by H. V. Elkin
“What’s your hurry?” Anderson asked. “We’re not so bad to live with around here.”
“The job’s not done,” Cutler said.
“That poacher’s not your responsibility, John.”
“Figure he is.” It was more than the promise he had made to Felix. Most of it was knowing that death still sat on his shoulder. He had thought meeting the grizzly would settle the score one way or other. Now he knew that was not all of it. If death was waiting for him along the trail out of Yellowstone or back in Cheyenne, Cutler was impatient for the showdown. He wanted to get it over with. He didn’t want to live a day longer than he had to with this on his mind.
“You bound and determined?” Anderson asked.
“You know I am.”
Anderson sighed. “If Rutherford was still alive, he could probably get you out without any trouble. If that old savage has a ghost, I hope it guides you. Ghost or no, if you’re going to go, you’d better leave by the north entrance. Some rough roads that way this time of year, but it’s the shortest route. It’ll get you out before things get as bad as they’re going to be. You make it to Livingston, and you can take the railroad east from there.”
Cutler considered this a moment. Something told him no. “Figure we better go out the way we came in, Captain.”
“Why in tarnation do you have to do that?”
“It’s the most direct way. We might pick up the poacher’s trail.” What he did not say was that, when you feel your destiny tugging you in one direction, there’s nothing to be gained by going in another.
“I wish you were one of my men,” Anderson said, “so I could give you an order. But what the hell! Eat hearty. This might be the last decent supper you ever have.”
The next morning, the cavalry was lined up on the parade ground as Cutler and Bill moved by with the rig. The horses and men breathed steam into the air. The sun on the snow was brilliant but without warmth. Cutler stopped the wagon as he and Bill jumped down to say goodbye.
They shook hands with the Captain and Burgess.
“Think we might get a little break in the weather,” Anderson said. Did he mean it? Or was his optimism a good-luck gesture? They had not ridden or hunted with the man, only sat across a desk from him and with him at a supper table; there was no way to tell how much he meant what he said.
It was different with Burgess. They could see his best wishes for them in his eyes. That look and the rough handshake said everything, plus the fact that he didn’t make a joke.
Anderson said, “John, Bill. Maybe you can come back sometime and see this place. Imagine your work is something like soldiering. You go places to do work, not to see the places. Yellowstone’s worth a visit, if you ever get a chance.”
He was making conversation, but it was too cold for that. Cutler nodded to the men, got back on the wagon, sent a message through the reins, and the mules moved forward. They left as they had come, the two black mules pulling the two men and dog on the covered wagon, the gay gelding following untethered. Except for the more-intent expression on the men, the procession looked the same.
Cutler and Bill did not feel fear as they rode. Fear would have been useless and dangerous on this journey. They had no time for it. When the trail got rough, it required all their skill and concentration. Cutler knew death might come too quickly to waste time worrying about it. You got to where you were going a yard, a foot, an inch at a time, and somewhere at the end was the reason for it: coming out alive. The reason for coming out alive was to keep a promise. In places where the trail was easy, they would be able to think about what was at the end of it—the poacher they believed was Hedge Bannister.
“He won’t have the buffalo heads by the time we find him,” Bill said. “That old piece of newspaper won’t be enough to get him arrested.”
Cutler nodded. “The man I’m after is a cowboy. He’ll still have the wound he got from the bear. If Bannister’s been clawed and his partner, the taxidermist, has a head or two, Bannister’s the man I’m after all right. He told me that, in the winter, he moved into places other folks moved out of.”
“Like Yellowstone.”
“You bet.”
“Might be more than Bannister and George Hobson we’ll have to deal with,” Bill said. “Bannister’s got a couple of friends who rode with him sometimes. Saw them on our farm once or twice when Hedge thought he needed company to cut our wire.”
“I’ll play with the hand they deal me.”
“Don’t forget me, John. We’re partners in this game, remember.”
