Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) (25 page)

Chapter 33

H
ANNAH SWALLOWED HARD AND TOOK A DEEP BREATH,
gently nudging Hestia down the street. She passed the post office, which she had visited routinely every business day for as long as she had worked for her father. She passed Blaine's store, where she had shopped since she was a little girl.

It was a street that she had traveled so often throughout her entire life, but tonight things were so very different, and they would never be the same again.

She peered into the bank. It was closed, of course, and the shades were drawn, but through a slit, she could see her father at his desk.

Having steered Hestia to a hitch rail in front of the closed store adjacent to the bank, she dismounted and made an effort to smooth her badly wrinkled skirt. She wished she had a mirror so that she could fix her hair, but she decided this was the least of her concerns.

The bank's front door would be locked, but Hannah had a key in her jacket pocket.

Isham Ransdell looked up in alarm when he heard the front door open, wondering who it could be and whether he had forgotten to lock it.

“Hannah,” he said in surprise.

To him, having no idea that she had been camping in the wilderness for two nights and on the trail for three days, his daughter looked terrible. Her clothes were wrinkled and dusty, her riding boots muddy. As he watched, she threw her hat on the counter and let her unkempt hair fall down across her shoulders.

“I'm so glad to see you,” he said, standing up from his desk chair.

“Hello, Father,” she said icily.

Her cold demeanor surprised and greatly disturbed him.

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” Hannah said without emotion.

“Yes . . . I have,” he said. “I just watched Leticia Blaine fall dead . . . less than an hour ago.”

“
What?
”

This was a twist that Hannah had not seen coming.

“It was tainted oysters . . . over at the Gallatin House.”

“She's
dead
?”

“Yes . . . she's dead.”

“There have been a lot of deaths in Gallatin City of late,” Hannah said, her insinuation clear, assuming he chose to hear it.

“A lot has happened since you've been in Bozeman,” her father said.

“I didn't go to Bozeman,” she replied, still disallowing herself from expressing emotion, aside from a perfunctory bitterness in her words.

“But you said . . . you were on the stage . . .”

“It was a ruse,” Hannah said, folding her arms.

“Why? Where?”

“I went up into the Sixteen Mile Creek country,” she explained. “I took Hestia and went up to Sixteen Mile Creek to find the bounty hunter.”

“Did you . . . ?”

“Yes, Father,” she said. “I
found
the bounty hunter.”

“Why?”

“Why did I go? . . . Or why did I go looking for a
bounty hunter
?” Hannah asked before proceeding to answer. “I went looking because I overheard
your
right-hand man—Mr. Edward J. Olson—sending Lyle Blake and Joe Clark to
kill
the bounty hunter, and to
kill
the Porter boys. I went looking for the bounty hunter because I wanted to
stop
that from happening.”

“But why would they . . . ?”

“Because,
as you know
, Father, dead men cannot point fingers,” Hannah said angrily. “Can they?”

“Point fingers at what?”

“
Really?
Don't insult my intelligence, Father. I'm not your little girl anymore.”

“I don't understand . . .” Isham Ransdell gasped. His daughter had never spoken to him like this.

“I know it
all
, Father,” she asserted. “I know the whole, sickening story.”

“What story?”

“
What story?
” Hannah repeated. “Let's start with ‘Once upon a time there was a railroad that was coming to Gallatin City.' Then there were four businessmen who owned some land that was not worth too much until the railroad was coming. Do you know this part of the story, Father?”

“Yes, that's true, of course, but . . . ?”

“But it's not anything out of the ordinary, is it?” Hannah fumed.

“No . . . not at all,” her father answered, becoming perturbed.

“Until you add on rights of inheritance,” she said, counting one by one on her fingers. “And you add to
that
a series of
murders
 . . . and
next
, the shares go not to families, but to surviving
partners
.”

“You can't believe . . .”

“I did not
want
to believe,” she said, fighting back tears. “You asked whether I found the bounty hunter . . . and I said I did . . . and I learned what he
did not
write in that letter from Fort Benton.”

“Which was?” Isham Ransdell demanded, his own ire growing.

“Which was Milton Waller's deathbed words. His
deathbed
words about him and the Porter boys being
paid
to go to the Blaine home that night. And
why
did they go there? Because there were
four
partners. ‘Three must die,' Waller said, ‘and only
one
can survive.' Who was the
only
man of the four who was
not
there that night?”

“I wasn't there, but . . .”

“
Exactly!
” Hannah shouted.

“What are you saying?”

“Gideon Porter knows, and Gideon Porter is
alive
. You sent the bounty hunter to bring him back, insinuating that you wanted him dead.
You
sent Blake and Clark out to kill them, and this morning,
your
right-hand man, Edward J. Olson, came
this
close to killing Gideon Porter until
your
little girl slammed him across the head with the butt of a Winchester . . . but Gideon Porter is
alive
!”

“I did
not
hire Gideon Porter to kill
anyone
,” Isham Ransdell shouted back angrily, though he could tell that this woman who said she was no longer his little girl did not believe a word he was saying.

Chapter 34

T
HE TALL, IMPECCABLY DRESSED MAN WITH NOTICEABLE
scars on his face stepped into the sheriff's office.

“Good evening, Sheriff,” he said, though his eyes were not on Marcus Johnson but scanning the other faces in the room and the cells.

“Mr. Cole, when I saw you coming down Main Street a moment ago, I could see that you had done your job,” he said, not looking at Cole, but directing his angry eyes at Gideon Porter. “And here is the mangy dog who did
this
to my face.”

