Miss Pink Investigates series Box Set Part Two

by Gwen Moffat

  ‘He’s taking our place,’ Seale said. ‘This is the canyon we have to work.’

  They dropped down the slope to the first conifers, threaded their way through a labyrinth of fallen and leaning timber to emerge in a meadow beside a lake. On the meadow were five cows and three mule deer with their fawns. At the approach of the horses the deer stood like garden statues, huge ears at right angles to their heads, then they faded gently, and the cows started to move. The riders fanned out to keep them in the bottom of the canyon, headed for Hell Roaring.

  Up on the wooded slope Miss Pink started to find more cows. They were in bunches and, once flushed and started moving, they drifted downwards. Instead of the work becoming harder as the numbers swelled, it became easier. She realized that the animals were communicating and the continual noise of cows and calves, and the riders’ calls, were the finest inducement to movement.

  The canyon was about three miles long. As they descended, and woodland turned to forest, so the trail in the bottom improved and the cows on the flanks came in until the riders were reunited behind a string of beasts all moving steadily in the right direction. Seale crowed, in no doubt that they had made a better job of getting beasts out of their canyon than Burg and Coons had in theirs. ‘I wonder what this lot’ll do when they come to Hell Roaring,’ she said. ‘If Archie and Zack have passed already, then our cows will follow theirs. But if their bunch hasn’t passed the mouth of this canyon, our lot may turn down Hell Roaring. But then they’ll meet the other bunch coming up and they’ll have to turn back, so it’s no sweat either way.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’ Miss Pink became voluble. ‘I’ve stayed on by luck so far, but one stumble too many, or a low bough when we’re galloping, and I’ll be off.’

  ‘Rubbish! You ride like a pro. You and Blaze make a good team.’

  Seale grinned, Miss Pink beamed, the cows plodded on like Friesians on their way to the milking parlour. Lulled by the pace, the riders were momentarily disconcerted to glimpse animals through the trees on their right, then they realized that these were the leaders of their own herd: quiet and deliberate, not breaking away. They had come to the junction with the Hell Roaring trail and the cattle had turned up the main canyon as they were supposed to do.

  The riders held back, allowing the stragglers room to make the turn, then they rode to the junction and it was obvious from the trampled ground and the fresh prints of horses, that a big bunch of cattle had recently passed up the main canyon. They continued to follow their own docile herd.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon and they were riding straight into the sun, riding along a wide bench high above the creek, hats pulled low to shade their eyes, warm and somnolent, when the cow immediately ahead of Miss Pink threw up her head.

  ‘Hold back,’ Seale said. ‘We’re crowding them.’

  They reined in to allow the cattle room to string out but, looking along the line, they saw that the animals were no longer moving steadily up the trail. Heads tossed, flanks showed instead of rumps, calves scattered, bawling. The cows were turning back.

  Miss Pink and Seale broke into startled cries. Suddenly all order was disrupted and perception was confined to images: wild eyes, horns, the lunging crash of heavy and potentially dangerous bodies. In the distance, along the bench, was a background similar to this unexpected foreground but the background was one rank of cows coming fast towards them while the foreground was individuals, but individuals progressively swept up in the stampede. The riders stopped shouting as their horses plunged sideways.

  Miss Pink’s ears, curiously selective, picked up an obscenity from Seale and she had one glimpse of the buckskin, all fat haunches from the rear, leaping timber with Seale flat on the mare’s withers. Then the chestnut was over the edge of the bench in the opposite direction and sliding feet first to water and rocks below while, behind and above, the cattle came thundering down Hell Roaring and one cow, too near the edge, rolled down beside them, and over and over, to land with a ghastly smash in the stream bed, the body poised for a moment before it fell doubled over the head. There was a sickening snap.

  By then the chestnut had reached the bottom, stumbled, dropped its hindquarters into a funnel of water and stood up, heaving and dripping, while Miss Pink, with both feet out of the stirrups, lay on his neck clutching mane and fur and groping for the reins.

  She clasped the horn and slid down onto boulders. She snatched at the dangling reins and glanced up, looking for more cows coming over the edge. Some paused, bellowing, on the skyline, then pushed back into the ruck. Clods broke away and rocks were spinning down the slope to the creek.

