High and Wild

by Peter Brandvold

  “Fuck you.”

  “You sure have a blue tongue for such a purty girl,” Haskell said. “If you ain’t all right, you better stay down there, and I’ll tend to you as best I can.”

  With an angry, painful grunt, she heaved herself to her feet and turned around, shoving her tawny curls out of her eyes with both gloved hands while continuing to glare at him. Her eyes were copper with pretty yellow specks in them.

  A nice-sized bust pushed against her pinstriped shirt. Suspenders pushed her breasts together alluringly. One button of her shirt had been ripped off, opening her shirt enough to reveal a well-filled chemise.

  “I just bet you’d like to tend to me,” she spit out, wrinkling her nose and narrowing her eyes. A real polecat, Haskell thought.

  Haughtily, she stooped to pick up her tobacco-brown Stetson. As she batted it against the chaps she wore over her jeans, Haskell picked up the Colt’s revolving rifle, to keep it away from her, and rested the rifle’s barrel on his shoulder.

  “Why in the hell are you shadowin’ me, little lady?”

  “Don’t ‘little lady’ me, killer!”

  “Killer?”

  “You know what you are.”

  “Yes, I do, and it ain’t no killer.”

  She stood back, glaring at him, her breasts rising and falling as she breathed from both exertion and fear, although also she seemed to be steaming with a good bit of rage. “I saw you ridin’ the trail earlier, lookin’ behind you like you were makin’ sure no one was followin’ you. You’re headin’ for the high country. I just sent my brother and our hired man on a run up to the North Star, and I followed you to make sure they weren’t your next targets.”

  Teddy Redwine spit dust from her lips. “What’d you stop here for? You usin’ this place for a hideout? I reckon it’s right fittin’, in a sick sorta way, ain’t it, since you killed the man who owned this place? Now look at it.” She waved her hat at the empty, dusty yard. “Like your handiwork?”

  Haskell opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off. “Who you workin’ for? Judith? I hear the deputies took you to her place last night. It’s all over town, you damn fool.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Haskell said. “I tramped shit on her floor so Goodthunder’s deputies could arrest me and then pull me out of the jail to visit with Judith under cover of darkness.”

  “You mean throw the wood to her, under the covers of that big bed I heard she has at that silly-looking house.”

  “Jesus, you got a mouth on you!”

  “Samson and Rock ain’t the most tight-lipped bodyguards in the world.” Teddy glanced at her rifle riding Haskell’s shoulder. “You gonna kill me now? If so, go ahead. If you think you’re gonna rape me—”

  “I know, I know, I got another think comin’.” Haskell clicked open the rifle’s loading gate and rolled the cylinder until all six cartridges had plopped onto the ground.

  Then he said, “Here,” and tossed the rifle to the girl, who caught it out of the air with one hand, frowning her befuddlement. He tossed her the cartridge he’d found inside the cabin. She caught that out of the air with her other hand.

  “That mean anything to you?”

  Teddy looked down at it in her hand and then looked up at Haskell, her eyes as perplexed as before. “A fifty-ninety shell?”

  “Came from in there.”

  “The killer’s said to be shooting a Big Fifty.”

  “Figured as much. It might be that he holes up here from time to time. Someone filled the olla on the porch recently, and there’s kindling by the stove and a pallet on the floor.”

  The girl tossed the cartridge back to Haskell, who returned it to the pocket of his coat. She narrowed one eye and planted her free hand on her hip. “Who the hell are you, Mister?”

  Bear saw no reason to conceal his identity any longer.

  “Pinkerton agent. I’m here to find out what happened to Malcolm Briar.” Haskell returned what was left of his stogie to his mouth. “His family’s worried.”

  He turned and walked away from the girl and around the cabin, heading for his horse. Behind him, he heard her say, “Pinkerton?”

  He kept walking. He doubted she knew anything more than what he’d already learned, and he had a long climb into the mountains to find where Briar had wrecked. Besides, she wasn’t friendly, and he didn’t like the feelings that her full shirt was evoking in his loins. He was a guitar, as most men were, but sometimes he just felt foolish being played so easily.

