Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) Read online

  At last she shot him a glance, and he saw that for the first time, the frown had disappeared from her face. It was not exactly a smile, but it was an expression of thanks.

  Cole nodded and touched the brim of his hat.

  In the space of two days, they had each saved the other in dramatic fashion, thereby establishing a bond not unlike that of soldiers.

  Cole had experienced this in those frenzied final days of the war, when the skirmishing seemed to run the length and breadth of Virginia’s fields and farmsteads. He had saved a man’s life, actually several lives on several occasions, and found his own preserved by the intervention of others more than once.

  His mind wandered to those days, and to the lives preserved and the lives lost. Back then, momentous events involving tens of thousands of lives moved rapidly. In those days, there would have been no way to imagine long hours on these infinite, windswept plains where the mind could be allowed to sink into the monotonous reverie of contemplation.

  “How many sleeps?” Natoya asked, pointing to the two prisoners and the distant horizon.

  “Maybe four,” Cole said.

  His mind, having been allowed to sink into reverie, had just been contemplating the immense scale of the West in the abstract. Making conversation in an attempt to break the icy silence that had prevailed between them, Natoya had brought him back from the abstract to the real.

  “Maybe more,” Cole said with a lessened conviction that begged and received the addition of the phrase “maybe a week . . . or so.”

  She nodded.

  Like him, she understood that it would take him longer to return with prisoners than it had for him to get here alone. A lone rider in pursuit of a quarry moves much more quickly than a man slowed by a pair of charges who would just as soon cut his throat as cast him a cutting glance.

  Indeed, it might take a week. He would just have to see.

  Montana Territory was a big place.

  Around noon, as the glow of the autumn sun stood as high in the overcast sky as it would that day, he pulled a scrap of pemmican from his pocket and shared it with her.

  For the first time since Heart Butte, she smiled.

  So did he.

  How could he not smile at the bashful way that she grinned and looked away with her face, but not her eyes. It was like when he had thanked her for saving his life.

  After that, they made small talk. He asked about the missionary school. She asked about the place from which he came and wrinkled her forehead in bewilderment as he tried to explain how far away it was.

  The West was a big place, and the East was still many, many sleeps beyond. He wondered what she would make of a place like Denver, or Kansas City, or Richmond.

  * * *

  THE LIGHT WAS FADING WHEN THEY FIRST SAW THE MANY smokes of O-mis-tai-po-kah’s camp on the horizon, and nearly gone when they crested the ridge and saw the campfires.

  The size of the camp had nearly doubled since Cole had seen it last, and the level of activity spread out before him between the tipis told him that the men who had traveled to the east to hunt buffalo had come home. By the looks of things, they had not returned empty-handed.

  Riding through the edges of the camp, Cole noticed that Natoya-I-nis’kim was looking around intently.

  Suddenly, she nudged the withers of her horse and galloped ahead a short distance, to where a group of hunters were unloading the fruits of their labors.

  With one, graceful, fluid motion, she slid off her horse, shed her buffalo robe, and jumped on one of the men. Had he not been a tall, powerfully built man, she would have knocked him over. Instead, it was he who pulled her off her feet, raising her face to meet his. As they embraced, Cole understood in a moment who he was, and what he meant to her.

  At last, as the hunter let her feet once again touch the ground, she turned and pointed to Cole. Pulling the man’s hand, she practically dragged him to where the bounty hunter was dismounting.

  Natoya introduced the tall man as Sinopaa, the man she loved and planned to marry.

  As Cole signed a greeting, the man’s expression said that her description of this nápikoan stranger with whom his fiancée had spent the last several days had painted him as one of the good guys.

  “Oki . . . napi,” Sinopaa said, grabbing Cole’s hand in a reasonable facsimile of a white man’s handshake. The bounty hunter knew enough Blackfeet to know that the greeting was a formal one, meaning “hello, friend,” and was reserved for use between men who truly respected each other. “Tsiiksi’taami’tsihp nomohkootsiito’toohpa, Mr. Cool.”

