Short Stories & Tall Tales
Montana’s Invisible Bandit
Tom Sheehan
The three towns along the Red Rock River in lower Montana were constant targets of a bandit and home robber that nobody saw, in the act, fleeing, or as suspicious looking. People soon began to call him The Invisible Bandit of Montana.
In Corroville, one of the towns The Invisible Bandit had hit three times, men of the town were talking in The Blue Horse Saloon.
Jeff Bronteck was the loudest, his house having been robbed as well as a nephew’s house at the end of town, nearer the Red River. He was at the bar, into a few drinks, and getting louder. “We ought to string him up the minute we get him.” He kept saying it and several men replied, “But we don’t even know what he looks like, Jeff. Nobody’s ever seen him. We got to take that into account. Can’t hang the first man we think it’s him.”
Bronteck was a big fellow, shoulders like ploughshares, arms like oak limbs, who for many years had managed to cow some of his friends. His physique and the bellows of his voice were sufficient leverage to assert his way upon any person of moderate character.
“It’s like I always say,” Bronteck continued, “If we catch a gent and the robberies stop, we know we got the right man. It’s that simple.” He swigged off another drink, lifting the empty glass as though he was saluting the high heavens, but some thinking he was really saying, “Or whatever’s coming to pass,” which simply meant nobody was about to change his mind on the bandit.
Wesley Mumford, town sheriff, was just coming into The Blue Horse Saloon and heard Bronteck’s words for a tiring 5th or 6th time. They reminded him of a cuckoo clock he had once seen in Chicago, made in Germany’s Black Forest by Johann Baptist Beha. When he heard Bronteck’s words, he saw the imprint of the clock in the back of his mind.
“How many guys would we hang before it all stops, Bronteck? You ever think of that?”
He had no fears of Bronteck who was strong of arm, but slow of wit, and a terribly poor shot with a gun, as proved a number of times in Corroville’s annual shooting contests. “What if we grabbed you or one of your real close pals and accused the both of you?”
All the saloon customers except Bronteck knew it was a loaded, one-way question, for each of them knew Bronteck had no real close friends.
“No one ever grabs me,” he said, mouthing off again in front of the saloon crowd. “You know that, Sheriff.”
Mumford stepped toward the big mouth. “I told you before, Bronteck, I’d lock you up in a minute if you step out of line.”
“That’s just talk, Sheriff. You just gotta keep saying those things if you want to keep your job.”
“Try me, Bronteck. There’s always the chance you’re right” and he paused before adding “or dead wrong.”
“Yah, I know,” Bronteck said, as his size seemed to diminish, the balloon of him deflating in open view, and Mumford thinking, with solid affirmation, “There’s nothing invisible about this man.”
“Well, Sheriff, “said one patron, “what do we know that we didn’t know before? Are we getting anyplace?” Looking around for support, he added, “You know how Meryl Hagson was scared right out of the outhouse in her nightclothes. Good thing she had her rifle with her. Saw him sneaking up on the house after midnight. One shot chased him off, but she never caught sight of him, just a shadow on a horse and going like hell across the grass toward the mountains.”
Mumford, realizing the audience factor, and all of them deserving some hope in stopping the bandit, nodded, posed a bit as he stood at the bar to project his confidence as far as he could, then began, in his slow and modulated and totally calm voice, to speak.
“Here’s what we know,” Mumford said. “He headed for the mountain. In the morning we found a horse up in there, in Bracer Canyon, no saddle on it, but we know that mare was stolen from the T-Bar-T remuda. We suspected the bandit was without a mount and would come out sooner or later. We had the canyon watched for three days, but he never showed up.”
“Well, so what, Sheriff. What’s that give us?”
Mumford was ready for more recitation, having settled the facts, as known, in his mind. “One, he won’t use his own horse, so he steals one. But he needs to have a mount to get to where the horses are to steal one. He comes on one horse and goes leading another one. We find the stolen horse. Where’s his horse? He leaves the stolen horse in the canyon. Where did he leave his horse?”
“So what, Sheriff? What’s that give us?”
“If his own horse ain’t in Bracer Canyon, then where is it? Where did he hobble it so he could ride off on it? He sure needs his own horse to get away from there.”
“Just more mystery, Sheriff. It don’t say anything to me.” The speaker took his turn to look around the room seeking his own support. There was a shuffling of seats, bodies moving, heads turned away from the speaker. Nobody spoke.
“Let’s think about this,” Mumford said, into the silence, staring into faces he had known for a long time. “If he ain’t in there and his horse ain’t in there, then he’s gone someplace else, on his own horse. How did he get out of there, that’s the point. When we find how he does it, we’ll find our mysterious robber, this Invisible Bandit.”
“There ain’t no way out of Bracer Canyon,” another saloon customer said from a far table. “Most of us growed up around here know that for a fact.” He stood beside his seat, which said he was confident with the fact as spoken.
This time there was response, support for the far speaker’s statement. “Yeh.” “Yep.” “He’s right on that count.” “I allus said that.” And another voice said, “Ain’t that the way it’s been in a couple of them other robberies only a stolen horse left up in the canyon and nothing else?”
“You got it, Harry. Exactly right. What it tells me is this he steals a horse, leads it off to Bracer Canyon, hobbles it someplace in there. Then he rides his own horse around until he’s on some other end of the canyon, on the other side of the mountain, and hobbles his horse to wait for him to show up after the robbery. Then he gets to the stolen horse, how he gets there we don’t know, rides off to rob someone or someplace, and goes back the same way, all the way to his own horse.”
He stopped, looked around, waited for a response. It came.
