Bear Claws

by Robert Lee Murphy

  About midafternoon the snow stopped falling. The temperature had stayed well below freezing for days. Maybe the storm was finally playing out. Sunbeams streaked through gaps in an overcast sky. The warm rays caressing his shoulders felt good. The ache from the old arrow wound diminished.

  He estimated he was making two miles an hour trudging on the snowshoes. His normal walk could cover solid ground at three to four miles an hour. But his slogging through the snow, plus Ruby’s struggling, made for harder going. With each breath he took he dragged ice-cold air into his lungs. White mist appeared in the air before him with each exhalation. Still, he perspired in his heavy coat. He unfastened the top two buttons.

  A couple of hours later, Ruby nudged him in the back of the arm with her muzzle and snorted. Will could hear her labored breathing and, when he looked back, a cloud of steam obscured her nostrils.

  “Yeah, I agree. We’ve been doing this for a long time.”

  The sun was well down over his back now. They’d been walking since early morning, and even at his slow two-mile-an-hour pace, he thought they should be nearing the North Platte River.

  “Come on, girl. Just a little farther.” He pulled on the halter rope, and the mule fell in behind him.

  A couple hundred steps later he stopped. There it was. Stretched out before him, the tops of a line of cottonwood trees poked above the white expanse. Their leafless limbs exhibited a dirty brown line across the horizon.

  “We’re here, Ruby.”

  From where Will stood, the North Platte flowed far to the north in a hundred-and-fifty-mile loop, before swinging southeast to hook up with the South Platte in western Nebraska.

  After a few more paces, Will stood looking down at the river. Cottonwoods lined the banks on both sides, the fifty-foot trees extending their barren limbs above the level of the plain on either side. Fingers of ice splayed out from the river’s edge, reaching into the center of the rapidly flowing, hundred-foot-wide stream. Now that the snow had stopped falling, the nighttime temperatures would plummet, and the river would freeze over completely.

  Will looked north, studying the course of the winding river. A cold breeze caressed his nose and cheeks—not strong enough to sway the trees or dislodge their coatings of snow.

  By traveling due east as he had, Will reckoned he’d reached the river ten or twelve miles north of where the Overland Trail crossed it at North Platte Crossing. Perhaps he should follow the river south, where he might hook up with a stagecoach. Maybe he could find his uncle and help him get food back to the camp. Bullfrog Charlie Munro’s cabin would be someplace between here and the river crossing. That was another possibility.

  A flicker of movement under the cottonwoods along the bank caught his eye. A hundred yards away, an antelope buck flicked his white tail. Was he signaling other members of his band? Were there females nearby? Will wanted that buck. That’s why he’d come here in the first place.

  “Quiet, Ruby,” he whispered. He led the mule down the slope a few yards to a large tree and looped her halter rope around a branch. He slipped his hands out of his mittens and untied his carbine from the packsaddle. The buck stood unmoving, looking in the opposite direction. The north wind blew Will’s and Ruby’s scents away from the antelope.

  The shot would be a long one from here, but the carbine’s .52-caliber, metallic, rimfire cartridge provided an effective range of five-hundred yards, under ideal conditions. He must remember to aim low, since the Spencer had a tendency to fire high. But he didn’t have a shell in the chamber. He’d packed the carbine unloaded for safety. If Ruby had fallen in the snow and the weapon had discharged accidentally, the shot might’ve killed the mule. He would have to lever a round into the chamber before he could shoot.

  He took a deep breath and pointed the carbine toward the antelope. He tried to ease the trigger guard lever down and back up to chamber the round, but a deafening click filled the silence around him.

  The buck had heard the sharp noise and bounded away.

  “Dang it!” Will muttered. “Sorry, Mama.” His mother, God rest her soul, had always chastised him for cussing. He tried to remember not to, but sometimes the curse slipped out.

  “Ruby, you stay here. I’m going after that buck.” Why he thought it did any good to tell the mule to stay where he’d tied her, he didn’t know. Nobody else to talk to he supposed.

  Will struggled down the slope on the snowshoes. Perhaps he should take them off. But the snow was deep and he’d probably bog down without them. He just needed to tread carefully.

