The Hunted

by Ralph Compton

  Hester hesitated. “No way of knowing yet. I expect we have a distance to go first, dear.”

  “Will Vin be there?”

  Again, Hester paused before replying, “I expect he will be in Gamble, yes. Waiting for you. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet, Delia.”

  The younger woman didn’t respond.

  “Delia? Is the pain . . . is it bad?”

  Delia shook her head. “No, no. But I will be glad to rest for the night.”

  “Me too, sister,” whispered Hester. “Me too.” With that, Hester tapped her heels to the horse’s barrel and the tired beast resumed her slow progress up the slope in the road before her.

  Chapter 3

  “If you all will recall, I said a whole lot of months ago that Jasper Rafferty was one man none of us should climb betwixt the covers with.”

  A collective groan rose throughout the low-ceilinged log saloon. An errant gust of icy wind chose that moment to whistle through a gap beside a poorly carpentered window opening. One of the men, a middle-height fellow with a thick, bristly black beard and big bony hands, the fingernails on which were mostly black from stray hammer strikes, leaned back in his spot on the split-log bench and poked the wadded flannel scrap back into the gap through which fine snow danced.

  The gathered individuals included most of the living residents of Gamble: two dozen men, two women, and a patch-haired black dog that slept under the stove—an annoyance only when he got spooked and woke up too fast, stinking up the place as he singed the hair on his head on the stove bottom. Or when he waited until he came inside to shake off after a swim in the brook, splashing ineffectually for the darting mountain trout that lived under the cutbanks of the raw mountain stream that ran alongside the camp. But even the dog, whom they all called “Dang Dog,” had largely given up on that frigid practice once the weather began hardening off the top of the water, a state the flow would soon remain in for many months of the foreseeable future.

  The man who had spoken, a small bald man with enormous dragoon mustaches, one Clayton Eldridge, hooked his thumbs behind his leather braces. He fancied himself a mayor of sorts of Gamble.

  He began to repeat his claim but was cut off by a fat black man wearing a brown bowler shiny from age and with a number of playing cards stuck at angles in the brim. “Now, I know you can’t be talking of the same conversation I was present at, Clayton, for as I recall . . .” He looked around himself at the other residents of Gamble and smiled. “The only sounds you made were sort of grunting, suckling noises when mention of whiskey was made.”

  Eldridge’s jaw dropped open and his eyes widened. “How dare you, Luther!”

  But the self-appointed mayor’s cries of protestation were swamped by jeers and hoots from the rest of the group. The noise subsided as a burly, pock-faced woman, gray of tooth, and with once-red hair to match, rapped a wooden spoon on the bottom of a blue spatter-ware pot. “Simmer down, already. Simmer it!”

  She held the pose, glaring at each man in turn until they all left off guffawing. Then she nodded. “The point of this gathering wasn’t to yammer about who’s right and who’s wrong. Seems to me we all been wronged by Jasper Rafferty. We were saddled with him as our freighting outfit because him and that lawman bankrolled most of Gamble. But part of that deal is that we get the goods we wanted brought up here to this forsaken rocky knob surrounded by timber and peaks.”

  “What’s your point, Sheila?” Eldridge worked his thumbs up and down his braces as though he were waxing them.

  “Point is, Clayton, that we should get what we’re paying for. We been sending our gold down there and in return, we been getting a whole lot less than we was promised.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ business anyway?” The black man smiled and sat back against the log wall, his callused hands resting on his paunch. “You got a mouse hidden in your dress, Miss Trudeaux?”

  The place erupted in laughter once again. Sheila stifled a smile and nodded, waited for it to die down. “Only thing no bigger’n a mouse in my dress lately’s been you, Luther.”

  “Now, look,” said Clayton Eldridge, shushing the laughing crowd with his hands. “We all know what we’re getting at here. And if we’re going to keep in any sort of manner at all until spring, we’d do well to send someone to track down our supplies. I know those Shoshoni got us pinned down here. No one knows that more than I do. I lost my only boy. . . .”

