner and saw the brown-haired, short-bearded man of average height standing beside a bucket of spilled grain, trying to reload a revolver.
Seeing Conn, he shouted, “You!”
Conn blasted him.
At this range, the ten-gauge snuffed Blake out like a candle.
A second later, someone was shooting at him from the house.
Conn fired the shotgun’s other barrel blindly in that direction and plunged deeper into the barn, running past the remains ofBen Blake and turning down a lane of stalls, where he paused to reload.