  He reached the spot where the buck had stood. Tracks led a few paces down to the river’s edge and then turned south. Will trudged along the bank, easily following the trail the antelope left in the snow.

  Hee-haw! Ruby brayed loudly.

  Will looked back up the slope over his shoulder. The buck stood frozen not far from where he’d tied Ruby. The antelope had circled back and surprised itself by coming face to face with the mule.

  Will swung around to get into position to fire, and in so doing stepped on the right snowshoe with the left one. He stumbled and slid backward down the sloping riverbank. He threw his arms up, in an attempt to regain his balance, and struck an overhanging branch with the barrel of the carbine. His finger jerked on the trigger. The weapon discharged with a loud bang.

  The force of the recoil tumbled him farther down the slippery slope. The snowshoes tangled in the underbrush and ripped from his boots. He landed on his back on the ice along the river’s edge.

  A cracking sound exploded beneath him. His weight broke the fragile ice. He dropped the carbine and sank.

  Wow! That was cold.

  His back side bumped on the bottom of the stream, as his body submerged. He got his legs under him and stood up. Fortunately, the river was only waist deep near the bank. But he had to get out of the freezing water—fast!

  He grabbed an overhanging cottonwood limb and pulled. The brittle branch broke off, and he fell back into the water.

  Once more he stood and stepped toward the bank.

  A dull snap from beneath the water’s surface surprised him.

  Oh no! An excruciating pain, far worse than the cold, engulfed his ankle.

  He’d stepped into a beaver trap.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jenny McNabb entered the Wells Fargo station, closed the door behind her, and brushed a light dusting of snow from her shawl. She removed her old bonnet, shook off more snow, and hung it on a peg beside the entrance. “Papa, I think it’s letting up. I can see patches of blue through breaks in the clouds.”

  “That’d be good. Maybe we can get a stage headed west before the day’s over.”

  Alistair McNabb had been hired the preceding fall by Wells Fargo to manage their home station at Laramie. It’d been a godsend for what remained of the McNabb family. They’d buried Jenny’s mother last summer at Virginia Dale, Colorado, and after they’d moved on in their covered wagon on the Overland Trail, they’d been attacked by Cheyenne Indians. Jenny had been kidnapped and spent several days in captivity before Will Braddock, with the help of Lone Eagle, rescued her. When she was reunited with her father and younger brother, Duncan, she’d learned her older sister, Elspeth, had gone to work for Mort Kavanagh as a dance hall girl in his Lucky Dollar Saloon in the Hell on Wheels town of Cheyenne.

  Jenny worked as the station’s cook, preparing meals she sold to the stagecoach passengers for a dollar and fifty cents. Meals were available only at what Wells Fargo designated as “home” stations, located about fifty miles apart. At intervals of ten to fifteen miles between the home stations, “change” stations provided a place where fresh horses were hitched to the coach after a six-horse team had run as far as they could go. Passenger amenities weren’t provided at the change stations.

  The fourteen-year-old girl had gained a reputation for serving the best meals between Julesburg, Colorado, and Salt Lake City. Drivers and shotgun messengers were replaced at each home station with a new crew. The in
coming crew took a few hours’ rest before their next run. When laying over at Big Laramie Station, the resting crew looked forward to one of Jenny’s meals.

  Jenny’s father, a former Confederate cavalry officer, had lost his left arm at the Battle of Yellow Tavern. Even with one arm, he still did the work of two men. Her nine-year-old brother helped her father and the two stock tenders water, feed, and groom the two dozen horses they stabled. Duncan particularly liked assisting the drivers in changing the teams each time a stagecoach passed through. When he wasn’t busy with the stock, he practiced Morse code. One of the stock tenders doubled as the home station’s official telegrapher, but Duncan was determined to learn.

  This latest snowstorm had brought all stage travel to a halt. Coaches heading west could get no farther than Big Laramie Station, and no stages had reached that point from the west for a week. Mail bags destined for Utah and California continued to accumulate. It was hard to walk through the place without stumbling over a mail bag—or a smelly passenger, for that matter. A dozen passengers had stayed, but many had given up and gone back east. Those who remained took turns sleeping in the few beds the station offered, often double bunking. A pungent odor permeated the small building.

