Outlaw Pass (9781101544785)

by West, Charles G.

  “We were afraid we’d lost you,” Bonnie said when Adam was across, her face lit up with a happy smile. “How bad is that?” she asked, pointing toward the dried blood on his face.

  “Nothin’ serious,” he said, “just slowed me down for a bit, or I’da been here sooner.” His gaze was fixed upon Finn. “How bad is he hurt?”

  “Well, it doesn’t look too good,” Bonnie said. “I haven’t had a chance to take a good look at it, but he thinks his shoulder is broken.”

  Adam frowned, hoping that was not the case, especially since it appeared to be his right shoulder, and there was no guarantee they were free of future attacks. “Well, let’s see what we can do for him. Then let’s get outta this hole you folks are in.” He started at once for the injured little man.

  “Damn piece of bad luck,” Finn complained as Adam knelt down to examine his wound. “But I sure am glad to see you. You showed up at the right time. That son of a bitch was fixin’ to shoot the three of us, and there wasn’t nothin’ we could do to stop him.”

  Bonnie and Lacey gathered around Finn to offer their help. “We weren’t able to help him with those bastards coming at us from both sides,” Bonnie said. “He’s lost a lot of blood,” she commented as she got a closer look at the hole in Finn’s shoulder.

  Adam nodded toward Jesse’s body a few feet away. “I see you got one of ’em.”

  “Bonnie shot him,” Finn replied, and told Adam how she had tricked the outlaw to drop his guard.

  “I’d have gotten the other one if I’d had one of those repeating rifles,” she said. Adam smiled and nodded his approval.

  Lacey, silent until that moment, spoke up then to confess, “I still haven’t fired my revolver. But I would have if he hadn’t stepped on my hand.”

  “You ladies did good,” Adam allowed. “Now let’s clean Finn’s wound as best we can, and then we’ll get him on his horse and get outta this hole—find a better place to camp while we decide what to do about gettin’ him fixed up.”

  After the women bound Finn’s shoulder, Adam helped him up in the saddle and tied the lead rope for his mules to the saddle. “Can you stay on that horse?” he asked, and Finn allowed that he damn sure would. Then Adam saw to the women, giving Lacey a lift onto her horse. He had to wait for a couple of minutes while Bonnie traded her Joslyn carbine for the seven-shot Spencer that Jesse had carried, as well as the cartridge belt that went with it. The party of fugitives filed up out of the gully. Adam picked out a jagged ridge in the distance and pointed it out to Bonnie. “You keep headin’ toward that ridge and I’ll catch up with you in a little bit. There are half a dozen horses tied somewhere behind that rise back there and I might as well go back and get ’em.” He figured that since they were already trailing a string of mules, they might as well drive some extra horses, too. In any case, he couldn’t leave them tied up.

  “There’s one horse in those trees up ahead,” Bonnie said. “We saw him ride by to get around us.”

  They crossed the Ruby River and continued on for almost a full day when it became apparent that Finn was in no condition to continue. To make matters worse, he began to lose blood again and soon he was unable to remain upright in the saddle. “We’re gonna have to find us a place to hole up for a while,” Adam told the women, “at least till Finn heals up enough to ride.” He looked toward the mountain range to their northwest, whose foothills they would have passed through on their way to reach the Madison. Rugged and thick with juniper, fir, and pine along the lower slopes, with many valleys and canyons formed by their higher treeless peaks, they looked to be the travelers’ best choice for a hard-to-find campsite.

  Bonnie studied his face as he gazed critically at the mountains. “You’re thinking about going back up in those mountains,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  “I am,” he replied.

  “Adam, we’ll freeze to death up in those mountains if the weather turns cold,” she said. “And it’s about the time of year when the first cold weather hits.”

  “I ain’t plannin’ on spendin’ the winter there,” he replied, “just till Finn gets a little better. There’s plenty of wood for fires, and there’s plenty of game for meat. He needs some rest and some fresh meat to build his blood back up. If we’re lucky, he’ll heal some in a few days and we can get on to hell away from here. If we don’t stop somewhere soon, we’re gonna drain the life right out of him.”

  “Can’t we just make camp right here by this stream?” Lacey asked as she gazed at the foreboding peaks. “If we’re just going to be here for a few days, this looks like a good spot.”

