Stranger in Thunder Basin (Leisure Historical Fiction)

by John D. Nesbitt

  “How many did you have to begin with?”

  “One. I wanted to know whether Mort Ramsey had anything to do with Bridge killing Jake Bishop.”

  “So it was Bridge. I thought so all along. And you did for him.” Tyrel gave him a full look. “You’ve got a lot of guts, kid.”

  “It seemed like the only way out.”

  Tyrel sniffed. “And she didn’t answer your question.”

  “I didn’t quite get around to it.”

  Tyrel’s gaze was off and away, and then it came back. “And what was the new question you picked up?”

  “There’s either one or more, dependin’ on the answer to the first of ’em.”

  “And that is...?”

  Ed had to force himself to say it. “I need to find out if Mort Ramsey is my father.”

  “I think I will have another drink.” Tyrel grabbed the bottle and poured a good three fingers into the tumbler. “Want some now?”

  “No, thanks. The smell of it still reminds me of how sick I got last week.” Ed waited what he thought was a respectable interval for the old man to answer, and when he didn’t, Ed spoke again. “So that’s what I found out, and those are my questions.”

  “I know, kid. I’m just thinkin’ of where I want to start. And I don’t know how much of this you’re gonna enjoy hearin’.”

  “I’m not in this for the enjoyment at this point.”

  “Damn good thing.” Tyrel raised his eyebrow and took a drink. After a wince and a shudder, he said, “Well, here goes. It starts over twenty years ago, when Mort Ramsey first comes to this country. He’s all het up to make a million dollars. Gonna raise hell and put blocks under it. He’s got a young, pretty wife, and they say he’s out to prove he’s good enough for her. He needs to show the world how well he did by marryin’ her, and he needs to show her how far he can go. So he buys the ranch and does all right, but he doesn’t cut the fat hog in the ass the way he wanted to, and he’s afraid she’ll leave him.”

  Ed shook his head. “Lot of trouble.”

  “That’s just the start of it. He goes back to Nebraska, as the story goes, and he swindles a shit-pot full of money—from his own father, no less—and he takes her on a vacation back east. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. He pisses away the extra money, and they come home.” Tyrel took a drink. “You know him, and you’ve met her, so you can imagine some of this.”

  Ed nodded as he put his pictures together.

  “Well, he thought she was ungrateful, and she didn’t like to be made to feel like she was bought and paid for, so she up and leaves him. By the way, we’re gettin’ into the part that you might not like.”

  “That’s all right. I haven’t liked some of it already.”

  “Good enough. So she leaves him. Now as the story goes, she has some help from another man. An older man who was a foreman on a big cattle outfit north of Ashton, on the Cheyenne River. I think you can guess who I’m talkin’ about.”

  “Jake Bishop.”

  “So then, as the story goes, she can’t stay with him because she’s trying to get a divorce. Hell of a mess, but she’s got plenty on Ramses, includin’ various ways he treated her physically, so she’s got a case. She just has to stay away from this other man. Meanwhile he gets fired, so he goes down by the Rawhide Buttes and gets his own place to run a few cattle. Maybe she still sees him, but if she does, it’s got to be on the sly because old Ramses has detectives out. Now somewhere in here a little baby comes along, a little boy, and the other man takes the kid to his place. The woman goes away, and the divorce case drags on. Are you sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “So after four or five years, this other man gets killed. People say that Ramses sent someone to do it, but no one can prove it, and to tell the truth, old Ramses had been so pious before about being the offended party, that there wasn’t a real strong drive to find out who killed a man who took another man’s wife. And at the time, this was still Laramie County, so the county seat and the sheriff were way the hell down in Cheyenne, and this was the middle of winter.”

  “I know. I remember the snow.”

  “When the law did come, they took the boy down to Cheyenne, and as I understand it, he was adopted out of there.”

  “By a family named Dawes.”

  “I would guess so.” Tyrel paused to take a sip. “Now, how are we doin’ on your questions?”