Cutler had deliberately not said “we.” If he could get Bill back to Cheyenne alive, he was certain he didn’t want him in on any gunplay. Bill had proved he was agile and good with a gun, but it wasn’t always the best man who came out alive.
Cutler was beginning to think that his own life was not worth endangering another. Cutler’s obsession with his work had made him a loner. Over the years, he had lost his taste for being responsible for another human being. Besides, if Cutler was going to die soon, it was that much more important for Bill to stay alive—and get the grizzly.
Cutler avoided talking about Hedge Bannister. Bill did not.
“I got a feelin’,” Bill said, “that Bannister’s another Big Spook.”
Cutler said nothing.
“I mean,” Bill said, “he’s as much a rogue as any animal, isn’t he? He’s got no respect for other animals or people, so he could be just as dangerous as a rogue grizzly. Yes, sir. Hedge is another Big Spook, and maybe we ought to try to catch him in a bear trap. It’d be fittin’.”
Cutler said nothing. He knew Bill had sensed Cutler might cut him out of getting the second Big Spook. That was why the young man kept bringing the subject up. Bill’s sense of Bannister was right. The difference between a rogue animal and a rogue man was that one operated on warped instinct and the other could think. Big Spook had shown something pretty close to thinking; in a lot of ways, Bannister was like the bear. If Cutler needed Bill to get the bear, he might need Bill to get the man. It was logical, but it did not change the direction of Cutler’s thoughts. The partnership he had with Bill might have to end before they reached the end of the trail.
Anderson’s words turned out to be prophetic.
There was a break in the weather. For awhile the temperature rose above freezing. Then it dropped again. The short spate of better weather served only to make what followed seem worse. Where there had been snow, there were now patches of ice. By the time they made camp some nights, their eyes were frozen shut on the windward side of their faces.
More snow fell and hid the ice along the trail. The blinding whiteness and the cold were hypnotic, and they had to fight to remain alert.
On top of that was the frustration of moving slowly. It was a good day if they made in a day half the distance they had when coming. The poacher had not only gotten a good head start on them, he had left ahead of the worst weather. The distance between them widened with each day. Was it possible that the poacher’s wound would heal before they got to him? Would the buffalo heads be sold and transported to another state? The criminal might have gone on himself and never be found. The urgency of finding the poacher in time was mocked by the slow progress Cutler and Bill were making.
They frequently had to get off the wagon and lead it when the mules started to lose their footing on the ice beneath the snow as they passed near crevices. Near one such place, Cutler was leading Kate on the left near the crevice and Bill was leading Emma on the right. The mules backed in their traces as they inched down a steep incline, losing their footing and sliding with increasing speed. Cutler slipped back toward the wagon wheel and grabbed the spokes, trying the take some of the weight off the mules until they could recover their footing.
“Do what I’m doin’!” Cutler shouted to Bill. “Quick, before the whole thing goes over!”
Bill took the right wheel. But it was a losing battle as the mules and rig slid faster along the edge.
&
nbsp; Both men lost their grip on the wheels. It slid past them with such suddenness that Cutler lost his footing and began to slide. Bill reached him in time to pull him back from the edge, but the force he used pushed to where Cutler had been. Bill went over the edge, belly down and backward, clawing at the snow for a hold that did not exist.
Lying belly down on the trail, Cutler lunged forward and grabbed Bill’s hand. For a moment he held on. Neither body moved. But Cutler could not get the traction needed to pull Bill up. He called to Apache, and the horse came next to him, putting its head down. Cutler grabbed the bridle, and Apache tried to back up, but the horse lost it footing.
“Let go, you fool!” Bill shouted.
“Go to hell!”
“This way we’ll both get killed!”
“I said go to hell!”
“That’s just where I’m goin’ and you with me if you don’t let go!”
Cutler was also sliding now. The motion stopped as he looked over the edge at Bill dangling in a crevice five feet wide and thirty feet deep. Bill had found a small toehold on the side. Maybe they had a chance. His eyes flashed anger at Cutler. His face red, Bill used his free hand to grab a loose rock and smash it against the hand holding him.
