Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) Read online

  “I’m afraid you will not be taking this man anywhere,” the doctor said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because within the next hour or so, he’ll be going home to the Lord.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad. If they’d gotten him to me a day or so earlier, I might have taken off an arm and saved a life, but it’s too late. The infection’s spread . . . all the way to his heart.”

  “Can I see him?” Cole asked.

  “Nothing wrong with that . . . I suppose.” The doctor shrugged, nodding to a door on the wall opposite the head of the stairs. “Go ahead.”

  Inside, a man lay on a bed, his head on a pillow soaked in sweat. His boots and shirt had been removed. There was a fresh bandage on his wrist, but his arm and shoulder were deeply inflamed.

  His eyes flickered open and rolled to look in Cole’s direction, but otherwise he remained motionless.

  “Which one of the Porter boys are you?” Cole asked.

  “Ain’t no Porter,” he whispered at last. “Name’s Waller . . . Milton Waller. If you’re here to arrest me, you’re too late. Sheriff done killed me already. He’s a good shot. Thought he just nicked me . . . but he done killed me.”

  “Why’d you kill those people?” Cole asked. “Why’d you go after Blaine?”

  “Got paid . . . paid good.”

  An attempt at an ironic chuckle was interrupted by a cough, followed by a choking sound.

  “The railroad . . . land deal,” the man explained between sputters. “They have to die . . . four partners . . . only one can survive.”

  “Who paid you?” Cole asked.

  “Got paid to kill ’em . . . half up front,” Waller continued, skating to the edge of deathbed delirium. “Had to get out of town without the rest . . . damn that Enoch Porter . . . he shot that woman . . . then it all fell apart . . . running out of time . . . had to get out of town quick.”

  “Who paid you?” Cole repeated.

  “All fell apart . . .” Waller said. “He shot the woman . . . we’re all scared . . . have to run . . .”

  With that, Milton Waller ran out of time. His eyes went blank, his body flinched and relaxed.

  Cole looked at Ashby, who nodded. Waller had gone home.

  Chapter 6

  BLADEN COLE HAD A STRANGE APPREHENSION THAT HE was congratulating a killer when he scrawled out a message to Isham Ransdell at the Fort Benton post office. He enclosed a copy of the death certificate and confirmed the death in his accompanying note. He wrote nothing, however, about Waller’s last words, nothing about “only one can survive,” because it had been Ransdell, conveniently absent from the shooting, who was the one who had walked away completely unscathed.

  Cole had long been pondering the words of Gideon Porter as related by Mrs. Stocker that the women were not supposed to be hurt. From this, he had concluded that the killings were not a matter of an angry madman settling a score, but part of a deliberately conceived plan, leaving only the question of whose plan it had been. In his deathbed declaration, Waller’s words had filled in this missing piece.

  For Bladen Cole, justice, when applied to the Porter boys, was no longer a matter of “dead or alive.” Justice could only be served by bringing the remaining outlaws back alive to point their fingers at Isham Ransdell.

  The bounty hunter had hoped to continue his pursuit the morning after the demise of Milton Waller, but the time expended in getting two copies of the death certificate—one for himself and one to mail to Isham Ransdell—had cost most of the day. It had taken all morning and several trips back and forth to the county clerk’s office to get copies of Waller’s death certificate and to get them signed by both Doc Ashby and the coroner. He then had to chase down a notary whose office hours began only when he had slept off his night before.

  Cole decided to sleep one more night between sheets in the fleabag hotel and bought his dinner at a little shack of a cafe near the levee. He decided to buy his whiskey at the saloon nearest his hotel, a typical Fort Benton dive, where trappers from the distant corners of the Plains and boatmen from the Missouri were being united with their first whiskey in months. The piano player was banging out some familiar Virginia marches, and it made Cole a little nostalgic.

  He met a woman who craved companionship in a commercial, rather than nostalgic, sort of way, and he talked with her until he discovered that she had no information about the Porter boys. She too lost interest and drifted on to another prospect when she discovered that the only thing he was buying that night was drinks.

  She had told him her name, but he forgot it right away. She too reminded him of Sally Lovelace in that way that most painted ladies now reminded him of Sally Lovelace. This one also had Sally’s habit of making intense eye contact and telling him that she knew what he was thinking.

  This night in this saloon reminded him of another night long ago in that other bar down in Silver City, where prospectors came down out of the Mogollon Mountains with too much gold dust and not enough sense.

  The Cole brothers, William and Bladen, had been drinking far too long for their own good that night—he would grant that as a fact—but young men barely into their twenties cannot be told such a thing at the time.

  So too had been another pair of young men barely into their twenties. As often happens in circumstances such as prevailed that night, neither pair of young men walked away, as they should have, from a quarrel that had ensued.

  Perhaps if Bladen had tugged at Will’s sleeve and insisted that they let the two men go, it never would have happened, but he had not, and it did.

  It happened so fast, and in such a fog, that Bladen never really knew which man drew his gun first, but Bladen knew he was the last. When the dust had settled, two men lay dead, and one was Will. The fourth man, the cowardly one with the narrow face of a rodent, had vanished into the night.

