The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  The killers’ trail led her northwest over the Bulls, via the now familiar route to the horseshoe bend of the Musselshell. Although Rose stuck to the trace with a bulldog’s tenacity, she was to suffer her first disappointment before she even reached the foothills.

  The point at which Plover’s men had turned back was easily discerned. From there on, only the killers’ trail remained, established sometime after the posse’s retreat. It was then, with the concentration of tracks reduced, that Rose realized she was following just two sets of prints. The third set had disappeared completely, as if the horse had taken wing.

  She hauled up in dismay. She’d been so confident that all three of Nora’s attackers were ahead of her that she could hardly credit what she saw. Reining off the main path, she cut back and forth through the sage, but the only prints she turned up were those of an antelope, paralleling the main trail. She stared back the way she’d come, but there was no sign of a delayed third rider, no waving flags or blaring brass band to announce that here, Rose Edwards, lay the answers you so desperately seek. There were only the gently rolling hills with their scattered, solitary junipers and busted shelves of caprock, cloaked in the bright green of spring buffalo grass.

  Rose was certain three men had been involved in Nora’s death. The shape and style of boot prints left in the spilled flour confirmed that. So what had happened to the third individual. Had he veered off somewhere after leaving the A-Bar-E. Or had the split occurred at the cabin itself. Who was he, and where had he gone?

  Although Rose tried to convince herself that information wasn’t needed yet, she knew her odds of finding the third man would be significantly diminished if she couldn’t come up with at least a name.

  With the tracks of Plover’s posse out of the way, Rose began to make better time. She camped on top of the Bulls that night, and by noon the next day was watering her horse in the Musselshell. It produced some odd sensations to stand so calmly at the river’s edge and study the various sites of importance within her view—the ridge where the Indian she’d killed had been standing, the sandy beach where Jeremy Frakes had laid in a halo of his own blood, the purling waters of the river itself, where Wiley’s mount had gone under in a hail of bullets.

  Yet there was more to her feelings than just the enormity of all that had happened since those days. Something had changed within herself. She wasn’t the same Rose Edwards any more, and, with a touch of sadness, she recognized that she never would be again. The old Rose was dead; the new one missed her already.

  • • • • •

  Three days later, she guided Albert down the last leg of the Highwood Road to the Fort Benton ferry. It was a cool, breezy day, with a light rain falling from leaden skies, and the steep grade was slick with mud.

  The weather had changed a couple of days before, when a slow-moving front pushed through from the northwest. Now the clouds hung low and the steady drizzle had saturated Rose’s clothing. The temperature had dropped, as well. Last night her breath had puffed like steam from a locomotive as she huddled over her smoky fire. Then just after dawn this morning a series of snow showers had swept across the soggy ridges, leaving behind a gray slush that hadn’t melted until midday. But if June snows and teeth-chattering summer winds were unusual, they weren’t unheard of, and although Rose suffered from the unexpected cold, her biggest concern was for the tracks she’d dogged all the way up from the Yellowstone. The bent-nail print had deteriorated rapidly in yesterday’s rain; she’d lost it completely that morning.

  It was a gamble coming into Fort Benton on nothing more than a hunch, even though the trail had been angling that way ever since leaving the Musselshell at Box Elder Creek. That was no guarantee they’d be here, of course, but the old fur trading post seemed like a logical destination.

  Staring at the town from the bluff south of the river brought an unexpected smile to Rose’s face. It had been a long time since she’d last visited the little high-plains hamlet stretched out along the Missouri’s left bank. The town hadn’t changed much in the years she’d been away, although she reckoned it soon would, what with the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railroad near to knocking on its front door.

  At one time, Fort Benton had been a river port of some prominence, a vital link to the fur streams, mining camps, and buffalo ranges of the vast Northwest. Its pulse had kept time to the throbbing engines of steamboats plying the river between here, the Missouri’s head of navigation, and the East, the cities of Kansas City and St. Louis in particular. In past years Rose had seen half a dozen or more stern- and side-wheelers tied off along the levee at any given hour during the high-water season that ran from May through August, while the bench above the river that served as one side of the town’s main street had swarmed with men and draft animals moving merchandise between decks and warehouses.

