Payback at Morning Peak

by Gene Hackman

  “We haven’t really been properly introduced. I’m Bob Patterson, but folks usually call me Ginger,” he offered, fluffing his reddish beard. “I’ve decided to ask if you wouldn’t mind company. Would’ve mentioned it last night, but I needed to speak to Anne to make sure she could get some help at the café. We have a bit of an arrangement, if you know what I mean.” He winked. “This is Duke.” He slapped the mule’s withers lovingly. “Duke and I been pals for a number of years. He don’t take a lot of tending and keeps a secret real good. Thought maybe I’d keep you company on up Alamosa way. You never can tell, right?”

  Jubal smiled wide. His first legitimate smile in a long time.

  “Duke, meet Frisk. She’s gentle and loving but packs a heck of a kick.”

  The two men rode off north, not really knowing what lay ahead. Jubal figured that if Bob was as handy as he appeared, he’d be a welcome companion.

  The Triple C Ranch lay southeast of Alamosa at the base of a mountain. It took Jubal and Bob nearly all day to travel the flat plain. They stayed close to the railroad tracks, Jubal still being impressed when the train caught up to them coming from the south. The idea that one could sit in luxury while traveling and enjoying magnificent views felt much like a wondrous dream. He promised himself that one day he would ride one of these splendid conveyances while watching the day gently change before him.

  “There’s a bluff just south of the bunkhouse,” Bob said. “We can lay up there and take a peek at what’s going on down below.”

  Bob had spent the last half hour fretting in his saddle. Jubal wondered if he wasn’t a little nervous and suggested they walk the horses to create less of a silhouette. Bob agreed as they climbed a low mesa south of the ranch proper, tied the horses to a piñon, and crawled to the edge of the mesa. They could smell smoke and meat cooking on an open grill outside the bunkhouse.

  Bob pulled out a small collapsible telescope from his inside jacket pocket. He scanned the bunkhouse area, where a number of men waited for supper. “I don’t see Tauson. It don’t mean he isn’t there. But ah, yes. There’s Walt Phillips and a couple other hands I knew. But no Mr. Tauson.”

  They remained still behind the rocks, watching the cowboys having their meal. Just as they decided that their Mr. Tauson and Wetherford weren’t going to show, they heard the unmistakable sound of a cartridge being ratcheted into a rifle.

  “What’s you fellers doing up here?”

  When they turned, they found a man in a long rancher’s coat training a .30-caliber rifle on them. He held the piece casually, waist-high. A look of recognition came over his face. “Well, Ginger, you came back. What you up to, a little surveying of the land afore you ask for your job back?”

  Bob dusted himself off as he got to his feet. “Hello, Mel. How you been?”

  “Can’t complain, and you?”

  “Same as usual. Broke and good-looking.” Bob took a few careful steps toward the cowboy with the rifle. “No, I wasn’t going to ask for my job back, Mel. We were looking for ole Billy Tauson, is all.”

  “Were you, now? Tauson ain’t here, Ginger. He came in day before yesterday, got some of his belongings, and lit out. Said something about meeting some fellows in Alamosa. That’s about it, I guess.”

  “You can put down that piece.” Bob gestured toward the rifle. “We’re not going to do anything desperate.”

  “I’m comfortable just the way I am, thank you.”

  “Can we mount up and kind of disappear, Mel? For old times?”

  He chewed on this a bit and glanced at Jubal. “I reckon if you was up to no good you’d have done so by now.” He lowered his rifle and motioned for them to move on.

  When they were comfortably seated on Frisk and Duke, Bob once again turned to Mel. “Do you know where Tauson’s headed after Alamosa?”

  The man pointed north. “I hear tell Poverty Gulch.”

  The two men rode in silence for nearly an hour. As they approached the town of Alamosa, Bob finally spoke out. “Not what you might call an auspicious beginning. If I have to say so.”

  Jubal said nothing.

  “Yeah, I’d have to say it was dumb, stupid,” Bob continued. “I’d go as far as to say ignorant.” They continued through town to the outskirts, where they finally dismounted to let the animals drink at a creek. “I knew better than to ride on in there like a greenhorn.… Jesus wept.” Bob kicked the earth. “If Tauson had been in camp, what in God’s hallowed earth was I gonna do? I ask you, now, what?”

