Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) Read online

  With that, Cole rode north.

  The breeze was rustling in the changing leaves of the cottonwoods as he paused to let his roan drink before they forded the creek. The Porter boys had left no tracks, but they were easy to follow.

  After killing men whose deaths were guaranteed to raise the ire—or at least the attention—of Montana’s powers that be, the next leg of their trail after the ambush was obvious. To have crossed west of the Missouri River would have taken them on a heading toward the territorial capital at Helena, while staying to the east would have taken them through Diamond City, which all agreed was an outpost of lawlessness.

  Cole reached Diamond City as the autumn sun was dipping toward the mountains in the west and stepped into the Diamond Bar Saloon on the main street of Meagher County’s seat for a late afternoon beer.

  “Hello, darlin,’ buy a girl a drink?” the seductively attired woman asked with an enticing smile.

  After observing that the floozies were out early, and appreciating the attractiveness of Hannah Ransdell by comparison to this girl, Cole smiled broadly and did, indeed, buy the girl a drink.

  He knew the end to which the proprietor who employed her intended the interaction to lead, and he knew where he intended it to lead.

  She had a few years on Hannah, and she had led a much different life. Her name was Aggie, or so she said. She had come to the lawless West with her father, a preacher, or so she said. Bladen told her that he had come west in the wake of the war, because there was nothing for him in Virginia, which was more or less true.

  He let her sit on his lap, and she let him touch her leg. It all felt good to Cole, and he was tempted to allow it to play out as the proprietor had intended.

  Knowing that her drink contained little but cherry extract and soda water, he insisted that she chase it with a beer. He knew that she wanted to, and so she did, and it loosened her tongue.

  When she was at last comfortable, and had shared her fictional life story with him, talk turned to his “old friend” Gideon, who Cole was hoping to catch up with on the trail.

  “Yeah, I believe I reckon to recall a man by that name was in here,” she reckoned to recall. “I remember the name because it’s from the Bible . . . and my daddy was a preacher, y’know. But you missed him . . . not my daddy . . . your friend Gideon. Day before yesterday, I think.”

  “He buy you a drink?”

  “No, not me . . . I think Crystal . . . no, Crystal, she was talkin’ with the one with his hand all bandaged up. I was with their partner. Your friend was in here with a couple of partners.”

  “Three partners?”

  “Yeah . . . I believe there was three . . . total of four with your friend, Gideon. I was with this squirrely little fellow who kept saying he was good.”

  “Goode?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said . . . good . . . ’cept your friend Gideon kept callin’ him ‘good-for-nothin,’ and that made him mad. As it turned out, he wasn’t very good at all . . . if you know what I mean . . . and that made him real mad.”

  “Sure wish I’d not missed ’em,” Cole said, trying not to laugh out loud at Aggie’s previous remark. “They say where they were headed?”

  “Up Smith’s River way,” she said thoughtfully. “They were talking about Fort Benton and Blackfeet country.”

  Having gotten the essential information he needed, Cole let the small talk spin off in another direction, allowing their discussion of the man named “good,” who wasn’t very good, to be buried in the blur of other topics touched upon.

  When at last Aggie got around to telling him that it was time to seal the deal of their implied contract, Bladen told her that it was time for him to get his horse taken care of for the night.

  “I’ll be right back, darlin,’” he promised as he touched the brim of his hat.

  He had lied.

  * * *

  BLADEN COLE BEDDED DOWN IN THE HILLS EAST OF TOWN.

  Sleeping with your head on a saddle was not nearly as desirable as sleeping with your head on a pillow—and not alone on that pillow—but if that pillow was in Diamond City, these arrangements in the hills east of town went further toward guaranteeing that your saddle would still be around in the morning.

  Aggie was beautiful in that striking way that comes in part from being skilled at the brushwork that transforms a woman’s cheeks and eyelids—and she was shrewd in that resourceful way that comes in part from being skilled at identifying what you want and knowing how to get it.

