Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) Read online

  “Power . . . medicine . . . comes to all animals from Natosiwa, the sun. When apóhkiááyo is beaten in a fight, his power is then granted to the man. The man receives the character and spirit of apóhkiááyo. Of course he was powerful in the start . . . the man. He has to be to overcome apóhkiááyo. You are a powerful man, Mr. Cool.”

  “I didn’t feel any different,” Cole admitted, “except kind of dirty from having this sweaty bear dead on top of me.”

  Natoya laughed.

  “By the way,” he said. “Since you seem to appreciate the grizzly, I’d like you to have this.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out a sharp and frightening six-inch grizzly claw.

  “I took this from that one yesterday,” he said, handing it to her. “I want you to have it.”

  She took the object as though it were a religious artifact, for to be given a grizzly claw by a man who had triumphed over apóhkiááyo in battle was an amazing gesture.

  She looked at it with an expression of awe. It was, Cole thought, like having handed a white woman a fistful of diamonds.

  Natoya then looked at him with an expression of speechless gratitude.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, ONLY NATOYA-I-NIS’KIM AMONG THE three Siksikáwa accepted the coffee that Cole offered, though she found it not to her liking.

  By the middle of the day, the jagged peaks of the Rockies could be clearly seen, rising abruptly from the Plains.

  “Mistákists Ikánatsiaw,” Natoya said with a nod as Cole pointed toward the snowcapped peaks. The trail of the horse thieves led toward the mountains, just as O-mis-tai-po-kah had predicted. They had not been hard to follow. It is hard to move a herd of a couple dozen ponokáómitaa without leaving ample evidence of their passing.

  Cole could tell by the fragrance of the “ample evidence” that it was more recent than it had been during the previous day. Thanks to Natoya’s having insisted that they break camp very early, they were now only a matter of hours behind their quarry. The fact that the thieves’ pace had slowed meant that the renegades were confident of not being followed. Just like the Porter boys, Cole hoped.

  Gradually, they passed out of the rolling hills dotted mainly with aspen and came to a ridge whose western, windward slope was covered with gnarled and windblown spruce. As they crossed the ridge, they were greeted with a breeze which blew colder than what they had experienced thus far.

  Natoya reined up her horse and pointed through the trees.

  In the distance, they could see a long, slender lake hugging the base of the mountains. The winter, which all expected, had already come to the high country. The jagged peaks were heavily cloaked in snow.

  Natoya identified the lake as Natoákiomahksikimi, but she translated the names of the peaks they saw. There were Red Eagle and Little Chief, and occupying a prominent place above the lake was Going-to-the-Sun. To the left, she pointed out one named for a man called Imazí-imita, whose name, Natoya explained, meant “Almost-a-Dog.”

  A short distance down into the valley of the lake, the horse thieves had steered their purloined herd onto a broad trail. Natoya identified it as being a main thoroughfare for the Siksikáwa which led down into the valley of the lakes.

  The “ample evidence” was now exceedingly fresh, and the Siksikáwa men pulled their rifles from the scabbards. Cole instinctively drew his Colt and spun the cylinder to count the cartridges. He knew it was loaded—this was just a ritual. As he undid the leather thong that secured his Winchester in its scabbard, he noticed that Natoya’s hand was resting on her holstered weapon as well.

  They rounded a bend near the base of the ridge, and the landscape of the valley revealed itself. There, not far below and swirling about in a meadow near a stream, was the stolen herd. Cole counted eight men.

  As he and his companions watched, their number increased by two with the approach of a pair of nápikoan riders.

  Cole squinted hard, determining that these white men were not the Porter boys. One might have been, but the other was much too fat.

  “Buyers,” Natoya whispered.

  Cole nodded. It was obvious that the two white men had been invited here to purchase the stolen herd.

  “I think something better happen before this transaction is completed,” he said under his breath.

  Natoya nodded and repeated this to the Ikutsikakatósi and Ómahkaatsistawa, who nodded their agreement.

