"Rose?"

  "I think you had best leave now," she said, but there was no forcefulness in the words. She folded her hands, held them tight together in her lap.

  "Not until you tell me the truth."

  He put out a hand, touched her arm. Even through the sleeve of her shirtwaist, the contact sent little tremors through her. She drew away - too quickly.

  Matt withdrew his hand. "I have to know," he said. "I need some idea of where I stand with you-"

  "No," she said.

  "Rose…"

  "No."

  "You do care for me, don't you?"

  "I am going inside now. It's late." She started to rise.

  "I love you," he said, blurting the words like a schoolboy.

  She closed her eyes, opened them again, and made it to her feet. Turned away from him and stared past the branches of the oak tree at the sky to the northeast. A faint reddish incandescence tinged the horizon in that direction, like the last lingering afterglow of a sunset. The forest fire at Pine Hill, she thought distractedly. Raging out of control, a wildfire - like her own emotions at this moment.

  Behind her, Matt said in a low, shaken voice, "I'm sorry, I am, but I had to say it. I had to get it into the open."

  "I don't want to hear such words…"

  "I love you," he said again.

  "I'm married. You know that."

  "Happily married?"

  "Yes."

  The lie seemed to hang in the dry, hot air.

  "Look at me, Rose."

  "No."

  "Please look at me."

  She didn't move.

  He got to his feet. She heard him come up behind her, felt him standing there, and she tensed. But when he took hold of her arms, gently, and turned her toward him, the small tremors moved through her again. She wanted to draw away, as she had moments ago, only this time she could not make herself do it.

  Her throat felt parched, her face hot and damp; she drew a breath, gathered herself, and lifted her head to look at him. Up close this way, the conflict in his face was more apparent. His eyes, dark-shadowed and steady, locked with hers, and she felt the yearning in them. They weakened her, stilled the lie she had been about to repeat.

  "Rose?".

  She heard herself say, "I don't know. I don't know. I need time to think."

  "Then you do care for me."

  "I don't know."

  "All right. I won't bother you anymore - won't come here again. I'll abide by whatever you decide."

  "Truly?"

  "Yes. I won't shame you, Rose. I won't hurt you."

  "You've already hurt me."

  One side of his mouth twitched, as if with anguish. "I shouldn't have come, shouldn't have said… I know that. But I had to, I just… I couldn't stop myself."

  From over at the Murdock house next door, a screen door banged and there was the sound of muted voices. Rose jerked her head around, stared over that way. Dear God, what if the Murdocks had overheard? Guilt welled up in her, made her back away from Matt until her hips came up against the porch railing. She listened, looking from the tree-shadowed front of the Murdock house and back to him again. Then, belatedly, she realized that the voices were coming from around back. Webb Murdock and his wife would have had to come slinking through the dark, spying, to overhear, and they weren't that sort at all.

  "I'll go now," Matt said.

  "Yes. Please go."

  "Good night," he said gravely, and turned and left her alone.

  She waited until he passed through the gate and started back toward Main Street. Then she sat down again in the shadows. In her mind she heard his voice saying the words that Will had not spoken to her in years, saying them over and over again like an echo that would not die: "I love you, I love you, I love you…"

  Her hands were trembling.

  ***

  Pete Weidenbeck leaned across the bar. "Closing up pretty soon, Will. You want one more?"

  "No," Denbow said without turning his head.

  "On the house…"

  "I said no."

  Denbow threw his last cigarette into the spittoon, pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. He'd had a dozen glasses of beer tonight and his stomach felt queasy and his head ached. But he wasn't drunk. Dull his mind, but he couldn't deaden it. Couldn't forget the accident, couldn't forget the stump or the crutch. Hell, just the opposite. The more he drank, the more he thought about them. When he was feeling his liquor, he could almost feel his right leg, too, little twinges in the knee, the ankle, the toes. Ghosts haunting his mind. Dead leg twitching in his memory.