  Naturally, he had also found himself comparing Hannah Ransdell to Sally—or more to the point, Sally as he had first known her. When you spend five years with a woman, she becomes a benchmark of comparison when a man finds himself crossing the paths of other women, even though in his present frame of mind with regard to Sally, it was more a contrast than a comparison.

  Hannah did remind him a little of the younger Sally, the Sally with whom he had fallen in love—if it really was love. After all, he was not sure he knew what “love” meant.

  Hannah was easy on the eye in a way that was different from the beauty of a woman such as Aggie. The color in Hannah’s cheeks was as natural as the blush of a Georgia peach. Her girlish grin and those freckles on her nose were enough to make a man smile back just by watching her.

  Hannah reminded him a little of Sally, when he had first crossed her path. Each woman was as sharp as a tack, and like Sally had been, back then, Hannah had that streak of stubborn idealism that comes from being long on brains yet still short on the experiences that come with years. For Hannah, these would come over time. With Sally, the time and experiences had come, and would continue coming. Naturally, Cole chose not to allow his mind to wander down the road of speculation as to the nature of the experiences Sally had been sharing with J. R. Hubbard out in San Francisco.

  Cole fell asleep dreaming that the three stars in the heavens directly above his head were the freckles on Hannah Ransdell’s nose.

  * * *

  COLE WAS BOILING HIS COFFEE WHEN THE NEW DAY WAS just a narrow, pinkish-purple sliver on the distant horizon.

  It was growing noticeably colder as the man and his horse made their way through the Little Belt Range, heading ever northward. Cole had ridden this roan for more than a year without naming him. The closest he got was “whoa, boy,” “hya, boy.” He figured the roan didn’t mind going nameless. The naming of horses had always been a matter of pride to the planters back in Virginia. Maybe that was why Cole now shied away from the practice.

  They camped a second night where the Little Belts give way to the Plains and where Cole could look out and see the lights of the scattered, distant settlements and farmsteads along the Missouri.

  If the Porter boys had kept to the plan that Aggie had overheard, they would certainly have come this way. They were running from the law, so wintering in Blackfeet country was a logical thing to do.

  They could have crossed the Missouri to head north at any number of places between the Great Falls and Fort Benton, but provisioning at Fort Benton made sense. As a river steamer port, it was both big enough and transient enough for them to get what they needed and not attract too much attention.

  With this, Cole naturally wondered, aloud, whether boys who were as witless as the Porter boys were supposed to be would think so logically.

  Riding alone for the past couple of days, Cole had been doing a great deal of wondering. He had been going over the Gallatin City shooting in his mind and had been wondering about a lot of unanswered questions.

  The Porter boys were impulsive punks who he could easily picture drawing their guns in a barroom brawl, but he had a hard time getting his head around Gideon Porter harboring a grudge for half a year before drawing his gun.

  Cole also wondered why Gideon Porter had barged into John Blaine’s house, with his gang, in order to
shoot his former employer in front of a room full of witnesses. From the universal impression of Gideon Porter, he seemed to be the type of lowlife who would be more at home shooting a man in the back in the dark of night.

  Another question that nagged Cole was one Hannah Ransdell had asked of Mrs. Stocker. What indeed had Gideon Porter meant when he told the impetuous Enoch that the women were not supposed to be hurt?

  He hadn’t said “don’t hurt the women,” he had said the women were not supposed to be hurt.

  To Cole, this implied that the men were supposed to be hurt, and by “supposing” anything, the statement implied that they had gone to Blaine’s house with a plan. This explained why it took four men. It was not an angry madman settling a score, it was a deliberately conceived plan.

  The conundrum that Bladen Cole pondered most particularly as his campfire turned to embers that night was whose plan it had been.

