Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) (15 page)

“It was very nice,” she replied, hanging up her coat.

“I heard you come in,” he said in an offhand manner. At one point in her life, he would have taken such a thing sternly. At this point, though, he was pleased with any attention that she might receive from any young man of courting age.

“I hope that I didn't wake you,” she said as she situated herself at her own desk. She had come home well before ten and had nothing for which to apologize.

“No, not at all,” he replied.

“Father, I was not aware of your arrangement with your partners about the land outside of town . . . that you and Mr. Stocker inherited the shares of the others.”

“Oh yes, that's true . . . I had actually forgotten that we had drawn up the papers that way until Virgil reminded me this week. We acquired it as a partnership, and it is typical for partners to grant one another the rights of inheritance.”

“I see,” Hannah said, turning to her work. She had wondered why her father had made such an arrangement, but his explanation seemed reasonable. She had wondered why her father had not told her about it, but she realized she had probably been a teenager when the deal was done. Most daughters in their twenties knew nothing of their father's business dealings. The fact that Hannah knew
nearly
everything was highly unusual.

Thoughts of this deal about marginal pasture land faded as Hannah dealt with the opening rush of customers, helping them with their transactions and answering their questions. Finally, when there was a lull, she decided to pick up the mail at the post office. She called to her father to tell him where she was going. He just waved back. He was in a meeting with Edward J. Olson.

Her father's right-hand man came and went without a schedule. While she and Mr. Duffy put in more than mere “banker's hours,” Olson kept no office hours whatsoever. He appeared unannounced from time to time, but he was always welcome in her father's office. To his credit, though, he seemed very competent in handling whatever task beyond the walls of the bank her father assigned.

Going to the post office reminded Hannah of that day a while back when the letter had arrived from the bounty hunter. There, she thought, was another handsome man. Unlike the clean-shaven Mr. Phillips, he had the beginnings of a beard, and she liked a young man with hair on his face. There was also a certain allure surrounding a man with danger in his life. The violence was both frightening and appealing. It gave her a thrill to think about the way he lived his life, but men like him were the ones you thought about,
not
the ones you thought about courting.

“Good morning, Miss Ransdell.”

Hannah was so lost in thought that she was startled by the greeting from Dawson Phillips, Jr. He was tipping his hat as she glanced up from the mail.

“Oh . . . good day, Mr. Phillips. I was just picking up the mail.”

“It's a lovely morning,” he said with a smile.

“The snow seems to have stopped,” she replied, also smiling. “And it looks like the sun wants to shine.”

“I enjoyed our dinner last night,” he said.

“And I did as well,” she replied.

“I was wondering . . . um . . . if it wouldn't appear too forward of me . . . since you made a cup of coffee for me yesterday . . . whether I might return the favor today?”

“Well . . . do you mean right now?”

“Why not?”

“Well, I have to get back to the bank,” she said in a tone that conveyed to him that there was no specific urgency.

“Of course,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed.

“I suppose that my father and Mr. Duffy could hold down the fort for a
little
while,” she said quickly. Though she had not yet decided whether the man from Denver was courting material, she certainly did not want to close the door—at least not as impulsively as she was in the habit of doing.

They sat in the same dining room at the Gallatin House as they had the night before, sipping coffee and sharing a croissant.

When the time came for Hannah to say that now it
really was
time for her to get back to the bank, she picked up her bag of mail and extended her hand.

“Thank you again, Mr. Phillips. Perhaps we'll run into one another again before you head back to Denver.”

“That would be a pleasure, Miss Ransdell . . . Oh, one thing I've discovered since last night carries good news for your father and Mr. Stocker.”

“What's that?” Hannah asked.

“The railroad . . . the Northern Pacific . . . Fred Billings has got the financing together to resume construction and will be building the tracks through Gallatin City.”

“That will be wonderful news for us all,” Hannah smiled.

