The Long Hitch

by Michael Zimmer

  “Non, Nicholas, it becomes our problem. The law, especially, becomes our problem. Too curious, the law.”

  “I’ve got my own way of doing things. Think about that before you make any new offers.” Nick chuckled at the cornered look on the Frenchman’s face. “Why don’t you tell me what you want done, LeBry, then we’ll figure out how much damage it’s going to do that fat wallet of yours.”

  Sighing, Baptiste said: “There is to be a train of wagons, a caravan, to Montana.”

  “Kavanaugh’s outfit?”

  “Oui, the Box K. It must not reach its destination before, shall we say, certain other parties arrive.”

  “You mean Crowley and Luce?”

  LeBry nodded. “You can arrange this?”

  “I can arrange just about anything you want arranged, providing you’ve got the cash to back it up.”

  “I have been authorized to pay you one thousand dollars to see that the Box K does not reach Montana before C and L.”

  Nick had to struggle to keep his surprise from showing. $1,000 was twice what he’d intended to charge. “How do you want it done?” he asked.

  “The details I leave to you. The Box K must be slowed, but not obviously so. If anyone is to die, it must look like an accident. You understand, monsieur? An accident. That is most imperative.”

  “All right,’ Nick agreed, still somewhat chary of the offer.

  “Then we have a deal?”

  After a long pause, Nick chuckled loudly. “For a thousand dollars, LeBry, I’d wipe the Box K off the face of the Earth.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They moved from the kitchen to the parlor, leaving the supper dishes to be dealt with later. Taking possession of a comfortable chair next to the fireplace, Jock gingerly lifted his aching leg onto a padded footstool. Standing in the open archway to the kitchen, Dulce said: “Your hip is worse, isn’t it, Papa?”

  “My hip is fine,” Jock replied dismissingly.

  Dulce looked at Buck. “Don’t you think he’s limping more?”

  “I reckon I’ll stay out of it,” Buck said, taking a nearby chair.

  “You shouldn’t be worrying about your old man so much,” Jock chided his daughter. “You don’t need to be staying home tonight, either. Why don’t you two take a walk somewhere and let me enjoy my paper in peace?”

  “You mean your cigar.”

  Jock grinned. “Now that’s a fine idea. Why don’t you fetch me one so I won’t have to get up?”

  Shaking her head in vexation, Dulce said: “You are incorrigible. Mama used to warn me of your shenanigans, but I didn’t believe her. I do now.”

  “I suspect my incorrigibility is one of the traits your mother liked best about me,” Jock retorted.

  “What she loved about you was your gentleness. I’m not sure where your impish nature fit into the picture.” She placed a box of matches on the table beside his chair, then headed for the twin bedrooms at the rear of the house. “I’ll bring your cigar.”

  Jock’s expression was warm as his daughter left the room. It changed completely when he turned to Buck. “Did you see Hank this afternoon?”

  “Uhn-huh. Everything’s loaded except for BMC’s machinery.”

  “That’s on its way. I received a telegraph from Evanston, Wyoming, just before I left the office tonight. The train carrying BMC’s equipment is scheduled to pull into Ogden around two A.M. Give them a couple of hours to switch engines and complete the paperwork with the Central Pacific, and it ought to be here by five tomorrow morning. You’ll load directly off the cars at Central’s siding.”

  “I’ll be there,” Buck promised. He already felt guilty about not being on hand that afternoon—cargo was the wagon master’s responsibility from the moment it left the warehouse until it was off-loaded at its destination—but he’d had other obligations. He’d settled all of Mase’s accounts around town that he could find, then made arrangements for a granite headstone out of Salt Lake City to be placed on the grave,, It had been late by the time he finished squaring things away at the boarding house where Mase kept a room, and he hadn’t been able to make it to the Box K warehouse, or to the International to talk to Tom Ashley about the events leading up to Mase’s death. Sheriff Sam Dunbar was investigating the murder, but Buck still didn’t trust him to see it through.

  Shifting restlessly in his chair, Buck said: “Do you know what BMC is sending us?”

  “The bigger pieces. There’ll be eight iron stampers at a ton apiece, four boilers, a pair of hundred horsepower steam engines, and four twelve-foot sections of smokestacks.”

