Bounty Hunter (9781101611975)

by Yenne, Bill

  “Yes, ma’am, I would be a liar to say that it is not a bother to me as well. Tonight worries me even more. Rascals like that are like the cowardly in the animal world who get their kills by attacking the unsuspecting under cover of darkness.”

  “I am certainly aware of that particular vexation,” she said, referencing without describing her overnight wolf kill. She thought of mentioning it but decided such a tale would seem so improbable that he would take it as fabricated bragging, and it would therefore undermine the image of usefulness she hoped to cultivate in their mutual endeavor.

  “I expect we’ll have no shortage of vexations tonight, Miss Ransdell,” he replied.

  * * *

  AFTERNOONS DON’T LAST LONG IN THE MONTHS WHEN THE cold winds begin to blow, and the clouds through which the patches of blue had appeared were starting to take on the golden hue that would precede the dreaded twilight.

  Below and ahead of them now lay broad, open country stretching down toward the confluence of Sixteen Mile Creek and the Missouri. They were now less than a day’s ride from their final destination, and Hannah could see the sense of relief in the bounty hunter’s eyes.

  Her eyes followed his, looking back into the Big Horn Mountains and the canyon of Sixteen Mile Creek, as though they were putting a monster behind them.

  “I half expected that your friends wouldn’t let us get this far,” he said, glancing at the surrounding hillsides. “Your description of them as ‘cesspool-bred thugs’ suggests to me that you’re just writing them off as fools. I would not have thought that of them, given that their ambush showed a certain amount of foresight in the planning.”

  “I did not mean to suggest that they were not wily in their conniving,” Hannah clarified, “only that they were scum of the earth.”

  “Scum or not, I hadn’t taken them for fools,” Cole replied. “If the tables were turned, I would have thought it foolish to let us get this far.”

  “I thought you said that you didn’t figure on them attacking us until after nightfall,” she said.

  “Didn’t think it more than a fifty-fifty chance, so I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “You didn’t want to worry me?”

  “No. Didn’t much want to worry me either, I ’spect. We still got the most worrying time ahead of us. After nightfall will be the time when a man can slink up out of the darkness and not be seen coming on a distant ridge beyond rifle range.”

  “I don’t appreciate your keeping things from me, Mr. Cole. I thought that we were in this together.

  “We have both taken fire from these men, and we are both being hunted by them. I cannot abide you withholding information from me because you find me too fragile to take the worry.”

  “I don’t much care for you keeping me in the dark either, Miss Ransdell,” the bounty hunter replied with unexpected sharpness.

  “What exactly do you mean by that?” Hannah replied defensively.

  “I mean that Isham Ransdell’s daughter shows up out of nowhere this morning with a chip on her shoulder as big as all outdoors . . . and tells me all coy-like that she’s here to ‘see justice done’ and nothing more. If this ain’t something to make a man wonder, I don’t know what is.”

  “I am not being coy, Mr. Cole, and I am not lying when I say that I am here to see that these men get back to Gallatin City alive. That is the only reason I am here. If I hurt your feelings by making you think there’s a chip on my shoulder, that’s just too bad. I’m certainly not here to shelter your feelings.”

  She could feel her face growing red with indignation.

  “It would be a lot easier on my feelings to ride with a less ornery companion,” he said with a smile, reacting to her suddenly flushed complexion.

  “Nor am I here to brighten your day, Mr. Cole, but to do my part in seeing that our common purpose is accomplished.”

  “Then you can tell me the whole truth about what’s going on, Miss Ransdell?” he said, the smile gone from his face. “I suspect there is some truth in what you’ve said, but I suspect it to be half truth, and half truth is just the same as half untruth.”

  “I have not lied to you, Mr. Cole.”

  “Then tell me the part that’s a half lie by its not being told.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean the part about you being Isham Ransdell’s daughter . . . and him being absent from the room when those shootings took place.”