It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that Cutler lost his grip, and Bill’s hand slid away. There was nothing to do now but watch the young man fall.
Bill remained on his small toehold for a moment. Then he pushed away into the air, as though he had decided to get it over with as quickly as possible. He used his toehold to push himself to the opposite wall of the crevice, where his other foot touched a small indentation. He looked down along the wall on Cutler’s side and lowered himself down to another small chink in the rock face. Imitating the action of the bighorn he had seen in Yellowstone, Bill descended the crevice in a controlled fall by leaping from one toehold to another until he reached the bottom. After reaching apparent safety, he lay face down in the snow and did not move.
“Bill!” Cutler yelled to him. “Are you all right?”
The body did not move.
“Bill!”
Then Bill rolled slowly over, looking like a snowman, and laughed.
Cutler was stunned. Bill was not so far down he could not see the expression on Cutler’s face. That made the young man laugh louder. “How’s your hand?” he called up and continued to laugh.
Cutler looked at his hand. It was bleeding and numb. Then he looked back at Bill and he began to laugh, too. “You sonofabitch!” he yelled, “if it wasn’t my gun hand, I’d shoot you!”
Cutler left Bill, laughing, and picked his way down the trail until he came to the place where the wagon and mules had stopped sliding. They were unharmed. He got two lengths of rope from the wagon, came back to the spot where Bill had slid over, and looked down. The laughter had stopped. Bill was sitting at the bottom, grinning up at Cutler.
“Don’t get too near the edge there!” Bill yelled. “It’s a mite slippery!”
Cutler tied the ropes together, fastened one end to a tree, and threw the rest to Bill. Bill got up, dusted himself off, and walked up the side of the rock face, pulling himself to the top hand over hand.
As Bill came over the edge, Cutler said, “I ought to push your right back where you come from.” He was smiling.
There were other close calls on the way back, but they did not seem important after Bill’s drop down the crevice.
As they passed through a grove thick with pines, where the snow had not yet reached the trail, they spotted the exposed poacher’s tracks. As long as they could see them, they knew they were following him. But when they got out of the pines, the tracks disappeared again.
Once out of the Park, the ground leveled off and they were able to pick up speed.
“We headin’ straight for Cheyenne?” Bill asked.
“No. I’m takin’ you home first.”
“What for?”
“Expect your folks might appreciate knowin’ you’re alive, though I can’t understand why.”
Bill did not joke back. “Listen, boss, you’re not going to leave me there.”
“Got to stop there myself till my hand’s healed.”
“When you go on after Bannister, I’m goin’ with you.”
Cutler kept hearing the medicine man’s words. Keep the boy with you. The boy had saved his life twice already, once by knocking the grizzly off balance with the soap-induced geyser, once by making Cutler loose his hold on Bill before they both slid over the edge of the crevice. That should have been enough to end Cutler’s premonition of his own death. But it did not. Keep the boy with you. He owed the boy something. He had to pay off his obligation. He couldn’t see how he could let Bill go with him to Cheyenne. He had to find a way to leave Bill on the farm.
Even if he had to smash the boy’s hand with a rock.
Chapter Ten
The farm looked the same, except that it was sparsely salted with snow.
“Nice-lookin’ spread, ain’t it?” Bill asked when he saw it.
‘That it is.”
“Never noticed before how good it looks.”
“Sometimes,” Cutler said, “a man’s got to get away from something in order to see it.”
“Guess so. And with the start of snow here, makes me think of Christmas. Must be pretty close.”
“Bill, maybe you ought to stay here a spell now. See how you feel about it now that you’ve been away. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with bein’ a farmer.”
“John, I’ll stay here just as long as you do and not a minute longer. When you pull out, I pull out with you.”
Cutler was beginning to think that smashing Bill’s hand with a rock wouldn’t be enough. He might have to do something harder, find a way to make the young man hate him.