  Back then, a small mountain range of stiff buffalo hides had waited to be loaded aboard decks stripped of their cabins to accommodate the huge numbers of hides bound for the downriver markets. Nowadays, outgoing cargoes ran more toward wool and cattle, and the cabins had been returned for passenger traffic. But the boom days were about over for Fort Benton. Soon the Manitoba would reach the community and push on, and the town would lose its distinction as the head of navigation, becoming just another whistle stop along another railroad.

  At the landing, Rose leaned from the saddle to ring a brass bell affixed to a post above the slip, letting the ferry operator know a customer was waiting. Then she sat back in hunched-shouldered misery to stare across the river at the levee, where a single, two-hundred-ton packet was moored to the bank, its engines cold, its decks slick from the rain.

  Rose paid four bits to cross, and on the Fort Benton side she kicked Albert up the slippery incline to Front Street. She remembered most of the businesses she saw from when her pap had hunted out of here—T.C. Power & Bro.; I.G. Baker; Murphy and Neel. There were several hotels, including the elegant Grand Union, but Rose doubted if she could afford any of them. Besides, her first priority was to get Albert inside, out of the rain; she’d worry about her own lodging afterward.

  The E. Willard Livery was just off the Mullan Road to Helena, near its junction with Front Street. Rose reined in there and swung down. Old Edgar Willard himself came to the door, one whiskered cheek bulging around a wad of tobacco, his too-large nose spidered with broken capillaries.

  “My God, if it ain’t Miss Rose of the Yellerstone,” he brayed when he recognized her. A grin split his woolly face, broad enough to reveal a set of stained ivory uppers.

  Rose smiled and nodded with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure. She’d forgotten how loud and boisterous he could be. “Hello, Edgar,” she said, genuinely pleased. She’d only called him Mr. Willard once, and that a long time ago; he’d forgiven her the trespass, but made her swear never to do it again.

  Edgar laughed loud enough to rattle the rafters, then twisted at the waist and spat into the rain. “Come on in where it’s dry,” he bellowed, “before ya catch yer death!”

  She led Albert inside, and Edgar nodded to an empty stall next to his office.

  “Have that ’un, girl, if ya plan ter spend the night.”

  “Likely I will.” She pulled the saddle off Albert’s back and slung it on top of the stall’s high wall, then hung the bridle off the horn and draped the saddle blanket behind it, hoping it would dry by morning. With just a hand on the gelding’s jaw, she guided him into the stall, then latched the gate. There was already water in a wooden trough that served two compartments, and Edgar dumped a quart can of oats in the feed box.

  “That straw’s pert near fresh,” he said. “He’ll be warm enough. Come on inter the office, girl, and warm yerself. Ya look half froze.”

  “I’m feelin’ half froze,” she allowed, following him into a cramped, stall-size room where a small stove crackled. She backed up to it with a grateful sigh.

  “If ya ai
n’t a sight fer sore eyes,” Edgar said cheerfully. “I noticed ya still got that roan hoss, too. I figure that turned out ter be a square deal, don’t you?”

  “He’s been a loyal friend,” Rose agreed. “I wouldn’t trade him for a Kentucky Derby winner, even if you throwed in the jockey for boot.”

  Edgar guffawed. “That’s the spirit, but damn iffen yer daddy didn’t throw a fit over that broomtail. Came in here the next day raisin’ all kinds a hell with me fer selling it ter ya.”

  “Pap was some put-out, for a fact,” she recalled, sniffing back a drippy nose, “though he was sportin’ a put-out nature in them days.”

  “Still is, I’d wager. Ya want some coffee?”

  “Coffee sounds good.”

  He brought a white, graniteware cup down from a shelf above the stove and filled it from a tin pot. Handing it to her, he winked and said: “That there cup cost me a wife, ya know?”

  She paused with the cup half raised, peering at him over the rolled rim. “How do you figure that?” she asked warily.

  “Ain’t much ter figure. I married me a widder woman here three, four years back. Good-lookin’ gal, too, hefty ….” He held his hands out in front of his chest to indicate breasts of impossible dimensions. “Ya know?”