  As much as he was taken with the memory of gazing upon the loveliness of Hannah Ransdell, Cole wondered about her father. Why had Isham Ransdell not been at the dinner party? Of course, he had a reasonable explanation that was certainly believable, but why had he not been there, really?

  Why had he been so anxious to hire a bounty hunter—at great expense and with his own money? Of course, his stated reasons were both reasonable and understandable, but why had he been in such a hurry to hire Cole, really?

  Whose plan, indeed?

  Chapter 5

  THE TOWN DOWNSTREAM FROM THE GREAT FALLS, WHERE Bladen Cole reached the Missouri, was hardly a town at all. It was merely a little no-name collection of shacks that had grown up around a place on the river where cattle could be loaded aboard steamers or barges for shipment to buyers downstream. This time of year, when the river was low, it was barely that.

  Naturally, as in any cow town in Montana, or in the West as a whole for that matter, civic life was centered on the watering hole. Cole limped into this place, a combination saloon and general store, noticeably favoring his left leg, and ordered a whiskey.

  “None of my business, but it’s a little early in the day for whiskey, ain’t it,” the proprietor said as he poured a generous shot and scooped up the coin that Cole tossed on the bar. As was often the case in very small towns where the saloon doubled as a general store, the owner was more used to selling salt pork or horseshoe nails when the sun was this high in the sky.

  There was another man in the place, noticeable by his especially large hat, which was tall in the crown. He was examining the wares in the general store part of the place and seemed to pay Cole no mind.

  “Medicinal,” Cole said sheepishly, nodding to his leg. “Part of the problem with camping for the night where others have camped.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Cut my foot on a piece of broken glass when I was answering the call of nature.”

  “Ow-ee,” the man said, commiserating.

  “Yep, two nights ago. Ain’t feeling much better. I fear it’ll be infected.”

  “If you been stepping where your horse been answering the call of nature, it shore ’nuff will be.”

  “Do you know where a man might find some doctoring around here?”

  “Which way you headed?”

  “North.”

  “Nearest place would be Fort Benton.”

  “Thank you greatly,” Cole said, holding out his shot glass for a refill.

  “Must be something goin’ on,” the man said as he took Cole’s coin. “There was another fella by here yesterday who was stove up with an infection. Nasty goddamn thing on his wrist. Also headed up to Benton. Around here that counts as an epidemic.”

  “Not Benton,” interjected the man with the large hat. “They was headed east.”

  “Well, then I guess the doctor will have time for me when I get there,” Cole said, finishing his drink and turning to leave. “Much obliged, good day to y’all.”

  When he had limped back out to his horse, and the second man had thought him sufficiently removed from earshot, he began berating the shopkeeper.

  “Damn you, man. They told us not to tell nobody which way they went.”

  “That fellow was no lawman,” the shopkeeper said, referring to Cole. “I could figure that out, and so could you. Besides, he wasn’t askin’, I was tellin’.”

  “They told us not to tell nobody.”

  Hoping that the disagreement would not go beyond verbal, Cole mounted up and rode out of town.

  His feigned limp had allowed him to open the door into talk of a man who was injured, and now he knew that he was gaining on the Porter boys. He had started out more than two days behind them and had halved their lead.

  As the faint sound of the argument died away, the only sounds were the songs of the meadowlarks in the tall grass. Except for the trail Cole was riding, the vast landscape surrounding the Missouri River in the valley below was as devoid of the hand of humanity as it had been when Lewis and Clark had been the first white men to pass through these parts more than seven decades before.

  Their journals of their westward trek on the river recorded no sign of another person for the weeks they took to cross most of the vast expanse of what became Montana Territory. The Piegan, Gros Ventre, and Blackfeet hunters, who no doubt noticed them from the high bluffs above the river, discreetly chose not to make their presence known. When the white men returned, traveling eastward, it had been a different story, but even after the passage of more than seven decades, this stretch of the Missouri, flanked by cottonwoods and aspen in their yellow autumn raiment, had not changed.

