by Dan Arnold
We left our horses tied where they were and walked across the meadow in the gathering daylight.
We found the camp exactly as Yellow Horse had described it. There were two dead men wrapped in blankets, lying beside a new fire ring, made of stones from the creek. Both men had been shot in the head. No animals had been chewing on them, yet.
There was cooking gear and a coffee pot on the edge of the fire ring. I could see a picket line stretched between trees about twenty yards away. We had seen two horses grazing as we crossed the meadow. There was a single pannier, hung high in a tree, over at the edge of the creek. There was also a tarp stretched between trees to form a rain shelter. There were two riding saddles, a pack saddle and some other gear under the tarp.
“I will look around.” Yellow Horse said.
I began gathering some of the tinder from the pile of wood at the edge of the fire ring. I started building a fire.
Clay was practically dancing with annoyance and excitement. “What the hell are you doing? We should be looking for the payroll.”
“The less we move around right now the better. We’ll warm up by the fire and have some coffee. When Yellow Horse gets back, we’ll decide how to proceed.”
“What about the pannier hanging over there?” He wanted a look in the pack bag that was hanging up in the tree.
“OK, go get it and bring it back here.”
He ran over and untied the rope to lower the bag, and then he ran back with it. When he got back he rummaged around in it, but all he found was some bacon, coffee and some canned goods.
“Perfect, we might as well use their supplies.” I said, as I lit the fire.
I handed Clay the coffee pot.
“Take this down to the creek and wash it out, then bring it back, full of water.”
“Do you plan to sit here and have breakfast, with these dead men lying here?” He asked.
“No, I plan to sit here and have breakfast with you and Yellow Horse. These boys have lost their appetite. After breakfast, we’ll probably carry them back to Bear Creek for burial.”
Clay actually stood there with his mouth open.
Yellow Horse came back.
“Are they your deputies?”
He indicated the dead men.
I knew that he already knew the answer, as well as I did.
Clay looked at them a bit more closely. He looked pale and drained.
“Yeah, that’s Rogers and the other is Glenn.”
“I’ll go get our horses and water them at the creek. Are you just going to stand there holding the coffee pot?” Yellow Horse asked Clay.
“What? No…” Clay started.
“Come with me then. You can help with the horses and fill the coffee pot.” Yellow Horse turned and Clay walked with him across the meadow.
I took the opportunity to have a quick look around. Close to the tarp, I discovered a place where there was an old, much used campfire ring. Under the tarp there was some stacked firewood. The ground under the tarp was smooth and there was a place where spruce bows had been used to form a mattress. The area around the picket line was trampled and littered with manure. Clearly, the camp had been here for weeks.
I was laying bacon out in a frying pan when Yellow Horse and Clay returned to the fire. As we waited for the coffee to heat, we discussed the situation.
“At the scene of the robbery, there was a man waiting for the wagon, one man alone. He was on foot and probably appeared harmless. He had secured two saddle horses down by the creek, tied to some willows. I found where they had been tied. He must have been in cahoots with the guards, because they were expecting him. I don’t know who killed the bank man. They took the horses and the payroll from the wagon. The three men rode the saddle horses and led the harness horses, one of which was carrying the mine payroll in panniers on a pack saddle. Once they were sure they weren’t being followed, they came to this camp, which had been prepared before the robbery,” Yellow Horse began.
He looked over at me, to have me take up the narrative.
“They settled in for the night. When it was time for the third man to take the watch, he shot your thieving deputies while they were sleeping.”
I looked back to Yellow Horse, who nodded in agreement and said, “The third man turned the horses loose to graze and get water. When he left here in the dark, the other two saddle horses may have followed him. There are many tracks here. It took me awhile to sort it out.”
As I put the bacon pan on the coals, Clay asked the obvious question.
“Do you think maybe the third man took the money out, packed on the two harness horses?”
Yellow Horse shook his head.
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They are still here.”
Yellow Horse pointed to the two horses now grazing close to each other in the meadow.”
I could smell the coffee as it began to boil.
“So, maybe he carried it out on the other two saddle horses.”
“Maybe,” I said “but I don’t think so.”
“…Why not?” Clay was frustrated and getting impatient.
The bacon began to hiss and sizzle.
I looked back to Yellow Horse, and raised my eyebrows.
He shook his head. “He wasn’t leading the other two horses. They wandered some. They weren’t carrying any kind of load, the saddles and bridles are still here, and so is this pannier.”
I took some cold water from a canteen and poured it over the boiling coffee grounds, to settle them.
Clay jumped up.
“Why are we just sitting here? We’re burning daylight. We have to track down the third man.”
“Yes,” I said, as I poured coffee into three cups. “We will. First we have to have breakfast and pack up this camp.”
I stirred the bacon some.
“You’re crazy; we need to get on the trail now!” Clay shouted.
As the morning sun had begun to drive away the chill, the flies had shown up and began to buzz around the dead men.
I used a fork to pull a piece of bacon out of the pan, gently shaking the extra grease off into the pan.
