Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) by Bill Yenne

Bladen Cole, justice, when applied to the Porter boys, was no longer a matter of “dead or alive.” Justice could only be served by bringing the remaining outlaws back
alive
to point their fingers at Isham Ransdell.
    The bounty hunter had hoped to continue his pursuit the morning after the demise of Milton Waller, but the time expended in getting two copies of the death certificate—one for himself and one to mail to Isham Ransdell—had cost most of the day. It had taken all morning and several trips back and forth to the county clerk’s office to get copies of Waller’s death certificate and to get them signed by both Doc Ashby and the coroner. He then had to chase down a notary whose office hours began only when he had slept off his night before.
    Cole decided to sleep one more night between sheets in the fleabag hotel and bought his dinner at a little shack of a cafe near the levee. He decided to buy his whiskey at the saloon nearest his hotel, a typical Fort Benton dive, where trappers from the distant corners of the Plains and boatmen from the Missouri were being united with their first whiskey in months. The piano player was banging out some familiar Virginia marches, and it made Cole a little nostalgic.
    He met a woman who craved companionship in a commercial, rather than nostalgic, sort of way, and he talked with her until he discovered that she had no information about the Porter boys. She too lost interest and drifted on to another prospect when she discovered that the only thing he was buying that night was drinks.
    She had told him her name, but he forgot it right away. She too reminded him of Sally Lovelace in that way that most painted ladies now reminded him of Sally Lovelace. This one also had Sally’s habit of making intense eye contact and telling him that she knew what he was thinking.
    This night in this saloon reminded him of another night long ago in that other bar down in Silver City, where prospectors came down out of the Mogollon Mountains with too much gold dust and not enough sense.
    The Cole brothers, William and Bladen, had been drinking far too long for their own good that night—he would grant that as a fact—but young men barely into their twenties cannot be told such a thing at the time.
    So too had been another pair of young men barely into their twenties. As often happens in circumstances such as prevailed that night, neither pair of young men walked away, as they should have, from a quarrel that had ensued.
    Perhaps if Bladen had tugged at Will’s sleeve and insisted that they let the two men go, it never would have happened, but he had not, and it did.
    It happened so fast, and in such a fog, that Bladen never really knew which man drew his gun first, but Bladen knew he was the
last
. When the dust had settled, two men lay dead, and one was Will. The fourth man, the cowardly one with the narrow face of a rodent, had vanished into the night.
    Through all the ensuing years, in saloons like this one in Fort Benton, Cole had found himself scanning the patrons who swirled in the kerosene glow, searching the room for the rat-faced man who took his brother’s life.
    Through all the ensuing years, he had yet to see that ugly face again.
    *   *   *
    D OC A SHBY HAD CONFIRMED WHAT A GGIE IN D IAMOND City had said that she had overheard. The Porter boys were headed across the Marias River into Blackfeet country. In Montana around this time, you could more or less dance all around the law with impunity, but
only
more or less. The only place you could
really
outrun the law was where there was
no
law. It was commonly stated that there was “no law north of the Marias.”
    The cold wind blowing from the Arctic across the Canadian prairies stung his face as Cole rode the undulating landscape of apparently endless flatness alternated with broad gullies cut by streams and filled with golden aspen.
    It was, in the eyes of an outsider, a