The Whippoorwill Trilogy

by Sharon Sala

  Eulis was thinking of the warm cabin and spit-roasted rabbit as he came down from the trees, pulling a felled tree behind each mule. As he neared the cabin, the smoke coming out of the chimney was as good as any welcome sign he’d ever seen.

  “Come on, Rosy, come on Blackie… let’s go home.”

  The mules dug in a little deeper and the trees they were pulling slid a little faster against the snow. They were as anxious to get unhitched as Eulis was to see Letty. Within minutes, they were back at the cabin.

  Eulis unhooked the trees near the woodpile, and then unhitched the mules. Rosy tossed her head and gave a quick kick before running out into the meadow. Blackie wasn’t far behind. Eulis laughed at their antics and then stomped the snow from his boots as he got to the door. But when he walked inside, the chill in the air made him frown. It shouldn’t be cold.

  “Letty?”

  She didn’t answer. He saw the water on the floor, and seconds later, saw her. She was flat on her back and lying halfway into some kind of opening. Shot through with panic, he picked her up into his arms and carried her to the bed. When he laid her down, his hand came away bloody. Sick to his stomach and so scared he could barely think, he found a cut on the back of her head.

  “Letty… Letty… what have you done?” he muttered, and ran for some clean rags to put a compress against the wound. As he eased her head up, she moaned, and then blinked.

  “Eulis?”

  “I’m here, darlin’. Lie still.”

  “What happened?” Letty murmured, and reached for her head.

  “I’m not sure, but it appears you’ve gone and knocked a hole in the wall.”

  She frowned. “I think you went and hit your head, too. You’re talkin’ crazy.”

  Ignoring the obvious opening in the back of the room, he began running his hands up and down her arms and legs to check for further injuries.

  Letty swatted at his hands.

  “Not now, Eulis. I’m not exactly in the mood.”

  He had to laugh. It was that, or curse, and she was highly opposed to that happening.

  “You ain’t the only one with lust in the dust. You might near scared the life outa’ me. I’m tryin’ to see if you’re still all in one piece, okay?”

  She sighed, then moaned. “I know… I’m sorry. I’m a bit out of my head.”

  “No wonder,” he said. “You’ve got a goose-egg of a knot and you’re bleedin’ some.”

  “Oh, lord, I don’t want to get blood on the bed,” Letty said, and tried to sit up.

  “It don’t matter,” Eulis said. “Just lie still.”

  Letty groaned again.

  Eulis patted her cheek, and then glanced over his shoulder to the opening in the wall.

  “What did you go and find, girl?”

  “Find? What are you talking about?”

  He pointed toward the corner of the room.

  When she saw what had happened, she started to get up, but the motion made her dizzy. She sat back down with a thump.

  “Easy, darlin’,” Eulis said. “You stay here. I’m gonna take a closer look.”

  He peered inside, but it was so dark he couldn’t see beyond the doorway.

  “Where’s that piece of candle?” he asked.

  “On the shelf above the cooking pans,” she said.

  He got it, lit it with an ember from the fireplace, and then carried it to the darkened opening.

  “Lord have mercy,” he whispered, and took a couple of steps inside. Almost immediately, he could tell that it was some kind of a shaft and that it ran straight back into the mountain.

  Letty held the compress to her head as she got up, staggering a bit until she got her balance, and then followed him inside.

  She ducked underneath his arm and then stopped.

  “Is it a mine? Did we find a mine?”

  “Well… I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely a tunnel.”

  “It’s a mine,” she repeated, then took him by the hand and pulled him forward.

  “Careful,” he said. “The floor feels a little uneven.” Then he lowered the candle for a better view.

  There were no holes in the floor of the tunnel, but there were a lot of rocks. He kicked them aside and then started forward when the faint light from the candle caught and held in something bright.

  Letty had seen it too.

  “What was that?” she asked, then took the candle from his hand and knelt down.

  The floor of the shaft appeared to be littered with rocks, but rocks like she’d never seen before. Her heart started to pound as beads of sweat appeared on her upper lip. Since it was anything but hot inside the tunnel, and she was still chilled from lying on the cold floor, she figured she was about to pass out. And since she already had one knot on her head, she figured the best thing she could do was stay down. At least this time she wouldn’t have far to fall.

  She handed Eulis the candle, then sat.

  “Honey… are you all right?” Eulis asked.

  “No. I got an extra hole in my head. Hurts something fierce, but that’s beside the point. Do you see what I see?”

  He squatted down beside her, holding the candle even closer to the rocks, unable to believe what he was seeing. But it was there just the same. Thick veins of gold ran through everything he picked up. Then he stood up and lifted the candle high, shedding a faint, but persistent, light on the walls of the shaft. The veins there were as wide as his arm. He thrust his knife into the wall to see how deep it ran. When it went all the way to the hilt without stopping, he thought he was dreaming.

  “Letty… are you seein’ what I’m seein’?”

  “If you’re seeing gold, then yes. I reckon we’ve found us a gold mine, and if this stuff is as good as it looks, we’re most likely rich.”

  “Wait here,” he said, and moved a few yards forward, curious as to how far back the shaft went.

