“She’s not my wife,” he blurted. “She’s just ridin’ with us.”
“I beg your pardon,” Nathan said, then stood aside and motioned for them to come in. He was playing the part of the perfect host, but Adam knew he would take his grief to a private place later, when he could be alone.
Bonnie beamed her thanks for the invitation and headed for the door, but Finn held back, reluctant to take his eyes off his packs. Adam assured him that his mules, and the load on their backs, would be fine. So Finn followed Bonnie into the house, still with some reluctance.
When they had gone into the house, Mose stepped up beside Adam and whispered, “Where’d you pick up the horses? What’s in them bags on them mules?”
“Somethin’ Finn don’t wanna lose,” Adam replied. “We’d best unload ’em and lock ’em in the tack room.”
“I knew it!” Mose said. “I knew right off there was pay dirt in them bags—had to be. Is part of it yours?”
“Nope, but we’d best protect it like it was.”
After the livestock were taken care of, Adam went back to the house to join his friends in a quick supper that Pearl, Nathan’s half-Shoshoni cook, prepared. Mose would eat with Doc and the rest of the hands in the bunkhouse when the crew returned for supper. Ordinarily, Nathan and Adam would have eaten with the men in the bunkhouse as well.
During their supper, his guests related their hazardous journey to reach Nathan’s ranch, and the fact that Adam had been kind enough to see them through. The details of the many killings, and Adam’s finding of the mutilated body of his brother, were left to Adam and his father after the others had retired for the night—Bonnie to the front bedroom, and Finn to the barn to sleep in the tack room. Adam assured him that his packs would be safe there, but he understood why Finn was reluctant to have them out of his sight.
Father and son talked late into the night, and Adam tried to explain why he had to go back to Alder Gulch. “I know you say it ain’t my fault about Jake, but I won’t ever feel like I’ve done him justice if I let that one murderin’ bastard get away with what he done—not only for Jake, but for the girl Jake was plannin’ to bring here to live.”
Finally, when Nathan was convinced that nothing he could say was going to change Adam’s mind, he gave up trying. “What about the folks you brought home with you?” Nathan asked.
“I’m hopin’ it’ll be all right with you if they stay here for a spell till they decide what they’re gonna do.”
“Sure,” Nathan said. “We’ve got plenty of room. They’re welcome to stay.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully, then said, “If that Finn has as much gold dust as you say, I expect he won’t be here long before he heads to Butte or Helena, or someplace else where he can spend it.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised myself,” Adam agreed. “And I doubt if Bonnie will let him out of her sight.”
Nathan smiled. Then his expression turned serious again. “When are you plannin’ to go back?”
“Tomorrow—don’t see any sense in waitin’. Cruz might decide to take off somewhere.”
His father nodded solemnly as he studied his son’s face. Adam had been a man since he was fourteen, and Nathan had trusted him to do the right thing. No one but Adam was qualified to say if one more killing was justified. Nathan only hoped it would be enough to eliminate the guilt his son harbored and bring him peace of mind. “Adam,” he finally said, “I’ve lost one son already. I can’t afford to lose another one. You be sure you come back home.”
“I will, Pa.”
“I noticed you rode in on a new horse,” Mose called out as he came out to the corral where Adam was examining Bucky’s left front hoof. “What happened to Brownie?” Adam explained that he had been forced to put Brownie down after he broke his leg in a badger hole. “That’un you rode back looks a lot like Bucky,” Mose said.
“I reckon that’s one of the reasons I picked him,” Adam said as he slipped a bridle on the bay gelding and led him to the gate. “Looks like I was worried about Bucky’s hoof for nothin’. It looks all right now.”
“Your pa said you was headin’ out again,” Mose said. He pulled the bar on the gate and held it open for him. “You takin’ a packhorse?”
“Nope. I ain’t takin’ nothin’ but what I can carry on Bucky. I don’t plan to be gone long.”
Mose’s demeanor turned to serious for a moment. “Damn it, boy. Don’t go gettin’ yourself killed. Your pa may act like the toughest son of a bitch north of the Yellowstone, but I don’t see how he could hold up if somethin’ happens to you. You know, maybe it ain’t up to you to right all the wrongs that happen in this territory.”
