by Erin Lindsey
“Like a leopard,” Thomas mused.
“Can’t say I know too much about leopards.” John slung a pump-action rifle into a scabbard and mounted up, his saddle creaking beneath him.
“Nor do I, but…” Thomas looked thoughtful. “I do know the behavior stems from competition. Leopards share their territories with more powerful predators that might drive them off their kill, so they drag it to a safe location before eating.”
John listened with polite interest. “Only other big predators around here is wolves and mountain lions. Bears, if you catch ’em on a bad day. Nothing big enough to give this thing any trouble.”
“That’s just it. The behavior makes no sense for an alpha predator.”
John rumpled his brow. “You wanna kill this thing or study it?”
“Both, I should think.”
“Mostly kill it,” I said, shooting my partner a look. “But I think I see what Thomas is getting at. Even if this creature is some kind of animal we haven’t discovered yet, or we thought was already extinct, it should still behave like an animal.”
“Precisely. If it is a product of nature, then it ought to follow the rules of nature.”
“What do you mean, if it’s a product of nature?” John glanced between us. “What else would it be?”
That, Mr. Ward, is an excellent question.
“What seems clear, at any rate, is that it prefers to hunt near water.” Thomas produced his map and handed it to John. “The Xs indicate predator attacks.”
The ranch hand stared at it for a long time. Then he said, “I’m a damn fool.”
“You didn’t have the full picture,” I said.
He shook his head, as if he hadn’t really heard me. “I figured we only found signs near the river ’cause that’s where the prey was at. But I shoulda known it was more than that. The tracks … Some of ’em had these marks between the toes…”
“Webbed feet.” I sighed. “White Robes showed us, but we didn’t realize what we were looking at until yesterday.”
“Yeah, well, I should have.” John refolded the map in stiff, angry movements.
“I felt the same,” Thomas said. “But we mustn’t be too hard on ourselves. It’s terribly difficult to see that which doesn’t make sense.”
“And it don’t. Not one lick. This river”—John gestured at the Little Missouri—“ain’t exactly the Mississippi. It’s running high this time of year, on account of the snowmelt, but most of the time it ain’t more than a trickle. How’s an animal that big gonna live in it? You wanna talk about the laws of nature…” He shook his head again. “No use crying about it now, anyways. Let’s get on up to Custer Crick and see what’s what.”
We headed back the way we’d come, riding single file along the narrow strip between the river and the bluffs. John took point, scanning the ground as we rode, though how he saw much of anything from the back of the massive bay he was riding was beyond me.
“That’s a big horse,” I called up.
“Catfish?” John patted the animal’s meaty neck. “Yeah, he’s a bull, all right. Got more than a little draft horse in him. Though how he come by them long whiskers, I couldn’t say.”
“That’s why he’s called Catfish, I suppose?”
“It was that or Otter. Which, speaking of…” John veered closer to the water, eying it critically. “If that thing’s a swimmer, it’s probably gonna feel safest where the water’s deepest. Reckon that’s where we oughta be looking.”
I smiled. “You’re thinking like a detective.”
“Am I? Guess I’ll take your word for it.” There was a pause. Then, over his shoulder: “What’s it like, anyhow? Being a detective?”
“Why, Mr. Ward, are you thinking of joining the Agency?”
I was only teasing, but his answer surprised me. “Thinking of finding a new line, anyways. Don’t know there’s much future in ranching out here, and I sure don’t plan on going back to Texas.”
“That’s not a Texas accent I’m hearing.”
Nosy, I know, but can you blame me? We had a long ride ahead of us.
He laughed. “No, ma’am. This drawl of mine’s a mongrel, and no mistake. My people was from Tennessee, but my daddy moved west soon as the war was over. Heard there was work out there, and land too, but he never did settle. Guess you could say we was tumbleweeds.” His hand brushed his saddle as he spoke, as if in memory. It looked comfortable and well-worn, with a set of initials stitched on the cantle.
“LJW. Was that your father?”
