Wilderness Double Edition 14 Page 8

  Cyrus Walton laughed. “Nice going, Vince. You sure skunked the old fart.”

  The greenhorns were in high spirits, and why shouldn’t they be? They were going to be wealthy. Judging by their dreamy expressions, they were contemplating what they would do with their ill-gotten riches. Even the Batson brothers. Billy commented that he couldn’t wait to see his pa’s face when they bought him a new plow.

  “A plow?” Ed Stark cackled. “You could wind up with enough money to start your own bank, and all you can think of is to buy your pa a stinking plow?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Billy asked defensively.

  “Nothing at all. Once a hick, always a hick, I reckon.”

  Zach flinched as he stiffly pushed upward. His forearms were leaden, his wrists layered with dry blood. But it was thirst that bothered him the most. It had been a full day since he last drank anything, and his mouth and throat were parched. Seeing Ira Sanders upend the water skin, he asked, “Any chance I could have some?”

  “Not on your life, ’breed,” Ed Stark said. Kendrick was picking up his saddle. “Lick the dew off the grass. That ought to hold you until you die.” Several of the whites thought their leader was hilarious. Billy Batson frowned but didn’t have the gumption to protest.

  Ben Frazier surprised everyone by declaring, “Give the boy some water, Kendrick. Or no gold.”

  The big man was about to hoist his rig onto his mount. “No one tells me what to do. Ever.”

  “Call it a swap. My cooperation in return for doing me a favor.”

  “You old coot. You’ll cooperate whether you want to or not. Haven’t you got that through that thick noggin of yours yet?”

  Frazier folded his arms and stiffened his spine. “Do your worst. I’ve had a belly full of your threats.”

  All eyes were on Kendrick as he threw his saddle on his sorrel. Pivoting, he was on the trapper in two bounds. He gripped the little finger on Frazier’s left hand, drew his butcher knife, and pressed the edge against it. “Did you think I was bluffing? One more word out of you and you can say good-bye to your pinkie.”

  Frazier wasn’t intimidated. “Go ahead. I dare you.”

  “No!” Zach yelled. “Don’t lose a finger on my account. It’s not worth it.”

  Support came from an unlikely source. Elden Johnson, of all people, put a hand on Kendrick’s shoulder. “Let him be, Vince. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

  No one was more astounded than Kendrick. “What in hell’s gotten into you? Taking this flea-ridden bastard’s side against me? I’d expect it from some of the others, but you and I always see eye to eye.”

  “It’s in our own best interests not to touch him.”

  “Did that wallop on the head scramble your marbles? How do you figure?”

  Johnson rattled off the reasons. “He’s already weak from loss of blood. Cut off a finger or two and he’ll lose a lot more. He might even become so weak, he can’t guide us to the gold. Do you want that?” Not waiting for a reply, he went on. “Either way, he sure won’t be in any shape to ride. Maybe not for days. Longer if infection sets in. Do you want that?” Johnson answered his own question. “No, of course you don’t. None of us do. The sooner we get this over with, the safer we’ll be. So do as he wants. Give the half-breed a few sips. What can it hurt?”

  Kendrick released Frazier and stood. “You always were the real brains of this bunch. All right. Let the ’breed have a little.” He abruptly whirled on the trapper. “But don’t get any wrong notions, old-timer. I’m not backing down. You haven’t won.”

  “ ’Course I haven’t,” Frazier gloated.

  The water was some of the tastiest Zach ever swallowed. Each sip was a luxury, each swallow a testament to life itself. Johnson took the water skin away much too soon, but Zach had slaked his thirst enough to get by.

  Walton and Sanders threw Zach over a packhorse. He requested they untie his ankles so he could ride upright, but they only snickered and regarded him as if his brains had seeped out his ears.

  “Hope you have a tinplate gut, ’breed,” Ira Sanders said. “Ten hours of bouncing around on it will about do you in.”

  It was more like ten minutes. In no time at all, Zach’s stomach was being lanced by pain whenever the packhorse moved any faster than a walk. For the longest while he felt sick, but the feeling faded. He counted on the brigade stopping for half an hour or so at midday to rest the horses, but Kendrick was too filled with greed to delay for more than ten minutes. And no one bothered to take Zach off.