  Bear growled when he heard footsteps behind her. “Hold on, hold on!” she called.

  Ignoring her, Haskell walked around the front of the cabin and headed toward where the black stood on the other side of the windmill from where it’d been standing before. Teddy ran up beside him and matched him stride for stride, although she was still practically running. “You really a Pinkerton?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You work for Mr. Allan Pinkerton?”

  Haskell chuckled. Everyone in the country had long since heard of the esteemed head of the Pinkerton Agency, about whom much had been written, although most of it was pulp confabulations churned out by dime novelists for the starry-eyed, unwashed masses.

  “Shit, I didn’t know they grew detectives big as you,” Teddy said as Haskell swung up onto the black’s back.

  “Learn somethin’ new every day, Teddy. Uh, I can call you Teddy, can’t I?” Haskell dug a match out of his shirt pocket. “I learned your name from your brother, but I wouldn’t doubt every man in town knows it.” He gave her a lusty wink. “And would like to know it better.”

  She stared up at him skeptically as he scratched the match to life and cupped the flame to the stogie. She said, “I’m not sure about that.”

  “About what?”

  “If I’d allow you to call me Teddy.”

  “All right. I kinda like how ‘Theodora’ rolls off the tongue, anyways.” Haskell tossed the match into the dust near her boots and sucked the cigar. “Or shall I stick to Miss Redwine? That is right pretty.”

  He couldn’t help raking her long, slender but also supple figure again with his customarily brash gaze, grinning like a snake noting the sudden appearance of a cottontail in its den.

  She planted her fist on her hip again and canted her head far to one side. “Does Mr. Pinkerton know how you undress young ladies with your eyes?”

  “I put it in all my reports.”

  She held his stare, trying to keep her face stony, but suddenly, her mouth corners rose slightly and a flush started in her pretty suntanned cheeks. She glanced away quickly, embarrassed. “What shall I call you?”

  “Bear.”

  “Where you headed, Bear?”

  Haskell turned his chin toward the high northern mountains. “I’m headin’ up to investigate the scene of Briar’s wreck. I doubt I’ll find anything of interest except twenty tons of rock, maybe some bones scattered by scavengers, but I gotta write somethin’ in the report that’ll be sent to the man’s family. I’d also like to include the name of his killer before I’m finished here.”

  “Do you know where it’s at?”

  “The wreck? I was told in town.”

  “You were told in town, huh?” Teddy turned her mouth down and shook her head in disgust. “Then you don’t know shit. Them mountains look a whole lot different up there than they do down here, and not all the trails are marked.”

  She added in even deeper disgust, as though it was just one more thing she had to add to a growing list of her day’s onerous chores, “I’d better ride along, show you where it’s at.”

  She thrust her hand up at him. “Give me a ride to my horse, will you? I left him ground-reined outside the gate.”

  Haskell decided to let Teddy Redwine serve as his guide for two reasons.

  One, he knew how vast the Sawatch was
and how easily even a veteran traveler could get hopelessly lost in it. Two, while he didn’t like being played like a guitar, feeling the two soft mounds of Teddy’s breasts pressing against his back as he rode her out to her pinto pony waiting outside the freight-yard gate caused him not to mind having his strings strummed quite so much.

  They rode stirrup-to-stirrup across the floor of the valley and up into the pines. It wasn’t long after reaching the trees and the first jog of forested foothills that Haskell became well aware of just how large the Ute Field was and how varied in landscape. He and Teddy rode through more valleys and climbed more ridges, each ridge steeper than the last, and then they rode through another canyon, following a creek through firs, spruce, tamaracks, and aspens.

  There were prospector cabins here and there in hollows where creeks flashed and murmured. Some of the hovels looked hunched, dark, and abandoned, while a few had thin tendrils of smoke curling from their brick chimneys or tin stovepipes and long stretches of sluice boxes, or “long toms,” extending down slopes to nearby streams.

