by Jake Logan
“Me’n Slocum rode this way up to their camp.”
“Notice any new ones comin’ down?” Lindsey asked.
“No,” Slocum said. “Just ours and theirs. No new ones.”
The men were silent after that. Slocum led the way when they neared the old logging camp, but stopped before they rode up to the ridge above the bluffs.
“What’s up, John?”
“Smell it?” Slocum said.
All the men sniffed the air.
“Smells like smoke,” Lindsey said.
“Wood smoke,” from Voorhees.
“Too damned strong for a campfire,” Chesney said. “It’s all over the timber.”
The smell grew stronger as the posse climbed still higher. Slocum knew something was wrong. It just didn’t feel right.
Finally, he stopped again and turned to Jenner.
“You and the others wait here,” he said. “I’m going to ride up ahead, flank the camp, and see what made all that smoke.”
“All right,” Jenner said.
Voorhees and Lindsey rolled cigarettes and lit them. Chesney drank from his canteen. Jenner watched Slocum until he disappeared through the pines and spruce. He listened for any unusual sound.
Slocum approached the camp from the east. He had the idea of coming up behind the teepees he had seen the day before, use them for cover while he scouted the rest of the camp. When he caught sight of a log cabin, he dismounted. He drew his Winchester from its scabbard and ground-tied Ferro to a sapling. He patted his horse on its withers and started sneaking toward the camp.
The smell of wood smoke was strong in his nostrils. He saw something white in the timber near the camp and approached in a low crouch. The closer he got, the more he could see. Paint horses. All unsaddled. All lying dead in a little plot of grass surrounded by tall pines. His stomach turned over and churned.
He crept closer.
He expected to see Crow lodges standing in a circle. Instead, he saw ruins, smoldering ruins, with smoke still spewing from the burned lodge poles and scraps of teepee hides. He saw untouched sheepskins on large willow withes stacked against trees.
Beyond, one of the cabins had its door open, and a thin tendril of smoke rose from its tin chimney.
He stood up straight and looked at the burned lodges.
Skulls and partial skeletons lay strewn among the smoking ashes.
He felt bile rising up his throat and turned away, gulping in a draught of fresh air to keep from vomiting.
“Damn,” Slocum breathed.
He waited, looking at all the cabins he could see from his vantage point.
There seemed to be no signs of life. He saw no horses either.
The silence was long and deep.
He felt as if he were looking at a small ghost town. The camp was surely deserted.
What had happened?
He shook his head and walked around the destroyed lodges. There was blood on the ground, drying in the morning sun. Bones and skulls lay in profusion inside the rings where the lodge poles had stood. One skeletal arm reached for the sky, frozen there as if the dying Crow had fallen and struggled to rise when the flames turned him into a cinder.
Slocum swore under his breath.
He walked back to Ferro and untied him. He rode slowly back down to where he had left Jenner and the other men.
Jenner rode out to meet him.
“Well?” he asked.
Slocum didn’t say anything until they both reached the other men.
“You don’t have to worry about the Crow,” Slocum said. “They’re all dead. Burnt to a crisp in their lodges.”
“What?” Jenner exclaimed.
“Camp’s deserted,” Slocum said. “It looks like Valenti and his men murdered the Crow while they slept, burned down their teepees, and lit a shuck.”
“Shit fire,” Jenner said.
“Save matches,” Lindsey said without thinking.
The others murmured among themselves.
“Now what?” Voorhees asked as the men went silent.
Jenner looked at Slocum, a questioning look on his face.
“Yeah, John, what now?” he said.
“Valenti’s not there. So he has to be somewhere else. Any of you boys trackers?”
“We’ve all tracked game,” Chesney said. “I’ve hunted with these boys and with Dave.”
“Well, we have some tracking to do,” Slocum said.
“Maybe they haven’t gone,” Lindsey said. “Maybe they’re lyin’ in wait for us in the timber. Hell, they could pick us off like turtles on a log.”