  By three o’clock Zach was in such anguish, he thought he would scream. But then something strange occurred. The pain lessened on its own. He couldn’t say why. Maybe his nerve endings had taken all the punishment they could, and shut down. Maybe his mind was numbed by the ordeal. Or maybe he just didn’t care anymore.

  The sun arced westward. Frazier kept telling Kendrick that Gold Mountain was “just up yonder,” but they never reached it. Zach doubted they would before the sun sank. What would Kendrick do? Carry out his threat?

  Wait and see was the only thing to do.

  The bearded rider came out of woods to the east, astride a splendid bay that once was the proud possession of a Flathead warrior. In his hair he wore an eagle feather, Cheyenne-fashion. But his beaded buckskins and moccasins were Shoshone, and the par-fleches strapped to his saddle were decorated with Shoshone designs. His features, though, were those of a white man—as were the striking green eyes that surveyed his world.

  Every now and again he would bend to inspect the tracks he paralleled.

  Large of build, he had broad shoulders that would be the envy of many. A mane of hair fell to those shoulders, crowned by a beaver hat. As with most of his kind, he was a living armory, with a rifle, pistols, and long knife—and a tomahawk obtained during his wide-flung travels.

  He could pass for an Indian if he wanted, so bronzed and weathered were his rugged features.

  The rider’s forehead creased when he came to where the pair he was after had dismounted on top of a ridge. He did the same, his eagle gaze probing a small valley below and settling on a clearing in some trees. The charred remains of a campfire stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.

  “So,” he said aloud to himself. “Strangers.”

  The bay took the slope on its hindquarters, its forelegs rigid. When only twenty feet from the bottom it slipped and slid and would have fallen if not for the superb mastery of the man in the saddle.

  Undaunted, the rider did not even slow down. At the tree line, he spurred the bay on.

  Rosy sunbeams bathed the clearing, lending it a deceptive, peaceful aspect. An aspect that never fooled the horseman. When he dismounted, he had his Haw-ken in hand. As he crisscrossed the clearing, he never took his eyes off the woods for very long.

  Most anyone else would have been befuddled by the confusing jumble of footprints and hoofprints. But not the frontiersman. He read them with the same ease literate people read books, able to tell one track from another by characteristics most would never detect. By the end of half an hour he knew there had been eight men in the party, and that all eight, in the company of one of those he sought, had ridden westward.

  Pieces of rope at the base of a tree hinted something was amiss. Sinking onto a knee, the bearded rider discovered smears of blood on the ground and drops on the bole. The prints of the unfortunate involved, toes splayed outward, told him it had been a white man.

  A white being tortured by other whites.

  Therein was a mystery that grew in scope when the rider found where only one of those he was after had entered the clearing. On foot, no less. He backtracked to learn why, and what he found brought him back to the clearing for a second, more thorough examination.

  The bay was chomping at the bit when the frontiersman swung up and hauled on the reins. Thunder and lightning danced on his brow as he brought his mount to a gallop. Someone had a lot to answer for. They would pay dearly should any harm befall his son.
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  Very dearly indeed.

  It was the gay chirping of a robin that brought Louisa May Clark back to the world of the living. Squinting against the bright sun, she rose, furious at herself for oversleeping. Fatigue had ended her search the night before, fatigue so potent, she had been asleep the moment her cheek touched the ground. An early riser by nature, she’d figured she would wake up about dawn. But the sun was several hours high.

  Lou smacked her lips, then ran a hand through her hair. She was hungry, grungy, and aching, and she would give anything for a hot bath.

  Arching her back, Lou stretched. Spying the bluff, not a quarter of a mile to the southwest, shocked her fully awake. She jogged toward it, her leg muscles objecting to every step. At the talus slope she was stunned to see the game trail, plain as day. How she could have missed it the night before, she would never know.

  Lou scrambled upward, using her hands in her haste to reach the top. As she had feared, Kendrick’s bunch were long gone, her darling Zach with them.

