High and Wild

by Peter Brandvold

  A cup of hot coffee came with the meal. It was so strong that Haskell thought he could float a bullet in it, and that’s just the way he liked it, although it would have been even better spiced with a couple of fingers of Sam Clay.

  But the virgin mud served him fine, washing down as it did the pound and a half of steak, the chili that was spiced just hot enough to make his toes burn, and the platter of well-browned, buttery potatoes with the four eggs bleeding scrumptiously into it.

  He devoured the main course in less than ten minutes—and he’d been trying to take his time and savor it—and followed it up with the pie adorned with a liberal plop of buttery cream. The Chinese woman came around with a black coffee pot that was nearly as big as she and refilled his cup.

  Haskell thanked the woman by slipping a nickel tip into the pouch hanging off her greasy smock, and when he’d finished the coffee, he dug a Cleopatra out of his inside coat pocket. As he got the cheroot going, blowing smoke around his head, he got to wondering about how Raven’s night was going. He’d been so busy being in jail and then in the sultry clutches of Judith that he’d nearly forgotten about his comely partner.

  He wondered what she’d learned from Sheriff Goodthunder. He also couldn’t help wondering, with a ridiculous jealous pang, what she’d had to do to acquire the information. He hoped she hadn’t gone quite as low as Haskell himself had, he thought with a raspy chuckle as he blew another plume of thick, blue smoke straight out in front of him.

  The smoke sort of fluttered back toward him. It had blown against the man Haskell hadn’t noticed standing there. Haskell looked up with a slight start and blinked through his smoke to see the big, bearded, one-eyed German he’d shared Goodthunder’s cell block with staring down at him, the tabby cat hunkered down on his right shoulder, half-asleep.

  Schwartz had a bowl of chili in one hand, a mug of beer in the other. He grinned beneath the broad brim of his canvas hat.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  “No, no, go ahead,” Haskell said, indicating the bench on the other side of him.

  The German stepped over the bench and sank into it. The cat remained on his shoulder, blinking slowly, indifferently, at Haskell.

  “I see you still got your friend,” Haskell said.

  “Like I always say,” Schwartz said, adjusting his position on the wooden bench and lifting his beer mug to his bearded mouth, “a man can’t go wrong by keeping a pussy near!” He chuckled and closed his upper lip and mustache over the rim of the glass.

  The long, jagged scar on his right cheek, just beneath the patch over his left eye, twitched slightly as he gulped a good half of his beer.

  Haskell took a first sip of his own ale, which was surprisingly good, although it was probably brewed in a shed out back, and he blew a smoke plume over the other man’s head. “Out tryin’ to drum up a job, are ya, Schwartz?”

  “Call me Emil,” Schwartz said. Then he added, with a sour expression, staring down at his chili, “The last ramrod I had fired me. He said I was a useless drunk who did more fighting than working, and I’m sorta startin’ to believe it.”

  “Ah, hell.”

  “Yeah, well, to tell you the truth, I’ve always enjoyed fighting more than working anyways. I spent several years in Chicago”—he raised his knobby fists—“fighting with my knuckles. It brings in a stake, now an’ then.”

  “Ah, a bare-knuckler.”

  “Done some fightin’ yourself, have you?” Schwartz hunkered down over his bowl, shoveling chili into his mouth and talking between bites. The cat had climbed down off his shoulder and was standing on the table, sniffing at Schwartz’s food. The big German didn’t seem to mind.

  “I did all right during the war. Usually during long encampments over the winter.”

  “You ever fight Cleveland Howe?”

  “From Cincinnati?” Bear grinned. “Beat him twice.”

  Schwartz looked up at Haskell from beneath his bushy right brow, chili staining the thick beard tufting his chin. “You must be good.”

  “Cleveland beat me three times.”

  Schwartz grinned and continued shoveling the well-spiced chili into his mouth, making a big mess of his mustache and beard. The big tabby came across the table to stand in front of Bear, humping its back and lifting its head, inviting attention.

