by Erin Lindsey
“It’ll take a while to round up the foreman,” Clive said.
“Send us whoever you find, then,” I said. “Just make it quick.”
Our first interview was with a kid even younger than Clive. He was terrified of Thomas, his gaze riveted to that brass badge as if it might leap off Thomas’s chest at any moment and stab him with the pointy bit. Thomas took full advantage, asking his questions in crisp, icy tones that sounded even more severe in his posh English accent. Not that it made any difference; the kid didn’t know much. Neither did our second interviewee, or our third. They were cooperative enough, at least, plainly accustomed to following orders.
Our next interview was neither.
A cluster of curious ranch hands had collected at the far end of the verandah, and they parted like the Red Sea as a burly man with a sunburn mounted the steps, spurs ringing, a mean-looking dog trailing behind him. The foreman, obviously. He carried himself with the same swagger as Hell Roaring Bill Jones—and the same latent menace. “Who gave you permission to sit on this porch?”
Thomas didn’t even look up from his notebook. “The government of the United States. Please take a seat, Mr.…” He flipped a page. “Howard.”
The man’s expression didn’t change, but his skin turned a little redder under the beard. “I don’t think you understood me, mister. This here’s private property. You ain’t—”
“Sit down, Mr. Howard, unless you would like this conversation to take an unpleasant turn.”
Figuring that was my cue, I leaned back in my chair, letting my jacket hang open in a way that just happened to show the Colt Lightning at my hip.
Howard snorted softly. “You let a woman do your heavy work?”
“Quite happily.” Thomas crossed one perfectly tailored trouser leg over the other. “I’m not going to ask a third time, Mr. Howard.”
The foreman hesitated a moment longer. Then he squirted tobacco juice between his teeth and took a seat, glaring at Thomas all the while. There was something familiar about that cold gaze, I decided. I’d seen this man somewhere before, but I couldn’t place it. Here on the ranch, maybe? Or in the saloon?
“The carcasses you found yesterday,” Thomas began. “You disposed of them, we’re told.”
“Sure. We don’t need wolves and whatever else coming around this close to the house.”
“How did you dispose of them?”
“Threw ’em in the river.”
A look of aristocratic disgust crossed Thomas’s features. “And did you inspect them first?”
“Come again?”
“Did you verify the cause of death?”
The foreman looked at me. “He joking?”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Thomas said. “Moving on. Has Cougar Ranch acquired any new horses recently?”
“Now I know you’re joking. Have you seen what’s going on around here? We ain’t exactly in a position to buy. ’Specially not the kind of ponies Mr. Reid’s got an eye for. He ain’t in the business of breeding any old nag.”
That, at least, we knew to be true. Luna was an exceptional horse, and Gideon would turn heads even in New York City. Which means Reid wouldn’t be interested in a couple of Lakota packhorses. At least not for breeding.
“Still,” Thomas said, “business is sure to pick up now that so many of your competitors are divesting.”
“If we have a good summer, maybe. But we lost more ’n half our stock last winter. Don’t much matter what the competition is doing if you can’t even fill the orders you already got.”
The man had a point. I’d seen for myself what the winter had done to Gus Reid’s cattle. Even the survivors were thin and weak. Depending on how deep his pockets were, competition might very well be the least of Reid’s worries. “What about your neighbors?” I asked. “Was everyone’s stock equally affected, or did some pull through the winter better than others?” It was a long shot, but if we were entertaining the idea that someone was trying to put ranchers out of business, the winter had played an even bigger role than the creature.
“From what I heard, every rancher in the territory lost his shirt.”
So much for that line of inquiry. As far as I could tell, precisely nobody had benefited from the Winter of the Blue Snow—except, perhaps, for the bone pickers.
“Very well. We’re almost through here.” Thomas tore a page from his notebook and handed it over, along with his pencil. “Please write down the names of every ranch hand hired within the past two years.” He didn’t mention the Buckshot Outfit, not wanting to tip our hand just yet.
