Bordered by the Blackfeet Reservation to the north and mountain ranges to the east and west, Cutthroat County is seven hundred glorious square miles of Big Sky grandeur. For generations, the Maddox and Drew families have ruled the county—often at odds with each other. Today, Ashton Maddox runs the biggest Black Angus ranch in the country, while County Sheriff John T. Drew upholds the law like his forefathers did more than a century ago. A lot has changed since the county was established in 1891. But some things feel straight out of the 1800s. Especially when cows start disappearing from the ranches . . .
Intrigued, a local newsman digs up the gun-blazing tale of the land-grabbing battles fought by Maddox’s and Drew’s ancestors. Meanwhile, their present-day descendants face a new kind of war that’s every bit as bloody. When a rival rancher’s foreman is found shot to death, Ashton Maddox is the prime suspect. Sheriff Drew is pressured into arresting him, in spite of a lack of evidence. So the two families decide to do what their forefathers did so many years ago: join forces against a common enemy. Risk their skins against all odds. And keep the dream of Montana alive for generations to come . . .
PROLOGUE
From the May issue of Big Sky Monthly Magazine By Paula Schraeder
The bestselling T-shirt for tourists at Wantlands Mercantile in Basin Creek has an image of a colorful trout in the center circle and these words on the front.
WELCOME TO CUTTHROAT COUNTY
We’re Named After Montana’s
State Fish
But on the back is the image of a tough-looking, bearded cowboy wearing an eyepatch and biting down on a large knife blade, with these words below.
But WATCH Your Back
Yes, this is Cutthroat County, all 1,197 square miles, according to the US Geological Survey’s National Geospatial Program, with 31.2 of those square miles water. According to the 2020 US Census Bureau, the county’s population is a healthy 397, though the sunbaked, silver-headed lady working the counter at Wantlands Mercantile when I dropped in on a windy but wonderfully sunny June afternoon told me differently. “Oh, ’em guvment volunteers mighta missed a coupla dozen or so. Folks live here ’cause they’ve lived here all their lives. Or they come because—”
I waited. Finally, I had to ask, “Why do folks come here?”
“To hide,” she said.
Having been in Cutthroat County for three days, I know there must be roughly 1,130 square miles (not including the 31.2 miles of water) for anyone to hide.
It seemed like a good place to hide.
And getting to Basin Creek wasn’t easy.
I left Billings early in the morning in my Toyota Camry, winding through plenty of Big Sky country, and after hitting the turnoff north at Augusta, I drove and drove and drove, with nothing to see but pastures and open country.
Aside: A truck driver at a Great Falls coffee shop on my way back home laughed when he heard my story.
“Was it at night?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I told him.
“You should drive through there at night. It’s like you’re in a [expletive] bowl.” He sipped his latte. “Liked to’ve sent me to the looney bin a time or two.”
Back to my trip: Finally, reaching a crossroads store, I stopped for coffee and confirmation. “Is this the right way to Basin Creek?” I asked the young Native man who rang me up.
“Yes.” He took my money.
He must have read the skepticism on my face. Then he smiled, titled his head north, and confirmed it. “Just keep going that way, and drive till you reach the end of the earth.”
Cutthroat County is bordered by the Blackfeet Indian Reservation on the north, the Ponoká (Elk) Mountains to the east, the Always Winter mountain range on the west, and US Highway 103 on the south. If you are driving to Glacier National Park or the Canadian entry point at Milk River City, it’s a good idea to take your potty break at Basin Creek. Maybe top off the gas tank as well. (That crossroads station I stopped at on the drive north has no gasoline for sale, and I did not have courage enough to use the outhouse.) There are only two gas stations in Cutthroat County, and both are in Basin Creek.
“That’s not exactly true,” I was later told.
“Roscoe Moss has a pump at Crimson Feather [a community of four trailers and a ranch far to the east of where owner Garland Foster has brought in wind turbines]. At least when the Conoco truck driver—there’s a refinery in Billings, you know—remembers to stop on the first of the month. ’Course, old Roscoe’s prices are higher than a loan shark’s interest rates, and his pump is slower than spring getting here.”
The speaker, a handsome man of slightly above average height, dark hair flecked with gray, and the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen, paused to sip coffee—black ( his third cup since I’d been interviewing him)—and appeared to be counting the other gas pumps.
“And most ranchers and mining companies have their own pumps,” he continued. “Though some stopped after they had to dig up their old pumps and haul them away. EPA thing, if I remember right.” His smile was disarming. “But you’re too young to remember leaded gasoline.”
He did not appear to be flirting. But he sure was charming.
“If you run out of gas, there’s a pretty good chance someone will top you off with enough to get you to East Glacier. Maybe as far as Cut Bank.” The disarming man was John T. Drew, Cutthroat County sheriff, one of those fellows “who’s lived here all their lives.”
“Well,” he politely corrected, “if you don’t count four-and-a-half years in Bozeman.” He points to the Montana State University diploma—criminal justice—on the wall to the right of the window overlooking the county courthouse grounds.