  Adam looked at the young girl as if explaining to a child. “I don’t wanna cause you to worry, Lacey, but it ain’t over with Ainsworth and Plummer. We beat those six that came after us back there on the Beaverhead, but there’ll be more to follow them. That’s why I pushed Finn so hard to stay in the saddle. I expect they’d like to hunt me down for killin’ some of their men, but there’s another prize that’s too big for them to pass up.” He motioned toward the mules. “And I’m afraid they ain’t likely to be real forgivin’ for any of us, includin’ you and Bonnie, especially when they find out the deputy sheriff is lyin’ back there dead.”

  “But you said you didn’t kill Bellou,” Lacey insisted. “They can’t blame you for that.”

  “There’s no way for them to know who shot him. They’ll say I did—or got him killed—same thing,” Adam said.

  “It don’t help none at all that he was the sheriff’s nephew,” Finn groaned.

  “Adam’s right, Lacey,” Bonnie interjected. “They’ll be looking for us with everybody they can get on a horse. We’ve got to find someplace to hide.” She looked at Finn, who was bent over on his horse’s neck, unable to sit up any longer, oblivious of the conversation. “Ol’ Albert Ainsworth would love to get his hands on those sacks, all right.” She looked back at Adam and grinned wide. “Let’s get up in those hills and get busy making a camp.”

  Chapter 9

  Henry Plummer stood staring at the telegram in his hand, a wire that had taken two days to reach him. “Damn it,” he cursed, “a man on horseback could have made it here in that length of time.” He glared at Joe French, as if his deputy was somehow responsible for the lateness of the wire’s arrival. “All Ainsworth knows is that they left Bannack and headed north. Hell, they could be anywhere. Ainsworth sent six men to track them, and he’s pretty sure they might be trying to sneak out with a helluva big shipment of gold, too big to let slip out of our hands.” He paused to consider where they could be heading, and decided upon two obvious choices, since they were apparently intent upon avoiding the road between Bannack and Virginia City. “They’re either planning to keep riding north to Butte or cut back east and head for Three Forks—doesn’t make sense to go anywhere else.”

  “No, sir,” French commented, “unless they’re thinkin’ to cross some mighty rugged mountains.”

  Still deep in thought, Plummer was oblivious of French’s comment. “Joe,” he ordered, “go find Bailey Cruz and tell him I want to see him right now.” French turned immediately to follow Plummer’s instructions. “Tell him he’s gonna need to get his boys together and ready to ride.”

  “Yes, sir,” French replied. Then remembering, he paused before saying, “Ben Caldwell’s wife is waitin’ out in the office to see you.”

  Plummer frowned, but said nothing and followed French out of the cells to the office out front. He waited until French had closed the door behind him before greeting the woman. “Good day, Mrs. Caldwell. What can I do for you?”

  “Good morning, Sheriff, or is it Marshal now?” Lois Caldwell asked with a bright smile for the town’s law enforcement officer. Taller than average, but not towering, Plummer cut a dashing figure among the ladies of Virginia City. With a brutish forehead framed by thick coal black hair, and cold penetrating eyes, he was a handsome man, who seemed to be a pure guardian of the town’s merchants. The fact that he was also a quick and accurate m
an with a gun was more commonly known by the legion of robbers and murderers he secretly led.

  Answering her question with a gracious smile of his own, he said, “Either one will do. How may I help you?”

  “Ben was going to come talk to you about it, but he’s busy parceling a new shipment of flour that just arrived, so I came instead. We were wondering if there was something that could be done to cut down on the wild drinking at the saloon two doors down from our store. Last night we heard gunshots, and when we opened the store this morning, we found part of our front window broken.”

  Plummer fashioned a frown of deep concern for Mrs. Caldwell’s benefit and offered his sympathy. “I’m right disturbed to hear that. I’ll certainly look into it right away to find the guilty party. I’ll try to get your window paid for. Thanks for stopping by to tell me. Sometimes it seems like my whole job calls for keeping the drunks under control, so citizens like you and Ben don’t have to worry about their safety.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” Lois said. “We appreciate your help.”

  “Not at all,” Plummer replied. “That’s what I’m here for.” He walked over to the door and held it open for her, returning her smile as she breezed through. As soon as the door was closed, his thoughts returned to the possibility of a sizable amount of gold dust slipping through his fingers.