  “Cover me,” Cole said as he spurred the roan forward.

  A few minutes later, the ten riders in the valley turned their heads at his approach. Hands tensed and touched guns.

  Cole raised his hand in greeting and rode toward the two white men.

  “Good morning, sir,” the heavyset man said cautiously. “To what do we owe the pleasure of seeing you here?”

  “Good morning, sir,” Cole said, extending his hand. “My name is Bladen Cole. If I’m not mistaken, you’re here to buy some Indian ponies.”

  “Name’s McGaugh,” the man said, taking Cole’s offered hand. “Benjamin McGaugh. You’d be correct in your supposition. We were informed at the Indian Agency that a herd would be available here this morning. I’m here to pick out four or five of the finest of these ponies.”

  “Would it make any difference to your plans if I was to tell you that these animals are a herd stolen from my friend White Buffalo Calf, whose lodge stands about two days’ ride east of here?”

  “If that were to be a fact, it would certainly make a difference. I am not in the business of accepting stolen property . . . certainly not Blackfeet property on Blackfeet land.”

  “I hoped that would be your position,” Cole said.

  “Mason,” the big man said, turning to his companion. “Ask these boys about that. Is this a stolen herd?”

  The other man, who looked to be part Blackfeet himself, queried the apparent leader of the horse thieves, who vehemently denied the assertion. However, the opposite message was conveyed by the nervous apprehension of the others when they heard the question asked.

  “There we have it,” the man said. “A denial from the man with whom I am about to consummate a transaction.”

  “And an admission from the expression of the others,” Cole added.

  “Were I to accept the discrepancy that you have pointed out,” said the man, who was certainly not one to use one word when three would do. “Then I would say that we are at a bit of an impasse. For argument’s sake, if I were to accept this discrepancy and agree with your opinion, then I would be faced with refusing the deal being offered and riding away without my friends getting the gold which they desire.”

  “That would probably be the case,” Cole agreed.

  “This would make my friends angry,” McGaugh continued. “I would not want them angry, nor would you. May I remind you, sir, that we are several days’ ride inside Blackfeet country and outnumbered. I suggest that our conversation never happened, and you may convey my heartfelt condolences to your friend, Mr. White Calf.”

  “If I had ridden all this way from Mr. White Buffalo Calf’s camp alone,” Cole began, “and if we really were outnumbered, I would be strongly inclined to agree with you . . . but that is not the case.”

  Turning toward the hillside, he raised his fist.

  As the eyes of everyone in the valley turned to follow his gesture, Ómahkaatsistawa rode out onto a bluff, raised his rifle over his head and shouted the Siksikáwa greeting “Oki!”

  Moments later, Ikutsikakatósi, in a far removed place, repeated the greeting. Cole was pleased that they had moved apart. This suggested that a much larger contingent was present.

  Realizing that the deal was off and their position compromised, the horse thieves immediately moved to secure their assets and get out of their present predicament. The only way to do this was to stampede the herd
and make a run for it.

  There was a crackle of rifle fire to spook the horses, and the mass began to move.

  Cole knew that the first volley was meant to stampede the horses, but any second volley would be designed to remove the inconvenient nápikoan, so he drew his Colt.

  Almost immediately, he watched the leader of the thieves draw a bead on a startled Benjamin McGaugh.

  Hoping that he had the range to make a difference, Cole aimed and fired.

  He watched the man jerk sideways and tumble off his horse as his rifle flew through the air.

  Mason had pulled a rifle from his scabbard and gotten off a couple of shots, but McGaugh was having too much trouble controlling his spooked horse to draw his gun.

  Another of the renegades rode at Cole firing his rifle.

  Keeping low, Cole ran at him rather than retreating, which seemed to surprise him a little.

  In the split second that the man’s hand was on the lever of his Winchester, Cole aimed and fired. The bullet caught him on the jaw and the lower part of his face exploded upward in a pink cloud.

