Mustering all his strength, he yanked the men toward the door. By then, Franklin had kicked free the loosened ropes on his ankles. Heaving Wicasha onto his back, he rushed through the door with Tory close behind. Outside, they fell to the earth and coughed, spitting phlegm. Franklin shook the last of the ropes from him. Wicasha collapsed to his side. No coughs, no tears came from his still form.
Through the haze of smoke, Tory crawled to Franklin and, dropping the rifle, wrapped his arms around him. Tears of fear, relief, and love poured down his cheeks. “I’m so glad I came back for you. I’m so glad you’re all right.” He sobbed like a boy.
Flames engulfed the cabin in a final sweep.
“Franklin, we got to get out of here.”
Franklin did not want to leave his friend’s side. But Tory’s tugging forced him to his feet.
“There’s nothing you can do for Wicasha. We need to get into Spiketrout.”
Tory pulled Franklin upwind from the smoke and flames, encouraging him to move faster away from the flying sparks. Bloody and covered in soot and soil, Franklin held onto Tory and pressed his head onto his shoulder. They slipped and limped toward the dismantled gate, coughing and wheezing.
A rifle shot echoed through the gulch above the crack of flames and falling timber, then another, and another. Both Tory and Franklin jerked up. Bilodeaux stood by the side of the flaming cabin about twenty yards off, his wide open eyes leering at them. He appeared frozen, like a statue, his rifle pointing straight at them. His eyes gaped. Something inhuman and unworldly emanated from his fiery irises.
Tory braced himself for the pain, the agony. He turned away from Franklin. He could not bear to watch one more man he loved expire before his eyes.
But neither fell. Slowly, Franklin and Tory turned to gaze into each other’s eyes. Against the soot and sweat and his singed horseshoe mustache, Franklin’s eyes sparkled with green fire. Full of abundant life.
Still clutching his rifle, Bilodeaux fell forward, propped up by the gun. In an instant, he fell completely over and lay lifeless.
Wicasha, his dark eyes fluttering from where he lay trembling on the ground, held onto the rifle Tory had dropped by his side. A thin ribbon of smoke wafted from the muzzle.
Chapter 42
OUTSIDE their temporary cabin tent, the kind used by the cavalry, Tory stirred the pot over the open fire. He no longer recoiled from the flames. Franklin kissed him full on the mouth and carried his plate of stew to the makeshift table he’d fashioned from fallen logs. A minute later, Tory joined him.
“Torsten Pilkvist, you make some brain-slapping good food.” Franklin stared at Tory, his expression comically severe. Then a slow smile crept above his taut jaw line. His horseshoe mustache, trimmed after the singeing a week before, lifted to near his ears.
“That’s why you want me to stick around, for my cooking?”
Franklin shrugged. “I don’t see any harm having a good cook around, do you?”
Tory simpered. The love pumping his blood at that moment was like nothing he had ever experienced. More full-blown than a steam locomotive crashing into his body.
“I guess we can count our blessings,” Tory said, glancing around at the few items they had salvaged from the fire, including the stewpot. A growing pile of logs, recently felled by Franklin and Tory, spread near where the cabin once stood. They were set to start rebuilding by the end of summer, after the logs had a chance to cure. “Lucky all this happened in the spring and not the autumn. We’d be freezing our tails off about now.”
“That’s what I like about you,” Franklin said, “always looking on the bright side.”
“No matter, at least that Bilodeaux is out of our lives. I still can’t believe it sometimes. I cringe, expecting to see him riding in on his gray stallion.”
“Don’t need to worry about that no more,” Franklin said, his cheeks bulging with stew. “He’s gone for good. He’s the devil’s trouble now.”
They were both relieved to have put the entire ordeal with Bilodeaux behind them. The bandit was dead. Two shots in his back by Wicasha’s painfully steadied hand just as Bilodeaux was about to shoot Tory and Franklin had ended any more of his enraged greed. One last shot, just as Bilodeaux had turned in surprise to see where the bullets had come from, had finalized the already done deal.
