The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  Rose paused on the street to listen to the rumble of conversation. She recognized Wiley’s snappy Irish brogue first, followed by Shorty’s even-toned reply. Had she been capable of real tears, she likely would have sat down in the middle of the street and bawled her eyes out. Instead she had to content herself with a sniff and a determined tug at her cartridge belt. Dropping Albert’s reins over the footboard of a wheelless buggy, she walked up to the tent. She searched for something solid to knock on, but Levi heard the jingle of her new spurs, and yelled: “Come on in, god dammit. There ain’t no doorman.”

  Rose ducked through the flaps and stopped. Wiley and Shorty were playing cards at a table with two other men; Levi stood at a makeshift bar at the back of the tent with another. Looking up, Levi’s face turned red as a brick. “Oh, hell, Rose, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t’ve used such rough language if I’d’ve known it was you.”

  “It ain’t no matter, Levi,” she replied, “though I appreciate the sentiment.” She was staring at Wiley, who was facing the door with a deck of cards frozen in his hands.

  “Well I’ll be go to hell,” Wiley said.

  “Likely you will,” Rose agreed. She let her gaze drift across the table. “How, Shorty?”

  Shorty didn’t reply. Slapping his cards to the table, he got up from the empty keg he’d been using as a chair and walked over to the bar. “Gimme a whiskey, Levi.”

  Wiley chuckled. “Hurry up with that drink, Levi. Ol’ Shorty looks like he’s about to apoplexy.”

  “He does for a fact,” Levi said, fetching a bottle from beneath the bar. He arched a brow questioningly to Rose. “A little hair of the dog?”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I ain’t been bit.” She came into the tent, casting a furtive glance toward the other three men; although they had the look of hunters, she didn’t recognize them. To Wilson, she said: “I didn’t know you was runnin’ a saloon, Levi.”

  “I ain’t. If I was, I’d have to buy a license, and I can’t abide that kind of government meddling.”

  He recorked the bottle and put it away. “That’ll be two bits,” he told Shorty.

  “What are ye doin’ in these parts, darlin’?” Wiley asked, resuming his deal. “Did Alice kick ye out. I heard ye’d turned hound dog on her, sleepin’ on the front porch and scratching fleas all day.”

  “Shut up, Wiley,” Rose and Shorty said at the same time.

  Laughing delightedly, Wiley turned up a card for the man on his left. “Seven and a king showin’. Nothing there that worries me. Shorty, are ye in?”

  “I’m folded,” Shorty replied. He looked at Rose. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Can I buy you a drink?”

  The offer caught her unprepared, but she shrugged and walked over to the bar. “I reckon I’ll have a beer, after all, Levi.” She started to dig for the buckskin poke that had once belonged to Shorty, but he tossed a 50¢ piece on the bar before she could find it.

  “My treat,” he said.

  “I can pay,” she said stiffly.

  “Watch ye fingers, Shorty,” Wiley said. “She’s liable to bite off a couple, ye ain’t careful.”

  “Come on, Collins,” one of the hunters grumbled. He was heavy-set and weathered, and had a knobby briarwood pipe canted sideways from the black tangle of his beard. “Either play cards or go palaver with your friends.”

  “Have a care there, friend Simons,” Wiley replied recklessly. “I be a happy-go-lucky sort, but I’ll take no guff from a lousy wolfer.”

  Simons’s face darkened above his beard. “Either play cards or quit the game, else I’ll pop that damn’ mick head of yours like it was a boil.”

  Silence fell over the makeshift saloon. Wiley carefully set the deck of cards aside, then slid his hands back until just the fingers rested on the edge of the table. “All right, Simons, come pop my mick head.”

  A change came over the hunter’s face. Taking the pipe from his mouth, he slowly leaned back. “I came here to play poker, not fight.”

  “Are ye backin’ off?”

  Simons’s lips thinned inside the shaggy mat of his beard. For a full minute he sat rigidly, glaring across the table at Wiley. Then he cursed and pushed to his feet, kicking away his stool. “Come on, Jake,” he said to the man at the bar. “Let’s go find a place that caters to a better class of customer.” He stalked from the tent, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Jake shrugged and followed.