  Jubal started to speak.

  “No, don’t say a word, Master Jubal. I know enough about you to know you’d make some kind of excuse for me, and I appreciate it, but that ain’t gonna cut it.”

  Jubal let it go for a while. “No, I wasn’t gonna excuse you, Bob. What you did was stupid.”

  “Hell’s fire, son, you don’t have to agree with everything I say. I was trying to be neighborly.”

  “Sir, maybe that’s what you were doing and maybe you were simply fishing.”

  “Fishing? For what?”

  “Compliments, congratulations, condolences, that sort of thing.”

  “Hold on there, Master Jubal. Yeah, I did a stupid thing and I should have thought it out better afore riding on in there like that, but the truth is, I had company.”

  They looked at each other.

  “I led you up there, trying to be the big man. I apologize. It won’t happen again.” They shook hands and remounted, riding in silence for half a mile.

  “Bob, it’s a good thing you knew that cowhand. He seemed a fair sort.”

  “Yeah, Meldrick was always okay with me.”

  “I’m glad we talked this out. We need to be a little more careful when it comes to these lawless bastards.”

  “Agreed.”

  Darkness got ahead of them, so they built a fire and took in a meal. After tending the animals, Jubal rolled up in his blankets.

  Just before falling asleep, he called out to Bob. “How far to this Poverty Gulch?”

  After a long pause, Bob answered, “Beats the heck outta me. I was hoping you’d know.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  In the morning, the duo went back to Alamosa in the hopes of getting information about Poverty Gulch. Bob presented a worn map to a local man in charge of the rail depot.

  “Poverty Gulch is up north of Cañon City,” the man said. “You’d be best to go east through the pass to La Veta.” He marked the spot on Bob’s map with a pencil. “Then keep the Sangres to your left and head north ‘til you’re past the Wet Mountains, then you’d be smart to ask from there. I’d say it’s the better part of a hundred miles.”

  Jubal mounted back up to begin this next part of their journey. “This just beats all,” Jubal said. “I almost had them in sight and now who knows how far ahead they are? And why are they headed for a place called Poverty Gulch?”

  Without answering, Bob ducked back into the depot. He came out a few minutes later, grinning. “Gold.”

  “Gold?”

  “There’s been a big find up around Fremont—Poverty Gulch. Close to a certain Cripple Creek that runs through the mountains.” Bob still had the smile. “Sounds promising.”

  “How so?” Jubal remained skeptical.

  “It’s the kind of place where old Billy Tauson would be drawn to. Lots of new gullible people, plenty of hell-raising, oodles of money.”

  “Let’s go.”

  It took five days of hard riding for Jubal and Bob to make the trip from Alamosa to Poverty Gulch, and the closer they got, the more would-be prospectors they met on the trail. Some folks came from as far as Chicago and St. Louis to strike it rich.

  Bob was a talker, and he talked to them all—when he wasn’t talking to Jubal. His favorite topic of conversation was describing the ways of the mountain man.

  “Use a few pounds of meat, cut it into strips…”

  Jubal suffered through Bob’s second telling of how to make beef jerky.

  “… add salt, garlic,
hot sauce, handful of onion and pepper… lay the strips out in the sun to dry.”

  They rode on, Bob thrilled with his current audience of one. “Tanning is the real art. Lord, it’s a process. Soak the hide in water to relax it, then into a lime solution for ten days or so, careful to stir it every day. Then take the hair off. Messy. Soak it again, then add alum and salt. Let it soak again.”

  Bob’s perception of how much his listeners could take was exaggerated.

  “After that, stretch while still wet, add sulfonated oil, then rub the devil out of it. Wrap it tight overnight, then smoke it to make it waterproof. See these pants? Hell’s fire, you’d never believe I made these myself.”

  Oh, really?

  “You could wade a creek and they’d still be dry inside. Pretty smart-looking, wouldn’t you say?”