  Through all the ensuing years, in saloons like this one in Fort Benton, Cole had found himself scanning the patrons who swirled in the kerosene glow, searching the room for the rat-faced man who took his brother’s life.

  Through all the ensuing years, he had yet to see that ugly face again.

  * * *

  DOC ASHBY HAD CONFIRMED WHAT AGGIE IN DIAMOND City had said that she had overheard. The Porter boys were headed across the Marias River into Blackfeet country. In Montana around this time, you could more or less dance all around the law with impunity, but only more or less. The only place you could really outrun the law was where there was no law. It was commonly stated that there was “no law north of the Marias.”

  The cold wind blowing from the Arctic across the Canadian prairies stung his face as Cole rode the undulating landscape of apparently endless flatness alternated with broad gullies cut by streams and filled with golden aspen.

  It was, in the eyes of an outsider, a trackless wilderness unpunctuated with landmarks, like the open ocean. To those who had been here for generations, each of the monotonous series of hills and gullies was as unique as a city street marked by a unique street sign.

  The Blackfeet, called Siksikáwa in their own tongue, had inhabited this distant corner of the Plains for centuries. For the most part, the white man had yet to build up the momentum to exploit this place. Aside from a few distantly separated trading posts, there were no people living north of the Marias—in a vast region larger than Cole’s native Virginia—whose grandparents had not been born here.

  Late in the afternoon, Cole noticed a cluster of scavenging birds circling and squawking, and he detoured slightly to investigate. They were not the remains of three men ambushed by Blackfeet, but the bloody and scattered bits of something else that had recently been living. The pieces were so far dispersed that it took Cole a few minutes to ascertain that these remains were, or had been, a bull elk.

  The big animal appeared to have b
een blown apart by a stick of dynamite, though in fact it had been attacked, killed, and partially consumed by a grizzly. A lump rose in Cole’s throat as he realized that this slaughter had occurred within the past hour. The meat was fresh, the blood still runny.

  The roan began acting nervously, jerking and snorting like a person who had come under the spell of an evil sorcerer. Cole had had barely a moment to understand why his horse was spooked, when he saw the reason in the corner of his eye.

  The bear arose with a crash and a snort from a thicket of willows. From a crouching position, it unlimbered itself to a standing posture and bellowed ominously. The grizzly is an enormous creature, taller than a man standing in his stirrups while on his horse.

  Cole felt the blood drain from his face as the roan reared.

  The signature terror of the remote corners of the West, the grizzly was a creature so fierce that all others avoided it—when they could. The Indians approached it with a mixture of reverence and trepidation. White men avoided it because it could not be killed. As many a man had learned the hard way, its skull was so thick and the muscle mass of its body so dense that only a lucky shot, a one-in-a-hundred shot, could bring one down.

  For the first time in years, Cole found himself frozen in fear. The first reaction of a person to a grizzly, that being to run like hell, was often fatal. As clumsy as they seemed while lumbering about, grizzlies could outrun a man, even a man on a horse.

  He pulled his Winchester from its scabbard and began backing his horse, figuring that his best chance was to get away slowly before the bear decided to drop back down to four legs and charge him.

  The Winchester represented his last chance.

  For a short while, it worked. The bear watched the mounted rider as though bewildered by the jerky backward motion.

  At last, the grizzly decided that despite an apparent backward movement, this intruder represented an interloper at his supper table.

  With an angry snarl, the beast charged.

  The roan bucked, and Cole felt himself losing his balance.

  In the process of trying not to lose his rifle, Cole lost his reins.

  For a moment, he felt himself sliding sideways from a galloping horse.

  In the next instant, he was colliding awkwardly with the ground.

  The Winchester, on which he had lost his grip, dropped about six feet away.

  The sound of the bear galloping toward him was like thunder.

  He literally threw himself toward the gun.

  Grabbing the rifle in mid-tumble, Cole fired without aiming.

  The bullet struck the bear with little more annoyance than a horse fly caused attacking a person. Cole might as well have poked him in the shoulder with a stick.

  However, the sound of the shot, something this bear had never heard, and the smell of the gunsmoke, something this bear had never smelled, provided a momentary pause.

  It is curious to contemplate the sorts of things that go through a man’s mind when he is about to die. They say that your whole life flashes before you, but what do “they” know?

  Bladen Cole thought about that Sunday in the Congregational Church in Bowling Green when he was about twelve, when he had thought about the effectiveness of prayer for the first time. The preacher’s remarks had lost him in the bobbing sea of his own daydreams, and he had wondered whether prayers went answered. He guessed that most did not, but he wanted to believe that some did.

  In that split second before the moment in which he expected his own violent and painful death, Bladen Cole prayed.

  He also squeezed the trigger again, and saw the lead tear into the cheek of an angry bear whose rapid progress toward him was not slackened.

  He could smell the disgusting stench of the grizzly’s breath as he fired the last shot possible before ten angry, raging claws reached him and ripped him apart as they had the elk.

  The slug impacted the bear’s left eye, cleaving straight into his brain.

