Rocky Mountain Justice (The Legend of Camel's Hump) (12 page)

Dawn was breathless as she responded with, “Yeah, but we have to talk. A lot has happened today.” She dove into Jerry’s open arms and clutched him frantically. Jerry was shocked. He’d never seen Dawn so worked up. He said, “Dawn, calm down, Honey. You’re shaking like a leaf. Calm down and tell me what’s going on.” “Not here, Jerry. Can you and Ray get away anytime soon?” The answer came from behind him, from one of the older workers who had been working in close proximity to the Olympia cooler all day, “Sure they can go! If I was your age and knew a young lady that looked like you, I wouldn’t have been here at all, let alone this long!” This set off a barrage of good-natured ribbing as the two boys put their tools away and moved toward the hole in the wall where the door frame was to be installed. It was late afternoon anyway and they had already put in more time than most of the workers. As Jerry moved toward the outside, he hollered back over his shoulder. “You guys take it easy on that near-beer, will you? I don’t want to spend all day tomorrow fixing your screw-ups in there!” Then he broke into a run, laughing, as one of the workers threw a half-full beer bottle at him. He loved the feeling of being accepted by the older men on the job. He was going to be seventeen soon and, for the first time, he felt as if he was really growing up.

Jerry, Dawn, Ray and Red all crowded into the old coupe and headed for Jerry’s home. They could sit under the trees in the yard there and talk privately. But Dawn couldn’t wait to tell the boys what had transpired that afternoon. By the time they got to Jerry’s, she had already told the story and was pleading for Jerry and Ray to figure out a way to rescue the girl, Annette. The discussion was animated. Dawn and Ray threw around their ideas as to how they could get the girl out by themselves or with the help of certain townspeople. Red was in favor of getting on the town’s only telephone and calling the capital, Helena, to find the FBI or any law organization not associated with the sheriff’s office. Jerry, characteristically, just drove and listened to them, thinking hard about the situation. Finally they got to their destination and piled out of the cramped car. Without going inside, they moved to the picnic table under the trees and continued the discussion. Still Jerry was silent.

Finally, Dawn reached her limit and, looking at Jerry, sharply said, “Jerry, What in hell are you thinking? You haven’t said a word since we got in the car!” Jerry’s eyebrows went up at the verbal assault, but he remained calm. “Guys, I’m thinking, but I’m drawing blanks. We can’t just charge up there and set her free. She may be a legitimate criminal prisoner, just working off her sentence. She did tell you that she had been arrested, didn’t she?” Dawn reluctantly concurred.

Then Jerry continued, “Even if she isn’t a criminal, we’ve seen what Ike and the sheriff are capable of and I don’t want to bring that down on our families. It would be smart to contact some outside law organization, but I don’t know how we could do that. If we try to use the town’s pay phone to call for outside help, we have to go through the operator in Big River. That operator listens to every conversation, so this will be gossiped all over town right away and the sheriff will hear the gossip. We’ll be dead meat.” As he spoke, Dawn’s face reddened and she heatedly interrupted, “But what about the girl?” Jerry stopped her by continuing with his thoughts. “I just don’t know what to do about her. Maybe it’s time that we tell an adult about this and get their ideas. My problem is that I don’t know who to tell. I don’t want to bring these thugs down on any of them. I guess I’m open to suggestions.”

The discussion then turned to the people they knew and trusted. But none of them could agree on an individual that they felt could help. They all agreed that the risk was huge for anyone that tried to get involved. The names that they discussed belonged to people with families; people who could be taking their lives in their hands if they tried to help. It was a dilemma.

They had been talking for over an hour when Aunt Hilda came to the door and yelled at them, “Time to break up the pow-wow, Fellas. It’s suppertime!” Startled, Dawn glanced at her watch, saying, “Oh man, she’s right. I’ve gotta get home.” Jerry then summed up the discussion with, “Look, Ray and I will go back out there in the morning. Maybe we can come up with some better ideas if we take a good look at the layout again. Then we can meet back here tomorrow evening and talk about it.”