Many men from Spiketrout, including a few women, had heeded Tory’s call for help during his charge down Main Street that afternoon. They had gathered quickly, and, as Doc Albrecht had later described, met the lone survivor escaping on horseback down the trail head-on. Like Bilodeaux, Jason Wozniacki posed few worries for Tory and Franklin now. Tried a day after his capture, a Deadwood judge had given him a fifteen-year sentence. He never made it. In the jail wagon heading to Bismarck, vigilantes overtook them and shot Wozniacki in the heart. Turned out the killers were paying him back on another score, no connection with Franklin whatsoever.
The man killed by the exploding outhouse turned out to be Deputy Ostrem. Tory’s shot had taken out the man who had kept watch over Franklin and Wicasha inside the cabin, Jeff McIntosh.
Having killed a man left a dull perforation on Tory’s soul. But the stakes had been too high. He had done what circumstance had ordained. For the love of Franklin. For the love of Moonlight Gulch, which he had grown to consider a part of him. The homestead represented more than a mere place to live. The lush gulch stood as a symbol of defiance against raiders. McIntosh got what he’d deserved, whether he had expired by Tory’s hands or someone else’s.
Despite the horror of Bilodeaux’s schemes being over and done with, they still had to face the long resurrection of Moonlight Gulch. The only remaining structures—the chimney and the sturdy steel windmill Franklin had ordered by mail from Chicago years ago—were triumphant reminders that the homestead could be reborn. Most of the barbwire fence lay twisted and useless. Franklin had said they didn’t need a fence any longer, anyway.
Salvageable debris from the pillaged site was used for kindling and fertilizer for the crops, where the ashes would nourish the soil much the way forest fires did. The alfalfa, bursting with yellow daisy-like blooms, already grew taller, sturdier, the blooms more firm and robust. The field was left undamaged from the pillage, and, with the irrigation ditches cleaned of soot, they still had carrots, onions, potatoes, and green beans to look forward to come harvest. Venison, thanks to a recent hunt, provided them ample meat. Curing hides and jerky draped from several ponderosa branches.
Tory washed down some of the venison stew with a sip of coffee. “This must remind you of your old days back when you were wandering the Black Hills looking for a homestead,” he said. “Camping out with nothing but you, the mountains, and the sky.”
“How do you feel about it?” Franklin said, shoveling stew into his hungry mouth. “You never lived this rugged before. You up for two months in a tent?”
“With you, I’d live in a cave.”
Franklin shook his head. “Don’t mention talk of living in caves. Not after what happened with you going off to Spiketrout alone.”
Tory shrugged and chuckled. “After everything that’s happened to us, living in a tent will be like a vacation, I guess.”
“It was awful nice of Doc Albrecht to invite us to stay at his place, though,” Franklin said.
“I’d rather stay close to the homestead,” Tory said. “We still have the crop to tend to.”
“I reckon the crop and good friends are a few more blessings we can count on,” Franklin said. “One thing about all this nonsense with Bilodeaux—we sure did learn who our real friends are.”
And by August, when the logs cured and they were ready to erect the cabin, their real friends lent use of their hands. Doc Albrecht, Clarence and Walter Grishin, Postmaster Jim, Mr. Tang, Reverend Dahlbeck, along with a half-dozen others, offered their sweat.
Even Marshal Reinhardt, an old adversary of Franklin’s (wracked with guilt that his own deputy helped trigger the destruction of Moonlight Gulc
h), had given his best effort to rebuild. Unfortunately, the marshal lived only a few days after they christened the new cabin and outhouse. A long-forgotten rival shot him in the back of the head while he lifted a mug of beer to his lips at the Gold Dust Inn. He spied the gunman in the large mirror behind the bar a split second too late. The shooter, the brother of a man Reinhardt had killed while he worked as a sheriff in a Texas panhandle town known for rough cattle rustlers, was apprehended by none other than Madame Lafourchette. Within two days of the killing, authorities promptly tried and hanged him.
Many called for Franklin to wear the marshal’s badge, but Franklin refused to have anything to do with living in town. Instead, Mayor Winters, always far enough from the action but still close enough to maintain control of important town affairs, recommended an old friend, known throughout Utah for his fast draw, for the post. A week after Reinhardt’s interment (a few paces from Henri Thibault Bilodeaux’s tombstone), the men, with an 87-36 vote, elected Booth Jorgensen as the new marshal. He was scheduled to ride into town in two weeks. The town hadn’t gone without a marshal in many years, but after all the hubbub with Franklin’s homestead and Henri Bilodeaux, the rowdies knew better than to get too far out of line.
