The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  Shorty smiled. “Slip in there between Jimmy and Garcia and bring up the rear. I’m going to ride point a while. Keep your eyes peeled, and if you see anything, even dust on the horizon, you fog it on up and let me know.”

  Jimmy and Garcia were already hazing the herd northward. Guiding Albert into the drag position, Rose was immediately engulfed in dust. In less than fifty yards she could feel it in her eyes and on her tongue, tickling her nostrils. She pulled one of the rags out of her saddlebags and tied it around her nose like a bandanna. She only looked back once, just as the herd dropped behind a swell of land that she knew would take them out of sight of the cabin’s remains. It wasn’t the cabin she found herself gazing at, though, it was the old, gnarled pine and the rocky ground under it, where Muggy’s grave was already too far away to see.

  “Well, that’s it then,” she said softly, the bandanna puffing in and out like a beating heart. Turning away, she knuckled impatiently at her eyes, which had teared up in the dust. “Serves you right,” she added, although, for the life of her, she couldn’t have said whether she was speaking to Muggy or herself.

  • • • • •

  They made good time, despite the woolliness of the country. Although the cavvy had been pushed hard the night before, it had enough spunk left to keep things lively that first day. It had been close to noon when they left the bluffs above the Yellowstone. By dusk they were well into the foothills of the Bull Mountains, that low range dividing the drainages of the Yellowstone and Musselshell Rivers. Wiley led them to a shallow box cañon where a dilapidated jack-leg fence made from juniper poles closed off the mouth. They drove the horses inside, and while Jimmy and Garcia rigged a gate from loose poles left lying nearby and Shorty started cutting boughs to patch gaps elsewhere, Wiley ordered Rose to gather some wood and start a fire.

  “New hand does the cookin’,” he told her. Then he was gone, riding back the way they’d come to look for signs of pursuit.

  Rose chafed at the assignment. She couldn’t help thinking it was on account of her being a woman, rather than the new

  hand. Still, she knew the Owlhoot well enough to know that partnerships along it dissolved faster than a spring snow. It wouldn’t be long before someone quit and someone else joined up. Then they’d see who did the cooking.

  By the time she’d gathered enough wood to last the evening, the men were just finishing their repairs to the fence. Shorty came over, slapping dust from his chaps. “Build your fire over there,” he said, nodding toward a sandy coulée with tall banks. “Keep it small, and we’ll put it out before full dark. Up this high, even dying coals can been seen for miles.”

  “Who’s chasin’ us, Shorty?”

  “Why, I don’t know that anyone’s chasing us. We’re just being cautious.”

  Jimmy Frakes jogged his horse over, leaving Garcia with the herd. Jimmy was a lanky kid of eighteen or so, the only one in the bunch who didn’t sport a sidearm, although he carried an old model Henry repeater on his saddle. Rose had known Jimmy’s daddy in the old days, when the Sioux still ran wild and buffalo covered the plains. The Frakeses had homesteaded a small ranch some miles from her pap’s place west of Bozeman, before moving on to a larger spread near where Sheridan, Wyoming Territory, now stood. Rose had been fourteen and Jimmy only eight or nine when the Frakeses left the Gallatin Valley; although she remembered the family well, she couldn’t tell if Jimmy recognized her.

  Before Jimmy could dismount, Shorty tossed him a collapsible canvas bucket. “There’s a spring about three hundred yards east of here. Fetch some water. Rose, there’s bacon and flour in my war bag. Use what you need. I’ll bring in some more wood.”

  It didn’t take long to fry up the bacon and make some biscuits, although even Rose had to admit it was a wanting meal—the meat too crispy, the biscuits black as coal on the bottom, and only water to wash it down. Afterward, Jimmy took a plate to Garcia, then stayed with him to talk. Wiley hadn’t returned, but Shorty set aside some food for when he did. Then he settled back to roll a cigarette.

  Rose lay against her saddle, her feet stretched toward the dying embers of the fire. In the west, above the rimrock and rolling hills crowned with scattered pines, the sky had turned a soft, deep purple, the higher clouds edged in gold. Although still light, the evening’s chill was creeping through the hills. Rose folded her arms under her breasts and wished for a good coat. Shorty had already slipped into his sheepskin jacket, turning its broad collar up to cover the back of his neck.