  She looked downstream and saw the herd plunging through the water. Then the chestnut screamed and tried to turn, his eyes rolling. Down the slope, upstream of them, came a cow—no, not a cow: a great furry form, descending in soft leaps and long slides to boulders so jumbled that the horse could not turn to face even this horror, only squeal and make to kick—and the grizzly was across the creek bed like a cat, boulder-hopping from rock to rock, and up the far bank and into the timber without one glance at horse or rider.

  He was gone. ‘You old fool,’ Miss Pink told the chestnut, half-stroking, half-clinging to the neck that was flecked with foam, looking around for a way of getting him out of there without his breaking a leg. ‘He never even looked at you—’ she began, and checked.

  The cows were all below now, the last of them thundering through a pool, and from directly above came a pounding of hooves—but no cries. She watched to see where the riders would cross the creek but no one appeared—and that made sense; they would gallop down the near side in order to get below the cows and turn them back.

  The chestnut could stand and he followed her out of the boulders without limping, but the cow was dead, its neck broken. She led the horse to the place where the cattle had forded and up the trampled bank. At the top she mounted and sat still for a moment, listening. On the far bank she could hear the cattle in the distance but nothing else.

  The trail was on her side of the creek. She walked until she was sure the horse was uninjured then she broke into a canter. She was safe, her horse was unscathed; now she was worried about Seale.

  At this point she heard the shot. The sound seemed to come from some distance downstream but it was impossible to tell exactly how far away it was in the thick timber. But there had been a shot; even above the pounding of her own hooves and the rush of wind in her ears, she knew that, and it was not the report of a pistol. This was a rifle shot.

  She slowed to a trot—and someone shouted her name. Through the tree trunks she saw Seale standing beside the buckskin and waving. She walked over. Seale was helping Archie Burg to his feet. He had lost his hat, he was gasping and cursing, but since his legs would hold him there couldn’t be much wrong.

  ‘I saw him whipped off by a tree,’ Seale said. ‘We were both galloping hard.’ Her rifle was still in its scabbard.

  ‘Who fired the shot?’ Miss Pink asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea. Probably someone trying to turn the cows.’

  ‘Who else is here beside Coons?’

  ‘Lots of people. At least three went by: too far away for me to see who they were.’

  ‘Three?’ Miss Pink repeated.

  ‘Bear,’ wheezed Burg, clutching his chest. ‘I musta hit the horn. Some mother of a bear come charging down the canyon. Where’s my horse?’

  ‘Make sure he hasn’t got a broken rib,’ Miss Pink shouted, and dug her heels into the chestnut’s flanks.

  Back on the trail she started to gallop but in a few minutes she saw a flash of white and a horse neighed. Coons’ pinto was riderless but as she slowed to come up to the animal and take its reins she saw Coons himself, apparently reclining beside the trail, propped on one elbow, watching her. There was a loose coil about his chest and the rest of the rope lay beside him in the grass.

  ‘Hi,’ he said weakly. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of people on this trail.’

 
‘He pulled you off?’

  ‘Someone pulled me off. I’m all right. Just hold my horse while I get my breath back.’

  ‘Who fired the shot?’

  ‘Dunno. I musta hit my head as I come off. I heard a shot downstream. Hey, you’re not going—’

  She was—and she was wondering how long this could go on: finding a trail of living people in Hell Roaring. At some point someone was going to be dead. And who was ahead, apart from the one whose identity she had already guessed?

  She saw them then: Mae Trotter sitting comfortably on a rock, her horse behind her, a rifle in her hands. Lying in front of her, clutching one arm with fingers through which the blood was streaming, was Lee Farrell. He said: ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone. Mae’s got all mixed up. She reckons—she’s accusing me of being involved in that hiker’s death. She’s took a shot at me!’

  Mae said: ‘He thinks he’s safe now you come. We’ve had the bit about he were just taking orders—’ she shifted the gun so that the barrel pointed at Farrell’s eyes, ‘—now he’s gonna tell me about Trotter. I’m just wondering can I blind him without the bullet going in his brain. Don’t think I can. Maybe I’ll just shoot him in one ankle, then the other, shatter the bones so they’ll never mend. So, tell us about my Jed, Lee.’

