Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) Read online

  “Much the same,” Hannah said, handing it to her father. “It’s a death certificate for Mr. Waller, signed by the Choteau County sheriff and the coroner. The cause of death is ‘complications due to a gunshot.’”

  “Well, it seems as though Mr. Cole has earned part of his fee,” Ransdell observed. “I wish him luck among the savages in Blackfeet country. I can recall the day when you had to worry about the Indians even in these parts.”

  “Yes, Father,” Hannah said with a smile, humoring him as she always did when he reminisced about the “old days.” Even though the “Custer Massacre” had taken place but three years before in the same territory where they were, the days of the epic struggle between two irreconcilably distinct civilizations seemed distant in time and place.

  “In Blackfeet country, it’s different,” her father insisted. “General Miles may have run the Sioux and the Nez Perce to ground out here, but north of the Marias, it is an untamed world, untouched by civilization.”

  “Yes, Father,” Hannah said with a serious face.

  Hannah went back to sorting the mail, delivering three more letters to her father, and handing off a couple that required the attention of Mr. Duffy. She then set to work responding to the remaining queries and missives herself, as she typically did.

  Most of the communications were as dry as the dust on Gallatin City’s main street in August, but as she systematically worked her way through the pile, she came across one that she found particularly touching.

  It was from Mr. Dawson Phillips, Jr., the son of the couple who had been murdered at the Blaine residence. In his letter to the bank, he expressed the great sadness of losing both parents to a violent criminal, and wrote that he would be coming to Gallatin City from Denver to settle the affairs of his late parents. He requested a meeting with Isham Ransdell, who was, of course, his father’s banker.

  Hannah checked the calendar that she kept of her father’s appointments and noted that he would have time available in the week of Mr. Phillips’s estimated arrival. She wrote back that a meeting could be arranged.

  When she had finished the paperwork that required her immediate attention, she stamped the letters and put them into her bag.

  “Father, may I get you anything?” Hannah said, sticking her head into her father’s office. “I’m going to the post office with the outgoing and to Mr. Blaine’s store for some ink and banker’s pins.”

  “I find a lump in my throat at each mention of ‘Blaine’s store,’” he said sadly, looking up from his desk and wistfully removing his glasses. “It’s hard to truly grasp the idea that he is gone.”

  “Yes, I understand,” she said. “I feel that way myself.”

  * * *

  THE GALLATIN CITY GENERAL MERCANTILE AND DRY Goods, known locally as “Mr. Blaine’s store,” was still draped in black bunting. Leticia Blaine had insisted on it, and the store’s general manager saw no reason to argue with his boss’s widow.

  The whole town was taking it hard. The hierarchy of society in any community will have its highs and its lows. It will have its center, and it will have its fringe. In the society of Gallatin City, the front and center had, until recently, been occupied by the Big Four of Blaine, Phillips, Ransdell, and Stocker. The loss of two men and Mrs. Phillips from among the most prominent figures in the community had left a tangible and powerful void.

  For Hannah Ransdell, the black bunting prompted an eerie feeling. Since that night, she had been haunted by the notion that a bullet meant for her father had gone untriggered in that room. She had come within the minute thickness of a hair from losing her father and everything that mattered in her life.

  Hannah loved her father, but she had also come to derive great satisfaction from her job. Her father knew, without having commented, that she had deliberately made herself indispensable to the running of the family business. Mr. Duffy knew it, and was happy with the situation. He was nervous around people, more comfortable beneath his green eyeshade working with his numbers, while Hannah’s cheerful demeanor and intuitive personal skills had become the face of the Gallatin City Bank and Trust Company.

  Edward J. Olson, on the other hand, was a man who believed that a woman’s place was not in the affairs of a bank, or in business matters of any kind. Though he spent most of his time managing Isham Ransdell’s other affairs and was rarely at the bank, Hannah’s father often referred to him as his “right-hand man.”

  Despite the role that Hannah had carved out for herself, her father had never referred to her as his “right-hand woman.” Hannah knew that if anything ever happened to her father, his right-hand man would ensure that there would be no woman of any hand at the Gallatin City Bank.

  This would leave her having to start considering offers from eligible bachelors, which was something she had resisted, knowing that few men in Gallatin City and its environs would be pleased with a wife who spent her days at a job outside the home.

  “Hello, Miss Ransdell, how are you today, dear?”

  The voice greeted Hannah almost the moment that she entered the store. It was Sarah Stocker. She was much more composed than she had been that night when she was found running down the street screaming about having witnessed the murders.

  “Good day, Mrs. Stocker,” Hannah said formally, affecting a slight curtsey, as was expected of younger women greeting older women in polite company. “I’m well . . . and you?”

  “Thank you for asking,” she said with a flourish. “It has been hard. The terrible memories . . . the nightmares . . . and poor Virgil.”

  “How is he getting on?” Hannah inquired.

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances. The wounds are healing . . . the physical ones, of course . . . but the doctor says there will be scarring on his forehead. The one on his chin . . . well . . . you know men and their beards.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Hannah smiled. She liked the look of a man with a beard.