  Hannah felt as though the jaws of the wolf had seized her windpipe.

  “What . . . makes you think . . . ?” she said, gasping and grasping for words as the tears welled up in her eyes.

  Her father!

  “Guess I touched a nerve,” the bounty hunter said. “I can tell by your manner that we both know that the crazy notion that those people were shot over some trifle wrong that Blaine did to Gideon Porter is just a load of bull, and I will not apologize for strong language, because it serves my point.”

  “Which is?”

  “That I figured out a long way back down the trail that Porter and his bunch got paid to do the shooting. And on his deathbed, Milton Waller told me so. I assume your daddy got my letter from Fort Benton?”

  “Yes . . . There was nothing about . . .”

  “Of course there wasn’t,” the bounty hunter said pointedly. “Would not have told your father what Waller said under any circumstance. But his words stuck with me since that night . . . and men don’t tell lies on their deathbeds.”

  “What . . . ?” Hannah started to ask, fearing the worst.

  “His words included something about a ‘railroad,’ and that there were four partners . . . three had to die . . . and only one could survive. We both know who among the four was not there.”

  Partners. Her father. The railroad again!

  In the back of her mind, Hannah had hoped some evidence might emerge to the contrary of her worst fears, but instead, there was only this cold, hard confirmation, and also now the fact that the bounty hunter knew.

  She turned her head, frantically wiping the tears from her cheek with a gloved hand.

  “Once again, Miss Ransdell, why did your father send you out here?”

  “Once again, Mr. Cole,” she gulped between sobs as she reached for her handkerchief. “He did not send me.”

  “I guess what I’ve just said comes as a pretty big surprise then,” he said, taunting her, watching her wipe her face.

  “No, Mr. Cole,” she said, blowing her nose. “It does not come as a surprise. I too have seen evidence of my father’s hand in this tragedy.”

  “Oh . . .”

  It was his turn to be startled.

  “Are you too blind to see that this is why I came all the way out here to make sure that those two men riding up ahead of us . . . hopefully hearing little of our conversation . . . that those two, especially Gideon Porter, did not die before they could point their fingers . . .”

  “Point their fingers at your father?”

  “At the truth, Mr. Cole. Point them at the truth . . . whatever it is . . . whatever terrible, sordid facts surround it. I cannot live or work with my father without knowing the truth.”

  “The last time we crossed paths, you thought your father not being there was just a fortunate accident. What was . . . ?”

  “What changed was the damned railroad . . . and I will not apologize to you, Mr. Cole, for strong language,” Hannah said, regaining her composure. “The railroad will be coming to Gallatin City, and it will need land owned jointly by the four partners . . . whose arrangement has them inheriting the shares of partners who die. I’ve uncovered the same facts which you uncovered at the bedside of Milton Waller.”

  “I see . . .”

  “What I discovered was suspicious, but open to interpretations. It is, as the lawyers call
it, ‘circumstantial’ evidence,” Hannah admitted. “However, when I saw my father’s cursed ‘right-hand man,’ Mr. Edward J. Olson, speaking to Lyle Blake and Joe Clark, within hours of their coming to kill you, this was the evidence which made the other evidence damning evidence.”

  “I reckon . . .” the bounty hunter said, “I reckon we both had the same reason for wanting those two to live long enough to see Gallatin City.”

  “I reckon that’s so, Mr. Cole,” Hannah said. “Now, are you going to tell me what you have learned from speaking with Gideon Porter? As I assume you have spoken to him on this matter.”

  “He has been even less willing to discuss it than you were earlier today,” Cole explained. “Though he does insist that he has friends in high places who won’t let him hang.”

  “Who? What friends?”

  “Didn’t say,” the bounty hunter replied with a shrug.

  “You didn’t press him?” Hannah asked with surprise. “Why didn’t you press him to tell you? Weren’t you the least bit curious?”

  “You mean why did I not beat it out of him?”

  “Well . . .”