Those four and a half years might be the only period of time when any Drew male had not dined, slept, and worked in Cutthroat County since long before Cutthroat County was carved out of Choteau County in 1891. I pointed out the first Maddox to set foot in Cutthroat County was a mountain man—perhaps seven, eight, nine generations ago.
Drew smiled and shrugged—“I’ve never figured the math”—then nodded at the diploma. “Math’s why it took me an extra semester to get that sheepskin on the wall.”
“Do people hide here?” I asked.
“People escape here,” he said, the smile still warm. “Tourists come here to fly-fish for cutthroat trout or to pick up one of those T-shirts Maudie sells by the scores during peak season. The three hundred and ninety-seven folks who call this patch of heaven home live here because they love it. Because this country’s in their blood. The air’s clean. The water’s pure. And if you don’t mind a whole lot of winter most years, it’s a good place to call home.”
Sixty years ago, Cutthroat County made national headlines for being the last of the Old West towns. The sprawling Maddox Ranch, now headed by Ashton Maddox, was likened to the Ponderosa of TV’s Bonanza. The county sheriff then—John Drew’s grandfather—was called a real Matt Dillon, the character played by James Arness in the long-running western series Gunsmoke.
Tourists from across the world flocked to Cutthroat County not just to go trout fishing in America but to see the wildest Wild West. A Montana state tourism guide raved about four guest ranches—three of which boasted to be real, working ranches—and a restored historic hotel. Two stables offered guided horseback rides along the county’s myriad peaks, valleys, and creeks. A plan was to turn part of the long abandoned railroad tracks, originally laid in the 1890s, into an Old West tourism train complete with a coal-powered locomotive and mock gunfights and train robberies.
That boom lasted slightly less than a decade.
A few years later, Cutthroat County, and especially Basin Creek, got statewide attention and a joke on The Tonight Show [though I have been unable to confirm it since there’s no video on YouTube] as a speed trap.
Drew laughed at that memory. “Well, the town speed limit was thirty-five, and my daddy did not like speeders. Maybe because his daddy preferred riding a horse than driving that Ford Galaxy. We have Ford Police Interceptor SUVs now, by the way. But we’re getting some pressure from the state to move to hybrids. If we get another electric charging unit, we might go for that. But that’s up to the county. And the annual budget.”
Today, no 1890s train runs through Basin Creek. There aren’t even any iron rails anymore. The only electric-charging station in the county is at my motel, though the Wantlands Mercantile is investigating the costs and reliability of adding one in the next two years. The restored historic hotel burned down twenty-five years ago. The site is home to the cinder block Wild Bunch Casino, where cowboys, sheepherders, townspeople, and a few passing tourists drink beer and play video poker, video keno, video blackjack, video slots, while Chuckie Corvallis serves up food. The day’s special was $7.99 for Tater-Tot Casserole.
I opted for coffee and the soup of the day, cream of mushroom, probably straight from a can.
There’s a NO SMOKING sign on the outside door, but Chuckie Corvallis was lighting a new filterless Pall Mall with the one he’d just burned down to almost nothing.
“It’s my place,” he said when he noticed my questioning, healthy-lung face. “I own this place. I can smoke if I wanna. Nobody else can. Ain’t my law. It’s the [expletive] feds.”
Aside: By the time our interview was over, I had to race back to my motel room, shower twice, and find a laundromat to rid my clothes of tobacco stink.
“What happened to Basin Creek?” I asked Corvallis.
“The [expletive] government. [Expletive] feds. [Expletive expletives]. Folks stopped carin’ ’bout their country. Hippies. Freaks. Now it’s the [expletive expletives] and their [expletive] ignoramus politics. [Expletive] ’em.” He pulled hard on his cigarette and blew smoke. “Pardon my [expletive] French.”
Both town stables have been paved over. On one site sits my quaint motel.
Things, however, are changing in Basin Creek.
A month before my arrival, newcomer Elison Dempsey announced his candidacy for Cutthroat County sheriff—a position that has been held almost exclusively by Drews since the county’s founding. Dempsey heads the Citizens Action Network, a quasi-military vigilante group, which MSNBC said nothing is “quasi” about it. Dempsey has been getting plenty of press, statewide, regionally, and nationally.
Tan, clean-shaven, his dark hair buzzed in crew-cut fashion, and white teeth, he looks like he might have been an Olympic track star or boxer. Smiling after I told him that, he corrected me.
“I might have done well in the biathlon. I’m a great skier, downhill or cross-country. Out here, it’s good to be able to ski. Winters can be long, and skiing sure beats snowshoeing when it’s forty below zero. But I am an excellent marksman. Rifle. Shotgun. 45. automatic.”
A Colt .45 was holstered on his hip. The rack behind him in his massive four-wheel-drive Ford carries a lever-action Winchester, a twelve-gauge pump shotgun, and a lethal-looking assault rifle, perhaps an AK-47. I don’t know. And I don’t want to ask.
