The Coyote Tracker Page 9

  It had been a long day, and the last thing Josiah had expected to encounter when he came home was this kind of trouble. He instantly felt a white-hot wave of anger dart up his neck and travel quickly to his hand. Without his realizing it, his hand immediately clinched into a hard fist.

  Josiah took four quick, giant steps and was suddenly standing over Lyle, his arm raised, ready to strike the boy. “You hurt Ofelia.”

  Rage had taken hold of Josiah. The wounds on Ofelia’s face struck a nerve deep within him. For a moment, Josiah didn’t even know where he was.

  “Stop!” Ofelia screamed. She had quickly inserted herself between Josiah and Lyle. One second she was across the room, and the next she was in between Lyle and Josiah, protecting the boy.

  Lyle drew back, his blue eyes open wide, showing an ocean of fear and uncertainty.

  Ofelia’s movement and reaction startled Josiah. “He can’t keep running off like that, damn it.”

  “Please do not swear, Señor Josiah, I know you are angry.”

  “I will swear, damn it, it’s my house. The last time he ran off, he almost got sucked under a train and killed. He hurt you. He’s going to hurt himself.” Josiah looked into Ofelia’s soft brown eyes. They were brimming with tears, pleading. He dropped his hand but did nothing to push away his anger.

  Instead of hitting Lyle, Josiah yanked him out of his chair. The boy slumped to the floor, trying to keep his butt out of range. “Stand up,” Josiah demanded, as he pulled Lyle to his feet.

  “Por favor, no,” Ofelia whispered. A tear fell to the floor. “It is my fault, I should have paid closer attention.”

  “He’s not a baby anymore, Ofelia. He needs to understand that there are consequences for acting bad, for hurting other people.”

  The look on Ofelia’s face was a mixture of grief, fear, and pain.

  Josiah had to look away or she was going to find a way into his better nature. “I’m sorry, Ofelia, he has to learn.”

  Before Ofelia could object, Josiah swatted Lyle on the behind.

  As far as Josiah was concerned, it was not a hard hit, just hard enough to let Lyle know he meant business.

  Lyle screamed like he had been hit upside the head by a rock.

  Ofelia quickly kneeled down to comfort the boy, but it was Josiah’s turn to intervene. “No,” he said. “Lyle. Tell Ofelia you’re sorry, and then you go on and take yourself to bed.”

  With red eyes, and tears rolling off his puffy cheeks, Lyle stood still, staring at Josiah like he didn’t hear a word.

  “To bed, now!” Josiah yelled.

  Lyle took a deep breath. Bubbles popped out of his nose, and he wiped them away with the sleeve of his shirt. A look of resignation fell over his face. “Sorry, Ofelia. I din’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Està bien. It is all right.”

  “To bed. Now,” Josiah said, pointing to the bedroom.

  Lyle nodded and trudged slowly to the door, looking back only once.

  Josiah had not moved, was pointing like he was a statue. Rage still flowed through his veins, but the first hint of questioning and doubt was starting to rise from the back of his mind, wondering if he was creating fear, love, or respect in his son. But all he had to do was look at the marks on Ofelia’s face, and that doubt was quickly erased from his mind.

  There were consequences for not taking other people into consideration, for causing harm. There had to be. It was the way the world worked, even for a little boy.

  CHAPTER 12

  The tiny flame in the hurricane lamp fluttered, casting a slow, dancing shadow on the wall. Night had fallen slowly, settling in like a dark prison outside the house. Inside, it was as quiet as a tomb. There was no ticking of a clock, or scratching of a mouse along on the floor; nothing, it seemed, wanted entrance into the house after Josiah’s earlier outburst.

  To kill time, since it was too early for him to go to sleep, Josiah sat at the table staring at the note left behind by Abram Randalls at the jail. If that were really the case. There was no sure way for Milt the deputy to know positively that Randalls had left the note there at all. It could have been left behind by the previous occupant of the cell for all Josiah knew, or the ten before him. It was hard to say. Milt seemed pretty sure the note had come from Randalls, but he never said how or why he was so certain.

