The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  For a long, painful moment, no one moved or spoke. Then Dirty-Nosed Dave said: “Hey, I know that jasper on the right. That’s Roy Green … used to run horses outta the Little Mo’ country.”

  “Lordy,” Rose gasped, averting her gaze just as Fred Baylor tumbled from his saddle and staggered away with the dry heaves.

  “Look at the neck on that fella,” Jeremy blurted. Of them all, only he seemed unaffected by the ugliness of the setting. “How long do you figure he’s been hanging there?”

  “You’re a dumb little shit,” Shorty said tautly.

  Dismounting, Rose turned her back on the dead men and breathed deeply. Fred Baylor had finally quit trying to bring up his breakfast. He stood with his hands on his knees, sucking in great gulps of air. His pale, hollow-eyed look made Rose remember Della’s expression on the day she’d watched him ride out, the toddler, Chad, perched on her hip, the worn-thin material of her dress drawn tight over the mound of her pregnant stomach. With a cry of outrage, Rose jumped at Fred, whipping off her hat and slashing it across his face.

  Fred hollered in surprise and stumbled backward, but Rose followed, beating him about the head and shoulders, crushing the stiff brim of her Stetson against his upraised arms. She slapped at him until her shoulders ached and her arms trembled, driving him back and forth among the junipers while the others watched in slack-jawed astonishment. Then the hat slipped from her fingers and she drew her pistol and fired a single round. With a howl, Fred pitched into the cushioning branches of a juniper.

  “Rose!” Wiley roared, leaping from his horse. He grabbed her around the shoulders, but before he could wrench the Smith & Wesson from her grasp, she twisted free and leveled the revolver on him. Wiley jerked to a stop, staring into the muzzle. “Ye’d best start usin’ ye noggin, girl, afore I take that shooter away from ye and blister ye butt with it.”

  “Shut up, Wiley. Just shut up!”

  “Tighten ye reins, darlin’.”

  “Shut up!” she screamed.

  “Are ye believin’ them tales they be tellin’ on ye, Rosie. Is that what’s got ye hackles so ruffled?” He backed off a step, straightening and relaxing. “I know ye stood up to Stroudmire there in the Silver Star, and the boys all admire ye for it. But ye got off lucky that night, gal, and shouldn’t be countin’ on it happenin’ again. John Stroudmire’s a heller with them pistols, and not given to patience with folks like ye ’n’ me.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?” Her gaze darted to Shorty, then came back to Wiley. “What’s that got to do with anythin’?” Then her shoulders sagged and the Smith & Wesson’s muzzle dipped toward the ground. “Damn you, Wiley Collins,” she said without heat.

  “Put the pistol up, darlin’,” he said gently, and she holstered the Smith & Wesson.

  “I’m shot,” Fred yelled from beneath the juniper where he’d fallen. Shoving aside several low boughs, he struggled to sit up. One hand was clamped tightly to his thigh, where Rose’s bullet had ripped the flesh along the outside of his leg. His face was welted and red where the brim of her hat had battered him, his nose bleeding. Looking at Rose in bewilderment, he said: “What’d you do that for?”

  “Because you need to go home,” she said wearily. “It don’t matter so much about the rest of us, but you need to go home.”

  “You shot me!”

  “You wouldn’t’ve listened, otherwise. This way you ain’t got no choice. Besides, you ain’t hurt bad, are you?” She started toward him, but Fred scuttled deeper into the protective branches of the juniper.

  “Keep her away from me!” he hollered. “She’s crazy.”

  Laughing, Wiley said: “She’s makin’ damn’ fine sense for a crazy woman, if ye ask me. Be quiet now, let her look at ye wound.” Turning to the others, he barked: “Davey, Jeremy, go find some soft dirt and scoop out a grave. I reckon the least we can do is give these fellas a decent burial.”

  Rose kneeled at Fred’s side, drawing a clasp knife from her vest pocket. “I’m sorry, Fred,” she said.

  “Dammit, Rose, we needed that money.”

  “Think of your kids, dang it. Think of Della.”

  “I was!”