  “Well, ’twas nice of the man to leave his share of the pot,” Wiley observed, though keeping his voice low, and his head cocked to listen to the sounds from outside.

  “Simons won’t try anything underhanded,” Levi said. “I’ve known him a spell. He’s a good enough sort.”

  “A coward, though, eh?” Wiley said.

  “Look at it how you’d like, but I’d ride the river with him.” A go-to-hell smile crossed the bartender’s face. “I’d rather partner with a man with brains enough to walk away from a fight than some dumb Irishman always on the prod to start one.”

  “The hell with him,” Wiley said, “and you, too, Levi.” He glanced at the man on his right. “And ye, Mace?”

  “I reckon I’ll call it a night,” the lanky hunter replied. He gathered his money, then exited the tent.

  “You’re hard on business, Collins,” Levi said darkly.

  “Aw, to hell with all them soreheads.” He came over to the bar. “Give me a whiskey and quit complainin’.”

  While Levi poured, Wiley turned to Rose. “By damn, ye’re lookin’ good, Rosie. Pretty as a newborn colt.”

  “My heart’s all a-flutter,” she replied acidly.

  “Sassy as ever, too. Damn if it doesn’t do me heart good to see ye again.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d care. I noticed neither one of you are big on good-byes.”

  Wiley laughed, and sheepishly Shorty said: “Didn’t Eben tell you why I cut my pin?”

  “Yeah, he told me. I reckon one excuse is as good as another when you’re in a hurry.”

  “By damn, what happened up there on the Pipestem after I left last winter?” Wiley asked. “You two’re railin’ at one another like an old married couple.”

  Rose and Shorty ignored him, and for a couple of minutes the four of them drank in silence, even though Wiley continued to grin into his glass as if enjoying a private joke. When a pistol shot cracked flatly across the town from somewhere down the street, all four flinched and reached for a weapon.

  “God damn’ nobs,” Levi muttered, meaning the Eastern ranchers and their hired guns. He leaned a double-barreled shotgun back under the bar. “They’ve got us all jumpy as hens in a thunderstorm.”

  “I wonder where Davey is?” Shorty said thoughtfully.

  “Dirty-Nosed Dave?” Rose asked.

  “You saw him?”

  “At Hannahman’s.”

  “What were ye doing in a dive like that?” Wiley asked.

  “I was lookin’ for you. Figured it’d be quicker to start low and work up, rather than the other way around.”

  Levi guffawed, but Wiley cold-shouldered him. “Was he still on his hind feet. Dirty-Nosed Dave, I mean.”

  “He was right well-lubricated, but still standin’.”

  “You boys ought to get him out of town before he drinks himself into a grave,” Levi opined.

  “The hell with him,” Wiley said, although a trifle uncertainly, Rose thought.

  “It wouldn’t be to our advantage if he started talking to the wrong people,” Shorty pointed out.

  “Maybe,” Wiley replied, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll run after ’im like he was some kid in a soiled diaper. A man can’t hold his liquor’s got no business drinkin’.” He glanced at Rose and his cat-ate-the-canary grin returned, full-blown. “Are ye figurin’ to ride with us again, darlin’?”

  She hesitated, glancing at Shorty.
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  “We’ve got enough hands,” Shorty said brusquely. “We don’t need another.”

  “We didn’t need another last fall, either, but she worked out.”

  “Things were different then,” Shorty countered. “She needed a stake.”

  “I’m needin’ a stake now, too,” Rose said to Wiley.

  “Not this kind of stake,” Shorty replied. He looked at his old trail pard. “She ain’t coming, Wiley.”

  That was the wrong position to take with Wiley Collins. Even Rose knew that. “What was it ye told Joe Bean last year, Shorty. That our Rosie here be a growed-up gal, capable of makin’ her own decisions?. His smile faded. “I say if she wants to come, she comes. How about it, hon. Ye want to ride with ye old partners ag’in?”

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  Wiley glanced at Levi.

  “Aw, hell,” the bartender said in disgust. “Go ahead and talk to her. I gotta see a man about a horse, anyway.” He came out from behind the bar. “Keep an eye on things for me, will you. And stay out of the liquor unless you pay for it.”

  “If she comes, you’ll pay her wages out of your share,” Shorty said to Wiley, when Levi had left.

