The Heart of Dark Passage

By Tony Masero

Drifting cowhand Wick Hailey asks directions from rancher Callie Barnes and his visit stirs something of unexpected interest in the young widow as she points the way to her neighbors spread. At the sprawling JM Ranch, Wick finds himself in the middle of a tense marital dilemma. Elegantine Mayhew the beautiful socialite wife from back east is definitely out of place in the tough Panhandle country. Her rough-cut yet kindly husband finds a place for Wick but the cowboy can’t stay away from Callie’s company for long despite Elegantine’s seductive advances. The brewing sexual tension is bound to boil over and before long it explodes into a sudden tragedy that places Wick in a perilous situation, the root of which runs a whole lot deeper than it appears. To save himself and prove his innocence Wick must travel a dark journey, the heart of which is enshrouded in deceit and danger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Masero
• Release date: Dec 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311268921

Tony Masero

It’s not such a big step from pictures to writing.And that’s how it started out for me. I’ve illustrated more Western book covers than I care to mention and been doing it for a long time. No hardship, I hasten to add, I love the genre and have since a kid, although originally I made my name painting the cover art for other people, now at least, I manage to create covers for my own books.A long-term closet writer, only comparatively recently, with a family grown and the availability of self-publishing have I managed to be able to write and get my stories out there.As I did when illustrating, research counts a lot and has inspired many of my Westerns and Thrillers to have a basis in historical fact or at least weave their tale around the seeds of factual content.Having such a visual background, mostly it’s a matter of describing the pictures I see in my head and translating them to the written page. I guess that’s why one of my early four-star reviewers described the book like a ‘Western movie, fast paced and full of action.’I enjoy writing them; I hope folks enjoy reading the results.

Book preview

THE HEART OF DARK PASSAGE

Tony Masero

Cover Illustration: Tony Masero

A Hand Painted Western

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

Publishers Note: This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events other than historical are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real person, places, or events is coincidental.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 © Tony Masero

Chapter One

Callie loved it.

She sat her chestnut pony, Ruidosa and looked out across the fields of Tall Waterhemp that covered the dry tank beds below and ran in a spreading river of soft purple under the bright sun. To her left rose the raw rough-red incline of the hills that outlined the canyon breaks and held them entrapped like so many giant fingers.

The two Mexican vaqueros her husband had hired four years back were down in the valley below at the heads of the creeks hunting up cows that had been pushed out ahead of the recent storm. The animals always moved dumbly ahead of a storm, sometimes they ran plumb into a fence or box canyon and just stood there. Sometimes they were trampled by those coming up behind and sometimes in the harsh Panhandle winter they froze doing that.

The Mexicans moved leisurely through banks of wild flowers on the valley floor, their pony’s shanks half hidden by the blooming galliardia and pale lazy daisies enlivened by the recent rainfall and it gave the impression the two men were floating through clouds of soft mist.

Callie breathed the dry scent-laden air deep, it was clean and bright and a calm flowed over her as she did so. Something in the peace and silence of the great space of the prairie beyond the breaks filled and settled her.

Callie Barnes was a widow woman.

She had been like that for a while now and normally it was a state that didn’t bother her too much. Three years had gone by since her husband Lew had passed on. Most folks considered it a shame; he hadn’t yet reached twenty-five years of age and was still young in body and spirit. But things like that happened on a ranch.

An accident. A four-year-old bronc, one of a string that the old Mescalero Apache, Ashkanasay had brought down from the hills to trade and Lew had been trying to break in. The critter had thrown him and pinned Lew up hard against the corral fence. They did not know it at the time but the beast had bust his spleen and that had caused Lew to go down hard.

They were too far out to get ready help, the Circle 86 being fifty and some miles from the nearest town. That was Carter’s Bend and there they had a doctor but even though Callie started out in the buckboard riding at top speed with Lew in back, she hadn’t managed to make it with him still alive.

Callie ran the place pretty much on her own now. She had the two Mexican vaqueros, Ramon and Ezekiel, but they needed constant watching, as they were an idle pair and always goofing off somewhere. So the workload and decisions often fell on her shoulders.

