Ralph Compton The Hunted

Chapter 1

That’s what you got for me? That? The dealer nodded toward the cards laid before him. His words came out too loud, and as if he’d been waiting long minutes to say them. The thin man with oiled mustaches, black visor, and arm garters shook his head and winked at the gawkers gathered about his table.

Across from him, his customer sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. He was a mammoth man with a broad back turned to the rest of the room.

The dealer and the others clustered by the table flicked eyes at each other, then settled back on him. The player’s rough-spun coat, the dark color of axle grease, strained across the shoulders as he brought a hand up to scratch the stubble on his face. I’m out, he said quietly, nodding toward the table.

You about were anyway. The dealer shifted his cigarillo to the other side of his slit mouth and winked at the watchers. Their soft laughs chafed Charlie, but he’d earned them. Coming in here half lit and feeling as if he knew more about playing blackjack and bucking the tiger than any man alive. Heck, three hours and he’d spent more time running from it than wrangling the tiger, and what did he have to show for it? A whole lot of empty in his pockets.

He had his emergency five-dollar piece in his vest and that, plus his mule, Mabel-Mae, and his meager kit, was about all he had in the world now. Three hours earlier he’d been halfway to owning a sizable chunk of land in a pretty mountain valley. Now he’d set himself back by two years—that was how long it had taken him to earn that two thousand dollars. Those two years had all but killed him, he’d worked so hard. And now? Now he was two years older, and as his father used to say of his family’s lot in life, he was poorer than an outhouse rat.

Hey, how about letting someone else take up space in that chair? The dealer squinted one eye against the slow curl of silver smoke rising up the side of his face from the cat-turd cigarillo. Charlie wanted to smear the smugness off his face, but he’d avoided jail for too long now to cozy up to the idea of being near broke and tossed in the calaboose in Monkton, Idaho Territory.

He pushed away from the table, the chair squawking back on the boot-worn boards. He kept his eyes on the dealer’s the entire time he stood, taking longer than he needed to. It wasn’t much, but showing off his height was about all he had. It worked. The dealer’s grin sagged at the corners and his cigarillo drooped as his eyes followed the big man’s progress upward.

He’d not been there when Charlie sat down at the table, so he didn’t know how big the fellow he’d been mocking was. And what he saw was a giant of a man, closer to seven feet than six. Charlie was wide enough at the shoulder that by now, at thirty-eight years of age, he naturally angled one shoulder first through doorways and ducked his head a mite. It didn’t guarantee he’d not rap his bean on the doorframe—there weren’t too many weeks of the year when he didn’t have a goose egg of sorts throbbing under his tall-crowned hat.

Charlie’s stubbled jaw—he’d not taken time to clean up before hitting the saloon for the first time in many months since he’d sold off his latest claim—was a wide affair beneath a broad head topped with brown curls, tending to silver, forever trapped beneath his big hat. It added nearly another foot to his height, but he didn’t mind. It suited him somehow. His hands too were wide, callused mitts with thick tree-branch fingers more suited to dragging and pounding and stacking than tapping out cards. He should have known better than to think he could best the house.

The dealer eyed Charlie’s hands covering the entire top of the now-wobbly wooden chair he’d been seated in. He swallowed once, began to speak, gulped again as the big man took his time straightening his coat, squaring that mammoth hat. The big man still didn’t look away from the dealer’s face.

The dealer finally managed to whisper, Thank . . . thank you for your patronage, sir.

Charlie nodded once, turned, and heard the dealer let out a stuttering breath of relief. Despite his new financial situation, Charlie half smiled. At least he had his size. It wasn’t worth much, but this big body could, by gum, still earn him a day’s honest wage most anywhere labor was needed.

The big man strode the length of the narrow room, making the long walk toward the front of the saloon, the floor squeaking and popping under his weight. Everyone he passed gave him the hard stare. He felt certain they all knew he’d lost all but his shirt.

Midway to the door he passed a cluster of men at the end of the bar. He felt relief that they were chattering among themselves and not concerned with him. Then he heard a voice that about stopped him in his tracks.

Shotgun? Why, by God, it is! As I live and breathe, it’s my old friend, Shotgun Charlie Chilton!