  It was not so much a running gun battle as a swirling gun battle. The horse herd had been grazing when it all started, with individual horses facing in every direction of the compass. Therefore, when the stampede began, it was a stampede that went nowhere but to turn like a cyclone, folding in upon itself and creating confusion and panic among the undisciplined herd.

  Some of the renegades were in the midst of this, first trying to straighten the herd, then just trying not to be knocked off and trampled.

  Other renegades were on the outside the cyclone. One fired at Cole. The miss was so close that Cole heard the lead hiss past his head like an angry hornet. When Cole’s return shot struck the man’s chest, he knew that it was a fatal hit.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw three riders coming at full gallop from the woods, firing as they came. In the center was Natoya-I-nis’kim. The Colt looked like a cannon in her small hand, yet she held it as steady as if it were bolted to her horse.

  She had shed her buffalo robe, and it was obvious—at least to Cole—that her slender, bare arms were not those of a man. What would the renegades do when they saw that they were being attacked by a woman?

  The answer was a split second of disbelief on the part of the nearest horse thief as she entered the fray, a split second that cost the man his life. Cole saw the big pistol buck in her hand and the man topple awkwardly from his horse.

  Suddenly, Cole watched in unanticipated disbelief as she pointed the Colt directly at him! For a moment, he froze as he stared down the muzzle with her riding directly at him. She was scarcely fifteen feet away when he found himself staring down a muzzle flash.

  Almost at the same moment, he heard a horrific shriek that seemed to come from his own shoulder.

  He turned to see a man hovering in the air, almost on top of him. Blood was splattering everywhere, and the contorted expression on his face was that of the most frightening banshee imaginable.

  As Natoya and her horse raced past him like a rocket, so close that Cole could feel the heat of her sweating mount, he realized what had happened. While he was distracted by the sight of her coming into the fight, one of the renegades had come within two feet of him for a certain kill.

  Natoya-I-nis’kim had just saved his life.

  * * *

  THE THUNDER OF HOOVES—BOTH PANICKED AND PURPOSEFUL, clamoring within an immense and growing cloud of dust—was punctuated by screams of anger and screams of pain—and by gunshots.

  Bladen Cole looked around. His eyes probed the choking yellow dust. He had emptied his revolver, dropping three men. He had now drawn his Winchester from its scabbard, and his eyes searched for more targets. Suddenly, he saw them, two riders who had bolted, leaving the scene and riding north at top speed.

  He raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted, and squeezed the trigger.

  One man tumbled off his horse.

  He hated to shoot a man in the back, but there was a job to be done. Again he aimed, but this time, before he could fire, he heard the crack of another rifle.

  The rider jumped slightly, but did not fall. The dust from his horse faded and disappeared into the distance.

  Cole looked down. Ikutsikakatósi was just lowering his Trapdoor Springfield.

  As the dust settled, he saw Natoya, riding hard to round up the stragglers from the stampeded herd. Realizing that she was the one working while her companions merely gawked at the battlefield, Cole went into action, chasing some stragglers and getting them back to the group.

  Benjamin McGaugh, who had started the day with a simple horse-buying trip, sat on the ground staring at the lifeless body of his hired man and gripping a blood-soaked sleeve.

  He was uncharacteristically speechless when Bladen Cole knelt beside him, ripped off his shirt, and constructed a tourniquet.

  “You seem to know what you’re doing,” he said weakly.

  “Learned it in the war,” Cole said succinctly.

  “Oh yeah,” said McGaugh with a nod. “The war.”

  The two men could tell by their respective accents that they had been on opposite sides. It had been a long time, but nobody who was there would ever forget the war.

  Cole stood him up and walked him to the nearby stream so that he could get a drink.

  As McGaugh sat at the edge of the water, he began to shake, not from the cold, because the afternoon had proved to be fairly warm, but from the onset of shock.

  Natoya, who had retrieved her buffalo robe, rode up, dismounted, and without a word, wrapped it around his shoulders.