  About an hour after Lois Caldwell left the sheriff’s office, Joe French returned with Bailey Cruz, a stocky, squarely built brute with long black hair reaching his shoulders. “You wanted to see me?” Cruz asked.

  Plummer wasted no time in getting to the problem at hand. “Yeah,” he replied. “I want you to round up some of your men and find somebody for me.” He went on to explain who they would be searching for and which way they had gone. Then he cautioned Cruz that one of the men he would be hunting was the suspected hired gun who had already accounted for more than a half dozen deaths since he hit town. “I’m thinking it might be a good idea to send for Briscoe, since this fellow is supposed to be such a grizzly bear.”

  His suggestion brought a frown to the otherwise bored face of Bailey Cruz. “Briscoe?” he questioned. “That man spooks me. He’s such a damn loner, anyhow, I ain’t sure he’ll wanna ride with me and my boys. Besides, accordin’ to what you’re sayin’, we’re goin’ after two men and two women. I don’t see why we need no high-priced hired gun to get that job done.”

  Plummer considered Cruz’s remark for a moment before deciding. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. Briscoe was a mysterious sort of assassin, hard to figure out, and not always easy to find. He could always call him in later if Cruz couldn’t stop the fugitives. “All right, what I want you to do is take the road to Three Forks and search all up and down the Madison River in case those people cut across that way.”

  Cruz looked skeptical. “That’s a lot of ground to cover. It ain’t gonna be easy to catch somebody cuttin’ across when we don’t even know where they’re comin’ from.”

  “You might not catch them at all,” Plummer said. “You’re just to make sure in case that posse Ainsworth sent after them doesn’t catch up to them.”

  Cruz shrugged. “You’re the boss. Me and the boys’ll scout out that whole country. ’Pears to me that it’s gonna take a helluva lotta luck to bump into ’em, though.”

  “There’s enough gold with them to make us all pretty happy, so it’s in everybody’s interest to find them,” Plummer said, although he, like Ainsworth, had no idea how much gold Finn had amassed.

  “Maybe Lady Luck will be lookin’ our way,” Cruz said as he headed for the door. “I’ll take John Red Blanket with us.” He wouldn’t presume to tell Plummer his business, but he was still of the opinion that his was a fool’s mission. Riding out in a world of wilderness, hoping you’ll bump into four people heading God knows where, he thought. Must be one helluva lot of gold those folks are carrying .

  After Cruz had gone, Plummer opened a cabinet behind his desk and weighed out ten dollars’ worth of gold dust from a pouch kept there. He handed the dust to Joe French. “Here, take this over to Ben Caldwell’s store and give it to them to fix their window. Tell ’em we investigated it and got the money from the drunk that shot it out.” It was important to retain the trust of the businesspeople of Alder Gulch, especially in recent times when Plummer had heard rumors of some dissatisfaction with the lack of curtailing outlaw activity on the trails between the claims of the miners.

  Bailey Cruz found Tom Seeger in O’Grady’s Place, where the gruff professional road agent was in the process of finishing off a breakfast of pork chops and potatoes, washed down with a mug of beer. A cheerless man of constant dyspeptic nature, Seeger dabbled with his food as if reluctant to ingest it. He glanced up to frown at Cruz when he walked in the door.

  “We got a job to do,” Cruz said as he pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. Seeger’s only response was a bored grunt as he continued to gnaw on the bone from his pork chop. “Where’s John Red Blanket?” Cruz asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Seeger replied. “I ain’t seen him since last night. Ask O’Grady.”

  O’Grady happened to come in the door from the back room in time to hear Seeger’s remark. “Ask me what?” he asked.

  “I’m lookin’ for John Red Blanket,” Cruz said. “You seen him?”

  “He’s sleepin’ off a drunk in my storeroom,” O’Grady answered. “And I wish to hell you’d get him outta there, before he wakes up and pukes all over the floor, like he did the last time you fellers were here.” O’Grady’s Place had become the informal base of operations for Bailey Cruz’s gang of cutthroats when they were in town. O’Grady was not particularly happy with the arrangement, but he had let it develop because of the amount of money they spent in his establishment. Now it had progressed to the point where he was afraid to complain about their patronage, even though it had cost him business from the peaceful citizens of Virginia City.

