“
W
ould you mind explaining this?” asked the sheriff, handing back the shopworn scrap of paper at the bottom of which the presidential seal was a gray smudge.
“I don't see why I got to, but if it'll spring the breed I don't suppose it'd hurt.” Church refolded the warrant and returned it to his pocket. He had strong hands, callused on the insides of his thumbs and forefingers and strung with tendons as taut as telegraph wires. “Chief Two Sisters has refused to talk peace with the army till Bear Anderson is gone from the Bitterroot. General Clifton met with Grant last April to get permission to send in troops, but the President didn't want to give the injuns the idea he was making war, so he signed this here warrant and ordered Clifton to hire a civilian to do the job. Well, it so happens the general remembered the good job I done for him a couple of years back when
he sent me into Canada after a bunch of deserters, so he wired me to come see him. I get twenty a week and expenses, with five thousand waiting for me when I bring in Anderson, dead or alive.” His eyes slid in the Strakeys' direction. “We're splitting that, of course.”
Junior giggled then, a high, keening neigh far back in his nose. The effect on me was the same as if a rat had just scrambled over the toe of my boot.
“Well, Grant's not President any more, but I suppose his signature's still good,” said Henry.
“Church,” I said, after a moment's reflection. “I knew I'd heard that name before. The way the story was told to me, none of those deserters made it back to the fort alive.”
The man in the duster swung his attention back to me, or so I thought. With that crossed eye it was hard to tell. “Who are you?” he demanded.
I told him. The grin fluttered across his face like bat's wings. “Hell,” he said, “You're a fine one to talk. You've kilt your share.”
“I'm not above killing,” I said. “Back or front, it makes no difference to me, as long as it had to be done. That's where we disagree. You just kill. I don't even think you like it, particularly; you just don't feel anything about it, one way or the other. That's what scares me. You don't care.”
“You're breaking my heart.” He returned to business. “What about it, Sheriff? Do I get the breed or don't I?”
“In the morning. Let him sober up first.” Protecting his left hand by wrapping his linen handkerchief around it, Henry lifted the coffee pot and poured a stream of steaming liquid into a yellowed china mug he had retrieved from atop the clutter on his desk. At no time had he strayed more than two steps away from the gun in his discarded holster, and he kept his right hand free; Church and his two friends made that kind of impression. “I'll talk to Bart Goddard tonight and get an estimate of the damages. If you can pay that, I guess you can have Longbow. If he doesn't object.”
“We was figuring on leaving tonight.” The bounty hunter's tone was mildly insistent.
“Then you're lucky he's in jail. Nobody travels in the mountains at night. Not the Flatheads, not Bear Anderson. Nobody. It's a good way to get dead.”
“Why? What's up there?”
“Wolves, for one thing.” Henry studied the steam rising from his mug. “There's not much game left after last winter, so they're traveling in packs of a hundred and more. They'll attack anything that moves. Also, there's a chance your horse will step in a chuckhole in the dark or lose its footing while you're feeling your way along one of those narrow ledges that wind around the mountains, and nobody'll find your body till spring. And if you get past all that, you've still got grizzlies to worry about.” He leered behind his moustache. “Outside of that, it's a waltz.”
Church stared at him for a moment with that peculiar detached gaze. At length he shrugged, his duster rustling with the movement. “I guess we got no choice any way you look at it,” he said. “Where can we get a room for the night?”
The sheriff directed him to Arthur's Castle.
“We'll be back first thing tomorrow.” Church left, followed by the younger Strakey. The old man hesitated a moment, ruminating absently on what appeared to be a plug of tobacco distorting his right cheek, but could just as well have been a rotten tooth. Then he, too, withdrew. He walked with a strange, rocking limp, putting me in mind of a trail cook I once knew whose right leg was an inch shorter than its mate. When he was out of sight, Henry took a big swallow of his scalding coffee, as if to get rid of a bad taste in his mouth.
“If that's what the army is hiring these days, I'm glad I got out while I was still a corporal,” he said.
“Don't underestimate Church,” I told him. “All the stories I've heard about him end the same way; he gets his man and collects his bounty.”
“If he does it this time, he'll have earned it. What about those characters he has with him? Bent or not, I'd bet my six-gun they're wanted somewhere.”
“That's your worry.” I stepped toward the door. “Take good care of my prisoner, will you? I'd hate to have to explain to Judge Blackthorne how you managed to poison him with that coffee of yours.”
“Where are you going now?”
I leered. “Charlene McGrath still in business?”
“You're too late. She pulled out for Deer Lodge last week. Won't be back till April.”
“I can't wait that long.” I scowled. “Guess I'll just pick up a bottle and get quietly drunk in my room.”
“Make sure it stays quiet. I've got too many drunk and disorderlies locked up now.” His eyes twinkled over the rim of his china mug.
I collected my key from Sir Andrew at the hotel desk and went up the carpeted stairs toward my room on the second floor. On the landing I met Church, who was on his way down. He had discarded his hat and duster and was wearing a striped shirt without a collar and a pair of pants, fuzzy at the knees, which had once belonged to a gray suit. The bone handle of what looked like a Navy Colt protruded above his holster, curved forward for a left-handed draw. His sandy hair was beginning to thin in front, a condition he attempted to conceal by combing it forward over his forehead, Napoleon-style. He stopped when he saw me.
“Me and the boys been in the saddle quite a spell,” he said. “You know where we can find us some female companionship?”
