Stranger in Thunder Basin (Leisure Historical Fiction) Read online

  “They did the same thing. They wanted someone to milk cows and churn butter, wash clothes and do the house work. But Mr. Gregory wasn’t very nice, so I ran away and went back to the orphanage. Then I went to work for Mrs. Porter’s sister—this is Mrs. Porter—working in a café.”

  The woman at Ravenna’s left smiled and nodded.

  Ed did the same and said, “Pleased to meet you.” “But Mr. Gregory found out where I was and kept coming around, so we decided it would be best for me to move. I took the train out here to go to work for Mrs. Porter.”

  “I hope it turns out well for you.”

  “So do I.”

  He hesitated, not wanting to be put in the same category as Mr. Gregory. On the other hand, he doubted that Mrs. Porter would try to keep her business place a secret. “Well,” he said, “if I’m ever in your town, it would be a”—he fumbled until he found the words—“an honor to pay my respects.”

  Ravenna turned to Mrs. Porter. “It’s Litch, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “My place is called the Iris. It’s by far the best boarding house in that town.”

  “I’m sure it is. Whenever I get to Litch, and who knows when that’ll be, I’ll know what to look for.”

  Ed was grinding points on the feet of a campfire tripod when Jory Stoner came into the shop. Jory was a happy-go-lucky young cowboy who came into town about once a month. He was lean and not very tall, clean shaven, with brown hair and brown eyes topped off with a wide-brimmed hat. At the moment, he carried a pair of hobbles in his left hand, and as usual, he was smiling.

  “Got a little job,” he said.

  Ed set the tripod free, standing on the packed floor. “What’s that?”

  Jory held the hobbles apart, one in each hand, to show that they were separated. One had a D-ring attached, and the other had a D-ring plus about five inches of chain. “Need to hook these together.”

  “How’d they come apart?”

  “Don’t know. That’s how I got ‘em.”

  Emerson appeared on Jory’s left. Raising his chin and looking down his nose, he said, “Go ahead and forge a link for him.” Then he turned away and left the two young men to themselves.

  Ed went to the forge and heated it up, found a link to match the chain, and went to work. Jory stood by and smiled every time Ed looked his way. When Ed was finished with the little job, he held the pair of hobbles apart at chest height and said, “That’s hotter’n hell. I don’t know if you want to soak it in water.”

  “Should I?”

  “Don’t know about the leather.”

  “Won’t hurt it.” Jory took the hobbles.

  At that moment, Ed’s gaze was pulled to an image beyond the open doorway, a slender dark shape of a man crossing the street at a three-quarters profile. Ed felt the old prickly sensation run through his upper body.

  “What’s the matter?” Jory’s voice seemed distant.

  Ed came back to himself and was surprised to see Jory standing so near. “I just saw something.”

  “What’d you see? You look like you saw a ghost. All the color drained out of your face.”

  Ed took a deep breath. “It was like a ghost, but it wasn’t. It was a man walking across the street.” He craned his neck to the right. “I need to see if I can get another look at him.”

  He went to the open doorway, with Jory half a step behind. The man was nowhere in sight.

  Jory’s hat appeared at the corner of Ed’s vision. “See him?”

  “No, he’s gone for right now.”

  “Someone you know?”

  “Someone I saw once before. A long time ago.” Ed searched up and down the street, taking in men and horses and wagons, but he did not see the man he was looking for.

  Then the man appeared on the sidewalk across the street and down a ways on the left. He did not look around, nor did he seem in a hurry. He stepped down into the street, untied a sorrel from the hitchrack, mounted up, and rode away.

  Ed’s heart was beating fast. He expelled a long breath as he watched the horse and rider recede. In spite of the sounds from the rock crusher, the world seemed silent.

  “Is that him?” came Jory’s voice at his side.

  “That’s the man.” Ed gave a slow shake of the head, as if to clear away any uncertainties. Then he turned to Jory. “Do you know who he is?”