  Haskell saw several trails branching off from the one that he and Teddy were following. Some were marked with signs of routes to different mines, including the Fancy Lady and the Irish Rose.

  An hour after they’d left the Briar freight yard, he saw the sign marking the trail to the highest mine in the field, the North Star. The trail didn’t look any different from the others: two deep wheel tracks winding and climbing off through the boulder-strewn, crag-pocked forest, visible for only a few yards before disappearing around a bend.

  As the riders climbed the trail leading toward the King Henry mine and the scene of Briar’s wreck, they had to pull off the trail to let a freight train pass. The train consisted of four large Murphy wagons with wheels nearly as tall as Haskell himself and outfitted with log chains for steep cornering.

  Each wagon had a driver and a shotgun rider, both looking owly and regarding Haskell and Teddy warily owing in no small part to the killer on the loose. The four wagons, each pulled by ten braying, steaming mules, were piled high with gravelly ore headed for the stamping mills outside Wendigo for processing.

  The drivers bellowed curses at the stubborn teams negotiating the steep terrain and the rocks that had been pushed up into the tracks by the frequent mountain rains coupled with near-freezing nights all year long. The blacksnakes popped like gunfire.

  Men, mules, and clattering wagons rumbled past, their din dwindling faintly as they continued bouncing and churning and swaying off down the mountain.

  Haskell and Teddy stopped to rest their horses a couple of times, an hour later, in the early afternoon, reaching the place on the trail where Briar had gone off the road. The aspens along the trail were nearly all yellow-leafed with the coming fall, the sunlight dancing and flashing silver as the breeze brushed them.

  The trail descended the shoulder of a mountain. On Haskell’s left, the pine and aspen forest climbed. To his right, just beyond the trail that had likely been blasted by dynamite out of the mountainside, a deep canyon dropped away.

  Haskell dismounted the black, dropped the horse’s reins, and walked over to the canyon’s lip, staring down into the chasm. On the bottom, a wide stream flashed, rippling over rocks. Beyond the stream, the gravelly floor of the canyon rose toward more forest covering the canyon’s opposite side, which was not as steep as the one upon which he stood. Beyond and above the trees, a great pinnacle of wind-blasted rock jutted above a massive talus slide.

  Haskell knew that the white specks dotting the slide were bighorn sheep pulling at the short alpine grass and fescue growing amid the rocks.

  It would have been a jaw-droppingly beautiful scene if not for the wagon piled up on the canyon floor below Haskell, lying on its side sort of half in and half out of the stream. The wagon was in pieces, with wheel spokes and parts of its steel frame jutting here and there. The ore was spread out all around it, some in the stream and some on the gravelly bank beyond it.

  The ten mules that had been pulling the wagon more than a year ago were dun-brown blotches, legs either crushed beneath them or under the ore or under the wagon itself or sticking out to one side. The poor beasts had nearly been turned to skeletons by time and carrion eaters, with only bits of hide remaining. Just now, Haskell watched a bald eagle sitting on the wither of one mule and poking its snout at the mule’s face, probably feasting on what remained in an eye socket.

  Haskell glanced at Teddy, who now stood beside him, staring stonily into the canyon. “How many men were part of Briar’s train?”

  “I heard it was just him and the two men who worked for him. They were going ahead. He was bringing up the rear.”

  “They heard a gunshot just before he went off the trail?”

  “That’s the word that was goin’ around Wendigo. Briar was the first one killed. His men got spooked and pulled out. About six weeks after Briar, one of Judith and Geist’s men got beefed on this same trail farther up the mountain. Now someone gets hit about once a month.”

  “I bet it’s got the freighters pretty jumpy.”

  “Ain’t easy keepin’ men on the roll. But me an’ Burt, we got nothin’ else to do, nowhere else to go. Neither does our hired man, Sonny Tidewater. We’re stickin’ it out. I heard one of Judith and Geist’s men was wrecked last night. That means we got a few weeks clear till the shooter hits again. Maybe by then, the snows will come, and we’ll all have to shut down for the winter. It ain’t easy gettin’ through the winter up here, but maybe the shooter will pull out, head down the mountains. Maybe he won’t come back. I’m hopin’.”

