The High Rocks

by Loren D. Estleman

  “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.”

  We left town at a walk, headed south and east in the direction of the Clark Fork River. The air smelled of rain, or possibly snow; there was a metallic sharpness about it that set my facial muscles to tingling. The buckskin’s breath was visible in gray jets of vapor. Two miles out, Brainard, riding several yards ahead of me, got out his coat and wrestled it onto his shoulders. By nightfall we were within sight of the Clark Fork. The sky was overcast and leaden.

  I dismounted first, then drew my gun and pointed it at the teamster. “Off.” When he was standing, I directed him to lie on his stomach while I removed my horse’s saddle. He did so, cursing when he scraped the side of his face against a bull thistle and squirming to get away from it.

  There’s something about making a stupid mistake that, no matter how it finally turns out, haunts you for the rest of your life. Since that moment I’ve come up with a dozen ways to handle the same situation without risk, and I’ve used just about all of them. That day I didn’t.

  I was undoing the cinch of my saddle when the buckskin shrugged its powerful shoulders. The buckle shot out of my hand and the saddle slithered away from me and fell to the ground on the other side, blanket and all. I muttered a curse and ducked under the horse’s belly to retrieve it. In that moment my prisoner hurtled to his feet and brained me with a rock he’d picked up from where he’d been lying. I swam to the ground through a red swirl.

  4

  Either it was dark when I awoke or I was blind; for a long time I wasn’t sure which was the case. I was lying on my back where I’d fallen, which meant that I’d turned over or had been turned over by someone else. That was convenient, as I was able to turn my head and retch without drowning myself. Not that it made me feel any better. At the bottom of the hill, the rush and gurgle of the river competed with the pounding inside my skull, and the pounding won. I wanted desperately to slip back into unconsciousness, to experience sweet oblivion, but at the same time I sensed that if I did I would never come out. With a superhuman effort I heaved myself up onto my knees and staggered to my feet. Twice I nearly fell, but at last I managed to place a steadying hand against a slightly yielding surface that turned out to be the flank of the chestnut, which was busy munching at the tall grass that carpeted the slope, and got rid of what was left in my stomach. That left me feeling more human, but just a little.

  Gingerly, I raised a hand to the back of my head—and took it away as if I’d touched a hot stove. There was a soft spot the size of a half dollar beneath the damp and matted hair. A little more effort on Brainard’s part, and I wouldn’t have gotten up at all.

  My gun belt was, of course, missing, as was the key to the handcuffs. I took advantage of the light cast by the three-quarter moon to search for the cuffs themselves and found them a little farther down the slope with the key still in the lock. My horse was gone as well, which spoke well for the teamster’s taste, along with my saddle and the saddlebags filled with supplies. I found my hat where I’d fallen and put it on, tilting it to avoid the injured area, then mounted the mare on the second try and turned it in the direction of town.

  It couldn’t have taken me longer if I’d crawled the distance. Long before the mare’s hoofs struck the washboard surface of Main Street, the sun, a pale glow behind the cloud cover, had floated clear of the distant peaks and the streets had begun to fill with early-morning shoppers and merchants on their way to roll up the blinds in their windows. Snowflakes the size of wood shavings danced and swirled about in the air. It wasn’t cold enough for them to stick, however, and so they vanished as soon as they touched the ground.

  I dismounted before the sheriff′s office, nearly folding when my weight came down on my legs, and caught Henry just as he was locking up before going over to the Castle for breakfast. Today he was wearing his hat, charcoal gray with a low crown, a wide, sweeping brim, and set off by a gold band—the style of headgear favored by gamblers who preferred not to store their derringers in plain sight. The brim wasn’t wide enough to conceal his look of surprise when he saw me swaying before him.

  “I need a fresh horse and supplies,” I told him. “Get them for me, will you, Henry?” Then I fell into a heap at his feet.

  The room in which I came around smelled strongly of carbolic and something else almost as pungent. Summoning all my strength, I forced open my eyelids, which evidently someone had sewn shut. Ezra Wilson’s gourd-shaped face swam into focus, dissolved, then came back and stayed. I noticed that the pomade had begun to lose its grip on his hair, allowing a band of pink scalp to peep between the loosened locks near his crown. His starched collar, missing now, had left its mark in the form of two horizontal red welts at his throat. His features seemed even more pinched then normal. Beyond his head, a water-stain shaped like a buzzard with a broken wing adorned the yellowing plaster of the ceiling.

  The mattress beneath me was not one of Sir Andrew’s featherbeds. A little thicker than a poorly constructed quilt, it was stuffed with straw and studded with metal buttons that dug into my back like pebbles. I could feel the slats beneath it. There were four of them running sideways, not enough to support my one hundred and eighty pounds. As a result I lay bent in the middle like a sprung bow.