Callie had been a mite older than Lew, being in her thirty-second year when they first met. Not that the age difference had mattered much to either of them. She had seen his advertisement in the Austin Chronicle asking for company to run a household on the Texas Panhandle and in an adventurous frame of mind had answered. It had taken a spell of letter writing, something that Lew had not been too hot at but she had read between the lines and liked the impression she received. It was all of nine months before she was out there at the ranch and within a six-week they had married, more for propriety’s sake than any love match, but it had worked out okay in the long run.

She was a handsome, lean figured woman with dark russet hair that she kept long and often tied back in a plaited tail to her waist. It was never practical on the ranch to wear regular ladies garments so she usually dressed in Lew’s old clothes when in the saddle, a work shirt and jeans with a broad brimmed prairie hat against the sun. The clothes were a couple of sizes too large but there was no one else to see except for the two Mexican hands and Callie gave them little mind in that respect.

Callie no longer had that peachy skin found amongst town girls, the north Texas sun and the high winds of April and March saw to that but from her tanned face a pair of clear blue eyes sparkled that were the color of a cloudless sky in mid-summer. There was still humor in those eyes with maybe just a touch of sadness too but as she looked out over their land, pride shone in them and also a look of determination. That was what kept her there, she had invested too much in the land to leave it just yet awhile.

It was a lonely life; there was no doubt about it. There was something though about the aridity in summer and the fierce bleakness of the winter months that stirred empathy in her soul, maybe it was the challenge of the place or maybe, she sometimes wondered, it reflected something harsh and unforgiving in her own nature.

The hardness, she had to admit, had grown with the passing years. With no man by her side, Callie had taken on the role and it had sucked some of the femininity out of her. She missed Lew. Not only for his decisive masculinity but also his company beside her in the big double bed he had built with his own hands in the cedar log cabin they called home. The bed felt like a desperate field of empty pastureland now without his body lying there beside her and she often rolled around sleepless in the vastness of loneliness it encouraged in her.

She had never known a man in an intimate way before Lew; he had been her first. A young man and full of vigor, he had been naturally energetic in their love-making but he was a rancher and his hands had been hard-skinned and work-worn and her introduction to the joys of connubial bliss had been both clumsy and uncomfortable even though her new husband had meant well. But for Carrie, who knew no better, that had just been the way of it and she had accepted things as they were and could only think of Lew with fondness since his passing.

On the day in question, she had just returned from checking the runaways from the small herd of a few hundred head that they ran and was dismounting outside the ranch house when Ezekiel called to her.

‘There is a rider coming, senora.’

Callie stopped at the porch step and turned her gaze, squinting against the prairie’s afternoon glare.

The rider quivered in the heat haze, indistinct as yet and impossible to recognize. He came at a steady walk, weaving carefully down the sloping land between clumps of prickly pear and milkweed.

‘You make him out?’ she asked the Mexican.

Ezekiel shook his head, ‘Not yet.’

‘Okay, take my pony, will you?’ Callie looked again at the distant rider. ‘Looks like he’s heading this way, maybe it’s the mail,’ she added the last as an afterthought as she shaded her eyes with her hand. The mail came once a month and it travelled from ranch to ranch, each owner passing on the next bundle of mail and sending a ranch hand along with it.

‘You want me to stay around, senora?’ Ezekiel asked. There was a cautionary note in his voice, the Indians were quelled but trouble could still be found on the Panhandle.

Callie knew that the two Mexicans would rather stay close to home than be about their work, so she shooed him off with orders to head out to the breaks and collect any more strays that they found there. ‘You leave any of Mayhew’s where you find them, you understand?’

Ezekiel nodded and swung himself up easily into the saddle and rode off to stable Ruidosa and collect his partner, Ramon.

Callie watched him go and turned her attention back to the nearing stranger, then, with a sigh she went inside the house. They had company coming and she decided she had best look more the lady than the ramrod, a thought that turned her mind to thoughts of her wealthy neighbor’s stylish wife.

The Mayhew’s, Jacob and Elegantine, ran the neighboring JM spread and whilst generally good neighbors their relationship with each other was not a perfect one as far as Callie could see. Jacob was a hardy, good-natured soul running twelve thousand acres that he had wisely purchased for seventy-five cents an acre before prices had risen. He ran two hundred shorthorn bulls and a hundred thousand head of cattle and he was devoted to his wife, too devoted it might be said. Jacob was not a pretty man in the looks department, his unfortunate appearance was compounded by a life raised on the range and leaving him rough-edged in a rather bearlike manner. His surprise at gaining the attentions and then winning the hand of the beautiful Elegantine had sorely blinded him to all her imperfections, so whilst a hard working and able rancher, at home he deferred to all that his wife asked and she could do no wrong in his eye. He was like butter in her hands and it was a strange thing to witness and almost embarrassing to see how such a tough old fellow could be turned to marshmallow by such a frail and delicate creature.