  “Hello, Gustav,” Bear said, running his hand down the cat’s back and pressing its tail down. “How you doin’ this evenin’?”

  The cat blinked slowly, enjoying the attention, and Haskell could hear its purring even above the noise inside the tent and out on the street. Bear sipped his beer and waited until Schwartz had finished his chili to say, “Emil, I’m feelin’ a little colicky tonight myself.”

  Schwartz flipped his spoon into his empty bowl and said, “Your dead friend?”

  Haskell nodded and rested his cheek dolefully against his fist. “I came here expectin’ ol’ Malcolm would give me a job runnin’ a mule team. Now . . .” He let his voice trail off forlornly.

  As Gustav, apparently having spied something of feline importance under another table, leaped to the earthen floor, Schwartz said, “That is bad luck. Very bad. He was a good man, Malcolm Briar.”

  Haskell lifted his eyes to the big German’s lone one. “You know who killed him, Emil? I’d really like to settle up with his killer. Gravels me, him gettin’ killed in this freightin’ skirmish I heard about.”

  “I don’t know who killed him. I know when he was killed, and I know where he and his wagon and load of ore are. But whoever’s doing the killing on the Ute Field, my friend, uh . . . ”

  “Bear.”

  “My friend, Bear, these killers are like ghosts. Who hires them is anyone’s guess. I guess we’ll know when most of the freight companies are out of business except for one, huh?” Schwartz winked and raised his beer schooner to the Chinese woman who was passing with the coffee pot. He held up two fingers beside the glass and then said, “My guess is it’s Benjamin Geist and Miss O’Brien.”

  “What about Pink Cheatum?”

  “Sure, it could be Cheatum, too. Why not? His business is not as big as Geist’s and Miss O’Brien’s, but sure, why not? He has the money to hire a gunman. There is a lot of money to be made in the freighting.”

  This seemed to amuse the German, who chuckled and shook his head.

  The Chinese woman brought the beers, and while Schwartz made a halfhearted play at paying for them, Haskell said, “I got ’em, Emil. I’m as down on my luck as you are, but I’ll get this round, since you’re havin’ such a bad night an’ all.”

  When the Chinese woman had left, Haskell sucked some foam off the top and said, “This Kane fella, he one of Geist’s and Judith’s henchmen?”

  “I don’t know. I been working and fighting and drinking and haven’t kept up with all the gunmen who ride through town. I know only what I pick up here and there. I do know this, though.” Schwartz winked and then took a couple of deep swallows from his beer glass, his eyes betraying his catlike appreciation for the thick, malty brew.

  He lowered the glass, smacked his lips together, and sucked the foam from his mustache, savoring every drop.

  Haskell waited, very interested in what the man had to say.

  Schwartz belched and leaned forward a little. “This little camp is a keg full of black powder. And you know what’s attached to that keg of black powder? A fuse only about this long.” He held his hands about a foot apart. “And every time another freighter is killed and another load of ore and a team of mules is lost to a canyon”—he moved his hands a few inches closer together—“it gets shorter.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t care about that,” Haskell lied. “All I care about is finding out who killed the man who brought me here and make him pay hard. I feel like I owe him that much.”

  Schwartz laughed as though the task were insurmountable for one
man. “Good luck!”

  “How many men did Malcolm have working for him?”

  Schwartz doffed his hat and scratched the back of his head before replacing the hat atop his bald, pink pate. “Two, maybe three.”

  “They still around?”

  Schwartz shook his head. “What I heard is after Briar was killed, they got scared and pulled out of Wendigo. They weren’t much, anyway. You know how mule skinners are. It’s easier running freight down on the plains.”

  “Where will I find Malcolm’s wreck?”

  “Bobcat Gorge. Just below the King Henry mine on the east shoulder of Bobcat Mountain.”

  “Hard to find?”

  “Just head north and follow the signs to the King Henry.”