  “Smokestacks?”

  “Specially designed to be hauled one inside the other, like a telescope. Hank’s already built a cradle for them out of two-by-fours. We’ll strap them down solid as a pack on a pinto. Everything else should be small enough to fit inside crates. Forty-eight tons for BMC alone, more than one hundred and fifty tons all together.” A smile cracked the businessman’s normally stoic countenance. “This will be the biggest caravan I’ve ever run.”

  “Can’t the two of you discuss anything other than business?” Dulce asked, coming into the room with a long Virginia cigar in one hand.

  Jock chuckled good-naturedly. “I’m afraid the opera would be beyond the scope of either of us,” he confessed, then glanced at Buck with an uplifted brow. “Unless your young friend here has been holding out on us.”

  Laughing and getting to his feet, Buck said: “Nope, you were right the first whack.”

  “There are more pertinent issues than the opera, which is deplorable in this community anyway,” Dulce countered, placing her father’s cigar on the table next to the matches and the latest edition of the Corinne Reporter. “Buck and I are going for a walk,” she informed him. “We shall discuss tonnage and axle weight.”

  “A splendid idea,” Jock replied solemnly. “Concepts any young lady should understand if she ever aspires to become a muleskinner.”

  “I give up,” Dulce said, pulling her coat and a shawl off a peg in the adobe wall beside the front door. “Will you accompany me, Mister McCready, or shall I solicit Peewee Trapp as my escort?”

  Buck wondered what the men of the Box K, especially Peewee Trapp, would say if they could see this unarmored side of their boss. Dulce had praised her father for his gentleness, but the only reference to Jock’s personality Buck had ever heard from the crew was that he was a fair but hard-assed son-of-a-bitch. Buck understood that Jock’s openness in his own home was a private matter, something he had been exposed to only because of Dulce’s feelings for him.

  He helped Dulce into her coat, then brought down the new hat he’d purchased for Mase’s funeral and put it on. “We’ll be back in an hour,” he told Jock.

  “Don’t fall in the river,” Jock replied absently, already reaching for his cigar.

  Buck and Dulce moved to the edge of the porch, then paused as Dulce pulled on a pair of kidskin gloves. “It’s chilly tonight,” she said, her breath puffing visibly in the moonlight. “Will you be warm enough?”

  “I’ll be fine.” He had on only the suit coat he’d worn to Mase’s funeral that morning, not having taken time to go back to his room above Chin Lo’s laundry to retrieve something warmer; the tie was in his jacket pocket.

  Dulce stared at him as she worked the tight gloves down between her fingers. Speaking softly, so that her father wouldn’t overhear, she said: “We could go to your place first, for a heavier coat.”

  Buck’s pulse quickened. He knew Dulce could have volunteered one of her father’s coats. Although the offer was exciting, a sense of urgency had been nagging at him all evening, and he said reluctantly: “We’d better not.”

  “No?” She gave him an engaging smile. “If I remember correctly, Mister McCready, a heavier coat was the song you sang the first time we visited your room.”

  He grinned. “That’s true, but I’ve got other business to take care of.…” There was a sharp smack, and Buck’s head rocked back in surpri
se.

  “I wouldn’t be so presumptuous in the future,” she said coolly, stepping around him and heading for the street.

  Buck hurried to catch up. “Dangit, why’d you slap me?”

  Slowing down but not stopping, Dulce said: “I just don’t want you assuming too much, Buchanan. I don’t want you thinking I’ve ever done anything like that with anyone else, or even considered it.” She stopped abruptly, facing him. “Oh, Buck, I know you’re grieving for Mase, yet you never even mentioned his name tonight. You’re as stubborn as Papa, when he refuses to speak of Mama’s passing. I swear I despise this silly society that won’t allow a man to mourn openly or a woman to tread even a single step into the male world. It just makes me so angry.”

  Buck lowered his hand from his stinging cheek, smiling in spite of her stormy mood.

  “You mock me!” she accused.

  “I guess I just never thought of you as being afraid to step into a man’s world. It seems like you do it pretty regularly.”