  “Two bits.” Emerson’s voice came out loud from behind them.

  The two young men turned. Jory smiled, showing a full set of good teeth. With the hobbles dangling in his left hand, he dug into his trousers pocket and brought out a coin. As he handed it to Emerson he said, “Much obliged.”

  “Not at all.” Emerson lingered.

  “I’ll be right there,” Ed told him. “Just one little thing.”

  Emerson turned and walked away.

  Ed raised his eyebrows. “Sorry,” he said. “Wasn’t worth more’n a dime.”

  “Aw, that’s all right. They didn’t cost me anything.”

  Ed cast his glance down the street again. The stranger was nowhere in sight. Half turning to Jory, Ed asked, “Did you say you know him?”

  “Didn’t say yet. But I think I know who he is. One of Mort Ramsey’s men.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Mort Ramsey? Aw, he’s got a big place out in Thunder Basin. Calls it the King Diamond Ranch.”

  “Thunder Basin. Where exactly is that? I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been there.”

  “It’s north and west of here. You go to Litch, then north from there. You get out into some pretty big country.”

  “Huh. I just met a girl who said she was on her way to stay in Litch. I should go there sometime. How far is it?”

  Jory smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a day’s ride, but quite a bit less if you know a girl there.”

  “I don’t ride like you do. I just ride gentle horses.” Ed looked down the street and saw nothing in particular.

  Jory’s voice came in a lilt. “Someone’s got to gentle ’em.”

  Ed turned and nodded. “Good thing.” Then he saw the tripod where he had left it. “Well, I’d better get back to work.”

  “Good enough. I need to shove along anyway. But if you ever get out that way, don’t be a stranger. Like Homer says, we’ll water down the soup and put another plate on the table.”

  “Tompkins Ranch.”

  “You bet. About halfway to Litch, there’s a road turns off by an old mound of dirt. They call it the Barrow. Go north twelve miles, and you’re in the yard.”

  “I might do that.”

  Ed saw the Barrow and the road that turned there, but he kept on the trail to Litch. Maybe on the way back he would ride the twelve miles, but for the time being he wanted to see if he could make the ride to Litch in one day.

  It was a good time of year to travel—not hot and not cold. The grass had greened up, and the call of meadowlarks carried on the clear air. Here and there an antelope showed, white and tan against the rolling grassland. More than once a prairie dog sat upright on the mound of its burrow and watched him from twenty feet away. In mid afternoon he jumped a jackrabbit, lanky and long eared. The animal bolted to the left, cut right, and crossed the trail, then kept on its zigzag way to the northwest until it disappeared behind a rise. Dawes had said that if you let out a long whistle, a jackrabbit would stop and perk up his ears to listen. Ed never tried it.

  He made it to Litch when the sun was slipping in the west, and he had to pull his hat brim down. But as he rode into the main street, he put the hat in its regular position. He wanted to be noticed as little as possible, while at the same time he wanted to see as much as he could without staring.

  The town had a rougher look to it than Glenrose did. Most of the buildings were weathered and un-painted, and what trees there were had not grown to eye level of a man on horse back. Most of them were elms, thin branches just leafing out.

  He imagined that for Mrs. Porter to say, as she had, that her boarding house was
the best by far in this town, there must be more an element of pride than a basis of comparison. He did not see the place on his first pass through, but on his way back he found it on a cross street in the middle of the next block to the north. The sign, which hung out perpendicular from the building, had seen some weather. The white background paint was flaking, and the lower part of the “r” on Iris had disappeared, so that it looked like a cattle brand or a letter from a foreign language.

  He tied his horse at the hitching rail and walked up the wooden steps, feeling nervous. At the desk inside, Mrs. Porter gave him a close look through her spectacles as she answered his question about staying just one night. She kept her eye on him as he signed his name in the register.

  Looking straight at him, she said, “Aren’t you the boy who was asking all the questions in Glenrose?”

  He drew back. “Yes, I am, but I didn’t know I was asking all of them.”

