The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  Rose laughed and accepted the mug. She drank two cups straight down at the creek, then filled a third and brought it back to the fire.

  Night had fallen over the narrow cañon, and the chill had deepened. Shorty set his skillet on the ground between them, then dug out some biscuits from the previous evening and tossed one to Rose. “I’d soak that in bacon grease first,” he advised wryly. “You’re liable to chip a tooth, otherwise.”

  “I ought to take exception to that, considerin’ I was the one who baked ’em.”

  “Oh, they’re tasty enough,” he assured her. “Just a tad leathery.”

  Rose started to relax. “Where are you and Wiley headin’ after this?” she asked, nibbling on a piece of bacon. “I got the notion from Wiley that you was boilin’ up another scheme.”

  “I guess Wiley and I are always percolating on something or the other.” He looked up, cocking a brow. “You interested?”

  “It would depend on what you had in mind. I was feelin’ mighty unconvinced about ridin’ with you two roosters a couple of days ago, but I reckon I’m startin to get used to it. I ain’t partial to schemes that might get me shot, though.”

  “Me neither,” Shorty replied soberly. “I’ve run with a fair number of fools over the years, but I try to avoid them when I can. To tell you the truth, Wiley and I haven’t discussed what we’re going to do next. Likely we’ll head for some town big enough to spend our money in first. After that ….” He shrugged. “It’s late in the season for anything big, but we might consider something small and quick.”

  “You got a buyer in mind. I’m thinkin’ Caldwell didn’t pan out the way you’d hoped he would.”

  “He didn’t, for a fact. Caldwell promised us twenty dollars apiece for a minimum of twenty head, and he knows it. As far as I’m concerned, he stole those three extra horses. It ain’t worth getting shot over, but I won’t deal with him again, and neither will Wiley. But, hell, you can always find someone willing to dicker for a horse. Caldwell’s an Alberta boy who’s been collecting ponies to run back into Canada, but there’re closer markets, especially if we’re careful about where we find our herd.”

  “It ain’t never stealin’, is it?” Rose mused. “I’ve knowed you ’n’ Wiley for almost four years now, and I ain’t yet heard either one of you call it what it is. It’s always ‘we found ’em,’ or ‘they followed us.” It’s never, ‘I stole these here horses off some hard-working ….’”

  “Shut up, Rose!” Shorty said harshly.

  Her jaw dropped in surprise.

  “Do you think we don’t … shit.” He threw what remained of his biscuit into the fire. “I figured you knew the way of it, being married to Muggy and all.”

  Rose had never seen Shorty so upset. Not even last summer when he and Wiley had sworn to kill one another. Coming on top of everything else, it made her want to bawl in the worst way, and for a moment she just sat there sucking in air, her fists knotted on her knees.

  “Aw, hell,” he said abruptly, drawing a deep breath. “I didn’t mean that. I guess you just rubbed a sore spot, is all.”

  “It weren’t your fault. I had no business ….”

  “No, don’t go taking any blame for my short fuse.”

  Her voice lowered. “You’re a good man, Shorty. I reckon your wife must’ve been mighty proud of you.”

  “Maybe that’s what rankles me,” he replied, staring into the fire. “I’m not sure she would’ve, the way things turned out. She was the church-going kind, and mighty forgiving, considering that, but I’m not sure she could’ve overlooked thievery.”

  “She would’ve. If she knew you half as well as I do, she would’ve.”

  “Well, it’s the truth she wouldn’t have had to, had she lived. We had a nice little house on the edge of Fort Worth, and I had dreams of raising horses, maybe even getting a small ranch close to town.” He shook his head. “It makes a man wonder where it all went screwy, doesn’t it. I’ve told myself a hundred times it was Kate’s dying that turned me wrong side to the law, but I’m not so sure any more.”

  “I reckon some scabs is best left unscratched,” Rose said. “There ain’t a day goes by I don’t think of Muggy and the mistake I made marryin’ him, but what’s done is done, and there ain’t no goin’ back.”

  “Amen to that,” Shorty replied, his voice a whisper. Before either of them could say more, a pebble landed in the dirt at Shorty’s knee. Rose started to rise, but Shorty made a motion with his hand and said: “Stay put. It’s only Wiley.”

