The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  Rose laughed and wiped her eyes. “I’ve been known to have that effect on men.”

  “Naw, that ain’t true. Everybody likes you. Everybody. Shoot, you think that trail past your cabin … is the closest route to anywhere. Or the easiest. It ain’t, I can tell you that. But it was always good … to swing past your place and see the look on your face when we rode up. It was worth a couple of extra days in the saddle … just to see that smile.”

  He fell silent then, closing his eyes. It took Rose a moment to realize he’d never open them again.

  • • • • •

  Five days later she rode across the Tongue River bridge into Miles City. Avoiding the main part of town, she followed a riverside path to Third Street to approach Alice’s parlor house from the rear. She was still a couple of blocks away when she spotted several women behind the building. As she approached, she recognized Callie and Nora among them. They were hanging bed sheets on a clothesline, the squares of dingy cotton rippling gently in the breeze. It was auburn-haired Jessie who spied Rose first, but they all stopped to look.

  Rose reined up a few yards away, and for a while no one spoke or moved. Rose figured she must have looked a sight—dirty, disheveled, probably smelling more like a horse than a human being. Her clothes, which had been new only a few weeks before, had taken a beating on the trail, and the once-flat brim of her hat hadn’t been the same since the thrashing she’d given Fred Baylor. She wore her pistol pulled around where it would be easy to grab, and had kept the Sharps loaded and balanced across her saddlebows ever since leaving the Pipestem. She was loaded for bear, for a fact, but hadn’t seen so much as a jack rabbit all the way in.

  Nora was the first to move. She came forward in jerky strides, as if the bottoms of her shoes were sticking to the dry grass and bare earth of the back yard. Rose squared her shoulders uncertainly.

  “We heard about Wiley, what happened up on the Musselshell,” Nora said, stopping beside Albert’s shoulder. “The papers are calling it the ‘Musselshell Massacre,’ and rumors have been flying all over about it. They’re saying the whole Collins gang was wiped out, including you.” Tears came to her eyes, and she looked away. “Dammit, Rose, we thought you were dead.”

  “Naw, I ain’t dead, but I’m god-awful tired, and I’ve seen so many dead things since I left here I can’t hardly stand it no more.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Is that offer of a partnership still open?”

  Cautiously Nora asked: “To rebuild your cabin and raise some cattle?”

  “Uhn-huh.”

  Taking a deep breath, she nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that a lot since you left. I believe I’d like to try it, after all.”

  “So would I,” Rose said, booting the Sharps. “So would I.”

  Homesteader

  Chapter

  21

  It was the birth of the little bald-faced bull calf in early November that convinced Rose it was time to make the trip into Billings. Nora had been urging her to go for the last six weeks. They needed basics to see them through the winter—flour, salt, sugar, tea, coffee, canned goods, ammunition—plus warm clothing and overboots for both of them. But mostly, with the arrival of the wobbly legged whiteface, they needed a branding iron to mark this new addition as A-Bar-E owned.

  They’d settled on the design for the iron only a few weeks before, when it became obvious the birth was nigh. The A stood for Alder, the E for Edwards. It wasn’t a complicated brand, and Rose knew it was possible someone else had already registered it, or one similar, with either the Montana Stockgrowers Association or the Yellowstone Basin Cattlemen’s Association. To be on the safe side, they’d worked up several variations on the A and E theme, and Rose was confident they’d be able to record one of them.

  It was a big step, though, registering their own brand, and a little scary, too, the way things had been changing recently. In all her years on the frontier, Rose had never felt particularly threatened, but she reckoned that would change when word of a new ranch spread across the range. The big outfits would view such a fledgling upstart as the A-Bar-E as an affront to their own way of life, their own concept of world order. That the operation was run by a couple of women would only add to the insult.

  Nor would Rose’s own reputation help matters. Although she was already on Joe Bean’s infamous list of suspected stock thieves, it would be her association with Wiley Collins and Shorty Tibbs that sealed her image among the larger outfits.