  Steeling herself to the task, Rose carefully sliced the bloody material away from the wound. Despite her efforts to be gentle, sweat was soon rolling down Fred’s face, and his leg was extended as rigid as a jockey stick, though twitchy with nerves.

  “Hold still,” she scolded. “You’re jumpin’ around like I’m holdin’ a brandin’ iron to your butt.”

  “There’s a hole in my leg you could lay your finger in,” he reminded her through gritted teeth.

  “Better a hole in your leg than your wife a widow. Listen, Fred, when I get done here, I want you to make a beeline to Junction City. You know where that is?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Good. Look up a man named Lew Parker who tends the bar at Hannahman’s Saloon. Tell him I sent you. He’ll see that things is taken care of until you’re fit enough to go home. You do that, and I’ll make sure you get your share of the money.”

  He looked at her in puzzlement. “Why are you doing this. I hardly know you.”

  “I don’t know why I’m doin’ it,” she admitted. “Just do what I say, and don’t argue.”

  He lay back in resignation. “Well, whatever your reason, I owe you. I figure Della will feel the same.”

  “You just hush about that. Hush and go home, where you belong.”

  • • • • •

  They buried the three men in a common grave, scraped out of the hard earth with a cast-iron skillet. Rose didn’t know how they arranged the corpse with the stretched neck, nor did she inquire. She stayed in the junipers with Fred until the bodies were covered, then went over to stand above the grave for a moment of respectful silence. Afterward they started the cavvy north. Nobody wanted to tarry at the box cañon now. Not with the ghosts of hanged men hovering about its entrance.

  Mounted awkwardly on his gray, Fred waited until the herd was under way before reining in the opposite direction. Rose and Shorty rode with him for a ways, mostly to see how he’d fare with his wounded limb, but he seemed to manage, his pain numbed by a flat pint bottle of whiskey Shorty had given him from his saddlebags. Dirty-Nosed Dave had eyed the bottle hungrily as it changed hands, but made no claim for a snort.

  “I got a bad feeling about this, Shorty,” Rose said, after Fred had left them.

  “So do I, but there’s nothing either one of us can do about it. Come on, it’s a long ride over the top, and I doubt if we’ll stop again until we reach the Musselshell.”

  It was just after dawn the next day when Rose spotted the familiar bend of the Musselshell in the distance. An exhausted smile came to her face. She’d lost track of the time they’d spent in the saddle, the days and nights having merged into a solid sheet of sight and sound and smell. They could all use a rest. Even the horses looked nearly dead on their feet.

  It was while coming down that last stretch before the river that Shorty pulled his horse aside and waited for Rose to catch up. “Got a minute?” he asked.

  She reined Albert—she’d returned the line-back dun to the cavvy that morning—away from the herd. “Sure, what do you want?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that Indian you shot last fall.”

  Rose’s gaze went to the ridge top where the Indian had stood, taking aim on Jimmy Frakes with a Springfield rifle. “What about him?”

  “It’s always bothered me that we didn’t take a look.”

  “He was dead,” she replied brusquely. “I hit him square.”

  “I know, I just want a look. Care to come with me?”

  After a pause, she shrugged. “All right.”

  While Wiley and the others took the cavvy on to the river, Shorty and Rose rode to the top of the ridge. Near its crest, Rose urged Alb
ert into the lead, reining up a couple of minutes later above the remains of the only human being she’d ever killed. Staring at the weathered cadaver created a fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach, but nothing else.

  “Looks like you plugged him center,” Shorty said, after dismounting. At some point on the ride up he’d shucked his rifle from its scabbard; he carried it with him now as he approached the corpse.

  “You ain’t likely to need that Winchester,” Rose said hollowly. “I doubt he’s been playin’ ’possum this long.”

  Shorty gave her a funny look but didn’t reply. He used the rifle’s barrel to sweep back a gray-green sage bough, exposing more of the corpse to view. It had decomposed considerably over the winter. Tufts of stiff black hair were lodged in the grass nearby, framing the white skull, and rotting leather leggings clung to the thigh and shin bones. A coiled rawhide lariat was draped over the body’s shoulder, forming a sort of crossed bandoleer look with a cartridge belt that hung from the opposite shoulder. The Springfield lay nearby, rusted beyond salvation.