  Downstream at Fort Benton, it was a different story. William Clark had been dead for less than a decade when this town was born as a bustling riverboat port serving the fur trade. Through the years since, it had grown in importance as gold was discovered and as cattle ranching proliferated. The most navigable inland port on the Missouri, it was served routinely by steamboats heading downstream to the Mississippi at St. Louis, the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans, and thence to the whole outside world.

  With hyperbole based lightly upon fact, its boosters called their port city “the Chicago of the West.” With hyperbole more closely rooted in reality, Fort Benton’s detractors, complaining of gunslingers and river pirates, called its main street “the bloodiest block in the West.”

  Fort Benton was a place where four men on the run could lose themselves, and where a man with a wrist infected by a bullet wound could seek medical attention without the embarrassment of intrusive queries. So too could a man with a limp, who feared an infection of his own.

  As had been the case in Diamond City, and as in the recent no-name cow town, the window into the soul of Fort Benton was the pair of swinging doors that led to the saloon. The only question when there were so many was which saloon?

  Cole bypassed the places on the main street—especially the one from which a fistfight had spilled across the boardwalk and into the street—and picked a smallish tavern on a side street that seemed more likely to cater to locals.

  Once again, he affected a limp, and once again he explained his need for whiskey as “medicinal.”

  “You oughta get that looked at,” the bartender offered in the way of advice.

  “Reckon I oughta,” Cole said in a tone that lacked conviction. There was no sense in his betraying too much eagerness to find a doctor who catered to strangers with suspicious injuries—especially not when he was tasting good whiskey. And the whiskey was good. The closer a man was to the port to which the whiskey had been shipped, the lower the percentage of native water that was likely to have been added to “extend” it.

  “Looks like winter’s comin’ on,” Cole said, changing the subject.

  “Saw some snow in the air the other night,” agreed the bartender, who drifted away to deal with some other patrons.

  When he retur
ned to Cole, the bounty hunter grimaced a little and asked for another shot.

  “If I was to want to have this looked at,” he said as his shot was poured, “where would I find a doc to do the lookin’?”

  “Hear of Doc Ashby?”

  “I’m not from around here.”

  “Second street over. He takes a lot of folks just passing through.”

  “Much obliged,” Cole said, laying a couple of coins on the bar.

  Doc Ashby’s shingle hung above the door that led to the second floor of a red brick commercial building. The bartender hadn’t actually said how many doctors practiced in Fort Benton, but Bladen Cole figured himself to be on the right track when the first one to come to the man’s mind took patients who were “just passing through.”

  There was no sign saying closed, and the door was unlocked. Cole took this to be a good indication. A little bell tingled happily as the door opened, and he began climbing the steep and creaky staircase. At the top of the stairs, standing behind a desk, was an older man in wire-frame glasses wearing a vest over a white shirt that was a little dirty in the cuffs.

  “I’m Dr. Ashby,” he said, extending his hand. “Can I help you?”

  “Well, Doc, I’m actually trying to catch up with some friends of mine.”

  “How . . . ?”

  “Well, one of ’em had an injury on his hand, and I figure he’d be looking for a doctor such as yourself to patch him up.”

  “That so?” Ashby said, his friendly demeanor enveloped by a tone of suspicion. “I believe that your friend is my patient . . . but he’s not really your friend . . . is he?”

  “Nope.”

  “You a lawman?”

  “No.”

  “Bounty hunter?”

  “I am.”

  “A man who collects rewards for collecting people,” Ashby commented, sniping at Cole.

  “A man who enforces legally executed warrants,” Cole said with more impatience than defensiveness. “Two men were gunned down in cold blood in the parlor of one of their homes . . . and then the wife of one of the men . . . and then the sheriff of Gallatin City, and finally a fourth man. I’m on the trail of men who’ve left a string of at least five bodies across this territory . . . I’m out to bring killers back to answer for those crimes.”