  Teddy removed her hand and ran it through her long, tawny hair.

  “Dangerous damn work for kids,” Haskell said.

  She narrowed an angry eye at him. “Who’s a kid?”

  “You know, Teddy,” Haskell couldn’t help telling her, “there are easier ways to make a livin’.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Typical man. You ain’t even got my panties off yet, and you’re already tryin’ to tell me what to do.”

  Even Bear was shocked by that, his tongue in a knot.

  Teddy said, “You wanna go down there and do your investigation, Mr. Pinkerton, or you wanna stand around up here telling me how to live my life?”

  Haskell still couldn’t get his tongue to work, so he just canted his head toward the canyon.

  “All right, then, Mr. Pinkerton, sir.” Teddy arched her brows at him and turned to swing up onto her pinto’s back. “I hope you can ride as well as you can give orders.”

  She put the steel to the pinto’s flanks with a raucous, “H-yah!” and galloped on down the trail in the direction from which they’d come, laughing over her shoulder at him.

  25

  Haskell had to admit to feeling a little wary as he rode on down the trail after Teddy.

  He usually preferred being the craziest one around, and when he wasn’t—when he wasn’t exactly sure how high the bar of relative sanity had been raised or, as regarding the case at hand, how deep was the chasm of craziness confronting him—he started feeling apprehensive.

  He himself was crazier than a tree full of owls, so anyone crazier was pure loony and possibly even dangerous.

  He was starting to believe that Teddy Redwine had him beat by at least an owl or two.

  They weren’t on the trail long before Teddy swerved off of it where it curved away from the canyon. She followed the line of the canyon, as did Haskell, at a hard gallop for at least twenty minutes before reining up on a slight rise. They rested their horses for five minutes, and then Teddy was off once more, jogging the pinto down the steepening grade for another half hour.

  Finally, they came to a narrow canyon, which ostensibly fed the main one, and dropped into it via a precipitous, switchbacking trail marked with the tracks of bighorn sheep and damn little else. Teddy handled the trail easily, grinning snidely bac
k at him from time to time and asking him how he was doing.

  “Don’t ask me.” Haskell grunted, feeling his balls rise up tight in his throat, constricting his air. “Ask my horse.”

  “You look a little peaked,” Teddy said as she swung the pinto hard right and onto the next switchback in the trail.

  Haskell only grumbled at that, cursing under his breath. The black stopped at the corner of the next switchback and looked down, as did Haskell, into the deep, narrow chasm before it—they still had at least another six hundred feet to the bottom—and gave a frightened chuff, twitching one ear and then the other.

  No wonder no one had retrieved Briar’s body or the ore he’d been hauling.

  “Come on, fella,” Haskell said to the cautious beast, patting its left wither. “When we get to the bottom, first round’s on me.”

  Teddy was already circumnavigating the next switchback, glancing up at him with that faintly jeering look of hers.

  The black and Haskell continued down the trail, and when they finally bottomed out on the rocky floor of the gorge, Bear wanted to climb down and kiss the ground. Instead, knowing you couldn’t show weakness to a she-cat like Teddy Redwine, he booted the black on down the gorge in the girl’s wake.

  It took nearly another hour to make it back up the canyon to the point where the wagon, the dead mules, and the ore lay along the stream. Afternoon shadows were angling far out from the canyon wall, and it had grown at least ten degrees colder than it had been only an hour before.

  Teddy was waiting by her horse, which grazed with its reins dangling. The girl sat on her butt, her arms around her raised knees, a long weed stem angling out of her pretty mouth. Her eyes owned their customary sneering cast that for some male reason, coupled with the girl’s figure, made Haskell’s trouser snake heavy.

  Haskell climbed out of the saddle. The black hung its head and blew. Bear felt like doing the same thing. As he loosened the horse’s saddle cinch so it could get a good blow, he glanced at Teddy.

  “I thought you were freighters. Where’d you learn to ride like that?”