The Darkest Winter

by William W. Johnstone

  * * *

  The whole village turned out to say good-bye to Morgan and Running Elk. It was a crisp, early fall day as the Crow gathered on the creek bank where the two fully loaded canoes rested. Large bundles of pelts rested in each of the craft. Most of the supplies Breckinridge and Morgan had brought with them to the mountains were gone, so the travelers would have to live off the land for the most part. Luckily, game was so abundant that they shouldn’t have much trouble doing that.

  Breckinridge clasped Morgan’s hand while Dawn Wind hugged her brother. Breck said, “You two keep your eyes open. We ain’t seen hide nor hair of Carnahan’s bunch for a long time, but that don’t mean they ain’t still around somewhere in these parts. The same’s true for the survivors of that Blackfoot war party.”

  “Those Blackfeet are long gone,” Morgan said. “Their usual hunting ground is up close to Canada, Running Elk told me, and this is a long way from there. And by now, Carnahan and his men will have plenty of pelts of their own and will just be concerned with getting them back to St. Louis and selling them.”

  “More than likely,” Breckinridge agreed. “Be careful anyway.”

  “Always,” Morgan said with a grin. He clapped a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I figure by the time I see you again, you’ll be an old married man. Probably even have a young ’un on the way.”

  “What?” Breckinridge exclaimed. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Of course not. I’m just saying that it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. It’s going to be a long, cold winter, though. You and Dawn Wind are going to be spending a lot of time wrapped up in those buffalo robes.”

  The young woman turned to Morgan in time to hear his comments. Looking a little embarrassed, she hugged him and then said, “Breckinridge will miss you, Morgan. So will I and my father.” She laughed. “From the gossip I hear, so will some of the girls in the village. When you return, many will be interested in becoming your wife.”

  “Now, hold on a minute—” Morgan began with a note of alarm in his voice.

  A laugh boomed out from Breckinridge. “So it’s all right for you talk about me gettin’ hitched, but the same ain’t fair for you.”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that . . . Damn it, I’m too young to settle down!”

  “We’ll see.” Breckinridge slapped his friend on the back, staggering Morgan a little.

  White Owl bid farewell to the two young men and gave them his blessing for their journey in a long speech that Dawn Wind translated briefly. Badger’s Den chanted a song that would give them good medicine. Then Morgan and Running Elk pushed the canoes out into the creek, climbed in, and took up their paddles. The current caught the craft and edged them downstream. Everyone on the bank waved good-bye.

  Dawn Wind hugged Breckinridge’s arm and said, “I will miss them. It will be good to see them again when they return in the spring. That is a long time from now, though.” She looked up at Breck. “A time I will enjoy spending with you, Breckinridge.”

  He turned her toward their tipi and suggested, “Let’s go get started on that.”

  * * *

  By the middle of the day, the two young men had followed the creek to the Bighorn River and entered the larger stream. They paddled north toward the Yellowstone. It had always struck Morgan as a bit odd that in this case north was downstream. It seemed to him that the opposite should have been true, but that was the way the geography had worked out.

  They hadn’t talked much. Running Elk still wasn’t all that comfortable with English, and Morgan had struggled to learn much of the Crow language. They could understand each other when they had a chance to sit down and use more extensive sign language, but out here on the river they settled for a few gestures and an occasional comment called from one canoe to the other.

  Ahead of them, the bank on the right side of the stream rose to a thickly wooded bluff. Morgan looked closely at it as the knowledge that this would be a good place for an ambush stirred inside him. He searched the growth for any sign of movement or a bit of sunlight reflecting from the metal of a gun barrel or a knife.

  Instead, the landscape seemed empty and peaceful. Morgan smiled ruefully to himself and shook his head. Sure, he had promised Breck he would be careful, but there was no point in worrying all the time. He kept up his steady strokes with the paddle. The canoe glided smoothly over the creek’s surface, even loaded down with pelts like it was. It just rode a little lower in the water than it had on the journey up here into the mountains.

