Ransom (9 page)

“Damn right I would. Now hand me that stick with the bacon on it, will you.”

Hahn left the fire without handing Taylor the requested bacon and sought the solitary comfort of his bedroll.

 

Jessica Taylor

Jess let the stick droop down onto the coals, deliberately allowing the chunk of fat bacon to become crusted with ash and charred wood. She hoped Ederle would break a tooth on something she picked up there.

“Watch it, you dumb bitch. I told you not to let that touch the ashes,” Ederle snarled.

“And you watch your language,” Jessica snapped back at him, picking the stick up off the coals. “You needn't be crude. There is a child listening, you know.”

Ederle grunted. He hunched his shoulders and said nothing further, but it was obvious he was not happy with her.

Jess glanced at the man out of the corners of her eyes, then let the stick droop again. Soon Ederle's supper was once more in contact with the ash.

Loozy looked at her mama and suppressed a giggle, then went back to very carefully tending the pieces of fat bacon that they would share for their evening meal. It was one thing to sabotage the man's food. It would be another to ruin their own.

They had to do the best they could under these trying circumstances. Both of them did.

Chapter 7

“Hold up there a minute,” Hahn called.

Taylor looked over his shoulder and frowned at Hahn, who was trailing by twenty feet or so. “What's your problem now?” Taylor demanded.

“I got to get down for a minute. My legs are cramping and my drawers are riding up in my crotch until I just can't stand it.”

“Mister, you whine an' snivel more'n just about anybody I ever come across. Well, anybody over two year of age anyhow.”

“Are you going to stop? I have to get down and walk. Just for a few minutes.”

“You are one useless S.O . . . Never mind. Get down.”

Hahn pulled the paint horse to a halt, stood in his left stirrup, and dragged his foot across the rump of the horse. He lowered himself gingerly to the ground, but when he tried to stand his left leg buckled and he sprawled hard onto the ground.

He lost his grip on the rein—or simply forgot to hang on—and the usually steady paint spooked. It snorted and bucked and took off running with the packhorse following owing to Hahn having tied its lead rope to his saddle horn.

Taylor swore, loud and forcefully, and dropped the lead rope of the pack animal that was trailing him. He put the spurs to his brown and sprinted after the fleeing paint. It took him a good ten minutes to run down the paint horse,
gather it up, and lead it back to Richard Hahn. By then one of Hahn's reins was broken after being stepped on by the loose animal.

Taylor refused to speak to Hahn, or even to look in his direction, while he stepped down to the ground and rummaged in his saddlebags. He produced an awl and a coil of rawhide, then hunkered down with his back to Hahn and began repairing the broken rein.

The two did not speak again the remainder of the morning.

* * *

“I can't find any tracks,” Taylor admitted.

“We're lost?”

“No, of course not. We ain't lost. But their trail is.” Taylor sat dispiritedly on the brown horse, hands folded across his saddle horn.

“What do we do now?”

“We look, of course.” Taylor hesitated, then said, “I know a, well, a sort of trading post. It's over that way.” He nodded his head in a generally southward direction.

“What is a ‘sort of' trading post?” Hahn asked.

“It's a hog ranch.”

“Fine,” Hahn retorted. “So what the hell would a pig farm be doing out this far from anything?”

Taylor gave Hahn a look of disgust and shook his head a little. “You don't know much of anything, do you?”

“I know quite a lot about the things I deal with,” Hahn returned, “things about finances and investments that you could not possibly understand. I do not know about cow shit and whatever else it is that you deal in.”

Taylor's chin came up and his glare hardened; then he thought about what Hahn said and he let his hackles
down. Patiently, as if trying to explain to a half-wit, he said, “A hog ranch is kind of like a trading post that deals mostly in women and whiskey. There's still Indians that wander this country. They don't cause much trouble, so don't get y'self all excited about that. They come to this here hog ranch t' buy whiskey. Which o' course is against the law. Fed'ral law. I dunno if it's against territorial law too, not that it makes no difference.