“I do have a concealed carry permit,” he assures me when he notices my focus on the automatic pistol. “You can ask our soon-to-be ousted sheriff.” He chuckles. “All the members of C.A.N. have concealed carry permits, too. But as you can see, we conceal nothing.”
Dempsey volunteered to take me on a tour of Cutthroat County. His truck gets eight miles a gallon, he said, but told me not to worry.
The gas container in the bed of the Ford looks like it could refill an aircraft carrier.
“The problem here,” he said as he slowed down and pulled off the road, “is that two men run this county.” He nods at a gate on the left. The arched sign above the dirt road reads Maddox Cattle Company. An encircled M—a brand well recognized across Montana—hangs just below the company’s name.
“There’s one of them. Ashton thinks he’s God,” Dempsey said. “Maddoxes have been gods here for too long. Maddoxes and Drews. It’s time for someone to put both of those gods in their place.”
Dempsey wore a camouflage T-shirt that appeared painted to his chest and upper arms. It was not a tourist T-shirt from Wantlands Mercantile, but a red, white, and blue Citizens Action Network T-shirt.
CUTTHROAT COUNTY
C.A.N. !
WE WILL!
Citizens Action Network
He flexed his muscles and grinned, showing those white teeth. “And I happen to be Zeus, Hercules, and Apollo rolled into one.”
For the record, Ashton Maddox declined my multiple interview requests.
“Who’s the other god?” I asked.
He snorted. “You just spent a couple hours with him in the sheriff’s office. You know that. For more than a century—two centuries really—this county has been all Drew and all Maddox. I’m here to change that. And I will. For the better.”
Several miles up the road, we turned onto another two-track. An hour later, I was thinking No one’s going to find my body. Ever!
Dempsey finally stopped, rolled down his window, and nodded at a ramshackle building. “Here’s another problem nobody seems to want to fix.”
Figuring it was abandoned, I stared at the house, if that’s the right word. One wall was made of straw bales. The rest that I could see appeared to be made of anything and everything someone could throw together. Wooden crates. Driftwood. Broken two-by-fours. Cans. Cinderblocks. Dirt. The window—singular—was apparently made of Coke bottles and Mason jars.
“Someone lives there?” I finally asked.
“If you call that living,” Dempsey answered.
I was about to ask what someone who lived there does. Maybe it was a line camp for Ashton Maddox. Then I remembered the lady at Wantlands Mercantile.
They hide.
“You’ve heard of folks wanting to live off the grid?” Dempsey asked.
“Sure, but—”
“You can’t get farther off the grid than Cutthroat County and fifteen miles off the highway.” Dempsey shifted the gear into first and we pulled away.
“He’s not so bad. I mean, he likely paid money for four or five acres. Land’s cheap here. This ain’t Livingston or Missoula. If he’s registered to vote, I like him. He can vote for me come November. I don’t care what party he belongs to. See, I’m running as an independent. I like all folks, those who don’t break the law, I mean. Maybe he grows a little grass. Does some illegal trapping. There’s a good crick four miles northeast. Poaches a pronghorn or takes an elk out of season. I don’t know. Maybe he’s like you. Wants to be a real writer. A real Louis L’Amour.”
I let him know. “I am a real writer.”
A half hour later, he stopped again. “Here’s another problem,” he said, pointing at another rundown trailer home. “The dude that lives here is a poacher. See, that good-looking deputy that Drew got himself, she was pulling off the road a deer that got hit by a tourist on the way back from Glacier. This dude comes by in that Jap rig and asked if he could take the deer carcass. Deputy Mary Broadbent let him. That’s illegal.
“This isn’t deer season. She broke the law. Broadbent, I mean. When I heard of it, I told Drew. He didn’t do a thing. So I called Trent, the local game warden here. He didn’t do a thing. Because if Ashton Maddox isn’t ruling Cutthroat County, John T. Drew is.”
We drove back to the main highway, and headed back to Basin Creek. When we saw two hitchhikers, Dempsey swore, blew the horn, and floored the rig, sending the lean man and tall woman jumping over the ditch and almost falling against the barbed-wire fence.
“That’s another problem,” Dempsey said after he stopped laughing. “Blackfeet Indians keep coming down here, taking jobs away from folks who live here and want to work.”
I didn’t bring up the fact that Cutthroat County covers what once was Blackfeet country and that anyone has the right to work anyplace in America.
He had to slow down when we found ourselves behind a semi hauling cattle.
“And there’s the final biggest problem in Cutthroat County. I aim to fix it once I send John T. Drew to pasture,” Dempsey said.
I smelled cattle manure over diesel.
“You won’t believe this, lady, but this spring, we had a report of rustling here. Cattle rustling. Just like you’d see in an old movie on Channel 16.”
“Rustling?”
He nodded, then named his suspects, but I left them out of this article. My editor and publisher have a policy that they don’t want to be sued for libel.
