Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) Read online

  “Guess he got scared when you told him he was gonna hang,” Cole replied.

  “I don’t plan to hang,” Porter said defiantly.

  “Why is that?”

  “No way they’re gonna let me hang.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Wasn’t it they who put you up to this?” Cole asked, getting to the question that had been on his mind for days.

  “Put me up to what?”

  “Shooting those two men . . . and that woman,” Cole said, putting emphasis on the fact that Mrs. Phillips had been among those murdered.

  “I seen you shoot more people in the last four days than I shot in my whole life.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Go ahead and doubt it,” Porter said defiantly. “And you done murdered my brother.”

  “Murder’s a strong word,” Cole replied.

  “What do you call shooting a man in the back?”

  “Saving somebody.”

  “All’s he was doing was tryin’ to have a little fun with a squaw,” Porter explained.

  “Your brother seems to have had him a weakness for hurting women,” Cole observed.

  “Wasn’t a woman,” Porter insisted. “It was a squaw.”

  Cole bit his tongue.

  As the ravine widened into more of a valley, Cole found it necessary to take the lead in order to look for evidence of Goode’s having come this way. The clumsy man made himself easy to track. He had kept to the path of least resistance, running downhill and following the streambed, while not making any effort to hide his tracks. Every fifteen feet or so, Cole could see the fresh footprint in the gravel of a man who was running hard.

  If it had been flat, open country as in previous days, men on horseback would have caught up with Goode by now, but the present terrain favored a runner. Goode had remained ahead of them by running in a straight line, while they had to pick their trail carefully with the horses—and a frightened man running downhill can move very quickly.

  As the ground grew more level, where Goode no longer had the momentum of a steep slope, Cole’s own progress was now slowed by the necessity of looking for his tracks. Where the streambed meandered into an oxbow, Goode had cut cross country, and it took time for his pursuer to find his tracks.

  Each time Cole seemed to lose the trail, Gideon Porter was eager to point out the fact with a taunting phrase reminding him of his failings.

  “Good-for-nothing Goode done got you there,” he would laugh.

  For Cole, it was no laughing matter. The narrower that they cut the distance, the more likely that Goode would hear the ranting Porter, and know they were closing in. If that happened, Goode would either quicken his pace or abandon the streambed. Cole hoped for the former, because a day of running would exhaust him, and he feared the latter, because tracking Goode on the hillsides, now covered with more and more ponderosa, would be much slower.

  A third possibility troubled Cole even more.

  What if Goode got tired of running and decided to ambush them with the purloined pistol? Cole guessed that Goode was not a good shot, but he did not know this. He did not want to ask Porter.

  Gradually, the air grew colder, and the clouds became darker and more ominous. If it started to snow, the footprints in the gravel would be lost, but these would be replaced by footprints in the snow, which would be easier to follow. Even if he was a few hands short of a full deck, Goode would certainly be able to figure this out.

  Coming to a place where it looked like Goode had stopped for a while and moved in circles, Cole dismounted. He let the roan graze, took Porter’s reins away from him and led his horse.

  About thirty feet farther on, they came to a place marked by the exposed roots of a large cottonwood that had been toppled a couple of years ago by a spring flood.

  In among the tangle of roots, bleached white, and as thick and stiff as limbs, two roots had been broken to form some sort of tool. Cole could see that they were spattered with blood.

  Goode had, with a frenzy born of desperation, tried and failed to use the roots to remove the manacles from his wrists. There was no way that steel would yield to cottonwood, but it looked as though the man had torn at least one of his wrists trying.

  Cole reached out and touched the blood. It was fresh.

  Chapter 16

  JEREMIAH EATON TURNED HIS EYES FROM THE MORNING sky to the dark ridgeline in the west. The contrast of the flakes against the heavily timbered hillside gave him a better take on how hard the snow was falling than to look upward into the uniformly gray sky.

  “She’s a-comin’ down,” he said to his wife, who stood a short distance away, in the doorway of their log home.

  “Be comin’ down hard before long, I reckon,” Rebecca said as she glanced down to see whether six-year-old Thomas had bothered to put on a coat before he ran out to see the flakes. He hadn’t. Early snowfalls were always a point of curiosity for youngsters, she thought to herself, before admonishing him to “Gitcher self inside and gitcher coat.”

  “Reckon I better ride on down the river and scare the cattle back up this way,” Jeremiah said with resignation.

  “Reckon,” his wife nodded in agreement.

  Early snowfalls were always a reminder of that moment in the cycle of months when it was time to button up their affairs, time for Rebecca to be glad that she had finished canning the vegetables and crabapples, and for Jeremiah to hope that he’d put up enough hay to get the milk cows through till spring.

  Four years now separated this cold autumn day from a moment of blissful, romantic dreaming on an Ohio front porch.

  Rebecca had first heard the glittering tales in her mother’s dining room. She had sat there, an infant on her knee, as a gentleman who was a cousin to her mother’s best friend, related tales of the open spaces of Montana Territory. He had been there, having gone west to the gold fields around Diamond City, and he had experienced the land for himself. He had seen its sights with his own eyes. There were opportunities to be had—if one was of a mind for homesteading.

