The eye of the hunter, p.1
The Eye of the Hunter, page 1
EYE OF THE HUNTER
EYE OF THE HUNTER
FRANK BONHAM
M. EVANS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by M. Evans
An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Distributed by National Book Network
Copyright © 1989 by Frank Bonham
First paperback edition 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:
Bonham, Frank
The eye of the hunter / Frank Bonham
p. cm.—(An Evans novel of the West)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3503.04315E94 1989 89-1560
813'.54—dc19
ISBN: 978-1-59077-219-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-59077-220-1 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
PART ONE THE GUNSMITH
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
PART TWO THE HUNTER
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
PART ONE
THE GUNSMITH
Chapter One
Nogales, Arizona Territory: May 1900
In three punishing days of train travel, Henry Logan had had plenty of time to think about Richard Parrish and his pretty wife. He thought the man must be dead, although the Richard I. Parrish trust checks were faithfully cashed each month—by someone whose handwriting looked to him more like a woman’s than a man’s. But Rip Parrish, an inveterate gambler and letter writer, had not answered a letter in nearly a year.
An attorney named John Manion, in Kansas City, wanted Logan to find out why, although he was neither a Pinkerton man nor a lawyer. He was a gunsmith, and he serviced Manion’s collection of firearms. He was also a Spanish-American War vet, still under the weather from the malaria he had brought home from Cuba, and Manion thought the trip to Arizona might be good for his health. The trust would pay all Logan’s expenses, and he would certainly cost less than a Pinkerton man. All the detective work he would need to do if Parrish wasn’t around, the lawyer said, was to check the cemeteries and Hall of Records for traces of the man.
And of course find and interview his pretty wife.
Nothing was ever as easy as it was made out to be, Logan knew, but the job sounded interesting. In a way it would be like going home. He had lived for two years with his parents at Fort Bowie, in southeastern Arizona, before his father’s death. But that was nine years ago. His recollections of the country were vague, and he had never been in Nogales.
What finally persuaded him to take the job, he realized, was that Parrish’s young wife, Frances, was apparently a real beauty. He had made himself an authority on Frances by studying the wedding picture the man had sent a couple of years ago. It made a lot of sense, of course, for him to be traveling halfway across the country mainly to find out whether she was as beautiful as she appeared in the picture. But he had come back from the war with some firm convictions, one of which was that if you really felt like doing something, you’d better do it now, before destiny intervened. Maybe, if Parrish was dead, she was as lonesome as he was. Maybe she liked gunsmiths.
So here he was this morning, dazed with fatigue, gaunt and unshaven in a wrinkled black suit he had not worn since before the war, gazing through a dusty window as the train clattered alongside an almost dry wash striped with rivulets and sandbars and called the Santa Cruz River. The conductor had advised the half dozen passengers of the mixed train to collect their belongings, and they were staggering around closing valises and hampers and putting on hats.
Henry remained seated. He was traveling light, with only a barracks bag and a case of gunsmith’s tools. It had been years since he had seen country as dry as this. The mountains in the distance were fantastically shaped, knoblike, jagged, lumpy, and protuberant, while the hills bordering the river valley looked as though they had been pinched up out of wet clay. Here and there yellow cane thickets grew along the streambed, and there were small olive-gray trees as well as a variety of cactus that looked like terrible whips tipped with blood. Yet the earth had a pretty, rosy tinge, and the whole area a bizarre beauty.
The train began a harsh clanking and convulsive shuddering. Coal smoke settled upon the cars and drifted in through the crevices. Henry craned his neck to see what was going on. Directly ahead, the railroad tracks split a shallow bowl in which a town lay protected by two barricades of brown hills piled up like earthworks. Overhead, the sky was a clear cornflower blue. The entire community, except for the business district, was perched on the hillsides—hovels on the east, somewhat larger homes with tin roofs on the west. Absolutely everything was constructed of the only building material he had noticed in the Territory: dirt. The dirt was formed into adobe bricks and, sometimes, plastered. The plaster did not adhere well: Many of the buildings looked like Missouri hogs with patches of dried mud on their sides.
With a squalling of iron shoes, the train came to a shuddering stop. Henry sat a moment gathering strength. In the sudden quiet, his ears rang. He realized he was overdue for a draft of quinine. Finally he got up and carried his bags forward. The last passenger off the train, he stood leaning against a baggage cart until he caught the eye of a man with a long-spouted oilcan.
“I’ve got a horse back there,” he said. “Big red dun?”
“Right. They’ll bring it to the hitch rack, yonder.”
“Keep an eye on him, would you? I don’t want him going on to Mexico. ” He gave the man a silver dollar and a wink. Traveling on someone else’s money was proving to be a great improvement on paying your own way.