  “He is still haunted by the deaths of his colleagues, of course,” Mrs. Stocker continued. “Your father must feel that way as well.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but of course he did not have to witness the horror of the attacks as Mr. Stocker did . . . and yourself as well.”

  “It is the worst terror of my life, and I can recall the war coming dreadfully close to our home in Pennsylvania.”

  “They say it was about revenge?” Hannah said, expressing her statement as a question. The killings had been, and continued to be, the talk of the town, and everyone had taken as fact the assumption that the motive had been revenge directed at John Blaine. Nevertheless, the wheels that turned in the back of Hannah’s mind had left her wondering if there was more to it than that.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Stocker said, reacting to a skeptical tone which the younger woman had unsuccessfully disguised. “They burst in and started killing people.”

  “Right away?”

  “What?”

  “The first thing when they broke in, they started killing people?”

  “Well,” Sarah Stocker said thoughtfully. Though the events of that evening gave her nightmares, they had also given her an element of celebrity in the town. She had come to take a certain perverse pleasure in the attention and the sympathy she received from her victimhood.

  “Well, the first thing was that they asked for Mr. Blaine . . . next, my husband was struck. Then Gideon shot John Blaine and that wicked Enoch Porter shot poor Mary.”

  “You mentioned when we spoke before about Gideon Porter having said that the women were not supposed to be hurt,” Hannah reminded her. “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “I don’t know . . . maybe even Gideon Porter realized that his heinous brother had crossed the line into the sort of unbridled savagery that we normally associate with the Indians.”

  “I still wonder why, if they were after Mr. Blain
e, they killed the others?” Hannah said, again phrasing her statement as a question.

  “Because,” Sarah Stocker said, raising her voice, “the Porter boys are baleful monsters . . . and if you will pardon me for being unladylike . . . they should all be hanged from the highest yard arm in Gallatin City and left hanging there until their bones are picked clean by the buzzards.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hannah nodded, imagining the sight of skeletons covered by buzzards dangling on Main Street.

  Sarah Stocker quickly regained her composure, and the two women politely bade each other “good day.”

  As Hannah turned her attention to a display of writing ink, the whirring motion of the wheels that turned in the back of her mind had slowed not in the least.

  Chapter 13

  THE BUREAUCRATS IN WASHINGTON, OR IN CHICAGO, OR somewhere across the eastern horizon had decided for the Marias River to be the boundary between the ancient civilization of the Blackfeet and the encroaching civilization of the nápikoan—but none of them had ever been here.

  They had ordered their cartographers to delineate one side as being as different as night and day from the other, but to a person riding the hills and swales of this limitless country, the landscape on the south side seemed identical to that on the north.

  The cartographers pictured the Marias as a great and imposing boundary, but today, the river, flowing forlornly low as autumn waited for winter, looked to the three riders who splashed across it this morning—you couldn’t really say they forded it—no more distinguished than any other stream.

  “How long you reckon . . . Mr. Cole?” Goode shouted, turning his head as they climbed the bank on the southern side.

  “How long for what?”

  “How long you reckon till we get there?”

  “Get where?”

  “Back to Gallatin City.”

  “Guess you’ll know it when you get there,” Cole promised. He didn’t know himself, and he did not care to speculate for the satisfaction of Jimmy Goode.

  Porter shot Goode an angry glance, and he said no more.

  This was the first time that Goode had spoken in a conversational tone since they started on this enforced adventure. Cole took it as a sign, an indication, that Gideon Porter, the mastermind whom Goode had obviously once idolized, might be losing his charisma.

  Goode perceived himself to have been captured in Heart Butte not as an individual, but as part of the entourage of Gideon Porter, an appendage to his power and presence, a mere addendum to the man himself. Goode had dared not engage in conversation because Porter did not, and he was merely an extension of the great man’s identity. Now, as the great man had been taken down a peg, Goode was flirting with the notion that he was, himself, a person with an individual identity.

  Jimmy Goode had, Cole intuited, probably spent a lifetime kowtowing to Gideon Porter, and living in a deeper, more shadowy corner of his shadow than even Gideon’s little brother, Enoch. In the past two days, though, Goode had seen Gideon Porter captured, humiliated, and beaten bloody. No longer was he the kingpin of a gang; he was now a humbled man chained to his saddle in his stocking feet, being fed like a baby from his own canteen by the bounty hunter who refused to unchain him for lunch, or even to take a drink. Gradually, Goode was realizing that he and Gideon Porter were essentially the same—except that Goode still had his boots!

  Nothing more was said, though. Porter’s glare was still cruel and still frightening. An hour passed, then two. The hours melted into one another as the skies grew dark and the wind picked up.

  It was one of those days when the wind demanded that you keep your head buried so low in your collar that you never notice the first snowflake. The first ones that landed on the roan’s mane disappeared almost immediately. It was when they started to stick that Cole decided it was time to look for a place to camp.

  One side of him yearned to press on, to try to get far enough so that they could reach the Missouri River early tomorrow. The other side knew that getting caught in a blinding blizzard in a deficient campsite was a potential disaster.