“Leonard John Ward. Now there was a horseman. He worked with Thoroughbreds in his plantation days, so tending livestock came natural. But he didn’t have no judgment. Fell in with the Buckshot Outfit over in Kansas. I told him they’d be the death of him, and so they was. That’s how I come by this.” He patted the saddle again.
I winced inwardly, sorry I’d brought it up. “My condolences. Were they a gang?”
“Buckshot Outfit? In a way. They call themselves a cattle company, but they’re just a bunch of hired guns. Half of ’em is wanted someplace or other. They been mixed up in just about every range war from here to New Mexico.” He shook his head. “Can’t understand why folks still hire ’em. Nothing but trouble. I told Mr. Reid he oughta leave them fellas alone, but he just told me to mind my own.”
I sat up a little straighter. Gus Reid being involved with a bunch of notorious mercenaries sounded like the sort of thing I wanted to hear more about. “What does your boss have to do with the Buckshot Outfit?”
“Couple of the newer hands used to run with them. Boss says he don’t care, long as they do the job. Bosses always say that. Then they act all surprised when their Buckshot boys start shooting up a saloon. Least the foreman keeps ’em out on the range most of the time, where they can’t do much harm.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Thomas. I could tell by the sharpness of his gaze that he was listening to every word. “Isn’t it odd for a legitimate rancher to hire wanted men?” he called.
John laughed. “Welcome to the frontier.”
Hard country attracted hard men, I supposed. The sort who might name themselves after …
I paused, picturing the tiny beads of lead known as buckshot. When you poured them out of a shotgun shell, they looked like … “Does the Buckshot Outfit have a brand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is it a cluster of dots, by any chance?”
He glanced behind him. “You seen it?”
“I might have. Does one of your co-workers have a horse with a Buckshot brand?”
“Not that I seen. Most of the boys don’t own their own horses, so they ride Cougar Ranch stock. But as for them Buckshot fellas, I couldn’t say for sure. Like I said before, most of ’em is way out on the range, so I don’t cross paths with ’em all that much.”
“Does anybody else have former Buckshot boys working on his ranch?”
“Couldn’t rightly say.”
It fits, I thought. Reid made it clear how he felt about the Lakota, and he sent his men to arrest Two Horses. But why steal their horses? And how did those horses end up in the belly of some mysterious wild animal?
Those questions would have to wait. John slowed his mount and pulled his rifle from its scabbard, signaling an end to our chat. From there on, we were on the lookout, Thomas and I scanning the brush while our guide kept his eyes on the ground. He stopped for every bit of spoor he found: badger and wolf, rabbit and coyote, weasel and deer and bighorn sheep. When he wasn’t watching the ground, he scanned the sky, looking for carrion birds. But after more than an hour of riding, we still hadn’t found hide nor hair of our quarry.
“Thought for sure we’d’ve come across something by now,” John said. The three of us stood ankle-deep in the water, longarms slung over our shoulders as we examined a rack of antlers tangled up in driftwood. “Deadwood trail’s just over yonder. Which means we’re almost at the spot where you say this Jonah fella was kilt.”
“Per
haps the creature rests for a few days between meals,” Thomas suggested.
John grunted skeptically. “Or maybe we’re just having a bad day.”
“It’s about to get worse,” said a voice.
We spun, all three of us leveling our weapons at the newcomer. He stood between us and the trail, a revolver in each hand and a smirk hitching one side of his oiled mustache. I recognized him straightaway. “Bowie Bill,” I said, mainly for Thomas’s benefit.
“So I surmised.” Thomas eyed the outlaw down the barrel of his 12-gauge. “Either you’re exceptionally foolish, Mr. Wallace, or you’ve an affection for drama. I’m going to assume it’s the latter and your friends are lurking somewhere in the shrubbery.”
The outlaw’s smirk faded, and a moment later half a dozen armed men filtered out of the trees. “Ain’t you just a smug sumbitch,” Wallace said sourly.