  “Dang’ weather,” Rose complained, just to make conversation. “Montana is the only place I know where the sweat on the tip of your nose can freeze into an icicle at sundown.”

  Shorty chuckled. “You ever been anywhere besides Montana, Rose?”

  “Not really. Pap says I was born in Tennessee, but my earliest recollection is of Bannock, over on Grasshopper Creek.”

  “I’ve never been that far west, although I’ve heard it’s a pretty country. I was born in Georgia, but my folks moved to Texas after the war. I went with ’em.”

  “Did you fight in the war, Shorty?”

  “Some, near the end, though I was young to be toting a musket. It was in Texas that I started to drift. Ended up clerking in a hardware store in Fort Worth. That’s where I met Katy, working in her father’s store next door. After she died I went to Colorado, but danged if my rope didn’t keep getting tangled up on other people’s beeves. Hell, maybe I was looking for trouble. On the prod, you know. Anyway, the law was watching me pretty close, so when Crazy Horse surrendered and Sitting Bull ran off to Canada, I came up here. Did a little prospecting in the Black Hills, but never had much heart for that kind of work. Then I met Wiley in Deadwood.” He let the story end there, as if figuring anyone who knew Wiley Collins could fill in the rest on their own.

  “I didn’t know you’d led such a varied life,” Rose said. “How long was you married?”

  “Not long enough,” he replied in a tone that invited no further intrusion.

  They grew silent as the light drained out of the sky and the coyotes tuned up in the hills. Far off, a wolf howled at the stars. It made Rose sad to listen to the baying of the wolf and think about Shorty and his wife, whose death still haunted him. It reminded her of Muggy, and the hopes she’d pinned on marrying him. She knew now that she’d only done it to escape her pap, the irony of the endeavor being that it hadn’t been much of a swap. They’d been about the same, Muggy and her pap, although Muggy had been a more accomplished liar.

  Her pap’s name was Daniel Ames and he lived in Billings now, not thirty miles from the cabin where Rose had settled after marrying Muggy. She didn’t see him more than once or twice a year, though, and then only when she made the trip into Billings. Whenever anyone asked, Rose would say her pap was a market hunter, but the truth was he’d fallen into a bottle so many years ago she could barely remember his sober times.

  It hadn’t always been that way. In Bannock, her pap had been a respected businessman, but he’d changed after Rose’s mam passed away. He’d gone on a year-long drunk, and by the time he came out of it, he’d lost both his butcher shop and his good name.

  With everything gone to hell in Bannock, they’d come over to the plains, where he’d gone to work for a robe trader out of Fort Benton, but that hadn’t panned out, either. He’d tried going into business for himself, hunting buffalo in the winter for hides and meat, then trading among the Indians for robes during the summer, but the isolation finally wore him down. That was when they’d moved back into the mountains near Bozeman to try homesteading.

  It was in Bozeman that Rose met Muggy Edwards. She’d been nineteen at the time, a big, gangling country girl, slope-shouldered and large-breasted, and lucky, she figured, that someone with Muggy’s flash would even consider a woman as dull as she. They were wed in her pap’s cabin with nobody to attend the ceremony but a traveling Methodist minister, her pap, and
some of the Jenkinses clan, who lived down the Gallatin River and ran sheep. Rose’s brothers were already long gone by then, scattered across the Northwest. The wedding had been fitting enough, although she’d cried afterward when Muggy, her pap, the minister, and old man Jenkins got drunk on sour mash whiskey behind the barn.

  It was Muggy who bartered four spans of mules and two large Mitchell freight wagons—the whole shebang won off a freighter in a poker game—for the cabin above the Yellowstone and a quit-claim deed to the spring, creek, and a six-hundred-and-forty-acre section of rangeland that ran from the pines west of the cabin to a shallow cañon that led down to the Yellowstone on the east; the southern boundary was the edge of the bluffs; a pair of stone cairns marked the northern line.

  Six hundred and forty acres was a rough estimate since the land had never been surveyed. Nor was Rose certain how legal the deed might actually be, Montana’s political arena being somewhat tempestuous in its earliest days, but for four good years the place had been her home, and she’d come to know every inch of it by heart, and a good deal of the surrounding country, too.