“It will
certainly
be wonderful news your father, and my father's other surviving partner, to own land through which the rails will pass.”

Hannah detected a trace of bitterness in his tone, but this was quickly washed away by his changing the subject. Talk of the railroad turned to talk of railroads in general, and thence to the general topic of the “progress” that railroads were bringing to the West. Dawson Phillips, Jr., smiled when he spoke of the changes he had seen in Denver in recent years, and Hannah found herself captivated by his charm.

She almost blushed when he politely, though nervously, asked whether he might enter into personal correspondence with her.

“Of course,” she said with a smile.

Chapter 19

“L
OOKS LIKE THE SNOW IS PILING UP PRETTY GOOD OUT
there,” Bladen Cole observed casually as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

“How's your friend doing?” Sheriff Joshua Morgan replied, ignoring Cole's observation, which was obvious to anyone who looked.

“He's gonna live,” Cole answered, absentmindedly winding his father's watch.

“How soon, you reckon?”

“Few days. No more.”

“That's good news,” Morgan said, pouring a cup of coffee for himself and looking out the window.

“You expect to be needing that cell of yours in the next few days?”

“Never know,” the white-haired sheriff said, still staring out the window at the falling snow.

If there was anyone in Copperopolis who wanted Cole on the trail
out of
Copperopolis more than Cole himself, it was Sheriff Joshua Morgan. It was not that he particularly disliked Cole, it was just that he had an attachment to the status quo, and having to let a bounty hunter with a warrant use his jail cell was not part of the status quo. Cole had negotiated a deal for the use of Morgan's single cell for two dollars a day, plus another dollar for a place for him to sleep in the sheriff's office.

In the long years that he had been the sheriff of Copperopolis, Morgan had seen a lot of things come and go, and the gradual quieting down of the town suited the way that he imagined living out his later years.

Copperopolis was not much of a town, and as tedious as that was, Cole was pleased. For the same reason that he had been anxious to avoid towns entirely, he liked a small place with minimal comings and goings, which allowed him to keep the low profile that he desired. He did not want word of his whereabouts to get back to Gallatin City.

Copperopolis had not always been a one-horse town. In the years immediately after the Civil War, it had been a boomtown of sorts for the reasons suggested by its name. It never became the metropolis that its namers had imagined, and its fortunes began running in the opposite direction when the fires of avarice began burning brightly at Confederate Gulch. Why work your fingers to the bone for
copper
when you can work your fingers to the bone for
gold
?

Cole had not exactly come voluntarily to Copperopolis, but with a prisoner lying bleeding in the snow, he had but two choices—the obvious one, and finding medical attention to patch him up. Cole did not want a repeat of Milton Waller's final days, and he was determined not to abide the “dead” part of his prisoners being wanted “dead or alive.”

Jeremiah Eaton had suggested Copperopolis as the nearest place that had a doctor, and thus Cole had come. Jimmy Goode was in a bad way when they had ridden into town the following day, but the doctor knew his way around a gunshot wound and lacerated wrists. That left only the wait for Goode to be well enough to travel. It seemed a terrible waste of energy, not to mention cash, to save a man for his own hanging, but Cole wanted to see the look on the faces in Gallatin City when he rode in with half of the Porter boys' gang still
alive
.

When he had recovered sufficiently to speak, Jimmy Goode claimed to be sorry, and he claimed to have learned his lesson. Whatever lessons he applied to whatever he had left of his misspent life, he would be applying them without the use of his right arm below his shattered elbow.

“Damn you to hell, bounty hunter,” Gideon Porter barked in his usual manner of greeting, as Cole went back to check on him in Morgan's cell. “When are we gonna get out of this piss-hole?”

“You're awful anxious to get home for your own necktie party,” Cole observed.

“I told you, bounty hunter,” Porter said smugly, consistently insisting on calling Cole by his profession rather than by his name. “I told you my friends in high places won't let me hang.”

“When are you gonna tell me the names of those friends in high places?”