  I had started to raise myself onto my elbows when a mule kicked me in the back of the head and I fell back, blinking at the fireflies swarming around my face. For a moment the pain was blinding, but as I lay motionless it ebbed into a sea of blissful warmth that drew me, as it had hours before, toward the brink of unconsciousness. The pounding returned (if indeed it had ever left), but now it seemed muted and distant, like a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil wrapped in cotton. The effect was mesmeric. This time I didn’t fight it. I slept.

  The barber was still there when I awoke a second time, or maybe he was back. He was dozing in a paint-spattered wooden chair near the foot of the bed with his legs stretched out in front of him and his hands folded upon the swell of h
is belly. A kerosene lamp stood on the cracked veneer of the bedside table, hissing and sputtering and casting a liquid glow over the bed and onto the ceiling, where the buzzard still crouched with its injured wing thrust out to the side.

  I avoided the temptation to sit up, remembering what had happened the last time. Instead, I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth, rolled it around a little to see if it still worked, and called out Wilson’s name. He shifted in his chair, crossed one ankle over the other, and went on sleeping. I tried again.

  “Wilson!”

  He came awake with a snort, nearly pitching headlong over onto his face when he drew his legs under him and his ankles became tangled with each other. He blinked about, bewildered, and then his eyes fell to me and comprehension dawned in his expression. He grunted like an old dog that had been kicked out of its master’s favorite armchair.

  “You’re alive,” he noted morosely. “Thought sure you’d be stone cold by now.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  He smoothed a careful hand over his thinning hair. The band of pink disappeared, then eased back into view as the locks separated again. He eyed me as if he didn’t know what to do next. “Suppose you want to eat.”

  I hadn’t thought about it, but as he said it I remembered that as far as I knew I hadn’t eaten since breakfast at Arthur’s Castle the morning I’d left with my prisoner, and God knew how long ago that had been. I nodded. The movement made me aware of the pounding in my head and I placed a hand against it. It was encircled just below the hairline by a bandage like an Indian headband.

  Outside, I heard a wagon rattling past, followed by the grinding sigh of hinges as a large door was swung open or shut nearby. I decided that I was in the back of the barbershop, which was next to the livery stable. No wonder Wilson was so surly, I thought; I was lying in his bed. Carefully I eased myself into a sitting position with my back supported by the brass bedstead. My head weighed fifty pounds.

  The barber had left his chair and been swallowed up by the blackness beyond the globe of light thrown by the lamp on the table. Dishes rattled, something wet splattered into something dry, and then he came back bearing a soup plate full of steaming something which he balanced in one hand while he drew his chair up to the bed and sat down. He lifted out a spoonful of liquid, blew on it, and slid it underneath my nose.

  “What is it?” I studied the contents suspiciously. It smelled like boiled rags.

  “Venison broth,” said the other. “Been cooking all day. Shot it last year and all I got left is jerky. Eat it. Worst it can do is make you heave.”

  I opened my mouth and he inserted the spoon. It tasted pretty good, but then the judgment of a man half-starved is not to be trusted. I held out my hands for the bowl. He handed it to me and I finished the broth in silence.

  “How long was I out?” I handed back the empty vessel and wiped my lips with the graying linen napkin he had given me.

  He shrugged and set the bowl and spoon on the table next to the lamp. “Nineteen, twenty hours. When the sheriff brought you in I told him you wouldn’t last till sundown. Yours is only the second fractured skull I ever saw. Man who had the first one died two hours after it happened. His didn’t look near as bad as yours. What was it, a rock?”

  I started to nod, then thought better of it and said, “Yeah.”

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Hurts like hell.”

  “I got something that’ll fix that.” He got up and walked back into the gloom, this time in a different direction, probably toward the front where the barbershop was. He had no shirt on over his long-handled underwear and his suspenders flapped loose around his knees. A moment later he returned, this time carrying a tall square bottle in one hand and a shot glass in the other. He sat down and poured a thin stream of pale brownish liquid into the glass. The sickly sweet scent it gave off was overpowering, like that of too many flowers in a room where a corpse lay in state. When the glass was nearly full he thrust it toward me with the same nonchalance with which he had offered me the venison broth. I was suspicious of the human race today. I asked him what it was.

  “Laudanum. Take some; it’ll ease that ache.” He pushed the glass closer. The fumes filled my nostrils and made me drowsy.

  I turned my head away. “Pour it back.”

  “Don’t be stubborn.” He slid the medicine around toward my lips. “It’s the best cure there is.”

