Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) Read online

  The first reaction was the satisfaction that’s always the product of surveying the miles you have put behind you on a long trip. Second came the realization that those miles behind were not unoccupied. Roughly two of those miles farther back, on a hillside in the distance, there was a lone rider.

  Cole could see little at this distance except a blue coat and a brown horse, neither of which were distinctive, and neither of which he recognized. The rider was coming deliberately, but not quickly. He was visible for only a few seconds before he dropped out of sight behind some trees in the foreground.

  The most likely explanation was that he was just another traveler, making his way along the same trail that Cole had chosen. It may have been a less traveled road, but it was not an untraveled road.

  Was it simply and innocently this, or was this lone rider bent on the same intended mischief that had cost the lives of the man in the big hat and his companion?

  Was the man a lone rider or was he merely one part of a whole gang who had gotten wind of Cole’s passing through Copperopolis with prisoners who had a price on their heads?

  Cole weighed his options. He assumed, or at least hoped, that he had the advantage of the man not knowing that Cole had seen him. The bounty hunter knew that if he had been riding alone, it would have been easy to leave the trail and double back, screening himself in the thick timber, to get behind his pursuer. With two cantankerous and sporadically bickering charges, this would be more difficult, perhaps impossible. It could also tip Cole’s hand as having become aware that he was being followed.

  “Let’s pick up the pace,” Cole demanded of Porter and Goode. “We have a lotta miles to cover.”

  “What does it matter if we hang on Tuesday or Wednesday?” Goode asked.

  “Shut up, you good-for-nothing Jimmy Goode,” Porter snarled. “I told you we ain’t gonna hang.”

  Cole looked back, hoping to see whoever followed them. The man he’d seen was not in a hurry, and perhaps by getting Porter and Goode to speed up, he could put more distance between them and the unknown pursuer or pursuers. He hurried them across a broad, treeless area and paused when they had reached the stand of ponderosa on the far side. He was curious to see how many riders entered the meadow.

  To Cole’s relief, only the single rider appeared, and he was more than two miles behind.

  Through the waning hours of the day, Cole managed to keep far enough ahead so that the man didn’t seem to know he’d been seen.

  Cole made camp quickly as the sun went down, choosing a place beside the trail in a V-shaped canyon where a man attempting to flank the campsite in the dark would find it impossible without making noise slipping across the shale that littered the hillsides.

  Having made a fire, the bounty hunter positioned himself high on this hillside, telling his prisoners that he was going to take a “look around.”

  It did not take long afterward for the lone rider in the blue coat to emerge upon the scene of the camp. His eyes being fixed on the brightness of the fire, he would not readily notice Cole ensconced above in the shadows of late evening.

  When viewed at close range in the firelight, the identity of the mystery man was revealed.

  It was Sheriff Joshua Morgan.

  He reined his horse to a halt and surveyed the scene briefly before he spoke.

  “Looks like you got yourself in a considerably less comfortable state there than you had in my cell, Porter,” he said, looking at his former lodger chained to a ponderosa trunk.

  “Damn you, Sheriff,” the man growled.

  “Where’s Cole?” Morgan asked, looking around as though he imagined the bounty hunter to be nearby.

  “He ain’t here,” Goode offered, after a long pause in which the question went unanswered by the moody Porter.

  “I can see that,” the sheriff said. “That’s why I was asking.”

  “Heard him go up yonder hillside,” Goode explained. “Couldn’t rightly see where on account of being chained here pointed t’other way.”

  “Here,” Cole said from his perch.

  “What are you doing way up there?” Morgan asked.

  “I been watching a fellow trailing us all day, and I figured I wanted to be on high ground when he overtook us.”

  “That feller would be me, I reckon.”

  “Reckon so,” Cole confirmed. “I never figured on you being one to be following us.”

  “Got to thinking,” Morgan said. “Got to thinking as I watched you ridin’ out that you might . . . could use a hand with these two scamps.”

  “Thank you for the thought, Sheriff, but I’ve come a long way on my own, and figure I can finish the job.”

  “I didn’t mean to question your abilities, Mr. Cole,” Morgan said apologetically. “I just wanted to offer my services. I hope you don’t take offense.”

  “No offense taken.”

  “Good,” the sheriff said with an exaggerated sigh.

  “Sorry to have you come all that way for nothing,” Cole said in a way that was not in the least apologetic.

  “No need to apologize,” the sheriff said with a smile, trying to lighten the mood.

  “You’re welcome to camp with us tonight before you head back to Copperopolis,” Cole said, his offer framed not in the generosity of hospitality, but as a stern insistence that the sheriff clear out at first light.

  * * *

  COLE SLEPT FITFULLY AND AROSE BEFORE THE OTHERS when the only indication of the nearness of morning was the position of the moon in the western sky. The others still slept, Porter and Goode chained awkwardly to separate trees, and Morgan on the ground near the fire. He snored relentlessly, his head of white hair bobbing in the moonlight with each breath.

  Cole entertained thoughts of kicking him to try to quiet him but did not.

