“I know he did an awful thing in the Sawatch House, Jack. What an uncouth character he is, really. I just don’t think he knows any better. Probably not raised right at all, if he was raised by anyone besides bobcats or jackals, that is. But I did hate to see him thrown in jail.
“Don’t you think that in light of his assisting the stagecoach, you might set him free and maybe just fine him or something? Possibly bar him from the hotel? He proved to be a decent sort—you know, deep down—and I’m sure he now realizes the error of his ways. I think he mentioned something about needing a job. Maybe you could have him work for free until he’s paid off that beautiful rug he ruined.”
Goodthunder studied her. Raven shrank a little, wondering if she’d stepped too far. If she’d blown her cover because of Bear Haskell, she’d bury a stiletto in the big idiot’s belly and twist it.
She was relieved when Goodthunder said, “Hmmm—work off the price of the rug . . . You know, Raven, that might be a very practical idea. Certainly, he’s no use to anyone in jail, and he’s only costing me and my men extra work, and the taxpayers of Wendigo are footing the bill to feed him. Hmmm. Yes.”
“Oh, would you, Jack? I’m sure he’s learned his lesson by now. Sometimes the bigger they are, the thicker their heads are, and, sadly”—she knit her brows together—“all the emptier. It takes a good tap to get their attention.”
“So true. Yes, Raven, I will see to it that he’s set free. I can’t turn him loose today, though. That wouldn’t be setting a very good example. But first thing tomorrow, I’ll set him free and even help him look for a job. With a build like his, I’m sure he’d be right handy with an ax and spitting maul. I’ll get him a job splitting wood for the Sawatch. They go through a lot of firewood over there.”
“Thank you, Jack.” Raven rose up on her tiptoes and planted a discreet kiss on the sheriff’s cheek.
Goodthunder beamed. The tips of his ears were mottled red. “No, thank you, Raven.”
She glanced down. His pants were swollen over his crotch.
“Until seven,” she said with a wink, and strode away.
14
When Haskell heard Raven leave the sheriff’s office, he gave a sigh of relief.
He’d heard the rise and fall of her conversation with Goodthunder, but because of his distance from the main office and the heavy cell-block door, the tone of their chatter was all he’d heard. Oh, a few muffled words now and then and Goodthunder’s nervous laughter along with Raven’s ridiculous titters.
But that was all.
That was enough.
Then there was the soft scuffing of footsteps and finally, mercifully, the closing of Goodthunder’s door.
Now Haskell heard what he assumed to be the girl’s boots on the porch and then their quick tapping on the steps. They thudded softly along the street paralleling the cell block. Bear rose from his cot with a groan and stepped over to where he could see out the barred window of the cell to his right.
It was her, all right. Striding away. As she passed the window, Raven glanced fleetingly over her shoulder. He thought he detected a snide look quirking those ripe, red, silky lips of hers that he could still imagine wrapped snugly around his cock—he remembered that they had been as warm and wet and supple as her snatch—and a wild desire flooded him on the same wave of nettling annoyance, jealousy, and inexplicable anger.
As he watched her stride away, her pretty ass working beautifully behind her pleated orange skirt, he heard himself mutter, “Two-timin’ little bitch.”
But then he caught himself.
“You fuckin’ fool.” He chuckled, reaching up to rake his hair straight back behind his tender head. “She ain’t your woman. She’s your partner. And judging by that look, she might very well have saved your ass again, you moron.”
He’d been able to tell from the tone of her voice that she’d been playing Goodthunder like a mandolin.
The heat of embarrassment touched his ears and aggravated the throbbing misery radiating from the back of his head. She’d saved his life once on the train. If she’d done it again here, he might have to blow his own brains out. He didn’t think he could take the shame of being rescued twice by a woman. Especially one who thought herself so much his better.
More important, one who’d ordered him out of her room at gunpoint, naked, after he’d fucked the living daylights out of her.
He cursed aloud. “Ma an’ Pa Haskell really did raise a cork-headed moron, didn’t they?”