Though it had been many long years since he’d been called that, Charlie’s step hitched, as if out of dusty reflex. He paused right there in the middle of the room and closed his eyes. He knew a couple, three things: He should have kept on walking, he’d never had many friends and most of them had died away in the war, and the man who all but silenced the room with his drunken shouting was no friend. Anybody who called Charlie by that old name was no one he wanted to know anymore—and should by all rights be dead by now anyway.

Charlie knew he should have kept right on going out that door, headed to the livery where he’d intended to bed down for the night in the stall beside Mabel-Mae, his old mule. And then come tomorrow he’d lick his wounds out on the trail, put some distance between himself and the town of Monkton. And once he did, he’d cipher out a way to earn money again, make up for the last couple of years’ wages he’d blown at the faro table.

Though Charlie knew all these things and thought all these things, he still opened his eyes and slowly turned to face his past. And that’s when what had begun as one of the best days of his life, which had gotten pretty bad, got a whole lot worse.

For who he saw annoyed him to no end. Jacob Dutchy Erskine. They had called him Dutchy because he looked as though he might be a Dutchman, though he wasn’t any more Dutch than Charlie was the king of China. But the fool was grinning at Charlie, and judging from his rheumy eyes and leering mouth, his boilers looked to be half-stoked with liquor too.

Charlie turned back to the door. He hadn’t gone another step before the voice stopped him again. All eyes were on them both now. Even the lousy banjo player in the corner had stopped.

Shotgun Charlie, as I live and breathe! Dutchy slid away from the elbow-smooth bar top and stumbled the few steps toward Charlie.

The drunk man was still a good couple of strides away when Charlie held up a hand. I . . . I don’t know who you are, nor what you’re after, but you’ve mistook me for someone else.

The man halted, weaving in place, his smile drooping. What? Charlie . . . aw, you’re funnin’ me.

Charlie pinned a broad forced smile on his wide, windburned face. He looked left and right, nodding and smiling at the staring faces. Seemed as though there were a whole lot more people in here than when he’d come in. He felt his cheeks redden even more. Curse Dutchy for a fool.

I’m telling you . . . fella, he said in a lowered voice. I ain’t never seen you before. Now do us both a favor and back off.

No, no, I ain’t neither. Come on over here, meet my new chums. You can buy us all a drink with your faro winnin’s. Dutchy’s smile turned pinched; his wet eyes narrowed. Unless you’d rather reminisce all about the old days right here in the middle of the bar. He raised his arms wide to the room.

Charlie saw the two missing fingertips on Dutchy’s left hand. They had healed poorly after they’d been shot off long before Charlie ever knew him. The hard pink scar nubs looked like pebbles or warts, and Charlie had always wanted to pare them off with a knife. If they had been on his fingers, he’d not have been able to live with the look, nor, he suspected, the feel of them.

Dutchy giggled, looked around at the silent, expectant faces. Maybe you’d like to tell ’em all about the last time we seen each other. Wichita, wasn’t it? Something about a lousy Basque, wasn’t it? All them sheep running all over the place, and Charlie here, he . . . Dutchy stopped and leaned forward. What’s the matter, Charlie? You look like you seen a ghost. Maybe one of a little girl? One who’s been all trampled by a . . . horse?

It had been a long, long time since Charlie had dreamed of the little girl. But it hadn’t been any longer than that afternoon that he’d thought of her. He’d been walking on into town leading Mabel-Mae when he’d seen the children playing before a white-painted schoolhouse a few streets away from Monkton’s main street. He thought of her every day, in fact, and this man, this damnable Dutchy, was fixing to rip it all wide open again.

Big Charlie Chilton had tried hard since that accident to make sure he was slow to start a thing. But once he set to a task, he dedicated himself to it and rarely gave it less than his all. But when his great ham-sized right fist drove like a rock hammer square at Dutchy’s grinning face, Charlie hadn’t known it would happen. Like the old days he’d worked so hard to put behind him. No warning, just action. He hated the fact that it felt good when his tight knuckles jammed hard against Dutchy’s leering face.

The strike happened so fast that the entire room was still silent, listening with rapt attention to the drunk’s account. The next thing they all heard was a muffled snap and Dutchy’s head whipped to one side as if he were gawking at a passing bullet. His body followed suit and spun in a dervish dance before slamming into the bar leaners behind him. They parted fast and let Dutchy drop, his head clunking the mud-scraped brass rail.