I told him the sad news about Charlene McGrath. He cursed and continued on his way, leaving behind a smell of leather, sweat and dust. The bounty hunter seemed to be one customer who wasn't attracted by the Castle's many baths. He stopped at the desk, where I heard him ask Sir Andrew what
any single man asks the hotel clerk his first night in a strange town. The answer he got was the same one I'd already given him, so maybe now he believed me.
I didn't sleep well that night. Maybe it was because, after seven nights of sleeping on the ground. I couldn't get used to the acre of featherbed with which the Englishman provided each of his guests, but I didn't think so. My mind kept wandering back to the thought of Bear Anderson alone in the mountains with a bird dog like Church on his scent. That the mountain man could take care of himself was something he had proved again and again throughout the decade and a half that had elapsed since the murder of his parents, but the bounty hunter had spent at least that much time proving the same about himself. Why I cared at all was another mystery. It had been a long time since Bear and I had seen each other, and I doubted that he'd even recognize me. Growing up together didn't mean we were friends; he'd never saved my life or anything like that, nor I his, and no matter how hard I tried I was unable to remember a scrap of conversation that passed between us during all the time we spent together hunting and exploring in the Bitterroot. At length I gave up trying to puzzle it out and went to sleep just as false dawn was beginning to dilute the blackness outside my window.
My first stop after rising some two hours later was the barbershop. After a shave, I went over to
Goddard's mercantile, where I ordered supplies for the trip back to Helena from the owner's hawk-faced wife, Hilda. The prices there were twice as high as any I'd encountered during the trip across the territory. I secured a receipt from her after paying and stashed it away in my coat pocket among the others to be used as proof when I presented my list of expenses to Judge Blackthorne. Leaving the stuff there for the time being, I then went to the livery stable.
The man at the stable was new, but only in the sense that he hadn't been there on my last trip to Staghorn. He was an old jasper in a greasy slouch hat with a square yellow pencil stuck in the band and a face like a peach pit. As I approached he squinted up at me from his seat beside a pot-bellied stove in the livery office and rose creakily to his feet when I asked him for my horse.
After he led it out of its stallâit was a big buckskin I'd had five years, fresh from a rubdown and a night's sleepâI inquired about Leslie Brainard's horse. The old man stared at me, blinking in confusion.
“It's all right,” I said, showing him my badge, which I kept in my breast pocket. “He's my prisoner.”
“It ain't all right.” His voice reminded me of two tree trunks rubbing together in the wind. “He ain't got no horse.”
“He didn't walk from Helena,” I pointed out, patiently, I thought, under the circumstances.
“Oh, he had a horse, but that was before he lost it over the poker table to a pair of treys.” The old man laughed noiselessly, opening his mouth to display a toothless cavern and heaving his chest in and out like a skinny bellows. “Reckon that's what made him disorderly.”
“No wonder the territory's in debt,” I grumbled, and asked him to show me what horses he had for sale.
He sold me a chestnut mare that had seen its good days, but none of them since Appomattox. The saddle and bridle were twelve dollars extra. I collected a receipt for that, too, as well as for the horse and my own animal's care, knowing all the time that the judge was going to argue the validity of the dirty scrap of paper with the old man's mark at the bottom, and after returning to Goddard's and loading the supplies onto my horse's back, I led the animals over to the sheriffâ²s office.
I found Henry seated at his desk over a mug of hot coffee which, from the smell of it, might have been the same one he'd been sipping the night before. Mingled with the burnt-grain odor was the unmistakable scent of Bay Rum.
“You've been to the barber already,” I reflected.
His slow brown eyes looked me over from head to foot, taking in my clean clothes and freshly shaven face. “Look who's talking,” he growled. He was one of those who aren't to be trifled with until after theyâ²ve had their second swallow of coffee.
“That cross-eyed son of a bitch got me up at five oâclock this morning to turn over his precious half-breed. There's nothing to do in this town at five o'clock but get a shave, and I had to get Wilson out of bed to do that. I enjoyed that part,” he added, smiling maliciously.
“That explains his mood when he shaved me.” I fingered the strip of gauze covering the nick at the corner of my chin. “Did Church go the damages?”
“Eventually. At first he tried to pay it off in army scrip. When I told him what he could do with that, he dug out a purse full of double eagles heavy enough to break your toe and counted out what I'd told him. I'm thinking of going into the bounty-hunting business; it pays better.”
“Where's my prisoner?”
He sat staring at me until I realized what he was waiting for and drew out the warrant signed by Judge Blackthorne. When it was on his desk he left it there without glancing at it, slid open the top drawer, and handed me a ring of keys. “You want a pair of handcuffs?”
I shook my head and showed him my own, a pair I'd had forged especially for me in Butte. On the other side of the connecting door, I handed them between the bars to Brainard and told him to put them on. He glared at me murderously with his mean little eyes, but he did as directed, sliding the manacles over his huge teamster's wrists and snapping them shut with a grating noise that made me
wonder if I should have cleaned them after accidently dropping them into the Beaverhead River last spring.
“He got a hat and coat?” I asked Henry on the way out.
The sheriff jerked his head in the direction of the peg beside the front door, where hung a black-and-red-checked woolen jacket with patches on the elbows and a shapeless brown hat. I retrieved them and handed the hat to Brainard. “Put it on.”
“What about the coat?” His tone was a belligerent snarl.
“Those cuffs stay on,” I told him. “If it turns cold you can slide it over your shoulders like a cape. Maybe it'll keep you from getting any ideas.”
He pulled on his hat with a savage thrust.
I shifted my drawn gun to my left hand and offered Henry my right. “Take care, Henry. I'll see you next trip.”
He accepted it. “Keep an eye on him. He's craftier than he looks.”
“I wasn't planning on inviting him to bundle with my sister.”