  The station’s door flew open and Sean Corcoran stepped inside. “Well, Alistair,” he said, “what do you think? This storm finally blowing itself out?”

  “I hope so. We’ve got passengers and mail that have to move west, and I know you’re anxious to go.”

  “Are you feeling well enough to travel, Mr. Corcoran?” Jenny asked.

  “Yes, thanks to you.”

  “I think Fort Sanders’ doctor had more to do with your getting well than I did.”

  “Well, he helped, I’m sure . . . but it was your care that really did it.” Corcoran had arrived a week ago on the last stage to make it through to Laramie from the home station at North Platte Crossing before the blizzard had shut down operations.

  Jenny recalled that day, when driver Butch Cartwright had shouted for help before the coach rolled to a stop. “Hey, McNabb!” The driver had a peculiar, high-pitched, scratchy voice that carried a long distance.

  Jenny’s father had stepped outside at the call. “What is it, Butch?”

  “Got a very sick man inside. Says his name’s Corcoran, Sean Corcoran. Claims to be a railroad surveyor.”

  Jenny recognized the name immediately. She’d never met him, but she knew he was Will Braddock’s uncle. She helped her father get the man out of the coach and into the station. He shivered uncontrollably, yet burned with fever.

  “Mr. Corcoran?” Jenny had tried to get his attention. “Mr. Corcoran, what happened?”

  He mumbled something, but he was incoherent, almost delirious.

  They laid him on one of the beds and piled on blankets. She set to work making broth and tea while her brother rode for Fort Sanders’ doctor, five miles away.

  The Army doctor knew the sick man and confirmed he was indeed Sean Corcoran. He examined the patient and left medicine for Jenny to administer. Jenny insisted Corcoran be left at the station under her care, rather than be moved to the fort’s infirmary.

  Shortly after the doctor had returned to the fort, Lieutenant Luigi Moretti arrived. Moretti told Jenny he had served with Corcoran during the recent war and wanted to check on his friend. Jenny had met Luey, as most people called him, the preceding fall—the day Will had brought her to Fort Sanders after he’d rescued her from captivity by the Cheyenne.

  “Luey, why do you suppose he turned up here?” Jenny asked.

  “Don’t know.” The Italian-born officer pulled on the ends of his waxed mustache to straighten them. “Wonder where the other members of his team are.”

  Jenny stared at Moretti. Will was part of Corcoran’s team. Where was he? What had happened? She placed her hand over the eagle talon she wore beneath her dress and felt its scratch against her skin. It’d taken Jenny three days to get Sean Corcoran back on his feet. During that time, she learned he’d left his team in Will’s care when he’d gone to seek help. Corcoran thought he’d escaped the strange illness that’d felled his team members, but shortly after reaching Bridger’s Pass on the Overland Trail he felt the symptoms.

  Corcoran had told Jenny he’d been disappointed to learn neither food nor medicine were available at the Bridger’s Pass change station. Even though he was feeling the onset of the illness, Corcoran made the decision to proceed east to North Platte Crossing in the hopes the larger home station would have provisions to spare. When he got there, he was too ill to stand. The station manager had decided to send him on to the closest doctor, who was at Fort Sanders.

  That had been seven days ago.

  “Listen up, folks.” Jenny’s father stood in the center of the room and addressed the passengers. “The storm’s let up enough that we’ll send a coach out this afternoon.”

  Applause and cheers greeted his announcement.

  “Don’t have enough room for all of you, so we’ll board you in the order you arrived here. With the exception that I’m placing Mr. Corcoran on this coach. He’s got a team of sick surveyors that have been snowbound out there for a week. They are in desperate need of food and medicine.”

  Jenny and Duncan helped Butch Cartwright harness the teams and pack the coach with mail bags. The passengers would have to sit atop them, but Jenny’s father wanted to get as many people and as much mail as he could moving west.

  Corcoran tied two horses to the rear of the coach—his saddle horse wore a McClellan saddle, the pack horse bore a load of provisions. He planned to take the stage as far as Bridger’s Pass where he would leave the coach for the cross-country ride back to Rawlins Springs.