“Easy enough to find out,” Slocum said. “I have a hunch they went atop that ridge where Dave and I were yesterday and headed toward Big Timber. Valenti wants to kidnap a couple of women and that’s where I figured he’d go.”
“I think you’re right, John,” Jenner said. “You lead, we’ll follow.”
“To make it easy on the rest of you, I’ll ride through the camp. You’ll be up on the ridge looking down. I’ll be the bait. If Valenti and his men are hiding out to bushwhack us, I’ll be the first to draw fire. Fair enough?”
“You don’t have to do that, Slocum,” Voorhees said.
“It’ll set your mind at ease. Those outlaws are plumb gone. I can feel it when I look at that camp. They’re long gone.”
“I hope you’re right,” Lindsey said.
Slocum fixed him with a hard look.
“We still have to find Valenti, and he won’t be easy to catch. Or to kill.”
“Why would he murder all those redskins?” Jenner asked.
“I guess,” Slocum said, “they weren’t useful to him anymore. He’s got something he wants to do and didn’t want a bunch of renegade Crow hanging on his shirttails.”
“Hummm, you might be right.”
“Let’s go,” Slocum said. “No telling how much of a headstart Valenti has on us, but those teepees are still smoking, so he can’t have been gone long.”
They rode up through the timber. Slocum showed them the camp and the burned Crow lodges. The men, including Jenner, stared at the ruins in disbelief. Lindsey vomited up his coffee. He leaned over from his saddle and just let the liquid erupt from his throat. Then he wiped his mouth.
“You know the way up there, Dave,” Slocum said. “I’ll ride through the camp and come up on the other side.”
“Be careful, John,” Jenner said.
Jays hopped around the smoldering teepees and squawked when Slocum rode slowly through the camp, past all the deserted cabins. He found a trail to the upper ridge on the other side and turned Ferro to climb up. At the foot of the bluffs, he stopped. Something caught his eye.
He rode over and looked down at the lifeless body of the other cougar hunter. There were rips in his jacket and shirt and dried blood on his neck. His body was starting to bloat and the smell of death was overpowering.
He rode away from the corpse and began to climb through the timber to the ridge.
The sun shot shafts of light through the pines and the smoke smell was not so bad when he joined the others.
“We found Valenti’s tracks,” Jenner said. “Jubal’s sorting them out. He’ll give us a head count in a minute.”
Slocum saw that all the men were examining the tracks. Jubal was walking around, counting in his head.
“Five horses,” he said.
“Five men,” Jenner said.
“And Bruno Valenti’s one of them,” Slocum said.
Jubal climbed back on his horse. The posse followed the tracks. Each man was wary and they moved slowly along the ridge.
Slocum knew that they could be riding into a trap, an ambush.
He was the wariest of all, for he had ridden that trail many times before.
24
Wicks and Cochran returned less than an hour after they had set out to find the Boulder and the town.
“How far to the river?” Valenti asked.
“’Bout two mile,” Cochran said. “As the crow flies.”
“How about ‘as the horse rides’?” Valenti said sarcastically.
“ ’Bout the same, Bruno.”
“That right, Harry?” Valenti asked.
Wicks nodded.
“Less than two miles, and a rugged ride down to Big Timber. Hard goin’. Lots of brush and the river roarin’ in your ears.”
“You see the town?” Valenti asked.
“We seen it,” Cochran said. “It’s about five miles downriver.”
“You didn’t ride in, though,” Valenti said.
Wicks and Cochran both shook their heads.
The others watched as Valenti walked around in a little circle, deep in thought.
Wicks and Cochran dismounted and joined the others. They sat down, leaned against sturdy pines, smoked and chewed tobacco. They were all in shade, but their bodies were dappled by shadows and streaks of sunlight creased their hats and flickered on their bearded chins.
Finally, Valenti walked back over to them.
“Hell, the town’s so close, ain’t no need to wait another day. Maybe we won’t have to sleep out in the open tonight. We can take that little old bank, grab the two sluts, and find a hotel up in Livingston or Bozeman.”