The foreman took his time about it, scratching his beard and squinting at the sky. I had the impression he was stalling, but eventually we had our list. As he was leaving, he crossed paths with our next interview, a skinny cowboy who couldn’t even be bothered to wear a proper shirt over his sweat-stained underwear. They exchanged a look—and suddenly I remembered where I’d seen Howard before. The two of them had been loitering outside the hotel yesterday. What business did they have in town? Hopefully, the skinny one would be more forthcoming than his boss. He dropped into the chair Howard had vacated and patted the dog, who dozed contentedly at his feet.
“Name?” Thomas asked.
“Zeke Porter. But everybody calls me Skinny.”
I cleared my throat into my hand, but I managed not to laugh.
Thomas glanced at the list the foreman had made. “I see you’ve only worked here for a year, Mr. Porter. How did you come to be hired at Cougar Ranch?”
“George … That is, Mr. Howard, he hired me. We used to work together back when.”
“And what are your duties here at the ranch?”
“This ’n’ that. Mending fences. Mucking stables.” He paused, coughing. “Whatever the foreman says needs doing, I guess.”
“Didn’t I see you outside the hotel yesterday?” I cut in. “You and Mr. Howard?”
Thomas glanced at me. This was new information to him.
Skinny, meanwhile, avoided my eye, giving the disinterested dog another pat. “Could be, I guess.”
“What business did the two of you have in town?”
“We was with the boss.”
That made sense, I supposed. Reid had gone into town for the stockman’s meeting. But why did he need an escort? And then there was the timing. “It was morning when I saw you, but Mr. Reid’s meeting wasn’t until evening. That’s a long time to be hanging around.”
“We had things to do.”
“Such as?”
Skinny coughed again, clearly stalling. “Picking up supplies ’n’ such, you know.”
“What sort of supplies?”
He could tell I was suspicious, and that made him nervous. He started coughing in earnest, a dry, wheezing hack that didn’t sound feigned. The dog pricked up his ears and whined, and I didn’t blame him. Skinny was making enough noise to wake the …
I paused, sitting up straighter.
White Robes’s words came back to me in perfect clarity. They woke me with their coughing.
“Do you own a horse, Skinny?”
He shook his head. “I ride one of Mr. Reid’s.”
“And is this horse branded?”
“Yes, ma’am. Ranch horses is all branded.”
“What does it look like? The brand, I mean.”
“Well, there goes one now.” He pointed to a horse being led out of the barn. Sure enough, it had a brand on its left haunch, and I recognized it straightaway. Not a Buckshot brand, but something just as damning: The horseshoe White Robes had drawn. Except it wasn’t a horseshoe at all, but a C. For Cougar Ranch.
I took a deep breath, composing myself. “Tell me, Skinny, have you ever heard of a company called the—”
“Skinny!” One of the kids we’d interviewed pounded up the steps, red-faced and out of breath. “Come quick! That bull is out again!”
The ranch hand cursed and stood.
“Wait a minute. We’re not done—” Before I could finis
h, two thousand pounds of angry beef went crashing through the brush near the river. The dog barked and bounded off the verandah, Skinny and the kid in hot pursuit.
“Damn it!” I stomped the floorboards in frustration. “I almost had him.”
“So it would seem. Your interview technique has come a long way, Agent Gallagher.”
That wasn’t saying much. Not so long ago, my idea of interrogating a suspect was sticking a gun in his face and repeating the same question over and over. “I just hope this doesn’t give him too much time to think.”
“You believe he’s our man, I take it?”
“One of them. Remember what White Robes said about being woken up by coughing?”
“Chronic coughs are common enough. And she also said something about a beard. Skinny is clean-shaven.”
“Yeah, but Howard has a…”
Thomas and I exchanged a horrified look.
We shot out of our chairs, but it was too late. A pair of horses burst out of the barn, their riders flogging them for all they were worth. Thomas and I could only watch as Skinny and Howard thundered across our paths, heading for the meadow and the trees beyond.