The early gasps had given way to scraping chairs and now yammering as standing people leaned, trying to get a look at the collapsed victim.

He dead? someone asked.

As if in response, Dutchy groaned and rolled his head to and fro, the left side of his face already swelling and purpling.

An old man with a cob pipe leaned close over Dutchy. Naw. It was his jaw that cracked. He plucked the pipe from its customary spot in his mouth, the groove worn by it in his teeth. He ain’t dead, but he ain’t gonna be right by a long shot for a long time to come, mark my words. . . .

That was the last thing Charlie heard as he bulled his way through the double front doors, the glass panes rattling as he pawed them shut behind him. His big granger boots punched squelching holes in the slushed mud of the early October street as he stepped off the sidewalk. The livery. That’s where he had to get to. Had to get on out of here before someone set the law on him.

Charlie didn’t hear the doors open and close again behind him, fast footsteps hammering the boardwalk in the opposite direction, toward Marshal Watt’s office.

Chapter 2

Mud muffled the blue roan mare’s slow steps. Two women bobbed in time with the animal’s measured pace, a pair of carpetbags jostling in counterpoint draped on the horse’s rump behind the second rider. Mud caked the hems of their layers of limp skirts, of once-gay coloring that would have looked right on a warm, sunny spring day. But on this darkening autumn afternoon in the hill country of the western edge of the Rockies, their clothes, horse, bags, and skin took on the bleak, russet hues of spattered mud and the grime of long days spent traveling hard. The horse’s gaunt frame worked to continue on, but she slowed, then stopped. A last step ended with a forehoof paused in the air, as if in middecision. Finally she set it back in the ice-rimed mud and stood still, head bowed against the coming dark and numbing cold.

Delia? the larger of the two whispered to the woman in front of her in the saddle. Are you awake? With a shawl-wrapped hand she gently nudged the smaller woman.

The figure nodded, finally said, Yes, yes, I’m here. So cold, Hester.

I know, Delia. Me too, but we have to get to that town. I swear I saw lights a few minutes ago. That next rise ought to put us in view of it again.

Delia forced herself to sit upright. Do you think that might be Gamble?

Hester hesitated. No way of knowing yet. I expect we have a distance to go first, dear.

Will Vin be there?

Again, Hester paused before replying, I expect he will be in Gamble, yes. Waiting for you. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet, Delia.

The younger woman didn’t respond.

Delia? Is the pain . . . is it bad?

Delia shook her head. No, no. But I will be glad to rest for the night.

Me too, sister, whispered Hester. Me too. With that, Hester tapped her heels to the horse’s barrel and the tired beast resumed her slow progress up the slope in the road before her.

Chapter 3

If you all will recall, I said a whole lot of months ago that Jasper Rafferty was one man none of us should climb betwixt the covers with.

A collective groan rose throughout the low-ceilinged log saloon. An errant gust of icy wind chose that moment to whistle through a gap beside a poorly carpentered window opening. One of the men, a middle-height fellow with a thick, bristly black beard and big bony hands, the fingernails on which were mostly black from stray hammer strikes, leaned back in his spot on the split-log bench and poked the wadded flannel scrap back into the gap through which fine snow danced.

The gathered individuals included most of the living residents of Gamble: two dozen men, two women, and a patch-haired black dog that slept under the stove—an annoyance only when he got spooked and woke up too fast, stinking up the place as he singed the hair on his head on the stove bottom. Or when he waited until he came inside to shake off after a swim in the brook, splashing ineffectually for the darting mountain trout that lived under the cutbanks of the raw mountain stream that ran alongside the camp. But even the dog, whom they all called Dang Dog, had largely given up on that frigid practice once the weather began hardening off the top of the water, a state the flow would soon remain in for many months of the foreseeable future.

The man who had spoken, a small bald man with enormous dragoon mustaches, one Clayton Eldridge, hooked his thumbs behind his leather braces. He fancied himself a mayor of sorts of Gamble.

He began to repeat his claim but was cut off by a fat black man wearing a brown bowler shiny from age and with a number of playing cards stuck at angles in the brim. Now, I know you can’t be talking of the same conversation I was present at, Clayton, for as I recall . . . He looked around himself at the other residents of Gamble and smiled. The only sounds you made were sort of grunting, suckling noises when mention of whiskey was made.