“That sounds right fine with me,” Crowley said. “I could use a little extry cash.”
The others guffawed at Crowley’s crack.
“We ain’t more’n an hour from town,” Valenti said. “It’s Friday and that’s when a lot of folks put money in the bank. We can take our time and hit the bank around noon. And we’ll have a couple of bitches to keep us company when we ride out of town.”
“That sounds like a good idee to me, Bruno,” Pettibone said. “I don’t much like it up here in this thin air.”
“Yeah, you like your air full of cigar smoke and glitter gal perfume,” Cochran said.
The others all laughed.
“Mount up, then,” Valenti said. “You all know where you’re supposed to go and what you’re supposed to do.”
“Yes, boss,” they all chorused.
“Cochran,” Valenti said, “you lead the way. Harry, you see he don’t stray none.”
Wicks nodded. He followed Cochran and they all rode off toward the Boulder River.
Valenti brought up the rear. He kept looking over his shoulder as if to see if they were being followed.
When Pettibone saw what he was doing, he asked Valenti point-blank.
“Why do you keep lookin’ over our backtrail, Bruno?”
“I dunno. I got a funny feelin’ is all.”
“What kind of funny feelin’?”
“Like maybe somebody’s on our trail. Maybe we didn’t kill all them Crow.”
“We kilt ’em all, boss.”
“Yeah, I know we did. I just . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence, but Pettibone felt uneasy after that.
Bruno was like a fox. He was smart and he had what he called “instincts.” He could smell trouble, and he could sense when somebody was watching or following him.
Pettibone started looking back over his shoulder, too, after that.
When they rode up on the Boulder, the sound blotted out all senses in the men. It was a roaring river at that altitude. It cascaded down over huge boulders and threw up spray filled with tiny rainbows.
Cochran turned to follow the river down toward Big Timber.
Valenti saw that the report was correct, it was rough going, with thick brush, a narrow game trail that petered out every once in a while, then branched off into dense timber.
It might take more than an hour to reach town, Valenti thought. They were riding single file and getting slapped in the face by tree limbs and leaves when the riders in the lead brushed past tall saplings. Down below, Valenti saw the white marred trunks of aspens and the river cutting through flat, rock-strewn ground. He stood up in the stirrups to see if he could see the town, but there was nothing but an old road and more rocks than he had ever seen in his life.
And they were a good quarter to a half hour from getting to the flat.
There, he thought, they would be out in the open.
He stopped looking over his shoulder because he was being whacked by the whip of slender limbs. He raised his arm to keep from being struck in the face. As it was, he had a welt on his forehead and one of his ears hurt as if it had been stung.
“I’ll be glad when we’re out of this shit,” Crowley said.
The other men grunted and forged ahead, hunching over their saddles and hanging on to their hats.
Sunlight speared the dancing waters of the Boulder. It no longer roared, but spoke in loud whispers, winding around huge boulders and sluicing through narrow miniature chasms, spewing blinding white light from its hurtling waters, churning up foam as thick as cream.
To Valenti, it was a long ride down to the flat, and something was itching in his mind, something he couldn’t scratch or comprehend.
When they reached the flat and all began to breathe easier, Valenti looked back up the canyon with its impenetrable brush and trees, the gold and silver of the river.
He saw nothing but what was natural to that part of the mountains.
But somewhere, deep in the recesses of his mind, he had a feeling that someone was following him.
And there was that infernal itch in his brain. The itch he could not reach or scratch.
25
Horace Booth, the bank manager, unlocked the outer doors from the inside. He turned around the sign that dangled in the window to read OPEN. The few people who were waiting outside entered the Big Timber Bank & Trust Co.
“Good morning, Mr. Booth,” a middle-aged woman said as she passed him.
He smiled and said, “Good morning to you, Mrs. Hutchins.”
“Such a lovely day, isn’t it?” she said as she walked to a teller’s window.