“Only the ones close to the family,” Adam responded as he pulled his saddle off the top pole of the corral and approached the bay. Bucky sidestepped a couple of times before he stood still to accept the saddle.
“He ain’t been rode since you been gone,” Doc said as he walked out of the barn and came over to join them.
“I can see that,” Adam remarked. “He always gets a little spooked when he ain’t seen a saddle in a while.”
He was almost ready to leave when Finn and Bonnie walked down from the house to see him off. “I wanna thank you for seein’ me through,” Finn said. “You’re walkin’ right into the devil’s den if you go in Virginia City lookin’ for Cruz. I don’t suppose you’d reconsider?”
“If I have one more person tell me . . . ,” Adam started, then stopped. “I’ll be comin’ back.”
“I meant what I said before we left Bannack,” Finn said, lowering his voice so only Adam could hear. “I’ll be payin’ you for actin’ as my guide and protection.”
Adam smiled at the earnest little man. “I told you, Finn, you don’t need to pay me. I was coming here anyway.” He stepped up in the saddle when Finn started to protest. “We’ll talk about it when I get back.”
Bonnie stepped up quickly when Finn moved away to give Bucky room to turn, and motioned for Adam to bend low so that she could tell him something. “You take care of yourself, big boy,” she whispered. She paused a moment before saying, “Thank you for not telling your father I was a prostitute.” It had been a while since anyone had treated her like a lady.
“I don’t see any reason to bring it up,” he told her. She favored him with a grateful smile and stepped back from his stirrup. He wheeled the big bay and prepared to give him his heels. Looking back toward the house, he saw his father step out on the porch and stand to watch him depart. Adam saluted with a touch of his hat brim with one finger. His father acknowledged the gesture with a single nod of his head, then turned and went back inside. Once Adam set something in his mind, there was very little that could dissuade him. I guess he got it from me, his father thought, because I’d do the same thing in his shoes.
“What the hell do you mean, showing up here with your tail between your legs, and that old man and his gold wandering out there somewhere in the mountains? Hell, you just let a fortune in gold ride right outta the territory to who knows where.”
Cruz cringed from the stinging rebuke from Henry Plummer, his swagger properly deflated by Plummer’s wrath. He did his best to defend his defeat at the hands of one old miner and an alleged hired gun hand. “That feller with old Finn ain’t human—” he started, but Plummer cut him off.
“He ain’t human?” Plummer roared. “Are you trying to tell me he’s a ghost or something?” He slammed his hand down hard on the desk, making no attempt to control his anger. “Five of you went after him and four of you don’t come back? Obviously, I picked the wrong five stumblebums to do a simple job of taking care of one man with a rifle.” His patience gone, he yelled, “Get out of my office before I decide to shoot you myself!”
“Yessir,” Cruz replied, humbly, his bull-like shoulders slumping as a result of the vocal whipping. He wasted little time going out the door, knowing that the only reason he didn’t get a bullet in the back was due to the fact that it was broad daylight and he was at Plummer’s o
ffice on Wallace Street. At the hitching rail in front of the building, he met Joe French, just then dismounting.
“Heard you was back,” French said. “Heard you came back by yourself. What the hell happened?”
Cruz had already had his fill of explaining why he failed to carry out Plummer’s orders. “Ran into some bad luck,” was all he offered.
French cocked his head to one side and grinned. “Big feller, totin’ a Henry rifle?” The smile vanished as suddenly as it had appeared and French became serious. “I’ve knowed you for a good while, Cruz, and that’s the only reason I’m tellin’ you this. You’d best make yourself scarce around Virginia City. Bannack, too. You know Plummer don’t have much use for anybody who don’t do the job for him. I’m just tellin’ you, that’s all.”
Cruz was not in a mood to appreciate the advice. “Is that so? Anybody comin’ after me is gonna regret it.” He glowered at French defiantly for a long moment before turning toward his horse.
“Like I said,” French remarked, “I was just offerin’ you some friendly advice.” He turned then and went inside the sheriff’s office.