  The bluff fell behind the two young men. A couple of hundred yards past it, they rounded a bend, and the bluff was out of sight.

  Several birds exploded from the tree branches as the three men who had been lying hidden and motionless in the undergrowth for the past hour finally moved again. Jud Carnahan had a satisfied smile on his bearded face as he got to his feet. He looked at Gordon Ralston and said, “Looks like Wallace and Baxter had a successful season. Those pelts represent quite a bit of money.”

  “Wallace wasn’t with him,” Ralston snapped. “I want his hide.”

  “You’ll have your chance at it,” Carnahan said. “Our friend told us Wallace stayed behind with the Crow. We’ll be settling scores there, too, but first I want to deal with Baxter and get our hands on those furs.” He looked over at the cold, impassive face of the Blackfoot war chief known as Machitehew, which he had been told translated as He has evil in his heart. “We can afford to bide our time with Wallace. Let him settle down and be happy. Then we’ll make the son of a bitch wish that he’d never been born.”

  * * *

  For two days, Morgan and Running Elk traveled downstream, following the Bighorn to the Yellowstone. By now Morgan had grown accustomed to the spectacular scenery, but every now and then he still realized how beautiful this country was and felt lucky that he’d been able to explore its wonders. Living in his father’s mansion back East, he never would have dreamed that someday he would feel this way, but many things had changed over the past couple of years and the way he regarded the frontier was one of them.

  On the third morning, he and Running Elk were packing up their camp on a bluff above the river. The bank fell almost sheer to the Yellowstone, but there was a path that led down to the narrow gravel bar where they had left the canoes. Morgan expected to have another good day on the river and perhaps even reach the Missouri by nightfall.

  A grove of trees stood about fifty yards from the campsite. The previous evening, Running Elk had killed a deer with an arrow, then dressed out the animal and hung the carcass from a limb of one of those trees. He walked toward it now, intending to hack off enough meat to last them for several days. Morgan shouldered the pack of their dwindling supplies and turned toward the bluff to carry the pack down the path to the canoes.

  He had just put his back to the trees when he heard Running Elk’s shout of alarm.

  Morgan whirled around, dropped the pack, and lifted the rifle he held in his other hand. A gunshot boomed from the direction of the trees. Morgan saw the spurt of flame in the shadows under the branches, as well as a puff of grayish-black smoke.

  Running Elk had dropped to one knee as he reached for an arrow in the quiver slung on his back. His motions were too swift for the eye to follow as he nocked the arrow, drew back the bow, and loosed the shaft toward the trees. As he fired, he let out an angry cry.

  Morgan didn’t know where the first shot had gone, but there was no doubt where the second ball landed. He heard the awful thud of it striking flesh and saw the way Running Elk rocked back and almost fell. The young warrior caught himself and tried to pull out a second arrow, but his movements were slower and more awkward now. Morgan knew his friend had been hit but couldn’t tell how bad the injury was. Perhaps worst of all, there was no cover around Running Elk, no place he could seek shelter from the attack.

  Without thinking about what he was doing, Morgan raised the rifle to his shoulder, took aim at the place where he had se
en a muzzle flash, and pressed the trigger. Its roar blended with a third shot from the trees, and this time Running Elk went over backward as blood spurted in the air from a terrible wound in his throat. His bow and the second arrow fell aside, unfired.

  “Nooooo!” Morgan howled. He dropped the empty rifle and pulled his pistol from behind his belt. He didn’t fire immediately, though. Instead he started toward Running Elk. He wanted to reach his friend and try to help him—even though, somewhere inside him, he knew it was too late already to do anything for the young man.

  He had taken only a couple of steps when something smashed into his right shin with enough force to knock that leg out from under him. He tumbled to the ground and screamed as pain exploded from the wound.

  Men emerged from the woods and moved toward Morgan, not advancing in any hurry. His vision was blurred by the agony that came from his injured leg. The figures drifting toward him were like ghosts. Panting hard, he forced his stunned brain to work. He put his free hand on the ground and pushed. He knew he had to get up. If he could hobble to the path and down to the river, he thought, he might be able to reach one of the canoes and get away. When he was halfway up, he saw his rifle lying on the ground nearby, got hold of its barrel, and used it as a lever and then a crutch.