Eldridge’s jaw dropped open and his eyes widened. How dare you, Luther!

But the self-appointed mayor’s cries of protestation were swamped by jeers and hoots from the rest of the group. The noise subsided as a burly, pock-faced woman, gray of tooth, and with once-red hair to match, rapped a wooden spoon on the bottom of a blue spatter-ware pot. Simmer down, already. Simmer it!

She held the pose, glaring at each man in turn until they all left off guffawing. Then she nodded. The point of this gathering wasn’t to yammer about who’s right and who’s wrong. Seems to me we all been wronged by Jasper Rafferty. We were saddled with him as our freighting outfit because him and that lawman bankrolled most of Gamble. But part of that deal is that we get the goods we wanted brought up here to this forsaken rocky knob surrounded by timber and peaks.

What’s your point, Sheila? Eldridge worked his thumbs up and down his braces as though he were waxing them.

"Point is, Clayton, that we should get what we’re paying for. We been sending our gold down there and in return, we been getting a whole lot less than we was promised."

What’s this ‘we’ business anyway? The black man smiled and sat back against the log wall, his callused hands resting on his paunch. You got a mouse hidden in your dress, Miss Trudeaux?

The place erupted in laughter once again. Sheila stifled a smile and nodded, waited for it to die down. Only thing no bigger’n a mouse in my dress lately’s been you, Luther.

Now, look, said Clayton Eldridge, shushing the laughing crowd with his hands. We all know what we’re getting at here. And if we’re going to keep in any sort of manner at all until spring, we’d do well to send someone to track down our supplies. I know those Shoshoni got us pinned down here. No one knows that more than I do. I lost my only boy. . . .

His voice cracked, and the gathered folks all looked at their hands, their feet, anything but at Clayton’s quivering lip and wet eyes. His son’s death had been a hard blow on them all. The boy had been well liked. More so than ever after he was found, flailing and gagging on the talus slope below the diggings that day in June, pinned by an Indian’s arrow. It had laid the boy low but had taken a long time to kill him. He had mostly bled out there, so it hadn’t taken him long to die by the time they got him back to what they jokingly called their town.

Gamble consisted of a cluster of log structures, a few with plank additions tacked on with the coming of the gold, some sporting store-bought roofing tin, and felt paper. The saloon they sat in on this very night, though a log affair, had two fancy hand-turned posts someone had brought up on the back of a mule. They’d replaced two cobby-cut pine poles in the center of the porch with the fancy turned ones flanking the steps. From then on—mostly with the help of the gold strike shortly thereafter—they had begun to feel that Gamble might not be one of those two-bit, two-month towns no one could recall five minutes after the gold dried up.

The boy, Selby, had died and they’d buried him on a pretty knoll not far from the buildings. Clayton, much to their surprise, dug harder than ever. When asked why he stuck, Eldridge said it was because he would never leave his boy. He’d had to leave his wife’s grave back where he and the boy had come from, in a town somewhere on the ocean in Maine, and he’d never forgiven himself for abandoning her. He said when he struck it big he was going to have her dug up, carted all the way to Idaho Territory, and reburied beside their boy.

Who in their right mind would go to Monkton? said Luther. I, for one, would bet a whole lot of ore that Rafferty did send up the supplies. I bet Marshal Watt made him do it. You know why the freight wagon never made it through. That foul Shoshoni laid ’em low and scattered our goods. Took what they wanted, then scattered the rest. And as far as Rafferty and the marshal are concerned, they did their part.

At this point, it doesn’t matter much who did what, said Clayton Eldridge. Just that we can’t afford to sit still here all winter and we can’t afford to go. But we can afford, maybe, to send a rider out, get help. Who’s up for it?

The Italian, where’s he at?

Sleepin’ off a hard one from last night, I expect.

How does he do it? I didn’t think there was much booze of consequence left in Gamble.

He gets himself in Fancy’s drawers, that’s how. The man’s voice, silent until then, drew attention from all.

The second woman in attendance paused in lighting a half-smoked cigarillo she’d pulled out of her brassiere. Screw you, Proudhorn.

Not likely, said Proudhorn, stroking his big black beard. But I’ll go.

