Hart the Regulator 10 Read online

  Short of the jail Hart turned and looked back down the street. Rebecca was standing over near a water trough, her long black hair shrouding her face, hands at her sides. She was quite still, staring into Hart’s face for as long as he stood where he was. After he’d turned away he could still feel her eyes piercing his back: even the door of the jailhouse didn’t help.

  Chapter Eleven

  She was sleeping up in the hay loft at the livery stable, curled in upon herself tight as she could. The blanket that was covering her showed only the fingers of one hand, one side of her face, the dark of her hair. Hart stood by the top of the ladder and looked down on her for several moments without either moving or speaking.

  When he was kneeling over her, he held his hand ready to cup across her mouth.

  She sensed his presence - not him but someone - and swung awake, her arm jerking up as she lifted her body off the straw. Hart’s hand muffled her shout and above it the dark eyes were wild with fear: surprise.

  ‘It’s okay. Just take it easy. Calm down.’

  She wriggled her mouth against his hand sufficiently to sink her small teeth into his palm, small and sharp like a young animal’s.

  Hart winced and cursed inside his head but clung on.

  ‘I ain’t goin’ to hurt you.’

  She struggled and beat her fist against his arm, the side of his head. Hart knocked it away and kept his temper checked. He could feel her warmth from sleep; the pressure of her face against his hand was strange, not unpleasant.

  ‘I want to help you.’

  She bit him again, but without as much force.

  ‘I’m goin’ to take my hand away and I don’t want you to scream. You got that?’

  She nodded beneath his hand.

  ‘Okay.’

  Hart lifted his hand from her face and she didn’t scream. She dived both hands for his face, nails seeking out his eyes. Hart blocked both arms upwards and she scratched twin lines up his forehead and into his hair.

  ‘Bitch!’ he hissed and trapped both wrists and flattened them against the straw, twisting her round as he did so. ‘I said I wanted to help.’

  ‘Like you did Jacob?’

  ‘Your brother got what he deserved.’

  ‘And those men yesterday. Them at the bank. I suppose they deserved it too?’

  ‘Sure they did.’

  Rebecca shook her head and fought with him again till he slackened his grip and allowed her to turn back round and sit up; he wasn’t letting go of her hands yet.

  ‘Yesterday ain’t nothin’ to you.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘I said it ain’t nothin’ to you.’

  ‘You rode into town with those men. Pretended to be one of them. Then you turned on them.’

  ‘It weren’t like that.’

  ‘That’s not what folk around here say. They say you joined up with ’em and then back-shot ’em for the reward money.’

  Hart showed his anger on his face; his fingers tightened on her wrists until she called out. ‘If that’s what they’re sayin’, they’re wrong. They don’t know what happened. I didn’t have no choice but to come ridin’ in with ’em. An’ I sure as hell didn’t back shoot anyone. Didn’t shoot anyone I didn’t have to.’

  ‘But you did do it for the money?’

  ‘Some of it, sure. Couple of ’em had a price on their heads. Reckon I can collect it as well as the next.’

  She seemed to have calmed down, her voice was less shrill and her breathing had steadied. He let go of her wrists and watched her carefully. She crossed her arms across her chest and rubbed at them where he had held her.

  ‘You do do things for money, though? Things like that?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘All kinds of things?’

  ‘I ain’t bustin’ that brother of yours out of jail, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.’

  She gave a quick shake of the head. ‘It weren’t that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I want you to find my uncle.’

  ‘Find him?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘My pa died. Just before you took Jacob to jail. He left a lot of money we didn’t know about. Left it all to his brother, Aram. Lawyer says there ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.’

  Hart didn’t feel it sitting right, not the way she was telling it. ‘You want me to fetch him so’s he can claim this money, that it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, that’s …’

  ‘That’s all there is? You love this uncle of yours so much you can’t bear to think of him workin’ his fingers to the bone on some dirt farm somewhere’s not knowin’ about all this money?’

  Rebecca turned away and he grabbed her shoulder and spun her back to face him. ‘What’s the truth of it?’