  “Damn’ tootin’ ’tis me.” Wiley’s voice came from the shadows behind them. “Caldwell’s up to something. We gotta skedaddle.”

  Shorty kept his head down. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Jimmy’s back and we’ve got the horses ready to go. One at a time, I want ye to get up and mosey on over here with ye saddles, like ye was fixin’ to bed down. Don’t dawdle, and keep that light in Two-Hats’s window in the corner of ye eye. When that goes out, we gotta shake a leg.”

  Rose’s throat was dry as the bottom of a busted bucket. Glancing at the light in the trader’s window, she tried to recall if there was a back way out, but her mind drew a blank.

  “You go first,” Shorty told her.

  Nodding tautly, she stood and ambled out of the firelight with her saddle and rifle. Wiley grabbed her arm as soon as she was clear of the light.

  “This way,” he whispered, propelling her toward the creek. “Jimmy’s waitin’ downstream. Go on and saddle up.”

  Rose glanced at the Grulla, foraging at the end of its picket rope.

  “Don’t worry about that one,” Wiley said grimly. “We’ll bring ’im.”

  Rose nodded and started downstream. She was almost around the first bend when she heard Jimmy’s low call. Following the sound of his voice, she discovered him behind some scrub, deep in the shadows of the bench. He had to guide her to the horses with a hand on her arm, as if she were blind.

  She smelled the animal he led her to before she could make out its shape in the darkness, and a rush of relief surged through her. “Albert!” she breathed, running her hand along the gelding’s neck.

  “It’s that worthless roan you started with,” Jimmy said scornfully. “I’d have left him and taken a better one, but Wiley said you’d raise a fuss if we did.”

  “How’d you find him in that mob of horseflesh?”

  “Wiley knows what he’s doing,” was Jimmy’s curt reply.

  Rose laughed softly and didn’t argue. Jimmy’s respect for Wiley’s skills as a horse thief was well-founded. Even Shorty admitted he was almost as good as a Crow, which was indeed high praise in those parts.

  She saddled the old gelding by feel, then strapped the new scabbard in place before going over to stand beside Jimmy. Away from the fire, it didn’t take long for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. With Albert, there were five horses waiting behind her, and remembering what Wiley had said about getting the Grulla, Rose understood his motive in backing away from Caldwell earlier. Wiley intended to steal back the three horses he hadn’t been paid for.

  At the fire, Shorty continued to lounge against his saddle while Wiley struggled with the Grulla’s picket pin. Shorty’s sorrel had already been freed and was standing close to the Grulla. Rose glanced at the trading post, but there was no one in sight through the open window. Not even Two-Hats, behind the counter. “I don’t like this,” she said to Jimmy. “I can’t see a soul in there.”

  “Just keep quiet and be ready when Wiley gives the word.”

  Little pin pricks of nervousness were playing up and down Rose’s arms, and she unconsciously wrapped her fingers around the Smith & Wesson’s butt. The breeze that had picked up at sundown continued to nose along the creek, cool off the distant mountains, but her palm was sweating around the Smith & Wesson’s hard rubber grips. Something was amiss; she c
ould feel it, as if the air itself had turned evil.

  It was at that instant that Rose heard the brisk ratcheting of a pistol being cocked behind her. Jimmy swore and started to turn, but a shot exploded from the nearby brush, slamming him to the ground. More shots sounded from upstream; muzzle flashes lanced the darkness. Wiley was shouting for Rose and Jimmy to bring up the horses, but there was nothing she could do. Jimmy lay curled at her feet, gasping for breath, while Rose stared wordlessly into the maw of Billy Garcia’s revolver.

  Chapter

  5

  Garcia edged closer, his old, run-down boots gliding silently over the creek’s gravel bed. His stealth surprised Rose. She wouldn’t have believed anyone could move so quietly over loose stones. A thread of powder smoke, barely visible in the thin star shine, curled from the muzzle of his pistol, but the scarred brown hand remained unwavering. In the dim light his eyes reminded her of a mouse’s, shiny as glass beads.