  Four years ago, Jeremiah Eaton had come home to his wife and toddler, dejected and complaining. It had taken him nearly a year to get on at the mill, and now there was talk that those hands who were newly hired might soon be let go. Two years on, and the nation was still digging out after the Panic of 1873.

  Somehow, it seemed to the young married Eatons that a place like Montana Territory was across the line that delineated the limit of the part of the world that could be affected by panics such as that of 1873.

  Thanks to vague directions given by the cousin, and a great deal more luck than they’d realized they had, the Eatons found the end of their rainbow in a mountain valley in Meagher County, Montana Territory.

  Canvas from the wagon that brought them had become the tent that was their home until the house was built. The team which had drawn their wagon maneuvered the ponderosa logs felled by Jeremiah, and the house was ready by Christmas.

  The first year was hard, but the fact that it was the hardest separated the Eatons from the majority of homesteaders who came west in the decades following the Civil War. For most, each successive year was worse than the one previous, and by the third or fourth, dreams faded like dust devils in a field gone dry.

  Jeremiah Eaton rode down along the stream that differentiated his 160 acres from those of the majority of homesteaders. At a time when most western homesteads required the sinking of a deep well at great expense and great labor, the Eatons’ land was blessed with a running stream. Unlike those in some of the adjacent valleys, it ran all year. The fact that it had run all year for many, many years meant that the soil was good—once you got at it. Like the soil in every corner of the territory, it had never been tilled, and that was back-breaking work. Though Rebecca had vigorously op
posed his taking up most of their emigrant wagon with it, she finally admitted that the single best possession they brought west with them was the old, one-runner plow.

  Little Thomas—his mother called him Tommy—had grown up not knowing the Ohio reality of streets and streetlights, but the pains and pleasures of a lonely mountain valley. Sometimes this pained his mother, but mostly it made her glad. What mostly pained her was the fact that Tommy’s younger sister would never know these things, and that the complications from her birth meant that, for certain, Tommy would grow up an only child.

  For this reason, Rebecca had developed a protective attachment to the child which Jeremiah dared not describe as “spoilin’.” There was one time that he had, but his wife’s tears and his wife’s words had told him it would be the last.

  Jeremiah could, and often did, count their blessings. They had each other, and they had a “place” which had stood the tests of the seasons.

  When she counted her blessings, and like her husband she often did, Rebecca arrayed few things in the opposite column. The one thing that most often headed this list, though, was the loneliness. The needs of the place kept her here. Except for a rare trip down to the small town at Camp Baker, or their annual ride all the way to Diamond City, she rarely saw another soul.

  It was for this reason that the rapping at her door caused her an alarm that nearly found her jumping out of her own skin.

  It seemed only natural that she should open the door. It was not locked, as doors in Ohio homes would often be, and Rebecca had long since forgotten her Ohio instincts.

  Nothing among her faded memory of Ohio instincts, or her recently acquired Montana instincts, however, had quite prepared her for the sight she faced on her doorstep.

  “Mornin’, ma’am,” said the stranger.

  The sight of him pronounced the definition of “stranger” on many levels. He was the very embodiment of dishevelment, with his scraggly beard, his dirty clothing, and his hair askew. However, that which struck Rebecca as most peculiar were his scabby wrists and those gray chains that bound them together.

  “I’m starvin,’” he insisted in a hoarse voice. “Could I trouble ya for a bite to eat?”

  While it was not exactly a neighborly thing to be impolite to a stranger, the extreme strangeness of this stranger invited pause.

  “Well . . . I never,” was the first phrase to fall from Rebecca Eaton’s lips.

  “You look a fright, sir” was the second.

  “If I’m forgetting any niceties might be due a lady,” the man said, “I am powerful sorry . . . but I’m powerful hungry.”

  “I reckon . . .” Rebecca said, regarding the flakes of snow nestling in his unkempt hair, and nodding for him to enter her home.

  She shot Tommy a “stay away from this man” glance, then ladled a bowl of the same cornmeal and elk fat porridge that she had served her family for breakfast and set it on the table for the newcomer.

  “My husband’ll be back soon,” she said, staking out the fact that she was not alone in this remote location and that the stranger would soon be dealing with the man of the house.

  “That would be good,” the man said between bites. “I reckon he’s got tools what might get these irons from my wrists.”

  “Looks like you been tryin’ at that yourself,” she observed as she watched him eat. “Looks like you cut yourself bad doin’ it too.”

  “Guess so, ma’am.”

  “Who put those things on you?” Rebecca asked. “Are you runnin’ from the law?”

  “No, ma’am. It is God’s honest truth that these were not placed here by no lawman.”

  “Then . . .”

  “I was kidnapped,” he explained nervously. “Me and my partner was. We was kidnapped by an angry stranger done have designs on sellin’ us to the Indians up north.”

  “Well . . . I never,” she began. She had been planning to add the phrase “heard of such a fool notion” to the usual expression, but she caught her tongue. “For what purpose?” Rebecca asked.

