by Will Hobbs
When Till asked after what the packhorse was carrying, Jim Clark said he was too old to go without his coffee and bacon.
Second-guessing was second nature to Till. “Won’t that packhorse slow us down? How are we going to catch up with Kid Curry?”
“Gradually and without raising a cloud of dust,” came the marshal’s answer. “He doesn’t know he’s being followed. You boys rise and shine when I say, and we’ll overhaul him just fine. Give me guff of any kind and I’ll stake you out on an anthill. Understood?”
I believe I heard Till gulp. “Understood,” we both replied.
“Keep up the patrols,” the marshal told the two deputies who showed up at the last minute to see him off. “I don’t expect much crime after a disaster like we just had.” Asked how long he might be gone, the marshal replied irritably, “As long as it takes. If the mayor asks, tell him I’m after a mule thief.”
With that, minutes after sun-up on the first Saturday in October, we rode out of Telluride: Marshal Jim Clark trailing a packhorse, then Till, then me. The marshal made it clear we would be riding in that order always and without exception.
Why was he taking us along? I could identify Logan, but on the face of it, this was ridiculous. Maybe it was just an excuse to get out of town. Did he have reason to believe somebody in Telluride was about to sneak up on him and blow his brains out? The man was so mysterious and sly, so contrary and unforthcoming, it was impossible to tell. Maybe it was to collect the bounty on Logan. No matter his motives, I had a strong feeling that going along was the only way we stood to recover Peaches.
The early sun was yet to burn off the frost. Like Till, I had the wide collar of my wool mackinaw flipped up against the chill. Just ahead of me, Till tugged at his new hat, which resembled the marshal’s Stetson. I tugged on my slouch hat that went back to Kansas. We’d shopped for the things Clark said we needed, including rain slickers, a bedroll for Till, some rope, a fistful of candles and wax-dipped matches, and two canteens, one for Till and the other for a spare. Till found himself a new pocketknife, long-handled underwear, and riding boots. We both bought bandannas to tie around our necks.
Our saddlebags were full to bursting with stuff of our own and items the marshal shoved at us including hardtack, tinned fish, and extra ammunition for his revolver and the Winchester scabbarded under his leg. The leather strings at the backs of our saddles secured our bedrolls and rain slickers, along with our tarp and ground cover.
A couple miles out of town, with the light coming up fast, we came to a fork in the wagon road next to a slaughterhouse and a stockyard with a hundred or more steers awaiting their demise. After ordering us to stay put, the marshal dismounted and walked in both directions, stooping here and there to examine tracks. He chose the road to Lizard Head Pass. Mounting up, the marshal surprised me by asking if I could handle a gun.
“Not hardly,” I said, “I’m a Quaker.”
“Imagine that,” he remarked.
Till said he was a crack shot with his .22 but Ma wouldn’t let him bring it.
“A wise woman,” quipped the marshal.
The wagon road up the south fork of the San Miguel was a climb from the start. On the mountainside above the hydroelectric powerhouse, nearing a dramatic loop in the railroad tracks, we got smoked by a train from Telluride hauling sacked concentrates to the smelter in Durango. Till was dying to tell me he’d been through here the day before but was trying to show the marshal he could keep his trap shut. I was happy to have little brother ahead of me, where I could keep an eye on him.
On the far side of the pass, we made a stop in sight of the monumental tower of rock called Lizard Head. “No way does it resemblify a lizard,” Till declared. “It’s scaly, I’ll give it that.”
The horses snatched at the grass while we lunched on hardtack biscuits and sardines. The marshal lay down on his back, exhaling a sigh. He looked at the sky and closed his eyes.
“I’m gonna see a man about a horse,” announced Till. When he returned from watering a tree, Clark was sharpening the big knife he wore on his left hip. Till said, “Is it gonna be in the newspapers about us chasing one of the Wild Bunch?”
“Newspapers?” Clark snarled, bolting upright. “Nobody knows about that photograph but me and you two. Did you boys say anything to anybody?”
Till was letting me handle this one.
Of course I’d told Molly, without even thinking about her father. I doubted she passed it along, since it involved me. “Just an old miner in the boarding house,” I answered.
