Stranger in Thunder Basin (Leisure Historical Fiction)

by John D. Nesbitt

  Time and again he walked up on the horse, and when he was within twenty yards, the horse would flinch and run away. Ed circled around, he approached it head-on, he fixed his eyes on the front left shoulder. At last the trailing reins came into his hand. Still shaking, he wasn’t sure of himself on horse back, so he walked the horse all the way back to the spot where Bridge lay in the dirt with his hat a few yards away.

  Ed followed the same method as the day before, taking the rope from the saddle and hitching up the drag. Holding the reins in one hand and the tail of the dallied rope in the other, he walked sideways and backward until he had the body on the brink of the draw where the crevice gaped below. Cooley’s coulee, he thought, and rolled Bridge in. Then he tossed the hat and six-gun in on top.

  After that, and fetching the wagon, he had the hard, sweaty work of unloading all the rubbish. The troublesome chunks and pieces presented a nuisance again, as it was all a mixed heap. Using now the shovel and now the pitchfork, he finally got the wagon unloaded and the bodies buried beneath a pile of garbage that anyone would have a hard time digging out.

  The sun overhead had passed the noon position, and he now had a great hunger as well as a thirst. But he still needed to tend to things.

  By now he had decided to strip Bridge’s horse and turn it loose. First he would ride it to the tall brush farther east, where he would throw off the saddle, blankets, and bridle. He would lead the horse back here, turn it loose, and drive the wagon to the ranch. All that would take time, but it would leave the fewest tracks.

  When he rolled into the yard, dirty and sweaty and all but exhausted, no human life stirred from any of the buildings. After backing the wagon into the shed and unhitching the horses, he rubbed them down and turned them into the corral. He felt once again that he had no time to lose. Ramsey could show up at the barn door at any moment and interrupt his course.

  Ed went to the horse trough and pumped himself a long drink. He sloshed water over his face, then rolled up his sleeves and scrubbed his hands and wrists. The trouble was, he still wasn’t one hundred percent sure of his next move. If he saddled his horse and ran for it, he would bring suspicion on himself. If he stayed around, he would be sitting on a powder keg. Furthermore, he didn’t know how well he could keep his calm. He was still feeling overwhelmed with what an enormous act he had committed when he pulled the trigger on Bridge. He had no regrets, but he couldn’t get rid of the shakes.

  As he splashed his face a second time, there came a moment of clarity. He had come to the King Diamond Ranch to find out why someone would want to kill Jake Bishop and to find out whether Bridge had done it on his own or was acting for someone else. He hadn’t found out any of that, and to boot he had killed the main person who could have told him though likely never would have. He had closed off one main portal to the truth, and the likelihood of getting any information from Ramsey, much less George the brute, was smaller than a pinpoint. If there was any more information to be had, Ed knew he was going to have to find it through some other channel. Add to that, he had created a state of turmoil here that could break open at any time. No matter what it looked like if he made a break for it, he would be a fool to stick around.

  He caught the buckskin and led it into the barn. As he saddled the horse, he was glad the scabbard and rifle were already tied on. He could roll his blankets and grab his warbag in a matter of moments.

  When he led the buckskin into the daylight, the ranch yard was still empty. If anyone was looking out from any of the brows of the big house, Ed could not know it. He walked leading the horse until he came to the hitching rail in front of the bunk house. He looped the reins over the rail, paused on the stone step, and pushed open the door.

  Inside, Pat rose up from his bunk, where he had been snoozing. “What’s goin’ on?” he asked.

  Ed spoke as he rolled his bedding. “I’m pullin’ out.”

  “What for? Don’t you like a little hard work?” Pat was sitting slouched on the edge of his bunk. He cleared his throat and spit in a can.

  “I haven’t minded any of the work I’ve done.” Ed stuffed his jacket into the canvas bag and hefted it. “Thing is, Bridge fired me.”

  Pat looked up. “The hell. What did you do?”