  Bob’s worn buckskins had knees that bulged out where the leather had stretched, while the ass end was baggy and thin. “I don’t know if I’d call them smart, so much as…” Jubal paused, trying to think about a word ma used. “Utilitarian.”

  “Whatever that means, Master Jubal. I like my trousers.” He pointed to his shirt. “I made this too, want to hear about it?”

  “I think I’ve had enough of mountain man schooling for one day, Bob.” Jubal smiled. “Maybe tomorrow you could go into fur hats and such.”

  In spite of Jubal’s plea, Bob droned on, entertaining himself with tales of big-game hunting and surviving a variety of outdoor adventures, while Jubal’s thoughts drifted south to Cerro Vista and Cybil.

  He tried to remember how tall she was. Did their eyes meet without her having to look up? When she wrapped her arms around him in the garden, where was the ribbon in her hair? He recalled the smell of her hair and the warm breath against his throat. She seemed incapable of dishonesty with him. Jubal came back to the present just as Bob finished a long diatribe on the benefits of sleeping outdoors.

  After being quiet for a long spell, Jubal heard Bob sniffling. “Catching a death of cold, Bob?”

  “Nah, it’s nothing.”

  Jubal looked back at Bob rubbing his eyes as if he’d been under stress. Jubal held Frisk back for a moment to let Bob come up alongside. “Anything you want to talk about, mountain man?”

  “Ah, hell, it’s silly, really.” He took several gulps of air. “I just got to reminiscing about the war, suppose when we were jabbering about sleeping outside and all. Hell’s bells, I was just a young’un. Not quite sixteen. Lied about my birthday. I was overgrown for my age.” He stopped to blow his nose. “Camped in a grove outside Nashville, near to Franklin. General Thomas’s Union troops came at us like hell wouldn’t have it. I’d buried my head behind a stump when my rifle flat refused to fire.”

  Jubal watched Bob, knowing what he said about the rifle was probably a lie.

  “I’d killed a couple of blues, and to be honest didn’t want no more of it. They shot the living Jesus outta us. We suffered hellish casualties, problem being we were from the same state so you kept hearing of folks you knew or heard about. Hell, in some cases the same little town. Strange what you can feel about a fellow soldier. You can hate the critter, but there’s this peculiar closeness. I don’t know what you would call it.”

  “Brotherhood, maybe,” Jubal said softly.

  “Yeah, so, these two fellows from Murphysboro flat couldn’t stand each other, something about a girl. She left one of them. Anyway, the one old boy got gut-shot real bad by a Yankee and his archenemy, think his name was Merle, picked him up and carried him a half mile back to an aid station. Damn.”

  Jubal reached across the space between them and squeezed Bob’s arm. The big man rocked back and forth in the saddle. “I left after that.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘left’?”

  Bob took a moment. “Went home, it weren’t far, fifty mile or so, Clarksville. Snuck through the lines like a thief. Hid myself in a woodshed on my cousin’s farm ‘til the end of the war. Onliest good thing came out of that little episode in my life, I taught myself to throw a knife. What else you gonna do, a snot-nosed kid stuck in a shed?”

  Jubal listened quietly.

  “Shame’s a funny thing, Jubal. It were years before I forgave myself for deserting. When you have the living shit scared out of you at such a young age it stays with you, trust me on that.” He stopped once again, clearing his throat. He did his best to grin. “Say, want to learn to throw a knife?”

  Jubal had very little interest in this, but in deference to Bob’s emotional state he agreed to a lesson or two. When they stopped to rest the horses and dine on a couple of beef jerky strips, Bob began showing Jubal the fine balancing art of knife-throwing.

  “To keep an even weight on your whole body, you step into the throw.…” Bob droned on about balance and speed and the sharpness of the point. Jubal dutifully tried his hand, and surprisingly it became a pleasant distraction.

  Toward day’s end, Bob asked Jubal if he’d be recognized. “What do you mean?”

  Bob rode on for a while before answering. “Did any of those varmints see you when they raided your farm?”

  “Yeah, one of them. Well, maybe a couple. There was a dustup in Cerro Vista earlier with my father, but I don’t think Tauson would remember me. Wetherford would, though.” Jubal’s thoughts drifted back to the night of the log bridge incident and how that cold hard voice told him what it would do to him if opportunity lent itself. “Yeah, he got a good look at me.”