They surrounded us in a semicircle, some upstream and some down, cutting off any escape. I kept my sights on the outlaw nearest to me, a ginger-haired kid with a .44 Starr pointed right between my eyes. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen—not that it mattered. Sixteen was plenty old enough to kill, especially out west.
“Well,” said John Ward. “Here we are.” He wore the same expression he’d had in the saloon two nights ago, cool and grim, as if this wasn’t the first time he’d found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. Which it probably wasn’t.
“Apologies, Mr. Ward,” Thomas said. “It appears we’ve entangled you in some unpleasantness. I suggest you get on your horse and head back to Medora. This needn’t involve you.”
In reply, the ranch hand racked his rifle. “Thought I told you to call me John.”
“Ain’t that sweet.” Wallace waggled his six-shooter between them. “I’ll tell the undertaker you all wanna be buried together.”
“What exactly is your quarrel with us?” Thomas asked.
“Like you don’t know.”
“Actually,” I said, “we don’t. Just because we’re Pinkertons doesn’t mean we’re interested in you.”
“You expect me to believe that? I’m Bowie Bill Wallace.” He let that hang in the air, eyebrows raised significantly.
Thomas sighed. “My dear fellow, I hate to disappoint you, but until two days ago we’d never actually heard of you.”
“Thomas,” I said between clenched teeth. “You’re not helping.”
The outlaw scowled. “I got a price on my head would keep a man in good liquor for the rest of his days. Bounty hunters chasing me all over creation. We hit the stage in Montana, and less ’n a week later a pair of Peckertons show up, and I’m s’posed to think that’s a coincidence?”
“Lord spare me,” said John Ward. “If I had a nickel for every peacock with a price on his head out here … You think you got a play, mister, go on ’n’ make it. But the way I see it, once the shooting starts, ain’t nobody walking away.”
“That’s a good point.” Thomas narrowed his eyes. “What was your plan, Mr. Wallace? Not this little parley, surely.”
“I expect he wanted to do it someplace quiet,” John said. “To keep the law off. Most likely he was laying for you on one of them bluffs outside of town.”
“Ah, I see. But then we changed course and headed east instead. How inconvenient for you. And now here we are, in an unwinnable stalemate. What is it they call that in the dime novels?”
“A Mexican standoff,” I supplied.
“Is that what you see?” Wallace’s smirk returned. “I see a couple of Peckertons and a cowpuncher outnumbered two to one. Hell, I bet I could put all three of you down before you got a shot off that fancy scattergun.”
“An expensive wager,” Thomas said, his finger tightening around the trigger.
Wallace gave a low, gritty laugh. “You got sand in your craw, Englishman, I’ll give you that. But it ain’t gonna save you.”
To this day, I wonder how that standoff would have ended. But we never got the chance to find out.
The undergrowth rustled, and a split second later a hulking form erupted from the brush and tackled the ginger-haired kid. He barely had time to scream before a pair of jaws clamped around his throat and gave a sharp twist, and then he went limp.
He wasn’t the only one. For a moment we all just stood there, gaping at the animal crouched over the kid. A cougar, my numb brain supplied. Or is it a bear? It was neither. It was both. Slim and sleek, it had the thick tail of an otter. But it was powerfully muscled too, with a long muzzle and claws like the blades of a harrow.
The horses screamed, breaking the spell.
We all started shooting at once.
The creature flinched back from the hail of bullets, but the only blood I could see was the kid’s. Then it reared up on hind legs, towering over us all and roaring its rage. The outlaws on either side of it scattered, but not fast enough; a massive paw lashed out, and I flinched away from the spray of blood even as I pulled the trigger. A man went down screaming, clutching at what was left of his midsection. As for my bullet, it did no more harm than the one before it, or the one after, or any of the others we unloaded in a steady stream of fire. I pumped the lever of my rifle again and again. Thomas emptied his shotgun and grabbed his sidearm, fanning the hammer until that was spent too. We could hardly see for the smoke, and yet all we succeeded in doing was making the thing angrier. It crouched defensively on its forepaws, snarling and snapping like a rabid wolf and looking for a place to pounce.