  “When?” Her doubt seemed genuine.

  “Today, when you had a glass of bourbon with the rest of us in your dad’s office, or when you ride Beau clothespin style.”

  Beau was Dulce’s claybank dun, a gentle gelding kept in the family pasture behind the house. Although Dulce owned a sidesaddle, she usually preferred a man’s rig and a lady’s range clothes—lace-up boots, baggy canvas trousers, and a flat-brimmed, flat-crowned Spanish hat. She only tolerated the sidesaddle for more decorous occasions—the 4th of July parade or church picnics. She owned an elaborate English riding dress of black-trimmed green satin for those events, complete with heavy skirts designed to cover her ankles and a cloth hat topped with a black ostrich plume.

  “I suppose you’d prefer a more proper young lady to squire about,” Dulce charged. “Most men would.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Buck said, laughing. “I think that’s just a rumor started by a bunch of old crones with warts on their noses.”

  “You!” She grabbed his chin between her thumb and forefinger and pinched gently. “You exasperate me. Sometimes I fear you’re picking up all of Papa’s worst traits.” Slipping her arm through his, she said: “Come along, but don’t think for one minute that I don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?” he asked.

  “Avoiding the subject.”

  Maybe, Buck thought, but his feelings about Mase weren’t something he wanted to share. Not yet.

  It wasn’t far to the banks of the Bear River, on the town’s east side. They stopped on top of the flat plain to watch its flowing waters. In the waxy moonlight the current looked swift and angry, fueled by the melting snows of the high country, and it made Buck wonder what the road to Montana would be like. Was the Snake River still in its banks? What about the sandy soil north of Camus Creek? Was it solid enough yet to support the heavy Murphy and Schuttler wagons he would soon be guiding over it? How deep was the snow over Monida Pass, and how quickly was it melting?

  “What are you thinking?” Dulce asked. “You look so serious.”

  “I was wondering what it must’ve been like around here before the railroad came, before they built Corinne.”

  “The land is so flat,” Dulce mused. “Papa says there aren’t a dozen trees between here and the Malad Divide.”

  “There aren’t many,” Buck allowed. “Some small groves along the Bear and Malad Rivers, then junipers and scrub pine on the mountains that run along each side of the road.” He started to tell her about the taller pines near the Malad Summit, but: a sound from behind, like a small, metallic chink, distracted him. He turned but there was no one there, nothing to see except clumps of sage and patches of grass.

  “What was that?” Dulce asked.

  “Just the wind, I guess,” he replied, but subtly eased a hand inside his suit coat to touch the butt of a stubby .31-caliber pocket pistol he carried concealed when he didn’t want to wear his heavier Colt on his hip.

  “Maybe it was a dog, pulling on its chain,” Dulce suggested.

  “Maybe,” Buck said dubiously.

  They began to walk upstream toward the Central Pacific bridge, barely visible in the distance. Under different circumstances, Buck might have led Dulce down off the plain to the river’s edge, where there would be shelter from the wind and enough privacy for him to steal a kiss or two. Instead, he remained alert as they followed the river, glancing frequently over his shoulder until Dulce finally forced a halt.

  “What is it?” she demanded.

  “What’s what?”

  “Why are you acting so furtive? Did you see something?”

  “No.…” He shut up abruptly and pulled his arm free of hers. A flat-roofed stock shed occupied the rear corner of a long house pasture about sixty yards away. An abandoned buggy was parked beside it. There was a shadow behind the buggy. There hadn’t been a moment ago.

  “Buck, you’re frightening me.”

  He cut her off with a low shush, drawing his revolver just as the shadow darted into the sage toward them. “Watch out!” Buck cried, pushing Dulce to the ground and stepping in front of her. A round flashed from the sage, the bullet passing close on Buck’s left. He dropped to one knee to steady his right wrist with his left hand, silently cursing the little cap-and-ball pistol’s inherent inaccuracy at such distances. He wished he had his Colt, or, better yet, his rifle. He squeezed off two quick rounds that wrung a startled yelp from the sage. A moment later the shadow was up and running in the opposite direction, tall and lean in silhouette, like a telegraph pole retreating from the grimy window of a speeding train.