  “Nothin’. He’s just had a bug in his ass all day.” “Well, he wasn’t in a good mood this mornin’, that’s for sure. How about your pay? Are you goin’ to draw it?”

  “We got paid up before we went to town, so it would only be a half day’s pay. Maybe I’ll come back for it sometime.”

  “Yeah, and maybe the dog’ll have kittens.”

  Ed hoisted the bedroll in one hand and the bag in the other. “I guess that’s it. So long, Pat.”

  The cook twisted his mouth. “So long, kid.”

  In less than a minute, Ed had his gear tied onto the back of the saddle and was off at a lope in the hot, dry afternoon. His hands were still trembling, and he felt as if he had killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. He was glad to be putting the King Diamond Ranch behind him, yet he thought there was a grain of truth in his saying that he might be back.

  Chapter Eleven

  Night had fallen by the time Ed rode into Litch. He had not pushed the buckskin very hard, as he had ridden the horse out to the ranch the day before, and he didn’t know how much more riding he had ahead of him. He figured he had a day or two until things broke loose at the King Diamond, and he might be traveling a long ways or not at all.

  Anyone who knew him would not expect him back in town for a month, so he needed to have a simple story and stick to it. He was in town on business and was going out again as soon as he was done with it.

  Meanwhile, he needed to eat. He hadn’t had a bite since breakfast, and the manual labor, the encounter with Bridge, and the long ride into town had drained him. As he tied the buckskin to the hitch rack in front of the café, he wondered if anyone would recognize his horse to night. Then he realized he had better get used to the idea of looking over his shoulder. None of this was going to go away by itself, and the sooner he got answers to his own questions, the better he could decide what course to take next.

  He was glad he decided to go to the café before leaving his horse at the stable, for the man and his wife who ran the place were starting to put things up for the night. Ed took a seat where he could see the front door and the sidewalk beyond, where the light fell.

  Two bowls of beef stew and a small plate of cold biscuits made him feel much better, but when he went outside to his horse he felt once again like a fugitive. He decided to walk the few blocks to the stable, so he unwrapped the reins and set out on foot, leading the buckskin and keeping an eye out around him.

  After two right turns he was walking west down the main street. He paused at the Rimfire Saloon, which had its front door closed as usual. He wondered who might be standing or sitting inside, and he wondered whether anyone in this town had the information he was looking for—and if so, whether he, Edward Dawes, would be able to get at it.

  He put up his horse in the stable, and for an extra two bits the stable man let him roll out his blankets on a bed of straw. When the man had gone away with his lantern and Ed had gotten nestled in his bed with his six-gun at hand, he felt the night settle in around him. Except for the shift of horses’ feet and the sound of animals eating hay, the night was silent. No noise came from the street nor from the Rimfire Saloon fifty yards away.

  He let his thoughts jump a great distance, out to a spot in the vast interior country, where lamplights might still be burning. Maybe the great turmoil would begin tomorrow, when it became evident that Bridge’s absence was as mysterious as Cooley’s. At the moment, Ed could imagine Pat sitting up late, smoking cigarettes, wondering what was going on. He could imagine Ramsey as well, wondering where in the hell the kid had dumped the garbage, why Bridge had fired him, and why Bridge hadn’t come in. Ed hoped that the boss and the cook at the King Diamond figured Bridge was out looking for Cooley. They would assume,
as anyone would, that no one would have gotten the best of the hardcase foreman—not on his own range, where he kept a crew of dummies. Sooner or later, though, they would have to change that assumption.

  Ed wondered if the other two punchers had come in or whether there were five empty cots in the bunk-house. He hadn’t seen another rider on the way into town, but they might have seen him and gotten out of the way until he rode past. What ever the case, the bunk house would have a tense feeling in the air for whoever was staying there.

  Ed made himself think of George the brute. He was part of the layout, too, and nothing to forget about. Ed could picture the brute and his master at daylight, or what ever time they got up, setting out on a search. George would be on the trail like a bloodhound, with Ramsey puffing along in tow.