  Mrs. Porter folded her hands together on the counter. “Well, if you came here just to see her, don’t get your hopes up. She’s got work to do, and one rule of the house is that everyone minds his own business.”

  “Oh, to be sure. And as far as that goes, I didn’t come this way just to see her. I’m going farther on, north of here, to see some of the country. I just thought I would stay at this place, since you said it was the best in town.”

  “I’ve got no quarrel with that.” She gave him another close look. “I thought you worked.”

  “I do. I’m taking a little time off.”

  “You mean you quit.”

  “Not exactly. Working in the shop was fine all winter, but I want to get out and see some things. I’ve got enough to pay my way, and if he hires someone else by the time I get back, I can find another job. I’ve always worked, and I’m not afraid of it.”

  She pushed a key toward him. “Room sixteen. You’ll share it with another workingman. Supper’s at seven.”

  During the meal, he caught every glimpse he could of Ravenna, her dark hair and shapely figure, but she did not linger. As she was clearing away the last of the dishes, she spoke.

  “Mrs. Porter says you’re passing through. I hope you have a safe journey.”

  “Thank you.”

  She did not reappear, so he left the table and went out to take the night air. He walked up and down the main street, steering wide of the saloons but catching a glimpse inside each of them. Seeing nothing to attract his interest, he went back to the boardinghouse.

  That night he slept in a narrow room, not six feet from a man with a large belly who groaned and snored. In the morning he saw Ravenna but did not speak to her, and not long after breakfast he rode north out of Litch.

  For the first three or four hours, he did not see a tree, only plain landscape with grass, cactus, and low sagebrush. Then he came to broken country, with bulges and gashes so rough he wondered how a cowpuncher could get cattle out of there. Yet the grass sprouted green in the bottoms, and cedar trees showed up here and there.

  By late afternoon the trail rose and wound through low hills with sparse vegetation. Off to the west and north, the breaks drained toward a valley that rose on the far side to a row of bluffs. Then the trail came down into a valley on the right.

  The hills on his left, to the northeast, had an orange hue and were dotted with dark clumps of brush, but for the most part they were bare and set apart from one another. Then came a line of hills running south by southeast, also orange and with a liberal spacing of pine trees.

  On the valley floor, out on a flat of grass and stirrup-high sagebrush, he found a waterhole. After letting his horse drink, he moved about a quarter of a mile west, where he found a low bluff and a six-foot cedar. He picketed his horse a ways off, rolled out his camp, and appreciated the silence as the shadows lengthened.

  The sun came up early over the hills in the east, and Ed was surprised to see that the hills were now green instead of orange. He figured it must be the light.

  He took the horse to water, set it out again, and boiled a cup of coffee in a can. Meadowlarks were singing, as were some small blackish birds with white shoulders, and the morning was still fresh when he saddled the horse and tied on his gear. He decided this valley was worth a look, so he marked in his mind where the main trail lay and then set out across the landscape.

  The first thing he noticed was the great number of prairie dog holes, every one of them abandoned. Most had drifted or washed in, and in the mouths of many of the holes, small dead tumbleweeds had settled.

  Crossing the flat, he rode down into a creek bottom, where he saw the hide remnants and scattered bones of an antelope that must have died in the winter. Past that he crossed a muddy trickle and climbed out the other side. Along the flank of the hills he saw the source of yesterday’s orange. Underfoot, there lay millions of small, shaly, orange bits of flat rock that he figured must shine brighter when the sun crossed over and hit them directly. Also on the hillside he saw chunks of sandstone, many of them that looked suitable for building banks, hotels, or ranch houses.

  He rode to the top of a smooth hill, threading through pines, and there he saw the clear silhouette of a dead pine tree against the blue sky. All the needles and twigs were long gone, and the outstretched limbs were smooth and dark.