  “I’ll go drag his sorry ass outta there,” Cruz said. “We need him for a little job we’ve got to do for Plummer.”

  Before Cruz could embellish, O’Grady turned on his heel and promptly headed for the bar. “Whatever it is, I don’t wanna know about it,” he said, figuring that the less he knew about their activities, the better. This was especially important in the face of recent vigilante retaliation on some of the road agents that had been identified. It worried him that he knew as much as he did, just from conversations he had overheard in his saloon, and he wondered how long it would be before he might be visited by the vigilantes.

  “What are you worried about, O’Grady?” Seeger called after him. “You ain’t got no cause to fret unless you start talkin’ in your sleep.”

  “It ain’t none of my business what my customers are doin’,” O’Grady said as he walked around behind the bar.

  “Long as you keep it that way,” Cruz said, “you’ll be all right.” Back to the business at hand, he instructed Seeger, “We’re goin’ on a little huntin’ trip that oughta tickle you. Plummer wants us to see if we can head off a couple of fellers that run off from Bannack with a full load of gold dust. One of ’em’s supposed to be some kinda sharpshootin’ hired gun, brought in by the miners up there. There’s just the two of ’em, and they got two women with ’em. You know one of ’em, that ol’ whore that Plummer run outta town a while back—Bonnie somebody.”

  “I swear,” Seeger grunted. “Bonnie, I remember her. She’s the one they said gutted Jack Chatwick, but nobody could prove it.”

  “That’s the one,” Cruz said. “Most folks thought the world was better off without Jack, anyway. He rode a fine horse, though—that little blue roan. Joe French didn’t waste no time claimin’ that horse.”

  Seeger paused to suck a sizable piece of meat from his front teeth, which he took a moment to examine before popping it back in his mouth. “That hired gun,” he asked, “is he the same jasper that had a run-in with Rafe Tolbert and Frank Fancher a few days back—broke ol’ Fancher’s nose?”


  They both paused to recall. “Mighta been. I don’t know.” Then Cruz got back to business. “Get through suckin’ on that bone and ride out to the camp and get Buster and Rawhide. And don’t dawdle. We got to get movin’.”

  “What the hell you need Buster for?” Seeger wanted to know. “He’s about as useless as tits on a boar.”

  “We might need some heavy liftin’,” Cruz said, “just in case.” The oxlike man was not endowed with a great deal of brains, but he was as strong as a mule, and had no better sense than to do whatever he was told to do. The only person with the patience to deal with him was Rawhide, a lean, saddle-hardened man who was tough as the name he went by. The name, however, came from the rawhide whip he always carried, which he was ready to apply with the slightest provocation. He had somehow adopted the simpleminded brute over the course of a couple of years and Buster followed him around like a puppy—a puppy capable of breaking a man’s back if Rawhide gave the word. It was for this reason that some of the men, like Seeger, were not always happy with Buster along on a job. But Cruz liked having the hulking man with the child’s brain with him. He had laughingly commented to Joe French that it was like having a grizzly in a harness, as long as Rawhide was there to make him dance. “Meet me back at the stable,” Cruz told Seeger, “and we’ll get started while there’s still plenty of daylight. I’ll go get John Red Blanket.”

  As O’Grady had said, Red Blanket was in the storeroom. Cruz found him sprawled on his belly across a couple of flour sacks, dead to the world. O’Grady’s Chinese cook had placed a bucket under the sleeping man’s head. “John!” Cruz shouted loud enough to be heard in the barroom out front, but evidently not loud enough to penetrate the deep alcohol-induced slumber of the Crow Indian. “John, damn it! Get up from there!” Cruz yelled at the unresponsive body. He looked around him, searching for something to hasten the procedure, and spying a bucket with a mop standing next to the wall, he picked it up and emptied it over Red Blanket’s head, mop and all. It was effective in accomplishing the awakening of the drunken Indian, and the sudden intrusion of light through the half-opened eyelids was enough to signal the same rumblings deep inside his belly as the last time. He made an attempt to get up, but was still on hands and knees atop the flour sacks when the contents of the night before rushed to evacuate his stomach, leaving a putrid waste on the storeroom floor close beside the empty bucket.