  Enough of the King Diamond Ranch, Ed told himself. He needed to get some sleep. He was in town on business. Before he drifted off, however, he thought of Ravenna. She would understand that he had done what he had to, but he needed to keep her from being dragged into the complications. This was his mess, and he had to work his way out of it himself.

  Gray light was filtering into the stable when Ed opened his eyes. He had heard movement, and now he placed it as the stable man going about his morning chores. Ed closed his eyes.

  He awoke at the sound of voices. The stable man and someone else were speaking in matter-of-fact tones. Footsteps came down the row of stalls, and someone led a horse away.

  Ed could not go back to sleep. At the first sound of voices, he had expected to hear the stable man say, “That’s him sleepin’ in the straw,” and even though the second voice turned out to be just another customer, Ed was past the point of lounging in his bed any longer.

  Having eaten late and plenty, he was not hungry yet, but it was too early to pay any visits. He went to the café and took his time drinking two cups of coffee. When he walked outside again, the sun had risen high enough that he thought he could knock on Tyrel Flood’s door.

  The old man’s voice bellowed from within, so Ed pushed the door open and looked into the dim interior.

  “Come in, come in,” the old man said again. “Ain’t nobody here but me ‘n’ the cat.”

  Ed stepped inside and saw Tyrel sitting at the kitchen table as before, but without the knife stuck in the tabletop. The old man was dressed in his usual sagging clothes and had not yet put on his spectacles.

  “Well, hello there,” he called, with a tone of surprise. “Are you still in town? I’d thought you’d have left by now.”

  “I did, but I had to come back. I’ve got some business to look after.”

  “So you come to see old Tyrel. Must not be very important. Here, sit down.”

  Ed crossed the front room, and now he took a seat at the table.

  “How about some coffee?” asked the host, gathering his stick as if he were about to get up.

  “No, thanks. I just had some.”

  “I don’t suppose you need an eye-opener.”

  Ed laughed. “No, I don’t. But thanks again.”

  “I’ll finish eating, then, if you don’t mind.” Tyrel clacked his spoon into a crockery bowl.

  “Go ahead.” Ed saw that the bowl held a serving of boiled rice and raisins, the kind of pudding that some people called speckled puppy.

  “Tell me what’s on your mind, if anything. Not that I want to pry into your business.”

  “Quite to the contrary. I came to see if I could ask a couple of questions.”

  “No harm in askin’.”

  Ed waited a few seconds as he took a breath, and then he began. “Well, you know, I’ve been workin’ out at the King Diamond Ranch, of my own choice, and it always seems that the men in charge there have got somethin’ they don’t want others to know.”

  Tyrel looked up, giving a slow stare with his glassy brown eyes in their yellow setting. “That’s always the way it is there, from what I understand.”

  “And it’s not just little things, like slappin’ a brand on mavericks, though they do some of that, as well as drive in good beef with someone else’s brand and put it on the meat hook. They don’t hide that from their own hands, at least not from me.”

  Tyrel swallowed a spoonful of pudding and said, “I don’t have any opinion on that.”

  “Neither do I, or not very much. And like I say, that’s not the part I’m wonderin’ about. It seems to be somethin’ else, somethin’ bigger.”

  “Could well be.” Tyrel was cleaning out the bottom of his bowl.

  “Here’s how it is. They bring in new hands every year, most of ’em men who aren’t likely to keep a job or stay in one place anyway. It’s as if they don’t want anyone to know anything. It seems they even bring in some kind of detective, or man of confidence, to see if anyone is on to anything. All of that, plus they’re quick to jump if they think someone is spyin’ or snoopin’. They give the idea that they’re sittin’ on somethin’, and it’s not a golden egg.”

  “You might be right.” Tyrel pushed his bowl away. “So is that your business? Are you a junior detective?”

  “No, I’m not, but I’d like to know what kind of secrets are being protected, if there are any.”