  “He was looking for horses, all right,” Shorty said, pointing out the rawhide rope.

  “A lariat Indian,” Rose said reverently; it was an old-timers’ expression, used to describe an aboriginal horse thief. It had been a sort of rite of passage in the old days for young men to venture out on foot in search of horses to steal.

  Stooping, Shorty started to reach for a knife in a beaded sheath propped against the Indian’s pelvic bone.

  “Uhn-uh,” Rose said sharply. “Leave it.”

  He looked up, scowling.

  “Just leave it be, Shorty Tibbs. We ain’t lowered ourselves to robbin’ the dead yet.” He straightened with a piqued look, but, before he could argue his point, Rose added: “Folks has got a sour outlook on redskins, but they weren’t bad neighbors, all things considered.”

  “Folks with sour outlooks toward Indians might be remembering some dead and scalped relative they had to bury,” he reminded her.

  “I ain’t defendin’ ’em. I just admired their straightforward way of tryin’ to kill all us White Eyes. It was a lot simpler to understand than what I saw yesterday.”

  “Oh, I thought what we saw yesterday was pretty straightforward,” Shorty replied, yet when he turned away, it was without the knife. He went to his horse, then paused with his gaze on the distant bend. “Did you hear something?”

  Rose twisted in her saddle for a better look. The cavvy had reached the river and was spreading out to drink, the men drifting upstream to find a clean place to satisfy their own thirsts. Yet even as she watched, Wiley jerked his horse around and started spurring down the front of the herd, trying to turn it back. A puff of gray smoke appeared on the far bank like a giant, frayed cotton boll. Shorty cursed and vaulted onto his horse as the report of the shot echoed up the ridge.

  It seemed like everything happened at once then, and too much of it for Rose to keep track of. A ragged volley of gunfire erupted from the far shore, and, in the horseshoe bend, horses screamed and men cursed. Powder smoke seemed to blossom from every direction, until a haze floated over the water like morning mist. Shorty was racing recklessly down the steep slope, riding pell-mell to the aid of his comrades, but Rose held back. Jumping from her saddle, she yanked the Sharps from its scabbard and slid it across the Mother Hubbard’s seat. Then she lowered the breech and thumbed a hefty brass cartridge into the chamber. The Sharps was a long-range weapon, and Rose knew she could provide more support from her ridge-top position than she could down below, where the rifle’s single-shot capacity and excessive weight would become a liability.

  The cavvy was bolting back up the coulée to the south, while the echo of gunfire rattled off the hills. Rose saw Dirty-Nosed Dave’s mount bolting with the rest of the herd, its head high and to one side to avoid the trailing reins, its empty stirrups flapping. She saw Jeremy slammed from his saddle to sprawl, unmoving, on the sandy riverbank. In the Musselshell, Wiley’s horse had reared, its hoofs churning the river’s surface. Still in the saddle, Wiley jerked convulsively under the impact of a slug, then jerked again when a second bullet struck him. His horse, nearly crazed by the thunder of guns, remained on its rear legs, but Wiley lost his grip and tumbled into the current. A second later, another bullet caught his horse in the head and it went over backward, crashing down on top of Wiley’s drifting body, pinning it to bottom of the Musselshell.

  All in less time than it took to work up a good spit.

  Desperately Rose eared back the Sharp’s big side-hammer. Sighting on the figure of a man half hidden in a tangle of sun-bleached logs on the far bank, she squeezed the trigger and the rifle bellowed. Powder smoke blew back in her face, and Albert whickered and shuffled. Something small and hard whizzed past Rose’s left shoulder as she reloaded. She fired again, but from this distance she couldn’t tell what effect her shots were having. Most of the stolen cavvy was already gone; only a couple of animals remained, crippled by stray bullets. In the river, Wiley’s horse was floating downstream, but there was no sign of Wiley or of Dirty-Nosed Dave. Jeremy lay on the beach where he’d fallen, and even through the pall of gunsmoke, Rose could see the deep red stain on the white sand around his head. On the far bank, the bushwhackers—there must have been half a dozen of them—were keeping up a steady fusillade, peppering the sky around Rose’s hat, tearing up the soft earth at her feet, and making Albert dance nervously.

