“I reckon if you knew who it was … ,” Little Ed began tentatively.
“If I knew who it was, he’d be in chains,” Buck stated resolutely. “It’s a hell of a note, but there’s nothing we can do except keep our eyes open. I’ve been saying all along that, sooner or later, he’ll trip himself up. I still believe that.”
“You said Collins was killed outside the women’s tent?” Peewee asked.
Buck nodded. “Yeah, and it’s the second time we know of that someone was caught sneaking around their sleeping quarters. From here on into Virginia City, the women will sleep beside the fire … one fire that we’ll all share. It’ll be more crowded than separate messes, but I want every man here keeping an eye on Dulce and Gwen as if they were his own sisters. Understand?”
There was a quick chorus of assents that Buck found gratifying, although he watched closely to see if anyone held back.
“Don’t you worry about them gals,” Ray said emphatically. “Ain’t no one gonna get close to ’em after tonight.”
Buck nodded with relief. It was a load off his mind, and it came at the right time. He had a heavy feeling in his gut that the days ahead were going to be some of the most dangerous they’d faced yet. Especially when Crowley and Luce learned how swiftly the Box K was overtaking them.
Buck found Dulce standing alone behind Nate’s trailer. Tears tracked her wind-roughened cheeks and her nose was red. He approached tentatively, not sure if he should intrude, or if he even wanted to. Her grief for the tall bodyguard baffled him; he might have expected it from Gwen, but not from Jock Ka-vanaugh’s iron-willed daughter. Dulce, he recalled, hadn’t even cried at Mase’s funeral.
“Are you all right?” he asked, stopping several feet away.
“Oh, Buck,” she whispered, moving awkwardly toward him in the heavy snow.
He met her halfway, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close. “It’s all right,” he said gently. “We’re going to make it.”
She buried her face in his shoulder and wept harder. It was several minutes before her sobs began to lessen. “I am so sorry,” she said into his chest. “So very, very sorry.”
He frowned in confusion. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about, Dulce. It wasn’t your fault he was killed.”
She leaned back, looking at him. “He died saving us, didn’t he?”
“It’s possible. I don’t guess we’ll ever know for sure.”
“We might if you’d find his assassin, but you won’t, will you?” She sighed heavily. “No more than you’ll ever discover who killed your friend, Campbell.”
Buck dropped his arms.
“It’s not your fault,” she hastened to add. “I’m not sure Papa could even solve this riddle.”
“Just what are you so angry about, Dulce?”
She met his gaze squarely, her voice harsh. “I am angry about this trip that you brought me on, this dreadful journey that will never end.”
“I seem to remember you saying you wanted to go to Montana, that you wanted to experience the same kinds of adventures your mother did when she crossed the plains with your father.”
“That was a long time ago,” Dulce replied. “Another age. Everything has changed.”
“What’s changed?” he demanded.
“I no longer have an urge to cross a plain, Buck, and Montana sounds as exciting as a toothache. Is that clear enough for you?”
“Yeah,” he replied, taking a step backward. “I reckon it is.”
“I want to go home. Take me home.”
“Is that all you want?”
“For the moment. I don’t know how I’ll feel when all this is behind me. We can only wait and see.”
“We?”
“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.” She folded her arms across her chest, like an iron gate being slammed shut.
“All right,” Buck said evenly. “Let’s go back to the fire. Gwen’s going to need your help with supper.”
“You go. I want to be alone for a while.”
He shook his head. “Uhn-uh, I want you where we can keep an eye on you.”
Dulce’s eyes flashed, but the moment passed. “Very well, Captain McCready, your wish shall remain my command.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and stepped over the short tongue connecting Nate’s lead and trail wagons.
Buck waited until she was gone, then waited a while longer, but whatever emotion he might have expected never materialized.
Buck had worried that news of Collins’s death might undermine the crew’s new enthusiasm, but instead it seemed to sharpen it. The men gathered around the fire that night, ignoring the muddy ground close to the flames, the cold air that nibbled at their backs. The old-timers with the Box K regaled the independents with tales of the days before the coming of the railroad to the Great Basin, when the giant freighters ruled all of the land.