  One of the horses below stamped his feet and then kicked against the back of his stall; the others shifted around restlessly. The first light of day was starting to filter through the narrow gaps in the roof and the kerosene lantern that hung below was beginning to fade.

  ‘Uncle Aram, we ain’t seen him for years. I ain’t only seen him the once when he come visitin’ and then he was an old man, least to me he was, an’ I was no more’n a little girl. He lives up in the mountains, somewhere off in the wilds. Hates folk, hates towns, anythin’ like that. Pa was always tryin’ to get him to come an’ live with us, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘He’s a mountain man?’

  ‘He’s a trapper, I know that.’

  ‘But you don’t know where he is? Where anyone can find him?’

  She pushed her thumb against the center of her lower lip. ‘Jacob does.’

  ‘Jacob’s in jail.’

  ‘You can talk to him. He’ll tell you where to find Uncle Aram.’

  ‘Always supposin’ I intend to.’

  ‘We’ll pay you.’

  Hart laughed: ‘You got money?’

  ‘We will have.’

  There was enough light now to see her face clearly and he was surprised at the mixture of youth and pain that he saw there. Rebecca, in her turn, was staring at him with much of the intensity of before.

  ‘This why you’ve been followin’ me around?’

  ‘Partly,’ she admitted after several moments.

  ‘I thought you wanted to kill me.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Now you want me to go find your uncle?’

  ‘Yes.’ She swung her back round and tossed her head so that her hair flared out for a second over her shoulders and revealed a glimpse of cream-white neck.

  Hart had a moment’s impulse to reach forward, slip his fingers beneath her black hair, and touch that neck.

  He didn’t: he said, ‘How you fixin’ to pay me when you ain’t got no money?’

  ‘I told you, we will have.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘My kin.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Hart shook his head. ‘You mean your uncle.’

  ‘But it’s our money. All of us. Uncle Aram’ll understand that.’

  Hart grunted. ‘Not many folk are so understandin’ when it comes to money. Kin more than most.’

  ‘Maybe our family’s different.’

  Yeah, thought Hart, I guess maybe it is at that.

  ‘You’ll do it?’ she asked, a trace of excitement jarring her voice.

  ‘I’ll talk with Jacob. I’ll go that far and see what happens.’

  ~*~

  As soon as Zack Moses was up and about Hart went over and talked to him about the Batt family and also about the possibility of getting some kind of payment from the town council for saving their money from being stolen from the bank. Moses put him on to John Quinton and Hart found the attorney asleep in the back room of his office above the dry goods store and waited long enough for Quinton’s spidery fingers to fix himself a cup of coffee and set his brain working. He found out as much as he could about the Batt will and what th
e attorney told him supported the facts of Rebecca’s story. That done, Hart stepped over to the jail house and had words with the temporary acting sheriff, a former stage line guard who’d been fired for persistent drunkenness. The stink of cheap whiskey was rampant in the office and the lawman hadn’t bothered to hide the empty bottles that were already beginning to line the side wall beneath the gun rack. If he carried on that way, Hart thought, nothing would be easier for Jacob than to sucker the sheriff out of his keys and get himself good and free. Right now, that weren’t none of his business.

  Hart watched carefully as the man signed the two reward applications Hart had filled in, then took them from him and slipped them down into his back pocket ready for the mails. If he left them in the office with the sheriff they’d likely still be there when he got back from searching for Aram Batt.

  Supposing he did get back.

  Supposing he ever went.

  ‘Your prisoner.’ Hart nodded towards the rear of the office.

  ‘Whichever one? Damn jail’s so crowded since you come back to town we’re having to keep a couple of them bank robbers locked in a shed.’

  ‘Won’t harm ’em none. It’s Jacob Batt I’m talkin’ about.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I want to talk with him an’ I ain’t so keen on too many other folk knowin’ what about. You reckon you could see your way fit to bringin’ him out here and leavin’ us alone for a while?’

