God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  Long John asked, “You promise?” His chest rose and fell, as if breathless from running. Dan removed the noose. He ignored Fitch’s protest, flapped his hand at the others to signal that they should lower their guns.

  Hammers clicked into place, and gun barrels looked at the ground.

  Williams said, “Dan Stark’s right. You’ll be fine if you tell us what happened.”

  “Him, too?” The prisoner jerked a thumb in Fitch’s direction, but kept his gaze on Dan and Williams.

  “Yeah, me too,” said Fitch. “Now spit it out, damn it. It’s too cold to chew the fat.”

  Long John lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the rising sun, and Williams took a step to the side to give him shade. Long John said, “George. George Ives. On account of the mules and the gold. George said it was a crying shame that dumb Dutchman should have all that and we don’t have nothing. And he plumb liked that black mule.”

  Dumb Dutchman. Dan clenched his hands on the rifle’s stock. He wanted Long John to taste the fear Nick must have felt as he looked into Ives’s gun. His biceps quivered with the effort of not cocking and firing the rifle.

  “The hell with that!” Fitch said. “Do you know who you’re a-talkin’ to? George Ives is a friend of mine. He’s the owner of Cold Spring Ranch. You’re just trying to save your own skin.”

  “No, I’m telling God’s truth. I swear. Give me a Bible, I’ll swear on it.” His tongue circled his lips like a small rodent come out of its den. “Ask Hilderman.”

  “Him?” Williams asked.

  “Yeah,” Long John said. “George Hilderman. He was with us that day. He’s working for Dempsey building a bridge over Ram’s Horn Creek. Ask him.”

  “We will,” Williams said. “Don’t your ranch lie next to Ives’s?”

  “Yeah.” Long John pointed with his chin toward the black mule. “The boundary’s the creek. Cold Spring Ranch is right across the creek, where that mule –”

  Dan felt something move under his collar. Had he picked up a flea from Long John? He scratched around his collar bone while he explained. “Evidence. The mule is found on Ives’s property, therefore it’s in his possession.” They gazed at him as if they had never seen him before. “Had Ives been known to covet the mule?”

  “God, yes,” said Beidler. “He borrowed her from me once for half an hour, he said, and brought her back after two hours of hard riding. She was all lathered up. I’ll never loan Ives any animal, the way he treated her.”

  “All right,” Dan said to Long John. “Now tell us, when did Nick start for home?”

  Perhaps sensing that the danger was past, instead of answering the question Long John asked if he could stand up. On his feet, he shuffled his feet and slapped his arms about his body, and only when he was warm enough did he tell them his story, front to back. “Tbalt showed up here to get the mules late the morning of, I guess it was the sixth. It took awhile to round them up, on account of they had drifted on west a ways. He paid for their pasture, and started home, maybe about two o’clock. Little after. Ives saddled up and rode after him right away, like I said.” The rodent tongue took its run around his lips. “He come back about an hour later with the mules and the gold.” He lifted his hands. “That’s all I know. I swear.”

  Fitch turned away. “I don’t believe it. Not George. Not something like this. No, sir.” He dug at the snow with a foot, watched the hole he made as if it were the most important thing he would do in his lifetime, and Dan saw a drop of moisture, then another, form at the end of his nose and fall into the snow. “George is my friend. He likes Nick. God damn it. Oh, Christ.”

  To Dan it sounded like prayer.

  * * *

  The light outlining the eastern mountains promised clear skies and temperatures above freezing, and Dan longed for warm dry feet. At the wickiup, Nick’s friends laughed with other men around campfires in the snow.

  “Shit!” Williams said. “They could get the drop on us any time.” He hurried ahead with Palmer, while Dan tried to prod Long John into walking faster.

  “Which one is Ives?” he asked.

  “Sitting by Aleck Carter, the big, dark-haired fella,” said Beidler. “Decent enough.”

  “Who? Ives?” Dan squinted against the sun to see the man who had called Nick a dumb Dutchman.

