hundred grizzly bears. He’d rather face a hundred grizzlies than his father. He welcomed sleep. It held the only freedom from misery he was liable to know for a long, long time.
6
C APTAIN HANK TOMLINSON possessed a rare reputation for vigilance. It was said that the wing beats of an owl could wake him from a sound sleep. The captain himself always dismissed the claim with a snort, for he knew owls’ wings made little or no noise at all. He doubted even the owl could hear its own strokes cutting the wind.
“No, I can’t hear the owl’s wings,” he’d reply, “but I can hear the mouse shit right before the owl catches him.”
The truth was, Hank realized that his hearing was not all it once had been. He attributed that to too many hours spent practicing his marksmanship, testing firearms, and using them in hunting and fighting situations. A lot of gunshots had gone off in his ears, not to mention the occasional artillery blast.
But this morning, instead of waking to a noise, Captain Hank Tomlinson woke to the
absence
of one. His eyes flew open, and he gasped his first waking breath. A faint glow of almost-dawn filtered in through the curtains. His ears told him something was missing.
He realized that the stud horses had not screamed their desire for that estrus Thoroughbred mare for hours. The first half of the night, they had caught her scent every so often, each time singing their desperate love songs to her. He’d heard the stamping of hooves, too, as the animals looked for ways out of their enclosures. Then, at some point in the night, the lusty stallions had fallen silent.
He threw the quilt all the way off the bed, felt the morning’s chill grab him. He winced at old wounds and aching joints on his way to the window. Though only a hint of daylight bathed the grounds outside, one look told him the mare was gone.
“There’d better be an explanation,” he muttered.
Two minutes later, dressed and armed with his Colt, he reached the bottom of the steps. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, all bowlegged, with his long gunfighter’s hair jutting every which way. He pulled his hair back, Indian-style, jammed a felt hat down on his head, and burst out onto the porch.
“I did not give orders for that mare to be moved,” he grumbled aloud.
He was beginning to get mad, and that was a bad way for Hank Tomlinson to start his day. For all of the qualities he knew he possessed, and all of the improvements to his character that he constantly strove to refine, Hank admitted that he had a bad temper.
He took a few deep breaths and then stalked toward the barn. He was hoping one of his men had put the mare in a stall, but a quick search proved the Thoroughbred was nowhere to be found.
He was growing seriously angry now, in spite of every effort to control his temper. Perhaps there was an explanation, but his hunches were telling him otherwise. That mare was gone. He could feel it. There was a great dearth of her being all around him. Whoever should have been standing guard last night had messed up on a grand scale.
Captain Hank Tomlinson turned on his heels and locked his glare onto the door of the bunkhouse. He began to stomp toward it. On his way to the old plank door, he noticed that the latch string had been pulled in. He wasn’t in a mood to knock. His pace quickened, his body leaning, building momentum. As soon as he got to that bunkhouse door, somebody was going to catch something that would make hell seem like a Sunday afternoon church social.
The latch on the bunkhouse door was of hand-carved wood. Inside the door, two old boot soles had been nailed on to hold the plank door to the log wall. With one mighty kick, Hank splintered the wooden latch and ripped the makeshift boot-sole hinges clean off the log wall. Among the surprised men inside, he saw Jay Blue and Skeeter sitting upright in their bunks, still dressed, right down to their boots. His voice came out as a roar.
“Which one of