  “It must’ve made walkin’ a chore,” Rose remarked dryly. “Did she tip over a lot?”

  “Forward,” Edgar replied seriously, “always forward. But ya know what. No matter how many times she fell, she never bumped her nose.” He laughed loudly, then slapped his knee with the flat of his hand. “Well, mayhaps I stretched ’er a mite,” he acknowledged. “She was a handsome woman, but tight. Lord, that gal was tight. We was always bickerin’ over money, and not the big kind of money, either, but the little stuff … the penny ’n’ nickel stuff. Then one day last spring a mule stepped on my cup and cracked the seam in the bottom, so I went over ter Baker’s and bought me this here enamel one. Cost me ten cents more’n a reg’lar tin cup, and that was the blow-up that cooked the goose.”

  Rose took a sip, grinning, then held the cup to her face so that its warmth could caress her cheeks. “She was ag’in’ it, was she?”

  “Heart ’n’ soul. Got so mad she walked out and went ter stay with a friend, an old biddy just as tight-fisted and sour as she was. Figured I’d come fetch ’er, I guess, but I never did. Three weeks later she left town with a hardware salesman out of Chicago, but I heard he dumped her before they reached Bismarck. I say she was lucky he didn’t toss her in the river with an anvil in her apron pocket.”

  “Now, that sounds kind of like a windy to me,” Rose said.

  “Well, there might ’a’ been some gambling the night before that added fuel ter the flame, but it was the cup what broke the camel’s hump.”

  Rose’s smile dimmed. “Edgar, I’m lookin’ for a couple of men who might’ve come through here a day or two ago, from the south.”

  “Billy Garcia and Larson Web?”

  She took a deep breath, nodding. “That sounds about right.”

  “Saw ’em day before yesterday, but ain’t seen ’em since.” He gave her a shrewd look. “I’d heard ya’d given up yer wayward ways after that little set-to on the Musselshell last summer.”

  “It ain’t necessarily what you think,” she replied, although she didn’t elaborate.

  The conversation shifted to lesser matters after that, mostly the old days and what had become of the various men and women they’d known. Edgar told her of the town’s plans for the future, assuring her that Fort Benton had no intention of rolling over and dying just because a railroad was coming up the trail.

  “The ol’ Manitoba’s gonna be a boon for Benton,” he told her. “They’re talking about a waterworks plant and maybe forming an electric company as soon as next year. Plan ter build ’em a wagon bridge across the Missouri, too, for the Judith Basin trade.” He became wide-eyed in the telling, as if the changes lurking just over the horizon would come rolling in like circus wagons, all a-glitter in paint and sparkle.

  When Rose finished her coffee, she left Edgar to his chores and went across the street to the Triplehorn Saloon, where she ordered a beer. Conscious of her dwindling funds, she took pains to nurse her drink slowly, before moving on to the next establishment. In that way she passed what remained of the day, hoarding her change by buying beer, then making it last while she listened to the ebb and flow of conversation, keeping a constant eye on the customers who came and went. No one bothered her, although she figured they were probably curious about this woman in trousers who carried a pistol and drank like a man. If anyone suspected her identity, they made no mention of it within her hearing.

  The cold drizzle strengthened into a downpour toward evening, complete with the rumble of thunder. It was into this pounding wall of water that Rose exited the Trapper’s Glen Saloon and ran onto her first piece of luck. Crossing Front Street from the riverbank just down the block was a wiry half-breed dressed in a hodge-podge of Indian and white clothing. A jolt of recognition coursed through Rose when she recognized him as one of the two ’breeds who’d accompanied Larson Web that long-ago day at Two-Hats’s.

  “Here’s opportunity,” she muttered to herself, and when the half-breed reached the shelter of the covered boardwalk, she stepped out after him.

  Chapter

  33

  The half-breed was a block ahead, threading his way through a growing crowd of pedestrians, and Rose hurried to catch up. She feared she might lose him in the failing light, but he didn’t go far. Pausing in front of a dry-goods store, he accosted a man in a business suit and received a couple of coins, offered grudgingly. Two more attempts at panhandling earned him quick rebuffs. A fourth man laughed in his face, then spat at his feet. The fifth gave him more change.