“Who’s that?”
“Merlin Custard.”
“The Cousin Jack? He ain’t the sort to flap his gums to the papers. This is my play, and I don’t want nobody butting in, be they law or Pinkertons.”
“Pinkerton detectives,” Till explained for my benefit. “The most famous one is Charles Siringo. He used to be a buddy of Pat Garrett, the sheriff who gunned down Billy the Kid. He’s been chasing Butch and the Sundance Kid for years.”
Clark sheathed his knife. “Know a lot about Butch and Sundance, do you, Tillson?”
“I know a few things.”
“Where from?”
“From one of them ‘Blood and Thunder’ books. Butch was a Mormon kid from Utah. His real name is Robert Leroy Parker. Growin’ up, he was Bob Parker. He had a butcher job once, so that’s where ‘Butch’ came from.”
“What about ‘Cassidy’?” I asked.
“Mike Cassidy,” Till replied without hesitation. “When Bob was about your age, his family was up against it. His pa kept the farm going while his ma ran a rancher’s dairy. It weren’t close enough to go back and forth every day. She had to go live there, and she took the boys with her. Mike Cassidy was one of the wranglers—he took Bob under his wing. Told him about his rustlin’ escapades, showed him how to throw a loop and use a runnin’ iron. Bob wanted to be like him. When he became an outlaw and needed an alias so as not to shame the homefolks, he chose Butch Cassidy.”
“Interesting,” said the marshal.
“So, where did ‘Sundance Kid’ come from?” I asked.
“That’s Harry Longabaugh,” Till said. “He did the sun dance with the Sioux.”
“You learn something new ever’ day,” said the marshal, droll as can be. “All this while I was under the impression it had to do with his prison spell in Sundance, Wyoming, for stealing a horse and a gun.”
Till didn’t let on that he’d been schooled. The marshal said, “Let’s get a move on, boys. I think it’s clabbering up to rain.”
On his feet, Clark took aim with his big hunting knife at a carving on the trunk of a nearby aspen, smooth as skin. MANUEL + ROSA it said, inside of a heart. He clean missed. “Gettin’ old,” the marshal groaned.
Before the marshal could take a step, Till ran and retrieved the knife. Just short of giving the pigsticker back, he stepped to the side, whirled, took it by the blade, and threw it end over end at the marshal’s target. By chance the knife stuck dead center between the names. Till let out a whoop and looked to the marshal, expecting amazement and congratulations. All he got was a glare.
It started showering as the road met the Dolores River. We didn’t break out our slickers, but it rained enough to make the tracking tricky. Even so, the marshal made out where Logan and Peaches left the road at a trail up Coal Creek. The trail led us over a high ridge to Dunton, an old mining camp with hot springs on the west fork of the Dolores. Clark approached the ghost town with extreme caution, scouting on foot from building to building with his .45 drawn. We waited by the stream until he reappeared and told us the coast was clear. Harvey Logan had spent the night here and so would we.
First thing, we hobbled the horses so they could get after the meadow grass. The whole place had a sulphurous rotten-egg smell to it. The marshal had no interest in the hot springs, but we were eager to take a soak. Inside a dank cabin we tried the concrete tank with steaming mineral water spilling in and out of it. The tank had a ledge fo
r sitting in the water, but we didn’t last two minutes. Till said, “This is where they boiled the rotten eggs.”
Outside, closer to the river, we found a hot springs pool dammed by smooth stones that was more to our liking. We sat out a rain shower there, perfectly comfortable. I said to Till, “I’ve been thinking. That was no lucky throw with the marshal’s knife. You’ve been practicing. Where’d you get a pigsticker?”
“Found it in the barn our first day,” he confessed. “Musta been Uncle Jacob’s. I practice at the big tree by the river.”
“What for?”
“I was gonna challenge you to a contest and whup ya. I’m tired of your almighty arm every time we skip rocks or throw at targets. You always win.”
“I’m fifteen. You should take that into account.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“Okay, I won’t,” I said, trying to keep a straight face.
“If Hercules got sold to one of the mines, how do we get him back?”
