Johnny countered this by telling Ms. Datko that he would “probably” begin horse patrols on the Madison County side at a later date.
Onstad was running a smooth operation over on the Gallatin side, and he had a lot more personnel than Johnny. Because neither sheriff seemed inclined to clear the other’s press statements, Johnny saw that he might be able to orchestrate the overall public assessment of the official pursuit to fit his needs. As things stood in late July, the impression Johnny was hoping to send indirectly to Don Nichols was that the heavy pursuit pressure was coming from the east, from the Gallatin side of the range. That way, the Nicholses might voluntarily keep themselves bottled up in the more confined area of the Beartrap.
One other advantage of this informal psy-war campaign was that Don Nichols might realize that the two sheriff’s had discovered a great deal about his background, his habits, and his mountain haunts. From all accounts, Don Nichols was an intensely secretive person; publicly exposing the intimate details of his life might rattle him enough to lower his guard. For example, Onstad stated in his Chronicle interview that he’d discovered the deep attachment Don had for Danny. Relatives, he said, “continually talk about the love this guy has for his son.” Comparing Don Nichols to a sow grizzly who feels her cub is endangered, he offered a rationale for Don’s apparent cold-blooded murder of Al Goldstein. Don, he said, might have become irrational when he saw Danny threatened by Goldstein’s pistol.
“You threaten the cub,” Onstad said, “and that sow becomes unglued.”
When Johnny read that rather flamboyant statement by Sheriff Onstad, he realized that his counterpart across the mountains might just be playing a clever psychological chess game with his quarry through media manipulation himself.
Johnny was not sleeping well at all after he came down from Big Sky. He took to driving his Eagle for hours, up and down the highway from Ennis to the right-angle bridge at the lower end of Beartrap Canyon, just driving with his face out the window, gazing up at those dark, timbered ramparts. He relied heavily on his under sheriff, Gary Dedman, and Deputy Sergeant Merlin Ehlers to keep up with the paper work and maintain the deputies’ duty rotations. Naturally, he had to cancel the river trips that had been reserved for the month of August.
One afternoon, Sue came into his home office with a yellow pad. She’d just called the last of the clients to cancel the final reservation. “Well,” she said sadly, “I figure it’s just about eight thousand dollars that we’re going to lose this summer, Johnny.”
He was hunched over his roll-top desk, staring at a smeared Xerox mine survey chart, trying to compare the coordinates of abandoned mine shafts in the Beartrap to actual locations on his Forest Service map.
After a long, strained moment, he looked up. “Sue, you remember the name of that old miner who had one leg shorter than the other? Used to live up the draw toward the Boaz Mine?”
Sue France sighed and folded her neatly printed accounting sheet in half, as if closing the page might eliminate their financial problem. As sheriff, Johnny’s salary was lower than his own deputies; unlike them, the sheriff of Madison County was not paid overtime. The France family needed the money from those canceled raft trips. If Sue worked seven days a week at the McAllister Inn, from now until after Labor Day, she might earn an extra thousand on wages and tips. But they had mortgages now on two properties, and a boy about to begin college.
“Johnny,” she said quietly, “we’ve really got to sit down and talk about money … soon.”
Johnny nodded, as if the urgency of his message had finally gotten through. “It wasn’t Henderson, was it? Old Toby Henderson?”
“I can’t remember,” Sue said flatly. “You knew those Norris and Harrison people better than I did.”
For the past several nights, Johnny had twisted and thrashed in bed, his jaws clamped tightly, mumbling radio call signs in his sleep, ordering the deployment of phantom forces. And each night he had woken yelling a futile warning, too late to prevent a nightmare ambush.
“I’ll get you some more coffee,” Sue said.
One afternoon Johnny drove eighty miles on gravel tracks, checking his three remaining roadblocks at the Hammond Creek campground and either end of Beartrap Canyon. These were manned by deputies, working off duty for compensatory time, rather than overtime pay, and by volunteer reserves like Billy Clark and Bill Hancock, men who quietly came forward to fill in where they were most needed.
