The High Rocks

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’ll get paid, Ezra,” Henry told Wilson. “I know the boy’s parents.”

  Bart Goddard came loping into the room, head down, barrel torso tilted forward, nearly bowling over the barber, who was on his way out. The face beneath the mop of dry white hair was crimson. He took in the damage with a sweeping glance. “Who’s gonna pay for all this?” he demanded.

  Henry shrugged.The fate of his six-shooter had put him in a sour mood. “You’ll have to talk to Ira about that after he sobers up.” He caught my eye. “Give me a hand getting him over to the jail.”

  That wasn’t as easy as it sounded. The half-breed couldn’t have weighed over a hundred and twenty, but it was all dead weight and raising him to his feet was the most physical labor I’d engaged in for some time. When at last we had him supported between us, Goddard glowered at him from beneath the heavy mantel of his brows.

  “There ain’t enough wampum in this old man’s whole tribe to take care of what he done today,” he said.

  Henry said something to him that for reasons of delicacy I will leave out of this narrative, and together we trundled our burden across the street to the jail.

  The warmth put out by the little iron stove hissing away in a corner of the sheriff’s office was a welcome change from the damp chill of the street. It was still September, and already the first icy blasts of winter were making their presence felt at that high altitude. Old-timers whose sole purpose in life was to predict the weather were laying odds that the region was in for yet another severe winter, perhaps the harshest yet.

  The jailhouse was the second that had been built on that spot since Staghorn′s founding fifty years before. The first, a log affair with a sod roof and no foundation, had perished within two years of its construction when a prisoner set fire to his mattress during an escape attempt and the flames spread to the walls, eventually engulfing the entire structure and killing the arsonist. In its place rose a stone building with steel bars on the windows and thick wooden shutters with gun ports in the centers which could be swung shut and locked in the event of a siege from outside. The office, a rectangular enclosure separated from the four cells in back by a flyblown wall, was furnished with two straight chairs and a desk with a scaly finish created by too many layers of cheap varnish. Its top was a litter of dog-eared wanted circulars and telegram blanks, many of which were soiled with coffee rings. A chipped enamel coffee pot, once white, now blackened at the base and up one side, gurgled insistently atop the stove and boiled over, its contents sizzling upon the iron stove top. The smell this made was harsher than burning hides but not as acrid as spent gunpowder. In any case, it was not an appetizing aroma.

  We went through a thick oaken door at the back of the office and deposited Ira Longbow in the cell nearest the door. The one opposite was already occupied. I studied the face and form of the man stretched out on the cot through the bars and checked them against the description on the wanted circular I’d been carrying in my hip pocket. Short, squat, black hair thinning, prominent jaw, incongruous button of a nose permanently reddened by a lifetime spent chugging cheap whiskey. Pointed ears. Mean little eyes. Forearms as big around as my calves. It was a perfect match. Leslie Brainard, the Helena teamster who had strangled his wife to death in an argument over money.

  “That him?” asked Henry.

  I nodded. “I’ll grab a good night’s rest over at the Castle and pick him up in the morning. I’ve earned that much.”

  “Just so you get him the hell out of my jail. He’s the most unaccommodating prisoner I’ve ever had.”

  “What’s this situation with the Flatheads?” I asked him, when the connecting door was shut and we were back in the office.

  He unbuckled his gun belt and draped it over a wooden peg beside the front door. “It’s Bear Anderson again,” he said. “Every time he takes a scalp, Two Sisters uses it as an excuse to go on another raid. Usually he confines himself to horse-thieving and looting. Doc Bernstein and his family were the first white casualties in years. It’s coming to a head fast. The army’s trying to get the Flatheads to sign a treaty, but they aren’t going to get anywhere as long as Anderson’s still up there.”

  “Which means they won’t ever,” I said.

  Henry eyed me curiously. “You know him, don’t you? I forgot.”

  “I grew up with him. I’ll bet Bear and I explored every cave and crag in those mountains as kids. To get him down, they’re going to have to find him first. Then they’ve got to take him. That’s a job I wouldn’t hand out to my worst enemy.”