Little Ed spoke of his adventures freighting out of San Diego, and broke them all up with his account of an encounter with a rattlesnake den that had spewed forth diamondbacks like steam from a teakettle. Even Big Kona stepped tentatively into the conversational waters, relating stories of his years on the big island of Hawaii, where the women went topless and snow never fell.
“Lordy,” Ray breathed when the Sandwich Islander finished speaking. “Kona, what’s the prospects there for a muleskinner? Could a fella like me find work?”
Kona’s response was drowned out by the raucous laughter of the other teamsters. Even Gwen chuckled. It was as if nothing had occurred—neither death nor sabotage—and the road before them lay straight and dry.
Buck stood at the rear of the crowd and marveled at the muleskinners’ resilience. Collins’s name wasn’t mentioned. Neither were Herb Crowley’s or Anton Luce’s, and the only reference to Nick Kelso came at Arlen’s expense, causing the shabby outlaw to duck his head in embarrassment. They stood there, talking and laughing late into the night, then were out of their blankets well before dawn, moving out smartly at first light.
Buck started the morning in his usual position in front of Peewee’s leaders, but by midday he’d increased his lead to more than a mile. It was shortly after noon when he spotted his ramrod stretched out on a large rock beside the road, lazily smoking a cigarette. The snow close to the rock had already melted back, and what remained in the road was turning to slush. By this time tomorrow, Buck mused, he would be worrying more about run-off and mud than having a wagon slide off into some snow-hidden gully.
“How’s the bed?” Buck asked, reining up a few yards away.
“I’d prefer a feather mattress and a pretty woman,” was Milo’s quick response.
“What about Crowley and Luce?”
Milo sat up with a thoughtful expression, pushing his hat back on his head. “Why, boss, I don’t know who they’d like to sleep with. I was only speaking for myself, you understand?” When Buck’s demeanor didn’t change, Milo quickly added: “They’re about a day ahead of us yet but still taking their time.”
“Then they don’t know we’re here?”
“They don’t act like it. They probably figure they were the last ones over Monida Pass.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Buck’s mouth. This was shaping up better than he’d anticipated. “Maybe we ought not be pushing so hard,” he said reflectively.
“I’d think we’d need to catch up as quick as we can. Sooner or later they’ll send someone back to have a look. They might be surprised when they learn we’re here, but they won’t stop to ponder how we did it.”
“Our mules couldn’t stand a flat-out race into Virginia City, they’re too wore out,” Buck replied. “I want to close the gap, but not by too much. I think I know a way we might be able to get around them and retake the lead … provided we can keep from being discovered too soon.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Buck returned to his place at the head of the column. Peewee’s mules were pulling strongly, keeping the long fifth chain taut,
and with the Crowley and Luce train breaking trail, they were making good time. Buck estimated they were within fifteen miles of the Franklin, Idaho outfit by the time they stopped that night. Close enough, he decided.
With the weather turning warm, Buck decided they needed to bury Collins. They did so beside the creek where they were camped. Afterward, Dulce wrapped a sheet of paper with some personal information about him in a strip of oilcloth and secured it under a stone at the head of the grave. Watching her back away, Buck was struck with a sudden jolt of understanding. He hadn’t seen it before, not even in the tears Dulce had shed when she first learned of Collins’s death, but he saw it now and wondered if they had been lovers as well, or if the circumstances of the Box K’s race to Montana had robbed them of that opportunity.
He looked around at the crew but couldn’t tell if any of them had made the connection. Gwen had; he could see that in the way she was looking at him, although he supposed that didn’t surprise him. Not nearly so much as his own lack of feelings. Where was the anger, the hurt, the sense of betrayal? The best he could summon was a peculiar numbness, as if what he and Dulce had shared had died somewhere back along the trail. Turning away, he made his way back to the teamsters’ camp.
