The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  “We’d all heard about Nora, even before Manning showed up,” Tom confided, “but no one knew for sure who’d done it until Manning started dropping hints. Nothing outright, but enough to let the boys know, if you catch my drift.”

  “He was braggin’ on it?” Rose asked incredulously.

  “In a roundabout way. Nobody ciphered it at the time, but we figure now he was baiting Gene.”

  “How?”

  “There was a big community dance at Russell’s about three weeks ago, on a Saturday night. Fiddlin’ John Johnson and the Bismarck Boys had come in by rail all the way from Dakota Territory to play, so there was quite a crowd. Well, you know how those affairs go. All proper and polite up front, but jugs and gamblin’ aplenty out back, where a lot of the smaller ranchers and homesteaders were camped. That’s where Gene and Manning tangled. They had some words, then Gene shoved Manning, and Manning grabbed his rifle and shot Gene dead.” Tom shook his head. “I didn’t see it myself, but Sparky Osgood did, and he said Gene went for his pistol as soon as Manning reached for his lever gun, but that Gene never stood a chance. I’d heard Manning could handle that Marlin like a pistol. I guess that’s what he did that night.

  “Anyway, the law was sent for, but by the time it showed up some Association cowboys were claiming Manning had acted in self-defense and had no choice but to fire, even though Sparky and a whole bunch of others eye-witnessed the shooting and said otherwise. Well, you know how the law works when it comes to Association matters. They didn’t even walk Manning to jail, although he was told to get, which he did.”

  “Which way’d he go?”

  “East, they say. Maybe Glendive.”

  “What about Lew Parker?”

  “Lew was working late that night for one of the stores, unloading boxcars down at the N.P. siding. He didn’t hear about the shooting until a couple hours after it happened. He was around the next day for the funeral, but I haven’t seen him since.”

  “You figure he went after Manning?”

  “Or Manning went after him.”

  “No!”

  Tom nodded. “That’s what some of the boys are speculating … that one of these days some fly fisherman is gonna catch more than he bargained for.”

  “What about Lew’s gear, his horse and all?”

  “He’d sold just about everything. Lew and Gene had fallen on hard times after their trapping venture last winter. Oh, they went on a spree for a while when they first got in, like men’ll do, but when they settled down to look for gainful employment, there wasn’t any to be had. A lot of boys are out of work right now, what with so many of the smaller outfits going under.”

  Rose’s shoulders slumped. “This can’t be let to happen, Tom. They’re pickin’ us off one by one, either drivin’ us out or buryin’ us.”

  “These are desperate times, Rose. Even the big boys are hurting this year.”

  She turned to stare out the batwing doors, at a sky gone hazy with the growing heat of early July. “They can afford it better’n we can,” she said softly.

  “That ain’t the way they see it.”

  “No,” she admitted. “I reckon it ain’t.”

  “Are you all right, Rose?” Tom asked.

  She nodded and pushed away from the bar. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, gol-dang it, I’m gonna be fine … one way or the other.”

  • • • • •

  It was early evening when Rose knocked at Alice’s kitchen door. Callie opened it.

  “I figured you’d be along sooner or later,” she said with unexpected curtness.

  Taken aback, Rose replied: “I can stop by tomorrow, if you’re busy.”

  “No, I ain’t busy.” She opened the door wide. “Come on in, before someone takes a shot at you.”

  Rose removed her hat as she entered the roomy kitchen. “I just come by to say howdy,” she said.

  Closing the door, Callie made a brief, snorty sound, like a startled deer. “Howdy, or good-bye?”

  “Howdy,” Rose repeated, puzzled by her friend’s coolness.

  Callie stared hard for a moment, then her features softened. “You ain’t quite figured that out yet, have you?”

  “You mad at me, Callie?”

  “Yeah, sugar, I am. I’m so mad at you I could spit hornets.” She pulled the younger woman into her arms. “Child, child, what have you got yourself into?”

  Rose allowed herself to relax. “Trouble, I guess,” she said, her voice muffled against the black woman’s soft shoulder.