  “It’s not my job. My job is to bring him in. It doesn’t matter what he tells me. It doesn’t matter what I say to anyone about what he told me. It matters what he says when he rides into Gallatin City. What matters is the look on their faces when he comes face-to-face with . . .”

  “My father,” Hannah said, completing his sentence.

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  HANNAH RANSDELL FELT A DEEP AND BROODING SENSE OF foreboding as the sun sank into the clouds on the horizon and darkness rapidly enveloped what was left of the day. To have had her worst fears confirmed by the suppositions of the bounty hunter and the deathbed words of Milton Waller caused her great anguish and despair.

  A person who has lost a parent often dreads the loss of the other, but to lose him to the gallows would cast a debilitating shadow across her own life.

  Still, she had to know the truth. As much as she dreaded it and wanted to prevent the pain, she had to see the look in her father’s eyes when he looked into the eyes of Gideon Porter.

  Of more immediate concern were Blake and Clark and what the bounty hunter had put into perspective about the probability that they would strike before the sun rose again.

  As they crested the last rise before the Sixteen Mile Creek trail dropped into the valley of the Missouri River, she breathed a sigh of relief to see a distant stagecoach making its way from Gallatin City to the territorial capital in Helena. It seemed to symbolize their passage from wilderness to civilization.

  When they reached the broad plain through which the river flowed, the bounty hunter announced that he was going to look for a campsite.

  “What about near the riverbank, where there’s water,” she suggested. “We’d also be near the road. If there are other people on the wagon road, they would be less likely to ambush us . . . wouldn’t they?”

  “Being near to water is useful, but unnecessary,” he said. “Our canteens will hold enough water to get us through one night.”

  “Then where?”

  “High ground,” he said, studying the hills that lay in the direction of Gallatin City. “I want to be where they got to show themselves to get close . . . if we have enough moon to cast light.”

  “It was pretty bright in the middle of the night where I was last night,” she said. “But I don’t like the looks of those clouds.”

  “We’ll have to take what we get,” he said, staring at the same gathering clouds and at the diminishing patches of deep blue twilight sky, touched by the first pin-pricks of distant stars.

  * * *

  AS THE BOUNTY HUNTER CHAINED HIM TO HIS TREE, Gideon Porter made a crude comment to Hannah, but Jimmy Goode just stared at her.

  Noting that Cole had chained the two men to widely separated trees, Hannah decided to approach Goode with the purpose of getting the information that Cole had failed to elicit from Porter. She knew him, as many people in Gallatin City did, as the easily manipulated oaf who lived in the shadow of the Porter boys and strived for their esteem and respect.

  “What have you got yourself mixed up in, Jimmy?” Hannah asked in a sympathetic voice, which she crafted so as to be inaudible to Porter.

  “Nothing,” he said, not looking at her.

  “Don’t you go talkin’ to that goddamn hussy, Jimmy Goode!” Porter shouted from the opposite side of the camp. “Don’t say a goddamn thing or I’ll kick your fool ass from hell to kingdom come.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Hannah said softly, trying to play a sympathetic card against Porter’s threat. “He can’t hurt you. He’s chained to a tree.”

  “Not forever he ain’t,” Goode said in a low voice.

  “What happened to your arm, Jimmy?” she asked sympathetically, sitting down on a log near where he was.

  “Got shot.”

  “By who?”

  “The bounty hunter . . . the goddamn bounty hunter.”

  “Why?” Hannah asked, startled. “What did you do to him?”

  “Done got away.”

  “You escaped?”

  “Yes, I did,” Jimmy answered, looking at Hannah for the first time, and seeing her sympathetic expression.

  “He shot you for escaping?”

  “Yeah . . . sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Well there was sort of this homesteader . . . a whole family of ’em.”

  “Did you hurt the homesteaders?”

  “No, ma’am . . . not one bit.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I took the boy . . .”

  “You took a boy? How old was this boy?”