  Monitoring his progress from the shelter of a recessed doorway, Rose waited impatiently, hands thrust into the soggy pockets of her light coat. By the time true dusk settled over the town, the half-breed had accumulated enough money to enter the I.G. Baker store with confidence. He emerged ten minutes later carrying a parcel wrapped in brown butcher’s paper. Shivering, Rose continued to follow him. He led her to a row of warehouses where activity had ceased for the day, slowing noticeably as he approached a building sitting hard on the Missouri’s bank. With a furtive glance toward an office at the opposite side of the compound, he ducked through a side door and quickly shut it behind him.

  Rose halted fifty yards away, but when the half-breed didn’t reappear after several minutes, she pulled the collar of her coat tighter around her neck and, as inconspicuously as possible, sauntered into the freight yard after him. Cat-footing along the back wall of the warehouse, she soon found what she was looking for, an empty knothole where she could peer inside.

  A single lantern illuminated the interior. The warehouse was long and narrow, a double row of columns supporting a tin roof that rattled loudly in the rain. Huge doors at either end allowed access to even the largest freight wagon. Although nearly empty, Rose could tell from the smell that its contents had come from the backs of Montana woollies. A trio of high-sided freight wagons used to haul the wool in from the shearing grounds sat, tongue to tailgate, down the center of the warehouse, and ten-foot-long canvas bags of compressed fleece, at least three feet in diameter, were stacked like cordwood in one of the middle bays.

  The half-breed was sitting on the lowered tailgate of the last wagon, slurping tomatoes from a tin can with his fingers. The lantern, hanging from a nearby spike, created a pocket of light that he alone occupied. Watching, Rose decided he was a trespasser, rather than an employee.

  Backing away from the knothole, she hunkered briefly inside an empty hogshead. She was miserably cold, her fingers and toes numb as steel pipe. She knew she had to get warm soon, else risk hypothermia. Just the thought of such an ignominious death irked her beyond measure. It would have been the rudest kind of insult, she thought, t
o have survived the winter of ’86 and ’87, only to freeze to death the following summer.

  Pushing to her feet, Rose slogged back through the rain to the nearest saloon, where she moved unhesitantly to a cast-iron stove still set up in the middle of the room. The heat felt good, and in no time her clothes were steaming in the warm air, the odor of horse and campfire smoke mingling unnoticed with that of a muleskinner standing next to her.

  Although it was well after dark when Rose left the saloon, she had no trouble locating the warehouse or finding the knothole again. Creeping close, she peeked inside. The half-breed continued his occupancy of the lowered tailgate, curled up now in a single blanket and using his hat for a pillow. Satisfied that he was alone and probably asleep, Rose moved to the side door. Drawing her pistol, she carefully lifted the latch and stepped inside. Her nerves were tingling, but no cry of alarm challenged her. Stealthily she crossed the cavernous warehouse. The half-breed didn’t stir, and her hope grew as she crept within the circle of waning lantern light. At his side, she slowly reached out to shake him awake. The appearance of a knife coming up at the edge of her vision caught her completely off guard.

  “Damn,” she breathed, staring at the heavy blade out of the corner of her eye, hovering just in front of her ear. Although she still gripped the Smith & Wesson, she realized belatedly that she’d allowed the muzzle to drift when she reached for the half-breed’s shoulder. It was pointed more toward the tailgate than his heart, and although only inches from her target, she knew it was much too far away to believe she could cock the hammer and pull the trigger before he could flick the cutting edge of the blade across her throat.

  “You shouldn’t have tried to get so close,” he admonished in surprisingly well-articulated English. His eyes were wary and mildly curious, but not especially threatening. He sat up, keeping the knife close to her cheek, so close she would’ve sworn she could feel its coolness against her flesh, even though the blade itself didn’t touch her. It was a Hudson’s Bay buffalo knife, huge and wickedly sharp, hefty enough to chop down a small tree, delicate enough, in the right hands, to dissect a June bug.