“Perfect,” he said, then walked to the door that led to the tellers’ cages and his office, pressed a lever to open it, passed through, shut it. The door clicked and was locked. Booth went to his office, where he sat down at his cherrywood desk and began reading the morning paper that had arrived from Billings by stage that morning. He looked at the New York Stock Exchange figures and began writing on a paper pad with a pen from his pseudo-marble inkwell.
Buggies pulled by horses passed in the street. Women with parasols and men in overalls went by the front windows, peering inside at the lines in front of the tellers’ windows. Joseph Grant was tending to Mrs. Hutchins, while Carey Newcomb, a prim, pinch-faced woman in her thirties, waited on another customer at the next cage.
Mrs. Adelaide Foreman, a middle-aged widow, sat at her desk outside Booth’s office and pecked on one of the new Underwoods recently purchased. She typed very slowly and each strike caused her to twitch with its loud, unfamiliar sound.
Valenti, Cochran, Pettibone, and Crowley rode past the bank and tried to peer through the front window. There were hitch rings and hitchrails in front of all the buildings. The bank was made of red brick and looked imposing next to the buildings made out of lumber. A hardware store and a mercantile store flanked the bank building.
“Looks okay,” Pettibone said.
“Yeah,” Valenti answered. He turned to talk to Crowley.
“You light down across the street at that flower shop,” he said. “Stay by your horse and look both ways. Anybody comes by you don’t like, shoot ’em. Especially anybody wearin’ a badge. You’ll be our lookout.”
“Sure, Bruno,” Crowley said and turned his horse to cross the street. He waited for a sulky to pass and then stopped in front of Emily’s Flower Shoppe and climbed out of the saddle.
“Cochran, you and me are going inside the bank. We’ll look things over for a couple of minutes, then you go to one of the tellers’ windows. I’ll get inside the cage and make the bank president grab money out of the safe. You ready?”
“I’m ready,” Cochran said.
“We’ll tie our horses up in front of Littlejohn’s Hardware Store. O
ne wrap of the reins.”
“Got it,” Cochran said.
Down the street, Pettibone and Wicks dismounted in front of the Big Timber Hotel. They wrapped their reins around the hitchrail and walked casually up the steps to the porch and entered the building.
They looked around the lobby. Pettibone waited as Wicks walked to the desk and spoke to the clerk.
Alfred Duggins was busy toting up the night’s receipts and marking the names and amounts in a small black-andred ledger. He looked up when the unimposing little man tapped on the counter.
“May I help you, sir?” Duggins asked, a forced smile on his face.
“I’m here to see Jasmine Lorraine,” Wicks said. “I have an appointment.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“Yes. I’m running a trifle late. If you would just direct me to her room.”
“I’ll see if she’s in,” Duggins said, knowing perfectly well that she and Lydia had not come down from their room.
Duggins made a pretext of examining the keys.
“Yes, I believe Mrs. Lorraine is in, but you’ll have to see her manager, Mr. Fenster. You’ll find him in the dining salon. The waiter will direct you to his table.”
“Thank you very much,” Wicks said. He looked at Pettibone and walked toward the hallway that led to the dining room.
Pettibone sat down in an overstuffed chair, where he could watch the dining room and the stairway to the second floor.
Duggins went back to his ledger.
He hadn’t even noticed the gunman who had come in with the small man asking to see Jasmine Lorraine.
It was a quiet morning and that was the way Duggins liked it.
26
Slocum looked at the moiled ground in the clearing. He saw cigarette papers, mangled and crushed into the dirt. He smelled urine, and there were horse droppings, piss holes in the dirt.
“They waited here for a time,” he told Jenner. “Then they rode west, from the looks of those tracks.”
“Hell, the Boulder’s less than two miles from here. I’ll bet that’s where they’re headed.”
Slocum mulled over what Jenner had told him.
“I’ll bet they’re heading for Big Timber,” Slocum said.
“Likely. If they don’t know the country, they could just follow the river right into town.”