  “No,” said Beidler. “Carter.”

  Ives squatted on his heels at one of the fires, his back against a log. He held men’s attention, they leaned toward him as he spoke, laughed with him. Ives raised a cup to his lips, and his companions’ laughter floated to Dan on the still air. Dumb Dutchman. The bastard.

  Fitch said, “I don’t believe Ives murdered my boy. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t.”

  Thinking about Ives, Dan only half heard. Ives had a reputation for high spirits, for playing pranks. People shook their heads and said, Boys will be boys. He rode his horse into a saloon and demanded a beer, and the horse shit on the floor, was startled and kicked over two tables. Hijinks were one thing, Dan said to himself, but murder?

  “I believe it,” Beidler said. “He doesn’t give a damn about anyone. He’ll do anything for fun and not care who gets hurt.” He walked backward, tugged on the lead rope, but the mule stiffened her neck. “Come on, damn it, Bessie. We’re hungry and cold. It’s been a long night.” He faced forward. “What the hell. She’s a mule. I guess she’s acting mulish.” His heavy mustache quivered as he chortled at his own pun. “You watch out, Bessie, or I’ll give you to Ives.”

  Long John slowed. “Don’t make me go there, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ll keep you safe,” Dan promised. “Just speed it up, will you? My feet are cold.” He prodded Long John with the rifle, and the tall man lengthened his stride.

  “There’s plenty don’t care about animals,” said Fitch, “but they don’t murder people.”

  Some hundred feet ahead of Dan and the rest, Palmer and Cap Williams had almost reached the camp. The big man – Carter, was it? – poked his thumb in their direction. Ives lifted his head on squared shoulders, his body intent, before he relaxed and spoke to Carter, and laughed. Dan had a flash of insight: Ives knew. He understood what it meant that Beidler was leading the mule. Dan recalled Grandfather hectoring Father at dinner after a loss in court: You misread the client’s behavior. A guilty man will laugh and joke, an innocent man never, do you hear? Never. Points emphasized with his fist among the cutlery. Innocence is frightened, bewildered, not knowing why the law takes him. A guilty man is jocular, to win over the law.

  Ives was joking.

  Williams barked: “Men! Look to your guns!”

  Once, returning from a deer hunt, Dan had walked past the Deans’ house, thinking to let Harriet know he was home, would call tomorrow, but a party in progress, music and laughter and light bubbling into the street, stopped him at their gate. She was waltzing with another man. Old Dean had appeared, spoken, and a servant put up the shutters. The house stood blank and dark.

  So now. All laughter stopped. In the act of pouring coffee, one of Nick’s friends dropped cup and pot into the snow, grabbed for his shotgun. “You got Long John. What’s the fuss?”

  “This ain’t a social visit, unless you’d like to leave a calling card,” snarled Cap.

  “What mule is that?” asked a friend of Ives.

  “This here’s Black Bess.” Beidler spoke for everyone to hear. “My mule! I let Nick borrow her the day he disappeared.”

  Ives spoke to the group around him, raised a laugh.

  Frowning, Jacob walked to meet Dan, while Beidler went to picket the mule and Fitch joined Williams and Palmer. Ives called to Fitch, gestured to a place next to him on the log. Fitch, looking to Dan like a man dazed by horse’s kick, sat with him.

  Williams ordered some men to search the wickiup.

  Jacob said, “You get warm. Eat. The food, it is not good, but it fills the stomach.”

  “Stick by me,” Dan told Long John, who mumbled Damn right. Dan sat by another fire
with Long John, Jacob on the tall man’s other side. Standing the rifle between his knees, Dan rested the barrel against his shoulder while he ate and studied Ives out the sides of his eyes. Jacob gave him a cup of a hot brown liquid that attempted to pass for coffee with whiskey in it, and on a tin plate some tough, gamy venison, an old buck killed during mating season. Jacob was right. Bite by bite, Dan’s stomachache eased.

  Long John stammered, “He’s watching me.”

  Dan said, “I’m watching him.”