“Gideon kept sayin' he had friends in high places who were gonna get us off,” Jimmy Goode shouted in uncharacteristic anger. “Now look at him . . . at
us
.”

For the first time, perhaps in his life, Jimmy Goode had spoken assertively without Gideon Porter denouncing him or telling him to shut up.

Looking at Stocker's face, Porter's expression changed from his usual countenance of bitter defiance to one of anxiety.

“And I see Mr. Olson here in a
cell
,” Stocker said dramatically, as though he was performing before a jury in a packed courtroom. “Can someone explain to me how on earth a pillar of our community has gotten himself locked up?”

“These men have all said that Mr. Olson hired Gideon to do the shootings,” Johnson explained.

“Edward?” Stocker asked, looking at the man himself.

Olson merely hung his head as Porter acrimoniously repeated his earlier assertion.

“The Ransdell girl stopped him from shooting Gideon . . . to keep Gideon from telling what you just heard he's already told,” Johnson told the lawyer.

“
The Ransdell girl?
” Stocker said, having been caught off guard. “Where? She's in Bozeman . . .”

“Actually not,” Cole said. “She rode with us down from Sixteen Mile Creek. Right now, she's over at the bank, where she's laying into the man Olson works for.”

“She's
what
?”

“As you know, the man who hired Gideon Porter to do that to your face works for Isham Ransdell,” Cole explained. “Milton Waller told me on his deathbed that they were paid for those killings. It also seems that the only man not present that night stood to inherit some pretty valuable real estate.”

“So you've surmised . . . that Isham hired Mr. Olson here . . . to hire Porter to . . . ?” Stocker said thoughtfully, recalling that Hannah had come to exactly the same conclusion.

“Haven't heard anything to the contrary,” Cole interrupted.

“You were sure lucky, Mr. Stocker,” Johnson added. “They was gunnin' for you too.”

“I see,” said Stocker thoughtfully. “So now we know the
whole
story . . . and we have
all
the perpetrators in custody. Wait, where's Enoch Porter?”

“He's out yonder,” Johnson said. “He's settin' on his horse, but not upright.”

“I thought I was smelling something pungent as I walked past,” Stocker said.

“Now that everything is taken care of here, maybe I should mosey him on over to the undertaker's before it gets too late,” Johnson said.

“That would be a very good idea,” Stocker agreed. “We'd hate to have Gallatin City awake to his stench.”

*   *   *

“
M
R.
C
OLE,
I
MUST COMMEND YOU ON ROUNDING UP THE
perpetrators of this crime,” Stocker said after Johnson had left the office. “Including one—Mr. Olson—we had
not known
to be involved.”

Cole merely nodded. His tired brain was fixed on a real bath and a good night's sleep in a real bed.

He should not have let his mind drift to such distracting thoughts.

“I commend you on figuring out all of the details . . .
except one
,” Stocker said with a smirk as he suddenly drew a gun and pointed it directly at Cole's head. “Now, please carefully unstrap your gunbelt and let it drop to the floor.”

Stunned by this unexpected turn of events, Cole could do nothing but comply. To attempt to draw his gun would be a fatal mistake. The man had the drop on him, and he apparently knew how to use a gun.

“Now, kick it over to the cell containing the incompetent Edward J. Olson,” Stocker demanded.

As Olson reached out and took Cole's pistol from its holster, Stocker tossed him the cell keys from Johnson's desk.

“It is quite amusing, Mr. Cole,” Stocker smirked, “that the
one
piece of the puzzle that you got wrong was believing that the straitlaced Isham Ransdell was the kingpin behind this affair. On one hand, I'm insulted, and on another, I find it a compliment that you
didn't
figure it out.”

“If not Ransdell, then who?” Cole asked. “
You?
”

“Guilty as charged,” Stocker confessed. As he laughed, the scars gave his face a macabre appearance.

“But Gideon Porter clobbered you bad with the butt of his gun,” Cole said grimly.

“That was to make it look convincing, though Mr. Porter made it a bit
too
convincing,” Stocker said, his leering grin fading. “While I
also
benefit from the right of inheritance, your eyes fell upon poor Isham because he was
absent
that night.”

“That, and the fact that Olson is
his
man,” Cole interjected.

“I also work for Mr. Stocker,” Olson said, stepping from his cell and strapping on Cole's gunbelt. “Under the table of course.”

“He really
did
hire the Porter boys to do the deed,” Stocker added. “You had that part right.”

“And I'm still owed another five hundred dollars for doing it,” Gideon Porter asserted as Olson unlocked his cell.

“What do you mean?” Jimmy Goode whined. “You only paid me
thirty
bucks and you're gettin'
five hundred
?”

“That's 'cause I'm worth it, and you're good for
nothing
,” Porter growled, roughly cuffing Goode alongside his head as they were released from their cell.

“Calm down, both of you,” Stocker demanded. “I believe that we all need to go over to the bank and see that everyone gets what's coming to him. Mr. Cole's diligence has presented us with an opportunity.”

“What sort of opportunity?” Olson asked.

“A terrible thing happened at the bank tonight,” Stocker said with exaggerated mock sadness. “You see, our Mr. Cole here decided that with the banker's vault wide open to pay the bounty, the rest of the bank's assets would be easy pickings for a robbery. He took you and me hostage and went to do his dirty work.”

“I follow you,” Olson said smugly. “And the banker dies in the shootout?”

“Exactly.” The attorney smiled broadly. “And sadly, his daughter is killed as well. Of course,
we
 . . . I'll let it be
you
 . . . will save the day by killing the bounty hunter.
You
will become a hero by avenging your boss's death.”

“I like it,” Olson said, and smiled.