“Anyway, the place also sells women. Injun women mostly after their husbands trade them for the whiskey. Cowhands, sheepherders, trappers, and the like come here to get laid. The women stay a spell until they figure their debt has been paid off; then one morning they just aren't there no more. Doesn't make much difference because soon enough there will be some other Injun wanting to trade for whiskey. If he has pelts, that's fine. If he don't, then one of his wives will do.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Hahn said, his tone of voice as much accusation as comment.

Taylor grinned. “I do. Time was, I was a pretty good customer my own self.”

“Jessica thought you were cheating on her, but she never caught you at it in any of the bawdy houses down in Thom's Valley. Now I know where you got your whores.”

Taylor backed the brown until he was side by side with Richard Hahn. He gave the man a long look, then without warning backhanded him across the face. Hahn was propelled out of his saddle. He hit the ground hard, his upper lip split and running blood from John Taylor's blow.

“I never,” Taylor snapped. “Not never while I was with Jessie, you wife-stealing bastard.”

Hahn picked himself up and brushed himself off, then
without comment crawled back up onto the paint horse. He collected his reins and waited silently for Taylor to lead on.

* * *

They reached a stream with a strong flow of water in it and stopped there to water the horses. Taylor knelt beside the brown and cupped the icy-cold water in his hands, let it warm to his touch for a moment, then drank sparingly. Hahn sprawled belly down on the bed of smooth stones that flanked the stream. The smaller man bathed his face, washing away the dried blood left by Taylor's blow; then he too drank.

“We'll be following this creek about a mile, mile and a half upstream from here. Nate built his place at the head of the valley. It's pretty. You'll see,” Taylor said, standing and bending backward half a dozen times to loosen muscles drawn tight by hours in the saddle.

Hahn saw and imitated the movement. “Say, this really helps,” he exclaimed in surprise.

Taylor gave him a sour look and stepped back onto the brown. He waited without comment and with no discernible expression until Hahn was atop the paint horse; then Taylor nudged the brown's flanks with his spurs and the small party turned up the south-flowing stream.

* * *

Taylor and Hahn skirted a stand of aspen, pale green leaves shimmering on a light puff of breeze. As they squeezed between the nearly white trunks of the trees and the west bank of the stream, there was a loud snort
and a stamping of hooves followed by the sounds of a large animal crashing through the thicket.

Hahn jumped and nervously asked, “What the hell was that?”

Taylor grunted. “Nothing much. A cow elk. Had a calf with her. They're spooky anyhow an' all the more when there's a calf with them.”

Hahn visibly relaxed. “I've never seen an elk.”

Swinging around in his saddle to stare at the smaller man, Taylor said, “You're serious?”

“Of course I'm serious. I have never seen an elk. Not a live one anyway. I've seen pieces of elk brought in by hunters and I've seen those big antlers, but I've never seen a live elk.”

“You sure have been sheltered, ain't you?” Taylor observed.

“By your lights I suppose so, but I'm trying to build a good life for Jessica and me. And Loozy too, of course.”

Taylor snorted almost as loudly as the elk had done. “You keep forgetting that Jess is still married to me, Hahn. It's one of those little details that seems t' slip your mind. But then I s'pose that decency is just one of those things you haven't got figured out yet, kinda like never seeing a live elk; you don't recognize another man's marriage.”

“If Jessie wanted to be with you, Taylor, she would be.”

It was not a statement Taylor had an answer for. He faced forward again and concentrated on where they were going.

 

Ervin Ederle

Erv got off his horse and turned to the blond bitch and her whelp. “Get down now. We gotta walk from here a ways.”

The grown-up tossed her head to get strands of falling hair out of her face. The gesture seemed arrogant and cocksure.

Bitch, Erv thought.

“I couldn't possibly walk right now. My limbs are cramping. We need to sit and rest first.”

Erv looked toward the west. The sun was on its way down, but it was still a long time before sundown. “We can take a break,” he conceded.

They were at the side of a rocky slope that was strewn with loose scree. A barely visible, very narrow path led north along the slope, the path probably worn into the side of the mountain by countless generations of bighorn sheep. He smiled when he saw that nothing seemed to have changed since the last time he was here.