  “A peck of it, I’d say.” Callie loosened her grip, pushing Rose away. “Sit down,” she said, moving to the stove. “You had supper yet?”

  “Had me a bite down to the Bull’s Head.”

  “Would you like some tea. I’ve kept a pot warm.” She brought down a cup and a tin container of Earl Grey from a shelf above the sink. Spooning the tea into a silver egg, she set it in the bottom of the cup, then poured hot water over it from a cast-iron kettle on the stove. “Eben’ll be sorry he missed you.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  “Eben got himself a job on a ranch down by Powderville, digging post holes.” Callie replaced the kettle, then picked up a cup of coffee that had been warming on the stove and sat down opposite Rose.

  “Somebody must be powerful lazy if they ain’t got enough gumption to dig their own post holes,” Rose opined, gently lifting and lowering the egg on its thin silver chain. “Either that or they figure to put in one heck of a corral.”

  “Oh, it’ll be big, once they get it done. It’s what they call a drift fence. Gonna run it thirty miles, east to west.”

  “Thirty miles. Lordy.”

  Callie nodded as if to affirm Rose’s reaction. “Folks are dead set against letting what happened last winter happen again. Lot of the bigger outfits are putting up fences to keep their cows from drifting too far in a blizzard. They’re bringing in haying machines and building stock sheds like they had a snapper turtle clamped to their butts. Folks say in another five years, Montana’ll be fenced in solid, as full of red barns and cow pastures as a country lane in Pennsylvania. A body won’t be able to go no place then, unless they take a road.”

  Rose hadn’t thought her spirits could sink any lower, but she discovered there was still a little drop left. It must have shown.

  “You feeling poorly, sugar?”

  “Just tired.”

  “You look like you’ve been wrung through a wringer, sure enough. When was the last time you slept in a bed?”

  Rose counted backward in her mind, then hazarded: “Late May or early June, I figure.”

  “There’s an empty bed upstairs. Soon as you finish your tea, we’ll march up there and put you in it.”

  Rose recalled the last time she’d stayed at Alice’s, and how Callie and the girls had taken her under their wings. That seemed like a long time ago now, and not just in years. “I reckon not,” she said quietly.

  Callie took a deep breath, then let it go, smiling her warm, sad smile. “No, Rose Edwards doesn’t need folks to be looking out for her no more, does she?”

  Averting her eyes, Rose’s attention was captured by a contraption bolted to the wall beside the parlor door—ear and mouthpiece hanging from a wooden box, a pair of domed bells sitting side-by-side on top, black, insulated lines running everywhere like arteries. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It is, and as fool a notion as any I ever saw. It gets used, though. Thing’ll ring two, three times a week sometimes.” She gave Rose a shrewd look. “You want to talk on it?”

  “Me. Who would I talk at?” Remembering how she’d begged Shorty to let her talk on a telephone made her cringe now. Lord, but she’d been naïve.

  “You could call Miss Doris,” Callie suggested. “Order yourself a new dress.”

  �
��No,” Rose said flatly.

  Callie’s expression changed. “How many men have you killed, child?”

  The question caught her off guard. “None but three. Why?”

  “Three. I would’ve thought a dozen, to hear folks talk.”

  “Folks talk too much. It gets to be a habit for some of them. The truth is three, but only one I regret. An Indian I shot over on the Musselshell, right after I throwed in with Shorty and Wiley. He surprised me ’n’ Jimmy Frakes while the others was away. I guess he figured he was gonna be one rich redskin, with Jimmy scalped and maybe me, too, and a passel of good Crow ponies on top of it, but I cooked that dream with a Forty-Four from my Sharps. I didn’t have much choice, but I still wish I hadn’t had to’ve done it.”

  “It ain’t often we get the choices we want,” Callie agreed.

  “It ain’t that I feel bad about it, so much,” Rose mused. “It’s just that it wasn’t as personal for me as the others was. With that redskin, it was the suddenness of it I always found troubling.”

