Hart the Regulator 10

by John B. Harvey

  ‘Depends who you are, old man.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘What name d’you go by?’

  Aram glanced at the knife under Hart’s boot. He shrugged and sighed. ‘Aram. Aram Batt.’

  Hart allowed himself the beginning of a smile, just the faded blue of his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Then you’re the one I want to see. Got news for you, from your kin. Might be good news. If n you take it that way.’

  ‘You come all the way out here to find me?’

  Hart nodded.

  ‘Must be some important message.’

  ‘I reckon.’

  ‘What name you travel by?’

  ‘Hart. Wes Hart.’

  ‘Could be a good thing I never cut your throat, Wes Hart. Even if you did ask for it.’

  Hart nodded and moved his boot. He picked up the trapper’s skinning knife and handed it back to him. ‘Any food back with that fire?’

  Aram Batt looked at him closely, nodded slowly and led the way back to his camp.

  ~*~

  It had been a time since Hart had eaten bob cat and if he had his way it would be even longer before it happened again. The meat was tough and sinewy and tasted bitter as gall. He sat close by the fire, chewing away and making a token attempt to disguise his lack of enjoyment from his host.

  While Aram had been preparing their food, Hart had told him about his brother’s will and what had taken place back in Fallon. The old trapper had listened with obvious interest, but his only comments had been in the form of questions, seeking to flesh out what Hart was telling him.

  When there was nothing more to come, Aram spat into the flames and reached into his possibles sack for his pipe and tobacco. Hart figured he’d talk when he chewed things over well enough in his mind, so was more or less content to sit and chew the tough meat and wait.

  ‘Guess you don’t reckon much to our cookin’, huh?’ laughed Aram.

  ‘Cookin’s fine. It’s this damn bob cat I ain’t so sure of.’

  Aram laughed louder and wiped the edges of his mouth. He tapped the bowl of his clay pipe against his foot and sucked hard on the stem, striking a match and relighting the tobacco.

  That cat’s pretty damn good for this time of the year. Let me tell you, boy, I done ate some strange things out here in my time. I ate crickets an’ ants and one time when I was caught in snow up to my ass I wrapped my feet in blanket and stewed up the soles of my moccasins! Either that or die of hunger.’ He glanced across at Hart. That’s the way it is up here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Hart, looking round. ‘Yeah, I can see.’

  Aram tried not to notice how bad his legs were paining him and did his best to disguise the twisting and drawing that was attacking the joints. Hart saw the pain shoot through the old man’s eyes and tried not to notice it either.

  ‘You know how he died? Jedediah?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Way I heard it, he just took to his bed and passed on. Don’t know no more’n that.’

  Aram shook his head almost savagely. ‘Hell of a way to go! Stinkin’ poor and all that gold sittin’ in the bank wastin’ away.’

  ‘Weren’t hardly doin’ that.’

  ‘Never mind! Jedediah was, wastin’ himself on that no-good land an’ for what?’

  Hart knew for what: kids and a wife were what. ‘I want to marry you. For you to come and live here. For us to have kids.’ Standing in the kitchen of the home he had built for them, the one she had refused to live in. Staring at him, freckles across her nose and beneath her eyes, just staring, unsmiling. A strand of brown hair caught across her face.

  ‘Kathy, for Christ’s sake, you don’t understand!’

  ‘No, Wes, it’s you that doesn’t understand.’

  He understood: knew.

  ‘Wastin’ himself for what?’ Aram repeated, as much to himself as his visitor.

  Hart shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he lied.

  Aram nodded. ‘You got a wife, kids?’

  Hart looked into the fire, shook his head again.

  ‘Never think about it?’

  ‘Guess I did that much. Time back. Most men do, I guess.’

  Aram smiled and toyed with his pipe. ‘Like me, huh? Rather live your own life. Be your own man. Ain’t so good gettin’ tied down. Kids an’ such, they’re okay but they weigh you down. Stop you doin’ what you want in your heart to do. Ain’t that the way you see it?’

  Hart spat into the edge of the fire. ‘Somethin’ like that.’