  Ed felt as if he had a pound of cold iron in his stomach. “I had a pretty strong suspicion all along that Mort Ramsey had him killed. Bridge had no personal reason, and Ramsey had all the motive in the world. Not the right, I don’t think, but the motive.”

  “And your second question?”

  “I’m not as worried as I was before that he might be my father, though even at that I had a pretty good idea that things were the way you tell them—about the three-sided thing, you know.”

  “I wasn’t sure how you’d take it.”

  Ed shrugged. “The only parts that were brand new were the details. As for the overall story, I was prepared for worse, about what any of the three might have done, or at what point the baby might have come along.”

  “Well, I’ve got to say, you took it on the chin.”

  “It wasn’t that rough, and I appreciate you tellin’ me what you know. Gettin’ the story has been like tryin’ to get water out of a stone.”

  “I’ll tell ya. For the last few years, I’ve just been an old drunk, tryin’ to laugh my way through the last part of life, but after what they did to Cam, I thought, if there’s somethin’ I can do to help someone catch up with these sons of bitches, then I’m satisfied.” Tyrel gave a little frown. “What about the other questions?”

  “There were one or two that would have come up if the answer to the second question had turned out different.”

  Tyrel looked at his drink. “I see. So they went away.”

  “Not entirely. I still remember them. But we can just say that I’m not done yet.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  At the boarding house, Ed learned that Cam Shepard was still in something like a comatose state, as he did not talk or open his eyes. The doctor had left orders that he was not to be bothered, and the room was under lock and key.

  Ravenna said she had a few minutes before she had to go to work on the evening meal, so she and Ed went out onto the back porch. They agreed that in broad daylight there wasn’t much likelihood of an eavesdropper.

  “This is a terrible thing that happened to Mr. Shepard,” she began. “Mrs. Porter is outraged.”

  “She’s got a right to be. I think it’s a cowardly thing to do. On top of that, I feel guilty for it.”

  “Because he had been talking to you?”

  “Yes. All it took was for the two riders I saw in the saloon to tell Ramsey I was talking to an old man of thus-and-such a description. Either that, or the bartender could have told him, or could have told someone else—Jeff, for example.”

  “Oh, him.”

  Ed quickened to her tone. “Has he been by again?” “Once. The first night you were gone. He’s so insistent, as if he thinks he has a claim, and his eyes—his looks are as bad as dirty words.”

  “He’s dirty himself, listenin’ in on other people’s conversations, not to mention lookin’ in through keyholes or windows. I was hopin’ we wouldn’t have any more to do with him, but it looks like I’ll have to do something if I get through some of these other things all right. By the way, he knows Mr. Shepard, doesn’t he?”

  “Of course. He’s met him several times.”

  “Did he talk to him the other night?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I doubt that he would have gotten much out of him anyway. But he could have heard something in the saloon and passed it on, and Ramsey and his bodyguard took care of the rest.”

  Ravenna wore a pained expression. “But why would they do something so... so atrocious?”
<
br />   Ed shifted his eyes and then met hers. “Well, to begin with, things were ready to blow open at the ranch. I hinted at that with you earlier.”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t plan it at all. It just sort of happened, and I did what I had to do to get out of two different jams.” He looked for her gesture to go on, and so he did. “First off, this fellow named Cooley, one of the regular men and a bully in his own right, wanted to push me around, rough me up, to find out why I was snoopin’ for information about Mort Ramsey. Well—I didn’t let him make mincemeat out of me. I left him in a gully, and as far as the rest of the ranch knew, he was missing.”

  “And you stayed there.”

  “Up till then, yes. Things were pretty tense, but no one knew anything for sure. Then the next day, this fella named Bridge—the one who killed Pa-Pa—got me off by myself and wanted to know what I knew about his pal disappearing. As far as I could tell, he didn’t know I was on his trail or his boss’s, or he would have shot me right there. But instead, he took me for a dummy, and I was able to get the drop on him. He wouldn’t answer any questions, though, and when he tried to make a move on me, I had to let him have it.”