  But if it was true that fortune smiled on those who had nothing to smile about, then twice in twelve hours a miracle had taken place. For grazing near the smoldering embers of the fire was Stalking Coyote’s dun. It had scaled the bluff on its own, maybe drawn by Zach’s scent, maybe lured by the scent of other horses.

  Ecstatic, Lou approached slowly, afraid it would run off if she wasn’t careful. “Ho there, horse,” she coaxed. It didn’t have a name. Stalking Coyote refused to give it one, saying that wasn’t the Shoshone way. “You remember me, don’t you? Sure you do. I’ve fed you enough carrots to gag a goat.”

  The dun munched contentedly, showing no inclination to run off.

  “I’ve given you sugar when I wasn’t supposed to,” Louisa mentioned. “I’ve taken you to the lake to drink.” Another few steps and her hand fell on the bridle. Overjoyed, she hugged the horse, then grasped the saddle to pull herself up. The dun was much larger than the mare, a full sixteen hands, and she had to hook her foot in the stirrup to lever her legs high enough to straddle its broad back.

  Recalling the pemmican Stalking Coyote carried in a parfleche, Lou fumbled at the tie, opened it, and pulled out a bundle wrapped in rabbit skin. Fingers fumbling, she removed a piece and hungrily bit down. Her stomach leaped upward as if to meet the food halfway, then growled as loud as the grizzly had. She chewed slowly, relishing the taste, the texture, the feel.

  “What am I doing?” Lou abruptly asked herself. Here she was, wasting time, while with every second that elapsed the distance between Stalking Coyote and her widened.

  “Let’s go, horse.” A slap of Lou’s hand was enough to goad the dun into a trot. She felt rejuvenated, due more to the horse than the food. Now she stood a very good chance of overtaking the cutthroats before dark, especially if they stopped to rest now and then, as they were bound to do.

  “Hang on, darling. I’m coming for you!” Lou declared. She didn’t, mind talking to herself. She had done so long before she met Zach. Solitude was to blame, the many hours spent alone when her pa was off checking traps and raising plews. As he’d once said, “The best listeners are our own ears.”

  The daunting task she faced did nothing to dampen Lou’s zeal. She would save her prince—or she would die trying.

  “A couple of hours more and the sun will set.”

  The thinly veiled threat in the announcement by Vince Kendrick wasn’t lost on any of the men strung out behind him, particularly Ben Frazier. No one had objected to the trapper riding next to Zach, which he had been doing most of the afternoon.

  “Hear that, sonny? It was for my benefit. He thinks he can scare me, the blamed mooncalf.”

  “Don’t prod him. Please.”

  “I’m touched you care,” Frazier said. “But I ain’t about to tread lightly. I’ve had my fill of him, actin’ as if he’s the greatest thing since the chamber pot.”

  They traveled several hundred more yards, then the column reined up. Kendrick and Ed Stark were off their mounts, and Stark was bent low over the grass as if he had dropped something and was hunting for it.

  “Cyrus!” Kendrick bellowed. “Bring the half-breed!”

  Walton tugged on the lead rope.

  The trapper tagged along, winking at Zach and joking, “Where you go, I go. Just in case one of these possum heads takes a notion to do you harm.”

  Clods of earth had been tom up in a fifteen-yard-wide strip. “What do you make of all these tracks, ’breed?” Kendrick demanded.

  Zach had a bird’s-eye view. A low-flying bird, admittedly, yet that made studying the finer details of the hoofprints a snap. But some of the trapper’s feistiness had worn off on him. “Why ask me?”

  “Don’t give me any guff. Everyone knows Injuns learn to track before they learn to talk. What do you make of all this?”

  Frazier broke in. “Hell, I can tell you what you want to know. Fifteen to twenty unshod horses came by here less than two hours ago, travelin’ north. Utes, would be my guess.”

  The others were gathering around, and they weren’t happy at the news. “Utes?” Cyrus Walton said. “Real Utes this time?”

  Kendrick shrugged. “So what? It’s a hunting party, heading for their village. Nothing for us to lose any sleep over.”

  Zach craned his head high enough to see the one he would most love to count coup on. “You’re mistaken. Utes live south of here. When they hunt, they usually go east, toward the prairie. For buffalo. This must be a war party, on a raid. And they’ll be back this way in a few days. When they cross our trail, they’ll come after us.”