Mr. and Mrs. Taylor had spent most of their lives ignoring pain and hardship. In keeping misery off their faces, they were also obliged to wipe away other emotions. The joy at their son’s return was expressed in the usual way, with a big meal. Cutler saw Bill eat as if he had never tasted his mother’s cooking before. The home atmosphere was working on Bill and maybe it would win out. Maybe it would do Cutler’s job for him and make Bill decide he ought to stay after all. And maybe not.
Jack kept pumping them for news of what happened in Yellowstone. There was a lot Bill might have said about the way they had trailed the bear and the fact that Bill had had a lot to do with capturing it, about the way Bill had scampered down the rock face like a bighorn—about how he had twice saved Cutler’s life. There was a lot Bill could have said to his own credit, but he didn’t.
Instead, he told what Cutler had taught him about grizzlies, how Cutler had taught him something about reading tracks, and about how a man named Rutherford Klock had taught him you could sometimes get a geyser started with soap.
“But it ain’t all excitin’, Jack,” he said. “A lot of it’s just bein’ on the trail, just nothin’.”
“That a fact?” his father asked. “The farm get-tin’ to look any better to you then?”
“Yes, Pa. The farm never looked so good before.”
“You fixin’ to stay a spell and get back in harness here, are you?”
Bill shook his head. “No, sir. I can’t never do that again, not for very long I couldn’t. But I like knowin’ I can come back and get me a meal like this once in a while.”
Mrs. Taylor said, “You can, just as long as there’s a chicken left to butcher.”
“And after that,” Taylor said, “there’s the steers. Always some kind of fatted calf around.”
The men went out on the porch after supper.
“You been bothered anymore with fence cuttin’?” Cutler asked.
“No, John. Hedge ain’t come around since that last time.”
“Know if he’s in town?”
“Can’t say. He might be. Don’t get in there more’n twice a month. I ain’t been lookin’ for him. But he shouldn’t be too hard to find. Probably hangin’ around the st
reets or in one of the saloons. Maybe that taxidermist would know. If he’s thinkin’ of goin’ back to cowboyin’, folks at the Cheyenne Club might know where he is.”
Bill explained, ‘The Cheyenne Club’s for folks in the livestock business.”
“Think they’d let me in there?” Cutler asked.
“Why not?” Taylor asked. “Those men might want to know about a rogue animal trapper for future reference.”
Cutler lit a cigarette. He noticed his hand was not as painful as it had been. He figured he’d be ready to move out in another couple of days. “You got any objections,” he asked Taylor, “to my cam-pin’ here a day or two before I move on?”
“’Course not. Stay as long’s it pleases you. You can bunk in the boy’s room or anywhere you can find a space in the house.”
“I’ll stay in my wagon and not be a bother.”
“It’s gettin’ too cold for that, John.”
Bill said, “After where we been, seems hot down here, Pa.”
“That’s as it may be,” Taylor said, “but there’s no sense in sleepin’ out if you don’t have to on nights like this.”
“I’ll bed down in the barn then,” Cutler said. He was maneuvering to be in a place he would be able to get away from fast without Bill knowing. “Think some mornin’ I might ride off a bit to keep my joints limber. Man can get soft fast when he’s restin’ up. Might even be gone a day or two, with my horse and dog. Think Jack’d mind takin’ care of the mules for me if I do? Boy like that can always use a little money of his own.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing,” Taylor said. “Look, John, I’m not a drinkin’ man myself, but I keep a jug in the barn. You help yourself if you want to.”
“No thanks, Marcus, not this time.”
“We don’t drink when we’re workin’,” Bill said, “and we still got a job to finish.”
Cutler knew the talk about morning rides had not fooled his partner one bit.
The next morning, Cutler saddled Apache and rode off onto some open range with Red running alongside him. He fired several rounds from the Krag and several from the Colt. In between, he worked his fingers. The hand was better than it had been the night before. There was still some pain, but it didn’t interfere with his coordination or his speed. Much more important to him than speed, was accuracy, and it was as good as it had ever been.
