'Funnily strange, Sheriff, that all these misfortune of yours started happening after this town got some new blood in it. In all my years of us being neighboring landowners, there had been not a single act onto you.'
Hensely’s words echoed in his mind. It had for some time now. A suggestion that someone was meddling with Jax’s ranch. And in all his thinking on it, his mind kept coming back to one face. One he stared at from across the room, waiting wordlessly for his thoughts on this.
Kob's quiet, working his jaw listening and for some time after, as he leans against the wall with arms crossed and staring at the crackling fireplace. Jax isn't too sure if he's just thinking, pissed at the happenstances or...if what he suspects is true.
A sigh, possible a hint deeper more tired. "Buckthorn's a good man, I don't think he'd go to such efforts."
That doesn't answer the big question here, the unspoken one, please Kob. Did you? Why? Tell me no.
His voice nearly croaks. That face was still raw, open, pleading, and Kob glances over and stills at it as Jax asks again, "One of Hensley's?..."
"..."
"Kob-"
"Jax, please..."
Don't ask me, please, it spoke.
"Who else could it be?...Whole town knows Hensley's willin' to go under the belt, even if he makes stink like roses." A deep frown as the hired cowpoke shifted off the wall and moved to the small table. He picked up his hat, lightly pivoting it by the brim between his hands. A look to the fireplace again, seemingly weighing his words before he looks to Jax again, "There ain't a good reason, not that I found. Been trying to stop it, the meddlin’."
Too blue eyes stared for far too long at the hazel gaze, and there’s a cornerstone of the home built there threatening to collapse and bring the house down. To break and shatter. When there was nothing more said, the sheriff pulled himself away, jaw clenched tight and shoulders so tense they threatened to shake harder than a wild storm’s gales. He got up, pushing from the table and stood for a moment, not knowing what to do or what to ask. So, he paced over to look out the window. His hands fiddling with the braided necklace around his neck and that copper penny with a bullet hole shot clean through it—
‘Penny for your thoughts.’
Jax had said, time and time again.
When Kob would be sitting on his mule or at the bartop of Minnie’s saloon, that deep and cloudy look crossed his face as if something had him trapped in his mind. Passing the coin the man had hit in a contest between them with his second shot, he’d provoke that dust storm, draw it out. Tell me what you’re thinking.
His boots scuffed the wooden floor of his cabin as he stopped in front of where Jakob leaned against the wall, silent and watching. Jax sets the copper on the table and slides it closer with a push of a red-tan finger, his throat too tight to ask, like a noose already been set.
Nothing.
Just a shift of weight and a heavy swallow, averting eyes.
Jax just slowly nods and his shoulders sagged as his voice sounded small and hurt, “Alright…Alright, I won’t ask any more on it. Won’t take a notion. Just…just…”
He cleared his throat, working his jaw, pausing and stuttering, and trying again and again.
“Are we…real?...”
“Or m-meddlesome?”
Kob’s words echoed in the sheriff’s heartbreak.
‘Been trying to stop it, the meddlin’.’
And the former outlaw as he watched the ground crack, that cornerstone give in Jax’s eyes realized in pain:
I’ve never truly did.