  He hadn’t gone more than twenty or thirty yards when he saw a bundle of rags lying against the wall. Upon closer inspection, he realized there was a skeleton within them. He took a deep breath, and then called back.

  “Letty.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a dead man back here.”

  Letty yelped, and then scrambled to her feet. Using the wall to steady herself, she moved toward the candlelight. Seconds later, she saw the skeleton.

  “Oh lord. Wonder what happened to him?”

  “Most likely, he just died of natural causes.”

  Letty leaned down, staring at the slack-jaw of the skull and the empty eye sockets and whispered.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Well, if someone had done him in, they would have most likely gone and laid claim to the gold? But since that Indian woman told you the man who lived here was dead, most likely when he didn’t show up anymore, they assumed the obvious, and the mine became his tomb.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Letty said. “If he had just up and disappeared, then why would she say he died? Assumption would lead anyone to believe that he’d just left for greener pastures, so to speak.”

  Eulis frowned. “You’re right.”

  “Of course, I’m right,” Letty said, then leaned a bit closer and moved aside the rotting fabric of the shirt. Suddenly she gasped and pointed. “Eulis! Look down there… on the ground between his ribs.”

  Eulis held the candle closer. Then he saw it, too.

  “That’s an arrowhead.”

  “Part of the shaft is broken off,” Letty said.

  “I’ll be danged,” Eulis muttered. “He was gut-shot. Broke the arrow off at the belly. But why did he crawl off in here?”

  The hair on the back of Letty’s neck suddenly stood on end. In her mind, she was twelve years old again, and hiding in that hollowed-out badger hole, listening to the shrill war cries of the Indians as they’d attacked her father and burned their home to the ground. She knew why he’d come in here.

  “He was hiding,” she said.

  E
ulis knew enough about her past to know what she was remembering. He squatted down beside her and slid an arm around her shoulders.

  “But it’s safe now,” he said. “The Arapahos are right friendly to the white man.”

  “Not to all,” she said, pointing to the arrowhead and remembering the dead white man she’d helped Little Bird hide.

  “I reckon they had their reasons,” Eulis said.

  When she looked down, the floor started to move. She flattened her hands against the dirt, but it kept on swaying.

  “Do you feel that?” she asked.

  “Feel what?” Eulis said.

  “The floor’s moving.”

  He remembered the knot on her head and cursed himself for being so dense.

  “Here, honey. Hold this,” he said, and handed her the candle, then bent down and picked her up.

  “I think I can walk.”

  “I don’t think you can even stand, and since I’ll be carryin’ you to the bed, you might as well just hush.”

  Then he kissed her once on the cheek to soften his words, and took her out of the tunnel.

  When he laid her on the bed, Letty pointed back at the wall.

  “Close that doorway. We haven’t had any visitors, but I wouldn’t want to bet that gold on the fact that we won’t. It’s not going anywhere, and we’ve got the rest of the winter to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  Eulis studied the opening for a bit before pulling it shut, then tried opening it over and over until he figured out how the hidden door worked. Satisfied that their discovery was safe, he hurried back to Letty.

  She was dabbing a wet cloth on her head, trying to wash out the blood. When he offered to help, she shooed him away, so he stood at the foot of the bed, marveling at the intensity with which she was working. After a bit, he started grinning.

  At that point, Letty looked up.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “You did it, honey. You found a mother lode.”

  “No. All I did was find someone else’s mine. It’s not ours until we register this claim and even then we gotta keep this secret. If those miners in Denver City find out what we’ve got and where it’s at, we’ll be dead before dark.”

  He frowned. She was right.

  “How do you reckon we’d best go about this?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” she said. “But we got a few months to think on it before we have to make a decision.”

  He brightened up. “That’s so,” he said. “Now lay back and rest your poor little head.”

  She sighed and did as he suggested, but she couldn’t be still. There was something still bothering her.

  “Eulis.”

  “What, honey?”

  “When the ground thaws, we need to give that man a Christian burial.”

  Eulis glanced back at the wall.

  “Kinda’ gives me the creeps, knowin’ he’s just layin’ back there like that.”

  “A dead man doesn’t scare me,” Letty said. “Except for you, that’s the only kind of man that I trust.”

  Except for the day Letty had admitted to loving him, it was the first real compliment she’d ever given him. Even though it was a bit backhanded, Eulis took it to heart.

  “Well, all right, then,” he said gently, and despite her fuss, took the wet rag out of her hand and cleaned up her wound.

  After putting a dry compress on it, he made her lie down. “I’m goin’ outside to cut up that wood. You rest. If you need something, call me.”

  He cupped her cheek with his hand, then leaned over and kissed her.

  “I’m sorry you hurt.”

  She caught his hand as he started to pull away.

  “There’s something I want to tell you… something I should have said months ago.”

  “What?”

  “I’m so sorry for all those years I treated you bad, for yelling at you when you were bringing up my bath water, and calling you names because I wanted someone to be more miserable than I was. I was terrible mean to you.”

  Eulis laughed. It was the last thing she expected him to do.

  “That makes you laugh?” she asked.