  With that, she lay down and submerged her face in the gurgling waters of the creek. After what seemed to Cole and McGaugh to have been about two minutes, she sat up abruptly, shook her wet braids vigorously and, obviously refreshed, smiled a smile which, had Cole been a poet—which he was not—he would have called angelic.

  “Thank you,” Cole said, looking at her, she who had been his guardian angel. “Thanks for saving my life out there.”

  She looked down and then off to the horizon, still smiling, and began to blush.

  The only sounds were the gurgling of the stream and the background racket of Ikutsikakatósi and Ómahkaatsistawa searching for trophies among their fallen enemies.

  Chapter 9

  THE SUN WAS DROPPING INTO THE STORM CLOUDS ENVELOPING the peaks of the Rockies when four horses and three riders lumbered into the isolated trading post on the river which the Siksikáwa called “Two Medicine” because it flowed out of the mountain valley where the sundance lodges of rival Siksikáwa bands stood side by side in a celebration of tribal unity. It was ironic, Cole thought, after a day marked by such deadly tribal disunity.

  Across the saddle of the riderless horse was tied the body of the half-breed named Mason, whose Yankee father had wed a Siksikáwa woman in this land many years ago.

  Bladen Cole and young Natoya-I-nis’kim had accompanied the wounded Benjamin McGaugh to this place, having agreed to a proposal made by Ikutsikakatósi and Ómahkaatsistawa that they be allowed to return the herd of recovered ponokáómitaa to O-mis-tai-po-kah. They had wished to do this because it would allow them to save face in light of the fact that the bloody work of actually killing the thieves and the mundane work of rounding up the heard had been done mainly by a nápikoan and a woman.

  Cole was happy to go along with this. He had done his part and paid the dues that bought him the credentials and credibility among the Siksikáwa that he would need to move about in their land and continue his manhunt.

  Natoya was happy to do this as well. She was tired of the jealous taunting of the young men and relished the respect that she had earned, and now enjoyed, from this stranger from a distant world.

  Benjamin McGaugh had begun to regain his composure by
the time that he was delivered into the capable hands of the trader at the Two Medicine trading post. The trader and his wife were decidedly more conversant than the Porter boys in how to doctor a bullet wound, and therefore, the would-be horse buyer was spared the anguished fate that had been that of poor Milton Waller.

  When the bullet had been removed, the wound cauterized, and a whiskey-sated McGaugh was left snoring in another room, Cole sat down with the trader to ask some questions.

  “Three white men?” the man asked rhetorically in reply to the bounty hunter’s query. “Yes, done heard tell . . . about three days ago . . . over around Heart Butte.”

  “Three nápikoan gunslingers show up out here, and people tend to notice,” the man’s wife interjected. “Talk is going around that these characters are hoping to winter out in these parts.”

  “Damn fool thing to contemplate,” the trader added.

  “Guess that makes you and me a coupla damned fools,” his wife said with an ironic grin.

  At this, the two of them laughed hysterically.

  The bounty hunter merely smiled. The phrase “stir crazy” entered his mind but went unverbalized.

  Natoya stared without expression. Either she didn’t quite grasp the joke, or she felt it insulting that someone would consider it foolish to winter where her people had wintered since the beginning of time.

  “Where exactly would they be wintering, if they did winter out here?” Cole asked.

  “Oh probably over at Heart Butte,” the wife said.

  “Yeah,” said her husband. “That would be old Double Runner’s band. He’s been known to take in all manner of scalawags and fugitives from down south of the Marias. Law can’t touch ’em up here, and he likes using them as hired guns.”

  “I’ve seen that happen in this country,” Cole nodded, with a knowing look at Natoya.

  * * *

  COLE AND NATOYA-I-NIS’KIM ACCEPTED THE HOSPITALITY of the trader, ate his food, and camped near the three-room building that constituted the trading post.

  As Cole stoked the fire so that it would be with them through the entire night, Natoya reclined on the opposite side of the fire wrapped in her buffalo robe. She continued to relish the opportunity to use her English words with a willing listener.