  The inside surface of the back of the bear’s skull, being too thick to be penetrated by the bullet, caused it to ricochet, then ricochet again. Each time that the bullet zigged or zagged in the soft tissue of the brain, it tore a separate path and ripped away another swath of the bear’s consciousness.

  Cole rolled to the side as the bear reached him.

  He felt the pain of the bear’s leg falling on his, but he barely avoided having the full weight of the animal’s thousand pounds crush him.

  He imagined that he was being mauled, and he struggled to get away, but the frightening gyrations were merely the bear’s death throes. By the time that he had at last gotten out from beneath the enormous mass, the grizzly had twitched its last.

  Cole gasped to catch breath, inhaling the rankness of the sweaty monster, but was overjoyed just to be breathing at all.

  Chapter 7

  COLE CAMPED THAT NIGHT AMONG THE ASPEN, WASHING himself off and watering his roan in the trickle of a stream that ran there.

  He awoke suddenly to the hot breath of an animal on his face, immediately imagining it to be another grizzly, but it was merely his horse. He now realized how his subconscious mind had shifted into wilderness mode. Would he have mistaken his horse for a grizzly two nights earlier when he went to sleep with the lights of Diamond City twinkling in the distance? He had not and probably would not have before the experience of the day just passed.

  Waiting for his coffee to boil, he watched the stars wink out in the lightening sky of dawn. He thought of what he had read of seafaring people using the stars as navigational tools, and of how he had always used the North Star as a reference point in unfamiliar territory.

  As he rode north with the gathering dawn and turned westward in the direction of the Rocky Mountains, he saw a small group of pronghorns at a great distance, but aside from that, the only sign of life was the usual companionship of the meadowlarks and a hawk circling in the distance.

  Shortly after his lunch, which consisted of a scrap of hardtack eaten in the saddle as he rode, he saw them. Two riders had materialized out of nowhere, or so it seemed. One minute, the hill about a quarter mile ahead and to the right had been deserted, and now there were two men there. He could make out the golden hue of their buckskin shirts and the long black hair that framed their heads. The fact that he had seen them at all signified that they wanted to be seen.

  Cole raised his hand to signify that he saw them and meant no hostility. The men returned the gesture and waited for him to reach them.

  “Good morning, fellows,” he said in English, more to establish that his intention was to greet them than in the belief that they could understand his words. “My name’s Bladen Cole.”

  They responded with a gesture to the tongue, which signified their not being conversant in his language.

  Cole knew a few Lakota words—as did most white men on the northern Plains, because the two groups had had much contact over the past three decades—but almost nothing of the totally unrelated Blackfeet language. What he did know pretty well, and what did unite the tribes on the Plains who could not communicate verbally, was the universal sign language.

  Using this, Cole was able to explain that he was looking for three men, three white men, who had come into Blackfeet country in the previous couple of days.

  Without saying whether or not they had seen the Porter boys, the two men replied that they had problems of their own. There was some sort of intertribal squabble going on, and they were on one side of it.

  One of them pointed to the Winchester Model 1873 rifle that Cole had in the scabbard attached to his saddle. At first, he thought that they were proposing to trade. One of them carried an older model, U.S. Army–issue “Trapdoor” Springfield, and he could see the distinctive bronze-colored breech of the Winchester ’66 carried by the other. Neither gun was desirable in a trade for a ’73 Wi
nchester, so he declined.

  At this, the man who was doing all the talking said that Cole was mistaken. They didn’t want his Winchester, they wanted him. They indicated that their head man had sent them to “volunteer” his services as a rifleman.

  Cole found it hard to stifle the laugh, which, when he suddenly guffawed, noticeably startled his new Siksikáwa friends. Bladen Cole, the hired gun, was being hired for a second job in parallel to that which had brought him north of the Marias.

  The two men were looking at each other with bewildered expressions, when Cole let it be known that he would help them.

  On one hand, allowing himself to become embroiled in a Blackfeet civil war was an unnecessary distraction from his purpose, but if he had any hope of completing a successful manhunt in this enormous land, he needed friends. And he was about to make some.

  They had ridden together for about an hour when Cole started to see the blue haze of many campfires in the distance. At last, as the sweet smell of smoldering cottonwood reached his nostrils, they came over a rise and saw a village below. There were more than a dozen tipis clustered along a quarter-mile stretch of a stream. People were going about their daily chores, and horses grazed on the hillsides.

  As they rode through the camp, Cole smiled broadly at the children who eyed him curiously. One group of preteen girls giggled and turned away as he caught their eyes.

  They stopped before a large tipi which was decorated with a variety of pictograms painted in both red and black. By its location in the center of the camp, Cole concluded that this was the chief’s house.

  The three riders dismounted, and one of the Siksikáwa men approached the open flap of the lodge. He spoke to someone inside and gestured for Cole to come in. The bounty hunter grabbed a knot of smoking tobacco from a parcel that he carried in his saddlebag and approached the opening. He wasn’t fully conversant in native customs, but he did know that among the people of the Plains, it was always good manners to present your host with a token gift of tobacco.