  Nora thought her worries were exaggerated, and even Rose had to admit they rang with shades of paranoia when spoken aloud. But she also understood that there was more involved here than just who owned a piece of property or controlled a source of water. For the more affluent cattlemen, especially those who still sported foreign citizenship, it was a matter of station and lineage. Those feelings were no doubt being intensified by the massive influx of European immigrants deluging the Eastern seaboard of the United States, then flowing westward by rail, water, and wagon.

  That fear of outsiders, or perhaps more correctly, that fear of the lower classes, was something Rose had trouble comprehending, having spent the better part of her pigtail days in the rough-and-tumble mining camps of western Montana, before coming to the buffalo ranges with her pap. In Bannock or Virginia City it hadn’t been uncommon at all to hear the ebb and flow of conversation in a dozen different languages, and she’d learned early in life to recognize Shoshone, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Salish, Italian, Flathead, Finnish, and Mandarin—men and women working side-by-side for a chance at a better life, free of the thumb of oppression.

  But if provincialism was a recent addition to the plains—carted in alongside baby grand pianos and crystal chandeliers—it was hardly difficult to spot, even to an uneducated frontier gal of Rose’s caliber.

  Halting at the edge of the timber west of the cabin, Rose pushed those darker thoughts aside as she studied the A-Bar-E. A smile tugged gently at her lips. They’d rebuilt the cabin first, using logs snaked out of the forest behind it. It hadn’t been easy, but by the time they’d cleared off the ruins of the old cabin and cut down the trees they’d need for the new one, they’d toughened to the task. From time to time travelers along the Outlaw Trail had stopped for a few days to help, but mainly the accomplishments were their own.

  The cattle had arrived in August, and were grazing off to the east where the grass was better. Nora had contracted for the herd before leaving Miles City last June, purchasing forty head of shorthorn cows and a good range bull from a Little Missouri outfit that was planning a drive to the mining camps of central Montana later that summer. Nora had met the rep during the Stockgrowers Convention in April and broached the idea to him then, but it wasn’t until Rose’s return after the Musselshell fiasco that she’d concluded the deal via telegraph. They hadn’t expected any of the cows to freshen before spring, but the newborn bull calf proved them wrong. Judging from the looks of several other cows, there would soon be more.

  Nora had been ecstatic when she saw the little bull for the first time. “That’s pure profit,” she’d exclaimed. “A one hundred percent return on that cow. By next summer our herd will be twice this size, and by the following year we’ll be marketing some of the two-year-olds.”

  Watching the calf nose its mama’s udder, Rose couldn’t deny a tentative hopefulness. Still, she’d been around livestock all her life, and knew it could be a risky venture. She recalled the time her pap had bought two new spans of young mules to pull a second hide wagon, only to have all four animals sicken and die within a month. But Nora refused to be brought down by such morbid cautions, and Rose soon quit bringing them up.

  In Rose’s opinion, Nora’s transformation since leaving Alice’s was a wonder in itself. As the summer progressed she’d become a different woman. The hard edges had softened and her language had mellowed out until it was nearly salt fre
e. Sometimes Rose would hear her humming or singing quietly to herself, and it seemed she could find delight in the damnedest things—a butterfly, or the trilling of a meadowlark. Not even the morning frost the last few weeks, clinging to the corral poles and the iron rims of the wagon wheels like bristles, had dampened her mood.

  She seemed to thrive on the challenge of rebuilding the A-Bar-E, too. Her once seemingly frail physique had turned as sinewy as a catamount’s after months of hard labor, and her milk-white skin had darkened to a rich walnut; calluses marked her palms and the first small wrinkles crinkled the flesh around her eyes. These changes might have demoralized another woman, but they seemed only to strengthen Nora, widening the gap between who she was now, and who she’d been six months before. Last June Rose might have fretted about leaving her new partner behind while she went to Billings for supplies, but Nora had been quick to assure her that some time alone would suit her just fine.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” she’d confided to Rose. “Besides, I’ll have the shotgun and my pistol, and I know how to use them.”

