High and Wild (21 page)

Kane knocked the dottle of his pipe out on the ground and wrapped his wrists around his knees. “She and Burt wouldn't take to saddle, so to speak. Teddy more than Burt. That poor boy's a hind-tit calf, a borderline ne'er-do-well. Would rather drink and whore around than drive a ten-mule hitch, and that's all he'd do, too, if not for his sister.

“The old man had planned to take them all out of here, but he died before he could, and Teddy and Burt stayed and bought some wagons and mules and slowly built a freighting business. Only Geist had sold his own mining claims by then and switched to freighting and hotels and saloons. He didn't have the savvy for running large mines. Doesn't have the savvy for freighting, either. Judith's the one who runs the show. Geist, he's just an old faker and confidence man who invested well. Now he's wearin' tailored suits from Philadelphia and has his spinster daughter, Morgana, keeping the books, although I hear she's not much better at that than her old man. I've also heard Morgana don't cotton to Judith and wants her father to take her out of here.”

Pondering this, Raven rose from the rock she'd been sitting on and flicked open the loading gate of Kane's Colt. As she slowly turned the cylinder, shaking out the cartridges and letting them plop into the dirt at her riding boots, she said, “Sounds like this Teddy Redwine has plenty of reason to try to run Geist and Judith out of business. This Mr. Cheatum, too.”

“Yeah, but she's just a girl.”

Raven arched a brow at the man as the last cartridge from his gun bounced off her boot to wink in the intensifying morning sun now clearing the eastern ridges.

“I mean,” Kane said, looking chastised, “she's just a kid. Hell, I don't think she's much older than twenty, and she and that boy, Burt, don't have a pot to pee in. Geist and Judith run this field, and the only contracts they don't get are the ones they don't have the time or wagons for. The Redwines and Pink Cheatum take their leavings.”

“Sometimes those you perceive to be the weakest horses in the
remuda
turn out to be the fiercest, Mr. Kane. And I suspect the Redwines—especially Teddy, being the
girl
—have every cause to feel fierce, indeed.” Raven tossed the man's Colt into the dirt between his legs. “I've enjoyed our conversation, but don't let me see you again, unless you want more of what you've received here this morning.”

With that, Raven pinched her hat brim to the befuddled, bloodied, and notch-eared regulator and strode on down the trail toward her horse.

23

A
lthough he'd only slept
a few hours, Haskell woke just after dawn.

He left his new friend, Emil Schwartz, sound asleep in the “rooming house”—it was merely a tent filled with miners and itinerant drummers of one sort or another and the stench of unwashed bodies, coal oil, and overfilled thunder mugs—and headed off to enjoy a stack of flapjacks as high as his hat crown and pork sausage as thick as his wrist.

The coffee was as dark as a gravedigger's dreams. Bear added a jigger of his own Sam Clay from his hide-wrapped traveling flask, to give the mud some hair. Over his second cup, he enjoyed a Cleopatra, sipping and smoking in the near-dark cook tent, and gathered some wool over his current assignment.

A baffling one at that.

He knew little so far. Most of what he'd learned had come from Judith O'Brien and Emil Schwartz. He thought it high time he sniffed out some information firsthand and went through it with a fine-tooth comb.

With that in mind, he carefully peeled off the cork-sized coal from the half-smoked stogie. He slid the precious cheroot into his vest pocket under the bear coat he wore against the early-morning chill, polished off the bracing belly wash, belched, and slung his saddlebags over one shoulder and his rifle over the other shoulder.

He had little trouble retrieving the bags, the Yellowboy, and his bowie knife from the sheriff's office, as neither Goodthunder nor the deputies had been around, and the padlock on the office door and the one on the gun rack had been no match for Bear's lock-picking skills.

Outside the cook shack, just as the sun was beginning to rise in the east, Haskell slung the saddlebags over the gelding's back behind the saddle and slid the Yellowboy into its scabbard. Then he mounted up and, after a half hour of following Schwartz's direction, he found himself staring at a ragged signpost leaning beside the front gate of “Bar B Freighting Services, Malc. Briar, Prop.”

Bear squinted up at the sky into which the sun had kited on his ride out here, northeast of Wendigo. He was still close enough to town that he could hear the thuds of the stamping mills, could at times even feel the reverberation through his boots, but he could not see the settlement from here. It was over a slight rise to the west.