  The sheriff shook his head and the action made him belch, the stench of whiskey fumes filling Hart’s lungs. ‘Can’t no way do that. That man’s my responsibility. Anythin’ happen to him an’…’

  He cut short and stared down at the five dollar bill Hart had just placed in his hand.

  ‘Buy a lot of whiskey,’ Hart said.

  The sheriff scratched his head, grabbed the bill before it disappeared and mumbled: ‘Guess you can look after him pretty good, you bringin’ him in in the first place an’ such. But no one’s gotta hear about this, you understand?’

  ‘I understand. Have him in here one hour from now.’

  Hart left the sheriff to think about the bottles he was about to buy to replenish his supply and went looking for Rebecca Batt. As usual when he was in town, she wasn’t hard to find. More or less as soon as he emerged from the jailhouse, she was there right across the street, staring that same damn stare.

  ‘Did you talk to him? To Jacob?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But—.’

  ‘It’s all arranged for later.’

  ‘You could’ve talked to him then. You could—’

  ‘Could have, but there’s some things more important.’

  ‘What kinda things?’

  ‘Breakfast. My stomach’s playin’ hell with me an’ I aim feat before I do anything else.’ He caught hold of her and spun her round. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Where d’you think I’m goin’?’

  ‘You’re havin’ breakfast with me. Now move it!’

  ‘I ain’t doin’ no such thing,’ she complained, as Hart propelled her forward.

  ‘Yes, you are. I know damn well if you ain’t sittin’ alongside me, every time I look up I’m goin’ to see that face of yours starin’ at me through the window. Nothin’ puts me off my food quicker than someone starin’ at me while I eat. Even you.’

  Rebecca shrugged and allowed herself to be hurried along the street to the dining rooms. It wasn’t until she was midway through her plate of ham and eggs that she looked up at Hart and asked: ‘What did you mean, even me?’

  Hart shook his head and carried on chewing. ‘Nothin’. Didn’t mean nothin’ at all.’

  But the way she continued to look at him, her head slightly to one side, suggested that she didn’t altogether believe him. Hart did his best to ignore her, concentrating on his hash and eggs and coffee, knowing that down inside he didn’t believe it either.

  Jacob Batt was a mixture of fierce anger and driving urgency: he clearly would have liked to rid himself of the cuffs about his wrists and the length of chain by which the sheriff had attached him to the leg of the heavy desk. Since he wasn’t going to be able to do that, he used his energies to convince Hart he should head up towards the North Platte River and locate Aram Batt.

  ‘You can tell him what Pa did for him. Tell him if he comes back he’s got all that money waitin’.’

  ‘Suppose he don’t want to come back? Suppose he don’t want the money.’

  ‘What kind of a man d’you think he is?’

  ‘Them mountain men - never can tell. Got to be somethin’ strange, choosin’ to live the way they do, never seein’ another white man maybe for months at a time.’

  ‘Aram ain’t all like that. He’s close kin.’

  ‘So the both of you keep sayin’. Sure don’t seem to have brung him close yetaways.’

  ‘Pa’s money weren’t there before.’ There was no missing the bitterness in Jacob’s voice.

  ‘I still don’t see how I get paid for all this. The Platte ain’t just a day’s ride, you know. More like a week on the trail without a break.’

  ‘Uncle Aram,’ Rebecca put in, ‘he’s bound to pay you good for tellin’ him. You can work that out with him. I guess you’d get, oh, couple of hundred dollars easy. More maybe.’

  ‘An’ if he don’t want the money?’

  ‘All he has to do,’ said Jacob, ‘is come into town an’ see lawyer Quinton, sign a paper an’—’

  ‘An’ release the money over to you,’ Hart finished for him.

  ‘That’s right,’ affirmed Jacob.

  ‘Then we can pay you ourselves,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Course that’s what you’re hopin’ he’ll do, ain’t it? Sign the money over. That’s the only way you’ll get what you reckon’s rightly yours, ain’t it? Less’n old Aram turns up dead.’

  ‘You’ll do it?’ said Rebecca a shade breathlessly.