  Rose didn’t point out that a shotgun—the more deadly of Nora’s two weapons—would be a poor defense against a sore-tempered grizzly bear or marauding Indians. Besides, she had other things on her mind now that the Billings trip was imminent—largest among them being her pap, who she hadn’t seen in more than a year.

  Daniel Ames lived in Billings, or had the last time Rose was there. He was getting on in years, and wasn’t as spry as he used to be. Nor was he as keen-witted, although she attributed that more to drink than age. Still, as an only daughter, she considered it her duty to look in on him from time to time, to make sure the bottle hadn’t claimed him completely.

  Sighing, she heeled the buckskin toward home, half a mile away.

  Dirty-Nosed Dave’s scrawny horse had been another little surprise. Rose had discovered the buckskin grazing along the creek one morning in July and recognized it immediately. Almost frantically she’d searched the barn, then the trees along the creek, but Dave was nowhere to be found. Nor was there any indication the buckskin had been ridden recently. Thinking back, Rose recalled that Dave hadn’t used the horse at all once they’d started north with old man Frakes’s winter cavvy. The buckskin had likely been drifting south ever since the ambush, and, given time, probably would have returned to whatever pasture Dave had stolen it out of. But the tawny gelding had taken a shine to Albert, and showed no inclination to move on.

  At first Rose ignored the horse in the hope that it would go away on its own. She didn’t relish the prospect of some previous owner showing up to level charges of theft against her or Nora, but, when the gelding was still around a few days later, she decided to let it stay. Had the buckskin been marked in any way, she would have taken it into the trees and shot it, rather than risk being found with stolen property, but since the horse was unbranded, and a runt to boot, she figured it wouldn’t pose much of a threat. And she was glad she didn’t have to kill it. Death was a part of life that anyone who lived with Nature understood, but Rose had seen enough of it in recent months to last her a good long time.

  If the buckskin got along well with Albert and the mules, its attitude toward humans hadn’t improved at all. Within the first week Rose had been bitten at and kicked—the latter a glancing blow that had sent her sprawling in the dirt. It was the unprovoked kick that angered her into challenging the buckskin for control. The next morning, before breakfast, she roped the gelding and snubbed it to the strongest corral post she could find. Then she slapped the Mother Hubbard onto the horse’s back and tightened the cinch. She handled the struggling bronco quickly and efficiently, taking no guff and showing no fear, and when she threw her leg over the saddle a couple of minutes later, the horse was thoroughly enraged.

  It was a hell of a battle, with lots of dust and noise but very little strategy on the buckskin’s part. Rose rode him out easily, then swung down and tied him to the post before he could catch his wind. She went inside for a cup of coffee, peering through a crack in the shutters while she drank. The horse continued to fight the rope, the makeshift snubbing post, and its own frenzied wrath, but when she went outside thirty minutes later, it was standing quietly, lathered with sweat, its flanks heaving.

  The rest was mostly anticlimactic. The buckskin had already been broken to the saddle; it had just required proof that Rose had the pluck to handle it. Still, she knew she’d never be able to trust the buckskin the way she did Albert.

  So they had an extra horse that would take some of the load off of Albert, a pair of mules they’d purchased in Miles City to pull the wagon, and forty head of cattle—forty-one, counting the little bull calf. The cabin was rebuilt better than the original, the corral repaired, and they’d added a lean-to to the side of the barn where they stored their tools and harness.

  Logs had been hauled down from the forest for a smokehouse, and firewood was cut and stacked against the north and west walls of the cabin, where it would serve as a windbreak until it was needed for the fireplace or cook stove. They’d hauled in several wagonloads of coal for the stove from an outcropping some miles to the east, then cut a couple of acres of hay that they stacked close to the corral.