  He wasn’t thinking straight because of the pain. He realized that as he struggled upright and balanced on his good leg. The blurriness in his eyes receded slightly. He could tell that some of the killers approaching him were white, but others appeared to be Indians. That confused Morgan. Then one of the figures spoke.

  “Surprised to see us again, aren’t you, Baxter?”

  Carnahan. Jud Carnahan was back, and he still had that one-eyed major with him, and now some evil-looking Indians as well . . . Morgan’s head swam crazily. He propped himself up on the rifle and backed away from the men closing in on him. Bloodlust was written clearly on their faces. They had killed Running Elk already, and now they were about to kill him.

  Breck had been right. They should have been more careful . . .

  “That’s a good-looking load of pelts you have, boy,” Carnahan said mockingly. “Put together with the furs we took, they’ll make us a good profit. We should be able to get even more, though. There’ll be a lot of you fellows heading back to St. Louis this time of year. They’re going to deliver their pelts to us. They just don’t know it yet.”

  “You . . . you’re nothing but thieves!” Morgan gasped. “Outlaws!”

  “Call us whatever you want,” Carnahan said. “I prefer to think that we’re going to be rich men. Of course, there’s more to life than money. There’s the satisfaction of settling old scores. And with the help of our new Blackfoot friends here, that’s exactly what we’re going to do, starting with you and that buck we just killed.” A savage grin curved Carnahan’s mouth inside the bushy black beard. “Your friend Wallace and his squaw are next.”

  Fury welled up inside Morgan and erupted from his mouth in an incoherent yell. He had backed all the way to the bluff’s edge. There was nowhere else for him to go.

  But at least he could die fighting and maybe blow that damned smirk off Carnahan’s face. He jerked up the pistol in his right hand.

  Several shots blasted at the same time. A terrible blow crashed into Morgan’s body and knocked him backward. The rifle slipped out of his other hand. He couldn’t hold himself up anymore, and there was nothing underneath him, anyway.

  He plummeted the forty feet to the Yellowstone River and struck the water with his back, throwing up a huge splash of water as he went under the surface. Long moments passed as Carnahan, Ralston, Machitehew, and the other men stood on the edge of the bluff and watched. Morgan didn’t come up.

  Carnahan spat out a glob of phlegm that arched over the river and then dropped into it. “The bastard’s dead,” he said. “Come on. We have more scores to settle and more pelts to gather.”

  “And more killing to do,” Ralston said.

  Chapter 24

  Now that he wasn’t spending his days checking the traplines, Breckinridge wasn’t sure what to do with himself at first. The Crow village would need meat over the winter, of course, so he began devoting himself to hunting, along with some of the young men.

  They brought the carcasses of the deer, elk, and antelope they killed back to the village, where the women skinned and dressed out the animals and cut off strips of meat to be dried and preserved for the cold, hungry months ahead.

  It didn’t take long to get a foretaste of those months, either. A week after Morgan and Running Elk left for St. Louis, an early storm blew in, bringing with it a frigid north wind and snowfall that ranged from several inches in the open to drifts that were several feet deep. The unseasonable storm reminded Breckinridge of the one that had roared down on him and Morgan the previous spring, when they had been ambushed by some of Carnahan’s men.

  That night as he and Dawn Wind sat beside the fire in their tipi, the young woman said, “I hope Morgan and my brother will be able to find shelter if this storm catches them.”

  “Yeah, I was hopin’ they’d get far enough down the Missouri by the time the first snow rolled in that they wouldn’t have to worry about it,” Breckinridge said. “Just goes to show you that when you’re talkin’ about the weather, you can’t never tell what’s gonna happen.”

  “That is true of most things, is it not?”

  Breckinridge thought about the way his plans had been upended time after time during the past couple of years and chuckled.

