Curse Of The Spanish Gold (The Mountain Men Book 2)

by Terry Grosz

  The next day found the three men digging out dirt and wood-rat debris from under a rocky overhang and hiding the gold in a typical trapper’s cache of log walls, floor, roof, and dried leaves. Several hundred pounds of loose rock and dirt over the cache’s roof logs completed the task in such a way that no one would be any wiser about the golden hoard hidden therein.

  During the process of getting ready for winter, the Indians came calling many times. They were still amazed by Cain’s color because they had never seen a black man before, and they were also astonished by his great size and strength. They held many contests of speed and strength, and Cain emerged as the winner most of the time. When an Indian bested him, which didn’t happen often, it was cause for great celebration in the Indian camp.

  Cain, because of his uniqueness, was also able to bed many of the Arapaho ladies—at their requests.

  Leaving the cabin one fall morning at daylight, the three men went into what is today the Michigan River drainage to trap beaver, which were now in their prime. After setting out twenty traps, they commenced hunting the willows and killed a large cow moose for camp meat. Returning to their recently set trapline, they found about half the traps full of prime, blanket-sized beaver. Even though a beaver pelt was worth only a dollar because silk had replaced the demand for beaver hats, the men still trapped them for old times’ sake. Resetting those traps, they loaded the beaver on their pack string along with the moose meat and headed back to their cabin before an oncoming winter rainstorm drenched them.

  Rounding the trees below the cabin, the men filed into the corral area and dismounted to unload the moose meat and beaver carcasses. They hobbled the animals and let them out to feed and water in the nearby meadow. Turning toward the cabin carrying armloads of beaver to be skinned and hooped, along with the moose quarters, they were suddenly confronted by six white men holding leveled rifles as they quickly emerged from their hiding places inside the cabin and fanned out in front of the door.

  “Drop what you are holding and turn around,” yelled a red faced, excited Ben Lord.

  For a long moment the three men just stood in amazement at the sudden change in their fortunes. Then they did as instructed, turning and facing away from the six men holding rifles. There were three loud thuds from rifle butts, and the lights went out for the brothers and Cain.

  When the three men awoke, they found themselves tied to adjacent separate trees. Unable to move or fight back, Jacob and Martin could only watch as Ben beat Cain within an inch of his life with a bullwhip. That whipping opened up great gashes in Cain’s heavily muscled flesh. Jacob and Martin quietly tried to loosen the ropes that bound their hands as the beating went on, but the armed men accompanying Lord had tied them too well.

  After Ben had beaten Cain almost senseless, he started in on Jacob with his bullwhip, asking where the rest of the golden ingots were hidden.

  Jacob coldly answered, “That was all there were.”

  A smash in the face from the leaded butt of the bullwhip brought tears of pain to Jacob’s eyes and a burning rage to reach out and squeeze Ben’s neck until he quit wiggling.

  As blood ran down Jacob’s face, Lord stuck his furious face in Jacob’s and said, “Tell me where the gold is, or I will beat you within an inch of your life same as I did the nigger!”

  Rage surfaced in Jacob, and he spat into Ben’s leering face. That was the last thing he remembered as Ben beat him about the head and shoulders with the leaded butt of the whip until he was senseless. When he came to twenty minutes later, Jacob swore to his maker that Lord would die a horrible death if he ever got free from his ropes. That rage became even more intense when Lord turned on Martin, beating him unconscious as he tried to get the secret of the location of the Spanish gold ingots from him as well.

  Leaving the three badly beaten men tied to the trees, the six invaders had a good laugh, then went into the cabin to get out of the lightly falling cold rain to eat and sleep. The three captives, soon soaked by the cold winter rains and stiff and sore, could only imagine what was to befall them come daylight.

  About two in the morning Jacob felt a knife cut his ropes, and he fell stiffly and awkwardly to the ground. Painfully rolling over, he stared up into the worried face of his friend Bison Path. Then he heard Martin and Cain fall with soft thuds as well. In a few moments the men were able to work the stiffness out of their arms and legs until they could stand.