I explained about the book of brands and December, and my suspicion that the marshal was on the take from the mining companies, including the Tomboy. Till said we should steal Hercules. “Take him,” I insisted. “Are you forgetting he’s ours?”
“That’s how come we’re gonna steal him.”
“Whatever you say. I’m already thinking about it, if that’s what it takes. I’ll have to wait until summer, when the snow is off the mountains.”
The marshal had a campfire going and was in a talkative mood. It appeared he was going to forgive and forget the knife-throwing incident. We learned that Butch Cassidy and his two accomplices passed through Dunton on the run from the Telluride job. Till asked Clark if he was the leader of the posse that was chasing them. “Sheriff Beattie was,” he replied. “He put a large posse together on short notice. I was out of town. When I got back, they’d already left.”
“They never caught up,” Till said. “Butch had fresh horses stashed along the way.”
“Including this very spot,” the marshal added. “Which reminds me of a story. That colt you’re riding, Tillson, is a ringer for the one Butch rode the day of the robbery. It was a gift from Harry Adsit, the owner of the Spectator Ranch, a huge spread west of Telluride. Butch cowboyed for him while he was scouting the bank. Ten days after the robbery Adsit got a thank-you letter mailed from Moab, Utah. Butch said that the colt carried him a hundred and ten miles in ten hours over rough country.”
The marshal cooked supper—bacon and beans and corn bread—out in the open over a fire. He baked the corn bread in a cast-iron Dutch oven he’d brought along. Dessert was peaches from a can. When Till said he must know a lot about Butch, the marshal said, “I have more than a passing interest. Some people say I musta been in on it with him, and that gravels me no end. Now I’ve got a chance to nab one of his Wild Bunch.”
“That’ll show ’em,” Till said.
“I reckon it will.”
“Where’s Moab,” I asked, “where Butch sent the letter?”
“It’s in Utah, on the Grand River, the biggest tributary of the Colorado. Butch and Matt Warner and Tom McCarty crossed on the ferry there. They were chased across the river through the Arches and beyond. They nearly got caught when they rode into a box canyon by mistake. Got cliffed out—it shoulda been all over. The posse was in such a hurry they rode on by.”
I asked if that was the original posse from Telluride. “Oh, no,” Clark scoffed, “they’d long since gone home. There were posses from all over. Telegrams will do that.”
It was just about dark, and the marshal called it a day. He said we should take advantage of the bunkhouse. I didn’t like the idea. We’d already walked through there and it was musty as could be, with rodent droppings all over the place. Some of the mattresses had been robbed of corn shucks for nesting material. But when the marshal moved in there with his bedroll, weapons, and saddlebags, I followed suit and Till along with me. How bad could it be?
Our candles were still burning when the rats appeared. We watched them scurry around, brazen as can be. “They’re huge suckers,” Till whispered.
“Don’t give ’em no never-mind,” ordered the marshal. “Just a couple of packrats.” He doused his candle. “Put out your lights.”
We did. My bed was sagging, a real back-breaker. In the dark, the sound of those rats was intolerable. After a bit I said, “I think I’ll sleep outside.”
“Sleep where you are!” Clark barked, mean as could be.
I lay awake a good while, afraid of what I’d gotten us into.
The dern packrats kept it up. One of them scurried across my bedroll. What was I going to do?
I felt in my shirt pocket for one of my lucifer matches, struck it on the bedrail, and lit my candle.
“What’s up?” Till whispered.
“I can’t take it in here,” I whispered back. We gathered up our stuff. The marshal, if he was still awake, didn’t give us any guff.
21
The Four Hundred Horsemen
WE HAD A fire going when the marshal appeared in the morning, and if he wanted to wring our necks he didn’t let on. He made oatmeal and bacon and eggs, and ate with his back against a big spruce. Coffee in hand and .45 at the ready, gazing at the mountain stream racing by, he looked almost peaceful, like he was on a camping trip.
Till broke the silence. “Marshal, ain’t you afraid Logan’s gonna git away?”
The marshal poured himself some more coffee. “He’s got no idea we’re on his trail, and he ain’t pushing the animals. You looking for bloodshed, Quaker boy?”
