Holt 2, page 7
“Not true,” Sam said firmly.
As usual, Holt thought dismally, he’d put his foot in it. He pressed on. “I’m in a mess through no choice. That doesn’t go for you.”
“Here is something I have learned: everything a person does in life is a matter of choice, and only fools deny it You chose to go into law work, you chose to get involved with Cat Lacey, and you chose to be drunk the night Gutt killed her.”
Holt gasped.
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Sam said. “I’m stating facts. You also chose to go along with my plan to bust you out, and to accept my help in clearing your name.”
“And you?”
“I choose to set my own rules. Always have, plan to continue in the future.”
Holt worked on a response. “I’m doing my best to come to terms with that.”
“You’ve more experience than I with this sort of business,” Sam said. “But don’t put undue emphasis on that. What we have in common is the need to find Gutt, and that we’re both scared at the prospect. Only way to face that fear is together.”
This reminded Holt of his mixed emotions when he was on the bronco at Brantville’s rodeo, once the whistle blew: relief mixed with apprehension. In an effort to move his thoughts along, he said, “You trust Charity?”
“I don’t distrust her.” Sam dwelled on the question. “She as much as admitted she had an agenda.”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing what it is,” Holt said.
“She asked this Emma woman about Gutt,” Sam said, reasoning it out. “Likely she wasn’t inquiring on her own account, which leaves us. Add to that, Quint failed to drive you away.” Sam made a sour face. “I’d say the seeds of suspicion are sown.”
To the south Holt could make out the blot on the prairie that was the settlement of Lobo, as they gave it a berth of at least a mile. Holt gazed at the town, shook his head as if denying some comment of Sam’s. “We’ve done what we promised Morgan. Now is the time to get Gutt and finish our business.”
Sam was peering off toward the mountains to the west. “I believe that in the end Charity’s loyalties lie with her uncle,” Holt said. “Her visit to town might have gained information that benefits us, or she may have known it all along. But as you said, now Quint and this Emma know we are after Gutt, and will be pondering on the why of it. Charity might have wished this to happen.”
“For what reason?”
“Same reason as Morgan,” Holt said. “Pit us against Quint and hope he loses.”
Sam reined up, pointed ahead of them. “Could be it worked,” she said.
Quint caressed the knuckles of his right hand over the steel plate of his jaw, the gesture almost tender. “Here is what I wonder,” he said. “Why do you still pollute my territory?”
The woman who sat horseback at his side gave him a schoolmarmish stare, turned it on Holt and then Sam. She’d be Emma Franks, Holt reckoned. A somewhat rank smelling buffalo robe hung limply and open to reveal a gaunt, chestless frame swimming within. Wiry hair the color of the inside of a tin can frizzed out from beneath a cloth cap with earflaps. Her features were plain and angular, sharp blades of chinbone and a hawkish nose above thin, tightly pursed lips.
“I know you two,” she said ominously.
Holt nodded politely and waited to see how much trouble that comment boded.
But Emma only said, “You are of a type. What do you want with Gutt?”
Quint and Emma had spotted them from no more than fifty feet when they emerged from the brush along the river, so it had been too late to run even if they wished to. Holt did not. He was tired of giving up control of his activities to the whims of others. “I owe him money,” Holt answered.
“Sure you do,” Quint said. “Give it over and I’ll see that he gets it. Your welcome is wore out in these parts.”
Holt met his gaze. “Yeah, I remember that welcome. Maybe you and me’ll have the chance to finish that business.”
Holt was mildly surprised that Quint didn’t come back with some threatening rejoinder. Emma snapped at him, “I’ll conduct this interview, and let you know when you are needed.” She stared him down. “Assuming you are up to the job.”
Quint looked away and rubbed vigorously at the steel plate, as if polishing it. Whatever was going on, Emma wore, or at least shared, the pants in this partnership. That was middling strange.