Around Haskell was a broad valley flat that rose slowly toward a timbered rise in the north. Beyond the rise, the mountains jutted, their stony crests touched with glaciers that fairly glowed in the early light. Now, as he stared in that direction, he saw a freight team moving slowly along a distant trail. It was little larger than an angleworm from this distance and heading toward a peak to the right of it, beyond another rise that was only slightly higher than the one nearest Haskell.

Occasionally, when the breeze switched, he could hear the whistles of the mule skinners and the pistol-like pops of the black snakes that the drivers whipped over the lumbering teams' backs as they headed deeper into that high, wild country up there around the mines.

A board fence encircled the freight yard once owned by Malcolm Briar. The yard was all that was out here except the tall green grass growing up around a creek that meandered between Haskell and the northern mountains, glacier-strewn boulders, silver-green mountain sage, willows, and the occasional hunting hawk.

There was a double gate on the fence in front of Haskell, but it was not locked. There was a chain, but no padlock remained, likely removed by those who'd scavenged the Briar holdings. Bear swung down from the gelding's back, opened both gates—they were larger than barn doors, having been made to let giant freight rigs and multihitch mule teams pass—and then led the black into the yard and closed the gates behind him.

He saw no reason to advertise his presence.

He looked around. A small cabin lay about fifty yards up the trail. Suspended above the ground on low stone pylons, it was flanked by several corrals constructed from unpeeled pine logs and two large wood-frame barns, one likely for the mules and the large amount of feed they consumed and the other for the wagons.

A windmill stood to the left of the cabin, encircled by a large stone tank. The wooden blades turned lazily in the breeze that drifted down from the northern mountains and was edged with a knifelike chill that presaged the frigid winter blasts that would arrive all too soon for the citizens of Wendigo.

Haskell took out his half-smoked cigar, fired a match on his cartridge belt, and walked toward the cabin, puffing smoke and looking around as he went. He'd wrapped the black's reins around its saddle horn, so it could wander about the enclosed yard, which was hard-packed and scoured of every blade of grass so that it resembled a
playa
, a dry lake basin.

Hearing the slow thuds of the black walking along behind him and the tinkling of water dribbling out of the windmill pipe, he tramped up to the cabin and its narrow front stoop. There was a washstand on the stoop, to the right of the front window over which a canvas curtain hung, but there was no pan. All that was on the stoop besides the wooden stand was an
olla
, a Spanish-style clay pot for holding drinking water.

Haskell peered inside. The
olla
was about half-filled with brackish-looking water, on the surface of which a dead fly floated.

Bear moved to the door and tripped the metal latch, and the door gave a burp as it settled on its hinges. He shoved, and it belched again as it scraped across a warp in the wooden floor and then swung wide, squawking faintly.

From just inside, where dusky shadows prevented Haskell from seeing clearly, there was a low mewl and clicking sounds. His heart gave a startled hiccup, and then his big LeMat was in his hand, and he was clicking the hammer back, crouching and spreading his boots as he extended the gun straight out in front of him.

He eased the tension on his trigger finger when he saw the fox standing against the base of the wall and ahead and to his right. The fox—mostly red, with some charcoal showing in its undercoat and four black feet—sort of slunk back against the wall before giving another whining cry and then scuttling through a curtained doorway.

Haskell heard the little beast's toenails click as it high-tailed it to somewhere at the rear of the cabin. There was a soft thud and then silence.

Bear depressed the main hammer—it had two, a second one for detonating the shotgun shell in the stout barrel beneath the one that fired .44 rounds—and returned it to its holster on his right thigh.

He looked around the place, which smelled of pent-up air and the sour musk of wild animals. The front room was about thirty feet wide by fifteen feet deep. All that remained was a small black iron monkey stove and some kindling in a box hammered together from several tomato crates. That and a grimy brown whiskey bottle on the floor.

Spider webs hung here and there, clinging to the flour-sack curtains that remained over the room's three windows. There were plenty of scrapes and scuffs that marked where furniture had been, likely including a desk, but all that had been scavenged, owing more to the practicality of these remote-living mountain people than to thievery.

Its owner was no longer here to use the furnishings, so they might as well be taken by someone who could.

Haskell moved to the curtained doorway leading to another room behind what was probably the main one. The muslin was so threadbare and patched that it had probably not been worth scavenging. Haskell swept it aside and stared into the room beyond.

It appeared to have been a sleeping area. A straw pallet remained on the floor, on the room's far side and to the left of a window that was partly broken out. A small table sat in front of the window, one of its legs not quite touching the floor.

Bear realized that the thud he'd heard when the fox ran had been the jostling of the table as the animal had leaped onto it and then out through the window.