Spiketrout still struggled, yet a new dawn had risen over the old gold rush town nestled in the lush gulch. A nascent tourism, indeed, seemed to awaken, just like Madame Lafourchette had predicted a year before when Tory rode the stage into town. With the opening of the new railroads, Easterners came to see for themselves the romantic west they had read of in dime novels or glimpsed during Wild West shows. Mr. and Mrs. Pilkvist, who now corresponded with their son regularly through mail and telegrams (they no longer held a grudge against Tory for having left so rashly last summer), had even mentioned they’d like to see America’s grand western peaks.
Each day, Moonlight Gulch grew bigger and better. “Like Chicago after the Great Fire,” Franklin said. Franklin had crafted much of the furniture during the summer while they had waited for the wood to cure. They filled their new cabin with a log sofa, tables, chairs, and a brand new feather bed. With the little money Tory had left over from his four hundred dollars, plus what Franklin had at the bank, they purchased a stove and cushions, much of it ordered from Chicago mail-order companies. Reverend Dahlbeck’s wife, Matilda, sewed them curtains for the new windows. Franklin told Tory he’d never even considered curtains for his old cabin, but now, with someone to share his life with, curtains seemed a perfect fit. Madame Lafourchette, always helpful in her assertive way, gave them a set of sheets that smelled of her jasmine perfume for weeks after.
No one ever questioned why Tory and Franklin chose to live together. Why should anyone? With the dearth of marriageable women, many bachelors shared cabins and labored as partners on homesteads across the west. It was the practical thing to do. The extra bedroom they’d added to the new cabin put to rest any suspicions anyone might’ve had about their relationship existing beyond business.
They had hoped Wicasha, who had needed most of the summer to recover from the gunshot to his stomach and a broken leg from his fall off the windmill, might want to move into the smaller bedroom. He insisted he preferred his teepee beyond the hillocks. Wicasha regretted his inability to help with the building of the cabin, but Tory and Franklin reassured him that by next summer, they would welcome his hands when erecting the barn.
A small pile of lumber was already in the makings near the old barn site. By next June, Franklin hoped to have the barn erected and ready to fill with livestock, which they would acquire slowly over the course of time. Franklin hoped to purchase hogs and a new dairy cow by next spring. In the meantime, they hadn’t the need to buy any new horses. Lulu and Wicasha’s gelding had both, by chance, escaped the flames and the bandits’ gunfire. They had showed a few days after the pillage, grazing in the hillocks behind the field as if nothing had happened. Franklin and Tory kept Lulu tethered near the site of her old pen, and Doc Albrecht currently stabled Wicasha’s gelding, close to where he convalesced.
Tory and Franklin visited Wicasha often during the three months he recuperated at the Gold Dust Inn under Doc Albrecht’s care. It was strange for Tory to watch Wicasha limp around with the assistance of a cane. But Wicasha quipped that it seemed unfair that he should have a third leg while Frank still had only one arm. A former soldier of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, who had managed to conceal his deafness during the entire seven-year campaign by his uncanny ability to read lips even from great distances, helped nurse him to health. Sean Brennan, often hired by Doc Albrecht to administer care to the sick, supplemented his lip reading with Indian sign language.
Yet even after the doc gave Wicasha the thumbs-up to return to his camp, the two remained inseparable. Franklin and Tory never spoke of Sean to Wicasha, since Wicasha preferred his privacy. But whenever Tory and Franklin watched Wicasha and his new friend amble over the hillocks toward Wicasha’s camp after a day of visiting, they turned their heads and smiled at each other. On some days, the new lovers didn’t even bother to wait until they cleared the first hillock before reaching for each other’s hand.
