Fool’s Gold

Otto Muller sat on a wooden chair outside the front door of his house, smoking his pipe and listening to the morning birdcalls. He sat there most days before starting work, usually holding a cup of his sister Elsa’s coffee and watching the sun rise above the Black Hills. This time he was holding a shotgun across his lap and watching the edge of the forest.

“You sure they vill come?” a voice said from the tiny doorway. Otto had to stoop every time he walked in or out.

He turned and took the steaming cup of coffee Elsa held out to him. “Yes. Soon as they figure out she might be here.”

A part of him wished she wasn’t. He knew Elsa felt that way too — she and Alice had never liked each other. He sometimes found himself wondering what had drawn him to Alice Bascom in the first place. Not that it mattered now.

So focused was he on the trail leading from the woods, he almost didn’t see the lone rider heading toward them through the meadow to the north. “Vee have company,” Elsa said. “Be alert.”

“You are suspicious voman, little sister.”

“Just cautious,” she said.

Which was true. Elsa had always been more careful and levelheaded than he was. Otto set his pipe and coffee cup on a wooden box beside his chair so he had both hands on the shotgun as he watched the man approach. Late thirties, maybe forty, Otto figured, straight and tall in the saddle with a droopy mustache and curly brown hair that fell to his shoulders. Not one of the Ferritts. Besides, that was the wrong direction — Eli Ferritt’s place was south of here, on the way through the woods toward town.

The stranger stopped his black mare 20 feet from the house. It nodded and pawed the ground with a hoof as if ready to move on.

“Mornin’ to you both,” he said.

“To you also,” Otto replied. Elsa said nothing. “Directions you need?”

“No, just passin’ by. I been visitin’, up the valley a ways.”

Otto glanced north and back again. “Only neighbor vee know, camped up