  “Funny you should say that.”

  The voice wasn’t Henry’s. It was thin as a razor and marked by a high Ozark twang, something like a bullet ricocheting off a rock. My back was toward the front door. I turned.

  The voice’s owner was as thin as the voice itself, and short enough to walk under my outstretched arm without ducking. Even so, the outsized hat he wore, together with a yellow ankle-length duster, made him seem even smaller than he was. His face was ordinary except for a crossed right eye that even when it was looking straight at you appeared to be focused on something beyond your shoulder. His nose was prominent but not gross, his hair, what I could see of it beneath the broad brim of his sweat-darkened hat, the color of wet sand and long enough in back to brush his collar. Sandy whiskers, some twelve or thirteen days old, blurred the lines of his chin and emaciated cheeks.

  He had two men with him, who looked enough alike and had enough years separating them to be father and son. Both wore their hair long, the old man’s dirty gray compared to the younger man’s brown, and their clothes, neutral in color beneath a skin of dust, were trail-worn and frayed at the cuffs, collars, knees and seats. Their eyes were small and close-set above huge hooked noses, beneath which their faces fell away to scrawny necks with hardly any chins to interrupt the sweeping lines. They were cleanshaven, or had been until about two weeks before. The young man wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had a long-barreled percussion cap pistol stuck in his belt. The oldtimer carried no weapon that I could see. Saddle tramps, both of them, with just enough of a furtive look about them to be wanted for something.

  “Who are you?” I asked the man in the duster.

  “Name’s Church.” When he spoke, he had a habit of grinning quickly with all of his white, even teeth, but it was more of a nervous habit than an expression of emotion, as nothing he said seemed humorous. “These here are Homer Strakey, Senior and Junior.” He tilted his hat brim in the direction of his companions. “Which one of you is Sheriff Henry Goodnight?”

  “I’m Goodnight,” said Henry, cautiously. He edged nearer his six-shooter hanging on the wall. “What’s your business?”

  “They told us over at the saloon you got a breed name of Longbow locked up in jail. I’d like to bail him out.”

  “What for?”

  “I need a guide. Folks around town say this Longbow knows them mountains like nobody else. What about it? I got the money.”

  “Mister, I wouldn’t send a yellow dog up into those mountains this time of year,” said Henry. “What do you want up there that won’t wait till spring?”

  Church unfolded a sheet of paper he’d had in a pocket of his duster and handed it to him. I read it over his shoulder. It was a warrant for Bear Anderson’s arrest, and it was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant.

  3

  “Would you mind explaining this?” asked the sheriff, handing back the shopworn scrap of paper at the bottom of which the presidential seal was a gray smudge.

  “I don’t see why I got to, but if it’ll spring the breed I don’t suppose it’d hurt.” Church refolded the warrant and returned it to his pocket. He had strong hands, callused on the insides of his thumbs and forefingers and strung with tendons as taut as telegraph wires. “Chief Two Sisters has refused to talk peace with the army till Bear Anderson is gone from the Bitterroot. General Clifton met with Grant last April to get permission to send in troops, but the President didn’t want to give the
injuns the idea he was making war, so he signed this here warrant and ordered Clifton to hire a civilian to do the job. Well, it so happens the general remembered the good job I done for him a couple of years back when he sent me into Canada after a bunch of deserters, so he wired me to come see him. I get twenty a week and expenses, with five thousand waiting for me when I bring in Anderson, dead or alive.” His eyes slid in the Strakeys’ direction. “We’re splitting that, of course.”

  Junior giggled then, a high, keening neigh far back in his nose. The effect on me was the same as if a rat had just scrambled over the toe of my boot.

  “Well, Grant’s not President any more, but I suppose his signature’s still good,” said Henry.

  “Church,” I said, after a moment’s reflection. “I knew I’d heard that name before. The way the story was told to me, none of those deserters made it back to the fort alive.”

  The man in the duster swung his attention back to me, or so I thought. With that crossed eye it was hard to tell. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  I told him. The grin fluttered across his face like bat’s wings. “Hell,” he said, “You’re a fine one to talk. You’ve kilt your share.”