The next morning, Jerry and Ray went to the construction site and made sure that the morning’s work was started. Then they excused themselves, saying that they had some errands to run for Aunt Hilda. Since they had been working on the site far more than anyone else, their absence was not a problem. They were soon heading for Camel’s Hump Road and their hidden parking place. Within an hour they were at the overlook site, adjusting their binoculars to better see the sheep ranch below them.

It was obvious, as soon as they arrived, that something had changed. The sheriff was gone, but they had expected that. Only Bird was in sight and she was industriously scrubbing the stone and cement hovel where Annette had been imprisoned yesterday. The door to the little prison building was wide open and the lock that had been on the door was missing.

Ray was the first to speak, “What’s going on? Do you see the girl?” Jerry was still scanning the area. “No. Something’s wrong. Keep watching and see if you can spot Ike anywhere. His pickup is here, so he can’t be far away.” Both resumed scanning the area. After about ten minutes of this, Ray dropped his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. “I’m not seeing anything. Do you think that he might have the girl inside the house? That would be scary, wouldn’t it?” Jerry grunted his agreement, but kept scanning. Then Ray continued, “You know, maybe we’re overreacting. Maybe the sheriff just brought the girl out here to do some work and then he took her back to jail. Maybe this is just the way the jail system works. We sure don’t know anything about that place. Maybe this is all just a normal way to do their law business!” It was Jerry’s turn to think a bit before replying, “Could be. I don’t know jack about jails. All I really know is what I read in Huck Finn.”

Just then Jerry saw something. “Wait! There’s movement way over to the right, on the far side of the hill behind the house. Can you see it?” Ray rolled over and focused in on the spot. “Yeah, I see it. Looks like the hat that Ike wears, just coming up that old trail back there.” After a moment he continued, “Yup. It’s Ike. Probably been hunting. Looks like he’s carrying a gun or something, can’t tell for sure through the trees.” Then Jerry spoke, “No, he’s carrying a shovel. He must have been working on something.” Silence enveloped them as the boys watched Ike casually strolling over the hill and down toward the house.

Ike walked around the house and up the stairs to the porch, leaning the shovel against the stair railing. He took a seat in one of the old rocking chairs on the porch and stretched as if to relax aching muscles. Bird came out of the stone building, throwing slop water from a bucket on the dirt outside the door. She noticed Ike and shouted at him. “Get it done?” His reply was lower, but was still loud enough to be heard by the boys on the hill. “Yeah. It was a big job. That was one big batch of trash. But I made sure it was deep enough that the critters couldn’t dig it up like before.” She said something the boys couldn’t hear and went back to scrubbing the building’s walls. Ike stood up and walked over to the cement building where he stood beside the barred window looking at the ground. “I sure wish I knew who left these tracks. Somebody’s been snooping around here.” Bird responded with, “I’m not too worried about it. From the size of the tracks, it was just a little kid. It’s probably some nosy brat that’ll be too scared to talk to anyone.” Ike replied thoughtfully. “Yeah, I know. But it could be that someone around here might know too much.” He paused and then added, “We’ll have to listen to the gossip. If anyone does know anything, they’ll eventually slip up and talk too much. We’ll take care of them when they do.”

Jerry glanced at Ray and whispered, “Time to get the hell out of here. Be careful to brush away any trace of yourself as you leave.” using one of the pine branches they brought along for this purpose, he followed his own instructions as he carefully made his way back to Camel’s Hump Road.

They moved silently until they were in the car and back on the road to town. Only then did they voice their thoughts, with Jerry making the first comment. “Dawn must have left some kind of tracks outside that window. I bet that the squaw had a trap laid there so she could tell if anyone came around.” Ray agreed, “Yeah. Ike ain’t smart enough to think of something like that, but I bet that old witch would. I’m sure glad that Dawn has little bitty feet!” There was a long silence from both of them after that thought. The two in the Ford were silent for the rest of the journey.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

Death Visits the Hump

I
t was turning into a very strange summer. In spite of their anxiety, Jerry and his friends found that life was moving along fairly normally. The construction project was keeping the townspeople busy and the sheep ranch with its cast of misbegotten characters was semi-forgotten by most people. The sheriff was spending more and more time at the ranch. He and Ike never seemed to do much. They just sat on the porch, drinking and shooting pistols at targets they set up in the yard.