  Haskell had drunk half of his second beer. Now he lifted the glass and polished off the rest, thinking of one more thing he wanted to know about Malcolm Briar. He set the empty schooner down on the table, scrubbed his forearm across his mouth, and said, “Where’s Malcolm’s digs?”

  “Huh?” The German seemed a little taken aback by the question.

  “Where was Malcolm’s freight yard? I’ll take a look around that, too. Maybe I’ll find some clue to who the bastard is who killed him.”

  The German was finishing his own beer. Now he set his glass down and canted his head to the right. He grinned knowingly. “Well, you know Malcolm. He didn’t like people too much. He liked to live way out, keep to himself, when he wasn’t runnin’ one of his teams down from the mines.”

  “Sure, sure—that’s Malcolm for you.” Haskell remembered seeing in the Pinkerton file he’d skimmed that Briar’s sister had described Malcolm as a bit of a recluse. Also as a man who tended to drift from one occupation to another. A bit of a malcontent, a peaceful renegade. A man who’d never married and probably never would marry.

  That’s why the West had beckoned to him.

  Schwartz said, “You know where Miss O’Brien lives?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Malcolm’s place is a mile northeast. It’s on the trail to the King Henry, before it winds up into the mountains.”

  Haskell scribbled a mental note of the route. He’d check out the scene of Briar’s wreck and his freight yard the next day, after a few badly needed hours of sleep. He doubted there was much left of the place, but he’d sift through what he did find in hopes of a clue to who the man’s enemies were. Even recluses had enemies. After Briar’s wreck, the yard had likely been looted and scavenged, the mules appropriated by other outfits.

  This far out in the high and rocky, there were few rules. Even fewer rules that were actually obeyed.

  Still, it was worth a look around.

  “One final question, Emil.”

  “Sure, sure, my friend, Bear.”

  “Can you recommend a flop house? I’m feelin’ the sandman tuggin’ on my eyelids.”

  Emil nodded. “I know a place. Let me find Gustav, and I’ll lead you there.”

  “Give me a couple minutes.” Haskell rose and donned his hat. “First, I got to pay a visit to the sheriff’s office.”

  He gave the bearded gent a sly wink and drifted off to retrieve his rifle and saddlebags.

  21

  Raven slept well in her room at the Sawatch House despite the fact that she’d left Jack Goodthunder lying dead in his room with a fist-sized hole in his head and his limp dong snuggling against the rug.

  She’d never left a man’s room in quite that fashion before, although she’d been tempted a time or two. However, she was confident that the sheriff of Wendigo had deserved the shabby treatment. After all, he’d tried to take advantage of her while she lay unconscious, and he would have raped her if she hadn’t awakened to find him pawing her breasts like a dog digging up a bone.

  No, she slept well. A long, dreamless sleep, although even when she didn’t dream, at the bottom of the deep well of her unconsciousness, she was acutely aware of all the sounds around her, sorting them for anything suspicious, possibly dangerous.

  It was a habit she’d picked up early, after she’d been taken out of her bed one night when she was nine and held for ransom. The two kidnappers, a man and a woman, had once worked at the York family mansion near Gramercy Park and Union Square, on Manhattan Island.

  Raven’s wealthy father, Alistair York, who, along with his own father, Tavish York, owned York Shipping, with headquarters in Scotland and New York, had not ended up having to part ways with even a cent of their money, since Alistair’s daughter, cagey even at nine, had managed to give her captors the slip.

  Before doing so, however, she’d tossed boiling water from a teapot into the man’s face, leaving him howling.

  The girl had nerves of steel, even then. They served her well here in Wendigo. She’d quickly decided not to immediately report the news of Goodthunder’s death unless someone had heard the shot and suspected its intended victim. Apparently, since no one had come to the room, no one had.

  She’d decided to let Goodthunder’s body be discovered in its own good time, giving her time the next morning to try quietly to locate the spot from which the shot had come, to see if the sheriff’s killer had left any clues. There was a good possibility that whoever had killed Goodthunder was responsible for the other killings, including the killing of Malcolm Briar, around the Ute Field of gold and silver mines.