Elison Dempsey said he had reached out to George Grimes, a noted Texas Ranger recently retired, and the subject of last year’s action movie titled Beretta Law. He asked him to join C.A.N. as a stock detective, but fears the fee George Grimes demands is far more than C.A.N. can afford.
Grimes could not be reached for comment.
“Is rustling why Garland Foster put up wind turbines on his ranch?” I asked.
“Foster is a fool” was all Dempsey would say. “He won’t vote for me. But he’ll be the only one.”
When I reach Garland Foster by telephone, he laughed when I asked for a response to being called a fool. “Been called worse, little lady.” He still reaps millions from his Florida condos and myriad business interests in Texas, many Great Plains states, and in Mexico, Central and South America. He moved from southern Texas after the death of his wife four years ago.
Dempsey isn’t the only person who has criticized Foster.
“Ashton Maddox hates my guts,” Foster said with another chuckle. “But it’s not my fault his granddaddy had to sell off part of that big ol’ Circle M spread during the Great Depression. I just happened to have a few million bucks to spend and thought Montana would sure beat the heat in Florida, Texas, and Mexico. I didn’t know a blasted thing about Sacagawea Pasture when I paid cash for eleven sections [7,040 acres] of real estate.”
Sacagawea Pasture, according to legend once the property of Maddoxes and Drews, has a name that dates to the 1840s, but the Maddox and Drew names go back even further in Montana lore and legend and actual history.
So why, I asked, is a longtime cattle rancher turning to wind turbines?
“More sheep than cattle,” he corrected. “Least for the past coupla years. Wind turbines don’t smell like cattle or sheep, and while beef and wool prices fluctuate, the wind always blows in this country.”
“What about rustling?” I ask.
Foster laughed. “Nobody’s rustled one of my turbines yet.”
Back in town, John T. Drew confirmed there had been one report of rustling on a small ranch. He and both deputies were investigating. “Not to sound like a fellow running for public office, but I cannot comment further because this is an active investigation.” He smiled that disarming smile again.
“Elison Dempsey says he has offered his Citizens Action Network volunteers to help with your investigation,” I told him.
The sheriff nodded. “Elison Dempsey says lots of things. Offers a lot of things. Most of them I ignore. No, I reckon I ignore anything Dempsey says. But I did tell him and some of his C.A.N. folks they are welcome to volunteer for the county’s search and rescue team.
“There’s a lot of country for hikers, hunters, and anglers to get lost in,” he explained, “and a lot of my time as county sheriff is spent searching and rescuing, not citing speeders who think all Montana highways are autobahns.”
I asked about the controversy with Mary Broadbent, game warden Ferguson C. Trent, and the deer given to a so-called squatter.
“Deputy Broadbent told that man he could have the deer as long as he told the game warden about it the next morning, which he did.” Drew smiled. “No sense in letting good deer meat rot when it could feed a family for a week. I’m partial to backstrap myself.”
That was confirmed by Trent of the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Not the backstrap part. But that the taker of the deer did call Warden Trent about taking the roadkill for many suppers.
Drew stared at me. “This place can still be the frontier.”
I asked about Mary Broadbent, who, like Ashton Maddox, declined to talk to me for this article.
The sheriff’s smile was gone, and the eyes again hardened. “She’s a good deputy.”
I looked around the office and kept looking.
“You look confused, Miss Schraeder,” he said politely.
I was. “Do you have a dispatcher? I mean, where do calls come in? If you’re patrolling how do you—”
“Nine-one-one calls go to Cut Bank in Glacier County. Those are relayed here.” The smile returned. “We’re small. But we are efficient.”
“Do you think you’ll win reelection?”
“That’s up to the voters.”
“Are things changing in Cutthroat County?” I asked.
“Nothing ever stays the same.” The look on his face tells me he’s okay with change . . . unlike some Westerners I’ve interviewed over the years. “We’ve never been on CNN or Face the Nation or NPR till recently. That takes some getting used to. But if that brings us some tourist dollars that won’t hurt us. We thank Big Sky Monthly Magazine for sending you here.
“Just remind your readers we indeed have speed limits. If you speed here, you’ll get pulled over. And fined. And if you commit a major crime, there’s one thing you need to know.”
“What’s that?”
There was that smile again. “The judge might not be in town for some time. Our jail holds ten comfortably. But it’s like any jail anywhere. It loses its uniqueness after a few hours.”
The jail is in the basement of the combination county courthouse and town hall, a rectangular two-story building of limestone that is dwarfed by Basin Creek’s biggest structure, a leaning wooden granary next to the old depot in what is called Killone Memorial Park.
Abe Killone was a rancher who paid out of his own pocket for the construction of the county courthouse. He was murdered on the streets of Basin Creek in 1917.
Except for the bathrooms, the entire eastern wing of the first floor holds the county library. Several rooms labeled storage, and town-related government offices (or desks) are also on the first floor.
Mayor Sabrina Richey, tax assessor Henry Richey, and constable Derrick Taylor, though he likes to call himself the town marshal. His hours are the same as the county’s justice of the peace, 9:00 a.m.–noon Mondays, and 1:00–4:00 p.m. Thursdays.
