“Sir, This Boy Lived With Me in the Orphanage…” Widow’s Daughter Said — Millionaire Cowboy Went Pale

Chapter 4

The east wing guest room was grand enough to break a poor woman’s heart. Thick wool blankets, a fire roaring behind a brass screen, windows that ran from floor to ceiling — and bars on the outside of the shutters, so finely wrought and so massive that Kora Baird noticed them at once and tried very hard not to cry at the sight.

“Ma,” Sadie said, standing at the window with her forehead against the cold pane, “why is he locking us in?”

“He is not locking us in,” Kora said, kneeling to take the girl’s shoulders. “He is keeping us safe, is all. Mr. Traven just wants to find his boy, and you helped him. You did a good thing, telling the truth.”

Outside, the first flakes of snow had begun to fall on the dark plains, and somewhere beyond the firelight the wind had started its long, lonesome rise. The door opened, and Jonas Pike came in carrying a tin mug of warm milk for the girl and stood with his rifle resting across his forearm, quiet as a standing stone.

“Do not fret, ma’am,” he said, his voice a low gravel. “I have two men at the end of the hall. Nobody goes in or out of this house without Mr. Traven’s word. You are safe as church.”

“Safe from what?” Kora asked.

Jonas looked at her for a long moment. “Ma’am,” he said, “Mr. Traven believes your daughter’s memory has just made you both the two most valuable people in the territory. And where there is that kind of value, there is a kind of man who will not want to live near it.”

He tipped his hat and closed the door, and they heard the iron bolt slide home like a word the house had been waiting to say.

Down the long corridor, in the study, the lamps had been left to burn low, and Garrett Traven sat in the dark with a leather folder open across his knees. Jonas came in and laid three more folders on the desk without being asked.

“I pulled the territorial records, like you said,” Jonas said, settling into the chair across from him. “The fire at St. Ann’s was three years back. The marshal who signed the report — a man named Hollister — ruled it an accident. Kerosene lantern tipped over in the records room, is the official finding. Case closed.”

“An accident,” Garrett repeated, without inflection, and Jonas heard everything the flatness meant.

“It gets worse,” Jonas said. “Hollister resigned his post two weeks after he signed that paper. Man was making a marshal’s wage all his life, and within a month he had bought a river steamer down at the Louisiana docks and paid for it in gold coin. No marshal in this territory has ever looked at gold like that, Mr. Traven, except to take it in a bribe.”

Garrett set the folder down slowly, as if it might burn him. The picture was assembling itself in his mind in hard, deliberate strokes — not a tragedy, but an accounting. A bill paid. A witness buried in paperwork. A mouth shut with enough gold to close it forever.

“Keep going,” he said.

Jonas hesitated. He had known Garrett Traven for twenty years, had ridden beside him through floods and fires and rustling wars, and he had never once seen the man’s hands shake. They were shaking now. He opened the third folder. “I checked the deed and the registration on the property. St. Ann’s was never owned by the church, Mr. Traven. It was owned by a private charitable foundation. The Lone Elm Trust.”

“Charitable,” Garrett said. “That would be a beautiful word for it.”

“The Lone Elm Trust,” Jonas read, “is a subsidiary of the Traven Cattle Company. It signs for everything the home needs. Food, coal, wages, records.” He looked up. “Garrett. It is funded entirely by your own money. Every loaf of bread that ever fed your boy came out of your own pocket. You have been paying for your son’s prison since the day you lost him.”

The fire was the only sound in the room for a long while. Garrett stood, walked to the window, and stood the way he had stood that morning, facing the dark, only now his shoulders were drawn with something that was no longer grief. Grief had a dull ache in it. This had teeth.

“Who runs the trust, Jonas? Who signs the drafts?”

Jonas did not need to look at the folder. “It is run by the family’s charity division,” he said quietly. “It is managed by your brother-in-law.”

Garrett’s back went very still.

“Otis,” he said. And then, with a brightness that frightened even himself: “Otis Traven. Margaret’s brother. The man who wept into his handkerchief at her grave. The man who has told me, every single year, at every single Christmas, that I needed to let go of the past and accept that the boy was gone.”

“He was here yesterday,” Jonas said. “He told you to find peace.”

“He was here yesterday,” Garrett agreed, turning slowly. “He sat in this very room, at this very desk, and poured me a drink, and told me to forgive myself.” His voice dropped to something that barely carried across the room. “Jonas. If Otis learns that a girl has walked into this house and named my son’s dog, he will not send a letter. He will come.”

“He keeps a matched pair of Missouri thugs with him everywhere he goes,” Jonas said mildly, rising. “I’ve made their acquaintance. They will not get past the end of this hallway.”

“Lock the house,” Garrett said. “And bring me every scrap of paper this territory holds on Otis Traven. I want to know where he eats, where he sleeps, who he has paid, and what he has buried. Tonight, Jonas. It cannot wait for morning.”

Jonas paused at the door. “Garrett. What if the girl is wrong?”

For the first time all night, a sound came out of Garrett Traven that was almost a laugh, an awful, dust-dry sound that had nothing happy in it.

“She isn’t wrong,” he said. “She knew the dog’s name. I never told that name to anyone — not the marshals, not the detectives, not even Margaret, before she died.” He looked down at the worn drawing in his own white-knuckled grip. “No one on this earth knew that name except me and that boy. And the girl has been carrying it folded in her pocket for three years, waiting for someone to ask.”

He laid the drawing flat on the desk, smoothed its creases, and stared at it as a man stares at a map of the place where he lost everything.

“It isn’t a question anymore, Jonas. It’s a hunting trail.”