“There is business here that is none of yours,” Emma said, “business that will work itself out in time and without meddling. We let you bring in Morgan’s cows. Maybe we were doing you a favor, maybe you served our purpose. Now you are not needed.” She nodded at Quint, as if giving a permission.
“You recall that beating I gave you?” he asked.
“Vividly,” Holt said.
Quint ignored Holt’s ironic tone. “It’s nothing compared to what I’ll do if I see you after today. I’ll break so many bones you’ll have to hire someone to pick your nose for you.”
“No,” Sam said.
Holt glanced over. Her buffalo robe had parted, and she held her gun at a point between Emma and Quint.
Emma ignored her in favor of a long second look at Holt. Something glimmered in her dull dark eyes. Sam waggled the revolver without getting Emma’s attention, though Quint kept his eye on her.
“You are digging your own grave,” Emma said to Holt, “in more ways than you know. Why should I not let you?”
Holt saw Quint quiver in the saddle, as if ready to make a move but apprehensive at the results. Sam fired over his head and Quint stopped moving.
Paying not the slightest attention and never taking her eyes from Holt, Emma Franks reached over and backhanded Quint across his good cheek. “Put your hands out in sight,” she ordered.
This episode was veering in bizarre directions, Holt thought. He recalled Quint before the fight was forced in the bar the previous week, his sense that despite the man’s size and reputation, some little mouse of fear was in permanent residence in his mental framework.
“More ways than you know,” Emma repeated, as if the conversation had never been interrupted, “starting with how you likely won’t come out of those mountains except belly down.”
She turned her horse toward town, oblivious to the gun Sam still held. Quint followed.
Emma looked back over her shoulder. “But if you happen to get lucky, we’ll pick up where we left off. Nothing I like better than a good chitchat.”
Chapter Nine
It was mid-afternoon by the time they reached the Rocky Mountain Front, so-called because in the old days the east side of the range marked wagon-train immigrants’ first sight of the awesome obstacle that stood between them and the Promised Land. The front also took its name from the abrupt way the prairie turned to steep mountain, as if in some prehistoric time the earth had buckled, squeezed, and exploded upward. “They’re awe-inspiring,” Sam said.
“And forboding, in more ways than one.” Much like the encounter with Quint and Emma, he thought, which had posed more questions than it answered. “Why’d she have that abrupt change of heart?”
A narrow valley cut by a creek provided entree to the mountains just ahead. Sam looked from it to Holt. “I’ve figured out the gist of your problem,” she said. “Antecedents.”
“Huh?”
“You jump right into old issues pronoun-first, without any clue to what they refer.”
“That Emma woman, of course,” Holt said impatiently.
“I don’t know,” Sam replied to the first question. “Clearly she is the brains of that duo, and figured that setting us loose to seek Gutt was to her advantage. I doubt she does anything that isn’t.”
“Let’s worry about immediate dangers,” Holt suggested. “Like wolfers in general and Gutt in particular.”
Sam was willing to drop it as well. “The grizzlies will be hibernating by now, at least. I did a story about them.”
“Then you didn’t do your homework,” Holt said. “Griz do sleep most of the winter, but it’s not true hibernation. They’ll even get up and roam around once in a while.” He laughed suddenly. “That reminds me of a tale.”
He dug out the tracing of Morgan’s map he’d made, and on which he’d jotted notes. “When I was a kid and we were living down south of here, the only other folks in the near vicinity were ranchers a half-dozen miles away. There was a son my age named Billy Jenks, and we got to be pals.”
He unfolded the map and smoothed it. “About the only season I got time to play was winter, and even then there wasn’t much of it, between chores. But this one occasion, I got my father to let me go with Billy on a camp-out in the mountains. I told him I’d bring back an elk, but mostly it was for the adventure of it. I fancied myself the incarnation of John Colter.”
“Who’s John Colter?”
“Mountain man who’d been with Lewis and Clark. He spent six months of the winter of 1808 traipsing not far from where we ended up living, carrying nothing but a buffalo robe, a rifle, a skinning knife, and coffee. Billy’d lent me a book about him.