They were three days getting out of the higher elevations. By the time they reached Dolsen’s trading post at the head of the Beaverhead Valley, the snow was nearly gone, the road muddy but firm. Buck ordered the wagons to keep rolling while he rode on to the post. He counted eight freight outfits scattered down the valley behind Dolsen’s, waiting for the pass to open to the south, and probably two thousand head of mules and oxen grazing on the surrounding hills.
Buck hitched Zeke out front and went inside, making his way to a short bar at the rear of the room.
“Well, as I live and breathe,” mocked the lean, bearded trader the post was named after. “What are you doing north of the divide, McCready? Don’t you know your outfit’s been stranded in Idaho Territory by the Bonner gang?”
“Is that a fact?” Buck replied. “Why don’t you pour me a beer and tell me about it? Sounds like an interesting story.”
Van Dolsen laughed and reached for a mug. A crowd of teamsters had gathered around them, hungry for details of the Box K’s encounter with Bonner’s men. Buck didn’t resent their queries, although he did feel somewhat put out that no one asked about Mase. It was as if the wagon master’s death had become old news. By keeping his answers short, the questions soon petered out.
Dolsen waited until most of the freighters had wandered off, then leaned across the bar and lowered his voice. “I’m thinking you’d like to hear what your ramrod had to say.”
Buck looked up curiously. “Milo was here?”
“This morning. He asked me to tell you that everything was flowing smooth as Kentucky bourbon. I assume he meant the Crowley and Luce train doesn’t know you’re so close. C and L camped north of here last night, and their wagon boss, Lomax, came in to ask about the road. He seemed under the impression that the Box K had been stopped cold.”
“Did he mention Jim Bonner by name?”
“He did, although he didn’t say how he happened to know that little tidbit of information.”
“He shouldn’t have known about it at all,” Buck replied. “His outfit was already well down the road before we learned who it was.”
“Now I consider that informative information and more than a little incriminating, not that it’d stand up in a court of law.”
“I don’t intend to take it to the law,” Buck vowed, sitting his empty mug on the bar and wiping his lips with his sleeve. “Who else knows about Milo?”
“That he works for you? No one. He kept his mouth shut and acted like any other out-of-work saddle tramp.”
Buck nodded, relieved that Milo was playing it close to his vest. “What have you heard about the Ruby Cut-Off?”
Van stared at him for a moment, then his eyes slowly widened. “Well, I’ll be go to hell. Is that what you’re planning?”
“It’s just a question.”
“Yeah, but it’s a hell of a question. I wish I could answer it. No one’s used that route this year that I know of. It was never a good road, but it used to be passable if a man was in a hurry. Everyone goes through Twin Bridges now.”
“Last you’d heard, could wagons make it over the cut-off?”
“Hell, Buck, I don’t know what to tell you. If you wasn’t trying to beat C and L into Virginia City, I’d say avoid the Ruby Cut-Off like the plague, but.…” He shrugged. “I will tell you this … I’d bet every nickel in my cash box that Lomax will know you’re here before the sun goes down tonight. You don’t have anything to lose by trying the cut-off.” His face took on a funny look. “Except your mules and wagons, of course.”
Buck nodded and tossed a coin on the bar for his beer. He knew the cut-off was the Box K’s only hope of beating C&L. The main Montana Road went north as far as the town of Twin Bridges before it split—one route going on to Helena and Fort Benton, far out on the plains, the other veering sharply southeast to follow the Ruby River to the many mining camps in that direction, Virginia City being the largest of the towns right now. The main road’s advantages were a smooth, solid bed and a pair of bridges over the Ruby and Big Hole Rivers. Good graze and water made a difference, too. It was an extra day’s pull to go through Twin Bridges, but everyone considered it worth the effort.
