A Man with a Past by Mary Connealy
NINE
After a couple of days, Cheyenne got tired of wandering and decided to climb.
Since she had no place to be and no time that made hurrying needed, she reined her horse back toward the RHR and rode for home. She waited until long after sunset. After the cowhands had come in from their long day of branding.
She felt a twinge of guilt for not helping them. Then the notion of working her fingers to the bone on a ranch that was in no way hers got her all lathered up again, and she shoved the guilt away. But that easy anger convinced her she wasn’t ready to stay at home yet.
She waited until after Wyatt, Win, and all those fools invading her house went to bed.
Feeling a smug assurance that no one would notice her if she was careful—and she was—she rode her horse right to the barn, stripped the leather off, and turned the mare loose with the other critters in the corral.
She snuck into the house, smack-dab into the kitchen, and collected plenty of food and a slicker because it looked like rain, and walked out. It was a long distance—especially on foot—but what difference did distance make when she wanted to be alone?
Three days now, she’d been camping and wandering and thinking. Her head was swooping left and right, mad and resigned and calm and furious, all churned up going from one feeling to another. The point of getting away was to get control of herself, and she hadn’t managed it yet.
And then, by the full moon’s glow, she saw signs that someone had passed through on foot.
She could track well enough to be sure it was no one she knew. Another invader. Could it be the man who’d shot Win?
All her mental fussing went flooding away. Someone was skulking around her land. And she didn’t care what the law said, the land was hers.
Not only did she have an invader to catch and throw off the RHR, she had something to do besides wrestle with her own half-crazed thoughts, and that was such a relief she jumped into finding out who it was.
The signs were hard to read. In fact, it got harder with every step. She could see that whoever it was had started out careless but then quickly switched to concealing his tracks.
And concealed by a man who knew what he was about.
Once in a while, she was lucky to catch a half-wiped footprint or a broken branch. She lost him repeatedly . . . and it was a him. She could tell by the size and weight of the occasional track that it was almost certainly a man. The tracks were odd though. Moccasins, she thought, but not those made by her Cheyenne people.
Was this man from another tribe? Without being able to say why, she was sure this was no Indian.
She’d lose him for a stretch and start circling, casting out a wider area until finally she found him again.
It was a grimly satisfying use of skills she didn’t employ often, and she was glad she hadn’t lost the knack, but at the same time, she knew she wasn’t near as good as the man she trailed.
Her skills were enough to keep her on the trail and judge the trail to be fresh. He was ahead of her but not far. She never caught sight of him, let alone caught up to him.
She considered herself a fine tracker, as good as anyone around, save the people from the Cheyenne tribe. They were her pa’s family, and Grandpa had gotten on well with them, her ma even more so. Cheyenne had spent time with them and learned a lot from them.
But not enough to find this man.
The search kept her busy, giving her a focus for the intense feelings inside her, especially since, in all fairness, she probably had no business being furious with Kevin Hunt anyway.
So she searched and the days passed and her confusion built along with admiration for the man she tracked. And she thought maybe, just maybe, after she found this invader and threw him off her land, or dragged him in to face the law, she might be ready to go home without chewing everyone’s head off.