The man lying on a cot three cells down from Haskell groaned and rolled onto his back. He was a big man, and the cot creaked loudly, dangerously, beneath his considerable weight. He had long red-blond hair hanging down from around his bald pate and a tangled beard that fell nearly to the middle of his belly. He wore a patch over his left eye. Beneath the patch was a long, grisly, white-knotted scar.
The bearded gent dropped his hobnailed miner’s boots to the floor, sitting up and leaning forward. He rested his elbows on his knees and massaged his temples with hands the size of dinner plates, the fingernails dark-crusted with grit. A couple were purple, likely smashed with hammers.
Either a miner or a freighter, possibly a blacksmith. At least, a man who worked with his hands.
He moved his head from side to side, moaning, “Mutter, bitte helft mir.”
Haskell had heard enough German down in Texas to know that the big miner was pleading with his mother for help.
“Put in a good word for me, too, will ya, pal?” Haskell said, sagging onto the edge of his own cot.
The German merely moaned again, holding his head in his hands. He must have made one hell of a night of it. Or maybe two or three nights. Show Haskell the miner or mule skinner who didn’t routinely paint the town red, and he’d show you a dead man.
Glancing over at the cell-block door, Bear saw no sign of movement inside the main office—no sounds now whatsoever.
Had she arranged to get him out of here or what?
Bear was beginning to feel less chagrined and more hopeful. Wouldn’t the joke be on him if he found himself stuck in here for one or two weeks, while Raven alone tracked down Malcolm Briar? She would have one very pretty report to send to Allan Pinkerton. As for Haskell himself, he’d probably head for Mexico and change his name.
There was a soft rustling sound at the far end of the cell block. He watched something small and furry crawl up out of a small hole between the base of the wall and the floor. The cat gave a meow and came sauntering into the cell back there, looking around, tail high.
The German glanced over his shoulder and said, “Gustav! Did you come looking for Papa, you precious old cat?”
He had a heavy accent, but he spoke near-perfect English.
The cat squeezed through the bars of the last cell on the right side of the walkway and hurried over to the big German’s cell, meowing. It slinked through the bars in the German’s cell door, and the man scooped the cat off the floor.
He cradled the animal in his arms and grinned through the several barred walls between him and Haskell. “In many ways, a better companion than a woman.”
Haskell said, “You got that right.” He watched the German pat the cat, which he could hear purring from twenty yards away, and then said, “What mine you work for?”
“I’m between jobs,” the German said. “The last mine I worked for was the North Star.” His eyes were slanted, giving him a Nordic look. It was hard to tell what age he was. His nose was hooked and tobacco-brown. The scar looked relatively fresh, maybe caused by a carelessly swung pick. A leather suspender hung off his sloping left shoulder.
“Way up high. Highest mine in the Sawatch,” he added.
“How do they get the ore down?” Haskell asked, feigning ignorance.
“Mule and wagon.” The German shook his head gravely. “Them are steep trails up there. Narrow trails.”
He motioned with his hand and arm to indicate a serpentine route. “Up that high, you need good men, good wagons, and even better mules.”
He shook his head again and then lowered it slightly as the cat climbed onto his shoulder. “No one wants to take wagons and mules up that high. Those who do”—he grinned again and rubbed his thumb and index finger together—“they come back flush. Don’t live long, but they fuck the good whores and drink the good whiskey for as long as they have.”
“You don’t say,” Haskell said, leaning back, raising his left knee, and hooking the heel of his left boot over the edge of his cot. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could find an acquaintance of mine, would you? He’s a freighter.”
“I know plenty of freighters. They are crazy men, especially those who haul ore down from the North Star. Ach du lieber!”
“Yeah, this one’s crazy, all right.” Haskell chuckled. “His name’s Briar. Malcolm Briar.”
The big German looked at him sharply. Storm clouds scudded across his eyes. Even the cat, standing on the man’s left shoulder with its front paws on the top of the man’s bald head, turned to look dubiously at the cell block’s only other prisoner.