Other kiosks are scattered across the western side of the dark building for the school superintendent, clerk, and recorder, while the county’s road department, treasurer, and assessor have their own offices.
“They keep the important stuff downstairs,” librarian Phyllis Lynne told me. “So people don’t have to walk up those stairs.”
Don’t worry. The building is ADA compliant. An elevator at the far corner was completed in 1992. County Manager Dan O’Riley told me, “It runs like it was put in in 1492.”
His offices are upstairs, along with Sheriff Drew’s and the three elected county commissioners, chairwoman Grace Gallagher, Sid Pritchard, and Mack “Yes, it’s my real name. Wanna see my birth certificate?” McDonald. They are responsible for the hiring of all nonelected county officers, including the county coroner and county attorney. Cutthroat County went to a county commissioner management style in 1948.
Most of the second floor covers what’s officially called the Cutthroat County Courthouse Basin Creek Municipal Building, even if the court is hardly used . . . for trials, anyway. Town hall meetings are sometimes held there, and the public school put on a presentation of Inherit the Wind three years ago.
The clerk, James Alder, says the last criminal case tried was six months ago. “Connie Good Stabbing stole a truck to get back to the rez. Well, she said she borrowed it. Dom Purcell pressed charges. But they reached a plea deal while the jury was deliberating. So everybody was happy. The jurors got paid for their time, Connie had to paint the Catholic church here in town and pay Malone a ‘rental fee’ and reimburse him for gas.”
I stared at him, and expected to wake up in front of an Andy Griffith rerun on MeTV.
“It’s not always this tame,” John T. Drew said when I found my way back to his office. “And it’s a long way from Mayberry.”
There have been four deaths over the past eighteen months, two in traffic accidents (neither involving alcohol), one hiker who met up with a bear in the Ponoká range, and this past December, a cowboy on Garland Foster’s ranch was killed while working alone. Apparently he was killed in what the coroner called “a horse wreck.”
The coroner, George J. White, by the way, does not live in Cutthroat County. He resides in Havre, Hill County seat and “a bit of a haul” from Basin Creek. The county attorney lives in Choteau, Teton County seat and “not as far away as Havre,” attorney Murdoch Robeson tells me over the phone, “but it sure ain’t close.”
“Does that work?” I asked Dan O’Riley, who was standing in the doorway to the sheriff’s office.
“It has to. Lawyers can’t make a living in Cutthroat County. Coroners don’t have much to do here, either.”
I asked O’Riley why Elison Dempsey was talking about the need for his Citizens Action Network in a town and county like this. “He told me Cutthroat County needs a change and a lot of illegal activity goes unreported.”
O’Riley laughed. “Most illegal activity goes unreported everywhere, miss. But how much illegal activity do you think you can find in a county of fewer than four hundred people?”
Dempsey also said he would reopen the investigation into the death of one of those traffic accidents. A single-car accident that claimed the life of forty-nine-year-old Cathy Drew, wife of Sheriff John T. Drew.
Disgusted as this makes me, I have to bring that up to the charming sheriff because those charges have been flying around the state–and on some cable news networks–since Mrs. Drew was found in her overturned Nissan Rogue on US Highway 103 between 12:30 and 4:15 a.m. on Friday, December 3, 2021. She was rushed to a Missoula hospital and pronounced dead on arrival.
Drew sighed. “US Highway, so Montana State Police troopers were the primary on that. They handled the investigation. Best guess is that she swerved, overcorrected. I’m a cop. I don’t like best guesses. I’d like to know for sure what happened. But I have gotten mighty sick of Elison Dempsey and one of these days, he’s going to wish he kept his mouth shut.”
Dan O’Riley quickly changed the subject. “You read enough history books on Montana and you’ll come across lots of names you’ll still find on the list of registered voters.”
“Like Drew and Maddox?” I asked.
“More than that,” O’Riley said. “My ancestors came here in 1881. But I’m a newcomer. You don’t read anything about Dempseys.”
“There you have it,” Elison Dempsey yelled when I met him at the Busted Stirrup Bar in Basin Creek. “If your roots don’t go back to fur trappers and cattle rustlers and Indian killers, you got no right to live in Cutthroat County. That’s what I’m fighting. That’s why I’m running for sheriff. And that’s why the truth will come out and I will be elected.”
Yet, when I left my motel, and drove down Main Street, I saw Sheriff John T. Drew getting out his Interceptor in front of the county-town courthouse. I stopped, rolled down the window, and thanked him for all his help.
His eyes were mellow again, and he leaned against the passenger door. “You’re welcome back anytime, Miss Schraeder.”
“You haven’t read my story yet.”
His grin widened and his eyes twinkled. “Most likely, I won’t. No offense. I just don’t like reading about me or Drews or Maddoxes. Got enough of those yarns growing up.”
Well, we heard the stories, too, read the novels, some so-called histories, and heard the schoolground rhymes even when I was a child.