  Regardless, the cipher intrigued Josiah; his attention was drawn to the puzzle like a drunkard is drawn to beer or whiskey.

  It had been a long time since he had engaged his mind in the matter of un-jumbling letters so they made sense, and it was a distraction that could not have come to him at any better time.

  Not only the incident with Lyle was weighing heavily on his mind, but so was Scrap’s situation, and of course, so, too, was his own relationship with Pearl Fikes. And then there was his ultimate status with the Rangers; his future was at stake in more ways than one, in more ways than just matters of the heart.

  If he did not ride with Captain McNelly’s company, then honestly, Josiah was not sure that he would continue to live in Austin. City life was like a new, odd-fitting suit that still did not feel comfortable on him. The only way to shed the suit was to leave it, if it came to that. And at the moment, leaving the city certainly was a consideration, but not one he wanted to dwell on.

  The cipher would have to do as a distraction. The future could wait, he thought. But no matter how long or how deeply Josiah looked at the piece of paper, he could not focus on it, could not corral his thoughts on what the jumble of letters meant. His mind kept wandering to the recent past—he knew he was questioning himself, his actions, not only with his son, but with everybody he came into contact with. For some reason, he could not help himself; discipline was lost to him.

  Lyle had not been allowed to whimper or beg for any undue attention after he was sent to bed without dinner. His punishment had been swift and certain, and Josiah knew no other way to be a father to the boy than to show him the error of his ways. Enforcement of the sentence, to bed without dinner, had to be strict and without waver. It was one of the ways Josiah had been taught right from wrong.

  Ofelia had finished up her duties, remaining quiet throughout. When she left the house just before dark, she barely spoke a word to Josiah and avoided looking directly into his eyes. She scurried off without her normal promise of returning the next day, and the air and attitude she left behind in her wake was cold with disappointment and judgment.

  Whether he’d handled the situation with Lyle correctly or not was yet to be seen.

  The only thing that Josiah knew for certain was that it was not the last time he would have to confront his own rage and restrain himself from whipping the boy directly, and harshly. He had been shown that kind of correction, too, as a boy, and he wondered now if any kind of physical punishment was right and just, if the beatings he’d taken at the hand of his own father had had an effect on him that made it easier to pull the trigger when he was in danger, instead of looking for another outcome.

  Still, discipline had to be enforced. Lyle could not be allowed to hurt anyone. And Ofelia, regardless of Josiah’s need and respect for her, did not have the final say in how Lyle was raised.

  There was no question that he needed Ofelia, that she was a big part of his life, and an even bigger part of Lyle’s. His dependence on Ofelia was one of the reasons why he was courting Pearl. And the reasons were many, beyond his physical attraction to her and his need to have a normal life for himself and Lyle—but even that relationship looked precarious. He could not see a time in the immediate future when he would consider taking Pearl as his wife. Neither of them was ready for that. Maybe in a year . . . or longer.

  Josiah stared at the paper again, thought about Randalls’s lack of enthusiasm for the jailbreak, then stared upward at the ceiling.

  No amount of focus could keep his mind o
ccupied.

  There was no apparent reward in deciphering the message left at the jail, other than gaining favor with Rory Farnsworth, and that in itself bore little currency. There would only be need to curry favor with the sheriff if it could help Scrap. And at the moment, the jailbreak and the murders didn’t seem to be related.

  Now, as the darkness of the night deepened, and silence surrounded him even more fully, Josiah had nothing left to absorb his attention except the cipher.

  It didn’t matter if it belonged to Randalls or not. What mattered was finding a solution, a trail of wandering thoughts focused on a fixed point, notching off incorrect assumptions, one thing leading to another, until the emotion of the night was far behind him.

  The joy of success would be minimal, a silent victory, if Josiah was able to determine what the note said. There would be no celebration of the promise of Scrap’s freedom. The only glory would be the knowledge that an age-old skill had been revived and not forgotten. The haunting of the war came in many different forms.