  His voice cracked, and the gathered folks all looked at their hands, their feet, anything but at Clayton’s quivering lip and wet eyes. His son’s death had been a hard blow on them all. The boy had been well liked. More so than ever after he was found, flailing and gagging on the talus slope below the diggings that day in June, pinned by an Indian’s arrow. It had laid the boy low but had taken a long time to kill him. He had mostly bled out there, so it hadn’t taken him long to die by the time they got him back to what they jokingly called their “town.”

  Gamble consisted of a cluster of log structures, a few with plank additions tacked on with the coming of the gold, some sporting store-bought roofing tin, and felt paper. The saloon they sat in on this very night, though a log affair, had two fancy hand-turned posts someone had brought up on the back of a mule. They’d replaced two cobby-cut pine poles in the center of the porch with the fancy turned ones flanking the steps. From then on—mostly with the help of the gold strike shortly thereafter—they had begun to feel that Gamble might not be one of those two-bit, two-month towns no one could recall five minutes after the gold dried up.

  The boy, Selby, had died and they’d buried him on a pretty knoll not far from the buildings. Clayton, much to their surprise, dug harder than ever. When asked why he stuck, Eldridge said it was because he would never leave his boy. He’d had to leave his wife’s grave back where he and the boy had come from, in a town somewhere on the ocean in Maine, and he’d never forgiven himself for abandoning her. He said when he struck it big he was going to have her dug up, carted all the way to Idaho Territory, and reburied beside their boy.

  “Who in their right mind would go to Monkton?” said Luther. “I, for one, would bet a whole lot of ore that Rafferty did send up the supplies. I bet Marshal Watt made him do it. You know why the freight wagon never made it through. That foul Shoshoni laid ’em low and scattered our goods. Took what they wanted, then scattered the rest. And as far as Rafferty and the marshal are concerned, they did their part.”

  “At this point, it doesn’t matter much who did what,” said Clayton Eldridge. “Just that we can’t afford to sit still here all winter and we can’t afford to go. But we can afford, maybe, to send a rider out, get help. Who’s up for it?”

  “The Italian, where’s he at?”

  “Sleepin’ off a hard one from last night, I expect.”

  “How does he do it? I didn’t think there was much booze of consequence left in Gamble.”

  “He gets himself in Fancy’s drawers, that’s how.” The man’s voice, silent until then, drew attention from all.

  The second woman in attendance paused in lighting a half-smoked cigarillo she’d pulled out of her brassiere. “Screw you, Proudhorn.”

  “Not likely,” said Proudhorn, stroking his big black beard. “But I’ll go.”

  “Go where, exactly?” said Sheila Trudeaux, folding her arms.

  Samuel Proudhorn stood, stepping back away from the bench he’d been sharing with three other men. “To find out if it was the Shoshoni who got to our goods before the goods got to us.”

  There wasn’t much sound in the room at his comments, though all eyes were on the broad-chested man with the big beard and big hands. He was not a particularly tall man, but Samuel Proudhorn, with his deep voice and its strange Cornish accent and his oversized facial features, boots, and hands, struck them all as a big man even in stature, nonetheless.

  “Well, now, don’t let’s all break into a chorus be
seeching me to reconsider.” His eyes seemed to narrow in that way that told them he was probably making a joke, though with that beard they could never see for certain if he was smiling.

  “That’s mighty kind of you, Samuel, and I think I speak for all of us here”—Eldridge spread his arms in a gesture he hoped showed he was including the entire room—“when I tell you that we appreciate it mighty. But on second thought, I wonder if we shouldn’t wait another few days.”

  “No, no.” Proudhorn circled around the table. “We’ve seen more sign than ever of Indians nearby. We’re all looking over our shoulders at the slightest noises when we should be concentrating on turning out the richest ore strike of our lives. All the signs of sizable riches are here. And yet we aren’t even hunting as much as we should for fear of Indian attack. And let’s not forget that winter comes early in the Bitterroot Mountains. No.” He waved a hand and pulled a big-bowled briar pipe from his vest pocket, rooting with a forefinger in the bowl. “We have taken far too much for granted. Assumed safety just because the Shoshoni to the east of us have been somewhat placated. All the gold in the world won’t mean much if we’re dead, either from starvation or scalping or both.”