“Anyhow,” Holt said, “when we make camp, it turns out Billy swiped a jug of homemade beer from his old man. We’re all of fourteen at the time, so naturally we drink the jug dry, and naturally Billy has to go to the bushes. A minute later he comes racing back, all excited.”
Holt watched the static clouds touching at the mountains’ crowns. “He’s stumbled across a grizzly den, a hollow clawed out around the roots of a big fallen Doug fir. He dares me to come look, which of course means I got to do it.”
“Plus by then you’ve got a bellyful of liquid courage.”
“Right. We’re standing about ten feet away, and Billy whispers, ‘It’s hibernating. When they’re hibernating, it’s like they’re dead. Nothing’ll wake them.’
“So I say, ‘Fine, but if you think I’m spending the night within shouting distance of this behemoth’—it must have weighed four hundred pounds easy—‘you are loco. Let’s go move camp.’
“Billy says, ‘It can’t wake up even if it wants to,’ and before I can press my side of the argument, he says, ‘For two bits, I’d go up and kick it.’”
Holt shook his head. “If aiding and abetting idiocy were a crime when you’re fourteen, I’d be a felon. Because me and the homebrew say, ‘I’d pay two bits to see that.’
“Billy looks a mite green, not expecting me to take him up, but two bits is a lot of money and there’s his grit at stake. He hitches up his britches, takes a deep breath, walks up to the bruin, and nudges it with his toe.
“I say, “That’s no kick.’ Billy curses, rears back, and boots the bear in the ribs with all his might.”
“Thereby, I’m guessing, conclusively disproving his hibernation theories,” Sam said.
“I should hope to shout. The bear lets out this roar of surprise, looks up to see this fool standing over him, swipes at him with a set of claws the size of a dinner plate.”
“I’ve heard that God watches over drunks and small children,” Sam said, “and since you and Billy were both, I’m hoping this story has an amusing ending.”
“We each made it to a tree. We couldn’t have gone up them faster if someone had lit off dynamite under our butts. The bear hung around for what seemed like half the night, while we clung on, shivered, and stayed enough scared not to fall asleep.
“Here’s the punch line,” Holt said. “When we got back—and I did get an elk, by the way—I stiffed Billy on the two bits. So he threatens to kick the stuffing out of me, and I say if he tries it, I’ll tell his dad about the homebrew he filched.”
“That was a nasty trick,” Sam observed.
“Billy felt the same way,” Holt said, “but he got over it.”
Sam pointed at the map. “I can’t help but notice that we’ve sort of drifted away from our original purpose. We were talking about dangers.”
“I was thinking back to what Charity said about the divvying up of the wolfing territory. We could be seen as claim jumpers, and there’s an honored doctrine of shoot first, ask questions later on that count.”
“Oh my goodness. We’d better turn back right this minute.” She was being sarcastic. “You’re stalling. Why?”
He ignored the question in favor of studying the map and his notes. A quarter mile back they’d crossed a ten-foot-wide creek with water the same milky color of Morgan’s river; Holt figured it was a tributary. Rock Creek in turn flowed into it, by the chart he was studying. The landmarks at the point where it exited the mountains were a six-foot-high falls with a pool behind it, the gallows frame of an abandoned mine shaft upslope from its left-bank bench, and a cliff of painted rocks opposite.
Sam looked over his shoulder. “This is it,” she decided. “Why are the rocks all those colors?”
“Minerals, pyrites and such. Do I look like a geologist?”
“No, you look like a man of two minds.” She pointed left and right. “There’s the falls, there’s the shaft. Let’s get moving.”
This would have been pretty country under other circumstances, but Holt was in a mood. All the time they had been tracking Gutt, ever since Sam had broken him out of Yuma, he’d had the nagging feeling he was like a mongrel chasing a stagecoach: If the cur did catch up, what did it mean to do with it?
