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4

Adam stared into the fireplace and pinched a twig between his fingers as he contemplated the conversation behind him.

“Seems to me,” Sheriff Coffee speculated, “Little Joe must’ve surprised a robber.”

“But nothin’s missing,” Hoss answered.

“Probably got scared off,” the sheriff added, “before he had a chance to take anything. Must’ve thought the house was empty, what with the horses gone and Hop Sing out back in the chicken coop. Running into Little Joe the way he did, why, he just got spooked.”

That didn’t add up for Adam. “Spooked by a fifteen-year-old boy who thought he was looking at a ghost?”

“Why else would he fire off all six rounds, if he wasn’t spooked?” the sheriff asked.

“I don’t know.” Frustrated, Adam tossed the twig into the flames and turned around to face them. Roy Coffee was on the settee with Hoss standing beside him, one hand resting on the back and his thumb absently tapping at the wooden edging. “And why did five of those shots miss?” Adam asked them both.

It was the sheriff who answered. “Could be the robber never intended to hit Joe at all. It might just be he didn’t want to hang for murder.”

“Do you really believe a man who starts shooting out of fear would be thinking clearly enough to try to miss?”

Sheriff Coffee shrugged. “Hard to say. Could’ve been shooting blind. Joe just got hit with a lucky shot.”

“Unlucky, I’d say,” Hoss said.

“And why was Joe’s horse out back?” Adam went on. “He was secure in the barn when Pa and I left.”

“Not when I went in to saddle Chubb,” Hoss repeated what he’d told them earlier. “Joe’s horse was gone by the time I got there.”

“He couldn’t have wandered off on his own. Someone had to have let him out of that barn.”

The sheriff still didn’t seem to find any of it particularly mysterious. “Maybe the robber aimed to steal the horse, too.”

Sheriff Roy Coffee might not be concerned; but Adam sure was. “Then why not take the horse when he ran off? No, there’s something more to all of this, something I just can’t figure.”

Roy sighed heavily. “Well, there’s not much I can do until Joe starts makin’ more sense. I can’t very well tell folks to look for a man who was publicly hung a week ago.”

“If you’re waiting for Joe to make sense,” a new voice pulled the attention of all three men toward where Doctor Paul Martin was descending the stairway, “I wouldn’t suggest you count on that wait ending any time soon. That boy firmly believes he was attacked by Frank Carver’s ghost.”

“How is he?” Adam asked while the doctor finished his approach.

“The bullet was lodged against bone. The bone’s not broken, fortunately, but there is a very small fracture. Nothing to be overly concerned about. I imagine it will heal up nicely after a few weeks. He’ll be pretty sore for a while, though.”

The sheriff leaned forward, putting one hand on the armrest of the settee. “Can I ask him a few more questions now, doc?”

Paul Martin shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I gave him something to help him sleep; although, as tired as he was, he might well have dropped off on his own.”

“Then why the medicine?” Adam asked.

“Well, despite being exhausted, he was fighting sleep every step of the way. I’d swear he was afraid to close his eyes.”

“He has been havin’ an awful lot of nightmares, lately.” Hoss pushed his hands into his pockets, looking not much more than a boy himself–a dejected boy who’d found himself in a pickle he just couldn’t fix.

Paul didn’t seem to notice. “So I gathered from what your father told me. It seems that boy has a lot of healing to do that my services simply cannot address.”

“Yes,” Adam agreed. “He does.”

Hoss glanced up the stairs and dug his hands deeper into his pockets. “Gettin’ shot by a man who looked like Frank Carver sure didn’t help him none.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Adam wondered. “Maybe that’s all there is to it.”

“What are you gettin’ at, Adam?” Roy Coffee asked.

“Maybe the man looked enough like Frank Carver to make Joe imagine it was him.”

The sheriff curled his brows, doubtful. “That’d be a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think?”

“I don’t mean exactly like him, but just enough to stir Joe’s imagination.”

“Well, it’s a stretch.” Roy shrugged. “But I can at least keep an eye out for a tall stranger with blonde hair and green eyes.”

Or maybe…. Maybe it really was more than that. Adam started thinking back to what Sheriff Coffee had told them just before the hanging. “Gonna have to bury him up on boot hill. Carver didn’t have any kin. Leastways, none that I could find.”

“Roy?” he asked. “How hard did you look before, when you were trying to contact Carver’s family?”

“Are you suggesting I didn’t do my job?” Roy shot back angrily.

“No. Nothing like that. It’s just…. I’m curious. Where did you look? What sort of information did you find?”

“I can’t see as how that’s any business of yours.”

“What if he did have family? A brother, perhaps. Someone who didn’t want to be found maybe, but who wouldn’t be too happy about Frank Carver being hung.”

Roy sighed, shaking his head irritably. “Well, if you must know, Adam, he did have a brother. Four of ‘em, in fact. All older than him. And all dead.”

Adam noticed Hoss’s eyes going wide…until Roy finished his statement. Then his nose curled up, as though he’d grown suddenly ill. “Dead?”

“That’s right. Killed by Indians when Frank was a youngster–four, maybe five years old they reckoned when they found him hiding in the woods. The boy was so shook up he couldn’t even tell them his name. It was someone at the orphanage who gave him the name Frank Carver.”

“So it is possible he had kin,” Adam considered aloud.

“No. It is not!” Roy got to his feet, his irritation boiling over into impatience. “Adam, if that boy’d had kin, he wouldn’t have grown up in an orphanage.”

“Maybe.” But Adam couldn’t feel so certain.

“Adam,” Doctor Martin laid a comforting hand on his shoulder, “I wouldn’t really put too much confidence in what Joe said about that man looking like…or being Frank Carver. His memory is not particularly trustworthy right now.”

“It was trustworthy enough to hang a man,” Hoss said skeptically.

“And that’s precisely why it’s not very trustworthy, now. He feels guilty, Hoss.”

“Yeah. I know.” Pulling his lower lip between his teeth, Hoss looked up the stairwell again.

“I’ll ask around town,” Roy offered as he started to make his way to the front door. “But that’s as much as I can do until Little Joe gets around to saying something different about the man who shot him.”

Adam and his brother saw the sheriff and the doctor off, and then…. Then there was nothing left to do. Sure, there was work to be done. There was always work. But neither Adam nor Hoss had the gumption to do any of it. Instead, they returned to the great room and fell into a troubled silence, one that was broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock and their own useless, wasted steps as they paced aimlessly about the room.

“Adam?” Hoss asked after a while. “What’re we gonna do? Little Joe ain’t been himself since this mess started. I sort of figured workin’ and ridin’ would help, but now…he can’t even do that.”

Taking a deep breath, Adam gave his attention back to the fire and tried to puzzle out all the pieces that just didn’t seem to fit together: The mystery behind Joe’s errant horse, the true target of that shooter’s bullets…and whether or not Frank Carver had really been alone in this world. “We’ll do what we have to,” he said, wishing it really could be as simple as he was about to make it sound. “We find the man who shot him.”

 

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