  Raven gave herself a quick sponge bath, brushed her hair, and drew it up into a hasty French braid. Then she dressed in a simple riding skirt and white muslin blouse over a comfortable silk chemise that felt fine against her breasts. No corset today. She needed room to move around and breathe.

  She shoved a derringer into the pocket of her waist-length leather jacket, donned a round-brimmed black felt hat, which sported a cord with an acorn tightener, and headed out of the still-quiet, semidark hotel to stand at the top of the veranda steps.

  Finally, after what had sounded like an all-night shindig, Wendigo was quiet. One piano was still being played somewhere up the street on Raven’s left, but the tune being tapped out she recognized as an old Scottish love ballad. A girl was singing along, although her raspy voice could only be heard now and then, when the piano strains weakened as though the player were momentarily nodding off.

  A few drunks lay passed-out here and there about the street. The cool dawn air was rife with the smell of wood smoke from fledgling breakfast fires and urine from men relieving themselves on the boardwalks. Raven thought that she could also detect the faint odor of sex rising from the multitude of whorehouses and makeshift cribs. Maybe that was just her imagination. God, what perditions mining camps were.

  And what did that say about her that she’d always found herself enjoying her time in them?

  It was only a passing thought. What had taken the brunt of her attention was a hill rising on the other side of town nearly straight ahead of her, to the south. She’d already looked over the buildings on the other side of the street, finding none tall enough to have offered the shooter adequate vantage for the killing shot he’d made the night before.

  Besides, the shot she’d heard hadn’t been loud enough to have originated from only thirty or forty yards away.

  If the gun that had been used to blow the sheriff’s brains out had been a Big Fifty, then it had to have been fired from the other side of town. Otherwise, the shot would have been more noticeable, even with all the other shots that had been fired around the same time.

  Raven had never heard such a gun triggered before, but she’d heard the report compared to that of a dynamite blast. And she’d heard plenty of dynamite blasts while growing up in New York, what with all the roads and canals being built.

  The exit hole in Goodthunder’s head had been larger than Raven’s fist. And since Goodthunder himself had told her that a buffalo rifle had been used to kill mule skinners around the mines in the mountains, the gun that had killed him
was likely one and the same.

  A Big Fifty.

  Raven would check out the hill on the south side of town. That was likely where the shot had been fired from.

  With that in mind, she strode east along the main street, stepping over a drunk now and then, looking for a livery barn. She saw no need in wasting time walking when riding would be more efficient, despite its making her more conspicuous and possibly compromising her cover as a whore.

  She’d known few whores to ride around on horseback.

  She had to wake the hostler of the first livery she came to from a dead, drunken sleep and pay him double to prepare a horse for her at this early hour. The man thought it criminal that she wouldn’t accept a sidesaddle like a proper lady, and when she told him that she was an improper lady, he just looked her dubiously up and down, scratched his chin whiskers, and tossed a traditional stock saddle onto the back of a steeldust gelding with one notched ear.

  Raven stepped onto a stock trough and then toed a stirrup and swung up onto the steeldust’s back.

  “When you gonna bring ol’ Dusty back?” the grizzled hostler called after her as she put Dusty into a trot to the east.

  “You’ll be the first to know!” Raven called behind her, and expertly turned the long-legged horse down a south-angling side street.

  The street wasn’t much, and the humble, age-silvered shacks and stock pens lining it had probably been the first in Wendigo, likely stemming from the time the town was little more than a ragged collection of down-at-heel prospectors who hadn’t yet discovered the mother lode higher in the mountains.

  The shacks, including a green frame-and-stone hovel whose sign outside a broken-down picket fence announced palm and tarot card readings by Mrs. Kordovskaya, wound along the side of a draw that angled northeast. Everything was shrouded in clinging night shadows that were gradually growing less substantial as the pearl light in the east grew brighter, seeped higher into the sky over Wendigo, and began turning blue.