  He wondered what the Springwood doctor had done with the leg after he'd cut it off. Burned it? Buried it? Dead and gone, whatever - didn't exist any longer. Piece of him didn't exist any longer. Doc should have told him what he'd done with the leg. Man had a right to know where a piece of him went. Should have given the leg to him, for that matter. Man had a right to bury his own leg, didn't he?

  Hell with it. Denbow scraped his chair back, caught his stump in both hands, and dragged the wooden leg out from under the table. Used the tabletop to lift himself upright. When he glanced toward the bar, Weidenbeck was washing glasses in the water tub with his head bowed and his eyes averted. Had to give him that much, Denbow thought bitterly. He knew better now than to gawk at a cripple.

  Denbow hobbled over to the door and went outside. The street was empty, the dust on it settled for the night. Kids had been out there earlier, chasing each other, rolling hoops. They were worse than adults, the way they looked at him: cruelty mixed with pity, laughing at him behind their hands, making fun of him. Good thing he and Rose hadn't had any kids. Living with her was hard enough now; he'd go crazy if he had to put up with a kid all day long.

  Some unsteady on his good leg, he made his way along Main Street. A breeze had come rip, blowing down from the north, but it was hot and dry and did nothing much to ease the night's heat. If anything, it mixed with the beer he'd drunk to draw an oily sweat out of him. He could feel it trickling down his sides, chafing at his crotch.

  When he came onto the side street where he lived, he saw two men standing at the gate of Sam Honeycutt's house - Honeycutt and Ben Purdom. They played cribbage most nights, but usually they were done by the time he came by. Now, sure as hell, they stopped talking and turned to look at him.

  "Evening, Will," Honeycutt said.

  "Evening."

  Purdom said, "Hot night." Denbow didn't bother to answer that. He started on past them.

  Honeycutt said, "Hold on a second, son."

  Damn. "What is it?"

  "You give any more thought to my proposal?"

  "No."

  "I sure could use a helper in the yards. Lot of work to be done, and I been spendin' too much time on that Baldwin-"

  "Sure you have. And a cripple's just what you need to ease your burden."

  "You get around pretty good, seems to me.

  "I'm not interested," Denbow said. "I told you that already. And even if I was, you think Trace would pay for the likes of me when he's already laid off better than two dozen able-bodied men?"

  "We could work something out-"

  "Yeah. Charity. I don't want your damn charity."

  "I'm not offerin' charity, son, I'm offerin' you a chance to work. You know trains near as well as I do-"

  "No," Denbow said. "How many times you want me to say it?" He swung away from them and stumped upstreet.

  He could feel their eyes on him, hear the faint murmur of their voices. Talking about him behind his back, the way they always did. Poor Will Denbow, poor cripple, won't let nobody do anything for him. Why, how are he and his poor missus going to get along when their savings runs out? Bullshit. Didn't understand him, none of them. Wouldn't leave him alone, neither. That was all he wanted, for Christ's sake, for them to leave him the hell alone.

  Rose had left one lamp lit for him in the front room. Afraid he'd stumble in the dark, fall on his face. Like he'd done that afternoon. Light or dark, what difference did it make? He went to the lamp, not being quiet about it, and lifted the chimney and snuffed the flame. In the bedroom, enough moonlight filtered through the open window to show him Rose lying on her side of the bed. Only she wasn't asleep; hadn't been asleep, likely. He heard her stir, sit up as he undressed. Watching him. Always watching him.

  "Will?"

  "Go to sleep," he said.

  "I can't sleep. I've been waiting for you."

  "Start in about loving again, I suppose."

  "No. Not unless it's what you want."

  "Well, it isn't."

  Denbow unbuckled his belt, dropped his Levi's, and stepped out of them clumsily. Went over to sit on the bed and unfasten the straps of his peg leg. He threw the leg on the floor; it made a sharp clattering noise as it struck one of the walls. Then he lay back with one arm over his eyes. Sleep commenced to move in on him right away.

  Rose said, "Will, I need to talk…"

  Ah, Christ! He rolled onto his side and put the pillow over his ears to shut out the sound of her voice.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They moved out some past eleven o'clock.