  Again, the room filled with the stone-faced silence that usually greeted Proudhorn’s blunt observations. Blue-black smoke clouded upward from his pipe, and his eyelids fluttered beneath it. He blew a plume of it outward. “Don’t look so horrified. I merely said what we’ve all been thinking for weeks now. And don’t tell me you don’t trust me.”

  The rush of voices made him smile again, and this time he laughed too, so his fellow Gamblers knew he was kidding. “I tell you what, you can all split my share of the diggings in the event that I do not return. That should convince you I intend to see this thing through. Because I’ll be cursed for eternity if I am going to give up my precious gold to you all!”

  “A drink to Samuel Proudhorn!” shouted Sheila, and the men offered up halfhearted cheers, hating that the Cornishman seemed to outman them once again, but as a feeling of relief worked its way into their thoughts, they cheered a little louder.

  • • •

  The next morning, the bushy-bearded man had saddled his buckskin mare, strapped on his big skinning knife and Enfield percussion pistol, and mounted up. Sheila Trudeaux slipped a precious nearly full bottle of whiskey into his saddlebag and rebuckled it. He watched her but only smiled with his eyes. She winked at him and said low enough that the others couldn’t hear the words, “Good luck, Samuel. Come back to me.”

  He nodded once to her, then looked at the rest. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m able. With answers at the least, and preferably leading a train of supply wagons. Maybe, if we’re lucky, soldiers will already be out and about, taking care of the blasted heathens.”

  “No, no, do not bring too many of the damn strangers up here to Gamble, Meester Proudhorn!”

  They all turned to see Vincenzo Tantillo standing behind them, his arm draped over Fancy’s shoulder. “Because eef you do, I will, uh, how you say, fight you for the gold, no?” His handsome smile spread wide across his darkly stubbled face. The smile did not reach his eyes.

  “Ignore him, Samuel,” said Sheila, smiling up at the man on the horse. “Go with God.”

  “I thank you. I hope I won’t need his assistance, but if it is required, far be it from me to turn him away.” He raised one of those big bony hands to the fawn brim of his slouch hat, nodded once, and headed south out of Gamble proper, leaving behind the tiny settlement, the buildings arrayed as if scattered by a drunken dice roller.

  Samuel Proudhorn knew he would have to follow the ragged cut of the wheel-rutted trail down out of the mountains, alongside the icy flow of the feeder streams that in spring became pummeling freshets, to the lower valley, where the freshets would feed the Salmon River that would eventually lead him to the town of Monkton. He also knew that between Gamble and Monkton, there were a host of deadly elements, not the least of which were the rogue Shoshoni and the fickle caprices of Mother Nature.

  By his careful count, he was beginning his fourth day out from the settlement he had called home, for better or worse, for much of the last year. Gamble had few redeeming qualities, in his estimation. Most of the baser points could be found in her inhabitants, but he had made the best of it. For all their coarseness, Samuel had found most of them to be of a giving, caring nature, and so he had tried in kind to reciprocate.

  In truth he would have departed long before, having a hankering to try his hand farther west at panning on the wide, promising streams of the lower Oregon and northern California region. But then in midsummer they had struck pay dirt, many of them, all at once, and they had all agreed in the saloon one night that they would do their best to keep the strike a secret, though for how long they could do so remained a mystery.

  Since nearly all of Gamble’s occupants had been staked by the wily merchant, Jasper Rafferty, and, consequently, Monkton’s Marshal Watt, who was part owner of Rafferty’s Mercantile, they naturally had to be told of the promising diggings at Gamble. But they all had agreed that few others should be told.

  All had gone along well then, as each of them worked like dogs to get as much easy ore out as possible. It was feared by them all that one or more of them might soon tire of the labor, cash in their personal claims, and skedaddle, leaving the rest of them open to well-known savage practices of large mining outfits, the very folks Rafferty and Watt wanted to bring in to Gamble, come spring.