“Clay, settle down. We know what we’re doing. We need to eat something, drink some coffee and think for a little bit. Ten minutes won’t make a whole lot of difference.”
He really didn’t have any choice. He was as cold, tired and hungry as we were, and that bacon sure was good. We drank all the coffee and ate all the bacon, using some of our corn bread to sop up the grease.
Sitting by the dead men’s fire ring, I gave some thought to what kind of a man would care more about horses, than he did for human beings. The horses had value to him, the people did not.
We often value the wrong things. We can spend our lives working to surround ourselves with things that don’t matter. We can sacrifice the things that do matter, to gain those things that don’t.
Later, we caught the loose harness horses and packed up what we could. We put the dead men on the pack horses.
We only had that one pannier though.
When we were ready to go, I looked at Yellow Horse, a question in my eyes. He shook his head in response. I shrugged. We mounted up and followed the trail, in the tracks of the killer.
20.
We found one of the saddle horses within about a mile of the camp. We kept following the trail down out of the mountains. At one point it went down into the same valley with North Fork, but veered away from the town. We saw a loose horse in a meadow just below the town, but left it there. It appeared to be at home. Yellow Horse lost the tracks when the rider got back on the road. There had been too much traffic, spoiling the hoof prints. The killer could have taken the road headed down toward Bear Creek, or gone back up into the mountains. Yellow Horse kept looking to see if the rider left the road, but there was no sign of it. He was convinced the rider had gone on to Bear Creek.
We rode back into Bear Creek, a little after noon. We dropped the bodies at th
e morticians and took the horses to the livery stable. Al agreed to see the harness/pack horses got sent back over to the freight yard.
He took me aside for a moment, to have a word in private.
I gave Dusty a good rub down before I turned him out in a pen. Then I went and had lunch at a certain boardinghouse, with a spectacular view of the creek and mountains.
Later that afternoon, I went to the Sheriff’s office to talk to Clay.
“You’ve done pretty well as Sheriff,” I said. “You recovered the stolen horses and the bodies of two of the robbers. When you recover the payroll you will look really good.”
“I don’t see any hope of that,” Clay said. “I have no idea where the payroll went, and those dead men were, my men. I hired them and they stole the payroll. The newspaper will crucify me.”
“Well then, you’d better go get the payroll.”
He narrowed his eyes at me.
“Are you saying you know where it is?”
I nodded. “I do, and so do you.”
“Are you accusing me of something?” He started to bow up.
“Easy, Clay,” I held my hands up. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just mean you will be able to find the payroll, because you already know where it is.” I grinned.
He snorted in exasperation.
“Get to the point John. You know I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
So I told him where the mine payroll was hidden.
The Bear Creek Banner told the story about two employees of Clay Atwater, the Sheriff of Alta Vista County, stealing the payroll. The paper went on and on, about how outrageous and scandalous it was. They suggested I had probably killed the deputies. They briefly mentioned Sheriff Clay Atwater had retrieved the stolen horses. They did say he had gone back to the camp in the mountains and single-handedly found the bulk of the payroll, in a pannier, buried under a fire ring. The newspaper couldn’t tell the story of how he figured it out.
Yellow Horse and I had both noticed the new fire ring, with a border of stones from the creek. We could clearly see the earth had been disturbed, before the new fire ring was built. There was no reason to build a new fire ring so near the more practical and much used, existing fire ring. That new fire ring was there as a marker over the hiding place. The payroll was in the missing pannier, buried beneath it.
Yellow Horse and I had both arrived at that conclusion, when we saw the evidence. Yellow Horse was not willing to tell Clay about it. When we got back to Bear Creek, we went back to the livery stable where Alexander Granville Dorchester III, told me the big bay horse that had belonged to Rawlins, was now in a stall. Yellow Horse picked up the bay horse’s feet and nodded. It was the horse we had tracked out of the mountains.
When I had looked in the saddle bags on Rawlins’ saddle, I had found several hundred dollars in gold and silver coins.
It was apparent Rawlins had been working with the two men inside Atwater Freight. He was probably thrilled when they got hired as deputies. In preparation for the robbery, he had set up the camp and provisioned it with supplies from North Fork. He used it as his hideout while he waited for the day of the theft. He was probably responsible for the death of the bank officer, as well as killing both of the deputies.
As far as Rawlins had been aware, there was only one person in Bear Creek who knew him by sight. He may have been planning to kill Tom, or maybe he just felt lucky. It was his bad luck that morning at the Bon Ton, to discover I was still in Bear Creek. It was an unfortunate coincidence for him, when I walked out of the Bon Ton, just as he started to step off his horse. He never got the chance to go back for the rest of the money.
I don’t believe in luck or coincidence.
Shortly after the first frost of fall, a little girl went missing from her family’s farm. Yellow Horse started tracking her, and then he found himself tracking a man. Yellow Horse found the little girl, but she was no longer living. He tracked down the man who had taken the girl.