  “He is happy to call you friend, and he is happy you are here,” Natoya translated.

  “Tell him that I am too,” Cole replied.

  * * *

  O-MIS-TAI-PO-KAH ROLLED OUT A WARM WELCOME FOR “Mr. Cool,” inviting him to spend the night and to join in the celebration being held to welcome home the hunting party.

  Even Ikutsikakatósi and Ómahkaatsistawa greeted Cole cordially. Though the two men had taken most of the credit for recovering the horses, they had acknowledged that the nápikoan gunman had participated bravely. Cole could tell by O-mis-tai-po-kah’s wry grin that he understood the extent to which the two men had embellished the details. He was just glad to have his horses back.

  The hunt having been successful, there were copious quantities of fresh meat, happily consumed by people who gathered around large fires near the center of the encampment. Being a guest, Cole was offered a hump steak, considered to be the prime cut, which he enjoyed. Porter and Goode, who spent the night chained to a pair of cottonwoods near the stream, were fed less desirable parts of the buffalo.

  As the dinner party unfolded, Cole’s eye was drawn, naturally, to his young friend, Natoya-I-nis’kim. He watched in the flickering firelight as she and Sinopaa sat beside each other on the periphery of the crowd, talking—and even giggling—like the young lovers they were.

  He was happy for her, happy that she had a man who cared for her as much as he obviously did. At the same time, though, he could not help being jealous of Sinopaa. She was a beautiful woman for whom he had, himself, developed a great fondness.

  Though Cole had imagined himself with her, he knew that such imaginings were unrealistic in the extreme. There was no place for her in the world of the nápikoan, or for him in her world. Sinopaa was a lucky man, and Cole knew that he knew it.

  At one point, Cole glanced away to converse briefly with a man seated near him, and when he glanced back, Natoya and Sinopaa were no longer there. He smiled and reached to slice off another piece from the meat that hung over the fragrantly crackling cottonwood.

  Chapter 11

  THE FOUR WHITE MEN—A BOUNTY HUNTER, HIS TWO PRISONERS, and the remains of the late Enoch Porter—were on the trail even as the sun was a cold sliver on the eastern horizon.

  Estoneapesta, whom the Blackfeet believed to be responsible for bringing the cold weather, had been plying his trade. It had not snowed overnight, but the frost was thick on the windblown prairie grass, and everyone’s breath was visible, except Enoch’s of course. At least the freezing temperatures made transporting a corpse more tolerable than it would have been in the heat of summer.

  The two men from Double Runner’s band who had ridden with them from Heart Butte had headed home, but as a friendly gesture, O-mis-tai-po-kah had assigned Ikutsikakatósi and Ómahkaatsistawa to ride with “Mr. Cool” as far as the Marias River.

  He welcomed the company.

  Though they were manacled to their saddles, the two felons still presented the potential for danger. So long as Porter and Goode were outnumbered three to two, they were unlikely to try anything, but once he was across the Marias, Cole knew that the tables would be turned.

  As he had the previous day, Cole brought up the rear, positioning himself where he could watch without be
ing watched. His helpers, meanwhile, functioned as outriders, ranging right and left of the manacled men. Because the country was so open, it was easy for four widely separated riders to travel abreast.

  He had tied the horses ridden by Porter and Goode together with a forty-foot rope and ordered them to remain that far separated. Being tied together, and with Enoch Porter’s horse tied to his brother’s, they were unlikely to try to make an escape. This arrangement would also reduce, if not prevent, their talking to one another without him overhearing what they said.

  It was not that either man was doing a great deal of talking. As yesterday, they sat silently and sullenly as the miles ticked slowly by.

  Jimmy Goode, the young oaf who had, like so many young oafs, gotten himself in over his head with bad company, displayed a jittery fear more than any other emotion. He feared being brought to justice and hanged, of course, but he also feared the wrath of Gideon Porter if they ever came within an arm’s length of each other. Then too Gideon had told him that they were within a hair’s breadth—as Gideon had sarcastically phrased it in an aside the day before—of having their hair lifted with a Blackfeet hunting knife.