Till was only a little taken aback. “Just askin’.”
“Well, you and big brother might want to reconsider. Logan is wanted for the murder of a sheriff in Wyoming last year.”
That got our attention. The murder, as Clark explained, was in the aftermath of a train robbery near Wilcox, Wyoming. Wearing masks, the Wild Bunch dynamited two safes and rode off with $50,000, some of it paper currency, a lot of it gold. After they split up, three of the robbers were pursued into rough country outside Casper. The sheriff and his posse located their hideout, dismounted, and nearly caught them by surprise. Without masks, all three came out with guns blazing, and Harvey Logan shot the sheriff in the guts. The other two weren’t identified. The outlaws escaped and the sheriff died the next day.
“So, what’ll it be, fellas? You still want to be in on this mule chase? Suit yourselves, quit me if you like.”
Till glanced my way, and I shook my head. The kid gave our answer. “We’re gonna stick, marshal. And if you ain’t in a hurry this morning, that don’t make no never-mind to us.”
That last bit had me amused at Till parroting the marshal’s lingo from the night before, but I kept a straight face. Till’s pride was easily bruised.
Logan’s track led us down the west fork to its confluence with the Dolores River. We were on the main-traveled road again, and Peaches’s hoofprints were nowhere to be found. The passage of freight wagons, stagecoaches, and riders had erased them. At the depot in Dolores, the marshal asked an old-timer on a bench if he’d seen a rider leading a saddled mule. The answer: “Yessir, this time yesterday.”
Outside of town, where the wagon road began its climb out of the narrow river valley, the marshal spied a trail heading downriver and dismounted to inspect it. His report: “Kid Curry went thisaway.”
For reasons of its own, the Dolores was making a sharp bend to the north. The trail kept us on the east side of the river. Here and there the trail was overgrown and hard to find, but mostly we made good time at a slow trot and put a great many miles behind us. It was beyond me how the marshal could proceed without the paralyzing fear of ambush. From behind I could see him scanning to his right and across the river to his left as well as straight ahead, but the task seemed nigh impossible.
If Clark’s strategy was to stay a day behind and catch up with Logan in a location more advantageous, that was fine by me. I was after our mule, not excitement.
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br /> Thoughts of Ma had me feeling blue. I could’ve stayed up the night before we left and written her a letter explaining a great many things, but I was thinking we wouldn’t be gone very long. I would wire her when we had Peaches. Now that it was evident we might be gone a good long while, I was deep in the weeds.
Whenever we crossed a creek, the marshal paused to let the horses drink. Other than that we pressed on. Late in the day my funk finally lifted. On both sides of the river, a layer of rock was emerging from the earth and shooting skyward. We were entering a canyon of red rock with fossils to be found.
The newborn canyon of the Dolores River soon rose to a few hundred feet. The resulting shadiness lent itself to ponderosa pines in the draws between the cliffs. Monarchs of their kind grew on the canyon bottom, their trunks three and four feet in diameter. Suddenly the trail steered into the river where it was especially shallow.
The marshal had me hold the packhorse while he rode across the river. He dismounted on the other side and continued on foot with his rifle, disappearing in the trees where the trail appeared to leave the canyon up a timbered draw.
Till and I were eyeing the soft beds of pine needles and hoping the marshal would call it a day. When he got back he did just that, after declaring that Logan had left the canyon.
“I expect he’s headed for Monticello, across the Utah line,” the marshal said over supper, a stew he cooked in his Dutch oven. He’d brought along no end of surprises: potatoes and onions and carrots, even apples, as well as a pantry of canned goods.
Daylight was dimming as I scrubbed the dishes at the river, but enough remained for me to study the sandstone behind our campsite. I didn’t find any fossils but was happy to be looking. The farther we got from the volcanic San Juans, the better. Crossing into Utah was all right by me. In my mind’s eye I could see all those sedimentary layers exposed like an open book.
In the morning we climbed out of the canyon and emerged onto a plateau with an immense expanse of sage and juniper before us. In the distance a solitary clump of mountains rose from the plain. The Blue Mountains, the marshal called them. Monticello, he said, sat in front of them.