  There was a moon now, and it shed enough light for them to see the road clearly as they set out with the freighter. Patch drove slowly, to minimize the creak and rattle of the wagon, the thump of the iron tires, the jangle of the trace chains. The noise they did make wouldn't carry far, Rudabaugh thought. Down in the valley, only a few lights showed like little burning holes in the sultry dark. One of the lights was in the watchman's shack at the main entrance to the mill compound. Trees screened the rest of the compound until they got down near the western perimeter. Then Rudabaugh could see that there were lights in the big sawmill over at the east end - and no lights at all in Austin Trace's house at the near end.

  The place he'd picked for Patch to wait with the Espenshied was a few hundred yards uphill from the mill's front gate, in another little clearing just off the road. Once they got into the clearing, the gate was partially obscured by trees. The high fence that enclosed the compound ran at a forty-five-degree angle to the road, through high brown grass and thick underbrush; forty yards of that rough, open ground separated the fence from the clearing. On the opposite side of the road, a densely forested slope hid the town in the shallow valley below. There were woods behind the clearing on this side, too, extending up around and behind the mill.

  When Patch halted the team, Rudabaugh glanced sideways at him to see how he was holding up. Still twitchy; still glancing now and then at the fire glow in the distance. But there was no real daunciness in him. He would stand up to the waiting all right.

  Rudabaugh swung down, waited for Chavis to come around from the other side. They were both wearing their revolvers now, holsters tied down. He'd had that.45 Colt of his twenty years; it was a better and more trustworthy friend than any man he'd ever known.

  There was no need for talk; they had said all that needed to be said earlier, gone over everything again and again until even Chavis had it down right. Rudabaugh led him across the open ground to the fence, along the fence another fifty yards to the place he'd found during his scouting expedition that afternoon.

  One of the redwood fence sheets had warped away here, leaving a gap wide enough for a man to crawl through.

  Once he was inside, Rudabaugh stayed down on one knee to study the compound. Not far away were a couple of long lean-to arrangements under which were ricks of board lumber, stacks of plywood, and redwood sheets. The sawmill bulked up well beyond, at the far side of the compound, shedding a broad shine of lamplight. The whine of the big steam saw came now, as it did at intervals. But there was only a skeleton crew working the night shift these days; he had confirmed that during his time in the Big Tree Saloon. That made things easier.

  He felt Chavis, quiet as a cat for all his size, brush up alongside him. But his gaze shifted the other way, to where Austin Trace's house squatted on its rise of land. Big place, two-storied, built after the fashion of swells' houses in San Francisco. No light showed anywhere on either floor.

  He nudged Chavis and then pushed up into a crouch and moved through the shadows to the closest of the lean-tos. Went along the rows of board lumber, past a second lean-to, across to where three conical mounds of sawdust loomed black against the moonlit sky. The smell of the sawdust was sharp in the air.

  Too sharp: it made you want to sneeze. Rudabaugh commenced breathing through his mouth.

  They stopped behind one of the mounds, putting it between them and the sawmill. Forty yards to their left was the squat shed in which dynamite and black powder was kept for stump blasting and road building. Rail tracks ran past it on the far side; one of the wagon tracks that crisscrossed the compound paralleled the tracks. Beyond the powder shed was fifty yards of ground sloping up to where Trace's house sat. There was plenty of cover between the sawdust mounds and the powder shed - open ricks of beam lumber and redwood blocks - but those fifty yards had nothing on them except clusters of ferns and scrub brush. And the moon was bright now, bathing the slope in its milk-white shine.

  Rudabaugh looked back behind them, to the northwest. Up there, the fence ran through a line of trees that hadn't been cleared off. Inside and outside the compound, the trees extended around behind Trace's house. There was still thirty yards or so of open ground between the woods and the house, on the west side and in back, but if they came in from the rear, they couldn't be seen by anybody at the gate or the sawmill.

  Rudabaugh set off in a humped-over run away from the sawdust mounds to the powder shed; Chavis was right behind him. From there he could see part of the mill gate and all of the watchman's shack. The watchman's lantern was lit but there was no sign of the man himself.