  Gideon Porter’s expression betrayed anger, directed both at the world at large and, for their being caught, at the hapless Jimmy Goode, simply for being, as usual, good for nothing.

  As Goode twitched and Porter stewed, Cole’s mind wandered.

  The only element absent from yesterday in his carefully arranged procession across the Plains was the company of Natoya-I-nis’kim. Though it was his preference to ride alone, he missed the pleasure of her shy smile and the pleasure of her company during long hours in the saddle in monotonous terrain.

  “Aakattsinootsiiyo’p . . . we’ll meet again” were the last words that Natoya had spoken as she waved good-bye that morning.

  He was left to ponder whether she meant the phrase merely as a perfunctory “see you later” or as a more purposeful “we will see one another again.” She probably meant him to ponder it—in a half-flirting, half “I hope you don’t forget me” way. And so he pondered, all morning and into the afternoon.

  She was perceptive beyond her years and no doubt knew how he felt. Like him, she recognized that they had developed a friendship that was and would remain, despite the unique bond of mutual life-saving, just and only that.

  Soon she would be out of his mind—or so he insisted to himself.

  They camped for the night overlooking the Marias. Of the four, five, or more sleeps to come, this would be the last one when Cole would not be alone with his captives. He had decided to avoid Fort Benton and stick to the open country as he headed south. The potential for complications associated with riding into an essentially lawless town with two criminals, two Indians, and a dead body was just too great.

  * * *

  BLADEN COLE AWOKE WITH A START.

  It was bitter cold, but quiet. Had the north wind not died down, he never would have heard it.

  There it was again.

  It was a crushing, snapping sound like a bear might make. He glanced quickly to where the horses were. They were standing calmly. Had there been a bear or a wolf in the vicinity, they would have been snorting and pawing the ground. They were not.

  As he got his hand on his Colt and began to roll out of his bedroll, he saw something, or someone, moving. A moment later, he identified this something and squeezed his trigger.

  In the cold, still air, the sound of a .45-caliber round being fired had the comparative effect of five pounds of dynamite going off.

  In the muzzle flash, he caught a quick view of an angry face.

  Gideon Porter, who had tried to sneak noiselessly to where the horses were tied, had been caught in the act and needed an alternate plan, immediately.

  As Bladen Cole came toward him, he reached for the nearest weapon that he could see in the light of the quarter moon—Ikutsikakatósi’s Trapdoor Springfield.

  Meanwhile, Ikutsikakatósi had awakened suddenly at the sound of the pistol shot, and he reacted by grabbing his rifle back.

  Cole’s instinct told him to take an easy shot and send Gideon Porter to join his brother at the Devil’s table, but instinct was outweighed by his commitment to justice. For that to be done back in Gallatin City, Gideon Porter would have to point his finger at the man who planned the crime that the Porter boys had carried out, and dead men can’t point fingers.

  He fired a second shot, aiming to miss the shadowy form of Gideon Porter, but to do so by as narrow a margin as possible.

  Both Ikutsikakatósi and Porter paused, but only for the second that it took Cole to reach them.

  In the split second that followed, Cole saw the flash of Ikutsikakatósi’s knife coming out of its sheath like a bolt of lightning.

  In the flash of a further second, split narrower than the sharp edge of Ikutsikakatósi’s blade, Cole slugged Porter in the face with his gun hand.

  The impact of a metal weapon striking his face with the tremendous force of Cole’s blow, combined with poor footing on dark, uneven terrain, sent Porter sprawling backward.

  Two men moved like pouncing cougars toward the fallen man.

  One reached him by a margin of a split second, sliced as thinly as a split second can be sliced.

  Bladen Cole stomped his boot on Porter’s neck, both because he knew it would immobilize him and because he knew that this neck was the destination of Ikutsikakatósi’s eight-inch blade.