Our own horses were on the far side of the yard; by the time we’d unhitched and mounted up, Howard and Skinny were halfway across the field. I drove my heels into Luna’s flanks and she answered, surging beneath me with a power that scared me a little. I’d never ridden flat-out before, and I did my best to mimic Thomas’s form, the way he came up slightly out of the saddle, leaning low over Gideon’s neck.
Until that moment, I’d figured Thomas overpaid for that horse. I was wrong.
Within seconds, the stallion had left Luna behind, chewing up the distance between Thomas and his quarry with every stride. Skinny lagged a fair distance behind Howard, and I guess he could hear the hoofbeats coming up on him, because he threw a terrified look over his shoulder. He tried to spur his mount faster, but his shoulders started shuddering with coughs, and he slumped back in his saddle. Faced with such mixed signals, his horse started to flag.
Thomas was almost on him now. I wasn’t sure what he meant to do when he caught up, but I never had the chance to find out. Howard twisted, rifle in hand, and fired off a clumsy one-handed shot. Skinny pitched backward off his saddle, forcing Thomas to swerve wildly to avoid a collision. He tried to return fire, but Howard was still more than fifty yards off. A six-shooter wasn’t going to get the job done, and his shotgun would be even less use. I started to reach for my Winchester, but thought better of it; even if my aim was up to the task, my horsemanship wasn’t. If I dropped my reins at this speed, I’d be more likely to break my neck than hit my target.
Howard twisted around again. Thomas broke left as the rifle cracked. The bullet sizzled past me, close enough to spook Luna; she nearly threw me as she lurched off course.
This is madness. One-handed or no, it was only a matter of time before one of Howard’s shots landed. He was still well out of range of Thomas’s revolver and about to hit the tree line, where his advantage would only increase. Thomas must have thought the same, because he pulled up, watching helplessly as Howard plunged into the woods and made his escape. As for me, I circled back to Skinny, hoping he might have survived.
No such luck.
I knew before I reined in that the ranch hand was dead. The shot had taken him through the neck. He probably hadn’t even survived the fall.
Thomas loped up to the body, took a cursory glance, and spurred Gideon onward. “We mustn’t linger! We’re too exposed out here.”
We didn’t stop again until we were well out of range of Howard’s rifle, sheltering in the trees in case anybody else at Cougar Ranch decided to try their luck. Only then did Thomas permit himself an uncharacteristically florid curse. Then he sighed and patted his horse’s neck. “Just a few more seconds and you’d have had him, old boy. Bloody good show, anyway.”
I looked across the meadow at the place where Howard had disappeared. “I suppose it would be foolish to try following him.”
“Beyond foolish. He’ll know this area like the back of his hand, and he’s got a scope on that rifle. He’s probably dug in for an ambush already.” Irritably, Thomas started ejecting spent casings from his Peacemaker. “Nor would it be wise to head back to the ranch. We don’t know how many others might be involved, and even those who aren’t won’t look fondly on our killing one of their own.”
Howard was the one who’d done the killing, but somehow I doubted they’d fuss about the particulars.
“A great deal of exertion for very little result,” Thomas went on. He seemed to be taking Howard’s escape awfully personally. “It does little good to put names to the horse thieves if we don’t know why they did it or how they’re connected with the creature. Nor are we any closer to ascertaining Reid’s role in any of this.”
All true, and yet I wasn’t so sure we’d wasted our time. “I still want to know what Howard and Skinny were doing loitering outside the hotel.”
“Perhaps it was their day off. It was Sunday, after all.”
“Exactly. So why come into town for a meeting with the boss?”
“Hmm.” Thomas paused in the act of reloading. “Especially since, as you pointed out, the meeting was hours away.”
“And the two of them weren’t even there when it did happen. They’d probably left town already. Otherwise, they’d have had to stay overnight, like Reid did.” I shook my head. “They weren’t there for the meeting, and they weren’t doing any shopping, either.”