  ‘He’ll do it,’ said Jacob, contempt in his voice. ‘He’s the kind’ll do anythin’ for money.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Hart nodded, stepping away, ‘even money from the likes of you.’

  He knocked on the door and the sheriff came back inside, looking a little more glassy-eyed and walking a mite less steadily than he had before. Hart waited to make sure that Jacob was set back in the cell without trouble and then ushered Rebecca out on to the street.

  ‘You best get back to your ma. You done what you had to do.’

  ‘I can’t leave Jacob here alone.’

  ‘Sure you can. It’s a time before the circuit judge gets to these parts. You can ride in an’ visit, bring him stuff from home. You won’t do no good hangin’ round Fallon; no good’s goin’ to come to you either.’

  She looked at him and pursed her lips tight together. Hart knew he was wasting his breath to argue further. She’d do what she wanted to do, advice or no advice. He touched her lightly on the shoulder and she jumped like she’d been stung. He left her there outside the jail and went down to Zack Moses’ store to get supplies for his journey.

  Chapter Twelve

  Aram was thinking about the time he’d come up against the Blackfeet at Pierre’s Hole. That had to be back in thirty-two when he was still a young man and the bristles on his beard were soft as the underbelly of a dove. He’d not been with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company long, eight, nine months at most, when all hell seemed about to bust loose.

  When they’d reached the rendezvous at the end of the spring season, there’d been trappers there so thick it was like watching the waves pump down the ocean till they hit the shore. Not only Rocky Mountain men, but them from the American Fur Company, half a dozen smaller outfits, a few ragged-assed freelancers. Only three things got talked about amongst all that carousing and celebrating that always greeted a season’s close: the first was what had been took and how - after that the men were full of the way the Blackfeet were whooping themselves up into a state of bloody glory and the rumor that the Hudson’s Bay Company from up north were aimin�
�� to push down south of the Missouri and muscle in on trade down there.

  It wasn’t clear which the trappers feared most - the invasion of a new group of men into an already overcrowded area, or the last-ditch attempt of the Indians to keep the whites out of their hunting grounds.

  The beaver were going to be trapped out inside another ten years if things escalated from what they were and then, Indians or no Indians, there’d be damn all to hunt for anyhow. There were buffalo on the plain, sure enough, but chasing them wouldn’t occupy all the men who were going to be fighting to make a living. That left deer and elk and antelope, maybe bob cats and wolves, but they promised slim enough pickings.

  Anyhow, the rendezvous ended without anything being settled one way or another and Aram rode out from Pierre’s Hole with a bunch of Rocky Mountain men, some fifteen in all, led by Milton Sublette and a Boston merchant by the name of Nathaniel J. Wyeth. They hadn’t got above eight or so miles and made camp, when these Blackfeet rode up and asked for a parlay.

  Sublette agreed and sent a small group of men out under a flag of truce. Aram watched them ride out and remembered being surprised at them as Sublette had chosen - he’d heard enough of them cursing the stinking savages the night before to know they weren’t best suited to talk peace.

  From where he was watching, he couldn’t see clearly what happened, just the sudden movements and the sound of shooting and the realization that the negotiators had killed one of the chiefs while they were exchanging greetings.

  Well, all hell did bust loose right about then. A rider went galloping back to the Hole to fetch the rest of the trappers still there and the Indians lit out for a batch of trees and the firing began in earnest. The battle, for that was more or less what it was, went on all day and by the time dusk approached there were five trappers dead and three times that many wounded. Most counts called for a couple of dozen dead Indians, which amount became greatly increased in the later telling. Aram himself reckoned the true total of dead Blackfeet was nearer to seven or eight.

  It could have been the end of himself as a trapper. He was not much more than a boy and scared as all hell let loose. He’d near enough been forced to rope himself to a tree to keep from running, wave after wave of Indians bearing down on them, and then, later, when they were trying to smoke them out of the trees, it had seemed there was a warrior behind every trunk, an arrow singing through every patch of air.