  “Naw, if she comes, she’ll get an equal share, same as the rest of us. ’Tis only fair. What do ye say, Rose. Ye want to help us drive some horses up to Canada?”

  “They’d be horses lacking a bill of sale, I reckon?”

  “Well, they might have one somewheres, but we won’t be carryin’ any.”

  “Who else is in on this?”

  “Me ’n’ Shorty and Dirty-Nosed Dave, if he can sober up long enough to saddle his horse. A couple others waitin’ down south. There’ll be six of us altogether, if ye throw in.”

  Meeting Shorty’s hard stare, Rose said: “All right, but only under one condition.”

  “What’s that?” Wiley asked warily.

  “I don’t cook.”

  Wiley paused with his mouth slightly agape, then he laughed and said: “Why, darlin’, I knew that the first time I ate a meal at ye house.”

  • • • • •

  They left Junction City five days later, calculating that by now most of the roundups would be completed, the ranges less crowded as crews moved back to headquarters to regroup. They crossed the Yellowstone under cover of darkness and made their way south in easy stages. Rose took charge of a pack horse carrying supplies to make their trip more comfortable—tinware, a coffee pot, extra blankets, and enough food to last them to Mexico, if they got turned around.

  Bringing up the rear was Dirty-Nosed Dave Merritt, riding a scrawny buckskin that would have looked better proportioned under a ten-year-old boy. Not that Rose would have advocated such a swap, for the runty mustang had a heart as black as a pirate’s. The first time she approached it, the buckskin tried to take a bite out of her arm; the second time, its rear hoofs had punched the air next to her left hip like an iron-shod battering ram. After that, she steered clear of the horse unless she was equipped with a club of adequate heft.

  What made the relationship between Dave and his mount so irksome to Rose was that, in the five days since her arrival in Junction City, she hadn’t seen him fully sober once. That he could even find the horse in a crowd of three amazed her; that he could saddle it, then climb onto its back without being mauled to death left her nearly sputtering with indignation.

  Dave remained drunk all that first night of travel, even falling off his horse a couple of times. By dawn, Wiley was so incensed by the delays that he busted all of Dave’s bottles on rocks. Sitting cross-legged under the buckskin’s fight-scarred muzzle, Dirty-Nosed Dave stared owlishly at the broken shards of glass. “That ain’t good,” he said foolishly.

  “What ain’t good is wastin’ such sweet nectar because some saddle tramp can’t control his urges,” Wiley snarled.

  They didn’t move out again until after sunset, when Shorty guided them south along the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. Two nights later, just before daybreak, they spotted the lights of Sheridan twinkling in the valley below. This time Wiley didn’t call a halt at dawn. He had a destination in mind, and Rose figured it had to be close for him to risk traveling after sunup.

  Several hours later they came to a ranch about twenty miles south of Goose Creek, a ramshackle collection of sod-roofed log buildings and crooked-pole corrals, located within a grove of towering cottonwood trees. Several dogs set up a clamorous barking as they jogged into the yard. At the cabin’s door a naked child with hair the color of old straw watched indifferently as they dismounted at the corral. The skinned carcass of a beef hung from a limb beside the house, its meat glazed by the wind. Trash—the busted-out seat of a cane-bottomed chair, rusting tin cans, rotting vegetables scraps—was heaped in a pile beneath the window on the near side of the cabin; a gnawed leg bone, probably from the same cow whose carcass hung in the shade of the cottonwood, lay in the front yard where one of the dogs had dragged it. Behind the cabin, beyond the garden patch, and nearly hidden by tall spring weeds, sat a weathered privy, its sole link to the rest of the ranch a narrow path tramped to hardpan.

  Rose had seen some fancy spreads since the influx of the big cattle outfits to the Yellowstone Basin—two-story frame houses with slate-shingled roofs, covered verandahs, and tiny round cupolas; sprawling complexes of corrals, runways, and breaking pens; gaily painted barns and stables capped with fancy weathervanes. There were even a few well-maintained polo fields—that sport of European royalty having caught on locally, chiefly through the influence of foreign investors. But for the most part what she saw before her now was the norm, and in many ways the true backbone of a cattle kingdom that stretched all the way from south Texas to the Milk River country of northern Montana.