  Bison Path helped them stumble away from the cabin and out of earshot while a number of his braves surrounded the darkened cabin and watched it for any sign of discovery. After walking several hundred yards into the dark timber behind the cabin, the men found themselves by a small fire and were able to warm up, partially dry out, and collect their senses.

  “What do you want us to do to the bad spider people, my friend?” asked a worried but obviously revenge-minded Bison Path.

  “We are going to kill every one of them!” stated the fast-reviving Jacob, who was now so full of rage and hatred that his whole body was violently shaking...and it wasn’t from the cold.

  Looking at his brother and Cain, Jacob could see the rage in their eyes by the dancing light from the fire.

  “When we’re ready, we’ll return to the cabin. If my Indian brothers will give us some knives, we will go into the cabin and kill every man there,” Jacob said coldly.

  “And if we are unsuccessful and some bad men try to escape, I would hope our Indian brothers will kill them as they exit the cabin,” Martin added.

  The look in Bison Path’s eyes told them that no man from Lord’s party would leave the forest alive that day.

  Jacob grabbed Bison Path’s arm in friendship and agreement as he was handed a long-bladed knife. Two braves standing nearby handed knives to Cain and Martin at Bison Path’s request. With that, the three men and a dozen braves quietly returned to the darkened cabin, which was being guarded by another band of heavily armed Northern Arapaho.

  Jacob slowly opened the front door as the returning thunder of the winter’s rains on the sod roof muffled any sound. He moved to his right and was followed by Martin, who moved to the left in the darkness inside. Cain silently moved into the middle of the cabin, blocking the door to stop anyone lucky enough to survive the brothers’ attack. If the beating Cain had taken from Lord meant anything, that survivor trying to escape from the brothers’ wrath would die from a broken neck or back at his hands.

  Boom—boom! roared two rifles, going off simultaneously as two men awoke when Jacob stepped on them by mistake in the early-morning darkness. The first ball tore along Jacob’s left side, ripping away hardened muscle and cracking two ribs. The man firing that rifle, illuminated by the fireball at the end of the barrel, died immediately from a knife thrust deeply into an eye socket. The second shot tore harmlessly into the timbers of the cabin above the door. With that, total terror reined within the darkened cabin as the invaders awoke to their worst nightmare. Boom—boom—boom went three more rifles in quick succession. One ball hit Cain in the point of his left shoulder, tearing out a two-inch chunk of muscle. Cain, in turn, hit the closest man so hard in the neck with his knife blade that he severed the shooter’s spine, dropping him instantly. Martin, unnoticed by everyone, swung his knife with such force that he beheaded his target, a small man just rising in alarm from his sleeping furs on the floor.

  “I surrender, I surrender!” screamed Lord as he struggled to his feet and then tried to escape. Cain broke Lord’s neck with a loud snap audible over the melee still going on in the darkened cabin as he tried to escape by running out the front door.

  Boom went another rifle in Martin’s face, leaving him with a powder burn along his neck and shoulder. That shooter died as Martin’s knife plunged repeatedly into his chest until the man sank to the floor, a lifeless, bloody rag.

  Whack went the sound of a tomahawk hitting the steel of Jacob’s knife in the darkened cabin. Losing his knife with the strike, Jacob lunged forward and, grabbing the man by the head, bit of
f the assailant’s ear as he gouged out the man’s eyes with his fingers. A terrible scream erupted as the man sank to the floor under the savage onslaught, only to have his neck quickly snapped by a furious Cain before Jacob could finish the job.

  The morning light was just starting to illuminate the room as the men paused in their killing fury, recognizing each other in the moment. The cabin smelled strongly of blood, black powder, and the urine and feces expelled by the dead men.

  “Are you all right, Martin?” yelled Jacob.

  “I have a powder burn, but I think I’m all right. How about you?” said Martin.

  “I hurt like hell on my left side where I was shot. Cracked ribs for sure, since I heard them break when the ball hit,” Jacob said flatly as he started coming down from his violent adrenalin driven emotional high.