  Farrell stared at Miss Pink. ‘Tell her,’ he said. ‘You can convince her. I’m hurting bad.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Mae was full of jovial encouragement. ‘Tell her what you told me, tell her about the lady you was working for.’

  Farrell said: ‘You shoot me again and you’ll get life. There’s a witness now.’

  ‘What lady?’ Miss Pink asked.

  ‘I’m bleeding bad. I’ll need to get to a doctor while I still got the strength to ride. I’ll have to take your horse, ma’am.’

  Miss Pink dismounted and, walking behind him, eased his fingers from his arm. ‘Have you a knife?’ she asked Mae.

  He cringed away from her and the rifle followed the movement.

  ‘I’m going to cut your sleeve,’ Miss Pink said. ‘To find out how badly you’re wounded.’ She looked at Mae who, one-handed, unsheathed her knife. Careful not to get in the line of fire, Miss Pink took it, cut Farrell’s sleeve and examined the wound. He gasped as he felt the cool air on the flesh.

  Miss Pink said thoughtfully: ‘Yes, you’re losing a lot of blood.’ She went and stood beside the other woman. ‘We ought to get him to a doctor,’ she mused.

  Farrell burst out: ‘Well, stop the bleeding! Put a tourniquet on! Here, tear my shirt—Oh, Christ!’ The pain hit him as he tried to use both hands to pull his shirt out of his belt. He collapsed, white and suffering.

  ‘Just lie still,’ Miss Pink said. ‘If you faint we’ll never get you on a horse and then we’d have to leave you, and that grizzly’s around. Maybe you didn’t see the bear? That’s what stampeded the cows. The smell of hot blood will bring him back soon as the sun goes down.’

  Mae looked at Miss Pink then back at Farrell. ‘They starts on the guts first,’ she said. ‘Pull out the entrails like gutting a trout.’

  ‘Who was the lady?’ Miss Pink repeated.

  He looked at their eyes and then at the sky. The shadow of a tree stretched almost to his foot. Very shortly the sun would sink behind the forest and soon the predators would start to prowl. He said: ‘I was just taking orders, that’s all; they told me what they wanted and I supplied it.’ He paused, then went on: ‘The wife was the go-between; she’s a strong lady, Mildred.’

  ‘Go-between?’ Miss Pink repeated.

  ‘She took the skins to Spokane when she visited with her mother. Spokane’s between here and Seattle.’

  ‘Tara Osborn?’

  ‘Of course. She and George give the orders, and Mildred, she’d come back and tell me what were wanted: bear, eagle; whatever they needed I had to supply.’

  ‘Why eagles?’

  ‘Injuns’ll pay a fortune for bald eagles. They’re protected birds, see; there’s no way to get ’em except our way.’

  ‘Golden eagles too?’

  ‘Sometimes you can find a buyer as don’t know the difference between gold eagles’ wings and balds’. Just the wings only; the rest of the skin is trash.’

  ‘How long had you been supplying the Osborns?’

  ‘Not long. Coupla years. There’s a migration route through the Silvertips and the Osborns would take every bear I could get. They got rich on my pelts.’

  ‘Of course they did. How did Irving die?’

  ‘Look, I’m dying here! I’m bleeding to death. And the sun’s going. It’s getting cold.’

  ‘Irving Tye bled to death.’

  ‘He didn’t—that wasn’t my fault.’ Farrell’s eyes were shifty. ‘What happened: he come through the snow, firing his pistol, shouting, terrified of bears and being alone, and I’d started skinning my bear, see. Well, he were lost and frightened; I thought to hell with it, I’d leave the bear where it were, come back for it later. If he said I was skinning a bear I’d deny it—but he was mad; I didn’t think he’d ever notice what kind of carcass I had there. Anyway, he had to be got down, so we went to the tent for Shelley; he said he’d left her in her sleeping bag, and she wasn’t there. So he says a bear had come and drug her off and he was all for getting on the horses and galloping out of there and I said we gotta find Shelley, she could still be alive. But he were just thinking of himself and getting out and he said no, we was going down and he turns his pistol on me, and when I starts walking away to look for the girl, here he fires that Colt at me! He missed, so I hits him with the butt end of my rifle before he can fire the rest of the clip. If I hadn’t hit him, it woulda been my corpse up there in Sundance. It were an accident; I didn’t mean to hit hard, but you gotta remember there was a blizzard blowing and we was slipping and sliding about in the snow—and him waving that loaded Colt around. I’m telling you the truth.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’ Miss Pink asked Mae.