  Josiah picked up the pencil next to the note and fixed it securely between his fingers.

  Mass production of lead pencils was a recent occurrence, beginning after the War Between the States had ended, with the convenience finding its way quickly into everyday life. Josiah now couldn’t remember a time when pencils weren’t close by even when pencils were rare. Reading and writing were a gift of his mother’s patience and insistence that had seen him through the better part of his life—an offset to his father’s stern and demanding nature.

  Josiah was able to naturally understand the rhythm of words, the correct location of letters when paired with each other, without much effort at all. Reading and writing were a matter of survival to him and not a matter of education or being stuffy about such things, like he found Rory Farnsworth to be.

  He stared at the letters with as much focus as he could muster, trying to make sense of them, trying to see some kind of pattern, trying to understand the foundation of the cipher:

  XLICAMPPOMPPQIYRHIVXLISEOXVII.

  Several different style codes had been used during the War Between the States, and since Josiah’s reading and writing skills were apparent to everyone who encountered him, he had been quickly set upon by the leading officers of the First Texas Brigade to learn the art of writing and decoding ciphers.

  The cipher before him looked similar to the codes used by all of the Confederacy to communicate between officers and camps about troop movement, supply routes, and attack plans. This one looked like a Vigenere cipher, which was a pretty simple structure, for the most part; one letter stood in place for another. An A was really a B, etc. But in reality, the simplicity of the cipher was also what made it so difficult to understand. Figuring out what letter stood in another’s place was far more difficult than it seemed.

  The first part of the pattern that jumped out at Josiah was the pair of double Ps.

  There was no separation for words, so it was hard to say where the double letters sat in the sentence. If he knew that, it would be a great help. But whoever wrote the cipher was not intent on making it an easy one to read.

  The double Ps could have been any letter. Ts or Es or Ms. Vowels or consonants. At this point, there was no way to tell. He didn’t think the double letters were the beginning of a word. So, maybe they were at the end of a word. He wrote down the letters and separated them:

  XLICAMPP OMPP QIYRHIVXLISEOXVII.

  Interestingly, as usually happened, a word appeared. Or he assumed it was one, though he could have been wrong. Double letters in the position they were placed in a single four-letter word would have been rare. There was no dictionary to refer to.

  Now Josiah noticed something else. An M was in the same place in comparison to the Ps in both instances. More of a pattern showing itself. The Ps weren’t a vowel, so the M probably was.

  All he needed was one more letter to help show him the way, a light at the end of the tunnel of ignorant darkness to shine on the solution.

  As he fully focused now, the house around Josiah and the silence of it fell completely away, taking with it the confrontations, disappointments, and explosions of the day.

  Josiah decided to mark the PPs as two Ls because it made sense to him that two words could possibly end that way. From there, he settled on an A to be the vowel. Words like “ball” and “call” came immediately to mind. Maybe they fit, maybe not—but nothing more jumped out at him. So he settled on the idea that the code was truly a Vigenere cipher and refocused on the LLs. If he moved the PPs back one letter, they would be OOs. Back two letters and they would be NNs. Three and they would be MMs, and finally, a break, four letters moved back would be LL.

  Josiah could feel his heart racing. He knew he was close to solving the cipher. Now if his theory worked on the rest of the letters, he would have the answer in no time. So he worked the formula on the one word that he was fairly certain of, OMPP, and came up with KILL.

  He sat back and breathed a sigh of relief, twirling the pencil among his fingers. That light at the end of the tunnel came rushing at him. Success for the sake of success was at hand.

  It took Josiah less than a minute to work out the rest of the cipher, now that he knew with greater certainty that the formula was true. The note Milt the deputy claimed to have found in Abram Randalls’s cell said:

  THEY WILL KILL ME UNDER THE OAK TREE.