A ghost of a smile started to tug at Thomas’s mouth. “So, what mischief could they have been about that they didn’t wish us to discover?”
I had a pretty good idea.
There’s only so much excitement you can take in one day before you start to feel overwhelmed. Yesterday had included a Mexican standoff, a near mauling, and an extremely distracting interlude outside my hotel room. My poor exhausted brain just hadn’t had the energy to dwell on the death of the hotel owner, but it was all coming back to me now.
“What about what happened to Mr. Oliver? He was robbed and murdered not fifty feet from where I saw Howard and Skinny.”
“Good heavens, I’d completely forgotten! I could certainly believe Howard capable, at least.”
“Especially if he used to be with the Buckshot Outfit. Skinny fits the profile, and he did say he and Howard used to work together before they joined Cougar Ranch. I’ll bet my eyeteeth it was with the Buckshot Outfit. Howard’s probably the one who convinced Reid to hire his old buddies in the first place. Men like Skinny who would do whatever he asked.”
Thomas grunted. “But why kill Oliver? A grudge, perhaps?”
“They tried to make it look like a robbery, but maybe that was staged. I saw Oliver arguing with that businessman from Bismarck. He was trying to buy the hotel, but Oliver wasn’t interested in selling. Howard and Skinny were right outside the door when it happened.”
Not loitering, I realized. Lurking.
“Hired muscle?”
“Why not? Like you said, Howard looks the part. He’s thick as a tree trunk, and a bully besides. Handy if you’re a bookish investor looking to intimidate a bunch of hard-bitten ranchers into…” I trailed off, my pulse breaking into a jog. “Thomas, I think I’ve just figured it out.”
“What?”
“Cui bono.”
CHAPTER 17
THE BONE PICKER FROM BISMARCK—FOOL’S GOLD—A SAFE CONCLUSION
“Who benefits from what, specifically?” Thomas asked. “Oliver’s murder?”
“Not only that. The creature, too.”
Before I could continue, Thomas put a hand on my arm, inclining his head toward Cougar Ranch. A trio of riders had just struck out across the meadow, heading for the spot where Skinny’s body lay in the grass. “We should move on,” he said. “Hold that thought.”
We rode deeper into the trees, staying well east of the house and avoiding the road. I guess we can add George Howard to the l
ist of people gunning for us. Not to mention any of his friends, or Skinny’s, who might be out for revenge. Between Howard’s boys and Bowie Bill’s, we were looking at quite the posse. And those were just the human threats. There was still a man-eating predator on the loose, and an extremely presumptuous ghost just waiting for us to let our guards down. All in all, our dance cards were a little too full for my liking.
When he judged we were far enough out of range, Thomas slowed his horse to a walk. “All right, let’s have it.”
I started to get excited all over again. “Do you remember what White Robes said about someone trying to frighten them away from this place? I think she was partly right. Only it isn’t the Lakota they’re trying to frighten.”
Thomas made a thoughtful sound. “You believe someone is deliberately clearing out the town?”
“Wait, there’s more. Lee Granger said something interesting too, that night in the saloon. About scavengers. He said when all those cows died over the winter, the only ones who profited were the bone pickers. After Upton died, it was the treasure hunters. And then—”
“The pasty fellow from Bismarck, buying their land on the cheap.” He nodded slowly. “It’s an interesting theory.”
Honestly, I was disappointed. I’d expected a Rose Gallagher, I could kiss you, or at least a bloody good show. An interesting theory was a lukewarm reception at best. “It seems to me that scooping up thousands of acres of land at a heavy discount is a pretty big benefit,” I said, a little sullenly.
“Potentially, but the benefit only accrues if the investment proves to be a good one. The local economy depends almost entirely on the beef industry. That industry is in dire straits, thanks to the Winter of the Blue Snow, and it may never recover. Our friend from Bismarck may simply be accumulating worthless land.”
“Maybe he knows something we don’t.”