  Aram stood up, wincing despite himself. ‘Figured it was. I’ll fix us some coffee. ‘Fore we ride.’

  Hart’s head jerked upwards in surprise.

  ‘Ride?’

  ‘Sure. What you said, Jedediah’s wife an’ kids, they got themselves a tough row to hoe. ’Specially with that fool Jacob gettin’ himself stuck on a murder charge. Guess I better ride back with you an’ see how things are. Get that money out from the bank an’ hand it over to them as needs it most.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be thinkin’ of stayin’?’

  ‘Stay there? Me, Aram Batt, settle down on some worthless farm for the rest of my days? What in tarnation you take me for?’

  Hart smiled and leaned back, watching the old man fetch the coffee pot to the fire, trying hard as he knew not to show how bad the rheumatism was biting into him.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind seein’ that little girl. Dark-haired little thing. What was she called?’

  ‘Rebecca.’

  ‘That’s it, Rebecca. Cute little thing she was. Held her in my arms an’ swung her round till she laughed fit to bust.’ He started to rub his leg and stopped just in time. ‘How’d she grow up? Still cute?’

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aram said quietly. ‘Always figured how she would be. Cute an’ dark. Even be good to see her again after all this time. Rebecca.’ He set the pot on the side of the fire and looked across at Hart. ‘Damn it, hoss, that girl’s my niece. Ain’t got too many of those.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  They stopped over at Fort Laramie and got as good a price as they could for the skins. Aram and Wolf fell over one another in greeting and set to a night’s drinking that left Hart behind after the first couple of hours. Neither man got to sleep until the sergeant on night duty had given them the assistance of the billy club he kept for such special occasions. When Hart roused up at first light and went to look for them, he found the two trappers lying outside the guardhouse door, wrapped in one another’s arms against the cold and snoring blissfully.

  ‘Sweet, ain’t they?’ grinned the Irishman standing sentry.

  ‘You didn’t lock ’em up?’

  ‘No reason when they’re like that.’

  Hart nodded agreement and got the corporal to give him a hand in separating the two of them and shaking them back to consciousness. Aram woke slowly and grudgingly to a buffalo-sized hangover, a bump on the back of his head and a tongue that was as yellow and bitter as a dried snake.

  ‘Had yourself a time, huh?’ said Hart, propping the trapper back against the guardhouse wall.

  ‘Sure hung one on!’

  ‘You surely did. Now you reckon you can drag yourself off to the wash house or I got to sling you over my shoulder an’ carry you?’

  Aram answered by levering himself gingerly away from the wall, stepping with care over Wolfs legs and heading towards his destination with a straight back, his head in the air and his route about as straight as a ship tacking into a head wind.

  Hart watched him go, exchanged a laugh with the sentry, and tagged on behind.

  Less than an hour later they were loaded up with supplies, most of which were tied to the back of the mule Aram was taking along with them. His other mule and his traps and equipment were being stored with Wolf, who promised to look after them until Aram returned.

  ‘If n you don’t make it back this way again,’ Wolf had said, ‘I’ll just take ’em out meself and trap a few pelts for you.’

  They’d all enjoye
d the lie and played along with it, even as Aram assured his old friend that he’d be back for the spring season without fail. He may even have believed it.

  They ate as much breakfast as they could cram down into their stomachs and rode out into the cold stretch of flat terrain that would take them towards South Pass. The hills ahead of them looked gray and forbidding enough, to say nothing of the snowcapped peaks that towered behind. The clouds were a little higher than the past few days and it was beginning to look as if the first serious fall of snow might just hold off until they’d forked south-west and found the trail across the Salt Lake Desert.

  After that they’d drop down south of Cherry Creek Mountain and look to stop over at Ely, the place where Cherokee and High-Hat had taken the bank belonging to the Mining Company and got their names on to the reward posters for the first time. After Ely, they’d follow the high trail between Diamond Peak and Summit Mountain until they finally dropped down beyond the Shoshones and skirted Dry Lake. The road to Fallon was straightforward and easy from there on in, up through Frenchman, and Salt Wells with the scent of the Carson River accompanying them all the way.