Pew Pew
Marshal Drew
Killed a Maddox
Times Thirty-two
Pew Pew
Marshal Drew
“Drive safe,” the sheriff said, tipped his hat, and stepped back. “And watch your speed. Remember what I told you. A person can wait a long time before the judge comes to town.”
As I headed out of Basin Creek to return to Billings I made sure I didn’t go a hair over thirty-five miles per hour and just to be safe, kept my Camry at sixty-five as I headed out of Cutthroat County, the last frontier in Montana.
But a frontier that is rapidly changing.
CHAPTER 1
After opening the back door, Ashton Maddox stepped inside his ranch home in the foothills of the Always Winter Mountains. His boots echoed hollowly on the hardwood floors as he walked from the garage through the utility room, then the kitchen, and into the living room.
Someone had left the downstairs lights on for him, thank God, because he was exhausted after spending four days in Helena, mingling with a congressman and two lobbyists—even though the legislature wouldn’t meet till the first Monday in January—plus lobbyists and business associates, then leaving at the end of business this afternoon and driving to Great Falls for another worthless but costly meeting with a private investigator. After crawling back into his Ford SUV, he’d spent two more hours driving only twelve miles on the interstate, then a little more than a hundred winding, rough, wind-buffeted miles with hardly any headlights or taillights to break up the darkness, which meant having to pay constant attention to avoid colliding with elk, deer, bear, Blackfoot Indian, buffalo, and even an occasional moose.
Somehow, the drive from Basin Creek to the ranch road always seemed the worst stretch of the haul. Because he knew what he would find when he got home.
An empty house.
He was nothing short of complete exhaustion.
But, since he was a Maddox, he found enough stamina to switch on more lights and climb the staircase, clomp, clomp, clomp to the second floor, where his right hand found another switch, pushed it up, and let the wagon wheel chandelier and wall sconces bathe the upper story in unnatural radiance.
Still running, the grandfather clock said it was a quarter past midnight.
His father would have scolded him for leaving all those lights on downstairs, wasting electricity—not cheap in this part of Montana. His grandfather would have reminded both of them about how life was before electricity and television and gas-guzzling pickup trucks.
Reaching his office, Ashton flicked on another switch, hung his gray Stetson on the elk horn on the wall, and pulled a heavy Waterford crystal tumbler off the bookshelf before making a beeline toward the closet. He opened the door and stared at the mini–ice maker.
His father and grandfather had also rebuked him for years about building a house on the top of the hill. “This is Montana, boy,” Grandpa had scolded time and again. “The wind up that high’ll blow you clear down to Coloradie.”
Per his nature, Ashton’s father had put it bluntly. “Putting on airs, boy. Just putting on airs.”
What, Ashton wondered, would Grandpa and Daddy say about having an ice maker in his closet? “Waste of water and electricity!”
Not that he cared a fig about what either of those hard rocks might have thought. They were six feet under. Had been for years. But no matter how long he lived, no matter how many millions of dollars he earned, he would always hear their voices.
Grandpa: The Maddoxes might as well just start birthin’ girls.
Daddy: If you’d gone through Vietnam like I did, you might know a thing or two.
Ashton opened the ice maker’s lid, scooped up the right number of cubes, and left the closet door open as he walked back to the desk, his boot heels pounding on the hardwood floor. Once he set the tumbler on last week’s Sunday Denver Post, which he still had never gotten around to reading, he found the bottle of Blanton’s Single Barrel, and poured until bourbon and iced reached the rim.
Grandpa would have suffered an apoplexy had he known a Maddox paid close to two hundred bucks, including tax, for seven hundred and fifty milliliters of Kentucky bourbon. Both his grandpa and father would have given him grief about drinking bourbon anyway. As far back as anyone could recollect, Maddox men had been rye drinkers.
The cheaper the better.
“If it burns,” his father had often said, “I yearns.”
Ashton sipped. Good whiskey is worth every penny, he thought.
Glass still in his hand, he crossed the room till he reached the large window. The heavy drapes had already been pulled open—not that he could remember, but he probably had left them that way before driving down to the state capital.
They used to have a cleaning lady who would have closed them. One of the hired men’s wife, sweetheart, concubine, whatever. But that man had gotten a job in Wyoming, and she had followed him. And with Patricia gone, Ashton didn’t see any need to have floors swept and furniture dusted.
He debated closing the drapes, but what was the point? He could step outside on the balcony. Get some fresh air. Close his eyes and just feel the coolness, the sereneness of a summer night in Montana. Years ago, he had loved that—even when the wind come a-sweepin’ ’cross the high plains. Grandpa had not been fooling about that wind, but Ashton Maddox knew what he was doing and what the weather was like when he told the man at M.R. Russell Construction Company exactly what he wanted and exactly where he wanted his house.
Well, rather, where Patricia had wanted it.
Wherever she was now.
He stood there, sipping good bourbon and feeling rotten, making himself look into the night that never was night. Not like it used to be.