  Cole fired a third shot into the ground eight inches above Porter’s head. The feel of the gravel kicked up by such an impact was frighteningly indistinguishable from being hit.

  As Cole had hoped, Ikutsikakatósi paused.

  Cole dragged Porter to his feet in the moonlight, noticing that his face was sheeted by the dark shadows of blood, flowing both from his face and from his scalp.

  Feeling Ikutsikakatósi nudging closer, with the probable intention of relieving Porter of that bloody scalp, Cole slugged the outlaw once again.

  This time, Porter fell with a thud and made no effort to get up.

  A half minute of gunsmoke and spattering blood was followed by nearly ten minutes of diplomacy as Cole tried, using sign language in the dim moonlight, to convince Ikutsikakatósi and Ómahkaatsistawa not to finish what Cole had left unfinished.

  Finally, the negotiations reached a compromise.

  Ikutsikakatósi agreed to forgo the taking of Porter’s scalp in exchange for his boots, finely tooled like those of his brother, which were now on Double Runner’s feet.

  Cole also agreed to Ómahkaatsistawa’s insistence that they throw in Enoch Porter’s saddle, though not without some demonstrative complaining. Cole really didn’t care. He argued only in the spirit of keeping up the bargaining, to add perceived value to the saddle. Enoch would certainly not be needing it.

  With light already starting to appear in the east, the two Siksikáwa decided that it was time to get an early start on their trip home.

  They said their farewells to “Mr. Cool,” claiming, as he did to them, that they would be friends forever.

  Nevertheless, Cole waited for about an hour before he made his way down to the river to get water to clean Gideon Porter’s wounds. He was not fully convinced that these impetuous young men would not double back in the hope of catching Porter unattended.

  In the gathering light of the promise of daytime, Cole could see what had happened. He had manacled Porter to a small aspen—mainly because there were no large aspen out here where the punishing winds blew—and the resourceful miscreant had actually climbed the tree to get the chain over the top. In so doing, he had bent the small tree over. The sound that awoke Cole had been that of the tree snapping back when Porter climbed off.

  Just as Porter realized that he had dodged three bullets from Cole’s gun in a literal way, Cole knew that he too
had dodged a bullet of the figurative kind, whose potential was no less deadly.

  If he had, as Natoya-I-nis’kim believed, inherited the medicine of the grizzly, such power had failed him.

  Or had it?

  Chapter 12

  “FATHER, YOU HAVE A LETTER HERE FROM YOUR BOUNTY hunter,” Hannah Ransdell said. She had just returned to the bank from the post office and was sorting the mail, as she typically did each morning.

  “I hope that he has some good news,” Isham Ransdell said, approaching his daughter’s desk. Hannah had started working at her father’s bank when she was still in high school, but her duties had gradually increased and evolved and had long since warranted her maintaining a well-used desk not far from that of Mr. Duffy, the accountant who kept the ledgers. Duffy may have been the custodian of the numbers, but Hannah was the custodian of the customers. She knew them all by name and knew what sorts of accounts they all had at the bank.

  “When was it mailed?” Isham Ransdell asked.

  “A week ago from Fort Benton,” she said, looking at the postmark.

  “Never thought I’d see the day when you could get a letter all the way from Fort Benton to Gallatin City in just a week,” Ransdell said, taking the letter.

  “It’ll be a lot faster than a steamer down the Missouri to Fort Union when the telegraph goes in,” Hannah observed, handing her father a letter opener.

  She watched curiously as he slit open the envelope and took out two pieces of paper, one a letter and the other an official-looking document. He handed the latter to Hannah out of force of habit. Through her experience at his bank, she had become so adept at grasping the legal wording of official documents that he often joked with her that he did not need the high-priced legal services of his associate, the attorney Virgil Stocker.

  “Mr. Cole writes that Milton Waller is deceased,” Isham said, scanning the handwritten note. “He goes on to say that he will be pursuing the Porter boys into Blackfeet country. What does that document have to tell us?”