Elegantine had arrived from back east. Some said she was from a wealthy family and displayed all the class and sophistication of such a background. Callie though considered there was something more to her origins than she let on. With all Elegantine’s airs and graces there was an underlying slyness and cunning than sometimes surfaced and it was this that made Callie suspicious of her motives. Despite these hidden attributes, Elegantine’s fair-haired china doll looks attracted the attention of all the men at church socials and picnics and it was whispered on occasion that she was not above a little more than girlish flirting with the local male population. Jacob missed it all and cow-eyed as he was over Elegantine he only pandered to her every whim.

Finest silk dresses were brought in from dressmakers in New York, furniture hand made and gilded in the French style, even wallpaper, an unheard of thing on the frontier, papered the walls of their parlor.

Through it all, Elegantine breezed carelessly, as if she were a hostess at some Baltimore or Boston high society function. None of it rang true for Callie but she kept her peace and said nothing, even when the gossips came to interrogate her about her closest neighbor. Live and let live was her motto.

She thought on this as she straightened the front of her simple and plain gray dress and studied herself in the mirror. The high-necked dress had seen better days and having been stored away for so long and unworn had not helped its condition. The cuffs were frayed and one of the front buttons missing, but hell, she thought as she fastened her mother’s cameo brooch at the collar, my name ain’t Elegantine Mayhew.

She heard the sound of boots on the porch step and a voice called out.

‘Hello, the house!’

Chapter Two

The man who stood in the shade of the porch roof was tall, slim-hipped and wide shouldered.

His features were hidden in shadow but his gear was that of a cowboy. He wore leather batwing chaps and his roweled spurs clanked as he settled himself, favoring one hip over the other. She noted the bone-handled six-shooter and ammunition belt he carried, they were set a little high on the hip of his denim pants so as not to ride up when he was in the saddle. He wore a dust coated blue shirt with a long loose bandana knotted around his throat, on his head a high-crowned curly-brimmed Stetson that he swept off as Callie brushed aside the bug curtain of threaded dry melon seeds.

‘Howdy,’ she said. ‘How’re you doing today?’

‘Fine, ma’am,’ he answered, dropping his gaze a little bashfully. Her first impression was of reservation and humility, their eyes rarely meeting but when they did it was only briefly as if he were a man self conscious and unsure of himself around women.

Now the hat was off she could see his features more clearly. Even and square-featured, with skin tanned the color of leather. His eyes, when they were on her, were the attribute that caught her attention, they were pale, so light they were almost a clear gray and the corners were crinkled with lines that spoke of squinting into far and distant horizons.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you, ma’am. The name’s Wick Hailey, I’m looking for the Mayhew place, the JM spread. It’s around here somewhere, so I’m told.’

‘This is the Circle 86, we’re Mayhew’s neighbors. Your not far off,’ she stepped out onto the porch and pointed. ‘Due east, about nine miles that way.’

‘Obliged, ma’am,’ he said, stepping back a pace as if about to leave. ‘Say, d’you mind of I water my pony? The gal ain’t had a sup for a while.’

‘No, sir. You go help yourself, there’s a pump and bucket out back. I’m about to make coffee if you’ve a mind for a cup.’

‘Why, that would be mighty pleasant. I’ll see to Santa Fe and be right along.’

‘Santa Fe? Is that your pony’s name?’

‘It is. I don’t know why but that’s the handle she came with.’

‘Looks like a good animal,’ she said, holding the porch post with one hand and shading her eyes with the other as she peered out into the sunlight. It suddenly struck her that she was striking a pose and was surprised at the discovery.

She wondered at this show of coquettish girlishness and felt a cheek-warming flow of embarrassment run through her. What the devil was she thinking?

As Callie watched the stranger walk away she found herself filled with an air of discomfort and distraction. What on earth was the matter with her, she wondered. Shaking off the sensation she hurried into the house. Picking up the coffee pot, Callie hurriedly started to pour water from