  Ives raised his voice to be heard beyond his immediate circle. “Did you boys hear the one about the drummer and the farmer’s daughter?”

  A swarthy man with curly black hair asked, “The one you had, George?”

  Long John murmured, “That’s Johnny Gibbons. Good friend of Ives. Mulatto.”

  “Seems this drummer begged a place to stay, and the farmer said, ‘Yes, but you’d have to sleep with my daughter.’” Ives wound the story with buttons, a big shaggy dog, and an ugly daughter, but the humor lay in the shock value.

  Fitch sat like a stone throughout, his laugh at the end sounded like a pebble in a tin cup.

  “You didn’t laugh.” Ives called to Dan.

  Dan said, “Tell a funny one.”

  “You saying my jokes ain’t funny?”

  Long John whispered, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, laugh.”

  Ives. Confident. Handsome. A monarch among his friends. Pale beard and mustache, his jacket trimmed – as they said, foxed – with deer hide at the lapels and elbows, his trousers foxed and fringed at the side seams. Supremely confident. Among armed men, eminently sure of himself. Dumb Dutchman. Like Gallagher, accustomed to the respect of others. Their fear.

  The hell with this, thought Dan. He was sick of men like Ives, Gallagher, and the rest, the roughs who bullied their way to the wealth that other men sweated and froze to prize out of the earth’s grip. He was sick of being afraid, of acting the coward to save his life. He stopped gnawing on the meat, spat out the bite, wiped his mouth on the back of his glove. Dumb Dutchman. “Exactly.”

  Jacob shifted about, his breath hissed out between his teeth. “Mein Gott.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” muttered Long John, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  “You need a better sense of humor, friend.” As if that ended the matter, Ives rose to his feet, yawned, stretched high, then swooped as if to wipe something from the toe of his boot, the connected series of movements flowing together. He was telling Dan, Look at me, I am George Ives, be careful of me.

  “Maybe you need a better line of jokes.” Leaning forward, elbows on his knees, Dan let the rifle barrel tilt forward, and the breech rested in his hands. Smiling, willing his hands not to shake, his voice to stay steady, he said, “My name’s Dan Stark.”

  “Ah, the surveyor.” Ives tipped back his hat. “I’m George Ives, but I expect you know that.”

  “Yes,” Dan said, “I do know who you are.” Dumb Dutchman.

  The wickiup yielded guns of various types, pokes of gold dust, and several thick packs of greenbacks. A recent robbery of Oliver’s stage had netted the robbers $70,000 in greenbacks, no good until a bank was found to honor them. The victim had a list of the numbers and names of the issuing banks; by comparing these numbers with his list, they would know if these bills came from that robbery. Dan was willing to bet they did, but who were the robbers?

  As the searchers laid the guns on a blanket, one of the pistols went off. Every man ducked.

  “Shit!” yelped Tom Baume, the Virginia merchant who had loaned Nick his pocket knife. “That nearly got me!” He explored his head where the bullet’s flight had disturbed his hair. “You want me to part my hair different, there’s better ways of telling me!”

  “Sorry, Tom,” the other man said. “I’ll be more direct next time.”

  To Dan’s ears their laughter sounded shaky. It had been a near thing. Too near.

  * * *

  Steam rose from Dan’s trousers, and the sun warmed his face and hands. Riding near the back of the group, Long John between him and Beidler, with Jacob just behind them, he was grateful for the snowmelt that kept the dust down, for the sunshine. Near the head of the group Ives rode with Fitch and Williams, as casual as if he were one of Nick’s friends. Amid the jostle of riders Dan glimpsed him, erect, relaxed, the reins in his left hand, the right resting on his thigh, Johnny Gibbons beside him, part of the retinue for the prince. He had made no difficulty about riding with them, but thought he should be tried in Virginia, not Nevada.