When he drove back through Ennis, he simply did not have the spirit to stop at home and face the bills and phone messages that he knew had accumulated on his desk. So he headed west on route 287 toward Virginia City. But, four miles up the highway, he turned left onto the dirt road to their “place,” the twenty acres of range that he and J.T. had fenced, on which the France family would build their dream house.
As the Eagle jolted across the dusty washboard, Johnny tried unsuccessfully not to scan the black timbered ramparts above the Beartrap to the east. But he just couldn’t stop himself from staring at those heights. Right now, at this very moment, Don Nichols and his boy were up there, hidden in a dugout or moving carefully through the brush, alive, free, no doubt feeling damn near invulnerable. This was coming on full berry season up in the back country. They’d be feasting on blueberries and gooseberries, roasting squirrel or venison steaks over smokeless coals. The streams would be low, but there were lots of permanent springs. The yearling elk calves would be fat, and one calf would provide enough sundried jerky to keep them in meat for a month.
Well, he thought with a certain grim satisfaction, at least they won’t be smoking any elk ribs or hams; that was just too damned risky. Unless … He gripped the wheel savagely and frowned. Unless they had found a real deep abandoned gold mine shaft, a long gallery that the old-timers blasted right out of the living granite, a mine with sumps and sinks and vertical cracks enough to disperse even the dense smoke needed to preserve large chunks of game meat.
He felt the almost overpowering urge to turn back to Ennis, to speed home and barricade himself in his little office, and to pour over those mine survey sheets just once more, in hopes of finding the Nicholses’ secret bonanza. But then he sagged at the wheel, letting the tension uncoil inside his chest. There would be raids on mine shafts; there would be slow foot patrols of those ramparts and overnight ambushes laid around the suspected garden plots. Dave Wing was back from working security on the latest forest fire, and Bernie Hubley of the FBI had gotten the green light from Helena to provide all practical assistance. Merlin and Gary Dedman were fine tuning the duty roster this very afternoon, so that Johnny would have at least three experienced deputies or reserves to run his sweeps and patrols whenever he wanted.
Within three days, he would be back up there, searching for tracks, scanning the game trails with Bernie’s fancy night-vision equipment. Within a week, Johnny and his men would be stalking the home turf of Don Nichols, moving silently, laying in ambush, waiting for the old man and the boy to drop their guard, to make just one mistake.
Just as Johnny was turning through the tall gate poles of the Circle Four, a herd of twelve pronghorns stood up from the brown grass across the track and bounced past the front of the car. In normal times, the presence of these beautiful antelope, living free right on his land, would have caused him to smile broadly, or even to laugh aloud. But today he only nodded, a silent acknowledgment that the animals had right of way over the car.
He drove across the front pasture and stopped at the jumble of boards and rolled roofing felt that stood beside the half-built barn. Johnny was building the structure with seasoned pine planking from the local lumberyard, and filling in with salvaged wood when he could find it. The original plan called for the roof to be raised and covered by the end of July, but the top of the barn was still just skeleton frames, without a single roof plank in place.
Johnny took off his uniform and pulled on a tattered old work shirt and a ragged pair of jeans. Leaning back on the fender of his flatbed
truck, he eyeballed the open ribs of the unfinished barn roof. The longer he stood there squinting up at the glaring sky, the more the harsh lumber skeleton seemed to taunt him. During months of backbreaking work, snatched from afternoons and Sundays, he had envisioned the satisfaction of wedging into place the long pine log of the roof’s main beam, the ridgepole. But Don and Danny Nichols had wiped out Johnny’s construction schedule.
He squinted at the big log that lay on its chocks near the far side of the barn. Now he stared up at the waiting frame timbers at the roof’s peak. Now he examined the chains and tackle arrayed beside the log.
This peeled log beam weighed well over a ton. He was alone. All he had to work with were his improvised blocks and tackle, his Rube Goldberg scaffolding, and his rattling old Ford truck for brute motive power. But he also had his cunning, and his determination.
He reached into the greasy toolbox on the truckbed and pulled on his leather work gloves. All right, he thought, I’m gonna raise that beam up to where she goes. And I’m gonna do it this afternoon.
Four hours later, Johnny France drove through the dark, back along the gravel track to the highway. Behind him in the lingering halflight of the sunset, his barn stood capped by its main roof beam.