  They hadn’t gotten to everything. They still needed a fence around the haystack to keep the deer and elk at bay, once the deep snows of winter drove them down from the high country, and Rose wanted a door on the barn. Eventually they hoped to add a couple of rooms off the back of the house for separate bedrooms, but that would have to wait, too. Now the season had ended. Four inches of snow had fallen before dawn that morning, and, even though it had melted off before noon, Rose knew it was time to start thinking of the smaller tasks that needed to be done before winter clamped its icy hand over the range.

  Riding into the yard, she stripped the saddle and hackamore—the buckskin still refused to take a bit—from the horse and stowed them in the lean-to. Nora had already forked hay into the corral for the stock and topped off the water trough that the cabin’s previous owner had carved out of a cottonwood trunk.

  Wafer-thin strips of lamplight were glowing from around the window frame in the cabin, illuminating cracks that would have to be caulked before the temperatures turned bitter, but Rose found the sight comforting at this time of day. Recalling the hundreds of times she’d returned alone to a cold, dark cabin reminded her of the gratitude she felt to have a friend like Nora.

  Nora was standing in front of the stove when Rose entered, sliding a cast-iron pan of biscuits from the overhead warmer. The aroma of baking sourdough and simmering meat was like a breath of succulent air.

  “Lordy, that smells good,” Rose said, sniffing loudly. “I hope you don’t ever get tired of cookin’. I reckon we’d starve if we had to go back to eatin’ my grub.”

  “Oh, I doubt if we’d starve,” Nora replied blandly. “We might shoot ourselves after a couple of weeks, though.” Setting the biscuits on the table, she added: “I was beginning to think you’d chopped off your foot.”

  “I lost track of time,” Rose admitted. With the snowy weather that morning, she’d opted to hold over a day and girdle trees rather than begin the long trek into Billings under such soggy conditions.

  “How many’d you strip?” Nora asked, setting out bowls and spoons.

  “Twenty-six.” Using a scythe-like tool with a hook on the tip of the blade, Rose had peeled away two-foot-wide strips of bark all the way around the trunks. Without that flesh-like connection to the soil, the tree would soon die, allowing it to be cut down next summer for the cabin’s addition. Although deadfall for firewood was plentiful, good straight logs of a suitable diameter for building required more effort.

  Rose hung her coat and hat on a peg beside the door, then washed her hands in a pan setting on top of the water barrel. She had to resort to the harsh lye soap they normally reserved for laundry to remove the pine sap. While she was doing that, Nora poure
d coffee, then set the kettle from the stove in the middle of the table. Taking her seat, Rose pulled the pot close to peek inside. “Stew?”

  “Slow elk,” Nora replied matter-of-factly.

  Rose bent closer, allowing the food’s warmth to caress her face. Slow elk was a local term for someone else’s beef, in this case a Flying Egg yearling Nora had shot and butchered the week before. Although technically rustling, it was another of those largely bygone practices Rose had grown up with, and which the old-timers—the foundation people—mostly understood. Like stealing horses from Indians, always with the full expectation that they could have their own stolen in return at any time.

  Reaching for her wooden spoon, Rose said—“I saw a bunch of Egg cows at the edge of the timber, north of where I was workin’.”—then almost immediately regretted opening her mouth.

  Plopping down opposite her, Nora said: “I’ve about come to the end of my patience with that outfit. They ought to show more respect for their neighbors.”

  The Flying Egg was actually registered as the Crooked Bar-O-Bar, the outfit having established itself along the upper Musselshell the preceding summer, even though the first of its cattle had come onto the range two years ago, in ’84. Its brand was a short, wavy line on either side of the letter O, but the blacksmith who’d fashioned the branding irons for the spread had failed to create a perfect circle. The result was more of an oval, with the wider side on the bottom, creating the effect on a cow or horse of an egg flanked by a pair of wings.

  “Likely they do, if their neighbors is flashy enough,” Rose said. There were several large outfits north of the Egg, Granville Stewart’s D-S and the N-Double-Bar being two of the better-known spreads. But the A-Bar-E was the only ranch to the Flying Egg’s immediate south, and Rose figured a company like the Crooked Bar-O-Bar would hardly credit such a rawhide outfit as theirs as worthy of respect.