The big German lifted his right hand and ran his index finger across his throat. Then he pressed that finger to his lips and shook his head darkly.
When a key rattled in the lock of the cell-block door, he jerked with a start. The door scraped open with a squawk of its heavy hinges, and the deputy Goodthunder had called Bodeen came in with a loosely rolled quirley drooping from between his thick lips, beneath a soup-strainer, tobacco-stained mustache, whose ends hung down beneath his chin.
The stoop-shouldered deputy strolled down the walkway between the cells, boots scraping the rough wood puncheons, spurs clinking loudly. He had a pendulous lower lip. One of his eyes didn’t open all the way. He turned that eye on Haskell, curled his right nostril, and then continued on to the big German’s cell.
“Sheriff said to let you out, Schwartz. Makes more sense to have you breakin’ rock somewhere than for me to be feedin’ ya and emptyin’ your thunder mug. I see your girlfriend found ya, eh?” The deputy chuckled.
“Gustav is a boy,” Schwartz said, heaving himself a little unsteadily to his boots. The cat was standing on his shoulders, back bowed. The German turned so the deputy could see Gustav’s face. “Can’t you tell?”
“Oh, your boyfriend, huh? I always knew you rock breakers was a bunch of fuckin’ nancy-boys. Too long alone in the dark, I reckon, huh?” Bodeen pulled the cell door wide and jerked his chin toward the main office. “Go on, haul your freight out of here. You can leave the cat if you want. We got enough mice in here to keep him fat an’ happy.”
“Gustav doesn’t like mice,” the German said, donning his floppy-brimmed leather hat and grabbing a ragged denim jacket off his cot. “He likes blood sausage.”
Jacket tossed over one shoulder, the cat in the crook of his right arm, Schwartz walked out of the cell and trudged on up the walkway toward the open cell-block door. He gave Haskell one more dark look of warning through his lone light-brown eye and kept walking.
“What about me?” Haskell said, glowering at the deputy from his cot, knee still raised.
“You’ll be gettin’ out after dark,” Bodeen said, and then grunted a chuckle and spit on the floor as he tramped past the Pinkerton’s cell and back into the main office.
Bodeen closed and locked the cell-block door, and it was just Haskell in the cell block now, wondering why in the hell Goodthunder wasn’t going to let him out until after dark.
So no one would know he’d freed the man who’d ruined Miss O’Brien’s precious rug and beat up her bouncers? Maybe. Haskell hoped that was the case, but he didn’t like the faintly menacing glint he’d seen in Bodeen’s eye as the deputy had tramped past his cell.
Haskell spent the next several hours like a caged panther, restlessly pacing his cell, compulsively testing the door hinges and all the bars, looking for a possible escape route.
There was none.
Maybe when someone brought him food.
But no food came, and by the time the cell-block door scraped and squawked open, his belly was thoroughly convinced that his throat had been cut.
“Hey, how ’bout a little supper?” he railed at the two men striding toward him, one holding a dim lantern that slid the night’s inky shadows back and forth across the cell block. “What the hell kind of a slipshod outfit you fellas runnin’ here?”
“Shut up, asshole,” Bodeen snarled. He handed the lantern to Slake and poked a set of handcuffs through the door. “Put those on. Behind your back. Make ’em tight, or you’ll get another brainin’ like the one you got over at the Sawatch.”
Haskell glared at the deputy through the door. Rage burned like a wildfire through him. He closed his large hands so tightly around the bars of the door that he heard the iron give a low, mewling groan.
During the war, such anger had come in handy. Here tonight, he had to hold it in check, or he’d only embroil himself in more dunderheaded trouble like that which had landed him in Goodthunder’s jail in the first place.
The deputy looked at Bear’s huge hands. His eye that was always half-closed twitched a little wider, and he raised the sawed-off double-barreled shotgun he was holding in his right hand while he continued to thrust the cuffs through the door with the other one.