  “No, no… you don’t understand. It’s right dear of you to be sorry like that, but you gotta know somethin’. Despite what I’ve said, I don’t remember even one time when you yelled at me. I was too drunk. Even when I wasn’t drunk, I was so hung-over I couldn’t focus on anything but my own misery.”

  Letty sighed. “Still, I did it, and I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t be. I haven’t been sorry for one day of my life since we left Lizard Flats together.”

  Letty smiled as she fought back tears, holding the words close to her heart long after he’d gone outside.

  Weeks passed.

  Snow came again, then melted back some.

  Days were getting longer, which meant their time left in the valley was becoming shorter.

  The End Of The Trail

  The wind came up in the night as Eulis and Letty slept. The sound alone wasn’t enough to awaken them to what was happening outside, although it blew and it blew in nerve-wracking gusts that never stopped, blasting from peak to peak and down into the valley, blowing all night long, rattling the door, and sucking air up the chimney so fast that the fire went completely out.

  Eulis woke just before morning and needing to pee, but when his bare feet hit the cold floor, shock almost drove the notion from his mind. He looked toward the fireplace, surprised to see that not only had the fire gone out, but there were no live coals left either.

  “What in blazes?”

  Letty roused, and then rolled over, realizing Eulis was up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Something’s weird. The fire’s out,” he said shortly. Then he turned toward the door. “And the wind’s stopped blowing.”

  She sat up and pulled the covers up to her chin.

  “Oooh, it’s freezing in here,” she said.

  “Like I said… fire’s out. Even the coals.”

  Letty frowned as she threw back the covers.

  “I’ll help. There’s some kindling in the corner.”

  “We don’t have any more matches,” he said.

  Letty panicked, but only for a moment. “We’ve got flint.”

  Eulis turned and looked at her. “Why do we have flint, and why didn’t I know it?”

  “I found it by the fireplace on our first day. My daddy used flint to make fire all the time, so I knew what it was. I just put it up.”

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “On the shelf behind the pan you used to make coffee, when we still had some to drink.”

  He shoved aside the pan, grabbed the flint, and hurried back to the fireplace. Within a few minutes, they had a small fire going. Letty sat on the stool by the fire, wrapped in a blanket from the bed, and slowly adding wood as needed, while Eulis went to get dressed.

  The sun was just a wink away when he opened the door to go let the mules out of the shed.

  “Letty! Look! Lord have mercy, would you look at that!”

  She ran to the door, and then started to laugh.

  “It’s gone! It’s gone! The snow is gone. What happened? How could it all melt this fast?”

  “Chinook,” Eulis said. “I heard of ’em. Never saw what one could do, though.”

  “What’s a Chinook?” Letty asked.

  “It’s a warm wind… comes outa the south and melts the snow right down. I reckon this is our first sign of spring comin’.”

  “Will it snow more?”

  “Might, but probably nothin’ like it has before.”

  “What do you think?” Letty asked.

  Eulis knew what she meant. “I think we oughta make plans to leave.”

  All of a sudden, the thought of the unknown was unsettling. Here, she knew what to do. Out there, every day was uncertain. Then she thought of the gold. Whatever they did they would be doing it in style.

  “
How are we gonna pack out the gold?” Letty asked.

  Eulis looked toward the wagon. Melted snow was still dripping through the cracks in the wagon bed. The wheels were okay, but the hubs would be needing grease, especially with a heavy load. There was some still in what they’d packed from Fort Dodge, although when he thought about that time, it seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “We’ll figure somethin’ out, but we will have to wait a couple of days until the ground freezes back or we’ll bog down in the wagon before we get across the meadow.”

  “I’m scared,” Letty said, and then couldn’t believe she’d admitted to being weak.

  Eulis put his arm around her.

  “Yeah, so am I.”

  The silence after their confessions was short. Letty was the first to laugh, and it came out in a snort.

  “I shouldn’t have said I was scared. I think that’s the wrong word. Scared was when I saw you fall off of Rosy into the snow, and I didn’t think I was gonna get you back to the cabin. Scared was watching you burning up with fever and not being able to do anything but pray you wouldn’t die. Scared was when that wolf wanted me for breakfast. I don’t know why I said I was scared.”

  But Eulis just patted her shoulder. “We ain’t never been rich before. Maybe that’s what’s wrong.”

  Letty frowned. “That’s right enough, but we’re not leaving that gold behind, so whatever it is that’s gotten in my craw, I intend to get over it.”

  Eulis grinned. “I guess you’re right.”

  “No guess about it,” Letty said. “I’m going to get dressed. After you let the mules out, bring me some meat from the shed to cook up for breakfast. After we eat, I think we need to dig that grave.”

  The mention of the miner’s skeleton drove all the silliness from the moment. Weeks ago and before they’d ever started mining the ore, they’d put the man’s remains in a box and set it in the shed where their meat was hanging.

  They had no idea how much ore they’d dug out of the mine, but it was in piles all along the shaft, just waiting to be carried out. Now that the time was here, a whole new set of worries evolved. Leaving the valley meant coming in contact with people again—people who would be willing to kill for what they’d found.