  Ravenna’s eyes had a soft shine as they roved over him. “It sounds like either one of those could have been like poor Mr. Shepard or worse. You came through it all right.”

  “I felt I was justified. Either of them would have finished me off with no conscience at all, and the second one had it coming from a long time ago anyway.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “The way I see it, you can’t just lie down and take it when they do something to someone close to you, much less when they want to do it to you.”

  Ravenna’s hair waved as she moved her head from side to side. “Not at all. You were in the right.”

  “So then, as I told you before, I let on that I’d been fired, and I lammed out of there. That brought me to town, where I talked to Tyrel Flood and Cam Shepard, who sent me off to see someone else. This was in Ashton, a town that’s on the other side of Glenrose.”

  “I see.”

  “He told me to go ask for a woman who used to be married to this Mort Ramsey.”

  “Oh. And did you find her?”

  “Yes, I did. But she didn’t want to talk about anything. So I left, and then she called me back—or her lawyer did.”

  “She changed her mind?”

  “To begin with, it seemed like all the lawyer wanted to do was impress me with how much better it would be if I just dropped everything.”

  “Were they afraid of what Mr. Ramsey would do, or were they trying to protect him?”

  “That’s what I couldn’t figure out, but I told him I was going to go ahead and do what I had to do anyway. That’s when she agreed to talk to me again.”

  “This is interesting.”

  “I should say so. It turned out that all she wanted was to protect herself.”

  Ravenna’s eyes widened. “You mean she had something to do with—”

  “That’s just it. She didn’t understand what I was trying to get at, because they wouldn’t let me come right out and ask my questions. They were thinkin’ on another track. Before we were very long into this second conversation, she broke down and told me how sorry she was for leaving me to make my own way in the world.”

  “Ed!” she gasped. “Does that mean she was your—”

  “Exactly. And I never guessed it, sitting there, while all the time she thought that was why I came.”

  “That must have been an incredible conversation. Did she ask you all about your life, how you grew up, what you’re doing now?”

  Ed shook his head. “That was the most curious part. It seemed as if once she had opened that box, she wanted to close it. As she phrased it to me, she just wanted to make her peace.”

  “To say she was sorry.”

  “Yes, and she did that. But she didn’t try to be a mother to me at this late point.”

  Ravenna frowned. “You’d think she’d want to know more.”

  “You’d think so, but I believe she’d accepted long ago that she had given up being a mother. It seemed she just wanted to come out of it now without getting hurt. Once she had made her peace, as she said, she kept the conversation as short as possible. She didn’t want complications.”

  “And you?”

  “I could tell it was causing her a lot of turmoil, and I didn’t want to see her cry. I told her it was all right, that growing up without a mother seemed normal to me—or the way life was, I think I put it. I told her I forgave her.”

  “You did? Why, Ed, that was a kind thing to do.” “I didn’t think about it very much. The words just came out.”

  “And there wasn’t much more to it than that? Than what you’ve told me, that is?”

  “No, that’s about it. Next thing I knew, I was back out on the street, and I didn’t get a chance to ask her about Jake Bishop.”

  “Pa-Pa.”

  “Right.”

  “And furthermore, once I found out what she was to me, I had to consider whether this man she had been married to was my father.”

  “Oh, I hope not.”

  “And if so, what I could do about it.”

  Ravenna’s eyes were opened wide. “But if he killed Pa-Pa, or had him killed—”

  “I know. And the idea of having someone like that for a father is—”

  “Repulsive.”

  “A good word. Meanwhile, the fellow comes to town and beats up an old drunk, or has it done.”

  Ravenna shook her head in slow motion.

  Ed waited a few seconds to speak again. “When I got back here an hour or so ago, I went to see Tyrel Flood. He didn’t want to give me much information before, but after what they did to Cam Shepard and after I told him what I’d found out, he told me the fuller story.”