  Two ridges farther on, they came into a broad gulch where the streambed was populated with a handful of tall cottonwoods. Unlike the small aspen of the previous night, there was no way that Gideon Porter could ever climb these.

  “This is it,” Cole declared. “Off your horses.”

  Porter and Goode each struggled off his mount as gracefully as he could while being chained to the saddle horn. Cole uncinched Goode’s saddle and let it slide to the ground, where the snow was starting to stick. Leaving Goode for a moment, he went to deal with Porter. With Cole’s back turned, Goode could start to run, but he wouldn’t get very far in a blizzard while anchored to a saddle. Cole was sure that he would not even try—after all, he had been told all his life that he was good for nothing.

  “This snow is damned cold on the feet,” Porter complained as Cole uncinched his saddle. “And damn you for givin’ my goddamn boots to that heathen brute.”

  “Damn you, Gideon,” Cole said, as he worked. “I didn’t give your goddamn boots to the savage.”

  “Whadya call it when he rides off with my boots, and I walk away barefoot?”

  “Tradin’,” Cole answered succinctly.

  “Tradin’?” Porter spat angrily. “Didn’t see nobody get no goddamn thing in trade from that redskin.”

  “I expect that even if you’re too stupid to notice that the Indian traded your life for those damned boots . . . you aren’t blind enough not to have seen that knife he wanted to drag across your neck from one ear to the other.”

  “I saw the knife all right,” Porter admitted.

  “What do you think he wanted to do with it?” Cole asked sarcastically. “Play mumblety-peg with it?”

  “Lost my goddamn boots,” Porter said, trying to redirect the trajectory of the conversation.

  “You still got your scalp?” Cole asked rhetorically. “Looks like, by the fact that you can feel the cold on your feet, you’re still alive . . . Now, pick up that saddle and head over to that cottonwood on the far right.”

  Once he had each man chained face-forward around a separate cottonwood trunk, Cole started a fire. Fortunately, there were plenty of broken cottonwood scraps in the gulch to use as firewood. Soon a big fire was blazing, the horses were secured, and Cole sat down to cook some of the buffalo meat that O-mis-tai-po-kah had given him as a parting gesture of hospitality.

  “What’s gonna happen to us in Gallatin City?” Goode asked cautiously, keeping his voice low so that Porter, who was forty feet away, couldn’t hear what he was saying over the roar and crackle of the fire.

  “Reckon there’s gonna be a trial,” Cole said.

  “I didn’t shoot nobody,” Goode insisted. “’Twas Gideon and Enoch who shot all those people in that house. Enoch shot a woman . . . an old woman. I seen him . . . I seen him do it.”

  “Hmmm.” Cole nodded. After having seen Enoch Porter in action at Double Runner’s shack, after watching him display the brand of uncontrollable rage that would make a man try to rape a woman in a room full of people, it took little stretch of the imagination to see him gunning down Mary Phillips.

  “And you got him dead already,” Goode continued. “You done got Enoch layin’ there wrapped in canvas. You could let me go right now ’cause you got them who did all the killin’.”

  “Doesn’t work that way,” Cole assured him.

  “You can’t charge nobody for murder that didn’t do no murder,” Goode asserted.

  “Why’d you do it?” Cole asked.

  “I didn’t do it . . . I didn’t do no murder.”

  “Why’d you go to the house that night?”

  “Gideon said we had to kill three of ’em,” Goode insisted.

  “Which three?”

  “Gideon
didn’t say. I ’spect that Enoch musta knowed, but nobody tells me nothin’.”

  “Who told you to go there?”

  “Gideon.”

  “Who told him to go?” Cole asked, hoping finally to know the truth.

  “I dunno,” Goode shrugged as best he could in his awkward position. “Maybe nobody. Maybe it was his idea, thought up by hisself. Like I said . . . nobody tells me nothin’.”

  “What are you talkin ’bout over there?” Gideon Porter yelled from across the fire. “Goode, I told you to keep your damned mouth shut and not be talkin’ to that bounty hunter.”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Cole shouted back. “Get some shut-eye. We got an early start tomorrow.”

  With that, he lay his head back onto his saddle, pulled his blanket up to his chin, and stared up into the skeletons of the big cottonwoods illuminated by the fire.

  His first thoughts went to his conversation with Jimmy Goode and his description of the lunatic Enoch Porter. Next, he went back to the nagging question of why they went to the Blaine house. Cole had found just over $200 in Gideon Porter’s saddlebags. Taking into consideration that they had only received half the payment due them, and that they had probably spent a fair sum in the saloons of Diamond City and Fort Benton—not to mention whatever Doc Ashby charged—the total payroll for the crime, not just a sum advanced to each of the perpetrators, still only came to around $500. Now Ransdell was paying eight times that sum to have them brought in. There was more to all this than met the eye.

  The snowfall, which had been coming down pretty heavily as they made camp, had finally slacked off considerably.

  As the few random flakes drifting out of the sky caught the orange light of the fire, Cole thought about that night out of Diamond City when he had dozed off comparing the stars to the freckles on Hannah Ransdell’s nose. It was a silly, romantic thought, but more pleasant to fall asleep to than the probable sins of Hannah’s father.