  “Servitude . . . slavery . . . who knows what a savage would do to a God-fearing man.”

  “Who knows?” Rebecca nodded in mock agreement. “Where’d you get yourself caught?”

  “Up north, up around Fort Benton.”

  “Guess you got away?”

  “Yes, ma’am . . . been runnin’ for days. He’s after me.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The slaver, ma’am. He’s a mean one, he is. I fear he’ll kill me.”

  “You must be an awful important slave to get yourself chased all the way from Fort Benton,” she said sarcastically. She had heard of Indians taking slaves, but never of them buying slaves.

  “Reckon I am,” he said modestly, not catching the sarcasm in her tone.

  Rebecca glanced out the cabin’s one small glass window, anxious to see Jeremiah coming up the trail, but the trail that wound its way downstream to where the milk cows usually went to graze was empty.

  “Reckon I could have some more?”

  “Where are you from, sir?” Rebecca asked as she ladled another helping into the bowl.

  “I’m from down toward Gallatin City. Headed home, I am.”

  “That’s real nice,” she nodded. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Oh . . . I’m truly sorry . . . I reckon I failed to give my name. My name’s Goode, James J. Goode.”

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Goode.” She smiled. “You lived long down there?”

  “My whole life,” he said, as though a life spent in Gallatin City was an accomplishment in which a man could take great pride.

  “Your people been there long?” Rebecca asked. She was growing more and more anxious at the fact of having a strange man in her house and was hoping to prolong the conversation as a distraction until the image of Jeremiah appeared in the small window.

  “Yes, ma’am. They been there since before the war. Don’t recall exactly when . . . ’Twas before my time.”

  “I reckon,” she nodded. “What do you do down yonder?”

  “Mostly what comes up that needs doin’. Nothing regular.”

  The small talk continued thusly for a time, but at last the limits of Jimmy Goode’s attention span were reached.

  “You said your husband’s comin’ back soon?”

  “Yes, I expect he’ll be showin’ up at any moment,” she replied with a nervous lump in her throat.

  “You reckon you could show me to your husband’s tools so’s I could take care of this iron on my wrists?” Goode said. “The itchin’ is something fierce, and I’m longing to be loose of these.”

  “As much as I’d like to help you, Mr. Goode,” she said. “My husband’s tools are not something I handle . . . any more than I would have him thrashing around in my kitchen.”

  “If you’d just point me at ’em, I’d be much obliged,” he said with a suggestion of irritation in his voice. “You would not need to touch nothin’.”

  Looking into his eyes, she could see that the sustenance provided to this disheveled man had revived him from trembling hunger to an almost cockiness.

  As he traced his tongue across his lips, her imagination did not like the way those eyes now regarded her, not as a good samaritan sating the pain of his empty stomach, but as a female body that might satisfy other hungers.

  * * *

  HAVING ROUNDED UP HIS CATTLE, JEREMIAH EATON HAD paused at the southern extremity of his 160 acres to restore some lodgepoles to the top rungs of several sections of his fence. It was a chore that would be exponentially more difficult in deep winter snow, and hence it was better to address it when the snowfall was still measured as less than an inch or two.

  The snow had stopped for a while but was picking up again as he made his way home. There were few
chores awaiting him other than getting the cattle situated in the pasture nearer the house, so his ride home was not done with particular urgency.

  As he neared the house, the column of smoke promised a fire before which he might warm himself, but as he rounded the bend and came within sight of his homestead, he was startled to see his wife walking toward the barn with a man.

  He had to blink a couple of times to assure himself that his eyes were truly seeing this. Visitors were a rarity out here, and unexpected visitors unheard of.

  Leaving the cattle to graze lazily in the yellow, foot-tall grass that rose above the thin dusting of snow, he galloped toward the barn.

  His wife and the man turned to watch him approach.

  “This would be Mr. Goode, Jeremiah,” Rebecca explained as her husband dismounted. “He has a problem that he’s anxious to have your help in getting out of.”

  “Would that be those irons that you got on your wrists, Mr. Goode?” Jeremiah asked.

  “That would be right, sir,” he answered, his tone reverting to its earlier politeness.

  “You’re a long way from anywhere, Mr. Goode. How’d you get way out here?”

  “He’s on the run from kidnappers,” Rebecca said with a note of sarcasm that was not lost on her husband.

  “Done escaped . . . but they’re after me. Trailing me right now too,” Goode explained.

  “You sure it wasn’t the law that put these on?” Jeremiah asked skeptically.

  “Like I told your missus, I would swear on a stack of Bibles that it wasn’t no lawman what chained me up.”

  “Kidnappers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But why . . . ?”

  “They planned to sell me and my partner into slavery among the Indians,” Goode insisted.

  “Never heard of no Indians buying slaves from white men,” Jeremiah said. “Heard of people . . . fair sum of people . . . gettin’ theirselves taken by Indians, but I never heard of Indians buying slaves . . . but then there’s lots of things I’ve never heard of. Lemme take a look.”