  “I once knew a cowhand who felt that way,” I said, looking at him. “He got stomped by a bronc and the doctors fed him that stuff for a solid week to ease the pain, then released him and told him he was good as new. Know what he was doing the last time I saw him? Screaming his lungs out in an insane asylum. The attendants had refused to give him any more of that good medicine. No, thanks. I’d rather have the pain.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and drank the stuff himself. I stared at him, but I don’t think he was aware of it. His pupils clouded and his pale lips were turned upward at the corners in a half-smile. It was the expression of a married man who had returned to a favorite mistress. I made a mental note to do my own shaving the next time I came to Staghorn.

  Somewhere off in the gloom a doorknob rattled. “Ezra?” The voice belong to Henry Goodnight, calling from in front of the shop. “Ezra, you asleep? Open up.”

  That broke the mood. The barber shoved the stopper back into the bottle and shot me a stern look, as if swearing me to secrecy.

  “He won’t hear it from me,” I assured him. “It’s not against the law anyway.”

  That didn’t have any effort on him at all. He went out to let Henry in. A bolt squeaked back, there was a muttered conversation, and then the sheriff came striding into the lamp light. He had traded his Prince Albert and fancy vest for a hip-length brown canvas coat with fur at the collar and cuffs and bone buttons that dangled loosely from the threads that held them, and his hat now was a Stetson. He walked as if this was the first time he had used his legs all night. There were dark circles under his eyes and his smile was weary.

  “You must have a cast-iron skull,” he said. He pulled off a pair of brown leather gloves and stood massaging his right hand with his left. “I had you buried hours ago.”

  “Where have you been?” I wasn’t in the mood for saloon stage banter.

  “To the Clark Fork River and back, tracking your prisoner.” He swung the paint-spattered chair around and straddled it, folding his arms atop the back. Exhausted or not, he hadn’t forgotten to pose. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about him any more, because he’s as good as dead.”

  “You shot him?” I started to get up, then remembered the mule waiting to kick my brains out and settled back.

  “Why waste a bullet? I followed his trail north as far as Glacier Pass, where it swung west and headed straight into the mountains. I figure he’s on his way to Canada by a route where he won’t meet too many people. He’ll meet a lot more than he reckoned on once the Flatheads find out there’s a white man in their midst. He won’t live to see Canada.”

  I felt a chill, but not from the thought of Brainard’s reception at the hands of the Indians. A vapor of cold air had begun to waft from Henry’s clothes over to me. The temperature outside must have dropped considerably since I’d returned to Staghorn, as there was a light dusting of snow on the sheriff’s hat and coat, now turning to beads of moisture in the heat of the shop’s invisible stove. I shivered slightly beneath the thin stuff of my nightshirt. I decided that Henry had helped Wilson undress me and put me to bed; the thought of the little barber attempting it alone was just too ludicrous.

  “Is the situation that bad?” I asked Henry.

  “Take a good look around you,” he said. “There isn’t a homesteader in the area who’d step outside his house without a rifle or a gun on his hip. It started after Doc Bernstein got killed, and since last spring when all those braves were scalped in that hunting party, it’s been just a matter of when Two Sisters thinks the time is right t
o strike. That’s what I tried to tell that bounty hunter Church, but he wouldn’t listen. Likely his scalp is already decorating a pole in some brave’s lodge.”

  There was a moment of silence while he appeared to be searching for something else to say. Absentmindedly he resumed massaging his right hand with his left where they rested on the back of the chair. He saw me watching, looked down at his hands, saw what he was doing, and dropped them to his knees.

  “What’s the matter with your hand?” I asked him.

  “Nothing. I think I sprained my wrist when I pistol-whipped Ira Longbow.” He got up. “Anyway, you can stop worrying about Leslie Brainard. He won’t be strangling any more wives.”

  “Tell that to Judge Blackthorne.”

  His laugh was theatrical, as was everything else about him, but it was genuine and it did me good to hear it. “You’ll think of a good excuse,” he said. “You always do. Meanwhile, leave your head on that pillow and don’t let Ezra get too close to you with a razor in his hand. He really wants that bed.” He strode out past the barber. A moment later I heard the front door clap shut.

  Wilson came over and returned the chair to its original position at the foot of the bed. “You need anything else?” He seemed gratified when I told him. I didn’t. “Chamber pot’s under the bed,” he said. “Holler if you need help.” He settled himself into the chair, squirmed around until he found the hollow he wanted, and was asleep again within five minutes.

  I waited until I was sure he wouldn’t wake up, then, slowly—not so much because of him as because of my head, which had settled into an almost bearable throb—I peeled aside the threadbare counterpane that had been covering me and swung my feet to the floor. The boards felt like ice. For a moment I sat there, preparing myself. Then I took a deep breath and stood up.