He jolted over the ruts, the dust billowing brown in the headlights. There was something hard and knotted, a clot of hot pain low in his back. His arms felt as if he’d been heaving hay bales all day. His fingers hardly closed on the wheel.
He had raised the main beam of his barn. Alone, with his primitive resources. And his brain.
Still, he was not prepared to go home. Sue was at work; the boys were probably working, too. The house would be empty, just those bills and phone messages.
He had definitely done something bad to his back, he mused, twisted lopsided to the steering wheel as he headed down the long dark incline toward the lights of Ennis. But that was all right, too. A little physical pain went a long way to taking a person’s mind off his worries.
He called Vickie on the car radio. There were no immediate crises at the office, but she mentioned that Billy Clark was working town patrol on the eight-to-midnight shift and that he had the information Johnny wanted. He thanked Vickie, and smiled into the night.
Billy’s regular job was as a talc miner, but he’d spent a lot of time up in the back country, hunting and working as both a logger and an outfitter. Johnny had asked him to draw up a list of all the abandoned mining cabins Billy remembered seeing between Jack Creek and Cherry Creek, north of the Beartrap. Now, apparently, Billy had completed his list.
Main Street was typically full; a midsummer week night brought out all the tourists and trout fishermen. It was getting so that parking near the saloons and restaurants was a real problem, what with all the pickups, campers, and sundry station wagons.
He spotted Billy’s patrol car parked near the post office and figured he was walking a foot patrol of Main Street. A little early, maybe, but then Johnny looked at the dash clock and realized it was after ten. He had worked right through suppertime up on the barn roof, jacking up the ends of the log, banging temporary bracing into place, his mouth full of four-penny nails and his hammer flailing.
I’ll kill a couple birds here, he thought, find Billy and get myself a glass of beer at the Long Branch.
He considered standing himself to a ten-dollar ribeye in the steak house behind the barroom of the Long Branch, but then got a whiff of the sweaty work clothes he still wore. I try goin’ in there like this, they’ll shun me like an orphan calf.
He parked and was halfway out the car door when he realized he’d left his stetson on the front seat of the flatbed, five miles back at the place. Johnny just did not like walking around in public without a hat. So, he rummaged around his fishing gear in the back of the Eagle and came up with a battered old trucking cap that J.T. had picked up somewhere.
Decked out in his ripped jeans, threadbare work-shirt, and greasy old gimme cap, the sheriff of Madison County was ready to buy himself a well-earned beer. Almost as an afterthought, he tucked his pearl-handled .38 snub-nose into his waistband.
Billy was in neither the Silver Dollar nor the Jack Creek Saloon. Johnny figured he needed a glass of beer more than that information right now, so he ducked into the smoky gloom and juke box noise of the Long Branch.
The bar was full, and several groups of locals and fishermen crowded around the pool table and electronic poker machines. One glance told Johnny what kind of a night it was. There were a couple drunken cowboys at the bar, propped up on stools, cadging drinks off the out-of-staters, swapping tales of the Wild West for cans of Coors. The fishermen looked sunburned, half drunk, and stuffed full of Harker’s rare prime beef. Cigar smoke and pseudocamaraderie between investment brokers who made a couple of hundred thousand a year and broken-down old cowboys who couldn’t keep their boots in half soles.
Johnny slid into the far end of the bar, pulled down the bill of his cap and signaled Harker for a beer. Three stools down, an old drunk with a white beard was regaling a couple fishermen about the “goddamned so-called mountain men.” Harker must have thought Johnny was in disguise of some kind because he didn’t even say hello. Or maybe it was the gloom at this end of the bar. In any event, Johnny found himself with a can of Lite, a dark niche at the end of the bar, and a hidden ringside seat to the old fellow’s diatribe.
Johnny studied the man’s face a moment, and let his mental file of mug shots flip slowly ahead. All right. He couldn’t remember the name, but the man himself emerged. Used to call him Gabby Hayes, back when Johnny was a deputy. The old guy was a sometimes prospector, sometimes elk outfitter. Wasn’t at all as old as he looked, either. Had a cabin down near Quake Lake at the bottom of the county. Brad Brisban collared him once for a real nasty DUI down at West Yellowstone. Far as Johnny knew, old Gabby Hayes had never found any gold. Maybe he spent too much time looking for it through the snout of a beer bottle.