  The bounty hunter had no reason to doubt the sheriff’s intentions, other than that sixth sense which had caused him so much consternation the day before. Was this sixth sense, this disquieting streak of exaggerated distrustfulness, part of the curse of the grizzly’s medicine?

  “Coffee?” Cole asked as the sheriff rolled from his sleeping bag, a sputtering sound on his lips.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” the older man said, rubbing his eyes and scratching the several days’ growth on his chin.

  Cole gestured to the sliver of light on the eastern horizon.

  Morgan just nodded.

  “Coffee?” Cole repeated.

  “Yeah . . . obliged.”

  “I drank a lot of your coffee in Copperopolis,” Cole said, shrugging congenially.

  “You’re up early,” Morgan said, stating the obvious, as Cole handed him a tin cup.

  “Got some miles to get behind us.”

  “I was thinking . . .” Morgan began. “Ummm . . . I was thinking . . . about what we was talking about yesterday . . . about my offering to help you take these two in . . . and about your saying you didn’t need no help.”

  “Don’t believe I do,” Cole said succinctly.

  “Well, you had one of those two fellers get away from you once . . .”

  “He ain’t going anywhere again,” Cole interrupted, referencing Jimmy Goode’s crippled state. He had not mentioned to the sheriff that both of the prisoners had made escape attempts.

  “You never know,” Morgan said, shaking his head.

  “Now, Sheriff, I do appreciate your offer . . . and I greatly appreciate your hospitality in letting me store one of my prisoners at your jail . . . but I paid you an agreed sum for that, and I consider our dealings to have come to a close.”

  “Listen, young man,” Morgan said, playing the elder statesman card. “I have been in and around law enforcement and the care of desperados since long before you were saddling your own horse, and I know a situation wh
ere two gunhands are better than one when I see it.”

  “I will certainly grant you the years of experience, Sheriff, but I am willfully determined that I’ll be carrying on alone.”

  Morgan sat for some time, thoughtfully staring off into the distance. At last he spoke.

  “Is there any . . . ?”

  “Nope.”

  “What if I was to ask you politely to include me in this?” Morgan asked.

  “No. I have gone through just about everything, including coming damned near being dinner for a grizzly, to get to this point, and I am not in a mood to share the reward . . . That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? The reward?”

  “Well . . . not that I know what that reward might be . . . excepting that I can imagine it to be a goodly sum . . . but I would be a liar if I said that the thought had not crossed my mind.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Cole laughed sarcastically.

  “I get barely more than room and board in Copperopolis,” the sheriff complained. “I been there for years . . . ever since the town was something . . . and I ain’t growing any younger.”

  “You were looking to sign on with me to bankroll a little change of scenery, then?”

  “You could put it that way . . . I reckon,” Morgan admitted.

  “I just did,” Cole said.

  “I heard you talkin’. When we were sittin’ around up yonder, I heard you talkin’ about not liking to be setting in one place too long.”

  “I’ve been known to use those words,” Cole said with a shrug.

  “Well, you aren’t the only one,” the sheriff insisted. “I have spent the last many years committed to exactly the opposite, to being planted firmly in one place, but a man gets to thinkin’. A man gets to wondering . . . A man gets to wondering whether it might be true that you can set in one place too long.”

  “A man does wonder,” Cole agreed.

  “So I got to thinkin’ that I ought to grab hold of whatever opportunity that might come along to get on to some other landscape.”

  “So you rode out to give me a little sales pitch?”

  “That I did.”

  “I see . . .”

  “It ain’t entirely about the money . . .”

  “It ain’t?”

  “Well, I’d be a liar to say that ain’t a part of it,” Morgan clarified. “But I’d be a bigger liar to say that that’s all there is to it.”

  “Itchy feet?”

  “A man gets to setting, and he stops wondering,” the older man said, looking Cole in the eye. “If you stop wondering . . . you stop thinking about anything besides what’s inside of your own four walls . . . and you stop being alive.”

  “That’s a pretty drastic view,” Cole replied.

  “What I’m saying is that if you get to doin’ nothing but setting around . . . pretty soon you ain’t good for nothing ’cept setting around.”

  “I suppose . . .”

  “I figured that at my age, I don’t have many more chances to change away from setting around. At my age, the body isn’t as limber as it once was . . . even a day’s ride like yesterday’s makes a man feel mighty stove up. If I don’t get around to goin’ now, I never will.”

  “Isn’t there anything left for you in Copperopolis?” Cole asked.

  “Don’t reckon on nothing that is worth me staying for.”

  “What about Mary Margaret?” Cole asked, recalling a wistful look in her eye with regard to mention of the sheriff.

  “Mary Margaret?”

  “Yeah, Mary Margaret?”

  “What about Mary Margaret?” Morgan asked, almost indignantly.

  “About her having this sort of dreamy expression when your name came up.”

  “Can’t imagine that to be.”

  “Let me ask you this . . . Are you interested in her at all . . . you know . . . in her as a woman?”

  “She’s got a look about her, I’ll give you that,” Morgan said, barely repressing a grin. “But as far as her and me . . . I reckon she’d never give me the time of day.”