  “Cain, you all right?” Martin asked worriedly.

  “I’m fine. I took a ball in the shoulder, but it’s only a flesh wound, I think,” Cain said quietly as he explored the damaged and bleeding area tenderly with his fingers.

  Several worried heads peered into the open doorway as the Indians approached to see what had happened during the furious exchange. They soon parted, and in walked Bison Path with concern written all over his face. Upon seeing his friends all standing, he smiled a huge smile of relief.

  The three men set to helping each other patch up their wounds. Jacob was hurt the worst with his broken ribs, but he had a whole winter in which to recover. All they could do was clean out his wound and tie it up tightly with a piece of tanned elk skin. By then several Indian women had arrived on the scene and patched up Cain and Martin with their herbal remedies. In the meantime, the warriors hauled the dead out of the cabin. They were dragged by ropes tied to the Indians’ horses across the meadow and piled up in a small gully. Because the Indians considered them to be evil, the dead men were deemed not worthy of scalping. Within days all that was left were meat scraps on the bones for the ravens, crows, and magpies to enjoy after the prairie wolves, coyotes, and bears not yet in hibernation had eaten their fill.

  For their help and rescue, Bison Path and his people were given the six assailants’ horses, pack animals, rifles, and supplies. However, Jacob kept the two Spanish ingots he had used to purchase Cain, which he recovered from Lord’s saddlebags before giving up all the men’s tack to the Arapahos. It seemed that Lord and his men had felt the ultimate sting and curse of the Spanish gold...

  ***

  The rest of the winter of 1855 went quietly as the men trapped beaver and other furbearers until freeze-up. When the snows came, they retreated to their cabin to fix equipment and horse tack for the next spring. During times of good weather, when the snows were not too deep, they hauled more firewood, trapped pine marten and lynx, and visited their friends at the Arapahos’ camp. During those sessions the men traded their excess supplies for the well-dressed furs taken by the Indians during their fall and winter trapping excursions. Soon their little cabin was literally filled to the rafters with piles of furs. During the winter the men healed from the fight with Lord and his henchmen. However, in the close confines of the small cabin and the deepening snows, they waited with keen anticipation for the spring thaw and what the new trapping season had to offer.

  Jacob and Martin frequently made the time to study the ridgepole with their fingers, feeling their fathers’ carved names as if to draw out the last ounce of family history. That history seemed to speak more and more often of mortality...

  Chapter Thirteen

  Spring and a Trip North

  When the spring of 1856 came, the men looked forward to a good year and put the previous winter’s events behind them. They began trapping for beaver on the Michigan and Illinois Rivers once again, and soon a small mountain of pelts adorned the back of their already crowded cabin. In addition, they continued hunting buffalo on the sagebrush plains to the north, and before long a pile of tanned buffalo hides filled one of their lean-tos.

  One late-March morning, as the skies spoke of more snow to come, the men moved in single file along the Michigan River, checking their traps. Jacob was in the lead, followed by Martin and then Cain, who was leading the pack animals.

  Crash—wham! A huge bull moose, apparently asleep in the dense undergrowth and startled by the quiet approach of Jacob’s horse, jumped up and immediately charged. The speed, surprise, and energy of an enraged 1,500-pound animal striking the side of the horse from less than ten feet away knocked Jacob and the horse to the ground. Pinned under his horse, Jacob heard his leg and two of those on his mount snap like rifle shots. As the horse screamed in pain, Jacob passed out, still under the weight of the frantically thrashing, terrified animal.

  Awakened moments later by extreme pain, Jacob became aware of the moose’s slobber-covered nose resting wetly on his face. Martin and Cain were yelling, and Jacob smelled the comforting odor of freshly fired black powder from rifles fired seconds earlier into the still enraged bull.

  “Jacob,” Martin yelled, “are you all right?”