  “So you come to ask me.”

  Ed shrugged. “Well, I remember you told me that if I had any questions or wanted to know more about old Snake Eyes or old Ramses, I could ask you.”

  Tyrel looked at the table and then up. “I don’t remember exactly how I put it, but I would have meant opinion more than fact.”

  After what felt like a setback, Ed summoned up more nerve. “I already knew what you thought of them, at least in a general way, and that is that they’re overbearing and might be crooked.”

  “That might not be an inaccurate summary.”

  “But you draw the line at actual information.” The old man did not answer right away. He reached across the table for his pipe and tobacco, then took up the pipe and stuck his yellow, ridged fingernail into it. After a scrape that did not produce much, he looked up and asked, “Have you ever heard of the Dead Hand?”

  “Not unless it’s a hired man they’ve got buried in the cellar.”

  “No, it’s an idea. A figure of speech.” He scraped again with the thick fingernail, his head lowered so that Ed could see his thin, straggling gray hair and spotted scalp.

  “Not like Dead Man’s Hand?”

  The old man raised his head. “No, it’s somethin’ else. It’s an idea about the past, how it controls the present. When I first heard of it, it was in connection with the dead hand of Shakespeare. The idea was that even when he was long gone, his influence was still around. People weren’t free to do something new. They were ruled by the past.” Tyrel reached into his trousers pocket and took out the little knife with the handle that looked like whalebone. He opened a blade and started scraping, and in a minute he began to talk again, raising his eyes now and then. “Well, the idea of the Dead Hand isn’t just the notion that history won’t die, like people still wantin’ to argue about secession and all that, you know. It also means things in a person’s past that’s got a grip on him. Rules his life. That’s why they call it the tyranny of the past.”

  “Secrets then.”

  “Sometimes not very secret, but tyrants all the same.”

  “So if you hire men who don’t know much about you, then you don’t have as much to deal with.”

  “Somethin’ like that, though you might have at least one person to help keep order, keep all the little beasts from gettin’ out.”

  Ed nodded in slow motion, taking it in. “Then I’m not just dreamin’ it up, that there’s a secret or two bein’ protected.”

  Tyrel rapped the bowl of the pipe upside down in his palm and then rubbed his hand on the upper leg of his trousers. “Now we’re gettin’ back to fact and information instead of opinion or theory.” He turned the pipe right side up and blew through it.

  “Is that something you don’t want to talk about, or would prefer not to?�
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  Tyrel fixed his old eyes on his guest. “I like you, young fella, and I have from the beginning. But I don’t know how much good it would do you to know some things. Somethin’ flies out at the wrong moment, and Snake Eyes could kill you. Just like that. Or Ramses himself, if it came to it.” The old man shook his head. “Some things aren’t worth it. Better to die in your bed, even if you’re just an old drunk with nothin’ but a cat to give a damn about you.”

  “Maybe some things are worth it.”

  “To you, maybe, if you don’t know any better.”

  “I think the truth is worth it. Worth some risk, anyway.”

  “Might be, to you. There’s some of it out there, probably more than I know. But even with what I do know, I’m not sure I’m the one to tell you. Not at this point, anyway.”

  Ed gave it a moment’s thought. He wished he could tell Tyrel that the threat of Snake Eyes was in the past, but he needed to keep that to himself, and as the old man said, Ramsey himself could do serious harm. So could George the brute. “I don’t blame you,” he said at last. “It’s none of your worry. But if one person knows somethin’, there’s probably someone else that does as well.”

  The old man’s stubbled cheek twitched as he poked tobacco into the bowl of the pipe. “How long has it been since you’ve seen Cam Shepard?” he asked without looking up.

  “Since before I went out to work on the ranch.”

  “He always appreciates a visit. Since you’ve got nothin’ better to do than visit the halt and the infirm, you could go cheer him up. You did a marvel here.”

  “That’s what I like to do. Spread goodwill wherever I go.”