  “Is Wiley Collins dead. First we’d heard he was, then lately some have said he ain’t. About a month ago a Powder River waddy came through saying Wiley had been sighted in Wyoming, up to his old tricks again.”

  “He’s dead,” Rose said bluntly. “Him and Davey Merritt both. I buried ’em myself.”

  “Oh, my,” Callie said, touching her lips with her fingers. “And Shorty Tibbs?”

  “I buried him, too.”

  Reaching out, Callie placed a pudgy hand atop Rose’s sun-browned lean one. “You ever tell Shorty about that young ’un you nearly had?”

  “No, I never did. To tell you the truth, I never really figured out what I felt for Shorty. Some of the time I was as smitten with him as any pig-tailed gal after her teacher, but it seems like the rest of the time I wanted to carve out his gizzard with a dull knife. But I never told him about that baby. I still ain’t made up my mind whether I should’ve or not.”

  “If you didn’t, then I’d say you made up your mind just fine,” Callie replied. She pulled her hand away. “Men don’t need to know everything. Most of them have already got swollen heads, knowing just what little they do.”

  Rose smiled and straightened, shoving back from the table. Her tea was cooled, nearly gone; she swallowed the last of it in a single gulp.

  “You in that big a hurry to go kill that Manning fella?” Callie asked.

  “It’s on my mind.”

  “You ought to stay the night, at least.”

  Rose stood, holding her hat against her leg. “I thank you, Callie. For the tea, but mostly for all you’ve done for me. You’ve been a good friend, better than I’ll ever be able to return.”

  “Killing Manning won’t bring Nora back. It won’t get you off the Association’s list or make your life any easier.”

  “On the day I buried Wiley and Dave, I asked a fella how far a body had to let ’em push her around before she fought back. On the day I buried Nora, I found the answer to that question. I reckon there are some things worth fightin’ for. Worth dyin’ for, too, if that’s what it comes to.”

  “I was born a free child in Ohio,” Callie said. “I never knew the bonds of slavery that so many others did. But free wasn’t much for a black woman, not even in the North. The things I put up with every day, every blessed day … well, they grew a powerful anger in me. Especially when I was young. But I gave up that anger once I got older and saw what a constant mad could do to folks. I didn’t want to grow old and gray and wrinkled with mad, so I gave it up. Ain’t no reason you can’t do the same.”

  Rose moved toward the door. “It ain’t even mad so much, not any more. It’s just something I gotta see through.”

  “Walk away from it,” Callie said, rising after her. “It’s not too late to start over.”

  “If I walk away now, something inside me is gonna wrinkle up bad, Callie. Like it did when I was livin’ with my pap and Muggy, and maybe even Shorty, some. It ain’t a thing I can rightly explain, but I know it when I feel it, and, when I feel it, it hurts something awful. It gets so a body can just stand so much of that kind of pain, then I reckon you have to either do something about it or go ahead and let your soul die.”

  She put her hand on the door’s cool, porcelain knob. “Nora used to say you had to learn to roll with the punches, but lately it seems that once you start rollin’, nobody wants to let you stop. They just keep on punchin’.”

  The sound of narrow, rubber-tired wheels, the kind used on better carriages, came to them through the open kitchen window, interrupting their conversation. The vehicle rolled around behind the house and creaked to a halt. A horse snuffled and stomped its hoofs in agitation. Callie stared at the wall as if she could see through it, listening sharply. Rose watched her closely, ready to take her cue from the larger woman’s reaction.

  “Now, who could that be?” Callie asked softly.

  Occasionally a cowboy or hunter would tie up out front, but most men didn’t approach Alice’s until after they’d stabled their horses and had a drink or two. Few men wealthy enough to afford a carriage would risk humiliating themselves by parking it outside a parlor house. Not even after dark.

  “Rose Edwards. I know you’re in there. Come out here … right now. Come out and … face your sins, before I … come in and … drag you … out!”

  It was a plucky threat for such a frail voice, Rose thought, broken as it was by wheezing gasps. Standing beside the table, Callie’s eyes widened. “You slip out the front door, sugar,” she urged. “Maybe he won’t hear you.”