“You saying, Sheriff, that there’s a way out of Bracer Canyon none of us ever knew about, even those of us played up in there as kids sometimes? Spooned up in there. Killed a stray cow as kids and roasted up the best meal we ever had. None of us know? ”
“Maybe only one of you,” Mumford said, and left The Blue Horse Saloon.
About six days later, a man standing at the bar in the saloon asked the barkeep where the sheriff was. “I ain’t seen him in two or three days. He on a posse or something?”
The barkeep responded, while shaking his head, “Down to Reedville what I heard. He caught a prisoner out on the trail and took him down to Reedville where a warrant was issued.”
“Not the Invisible Bandit, was it?”
“Heck, no,” the barkeep said. “He ain’t been seen at all, maybe two weeks now. At least, not from what I hear.”
“They might never catch that dude,” the man said, and left the saloon.
In truth, Sheriff Mumford had ridden downriver from Corroville to visit his maternal grandfather, Francon LaBateau, a scholar, teacher, man with a world of knowledge on too many subjects for a regular man to carry in his saddle bag. The man was 88 years old, spent his days on the porch looking at the world passing by, his nights under an oil lamp reading one of the many books in his library.
“Tell me about caves, Granpere,” he said. “All that you know.” He sat at the foot of the man’s rocker on the porch. The wind carried the prairie right to their noses, the wind carried the blue of clouds so that they refracted a bit of the sun, tossed some comfortable shadows, toned day into soft colors.
“Ah,” the old man said. “Spelunking, the hobby of some brave souls who go down into the heart of Earth. Mon deux, I have heard of some who never came back from their exploration into the depths of the Mother Planet.”
The old man spoke at length about the hobby of some spelunkers he had come in contact with.
Mumford, nodding at each fact exposed, finally said, “Do you know of any spelunkers, those cave men, who live near here?”
“Oui, my son, I do. In the town below us here, in Quartston, lives Francon LeBrun, exalted at the hobby, dives recklessly into Mother Earth herself, a dear friend of mine, whose father came from the next village to mine in Normandy, from Sainte Mére Eglise. He hugs the earth to him. He knows the splendors of creation in the darkest places, throws light upon them.”
The smile of interest filled his face. “Pardon the pun, son,” he said, "but spelunk comes from obsolete Middle English, from Old French spelunque, from Latin spelunca and the Greek spelunx. It goes as far back as caves go deep.”
“I need his help,” Mumford said.
“Oui, it is done,” the aged grandfather said, his hand flipping off all minor efforts, minor needs.
In two days, Mumford and Francon LeBrun set off for Bracer Canyon. The little Frenchman, full of smiles, carried little … a ball of twine, a can of thick oil, a rag-wound stick, a canteen. He chattered incessantly until they entered Bracer Canyon.
In one moment, quick as telegraph, LeBrun went silent, gripped by the area, the rock formations, the possibilities that must have leaped at him, the coming excitement and mystery waiting to fold itself open.
“Oh, my, Wesley, he said, “There is much to be found here. I know what your needs are. Just turn me loose, sit still, and wait for me. I will return. Where I come out on the other side of the mountain, I will impress the most subtle sign possible on some part of a wall. You will not miss it, I promise.”
Mumford saw him walk along the wall of the canyon, peer at places, move one, peer again, move on again. As slow as an earthworm he moved, and Mumford had a small laugh at the comparison, shaking his head up and down that could be interpreted as a positive outlook on the spelunker’s efforts.
But he made up his mind not to hold his breath for the outcome.
Five hours later, Mumford heard a sudden sound behind him. Twisting around, he saw Francon LeBrun emerging from a slit in the rock wall, a crevice so narrow it seemed impossible for a man to pass through. He saluted the spelunker and said, “Dear friend, how you surprise me, coming out there, further back from where you started.”
“Oh, my new friend, my deepest thanks for allowing me this opportunity. Let me explain, there is a whole world under there, a whole world.” He pointed back to where he had come from, “and up there,” pointing to where he had originally disappeared hours earlier.
“Oh, my pleasure, dear friend. A whole world down there so big, so wide, one cannot imagine if one has never seen such sights before.” He clapped his hands like a child receiving a new present. His face filled with joy. “And the one you seek, ‘le bandit invisible, cavalier invisible,’ he has seen much of what I have seen. ‘Mon deux, une grande partie de son butin est cachée là.’” He held his hands wide apart and offered his translation “Much of his loot is hidden there.” He clapped his hands again like the same child had won a guessing game, solved a minor mystery. His grin was as wide as Bracer Canyon.
“Let me tell you what I found, hidden in this part of Earth.” He carried on for perhaps 20 minutes, until Mumford had an exact idea of what was where in “the new netherworld,” as LeBrun occasionally called it.
When Brad Turleson told Mumford a few days later that one of his horses, a black mare, had been stolen in the night, the sheriff headed out of town with his deputy, telling the barkeep at The Blue Horse Saloon that he was going downriver for a day or two. He realized it was as good as telling the whole town his plans.
When rugged, supposedly dim Jeff Bronteck, supposedly too dumb to have carried off all the mysterious thefts, came out of a slit in the wall on the other side of the mountain to reach his horse hobbled to a large rock, Sheriff Mumford and his deputy were there to arrest him.
He carried a bag of loot with him.
“You got nothing on me, Mumford. I found this stuff.”
“That’s fine for starters, Bronteck, but when we let all the folks know in town what we found you carrying, and when we check out your hiding place down in there, we’ll have you in prison for a long time. This is the end of The Invisible Bandit, now here before me as big as all life.
At the crack of dawn the next day, Sheriff Wesley Mumford hastened downriver to tell his maternal grandfather and his friend, Francon LeBrun, the spelunker, about the latest exploit, and the last one, of Montana’s Invisible Bandit.
|
|
