Yellowstone Read online

  John Cutler was famous for tracking down anything or anyone. So when Iris Shannon, the beautiful saloon keeper, asked him to kill a rogue grizzly in Yellowstone, he couldn’t refuse. But he had his work cut out for him. Not only was there a wild grizzly to deal with but poachers were in Yellowstone and Cutler had to put an end to them. Man or beast, Cutler had trouble ahead!

  YELLOWSTONE

  JOHN CUTLER 6

  By H. V. Elkin

  First Published by Tower Publications in 1980

  Copyright© 1980, 2014 by Vernon Hinkle

  First Smashwords Edition: June 2015

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  This book is for Larry Hinkle

  Chapter One

  He thought he felt a chill in the air as the sun descended toward the rim of the vast bowl of the Oklahoma sky. He felt another kind of chill, apprehension, as the flaming ball seemed to stop in its course, and, while suspending itself against nature, stared hard at the man. It cast long shadows of the man, the two mules pulling the rig he rode, the giant Airedale that sat on the seat beside him, and the bay gelding that followed.

  The dog whimpered and looked at the man. What was it that was going to happen? They had been caught in a tornado recently. The man knew an Indian who had been picked up by the storm and deposited bodily, unharmed, a mile away. The man had killed two other men. None of this had given him the tingling sensation he now felt.

  What was going to happen?

  Why was the sun pausing to invite the man to take a last look at his life? When it rose again on the opposite side of the earth, nothing would be the same.

  Nobody thought of John Cutler as a sensitive man. Ask anyone in Tensleep, where the trapper checked in from time to time. No, sir. John Cutler was as hard as a new nail, as strong as a bull elk, as tough as a cookhouse steak. But sensitive?

  Sure, he had a driving obsession to kill a particular bear. And sometimes, at the bottom of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, a faraway look came to his eyes; it would take maybe another half a bottle to make it go away. Troubled, maybe, lonely most of the time. But never sensitive.

  Cutler knew himself best, and he would not think of himself as sensitive. Among most men like him, who seldom put a roof between them and the stars—men who shared a cautious partnership with nature, who were still alive because they knew when to kill and how to—there was no room for sentiment.

  There hardness etched deeply in his face by the slanting rays of the mocking sun. Under the brim of his flat-crowned sombrero, Cutler’s face was hard and craggy as if everything unnecessary had been removed. There were threads of gray in his black hair and eyebrows, even though he was still in his early thirties. His skin was like tightly stretched rawhide, and his deep-set, gunmetal-colored eyes squinted from looking across long distances through bright sunlight.

  The hardness was in his body, too. His barrel chest had grown large from hard work and breathing deeply when air was all he had to live on. Lean of waist with slim hips, he had just what a man needed to survive. There was nothing extra to carry across the thousands of miles his profession had sent him regularly over the last few years.

  The dog whimpered again. Cutler scratched the Airedale behind its ears. It was the only reassurance he could offer the animal. Sorry, Red, he thought, I don’t get it either.

  The sun plummeted. The man could not foresee the danger ahead. It was too late. It was about to begin.

  Cutler shrugged his broad shoulders. He didn’t know how to deal with vagueness any more than he was able to be dishonest. He wouldn’t waste ammunition shooting into the darkness. When the thing came, whatever it was—when it could be seen—he would know what to do about it. All that was clear so far was night was happening. All there was to be done was to set up camp.

  His fingers barely moved on the reins, but a message went through them to the mules as surely as a signal goes over a telegraph wire. With sleek black bodies, Kate and Emma, stopped. They were sensitive. They were able to pick up Cutler’s thoughts, responding accordingly. “Stubborn as a mule” did not apply to them two.

  Red, the Airedale, was sensitive to his master in the same way.

  So was Apache, the bay gelding, now coming alongside the wagon seat. He shook his head in agreement about making camp beside a stream bordered by cottonwoods.

  The four animals were the only family Cutler had. But he didn’t like to think about that.

  A spring wagon covered with a tarp over hoops was his home. The opening by the seat was its front door and tailgate was the backdoor. Inside, instead of chandeliers, there were all sizes and types of animal traps hung from the hoops. For a bureau there was a big, battered leather suitcase; it held a change of clothes for when Cutler reached the end of the trail and washed off the trapper smell.

  The wagon was more of an arsenal. There was a Winchester .30-30 carbine, he usually carried in the saddle boot. In the rack behind the wagon seat there was a Krag .30-caliber high-powered repeating rifle. In the wagon was a 12-gauge shotgun. Added to these weapons was the .44 Colt Cutler wore on his right hip and the Case sheath knife on his left side. They prepared for any situation he would encounter—except maybe the one creeping toward him, the one he couldn’t see yet.

  After camp had been set up and the animals tended to, Cutler drank strong coffee from a tin cup and stared into the fire. In the flames, were only memories he wanted to forget. He finished his coffee and poured bourbon into the cup. Only half a bottle was left. Another man might have rationed it to last until he reached a town, but Cutler never doled out the meager comforts of his life. He didn’t make the whisky last any more than he used moderation with women. The difference was, when liquor was drunk, it was gone. Women had a way of replenishing themselves when they were around.