  “Well, yeah, you could sure say that,” he replied. “But I’m sure Morgan and Runnin’ Elk are fine. They know what they’re doin’, and they’ll find a place to get in outta the storm.” He put his arm around Dawn Wind’s shoulders and pulled her closer to him as he listened to the wind blowing outside. “I reckon I’m more worried about how you and me are gonna stay warm tonight.”

  “That does not concern me,” she said as she snuggled against him. “That does not concern me at all.”

  * * *

  The storm caught Carnahan, Ralston, the rest of the outlaw trappers, and their Blackfoot allies mostly by surprise, although Machitehew had warned Carnahan that the weather was unpredictable at this time of year.

  They took shelter in a canyon that blocked the worst of the wind and built a fire under an outcropping of rock that shielded the flames from most of the snow. Some of the swirling flakes drifted into the fire anyway and melted with a faint sizzling sound.

  Some of the men didn’t have thick enough coats for this sort of weather. They huddled as close to the fire as they could get for its warmth.

  Major Gordon Ralston was one of them. His face was more lean, wolfish, and bitter than ever as he held out his hands toward the fire.

  “We should’ve already killed Wallace and headed back downriver,” he muttered.

  Carnahan, who was also sitting near the fire, leaned forward. “What was that, Major?”

  Ralston hesitated, as if unsure whether he wanted to repeat what he had just said. But then a stubborn look came over his face.

  “I said we should have killed Wallace and headed back to civilization before now.”

  “Are you questioning my judgment, Major? Maybe you think you should be the one giving orders around here, not me.”

  Ralston didn’t respond to that right away. The pause made Carnahan’s face darken with anger above the beard.

  Then Ralston said, “I’m willing to take your orders, Jud. You know that. But you have to admit, this storm complicates things.”

  “Not really,” Carnahan insisted. “Sure, we haven’t gotten back to that Crow village yet . . . but we’re richer than we were a few days ago, aren’t we?”

  In addition to the pelts they had stolen from Morgan Baxter and Running Elk, the group had also taken another load of furs from three trappers they had encountered the next day. Those men had been able to get into some rocks, hunker down, and put up a desperate fight for their lives and their pelts, but in the
end, all three had died and the pelts wound up in the possession of Carnahan and his group.

  However, that encounter had slowed them down enough that they hadn’t been able to reach the Crow village before this storm moved in.

  “We’re not rich,” Ralston said in response to Carnahan’s comment. “We won’t be until we get back to St. Louis and sell those furs.”

  “They’re as good as money,” Carnahan said, “and you know it. In fact, I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea not to go back downriver at all this winter.”

  That statement made Ralston and all the other white men stare at him in surprise. More than surprise, actually. Some of them looked shocked and upset.

  In a quiet voice tinged with menace, Ralston asked, “What the hell are you talking about, Carnahan?”

  Carnahan looked up the canyon as his deep-set eyes narrowed in concentration.

  “What if we built some cabins and stayed right here for the winter? We’d be out of the worst of the weather, so we’d be comfortable enough. There’s plenty of game around. We wouldn’t go hungry. And we’re close to the river. Every trapper who comes by would be waltzing right into our hands. We snatch them up, kill them, and add their pelts to our stockpile. When spring comes and more men start traveling upriver, we’ll be waiting for them, too. All their traps and supplies will be ours for the taking. We wipe them out as they come, so we won’t have any competition for next summer’s pelts. I’m telling you, Major, it won’t be long before we have a damn empire up here!”

  Ralston stared at Carnahan for a long moment, disbelief etched on his face. But then the former officer frowned and said slowly, “You know, that might actually turn out to be true. It’s a bold plan, but it could work.”

  Al Nusser exclaimed, “Hold on a minute! You’re talkin’ about spendin’ the whole winter up here, Jud.”

  “I know that,” Carnahan said calmly.

  “We’ll freeze our asses off!”

  Chet Bagley added, “The rest of us were sort of counting on spending the winter in some nice warm whorehouse back in St. Louis, Jud.”