  “Rose!” Wiley screeched. “God dammit, Jimmy!”

  Garcia licked his lips. “Frank says I got to shoot you, but I think maybe we got a little business first, you and me, huh?”

  “Damn,” Rose breathed, then instinctively drew the Smith & Wesson and fired from the hip.

  Garcia could have dropped her easily if he hadn’t been so intent upon his “little business.” Instead he hollered and spun away, dropping his pistol in the creek. He stumbled into the deeper shadows downstream, clutching the side of his head with both hands. He was making a lot of noise leaving, Rose noted wryly. Then another gunshot hammered the night from somewhere upstream, and she grabbed Jimmy by the collar of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. “Come on,” she said. “We gotta ride.”

  Even gut shot, Jimmy had managed to hold onto the horses. He cried out as Rose pulled him off the ground, but kept his grip on the reins and lead ropes. Pushing him against his horse, she got a shoulder under his skinny buttocks and shoved.

  “Ohhh, God,” he moaned, “you’re killing me.”

  “Quit complaining and take these,” she said, jamming the horse’s reins into his hand even as she pried the others loose. “And hang onto ’em, hear?”

  Grabbing Albert’s reins, Rose swung into the saddle. Running boots crunched gravel along the creekbed, and she wheeled her horse with the Smith & Wesson leveled.

  “Where the devil were ye?” Wiley shouted, then grabbed his horse without waiting for a reply. Shorty appeared a few seconds later, lugging his saddle in his free hand, his pistol drawn and pointed upstream.

  “Gimme that thing,” Wiley demanded, riding close.

  Shorty tossed him the saddle, then jerked a lead rope from Rose’s hand and flung himself bareback atop the lunging, frightened horse. Raking his spurs along the animal’s ribs, he raced north toward the Missouri, the others pounding at his side. The extra horses fled with them. Rose’s scalp crawled as they sprinted across the open patches. She kept expecting more bullets to come buzzing after them, but only the echo of their ponies’ hoofs followed them away from Two-Hats’s post.

  • • • • •

  Rose sat alone on top of a bluff overlooking the Missouri. In the east the sun was already up, but it was cold yet. Her breath puffed little clouds of vapor every time she exhaled, and her fingers were numb where she clutched the ratty old Hudson’s Bay blanket around her shoulders. When they’d stopped at first light, Shorty had kindled a fire from the branches of a dead juniper standing nearby, but Rose had shunned its warmth in favor of solitude.

  Across the river, bighorn sheep were browsing along the broken scarp. She could see a ewe and two kids now, and had earlier watched an entire band scamper up the cliffs from the river’s edge. She could have shot one easily, but killing a sheep on the far side of the river would have been akin to murder since they had no way to retrieve the meat.

  Still, it was easier to think about wild mutton and how good it would taste than it was to think about Jimmy, who they’d buried at dawn. Rose had been holding his hand when he died, hoping to tell him once more that the stories he’d heard about her and his pap had been lies, but she never got the chance. Jimmy had lapsed into unconsciousness at some point during their flight down the Missouri, still stubbornly clinging to his saddle, and had passed away without coming to.

  Rose was still watching the sheep when Shorty came over. He halted just out of arm’s reach and held up a piece of jerky, like he would to a growly dog he wasn’t yet familiar with. “You’d best eat something, Rose,” he said gently. “Wiley’ll want to move on soon.”

  She ignored the strip of dried beef and kept her eyes on the cliffs across the river, admiring the way the strengthening light seemed to change the shapes of the crags.

  “A man’s time comes to die, it just comes,” Shorty said. “There ain’t a thing you can do about it.”

  “He wasn’t a man, Shorty, he was a kid. He didn’t even shave.”

  “He died young, for a fact.”

  She remembered Shorty’s wife, and the son who’d perished with her, and felt a stab of sadness for the bowlegged cowboy. Looking at him, she forced a smile. “Shorty, I’d give a silver dollar for that sheepskin coat you’re wearing.”

  He chuckled and pushed the jerky closer. Rose hesitated, then accepted it.

  “Wiley and I are going to Miles City,” he said, hunkering down nearby. “You’re welcome to ride along if the direction suits. I talked to Wiley, and he says you can throw in with us for a spell, too, if you want.”