He had found the place by chance that time. He was on the run then with a posse somewhere behind. This treacherous talus slope saved his bacon that time. This time around it would make him rich.

Erv's smile turned into a chortle and he told the woman and kid, “This ain't as bad as it looks. Trust your horse. If the stupid thing wants to bolt and run you over, jump to the uphill side. Let the damn horse pass by over top of you if need be. But remember. The uphill side o' the
mountain. That way you won't go sliding down the damn mountain and you shouldn't get hurt too awful bad.”

Mother and daughter were both sitting cross-legged on the stones, rubbing their legs—“limbs” the stupid bitch called them and wasn't that a laugh, as if they were too high-mucky-muck to have legs?—and acting like they were the most put-upon creatures on this green earth.

All right, he thought, looking around, not necessarily green. Right here it looked all gray and ugly with a few bits of brown and black tossed in for good measure.

“Come on. On your feet. You've sat on your butts long enough. I want to get to my hidey-hole before too awful long. Or maybe you want to walk across that—” he pointed toward the sheep path—“in the dark.”

That got them onto their feet, just as he expected.

“No, you don't, missy. You ain't gonna ride that animal right now. You lead him, just like I said. You!” He pointed at the woman. “You go first. I don't trust neither of you's to follow where I can't turn back and thump you, so you go first an' the kid behind you. You can't get off the path. Not without you fall a couple hundred feet and get all busted up into little pieces. When you come out the other side of this slope, you'll know it right enough. Stop there and I'll tell you where we go next. Go on now. Lead off.”

Jessica took a few reluctant, tentative steps out onto the path, her horse following close behind.

“You next,” Erv told the kid, who quickly moved to follow her mother.

So far, so good, Erv mused. No one would ever find this place unless he brought them to it. Better yet, they would leave no hoofprints on the rocky sheep path.

He gathered up his reins and followed close behind the butt of the kid's animal.

Chapter 8

Even Taylor, whose way of living took him into the finest country on God's green earth, found this view breathtaking. The waterfall, that was what made it so spectacular. The creek down below was no wider than a man could jump across, but that slim flow of water came pouring down a sheer drop of a hundred fifty feet or more. It splashed onto the rocks below and burst into a soft, shimmering mist before it collected once again into the stream they had been following for the past several miles.

At the head of the narrow valley, close to the pool that lay at the base of the waterfall, the foliage was lush and green, almost tropical in appearance. The dark logs of a cabin were nearly hidden from sight by the naturally watered mix of aspen and pine. The cliff face hanging above the cabin was dotted here and there with small plants that somehow clung to the tiny ledges.

“Damn,” Hahn whispered when he caught sight of it.

“Yeah,” Taylor agreed. “Damn an' then some.”

“I wish Jessie could see this.”

Taylor's expression hardened. “Could be that she has.”

Hahn immediately sobered and he reached back to touch the butt of the expensive shotgun he was carrying in a saddle scabbard. “That is what we came for, isn't it?” He turned and looked this way and that along the
sloping walls of the valley. “You know this man, do you?”

“Aye. I've traded here a time or two.”

“Do you think he will tell you the truth?”

“Unless the kidnappers bought him off. Nate, well, he can be bribed. Doesn't have to be with money. He's a funny duck, Nate is. Lives all alone up here 'cept for the Injuns and the folks like me that come by to get drunk or t' get laid. He always has his Injun girls, of course. Keeps them in a sort of a cave dug into the cliff behind his place. Brings them out when somebody wants to have one.

“I dunno who packs alcohol in for him. That's what he uses to make his whiskey. Raw alcohol with . . . with God knows what added to give it flavor an' make it kinda spread out. You would think after all the years I been in this country that I'd know such a thing, but I don't. I suspect Nate worked a deal with some Mexican trader coming up outta Santa Fe or Taos. Prob'ly the same outfit takes away the furs and stuff that the Injuns bring to trade for the whiskey. But that's only speculation. I don't know none of it for certain sure.”