  It was full dark when Wiley returned. Dismounting at the corral, he tossed his reins to Garcia, then came into the coulée. He jerked to a stop when he saw Shorty loosening the drawstring on a tobacco sack. “Sitting here comfortable as a lord in his manor, are ye?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Pert near,” Shorty agreed, grinning broadly but not looking up. “No point in both of us foaming at the bit.”

  Wiley’s voice turned harsh. “Nope, none a-tall, though ye might want to save that smoke for tomorrow. We’re bein’ followed.”

  Chapter

  2

  Shorty froze with his tobacco sack poised above the shallow trough of his paper. “How many?”

  “I didn’t count ’em,” Wiley replied, then grudgingly admitted: “They’re still ten or twelve miles back. All I saw was the haze of their dust through my field glasses.” He stooped for a biscuit.

  Looking relieved, Shorty continued his cigarette.

  “I’m telling ye, they might’ve sent scouts ahead,” Wiley warned.

  “Might’ve,” Shorty agreed, “but I doubt it.” He pulled the drawstring closed on his tobacco pouch and tucked it away.

  “Ye be a damn’ fool, Shorty,” Wiley said, then gnawed off a chunk of biscuit.

  Keeping her blanket around her, Rose said: “You figure it’s cavalry?”

  “If it was cavalry, they’d be bivouacked by now and have their mess fires lit,” Shorty replied. “No, they’re Crows. Probably hotheads, too fired up to run back to the agency for permission to leave the reservation.” He struck a match with his thumbnail and held it to his cigarette. “Or else they just got fed up with supplying us White Eyes with horses,” he added through a wreath of tobacco smoke.

  “Maybe they’re drifters,” Jimmy said. He’d returned to the coulée at dark and crawled into his bedroll, leaving Garcia to stand first watch over the horses alone. “You said yourself, Wiley, that this is a handy trail to Helena.”

  “Well, I may’ve misled ye there,” Wiley said. “’Tis one way to the Last Chance, right enough, but probably not the handiest.”

  “A man generally coyotes this trail when he doesn’t want others to know he’s around,” Rose put in. Having run an informal roadhouse along the trail for the past few years, she figured she knew a thing or two about the character of the men who traveled it.

  “They could be miners or drovers,” Wiley allowed, “but it ain’t likely. They’re either Crows, like Shorty figures, or hardcases plannin’ to help themselves to our horses now that we’ve done all the dangerous work. Either way, I want to keep as many miles between them and us as possible.” He glanced at Shorty. “What do ye say, hoss. Could we make it through these mountains before first light, was we to leave now?”

  “That moon’ll go down a couple of hours before dawn,” Shorty replied. “We’d lose some horses in the badlands on the other side if we tried to push ’em through with just the stars to guide us.”

  “We’ve got twenty-seven head. I only promised Caldwell twenty.”

  “Seven head’s still seven head. They’d pay most of the wages for Garcia, Jimmy, and Rose if we delivered all of them.”

  Wiley looked up, a slice of bacon halted halfway to his lips. “Nobody said anything about payin’ Rosie. I figure feedin’ her’ll be pay enough.”

  “No, she’s doing her share. She deserves some coins to jingle.”

  Rose remained silent, waiting for Wiley’s reply. It was a long time coming, but finally he said: “’Twasn’t the deal, Shorty. We agreed on just two extra hands. If ye want to pay her something out of your own poke, that’d be your business, but I ain’t kickin’ in anything.”

  “No.” Shorty’s eyes narrowed above the glowing tip of his cigarette. “We’ll pay her something. It’s only fair.”

  Wiley guffawed as he pushed a strip of bacon into his mouth, folding it against his tongue like an accordion. He studied Rose thoughtfully for a moment, then said: “If it came to a shootin’ scrape, girl, do ye think ye could hold ye own?”

  “I’d stand my ground as long as you do.”

  A twinkle came into Wiley’s eyes. “By damn, I bet ye would. All right, Shorty, we’ll pay her. But not the same as Jimmy and Garcia.”

  “That’s fair,” Shorty agreed. “She came on late.” He looked at Rose. “Let me ’n’ Wiley talk it over … decide what’s right. It’s still a couple of days to Two-Hats’s.”

