The Eye of the Hunter
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Authors: Frank Bonham
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
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.â(An Evans novel of the West)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3503.04315E94Â Â Â Â 1989Â Â Â 89-1560
813'.54âdc19
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 SciencesâPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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 monthâby 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 hillsidesâhovels 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!âyour gun shop, in Kansas City, Missouri
.
Kansas City? Wait a minute, boyâwhere are you?
... He was in his gun shop on a side street in Kansas City, Missouri. He must be thereâhe 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'll do it. Could I offer you an Irish blessing, for the road?”
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. Parrishâknown 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 cameoâthe “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.