  “You know . . . eight or ten or something? Goode answered, his voice expressing that it had never occurred to him how old the boy might be, and that he found it difficult to guess.

  “You took an eight-year-old boy? Whatever for?”

  “I dunno . . . Guess I kind of took him . . . well, like a hostage.”

  “You took a hostage? Did you have a gun?”

  “Yeah . . . but I swear I did not shoot the boy . . . I only wanted to flush him out when he went to hidin’.”

  “The bounty hunter shot you for trying to scare the boy, then?”

  “No, I guess he shot me for trying to shoot the boy’s pappy.”

  “Did you?”

  “I tried, but I got hit in the elbow.”

  Hannah just shook her head. What had he expected for having kidnapped a child and having tried to shoot the boy’s father? Really? At the same time, she was pleased to hear that the bounty hunter had not shot the man merely for trying to escape.

  “How did Gideon Porter get you mixed up in all this?” Hannah asked, continuing to feign sympathy.

  “I was part of the gang,” Goode said proudly.

  “I know, but this shooting of people . . . at the Blaine home . . . ? That doesn’t sound like you. Like you were saying, you are not one to shoot people.”

  “Got paid,” he said. “Done it ’cause I done got paid.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty bucks.”

  “Who paid you?”

  “Gideon.”

  “Who paid him?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Do you know . . . ?”

  “I don’t know nothing . . . and I wish I didn’t even know that,” he said sadly. “Miss Ransdell, I really wish none of this would have happened.”

  “I can tell,” she said with an empathetic glance at his limp forearm.

  “Did Gideon say anything about my father?”

  “Just that he wasn’t there that night . . . course I knew that ’cause I was there.”

&nb
sp; “Anything else?”

  “Not that I can remember, but I have trouble remembering sometimes . . . you know?”

  “Yes, Jimmy, everybody’s got trouble remembering sometimes.”

  “Miss Ransdell?” Goode asked after a pause. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are we gonna hang? Gideon says we ain’t . . . but I figure since those folks got killed that we are.”

  “What makes Gideon think you won’t be hanged?”

  “Says he’s got friends . . . friends who ain’t gonna let it happen.”

  “What friends? . . . Who?”

  “Gideon never tells me nothing.”

  Hannah smiled and stood up.

  She walked away, regarding the man with a mixture of pity and contempt. What was it that made this man tick? Perhaps he didn’t tick at all. Perhaps he was, as everyone had always said, really just “good-for-nothing Jimmy Goode.”

  * * *

  “SOUP?” THE BOUNTY HUNTER ASKED, HANDING HER A CUP.

  “Thank you . . . much obliged,” she said, noticing herself smiling at the man. “Aren’t you having any?”

  “I just did,” he replied. “This is coffee.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I could smell it. But it’s kind of late for coffee, isn’t it, Mr. Cole?”

  “I don’t plan on much sleep tonight . . . or rather I don’t plan on any sleep tonight.”

  “It’s almost night now,” she said, looking out at the landscape.

  He had picked a campsite on the side of a hill that was separated from other hills by at least half a mile.

  “You can see almost everything from up here,” she said. “You can see everything but the far side of this hill.”

  “From up there, I can see everything,” he said, nodding to the top of their hill, which rose another fifty feet. “And I guess it’s time for me to get to work.”

  “You’ll be cold up there,” she said, regretting her forwardness in expressing concern for his welfare.

  “It’ll keep me awake,” he said, before he disappeared around a boulder into the nearly complete darkness.

  Chapter 27

  BLADEN COLE SURVEYED THE SCENE FROM HIS CROW’S NEST high above the campsite. He watched the surrounding terrain as the moonlight brightened and faded with the passing clouds. Even when the moon slipped away, though, the contrast between the sheet of snow and anyone who walked on it was still stark. Cole saw a few deer at a considerable distance and was pleased by how well they stood out against the snow, even in the cloudy diffusion of the moonlight.