  The air was so crisp and clear Dan almost expected it to sing, as Mother’s wine glass sang when he ran his finger around the rim. On a low rise he could see across the valley to where a jagged outline indicated hills and the mouth of Alder Gulch, nearly hidden among the rock. All around, white mountains guarded the valley, where snow lay in some places a foot or two deep and in others had melted off to a crazy quilt of snow, dead grass and black dirt.

  He used to think he knew mountains. After all, he hunted in the Adirondacks, in the Blue Mountains, but he had never truly known mountains until the Rockies. On the trip out, he had stood at the top of a mountain pass while the horses blew and looked out on a sea of mountains, range after range like waves in the ocean, from deep green nearby to blues farther away that paled at last into the sky so that he could not make out the horizon and had the odd sense that this earth was made of sky and not rock.

  Just as he had thought he knew the world, knew men, until Father’s – death (his mind as ever shying from the word suicide). Did Fitch, riding with Ives, not wanting to believe in Ives’s guilt, did he have a similar sense of unreality? Was his confidence shaken, that he did not know men as he thought he did?

  And his own inner conviction could hardly be called evidence. Even in a miners court. Ives was a murderer because he told dirty jokes? Nuts. Perhaps Hilderman might say something useful, but they’d question him well away from Long John, and hold all three men separately. No, they had no hard physical evidence.

  The search of the wickiup had turned up nothing belonging to Nick. But perhaps the mule was hard evidence. She was stolen property, found on Ives’s ranch. On Ives’s property, therefore in his possession. He might claim she had strayed there, but from Long John’s place, unsaddled? Their horses had been reluctant to cross Wisconsin Creek, and a mule would not do so on her own. Why had Ives not notified Beidler that he had the mule? If he tried to claim that he didn’t know she was there, they could counter, how could he not know?

  Ives turned in his saddle with a challenge: “I bet an ounce of gold my horse is the fastest in the Gulch.”

  “Like hell,” shouted another man, who kicked his horse into a gallop.

  Dan’s horse jumped to a gallop, pits and rocks under its hooves blurred, the wind brought tears to his eyes. Trees, a house, swept backward, and other riders fell behind. A mustang, a full hand shorter than Ives’s cob, won the race, and the owner petted the animal, held out his hand for payment of the bet. Ives laughed. “When we get to town, friend, where there’s a scale.”

  Having been let out, Dan’s mount would not soon settle, but danced along, head up, ears pricked forward. Friend. That word again. What friends did Ives have? Johnny Gibbons rode beside him, the two of them talked as they rode along, and Dan noted how Ives sat his horse with a quiet back, while Gibbons held a stiffer posture. Then Gibbons relaxed, punched Ives lightly on the upper arm and laughed, and the horse began to jog, then loped, and pulled away from the plodding group. Dan tugged at his hat brim to shield his eyes from the sun. He hoped they would come soon to Dempsey’s.

  * * *

  Beside the road, Oliver’s stage had pulled into Dempsey’s ranch yard to change horses. Nearby, men labored to build a bridge over Ram’s Horn Creek.

  Well away from the ranch buildings, on the river bank, stood Dempsey’s family homestead. Laundry was drying on a line strung between alder trees, smoke rose from the ranch house chimney, and small children
chased each other around the house, their squeals echoed in Dan’s memories of his small brothers and sister.

  George Hilderman. The American Pie Biter. Pathetic fellow, thought Dan. A man with graying hair and a vacant mind. He got along by entertaining people because he had a trick jaw that let him bite into as many as six meat pies at once. He had a good sense of smell, too, and now he smelled danger. When he found he could not joke his way out of it, he made excuses to delay them. He could not ride to Virginia because he had no horse. “You can ride Black Bess,” said X. He had no saddle. Dan told him they would borrow a saddle from Dempsey.

  As they waited for Dempsey to finish his business, Fitch led his horse over to Dan and Jacob chewed on jerky that Jacob had brought from the wickiup. Dan had purloined a few handfuls of hay from Dempsey’s barn for their horses, and he leaned his back against his horse’s shoulder while he chewed on jerky and hoped for dry boots.