  “Jenny,” Corcoran said, “it was a pleasure to meet you. I know why Will was determined to rescue you last fall. You’re a special young lady. Thank you for nursing me back to health.”

  “You’re welcome. Please give my best to Will.”

  “I’ll do that.” He climbed into the coach.

  Butch snapped the reins. “Giddup!” The coach lurched on its thoroughbraces and rumbled away.

  Jenny caressed her eagle talon. Was Will still alive out there?

  CHAPTER 5

  Paddy O’Hannigan walked across the hard-packed dirt floor of the large circus-style tent that enclosed the main dance floor and gaming tables of the Lucky Dollar Saloon. At midday, the piano was silent and no dance hall girls circulated among the empty tables. Only Randy Tremble, the bartender, was at work wiping the top of the long wooden bar that extended the length of one side of the tent. Randy didn’t look up. That was all right with Paddy. He didn’t have anything to say to the heavyset, bearded, ruffian who doubled as a bouncer.

  Paddy stepped up onto the narrow wooden floor of the false-fronted saloon and knocked on the door of Mortimer Kavanagh’s corner office.

  “What is it?” Kavanagh’s gruff voice called from within.

  “Paddy, Mort.”

  “Come in.”

  Paddy entered the small office and removed his bowler hat. “Well, and they’re gone, Mort.”

  “What do you mean, they’re gone?”

  “Sure, and Chief Tall Bear’s camp ain’t there no more.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Now how would I be knowing that? They didn’t leave no painted sign telling me where they’d gone.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Paddy O’Hannigan.” Mort leaned back in his swivel chair and cradled the back of his head in his interlaced fingers. “You’re lucky I still keep you around.”

  Outwardly Paddy remained calm—internally he seethed. When his temper rose, his scars itched. With his left hand he caressed the older scar that ran down his left cheek. With his right hand he rubbed his left chest muscle where his shirt concealed the newer scar, the one inflicted on him last year by Will Braddock’s knife stab.

  The sixteen-year-old wasn’t sure how much more abuse he could take from his godfather. Kavanagh was his mother’s cousin
, and after Paddy’s father had been killed by Major Sean Corcoran during the New York draft riots of 1863, Mort had agreed to take his godson under his wing. It was Corcoran’s saber that’d sliced Paddy’s cheek open when he’d stepped in to defend his father.

  But Paddy hadn’t found a way yet to break away from Kavanagh. He needed the money he earned at the Lucky Dollar Saloon to support his mother and younger sister in Brooklyn, where they struggled as laundresses.

  “Sit down,” Kavanagh said. “Tell me what you actually found out there.”

  “Well, d’ye see, there’s nothing left of that Cheyenne camp, to be sure.” Paddy dropped into a chair in front of Kavanagh’s desk, pulled his Bowie knife from his boot top, and sliced a chaw off a twist of tobacco he pulled from his vest pocket. “Sure, and I didn’t find any tracks leading away. Snow’s too deep, don’t ye know, to reveal much. Them Injuns must’ve skedaddled outta there before this storm struck. That’s the best I make of it.”

  “The railroad’s what caused it,” Kavanagh said.

  “Well, now, how d’ye figure the railroad done it?”

  “Buffalo don’t like crossing the iron rails. Those Cheyenne had to move to find buffalo, since the herd won’t come to them now.”

  “Hmm.” Paddy spat a stream of tobacco juice at a spittoon sitting beside the corner of the desk. “And what will ye be doing now to slow construction?” Paddy knew that the longer it took the railroad to move the tracks west, the more opportunity the so-called mayor of Hell on Wheels had to sell whiskey to the workers.

  “That band of Cheyenne did a good job scaring the pants off the railroad last year. The track layers had to keep one eye peeled all the time, never knowing when they’d be attacked.”

  Kavanagh bit the end off a cigar and spat it into a wastebasket, then lit the cigar with a lucifer match. “The Sioux are still attacking the line between here and the Platte River, but I’ve got to come up with another scheme once the railroad moves west of Laramie.”