The Ruby Cut-Off swung away from the main road just north of Beaverhead Rock, some miles above Dolsen’s trading post, and ran almost due east, skirting the northern tip of the Ruby Mountains before it joined the southeastern fork of the Montana Road at the upper end of the Ruby Valley. It was a rough stretch even in the best of conditions—hard on stock and equipment alike. Buck had never traveled the cut-off himself, but both Mase and Lew Walker had. They’d called it a spine-jolting trip through a corner of hell that neither man wanted to repeat—but they’d still done it. Barring rock slides or high water, Buck intended to do it, too.
As he turned away from the bar, he spotted a short, stocky man in a brushed riding coat and expensive topper get up and walk out the front door. Something about the stranger’s manner caught Buck’s attention and he went outside to look for him. The man was nowhere to be seen, but there were several men nearby that Buck knew, and he walked over to talk to a couple of Leavitt Brothers muleskinners.
“By jingo, Buck, they’re sayin’ you busted up that Bonner gang pretty good,” a teamster named Boyd said.
“I heard that same story,” Buck replied. “I couldn’t say how true it was, though.”
Boyd chuckled and the second Leavitt man, a woolly-bearded Mormon named Jenkins, added: “Whatever you did, it likely improved the character of the territory. Far as I’m concerned, they should hang the whole bunch of ’em.”
“You guys see a short-legged gent in a topper leave here?” Buck asked, changing the subject.
“Sure,” Boyd said. “Frenchy. He a friend of yours?”
“Never laid eyes on him before.”
“I hadn’t either until a couple of days ago. He drinks some, but mostly stays to himself. A Utah Freight driver tried to egg him into a fight last night by making fun of his hat, but Frenchy pulled a pistol from somewhere and that Utah Freight man backed off so fast I thought he was going to go through the wall.”
“Speak of the devil,” Jenkins murmured, and Buck looked up to see the stubby Frenchman coming out of the stable astride a handsome sorrel. He looked strangely out of place atop his heavy Santa Fe saddle. His cream-colored trousers were stretched tight across muscular thighs and his shoulders looked straight as a carpenter’s level beneath the brushed twill of his long coat—a suit more practical for carriage rides in the park than the Montana frontier—but as he rode out of the yard, he gave Buck a look that made the hairs across the back of his neck stand up like a dog’s hackles.
“Wonder where he’s going,” Boyd murmured as Frenchy kicked his horse into a canter.
“Why was you askin’ about him, Buck?” Jenkins inquired.
“I couldn’t rightly say,” Buck confessed. “Something about him bothers me, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“I don’t trust a Frenchman,” Jenkins stated, then spat as if merely uttering the word was distasteful.
Boyd said: “You don’t trust nobody that ain’t a Mormon or a Leavitt man.”
“Ain’t no reason I should, either,” Jenkins retorted.
Buck walked away before he could be drawn into an argument he had no interest in. Mounting Zeke, he reined after the Frenchman, but he didn’t try to catch up. He felt a need to get back to the Box K, and thought maybe he shouldn’t wander too far away from it any more.
Gwen guided her chestnut up the gentle southern slope of Beaverhead Rock, then reined east toward the top of the cliff that gave the formation its name. Buck rode in front of her, his black mule picking its way carefully around the low, jutting stones that peeked out from the clumpy new grass.
Gwen had been eager to view the famous landmark ever since she’d learned the caravan would pass within its afternoon shadow. She’d first heard of it from her father’s readings, when she and Eddie were still small enough to sit on his lap. In those halcyon days of her youth, Robert Haywood had read to his children nightly—stories by Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll and Sir Walter Scott. But it was the condensed journals of Captains Lewis and Clark that had captivated Gwen—tales of her own country, of exploration and adventure, giant bears and unknown rivers. And somewhere deep within that land of bewitchment, a huge rock shaped just like the beavers the city kept in its small, riverside menagerie.
Gwen had thought young Roscoe Evans was making sport of her when he’d pointed out the craggy stone wall that morning and told her it was the Beaverhead. “It doesn’t look much like a beaver from the south,” he’d hastily reassured her, noticing the doubting look on her face, “but you can make it out from the north if you look close.”
The Long Hitch Page 27