The drainage defined by Rock Creek, according to the map, did not become impassable canyon until just below its headwaters. In the lower reaches it was more of a swale, one side of the watercourse a broad, flat bench above cut bank that was treeless except along the water’s edge, the other side occasional cliffsides among steep slope forested with snow-dusted ponderosa pine and Doug fir.
The snow’s depth increased proportionately to their rise in elevation, and slowed their going. The clouds finally opened as they rode, to drop a light but persistent fall of flurries. So far no wind had come up, but with the waning day, Holt could feel the temperature dropping steadily.
They were an hour upstream when he said, “This is as far as we go for now.” He swung out of the saddle to forestall the argument he anticipated.
It didn’t work. “There’s daylight left,” Sam protested.
“Yeah, and there’s nothing I like better than making camp in pitch-dark.” Holt faced her. “You ever done this before? Slept out when the temperature drops below zero, and a storm might bust wide open at any time?”
“No,” she admitted.
“I have, and I’ll tell you what could happen without fire, shelter, and enough clothing to beat the chill. First your lips turn blue and you shiver like an aspen in a gale. That’s bad. Then you stop shivering—that’s worse. The idea of dozing off is sweet as nectar, but if you do, you’ll never wake up.”
He’d reached her; she dismounted. “I’ll gather wood,” she said.
“You do that.”
The exchange set the mood of the miserable evening. Although the snow fell no more vigorously, the cold deepened and there was no way the fire would be much succor once they fell asleep, assuming they were able to. After a supper of tinned beans, Holt jerry-rigged a shelter with their saddle blankets and his riata. It smelled bad and offered little relief from the chill, but at least kept them from being buried in the snowfall.
They turned in soon after; there was not much else to do. They wore every article of clothing they had packed, but sometime in the night Holt was awakened by noise.
Sam’s teeth were chattering. In the sub-consciousness of her sleep she must have felt her distress, because her hip was close against his.
Holt shook her. She moaned in a way that alarmed him, came awake sluggishly.
“Come closer,” Holt said.
“What?” She was more fully conscious now.
“This has nothing to do with nothing,” Holt said roughly, feeling awkward, the more so over the short words they’d had around supper. “We need each other’s warmth.”
Holt pulled her into his arms, immensely embarrassed.
It got worse when she nestled against him. He could feel her warmth and every contour of her curves. “This is nice,” she said. Her tone was stuporous, but gradually her body warmed against his and her shivering stopped.
“It’s what we got to do,” he said.
But she had fallen asleep again, this time more peacefully, and made no answer.
Holt awoke frequently, and when he did doze, dreams came. He was in blue uniform in one, marching endlessly through sucking mud in a driving rainstorm while gray-clad Rebs lurked just out of sight. In another he was back in prison with his old cellmate Billy Card, but in a cage so small that they were compelled to stand belly to belly, and bars were everywhere. Later he dreamt of erotic doings, the woman changing like a malevolent spirit from Sam to Cat Lacey to Charity Morgan.
Sam rolled over as Holt gave it up and disentangled himself from her to crawl from under the makeshift tarp. He built a driftwood fire using pine needles for starter; their natural oils made them excellent tinder. When it was going good enough, he added a log, fetched the coffeepot, and went to the horses.
They were picketed in the trees by the creek, where the ground was somewhat shielded and the snow less deep. During the night, the animals had managed to paw down to some dried grass and ferns. Holt led them to where the cut bank gave way to less steep slope. The roan was thirsty enough to step out on the three-foot shelf of ice fronting the open water; the bay, seeing it hold, followed suit.
When they drank their fill, Holt edged gingerly out to where they’d been. The ice covered a back-eddy pool, and when he knelt at its edge, he discovered it was a good half foot thick. He shivered and filled the pot.
He took the horses back to camp, then piled on more logs until the fire blazed heartily. From a saddlebag lying next to the tack, he dug a pint bottle of bourbon.
