Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega 4)

But the magic of riding in the last of the afternoon sun, the smell of horses, and the rhythm of the ride had, she decided, caught him up in the magic of the shared experience. Or maybe he didn’t have the heart to shut Max down with one of his usual conversation-killing two-words-or-less answers.

“I first saw him when he was about Michael’s age,” said Charles. “Really met him when he was barely a teenager in a bar fight in Phoenix—it can be a hard thing to be a different color when men get together and get drunk. I was walking by and I heard a war cry.” His horse snorted and shook her head; Charles patted her. “And then a whole lot of cursing and glass breaking. But it was the war cry that made me wade into that bar fight and start clearing it out. At the bottom of a pile of battered veterans—it was just after World War Two—was this skinny little Indian kid of about twelve or thirteen.”

Charles’s face lighted with the sudden grin he had sometimes. “I said, ‘Takes a real man to hit a kid.’” His grin widened. “One of the guys—he was sporting the start of a real beauty of a shiner—he said, ‘Hell, mister, all I said was that he should get his butt out of here because he was too Indian to be safe with all the rough stock in here drinking like fishes. And the kid lit into me like I punched him.’”

Charles ran his hand down the shiny long neck of his horse and then said, “Joseph never did have any quit in him. Though he learned, eventually, to pick his battles. I’d been up conducting my father’s business with Hosteen when someone told him that Joseph was missing. His mother had found out what Hosteen was and picked up and left. I guess Joseph overheard one of the hands saying that she’d probably run down to Phoenix to earn a living on her back in the bars there, which she hadn’t. Hosteen had followed her all the way back to her sister’s home out in the Four Corners area to make sure she was safe. But he told Joseph he wouldn’t talk about her to him, and Joseph took him at his word, so Joseph didn’t know where she’d gone. When he overheard the cowboys, he decided he couldn’t leave his mother in trouble. So he stole one of the ranch trucks and drove it into Phoenix with the intention of finding his mother if he had to go to every bar in town to do so. When Hosteen figured out what happened, and those two cowboys never worked on the Sanis’ ranch again, he took the whole pack, and me, to Phoenix to find Joseph.”

Charles was quiet for a little while, and Anna thought he’d finished the story, but he picked it up again. “So I looked down at that boy and said, ‘Are you Joseph?’ He got to his feet, dusted himself up, wiped the blood off his chin, and said, ‘Yes. I got twelve more bars to go.’ I said, ‘You need to be more careful who you get your information from. Your mom is living with her sister over near Monument Valley.’ That gave him pause. While he was still thinking, I said, ‘You need to remember one other thing. If you’re going to face someone bigger and stronger than you, kid, make damn sure you are better armed.’ I gave him my knife and sheath. We stopped to give the bartender Hosteen’s address so that Hosteen could settle the bill, because by my reckoning it was Hosteen’s pride that had caused the whole mess.”

“You used to run around with him,” Max said. “Kage said you and he got into a lot of trouble.”

“That was later,” Charles said. “Started, I suppose, when your grandfather was about seventeen. He’d run away again and was punching cows for a Navajo rancher. He and Hosteen locked horns over every little thing in those days. Hosteen asked if I’d stop and check in on him and see if I couldn’t talk him into going home. Might not have worked, but he sent me out with an Arab Hosteen had bought from a breeder in California. Joseph could resist almost anything except pretty mares.”

“That would have been in the fifties, right?” asked Max. “Why were you on horseback?”

“The ranch was out in Navajo country,” Charles said. “I don’t think there was anything with four wheels that could have made it there. I had a truck and horse trailer parked about twenty-five miles from the ranch.” He paused. “My da and I were having trouble seeing eye-to-eye about then. It gave Joseph and me something to talk about on that trip back. I didn’t go home. We worked Hosteen’s ranch until the next fight. Then Joseph and I went out on our own. Mostly working cows and increasing our cash flow with the occasional rodeo. Your granddad could ride anything with four hooves. On one memorable, almost-fatal occasion, that included a moose. I think I have a photo of that one somewhere; if I find it I’ll send you a copy.”

“That’s when he met Maggie, right?” Max said. “Granddad says he was working at her ranch.”

Charles huffed a laugh. “Her ranch was two hundred acres of the nastiest country I’ve ever tried to run cows on. It had a spring, though, pure and clean and cold at high summer. We were at the nearest town … I don’t remember the name of it, though it might come to me. Joseph and I had just finished up the fall roundup and were flush with money and time, because we’d been let go like most of the other hands after the drive. She’d come into town driving a beat-up old truck to buy supplies and ran into trouble at the store.”

“Because she was Navajo—I mean, Diné?”

Charles shook his head. “Most of the people there were Navajo—Diné if you’d prefer. No. It was that she was a woman trying to be a man. That kind of attitude about women wasn’t very Navajo, really, but it was very 1950s. Anyway, Joseph and I stepped in. Joseph being Joseph, it wasn’t long before fists were flying, and Maggie was pretty good with her fists. She was smarter than the rest of us, though, because she hiked back to her truck and pulled out her shotgun. And that was the end of that fight. We worked for her all that winter.” He looked at Anna. “Not that winter in Arizona, except for the really high country, is very cold compared to Montana. I lit out that spring, but Joseph stayed and married her. I think she still owns that patch of ground, but they moved back here after a few years when Hosteen’s dedication to the Arabians started to pay off and he really needed more help.”

“Why a moose?” Anna asked. She’d seen a few moose since moving to Montana. Even the werewolves were wary of them.

“You’d have to be male, eighteen, and trying to impress a girl to understand,” said Charles.