  “Buck?”

  He pivoted on his knees. Dulce lay on her stomach in the new grass, her eyes as big as saucers.

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. It was too dark to make him out.”

  She got to her knees and wrapped her arms around his neck and began to cry.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” he said gently.

  “I don’t think so, Buck. I don’t think it’s a bit all right when someone tries to kill you.”

  “We don’t know if that’s what he was trying to do. He was probably just drunk and sleeping it off in that shed, then we came along and scared.…”

  “Don’t treat me like a child, Buck. I won’t stand for it. I know what happened to Mase. Now they want to kill you, too.”

  “You don’t know that, Dulce.”

  “Don’t I? Can you honestly say you believe Mase’s death wasn’t somehow connected to this … this damn’ race to Montana?”

  He wanted to allay her fear, but couldn’t without lying. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Maybe it is. Herb Crowley and Anton Luce are determined men. They’ll be tough competition. But murder? I just don’t know if they’d go that far.”

  “Well,” she said, her voice suddenly brittle, “I suspect you soon will. I suspect we all will.” After a pause, she asked: “Will you tell Papa about this?”

  “I ought to.”

  “You most certainly should. He has every right to know.” After a pause, she added: “But you don’t want to, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t, and I won’t, either. I’ll respect your wishes, Buck, and stand behind you, but you have to promise that you’ll do the same for me, and trust me when I ask you to.”

  “You know I will.”

  “Promise me, Buck. No matter what.”

  He stared into her eyes, puzzled by the seriousness he saw there. “All right, I promise,” he said.

  Dulce smiled. “Then that’s good enough for me, Buck Mc-Cready, because I know you’re a man of your word.” They stood and she linked her arm through his once more. “Now, sir, walk me home. Walk me home so that I can tend to my supper dishes and you can do whatever it is you’ve been itching to do ever since you knocked on my door tonight.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In his room above Chin Lo’s laundry, Buck skinned into more suitable attire—sturdy wool trou
sers, low-heeled mule-ear boots, a cotton shirt, and a sack coat of the same dark color as his pants to ward off the early spring chill. His trail hat was wide-brimmed and round-crowned, dented and sweat-stained above a frayed horsehair hatband.

  Leaving the pocket pistol on the table beside his bed to be cleaned and reloaded later, he buckled on his everyday pistol, a converted Army Colt. He was almost out the door when he remembered to grab a block of matches off the top of the chest of drawers.

  He went back to the stock shed where his attacker had lain in wait. He thought it unlikely the man would return, but he remained cautious as he checked out the shed, then moved on to the buggy. Dropping to one knee, he began a more thorough search of the ground where he’d first spied the crouching shadow. He used his matches sparingly, but still managed to go through most of the block before he made his first discovery—a solitary heel print in the moist soil next to the buggy’s rear wheel.

  Buck bent closer as he passed a second sputtering lucifer over the shallow imprint. He was a muleskinner, not a tracker, but he would have bet a month’s wages that the print had been made by a drover’s boot, the kind with the deep arch and stacked heel favored by men who made their living pushing cattle from range to market. On the plains of Texas and even into Kansas, such a track wouldn’t have amounted to much as a clue, but out here in Utah, where the cattle industry was still in its infancy, Buck considered his find significant.

  He spotted a dull glint in the sage a couple of feet away and leaned over to pick up an empty copper cartridge, the rotten-egg odor of burnt gunpowder still strong at its mouth. His excitement waned as he twirled the stubby case in his fingers. It was a standard .44 Rimfire, the kind that could be purchased off the shelf of any grocery or hardware store in town. He plucked a loaded round from his own cartridge belt and held it alongside the empty. There was no appreciable difference between the two pieces of copper. Even the head stamps—the letter H, referring to the Henry rifle and the man who’d developed the cartridge for it—were identical.

  Buck was almost certain that whoever had taken a shot at him had done so with a rifle, although that didn’t mean as much now as it once did. It was becoming more popular all the time to have a rifle and revolver chambered for the same cartridge. Even Buck’s Colt, originally a cap-and-ball model, had been converted to .44 Rimfire.