“You can see forever,” Patricia had told him on their first night, before Russell’s subcontractor had even gotten the electricity installed.
He could still see forever. Forever. Hades stretching on from here north to the Pole and east toward the Dakotas, forever and ever and ever, amen.
The door opened. Boots sounded heavy on the floor, coming close, then a grunt, the hitching of jeans, and the sound of a hat dropping on Ashton’s desk. “How was Helena?” foreman Colter Norris asked in his gruff monotone.
“Waste of time.” Ashton did not turn around. He lifted his tumbler and sipped more bourbon.
“You read that gal’s hatchet job in that rag folks call the Big Sky Monthly?”
“Skimmed it. Heard some coffee rats talking about it at the Stirrup.”
“Well, that gal sure made a hero out of our sheriff.”
Ashton saw Colter’s reflection in the plate glass window.
“And made Garland Foster sound like some homespun hick hero, cacklin’ out flapdoodle about cattle and sheep prices and how wind’s gonna save us all.” Holding a longneck beer in his left hand, Colter lifted his dark beer bottle and took a long pull.
Ashton started to raise his tumbler, but lowered it, shook his head, and whispered, “ ‘While beef and wool prices fluctuate, the wind always blows in this country.’”
The bottle Colter held lowered rapidly. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Ashton took a good pull of bourbon, let some ice fall into his mouth, and crunched it, grinding it down, down, down.
The foreman frowned. “Thought you said you just skimmed that gal’s exposé.” Colter never missed a thing—a sign, a clear shot with a .30-.30, a trout’s strike, or a half-baked sentence someone mumbled.
Raising the tumbler again, Ashton held the Waterford toward the window. “He didn’t put up those wind turbines,” he said caustically, “because of any market concerns.” He shook his head, and cursed his neighboring rancher softly. “He put those up to torment me. All day. All night.”
A man couldn’t see the spinning blades at that time of night. But no one could escape the flashing red warning lights. Blinking on. Blinking off. On and off. Red light. No light. Red light. No light. Red light. Red . . . red . . . red . . . red . . . all night long. All night long till dawn finally broke. There had to be more wind turbines on Foster’s land than that skinflint had ever run cattle or sheep.
Ashton turned away and stared across the room. Colter held the longneck, his face showing a few days growth of white and black stubble and that bushy mustache with the ends twisted into a thin curl. The face, like his neck and wrists and the forearms as far as he could roll up the sleeves of his work shirts, were bronzed from wind and sun and scarred from horse wrecks and bar fights. The nose had been busted so many times, Ashton often wondered how his foreman even managed to breathe.
“You didn’t come up here to get some gossip about a college girl’s story in some slick magazine,” Ashton told him. “Certainly not after I’ve spent three hours driving in a night as dark as pitch from Helena to here by way of Great Falls.”
“No, sir.” The man set his beer next to the bottle of fine bourbon.
“Couldn’t wait till breakfast, I take it.” Ashton started to bring the crystal tumbler up again, but saw it contained nothing but melting ice and his own saliva. “I figured not.”
Few people could read Colter’s face. Ashton had given up years ago. But he didn’t have to read the cowboy’s face. The voice told him everything he needed to know.
Colter wasn’t here because some hired hand had wrecked a truck or ruined a good horse and had been paid off, then kicked off the ranch. Colter wasn’t here because someone got his innards gored by a steer’s horn or kicked to pieces by a bull or widow-making horse.
Frowning, Ashton set the glass on a side table, walked to the window, found the pull, and closed the drapes. At least he couldn’t see those flashing red lights on wind turbines any longer.
Walking back, his cold blue eyes met Colter’s hard greens. “Let’s have it,” Ashton said.
The foreman obeyed. “We’re short.”
Ashton’s head cocked just a fraction. No punch line came. But he had not expected one. Most cowboys Ashton knew had wickedly acerbic senses of humor—or thought they did—but Colter had never cracked a joke. Hardly even let a smile crack the grizzled façade of his face. Still, the rancher could not believe what he had heard.
“We’re . . . short?”
Colter’s rugged head barely moved up and down once.
Ashton reached down, pulled the fancy cork out of the bottle, and splashed two fingers of amber beauty into the tumbler. He didn’t care about ice. He drank half of it down and looked again at his foreman.
No question was needed.
“Sixteen head. Section Fifty-four at Dead Indian Pony Crick.” His pronunciation of creek was same as many Westerners.
Ashton took his glass and rising anger to the modern map hanging on the north-facing wall, underneath the bearskin. Colter left his empty longneck on the desk and followed, but the foreman knew better than to point.
Ashton knew his ranch, leased and owned, better than anyone living. He found section fifty-four quickly, pointed a finger wet from the tumbler, and then began circling around, slowly, reading the topography and the roads. “You see any truck tracks?”
“No, sir. Even hard-pressed, a body’d never get a truck into that country ’cept on our roads. What passes for roads, I mean. Our boys don’t even take ATVs into that section. Shucks, we’re even careful about what horses we ride when working up there.”