Go where, exactly? said Sheila Trudeaux, folding her arms.

Samuel Proudhorn stood, stepping back away from the bench he’d been sharing with three other men. To find out if it was the Shoshoni who got to our goods before the goods got to us.

There wasn’t much sound in the room at his comments, though all eyes were on the broad-chested man with the big beard and big hands. He was not a particularly tall man, but Samuel Proudhorn, with his deep voice and its strange Cornish accent and his oversized facial features, boots, and hands, struck them all as a big man even in stature, nonetheless.

Well, now, don’t let’s all break into a chorus beseeching me to reconsider. His eyes seemed to narrow in that way that told them he was probably making a joke, though with that beard they could never see for certain if he was smiling.

That’s mighty kind of you, Samuel, and I think I speak for all of us here—Eldridge spread his arms in a gesture he hoped showed he was including the entire room—when I tell you that we appreciate it mighty. But on second thought, I wonder if we shouldn’t wait another few days.

No, no. Proudhorn circled around the table. We’ve seen more sign than ever of Indians nearby. We’re all looking over our shoulders at the slightest noises when we should be concentrating on turning out the richest ore strike of our lives. All the signs of sizable riches are here. And yet we aren’t even hunting as much as we should for fear of Indian attack. And let’s not forget that winter comes early in the Bitterroot Mountains. No. He waved a hand and pulled a big-bowled briar pipe from his vest pocket, rooting with a forefinger in the bowl. We have taken far too much for granted. Assumed safety just because the Shoshoni to the east of us have been somewhat placated. All the gold in the world won’t mean much if we’re dead, either from starvation or scalping or both.

Again, the room filled with the stone-faced silence that usually greeted Proudhorn’s blunt observations. Blue-black smoke clouded upward from his pipe, and his eyelids fluttered beneath it. He blew a plume of it outward. Don’t look so horrified. I merely said what we’ve all been thinking for weeks now. And don’t tell me you don’t trust me.

The rush of voices made him smile again, and this time he laughed too, so his fellow Gamblers knew he was kidding. I tell you what, you can all split my share of the diggings in the event that I do not return. That should convince you I intend to see this thing through. Because I’ll be cursed for eternity if I am going to give up my precious gold to you all!

A drink to Samuel Proudhorn! shouted Sheila, and the men offered up halfhearted cheers, hating that the Cornishman seemed to outman them once again, but as a feeling of relief worked its way into their thoughts, they cheered a little louder.

•   •   •

The next morning, the bushy-bearded man had saddled his buckskin mare, strapped on his big skinning knife and Enfield percussion pistol, and mounted up. Sheila Trudeaux slipped a precious nearly full bottle of whiskey into his saddlebag and rebuckled it. He watched her but only smiled with his eyes. She winked at him and said low enough that the others couldn’t hear the words, Good luck, Samuel. Come back to me.

He nodded once to her, then looked at the rest. I’ll be back as soon as I’m able. With answers at the least, and preferably leading a train of supply wagons. Maybe, if we’re lucky, soldiers will already be out and about, taking care of the blasted heathens.

No, no, do not bring too many of the damn strangers up here to Gamble, Meester Proudhorn!

They all turned to see Vincenzo Tantillo standing behind them, his arm draped over Fancy’s shoulder. Because eef you do, I will, uh, how you say, fight you for the gold, no? His handsome smile spread wide across his darkly stubbled face. The smile did not reach his eyes.

Ignore him, Samuel, said Sheila, smiling up at the man on the horse. Go with God.

I thank you. I hope I won’t need his assistance, but if it is required, far be it from me to turn him away. He raised one of those big bony hands to the fawn brim of his slouch hat, nodded once, and headed south out of Gamble proper, leaving behind the tiny settlement, the buildings arrayed as if scattered by a drunken dice roller.

Samuel Proudhorn knew he would have to follow the ragged cut of the wheel-rutted trail down out of the mountains, alongside the icy flow of the feeder streams that in spring became pummeling freshets, to the lower valley, where the freshets would feed the Salmon River that would eventually lead him to the town of Monkton. He also knew that between Gamble and Monkton, there were a host of deadly elements, not the least of which were the rogue Shoshoni and the fickle caprices of Mother Nature.

By his careful count, he was beginning his fourth day out from the