Jerry, Dawn, Ray, and Red had put their heads together as soon as the old Ford arrived in Dublin after finding the girl missing. It had been an extremely puzzled group that slowly came to the realization that the girl they knew as “Annette” had disappeared. The consensus was that the sheriff had returned the girl to the county jail to serve out her sentence, whatever it was. Dawn held out hope that she may have escaped, but none of them really believed that was possible. Young Red came up with a scenario under which the prisoner had been killed and buried somewhere on the sheep ranch, but that was quickly discarded as far too unrealistic. Even Red admitted that there hadn’t been a murder in this part of Montana for as long as any of them could remember. So the likelihood of a sheriff and his deputy committing the first one was just unrealistic.

They agreed to keep the secret of the girl to themselves. They decided that they didn’t really know anything concrete and, by staying quiet, they could protect the people of the town and, at the same time, let things die down a bit. They thought that the silence might lull Ike and the sheriff into a bit of complacency. They decided to stay away from Camel’s Hump, except for periodic surveillance, until the end of August. By then, they reasoned, they would have figured out what was going on at the ranch and they would have had time to develop a plan of attack. They wanted to make Ike and the sheriff understand that they couldn’t bully the town and they wanted to get it done before the winter’s snow started. Past that, they had no firm plan. But they knew that a showdown was coming.

As the summer wore on, Jerry’s bandages slowly came off as his cuts healed. But there was a huge scar that ran from the outside corner of his right eyebrow up into his hairline; a red slash of a scar that never seemed to fade. The summer sun tanned him, but the scar never tanned. If he became emotional, or strained to lift something, it turned pure white, carving its way across his forehead. Dawn said that it gave him character, but to Jerry it was a constant reminder of the horrors brought to Dublin by the people living in the shadow of Camel’s Hump. He developed a habit of softly stroking the scar when he was lost in thought or nervous.

Through the summer, Jerry and Ray worked nonstop on the home construction project. Dawn and Red checked regularly on Ike’s place, particularly when Sheriff Montgomery came to town, but their surveillance turned up nothing of interest. Life went on, seemingly unaltered, for the other Dublin townspeople. The pastor came back to town and held regular Sunday services.

But there was an uneasy undercurrent everywhere. The townspeople didn’t know about Annette, but they knew about the encounters involving the sheriff and his deputy. Rumors, suspicions, and speculation were everywhere as the people waited for the next shoe to drop.

The new home moved along rapidly. By the middle of August, they were installing fixtures, plastering walls, and laying in the finished flooring. Hilda had decided to wire the home for electricity and put in a modern bathroom. Electric power lines had not yet reached the area where the home was located, but she wanted to be ready when they did come. She was adamant on this. She went to the little bank in Big River and took out a loan to pay for the light fixtures, bathtub, sinks, and commode. Without protest, the building crew installed them, blanking off all the plumbing fixtures so they could be used with water hauled in from the hand pump in the new well house. They thought this was a bit strange, but they were not about to argue with Hilda Moore about such a minor item.

The town began planning a big celebration to be held on Labor Day at the new home site. It would be their standard community Labor Day Celebration enhanced by also being a moving day celebration for the Moore family if the home construction was complete. The building crew stepped up their efforts so the house would be complete in time.

It was the last week in August before anything changed. It was a beautiful summer day in the mountain community and Jerry and Ray were shirtless, working on the house. The sheriff’s big car rolled through town and headed toward Ike’s place. Red was sweating profusely, but was steadfastly delivering newspapers when he saw the car go past. He finished his deliveries and then found Dawn at home. They got on their bikes and headed for Camel’s Hump to see what they could see.