  CHAPTER 13

  Morning light cut softly inside the livery. There was a steady amount of activity going on; stalls were being cleaned out, and several horses were getting washed down and brushed out by a couple of familiar stable boys. On the other side of the stables, a wagon wheel was being repaired, the constant pounding out, metal against metal in perfect time, sounded like the beginning of a musical performance in an opera house somewhere. It wasn’t like the livery was a beehive of activity; this was just a normal pace for a normal day. Urgency, as if in preparation for a battle, was nowhere to be seen.

  As Josiah walked inside the livery, the odors of fresh straw, oils, and soap offered up plenty of reasons for a pleasant mood.

  Lyle squeezed Josiah’s hand, skipping a bit, mumbling happily, but not pulling on Josiah, not trying to get away, obviously glad to be in his father’s company.

  There had not been hide nor hair of Ofelia that morning, the lack of routine more than a little surprising to Josiah. He’d been left little choice but to offer some warmed up beans and toasted bread to Lyle for his breakfast. The boy didn’t complain about the food or ask for Ofelia.

  Of course, Josiah was concerned about Ofelia’s absence, but he had to get on with the day.

  Tracking down McNelly was on his list, and so was stopping by the jail to see Scrap and give the decoded cipher to Rory Farnsworth to see if it meant anything to him. Neither of those trips seemed to lend themselves to Lyle’s young and unpredictable presence, but Josiah might have no choice but to take the boy along if he was not able to find Ofelia in Little Mexico.

  “Where’s Chipper?” Lyle asked.

  “Clipper,” Josiah said.

  “Chipper.” Lyle smiled, sure that he’d gottten it right this time. “Where’s Chipper?”

  Josiah smiled and let it go. “In his stall. Let’s go look.”

  Lyle nodded. “All right.”

  Josiah lead the boy to the stall, and Clipper, an Appaloosa that had been Josiah’s mount for more years than he cared to count, looked up and greeted them with a snort, then pushed back a pile of freshly laid straw with his right hoof. Josiah reached into the stall, scratched the horse’s nose, and hoisted Lyle up so he could do the same thing.

  “Give him some oats,” Josiah said. He leaned Lyle down so he could reach into a bucket that hung next to the gate.

  Lyle scooped up a healthy portion of the dry oats and offered the treat to Clipper. The horse immediately oblige
d him with a munch, and Lyle started squirming and giggling. Oats fell to the floor like snowflakes fluttering from the sky, and Josiah let the boy down before he dropped him.

  “What’d you do that for?” Josiah asked.

  “Lips tickled. Don’t like it.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  Lyle shook his head no.

  Clipper finished the oats, then looked at Josiah expectantly. Josiah shrugged. “Well, I guess we best get the saddle on him.”

  Lyle nodded yes, eagerly this time.

  Josiah was about to open the gate and go inside the stall when he noticed a horse three stalls down. The gray gelding looked familiar. So familiar that Josiah stopped, grabbed Lyle’s hand, and hurried down to the stall to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was.

  He wasn’t sure if it was the same horse he’d seen yesterday, the one he’d noticed at the jailbreak, but it sure looked like it.

  The horse was dappled with darker gray against light, typical for a paint, and was a little over fifteen hands high. It had sweet black eyes, but it was the proud and calm way it held itself that had struck Josiah the first time he’d seen it, and this time, too. The horse acted battle-tested, like nothing could spook it or stir it out of its duty. That kind of horse always stood out to Josiah. It was a demeanor usually well earned, not bred.

  This horse had been recently washed down and reshod, and there was no saddle in the stall. It must have been stored away in the tack room.

  Perplexed, Josiah made his way to the front of the livery, looking for Jake Allred, the livery master.

  It didn’t take long to find the man. Allred was in the front office, yelling at one of the stable boys, a towheaded waif about four feet tall, twelve years old at the most, who looked like he was already a master himself—at being bawled out. The boy’s eyes were distant, staring off in the opposite direction from Allred . . . and Josiah knew it was only a matter of years before Lyle reacted the same way to him when discipline was needed, like last night.