“The water!” John grabbed my arm. “Get out of its way!”
Thomas dove one way, John and I another. The moment its path was clear, the creature sprang into the creek, slicing through the water like an arrow and darting away, leaving a plume of blood in its wake.
The three of us sat sprawled on our behinds, breathing hard as the cold water seeped into our britches. The horses were still screaming and straining against their tethers, but all else was quiet. Wallace and his boys had lit out, leaving their two dead comrades bleeding in the dust.
“Jesus,” John whispered. “Jesus.”
I levered myself up onto wobbly legs and waded back to dry land. I kept my gaze on the ground, unwilling to look at what the creature had done to the ginger-haired kid. He never even knew what got him.
John leveled a finger at the creek. “What in the hell was that?”
Thomas squinted into the distance where the creature had disappeared. “You know,” he said, “I thought it would be bigger.”
CHAPTER 14
A TRICKY TELEGRAM—BAITING THE TRAP—A LETTER FROM HOME
John Ward knelt over the scattering of spent bullets, staring at them with a numb expression.
“We’re fortunate no one was injured,” Thomas said, running a hand down Gideon’s forearm. “I thought the horses, at least, would have taken a stray.” Rising from his crouch, he patted the stallion’s neck and murmured consolingly in his ear. Gideon’s eyes were still white-rimmed, his ears swiveled back, but he’d stopped bucking, at least. Luna had taken it a little better, and Catfish was already cropping at the weeds, his nerve apparently as sturdy as the rest of him.
“I suppose we missed our chance to follow it.” I was surprised how steady my voice sounded, considering that my heart was still hammering in my chest.
“I’m not sure we ever had one. Did you see the way it moved in the water?” Thomas shook his head in awe. “Remarkable.”
“So what now?”
“We found it once. We’ll find it again.”
“And then what? We unload more of those?” I gestured at the fresh shells he was snapping into his 12-gauge. “There were seven of us shooting at that thing and we didn’t even make a dent.”
“True. Could we catch it, perhaps?” He looked to John, but the other man was in a world of his own, turning a shattered bullet over in his hand.
He’s shaken. Which made two of us. Thomas, meanwhile, was his usual businesslike self, flipping out his notebook and scribbling down a few lines, cool as you p
lease, as if we hadn’t nearly been gutted by a man-eating monster. If this was what a few years in the special branch did to a person, maybe I was in the wrong line of work.
“We’ll need to wire the Agency straightaway. And start looking through those books of the arcane. There, you see? You mocked me for a bringing a trunkful of books, but we’ll be very glad of them now.”
I struggled to imagine how he’d explain all this in a telegram. Have located creature, stop. Appears to be bulletproof cougar-bear, stop. Please advise.
“A telegram isn’t exactly private. Hadn’t you better send it in a letter?”
“I think we can manage, provided we choose our words judiciously. But Jackson will probably have to respond by post, which means we’ll be waiting a couple of days for an answer.”
Jackson? If Thomas was planning to consult the Agency’s senior necromancer, that could only mean … “You think we’re dealing with magic.”
That got John’s attention. His head snapped up. “Beg pardon?”
Thomas demurred, but I didn’t see much point in sugarcoating it now, not after everything John had just witnessed. “Magic,” I repeated firmly. “Witchcraft. Sorcery.” When my partner still hesitated, I added, “You’re the one who suggested we bring John into our confidence, remember? I think we’re past half measures.”
Thomas sighed. “Very well, then. Yes, I think it’s possible. Chiefly because I can’t think of any other explanation. That thing isn’t just unfamiliar, it’s unnatural. Any member of the animal kingdom, prehistoric or otherwise, would be vulnerable to bullets. Yet as you pointed out, we didn’t even graze its hide. What else but magic could account for that?”
John’s gaze cut between us, as if trying to decide whether we were joking. “What kind of Pinkertons believe in magic?”
“The kind who work for the special branch.” I handed him a silver business card embossed with the single staring eye of the Pinkerton Agency.
He flipped it over, frowning. “There’s no writing on this.”