  “Do you shave?”

  “What?”

  “Shave. You know, run a blade over your face to take off whiskers. Snip, prune, trim. Shave.”

  Jubal hadn’t really thought much about his appearance for some time.

  Bob pulled back on Duke until the two riders were side by side. “You’ve got what looks to be peach fuzz scattered about your face.”

  “What are you thinking? We need to change our looks?”

  “Yep. What if we clean you up around your cheeks and shave a goatee into that young face? We could darken it with walnut stain. Same with your hair. Cut it short, kinda neat. It’ll put some maturity on you. What do you say?”

  “I’m game only if you are.” Jubal needed convincing.

  “What you mean?”

  “That old boy Pete Wetherford has never met up with you, but Tauson has. You say you worked for him. Fair is fair, Ginger.”

  “Ah, hell. Me and my big mouth. Damnation.” Bob fiddled with his beard.

  They devoted the night before arriving in Poverty Gulch to barbering. Bob looked ten years younger with his ginger-colored beard shorn. He saved a mite of whisker over his upper lip and, with the help of the polished bottom of a tin cup to see his reflection, trimmed it into a neat mustache. Bob’s scissors made good work of Jubal’s locks. It had been a long time since he’d felt a breeze on the back of his neck. As promised, Bob also darkened the few wisps of Jubal’s sparse facial hair with the juice from crushed walnut hulls.

  “You look like a desperado with that goatee, son. Here, let’s rub a little of that juice into your hair and let it dry.”

  Jubal went to sleep anxious to see himself, not in the bottom of a polished tin but in a proper mirror.

  “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Jubal said as they approached the community. Dozens of shacks and tents dotted the hills, most of them scattered in haphazard fashion along the trail heading into town.

  “How long have you had that hat?”

  “It was Pa’s. Started wearing it right after the raid.”

  “It’s fairly noticeable with those feathers coming out the brim.”

  Jubal took off the hat and pushed the bright feathers down under the wide band. A brooch of his mother’s that he had taken from the remains of the fire came to mind, and he dug it out of his pack. Silver, with several greenish blue stones and small stars carved into the crescent form. He smoothed the brim and bent the front of it up flush with the crown and secured it with the brooch.

  “You look like a real hel
l-raiser, son.” Bob eyed him closely. “Yep, a desperado.”

  “Speaking of hats, Mr. Mountain Man, I can’t imagine anything more distinctive than that animal sitting on top of your head. Lordy.”

  Bob grabbed the coonskin by the tail and pulled it off his head, cramming it into his saddlebag. He scratched his shiny dome vigorously, then took his sweaty neckerchief and wrapped it Indian-style around his head. “Satisfied?” He grinned like a fool.

  “Satisfied.”

  They pushed on to the center of town, where a group of people and their animals milled about in front of the claims office.

  “What do you think, Bob? Should we find a place to bed down?”

  The big fellow glanced around, then called out to a man in a fancy suit. “Excuse, sir. Could you direct my friend and me to a hotel or boardinghouse?”

  “I could direct you, but it wouldn’t do you any good. The town is chockablock full.” He rubbed his hands gleefully and continued on his way.

  Bob looked at Jubal. “He probably owns a brothel.”

  Jubal stood high in his stirrups. “Just beyond that row of houses on the street opposite, I can see a row of tents. Let’s drift on out that way. What do you think?”

  They found a spot near a small stream, made their camp, then walked back into town. The atmosphere was charged with people scurrying about buying supplies and peddlers selling a variety of items on the street. They waited in line at the office for nearly an hour.

  “Yes, sir. How can I help?” The man behind the caged portal took a moment to suck on his smelly cigar.

  “Just some information, if you please.” Bob adopted a countrified presence. “My friend and I was curious on how to go about making a right proper way to start prospecting. You know, staking a claim—”

  “You got to do just that, my man, stake it out right proper,” the man interrupted. “The government says you can work twenty acres, but you got to have a map like the one behind me.”