Later, when I found the man, he was no longer living. I found him hanging naked by his ankles from a corner of his front porch roof. He’d been castrated, scalped and left hanging there to bleed out.
Evil for evil - the way Yellow Horse lives his life.
If Yellow Horse hadn’t gone to Texas, I would’ve had to arrest him for murder. Instead, I paid for his train ticket.
Early in the spring Bob Maxwell got drunk, one time too many. When Clay Atwater tried to arrest him, Bob managed to get his gun out of its holster. Clay pulled his own gun quick, and smacked Bob on the head with it. Clay is a great mountain of a man, and he hit Bob too hard, caving in his skull.
It took Bob Maxwell four days to die.
Clay couldn’t stand it. He concluded that between the scandals surrounding the payroll theft, his accidentally taking a life, and the conflict of running Atwater Freight, he wasn’t cut out to be a lawman.
To some of us, it had always been evident.
Clay Atwater resigned from the office of Sheriff, and the county had a special election. I decided to run for the office.
The shooting of Ed Rawlins, along with newspaper stories suggesting I had killed the two payroll thieves at their camp in the mountains, had made me famous and advanced my reputation as a lawman that killed without hesitation. I didn’t like it, but at least I had some name recognition going for me.
My only opponent was Tommy Turner, the sheriff of North Fork. He ran a good campaign with the support of the mine owners, the miners and the colorful citizens of North Fork. I had the support of Atwater Freight, the Courtney’s at the Bar C and even the Governor of Colorado.
I won, in a landslide victory.
I was sworn into office in the spring.
Tom took over as the town marshal of Bear Creek. Almost immediately they changed his title to “Chief of Police.”
Lora and I realized we had fallen in love. One night, as we were having supper in the Palace, I asked, and she agreed to marry me!
Things were changing fast. There was talk of running lines for the electric lights and the telephone from here to Denver. The telephone, now there’s a strange deal. I hear you can talk to someone on the other side of the country, by speaking into a cup mounted on your wall.
The day I was sworn in as Sheriff, I was summoned by the Governor. It wasn’t clear what he wanted to see me about, but I hopped the 12:10 train to Denver.
21.
Denver was a busy place. There was the sound of construction everywhere. There were even little railroad tracks set into the brick streets for trolley cars. I knew there were plans in the works to build the State Capital building.
I was met on the platform by a man named Irving McCormick. He was an aide to the Governor.
“Sheriff Sage, I’ve heard a lot about you. I know you must be wondering why the Governor has sent for you, but he will explain all that to you himself.”
The Governor’s mansion was just that. It was even bigger than Bill Courtney’s house, out at the Bar C. A good deal more refined as well. This house had three stories and was made entirely of granite, cut from the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The entire mansion was equipped with electric lights.
“Congratulations, John. I’m sorry I couldn’t swear you in myself. I’m confident you’ll do a better job as County Sheriff than Clay Atwater did, but I had more pressing issues.”
“Of course, Governor, I completely understand. It wasn’t any big deal.”
“John, I know you are a man of few words, so I’ll get right to the point. Do you know where Capitol City is?” Governor McGhee asked me.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“It’s southwest of here, up in the highest mountains.”
He pointed to a map on the wall.
“It’s a heavy mining area. At one point, it was thought the town would be the State Capital instead of Denver, hence the name. To get there from here, you have to take the train to Gunnison and a stage from there to Lake City.”
“Are you asking me to go there?”
“Yes, John, I am. My nephew is the newly elected Mayor of Capitol City. I know, it’s ironic isn’t it?” He grinned. “He’s asked me to send a lawman to confront the local authorities. They have established their own little system of justice, and it has nothing to do with the law. I’m sending U.S. Marshal, Maxwell Warren. I want you to go with him.”
Now, why on earth would the Governor be sending me off to some God forsaken corner of Colorado, when I had a job to do at home? I thought.
“Yes of course, Governor, but if you don’t mind my asking; why me? Maxwell Warren and his deputies can handle whatever the problem is, without my help.”
He nodded.
“Yes, they could, John, but this is a big state and sometimes I need to be able to call on local men who can be trusted, to do things for the state without involving federal employees. Will you do this for me?
“Yes sir, I’ll be happy to help out.”
I met Max Warren later that morning at his office.
“I tried to tell the Governor this wasn’t really a matter for the U. S. Marshal’s office to address. I don’t know that there has been any violation of Federal law. I like to keep out of local conflicts, but he insisted and pointed out I have a duty to help get this new state into compliance with the rest of the Union. He’s right about that. I have a mandate to address anything that’s a threat to law and order in the region. This just seems kind of petty, and it’s a hassle to get there.”
“I hope you aren’t offended he’s sending me along for the ride.”
He grinned.
“No, on the contrary, you’re getting a reputation for hard-nosed law and order in this state. What did Jasper say he wanted you to do.?”
“He asked me to help you convince the locals of the value of law and order, and to, and I quote; “make damn sure they get the message.”