  “I’m not above killing,” I said. “Back or front, it makes no difference to me, as long as it had to be done. That’s where we disagree. You just kill. I don’t even think you like it, particularly; you just don’t feel anything about it, one way or the other. That’s what scares me. You don’t care.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.” He returned to business. “What about it, Sheriff? Do I get the breed or don’t I?”

  “In the morning. Let him sober up first.” Protecting his left hand by wrapping his linen handkerchief around it, Henry lifted the coffee pot and poured a stream of steaming liquid into a yellowed china mug he had retrieved from atop the clutter on his desk. At no time had he strayed more than two steps away from the gun in his discarded holster, and he kept his right hand free; Church and his two friends made that kind of impression. “I’ll talk to Bart Goddard tonight and get an estimate of the damages. If you can pay that, I guess you can have Longbow. If he doesn’t object.”

  “We was figuring on leaving tonight.” The bounty hunter’s tone was mildly insistent.

  “Then you’re lucky he’s in jail. Nobody travels in the mountains at night. Not the Flatheads, not Bear Anderson. Nobody. It’s a good way to get dead.”

  “Why? What’s up there?”

  “Wolves, for one thing.” Henry studied the steam rising from his mug. “There’s not much game left after last winter, so they’re traveling in packs of a hundred and more. They’ll attack anything that moves. Also, there’s a chance your horse will step in a chuckhole in the dark or lose its footing while you’re feeling your way along one of those narrow ledges that wind around the mountains, and nobody’ll find your body till spring. And if you get past all that, you’ve still got grizzlies to worry about.” He leered behind his moustache. “Outside of that, it’s a waltz.”

  Church stared at him for a moment with that peculiar detached gaze. At length he shrugged, his duster rustling with the movement. “I guess we got no choice any way you look at it,” he said. “Where can we get a room for the night?”

  The sheriff directed him to Arthur’s Castle.

  “We’ll be back first thing tomorrow.” Church left, followed by the younger Strakey. The old man hesitated a moment, ruminating absently on what appeared to be a plug of tobacco distorting his right cheek, but could just as well have been a rotten tooth. Then he, too, withdrew. He walked with a strange, rocking limp, putting me in mind of a trail cook I once knew whose right leg was an inch shorter than its mate. When he was out of sight, Henry took a big swallow of his scalding coffee, as if to get rid of a bad taste in his mouth.

  “If that’s what the army is hiring these days, I’m glad I got out while I was still a corporal,” he said.

  “Don’t underestimate Church,” I told him. “All the stories I’ve heard about him end the same way; he gets his man and collects his bounty.”

  “If he does it this time, he’ll have earned it. What about those characters he has with him? Bent or not, I’d bet my six-gun they’re wanted somewhere.”

  “That’s your worry.” I stepped toward the door. “Take good care of my prisoner, will you? I’d hate to have to explain to Judge Blackthorne how you managed to poison him with that coffee of yours.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  I leered. “Charlene McGrath still in business?”

  “You’re too late. She pulled out for Deer Lodge last week. Won’t be back till April.”

  “I can’t wait that long.” I scowled. “Guess I’ll just pick up a bottle and get quietly drunk in my room.”

  “Make sure it stays quiet. I’ve got too many drunk and disorderlies locked up now.” His eyes twinkled over the rim of his china mug.

  I collected my key from Sir Andrew at the hotel desk and went up the carpeted stairs toward my room on the second floor. On the landing I met Church, who was on his way down. He had discarded his hat and duster and was wearing a striped shirt without a collar and a pair of pants, fuzzy at the knees, which had once belonged to a gray suit. The bone handle of what looked like a Navy Colt protruded above his holster, curved forward for a left-handed draw. His sandy hair was beginning to thin in front, a condition he attempted to conceal by combing it forward over his forehead, Napoleon-style. He stopped when he saw me.

  “Me and the boys been in the saddle quite a spell,” he said. “You know where we can find us some female companionship?”