  Farther along, he came to a vantage point where he could view the valley below. From camp he had seen the leafless tops of several trees, and now he took in the larger picture. A long watercourse, with a great many draws draining into it, threaded through this valley. Ed could see where the water had cut against one bank or another as the course had changed over the years. For about a mile, the banks were fifty to a hundred yards apart, and in the wide, grassy bottom, huge cottonwoods had grown. Most of them grew in clumps, while a few stood alone. Almost every one was dead. Some had fallen over, showing large, uprooted trunks, and from the debris that had caught between the branches and the ground, Ed could imagine the powerful flash floods that might come through here. In spite of the wreckage, at least a hundred trees stood upright along the course, their gray and broken branches giving the place the character of an old cemetery.

  On his way out of the valley, Ed stopped at the waterhole again. Then he found the trail and followed it as it wound to the north. It took him through more broken country into a land of vast reaches where, more than a day’s ride in all directions, bluffs and buttes rose in the hazy distance. He felt as if he had entered an interior country, a broad, uncharted land that lay between the old road to the east, which ran from Cheyenne to the Black Hills, and the Bozeman Trail on the west, which went to Douglas and Casper and then north from there.

  From time to time, the broken country would smooth out a little into a wide, grassy bowl a few miles across. In one of these, off to his left, he saw the headquarters of a ranch. It lay downslope and sheltered from north and westerly winds but uphill from the creek that ran through the drainage. A mile farther, he came to a road that led into the ranch area he had just seen. A massive gateway, made of upright logs and a crossbeam that must have been hauled a long way, marked the entrance. Hanging from the cross-member by two short chains was a plank two feet wide and about nine feet long, with the words King Diamond Ranch burned into the lumber.

  Ed rode back along the trail until he could see the headquarters again. Here in the middle of this far-flung country called Thunder Basin, he had found the place he was looking for. He would know it when he came this way again.

  He camped in the valley of the dead cottonwoods on his way back to Litch. The hills showed orange again, and the only difference from the evening before was the appearance of a big, feathery-legged owl that came flapping out of the bare branches of a cottonwood as he rode past.

  He returned to Litch without having seen or talked to another human being since he left. Now back in town, he checked into the Iris, where Mrs. Porter had minimal conversation and where he exchanged about as many words with Ravenna as on his previous visit. After supper he had a bath, then ended up i
n the room with the same man as before. The man, who seemed inclined to talk, asked Ed if he was looking for work.

  “Not quite. I did see some ranches, though. One in particular caught my eye. The King Diamond.”

  “Oh, yeah.” The man wrinkled his nose. “I used to work there.” He was sitting on the edge of his bed, and at this point he braced himself with his hands on his knees and started coughing. He hawked up a gob and spit it into a can by his foot.

  “Really? How long ago was that?”

  “Left about ten years ago. Worked there five years. Hasn’t changed much since then, from what I’ve heard.” The man did not seem to harbor any fond memories.

  “Hmm. I was wonderin’ about a fella who works there.”

  “Which one?”

  “Thin sort of fella. Dark features, dark hat.”

  “Snake Eyes.”

  “Is that what they call him?”

  “No, that’s what I call him. His name is Bridge.” “Bridge, huh? Did he work there when you did?” “Oh, yeah. Him and Ramsey go way back.” The man coughed again. “What’s your interest in him?”

  “Not much. I just saw him and wondered who he was.”

  “Lots of things to wonder about in this life. When I was your age, I wondered about the girls and what I might get to do with them.”

  “Oh, I wonder about that, too.”

  The man held his hand on the bottom of his belly. “Well, don’t worry about any of the rest of it until you have to.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  Ed went to sleep as soon as the man turned down the lamp. He slept straight through, and in the morning he realized the older man’s snoring hadn’t bothered him at all.

  Chapter Three

  When Ed came to the Barrow, he turned north. Twelve miles into the yard, Jory had said. It seemed like a lot of extra travel to have ridden south to Litch, east to the Barrow, and now north to the ranch. There had to be more than one way to cut across country southeast from where he had left the Thunder Basin area the day before, but until he knew the country better, he had to stick to the main roads.