Already, in May, it was pretty warm, but when he entered the waiting room he found it surprisingly cool. Adobe, he knew, had the fine insulating qualities of a cave. He sat on a bench against the wall while the half dozen other passengers lined the counter, asking questions of a man in a green eyeshade. Could he recommend a hotel? Was there a good restaurant? At the near end of the counter, a man with a gray fedora on the side of his head was writing a telegram. Henry was supposed to wire John Manion of his arrival, but it could wait. He felt a little feverish; it was past time for his quinine. He would take the awful stuff as soon as he was installed in a boardinghouse.
The building seemed to lurch. Was it swaying, or was his body still bracing itself against the jouncing of the railroad train? He decided everything was all right, and almost immediately his limbs sank into a blissful torpor. He felt as though he were moored in a little backwater in which he did not have to decide things, worry about the aftereffects of malaria, and wonder about what had happened to Rip Parrish.
Lately he had been worrying too much about too many things. He was twenty-two. He had come to lanky maturity on a farm in Missouri, spent a year and a half in the Army in Cuba, serving first as an armorer, then as a sharpshooter; and although the Spanish troops had failed to hurt him, a mosquito had brought him down with a single shot of its small-bore stinger.
On the walk outside the shop he heard two women talking. In a tree a cicada was creating a hypnotic drone. Hold on, he thought, confused. The shop? Come on, Henry!—your gun shop, in Kansas City, Missouri.
Kansas City? Wait a minute, boy—where are you?
... He was in his gun shop on a side street in Kansas City, Missouri. He must be there—he could smell the good banana-like fragrance of gun oil. He had just handed to a customer, a lawyer named John Manion whose collection of firearms he serviced, a black-powder model Colt he had left for repair. Manion liked to hear him tell about sharpshooting in Cuba, and how, as an armorer, he had personally taken care of Colonel Teddy Roosevelt’s famous ’95 Winchester.
The lawyer tested the hammer clicks of the revolver. “That’s better. What was the problem, Henry?”
Logan explained that a tang on the hammer mechanism was worn smooth. He said he could have refiled it but thought it was a better idea to replace the whole piece.
“What do I owe you?”
“Dollar
Manion accepted, and from under the counter Henry Logan took a bottle of Irish whiskey and two glasses. While he poured the whiskey, the lawyer opened his briefcase and began sorting and searching until finally he pulled out what looked like a studio photograph in a gray folder. He tossed it on the counter.
“Take a look at this,” he said. Was there something sly in his smile? He watched with amusement while Logan opened the folder and gazed blankly at an ordinary wedding photograph. Turning the picture over, Logan read the photographer’s stamp on the reverse: Y. GUERRERRO. NOGALES, A.T.
Then he studied the members of the wedding again. “Am I supposed to know these folks, John?”
“No, but the groom’s a client of mine. Take another look. Ever see a wedding picture before where the groom was wearing a hat and holding a gun? Damned featherbrain. Rich featherbrain,” he added.
Intrigued, Henry held the photograph under a goosenecked lamp. The bridegroom was big and handsome in a fringed leather coat. He wore a trimmed jawline beard and mustache and a wide grin. A sombrero was pushed to the back of his head. And Henry chuckled when he realized that the man held at port arms a long-barreled Colt. The pose, and the groom’s waggish expression, made him think of an outlaw who had stopped running long enough to get himself married and have his picture taken.
“Isn’t that rare?” Manion asked.
“I’m surprised the bride let him get away with it. What’s he do?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. Plays at being a rancher. Actually, he’s the nephew of a client I had, a gambler named Humboldt Parrish. Hum won a ranch near Nogales in a poker game. When he died, couple of years ago, the nephew inherited it and got married. Richard I. Parrish—known as Rip, and the grin tells you why.”
And the bride, Henry supposed, would be a suitable mate for a man who carried a gun and wore a hat at his own wedding. Yet when he looked more closely, he murmured in surprise. For she was truly a beauty, and no saloon beauty, either. The top of her head came to her husband’s ear. She stood straight and slender in a puff-sleeved dress that was tight in the waist and full-bosomed, with a high lace collar closed by a cameo—the “something old,” maybe. Still, her gown was for street wear, not for a church wedding. Small crosses hung from her earlobes, and a tortoiseshell comb rose from the back of her head like a peacock’s tail.
“Got a magnifying glass?” Manion asked. “Take a look at that gun! An 1873 Army Colt, engraved and gold-inlaid and with a genuine ruby in the front sight! We fired a couple of rounds when Rip was in town—just stuck it out the window and let fly at the river!”
Logan found a magnifying glass in a drawer full of tools.
“Squint hard and maybe you can see the ruby,” Manion said.