  Women. That was a pleasant turn of thought. That pretty Fairfax Randall had a ranch near Buffalo Springs in west Texas. Sue Blue Cloud was an Indian in Oklahoma. Iris Shannon, who had been born of English parents, now ran a string of saloons; he had seen her more than once. He had liked her a lot, because she was responsible for the few times he had really felt good since . . . since when? Since his wife was killed.

  He pushed the memory back with a long drink from the cup. It helped long enough for him to be able to pour again. And drink again. He was gaining control of himself now. He thought he could handle his thoughts for the rest of the night.

  Cutler finished the bourbon, got into his bedroll, and stared at the stars. He remembered a night on his ranch in Arizona when he sat on the porch looking at the stars with the only woman who had ever made him care about them.

  Looking down at the fire, he noticed it was dying, and closed his eyes.

  He slept but did not dream. At least, he didn’t remember his dreams. Sleep was a long, fast fall into oblivion, he usually came out of it as fast as he went into it. Tonight was different. His stomach contracted for no apparent reason. An arm shot out suddenly and smashed down on the ground with great force. The noise woke up Red, who came and settled near his master, but the fitfulness continued.

  A warning growl came from the dog.

  As Cutler shot up from the dark depths of sleep, one last swipe of his arm hit onto a rippling coil of a snake. It arched it head, its rattles shaking quick
ly, and sunk its fangs into Cutler’s wrist.

  He sprang to his feet and saw the rattler ready to strike again. Then he saw Red, hunched and ready to attack.

  “Back, Red!”

  The dog obeyed reluctantly.

  Cutler had the Colt in his hand and fired. A hole appeared in the snake’s head and it fell. The rattles continued to sound for a while after the snake was dead.

  Cutler saw the two wounds in his wrist. One bang had punctured a vein. He applied pressure with his thumb above the fang mark and kicked some wood on the fire’s embers. In a moment, the fire was bright enough for Cutler to see what he was doing.

  He made a tourniquet with his bandanna and a stick and squeezed in tightly around his forearm. Then he took his sheath knife and made two incisions on either side of the wound. He sucked at the wound, and spit. Then he sucked and spit again. After loosening the tourniquet for half a minute, he tightened it again and repeated his attempt to suck out the poison.

  He did not know if he had gotten enough poison out to remain alive.

  Cutler felt the numbness in his hand spread to his lips, tongue and scalp. As he looked at the fire, it blurred and became two. He must wait it out now. Lying on the ground he did not move. Any exertion would only make it worse—if that was possible.

  He felt as if he were floating. The widely scattered stars blended into a white haze. Then came nausea and a deep pain in his gut. Moving his head slowly to the side he vomited. Then he heard a roaring, rushing sound as if the stream was turning into a flash flood.

  But the sound was inside his head. Its currents carried him into delirium, a dream he could not forget.

  He saw a grizzly bear caught in a trap, saw it chew off its own foot to escape. A giant, snake-headed silvertip bear, howling in pain, a blaze of white along one shoulder from an old wound, hob-bled away toward the ranch.

  Doreen was hanging up clothes in the yard in the last moments of her life. The beauty inside her shone on her face. The light that had always been there was now magnified by the knowledge that she carried a child, Cutler’s child.

  Then the bear was on her, dragging her down into a jumble of laundry and blood.

  Next, the bear was gone. Cutler stooped over Doreen and held her in his arms. Her face was bloody and one arm was a stump. Her left breast was ripped and punctured. Before dying she was able to tell him what happened. Then she went limp in his arms.

  Cutler saw himself on the trail of the rogue grizzly. He felt the obsession grow within himself, goaded by the death of the woman he had truly loved, by the loss of his child, by the guilt that he had not checked his traps. If he had, the bear would not have gotten away to kill Doreen only to be trailed through half a dozen states and territories, always to be lost.

  Cutler saw himself becoming an expert on rogue animals, his fame spreading, his journeys to trap the rogues, and his continuing search for that particular one.

  The images lost their color and faded into a brilliant whiteness. Cutler opened his eyes and stared directly into the blinding overhead sun. His mouth was dry, and he had a craving for sweet drink.

  He sat up. There was a slight swelling in his arms, but the danger had passed. He was still alive. There was no guessing how long he had been unconscious.

  Red licked his face. The dog looked as if he hadn’t eaten for a couple of days. Apache raised his head from the stream and trotted over to nuzzle Cutler.

  Cutler was not a religious man. Belief in a Maker would be accepting the destiny that had killed Doreen. Cutler could not do that. As a boy in Oklahoma, he had picked up a sense of the Great Spirit from a Comanche friend. Maybe some of that was still with him. He had a feeling that that sun’s existence was no accident. If someone put it up there, maybe that someone had also kept him alive—for some reason.

  But he was still reluctant to look for heavenly guidance. He lived by his wits and muscles. If things went bad in his life, it was his own damned fault. He was not going to change now, not by a long shot. Even the most boneheaded of men though, are unlikely to come away from almost dying without seeing the world a little differently.