  I told him the sad news about Charlene McGrath. He cursed and continued on his way, leaving behind a smell of leather, sweat and dust. The bounty hunter seemed to be one customer who wasn’t attracted by the Castle’s many baths. He stopped at the desk, where I heard him ask Sir Andrew what any single man asks the hotel clerk his first night in a strange town. The answer he got was the same one I’d already given him, so maybe now he believed me.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. Maybe it was because, after seven nights of sleeping on the ground. I couldn’t get used to the acre of featherbed with which the Englishman provided each of his guests, but I didn’t think so. My mind kept wandering back to the thought of Bear Anderson alone in the mountains with a bird dog like Church on his scent. That the mountain man could take care of himself was something he had proved again and again throughout the decade and a half that had elapsed since the murder of his parents, but the bounty hunter had spent at least that much time proving the same about himself. Why I cared at all was another mystery. It had been a long time since Bear and I had seen each other, and I doubted that he’d even recognize me. Growing up together didn’t mean we were friends; he’d never saved my life or anything like that, nor I his, and no matter how hard I tried I was unable to remember a scrap of conversation that passed between us during all the time we spent together hunting and exploring in the Bitterroot. At length I gave up trying to puzzle it out and went to sleep just as false dawn was beginning to dilute the blackness outside my window.

  My first stop after rising some two hours later was the barbershop. After a shave, I went over to Goddard’s mercantile, where I ordered supplies for the trip back to Helena from the owner’s hawk-faced wife, Hilda. The prices there were twice as high as any I’d encountered during the trip across the territory. I secured a receipt from her after paying and stashed it away in my coat pocket among the others to be used as proof when I presented my list of expenses to Judge Blackthorne. Leaving the stuff there for the time being, I then went to the livery stable.

  The man at the stable was new, but only in the sense that he hadn’t been there on my last trip to Staghorn. He was an old jasper in a greasy slouch hat with a square yellow pencil stuck in the band and a face like a peach pit. As I approached he squinted up at me from his seat beside a pot-bellied stove in the livery office and rose creakily to his feet when I asked him for my horse.

&nbs
p; After he led it out of its stall—it was a big buckskin I’d had five years, fresh from a rubdown and a night’s sleep—I inquired about Leslie Brainard’s horse. The old man stared at me, blinking in confusion.

  “It’s all right,” I said, showing him my badge, which I kept in my breast pocket. “He’s my prisoner.”

  “It ain’t all right.” His voice reminded me of two tree trunks rubbing together in the wind. “He ain’t got no horse.”

  “He didn’t walk from Helena,” I pointed out, patiently, I thought, under the circumstances.

  “Oh, he had a horse, but that was before he lost it over the poker table to a pair of treys.” The old man laughed noiselessly, opening his mouth to display a toothless cavern and heaving his chest in and out like a skinny bellows. “Reckon that’s what made him disorderly.”

  “No wonder the territory’s in debt,” I grumbled, and asked him to show me what horses he had for sale.

  He sold me a chestnut mare that had seen its good days, but none of them since Appomattox. The saddle and bridle were twelve dollars extra. I collected a receipt for that, too, as well as for the horse and my own animal’s care, knowing all the time that the judge was going to argue the validity of the dirty scrap of paper with the old man’s mark at the bottom, and after returning to Goddard’s and loading the supplies onto my horse’s back, I led the animals over to the sheriff′s office.

  I found Henry seated at his desk over a mug of hot coffee which, from the smell of it, might have been the same one he’d been sipping the night before. Mingled with the burnt-grain odor was the unmistakable scent of Bay Rum.

  “You’ve been to the barber already,” I reflected.

  His slow brown eyes looked me over from head to foot, taking in my clean clothes and freshly shaven face. “Look who’s talking,” he growled. He was one of those who aren’t to be trifled with until after they′ve had their second swallow of coffee. “That cross-eyed son of a bitch got me up at five o‘clock this morning to turn over his precious half-breed. There’s nothing to do in this town at five o’clock but get a shave, and I had to get Wilson out of bed to do that. I enjoyed that part,” he added, smiling maliciously.