  With the powder shed at their backs they ran diagonally toward the fence, keeping to the shadows. They had to cross more open ground near the fence, so when they got up into the trees, Rudabaugh stopped to scan the compound again. But nobody had come out of the sawmill or the watchman's shack, and Trace's house was still dark and silent.

  Quickly now, Rudabaugh led the way up through the trees. The closer they got to the house, the more carefully he watched where he stepped. Sounds carried on a hot night like this, and the ground was strewn with small dry branches and brittle twigs. When they reached a point opposite the rear corner, he halted again and gave the house a long look past low-hanging pine boughs. Two windows in the sidewall on the first floor, both of them shut. Across the rear was a veranda supported by latticed pillars; there were too many shadows for him to tell if any of the windows back there were open.

  He moved out of the trees, Chavis following, across to where a set of stairs gave access to the veranda. They hunkered down there to listen. Silence from inside the house. Rudabaugh leaned up to peer at the windows: shut tight, all of them. He could go up there and check each one, but he didn't want to do that unless they were unable to find another way in. Old wood like those steps and the veranda floor was liable to creak loud as hell when you put your weight on it.

  He motioned Chavis to stay where he was, took himself around to the west-side wall. At the nearest window he ran his fingers around the frame, squinted at the glass. There was a drawn curtain inside. He got a grip on the bottom of the sash and gave it just enough upward pressure to see if it would open. It wouldn't; locked or stuck tight. He moved to the second window, tugged up on its sash in the same way, with the same results.

  When he came back around the corner, he shook his head at Chavis and moved on past to the east corner. The sawmill was visible from there, but the gate and the watchman's shack were obscured by a long tin-roofed train shed. Still nobody moving around down there. He eased along the wall to the first window on that side, tested it, found it locked or stuck like the others. Same thing with the next in line.

  The third window, nearest the front, was open by a couple of inches.

  Rudabaugh hooked his hands under the sash, lifted. It slid up a few more inches, soundlessly. The curtain inside billowed a little in the warm night breeze, but also without sound. He stepped away, went back around to where he could see Chavis, and waved for him to come ahead.

  At the open window, Rudabaugh eased the sash up as far as it would go. The window was set low enough to the ground so that he had no trouble swinging a leg up and over the sill. He pushed the curtain aside and lifted himself through the opening.

  The room he was in seemed to be a study. He could make out the black shapes of a desk, a sofa, a couple of chairs. The door on the far side of the room was closed.

  He beckoned to Chavis, who straddled the sill, got his broad back under the sash. But when he started to raise up inside, his shoulder caught the sash's bottom edge. The window rattled - not loud, but loud enough to freeze both of them where they stood.

  Rudabaugh listened.

  Stillness.

  He waited a full minute before he moved again. He gripped Chavis's arm, hard, to tell him to watch what the hell he was doing. Chavis didn't object; he came in the rest of the way without disturbing the night-hush.

  There was just enough in-spill of moonlight to show Rudabaugh an unobstructed path across to the door. Otherwise he would have had to strike a lucifer and he hadn't wanted to do that, more because of the sharp smell than the flare of light. He eased ahead across the carpeted floor, heel and toe. At the door he opened it a few inches and peered through the crack.

  Hallway. He widened the opening, stepped through, padded down the hall to where it opened into a foyer with a staircase on the far side. He went to the foot of the stairs. He could hear the ticking of a clock somewhere; that was the only sound. When he looked up at the second-floor landing, he could just make out two closed doors, one on either side.

  Slowly, Chavis at his heels, he began to climb.

  ***

  Austin Trace slept lightly enough so that the opening of the bedroom door roused him. But it was one of two figures bumping against the canopied bed that brought him fully awake. He sat bolt upright, blinking in confusion. In the next second a hand clutched at his throat, drove him back hard against his pillows. Something cold and metallic jabbed against his right ear; then he heard the sharp and unmistakable click of a handgun's hammer being cocked.