The other deputy, Slake, stood behind Bodeen, aiming a carbine at Haskell’s belly. He’d hung the lantern from the carbine’s barrel. The low rumble of his voice echoed around the cavernous cell block. “Take ’em, or you’ll rot here, amigo. No food or water. And you’ll piss on the floor.”
“Where you takin’ me?”
“Someone has asked for the honor of your company this evenin’,” Bodeen said.
Behind him, Slake snickered.
“My company, eh?”
Haskell shuttled his wary gaze between the two deputies. Finally, because he had no choice, he took the cuffs. He closed one ring around his right wrist, thrust both hands behind his back, and closed the other steel bracelet around his other wrist with a tooth-gnashing, grinding click.
His guts writhed with dread and dire helplessness. Now, cuffed as he was, he was more or less a calf for the slaughter.
“They good and tight?” Bodeen asked.
“They’re tight.”
“Better be,” Bodeen said. “’Cause I’ll be checkin’.”
He opened the door, and while Slake held his carbine on Haskell, Bodeen checked the cuffs. Satisfied that they were tight, the deputies led Bear down the cell-block walkway and into the main office, which was empty, a single lamp burning on Goodthunder’s desk.
“Where’s the sheriff this evenin’?” Haskell asked.
“Ol’ Goodthunder’s got him a dinner date with a new lady friend,” Slake said with a snicker in which Haskell detected a note of envy. “A well-built lady friend. I seen her earlier. Did you see her, Jake?”
“I seen her,” Bodeen assured his partner. “Never felt my cock get so hard so quick. You think ol’ Goodthunder’s got her sittin’ on his face yet?”
The deputies laughed as they prodded Haskell out the front door.
The same jealousy he’d heard in Bodeen’s voice caused the snakes in Bear’s belly to writhe a hair more violently than they already were. Raven was sitting down to a meal with Goodthunder. Haskell knew she had ulterior motives in spending the night with the sheriff—she was likely probing him for information that might lead to her and Haskell locating Malcolm Briar—but that only slightly tempered the jealousy he found himself at the mercy of.
Stupid as the compulsion was, he did not like thinking of Raven with another man. It was an instinctual impulse, one that was totally foreign to him. He hadn’t felt jealousy over a girl since way back before the war, when he was maybe twelve years old,
back in West Texas. It had him beleaguered, and he didn’t like feeling beleaguered any more than he enjoyed feeling jealous, especially over a snooty little bitch he didn’t much care for.
But Christ, what a piece of ass . . .
Haskell looked around the town. Oil pots flared in front of the open business establishments, including saloons and beer tents. Torches bracketed to posts sparked and cast wan spheres of copper light, revealing the men and women milling along both sides of the street, most reeling drunkenly.
There was much shouting and laughter, and two small bands seemed to be competing for attention in separate watering holes, one to Haskell’s right, another up the street a ways on his left. Down a near side street, an off-key piano was getting a good workout.
Haskell glanced at the Sawatch House, which loomed a block away on his left and on the main street’s opposite side. The hotel-saloon was like a giant sparking meteor standing coolly, grandly aloof on its own lot, appearing all the grander for the humble structures around it, including a tent in front of which a drummer in a gaudy suit was hawking wares of some sort from a long table.
Haskell’s rented black gelding, saddled and bridled, stood at the hitch rack fronting the sheriff’s office porch. Two other saddled mounts stood to each side of the black.
“Get mounted,” Bodeen said, giving Haskell a hard shove that sent the big man stumbling down the porch steps, seething and straining futilely against the cuffs grinding into his wrists behind his back.
“That’s gonna be kinda hard to do, you son of a bitch.”
“You can manage it,” Slake said, closing the sheriff’s office door. “Use the stock trough.”
Just then, a rider walking a horse slowly along the street from the east to the west caught Haskell’s attention. The rider wore a fur coat against the night’s mountain chill. He was a tall, lean hombre with a long, hawkish face whose severe planes were dramatically relieved by the shadows being tossed around by the various fires.
High and Wild Page 11