  Rose loosened the Smith & Wesson in its holster. “No, my horse is this way.” She twisted the knob and yanked open the door. With her hand on the pistol, she stepped outside and quickly to one side, out of the kitchen’s light.

  The carriage had stopped about thirty feet away, a polished black surrey with its leather top folded down. A bearded man in denim trousers and a flannel shirt handled the lines, but it was the creature in back who caught Rose’s eye. In the reflective light of a pair of kerosene running lamps, the passenger looked more dead than alive. The skin was stretched tight across his face, and his hands reminded her of bleached parchment shrunken over a framework of fragile bones. Thin wattles connecting chin to neck suggested a fuller, more powerful figure in the not-too-distant past. Even his clothing appeared to have been tailored for a man several sizes larger, and the silk-banded Homburg atop his head looked like it would slide off if he turned too abruptly. The overall effect was of a turkey vulture dressed in a man’s suit, the image chilling.

  Warming the vulture’s lap was a sleigh robe of buffalo, but, as Rose approached the edge of the stoop, it was flipped back to expose a double-barreled shotgun. He brought the muzzles up to cover her, but even that small exertion seemed to wind him.

  “I’ve been … waiting for you. I knew you’d … come, that I’d get … my chance.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Rose demanded.

  His lips quivering with indignation, he began to struggle with one of the shotgun’s stiff hammers.

  “Aw, Christ,” Rose breathed.

  “Careful,” Callie warned from the door. “I expect he’s been demented by some disease.”

  “It’s Frakes,” Rose said hollowly. “Maxwell Frakes. Lord, I didn’t even recognize him.”

  Callie gasped. “It’s the cancer,” she said. “Pearl told me he’d come to town to see the doctor for it, but, blessed be, it’s turned him into a ha’nt.”

  In the surrey, the old man finally gave up trying to cock the shotgun. He fell back against the seat, a thin line of drool running down his chin, glistening in the lamplight. “Bodine,” he gasped. “Shoot … her.”

  The driver looked around helplessly. “I ain’t gonna shoot a woman, Mister Frakes.”

  “Damn you, kill … her!”

  “No, sir, I won
’t.” He glanced at Rose, embarrassed.

  “You sorry old buzzard,” Rose said, coming down off the stoop and striding angrily to the surrey’s side.

  “Here, now,” Bodine said, looking suddenly worried. “He’s a sick old man.”

  “He was a sick old man long before the cancer bit him,” Rose said. “But don’t worry, I ain’t gonna hurt him, although I ought to.” She put a foot on the iron step pad and leaned part way into the carriage.

  “Help,” Frakes squawked.

  “Shut up,” Rose snapped, jerking the shotgun from his grasp. His skin was so thin that, as one of the hammer spurs slid across his palm, the flesh ripped like cheap paper. Frakes shrieked at the sudden spurt of blood, his eyes wide as silver dollars.

  Rose stepped back and opened the breech, extracting a pair of shiny brass ten-gauge shells that she tossed into the darkness behind the car. Then she flung the shotgun as far as she could in the opposite direction.

  Frakes glared at her, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest, but he had no words—neither threat nor promise—with which to attack her.

  “I hope you rot in hell, you god-damned cadaver in a hat,” Rose said. Whirling, she stalked to the Baylor horse, hitched to one of the clothesline poles.

  “You took … my children,” the old man screeched, his voice like fingernails on slate.

  Rose mounted, her face set hard as stone. But she didn’t reply. She knew the truth. More important, so did Frakes. Tapping the sorrel’s ribs with the sides of her stirrups, she rode out of the yard. It would only be later that she would recall with regret that she’d failed to say a final good-bye to Callie.

  Chapter

  40

  East of Miles City wasn’t a whole lot different from west of it, other than that it was a country Rose had never visited before. She followed the Bismarck road past the mouth of the Powder River, but when that little-used freighters’ route—the Northern Pacific had rendered it virtually obsolete by now—veered more directly eastward, she abandoned it for a rutted trail hugging the Yellowstone’s right bank.