“Where’ve you been?” Plummer demanded gruffly. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “I think Cruz’s worn out his usefulness to us. I want you to take care of him. I can’t tolerate a man working for me who ain’t got the spine to do a simple killing. Maybe it’ll send a message to everybody else that they’d damn sure be ready to do whatever I tell them.” French shrugged indifferently and started toward the door, but Plummer stopped him. “Do it out of town somewhere. No sense in getting the people in town more fodder to chew on.” He was thinking about some recent developments that had given him cause for serious concern. The vigilantes had gotten a tip-off on the whereabouts of eight members of his network of road agents and arrested five of them—caught them in their camp. Instead of bringing them back to Virginia City or Bannack, where Plummer’s judges could have found them not guilty, they took them instead to trial in Nevada City. It was the first real threat to Plummer’s control over the concept of law and order. Especially of concern to him was the fact that these people had acted without making their intention known to him. He had joined the vigilance committee when it was first proposed, so as to know what their plans were, and thus be able to warn his gang members. The fact that it was obvious to at least some members of the vigilantes not to inform the entire committee of arrests like this recent one led him to believe that it might be approaching the time when he should be moving on to another town. He was reluctant to leave. He had established himself well here, and it had made him a very wealthy and powerful man.
“When did you get back in town?” O’Grady asked when Cruz walked in the front door of his saloon. “Where’s the rest of your friends?” The sight of the brooding bully was not a welcome one to O’Grady. He had hoped he had seen the last of Cruz and his troublesome gang.
“In hell by now, I expect,” Cruz answered. “Gimme a beer.”
“Somethin’ happen to ’em?”
“I guess you could say that,” Cruz replied, and paused while O’Grady set a glass of beer before him. He tipped the glass back and drained half of it before continuing. “Somebody happened to ’em would be better said.”
O’Grady was curious, but as usual, deemed it better not to know what Cruz and his friends had been up to, so he tried to steer the conversation away from the subject. “You stayin’ in town long, or just passin’ through?”
“Hell no,” Cruz replied. “I ain’t stay in’ around this damn town. I’m on my way now as soon as I have me another glass of beer. Folks are more friendly in Bannack.” He said it before he took time to think about it, so he warned O’Grady, “I expect you’d best keep that under your hat. Ain’t nobody’s business where I’m goin’. You catch my drift?”
“Oh, hell yeah, Cruz. You know me,” O’Grady was quick to reply.
“Right,” Cruz grunted, and fixed O’Grady with a cold eye. “I know you.” He finished off his second glass of beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and turned to leave without any gesture of paying.
“Beer’s on the house,” O’Grady called after him with a hint of sarcasm. Although annoyed by the somber brute’s indifference to an obligation to pay for his beer, he was far too afraid to make a demand.
O’Grady wiped the bar where Cruz’s glass had left a ring, then plunged the glass in a bucket of water behind the counter and set it on a towel to dry. No more than fifteen minutes later, he turned to see Joe French come in the front door. “How do, Joe?”
“I’m lookin’ for Bailey Cruz,” Joe said, “thought he mighta come in here.”
“You just missed him,” O’Grady replied. “Couldn’ta been more’n a quarter of an hour, maybe less.”
“He say where he was goin’?”
O’Grady hesitated for a brief moment, thinking about Cruz’s warning, but Joe French was probably one of the few friends Cruz had. “I think he might be headin’ for Bannack, but I don’t know for sure.”
“Bannack, huh? I expect he might be at that.” French turned and left without further comment. One of Cruz’s favorite hangouts was the Miner’s Friend in Bannack, a saloon near the end of the short main street, with several rooms upstairs to let. It was a good bet he could be found there if French failed to overtake him on the road to Bannack.
Feeling the familiar weight of his master on his back, Bucky settled into a comfortable gait that would be easy for him to maintain for as long as Adam felt reasonable. The partners knew each other well. Retracing his previous journey to find Jake, he reached the camp where he had met Rob Hawkins and Jim Highsmith, making the ride in three days, a full half day better than the first time. Remembering the two as pleasant men to share a camp with, he found it ironic that he was now sitting by the fire sipping his coffee, knowing that he had killed them both. They chose the path to follow, he reminded himself.