  Rose wasn’t sure what she would have done next if not for Shorty. From the corner of her eye she saw him clinging to his saddle at the bottom of the ridge, his horse fighting the bit, wanting to run. Shorty had lost his hat in the struggle, and in the bright sunshine his bald head seemed to gleam like polished marble. With a cry of alarm, Rose swung into her saddle, resheathing her rifle on the fly so that by the time she reached Shorty’s side, her hand was free.

  “Hang on!” she shouted, pulling the reins from Shorty’s unresponsive fingers. A bullet whined past her cheek and she swore and flinched at the quick burn under her right ear. Across the river, several of the ambushers had emerged from cover, concentrating their fire on the two surviving horse thieves.

  “Come on, dang it!” she yelled, hammering at Albert’s ribs with the sides of her stirrups. They made a mad dash back down the coulée toward the Bulls, the sound of bullets whisking past becoming almost like the sound of the wind itself. It took less than two minutes to round the first deep curve in the coulée, putting them safely, if temporarily, out of the line of fire from the bushwhackers’ rifles.

  • • • • •

  Rose hauled up a few miles into the Bulls, dismounting and scrambling onto a nearby rock, where the winding course of the coulée could be scanned for pursuit. Although she saw nothing to indicate they were being followed, she knew that meant little. Returning to the horses, she quickly mounted and led off into the hills, tugging Shorty’s horse along by its reins.

  She took them into a maze of broken ridges and winding cañons, and when she judged they’d gone far enough, she stopped and helped Shorty out of the saddle, laying him in the shade of a cutbank. The left side of his shirt was soaked with blood, and a pink froth had collected at the corners of his mouth. Moving aside the torn material of his shirt, she caught her breath. “Dang it, Shorty,” she said.

  He gave her that old, familiar smile. “I ain’t dead yet.”

  “You need a doctor. I reckon they nicked a lung, at least.”

  “Busted a rib, too, the way it feels.” He put a hand on his side and pressed gently, wincing at the sudden pain. “I’ve seen worse,” he said. “They only shot me once. I recollect a time a Mountie north of the line put four slugs into Sam Matthews, and he wasn’t down but a week.”

  “Shorty, I ain’t never knowed nobody to tell so many lies as you.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I always said that about you, Shorty Tibbs, that you was …..” Her voice broke and she looked
away.

  “Rose, we can’t stay here. We’ve got to find a place to hole up. I’ve been thinking about that cabin on the Pipestem. It ought to be dry by now.”

  “That’s three days from here,” she protested. “Maybe four, the shape you’re in.”

  “Naw, we can make it in three. Hell, we could make it in two if we rode all night. Help me on my horse.”

  “Just settle down,” she said, pushing him back. “At least let me wrap that wound, before you bleed out right here.”

  “You need to keep an eye behind us, too,” he said, his voice wheezy.

  Pulling her knife, Rose deftly sliced the fabric away from the wound, taking confidence from the experience she’d gained yesterday with Fred. “I been keepin’ my eyes behind us,” she said.

  “Those boys were good,” Shorty murmured, letting his muscles go slack. “They slickered us clean, and Wiley ain’t a …”—he paused, then went on doggedly—“Wiley wasn’t a man to be slickered easily.”

  Rose ripped the shirt away from the wound and didn’t reply. The bullet had entered close to the center of Shorty’s chest, breaking one of his ribs and probably striking a lung, although she was relieved that there wasn’t any sign of the lung starting to collapse. Still, it frightened her that the bullet hadn’t exited anywhere. It meant the slug had hit the rib and probably ricocheted Lord knew where inside his body.

  “Bad?” he asked, keeping his eyes closed.

  “I reckon you’ll live,” she replied, although she wasn’t sure he believed her.

  Smiling, he said: “Well, there’s no point looking too far ahead, even on a good day. I’ve got a spare shirt in my saddlebags. Why don’t you wrap it around this, then we’ll get on down the trail. If whoever jumped us decides to follow, we’d be in a poor position here.” Then his eyes snapped open and he grabbed her forearm, squeezing hard. “If they come, Rose, promise me you’ll hightail it outta here without me. I can’t ….”