  “You’re just guessing,” Kendrick said. “It could be a month before they return. Or they could go another way.”

  Frazier tittered. “I’d give up on the gold, were I you. It ain’t worth havin’ more arrows stuck in you than a porcupine has quills.”

  “He has a point,” Frank Batson said. “The last thing we want is to tangle with bucks out to add to their scalp collection.”

  “Who held an election and voted you the new boss?” Kendrick demanded. “I liked you better when you were too sick to flap your gums.” Climbing back on his horse, he gestured. “We’re seeing this through together. And I’ll gladly shoot the first bastard who tries to run out on us.”

  Zach sagged against the packhorse, then snapped his head up again. Had it been his imagination, or had he seen a solitary warrior on a hill to the northwest? When he looked the second time, the man was gone. Chalking it up to lack of sleep and food, Zach didn’t rate it worth mentioning.

  The gold seekers resumed their journey.

  Seven

  Louisa May Clark didn’t see the bear until almost too late.

  Ironically, she suspected it was the same grizzly that had chased her the night before. It lay in a basin rife with high grass, sleeping, when she blundered onto it. She had decided to let the dun rest awhile and veered toward a stand of trees, where they would lie low for half an hour. Partway there, she saw the bowl-shaped depression and the enormous brown mass lying at the bottom. The distinctive hump warned her what it was, and she wheeled the dun to flee.

  But the harm had been done. The silvertip had been awakened, and it charged up out of the basin in a surly mood. To put it mildly. Slavering and snarling, it bore down on her like a bull gone amok.

  Lou raced westward. She was confident the dun could outrun the monster. But what if Kendrick’s bunch had stopped not far ahead and she blundered on them as she had the bear? There would go any chance she had of saving Stalking Coyote. So Lou cut to the right, to the northwest, and lashed the reins against the dun’s neck for an extra spurt of speed.

  It was well she did. The grizzly put on a spurt of its own. In a twinkling it was upon her, a huge forepaw flicking at the dun’s flanks. Instead of rending flesh, the claws clipped the dun’s bobbing tail.

  At the contact, the dun shot forward, gaining a small lead but a lead nonetheless. And any lead was better than none when the alternative was to go down u
nder the grinding teeth and rending claws of a living engine of destruction.

  Lou thought the bear would soon give up. It was common knowledge grizzlies did not have a great deal of stamina. They could run fast, but only for short distances. Then they tired. Everyone said so.

  But after a minute of harrowing pursuit, Lou began to question conventional wisdom. Because the grizzly showed no signs of tiring and giving up. If anything, it was going faster, incensed by its failure to overtake her. Drool rained over its lower lip as its paws chewed up the ground like living rakes.

  “Go, horse, go!” Lou urged, knowing it couldn’t possibly make the dun run any swifter but needing to voice her anxiety anyway.

  Ahead woodland appeared. Lou’s breath caught in her throat; it would slow her down! She couldn’t maintain the same pace in the thick of densely pressed trees and brush. The bear would catch up, would bring the dun crashing to earth. And if she tried to change direction again before she got there, with the beast right on her heels, it would be all be over in seconds.

  She had to slow it down somehow. Glancing back, she placed a hand on a flintlock.

  At that juncture the grizzly did slow, growling hideously as if calling her every cussword in the grizzly vocabulary.

  Louisa smiled and waved and then was in the trees. Bringing the dun to a halt, she twisted in the saddle to confirm the behemoth had lost interest. It had already turned and was shuffling southward, its great head swinging from side to side. It reminded her so much of a grumpy old man that she laughed.

  “You were lucky, boy, is all.”

  Startled, Louisa swung around, palming the pistol and cocking it as she drew. Not twenty feet away, on a tired-looking horse, sat a tired-looking man in his early thirties, dressed in buckskins that had seen better days. Straggly hair and a straggly beard lent him the image of a wild man, but his smile was kindly and he made no move to use his rifle or flintlocks. Behind him was a packhorse laden with traps and a small pile of peltries. “I didn’t know you were there, mister!” Lou blurted.