“I done told you I
ain't
telling you.”

“Suit yourself,” Cole said, turning his back on his prisoner and slamming the outer door to the cell area.

Bladen Cole had been spending his days pacing back and forth in the snow between the jail and the doctor's office, where Goode's leg was manacled to an iron cot, and playing penny-ante poker with the middle-aged woman who owned the saloon that was conveniently located on the ground floor of the building where the doctor kept his office. To date, he had lost nearly seventeen dollars. Copperopolis was no metropolis.

“Slow this afternoon, Mary Margaret?” Cole asked as he walked into the saloon.

“Every afternoon's just peachy here in paradise,” the proprietor said from behind the bar. Though her name suggested that she was a long-ago defrocked nun, it was clear that the things she had seen and done in her lifetime were beyond the imagination of most nuns. She had come with her husband in the boom years of Copperopolis and had stayed on after a mine explosion made her a widow.

“You here to lose another five dollars, Mr. Cole?” Mary Margaret asked as she turned to face him.

“Reckon,” he said, pulling up a chair at the table that had become
his
table in the days he had been in Copperopolis.

Mary Margaret rolled a cigarette and sat down opposite him.

“When you gonna let me pour you a shot, Mr. Cole?”

“As I been tellin' you, Mary Margaret, I've gotta keep a clear head to keep an eye on my two rascals.”

“The doc says the one upstairs there with his arm half-shot-off kidnapped a little boy off a homestead up in the Little Belts,” she said, making conversation as he dealt the cards.

“That's about the size of it,” Cole confirmed. He had been noticeably tight-lipped about his prisoners since he rode into town. Mary Margaret had described herself as being “not one to pry,” but she was naturally curious.

“How does a feller get into a line of work like bounty huntin'?”

“Are you contemplating a career change?” Cole asked as he studied his cards and drew two.

“I figure
I'd
be the one on the lam,” she said thoughtfully as she studied her cards.

“That so?”

“Yep. Figure I'm gonna have to shoot the dealer after gettin' a hand like this,” she said disgustedly.

“You bluffin'?” Cole asked.

She just shook her head.

He threw a couple of extra coins on the table.

When Cole proudly displayed a full house, Mary Margaret tossed over all four jacks.

“You been at this long?” she asked.

“Not long enough to tell when a young lass like yourself is bluffin'.”

“Not poker,” she clarified. “Bounty huntin'.”

“Few years,” he said. “I had a town sheriff job down in Colorado for a while, but my feet started gettin' itchy.”

“What was her name?” Mary Margaret asked as Cole shuffled and dealt.

“Whose name?”

“The woman down in Colorado that made you get itchy feet,” she smiled.

“Didn't say it was a woman who made my feet itch.”

“Oh, come on,” she laughed. “I've been around the block enough times to know that there's only two things that'll get a man over the age of twenty-five to feel like he's gotta pull up stakes. By the fact that you've taken to deliverin' wanted men to lawmen, I can rule out the one that involves runnin' from the law.”

“Sally,” Cole said. He figured there to be no harm in talking about his almost wife. Mary Margaret was old enough to be his mother, and he figured her intentions to be more nosey than romantic.

“Who was the feller?”

“Cardsharp named Hubbard . . . heading out to San Francisco.” He didn't ask how she knew there was a “feller.”

“Were you married to her?”

“Nope . . . almost.”

“Almost don't cut it for a lady,” Mary Margaret said, shaking her head in a motherly way. “Did Sally marry the gambler?”

“Don't know. Reckon she has a lot more prospects out there if she didn't.”

“Reckon.”

“How about you, Mary Margaret?” Cole asked. “What made you decide to stay on in this town all these years?”

“In the time that I had with Mike in this place, it sort of became like home. I didn't have nothing anywhere else.”

“No family?”