  “You ever ask?”

  “Of course not,” the sheriff exclaimed.

  “Why not?”

  “A man don’t ask a woman nothing unless he’s damned sure of a positive answer.”

  “Yeah . . . I understand,” Cole shrugged, “but I bet you’d be more likely to get a positive answer from Mary Margaret than you seem to think you would.”

  “Do tell.”

  “It ain’t my place to tell a man that he hasn’t been too long in a place,” Cole said. “That would be against my nature . . . but I will tell you that I think you’re wrong to say you got nothing left for you back in Copperopolis.”

  Chapter 22

  THE HIERARCHY OF SOCIETY IN ANY COMMUNITY WILL have its center, its high and its mighty, and it will have its fringe. On the periphery of said fringe are the hangers-on, and the doers of odd and part-time jobs. Beyond that edge are the ne’er-do-wells, whose odd jobs are as often as not beyond the edge of what can be considered lawful.

  In the hierarchy of society in Gallatin City, the latter caste certainly included the Porter boys, though they were not alone. Their names would be likely to come up in the same sentence with those of men such as Lyle Blake and Joe Clark, whom one might generously have characterized as losers.

  For this reason, Hannah Ransdell did a double take when she saw Blake and Clark seated at the same table in the Big Horn Saloon with Edward J. Olson.

  On her daily rounds, whether it be to the post office, or to Mr. Blaine’s store for supplies, Hannah’s route did not often take her on the boardwalk that passed the Big Horn Saloon. It was an institution that was not patronized by ladies—as the women who were seen inside the Big Horn were not considered to be “ladies” by the women of society’s hierarchy who considered themselves to be ladies.

  So long as she held to the pretense of her place in the hierarchy of Gallatin City society, Hannah avoided the Big Horn Saloon.

  This is not to say that the place did not have a certain risqué allure, but she imagined that the allure of the laughter and the tinkling piano might not stand up to the reality of the stench of stale beer and tobacco smoke that often wafted beyond the swinging doors.

  But for the company he was keeping today, Hannah would not have thought twice about seeing Edward J. Olson in the Big Horn—the rules of the hierarchy that governed ladies did not apply to gentlemen—but seeing him with Blake and Clark was surprising. What business did her father’s “right-hand man” have with these lowlifes?

  She wished that she could just stroll into the Big Horn, order a beer, feign surprise at seeing Olson there, and ask him point-blank—but, of course, she could not.

  She wished too that she could just stroll into the bank and ask her father what his “right-hand man” was doing at the Big Horn in the middle of the afternoon with Blake and Clark—but, of course, she would not.

  Hannah did not, however, refrain from asking; rather she did so indirectly.

  “What errands do you have Edward J. Olson doing for you these days? I haven’t seen him in the office for a day or two.”

  “Some things out at the ranch,” Isham Ransdell replied without looking up, giving a matter-of-fact answer to a matter-of-fact question. “Getting some men to rebuild the shed so we can bring in more hogs in the spring . . . Pork prices are on the rise again . . . good time to get into hogs.”

  “What do you hear from your bounty hunter?” Hannah asked, not commenting on the evasiveness of his reply.

  “I’ve heard nothing since I got that letter postmarked out of Fort Benton,” he said, looking up from his desk. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering. I heard you and Mr. Olson talking about it the other day.”

  “Yes
. . . we were wondering ourselves,” he replied. “The man said he was headed into Blackfeet country. There’s no telling what might have happened out there.”

  “Do you reckon that he’ll bring them back alive?” Hannah asked.

  “One way or another, I hope he brings them back,” the banker said. “Could be that they’ll all wind up under this winter’s snow with Blackfeet arrows in them.”

  Hannah grimaced slightly at the thought of the handsome bounty hunter with the showings of a nice beard lying dead on the wild and distant plains.

  “Do you prefer the Porter boys dead or alive, Father?”

  “Well, wanting a man, even a Porter, to be dead, is not something a man likes to talk about with his daughter . . . but I will say that justice would be done either way.”

  * * *

  HANNAH RANSDELL LEFT WORK AT HER USUAL TIME. IT was her custom to leave within an hour of the bank’s closing in order to prepare supper for herself and her father, who usually remained at his desk until around seven.

  As usual, the walk home took her past the Gallatin City General Mercantile and Dry Goods. Even all these weeks after the murders, people still called it “Mr. Blaine’s store.” If she needed something for the meal, she could always stop in and get it. Today, she had neither reason nor intention of doing so—until she saw Lyle Blake and Joe Clark walking into the place.

  The embers of curiosity that remained from her having seen them in the Big Horn with Olson burst into flame. She impulsively followed them. Unlike the saloon, Gallatin City’s largest store was frequented by those from all strata of the social hierarchy.

  Hannah had no notion whatsoever of what she could or would accomplish by following Blake and Clark, but neither did she have any question that she should.

  She inserted herself into a place where she would appear to be examining goods on the opposite side of a large rack from where the men were picking out beans and hardtack.