  “’Course I’m all right. I always lay under a horse and bull moose for the hell of it,” Jacob called back. “That damn moose broke my leg, which hurts like hell, and I now have a horse with broken legs still squirming on my bad leg. Do something/”

  “He’s all right,” Cain said in relief. “If he can bellow at us like that after being hit full-on by a bull moose, he’ll survive.” Grabbing Jacob’s still thrashing horse, Cain lifted its head and slit its throat clean to the spine, killing it within moments as it bled out. Then, grabbing the dead moose by its head, Martin and Cain rolled the body off the still quivering horse and Jacob. They then lifted the front end of the dead horse high enough for Jacob to painfully drag his body and broken leg out from under it. That effort and the pain of his broken, twisted leg hanging up on some crushed willows beneath him caused Jacob to pass out again.

  Awakening, Jacob found that his leg had been splinted and that he was lying on a makeshift travois that also carried several beaver carcasses and the back straps and one hindquarter from the moose that had almost killed him. The remaining hindquarter was carried by their pack horse along with several more dead beaver. An unexpected drop as the travois passed over a small creek bank caused Jacob to pass out yet again from the pain in his leg, and he made it back to the cabin without any further felt suffering.

  The next time he awoke, it was to the smell of fresh moose steak frying in bear grease and the pleasant feeling of the sleeping furs in his bed. Propping himself up on his elbows, he saw Cain struggling to hoist the moose quarters onto the meat pole in the front yard. On the other side of his bunk, by the fireplace, Martin was occupied with cooking dinner. The heavenly smell of sourdough Dutch-oven biscuits reached Jacob’s nostrils, and if his leg hadn’t hurt so badly, he would have been pleased.

  “Awake, are you?” asked Martin, still worried as he strode over to his brother’s side.

  “Yes,” answered Jacob as he ran his hand over the now tightly wrapped break in his leg.

  “It’s a good thing we have extra horses since you lost yours to that damned moose,” Martin said with a wry smile.

  “Leave it to you to worry about a damn horse over your brother,” Jacob shot back. But he smiled his thanks for the others’ help in surviving what would have been a fatal backcountry encounter if he had been alone.

  The light in the cabin dimmed as Cain’s huge frame filled the doorway.

  “Who’s going to take over his chores until he heals up?” asked Cain with a large grin on his weathered face, as if he didn’t already know.

  “That does it!” exclaimed Jacob, albeit with a grin of his own. “After all I have done for you two miserable wretches, that’s all the concern I get as I lay here almost in death.”

  The men had a hearty laugh over Jacob’s bad luck, and the three were no closer now than if they had all been biological brothers. In the end, Jacob enjoyed that fresh moose-steak dinner more than he had enjoyed any other moose me
als in the past.

  Several more deep snows confined the men near their cabin and the Indians to their camp until the end of April. By then Jacob was able to get around with a homemade crutch as he and the others prepared for the summer.

  “The beaver are about gone in all the river bottoms, and the buffalo have moved farther north as a result of the Indians’ presence and our hunting pressure,” Cain mumbled through a gigantic mouthful of steaming-hot elk stew and biscuits.

  Jacob and Martin nodded in agreement as they filled their mouths with the gravy-laced, thick, delicious stew as well.

  “I say we move on farther to the north and try our luck,” Cain continued.

  Martin looked over at Jacob, the nominal leader of the group, to see what he thought.

  Swallowing a mouthful of the elk stew, Jacob helped himself to another cup of strong black coffee and sat thoughtfully for a few moments as he looked into the dying embers of the fire as if that was where the answer lay.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing. It’ll do us no good to stay here and continue to trap in an area now lacking critters. Our trapping success with marten, fox, and wolves is down as well, and it does us no good to have to ride five miles one way in order to get into the buffalo so we can make meat. What say we move north and west over toward the Sweet Water River and do some serious buffalo hunting for hides. We can take them over to Jim Bridger at the fort, if he is still in business, and replenish our supplies there. From there we can continue moving north and east up through South Pass and into the Popo Agie to continue trapping and hunting buffalo if that suits our fancy.”

  “That ain’t getting me any closer to that big pond out west and a place where we can settle down and raise a passel of kids,” Martin said slowly, reminding his brother of his lifelong Pacific Ocean dream.