  That one or more of the big mining corporations would come in was inevitable, blasting roadways and bringing with them thousands of men, all with families. Stores, gambling houses, saloons, laundries, eateries, liveries—such grand-scale mining would be the ruination of small personal fortunes. It would also be the gateway to large personal fortunes, but for far fewer of them than any supposed.

  Samuel Proudhorn knew this only too well. For he had been one of the early discoverers of color at Pikes Peak. And he had been a younger, more foolish man then, and had sold his early efforts, diggings that had seemed to him little more than promising short-term holes. He had doubted very much they would yield more than what he was able to pry from them in the short months he had been there. So when a large firm had come in and offered him four thousand dollars, he leaped at the offer, signing away all rights to his claims.

  And two months later, in between bouts of drunkenness in Breckenridge, he heard that the Eastern Amalgamated Corporation had struck a fortune in gold on his old claim—it tested three thousand dollars to the ton—and in the years since, had proven up as one of the best claims ever, worth more than one million so far.

  So to have the opportunity at another fortune at his fingertips, Samuel Proudhorn found it was worth the effort of putting up with Gamble’s other denizens. He could also endure the hard, long, labor-filled days, the ragged hands and aching back, leg, and arm muscles. He also welcomed the tender, if misguided, ministrations of Sheila Trudeaux, proprietor of the town’s saloon and sporting house, such as it was. He even justified the necessity of making this trip that none of them would have dared make. Yes, it was all vital to preserving his take. And this time he would not waste the effort.

  As if waking from a dream that never changes, Samuel Proudhorn was dragged from his musings by the grunt of his horse, Sassy, whom he’d had charge of for five years. Never had she let him down, rarely faltered in her footing, and never nipped an arm or threw him, nor made overtures to pluck from him a pound of flesh. But the grunt was a sound he’d not heard from her in a long time, long enough for him to have forgotten momentarily that it meant she’d become nervous and wary.

  And in the finger snap of time following it, he saw her left ear twitch, and when her head turned to the side he saw a nerve pulse in the soft hollow above her eye. Then he felt a punch to his left thigh, and a pucker of black-red blossomed unbelievably on his trouser leg. The realization he’d been shot hit him
with a searing pain that in an instant coursed through his body, flaming outward from the raw new wound. He kicked with his right leg at the horse and hunched low.

  I should pull my rifle, he thought. I should try to find out where they are. One hundred things he knew he should do before another instant passed him by flooded his mind. They left as quickly when he heard a howl to his right, then another to his left. They were the shouts of at least two men, excited, crazed men filled with a killing frenzy of bloodlust. Samuel had heard it before, had witnessed it in the eyes of poker players sure of themselves, drunk on nothing more than the power of their conviction as they bet it all.

  He had now begun to catch glimpses of them, Indians by the look, perhaps the Shoshoni, as he broke Sassy from the trail and veered to softer earth that she might gain better purchase on. But it wouldn’t matter, because another punch, harder this time and in his shoulder, shoved him from the saddle, pitching him hard to the rising blurry ground.

  Samuel Proudhorn’s head bounced on a gray boulder; mint green flecks of moss flew up when he hit. His hearing pulsed as if he were underwater, and his eyesight dimmed.

  The last thing he heard was loud yipping noises, not unlike coyotes taking turns sinking fangs into a lamed fawn. The last thing he saw were the faces, not of men, but of demons, leering demons from beyond the grave. And he knew he would never get to enjoy all the finery that his precious gold would one day offer him.

  Chapter 4

  Samuel Proudhorn had never awakened so fully and so quickly in his life, and to such sharp hot stabs of pain. It felt as if his entire body were being roasted on a spit. There, before him, over him, one of the leering demon faces. It leaned closer, and then it smiled a wide, toothy grin and its hand delivered a stout smack, backhanding him in the face, snapping his head to the side. Pain flowered up his left side, laced him like lightning. What was happening?

  “Wake, white man! Wake!”