  It was a hard ride, long and arduous and made only a mite easier by having company. For whatever reasons, both Hart and Aram seemed to shut in upon themselves as soon as they were in the saddle, keeping conversation down to what was essential and thinking their own unspoken thoughts.

  Only at night, wrapped in their bed rolls and with the fire between them, did they talk about themselves, mostly the trapper going back over the incidents of his life and exaggerating as much as any frontiersman ever did. Hart talked a spell about the time he’d ridden with the Texas Rangers, of the strange encounters with the wife of John Wesley Hardin and how he’d been present that time in Florida when the Rangers stepped out of their own jurisdiction and arrested Hardin on the train while it was waiting to pull out of the station. He talked about the short time with Billy Bonney in the Lincoln County War and the even shorter spell as a United States Deputy Marshal. Of Kathy or the place he built for her, he never said a word.

  Aram didn’t speak of the time he swung his niece, Rebecca, in his arms either.

  They weren’t any different from most men of their kind in that, no better, no worse.

  They didn’t hear about Jacob until they were talking with a peddler a couple of miles outside of Ely. He told them how the boy had tricked the guards in the jailhouse into unfastening his cuffs and leggings so that he could go to the outhouse and grabbed one of their guns. He shot the two without hesitation and pushed both their bodies - one dead with a bullet through his brain and the other wounded in chest and neck – into the privy and stole guns and a horse. He emptied a half-dozen shots through the plate glass of the mayor’s store and rode up and down the main street a few times firing at will, folk diving off the sidewalk for cover and all bloody hell let loose. Before Jacob Batt finally lit out of town there were two women nursing surface wounds, a seven-year-old kid with a slug jammed hard against his shinbone, a dead dog whose brains had been splattered all over the saloon wall, a badly maimed horse and a lot more broken glass.

  He’d shown again pretty soon. A trader on his way towards Fallon had been held up at gunpoint, his supplies strewn all over the road while the youngster took what he wanted. The man had handed over every cent he had with him and been lucky to escape with his life.

  Three days later Jacob put a bullet through the back of a stage coach guard and broke the arm of the driver before robbing the passengers and bursting open the strong box and taking three hundred dollars.

  A deputy had come close enough to him a couple of days after that to get a leg wound for his troubles. Since then there’d been a lot of rumors and not a deal more. Some folk reckoned Jacob had quit the territory altogether, others swore he’d been seen in the vicinity of his family’s farm and was hiding out there; he’d been reported as far north as the state line and as far east at Ely.

  The peddler didn’t know which story was more like to be true than the rest, he just prayed he wasn’t goin’ to run into Jacob on the road.

  ‘Young feller like that, must want to make hisself into another Billy the Kid, some such like that. Don’t you reckon, mister?’

  Hart didn’t know what he reckoned for certain, except that he didn’t see Jacob striving to make a reputation for himself as an outlaw and killer. He figured there was something else going wild inside the youngster’s head, some strange mixture of frustration and anger that was all bound up in being forced to work all the hours that God sent among hogs and crops that refused to grow right - that and knowing there was money and plenty he reckoned was his except he couldn’t get at it. Couldn’t get at it on account of it belonged legally to his Uncle Aram.

  Close alongside Hart, Aram Batt was more or less reading his thoughts. ‘He know you’re fetchin’ me in?’

  ‘Knows I’m tryin’.’

  ‘An’ he can figure out when?’

  ‘I guess.’

  Aram shifted his pipe across from side of his mouth to the other. ‘Then he’ll be waitin’ for us. Somewhere along the trail.’

  Hart shifted in the saddle. ‘Welcome party.’

  Aram half-laughed, removed his pipe stem from between his lips and cleared his throat off to the side. ‘Sort of.’

  Neither man spoke for another mile or so and then Aram asked: ‘Supposin’ you’d rid out to the Platte an’ found me dead - what’d’ve happened to the money then?’