  “If we make it,” Wiley amended. “’Tis a ways yet between here and that whore’s son, and them Crows, if Crows they be, will be makin’ better time than us.”

  “Then maybe we ought to saddle up right now,” Shorty replied. “We could damn’ near be through these hills by sunup if we didn’t dally.”

  Wiley laughed and wiped his fingers on his chaps. “Now ye’re talkin’. Rosie, get this gear stowed away. Jimmy, haul ye butt outta them blankets. By God, we ain’t payin’ the two of ye to sleep.”

  • • • • •

  They reached the top of the Bull Mountains shortly after midnight and stopped to let their horses blow. Wiley, who’d been scouting ahead, came back to sit his mount between Shorty and Rose, the three of them staring out over their back trail.

  Far to the southwest, Rose could make out the jagged peaks of the Absaroka Range, moonlight shining off the streaks of snow and ice. To the west, the mountains rode lower, slashed with cañons that looked like rivers of spilled ink in the thin light. To the east and south, however, the land was all rolling plains and flat-topped buttes, sculpted by wind and rain and spring run-off, far-flung and mostly empty nowadays.

  It was a country known well to the Crows, the Blackfeet, and the Assiniboines, and to a lesser extent the Sioux, Cheyennes, and Métis. Others had made their homes here as well—trappers and traders, scouts and squawmen, miners and hunters. And the Army, if a person looked at it that way, making their living chasing the Indians.

  Buffalo hunters, both white and red, had only recently killed off the scattered remnants of the great northern herd, the last remaining animals of the millions that had once roamed the plains from central Canada to Mexico. And even before the final bull had been skinned, the last hide hauled to market or back to the reservation, the cattlemen had started moving in. With their big Texas herds and hard-bitten, get-the-hell-out-of-my-way attitudes, they were swallowing up huge chunks of land, claiming as their own private domain what earlier inhabitants—the Indians and traders and hunters—had considered unclaimable.

  Rose felt a twinge of melancholy, thinking about how everything in the territory seemed to be going to hell of late. She felt like crying, as she had a dozen times already since watching her life go up in flames not twenty-four hours before. She didn’t, though. It had been a long time since she’d bawled real tears, and she’d be damned if she�
�d start now, with Wiley and Shorty there to see her and maybe make fun of her soggy-eyed mewlings.

  But the two horse thieves seemed oblivious to her sadness, and were all business as they scanned their back trail, Wiley through a pair of field glasses carried in a 7th Cavalry case. It was probably twenty minutes before he lowered his binoculars. “’Tis the Crows, like ye figured, Shorty. Can’t be no other, stuck to our hinders the way this bunch has been.”

  “We’ve got a jump on them now, but not enough to outrun them.”

  “Ye think they’ll catch us, then?”

  “More sooner than later, I expect. Maybe we ought to cut our losses while we’re ahead. I ain’t sure these horses are worth a shooting scrape.”

  “The hell!” Wiley retorted. “Ye cut ye own losses, hoss. I gave me word I’d deliver twenty head to Two-Hats by the end of the week, and, by damn, that’s what I intend to do.”

  Shorty shrugged. “It was only a thought.”

  “Well, ’twas a damn’ poor one,” Wiley grumbled. “Are ye gettin’ too old for this business?”

  “I’ll likely die with a noose around my neck, same as you,” Shorty replied curtly, pulling his horse around. “Come on, we’re only halfway across and the worst is still ahead of us.”

  Rose rode back to the herd with the boys, easing the buckskin Shorty had roped out for her over next to Jimmy, while Wiley and Shorty went ahead. Although they’d barely spoken to one another all day, she felt more comfortable around young Frakes than she did Garcia.

  Garcia was maybe forty years old, a short, wiry man with coal-black hair and a pockmarked face who, to Rose’s knowledge, hadn’t looked directly at her once since she’d joined the drive. She told herself he was probably shy around women, but that argument wasn’t affording her much comfort. Garcia didn’t handle himself like a shy man; he handled himself like a brash one.

  Although Rose had talked a good bluff to Wiley and Shorty, she was beginning to regret her decision to throw in with them. She felt ill-prepared for the life of an outlaw, and had she a home left standing to go back to, she might have given up and gone.