  “Was he afraid before?”

  “I think so, and with good reason when you see what happened to Cam. And besides, some people don’t like to go diggin’ up the past.”

  Ravenna’s eyes had taken on a serious glint. “How would you feel about yourself if you didn’t?”

  “I know. You and I think the same on this. I couldn’t have done otherwise.” He patted her hand. “But anyway, back to what Tyrel told me.”

  “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “That’s all right.” He kissed her quick, then paused for a few seconds and went on. “A long time ago—before I was born, at least—this fellow Mort Ramsey married a woman. I’ll just call her Leah to make things easy. That’s her name. He brings her out here, buys a ranch, wants to cut a better figure in the world, swindles a bunch of money from his own father, and she leaves him. It seems he mistreats her, too. Anyway, Jake Bishop helps her leave. He’s a little older than she is, but not too old to have a romance with her.” Ed paused. “That sounds like a soft word for all of this, but we’ll leave it at that. So she goes into divorce proceedings, and meanwhile she has a baby, which ends up with Jake Bishop. She has to make herself scarce for purposes of the divorce, which she finally wins. But someone kills Jake Bishop. People assume it was someone sent by Mort Ramsey, but after all, the man took his wife, or something like it, though he didn’t end up with her, so no one is anxious to look into it. The baby gets taken to Cheyenne and gets adopted out to a farm family.”

  “Then Mr. Ramsey is not your father.”

  “It doesn’t seem like it.”

  “And yet your mother is so—I don’t know. Cold isn’t the word.”

  “No, I don’t think it is. My belief is that through all of this, the best she’s been able to do is try to save herself. At least she’s done that, and I can tell it hasn’t been easy on her.”

  “It hasn’t been easy for you either, and yet you have it in you to feel for her.”

  “That’s a little strange in itself. It’s not my usual way. When I was on the farm, for example, when one of the little Dawes kids would fall down or get hurt, I couldn’t stand to hear the
brat cry. Same as one day last year, out at the Tompkins Ranch. Little boy falls out of a tree he should never have been climbing and screams bloody murder, and I’ve got no feelin’ at all for him. Same for old people. I just didn’t want to know about someone else’s pain or suffering. But when I was sitting in that lawyer’s waiting room with a woman who was a complete stranger to me, and she started to cry, why, I felt for her.”

  “And you didn’t have any sense that she was your mother?”

  Ed shook his head. “None at all, at that moment.” “They say people can recognize those things naturally.”

  “Maybe some people can, but I didn’t.”

  “Well, it was good of you to treat her well, before and after you knew what she was to you.”

  Ed shrugged. “It seemed like the only way to be. And as for her wanting to leave things as they are, that was acceptable. After all, how can you suddenly care about somebody you’ve never known—care about in that way, I mean?”

  Ravenna sighed. “I don’t know. I guess you can’t.”

  “It hasn’t changed much, really. It hasn’t changed who I am, or what I think I need to do.”

  Her eyes quickened. “Are you going to go to the ranch?”

  “I think that’s my next move. From the looks of things, Ramsey must be feeling pretty desperate right now, or he wouldn’t have done what he did. My guess is that he came lookin’ for me, and when he couldn’t find me he took it out on poor Cam. I suppose he high-tailed it back to the ranch after that.”

  “There’s been a lookout, but no one has seen either of them.”

  “I’d say that whether he knows who I am or not, he’s found Bridge and Cooley by now, and he knows someone’s on his trail. Feels driven into a corner.”

  “It sounds so dangerous, Ed.”

  “He’s always been dangerous, or at least since I was born. It’s just that he’s on his guard against me now.”

  “And you’re sure you’re going out there?”

  “I’ve got to. I can’t rest until I do. I can’t wait for him to come after me, get me in my sleep or when my back is turned.” A thought crossed his mind. “By the way, there’s something I want to show you.”