  Hart didn’t answer right off. ‘Jacob’s next in line for it, the lawyer reckoned.’

  Aram set his face into the wind and said, unblinking, ‘Then the sort of welcome party he’s got in mind for me is to blow my brains clear out my old head.’

  Hart looked over at the trapper but didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a deal to say. He’d already voiced the same thought inside his head a while back. The way Jacob was acting he’d got the taste of blood in him and he couldn’t let go. Hart had seen it in other men before; seen it in Billy Bonney at times – the Kid’s mouth would like to froth with saliva like a mad dog eaten up with rabies. It was one hell of a journey to bring a man just to get him killed.

  ‘You know,’ Aram said, ‘I lived a long life an’ a good ’un. Wouldn’t have suited most folk but for me it was fine. Ain’t never done nothin’ I can’t face lookin’ at when it comes my time. Ain’t done nothin’ I come to regret bad inside. While I ain’t about to say I’m done through with livin’, I had more’n my time by most counts and if I pass on today or tomorrow, that don’t matter too much. But I’ll tell you – I don’t want to go if it means one of my own kin’s goin’ to set me under the ground. You understand that?’

  Hart nodded; he understood. He said so.

  Aram said: ‘You know what this Jacob looks like, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, I know him.’

  ‘More’n I do. That Rebecca I might know, though I doubt that. The boy I don’t reckon I could place.’ He looked square at Hart. ‘You know him, you give me a chance. You let me know too.’

  ‘Oaky,’ said Hart. ‘You got my word on it. I ain’t about to ride you back to your kin to see you shot, don’t you worry none ’bout that. ’Sides,’ he added, with an attempt at a laugh, ‘you don’t make it to that gold, how’m I goin’ to get paid?’

  ~*~

  Frenchman wasn’t much more than a trading post with a few hangers-on scattered about it. Sod houses and dugouts, they made a rough circle about the only frame building, one story the width of a fair-sized saloon with another half-story down into the dug cellar. The bottom section was used for storing corn and flour and supplies and in the worst of winter the animals were crowded in there so that the freezing wind wouldn’t catch their blood and stop it in their veins. The main floor was divided into three, the major part of which was a bar and store and dining room, a long scarred and rough-hewn table standing on trestles down most of its length. The rest of the place was split off into the living quarters of the proprietor and
his wife and a few bunk beds and straw mattresses which were rented out to any passing travelers with a dollar to keep out the night and the cold.

  The place had belonged these past seven years not to a Frenchman at all, but to a fifty-year-old immigrant whose original home was somewhere in the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and whose original name had long fallen into such disuse that he was hard-put to remember it himself. With a stubbornness that was typical of the older settlers to the new, most folk insisted on calling him Frenchie, on the lines that any man who spoke American with a broken tongue could as well be from France as any other Godforsaken place in the world. The old world, that is.

  Frenchie had taken on the place and worked hard to carve some kind of living from it; he’d taken on the name because he didn’t want to offend those folk whom he depended upon for his bread and money; he’d taken on a part-Yakima squaw whose tribe had thrown her out and who’d turned up at the trading post dragging a few belongings behind her on a travois and followed by a yelping one-eyed black-and-white dog.

  She’d stayed.

  The first two winters had been hard and to get through the second they’d butchered the dog and stewed it slow over the fire with turnips black from the fierce frost.

  Gradually other folk had stayed instead of forever passing through. When the post had grown too small they’d either moved on or built for themselves, places round the perimeter, huddled there for warmth or protection or both.

  When Hart and Aram rode in there was snow in the air and the clouds sealed the land down like sheet-iron. They hitched their mounts to the rail and pulled off their saddle bags and went inside slapping their arms across their chests. Inside the lanterns were already lit and the stink of tallow was high and keen. A game of checkers in progress close by the stove and an ageing woman sat the far side of it, almost resting her stockinged feet against its base as she cradled a glass of beer between her hands and dreamed about some past that had never happened.

  Hart went to the bar while Aram stood and looked careful about the long room. Four or five others were sitting or squatting, drinking or staring at the walls.