“Damn it,” Gabby shouted. “Them two ain’t mountain men. They’re just a couple crazies that got some dumb idea to take that girl.” He sucked on his beer can, pinky finger cocked to impress the dudes. “Whole damn thing’s got blown out of control … SWAT teams, and helicopters.…” He shook his head for effect and the hovering fishermen leaned low to hear his whispered comment.
“I said,” he repeated, “that I could of taken my two hounds and just walked into the woods from that there lake up there and had them two fellas up a tree in half an hour.”
Again, he shook his head, muttering.
The dudes popped fresh beers and the noise seemed to revive Gabby Hayes. His washed out old eyes sparkled in the smoky light from the pool table. “Tell you one thing.… This here sheriff they got here … he’s lazy, and scared and he couldn’t find the side of Blaze Mountain up there, and that’s no lie.” He slurped some beer and wiped his billowing mustaches. “Why, hell … they’d of asked me, I’d of had both them Nichols boys up a tree in half an hour. Instead, that old Johnny France let ’em just stroll on out of the hills and drive their car up to Canada.”
For a moment, Johnny considered upbraiding the old fool. But to what gain? Let Gabby Hayes and the dudes think what they wanted. Somehow, the afternoon’s long battle with the roof beam had given him the confidence that he would win the other victory he wanted so badly.
The moon was high, cold and bright above the circling timber. Danny moved quietly through the grass, his rifle held before him, his eyes open to any sign that the tent held danger. Behind him in the trees, Dad had a good position, a boulder and tree trunk that gave him cover and a full view of the Cowboy Heaven cow camp.
They had been watching from the trees, waiting and watching, since sunset. Now it was after midnight. No soldier or deputy could stay inside that old frame tent without moving, without taking a leak, without talking on his fancy radio, for so many hours.
The tent held no danger. But there was food inside. And they needed food. Traveling so much at night, avoiding the
ir regular gardens and caches, they had gotten kind of worn down, and they’d not been able to hunt much. Dad was right about that. A shot was too risky with the helicopters and soldiers and posses riding around. So they had traveled on berries and a few snared grouse. But now they needed real food.
For a day and a night and another day, and now since sunset, they had watched the cow camp. No cowboys, no deputies. No human beings. It was easier to watch a place at night, because you didn’t really have to stare, just to listen to the night sounds, the mice and the owls, the moles and the bats. The little animals got scared first and were the last to come out when the danger was over.
And now, with the moon so high, it was plain to see the owls and bats. There was no one hiding in the tent.
He moved as quietly as he could. Then he used his rifle muzzle to pull back the tent-flap. It was lashed from the outside, secured against wind or rain.
Inside, he could smell there was no one hiding. Working carefully so he wouldn’t spill in the dim light, Danny filled his plastic canisters with Krust-eze biscuit mix from the big box near the stove. He took a bottle of Karo syrup and filled a canister with white sugar. He had nothing to carry the Mazola oil in, so he took the whole plastic jug. Then he filled two more canisters with biscuit mix. There were no red beans. Too bad; Dad said you could travel a long way on red beans. But there was a bottle of whiskey. Danny held the cold glass between his fingers and swallowed the hot sweetness. Dad would smell the liquor on him. Maybe. Dad didn’t really smell as good as he said he did.
Danny slung his rifle and moved slowly around the dark corners of the tent, feeling among the cots and blankets with his free hand. There was no radio. Dad had said to check the cowboys’ personal gear to see if there’d be a little transistor radio. But there wasn’t any personal gear up here now, just tools and some food.
Their own radio was hidden at the Fall Creek cache, and it was too dangerous to go dig it up. Anyway, the batteries were dead, so it wouldn’t do much good. Dad said a radio would help them stay away from the posses. But Danny was not so optimistic. You kill a girl and a cowboy, and people were going to keep looking for you. They just didn’t forget something like that. But Dad said they would, that they’d stop caring in a while, next year, maybe after that.
Incident at Big Sky Page 15