“We came over from County Tipperary when I was four. My parents died in the fifties, my two brothers joined up with the 74th Pennsylvania and got themselves shot at Chancellorsville . . . You weren't at Chancellorsville, were you, Mr. Cole?”

“No, ma'am,” he said, knowing that she knew he would have been on the other side.

“So I stayed on here because there was no place else,” she said with an affirmation flavored by a slight dash of wistfulness. “How about you? Now that you know all about me, what put you onto a life on the run?

“I can tell by your accent that you and I were not on the same side in the war, but I consider that water to be long past the bridge.”

“No, ma'am, we were not. My family is still down around Caroline County, Virginia. I rode with the raiders for a couple of months in '65 . . . me and my brother, Will . . . then we came west. We were down in Texas . . . ended up in New Mexico.”

“Where's Will now?”

“He never made it out of New Mexico,” Cole said, trying to be matter-of-fact. “Got shot in a bar fight. I got one of them who did it. Other got away.”

“You're still hunting him, aren't you?” Mary Margaret asked sagely.

“Still looking around . . . not exactly hunting.”

“Guess that's why you didn't stay settled down there in Colorado when Sally ran off. Hope you find him. Hope you find somebody to fill that hole that Sally left.”

“I never said anything about a hole,” he replied defensively.

“Didn't have to,” she laughed. “In all my years of standing behind yonder bar, I've heard it all . . . and I've heard it so many times that I don't have to hear it . . . I can read it in their eyes.”

“Reckon I'm bothered by it to a degree,” Cole admitted.

“I suspect that when you're ready for courtin,' you'll know it.”

“I keep an eye open.”

“I'll bet you do,” Mary Margaret laughed.

“What about you, Mary Margaret?”

“Hmmm?”

“You keepin' an eye open?”

“Well . . . when Mike passed, it was not like he run off. He was taken . . . I sort of resigned myself to permanent widowhood. Once in a while there's somebody passing through.”

“I suppose . . .” Cole nodded.

“I didn't mean
you
,” Mary Margaret clarified. “I hope you won't take offense . . . or disappointment . . . but you're just a wee bit on the young side for me.”

“My heart is broke,” Cole said with a smile.

“If I was twenty years younger, it might not be,” she laughed, rocking back in her chair.

“So you're keepin' an eye open yourself?” Cole asked.

“You never know what can happen,” she said.

The way that her eyes flicked subconsciously in the direction of the jail, an idea came into Cole's head.

“Joshua Morgan?”

“Let's play some cards,” Mary Margaret said, beginning to shuffle the deck again.

Cole had just succeeded in winning his first hand of the four they had played when the doctor came in. He looked cold and had a dusting of snow on his shoulders.

“You got something warm behind the bar, Mary Margaret?” he said.

“I'll put on a pot of coffee on,” she said.

“Not that kind of warm,” he said. “I just got back from delivering a set of twins out at the Edredin place. One of 'em didn't make it.

“Sorry to hear that,” Mary Margaret said sympathetically as she poured a shot of dark amber liquid from a bottle that she kept under the bar. This, Cole knew, was what she called “the good stuff.”

“The missus took it real bad,” the doctor confided as he sat down at the table and savored a sip of his whiskey. “So did her husband.”

“How's the other one?” Mary Margaret asked in a motherly way.

“She'll be fine. Got a real set of lungs on her. Squealed herself pink in the first moments of life.”

“That's a good sign,” Mary Margaret said. Cole wondered if she had ever had children.

She dealt the doctor into the game without asking, and he drew a flush that topped his companions.

“Lucky day after all,” he said without smiling. He raked the coins to his side of the table and took another sip.

“How's our patient?” Cole asked the doctor as they studied their next hands.

“He's on the mend,” the doctor replied. “I've been keeping him pretty doped up because he's been in a lot of pain. He did almost more damage himself to his wrists than you did to his elbow. People don't seem to understand that you gotta clean a wound out real good as soon as possible or it will go to hell real fast.”