Ashton nodded in agreement. “Steers? Bull or . . . ?”
“Heifers.”
“Who discovered they were missing?”
“Dante Crump.”
Ashton’s head bobbed again. Crump had been working for the Circle M for seven years. He was the only cowboy Ashton had ever known who went to church regularly on Sundays. Most of the others were sleeping off hangovers till Mondays. A rancher might question the honesty of many cowboys, but no one ever accused Dante Crump of anything except having a conscience and a soul.
Ashton kept studying the map. He even forgot he was holding a glass of expensive bourbon.
Colter cleared his throat. “No bear tracks. No carcasses. The cattle just vanished.”
“Horse tracks?” Ashton turned away from the big wall map.
The cowboy’s head shook. “Some. But Dante had rode ’cross that country—me and Homer Cooper, too—before we even considered them cattle got stoled. So we couldn’t tell if the tracks were ours or their’uns.”
“Do we have any more cattle up that way?” Ashton asked.
“Not now. We’d left fifty in the section in September. Dante went there to take them to the higher summer pasture. Found bones and carcasses of three. About normal, but he took only thirty-one up. So best I can figure is that sixteen got rustled.”
“Rustled.” Ashton chuckled without mirth. The word sounded like something straight out of an old Western movie or TV show.
“Yeah,” the foreman said. “I don’t never recollect your daddy sayin’ nothin’ ’bout rustlers.”
“Because it never happened.” Ashton let out another mirthless chuckle. “I don’t even think my grandpa had to cope with rustlers, unless some starving Blackfoot cut out a calf or half-starved steer for his family. Grandpa had his faults, but he wasn’t one to begrudge any man with a hungry wife and kids.” He sighed, shook his head, and stared at Colter. “You’re sure those heifers aren’t just hiding in that rough country?”
The man’s eyes glared. “I said so” was all he said.
That was good enough for Ashton, just as it had been good enough for his father.
“Could they have just wandered to another pasture?”
“Homer Cooper rode the lines,” the foreman said. “He said no fence was down. Sure ain’t goin’ ’cross no cattle guards, and the gates was all shut and locked.”
They studied each other, thinking the same thought. An inside job. A Circle M cowboy taking a few Black Angus for himself. But even that made no sense. No one could sneak sixteen head all the way from that pasture to the main road without being seen or leaving sign.
“How?” Ashton shook his head again. “How in heaven’s name . . . ?”
Colter shrugged. “Those hippies livin’ ’cross the highway on Bonner Flats will say it was extraterrestrials.” Said without a smile, it probably wasn’t a joke.
In fact, Ashton had to agree with the weathered cowboy.
The Basin River Weekly Item had reported cattle turning up missing at smaller ranches in the county, but Ashton had figured those animals had probably just wandered off. The ranchers weren’t really ranchers. Just folks wealthy enough to buy land and lease a pasture from the feds for grazing and have themselves a quiet place to come to and get a good tax break on top of it. Like that TV director or producer or company executive who ran buffalo on his place and had his own private helicopter. There were only two real ranchers left in Cutthroat County, though Ashton would never publicly admit that Garland Foster was a real rancher. He’d been mostly a sheepman since arriving in Cutthroat County, and he was hardly even that anymore.
Ashton looked at the curtains that kept him from seeing those flashing red lights all across Foster’s spread. “How did someone manage to get sixteen Black Angus of our herd out of there? Without a truck or trucks. Without being seen? That’s what perplexes me.” He moved back to the map, reached his left hand up to the crooked line marked in blue type—Dead Indian Pony Creek—and traced it down to the nearest two-track, then followed that to the ranch road, then down the eleven miles to the main highway.
Colter moved closer to the map. Those hard eyes narrowed as he memorized the topography, the roads, paths, streams, canyons, everything. Then he seemed to dismiss the map and remember the country from personal experience, riding a half-broke cowpony in that rough, hard, impenetrable country in the spring, the summer, the fall. Probably not the winter, though. Not in northern Montana. Not unless a man was desperate or suicidal.
His head shook after thirty seconds. “I can take some boys up, see if we can find a trail.”
Ashton shook his head. He had forgotten about a wife who had left him, had dismissed a fruitless trip to the state capital, and then an even more unproductive meeting in a Great Falls coffee shop with a high-priced private dick. “No point in that,” he said. “They stole sixteen head of prime Black Angus because we were sleeping. Anyone who has lived in Montana for a month knows you might catch Ashton Maddox asleep once, and only once. I’ll never make that mistake again. They won’t be back there. Any missing head elsewhere?”
“Nothin’ yet,” Colter replied. “But I ain’t got all the tallies yet.”
Ashton remembered the bourbon and raised the tumbler as he gave his foreman that look that needed no interpretation. “I want those tallies done right quick. There’s one thing in my book that sure hasn’t changed since the eighteen hundreds. Nobody steals Circle M beef and gets away with it.”