  On the whole they were a dirt-poor and seedy lot—under-educated, narrow-minded, suspicious of strangers even as they were hospitable to a fault, zealously cautious of every hard-earned nickel. They were a hang-and-rattle kind of people, tough as tom turkeys. They had to be, because without their bull-headedness, their prejudices, their abrasive arrogance, they never would’ve lasted, never would have secured that first perilous foothold in an uncompromising wilderness. They were the ones who forged the way for the softer elements that always followed. Foundation people, Rose thought, loosening Albert’s cinch. As she herself had been, before taking up the aimless ways of a vagabond.

  A woman appeared at the cabin’s door, young and pretty in a shy, work-gaunted sort of way. Her long, blonde hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and bare toes peeked out from under the hem of her faded cotton dress. A taut round belly disclosed the early stages of pregnancy.

  “Della, me darlin’!” Wiley bellowed while still some distance away. “Ye be as lovely as ever.”

  A faint look of pleasure crossed the woman’s face, but she lowered her eyes anyway, as if embarrassed. Her gaze fell on the naked child, and she said: “You, Chad, get in the house.”

  “Is Fred about?” Wiley called.

  “He’s acrost the crick yonder,” Della replied, “but likely he heard the dogs barkin’. I expect he’ll be along directly.”

  “And Jeremy?” Wiley asked—cautiously, Rose thought.

  “He’s with Fred.” Della’s eyes were on her child. “Chad, come here!”

  The boy looked up but made no effort to comply. From the scrub across the creek a covey of sage grouse exploded skyward. Minutes later a husky young man on a gray horse emerged from the brush, followed by a second man on a flaxen-maned sorrel. Something about the second man caught Rose’s attention, but it wasn’t until he was splashing his horse across the shallow creek that she grunted as if sucker-punched. Hearing her, Shorty edged over with an apologetic look.

  “Hell, Rose,” he said, “I wish I’d have said something, given you some warning.”

  “That’s all right,” she replied. “I should’ve remember
ed. Sure … Jeremy, Della, Jimmy. But that was so long ago. Shoot, Della was just a kid when her folks left the Gallatin.” She watched as Jeremy Frakes drew up in the yard, the resemblance between him and his brother Jimmy unmistakable. Della, too, bore a similar visage—heavy brows, a small straight mouth, sharp cheek bones.

  “I expected you here a week ago,” Jeremy said to Wiley. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Laughing at the younger man’s brashness, Wiley said: “Whoa, young buck, afore ye find yeself eatin’ dirt.” Jeremy’s face reddened, but Wiley had already turned to the stocky young man on the gray. He walked over, holding out his hand. “Howdy, Baylor.”

  “How do, Wiley.”

  “Tolerable, by damn, tolerable.” He stepped back. “I brung ye some stuff I was hopin’ ye’d accept without arguin’.”

  “I ain’t looking for charity. I told you that last time.”

  “No one said anything about charity. It’s just some vittles and such I thought ye woman and kid might enjoy while ye was gone. Hell, we’ll dig into some of it tonight, if it’ll make ye feel any better.”

  “Well,” Fred said uncertainly, “maybe we could leave a little behind, as long as it won’t be needed on the trail, and as long as you let me pay for it out of my share of the horses.”

  Jeremy suddenly forced his mount between Wiley and Fred. He was looking at Rose, struggling with his memory. “Who are these people?” he demanded.

  “Why, that there’s Dirty-Nosed Dave Merritt,” Wiley said by way of introduction. “And the lady is none other than Rose Edwards. The Rose Edwards, who stood up to John Stroudmire in a Miles City saloon not a month ago.” Wiley smiled cockily. “Ye’ve heard of Stroudmire, ain’t ye, boy?”

  “I’ve heard of Rose Edwards,” Jeremy returned flatly.

  Rose saw Della standing in the cabin’s door with her hand over her mouth. It was a gesture she’d seen Indian women use when startled, covering their mouths to prevent their spirit from escaping. It made her feel ill at ease to know what Jeremy and Della must be thinking, what lies of their father they must have overheard. She supposed they also blamed her for their mother’s death, as Jimmy had.