  The coffee tasted better than it had last time. So did the beef jerky. His four animals seemed more alive than ever before. And the sun shone so bright and hot it seemed to drill these perceptions deeper inside him

  That wasn’t all. For the first time in his life, John Cutler was worried.

  He had never been foolhardy with a man or an animal, but he wasn’t afraid of being killed by one of them either. If he was going to die, the way he did it was all that mattered.

  The rattler had taught him about his own mortality. He just might die. He had been in a dozen dangerous situations already where it could have happened. Maybe two dozen. What if it happened before he killed that grizzly? That was what stuck in his craw and would not let go. That is why he was suddenly worried.

  He thought about this when he got back on the trail, about the pattern of his life. He had to get that grizzly. He was always hearing rumors about bear’s whereabouts, but he always lost it. With each encounter or near encounter, he seemed to get closer, but as he got closer to the bear, he also got into situations that brought him closer to his own death. Each day was one less day to live, one less day in which to finish what he had started out to do.

  He had stacked the odds against himself by being a loner. Who the hell was there to shoot the man who might be aiming at Cutler’s back? Who would keep him alive if the next bout with a rogue animal was one too many?

  He didn’t like the idea of a partner at all. But what was more important—his pride or getting the grizzly?

  Iris Shannon had gotten word to him about a grizzly that had been seen in the direction Cutler was headed. The reports were not specific about whether or not it was the one Cutler was after. It was not known if it had a stump instead of one of its legs.

  In the far distance, Cutler could make out the town of Cheyenne, where Iris owned a saloon. In Cheyenne, or somewhere outside it, was a ranch with a kid named Bill Taylor. Cutler wanted to see them both very much now. But for different reasons.

  Chapter Two

  One Cheyenne citizen said the town had situated itself in the southeast corner of the greatest state in the West in order to keep the state government on its toes. If Cheyenne ever got mad at Wyoming, it would step over into Colorado. But nobody believed Wyoming would ever want to lose Cheyenne. Nobody in Cheyenne believed it anyway.

  It was a town that considered the first deadly sin a virtue. There were a lot of things worse than pride, and Cheyenne had them, too, but they were not worth talking about now that the worst days were gone.

  What was worth talking about was electricity. The citizens liked to say Cheyenne was the first town in the world to have electric lights.

  They liked to talk about the growing population. They didn’t like to mention that a part of the citizenry was only on the books, people who had been traveling through on the train and had their vital statistics taken down then rode away, having been made citizens of a place they had been in only about twenty minutes.

  They liked to mention that Cheyenne was the first place to give women full suffrage—and get the extra representation that went with those votes.

  But those things did not show on a first look. In 1895, Cheyenne looked like a lot of other frontier towns. The buildings were made from granite, sandstone, limestone, and marble from local quarries. Some looked as if they might have ghosts in them—eventually if not now. The other ones, where people lived, were decorated with Victorian gingerbread.

  To Cutler, the town was no more sophisticated than he was. It looked not much different from Tensleep up north the first time he had ridden into it or Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he’d been just a couple of months ago. People acted as if the circus had come to town. They gawked at the tall man, the dog beside him, the matched mules, the horse that followed untethered, and the small covered wagon with the traps jingling against each other inside.

>   They gawked and then they tried not to. The ones with any sense tried not to, because they could see the stern dark cloud of the loner, the killer in Cutler’s face, the man you did not cross. The younger ones did not know that there once were a lot more like him. If there hadn’t been, there might not have been any Cheyenne or Wyoming. Until they would get to know him, they would merely know there was something about the man that made them comfortable. Later, he would become a celebrity.

  The wagon stopped outside a hardware store. In the window was a handmade sign: “John W. Gates Patented Barbed Wire. The Finest Fencing in the World. Light as Air, Stronger than Whiskey, Cheaper Than Dirt, All Steel and Miles Long!”

  “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?” A young man with a handlebar mustache came hurrying to the door from the back of the store.

  “You fix traps here?” Except for the two words to his dog, these were the first ones out of Cutler’s mouth in two months.

  “We do. We do. How big?”

  “Number six. Newhouse. Weak spring.”

  The man whistled. “Go after the big stuff, do you?” Then he got a better look at his customer and wished he hadn’t started off by asking an unnecessary question. “I think we can help you.”

  Cutler got the big trap from the wagon and took it back into the store.

  “Where’s the livery, a barber with a bath, and the Silver Dollar Saloon?” he asked.

  He got the directions, then returned to his wagon. The hairs were up on Red’s back. The dog was watching a cowboy leaning against a hitching post and grinning. He needed a shave, had a scar on his right cheek, and wore an ivory-handled sidearm.

  “Funny lookin’ dog you got there,” he said. “What kind is he?”

  “Mine,” Cutler said and drove on.

  The livery stable was always the first stop in any town. This one was run by a toothless old man with a game foot. The animals never cared what a man looked like. Neither did Cutler. All he was looking for in a liveryman was someone who knew how to take care of animals.