  “Miles City,” she replied, tearing off her first bite. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen ol’ Milestown.”

  “It’s growed,” he acknowledged. “It’s a right pert town now, and not at all like it was a few years ago.”

  “All right, I’ll ride with you that far.” She stood, brushing off the seat of her trousers. Across the river the ewe and kids had disappeared. Rose paused to scan the bluffs more closely, but the little family was gone.

  “See something?” Shorty asked.

  “Naw.” She turned away. “There ain’t nothin’ over there but busted dreams.”

  Pushing past him, she began kicking dirt over the fire while Wiley and Shorty lined out the extra horses on lead ropes. Wiley wanted to keep the four riderless horses close, and he’d decided it would be easier to lead them than drive them.

  Although they saw no sign of pursuit, it was obvious from the way Wiley and Shorty traveled that they expected it. They stayed off the main trail along the Missouri, and swung wide around Billy Downs’s old trading post at the mouth of the Musselshell. Rose would have liked to have seen what was left of the place—the Stranglers had hung Billy the year before, in their sweep along the Missouri—but she was feeling melancholy, so didn’t mention it.

  They rode almost due east for two days, until they reached the divide that separated the drainages of the Musselshell and Big Dry Creek. There they turned southeast toward Miles City and began to make better time. The fear that Frank Caldwell and his men might be following them was put to rest by Wiley, who said he reckoned even a snake in the grass like Caldwell wouldn’t trail them halfway across Montana just for three scrawny Indian ponies.

  Two days later they pulled up on a bluff overlooking the Yellowstone River. Miles City lay below them, with Fort Keogh visible a couple of miles to the west, across the Tongue River that flowed in from the south. Rose had never been to Fort Keogh—soldiers always made her nervous—but she’d visited Miles City with her pap a number of times, back when its biggest export had been buffalo hides rather than cattle.

  Wiley and Shorty were clearly excited. It was a trait of men Rose had never understood, their need to spend whatever money they acquired as quickly as possible. Muggy had been the same way, and her pap still was. She figured Wiley and Shorty had around $150 apiece from the sale of the Crow ponies, but sure as hawks flew, by the end of the week, two at the most, they’d be broke a
gain and looking for another stake.

  Wiley reined toward the trail that led down to the ferry, but Shorty held back. “What will you do now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She hadn’t trailed along to Miles City for the same reasons as Wiley and Shorty. Even if she had, entertainment opportunities for women were few. “Maybe I’ll look up some old friends,” she said. “You know Charley Schuyler?”

  “Wahoo Charley. Used to be a buffalo runner?”

  “Yeah.” She perked up. “Him and my pap used to hunt the same ranges, and sometimes he’d come over or we’d visit him. He was based out of Miles City, there toward the end.”

  “Rose, Charley Schuyler got himself killed in a bar fight about three years ago.”

  “Aw, no, not Charley.” Her shoulders slumped. “This land is changin’, Shorty. I swear it’s changin’ so fast a body can’t hardly keep track of it.”

  She was thinking of the trip down from the Missouri. In two days, they’d seen antelope, a few whitetail deer in the draws, and more wolves than she would have thought possible, but not one buffalo. She’d heard that the herds had been shot out, but it had taken traveling through what had once been the heart of the buffalo’s range to really comprehend the loss. The shaggies were gone, and in a sad kind of way, so were the people who’d lived off them—Wahoo Charley killed and her pap wed to a bottle over in Billings, and who knew what had become of the rest—Jim White and Doc Zahl and Hi Bickerdyke, whose mother had been so loved during the late hostilities back East—plus a host of others.

  And the Indians, too—penned on reservations like sheep in a corral, all except for a few old goats like Two-Hats, who hardly seemed to count in Rose’s mind. At least not when compared to the wild and woolly types she remembered from her childhood. Lord, but it was sad—the buffalo and Jimmy, and the whole damned mess that was her life right now ….

  “Rose?”

  She looked up. “Charley was a good ol’ boy, Shorty. He could tell a story that would make you laugh till you dang’ near fell over. Those were good days.”