Logan squinted. “I can’t, but I can sure see Rip’s diamond. She’s a thousand-dollar presentation model herself! Does she look a little foreign, maybe? What’s the word? Exotic ...
“Maybe. Her father was a doctor in Arizona, but he practiced in Sonora for years. So maybe she picked up the look, somehow. Rip called her Panchita—Spanish for Frankie. Her name’s Frances. Kind of taken by her?” asked the lawyer, amused.
“Well, you know ...” Logan said. “The beautiful face in a crowd thing—ever had that experience? You think, You gorgeous creature, what are you doing on some other man’s arm? And look at her expression, John—is that independence, or haughtiness, or ... what?”
“Disdain,” said Manion. “Disdain for her hoorawing husband, clowning for his own wedding picture.”
“So why did she marry him?”
“She’s probably wondering that herself, by now. Especially,” said the lawyer, “since he seems to be missing. Cashes his trust checks but hasn’t answered a letter since last summer.”
“If he’s like me, he probably hates writing letters.”
“He dido’t used to. And there are always questions about his trust that I’ve got to have answers to. How does he want his money invested? Does he want to sell that stock? Buy a little farmland? But he doesn’t write to say boo anymore.”
“Ask his wife.”
“She doesn’t write, either. But somebody’s cashing those checks, Henry. Not Rip, because the handwriting is different. Look at this....”
From his coat Manion took an envelope. He drew out a couple of bank drafts and laid them before the gunsmith. “Before and after,” he said.
The difference was clear. The earlier check, dated August 1898, was signed with a bold flourish. On the later one, dated two months ago, the name Richard I. Parrish was traced in the same calligraphic swirls and brown ink as the names on the back of the photograph.
“As the administrator of the trust, I’ve got to do something pretty soon. Find out whether R.I.P stands for his initials, or ‘rest in peace.’”
“Send a Pinkerton man,” Henry suggested.
“Cost an arm and a leg.” Manion sipped his whiskey and regarded Henry with a grin. And suddenly Henry saw where this whole charade was leading. He laid the magnifying glass down and gave a chuckle.
“Okay, John, I get it. You think a change of climate might be good for me.”
“I really do. You were off two days last week, and you still look like parchment. A trip might do you a world of good. The trust would pay all your expenses, and a couple of hundred to boot. As a bonus, you’ll be interviewing Frances Parrish and finding out what she’s really like. Can she bake a cherry pie? Does she like to dance? The detective work should be like shooting fish. If Rip’s dead, he’ll be enshrined in a Hall of Records somewhere. Not to mention a cemetery.
“Think about, Henry. Do us both a favor. Well, I’m off.”
The lawyer had only gotten as far as the door when Henry said, “I’ve thought about it. When would you like me to leave?”
The lawyer wanted him to leave as soon as possible. A few days later he gave him a folder of correspondence, the wedding picture, and a power of attorney. He provided him with a money belt with a supply of gold pieces, and a railroad ticket. He said, “The picture might help you identify Rip Parrish if you find him in a shallow grave. I don’t know whether he wrote a will in Nogales, but he left none here, so if he’s dead, the bride is pretty well fixed.
“If you feel so good in Arizona that you decide to stay, I’ll have your stuff crated and shipped.”
The night before he left, Henry studied the features of Frances Wingard Parrish. The more he looked at her, the more captivated he was. He liked the quirk of her eyebrows, and thought her throat the most graceful line he had ever seen on a woman. But then he thought, wryly, Mrs. Rip, you wouldn’t kill your husband for his ranch, would you?
That would be beyond belief. Yet it was also hard to believe that Rip would cash his checks but not answer his mail. Something was going on out there, and one person who was sure to know what it was, was Frances Parrish.
Chapter Two
“Mr. Logan?”
Henry opened his eyes. A man wearing a green eyeshade was peering at him from behind a counter. For a moment he was unable to decide where he was.
“Mr. Henry Logan?” the man said, with a sympathetic smile. He was tall and thin, with a small head decorated with black hair slicked down and parted in the middle.
“Hello,” Henry said.
“Your horse is at the rack, now, my friend. Are you ... everything okay?”
Henry took a lungful of the warm, dusty Arizona air that was supposed to put him back on his feet. The cicada that had put him into a trance was a telegraph key at the end of the counter. “I’m fine,” he said. By a considerable effort, he managed to get on his feet and tried to think of what came next. He had saved a question to ask after the other passengers were finished with theirs. They had all departed now, and he heard his horse pawing the ground at the rack outside, relieved to be out of a railroad car after three days on the road.
“I’d like to find a nice, quiet boardinghouse,” he said. “Not too expensive.”
The stationmaster called to another man down the counter, who appeared to be writing a telegram.
“What do you think, Ben? A boardinghouse.”