From this camp, it was no more than a half day’s ride to Virginia City, but he decided not to start out early the next morning, thinking it better to arrive after dark for a couple of reasons. It was a pretty good bet that there might be a lot of Plummer’s men looking for him, so it made sense to hit town under the cover of darkness. And, too, it was more than likely that Cruz might be easier to find, in O’Grady’s, or one of the other saloons, at night.
With a cautious eye to either side of him, Adam rode along Wallace Street at a slow walk. As usual, Virginia City was noisy after dark, with saloons and bawdy houses in full swing. There appeared to be no one in the sheriff’s office when he passed it on his way toward the end of the street and O’Grady’s saloon. No doubt Plummer’s deputy was making the rounds of the town, so Adam warned himself to be extra careful. There was no way he could identify a deputy from any other man on the crowded boardwalk unless the deputy wore a badge. He was counting on the possibility that no one of the sheriff’s deputies could really identify him as well. If events occurred as he hoped, he would find Cruz, take care of business, and be on his way before Plummer could react. Being the realist that he was, however, he doubted things would happen in that orderly fashion.
Unlike the other saloons in town, O’Grady’s seemed to be doing a less than lively business when he reined the bay up by the hitching rail and dismounted. He drew his rifle from the saddle scabbard, took a quick look up and down the street, then stepped up on the boardwalk. Inside, he paused to look the room over, his gaze skipping from table to table, searching for someone that might match the description Seeger had given him, but none fit the picture he carried in his mind. His gaze shifted to the bar, and he recognized the bartender from the time before when he had come in for a drink and had an altercation with two of Plummer’s boys.
When he walked up to the bar, O’Grady glanced up and immediately recognized him. He started to say so, but decided to hold his tongue. He had overheard enough of the talk between Cruz and Seeger to know that Adam had been targeted for death, along with the confiscation of Micha
el Finn’s fortune. He was not sure what the unexpected presence of the big man with the Henry rifle meant, but he had a feeling it promised trouble for someone. “What’s your pleasure?” O’Grady managed to ask.
“You remember me?” Adam asked.
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“I’m lookin’ for a fellow named Cruz. Is he in here?”
“No, sir, he ain’t,” O’Grady replied. That was all he intended to say, but reflecting for a moment on how much he resented Cruz’s presence in his bar, and the effect it had been upon his patronage with the town’s honest citizens, he changed his mind. “He was here, but I think he’s on his way to Bannack. I might oughta tell you that one of the sheriff’s deputies, Joe French, is lookin’ for him, too.”
Adam could not be sure. “You ain’t just tellin’ me that to send me off on a wild-goose chase, are you?”
“Mister—” O’Grady looked up at the formidable figure towering above him and answered frankly, “I’m afraid to lie to you, and that’s the God’s honest truth. Cruz’s been gone since this afternoon.”
“Much obliged,” Adam said, then promptly left the saloon. Outside, he replaced his rifle in the scabbard and stepped up in the saddle. Turning Bucky’s head toward the road to Bannack, he decided not to take the shortcut, as he did the last time, still remembering Brownie’s untimely demise caused by a badger hole. There was a three-quarter moon hanging over the hills surrounding the gulch, so he figured he wouldn’t wait for daylight to get started.
Chapter 14
Close to the time Adam started out along the moonlit road to Bannack, a lone rider thirty miles west of Virginia City guided his horse cautiously up a wooded ravine toward a soft glow near the top of a bald ridge. When within about fifty yards of the campfire, Joe French dismounted and tied his horse to a pine limb, planning to go the rest of the way on foot. The trees that lined the ravine provided ample cover, although the darkness might have been protection enough, but French was not inclined to take any chances on being seen. Never one to complicate things, he sought only a clear line of sight where he could let his rifle take care of the business he was about. Cruz would be scratched off the list. He had no particularly hard feelings toward Cruz. The man was an especially crude brute, but French had never had any trouble getting along with him. He’d even spent a few nights drinking with Cruz and his late companion, Tom Seeger. French was just carrying out his boss’s orders.
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