Joy filled Tory’s heart to see Wicasha find a new love. Like Wicasha, who had lost Bua Ishte to the marauding Sioux, Tory had lost Joseph van Werckhoven to unexpected tragedy. After overcoming their grief, both had a second chance at love. The fears Tory had had that he would forever wear the heavy cloak of bachelorhood had vanished along with the smoke from the fires that had engulfed Moonlight Gulch.
He thought of Joseph often. Like a rose flattened between the leaves of a heavy book, Joseph, though out of sight, was never far from Tory’s mind. In many ways, Joseph had lit the spark that had led Tory to find happiness at Moonlight Gulch. Joseph’s love—a love so rare that even Tory still wondered if he had imagined it—had spurred him to demand more from life. Joseph, in the way he had expressed his love for Tory, had spoiled him, in a sense. Tory would wear that precious love for the remainder of his life, like a figurative charm around his neck.
The days following the cabin’s completion passed as if the fires had never consumed the homestead. Tory and Franklin went about life, harvesting, hunting, building, and living a quiet domestic life together. Slowly, they mended the pieces of their land. The cabin tent, now used as cover for the logs curing for the barn, reminded Tory how far they’d come in only a few months. Who knew how glorious next year would be? But Tory felt he had already accumulated enough good fortune to last him a hundred lives.
Tory and Franklin never did pan for gold in the creek. Even after Franklin blasted away the natural pool, they knew some gold deposits most likely remained. Once, while bathing in the creek on a warm autumn day, Tory came across a nugget the size of a baseball wedged at the bottom between two pieces of boulder. Tory and Franklin looked at each other over the surface of the water a long time. The gold itself, as Franklin had said many times, wasn’t evil. The evil was that it came too easily. Just like back in Chicago while playing ball with his comrades, Tory pitched the pricy nugget down creek as far as he could. Baseball Gulch, Tory sometimes referred to the homestead as a quip afterward.
To Tory’s relief—and also a little to his embarrassment—his letters to Franklin (and the letters Franklin had written to Torsten that Postman Persson had returned) had survived the blaze. Spared inside Franklin’s sturdy leather war trunk, Tory did not know about Postman Persson’s parcel until many months after he’d sent them, weeks after they’d completed the cabin. Wicasha during his many visits to Spiketrout had refrained from telling Tory the details of how Franklin had learned the truth. Tory had always assumed Franklin had pieced together the lies.
They were sitting outside by a blazing yet innocuous bonfire when Franklin, without explanation, handed the bundles to him. Tory held them for a time, as if weighing their frailty. Inhaling, he began to read them, one by one, by firelight. He sobbed, he chuckled. He sat up straight, then fell limp with sentiment. It was like finding himself transported back to
his parents’ row house on Chicago Avenue, upstairs, concealed behind his bedroom door, reading Franklin’s letters for the first time.
He considered it a treat to read letters he thought Mr. Persson had destroyed by fire. Franklin’s words had intensified with each postmark, as Tory had expected. When he read the letters that he had written Franklin, a strange sensation burned his eyes. For Tory, the letters still represented deception, yet also a genuine desire for love.
After Tory laid the last letter aside, three hours later, Franklin, as if he had been waiting for him to finish, wrapped his arm around him. His stump lay across Tory’s shoulder. Tory reached up and held onto it. Blood pulsed inside the veins in a frenzied rush, as if still seeking to fill a limb that hadn’t existed in twenty years.
“The letters I wrote you weren’t fake, Franklin,” Tory said. “I meant every word of them. You must understand. I meant every word.”
Franklin never asked Tory to explain why he’d responded to his advertisement in Matrimonial News. Whenever Tory tried to, like now, Franklin always placed his hand over Tory’s mouth and gently shook his head. Tory knew to say nothing more.
“I’m glad you answered my advertisement,” was all Franklin would say about the matter.
About the Author
SHELTER SOMERSET enjoys writing about the lives of people who live off the land, whether they be the Amish, nineteenth-century pioneers, or modern-day idealists seeking to live apart from the crowd. Shelter’s fascination with the rustic, aesthetic lifestyle began as a child with family camping trips into the Blue Ridge Mountains. When not back home in Illinois writing, Shelter continues to explore America’s expansive backcountry and rural communities. Shelter’s philosophy is best summed up by the actor John Wayne: “Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.”
On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch Page 33