He walked into the room, which was about the same size as or maybe a little smaller than the first room. Nothing here besides the pallet and the table and some broken glass littering the tabletop. Mouse droppings and spider webs. The same wild musk.

Haskell looked out the window at the barns and the corrals and the board fence behind them, securing the place. Nothing out there, either. The freight yard was like a small ghost town.

He turned away from the window and was about to walk back toward the curtained doorway, but he stopped. Something had caught his eye.

He stepped over to the straw pallet, dropped to a knee, and reached down between the pallet and the chinked log wall. He scooped up the object he'd spied there reflecting the window light and held the brass rifle cartridge, which was about three inches long, up to his face for closer inspection.

It was a .50-.90 black-powder cartridge and bullet used in the Sharps .50-caliber rifle, or the Big Fifty, as it was more commonly called among buffalo hunters. At the end of the brass casing was stamped “Sharps Manuf. Co.”

Haskell himself had fired such a weapon, prized by buffalo hunters for its accuracy and its ability to penetrate the tough hide of a buffalo. It was the most accurate rifle from long range.

He tossed the cartridge in his lightly closed hand and considered his find. From outside came a horse's whinny. He turned toward the sleeping area's curtained doorway.

Now there was only silence.

Haskell pocketed the cartridge and released the keeper thong from over the hammer of the big LeMat. He slid the revolver from the holster with a slow
snick
of steel against leather and walked slowly, as lightly as possible for a man who weighed nearly two hundred forty pounds, to the curtained doorway.

He slid the curtain a couple of inches to the left and peered out through the main room's front door, which he'd left standing open. He could see all the way to the front gate from this vantage, but as far as he could tell, nothing was out of the ordinary.

Looking through the front window to the right of the door, he could see the black gelding standing near the windmill and the stone stock tank. The horse was obscured by the grimy curtain, but he saw it, standing and facing the cabin, give its head a violent shake, rattling the bridle chains and the bit in its teeth.

Holding the LeMat straight up in front of his right shoulder, Haskell walked slowly to the front door and, holding his head forward, slid his eyes around quickly to survey the entire yard in front of the cabin.

The gelding nickered uneasily.

Haskell looked toward the gate in the board fence. He'd closed it, but it now appeared to be open a foot. The wind might have blown it open, but he didn't think so. The gelding and his own sixth sense were telling him that he was no longer alone here in Briar's freight yard.

He stepped out onto the stoop and, swinging his head from left to right and back again, walked down the three steps to the ground. Continuing to look around cautiously, he started for the east front corner of the cabin and then stopped.

A fresh boot print stamped the ground in front of him. Beyond lay another one. Just behind the heel print was the scratch of a spur.

Haskell looked down past the side of the cabin. The owner of the tracks was nowhere in sight, but the tracks continued around to the back.

Haskell followed them, moving quickly and holding the LeMat high as he clicked the main hammer back. He stopped at the rear corner and edged a look around the cabin's rear.

Still nothing. The maker of the tracks, however, had stopped near the broken back window, most likely to peer inside. Then he'd continued around the far corner. By now, he might have made it around to the front and discovered Bear's own tracks overlying his own.

The thought had no sooner passed over his mind than a shadow jutted out from the shadow of the cabin itself, about six feet out from the hovel's rear wall. It was the shadow of a hatted head. It grew to include the neck and chest and rifle of a man who'd climbed onto the cabin's roof.

Haskell stepped back into the shadow and pressed his back to the log wall. He watched the shadow grow as his stalker cat-footed down toward the edge of the roof. Haskell heard the shake shingles creak and the faint scuff and chink of the man's spurs. Dust sifted down from the roof's overhang to dribble onto the straw-flecked ground at the edge of the cabin's shadow.

Haskell pressed his back against the cabin, flexing his gloved hand on the LeMat's horn grips, which he continued to hold up above his right shoulder, the barrel aimed at the overhang only a few inches above his head.

He watched the shadow of the man turn and slide off toward the cabin's far side, the shingles again groaning against his weight.

Bear took two steps forward and then stepped back away from the pitched roof, the edge of which was no higher than the crown of his hat. He raised his left arm and swept it up and over the roof in a slashing motion, feeling it connect with a pair of legs.

There was a scream as the man's feet were swept out from beneath him. It was followed by the crunching thud of the man hitting the cabin roof on his back. Haskell rose onto the toes of his boots and shoved his hand up onto the roof once more, finding one of the man's lower legs and giving it a fierce tug.