  ‘He didn’t have no time for all this. He told me it were a gang and a lady were running it. But there weren’t no lady up in Sundance. Besides, after he killed Tye he robbed the body.’

  ‘I didn’t say that!’ Farrell shouted.

  ‘But you did take the money,’ Miss Pink said. ‘Jed Trotter was on Wapiti, with Zack Coons. And Coons is alive and knows Jed wasn’t in Sundance.’

  He said quickly: ‘Coons got between me and a cow. I didn’t mean to pull him off his horse.’

  ‘So why’d you run off soon’s we appeared?’ Mae asked.

  ‘I was chasing after the cows!’

  Mae laughed. ‘You tried to stop a stampede by roping one cow at the side? There was no cows anyway; they was all on the far bank of the creek. He woulda killed Zack if we hadn’t come along, Billy and me. We was chasing Farrell, see.’

  ‘I didn’t hurt Zack Coons,’ he said. ‘And Tye was an accident. I never meant to kill him even though he were firing at me.’

  ‘Now tell us about Jed,’ Mae said softly.

  ‘No.’ Farrell was firm. ‘That was the Osborns. I gave Tara Tye’s billfold. She’s a very clever lady. I took it because it had his identification inside and—okay, maybe I was going to steal the money, but by the time I got back to the ranch I’d had time to think. I knew that billfold were dynamite, so I told Tara about it. She told me to give it her. She musta passed that money to Jed somehow. I reckon Tara were wanting to get rid of Mildred and me; we’d told her she wasn’t paying enough for them pelts and she’d said as how there were others willing to supply her at the same rates she’d been paying. I guess she was thinking of Jed, and that two thousand dollars she give to him against his promise to start supplying her with pelts.’

  ‘So how did he die?’ Mae asked conversationally.

  He shrugged and winced. ‘I don’t know nothing about that. I’m no killer. Coulda been a bear, coulda been Tara, but if George Osborn wanted Jed working for them, why would they kill him? Unless they thought better of it once
all the police started coming around. Maybe it got too hot for George and he decided to get out altogether, start operating in another area, but then Tara had given Jed the money, so Jed had to go. That coulda been the way of it.’

  The spirit went out of Mae and she lowered the rifle. ‘You believe him?’ she asked Miss Pink.

  Before the older woman could reply there was a sound of hooves and young Billy came riding up the trail leading a second horse. Mae looked at her son dully, but Miss Pink was watching Farrell and she saw the same naked terror in his eyes that had been there when he thought Mae was about to shatter his ankles. When Billy dismounted and came towards them it was not the boy the man watched but his own horse.

  Miss Pink gave a long sigh. The last piece of the puzzle was to hand, and whatever happened she must prevent Mae Trotter from seeing what it was.

  Chapter 17

  ‘This is a drive will be remembered for a long long time,’ Logan said. ‘By the police as well as us, because no sheriff is going to stop me getting my cows out of Hell Roaring tomorrow. Shouldn’t wonder if the grizzly remembers it too. It musta been a bad moment for that old bear when he come walking up the canyon ahead of the cows and meets Lee Farrell coming down.’

  ‘That’s typical,’ Seale said. ‘Mel caught a murderer and all Sim can think about is cows.’

  It was nine o’clock in the evening and they were back in the Logan kitchen. Doug Spears had returned with them, but the others had mostly gone to their own homes, at least those who were free to do so: Lenhart, the Trotters, old Wilbur and Flossie Schmitz. Archie Burg and Zack Coons were at Cow Camp where no doubt they were already weaving the stories that would entertain The Covered Wagon for weeks ahead. Throughout Prosper the telephone lines were buzzing with the news that Lee Farrell was in a cell at Sweetgrass with a gunshot wound and that Mildred was helping the police with their inquiries. As for the Osborns, they had left Prosper early that morning and the police were looking for them. A lot of people were interested in the Osborns, not least the Audubon Society. Seale suggested that, if four people were convicted for illegal killing, the reward might be quadrupled, which was an asset since it should be divided between Miss Pink and Mae Trotter.